One night at the Pennells’, Whistler had been grumbling in an amusing way over art criticism and art critics. No one answered him. He had the floor entirely to himself and the rest of us were content to smile. Near eleven o’clock, as I rose to go, and Whistler and Pennell went with me to the door, I ventured to say that art critics were not very different from other people, that they did the best they could, but were human and often erred. It was good-natured deprecation of his point of view, which he met by putting his hand on my shoulder and saying with equal good nature:
“Oh, my dear Van Dyke, don’t misunderstand. We none of us think of you as an art critic.” Everybody laughed, myself included. There was not a particle of venom in it. I had written about him in praise in the early eighties when others were abusing him and he had thanked me for it; I was in his good books. To be sure, the retort was hardly new. John Brougham had launched it at Lester Wallack many years before. But the cleverness of it lay in its application.
Whistler liked to talk, especially if there was an audience of half a dozen. He was then very willing to fill space in the spot-light and conduct the session, especially if art was up for discussion. Another night, at a Pennell dinner, a very clever man—one of the editors of the Daily Telegraph—was present. He had recently returned from the far North—beyond Spitzbergen—and had been telling us about the brilliancy of the Northern color. Whistler, beside whom I sat, was not interested and kept tugging at my arm, telling me that it was mere raw color and not art. To that I finally had to make reply that I cared not a rap whether the color was artistic or not, that I was interested in the mere fact of its brilliancy. With that he flung around in his chair, turning his back on me, much as a child might do, and remained silent until the subject changed.
But it is an error to infer that because he was often witty and occasionally petty, wit and pettishness were his outstanding characteristics. By setting forth unrelieved chapters of his stories and sayings the impression has been produced that he started a new quarrel each morning before breakfast and shot envenomed shafts until sunset. That his witticisms were scattered over a period of forty years is neither stated nor implied. As a matter of fact, he was almost always in a serious mood, and, with his knowledge and gift of language, talked most sensibly and persuasively. I remember many interesting and informing talks with him when there was no jesting and not even smiling. In his own studio, with his own pictures on the easel and he explaining his intention and its development on the canvas, he was at his best. He was then a reasonable, sensible painter, with none of the pose of the Ten O’Clock and none of the vanity of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. I have never met a more striking contradiction in an individual, and it always seemed to me that the Whistler of the sharp tongue and pen was not the true Whistler but merely a character assumed for the occasion.
His published writings, as one reads them to-day, are extravagantly brilliant, but hardly sincere, even from a Whistlerian point of view. Take from the Ten O’Clock, for instance, the oft-quoted sentence: “There never was an artistic period, there never was an art-loving nation.” A measure of truth lies under that, but Whistler knew that he exaggerated it, overstated it. Again the statement that “Art happens—no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about, and puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy and coarse farce.” Here is another half-truth, but so arbitrarily insisted upon that one infers that art is really an isolated and unrelated phenomenon on the earth. Whistler knew better than that. Nothing “happens” in this world. There is a cause for every effect. Once more the remark about “the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.” But he himself never was so foolish as to believe such nonsense. It was merely a rococo way of saying that art could not handle a sunset in a satisfactory manner, and that his art, in particular, preferred a twilight or a midnight. The Ten O’Clock indeed explains Whistler’s art better than any other, and, of course, that was why it was written. His own limitations and necessities could not have been better set forth than by the sentence: “Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong.” He wanted to put a conventionalized nature into a decorative pattern, and he justified it by saying that a realistic nature is “usually wrong.” It is somewhat of a piece with his remark that “there are too many trees in the country.” There were—for Whistler’s art.
But it is useless to point out the superficial in the Whistler arguments—the falseness of analogy, for instance, in comparing national art with national mathematics. That statement was made to produce a laugh, and it succeeded. It is even stupid to point out the want of logic or historical truth in the Ten O’Clock. One might as well try to break Whistler’s own butterfly on a wheel. The lecture was written and delivered to astonish the natives. And it did. It was a charming bit of extravagance, beautifully written for platform delivery, and a delightful piece of literature for fireside reading. Had it been logical, temperate, well-guarded in its utterances, it would have fallen flat. It fitted the occasion, was a work of art in itself, and no more “happened” than Whistler’s pictures and etchings.
That he wrote extremely well makes it all the more unfortunate that he wrote at all. The letters of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies are amusing, but leave an impression of flippancy and mere cleverness. These were qualities rightly enough used in a rough-and-tumble newspaper quarrel, but the reader does not leave them there. Unwittingly he looks for the same qualities in Whistler’s portraits and pastels, perhaps reads them into the art itself. Worse yet, he possibly arrives at the conclusion that the art is of less interest than the quarrels, of less moment than the passing gibe of the “foolish sunset,” or the casual irrelevance of “dragging in Velasquez.” Once more, it is a pity that Whistler the painter has to be confused with Whistler the critic-baiter. However well one comes out of a fight, it is generally with rumpled plumage and a lack of dignity. Whistler could well have afforded to go his way in silence. Why did he have to kick at every cur that barked at his heels? Degas said he acted as though he had no talent, and Degas was right.
After these books of bickerings one comes back to Whistler’s pictures with relief, for they at least are serious. That is not, however, to say that they are the greatest this, or the most wonderful that, in all painting. They are far from being impeccable, but they are not the wherewithal to suckle fools and chronicle small beer. No competent person nowadays thinks them other than very sincere art. His brothers of the craft have, indeed, so elevated them and him, so pedestalled and niched them both, that it is very doubtful if they can long hold out in their rarefied atmosphere. Again and again has the world been told that he was a faultless draftsman, that his brush was equal to that of Velasquez, and that his needle outdid Rembrandt. He did not believe so himself, nor, soberly considered, does his art affirm it.
The Pennell book contains photographs of a number of pictures labelled “destroyed,” and there were scores of canvases that never got so far as even to be photographed. Many of the pictures that escaped destruction are faulty in drawing, lacking in construction, out of proportion, or smitten with stiffness in the joints. Connie Gilchrist on the stage skipped the rope delightfully, but in Whistler’s portrait called “The Gold Girl” she is petrified. The “Sarasate” seems pinched in scale, the “Irving as Philip” is unbelievable in construction, the “Leyland” legs had to be redrawn from a model. Whistler glorified the people of Velasquez because “they stand upon their legs.” In his studio, showing his own portraits, his first question about each figure was: “How does it stand?” And then: “Does it stand easily, stand firm, stand in? Is it placed right on the canvas, has it enough body, enough atmospheric setting?” These were questions that had to do with realistic or representative appearance. Again and again he rubbed out the whole day’s work or destroyed the picture entirely. And he could write of himself to his printer in the severest terms, thus: “No, my drawing or sketch or whatever you choose, is damnable and no more like the superb original than if it had been done by the worst and most incompetent enemy.... There must be no record of this abomination.”
This, in measure, is the experience of every artist. He produces with difficulty and has scores of failures. It was not to Whistler’s discredit that he was so severe a judge of himself, but perhaps it dispels the delusion of his being an impeccable craftsman. Besides, there was an unusual reason for his lack of success with many pictures. It has been already suggested that he strove to harmonize the conflicting traditions of the West and the East. He was born and bred to the realism of the third dimension—to the protrusion or recession in space of planes, figures, lights, and colors. Midway in his career he took up with the decorative in Eastern art and strove to show the representative figure of the French with the flattened formula of the Japanese.