A Painter's Pen and Brush

MR. HOPKINSON SMITH has before given us examples of his sketches with a slight accompaniment of letterpress ; now he gives us a literary sketch with a few pictorial decorations.¹ It is not very hard to detect the same hand, whether it holds the brush or the pen. There is in either case a happy faculty for catching those broad effects which plenty of sunshine makes possible, and that skill which uses a few strokes with dramatic force and suggestive boldness. Mr. Smith went to Mexico, as he tells us, with no such serious intent as would have compelled him to unload on the public a volume of description and reflection touching the social, political, religious, and financial problems of the country. He says frankly, " I have preferred rather to present what would appeal to the painter and idler,” and then he adds a rapid catalogue of the charms of the country in this aspect: “ A land of white sunshine, redolent with flowers ; a land of gay costumes, crumbling churches, and old convents ; a land of kindly greetings, of extreme courtesy, of open, broad hospitality. I have delighted my soul with the swaying of the lilies in the sunlight, the rush of the roses crowding over mouldy walls, the broad-leaved palms cooling the shadows, and have wasted none of my precious time searching for the lizard and the mole crawling at their roots.”

The power to sketch surfaces agreeably is not lessened by an ability to see below the surface, and Mr. Smith does not always do justice to his own nature in this book. He is a good deal more than an ingenious rattle, as the chapter on Some Peons at Aguas Calientes intimates, and we suspect that he was a little in fear of his own shadow in drawing off this result of a jaunt in Mexico. He really was in no danger of being dull. The pictorial and the dramatic are too highly developed in him to permit this, but a freer, bolder recourse to sentiment and thought would have added the one touch needed to make this book an uncommon piece of literature; so true is it that surfaces have a value in proportion to the solidity of the presumable substance of which they are the exposition. To take a technical illustration from this book itself, it is printed on paper which is superficially polished to counteract the lack of depth in the engravings, and one handles it with an apprehension lest the whole will “ come off.” So the reader catches himself wondering if some of the incidents and persons that serve as the basis for Mr. Smith’s lively narrative have not been glazed a little to add to the effect of the drawing. The painter is so clever and has so lively a touch that he must easily have yielded to the temptation to heighten this or that scene. The absence of deep tones sometimes requires the exaggeration of lights.

As soon as we accept the dramatic element in Mr. Smith’s art, and recognize the fact that what we see in his pictures and read in his text is Mexico on the stage, as it were, we resign ourselves to very unusual enjoyment. We are in the position of spectators who are far enough away from the front to find all the illusions satisfactorily deceptive, the voices pitched just right, the scenery effective, and the figures natural and expressive. What could be cleverer than the opening scene, with the breakfast party superintending the painter’s sketch, and the generous hospitality of the Mexican grandee concentrated on the roving artist ? If Mr. Smith had chosen an introduction to his acquaintance with Mexican life, he could not have been more felicitous. Nor is the close of the book less happily conceived, He holds the incident of the visit to Tzintzúntzan and the disclosure of the Titian as an admirable climax, to which the reader’s mind is led by a succession of interesting steps.

The dramatic is thus involved in the very structure of the book, and from beginning to end there is a suggestion of gesture and almost pantomimic action ; yet all is so deft, so free from excess and mere extravagance, that the reader is not teased by a reminder that this is a free, mimetic representation of life; he enjoys the play as a piece of art, and does not think, while he is engaged upon it, that everything has been arranged for his pleasure.

It is not often that we fall upon a little book which unites so many diverse manifestations of a single predominating nature. The quick touch-and-go quality of Mr. Smith’s work is as much in the literature as in the art, and characterizes both the manner and the structure of the book. It is a quality not often found under such absolute control; and it is this control, determining the use to which it may be put, that raises the book from a mere desultory collection of bits into a unique, gay little masterpiece of its kind.