It was partly therefore upon principle that he forbore to discuss at any length subjects with which he deemed the layman had no proper concern; partly also because in intimate conversation his innate and powerful sense of humour so loved to assert itself that he wandered, by preference, into fields where it found unfettered play. And so it happened in the long and intimate talks in the studio, while he was at his work, he loved to speak of things that belonged to the outer world, and to let his wit play vividly, sometimes mischievously and even maliciously, upon the qualities and foibles of his friends. Here he was never reticent, and so relentless were his raillery and his sarcasm that one was sometimes tempted to think that his acquaintances, and even his friends, only existed for the purpose of displaying his powers of attack and annihilation. I remember very well, when he was decorating what afterwards became known as the “Peacock Room” in Mr. Leyland’s house, that I used often to visit him at his work, and sometimes shared with him the picnic meals which a devoted satellite would prepare for him in the empty mansion. He was certainly very proud of the elaborate scheme of blue and gold ornament he had devised, but I believe this unalloyed admiration of his own achievement was scarcely so great or so keen as his delighted anticipation of the owner’s shock of surprise when he should return to discover that the handsome and costly stamped leather, which originally adorned the walls of the apartment, had been completely effaced to make room for the newly fashioned pattern of decoration. He already scented the joy of the battle that impended, and this added a peculiar zest to his labours in the accomplishment of a purely artistic task. As he had hoped so indeed it happened, and in the long controversy and conflict that ensued, he found, I believe, the most perfect and unalloyed satisfaction.
His nature, in short, at every stage of his career was impishly militant, and whereas other men are so constituted as to desire peace at any price, there was with Whistler scarcely any cost he deemed too great to secure a hostile encounter. To baulk him of a controversy was to rob him of his peace of mind, and so deeply implanted in him was the fighting spirit that he was sometimes only half-conscious of the wounds he inflicted. Certain it is that, the lists once entered, he was relentless in attack, and availed himself without scruple of any weapon that came to his hand. And yet even in his most saturnine sallies there was an underlying sense of humour that yielded to the onlooker at least a part of the enjoyment that he himself drew from the encounter; while his after recital of the tortuous ingenuity with which he had whipped a harmless misunderstanding into a grave estrangement was always irresistible in its appeal.
But though pitiless in combat, Whistler was not without a chivalrous side to his nature. He was fond enough, to use his own expression, of “collecting scalps,” but his tomahawk was never employed against members of the gentler sex. His manner towards women was unfailingly courteous and even deferential. In their company he laid aside the weapons of war, exhibiting towards them on all occasions a delicacy of sympathy and perception which they instinctively recognised and appreciated. It set them at their ease. They felt they could listen with interest and amusement to his recital of those fearless and sometimes savage contests with the male, in complete security from any danger of the war being carried into their own country. They were conscious, in his presence, of an enduring truce between the sexes: a truce so artfully established and so chivalrously conceded as to arouse no suspicion that they were being treated with the indulgence due to inferiors. There was, indeed, in his own character and personality something of the charm, something also of the weakness, that is commonly supposed to be exclusively feminine. The alertness of his temperament betrayed an intuitive quickness in identifying himself with the mood of the moment that found in them a ready response; and his natural vanity, though it might sometimes seem overpowering to members of his own sex, was so exercised as to leave no doubt that he still held in reserve a full measure of the admiration which was due to theirs.
Even as a craftsman there was something delicately feminine in Whistler’s modes of work. I have often watched him at his own printing-press when he was preparing a plate of one of his etchings, and it was always fascinating to follow the deft and agile movements of his hands as he inked the surface of the copper and then, with successive touches, graduated the varying force of the impression to be taken. Here, as I used to think, his method seemed more assured, his alliance with the mechanical resources of his art more confident, than when he was struggling with the subtler and more complex problems of colour.
I have already spoken of those physical peculiarities with which he had been liberally endowed by nature. They were such as to make him a marked figure in any company in which he appeared, and, so far from being a source of embarrassment to himself, he regarded them as a substantial asset to be carefully cultivated and artfully obtruded upon public notice. He even went so far as to enforce and emphasise what there was of inherited eccentricity in his personal appearance. The single tuft of white hair which lay embedded in the coiling black locks adorning his brow, he regarded with a special complacency and pride; and I was amused one evening in Cheyne Walk, while I watched him dressing for dinner, to observe the infinite pains he bestowed upon this particular item of his toilet. It was already past the hour when we should both have been seated at our friend’s table, but this fact in no way abbreviated the care with which he cultivated and arranged this unique feature in his appearance.
