No book-lover, I. Give me an uninterrupted view of my fellow-creatures.
The most tedious of them pleases me better than the best book. You see,
I admit that some of them are tedious. I do not deem alien from myself
nothing that is human: I discriminate my fellow-creatures according to
their contents. And in that respect I am not more different in my way
from the true humanitarian than from the true bibliophile in his. To
him the content of a book matters not at all. He loves books because
they are books, and discriminates them only by the irrelevant standard
of their rarity. A rare book is not less dear to him because it is
unreadable, even as to the snob a dull duke is as good as a bright one.
Indeed, why should he bother about readableness? He doesn't want to
read. 'Uncut edges' for him, when he can get them; and, even when he
can't, the notion of reading a rare edition would seem to him quite
uncouth and preposterous The aforesaid snob would as soon question His
Grace about the state of His Grace's soul. I, on the other hand,
whenever human company is denied me, have often a desire to read.
Reading, I prefer cut edges, because a paper-knife is one of the things
that have the gift of invisibility whenever they are wanted; and
because one's thumb, in prising open the pages, so often affects the
text. Many volumes have I thus mutilated, and I hope that in the
sale-rooms of a sentimental posterity they may fetch higher prices than
their duly uncut duplicates. So long as my thumb tatters merely the
margin, I am quite equanimous. If I were reading a First Folio
Shakespeare by my fireside, and if the matchbox were ever so little
beyond my reach, I vow I would light my cigarette with a spill made
from the margin of whatever page I were reading. I am neat,
scrupulously neat, in regard to the things I care about; but a book, as
a book, is not one of these things.
Of course, a book may happen to be in itself a beautiful object. Such a
book I treat tenderly, as one would a flower. And such a book is, in
its brown-papered boards, whereon gleam little gilt italics and a
little gilt butterfly, Whistler's Gentle Art of Making Enemies. It
happens to be also a book which I have read again and again--a book
that has often travelled with me. Yet its cover is as fresh as when
first, some twelve years since, it came into my possession. A flower
freshly plucked, one would say--a brown-and-yellow flower, with a
little gilt butterfly fluttering over it. And its inner petals, its
delicately proportioned pages, are as white and undishevelled as though
they never had been opened. The book lies open before me, as I write. I
must be careful of my pen's transit from inkpot to MS.
Yet, I know, many worthy folk would like the book blotted out of
existence. These are they who understand and love the art of painting,
but neither love nor understand writing as an art. For them The Gentle
Art of Making Enemies is but something unworthy of a great man.
Certainly, it is a thing incongruous with a great hero. And for most
people it is painful not to regard a great man as also a great hero;
hence all the efforts to explain away the moral characteristics
deducible from The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and to prove that
Whistler, beneath a prickly surface, was saturated through and through
with the quintessence of the Sermon on the Mount.
Well! hero-worship is a very good thing. It is a wholesome exercise
which we ought all to take, now and again. Only, let us not strain
ourselves by overdoing it. Let us not indulge in it too constantly. Let
hero-worship be reserved for heroes. And there was nothing heroic about
Whistler, except his unfaltering devotion to his own ideals in art. No
saint was he, and none would have been more annoyed than he by
canonisation; would he were here to play, as he would have played
incomparably, the devil's advocate! So far as he possessed the
Christian virtues, his faith was in himself, his hope was for the
immortality of his own works, and his charity was for the defects in
those works. He is known to have been an affectionate son, an
affectionate husband; but, for the rest, all the tenderness in him
seems to have been absorbed into his love for such things in nature as
were expressible through terms of his own art. As a man in relation to
his fellow-men, he cannot, from any purely Christian standpoint, be
applauded. He was inordinately vain and cantankerous. Enemies, as he
has wittily implied, were a necessity to his nature; and he seems to
have valued friendship (a thing never really valuable, in itself, to a
really vain man) as just the needful foundation for future enmity.
