Modern Painting | Page 2

astonishing as a
denial of the rotundity of the earth would be in a pamphlet bearing the
name of Professor Huxley. Mr. Whistler is only serious in his art--a
grave fault according to academicians, who are serious in everything
except their "art". A very boyish utterance is the statement that such a
thing as an artistic period has never been known.
One rubbed one's eyes; one said, Is this a joke, and, if so, where is the
point of it? And then, as if not content with so much mystification, Mr.
Whistler assured his ten o'clock audience that there was no such thing
as nationality in art, and that you might as well speak of English
mathematics as of English art. We do not stop to inquire if such
answers contain one grain of truth; we know they do not--we stop to
consider them because we know that the criticism of a creative artist
never amounts to more than an ingenious defence of his own work--an
ingenious exaltation of a weakness (a weakness which perhaps none
suspects but himself) into a conspicuous merit.
Mr. Whistler has shared his life equally between America, France, and
England. He is the one solitary example of cosmopolitanism in art, for
there is nothing in his pictures to show that they come from the north,
the south, the east, or the west. They are compounds of all that is great
in Eastern and Western culture. Conscious of this, and fearing that it
might be used as an argument against his art, Mr. Whistler threw over
the entire history, not only of art, but of the world; and declared boldly
that art was, like science, not national, but essentially cosmopolitan;
and then, becoming aware of the anomaly of his genius in his
generation, Mr. Whistler undertook to explain away the anomaly by
ignoring the fifth century B.C. in Athens, the fifteenth century in Italy,
and the seventeenth in Holland, and humbly submitting that artists
never appeared in numbers like swallows, but singly like aerolites.
Now our task is not to disprove these statements, but to work out the
relationship between the author of the "Butterfly Letters" and the
painter of the portrait of "The Mother", "Lady Archibald Campbell",

"Miss Alexander", and the other forty-one masterpieces that were on
exhibition in the Goupil galleries.
There is, however, an intermediate step, which is to point out the
intimate relationship between the letter-writer and the physical man.
Although there is no internal evidence to show that the pictures were
not painted by a Frenchman, an Italian, an Englishman, or a
Westernised Japanese, it would be impossible to read any one of the
butterfly-signed letters without feeling that the author was a man of
nerves rather than a man of muscle, and, while reading, we should
involuntarily picture him short and thin rather than tall and stalwart.
But what has physical condition got to do with painting? A great deal.
The greatest painters, I mean the very greatest--Michael Angelo,
Velasquez, and Rubens--were gifted by Nature with as full a measure
of health as of genius. Their physical constitutions resembled more
those of bulls than of men. Michael Angelo lay on his back for three
years painting the Sistine Chapel. Rubens painted a life-size figure in a
morning of pleasant work, and went out to ride in the afternoon. But
Nature has dowered Mr. Whistler with only genius. His artistic
perceptions are moreexquisite than Velasquez's. He knows as much,
possibly even a little more, and yet the result is never quite equal. Why?
A question of health. _C'est un tempérament de chatte_. He cannot pass
from masterpiece to masterpiece like Velasquez. The expenditure of
nerve-force necessary to produce such a work as the portrait of Lady
Archibald Campbell or Miss Alexander exhausts him, and he is obliged
to wait till Nature recoups herself; and these necessary intervals he has
employed in writing letters signed "Butterfly" to the papers, quarrelling
with Oscar over a few mild jokes, explaining his artistic existence, at
the expense of the entire artistic history of the world, collecting and
classifying the stupidities of the daily and weekly press.
But the lesser side of a man of genius is instructive to study--indeed, it
is necessary that we should study it if we would thoroughly understand
his genius. "No man," it has been very falsely said, "is a hero to his
valet de chambre." The very opposite is the truth. Man will bow the
knee only to his own image and likeness. The deeper the humanity, the
deeper the adoration; and from this law not even divinity is excepted.
All we adore is human, and through knowledge of the flesh that grovels
we may catch sight of the soul ascending towards the divine stars.

And so the contemplation of Mr. Whistler,