WHISTLER.

I have studied Mr. Whistler and thought about him this many a year.

His character was for a long time incomprehensible to me; it contained

elements apparently so antagonistic, so mutually destructive, that I

had to confess my inability to bring him within any imaginable

psychological laws, and classed him as one of the enigmas of life. But

Nature is never illogical; she only seems so, because our sight is not

sufficient to see into her intentions; and with study my psychological

difficulties dwindled, and now the man stands before me exquisitely

understood, a perfect piece of logic. All that seemed discordant and

discrepant in his nature has now become harmonious and inevitable; the

strangest and most erratic actions of his life now seem natural and

consequential (I use the word in its grammatical sense) contradictions

are reconciled, and looking at the man I see the pictures, and looking

at the pictures I see the man.

But at the outset the difficulties were enormous. It was like a

newly-discovered Greek text, without punctuation or capital letters.

Here was a man capable of painting portraits, perhaps not quite so

full of grip as the best work done by Velasquez and Hals, only just

falling short of these masters at the point where they were strongest,

but plainly exceeding them in graciousness of intention, and subtle

happiness of design, who would lay down his palette and run to a

newspaper office to polish the tail of an epigram which he was

launching against an unfortunate critic who had failed to distinguish

between an etching and a pen-and-ink drawing! Here was a man who,

though he had spent the afternoon painting like the greatest, would

spend his evenings in frantic disputes over dinner-tables about the

ultimate ownership of a mild joke, possibly good enough for _Punch_,

something that any one might have said, and that most of us having

said it would have forgotten! It will be conceded that such

divagations are difficult to reconcile with the possession of artistic

faculties of the highest order.

The "Ten o'clock" contained a good deal of brilliant writing,

sparkling and audacious epigram, but amid all its glitter and "go"

there are statements which, coming from Mr. Whistler, are as

astonishing as a denial of the rotundity of the earth would be in a

pamphlet bearing the name of Professor Huxley. Mr. Whistler is only

serious in his art--a grave fault according to academicians, who are

serious in everything except their "art". A very boyish utterance is

the statement that such a thing as an artistic period has never been

known.

One rubbed one's eyes; one said, Is this a joke, and, if so, where is

the point of it? And then, as if not content with so much mystification,

Mr. Whistler assured his ten o'clock audience that there was no such

thing as nationality in art, and that you might as well speak of

English mathematics as of English art. We do not stop to inquire if

such answers contain one grain of truth; we know they do not--we stop

to consider them because we know that the criticism of a creative artist

never amounts to more than an ingenious defence of his own work--an

ingenious exaltation of a weakness (a weakness which perhaps none

suspects but himself) into a conspicuous merit.

Mr. Whistler has shared his life equally between America, France, and

England. He is the one solitary example of cosmopolitanism in art, for

there is nothing in his pictures to show that they come from the

north, the south, the east, or the west. They are compounds of all

that is great in Eastern and Western culture. Conscious of this, and

fearing that it might be used as an argument against his art, Mr.

Whistler threw over the entire history, not only of art, but of the

world; and declared boldly that art was, like science, not national,

but essentially cosmopolitan; and then, becoming aware of the anomaly

of his genius in his generation, Mr. Whistler undertook to explain

away the anomaly by ignoring the fifth century B.C. in Athens, the

fifteenth century in Italy, and the seventeenth in Holland, and humbly

submitting that artists never appeared in numbers like swallows, but

singly like aerolites. Now our task is not to disprove these

statements, but to work out the relationship between the author of the

"Butterfly Letters" and the painter of the portrait of "The Mother",

"Lady Archibald Campbell", "Miss Alexander", and the other forty-one

masterpieces that were on exhibition in the Goupil galleries.

There is, however, an intermediate step, which is to point out the

intimate relationship between the letter-writer and the physical man.