Quarrelling and picking quarrels, he went his way through life
blithely. Most of these quarrels were quite trivial and tedious. In the
ordinary way, they would have been forgotten long ago, as the trivial
and tedious details in the lives of other great men are forgotten. But
Whistler was great not merely in painting, not merely as a wit and
dandy in social life. He had, also, an extraordinary talent for
writing. He was a born writer. He wrote, in his way, perfectly; and his
way was his own, and the secret of it has died with him. Thus,
conducting them through the Post Office, he has conducted his squabbles
to immortality.
Immortality is a big word. I do not mean by it that so long as this
globe shall endure, the majority of the crawlers round it will spend
the greater part of their time in reading The Gentle Art of Making
Enemies. Even the pre-eminently immortal works of Shakespeare are read
very little. The average of time devoted to them by Englishmen cannot
(even though one assess Mr. Frank Harris at eight hours per diem, and
Mr. Sidney Lee at twenty-four) tot up to more than a small fraction of
a second in a lifetime reckoned by the Psalmist's limit. When I dub
Whistler an immortal writer, I do but mean that so long as there are a
few people interested in the subtler ramifications of English prose as
an art-form, so long will there be a few constantly-recurring readers
of The Gentle Art.
There are in England, at this moment, a few people to whom prose
appeals as an art; but none of them, I think, has yet done justice to
Whistler's prose. None has taken it with the seriousness it deserves. I
am not surprised. When a man can express himself through two media,
people tend to take him lightly in his use of the medium to which he
devotes the lesser time and energy, even though he use that medium not
less admirably than the other, and even though they themselves care
about it more than they care about the other. Perhaps this very
preference in them creates a prejudice against the man who does not
share it, and so makes them sceptical of his power. Anyhow, if Disraeli
had been unable to express himself through the medium of political
life, Disraeli's novels would long ago have had the due which the
expert is just beginning to give them. Had Rossetti not been primarily
a poet, the expert in painting would have acquired long ago his present
penetration into the peculiar value of Rossetti's painting. Likewise,
if Whistler had never painted a picture, and, even so, had written no
more than he actually did write, this essay in appreciation would have
been forestalled again and again. As it is, I am a sort of herald. And,
however loudly I shall blow my trumpet, not many people will believe my
message. For many years to come, it will be the fashion among literary
critics to pooh-pooh Whistler, the writer, as an amateur. For Whistler
was primarily a painter--not less than was Rossetti primarily a poet,
and Disraeli a statesman. And he will not live down quicklier than they
the taunt of amateurishness in his secondary art. Nevertheless, I will,
for my own pleasure, blow the trumpet.
I grant you, Whistler was an amateur. But you do not dispose of a man
by proving him to be an amateur. On the contrary, an amateur with real
innate talent may do, must do, more exquisite work than he could do if
he were a professional. His very ignorance and tentativeness may be,
must be, a means of especial grace. Not knowing 'how to do things,'
having no ready-made and ready-working apparatus, and being in constant
fear of failure, he has to grope always in the recesses of his own soul
for the best way to express his soul's meaning. He has to shift for
himself, and to do his very best. Consequently, his work has a more
personal and fresher quality, and a more exquisite 'finish,' than that
of a professional, howsoever finely endowed. All of the much that we
admire in Walter Pater's prose comes of the lucky chance that he was an
amateur, and never knew his business. Had Fate thrown him out of Oxford
upon the world, the world would have been the richer for the prose of
another John Addington Symonds, and would have forfeited Walter Pater's
prose. In other words, we should have lost a half-crown and found a
shilling. Had Fate withdrawn from Whistler his vision for form and
colour, leaving him only his taste for words and phrases and cadences,
Whistler would have settled solidly down to the art of writing, and
would have mastered it, and, mastering it, have lost that especial
quality which the Muse grants only to them who approach her timidly,
bashfully, as suitors.
Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Whistler would never, in any case, have
acquired the professional touch in writing. For we know that he never
acquired it in the art to which he dedicated all but the surplus of his
energy. Compare him with the other painters of his day. He was a child
in comparison with them. They, with sure science, solved roughly and
readily problems of modelling and drawing and what not that he never
dared to meddle with. It has often been said that his art was an art of
evasion. But the reason of the evasion was reverence. He kept himself
reverently at a distance. He knew how much he could not do, nor was he
ever confident even of the things that he could do; and these things,
therefore, he did superlatively well, having to grope for the means in
the recesses of his soul. The particular quality of exquisiteness and
freshness that gives to all his work, whether on canvas or on stone or
on copper, a distinction from and above any contemporary work, and
makes it dearer to our eyes and hearts, is a quality that came to him
because he was an amateur, and that abided with him because he never
ceased to be an amateur. He was a master through his lack of mastery.
In the art of writing, too, he was a master through his lack of
mastery. There is an almost exact parallel between the two sides of his
genius. Nothing could be more absurd than the general view of him as a
masterly professional on the one side and a trifling amateur on the
other. He was, certainly, a painter who wrote; but, by the slightest
movement of Fate's little finger, he might have been a writer who
painted, and this essay have been written not by me from my standpoint,
but by some painter, eager to suggest that Whistler's painting was a
quite serious thing.
Yes, that painting and that writing are marvellously akin; and such
differences as you will see in them are superficial merely. I spoke of
Whistler's vanity in life, and I spoke of his timidity and reverence in
art. That contradiction is itself merely superficial. Bob Acres was
timid, but he was also vain. His swagger was not an empty assumption to
cloak his fears; he really did regard himself as a masterful and
dare-devil fellow, except when he was actually fighting. Similarly,
except when he was at his work, Whistler, doubtless, really did think
of himself as a brilliant effortless butterfly. The pose was, doubtless
a quite sincere one, a necessary reaction of feeling. Well, in his
writing he displays to us his vanity; whilst in his Painting we discern
only his reverence. In his writing, too, he displays his
harshness--swoops hither and thither a butterfly equipped with sharp
little beak and talons; whereas in his painting we are conscious only
of his caressing sense of beauty. But look from the writer, as shown by
himself, to the means by which himself is shown. You will find that for
words as for colour-tones he has the same reverent care, and for
phrases as for forms the same caressing sense of beauty.
Fastidiousness--'daintiness,' as he would have said--dandyishness, as
we might well say: by just that which marks him as a painter is he
marked as a writer too. His meaning was ever ferocious; but his method,
how delicate and tender! The portrait of his mother, whom he loved, was
not wrought with a more loving hand than were his portraits of Mr.
Harry Quilter for The World.
His style never falters. The silhouette of no sentence is ever blurred.
Every sentence is ringing with a clear vocal cadence. There, after all,
in that vocal quality, is the chief test of good writing. Writing, as a
means of expression, has to compete with talking. The talker need not
rely wholly on what he says. He has the help of his mobile face and
hands, and of his voice, with its various inflexions and its variable
pace, whereby he may insinuate fine shades of meaning, qualifying or
strengthening at will, and clothing naked words with colour, and making
dead words live. But the writer? He can express a certain amount
through his handwriting, if he write in a properly elastic way. But his
writing is not printed in facsimile. It is printed in cold, mechanical,
monotonous type. For his every effect he must rely wholly on the words
that he chooses, and on the order in which he ranges them, and on his
choice among the few hard-and-fast symbols of punctuation. He must so
use those slender means that they shall express all that he himself can
express through his voice and face and hands, or all that he would thus
express if he were a good talker. Usually, the good talker is a dead
failure when he tries to express himself in writing. For that matter,
so is the bad talker. But the bad talker has the better chance of
success, inasmuch as the inexpressiveness of his voice and face and
hands will have sharpened his scent for words and phrases that shall in
themselves convey such meanings as he has to express. Whistler was that
rare phenomenon, the good talker who could write as well as he talked.
