While Whistler as a man, in his attitude toward the world, has been the Beau Brummel of this nineteenth-century modernity, he has kept his art in a beautiful isolation, selecting for it only the choicest contributions of the spirit of the age and impressing upon them the fine distinction of his unique personality. Thus, while some of his contemporaries in the search for new sensations pushed their analysis into the gutter, his work has been invariably fragrant and pure. He has been a consistent apostle of beauty, of the sane and normal type of it. I do not mean beauty as it is commonly understood, for he has had his very personal ideas and his own modes of reaching them; but that the source in which he has always looked for them has been sane and normal; so that, amid the craving for new sensations and for new forms of expression, by which, like others, he has been affected, and with a taste also for notoriety and for shocking the vulgar, he has never in his art deviated from the sweet and wholesome. Nor has he lived without a strong faith. He has believed in himself without reservation, and just as absolutely in his art as he has formulated it. There is one god, and Whistler is its prophet; a creed narrow and intolerant, but abundantly justified, if you accept his god, which, again, is Whistler—the spiritual ego within him to which all his life he has tried to give an adequate expression.
For his faith at root is a very simple one: the love of beauty and the expression of it; only beauty with him is one of essence and significance, quite removed from any literary allusiveness, and as far as possible expressed by means which are solely the products of brush or etching needle, sensation and method approximating as much as may be to the exclusively abstract ones of music. He cannot escape the concrete altogether and must often use as vehicles of expression things to which the dictionary assigns terms, and to which the association of memory and ideas has given a verbal significance. But even in using these he feels such significance extraneous, and subordinates it as far as possible to the special æsthetic significance of the pictorial art. It is the meaning that these things have for the artist’s peculiar vision that he tries to keep free from other allusion—abstract. It is not the object before him for the time being that is worth his consideration, but the enjoyment of the purely æsthetic impression of it aroused in his own mind, of which he seeks to express the essence in his picture. It is a theory of art all but too subtle for human nature’s daily food; in a world in which we are continually confusing cause and effect, the object with the subject, the source of our enjoyment with the enjoyment itself; a theory quite intolerable when exploited by a mediocre painter, or by a facile painter of mediocre mind; only, perhaps, so acceptable in Whistler’s case, because it is essentially a product of his own unique originality.
It was his craving for abstract expression as well as for abstract sensation that led to his symphonies; and the storm of abuse and ridicule which they aroused gave him, no doubt, a keener relish for such studies. It would be too much to say that any of them were done deliberately to mystify the public; but that he found a sly relish in the mystification is most probable, and one may believe that some of these, to him only experiments in the record of impressions, were exhibited with the Satanic purpose of infuriating a public, so enamoured of the “finished picture.” Today, however, these studies are applauded, and Whistler is probably as contemptuous of the undiscriminating approval as of the indiscriminate abuse. For really their vogue is as open to suspicion as would be a vogue of Bach. In their lack of any graspable theme and in their delicately elaborated orchestration of tone they can be appreciated, priced, that is to say, at their proper worth, only by those whose sense of colour is very cultivated; nor even, perhaps, by all of them, for these impressions are so personal to their author that they must always mean more and otherwise to him than to others.
The vogue, therefore, may well make him sad, and sadness with Whistler takes the form of contempt. It is the distortion of his character or the bias to its flaws produced by opposition. Conviction has stiffened into arrogance, individuality become deflected toward an attitude of pose. These blemishes are absent from his work, which is always serene and lovable; they are merely incidental to the man and should not enter into an appreciation of his art, except that he has himself forced a recognition of them even upon his admirers. It is this aspect of him which Boldini has thrust upon the world in his well-known portrait. I have always resented it, for it is founded only on partial fact, suppressing the better facts and smacking too much of Boldini himself and of the pruriency of suggestion, with which he has invested so many portraits. The Whistler that we see in this picture, sitting sideways on a chair, his elbow on the back of it and his long fingers thrust through the snaky black hair, represents the last word in modernity; thrilling with nervous vibration, keyed to snapping intensity; a creation of brilliant egoism, quivering on the edge of insanity; the quintessence of refined callousness and subtlety. How much truer to the man and the artist is Rajon’s portrait; nimbly impressionable, clever and elegant, the lurking devil in
From the Luxembourg Gallery.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST’S MOTHER.
By James A. McNeill Whistler.