Although there is no internal evidence to show that the pictures were

not painted by a Frenchman, an Italian, an Englishman, or a

Westernised Japanese, it would be impossible to read any one of the

butterfly-signed letters without feeling that the author was a man of

nerves rather than a man of muscle, and, while reading, we should

involuntarily picture him short and thin rather than tall and

stalwart. But what has physical condition got to do with painting? A

great deal. The greatest painters, I mean the very greatest--Michael

Angelo, Velasquez, and Rubens--were gifted by Nature with as full a

measure of health as of genius. Their physical constitutions resembled

more those of bulls than of men. Michael Angelo lay on his back for

three years painting the Sistine Chapel. Rubens painted a life-size

figure in a morning of pleasant work, and went out to ride in the

afternoon. But Nature has dowered Mr. Whistler with only genius. His

artistic perceptions are moreexquisite than Velasquez's. He knows as

much, possibly even a little more, and yet the result is never quite

equal. Why? A question of health. _C'est un tempérament de chatte_. He

cannot pass from masterpiece to masterpiece like Velasquez. The

expenditure of nerve-force necessary to produce such a work as the

portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell or Miss Alexander exhausts him,

and he is obliged to wait till Nature recoups herself; and these

necessary intervals he has employed in writing letters signed

"Butterfly" to the papers, quarrelling with Oscar over a few mild

jokes, explaining his artistic existence, at the expense of the entire

artistic history of the world, collecting and classifying the

stupidities of the daily and weekly press.

But the lesser side of a man of genius is instructive to study--indeed,

it is necessary that we should study it if we would thoroughly

understand his genius. "No man," it has been very falsely said, "is a

hero to his _valet de chambre_." The very opposite is the truth. Man

will bow the knee only to his own image and likeness. The deeper the

humanity, the deeper the adoration; and from this law not even divinity

is excepted. All we adore is human, and through knowledge of the flesh

that grovels we may catch sight of the soul ascending towards the

divine stars.

And so the contemplation of Mr. Whistler, the author of the "Butterfly

Letters", the defender of his little jokes against the plagiarising

tongue, should stimulate rather than interrupt our prostrations. I

said that Nature had dowered Mr. Whistler with every gift except that

of physical strength. If Mr. Whistler had the bull-like health of

Michael Angelo, Rubens, and Hals, the Letters would never have been

written. They were the safety-valve by which his strained nerves found

relief from the intolerable tension of the masterpiece. He has not the

bodily strength to pass from masterpiece to masterpiece, as did the

great ones of old time. In the completed picture slight traces of his

agony remain. But painting is the most indiscreet of all the arts, and

here and there an omission or a feeble indication reveal the painter

to us in moments of exasperated impotence. To understand Mr.

Whistler's art you must understand his body. I do not mean that Mr.

Whistler has suffered from bad health--his health has always been

excellent; all great artists have excellent health, but his

constitution is more nervous than robust. He is even a strong man, but

he is lacking in weight. Were he six inches taller, and his bulk

proportionately increased, his art would be different. Instead of

having painted a dozen portraits, every one--even the mother and Miss

Alexander, which I personally take to be the two best--a little

febrile in its extreme beauty, whilst some, masterpieces though they

be, are clearly touched with weakness, and marked with hysteria--Mr.

Whistler would have painted a hundred portraits, as strong, as

vigorous, as decisive, and as easily accomplished as any by Velasquez

or Hals. But if Nature had willed him so, I do not think we should

have had the Nocturnes, which are clearly the outcome of a

highly-strung, bloodless nature whetted on the whetstone of its own

weakness to an exasperated sense of volatile colour and evanescent

light. It is hardly possible to doubt that this is so when we look on

these canvases, where, in all the stages of her repose, the night

dozes and dreams upon our river--a creole in Nocturne 34, upon whose

trembling eyelids the lustral moon is shining; a quadroon in Nocturne

17, who turns herself out of the light anhungered and set upon some

feast of dark slumber. And for the sake of these gem-like pictures,

whose blue serenities are comparable to the white perfections of

Athenian marbles, we should have done well to yield a littlestrength

in portraiture, if the distribution of Mr. Whistler's genius had been

left in our hands. So Nature has done her work well, and we have no

cause to regret the few pounds of flesh that she withheld. A few

pounds more of flesh and muscle, and we should have had another

Velasquez; but Nature shrinks from repetition, and at the last moment

she said, "The world has had Velasquez, another would be superfluous:

let there be Jimmy Whistler."

