The real Whistler, then, as his closest friends saw him, was an impulsive, quixotic, erratic, if you like, but, above and beyond everything else, an artist of indisputable genius who fought a losing battle for a quarter of a century; jested through it all, and finally triumphed magnificently. His minor accomplishments were illumined by the flare of newspaper polemics; his greater and nobler qualities were too often obscured by the lack of comprehension. Yet there were times when Whistler gave of his best simply and sincerely to all who had the perception to receive his gift. Such an occasion was that on which he delivered for the first time his immortal lecture on art, "Ten O'Clock." He chose this title because he did not want the people to rush to him from the dinner table, as to the theatre. Ten o'clock was early enough. The audience and critics who greeted him in Prince's Hall, London, on that never to be forgotten occasion, were puzzled by what they chose to regard as Whistler's "new pose." As a matter of fact, he was not posing at all, but had called them to him that he might impart to them, out of his very heart, the standard of artistic faith by which his life was ruled. It was a revolt not so much against the conclusions of modern paintings nor a plea for Japanese art (he does not mention Japan except once in the beautiful final sentence: "The story of the beautiful is already complete, hewn in the marble of Parthenon—and broidered, with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai at the foot of Fusiyama") as against the pedantic and realistic methods in art, a fierce crusade for the ideals of painting. His style is virile, individual, marvellously condensed and suggestive. It contains a number of beautifully put phrases like: "Art happens—no hovel is safe, no prince can depend upon it."
THE LIME BURNER (ETCHING).
"Colours are not more since the heavy hangings of night were first drawn aside, and the loveliness of night revealed."
"If art be rare to-day it is seldom heretofore." In these aphorisms he puts his finger on the secret of literary expression—the application of the simplest and subtlest means to the most complicated and inexistent subject.
Paragraphs as the following must excite the admiration of every literary man.
"Alas! ladies and gentlemen, Art has been maligned. She has naught in common with such practices. She is a goddess of dainty thought—reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others."
"She is, withal, selfishly occupied with her own perfection only—having no desire to teach—seeking and finding the beautiful in all conditions and at all times as did her priest Rembrandt, when he saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks."
Or again: