THE WHITE CHRYSANTHEMUM
“What troubles me,” says Mrs. Ogi, “is that you call this a book of all
the arts, and continue to deal with literature.”
“In modern times each of the arts has developed a complicated technique;
and in order to analyze them all and show what they mean, one would have
to know much more than I know. But every now and then it happens that a
musician or painter or sculptor is not satisfied with his own art, but
uses mine; and then I have him!”
“Oh, that mine enemy would write a book,” says Mrs. Ogi.
James McNeill Whistler wrote a book; he gave it a title: “The Gentle Art
of Making Enemies as Pleasingly Exemplified in Many Instances, Wherein
the Serious Ones of this Earth, Carefully Exasperated, Have Been
Prettily Spurred on to Unseemliness and Indiscretion, While Overcome by
an Undue Sense of Right.” The pages of this book are covered with
butterflies which the painter adopted as the signature for his work.
These butterflies are defiant, care-free, insolent; manifestly, some one
has taken great pains with them, and with the volume through which they
flutter. Studying it, we learn what kind of man it takes to succeed as a
leisure-class portrait-painter.
Whistler was born in Boston, his father being a major in the United
States Army. We have seen him “let out” from West Point; he was
“deficient in chemistry.” He went to Paris and lived the Bohemian
student life for some years, and imbibed those ideas concerning the
non-moral nature of art, which are a symptom of the disintegration of
our ruling classes.
Whistler settled in London. He was unknown and an American; he had new
ideas about painting, and the Royal Academy would have nothing to do
with him, so he had to fight his way. A fiery little man, with wavy
black locks and one very singular white lock over his forehead, he
trained his eyebrows to stand out fiercely, and wore a little imperial
and a monocle, and carried a very long cane, and a white chrysanthemum
always in his buttonhole. He cultivated truculence, and his life was a
succession of conspicuous libel suits and public quarrels, kept alive by
letters to the newspapers.
To a little group of his intimates Whistler could be a charming
companion and host; but when he went out into the world, he put on armor
like a hard-shelled crab, and was ready to bite the head off the first
person who got in his way. He would hit a man in the eye for differing
with him indiscreetly; once in a theater he beat a critic over the head
with his cane. In deadly seriousness he challenged George Moore to a
duel, and appointed seconds, and published Moore’s failure to reply.
Because he was dissatisfied with the price paid him for the portrait of
a certain lady, he painted out the lady’s face. He undertook to decorate
a dining-room for a wealthy shipowner, and became fascinated with the
idea of covering walls and ceiling with an endless number of peacocks in
gold and blue. He worked over this in a frenzy for months. The shipowner
wanted his house, but could not have it; Whistler turned it into an art
gallery, and brought the critics as to a public show. The man had agreed
to pay five hundred guineas for the decorating; in consideration of the
unforeseen amount of work, he raised the price to a thousand. But
Whistler insisted upon two thousand, and flew into a furious rage with
the man, and carried the row into the newspapers, and painted most
odious caricatures of the man and exhibited them publicly.
Whistler was not content to be a great painter; he was also a lecturer,
man of letters, and historian. His idea was that when he overcame one
of his enemies by a witty retort he made history, and when he collected
these retorts and the stories of his quarrels into a book, he wrote
history. The collecting was suggested to him by a journalist, who
proposed the title, and was authorized to gather the various items from
newspaper files. After the work was done and the book prepared and
printed, Whistler decided to take the credit for himself, so he sent the
journalist a check for ten pounds and dismissed him. Naturally the poor
fellow insisted that he had rights in the matter, and tried to bring out
the book in Belgium and in Paris. Whistler pursued him and had him
arrested and heavily fined; he took over the man’s idea and title, and
so we have the beautiful volume with the fancy butterflies. Whistler’s
conduct throughout the affair was brutal, and his book I am inclined to
call the most hateful thing in print. Its content is the egotism of a
highly intelligent and persistent hornet.
Whistler has, to be sure, some ideas to advocate. He reprints a lecture
called “Ten O’clock,” named from the after-dinner hour at which it was
given in London. To his well-fed audience he explained that art is for
artists, who alone can understand it; art has nothing to do with the
people, who only degrade it when they touch it. Moreover, art has no
concern with morality, whether individual or national; “in no way do our
virtues minister to its worth, in no way do our vices impede its
triumph.”