In the Nocturnes Mr. Whistler stands alone, withouta rival. In

portraits he is at his best when they are near to his Nocturnes in

intention, when the theme lends itself to an imaginative and

decorative treatment; for instance, as in the mother or Miss

Alexander. Mr. Whistler is at his worst when he is frankly realistic.

I have seen pictures by Mr. Henry Moore that I like better than "The

Blue Wave". Nor does Mr. Whistler seem to me to reach his highest

level in any one of the three portraits--Lady Archibald Campbell,

Miss Rose Corder, and "the lady in the fur jacket". I know that Mr.

Walter Sickert considers the portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell to be

Mr. Whistler's finest portrait. I submit, however, that the attitude

is theatrical and not very explicit. It is a movement that has not

been frankly observed, nor is it a movement that has been frankly

imagined. It has none of the artless elegance of Nature; it is full of

studio combinations; and yet it is not a frankly decorative

arrangement, as the portrait of the mother or Miss Alexander. When

Hals painted his Burgomasters, he was careful to place them in

definite and comprehensible surroundings. He never left us in doubt

either as to the time or the place; and the same obligations of time

and place, which Hals never shirked, seem to me to rest on the

painter, if he elects to paint his sitter in any attitude except one

of conventional repose.

Lady Archibald Campbell is represented in violent movement, looking

backwards over her shoulder as she walks up the picture; yet there is

nothing to show that she is not standing on the low table on which the

model poses, and the few necessary indications are left out because

they would interfere with the general harmony of his picture; because,

if the table on which she is standing were indicated, the movement of

outstretched arm would be incomprehensible. The hand, too, is somewhat

uncertain, undetermined, and a gesture is meaningless that the hand

does not determine and complete. I do not speak of the fingers of the

right hand, which are non-existent; after a dozen attempts to paint

the gloved hand, only an approximate result was obtained. Look at the

ear, and say that the painter's nerves did not give wayonce or twice.

And the likeness is vague and shadowy; she is only fairly

representative of her class. We see fairly well that she is a lady _du

grand monde_, who is, however, not without knowledge of _les environs

du monde_. But she is hardly English--she might be a French woman or

an American. She is a sort of hybrid. Miss Rose Corder and "the lady

in the fur jacket" are equally cosmopolitan; so, too, is Miss

Alexander. Only once has Mr. Whistler expressed race, and that was in

his portrait of his mother. Then these three ladies--Miss Corder, Lady

Archibald Campbell, and "the lady in the fur jacket"--wear the same

complexion: a pale yellow complexion, burnt and dried. With this

conventional tint he obtains unison and a totality of effect; but he

obtains this result at the expense of truth. Hals and Velasquez

obtained the same result, without, however, resorting to such

meretricious methods.

The portrait of the mother is, as every one knows, in the Luxemburg;

but the engraving reminds us of the honour which France has done, but

which we failed to do, to the great painter of the nineteenth century;

and after much hesitation and arguing with myself I feel sure that on

the whole this picture is the painter's greatest work in portraiture.

