Part 9

After considering La Farge, it is difficult to think of Whistler other than in terms of contrast. They were of the same time, their tastes were not dissimilar, and many features of their theory and practice were in agreement; but Whistler’s impetuosity and contentiousness seem magnified when set over against the gravity and reticence of La Farge. He had not the latter’s mental poise, nor philosophy, nor tenacity, nor patience. The seriousness of his art always suffered from the acrimony of his talk or the cleverness of his writing or the flare of his conduct. He was a wit, to be sure, but not a wise one; a brilliant writer but not a profound one; an æsthetic bravo but not a discreet one. His social activities gave his art a wide notoriety, but that rather harmed than helped its permanent fame. The mob enjoyed his caustic utterances but continued to look askance at his symphonies and nocturnes. What else could have been expected? Art explains itself or it falls. Talk may make it talked about but does not establish its final worth.

And so one, at times, wishes that Whistler had said nothing, written nothing, explained nothing. His art standing alone would eventually have vindicated itself as did that of Hals and Rembrandt and Velasquez. There is not the least bit of flippancy or irritability or waspishness about it. If we knew naught of his life and had never read _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ and the _Ten O’Clock_, we could not have derived the militant Whistler from his pictures. They are cast in a vein of decorative beauty and done not only with the greatest seriousness but with the greatest tranquillity. With their simplicity and largeness of vision, their fastidiousness of arrangement, their charm of mood and loveliness of color they would point to an Ariel-like creator who was in love with color refinements, a devotee of nature’s minor chords, her shadowy manifestations, her evanescent harmonies. And that would have been the true Whistler--the Whistler that fame will not allow to die. But his clarification is still some distance away. Appreciation is clouded by the presence of the egotist, the dandy, the bitter-tongued wit, the maker of paradoxes--passing phases of temperament quite aside from his reckoning as an artist, mental poses forced upon him by circumstances which he doubtless felt he had to meet and overcome.

That is not to say that the capacity for verbal fisticuffs was not born in him, though he did not show it in his early days, nor while a student in Paris. It was only after he took up life in London and was reviled by British criticism that he stepped outside of his art to defend himself. Perhaps he took to words as readily as Cellini to throat-cutting or Goya to bull-fighting, but it was not the less unfortunate. That Cellini was a bravo and Goya a roysterer and Whistler a maker of enemies merely suggests that artists may have dual natures like other people and not be the better for them. Their art is not improved thereby.

But it is perhaps useless to argue against the admission of the irrelevant. The world likes it and will have it. That Bacon, Titian, Goethe were mean in spirit is inconsequent backstairs gossip, but it is taken as a relish along with their vision and their wisdom. Just so with Whistler. The present generation of painters thinks his _Ten O’Clock_ the law and gospel of art, and a dozen biographies of him record his epigrams and corrosive remarks along with his epoch-making pictures. We shall have to take the chaff with the wheat.

Perhaps the chief infirmity of Whistler’s make-up was his lack of patience. Nature had endowed him with a bright, alert mind that flashed and scintillated but wavered perhaps in continuity of purpose. It was a true-enough American mind in that at first it balked at effort and sought to vault over obstacles by bursts of speed or sudden inspiration. The average American believes more in inspiration than in work, though as applied directly to Whistler we must not push that point too far. There were periods when he labored hard but there was no prolonged patience, no calm philosophy of enduring and biding his time. As a boy he would never submit entirely to education, and as a young man the rigor of studio-training fretted him. He took as much of each as pleased him and let the rest go. He resented guidance and resisted discipline as more or less of a restraint on individuality.

The story of his birth, family, and early education is told minutely in the excellent biography by the Pennells.[11] From their account it appears that Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834. He was reported to have been born in Baltimore, and he did not deny the report. “If any one likes to think I was born in Baltimore, why should I deny it? It is of no consequence to me.” His parents were refined, educated people, the best that the United States at that time was capable of producing. His father was a West Point graduate, a major in the United States army, and, at the time of Whistler’s birth, an engineer, building locks and canals at Lowell. In 1843 the whole Whistler family went to Russia, where the father had been called by the Czar to build the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. In St. Petersburg the children were carefully tutored, especially in such polite learning as the languages and the arts. Whistler was already drawing in a boyish way, and was no doubt receiving impressions of art from various sources. In 1847 he was in England for the summer with his mother, and again in 1849 he went there for the winter because his health could not stand the Russian climate. In the latter year his father died, and shortly thereafter Mrs. Whistler, with the children, returned to America. Whistler the boy was sent to school at Pomfret, and his mother records that he was still “an excitable spirit with littler perseverance,” and had “habits of indolence.”

