James McNeill Whistler

I

THE problem with Whistler is to reconcile a great artist with a little man — or, if not a little man, an odd man, an eccentric man, a curious, furious creature, who flitted through the world, making epigrams and enemies, beloved and hated, laughing and laughable, and painting great pictures. He was glorified by his hand and damned by his tongue.

The task of disentangling this snarled soul is made much more difficult by the perplexity of records. What little he himself wrote, helps, so far as it goes. But it does not go far; and, for the most part, we have to deal with a cloud of legend, sometimes rosy, sometimes lurid, according to the reporter, but always obscuring and deceitful. Anecdotes are told in a dozen different ways, and there is never that care for verbal authenticity which is essential with a spirit at once so precise and so evasive. The chroniclers are baffling, when they mean to be helpful. The shrewd invent, the dull misapprehend. Take a single instance. One of the best-known Whistler stories is that of the answer to a lady who declared that there was no one but Whistler and Velasquez: ‘Madam, why drag in Velasquez?’ An obsequious follower actually inquired of the Master, whether he really meant this. When they are subjected to such Boswells, who can blame the Dr. Johnsons and the Whistlers for running riot? So, through all the uncertainty, we have to do the best we can.

Whistler was born in Lowell, like other great men. He did not like it; he would have preferred his mother’s southern dwelling-place, and sometimes implied that he was born in Baltimore. He declared in court that he was born in St. Petersburg. He once said to an inquisitive model, ‘My child, I was not born. I came from on high.’ And the model answered, with a frivolous impertinence that charmed him, ‘I should have supposed you came from below.’ He was as reticent about his age as he was about his birthplace. But the hard fact is that he was born in Lowell, in 1834. To be born in Lowell, to grow up in Russia, to be educated at West Point, to paint in France and England, with vague dashes to Venice and Valparaiso, and to die in London at seventy, makes a sufficiently variegated career. Even so, it was less variegated without than within.

Through the whole of it his life was in the pencil and brush, and I he world to him was a world of line and color. As a small child, he drew in Russia, and laughed at the pictures of Peter the Great. At West Point he drew his instructors, and astonished them. In the Coast Survey service he made exquisite official drawings — and odd faces on the margins of them. And, till he died, laughter and fighting may have been his diversions, but drawing and painting were his serious business.

The only serious one. Few human beings have taken less interest in the general affairs of men. Even for the other arts he had little thought to spare, except as they affected his own. Poetry did not touch him, unless an occasional jingle. Tragedy he found ludicrous. He liked to fetch analogies from music, but he knew nothing about it and cared nothing for it.

Apparently he read little, except as a special fancy took him. He adored Poe. He read Balzac and t he writers of that group. The Pennells insist that he must have read widely, because he had so much general information. Others say that he never touched a book. Probably the truth is that his reading was limited, but that a most retentive memory kept forever anything that impressed him. However this may be, in all the records and biographies I have found little trace of his conversing, or wishing to converse, on ordinary topics of general interest.

To politics and the wide range of social questions he was utterly indifferent. He hated journalists because they talked about him, and politicians because they did not. He praised America and t hings American at a distance, but American democracy would not have pleased him. In one sense he was democratic himself; for a street-sweeper who could draw would have interested him more than a British peer who only patronized art. ‘The Master was a Tory,’ says Mr. Menpes. ‘He did not quite know why; but he said it seemed to suggest luxury; and painters, he maintained, should be surrounded with luxury. He loved kings and queens and emperors, and had a feeling that his work should only be bought by royalty.’

With religion the attitude was about as elementary. Whistler dreaded death and avoided it and the thought of it. He believed in a future life, and could not understand those people who did not. He even pushed this belief as far as spiritualism, took a lively interest in mediums and table-rappings and communications from the dead. But I do not find that religious emotion or reflection had much real place in his life. He was immensely busy in this world, and left the next to take care of itself. In general, his religious tone is admirably conveyed by the anecdote of the dinner at which he listened in unusual silence to an animated and extensive discussion between representatives of various sects. At last Lady Burton turned to him and said, ‘And what are you, Mr. Whistler?’ ‘I, madam?’ he answered, using the word with which he would have liked to stop the mouths of all those who chattered about his own pursuit in life; ‘I, madam? I am an amateur.’