We forget relations, friends, perhaps even our parents; but that

picture we never forget; it is for ever with us, in sickness and in

health; and in moments of extreme despair, when life seems hopeless,

the strange magic of that picture springs into consciousness, and we

wonder by what strange wizard craft was accomplished the marvellous

pattern on the black curtain that drops past the engraving on the

wall. We muse on the extraordinary beauty of that grey wall, on the

black silhouette sitting so tranquilly, on the large feet on a

foot-stool, on the hands crossed, on the long black dress that fills

the picture with such solemn harmony. Then mark the transition from

grey to white, and how _le ton local_ is carried through the entire

picture, from the highest light to the deepest shadow. Note the

tenderness of that white cap, the white lace cuffs, the certainty, the

choice, and think of anything if you can, even in the best Japanese

work, more beautiful, more delicate, subtle, illusive, certain in its

handicraft; and if the lace cuffs are marvellous, the delicate hands

of a beautiful old age lying in a small lace handkerchief are little

short of miraculous. They are not drawn out in anatomical diagram, but

appear and disappear, seen here on the black dress, lost there in the

small white handkerchief. And when we study the faint, subtle outline

of the mother's face, we seem to feel that there the painter has told

the story of his soul more fully than elsewhere. That soul, strangely

alive to all that is delicate and illusive in Nature, found perhaps

its fullest expression in that grave old Puritan lady looking through

the quiet refinement of her grey room, sitting in solemn profile in

all the quiet habit of her long life.

Compared with later work, the execution is "tighter", if I may be

permitted an expression which will be understood in studios; we are

very far indeed from the admirable looseness of handling which is the

charm of the portrait of Miss Rose Corder. There every object is born

unconsciously beneath the passing of the brush. If not less certain,

the touch in the portrait of the mother is less prompt; but the

painter's vision is more sincere and more intense. And to those who

object to the artificiality of the arrangement, I reply that if the

old lady is sitting in a room artificially arranged, Lady Archibald

Campbell may be said to be walking through incomprehensible space. But

what really decides me to place this portrait above the others is the

fact that while painting his mother's portrait he was unquestionably

absorbed in his model; and absorption in the model is perhaps the

first quality in portrait-painting.

Still, for my own personal pleasure, to satisfy the innermost cravings

of my own soul, I would choose to live with the portrait of Miss

Alexander. Truly, this picture seems to me the most beautiful in the

world. I know very well that it has not the profound beauty of the

Infantes by Velasquez in the Louvre; but for pure magic of inspiration,

is it not more delightful? Just as Shelley's "Sensitive Plant" thrills

the innermost sense like no other poem in the language, the portrait

of Miss Alexander enchants with the harmony of colour, with the melody

of composition.

Strangely original, a rare and unique thing, is this picture, yet we

know whence it came, and may easily appreciate the influences that

brought it into being. Exquisite and happy combination of the art of

an entire nation and the genius of one man-the soul of Japan incarnate

in the body of the immortal Spaniard. It was Japan that counselled the

strange grace of the silhouette, and it was that country, too, that

inspired in a dim, far-off way those subtly sweet and magical passages

from grey to green, from green again to changing evanescent grey. But

a higher intelligence massed and impelled those chords of green and

grey than ever manifested itself in Japanese fan or screen; the means

are simpler, the effect is greater, and by the side of this picture

the best Japanese work seems only facile superficial improvisation. In

the picture itself there is really little of Japan. The painter merely

understood all that Japan might teach. He went to the very root,

appropriating only the innermost essence of its art. We Westerns had

thought it sufficient to copy Nature, but the Japanese knew it was

better to observe Nature. The whole art of Japan is selection, and

Japan taught Mr. Whistler, or impressed upon Mr. Whistler, the

imperative necessity of selection. No Western artist of the present or

of past time--no, not Velasquez himself--ever selected from the model

so tenderly as Mr. Whistler; Japan taught him to consider Nature as a

storehouse whence the artist may pick and choose, combining the

fragments of his choice into an exquisite whole. Sir John Millais' art

is the opposite; there we find no selection; the model is copied--and

sometimes only with sufficient technical skill.

But this picture is throughout a selection from the model; nowhere has

anything been copied brutally, yet the reality of the girl is not

sacrificed.

The picture represents a girl of ten or eleven. She is dressed

according to the fashion of twenty years ago--a starched muslin frock,

a small overskirt pale brown, white stockings, square-toed black

shoes. She stands, her left foot advanced, holding in her left hand a

grey felt hat adorned with a long plume reaching nearly to the ground.

