Part 9

Fromentin was about the only writer on art that La Farge cared for. He was kind enough to send me a copy of his _Considerations on Painting_ when it was published, and later, in talking over the book with him, he took occasion to remark (as afterward in print) that he had read thousands of pages of art criticism “without finding anything that a person seriously devoted to his profession of art could find of the slightest use.” At the time I ventured to suggest to him that aid to artists was not the object of art criticism, that an attempt to instruct professionals would argue greater knowledge in the critic than in the artist and be presumptuous, that the critic wrote for the public and thought to be of service by calling attention to and explaining certain things that might otherwise be overlooked or misjudged. Moreover, it was suggested that the writer, too, had his design and pattern in words which he was trying to work out artistically and decoratively, and that the subject, whether criticism, history, poetry, or fiction, was of as little importance with him as with the painter. Ruskin in art criticism, Newman in sermons and lectures, and Carlyle in history and essay were possibly greater artists than Dickens and Thackeray in fiction.

There was nothing new about that to La Farge, but he acquiesced in it by bowing and smiling a little, especially over Ruskin, for whom he came as near having contempt as for any one. Not only Ruskin’s ideas but his vehemence of style were not to La Farge’s fancy. He wrote in no such hectic vein in his _Considerations on Painting_. The whole treatise is an inquiry, not an argument, and through it all you feel the evenly poised, well-balanced mind that is weighing the question and is not to be stampeded by rhetoric or eloquence of any kind. He was too intelligent for enthusiasm or emotion. He thought out everything very calmly, and in the midst of conviction often doubted or questioned his own conclusions. It was his normal attitude of mind--a mind that indulged in subtleties, that saw as many meanings in a problem as a rug-weaver’s eye sees colors in a pattern of tapestry. It was the attempt to put these subtleties in parenthesis that sometimes makes his _Considerations on Painting_ hard reading, and yet no one would wish them deleted. They are side-lights that illumine the quest. The book is an epitome of La Farge’s method of thinking and is a type of its kind in literature as truly as his “Paradise Valley” is a type in painting.

As for the philosophic mind, he practically describes himself in one passage in an article in _Scribner’s Magazine_[10] on the “Teaching of Art.” It is worth quoting:

“The noblest of all the gifts of the great institutions of learning is a certain fostering of elevation of mind. It is not so much by what he knows that the man brought under the trainings of the great academies is marked; it is by his acquaintance with the size of knowledge; with, if I may say so, the impossibility of completing its full circle; with the acquaintance of the manners of enlarging his boundaries; with the respect of other knowledge than his own; with a certain relative humility as compared with the narrower pride of him who knows not the size of the spaces of the world of knowledge. And such an attitude of mind, such an elevation above petty prides, such a belief in something larger than one’s self, such an openness to the world, is the privilege of a full artistic development.”

[10] _Scribner’s Magazine_, vol. 64, page 181.

La Farge as a painter, as an inventor of precious glass, as an illustrator of Oriental life, as a writer of books, was a great success; as a student, a man of learning, a philosopher and a talker he was not less so. He had been born of cultivated parents and all his life had been saturated with the intellectual. He knew how to think, weigh, and judge matters, and he knew how to express himself in paint, in letters, and in words. His mental poise was remarkable for its stability, though he was not stubborn and was always open to new light. His conversation was serious, and his manner grave, courteous, calm as that of a French academician. Certain eccentricities--mental habits that indicated the questioner--were peculiar to him, and Henry Adams, his travelling companion, was led to speak of him as a wonderful mind and a wonderful contradiction. By that, perhaps he meant that La Farge always stopped short of the positive conclusion. He guarded himself with qualifying clauses, as though conscious of another side to the question.

His talk was quite as delightful as his books. He had read almost everything, knew almost every one in the modern art world, and his fund of information seemed as exhaustless as his charm of manner. And yet withal he was rather a shy man and had to be sought out. For many years he dined regularly at the Century Club, and more often alone than with company. If any one sat opposite to him at his little table, the chances were two to one that the visitor was self-invited. He held as intimates for many years Clarence King, John Hay, and Henry Adams. They must have proved a rare quartet of wits around a dinner-table, for all of them were exceptionally brilliant talkers. But I never heard of a fifth at the table.

Honors had come to La Farge from the beginning. He had received medals and prizes and degrees, he wore the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, was president of the Society of American Artists, and an initial member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He took them all very calmly. They were recognitions that he did not despise; neither did he count them as crowns of glory. His well-poised mind, with its Oriental sympathies, could rise above praise, and yet he was human enough to like it. When the gold medal of the Architectural League was presented to him he startled the honor-bearers by suggesting that it was late in coming. That was not so much egotism as the bald truth, and he could not refrain from pointing it out.

La Farge had never been physically robust, and during his latter years he had known much illness. There were periods when he was totally incapacitated and could do no more than lie still. He took that calmly, too. He was a philosopher always and made the best of things. Perhaps that is the reason why with his frail body he lived on to seventy-four, not dying until November, 1910. He lived his character to the last, and when he died the painter-world, if no other, knew that a master mind as well as a master craftsman had passed out.

In the arts he was our first great scholar and spoke as one having authority. With his learning, his imagination, and his skill he gave rank to American art more than any other of the craft. For that reason he is to-day hailed as master and written down in our annals as belonging with the Olympians. He deserves the title and the separate niche.

VII

JAMES ABBOTT McNEILL WHISTLER

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.

[Illustration: “Nocturne. Gray and Silver. Chelsea Embankment,” by James A. McNeill Whistler.

In the Freer Collection, Smithsonian Institution.]

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.