The same ignorance of the general thought and life and movement of the world very naturally permeates even Whistler’s elaborate discussions of his own art. The theories of the celebrated Ten o’Clock lecture, that art is a casual thing, and cometh and goeth where it listeth, that the artist happens, that there are no artistic peoples or periods, and that art has nothing to do with history, are shrewd, apt, and, as a protest against pedantry, in many respects just. But they are incoherent and chaotic, more witty than philosophical, and more significant of Whistler than of truth. Above all, they are intimately relat ed to the wide ignorance and indifference I have been commenting on.

Whistler made much of his musical analogies. If he had thought a little more deeply on music, he might have used another — or he might not. For music is indisputably and naturally what he always sought to make painting— the art of ignorance; the art, that is, which appeals directly to the emotions and does not require for its appreciation any wide training or experience in history or in the general interests of human life. It is for this reason that music, even more than painting, seems destined to become the all-engrossing, all-devouring art of the future.

And as Whistler was indifferent to human concerns outside his art in a theoretical way, so he carried the same indifference into practical action. He lived to paint, or to talk about painting; all else was pastime, and most things hardly that. Money? He could somet imes drive a hard bargain, but it was a question of pride in his own work, not of meanness. Otherwise, money slipped through his fingers, though in the early days there was little enough to slip. An artist should be comfortable, and bills were mundane things. So, though no one ever disputed his honesty of intention, he was apt to be in trouble. With time as with money. Exact hours and art had nothing to do with each other. What was punctuality? A virtue — or vice — of the bourgeoisie. If people invited him to dinner, he came when he pleased and dinner waited. If he invited them to breakfast at twelve, they might arrive at one and still hear him splashing in his bath behind the folding doors.

In all these varied phases of simplicity and unsophistication what strikes me most is a certain childlikeness. The child is a naked man, and in some respects so was Whistler. The child view accounts for many of his oddities and reconciles many of his contradictions. He thought strange things; but above all, he said and did what he thought, as most of us do not. Take his infinite delight in his own work. What artist in any line does not feel it? But some conceal it more than Whistler did. Gazing with rapt adoration at one of his pictures, he said to Keppel, ‘Now is n’t it beautiful?’ ‘It certainly is,’ said Keppel. And Whistler, ‘No, but is n’t it beautiful?’ ‘It is indeed,’ said Keppel. And Whistler again, raising his voice to a scream, with a not-too-wicked blasphemy, and bringing his hand down on his knee with a bang, so as to give emphasis to the last word of his sentence, ‘— it! is n’t it beautiful?’

The child is the centre of his own universe, relates everything, good and evil, to himself, as does the man also, in his soul. Whistler did it openly, triumphantly. His official biographers declare that they never heard him refer to himself in the third person; but they knew him only in later life and always managed to take a somewhat academic and decorous view of him. It is impossible to question Mr. Bacher’s account of his referring to himself as Whistler, though there may be some exaggeration in it. Not ‘I,’ but ‘Whistler’ did this or that. You must not find fault with the work or with the word of Whistler. Or again, at another period, it was the Master, as Mr. Menpes records it for us. ‘You do not realize what a privilege it is to be able to hand a cheque to the Master. You should offer it on a rich old English salver and in a kingly way.’ Just a hint of mockery in it, of course, but an appalling deal of seriousness also. And note the curious coincidence of this self-asserting, third-personal egotism with the attempt of Henry Adams to avoid egotism in precisely the same manner.