[11] _The Life of James McNeill Whistler_, by E. R. and J. Pennell, Philadelphia, 1911.

Two years of Pomfret and he was entered as a cadet at the West Point Military Academy. He remained there three years, and was dropped in 1854 because deficient in chemistry. Besides, he could not remember dates, and at cavalry drill he had difficulty in keeping on his horse. These seem slight reasons for dropping his name from the rolls, but the West Point requirements in those days, as now, were rather rigorous. He appealed to Washington for reinstatement but was denied. In its place a job was offered him in the Coast Survey. He accepted and drew on government maps for some months, resigning in 1855. The same year he went to Paris to study art and entered the studio of Gleyre, one of the leading semiclassic painters of the time.

Whistler’s boyhood and youth suggest little out of the ordinary except that he was better born, better educated, and had better advantages than the average aspiring youth. In art he had left only the usual record of desultory drawings. Professor Weir at West Point had given him lessons, but nothing remarkable resulted therefrom. Some of the sketches of his West Point days are preserved, and while they are not astonishing, they are nevertheless moderately indicative of the coming master. Two drawings called “The Valentine” and “Sam Weller and Mary” have the same small delicate line and an attempt at tone by shadings and hatchings that characterize his etchings and lithographs of later date. But Whistler’s career does not begin for us until he reached Paris in 1855--the year before La Farge’s arrival.

There are conflicting stories about what he did or did not do under Gleyre. He must have learned something of drawing and construction besides such small studio devices as arranging colors on the palette, preparing the canvas, using ivory-black as a base of tone--a method which he retained all his life. In actual handling of the brush he seems to have gotten something from his associates, Fantin-Latour and Degas, who were then following Courbet. Evidently he did not care for the routine of the _atelier_. Drouet, the sculptor, who was one of his intimates, did not think that he worked much but was well disposed toward jokes, pranks, and a good time. By way of interlude during his two years with Gleyre he went with a companion on a trip through Alsace and did some etchings, known as the French set. In 1857 he made a trip to England and studied pictures at the Manchester Exhibition. Returned to Paris, he remained there until 1859, living in the Latin Quarter, copying pictures at the Louvre, and doing original work of his own. His first notable picture, “At the Piano,” was sent to the Salon of 1859 and rejected, though two of his etchings were accepted. Sent to the Royal Academy the same year, the picture and the etchings were well received and praised.

There were many journeyings backward and forward from London during this year. Whistler’s sister had married Seymour Haden and was living there; his student friends of Paris days--Poynter, Armstrong, Ionides, Du Maurier--were there and he had not as yet quarrelled with them; above all, the Thames was there. So finally he took up his residence in London and began work along the river. He did eleven etchings of the Thames set, and the next year painted the “Wapping,” the “Thames in Ice,” and later in the year “The Music Room,” besides a number of portraits. In 1861 he was in Brittany doing the “Coast of Brittany” in the style of Courbet, then in Paris at work on “The White Girl,” and later at Biarritz painting “The Blue Wave,” again in the style of Courbet.

Up to this time everything had gone fairly well with him. He had had an artistic success at the English exhibitions, though his “White Girl” had been rejected; many friends--Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, and others--recognized his ability; there was as yet no marked denunciation from press or public. It was not called for, even from a Philistine point of view. Nothing very ultra or bizarre showed in his painting. It was modern, but it was the modernity of Gleyre, Courbet, Fantin--the advanced painting of the times. The pattern of his pictures was perhaps something of an innovation, because already he had begun flattening it. That may have been the reason for the rejection of “At the Piano” and “The White Girl.” But there could have been nothing very forced about the flattening then, for to-day the pictures look just a little old-fashioned. For the realistic requirements of 1860 they were extremely well planned and executed, and the wonder now is that every one did not give them positive recognition at once. Perhaps the handling was a little too free and the modelling of the figures too low in relief for the man in the street, but on the whole there was small cause for complaint on the part of the young painter.

If there was little question at this time about Whistler’s pictures, there was none at all about his etchings. Every one, even the stodgiest of Britons, liked them. Perhaps that was due again to their conformity to custom. There was little about the early work very different from that of other etchers except that it was freer, surer, and better. The long swinging line, as in the dry point of “Jo,” or the sharply contrasted blacks, as in the “Drouet,” were given with emphasis. Contrast rather than uniformity was the aim and there was little attempt at pronounced tone effect, or flattening of the figure, or disturbance of perspective--the thing most dear to the viewing public. In fact, Whistler’s etchings have always been exempt from the denunciation of his paintings. People could see in them things realistic and representative; the decorative pattern did not bother them.

