At the end of the cross-examination Whistler adjusted his eye-glass, put his hat on the rail of the witness-box, slowly pulled off one glove after the other. He turned to the judge and said:
"And now, my Lord, may I tell you why we are all here?"
"No, Mr. Whistler," said his Lordship; "we are all here because we cannot help it."
Whistler left the box. What he meant to say no one will ever know. We asked him later. He shook his head. The moment for saying it had passed.
Sir Sidney Colvin, Keeper of the Print Room of the British Museum; Mr. Strange, of the Art Library, South Kensington; Mr. Way and Mr. Goulding, professional lithographic printers; and Mr. Alfred Gilbert were our witnesses.
Mr. Bigham said that the case was a storm in a teacup blown up by Whistler, and that the article could do no harm to anybody.
Mr. Sickert protested that he was familiar with all the processes of lithography; that the plaintiff's lithographs were not lithographs, but, as a matter of fact, mere transfers. He had submitted the article to another paper, which refused it before it was accepted by the Saturday Review. He had been under the impression that the plaintiff would like a newspaper correspondence. He was actuated by a pedantic purism. Cross-examined by Sir Edward Clarke, he had to admit by implication that he intended to charge the plaintiff with dishonest practices, and that he had caught Mr. Pennell, the purist, tripping. He had to admit that the only lithograph he ever published was made in the same way, and he had called it, or allowed it to be called, a lithograph.
Mr. Sickert's witnesses scarcely helped him. Mr. C. H. Shannon's testimony was more favourable to us than to him. Mr. Rothenstein testified that all the lithographs he had published were done exactly as Whistler and J. had done theirs, and as he came out of the box fell into his hat. Mr. George Moore solemnly proclaimed that he knew nothing about lithographs, but that he knew Degas. "What's Degas?" roared the judge, thinking some new process was being sprung on him, and Mr. Moore vanished. The editor of the Saturday Review acknowledged that he had published an illustrated supplement full of lithographs done on transfer-paper and advertised by him as lithographs; that he had not known what was in Mr. Sickert's article until it appeared.