Everywhere with Whistler there is the intense determination of the child to occupy the centre of the stage, no matter who is relegated to the wings. There is the sharp, vivid laugh, the screaming ‘Ha! ha!’ a terror to his enemies, and something of a terror to his friends also. Not a bit of real merriment in it, but a trumpet assertion of Whistler’s presence and omnipresence. There is the extraordinary preoccupation with his own physical personality. In some respects, no doubt, he was handsome. A good authority declares that in youth he must have been ‘a pocket Apollo.’ At any rate, to use his pet word, he was always ‘amazing.’ The white lock, whether he came by it by inheritance or accident — what an ensign it was to blaze out the coming of the Master! Just so Tom Sawyer triumphed in his deleted front, tooth. Read Mr. Menpes’s charming account of Whistler at the barber’s. What a sacred function, what a solemn rite, the cult of the lock, the cult of the Master’s personality. At the tailor’s it was the same. Every customer was called upon to give his opinion as to the fit of a coat, and the tailor was duly impressed with his almost priestly privilege. ‘You know, you must not lot the Master appear badly clothed: it is your duty to see that I am well dressed.'

Milton tells us that he who would be a great poet must make his own life a great poem. Whistler apparently thought that he who would be a great artist must make himself a great picture ; but the picture he made was only what he detested most, — the word and the thing, — clever.

II

A large feature of the life of children is quarreling. It certainly was a large feature of the life of Whistler. And we shall best understand his quarrels, if we think of him as a noisy, nervous, sharp-tongued, insolent boy. There have been plenty of other artists like him, alas! He has been compared to Cellini, and justly; and Vasari’s accounts of Renaissance painters abound with rough words and silly or cruel deeds that might easily have been Whistler’s.

Whistler liked flattery and adulation as a child does, and sought them with the candid subtlety that a child employs for the same object; witness the singular story of the arts and wiles with which the Master tried to wan the affection of the ignorant fishermen of St. Ives — without success.

As he liked compliments, so he resented criticism, especially if it did not come from a competent source; and a competent source was too apt to mean one that took Whistler’s preëminence for granted. Criticism, sometimes reasonable, sometimes ignorant, sometimes really ill-natured and spiteful, was at the bottom of most of the riotous disagreements which long made the artist more conspicuous than his painting made him. It is not necessary to go into the details of these unpleasant squabbles. The names of Ruskin, Wilde, Moore, Whistler’s brother-in-law, Haden, and his patrons, Eden and Leyland, will sufficiently suggest them. Sometimes these adventures began with hostility. Sometimes friendship began them and hostility ended them. Sometimes Whistler appears madly angry, actually foaming at the mouth, says one observer, so that flecks of foam were to be seen on his tie. Sometimes he chuckled and triumphed devilishly, with punctuations of the fierce and irritating ‘Ha! ha!’ Sometimes there was physical violence.

Of course, such doings were disgusting and disgraceful, and they should have been forgotten as speedily as might be. But this was not Whistler’s way. Instead, he gloated over every contest, whether verbal or muscular. He insulted his enemies and exalted their discomfiture in print, like a hero of Homer or a conceited boy. He wrote letter after letter to the papers, always so obligingly ready to help a great man expose himself. Then he collected the whole mass, including the replies of those who had been foolish enough to reply, into The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and flattered himself that he was a great author as well as a great artist.

Some people think he was. There is no doubt that he was a master of bitter words. His phrases have a casual ease of snapping and stinging that often scarifies and sometimes amazes. From his Puritan training and his extensive knowledge of the Bible, — ‘that splendid mine of invective,’ as he characteristically called it, — as well as from his own reckless temper, he drew a profusion of abuse, which withered, whether justifiable or not. And occasionally he was capable of great imaginative touches that recall his pictures.

But in general his writing is vexatious and, to say the least, undignified; the angry rattle of a gifted small boy, who ought to know better. The Wilde correspondence is perhaps the worst; but everywhere we get a tone of cheap abuse and railing. There is a careless vigor of sharp wit, but hardly the vituperative splendor of Voltaire or Swift. And it is such a small, such a shallow, such a supersensitive way of taking criticism; no urbanity, no serenity, no large, sweet, humorous acceptance of the inevitable chattering folly of the world. I do not see how any admirer of Whistler’s genius can read The Gentle Art without sighing over the pity of it.