The wall behind her is grey with a black wainscot. On the left, far

back in the picture, on a low stool, some grey-green drapery strikes

the highest note of colour in the picture. On the right, in the

foreground, some tall daisies come into the picture, and two

butterflies flutter over the girl's blonde head. This picture seems to

exist principally in the seeing! I mean that the execution is so

strangely simple that the thought, "If I could only see the model like

that, I think Icould do it myself", comes spontaneously into the mind.

And this spontaneous thought is excellent criticism, for three-parts

of Mr. Whistler's art lies in the seeing; no one ever saw Nature so

artistically. Notice on the left the sharp line of the white frock

cutting against the black wainscoting. Were that line taken away, how

much would the picture lose! Look at the leg that is advanced, and

tell me if you can detect the modelling. There is modelling, I know,

but there are no vulgar roundnesses. Apparently, only a flat tint; but

there is on the bone a light, hardly discernible; and this light is

sufficient. And the leg that is turned away, the thick, chubby ankle

of the child, how admirable in drawing; and that touch of darker

colour, how it tells the exact form of the bone! To indicate is the

final accomplishment of the painter's art, and I know no indication

like that ankle bone. And now passing from the feet to the face,

notice, I beg of you to notice--it is one of the points in the

picture--that jaw bone. The face is seen in three-quarter, and to

focus the interest in the face the painter has slightly insisted on

the line of the jaw bone, which, taken in conjunction with the line of

the hair, brings into prominence the oval of the face. In Nature that

charming oval only appeared at moments. The painter seized one of

those moments, and called it into our consciousness as a musician with

certain finger will choose to give prominence to a certain note in a

chord.

There must have been a day in Mr. Whistler's life when the artists of

Japan convinced him once and for ever of the primary importance of

selection. In Velasquez, too, there is selection, and very often it is

in the same direction as Mr. Whistler's, but the selection is never, I

think, so much insisted upon; and sometimes in Velasquez there is, as

in the portrait of the Admiral in the National Gallery, hardly any

selection--I mean, of course, conscious selection. Velasquez sometimes

brutally accepted Nature for what she was worth; this Mr. Whistler

never does. But it was Velasquez that gave consistency and strength to

what in Mr. Whistler might have run into an art of trivial but

exquisite decoration. Velasquez, too, had a voice in the composition

of the palette generally, so sober, so grave. The palette of Velasquez

is the opposite of the palette of Rubens; the fantasy of Rubens'

palette created the art of Watteau, Turner, Gainsborough; it obtained

throughout the eighteenth century in England and in France. Chardin

was the one exception. Alone amid the eighteenth century painters he

chose the palette of Velasquez in preference to that of Rubens, and in

the nineteenth century Whistler too has chosen it. It was Velasquez

who taught Mr. Whistler that flowing, limpid execution. In the

painting of that blonde hair there is something more than a souvenir

of the blonde hair of the Infante in the _salle carrée_ in the Louvre.

There is also something of Velasquez in the black notes of the shoes.

Those blacks--are they not perfectly observed? How light and dry the

colour is! How heavy and shiny it would have become in other hands!

Notice, too, that in the frock nowhere is there a single touch of pure

white, and yet it is all white--a rich, luminous white that makes

every other white in the gallery seem either chalky or dirty. What an

enchantment and a delight the handling is! How flowing, how supple,

infinitely and beautifully sure, the music of perfect accomplishment!

In the portrait of the mother the execution seems slower, hardly so

spontaneous. For this, no doubt, the subject is accountable. But this

little girl is the very finest flower, and the culminating point of

Mr. Whistler's art. The eye travels over the canvas seeking a fault.

In vain; nothing has been omitted that might have been included,

nothing has been included that might have been omitted. There is much

in Velasquez that is stronger, but nothing in this world ever seemed

to me so perfect as this picture.

