Part 10

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.”

[Illustration: “The Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine,” by James A. McNeill Whistler.

In the Freer Collection, Smithsonian Institution.]

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.

In spite of abuse Whistler continued producing portraits--one of Leyland in evening dress standing at full length, an “arrangement in black”; one of Mrs. Leyland, never entirely completed, a very beautiful “symphony in flesh color and pink”; one of Mrs. Huth in black velvet, another “arrangement in black.” They were all realistic enough as regards the likeness but decoratively arranged as regards pattern and color. They were, once more, the blended view of the West and the East, and Whistler never tried to disguise the fact. He sought to place the figure in the canvas as far as he stood from the sitter when painting the picture, but otherwise he adhered to the flattening of the pattern, the simplicity of the arrangement, and the predominance of a tone of color.

In 1876 Whistler was given _carte blanche_ to produce one of his tone effects in a room at the Leyland house. This afterward became known as the Peacock Room. It held the picture of the “Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine” at one end, was decorated elsewhere with peacocks, furnished with cabinets of blue-and-white china, and set off with blue and gold in the walls and ceiling. The idea of the peacocks had probably come to Whistler from some Japanese master, perhaps Okio, and the rest of it was his own arrangement of color. The next year was that of the suit against Ruskin. London laughed and Whistler shortly thereafter went into bankruptcy. Everything was seized and sold, bringing little or nothing. The tide was at its lowest ebb, and the painter was left stranded, but by no means dead or even moribund.

When he had sufficiently recuperated he went off to Venice, where he gathered a little coterie of admirers about him who referred to him as “the master,” and where he talked much, and did some etchings and some pastels on colored paper. The first series of Venetian etchings, twelve in number, were done in the summer of 1880, and possibly he never went beyond such plates as “The Rialto,” “The Bridge”, and “The Traghetto.” They seem the most flawless of his etched work. As for the pastels, they were largely notes of color, line, or movement, and while charming as notes, they were not impeccable in drawing. They were never intended to be realistic in any modern sense; they were, in fact, mere flying autumn leaves that meant nothing aside from form and color and their airy lightness.

In November Whistler returned to London, and the sniping and sharpshooting began again. It was temporarily interrupted by the death of his mother in January, but soon broke out anew. Portraits were being painted--that of Duret in evening clothes with a domino on his arm, and one of Lady Archibald Campbell, called “The Yellow Buskin,” an “arrangement in black,” being the most notable. “The Yellow Buskin,” now in the Fairmount Park Gallery, Philadelphia, appeals to many people as perhaps Whistler’s most spirited and effective portrait, but London criticism viewed it lightly. The _Morning Advertiser_ said “its obvious affectations render the work displeasing,” and another critic stated that “he has placed one of his portraits on an asphalt floor and against a coal-black background, the whole apparently representing a dressy woman in an inferno of the worldly.” The public was equally unconvinced. So in 1884 Whistler mounted the platform at Princes Hall and in his _Ten O’Clock_ set forth not only his philosophy of art but his scorn and contempt for almost everybody and everything excepting art and artists. The lecture created a stir, was repeated at Oxford and Cambridge, and Whistler became famous as one who could write even if he could not paint. Oddly enough, his lecture seemed to command more respect than his pictures, though it had not a tithe of their sincerity.

At any rate, the painter’s fortunes now began to mend. He joined the Society of British Artists, and two years later became its president. In 1888 he was married to Beatrix Godwin, widow of E. B. Godwin, the architect, afterward moving to No. 21 Cheyne Walk, where many orders for portraits came to him. Success and honors came also. France gave him the Legion of Honor, Bavaria made him an academician, he had the Cross of St. Michael, and later on Glasgow University gave him an LL.D. His pictures at auction increased in price five and ten fold; his commission prices were in proportion. He grew so affluent that he could even decline to paint a ceiling for the Boston Public Library. At last the light was beginning to dawn--a trifle late, to be sure, but nevertheless it was welcomed by the painter.

[Illustration: “The Yellow Buskin,” by James A. McNeill Whistler.