As for painting, Whistler declared it to be a matter of the arrangement
of line, form and color; it has nothing to do with any other idea, not
even with the subject being painted. To quote the painter’s own words:
“The subject matter has nothing to do with the harmony of color.” In
order to emphasize this point of view Whistler took to calling his
portraits by such names as “Harmony in Green and Rose,” “Caprice in Blue
and Silver,” “Symphony in White,” “Variations in Violet and Green,”
“Arrangement in Black and Gray.” One of his most famous paintings showed
fireworks at night, and was called “Nocturne in Black and Gold.” John
Ruskin wrote of it: “I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred
guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” So there was
a picturesque and sensational libel suit, and the jury awarded Whistler
damages of one farthing, that is, half a cent. That was not enough to
pay his lawyer’s fees, and so the painter went into bankruptcy and spent
a few years in Europe.
What is the meaning of this art doctrine so defiantly enunciated? The
answer is, it is an extension of the artist’s egotism; the snobbery of
his profession and his caste, in every way and from every point of view
an anti-social and predatory thing. Here we are in London, the heart and
brain of the British Empire, at that time the greatest agency of
exploitation in the world. Here is wealth and fashion, representing the
wrung-out sweat and blood, not merely of enslaved British workers, but
of enslaved hundreds of millions of black and brown and yellow races.
Here dwell the masters, and they wish to flaunt their splendor; heedless
of the groans and the agony, the clamor of all the misery of mankind,
they command a dining-room painted over with gold and blue peacocks, or
hung with portraits of their splendid predatory selves and their lovely
parasitic females.
And here come the swarms of painters competing for their attention,
seeking to flatter their vanity and awe their ignorance. One hornet a
little more venomous than the rest is able to impress his hornetry upon
them, to stir their greed by the possibility that his paintings may some
day be sold for thousands of pounds. So they decide to have themselves
“done” by this strange genius. They come to his studio and spend months
of torment standing or sitting for him, while he fusses and frets, and
paints and wipes out and paints again, taking infinite pains to see that
the ladies’ dresses are made of exactly the right quality of muslin, cut
and stitched in exactly the right way--because there is one certain
precise kind of muslin dress which is art, and any other kind is
something else.
All this is called “beauty”; all this has laws, so Whistler tells us, as
definite and determinable as the laws of physics or chemistry. Beauty is
a thing permanent and immortal, and independent of all other
qualities--morality, justice, health, truth, honesty. The answer is: all
this is poisonous nonsense, handed out to the rich by those who exploit
their vanity. Art without morality is simply art produced for patrons
who have no morality by artists who have no morality. As to the
permanence of such art, the answer is that its standards are at every
moment subject to the attack of more clever devisers of new forms of
folly and pretense. The proper way to cut a muslin dress today is an
absurd way to cut it tomorrow; and the same applies to harmonies of
color and outlines of form. The Turks cherish fatness in women, because
they like to be comfortable in their harems; the early Christians
thought that emaciation was beautiful, because it prepared them for
heaven; Whistler, wishing to flatter the aristocratic conceit of his
patrons, paints them abnormally tall and lean, because that is the
snobbish notion in fashion at the moment.
Whistler was a great artist in the technical sense; that is, he learned
to put paint on canvas in such a way as to convey an impression of
reality, not merely physical but emotional and spiritual. He was a
terrific worker, as any man must be to succeed in the fierce competition
of modern life. He took his art with seriousness; and it happened that
twice in his lifetime something lifted him above the empty theories in
which he gloried. The first time was when he painted his mother. Here
was a gentle, sensitive, sweet-faced, devout Presbyterian old lady, with
whom all his childhood memories were bound up; he painted her sitting
with her hands in her lap, and her gray hair brushed down and covered
with an old-fashioned lace cap. He called it “Arrangement in Black and
Gray”; and that is all right, because black and gray are old lady’s
colors. But he would have described the painting even better if he had
given it a moral title: “Arrangement in Reverence and Affection.”
And then came Carlyle; poor, bewildered, dyspeptic, struggling old
prophet from Scotland, he looked at Whistler’s portrait of his mother
and loved it, and consented to let the painter do the same thing for
him. So here is another study, posed in the same way, and called
“Arrangement in Black and Gray,” instead of “Arrangement in Pity and
Pathos.” These two pictures have human feeling and moral meaning;
therefore they are the two which have been reproduced, and which
everybody knows and loves. That is the answer to Whistler’s art
theories; but of course it is an answer which he himself would have
scorned--he would have made a witticism on it, and got out a new edition
of “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.”
“This victory is not yours,” says Mrs. Ogi. “It is Death’s.”