POLICE CAPT. JOHN F. MURRAY,
Cambridge, Mass.
FOUR MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY.
THE WHISTLERS—A FAMILY ILLUSTRIOUS IN WAR AND PEACE.
BY JOSEPH SMITH, LOWELL, MASS.
The following sketch of the Whistler family appeared originally in the Illustrated American of May 25, 1895, and is reproduced with some few slight emendations, because it is germane to the work of the American-Irish Historical Society. It was the intention of the writer to make a brief sketch of the famous artist, whose birthplace was at that time the subject of much amusing discussion, but he found the antecedents of the artist such interesting personalities and their history so romantic, that he amplified his first sketch into a brief story of the family.
Major Whistler’s connection with the beginnings of Lowell, Mass., led the writer further afield and gave him material that may at some future time be added to the literature of the society. It is sufficient to say here that this splendid seat of American industry—Lowell—was conceived, founded, cradled and fostered by the grandson of an Irishman and the husband of that grandson’s sister, Patrick Tracy Jackson and Francis E. Lowell, from the latter of whom it received its name.
The French savant, Guèrinsen, may or may not have been scientifically correct when he wrote, “Genius is a disease of the nerves;” but certainly the eccentricities of genius point too frequently to neurotic degenerations, to aberrations from the normal, and to symptoms that are “conceived in spleen and born in madness.” Modern instances of this truism are on every hand. There is that in James Abbot McNeill Whistler, for instance, which marks him distinctly as standing among the eccentrics of genius; and which, in his splenetic vagaries, shows him to be hovering on the borderland of madness.
While his affectations in art, his “harmonies,” “symphonies” and “arrangements” in blue and gold, and gray and green, and so on ad nauseam, might seem to set him down among the Barnums of art, with the poseurs of the æsthetic, Whistler’s work shows him to be a man of undoubted genius, a most uncomfortable and irritating genius perhaps, but still a genius whose brilliancy is flawed by his aggressive ego-mania. When we have discounted all the theatrical “isms” in which he frames his art, we are compelled to recognize the fact that he is an artist whose work will live. No ordinary man, no merely artistic charlatan, could make the impression on the age that Whistler has done. Whistler is a writer of deliciously clever and disagreeable things; he has a literary quality whose acidity has etched his personality on this decade; he is a brilliant talker, overflowing with quirk and bon mot, satire and repartee, alert and resourceful in the battle of wits, and he is easily the central figure at the social functions he honors, outshining all other lights, out-roaring other lions, a meteor among the stars.