The exhibition was a shock to London. The decorations seemed an indiscretion, for no one before had suggested to people, whose standard was the Academy, that a show of pictures might be beautiful. The work scandalised a generation blinded by the yearly Academic bazaar; they could not see the beauty of flat modelling and flesh low in tone, they preferred the "foolish sunset" to the poetry of night. But the pictures could have been forgiven more easily than the titles. From the moment he exhibited them as Arrangements and Nocturnes, his reputation for eccentricity was established. He wrote in The Gentle Art:
"I know that many good people think my nomenclature funny and myself 'eccentric'. Yes, 'eccentric' is the adjective they find for me. The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.... As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour."
Well received at first, his position in public favour had of late hung in the balance. The exhibition weighed in the scales against him, and for almost twenty years to come, ridicule was his portion. The Athenæum and the Saturday Review ignored the show. The Pall Mall saw in it more intellect than imagination. Here and there was a polite murmur of "noble conception" and "Velasquez touch." Of all that was said Whistler singled out for notice then, and preservation afterwards, the comments of a forgotten journal, the Hour. It has been wondered why he noticed papers of small importance. When he answered the critics and kept the correspondence, it was "to make history," he said, and he selected what he thought important, though it might come from an unimportant source. The Hour suggested that the best work was not of recent date; Whistler wrote to remove "the melancholy impression"; and notice and letter "make history," for it was about this time that English critics, following the lead of the French, were beginning to say that he did not fulfil his early promise, and it is recorded in The Gentle Art.
The pictures of this period that remain may seem few in number. But others were completed or in progress, and disappeared before they were exhibited or seen outside the studio. We have reason to believe, however, that some have been recently discovered and eventually will not be lost to the world.
CHAPTER XV: THE OPEN DOOR.
THE YEAR EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-FOUR AND AFTER.
"Whistler laughed all his troubles away," it has been said. When the Academy rejected him, and the critics sneered at his pictures hung in other galleries, and the public took the critics seriously, he laughed the louder, and felt the more. English ears shrank from his laugh—"his strident peacock laugh," Sir Sidney Colvin called it.
"He was a man who could never bear to be alone," Mr. Percy Thomas remembers. "The door in Lindsey Row was always open," and Whistler liked to think that his friends' doors were open to him. Lord Redesdale, who came to live in the Row in 1875, said that Whistler was always running in and out. Through his own open door strange people drifted. If they amused him he forgave them however they presumed, and they usually did presume. There was a man who, he told us, came to dine one evening, and, asking to stay overnight, remained three years:
"Well, you know, there he was; and that was the way he had always lived—the prince of parasites! He was a genius, a musician, the first of the 'Æsthetes,' before the silly name was invented. He hadn't anything to do; he didn't do anything but decorate the dinner-table, arrange the flowers, and then play the piano and talk. He hadn't any enthusiasm; that's why he was so restful. He was always ready to go to Cremorne with me. At moments my mother objected to such a loafer about the house. And I would say to her, 'Well, but, my dear mummy, who else is there to whom we could say, "Play," and he would play, and "Stop playing," and he would stop right away!' Then I was ill. He couldn't be trusted with a message to the doctor or the druggist, and he was only in the way. But he had the good sense to see it, and to suggest it was time to be going; so he left for somebody else! It never occurred to him there was any reason he shouldn't live like that."
We have heard of many others. One, to whom Whistler entrusted the money for the weekly bills, gave lunches to his friends and sent flowers and chocolates right and left, while Whistler's debt multiplied.