“_RENGAINES!_”
Pall Mall Gazette, Feb. 21st, 1885.
Last night at Prince’s Hall, Mr. Whistler made his first public
appearance as a lecturer on Art, and spoke for more than an hour with
really marvellous eloquence on the absolute uselessness of all lectures
of the kind. Mr. Whistler began his lecture with a very pretty _aria_
on pre-historic history, describing how in earlier times hunter and
warrior would go forth to chase and foray, while the artist sat at
home making cup and bowl for their service. Rude imitations of nature
they were first, like the gourd bottle, till the sense of beauty and
form developed, and, in all its exquisite proportions, the first vase
was fashioned. Then came a higher civilisation of Architecture and
Arm-chairs, and with exquisite design, and dainty diaper, the useful
things of Life were made lovely: and the hunter and the warrior lay
on the couch when they were tired, and, when they were thirsty, drank
from the bowl, and never cared to lose the exquisite proportions of
the one, or the delightful ornament of the other: and this attitude
of the primitive anthropophagous Philistine formed the text of the
lecture, and was the attitude which Mr Whistler entreated his audience
to adopt towards Art. Remembering, no doubt, many charming invitations
to wonderful private views, this fashionable assemblage seemed somewhat
aghast, and not a little amused, at being told that the slightest
appearance among a civilized people of any joy in beautiful things is
a grave impertinence to all painters; but Mr. Whistler was relentless,
and with charming ease, and much grace of manner, explained to the
public that the only thing they should cultivate was ugliness, and that
on their permanent stupidity rested all the hopes of art in the future.
The scene was in every way delightful; he stood there, a miniature
Mephistopheles mocking the majority! he was like a brilliant surgeon
lecturing to a class composed of subjects destined ultimately for
dissection, and solemnly assuring them how valuable to science their
maladies were and how absolutely uninteresting the slightest symptoms
of health on their part would be. In fairness to the audience, however,
I must say that they seemed extremely gratified at being rid of the
dreadful responsibility of admiring anything, and nothing could have
exceeded their enthusiasm when they were told by Mr Whistler that no
matter how vulgar their dresses were, or how hideous their surroundings
at home, still it was possible that a great painter, if there was such
a thing, could, by contemplating them in the twilight, and half closing
his eyes, see them under really picturesque conditions, and produce a
picture which they were not to attempt to understand, much less dare
to enjoy. Then there were some arrows, barbed and brilliant, shot off,
with all the speed and splendour of fireworks at the archaeologists,
who spend their lives in verifying the birth-places of nobodies, and
estimate the value of a work of art by its date or decay; at the art
critics who always treat a picture as if it were a novel, and try
and find out the plot; at dilettanti in general, and amateurs in
particular, and (_O mea culpa!_) at dress reformers most of all. “Did
not Velasquez paint crinolines? What more do you want?”
Having thus made a holocaust of humanity, Mr Whistler turned to
Nature, and in a few minutes convicted her of the Crystal Palace, Bank
Holidays, and a general overcrowding of detail, both in omnibuses and
in landscapes; and then, in a passage of singular beauty, not unlike
one that occurs in Corot’s letters, spoke of the artistic value of dim
dawns and dusks, when the mean facts of life are lost in evanescent
and exquisite effects, when common things are touched with mystery and
transfigured with beauty: when the warehouses become as palaces, and
the tall chimneys of the factory seem like campaniles in the silver air.
Finally, after making a strong protest against anybody but a painter
judging of painting, and a pathetic appeal to the audience not to
be lured by the aesthetic movement into having beautiful things
about them, Mr Whistler concluded his lecture with a pretty passage
about Fusiyama on a fan, and made his bow to an audience which he
had succeeded in completely fascinating by his wit, his brilliant
paradoxes, and at times, his real eloquence. Of course, with regard
to the value of beautiful surroundings I entirely differ from Mr
Whistler. An artist is not an isolated fact, he is the resultant of a
certain _milieu_ and a certain entourage, and can no more be born of a
nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from
a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle. That an artist will find
beauty in ugliness, _le beau dans l’horrible_, is now a commonplace
of the schools, the argot of the atelier, but I strongly deny that
charming people should be condemned to live with magenta ottomans and
Albert blue curtains in their rooms in order that some painter may
observe the side lights on the one and the values of the other. Nor do
I accept the dictum that only a painter is a judge of painting. I say
that only an artist is a judge of art; there is a wide difference. As
long as a painter is a painter merely, he should not be allowed to talk
of anything but mediums and megilp, and on those subjects should be
compelled to hold his tongue; it is only when he becomes an artist that
the secret laws of artistic creation are revealed to him. For there
are not many arts but one art merely: poem, picture, and Parthenon,
sonnet and statue――all are in their essence the same, and he who knows
one, knows all. But the poet is the supreme artist, for he is the
master of colour and form, and the real musician besides, and is lord
over all life and all arts; and so to the poet beyond all others are
these mysteries known; to Edgar Allan Poe and to Baudelaire, not to
Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche. However, I would not enjoy anybody
else’s lectures unless in a few points I disagreed with them, and Mr
Whistler’s lecture last night was, like everything that he does, a
masterpiece. Not merely for its clever satire and amusing jests will
it be remembered, but for the pure and perfect beauty of many of its
passages――passages delivered with an earnestness which seemed to amaze
those who had looked on Mr Whistler as a master of persiflage merely,
and had not known him, as we do, as a master of painting also. For
that he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting, is
my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr Whistler himself
entirely concurs.