Modern Painting | Page 2

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 temp��rament 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, the author of the "Butterfly Letters", the defender of his little jokes against the plagiarising tongue, should stimulate rather than interrupt our prostrations. I said that Nature had dowered Mr. Whistler with every gift except