The pity of it is rather increased by his evident enjoyment. There was no real hatred at the bottom of his attacks. Mr. Chesterton insists that he tortured himself in torturing his enemies. This is rather too much of a tragic emphasis. He relieved his nervous irritability by slashing right and left. But I do not know that there was much torture in it and there was a good deal of fun — of a kind. ‘I have been so abominably occupied, what with working and fighting —! and you knowhow I like both.’ He did like fighting, and winning — or to make out that he had won. In a charming phrase, he describes himself as ‘delicately contentious.’ Again, he told the Pennells that he ‘could never be ill-natured, only wicked.’ The distinction is worthy of him, and is no doubt just, though perhaps not so self-complimentary as he thought it.

Moreover, in all his fights and quarrels, he liked and respected those who stood up to him and answered back. If you dodged and cowered, he would pursue remorselessly. If you gave him as good as he sent, he would laugh that shrill ‘Ha! ha!’ and let you go. When the artist was painting Lady Meux, he vexed and bothered and badgered her past endurance. Finally she snapped out, ‘See here, Jimmie Whistler! You keep a civil tongue in that head of yours, or I will have in someone to finish those portraits you have made of me.’ All Whistler could find to say was, ‘How dare you? How dare you?’ But he thought a good deal more of Lady Meux.

Also, his impishness, his strange, fantastic love of mischief, prompted him to scenes and touches of Aristophanic, Mephistophelian comedy, sometimes laughable, sometimes repulsive. There is a Renaissance cruelty about his remark, when told that the architect who originally designed the Peacock Room had gone mad on seeing Whistler’s alterations: ‘To be sure, that is the effect I have upon people.’ There is more of the ridiculous, but also much of the bitter, in his own wonderful account of his revenging himself upon Sir William Eden by spoiling the auction sale of his pictures. ‘I walked into the big room. The auctioneer was crying, “Going! Going! Thirty shillings! Going!” — “Ha! ha!” I laughed — not loudly, not boisterously— it was very delicately, very neatly done. But the room was electrified. Some of the henchmen were there; they grew rigid, afraid to move, afraid to glance my way out of the corners of their eyes. “Twenty shillings. Going!” the auctioneer would cry. “Ha! ha!” I would laugh, and things went for nothing and the henchmen trembled.’

Moralizing comment on all these wild dealings and doings of Whistler is perhaps superfluous and inappropriate. It would certainly have caused boundless glee to Whistler himself. Yet one may be permitted to point out how easy it is, after all, to be disagreeable, and how little real cleverness it requires. Most of us devote our best efforts to avoiding instead of achieving it. And then how often we fail! Even to lie disagreeably witty is not always a triumph of genius. Any tongue can sting, and the unthinking are always ready to mistake stinging for wit. Much of Whistler’s recorded talk irresistibly suggests Dr. Johnson’s remark about Cibber: ‘Taking from his conversation all that he ought not to have said, he was a poor creature.’

In the same way with the gentle art of making enemies. Most of us require no art for it, being incredibly gifted by nature in that direction. The art of making friends is the difficult one, especially that of keeping them after they are made. It is easy to ridicule friendship. A lady once asked Whistler, ‘Why have you withered people and stung them all your life?’ He answered, ‘My dear, I will tell you a secret. Early in life I made the discovery that I was charming; and if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away to keep from being bored to death.’ And he dedicated The Gentle Art to ‘The rare Few, who, early in Life, have rid Themselves of the Friendship of the Many.’

The irony is obvious enough, and it is equally obvious that Whistler was referring to the casual friendships of the world, which do not deserve the name. At the same time, the art, or the gift, or the instinct, of drawing men to you is worth more, to the artist or the Philistine, than that of repelling them. In studying Whistler one cannot but think of such an opposite type as Longfellow, who, without effort, almost without thought, and still keeping an individuality as sturdy as Whistler’s, and more manly, made himself lovable and beloved by everybody. Or, if Longfellow as an artist is not thought worthy the comparison, take Raphael, of whom Vasari tells us that a power was ‘accorded to him by Heaven of bringing all who approached his presence into harmony, an effect inconceivably surprising in our calling and contrary to the nature of artists.’ And again, ‘All harsh and evil dispositions became subdued at the sight of him; every base thought departing from the mind before his influence.

