The New York herald., 1922-02-26

| the greatest work have seen here
has been builded and fashioned in
a spirit Of religious devotion-the
greatest pictures, the greatest sculp-
ture and the greatest architecture.
One cannot wonder at the simpler
minded people of former ages falling
down in worship before the statues of
the great Greeks"
In contrast with such an emotion
is the feeling he had a presence of
the wax effigies Of the Kings and
Queens Of England, the faces
modelled from death masks and the
bodies clothed in the actual robes
once worn by the monarchs.
There is Queen Elizabeth" wrote
Abbey. standing erect and naughty
in her robes Of state, with crown
and scepter: such an awful lesson
of the decay of earthly grandeur
her hard, merciless face, with pearls
and diamonds encircling the withered
neck. and the immense ruff, wilted
and covered with the dust Of CEN
turies."
Later Dean Stanley invited the
young American to luncheon where
he was waited upon by q have
strong reasons for believing) theo-
logical students in disguise. The
butler I'm sure was a retired clergy
man who had lost his voice or some
thing
The record Of the later years is
largely English. But his most un-
equivocal burst of enthusiasm over
art was reused by a French paint
irg. After seeing Bastien Lepage's
Joan of Arc, now in the Metropoli-
tan Museum, he wrote:
You don't see any paint or any
brush marks-there the real girl just
stands. Everything looks cheap
and commonplace and feeble beside
this wonderful masterpiece. I never
had anything so stir me up in my
life. :. If I could half express to
you the wild longing within me to
grab a brush and set my teeth and
paint until 1 dropped dead this pen
would get red hot"
Not often does the passion of the
artist come so close to feeling about
mans human relationship as in
this paragraph. For in the very
next sentence Abbey adds: II haven't
said anything in this of the crushing
trouble that has come to me, SIM
ply because I don't dare to let my
self think Of it." He spoke of his
mothers death. Very likely the in
tensity Of his grief over her loss
mingled with his vivid sense of the
spiritual beauty in the Lepage paint
ing.
Certainly man and artist had
grown since the day when he was
reused to high pitch of enthusiasm
over the English paintings at the
Centennial show in Philadelphia
Leighton,s Summer Moon" and the
like.
In recalling his early attitude
toward his work Abbey wrote to
Will RI. Low:
II couldn't see the use Of painting
or drawing unless we said something
in a sympathetic way"
And many years later, when he
had been elected to full membership
In the Royal Academy. he wrote:
"Now I'm hard at the Trial Of
Queen Katherine in which I'm going
to use a lot Of stained glass. hope
the effect will be rich and serious.
I think 1t a fine subject. dare say
it might be called literary. So soon
as one begins to mean something it
seems one is literary :. If my in
stincts present these pictures before
my eyes I can't turn my back on
them. If I'm very much interested
in them. as I am, it would be alb
surd to try to do something I'm not
particularly interested in. People
seem to look at them and be inter-
ested In them. too, which some might
say is a proof Of this lack of right
eous aim"
| The book is full of good stories and
hints of character from his own let
ters or from the words of his friends.
An odd little by product Of his
amazing vitality is the invention of