Part 2

Later on, Swinburne did not allow the Ten o'clock lecture to go unchallenged, and he subjects its glittering rhetoric to a not unkind but cold analysis which, however, Whistler has the grace to print with marginal reflections in "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies," the book which contains the paradoxes which reflect so well his powers as a thinker. It is doubtful whether Whistler in kinder circumstances would have produced his brilliant theories. The irritation caused by misconception, the necessity of justifying even his limitations to a world which was apparently prepared to consider nothing else about him at one time--these were the wine-press of his eloquence. He disliked the rôle of teacher and apologised for it at the beginning of his "Ten o'clock," and when, in later life, following the fashion, he started a school, he relied upon the example of his own methods of setting the palette rather than upon precept, with a little banter to keep good humour in his class-room. A young lady protested "I am sure that I am painting what I see." "Yes!" answered her master, "but the shock will come when you see what you are painting." A student at the short-lived Académie-Whistler has written that merely attempting to initiate them into some purely technical matters of art, he succeeded--almost without his or their volition--in transforming their ways of seeing! "Not alone in a refining of the actual physical sight of things, not only in a quickening of the desire for a choicer, rarer vision of the world about them, but in opening the door to a more intimate sympathy with the masters of the past."

The thing that strikes one in reading "The Gentle Art" is how badly those who entered into combat with its author came off in the end, some of them in what they consider their witty replies committing suicide so far as their reputation as authorities on art went. Notable is the case of the critic of _The Times_, replying "I ought to remember your penning, like your painting, belongs to the region of chaff." We have indicated the source of Whistler's success as a wit--at that source we find the reason why he always scored when talking about painting. He is playing something more than a game of repartee. His best replies are crystallised from his inner knowledge. In them we get bit by bit the revelation which he had received as a genius in his craft.

It was the force of his personality that obtained for Whistler's evasive art such recognition in his lifetime as in the natural course only falls to fine painters of the obvious, whom every one delights to honour. He had said that "art is for artists," and it is true that the perfection of his own art is the pleasure of those who study it. It reached heights of lyrical expression where life in completeness has not yet been represented in painting; reached them perhaps because so lightly freighted with elementary human feeling. His work so often leaves us cold, and we turn seeking for art mixed further with the fire of life and alight with everyday desire.

But nature showed many things to this her appreciator--I write, her intimate friend. As a moth which goes out from the artificial atmosphere of a London room into the blue night, I think of the painter of the nocturnes--yet always as a lover of nature, never more so than when his subject is the sea. For he has a greater consciousness of the salt wet air than any other sea painter, of the veil behind which all ships are sailing and through which the waves break, the atmosphere which descends so mystically and invisibly and yet which if not accounted for in a canvas leaves ships with their sails set in a vacuum and the waves as if they were crested with candle-grease. Is it not absence of this atmosphere which has tortured us on so many occasions when with everything quite real a picture has not brought us pleasure. Pleasure comes to us always with reality in art, and the end of art is realism. All is real even around a mystic, though his thoughts are out of our sight. Whistler was not a mystic but above everything he wished to suggest the atmosphere which is invisible except for its visible effect, and I cannot help thinking his vision essentially abstract.

He did not paint subject pictures. To make our meaning quite clear, let us say such pictures as Frith's, or better still, as Hogarth's in which we have the extreme. The art of Hogarth moved upon a plane lower down, but there it had a strength unknown to Whistler, a careless and lavish inspiration of life itself. He had to find speech for all sorts of things in his art, beauty was but one of these, creeping in less as a deliberate aim than as the accident of a nature artistic. Whistler in painting desired to express nothing but his sense of beauty. For the rest of his nature, he found expression altogether outside his art in enthusiasm for life itself, its combats, difficulties, and its opportunities for saying brilliant things at dinner. His dinner conversation, I have been told, was like the abstract methods of his etching, always cryptic, full of suggestion,--wonderful conversation, full of short ejaculations which carried your imagination from one point to another with hints that seemed to throw open doorways into passages of thought leading right behind things.

