It is easier to explain Whistler’s personality than his work. In his lifetime most people had recognised all the force of his personality, but it was not so with his art. In this he is as a player of violin music, or a composer after the fashion of the masters of music—his relationship to the subject which suggests the motif, of course, could not be quite so slight as theirs—but it was their standpoint that he adopted and so approached his art from another direction than the ordinary one. To a great extent he established the unity of the arts. Without being a musical man, through painting he divined the mission of music and passed from the one art almost into the other. And the effort above everything else for self-expression was in its essence a musical one too, as also the fact that he never allowed a line or brushmark to survive that was not as sensitively inspired—played we might almost say—as the touch of a player, playing with great expression, upon the keyboard of his piano. This quality of touch—how much it counts for in the art of Whistler—as it counts in music. It is one of the essential things which we have to understand about his work, to appreciate and enjoy it.
Both painting and music are so different from writing in this, that the thoughts of a painter and musician have to issue through their fingers, they have to clothe with their own hands the offsprings of their fancy. They cannot put this work out, as the writer does, by dictation to a type-writer. It is not in the style he lays the ink that the poet finds the expression, its thickness or its thinness bears no resemblance to his soul, but the intimacies of a painter’s genius are expressed in the actual substance of his paint and in the touch with which he lays it. So in painting the mysterious virtue arises which among painters is called “quality,” a certain beauty of surface resultant from the perfection of method. And it is “quality,” which Whistler’s work has superlatively, in this it approaches the work of the old masters, his method was more similar to the old traditions than to the systems current in the modern schools. And part of the remote beauty, the flavour of distinction which belongs to old canvases is simulated by Whistler almost unconsciously.
Mr. Mortimer Mempes has put on record the painful care with which Whistler printed his etchings. The Count de Montesquieu, whom Whistler painted, tells of the “sixteen agonising sittings,” whilst “by some fifty strokes a sitting the portrait advanced. The finished work consisted of some hundred accents, of which none was corrected or painted out.” From such glimpses of his working days we are enabled to appreciate that desire for perfection which was a ruling factor both in his life and work. In art he deliberately limited himself for the sake of attaining in some one or two phases absolute perfection; he strained away from his pictures everything but the quintessence of the vision and the mood. He worked by gradually refining and refining upon an eager start, or else by starting with great deliberation and proceeding very slowly with the brush balanced before every touch while he waited for it to receive its next inspiration. So he was always working at the top of his powers. Those pleasant mornings in the studio in which the Academy-picture painter works with pipe in mouth contentedly, but more than half-mechanically, upon some corner of his picture were not for him. Full inspiration came to him as he took up his brushes, and the moment it flagged he laid them aside. So that in his art there is not a brush mark or a line without feeling. His inspiration, however, was not of the yeasty foaming order of which mad poets speak, but spontaneity. Spontaneous action is inspired. And this is why his work looks always as if it was done with grace and ease, and why it seemed so careless to Ruskin. However, such winged moments will not follow each other all day long, and though they take flight very quickly, work at this high pressure—with every touch as fresh as the first one—cannot be indefinitely prolonged. Whistler’s friends regretted that he should suddenly leave his work for the sake of a garden party. It is more likely that he turned to go to the garden party just when the right moment came for him to leave off working and so conserve the result, for it is the tendency of the artist in inspired moments to waste his inspiration by allowing the work of one moment to undo what was done in the one before it.
II
The wit of Whistler was not like the wit, let us say, of Sheridan, but it was the result of intense personal convictions as to the lines along which art and life move together. About one or two things in this world Whistler was overflowing with wisdom, and upon those things his conversation was always salt, his sayings falling with a pretty and a startling sound. He talked about things which were much in advance of his day. His was not the wisdom of the past which always sounds impressive, but the greater wisdom of the future, of instincts not yet established upon the printed page. By these he formed his convictions as he went, referring all his experiences, chiefly artistic ones, back to his intelligence, which as we know was an extraordinarily acute one. Other people’s ideas, old-fashioned ones, coming into collision with the intensity of his own, produced sparks on every occasion, and this without over anxiety to be brilliant on Whistler’s part. It is so with original minds.
There is a difference between artistic work and other sorts of work. Outside the arts, in other professions, what a man’s personality is, whilst it affects the way his work is accomplished, does not alter the nature of that work. Immediately, however, the work becomes of such a nature that the word art can be inserted, then the personal equation is before everything to be considered. “Temperament” meets us at every turn, in the touch of brush to paper, in the arrangement of the design, in the subject chosen, in the way of viewing that subject, in the shape that subject takes. Also we can be sure that a picture suffers by every quality, either of mere craftsmanship or surface finish, that tends to obscure individuality of touch and feeling. Outside the arts every job must be finished, if not by one man then by another. A half-built motor-car means nothing to any one, it cannot be regarded as a mode of personal expression, but in art it is otherwise, no one can finish a work for some one else, and as Whistler pointed out, “A work of art is finished from the beginning.” In such a saying Whistler showed the depths from which his wit spilt over. His intuitiveness in certain directions was almost uncanny, taking the place of a profound scholarship, and this saying is a case in point. For however fragmentary a work of art is, if it contains only a first impulse, so far as the work there is sufficient to explain and communicate that impulse, it is finished—finish can do no more. And of course this is not to say that art should never pass such an early stage. All this depends on what the artist has to say: sometimes we have to value above everything the completeness, the perfection of surface with which a picture has been brought to an end. Whistler’s paradox sums up the fact that finish should be inextricably bound up with the method of working and the personal touch never be so “played out” that resort is made to that appearance of finish which can always be obtained by labour descending to a mechanical character. This may sound rather technical, but it is not so really.
PLATE III.—THE ARTIST’S STUDIO
(In the possession of Douglas Freshfield, Esq.)