The portrait of Carlyle has been painted about an arabesque similar, I

might almost say identical, to that of the portrait of the mother. But

as is usually the case, the attempt to repeat a success has resulted a

failure. Mr. Whistler has sought to vary the arabesque in the

direction of greater naturalness. He has broken the severity of the

line, which the lace handkerchief and the hands scarcely stayed in the

first picture, by placing the philosopher's hat upon his knees, he has

attenuated the symmetry of the picture-frames on the walls, and has

omitted the black curtain which drops through the earlier picture. And

all these alterations seemed to me like so many leaks through which

the eternal something of the first design has run out. A pattern like

that of the egg and dart cannot be disturbed, and Columbus himself

cannot rediscover America. And, turning from the arabesque to the

painting, we notice at once that the balance of colour, held with such

exquisite grace by the curtain on one side and the dress on the other,

is absent in the later work; and if we examine the colours separately

we cannot fail to apprehend the fact that the blacks in the later are

not nearly so beautiful as those in the earlier picture. The blacks of

the philosopher's coat and rug are neither as rich, not as rare, nor

as deep as the blacks of the mother's gown. Never have the vital

differences and the beauty of this colour been brought out as in that

gown and that curtain, never even in Hals, who excels all other

painters in this use of black. Mr. Whistler's failure with the first

colour, when we compare the two pictures, is exceeded by his failure

with the second colour. We miss the beauty of those extraordinary and

exquisite high notes--the cap and cuffs; and the place of the rich,

palpitating greys, so tremulous in the background of the earlier

picture, is taken by an insignificant grey that hardly seems necessary

or helpful to the coat and rug, and is only just raised out of the

commonplace by the dim yellow of two picture-frames. It must be

admitted, however, that the yellow is perfectly successful; it may be

almost said to be what is most attractive in the picture. The greys in

chin, beard, and hair must, however, be admitted to be beautiful,

although they are not so full of charm as the greys in the portrait of

Miss Alexander.

But if Mr. Whistler had only failed in these matters, he might have

still produced a masterpiece. But there is a graver criticism to be

urged against the picture. A portrait is an exact reflection of the

painter's state of soul at the moment of sitting down to paint. We

read in the picture what he really desired; for what he really desired

is in the picture, and his hesitations tell us what he only desired

feebly. Every passing distraction, every weariness, every loss of

interest in the model, all is written upon the canvas. Above all, he

tells us most plainly what he thought about his model--whether he was

moved by love or contempt; whether his moods were critical or

reverential. And what the canvas under consideration tells most

plainly is that Mr. Whistler never forgot his own personality in that

of the ancient philosopher. He came into the room as chirpy and

anecdotal as usual, in no way discountenanced or put about by the

presence of his venerable and illustrious sitter. He had heard that

the Chelsea sage wrote histories which were no doubt very learned, but

he felt no particular interest in the matter. Of reverence, respect,

or intimate knowledge of Carlyle there is no trace on the canvas; and

looked at from this side the picture may be said to be the most

American of all Mr. Whistler's works. "I am quite as big a man as

you", to put it bluntly, was Mr. Whistler's attitude of mind while

painting Carlyle. I do not contest the truth of the opinion. I merely

submit that that is not the frame of mind in which great portraiture

is done.

The drawing is large, ample, and vigorous, beautifully understood, but

not very profound or intimate: the picture seems to have been

accomplished easily, and in excellent health and spirits. The painting

is in Mr. Whistler's later and most characteristic manner. For many

years--for certainly twenty years--his manner has hardly varied at

all. He uses his colour very thin, so thinly that it often hardly

amounts to more than a glaze, and painting is laid over painting, like

skin upon skin. Regarded merely as brushwork, the face of the sage

could hardly be surpassed; the modelling is that beautiful flat

modelling, of which none except Mr. Whistler possesses the secrets.

What the painter saw he rendered with incomparable skill. The vision

of the rugged pensiveness of the old philosophers is as beautiful and

as shallow as a page of De Quincey. We are carried away in a flow of

exquisite eloquence, but the painter has not told us one significant

fact about his model, his nationality, his temperament, his rank, his

manner of life. We learn in a general way that he was a thinker; but

it would have been impossible to draw the head at all and conceal so

salient a characteristic. Mr. Whistler's portrait reveals certain

general observations of life; but has he given one single touch

intimately characteristic of his model?