He had a remarkable regard for purity of speech, as became the painter of such spiritual types of womanhood. It would seem that women liked him, and readily apprehended in his art his sensitive view of life. At table he drank but little and was a slender eater. When alone he would sometimes forget all about his meals, or eat scarcely anything; in later years, feeling the necessity of taking care of himself he would guard against his indifference by always seeking companionship when away from his house. His nervous disposition forced him to content himself with little sleep, his active brain keeping him awake conceiving witticisms and planning the battle for the morrow.

IV

It would be incomplete in any memoir of Whistler to omit the most thrilling battle of his life. To all adventurers there comes at last the event which knocks all their venturousness out of them or is the beginning of a triumphant way. Whistler had been before the footlights a long time, but it was his contact with Professor Ruskin which brought him into the full lime-light, which he was so much prepared to enjoy. Ruskin paid him the only tribute strength can pay to strength when it is not on the same side--with a prophetic instinct that as regards picture exhibitions Whistler's art was the sign of a coming, and licentious, freedom from the old rules of the game. He saw in Whistler's work the end of old fair things, the laws of those old things all set aside. In reading the so well-known criticism of Whistler one has a feeling that after all Ruskin has only half expressed his feelings in it--however it resulted in the famous libel action. Whistler received one farthing damages, which sum he afterwards magnanimously returned to his eminent critic, as his contribution towards the subscription set on foot to pay Ruskin's legal expenses.

Ruskin's criticism was as follows:--

"For Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."

The case came on in the Court of Exchequer Division before Baron Huddleston on November 15, 1878, Whistler claiming £1000 damages. "The labours of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!" asked the Attorney-General representing Ruskin. "No," replied Whistler, "I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime." "Do you think now that you could make _me_ see the beauty of that picture?" asked the Attorney-General. "No!" he replied. "Do you know I fear it would be as hopeless as for the musician to pour his notes into the ear of a deaf man." In resuming the Attorney-General said: "Let them examine the nocturne in blue and silver, said to represent Battersea Bridge. What was that structure in the middle? Was it a telescope or a fire-escape? Was it like Battersea Bridge? What were the figures at the top of the bridge? And if they were horses and carts, how in the name of fortune were they to get off?"

Mr. W. P. Frith, R.A., was examined and in his evidence said that in his opinion Mr. Whistler's pictures were not serious works of art. In the margin of the account of the trial in "The Gentle Art" Whistler quotes from that painter's "It was just a toss up whether I became an artist or an auctioneer," and adds, "He must have tossed up." There was a time when policemen had to keep the crowd away from Frith's Margate Sands. There was a time when Whistler's pictures were hissed when they were put on the easel at Christie's? If the attitude towards these so different kinds of art is changed, it is the resolution Whistler showed in life as well as in his art that changed it. And have we not in the above interchange of points of view at the court the whole vexed question--the issue around which the battle of Whistler's life always raged? Whistler explained to the court that his whole scheme was only to bring about a certain harmony of colour. He tried to dispel the illusion that the painter's craft forms itself upon the desire to communicate a story. It may be so with the literary craft, but there is no life in the drawing or painting that is not inspired by the delight of the artist in the mere outside of things. Where there is the expression of that delight, there may be the expression of much beside, of the spiritual meanings behind all beauty--though Whistler did not take this flight in his reply. He himself tried to limit the meaning of art almost as narrowly as Ruskin. He had this advantage over Ruskin, that whatever he said about painting was from the inside knowledge of his genius in painting. Ruskin's genius was always approaching that subject from the outside. We could not on any account dispense with what was said at any time by either of them. It was impossible for them to see each other except as enemies across a wide gulf, all speech with each other drowned by the rapids of misunderstanding. The gulf is nearly bridged. In viewing art in its relation to life no one wrote more profoundly than Ruskin, but he failed in knowledge of the beautiful and inner mysterious delights of the craft of painting. Whilst exalting the mission of painting, he degraded its craft, he seemed to fail in appreciation of the fact that at its highest this is as mystical as inspired--and as unaccountable as the craft in Shelley's lyrics. The number of rules he laid down, the gospels he preached upon them reveal always the irritating scholiast and pedant. How eloquently Whistler expresses his irritation in the Ten o'clock lecture!