In the W. P. Wilstach Collection, Fairmount Park Gallery.]

The rest is soon told. In 1892 he moved to Paris and lived in the rue du Bac. A studio was opened for pupils in Paris at which he agreed to give lessons. It was popular at first, but did not last long. He travelled back and forth to London a good deal, and finally returned to England to live. Quarrels had followed him to Paris and the Eden trial had taken place there. It was unfortunate. _Trilby_ had been written and Whistler was parodied in it, which caused another tempest in a teapot. Then Mrs. Whistler died, and that was not only a great shock but a lasting grief. He never quite got over it. He wandered to Paris and Rome, but he cared little for them; he kept at work with feverish energy, but he accomplished little. He was evidently broken, not only in spirit but in body; and his death in July, 1903, was hardly a surprise to his more intimate friends. The overstrung bow at last had snapped.

For many years Whistler had been wrongly estimated alike by friend and foe. That one admired and the other condemned did not change the measure of extravagance. There was exaggeration on both sides. Since his death his critics have held their tongues, but many of his admirers have burst into print with impressions and reminiscences that are quite out of proportion and give a misleading idea of the man and the painter. The best account of him is that of the Pennells. They were devoted to him and wrote enthusiastically about him, as they should; but they did not fail to give the pros and cons in parallel columns. Moreover, they did not make him out a jester with cap and bells, a poseur, a wit, and a fop, but a very sincere and serious artist stung to resentment by the stupidity and studied insults of a perverse generation. That is precisely the right point of view, but unfortunately the Pennells are about the only ones who have consistently held it. The other accounts, for the most part, deal with his personal appearance, his witticisms, his eccentricities, his quarrels, and let his art go with a few rhapsodic generalities.

As for the descriptions of Whistler’s personality, they give a false impression by undue emphasis on certain appearances. My acquaintance with him was after 1890, though I had met him some years before. At no time was I impressed with his “flashing” eye, or his “claw-like” hands, or his “white lock,” or his “dandified” costume. They were not marked features unless one were looking for them. He was slightly built, refined-looking, and carried himself well, even gracefully. The Chase portrait of him is so foolish that even Chase could not show it without apologies and explanations; and as for the Boldini portrait, it is thoroughly Mephistophelian. About the latter, Whistler said: “They say that looks like me; but I hope I don’t look like that.” The portrait is a typical Boldini, with all that that implies of vulgarity and insinuation. But Whistler looked like a gentleman, not like a _boulevardier_.

His manner was courteous and his disposition usually good-natured. I never saw anything of his waspishness, nor heard any of his vitriolic retorts. He talked soberly and very sensibly unless aroused or driven into a corner by argument. Then he would fight back viciously enough and with excellent wit. From some quick answers to foolish people he finally became known for repartee and his name was used as a peg upon which many sharp sayings were hung, and he quite innocent of them. The only bright retort from him that I ever heard was made at my own expense. I recount it as illustrative of his brightness.

One night at the Pennells’, Whistler had been grumbling in an amusing way over art criticism and art critics. No one answered him. He had the floor entirely to himself and the rest of us were content to smile. Near eleven o’clock, as I rose to go, and Whistler and Pennell went with me to the door, I ventured to say that art critics were not very different from other people, that they did the best they could, but were human and often erred. It was good-natured deprecation of his point of view, which he met by putting his hand on my shoulder and saying with equal good nature:

“Oh, my dear Van Dyke, don’t misunderstand. We none of us think of you as an art critic.” Everybody laughed, myself included. There was not a particle of venom in it. I had written about him in praise in the early eighties when others were abusing him and he had thanked me for it; I was in his good books. To be sure, the retort was hardly new. John Brougham had launched it at Lester Wallack many years before. But the cleverness of it lay in its application.

