It reminds us of Gandish and the glorious hantique, of "Boadishia," and "Beauty, Valor, Commerce, and Liberty condoling with Britannia on the death of Admiral Viscount Nelson." But we must remember that it is characteristic of the art of a young country to take itself too seriously, and to think that a great picture cannot be painted without a subject at least as large as a volcano or the court of King Solomon. And, after all, there was something earnest and honest about this grandiose spirit, even if it was neither catholic nor expansive.

But it made many bad painters out of men who might have been good illustrators, and it made the art of illustration an impossibility in this country so long as its unfriendly influence lasted.

That influence ended with the civil war. Times became "flush "; Americans saw more of European art than they had ever seen before; and, on the other hand, a quickened spirit of nationalism led to a

demand for and a supply of Americanmade books.

This is not the place to tell how the art of illustration has grown in this country since the days of '67 or '68, when Mr. J. W. Ehninger's illustrations to an Arthurian legend were reproduced by photography, because they were considered too delicate to intrust to the engraver's burin. It would be curious reading to tell of the brave, half-empirical efforts of the earlier engravers, from Anthony and Linton to the late Mr. Juengling, to better their craft as a reproductive art, and of the struggle between true wood-engraving and the newly invented reproductive processes a struggle in which both sides gained strength, in the end consenting to a fair division of a much larger field than they had dreamed of fighting for at the outset. I have said as much as this only to show how poor a forecast John Frost, LL.D., would have thought it, had he been told, on the 19th of January, 1851, that his

new-born son, Arthur Burdett Frost, was to win fame and fortune as a maker of pictures for books.

In 1874 there was published in Phila delphia a book of humorous sketches by a writer whose talent had greater possibilities than he ever gave it credit for. In the preface to Out of the Hurly-Burly, by "Max Adeler," the author, Mr. Charles Heber Clarke, said: "If this little venture shall achieve popularity, I must attribute the fact largely to the admirable pictures with which it has been adorned by the artists whose names appear upon the title page.... I wish to direct attention especially to the humorous pictures of Mr. Arthur B. Frost. This artist makes

to give promise of a prosperous career for the artist."

It is hard to see in those coarse woodcuts, that look as if they were carved with a penknife, the touch of Mr. Frost's firm and facile hand. Those who know his work to-day must find it difficult to realize that these rough productions represented a positive superiority to the efforts of other young men of his day and generation; yet they did, and the fact was immediately recognized. But, as we look at those cuts to-day, it seems as if that engraver could have killed any genius that ever lived.

That Mr. Frost ever thought of appearing before the world as an illustrator is

time of the young man's earliest struggles, and it was he who insisted that Mr. Frost should undertake the work of illustrating Out of the Hurly-Burly. Mr. Frost was a lithographer at the time-a bad one, he tells usand we may believe that a man who saw nature as he saw it would hardly be able to put much heart into the dull mechanic toil of commercial lithography. He certainly felt a deep distrust of his powers as an illustrator. He thought he could not do the work, and he would not have done it had not Mr. Clarke come in with a subjunctive imperative and declared that he should. He did it, and within a year he was working on the New York Graphic. In 1876 he entered the studio of Messrs. Harper & Brothers, and drew side by side with Mr. Abbey, Mr. Alexander, and Mr. Reinhart-surely a remarkable quartette in the silent art.

Then and there began a career of persistent toil and steady growth. Mr. Frost made himself the first of "comic artists," to use a vile term for want of a better.* This position was most readily accorded him by his brother comedians of the pencil, who long ago learned to consider him

SKETCH.

"easily the king-pin of the whole lot of us," as one of the ablest of them put it. Then came the graver work by which he is best known to-day.

An artist would probably speak of the honesty of Mr. Frost's art as its principal characteristic. Thorough draughtsmanship is the foundation of his success. He is never obliged to resort to trick or device, or to employ meretricious effects. He never has to puzzle" bad or doubtful drawing. He is never in the position of the painter of beclouded battle-pieces to whom a cruel friend said, "Great heavens, Pulner, what will become of

you when smokeless powder comes into general use?"

