About the time this peevish little pigmy was put into short dresses, his father resigned his position in the United States Army to accept a like position with the Czar of Russia. The first railroad constructed in Russia, from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, was built under the superintendence of Major Whistler, who also designed various bridges, viaducts, tunnels and other engineering feats for Adam Zad, who walks like a man, and who paid him princely sums for his services.
Americans not only fill the teeth of royalty, but we furnish the Old World machinery, ideas and men. For every twenty-five thousand men they supply us, we send them back one, and the one we send them is worth more than the twenty-five thousand they send us. Schenectady is today furnishing the engines and supplying engineers to teach engineers for the transcontinental Siberian railway. When you take "The Flying Scotchman" from London to Edinburgh you ride in a Pullman car, with all the appurtenances, even to a Gould coupler, a Westinghouse air-brake, and a dusky George from North Carolina, who will hit you three times with the butt of a brush-broom and expect a bob as recompense. You feel quite at home.
Then when you see that the Metropolitan Railway of London is managed by a man from Chicago, and that all trains of "the underground" are being equipped with the Edison incandescent light; and you note further that a New York man has morganized the transatlantic steamship-lines, you agree with William T. Stead that, "America may be raw and crude, but she is producing a race of men—men of power, who can think and act." Coupled with the Englishman's remarkable book, "The Americanization of the World," there is an art criticism by Bernard Shaw, who comes from a race that will not pay rent, strangely enough living in London, content, with no political aspirations, who says, "The three greatest painters of the time are of American parentage—Abbey, Sargent and Whistler; and of these, Whistler has had greater influence on the artists of today than any other man of his time."
But let us swing back and take a look at the Whistlers in Russia. Little Jimmy never had a childhood: the nearest he came to it was when his parents camped one Summer with the "construction gang." That Summer with the workers and toilers, among the horses, living out of doors—eating at the campfire and sleeping under the sky—was the boy's one glimpse of paradise. "My ambition then was to be the foreman of a construction gang—and it is yet," said the artist in describing that brief, happy time to a friend.
The child of well-to-do parents, but homeless, living in hotels and boarding-houses, is awfully handicapped. Children are only little animals, and travel is their bane and scourge. They belong on the ground, among the leaves and flowers and tall grass—in the trees or digging in sand piles. Hotel hallways, table-d'hote dinners and the clash of travel, are all terrible perversions of Nature's intent.
Yet the boy survived—eager, nervous, energetic. He acquired the Russian language, of course, and then he learned to speak French, as all good Russians must. "He speaks French like a Russ," is the highest compliment a Parisian can pay you.
The boy's mother was his tutor, companion, playmate. They read together, drew pictures together, and played the piano, four hands.
Honors came to the hard-working engineer—decorations, ribbons, medals, money—and more work. The poor man was worked to death. The Czar paid every honor to the living and dead that royalty can give. When the family left Saint Petersburg with the body of their loved one, His Imperial Majesty ordered his private carriage to be placed at their disposal. And honors awaited the dead here. A monument in the cemetery at Stonington, Connecticut, erected by the Society of American Engineers, marks the spot where he sleeps. The stricken mother was back in America, and James was duly entered at West Point. The mother's ideal was her husband—in his life she had lived and moved—and that James should do what he had done, become the manly man that he had become, was her highest wish.
The boy was already an acceptable draftsman, and under the tutelage of Professor Robert Weir he made progress. West Point does not teach such a soft and feminine thing as picture-painting—it draws plans of redoubts and fortifications, makes maps, and figures on the desirability of tunnels, pontoons and hidden mines. Robert Weir taught all these things, and on Saturdays painted pictures for his own amusement. In the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington is a taste of his quality—the large panel entitled, "The Departure of the Pilgrims."
Tradition has it that young Whistler assisted his teacher on this work.