There was no hue and cry raised in England over Whistler’s early work because it was not vehemently radical or audaciously assertive. He had accepted and followed the classic tradition of Gleyre, had modified it by studies of Rembrandt, Courbet, Fantin, Manet, had bettered it by observations and methods entirely his own; but he was going with the tide, not against it or across it. Had he died at, say, twenty-seven, and the world had only his early etchings, “The White Girl,” “At the Piano,” and “The Music Room,” to go by, it is doubtful if his dozen biographies would have been written, or that he would have held more than a modest niche in the hall of fame. It was when he became a great innovator that he met with vituperation, and, by the same token, it was only then that he became a really great artist.

The innovation came with his modification of the realistic tradition of the Western world and his introduction of the decorative tradition of the Eastern world. The latter was a better-based, a fairer, a more alluring tradition than the one he had been reared in; but he did not, could not, go over to it in its entirety and turn himself into an Occidental painter on silk. That would have been mere forceless imitation. Instead of doing so, he strove to graft the Eastern shoot upon the Western stock, to take what was best of Japanese art and blend it with French art, thus harmonizing the two traditions. Representative figures from the Western world were put into an Eastern pattern and made to do decorative service. The Thames was turned into nocturnes, portraits were changed to arrangements in grays or browns or blacks, and London _genre_ became so many symphonies or harmonies in gold, blue, or old rose. The result was a rare bouquet of orchids which the English public, reared on primroses and daisies, did not find in its botany book and could not understand. No wonder there was confusion, misunderstanding, and denunciation. With his Oriental gospel Whistler in London was scoffed at and reviled. He had brought a new faith to English art, but no one believed in it or would receive it. There was nothing to do but stone the evangelist. The stoning roused his ire.

“though young he was a Tartar And not at all disposed to prove a martyr.”

And so the quarrel began and ran on for forty years, until the painter died, and the British public bought his pictures and hung them in its national galleries, and the incident was declared closed. The story is old in art but this one possesses distinctly modern variations.

Whistler had probably begun the study of Japanese art before 1860, and there is equal probability that in Paris he saw not the best examples of it, but only its latter-day manifestations in the color prints of Hokusai, Utamaro, and Hiroshige. However that may have been, he saw enough to change his ideas about pattern and to turn him half-way round, at least, from the representative to the decorative. That was the beginning of the misunderstanding. Time out of mind artist and public had been conscious that painting possessed the dimensions of height and breadth, and, by illusion, was capable of a third dimension in depth or thickness. The illusion was produced by variations of light, shade, or color which gave modelling. From long custom a preference grew up for figures modelled out--a depth by protrusion rather than by recession. When, therefore, Whistler came to the fore and insisted that the third dimension was something of a vulgarity and that figures should not be round and stand out but be flat and _stand in_, there was instant disagreement.

He went further. Linear perspective was a cheap accomplishment and the delight in it was unintelligent. There was infinitely more distinction in aerial perspective whereby recession and depth were produced by a degradation of values. Aerial perspective was, in fact, the only perspective worth while. There should not be too much depth. The pattern should be kept flat and the picture should not “break through the wall” but be a part of it. Moreover, contrast of color was less decorative, less charming, than accord. A picture should be pitched in a certain tonal key and maintain the tone throughout. The minor chords were more refined than those of higher pitch and greater resonance; a twilight or a midnight was more lovely than “a foolish sunset.” Finally the picture was finished when its decorative pattern was complete. The whole meaning of the picture was in its look. It should make no other appeal. Piety, patriotism, sentiment, emotion, story were all barred out as beside the mark--foreign to the medium.

All this Whistler said in his pictures and it irritated him that the public would not recognize his point of view, but chose instead to judge his work by the standards of a Leighton and a Millais. By way of supplement he sought to explain with tongue and pen, but he used too many metaphors, paradoxes, and sophisms, with the result that the audience was more mystified than ever. He achieved a reputation for insincerity; was derided as a coxcomb, a mountebank, an impostor, a charlatan. Finally it was discovered that some of the things he said were sharp-pointed, that he was a wit, a dandy, a gay fellow. And they laughed. They would not take either his word or his art seriously. It was admitted, with some complacency, that he was a good etcher, but as a painter he had not fulfilled expectations. The prophet had arrived ahead of his time.