In his account of the trial in "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies," Whistler fills the margin with quotations from Ruskin so dexterously opposed to the matter in hand as seemingly to discredit for ever Ruskin's writings upon art and the mode of thought therein. But at the bidding of Whistler, and those who boast his opinions second hand, we cannot abjure all this order of thought. One passage which Whistler quotes: "Vulgarity, dulness, or impiety will indeed always express themselves throughout, in brown and grey as in Rembrandt" is not without its bearing on his own art--which has since then quite altered the meaning of the word grey. And despite the perhaps unfortunate naming of Rembrandt one divines that Ruskin is here speaking in the light of the highest intuitive knowledge.

It must be remembered that in prose, which may accept its motif from anything, from art if it likes, Ruskin could sometimes lose himself as completely as Whistler often did in the beauty of his own art. And with the waters of beauty closing over their heads, one was as deaf and blind as the other. That trial was Ruskin's Waterloo. If there is one thing that would make me doubt that Whistler was a great man, it is the fact that he never had a Waterloo, but perhaps that is reserved for those who have been successful right from the beginning. The light air with which Whistler carried his own early troubles is misleading as to their extent. Without the thread of coarser stuff that crossed his otherwise over-refined nature some such sadness of fate might have awaited him as awaited Meryon, the French etcher, for possessing motives too far in advance of those accepted by his time. For really at first no one hardly seemed to have understood the delicate order of things that Whistler was trying to do, especially in his later etchings, in which everything is a symbol counting upon our imagination; everything a pleasure to its creator and nothing a labour; every line one of nervous impulse, the whole etching an inspiration of such impulsive threads. In what loneliness he must have possessed his abnormal delicacy of perception. He hugged to himself the delusion that a knowledge of his craft enabled artists to understand him--but it is common for artists of abundant gifts not to have the necessary refinement of sense, and after all artists are not so numerous that these appreciators will be many. But in the wide world outside the studios there are many people thus delicately attuned, their numbers to be increased when Whistler in his subtlety of vision is less ahead of the world in point of evolution. He brought recognition to himself before his time by strident challenges, aggressive at every point and scornful--as they could not have been had the real nature of his superiority dawned on him at the first. In the first Thames etchings he has not received his revelation: they do not show his hand quite so conscientiously, nervously, awaiting its inspiration for every movement.

Nothing can make us realise the great significance of the Whistler influence in art more than the contrast between the esteem in which his etchings are now held and the early criticisms of them which he collected and scornfully embodied in his book. These are indeed the most depressing reading--and Whistler's quaint termination to those pages, "they roar all like bears," does very aptly express the feeling of desolation that must overcome any one who appreciates the spirit of his etchings. When praise is forthcoming it is only for the early etchings at the expense of those later ones in which he conceived such an inspired use of the needle. By the criticisms in this book we know the exhausting struggle and how right it was that a life, the first half of which had been spent thus, should have no "Waterloo," but end with rest--and with honour, accorded to this "Merlin," so evidently great, if only a few knew why.

It was 1878, the year of the Ruskin trial, that he started working in lithography as a medium, being initiated into the technicalities by Mr. Thomas Way. In the "Fair Women" Exhibition held by The International Society, which is open whilst I write, there are some lithographs by Whistler, which suggest purity of type and the charm of beautiful womanhood in a manner that puts to flight the claims of many a famous canvas in the gallery. It is the most delicate of all mediums; it suited his touch and the sensitive order of his perceptions.

After the Ruskin case Whistler left London for Venice for about a year; upon his return he exhibited at the Fine Art Society the first series of Venice pastels, and a little later at the same gallery fifty-three pastels of Venice. He also held exhibitions at the Dowdeswell Gallery in 1883, Etchings in 1884 in "Notes, Harmonies, and Nocturnes," in 1886 all the time still continuing to exhibit at the Grosvenor Gallery some of his most famous portraits, nocturnes, and marines.

V

On 31st December 1884 the following amusing letter appeared in _The World_, signed with the well-known butterfly. "Atlas, look at this! It has been culled from the _Plumber and Decorator_, of all insidious prints, and forwarded to me by the untiring people who daily supply me with the thinkings of my critics. Read, Atlas, and let me execute myself. 'The "Peacock" drawing-room of a well-to-do shipowner, of Liverpool, at Prince's Gate, London, is hand painted, representing the noble bird with wings expanded, painted by an Associate of the Royal Academy, at a cost of £7000, and fortunate in claiming his daughter as his bride, and is one of the finest specimens of high art in decoration in the kingdom. The mansion is of modern construction.'