But if the portrait of Carlyle, when looked at from a certain side,

must be admitted to be not wholly satisfactory, what shall be said of

the portrait of Lady Meux? The dress is a luminous and harmonious

piece of colouring, the material has its weight and its texture and

its character of fold; but of the face it is difficult to say more

than that it keeps its place in the picture. Very often the faces in

Mr. Whistler's portraits are the least interesting part of the

picture; his sitter's face does not seem to interest him more than the

cuffs, the carpet, the butterfly, which hovers about the screen. After

this admission, it will seem to many that it is waste of time to

consider further Mr. Whistler's claim to portraiture. This is not so.

Mr. Whistler is a great portrait painter, though he cannot take

measurements or follow an outline like Holbein.

Like most great painters, he has known how to introduce harmonious

variation into his style by taking from others just as much of their

sense of beauty as his own nature might successfully assimilate. I

have spoken of his assimilation and combination of the art of

Velasquez, and the entire art of Japan, but a still more striking

instance of the power of assimilation, which, strange as it may seem,

only the most original natures possess, is to hand in the early but

extremely beautiful picture, _La femme en blanc_. In the Chelsea

period of his life Mr. Whistler saw a great deal of that singular man,

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Intensely Italian, though he had never seen

Italy; and though writing no language but ours, still writing it with

a strange hybrid grace, bringing into it the rich and voluptuous

colour and fragrance of the south, expressing in picture and poem

nothing but an uneasy haunting sense of Italy--opulence of women, not

of the south, nor yet of the north, Italian celebration, mystic altar

linen, and pomp of gold vestment and legendary pane. Of such hauntings

Rossetti's life and art were made.

His hold on poetic form was surer than his hold on pictorial form,

wherein his art is hardly more than poetic reminiscence of Italian

missal and window pane. Yet even as a painter his attractiveness

cannot be denied, nor yet the influence he has exercised on English

art. Though he took nothing from his contemporaries, all took from

him, poets and painters alike. Not even Mr. Whistler could refrain,

and in _La femme en blanc_ he took from Rossetti his manner of feeling

and seeing. The type of woman is the same--beauty of dreaming eyes and

abundant hair. And in this picture we find a poetic interest, a moral

sense, if I may so phrase it, nowhere else to be detected, though you

search Mr. Whistler's work from end to end. The woman stands idly

dreaming by her mirror. She is what is her image in the glass, an

appearance that has come, and that will go leaving no more trace than

her reflection on the glass when she herself has moved away. She sees

in her dream the world like passing shadows thrown on an illuminated

cloth. She thinks of her soft, white, and opulent beauty which fills

her white dress; her chin is lifted, and above her face shines the

golden tumult of her hair.

The picture is one of the most perfect that Mr. Whistler has painted;

it is as perfect as the mother or Miss Alexander, and though it has

not the beautiful, flowing, supple execution of the "symphony in

white", I prefer it for sake of its sheer perfection. It is more

perfect than the symphony in white, though there is nothing in it

quite so extraordinary as the loving gaiety of the young girl's face.

The execution of that face is as flowing, as spontaneous, and as

bright as the most beautiful day of May. The white drapery clings like

haze about the edge of the woods, and the flesh tints are pearly and

evanescent as dew, and soft as the colour of a flowering mead. But the

kneeling figure is not so perfect, and that is why I reluctantly give

my preference to the woman by the mirror. Turning again to this

picture, I would fain call attention to the azalias, which, in

irresponsible decorative fashion, come into the right-hand corner. The

delicate flowers show bright and clear on the black-leaded fire-grate;

and it is in the painting of such detail that Mr. Whistler exceeds all

painters. For purity of colour and the beauty of pattern, these

flowers are surely as beautiful as anything that man's hand has ever

accomplished.