. . . And this happened because he surpassed all in friendly courtesy as well as in art.'

I am inclined to think that such praise would be worth more to Whistler’s memory a hundred years hence than The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.

III

So, having got rid of the too-abundant negative traits, let us turn to Whistler’s attraction and charm. He was a man of contradictions, says Mr. Van Dyke; and the frivolous mischiefmaker lived side by side with a thoughtful, earnest, even lofty-souled artist.

The child clue will stay with us, as before. Those who knew Whistler best frequently recur to it: ‘When off his guard, he was often a pathetic kid.’ The childlike candor rarely failed, not only in asserting merits, but even in recognizing defects. ‘He was the most absolutely truthful man about himself that I ever met. I never knew him to hide an opinion or a thought — nor to try to excuse an action.’ And with the candor in professing opinions went a high and energetic courage in defending them, a courage that was sometimes blatant and tactless, but. seems to have been genuine, even to the point of admitting its own failures. When Mr. Menpes said to him, ‘Of course, you don’t know what fear is?’ Whistler answered, ‘ Ah, yes! I do. I should hate, for example, to be standing opposite a man who was a better shot than I, far away out in the forest in the bleak, cold early morning. Fancy, I, the Master, standing out in the open as a target to be shot at!’

In general human relations it would be a mistake to suppose that Whistler was always thorny, prickly, biting and stinging. His biographers assert that he was ‘ the gayest man who ever lived.’ Mr. Chesterton denies that he was gay, and I think Mr. Chesterton must be right. True gayety not only does not wound, but cannot bear the thought of having wounded; and such was not Whistler. Though he chose the butterfly signature, his nature had not the butterfly’s light and careless saturation of sunshine.

But it is true that he loved human society and could never bear to be alone, even liking people about him when he worked. He could use his wit to charm and fascinate as well as to punish. Whenever he took part in conversation, he led it and deserved to lead it. Hear this account of his appearance in a crowded club-room. ‘Speaking simply in a quiet way to myself, without once looking round, Whistler would draw every man in that club to his side — smart young men about town, old fogies, retired soldiers, who had been dozing in armchairs.’ And men not only listened to him, they loved him — when they did not hate him. ‘ Whistler could be gentle, sweet, sympathetic, almost feminine, so lovable was he.’ He inspired deep attachments, which could be broken only by the rude knocks that he too well knew how to give. Servants loved him, and there is no better test of simple goodness and kindness.

For women he seems always to have had a peculiar regard, although the records of his relations with them are naturally not abundant. His Southern training and habits gave him a rather unusual formal courtesy toward them, and many witnesses insist upon what is somewhat curious in consideration of his wit and comic instinct and of his distinctly irregular life: that he never uttered and never tolerated grossness. Two attachments to women, at any rate, played a large part in his career. He adored his mother and obeyed her in his youth. He adored her and watched over her in his riper years. Though he bitterly resented any critical suggestion of sentiment in his portrait of her, he confided to a friend, speaking very slowly and softly, ‘Yes — yes — one does like to make one’s mummy just as nice as possible.’ When he was over fifty he stumbled upon a casual marriage, fortuitous as most oilier external events in his career; but the marriage was singularly happy: he adored his wife as he had adored his mother, and her death shattered him in a way to confute those who denied him human tenderness.