"He is not guilty, this honest Associate! It was I, Atlas, who did this thing--alone I did it--I 'hand painted' this room in the 'mansion of modern construction.' Woe is me! I secreted, in the provincial shipowner's home, the 'noble bird with wings expanded'--I perpetrated in harmless obscurity, 'the finest specimen of high-art decoration'--and the Academy is without stain in the art of its member. Also the immaculate character of that Royal body has been falsely impugned by this wicked _Plumber_! Mark these things, Atlas, that justice may be done, the innocent spared, and history cleanly written."

Whistler's picture "La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine" had been hung by Mr. F. R. Leyland in his mansion at Prince's Gate, and Whistler could not reconcile himself to its appearance against the valuable Spanish leather on the walls. He was to correct this by treating a little of the wall; meanwhile Mr. Leyland went down into the country. When he returned it was to find that Whistler was painting over the whole of the room. Much money had already been spent on the original leather scheme, and Whistler had quickly effaced all appearance of its intrinsic worth, but he was in the rapid process of creating the famous Peacock Room. Dissension took place as to terms under the circumstances, and Whistler finished the room with a panel of two peacocks fighting, emblematic of the quarrel. Mr. Leyland was considered one of the most discriminating patrons of his time. Just previous to the above events the interior of the house had been reconstructed and decorated in accordance with designs by Norman Shaw and Jekyll. The leather had been the latter architect's scheme for the room where the "Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine" was hung. The walls were fitted with shelves designed for the display of blue china. Whistler painted all the window shutters with gold peacocks on a blue ground, and a panel at the end of the room, which had been reserved for a picture commissioned from him; into this panel he put the fighting peacocks, whose eyes were real jewels, the one a ruby and the other a diamond. It was found possible to move all the decoration without injury and some time after the original owner's death this was done, the purchaser taking it to America. Before it left England it was set up temporarily for the purpose of its exhibition at Messrs. Obach's Gallery. The picture "The Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine," the key-note, was however missing from the scheme, having found another purchaser.

The room was the finest example of a less known side of Whistler's art. His designs sprung straight from himself, they had no connection with any European tradition. He accepted in their entirety the conventions, the arrangements and devices of the Japanese designers. Yet his designs could not have been created by any of the great artists of Japan. There is too much vitality about them, and these peacocks which belong to a pattern and are conventionalised to the last degree, have a more startling reality than any peacock painted in a modern picture. No one knows how Whistler came to know so much about peacocks. A duffer can paint the bird until he comes to the neck--and then we have to turn to photographs for the reality that gives us pleasure, it eludes all modern genius. So for the most part, fortunately, peacocks are left severely alone. The dancing of the _première danseuse_ at the Empire, perfected with ardent years of study, is a less recondite theme of movement than a peacock raising its head. It is a delight, to all those who love it, beside which all dancing pales, more gracious and stately in movement than the accumulated grace of many women. That is how it must always seem to those who really know it. Whistler arrived at perfect understanding by the instinctive route on which he never went astray.

After the peacock-room incident the wildest legends were afloat about the whole matter, one of them that the architect had been driven mad by the sight of what had happened to his leather, and that later he was found at home painting peacocks blue and gold all over the floor.

VI

In 1885 Whistler's lecture on art was given in London, Oxford, and Cambridge; to suit the convenience of Londoners who liked to linger over dinner, he fixed the hour of delivery rather later than usual. This was the famous "Ten o'clock lecture"--so vague and shadowy in its facts at the beginning, so brilliant at the end, and dispelling the æsthetic fog in which the æsthetes elected to dwell. It is significant of the slight heed given to Whistler's real beliefs that characteristics of his appearance were at one time satirised in W. S. Gilbert's "Bunthorne," confusing him as was common with the æsthetic craze. In "The Ten o'clock" his scorn is eloquent enough of the weird cult "in which," as he says, "all instinct for attractiveness--all freshness and sparkle--all woman's winsomeness--is to give way to a strange vocation for the unlovely--and this desecration in the name of the Graces!" But for all that the principles which governed in L'art nouveau which followed and may be said to be a part of the movement, are prominent in those two "arrangements" of his own, the portrait of Carlyle and the portrait of his Mother.