Sketches Abroad With Pen and Pencil
By . The Drawings engraved on Wood by J. Augustus Bogert and James L. Langridge. New York : Hurd and Houghton.
How it may be with those unhappy ones to whom the American destiny of an European tour has not yet beckoned, as they turn over these delightful sketches, we do not know. Doubtless they feel their humor, and are persuaded, by some inner evidence of things unseen, that they are marvellously true ; but it is not the high privilege of such to declare : “ This is the very peasant I saw in the church at Munich ; that beggar took money of me for the favor of not being run over by my driver in Genoa ; those donkeys are personal acquaintance, as are those priests and monks and fishermen ; that gondola bore me through the Venetian street to my hotel ; that sleepy waiter is he who yawned in my face when I arrived late at his damp, stony, delightful little inn,” We stand again on the steps in the Piazza di Spagna as we gaze upon that group of models; we hear the twang of the Neapolitan dialect out of that noisy picture of the crowded quay; the bigolante stepping freely towards us bears all the Grand Canal in the buckets at her shoulder ; what memories of tire swift seen LowCountries rise not up in those figures of market-folk and fishermen ? The bits of ruin and of architecture, the glimpse of a tower, the turn of a street, the porch of a church, are all full of suggestion and association. Mr. Darley seems at his happiest here, and his pen has pleasantly done the little his pencil could not do. Europe has been an inspiration to him. While all that is characteristic of him remains in these pictures, that which was unpleasantly manneristic is absent ; delicate and jealous finish marks them, of course, and there is fresh life and enjoyment of it in them. How sharply and subtly the different nationalities are discriminated in the different figures as well as faces, and how unmistakably every smallest sketch is made to express France or England, Holland or Italy ! There are touches of fine and pleasant sentiment in some of the pictures, but they are chiefly of a humorous cast, and record without exaggeration those common fortunes of travel which befall every tourist. Whatever so good an artist should say of art would be worth reading, and Mr. Dailey’s criticism of famous works is not the less valuable for being very informally and modestly offered, — perhaps all but the admirers of Ruskin would agree with us that it is the more valuable for that reason. The only exception we take to the book is upon a point of propriety : whether it was proper to caricature Lord Lytton, and to do it so well that it should seem the best thing in the book, and should threaten to associate itself hereafter with the ideas of his elegant poetry.