JAMES A McNEILL WHISTLER
LONDON PRIVATELY PRINTED MCMVI
Mr WHISTLER’S TEN O’CLOCK,
BY MR OSCAR WILDE.
“RENGAINES!”
Pall Mall Gazette, Feb. 21st, 1885.
Last night at Prince’s Hall, Mr. Whistler made his first public appearance as a lecturer on Art, and spoke for more than an hour with really marvellous eloquence on the absolute uselessness of all lectures of the kind. Mr. Whistler began his lecture with a very pretty aria on pre-historic history, describing how in earlier times hunter and warrior would go forth to chase and foray, while the artist sat at home making cup and bowl for their service. Rude imitations of nature they were first, like the gourd bottle, till the sense of beauty and form developed, and, in all its exquisite proportions, the first vase was fashioned. Then came a higher civilisation of Architecture and Arm-chairs, and with exquisite design, and dainty diaper, the useful things of Life were made lovely: and the hunter and the warrior lay on the couch when they were tired, and, when they were thirsty, drank from the bowl, and never cared to lose the exquisite proportions of the one, or the delightful ornament of the other: and this attitude of the primitive anthropophagous Philistine formed the text of the lecture, and was the attitude which Mr Whistler entreated his audience to adopt towards Art. Remembering, no doubt, many charming invitations to wonderful private views, this fashionable assemblage seemed somewhat aghast, and not a little amused, at being told that the slightest appearance among a civilized people of any joy in beautiful things is a grave impertinence to all painters; but Mr. Whistler was relentless, and with charming ease, and much grace of manner, explained to the public that the only thing they should cultivate was ugliness, and that on their permanent stupidity rested all the hopes of art in the future.
The scene was in every way delightful; he stood there, a miniature Mephistopheles mocking the majority! he was like a brilliant surgeon lecturing to a class composed of subjects destined ultimately for dissection, and solemnly assuring them how valuable to science their maladies were and how absolutely uninteresting the slightest symptoms of health on their part would be. In fairness to the audience, however, I must say that they seemed extremely gratified at being rid of the dreadful responsibility of admiring anything, and nothing could have exceeded their enthusiasm when they were told by Mr Whistler that no matter how vulgar their dresses were, or how hideous their surroundings at home, still it was possible that a great painter, if there was such a thing, could, by contemplating them in the twilight, and half closing his eyes, see them under really picturesque conditions, and produce a picture which they were not to attempt to understand, much less dare to enjoy. Then there were some arrows, barbed and brilliant, shot off, with all the speed and splendour of fireworks at the archaeologists, who spend their lives in verifying the birth-places of nobodies, and estimate the value of a work of art by its date or decay; at the art critics who always treat a picture as if it were a novel, and try and find out the plot; at dilettanti in general, and amateurs in particular, and (O mea culpa!) at dress reformers most of all. “Did not Velasquez paint crinolines? What more do you want?”
Having thus made a holocaust of humanity, Mr Whistler turned to Nature, and in a few minutes convicted her of the Crystal Palace, Bank Holidays, and a general overcrowding of detail, both in omnibuses and in landscapes; and then, in a passage of singular beauty, not unlike one that occurs in Corot’s letters, spoke of the artistic value of dim dawns and dusks, when the mean facts of life are lost in evanescent and exquisite effects, when common things are touched with mystery and transfigured with beauty: when the warehouses become as palaces, and the tall chimneys of the factory seem like campaniles in the silver air.