Read any page of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and you will hear a
voice in it, and see a face in it, and see gestures in it. And none of
these is quite like any other known to you. It matters not that you
never knew Whistler, never even set eyes on him. You see him and know
him here. The voice drawls slowly, quickening to a kind of snap at the
end of every sentence, and sometimes rising to a sudden screech of
laughter; and, all the while, the fine fierce eyes of the talker are
flashing out at you, and his long nervous fingers are tracing
extravagant arabesques in the air. No! you need never have seen
Whistler to know what he was like. He projected through printed words
the clean-cut image and clear-ringing echo of himself. He was a born
writer, achieving perfection through pains which must have been
infinite for that we see at first sight no trace of them at all.
Like himself, necessarily, his style was cosmopolitan and eccentric. It
comprised Americanisms and Cockneyisms and Parisian argot, with
constant reminiscences of the authorised version of the Old Testament,
and with chips off Molie're, and with shreds and tags of what-not
snatched from a hundred-and-one queer corners. It was, in fact, an
Autolycine style. It was a style of the maddest motley, but of motley
so deftly cut and fitted to the figure, and worn with such an air, as
to become a gracious harmony for all beholders.
After all, what matters is not so much the vocabulary as the manner in
which the vocabulary is used. Whistler never failed to find right
words, and the right cadence for a dignified meaning, when dignity was
his aim. 'And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry,
as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky,
and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces
in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is
before us...' That is as perfect, in its dim and delicate beauty, as
any of his painted 'nocturnes.' But his aim was more often to pour
ridicule and contempt. And herein the weirdness of his natural
vocabulary and the patchiness of his reading were of very real value to
him. Take the opening words of his letter to Tom Taylor: 'Dead for a
ducat, dead! my dear Tom: and the rattle has reached me by post. Sans
rancune, say you? Bah! you scream unkind threats and die badly...' And
another letter to the same unfortunate man: 'Why, my dear old Tom, I
never was serious with you, even when you were among us. Indeed, I
killed you quite, as who should say, without seriousness, "A rat! A
rat!" you know, rather cursorily...' There the very lack of coherence
in the style, as of a man gasping and choking with laughter, drives the
insults home with a horrible precision. Notice the technical skill in
the placing of 'you know, rather cursorily' at the end of the sentence.
Whistler was full of such tricks--tricks that could never have been
played by him, could never have occurred to him, had he acquired the
professional touch And not a letter in the book but has some such
little sharp felicity of cadence or construction.
The letters, of course, are the best thing in the book, and the best of
the letters are the briefest. An exquisite talent like Whistler's,
whether in painting or in writing, is always at its best on a small
scale. On a large scale it strays and is distressed. Thus the 'Ten
o'Clock,' from which I took that passage about the evening mist and the
riverside, does not leave me with a sense of artistic satisfaction. It
lacks structure. It is not a roundly conceived whole: it is but a row
of fragments. Were it otherwise, Whistler could never have written so
perfectly the little letters. For no man who can finely grasp a big
theme can play exquisitely round a little one.
Nor can any man who excels in scoffing at his fellows excel also in
taking abstract subjects seriously. Certainly, the little letters are
Whistler's passport among the elect of literature. Luckily, I can judge
them without prejudice. Whether in this or that case Whistler was in
the right or in the wrong is not a question which troubles me at all. I
read the letters simply from the literary standpoint. As controversial
essays, certainly, they were often in very bad taste. An urchin
scribbling insults upon somebody's garden-wall would not go further
than Whistler often went. Whistler's mode of controversy reminds me, in
another sense, of the writing on the wall. They who were so foolish as
to oppose him really did have their souls required of them. After an
encounter with him they never again were quite the same men in the eyes
of their fellows. Whistler's insults always stuck--stuck and spread
round the insulted, who found themselves at length encased in them,
like flies in amber.
You may shed a tear over the flies, if you will. For myself, I am
content to laud the amber.