When it comes to art, Whistler’s admirable qualities are questioned by no one. His devotion to it from youth to age was perfect and unfailing. It was not perhaps as devouring and morbid a passion as with some; but it was a constant flame, which burned steadily through all difficulty and all discouragement. It was enlightened and intelligent also, directed from the beginning with firm and close discipline toward a definite object. Not that the difficulties and discouragements did not come. In spite of his confidence and belief in himself, there were times, as with all artists, when things went bitterly, hopelessly wrong. ‘No one,’ says Mr. Gay, ‘can realize, who has not watched Whistler paint, the agony that his work gave him. I have seen him, after a day’s struggle with a picture, when things did not go, completely collapse, as from an illness.’ And one should read Mr. Menpes’s strange account of abnormal excitement, on the very eve of an exhibition, over a mouth that was not right and could not be made right. ‘ He became nervous and sensitive. The whole exhibition seemed to centre on that one mouth. It developed into a nightmare. At length, in despair, he dashed it out with turpentine, and fled from the gallery just as the first critic was entering.’

As these efforts and struggles show, no matter how much Whistler may have attitudinized in life, in art he was sincere and genuine. If you took him quietly by himself, you could not but feel this. ‘As a matter of fact,’ says Mr. Van Dyke, ‘ he was almost always in a serious mood, and, with his knowledge and gift of language, talked most sensibly and persuasively.’ His actions showed sincerity far more than his talk. Though he was careless about money, spent much of it and would have liked to spend more, and believed that he could have done better work if he had had more to spend, he never sacrificed one line of his ideals for any earthly payment. ‘It is better to live on bread and cheese and paint beautiful things than to live like Dives and paint pot-boilers,’ he said; and he meant it and acted on it always.

Also, he was sincere enough to accept criticism and profit by it, when it came from a proper source and in a proper spirit. He once asked a great sculptor to say what he thought of a portrait. The sculptor, after some hesitation, pointed out that one leg was longer than the other. Whistler’s friends expected an outburst. Instead, he remarked quietly, ‘You are quite right.

I had not observed the fault, and I shall correct it in the morning.’ Afterwards he added, ‘What an eye for line a sculptor has!’

And, as he was ready to submit to criticism of his own work, so he was equally quick to acknowledge merit in others, provided it was really there. He praised the work of students and fellow artists with quick and discerning kindness, if it seemed to him praiseworthy. But pretence and shallow cleverness he withered wherever he found them.

His capacity for labor, for continuous and prolonged painstaking, was limitless. Because he concealed this and pretended to work lightly and carelessly, people thought him idle; but he was not. Industry, he said, was an absolute necessity, not a virtue, and a work of art, when finished, should show no trace of the labor that had produced it. ‘Work alone will efface the footsteps of work.’ In fact, it was only in age that he discovered that he had never done anything but work. ‘It struck me that I had never rested, that I had never done nothing, that it was the one thing I needed.’ He could not tolerate laziness in himself or in others. In his house there were no armchairs, and to a friend who complained of this, he remarked, ‘If you want to rest, you had better go to bed.’ But his friends and pupils did not want to rest when he was with them. ‘ Whistler invariably inspired people to work,’ says one who knew him well. The sittings for his portraits were prolonged and repeated, till the sitters’ patience was utterly exhausted, and some of them complained that the intensity of his effort seemed to draw the very life out of them.

In short, those who judge him by his quarrels and his bickerings and his flippancy and his odd clothes get no idea of the deep, conscientious earnestness of the artist. He worked till death to produce beautiful things. A year before he died he insisted with passionate simplicity and sincerity, ‘I would have done anything for my art.’ He was always looking forward, and there are few finer expressions of the ardor of creation than his noble phrase, ‘An artist’s career always begins tomorrow.’

IV

It is not my business to discuss Whistler’s art as such. But as the general’s soul is revealed in his battles and the preacher’s in his sermons, so in his pictures we must seek the painter’s, and the psychographer considers work as well as words.

It appears, then, that in Whistler’s art there are two marked elements, which, taken together, help largely to elucidate his spirit. The first of these is the element of truth, sincerity, precision, exactitude, showing more conspicuously in the etchings, but never neglected in any of his work at any time. As he himself said of the Thames series of etchings, ‘There, you see, all is sacrificed to exactness of outline.’