Mr. Whistler has never tried to be original. He has never attempted to

reproduce on canvas the discordant and discrepant extravagancies of

Nature as M. Besnard and Mr. John Sargent have done. His style has

always been marked by such extreme reserve that the critical must have

sometimes inclined to reproach him with want of daring, and ask

themselves where was the innovator in this calculated reduction of

tones, in these formal harmonies, in this constant synthesis, sought

with far more disregard for superfluous detail than Hals, for

instance, had ever dared to show. The still more critical, while

admitting the beauty and the grace of this art, must have often asked

themselves what, after all, has this painter invented, what new

subject-matter has he introduced into art?

It was with the night that Mr. Whistler set his seal and sign-manual

upon art; above all others he is surely the interpreter of the night.

Until he came the night of the painter was as ugly and insignificant

as any pitch barrel; it was he who first transferred to canvas the

blue transparent darkness which folds the world from sunset to

sunrise. The purple hollow, and all the illusive distances of the

gas-lit river, are Mr. Whistler's own. It was not the unhabited night

of lonely plain and desolate tarn that he chose to interpret, but the

difficult populous city night--the night of tall bridges and vast

water rained through with lights red and grey, the shores lined with

the lamps of the watching city. Mr. Whistler's night is the vast blue

and golden caravanry, where the jaded and the hungry and the

heavy-hearted lay down their burdens, and the contemplative freed from

the deceptive reality of the day understand humbly and pathetically

the casualness of our habitation, and the limitlessreality of a plan,

the intention of which we shall never know. Mr. Whistler's nights are

the blue transparent darknesses which are half of the world's life.

Sometimes he foregoes even the aid of earthly light, and his picture

is but luminous blue shadow, delicately graduated, as in the nocturne

in M. Duret's collection--purple above and below, a shadow in the

middle of the picture--a little less and there would be nothing.

There is the celebrated nocturne in the shape of a T--one pier of the

bridge and part of the arch, the mystery of the barge, and the figure

guiding the barge in the current, the strange luminosity of the

fleeting river! lines of lights, vague purple and illusive distance,

and all is so obviously beautiful that one pauses to consider how

there could have been stupidity enough to deny it. Of less dramatic

significance, but of equal esthetic value, is the nocturne known as

"the Cremorne lights". Here the night is strangely pale; one of those

summer nights when a slight veil of darkness is drawn for an hour or

more across the heavens. Another of quite extraordinary beauty, even

in a series of extraordinarily beautiful things, is "Night on the

Sea". The waves curl white in the darkness, and figures are seen as in

dreams; lights burn low, ships rock in the offing, and beyond them,

lost in the night, a vague sense of illimitable sea.

Out of the night Mr. Whistler has gathered beauty as august as Phidias

took from Greek youths. Nocturne II is the picture which Professor

Ruskin declared to be equivalent to flinging a pot of paint in the

face of the public. But that black night, filling the garden even to

the sky's obliteration, is not black paint but darkness. The whirl of

the St. Catherine wheel in the midst of this darkness amounts to a

miracle, and the exquisite drawing of the shower of falling fire would

arouse envy in Rembrandt, and prompt imitation. The line of the

watching crowd is only just indicated, and yet the garden is crowded.

There is another nocturne in which rockets are rising and falling, and

the drawing of these two showers of fire is so perfect, that when you

turn quickly towards the picture, the sparks really do ascend and

descend.

More than any other painter, Mr. Whistler's influence has made itself

felt on English art. More than any other man, Mr. Whistler has helped

to purge art of the vice of subject and belief that the mission of the

artist is to copy nature. Mr. Whistler's method is more learned, more

co-ordinate than that of any other painter of our time; all is

preconceived from the first touch to the last, nor has there ever been

much change in the method, the painting has grown looser, but the

method was always the same; to have seen him paint at once is to have

seen him paint at every moment of his life. Never did a man seem more

admirably destined to found a school which should worthily carry on

the tradition inherited from the old masters and represented only by

him. All the younger generation has accepted him as master, and that

my generation has not profited more than it has, leads me to think,

however elegant, refined, emotional, educated it may be, and anxious

to achieve, that it is lacking in creative force, that it is, in a

word, slightly too slight.