"Mr. Whistler says he received a note from me. That is a mistake. I have never in my life written a line to Mr. Whistler.[40] [40]The official memory:
"Dear Sir—I wish by return mail you would send description for oils; and if you desire to have titles to etchings printed, you will have to furnish the necessary material for copy.—Yours faithfully,
Rush C. Hawkins,
Commissariat General, Paris, March 29, 1889.
(Autograph.)
To Mr. Whistler." What he did receive was a circular with my name printed at the bottom. These circulars were sent to all the artists who had pictures refused by the jury, and contained a simple request that such pictures be removed.
"Our way of doing business was not, it seems, up to Mr. Whistler's standard of politeness, so he got angry and took away, not only the ten rejected etchings, but seventeen others which had been accepted. It is a little singular that among about one hundred and fifty artists who received this circular, Mr. Whistler should have been the only one to discover its latent discourtesy. How great must be Mr. Whistler's capacity for detecting a snub where none exists!"
"In any case, there is not the slightest reason for Mr. Whistler's venting his ire upon me. I had no more to do with either accepting or rejecting his pictures than I had with painting them. What he sent us was judged on its merits by a competent and impartial jury of his peers. If there were ten etchings rejected it only shows that there were ten etchings not worthy of acceptance. A few days after the affair a trio of journalists—not all men either—came to me, demanding that I reverse this 'iniquitous decision,' as they styled it. I told these three prying scribblers in a polite way that if they would kindly attend to their own affairs I would try to attend to mine. In this connection, I may remark that there are in Paris a number of correspondents who ought not to be allowed within gun-shot of a newspaper office."
"The next mis-statement in Mr. Whistler's interview is in regard to the ultimate disposal of his important etchings. His words are:—'Mr. Hawkins was quite embarrassed, and urged me to reconsider my determination, but I withdrew every one of the etchings, and they are now well hung in the English department.'"
"Now, I leave it to any fair-minded person if the plain inference from this statement is not that the whole twenty-seven etchings were accepted by the English department. If not, what in heaven's name is he crowing about? But the truth is that while we rejected only ten of his etchings, the English department rejected eighteen of them, and of the nine accepted only hung two on the line. Had Mr. Whistler been the possessor of a more even temper and a little more common sense, he would have had five or six of his works on the line in the American department, and nearly twice as many on exhibition than is actually the case. Really, I fail to see what he gained by the exchange, unless it was a valuable experience. He says I was embarrassed when I saw him; I fancy he will be embarrassed when he sees these facts in 'cold type.'"
"Whistler's Grievance"
TO THE EDITOR:
Sir—I beg that you will kindly print immediately these, my regrets, that General Rush Hawkins should have been spurred into unwonted and unbecoming expression by what I myself read with considerable New York Herald. bewilderment in the New York Herald, October 3, under the head of "Whistler's Grievance."
I can assure the gallant soldier that I have no grievance.
Had I known that, when—over what takes the place of wine and walnuts in Holland—I remembered lightly the military methods of the jury, I was being "interviewed," I should have adopted as serious a tone as the original farce would admit of; or I might have even refused to be a party at all to the infliction upon your readers of so old and threadbare a story as that of the raid upon the works of art in the American section of the Universal Exhibition.