This instinct of truth, of reality, should be closely related to the more external facts of Whistler’s life. In combination with the childlike simplicity and openness, it entered largely into his everlasting quarrels. He did not quarrel in Paris — that is, not abnormally. But all the artist in him, all the truth-lover, revolted against the conventions of English Philistinism, and he fought them, whether critical or social, with all the passion that was in him. ‘The wit of Whistler . . . was the result of intense personal convictions as to the lines along which art and life move together,’ says one of his most intelligent biographers. As applied to life, this instinct of truth in him was mainly destructive, and did little good to him or others; but it was obscurely lofty in aim, and it was an integral part of his better nature.

In art, on the other hand, the destructive instinct led at once to construction. Here too, indeed, there was the perpetual, deadly war on sham. Whistler saw all around him, in painting as in poetry, the Victorian excess of sentiment. The ‘heart interest’ was what counted, and execution was a minor matter. The Angelus and Evangeline would make a world-wide reputation, even if the workmanship was inferior. Against this heresy of the subject Whistler was in constant revolt. He did not sufficiently realize that a great artist may treat a great subject, though it too often happens that to the common eye a great subject may transfigure a mean conception and a xml gar handling. He wanted to shake art free from all these adjuncts of theme and historical association and historical development, and concentrate the artist’s whole effort on the pure ecstasy of line and color. He pushed this so far as to revel in mere decorative richness, feeding and filling his eye and imagination with the azure and golden splendors of the Peacock Room.

But of course, if you had pushed him home, he would have admitted that in the end all beauty must lie in human emotion, vague suggestions and intimations of subtle feeling, all the more overpowering because indefinite. And the real purpose of getting rid of a distinct, trite subject was to allow these essential emotions richer play. Music, in which he so often sought analogy, would have given it to him on this point also. For the most elaborate orchestral symphony depends as fundamentally on human emotion for its significance as does the simplest air. And Bach and Wagner appeal to realms of feeling equally deep, though widely different. The most original and suggestive part of Whistler’s painting, if not the greatest, is that which enters most into this vast, uncharted region of intangible emotion. Of all things he loved to paint night; and what in the wide world is more throbbing with imaginative depths? ‘Subject, sentiment, meaning were for him in the night itself — the night in all its loveliness and mystery.’

Here we seize the second cardinal element in Whistler’s work — the element of mystery. What characterizes his range of vague emotion is not passion, not melancholy, but just this sense of mystery, of the indefinable, the impalpable. It is singular how all the critics, whatever their point of view, unite in distinguishing this, something vague, something elusive, some hidden, subtle suggestion which cannot be analyzed or seized in words. It is naturally more marked in the nocturnes and similar paintings, but it is perfectly appreciable also in the portraits and in the etchings: the handling of backgrounds and accessories, the delicate, evasive gradation of tints and shades. As Huysmans puts it, ‘these phantom portraits, which seem to shrink away, to sink into the wall, with their enigmatic eyes.’

And note that the two elements must work together to produce their full effect. It is the intense sense of definiteness, of clearness, the extraordinary realistic emphasis on one salient point, that doubles the surrounding suggestion of mystery. In the secret of making precision, vivid definition, enhance and redouble the obscure, Whistler shows his debt to Poe, who was always rescued from mere melodrama by having this obsession of mystery as overwhelmingly as anyone who ever lived. But there is another influence that may have affected Whistler in this regard, and that is Russia. I cannot find that any critic or biographer has suggested this. Yet the artist passed the most impressionable part of his youth in Russia. His eyes, his ears, his heart were wide open all that time. Not only Russian painting, but Russian music and Russian thought must have passed into them. He must have touched the Orient there, as he did later through Japan. And surely the essence of Russian art is in just this union of intense, bald realism with the most subtle, far-reaching suggestion of the unlimited, the unexplored, the forever unknown. Russia is childhood intensely sophisticated. And so was Whistler.

It is curious to reflect that the combination in Whistler of the most lucid, direct, energetic intelligence with the complete general ignorance that I have noted earlier led to exactly this result of the vivid union of precision with mystery. Clear-sighted and observant as he was, there is no sense of modern life in him, no portrayal of the quick, active, current movement of the contemporary world, no such of any world. The intelligence seems to clarify simply for the purpose of obscuring. The total result of the age-long evolution of such a magnificent instrument as human reason is to stultify it, to show with blinding flashes the boundless region of impenetrable shadow. And in this phase of Whistler’s art nothing is more symbolical and suggestive than the nocturne with fireworks. The glare of the rocket makes the involving darkness oppress you with a negative visibility that is maddening.

