PORTRAIT OF MISS WOAKES
In the possession of Messrs. Knvedler & Co.
"Manet did very good work, of course, but then Manet was always l'écolier—the student with a certain sense of things in paint, and that is all!—he never understood that art is a positive science, one step in it leading to another. He painted, you know, in la manière noire, the dark pictures that look very well when you come to them at Durand-Ruel's, after wandering through rooms of screaming blues and violets and greens, but he was so little in earnest that midway in his career he took to the blues and violets and greens himself. You know, it is the trouble with so many; they paint in one way—brilliant colour, say—they see something, like Ribot, and, dear me, they think, we had better try to do this too, and they do and, well, really, you know, in the end they do nothing for themselves!"
He was furious with the critic who stated that his medal was awarded for The Little White Girl. The statement was offensive because, he said, "the critics are always passing over recent work for early masterpieces, though all are masterpieces; there is no better, no worse; the work has always gone on, it has grown, not changed, and the pictures I am painting now are full of qualities they cannot understand to-day any better than they understood The Little White Girl at the time it was painted."
This was an argument he often used. A few evenings after, he told a man, who suggested that Millet's later work was not so good because he was married and had to make both ends meet, "You're wrong. An artist's work is never better, never worse; it must be always good, in the end as in the beginning, if he is an artist, if it is in him to do anything at all. He would not be influenced by the chance of a wife or anything of that kind. He is always the artist."
He was annoyed because critics could not see a truth which to him was simple and obvious. His annoyance culminated when the Magazine of Art not only said the Grand Prix was awarded for The Little White Girl, but protested against the award, because the picture was painted before the ten years' limit imposed by the French authorities, a protest printed in other papers. Whistler could not bear this in silence, for it looked like an effort to deprive him of his first high award from a Paris Exhibition. The attack was disgraceful. Whistler's two other pictures were his most recent, and, as we have said, The Little White Girl was specially invited. As soon as he was well enough, he came to us several times, with Mr. William Webb, his solicitor, to talk the affair over. As a result, an apology was demanded, and made. This belittling of certain pictures in favour of others, with its inevitable inference, offended him, in the end as in the beginning. Mr. Sargent writes us an instance of his manner of carrying off the offence before the world. Somebody brought him a commission for a painting, stipulating that it should be "a serious work." Whistler's answer was that he "could not break with the traditions of a lifetime."
Another worry he should have been spared was a dispute with one of the tenants at the Rue du Bac, a trivial matter which, in his nervous state, loomed large and made him unnecessarily miserable. The carpets of the lady on the floor above him were shaken out of her windows into his garden, and it could not be stopped. He tried the law, but was told he must have disinterested witnesses outside the family. If he engaged a detective, a month might pass before she would do it again. But it chanced that, while beating a carpet, it fell into his garden, and his servants refused to give it up. The lady went to law and his lawyer advised him to return the carpet. It depressed him hopelessly, and as he had long ceased to live in the Rue du Bac, we could not understand why he should have heard of so petty a domestic squabble.
Ill and worried as he was, our work at intervals came to a standstill. When he felt better and stronger the talks went on, but at moments he seemed almost to fear that the book would prove an obituary. Once he said to us that we "wanted to make an Old Master of me before my time," and we had too much respect and affection for him to add to his worries by our importunity. With the late autumn his weakness developed into serious illness. By the middle of November he was extremely anxious about himself, for his cough would not go. The doctor's diagnosis, he said, was "lowered in tone: probably the result of living in the midst of English pictures." A sea journey was advised, and Tangier suggested for the winter. When he was with us he could not conceal his anxiety. If he sneezed, he hurried away. He fell asleep before dinner was over; sometimes he could hardly keep awake through the evening. Once or twice he seemed to be more than asleep, when there was nothing to do but to rouse him, which was not easy, and we were extremely frightened until we could, and, indeed, until J. got him back to Garlant's. He would never trust himself to the night air until Augustine had mixed him a hot "grog." Tangier did not appeal to him, and he asked J. to go with him to Gibraltar, stay a while at Malaga, and then come back by Madrid to see at last the pictures he had always wanted to see. He was hurt when J.'s work made it impossible for him to leave London.