But it seems to me that its catholicity is the highest attribute of his art. The artistic tendency of the day is strongly toward specialism. An artist too often achieves fame because he paints snow well, or veined marble, or because he has brought out the unsuspected possibilities of the textural treat

*I call this a vile term, and the worst of it is that it calls for definition. The "comic artist," as I take it, is the artist who draws what are known in the profession as "comics," pure and simple-pictures that are true to nature and funny at the same time. There are few who devote themselves to this line of work, though there are many whose drawing involves the element of humor. Not to be too intimately invidious, let me illustrate from a few European examples. Tenniel is a cartoonist in Punch; in his illustrations to Alice in Wonderland he is a master of the grotesque. To this latter class of grotesque artists belong Busch, Oberländer, Harry Furness, Linley Sambourne, Sullivan, and many others. Harburger is a character artist. Du Maurier and Schlittgen are social satirists; as is Mars, in his peculiar way. Of the men who draw things as they are, and who are humorous in their drawing, Keene, who follows in the footsteps of Leech, is perhaps the best known.

ment of sole-leather. How frequently does the haunter of studios hear the pitiful apology for a meaningless background, "I'm no landscape-painter, of course you know"! How frequently does the landscape-painter who has tried to help out his picture-"just for the composition, you see" with an ill-drawn figure or two, plead feebly, "I don't go in for figures, you know"!

Once, when I was a boy, I sat in the studio of a kindly old painter, who had

Mr. Frost's world is not thus onesided. It is not only that he draws all that he has to draw correctly and effectively. He draws all the elements that compose his picture with the same interest and sympathy. His attention to the figure does not dim his clear sight to the ground on which it stands; to the significance and character of its surroundings. This broad sympathy with all visible things is to be seen in every drawing-the most ambitious or the most modest. When Mr. Frost draws a trapper in the woods of Maine or Canada, his artistic interest does not cease with the portrayal of the sturdy solitary. Behind that fine figure he shows us the woods that make him what he is, and he conveys to us a clear suggestion of the sadness with which their desolation clouds the spirit, and of the mysterious thrall of unspeakable, incomprehensi

ble delight that at the same time holds us heart and soul communicants in the great secret of the wilderness.

This seems a simple thing to pick out as the best and most vital characteristic of an artist's work; and it is a simple thing as simple a thing as planning a pyramid, or writing" Che faro senza Eurydice?" But look around you, and see how few men among those who create for us in the arts have this same simple accord with the world which they make it their business to describe, to depict, to reproduce, and to interpret. There is no more distinctive mark of the art of our day than the tendency of our artists toward the judicious elimination from their work of all the things that they cannot do, and toward the concentration of all their powers upon the things they can do. There is an engaging modesty implied in this tendency, and it is certainly better to do one thing well than a dozen things indifferently; and yet, if you carry out the idea involved to its logical conclusion, you must introduce into art the system that has been introduced with deplorable results into artisanship, and make the collaboration of specialists the one way of producing a work that is good all around. It is a system that has given us much trouble with chairs and tables, and has

played the deuce with the dignity and self-respect of "labor"; and it is a system which has led to an over-dependence upon glue in the wood-worker's handicraft, and might suggest some correlative iniquityperhaps in the photographic line-to the graphic artist.

We have not yet reached the point of artistic collaboration; but we have got far enough toward it to feel an especial gratitude for the work of a man who looks upon all he sees with a kindly and catholic friendliness; who marks out no limitations for his art; who can be as friendly with a mountain as with a man; to whom nothing is alien, nothing unsympathetic or uninteresting, nothing unworthy of thoughtful and affectionate study.

It is this way of viewing his world that gives Mr. Frost's pictures the charm of a convincing naturalness. You will find this charm in all his work-even in his slightest "comic." Indeed, it is most effective, in a certain sense, because it is least expected, in these lighter productions. Take, for instance, a certain little picture of a gentleman "gardening for pleasure." His setting is hardly more than indicated, but a hot day was never more unmistakably hinted. The air is hot. The flat landscape is hot. In a few lines, that look careless and unstudied, the artist has made atmosphere and scenery add "artistic verisimilitude" to a figure which tells its story in a way that would have more than satisfied any less conscientious humorist. Or look at his incomparable cat-the cat who has swallowed the rat poison by mistake. I