His own mind was steeped in their beauty, as may be seen in his constant recurrence to these legends as chosen subjects for his design, and I fancy it was their common love for this subject in romance which formed one of the strongest links of fellowship between himself and William Morris. I have said that to Rossetti he always confessed his deep obligations as an artist, but there can, I think, be little doubt that of all living comrades it was Morris whom he most loved. Though, as he has himself confessed, they had parted company in regard to some of the problems that beset the artist, in the graver issues of life, no less than in the lighter moods of social comradeship, they were at one to the end. He told me that once in the earlier days of their association they had gone with Charles Faulkner on a boating excursion up the Thames. At that time Morris was apprehensive that he was growing too stout, and at one of the river inns where they had to share the same room the painter conceived the mischievous idea of unduly alarming the poet as to his condition. Morris had retired earlier than the others, and was fast asleep, when Burne-Jones, having procured a needle and thread from the landlady, took a large slice out of the lining of his companion’s waistcoat, and then sewed the two sides together as neatly as he could. In the morning Morris was up betimes, and Burne-Jones, still feigning to be asleep, watched with eager excitement the terror and consternation with which the poet sought, in vain, to make the shrivelled garment meet around his waist. The victim of the plot fancied that his increasing proportions had suddenly taken on a miraculous acceleration of pace, and it was not until the smothered laughter of the painter greeted his ears that he was relieved from the panic of anxiety into which he had been suddenly thrown.
Burne-Jones could sometimes, on occasion, be himself the victim of a practical joke, and once when I paid him a sudden and unexpected visit at his little cottage in Rottingdean, I contrived to play, very successfully, upon what I knew to be his horror of the professional interviewer. I announced myself to the servant as an American colonel, who had called as the special correspondent of the Cincinnati Record, and on the message being conveyed to her master, she returned, as I expected, with the curt intimation that he was not at home. But he evidently felt that no precaution was too great to be taken in the face of this threatened invasion, for as I crept by the window that looks out on to the little Village green I saw him, in company with his son, stealthily crawling under the table, and when I afterwards returned and announced myself in my own name, he related with childish delight how skilfully he had avoided the attack of the enemy.
JAMES M‘NEIL WHISTLER
The many pleasant hours I spent in Whistler’s studio in Cheyne Walk are dominated in recollection by the striking personality of the artist. In physical no less than in mental equipment, he stood apart from his generation, and the characteristic peculiarities of his appearance, joined to the marked idiosyncrasy of his temperament, must remain unforgettable to all who knew him. It is easy indeed to recall the tones of the sometimes strident voice as he let slip some barbed shaft in ruthless characterisation of one or other of his contemporaries: easier still to summon again, as though he stood before me now, the oddly fashioned figure, lithe and muscular, yet finely delicate in its outline, as he skipped to and fro in front of his canvas, now with brush poised in the air between those long slender fingers, seeming, as he gazed at the model, to challenge the supremacy of nature, now passing swiftly to the easel to lay on that single touch of colour that was to record his victory. It is not so easy, however, to convey in words the intellectual impression left by the agile movement of his mind, as it leaped in sudden transition from the graver utterance of some pregnant thought concerning the immutable laws of his art, to those lighter sallies of wit and humour that found their readiest and most congenial exercise in the half-playful, half-malicious portraiture of men we both knew.
So notable indeed and so notorious became the sayings of Whistler, uttered in such moods of laughing irony, that the more deeply serious side of his nature was apt in his own time to be ignored or even denied. And for this he himself was partly to blame. His own manifest enjoyment in the free play of a ready and relentless wit was apt sometimes to obscure that deeper insight into the essential principles of the art he practised, to which no one on occasion could give a finer or more subtle expression.
No one, surely, perceived more clearly that there is in every art an essential quality born of its material and resting with instinctive security upon its special resources and limitations, without which it can make no lasting claim to recognition. He never forgot that the painter or the poet who ventures to take upon himself added burthens of the spirit which he is unable to subdue to the conditions of the medium in which he works, can find no just defence for the violation of any of the conditions the chosen vehicle imposes, by an appeal to the intellectual or emotional value of the ideas he has sought to express. He looked perhaps with even excessive suspicion upon the interpretation through painting of subjects that suggested any sort of reliance upon the modes appropriate to other arts, with the result that the effects he achieved bear sometimes too strongly the stamp of calculated effort. Science was a word he was very fond of employing with regard to painting, and though it implied a just rebuke to those who were wont to make a merely sentimental appeal, it sometimes fettered his own processes and left upon some of the work he produced rather the sense of a protest against the false ideals of others than of the free and spontaneous enjoyment of the beauty in nature that he intended to convey.
But an artist, after all, is either something better or something worse than his theories, and Whistler was infinitely better. His instinct was sure, and within the limits he assigned to himself he moved with faultless security of taste. If the realm he conquered was not over richly furnished it was at any rate kept jealously free from the intrusion of inappropriate elements. Whatever was admitted there had an indisputable right to its artistic existence, and while he excluded much that other men, differently gifted, might equally have subdued to the conditions he was so careful to obey, such beauty as he found in nature was at least always of a kind that painting alone could fitly render.
To watch Whistler at work in his studio was quickly to forget that he had any theories at all. Nothing certainly could less resemble the assured processes of science than his own tentative and sometimes even timid practice; for although the result, when it received the final stamp of his approval, seemed often slight and was always free from the evidence of labour, labour most surely had not been absent, for the ultimate shape given to his design, though it may have represented in itself only a brief period employed in its execution, had in many cases been preceded by unwearying experiment and by many a misdirected adventure that never reached completion at all.
Whistler’s talk in the studio was not often concerned with the subject of Art, and even when Art was the topic it was nearly always his own. His admiration of the genius he unquestionably possessed was unstinted and sincere, and if he avoided any prolonged discussion of the competing claims of his contemporaries, it was, I think, in the unfeigned belief that they deserved no larger consideration. He had his chosen heroes among the masters of the past, but they were few, and their superior pretensions, in his judgment, were so manifest that it seemed sufficient to him to announce their supremacy without further parley as to the inferior claims of their fellows. The position they occupied in his regard was as little open to argument as the place of incontestable superiority he was wont to assign to himself in his own generation. I remember once, when a friend in his presence rashly ventured to accuse him of a lack of catholicity in taste, Whistler in swift response admitted the justice of the charge and excused himself on the ground that he only liked what was good.
But there were causes, apart from the convinced egotism of his nature, which led him by preference towards other topics of conversation. He has written in his lectures and in his letters both wisely and wittily of the proper mission of painting; so wittily, indeed, that his humour and satire are apt sometimes to obscure the sound and serious thought which, on this subject, coloured even his most playful utterances. For, underlying all he said or wrote, was a conviction he took no pains to conceal—that the principles of Art, together with its aims and ideals, were the proper concern only of artists and could scarcely be debated without impropriety by that larger and profaner circle whose praise and appreciation, however, he was by no means disposed to resent. At times he was even greedy of applause, and provided it was full and emphatic enough, showed no inclination to question its source or authority. There were moments, indeed, when, if it appeared to lack volume or vehemence, he was ready himself to supply what was deficient.