“Failures that are complete and failures that are partial.”
“A publicity rarely bestowed upon failures at all.”
Whereupon Whistler brought the catalogue to a close with these scriptural sentences:
“Therefore is judgment far from us, neither doth justice overtake us; we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness.”
“We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes; we stumble at noonday as in the night.”
“We roar all, like bears.”
Whistler’s manner of arraigning his critics was his own. No one else could compile such delightful bits of literature as were those catalogues he issued from time to time; but the idea of publishing adverse criticism with the work criticised was not new.
To his first edition of “Sartor Resartus” Carlyle—Whistler’s neighbor in Chelsea—printed as an appendix the letter of condemnation which Murray the publisher received from his literary adviser and which led to the rejection of the manuscript.
The scheme is not without advantages,—it amuses the reader and confounds the critic, to which ends books and paintings are created.
How the galled jades winced may be gathered from the following mild comments: