Nearly every great artist of whom we have any record has at one time or another in his career yielded to the temptation—frequently under pressure of dire necessity—to do something that would sell. No such reproach can be laid at Whistler’s door.
The galled critics complained that he did not treat them fairly,—that he selected small excerpts from voluminous essays; whereas, if he had reprinted the essays entire, language apparently plain would have been reversed in meaning. For instance, he of the Times, who had written of Velasquez, complained that the quotation gave “exactly the opposite impression to that which the article, taken as a whole, conveys.” It must have been an extraordinary article to transform what was quoted into praise; but Whistler, in reply, said:
“Why squabble over your little article? You did print what I quote, you know, Tom; and it is surely unimportant what more you may have written of the Master. That you should have written anything at all is your crime.”
Ruskin never complained of anything Whistler wrote. The one utterance which caused the suit for libel was probably the first and last that passed his lips. The eloquent old man never did pay very much attention to what others thought of him; he was too busy with his own dreams and fancies.
He did write what Whistler quoted about Rembrandt, but the whole passage is a lament over the lack of appreciation of color, and is as follows:
“For instance: our reprobation of bright color is, I think, for the most part, mere affectation, and must soon be done away with. Vulgarity, dulness, or impiety will indeed always express themselves through art in brown and gray, as in Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Salvator; but we are not wholly vulgar, dull, or impious, nor, as moderns, are we necessarily obliged to continue so in any wise. Our greatest men, whether sad or gay, still delight, like the great men of all ages, in brilliant hues. The coloring of Scott and Byron is full and pure; that of Keats and Tennyson rich even to excess. Our practical failures in coloring are merely the necessary consequences of our prolonged want of practice during the period of Renaissance affectation and ignorance; and the only durable difference between old and modern coloring is the acceptance of certain hues by the modern, which please him by expressing that melancholy peculiar to his more reflective or sentimental character and the greater variety of them necessary to express his greater science.”[28]
Again, on the subject of color, he says:
“We find the greatest artists mainly divided into two groups,—those who paint principally with respect to local color, headed by Paul Veronese, Titian, and Turner, and those who paint principally with reference to light and shade irrespective of color, headed by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Raphael. The noblest members of each of these classes introduce the element proper to the other class, in a subordinate way. Paul Veronese introduces a subordinate light and shade, and Leonardo introduces a subordinate local color. The main difference is, that with Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Raphael vast masses of the picture are lost in comparatively colorless (dark, gray, or brown) shadow,—these painters beginning with the lights and going down to blackness; but with Veronese, Titian, and Turner the whole picture is like the rose,—glowing with color in the shadows and rising into paler and more delicate hues, or masses of whiteness, in the lights,—they having begun with the shadows and gone up to whiteness.”
Ruskin said so much about art, and said it so dogmatically, that no one utterance gives an adequate conception of what he thought about any one man. Furthermore, while his language is crystal itself, his thoughts are often contradictory and confusing in the extreme.