To the World Whistler wrote the letter called "Freeing a Last Friend" in The Gentle Art. It is short, the sting in the concluding paragraph:
"Thank you, my dear! I have lost a confrère; but then, I have gained an acquaintance—one Algernon Swinburne—'outsider'—Putney."
The letter was sent to Swinburne before it appeared in the World. We have been told that it was received at Putney one Sunday morning when Mr. Watts-Dunton was to breakfast with Whistler. Suspecting that the letter might not be friendly, Mr. Watts-Dunton took it, unopened, with him to Chelsea and begged Whistler to withdraw it. Whistler refused. Mr. Watts-Dunton left the house without breakfasting, and the same day the letter was delivered to Swinburne, who, after reading it, pale with rage, swore that never again would he speak to Whistler. As a result, Mr. Watts-Dunton, we believe, was at pains to avoid Whistler, fearful of a rupture with him. Mr. Meredith had discovered years before that the springs in Whistler were prompt for the challenge, and it cannot be denied that he had reason to see a challenge in Swinburne's article. How much it hurt he did not conceal in The Gentle Art, where the extracts from Swinburne are followed immediately by Et tu, Brute, and there is nothing more dignified, almost pathetic, in the volume:
"... Cannot the man who wrote Atalanta, and the Ballads Beautiful—can he not be content to spend his life with his work, which should be his love, and has for him no misleading doubt and darkness, that he should so stray about blindly in his brother's flower beds and bruise himself!...
"Who are you deserting your Muse, that you should insult my Goddess with familiarity, and the manners of approach common to the reasoners in the market-place? 'Hearken to me,' you cry, 'and I will point out how this man, who has passed his life in her worship, is a tumbler and a clown of the booths, how he who has produced that which I fain must acknowledge, is a jester in the ring!'
"Do we not speak the same language? Are we strangers, then, or, in our Father's house are there so many mansions that you lose your way, my brother, and cannot recognise your kin?...
"You have been misled, you have mistaken the pale demeanour and joined hands for an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual earnestness. For you, these are the serious ones, and, for them, you others are the serious matter. Their joke is their work. For me—why should I refuse myself the grim joy of this grotesque tragedy—and, with them now, you are all my joke!"
And Swinburne, in pitiful spite, we have been told, burned Whistler's letters, and tried to sell La Mère Gérard which Whistler had given him. Later, Mr. Watts-Dunton is said to have stated that Whistler asked Swinburne to write the article, and also that he tried to make peace between them.