And here come the swarms of painters competing for their attention, seeking to flatter their vanity and awe their ignorance. One hornet a little more venomous than the rest is able to impress his hornetry upon them, to stir their greed by the possibility that his paintings may some day be sold for thousands of pounds. So they decide to have themselves “done” by this strange genius. They come to his studio and spend months of torment standing or sitting for him, while he fusses and frets, and paints and wipes out and paints again, taking infinite pains to see that the ladies’ dresses are made of exactly the right quality of muslin, cut and stitched in exactly the right way—because there is one certain precise kind of muslin dress which is art, and any other kind is something else.
All this is called “beauty”; all this has laws, so Whistler tells us, as definite and determinable as the laws of physics or chemistry. Beauty is a thing permanent and immortal, and independent of all other qualities—morality, justice, health, truth, honesty. The answer is: all this is poisonous nonsense, handed out to the rich by those who exploit their vanity. Art without morality is simply art produced for patrons who have no morality by artists who have no morality. As to the permanence of such art, the answer is that its standards are at every moment subject to the attack of more clever devisers of new forms of folly and pretense. The proper way to cut a muslin dress today is an absurd way to cut it tomorrow; and the same applies to harmonies of color and outlines of form. The Turks cherish fatness in women, because they like to be comfortable in their harems; the early Christians thought that emaciation was beautiful, because it prepared them for heaven; Whistler, wishing to flatter the aristocratic conceit of his patrons, paints them abnormally tall and lean, because that is the snobbish notion in fashion at the moment.
Whistler was a great artist in the technical sense; that is, he learned to put paint on canvas in such a way as to convey an impression of reality, not merely physical but emotional and spiritual. He was a terrific worker, as any man must be to succeed in the fierce competition of modern life. He took his art with seriousness; and it happened that twice in his lifetime something lifted him above the empty theories in which he gloried. The first time was when he painted his mother. Here was a gentle, sensitive, sweet-faced, devout Presbyterian old lady, with whom all his childhood memories were bound up; he painted her sitting with her hands in her lap, and her gray hair brushed down and covered with an old-fashioned lace cap. He called it “Arrangement in Black and Gray”; and that is all right, because black and gray are old lady’s colors. But he would have described the painting even better if he had given it a moral title: “Arrangement in Reverence and Affection.”
And then came Carlyle; poor, bewildered, dyspeptic, struggling old prophet from Scotland, he looked at Whistler’s portrait of his mother and loved it, and consented to let the painter do the same thing for him. So here is another study, posed in the same way, and called “Arrangement in Black and Gray,” instead of “Arrangement in Pity and Pathos.” These two pictures have human feeling and moral meaning; therefore they are the two which have been reproduced, and which everybody knows and loves. That is the answer to Whistler’s art theories; but of course it is an answer which he himself would have scorned—he would have made a witticism on it, and got out a new edition of “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.”
“This victory is not yours,” says Mrs. Ogi. “It is Death’s.”
CHAPTER XCVII
THE DUEL OF WIT
Some years ago a story was told me concerning a certain eminent man in England. This man came from the common people; he possesses one of the finest minds in England, and he is the champion of all things generous and free in letters and life. The lady who told me the story, herself a well-known novelist, was writing about the particular section of society from which this man sprung, and in which he had lived his boyhood; she needed an item of local color, and asked him how such people pronounce a certain word. The man flushed, and demanded: “How should I know?” I thought this story one of the most awful I had ever heard; and the lady novelist was shocked when she saw how I took it, for she had not meant to tell anything so serious about her friend. She tried to explain to me, it wasn’t really so bad as it seemed; the pressure of caste feeling is so strong in England that a man is irresistibly driven to cover up his humiliating past.
I tell the incident as preliminary to a discussion of George Meredith. Here was a devoted servant of the muses, a master of his craft, who won a quite unique position among his contemporaries. The public knew him not; to the end of his life his books had little sale, and he was compelled to support himself by odd jobs of journalism and publisher’s reading. But to the inner circle of letters his name became a kind of secret password; he was the choice and precious one, the poet’s poet and the novelist’s novelist, and the little country nook where he dwelt was a shrine to which the distinguished pilgrims traveled from England and America and the Continent.
But over this great writer’s life there hung a dark shadow; a tragic secret, hidden from the world, dimly guessed only by a few of the inner circle. What had been the master’s early life? He never spoke of it. Where had he spent his childhood? No one knew. Where had he been born? The government was collecting some kind of census, and put the question to its great novelist, and he lied; he invented an imaginary birthplace. So he lived safe from scandal, and only after his death was the dreadful truth revealed. His grandfather had been a tailor to naval officers! His father likewise had been a tailor, and failing in business, had gone to South Africa and become a tailor there. His son had nothing to do with him and never spoke of him.
What there is so especially dreadful about a tailor you will have to ask some Englishman to explain to you. I personally have known tailors who were exceedingly kind and generous men; I have known tailors who were students and thinkers and devoted workers in the Socialist movement. All that a tailor may be; I suppose he may even be a saint. There is only one thing which he can never by any possibility be, and that is an English gentleman.