But the recognition of this should not obscure the larger faculty of which this is only a phase, of being able to illuminate the text; to illustrate it in the true sense, for the term has fallen into discredit. This is partly the fault of publishers who are apt to insist on the most literal interpretation of the text, instead of allowing the artist to reinform the essence of the text with the spirit of his independent art; and partly, no doubt, to the inability of many draughtsmen to do more than baldly literalize. Thus we have a perpetual crop of so-called illustrations, either crowded with detail or almost flippantly negligent of anything but a certain loose bravura of line and spacing, clever, if you like, but tediously similar in general character. “She rose to greet him”--can you not predicate with tolerable accuracy how such and such a one among many illustrators would represent the incident? In Abbey’s case you could not. The phrase would formulate in his mind a picture; complete, daintily suggestive, full of the charming quality of unexpectedness. But it is when an illustration tries to enforce the text by picturing some incident of prime importance in the story, with its play of passion, perhaps, and diverse possibility of appeal to different minds, that the effort of the ordinary illustrator is so hopelessly jejune. Such subjects are only partially acceptable when one like Abbey essays them. Indeed, many of us may have felt that where, as in Shakespeare, the scene is one of very full significance, affecting the sensibility of different thoughtful readers as diversely as the same passage of music will affect its auditors differently, one’s intelligence and power of appreciation can hardly be satisfied with any one man’s crystallizing of such fluidity and diversity of appeal into a fixed presentment. Abbey’s illustrations to Shakespeare, though I know they are considered one of his greatest triumphs, have seemed to me to mark the beginning of less perfection. Again, I am not speaking of the craftsmanship, but of the spirit that animates the artist. So long as he confines himself to fragments from the scenes and to subordinate persons, or to those whose character is very simple and direct, his old charm remains; but when he attempts a complex character, as that of Portia, he necessarily cannot please all comers; and when he essays to build up scenes, the old spontaneity of imagination seems to dwindle. It is as if the foliage of a tree were beginning to lose its freshness and twinkle of artless movement; as if by degrees the leaves were losing sap and falling; and the naked boughs, the bare construction of the tree, were gradually being revealed. And in Abbey’s case it seems to be a process that has been going on more and more as he passed to the use of paint and to the building up of important _mise en scènes_, such as “Hamlet,” “Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and the Lady Anne,” or “The Penance of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester.”