The Japanese influence--the most potent of all in Whistler’s art--began to show itself gradually and did not come out entirely in the open until such pictures as the “Lange Leizen,” “The Gold Screen,” “The Balcony,” and the “Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine” appeared. With them not only the flat pattern but Tokio porcelains, fans, screens, robes were shown. There was some incongruity in the appearances, which Whistler did not seek to conceal. The figure in the “Lange Leizen” is English, sits on a chair like an English model, and is in an English interior; but Japanese costume and blue-and-white pots and jars are introduced. Whistler regarded it as a color scheme and called it “An Arrangement in Purple and Rose,” but his audience saw only the incongruity. “The Balcony” again was mystifying. There were four figures in Japanese robes on an iron-railed platform with an outlook on the Thames. There were bamboo screens and potted azaleas and blue-and-white tea things. Again there was the impossible--Japan set down in London. The subtitle, “A Harmony in Flesh Color and Green,” explained nothing. The picture was judged by its meaning, not by its appearance, and, of course, it meant nothing in an English sense.

The “Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine” was even more startling. Every one knew it was a young Greek girl who posed as the Princesse, and the masquerade of Japanese robe and rug and screen and fan was only a pretense. The subtitle of “Rose and Silver” again did not enlighten. What was wanted was the common sense of it and not the harmony or the arrangement. But it had no common sense; it was merely a fantasy in color. Persistently they looked for the wrong thing and would not see what the painter wished them to see. It was just so with “The Little White Girl”--a beautiful symphony in white showing a young girl in muslin leaning against a white mantel with her face reflected in a mirror. It was Japanese only in the fan, the flowers, and the vase, but the arrangement was too flat for public appreciation, and the girl was declared the “most bizarre of bipeds.”

All through the sixties this misapprehension of purpose and aim persisted, and toward 1870 another riddle was presented with the appearance of the nocturnes. They were things done along the Thames at dusk and were revelations of that blue-air envelope which forms when the shadow of the world begins to creep up the Eastern sky. The idea had perhaps been suggested to Whistler in the color prints of Hiroshige and he had afterward found its reality in English twilights. Such a motive was quite the opposite of Turner’s blazing sunset upon which the generations had been reared. Everything was muffled, vague in outline, half seen as to place. Much was left to the imagination, and as for the composition, it was arranged with the greatest simplicity. Indeed, it was so simple that people thought it must be foolish and said so without hesitation.

Again the subtitles of “Blue and Gold” and “Black and Gold” carried no meaning. Even the experienced Ruskin could see nothing in the later “Falling Rocket” but “a coxcomb flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” It was “cockney impudence” and “wilful imposture.” That was more than Whistler could stand, and he began a libel suit against Ruskin in the course of which the Attorney-General of England said he “did not know when so much amusement had been afforded the British public as by Mr. Whistler’s pictures.” The trial was a farce and the laugh went against Whistler. But he laughs best who laughs last, and it has not been the British public that has done the latest laughing.

There had been merriment before that, and--incredible as it may seem--over Whistler’s now celebrated portrait of his mother. It was admitted to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1872 only after a well-known academician had threatened to resign if it were rejected. It was not wanted, but having been received, it was treated as a joke. London revised its opinion about the portrait later on. After the French Government bought it for the Luxembourg it was thought, even by the hosts of Philistia, to be Whistler’s best effort, and there was much talk of its refined motherly spirit and decent air--praises that the painter resented, telling the public that the sitter was no affair of theirs and that their only interest should be in “the arrangement in gray and black.”

The portrait of Carlyle followed, and was not unlike the mother portrait in its color scheme and pattern. Nothing was round in modelling, or projected, or stood out in the canvas. The wall, the chair, the figure, even the head, were flattened, and to that extent rendered incomprehensible to the general. The ponderous _Times_ proclaimed that “before such pictures ... critic and spectator are alike puzzled. Criticism and admiration seem alike impossible, and the mind vacillates between a feeling that the artist is playing a practical joke upon the spectator or that the painter is suffering from some peculiar optical illusion.” Eventually the Carlyle won its way, and is now one of the treasures of the Glasgow Corporation Art Gallery. But for years no one would touch it with a pair of tongs.

Both the Carlyle and the mother portraits had their prototypes in the groups of Frans Hals at Haarlem. Whistler much admired Hals’s late portraits of Women Regents there, and found in them his “arrangement in gray and black.” But about the same time with the Carlyle he painted a portrait of Miss Alexander, the like of which had never before been seen. It was the portrait of a little girl, hat in hand, standing at full length in a room, with daisies at the side and butterflies at the back. The title of it was a “Harmony in Gray and Green.” The pattern was beautiful, the color delightful, the pose childlike, and even realistic. But London would not have it. It was “gruesomeness in gray,” “a rhapsody in raw child and cobwebs,” “a disagreeable presentment,” and “uncompromisingly vulgar.” Not even in the turbulent times of Delacroix and “the drunken broom” had criticism so cheapened its array and shot so wide of the mark.