It is in view of this union of intense intellectual clearness with mystery that we must read all Whistler’s perplexing remarks about Nature. Nature was crude multiplicity. To the unseeing eye, to the unaided imagination, she would not yield her secret or tell her story. It was the artist’s business and his triumph to select, to isolate, to emphasize, to coördinate, so as to suggest the emotion he wished to convey, no other and no more. Here again, the parallel of music would have illustrated better than any analysis of painting. Even’ sound that music uses is given in nature, but given in a vast and tangled disorder, which as often results in pain as in pleasure. The musician’s genius brings this chaos into a harmonized scheme of ordered ecstasy. In Whistler’s idea the final and perfect triumph of human intelligence was the transformation of confusion into mystery.

Many have been perplexed by his dislike of the country, and even abuse of it. The explanation is simple. In the first place, he had never lived in the country. His experience of it was the tourist’s, and nature to the tourist is a mere panoramic display, a succession of vulgar excitements from an ever-higher mountain or deeper sea. Nature to the tourist is scenery, not feeling. This is what Whistler meant when he returned from a visit to the English lakes and said the mountains ‘were all little round hills with little round trees out of a Noah’s ark’; when he complained in general that there were too many trees in the country, and even grumbled to a friend, who urged the glory of the stars, ‘there are too many of ’em.’ If he had grown up with an exquisite threshold beauty, such as hovers in the lovely lines of Cowper, —

his brush would have drawn out the charm as few have ever done before. But he dwelt in cities. Huge casual doses of nature first surfeited and then starved him. Moreover, he held, perhaps justly, that the deepest fountains of mystery are not even wide fields and quiet skies, but the human eye and the human heart.

It is needless to say that the theory of mystery as I have elaborated if — perhaps too subtly — is not explicit in any writing or recorded speech of Whistler himself. When one has it in mind, however, there is a curious interest in catching the notes and echoes of it in his own words. Thus, in practical matters, take his remark to one who commented on the unfinished condition of the painter’s abode, ‘You see, I do not care for settling anywhere. Where there is no more space for improvement, or dreaming about improvement, where mystery is in perfect shape, it is finis — the end — death. There is no hope nor outlook left.’ Or take the same instinct in a more artistic connection. ‘They talk about the blue skies of Italy. — The skies of Italy are not blue, they are black. You do not see blue sides except in Holland and here, or other countries where you get great white clouds, and then the spaces between are blue! And in Holland there is atmosphere, and that means mystery. There is mystery here, too, and the people don’t want it. What they like is when the east wind blows, when you can look across the river and count the wires in the canary bird’s cage on the other side.’ Finally, take the wonderful words about painting in the twilight, as full of mystery and vague suggestion as a poem of Shelley. ‘As the light fades and the shadows deepen, all the petty and exacting details vanish; every triviality disappears, and I see things as they are, in great, strong masses; the buttons are lost, but the garment remains; the garment is lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter’s imagination.’ Even allowing for the touch of Whistler’s natural irony, such a view of art seems to amend Gautier’s celebrated phrase into, ‘I am a man for whom the invisible world exists,’and to give double emphasis to the lines of Keats, —

So we find in Whistler, as we found implicit in Mark Twain and explicit in Henry Adams, the immense and overwhelming heritage of ignorance transmitted by the nineteenth century to the twentieth. But whereas Mark erected ignorance into a dogmatic religion of negation, and Adams trifled with it as a toy, Whistler drew from it the enduring comfort of artistic effort, and applied to its persistent torment the immortal, divine recipe for cure of headache, heartache, soul-ills, body-ills, care, poverty, ignominy, neglect, and pain — the creation, or even the attempted creation, of things beautiful.