"Why, my dear old Tom, I never was serious with you even when you were among us. Indeed, I killed you quite, as who should say without seriousness, 'A rat! A rat!' you know, rather cursorily."

Whistler had the power of expressing himself in words which is rare with artists. He could write, he had style. Literature, no less than art, was to him a "dainty goddess." He worked out his shortest letter as carefully as a portrait or a Nocturne, until all trace of labour in it had disappeared. People, awed by the spectacle of Ruskin wallowing amid the many volumes of Modern Painters without succeeding in the end in saying what he wanted, could not believe that Whistler was saying anything that mattered when he said in a few pages what he wanted with no sign of labour. In his notes to Truth and the World, as in The Ten O'Clock, he reveals his knowledge of the Scriptures, while his use of French which displeased his critics, his odd references, his unexpected quotations, are placed with the same unerring instinct as the Butterfly on his canvas. He chose the right word, he made the division of paragraphs effective, punctuation was with him an art. It is difficult to give examples, because there are so many. The Ten O'Clock is full of passages that show him at his best, none finer than the often-quoted description of London "when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil." The Propositions and The Red Rag are as complete, as simple and direct as his prints. The book, as an exposition of his beliefs and doctrines, ranks with Reynolds' Lectures; as a chronicle of an artist's adventures, it is as personal and characteristic as the Memoirs of Cellini. We have been criticised for devoting so much space to Whistler's wit and his writings, but as a wit and writer Whistler will live. He was a many-sided man, not a lop-sided painter.

The period of the preparation and publication of The Gentle Art was one of unimportant quarrels. In each case there was provocation. Of two or three so much was made at the time that they cannot be ignored. One, in 1888, was with Mr. Menpes, who, making no secret of it, has recorded its various stages until the last, when the Follower adopted the Master's decorations and arrangements in his own house. His Home of Taste was paragraphed in the papers, and Whistler held him up to the world's ridicule as "the Kangaroo of his country, born with a pocket and putting everything into it." The affair came to a crisis not long after the Times Parnell disclosures, and Whistler wrote to him: "You will blow your brains out, of course. Pigott has shown you what to do under the circumstances, and you know your way to Spain. Good-bye."

Once afterwards, at a public dinner, Whistler saw Mr. Menpes come into the room on Mr. Justin McCarthy's arm: "Ha ha! McCarthy," he laughed as they passed him. "Ha ha! You should be careful. You know, Damien died."

In 1890 Augustus Moore, brother of George, was added to the list of "Enemies." The cause was an offensive reference to Godwin, Mrs. Whistler's first husband, in The Hawk, an insignificant sheet Moore edited. Whistler, knowing that he would find him at any first-night, went to Drury Lane for the autumn production, A Million of Money, and in the foyer hit Moore with a cane across the face, crying, "Hawk! Hawk!" There was a scrimmage, and Whistler, as the man who attacked, was requested to leave the house. The whole thing was the outcome of a sense of honour, a feeling of chivalry, which is not now understood in England, though it would have been found magnificent in the days of duels. The comic papers made great fun of the episode, and the serious ones lamented the want of dignity it showed. No one understood Whistler's loyalty and his devotion to the woman he had married.

Footnotes

[10] See Appendix at end of volume.

CHAPTER XXXV: THE TURN OF THE TIDE.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-ONE AND EIGHTEEN NINETY-TWO.

The world owed him a living, Whistler said, but it was not until 1891 that the world began to pay the debt with the purchase of the Carlyle for Glasgow and the Mother for the Luxembourg.