And yet it would be wrong, perhaps, to ascribe the delay only to vanity, because to be late for dinner was with Whistler almost a religion. Certain it was, however, that he took a childish delight in any little studied departures from the rules of ordinary costume. At one time he ostentatiously abandoned the white neck-tie which was the accepted accompaniment of evening dress; at another, a delicate wand-like cane was deemed to be a necessary ornament to be carried in his walks abroad; and yet again he would announce an approved change in fashion by appearing in a pair of spotless white ducks beneath his long black frock-coat. These calculated eccentricities induced in the minds of the crowd the conviction that Whistler deliberately sought a cheap notoriety, and it must be conceded, even by those who recognised the serious side of his nature, that he exhibited at times a strange blend of the man of genius and the showman. And yet this admission might easily be made to convey a false impression. He was in a sense both the one and the other, but their separate functions were never merged or confused. Till his task as an artist was completed no man was more serious in his purpose or more exacting or fastidious in the demands he made upon himself. There was nothing of the charlatan in that part of him which he dedicated to his work; and it was not until the artist was satisfied that he availed himself of such antics as attracted, and perhaps were designed to attract, the astonished attention of the public.
One charge that was often urged against him by his enemies, arose out of the singular choice of titles for his pictures. But it was not, I think, in any spirit of affectation that he elected to describe some of his works in terms only strictly appropriate to music. His “Harmonies” and his “Nocturnes,” though they seemed at the time to indicate a certain wilful perversity, had in reality a true relation to principles in Art which he was earnestly seeking to establish. It has been rightly held of music that, in its detachment from the things of the intellect and its independence of defined human emotion, it stands as a model to all other modes of expression by its jealous guardianship of those indefinable qualities which are of the essence of Art itself. And in a sense it may be said of Whistler that he discharged a like function in the realm of painting. For all appeal made through other means than those strictly belonging to the chosen medium he had neither sympathy nor pity. It was for the incommunicable element in painting, incommunicable save through the unassisted resources of painting itself, that he was constantly striving, and it was his revolt against all alien pretensions that led him to seek and to adopt the analogy of music wherein the saving efficacy of such elements is never questioned.
THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF PAINTING
AT THE ROMAN EXHIBITION[1]
The British Section of the International Fine Arts Exhibition, to the study of which these pages are designed to serve as introduction, may claim to possess one or two features of exceptional interest. It is the first time that in any exhibition held outside the British Isles a serious endeavour has been made to illustrate the progressive movement of the English school of painting. The works of English painters have time and again been shown in the different capitals of Europe, and it is no longer possible to allege that the masters whose achievements we prize are unknown beyond the limits of our own shores. But the present occasion is the first wherein a serious and successful experiment has been made to render the chosen examples of the art of the past truly representative of the birth and growth of modern art in England and of the distinctive developments of style which have marked its history. And it is peculiarly fitting that this connected panorama of English art should be offered in the capital of a kingdom to whose example the art of every land has at some time owned its indebtedness. If it be true that every road leads to Rome, it is no less true that, since the dawn of the Renaissance, the footsteps of the artists of all northern lands have worn the several ways that make for Italy; and it will be seen, as we come to trace the story of painting in England, that, not only in its earlier appeal but again and again in the successive revolutions of style and method that have marked its progress, it has found renewed encouragement and fresh inspiration in the splendid and varied achievements of the great Italian masters, from Giotto to Michael Angelo, from Bellini to Tintoretto.
The history of painting in England precedes by more than a century the history of English painting. The force of the Reformation had unquestionably the effect of suddenly snapping the artistic tradition. At an earlier time England could boast of a race of artists who, as the illuminated manuscripts of the period clearly show, were able to hold their own with the most perfect masters in that kind that Europe could show; but with the advent of the Reformation the imaginative impulse of our people found a different channel. The strength of our Renaissance sought expression in our literature, and for a considerable period we became and remained indebted for all expression of pictorial design to a race of foreign artists who enjoyed the hospitality of our land. Even before the Reformation was complete Holbein had found a home at the English Court, and at a later period Rubens and his great pupil Van Dyck were invited to our shores. They brought with them to England the great tradition in portraiture that may be traced back to Italy—a tradition having its spring in the style and practice of the masters of Venice, whose devotion to Nature survived as an inheritance to Northern Europe when the more imaginative design of the school of Florence had fallen into decay.