Whistler liked to talk, especially if there was an audience of half a dozen. He was then very willing to fill space in the spot-light and conduct the session, especially if art was up for discussion. Another night, at a Pennell dinner, a very clever man--one of the editors of the _Daily Telegraph_--was present. He had recently returned from the far North--beyond Spitzbergen--and had been telling us about the brilliancy of the Northern color. Whistler, beside whom I sat, was not interested and kept tugging at my arm, telling me that it was mere raw color and not art. To that I finally had to make reply that I cared not a rap whether the color was artistic or not, that I was interested in the mere fact of its brilliancy. With that he flung around in his chair, turning his back on me, much as a child might do, and remained silent until the subject changed.

But it is an error to infer that because he was often witty and occasionally petty, wit and pettishness were his outstanding characteristics. By setting forth unrelieved chapters of his stories and sayings the impression has been produced that he started a new quarrel each morning before breakfast and shot envenomed shafts until sunset. That his witticisms were scattered over a period of forty years is neither stated nor implied. As a matter of fact, he was almost always in a serious mood, and, with his knowledge and gift of language, talked most sensibly and persuasively. I remember many interesting and informing talks with him when there was no jesting and not even smiling. In his own studio, with his own pictures on the easel and he explaining his intention and its development on the canvas, he was at his best. He was then a reasonable, sensible painter, with none of the pose of the _Ten O’Clock_ and none of the vanity of _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_. I have never met a more striking contradiction in an individual, and it always seemed to me that the Whistler of the sharp tongue and pen was not the true Whistler but merely a character assumed for the occasion.

His published writings, as one reads them to-day, are extravagantly brilliant, but hardly sincere, even from a Whistlerian point of view. Take from the _Ten O’Clock_, for instance, the oft-quoted sentence: “There never was an artistic period, there never was an art-loving nation.” A measure of truth lies under that, but Whistler knew that he exaggerated it, overstated it. Again the statement that “Art happens--no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about, and puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy and coarse farce.” Here is another half-truth, but so arbitrarily insisted upon that one infers that art is really an isolated and unrelated phenomenon on the earth. Whistler knew better than that. Nothing “happens” in this world. There is a cause for every effect. Once more the remark about “the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.” But he himself never was so foolish as to believe such nonsense. It was merely a rococo way of saying that art could not handle a sunset in a satisfactory manner, and that his art, in particular, preferred a twilight or a midnight. The _Ten O’Clock_ indeed explains Whistler’s art better than any other, and, of course, that was why it was written. His own limitations and necessities could not have been better set forth than by the sentence: “Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong.” He wanted to put a conventionalized nature into a decorative pattern, and he justified it by saying that a realistic nature is “usually wrong.” It is somewhat of a piece with his remark that “there are too many trees in the country.” There were--for Whistler’s art.

But it is useless to point out the superficial in the Whistler arguments--the falseness of analogy, for instance, in comparing national art with national mathematics. That statement was made to produce a laugh, and it succeeded. It is even stupid to point out the want of logic or historical truth in the _Ten O’Clock_. One might as well try to break Whistler’s own butterfly on a wheel. The lecture was written and delivered to astonish the natives. And it did. It was a charming bit of extravagance, beautifully written for platform delivery, and a delightful piece of literature for fireside reading. Had it been logical, temperate, well-guarded in its utterances, it would have fallen flat. It fitted the occasion, was a work of art in itself, and no more “happened” than Whistler’s pictures and etchings.

That he wrote extremely well makes it all the more unfortunate that he wrote at all. The letters of _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ are amusing, but leave an impression of flippancy and mere cleverness. These were qualities rightly enough used in a rough-and-tumble newspaper quarrel, but the reader does not leave them there. Unwittingly he looks for the same qualities in Whistler’s portraits and pastels, perhaps reads them into the art itself. Worse yet, he possibly arrives at the conclusion that the art is of less interest than the quarrels, of less moment than the passing gibe of the “foolish sunset,” or the casual irrelevance of “dragging in Velasquez.” Once more, it is a pity that Whistler the painter has to be confused with Whistler the critic-baiter. However well one comes out of a fight, it is generally with rumpled plumage and a lack of dignity. Whistler could well have afforded to go his way in silence. Why did he have to kick at every cur that barked at his heels? Degas said he acted as though he had no talent, and Degas was right.