The white chrysanthemum is my favourite flower. There are other flowers, I grant, perhaps more beautiful, which I cannot help admiring, but the white chrysanthemum somehow appeals to me more than any other flower. Why? That is more than I can tell. The unconscious movements of our soul activity cannot be turned into sodden prose. What would be the use of having a favourite flower if one could give any reason for liking it? It merely reveals that part of our personality, not to be logically explained, which rises within us like the reminiscences of some former soul existence. There are colours and certain sounds and odours which effect me similarly. Whenever I gaze at a white chrysanthemum, my mind becomes conscious of something which concerns my life alone; something which I would like to express in my art, but which I shall never be able to realize, at least not in the vague and, at the same time, convincing manner the flower conveys it to me. I am also fond of displaying it occasionally in my buttonhole; not for effect, however, but simply because I want other people to know who I am; for those human beings who are sensitive to the charms of the chrysanthemum, must hail from the same country in which my soul abides, and I should like to meet them. I should not have much to say to them—souls are not talkative—but we should make curtsies, and hand white chrysanthemums to one another.

Whistler was busy all his life painting just such white chrysanthemums. You smile? Well, I think I can persuade you to accept my point of view.

You are probably aware that Whistler was opposed to realism. The realists endorse every faithful reproduction of facts. Also, Whistler believed all objects beautiful, but only under certain conditions, at certain favoured moments. It is at long intervals and on rare occasions that nature and human life reveal their highest beauty. It was Whistler's life-long endeavour to fix such supreme and happy moments, the white chrysanthemums of his Æsthetic creed, upon his canvases. Have you never seen a country lass and thought she should be dressed up as a page—her limbs have such a lyrical twist, as George Meredith would say—she should stand on the steps of a throne, and the hall should be illuminated with a thousand candles? Have you never met a New England girl, and thought that she was ill-suited to her present surroundings, that she would look well only standing on the porch of some old Colonial mansion, in the evening, when odours of the pelargoniums and gladioli begin to fill the garden? Have you not noticed that a bunch of cut flowers which looks beautiful in one vase may become ugly in another? And how often has it not happened to all of us that we were startled by a sudden revelation of beauty in a person whom we have known for years and who has looked rather commonplace to us? Suddenly, through some expression of grief or joy, or merely through a passing light or shadow, all the hidden beauty bursts to the surface and surprises us with its fugitive charms. Whistler's "At the Piano," "The Yellow Buskin," "Old Battersea Bridge," "Chelsea: Snow," are painted in that way. Could you imagine his "Yellow Buskin Lady" in any other way than buttoning her gloves, and glancing back, for a last time, over her shoulder, as she is walking away from you into grey distances! That peculiar turn of her body reveals the quintessence of her beauty. And that is the reason why Whistler has painted her in that attitude. Thus every object has its moment of supreme beauty. In life these moments are as fugitive as the fractions of a second. Through art they can become a permanent and lasting enjoyment.

The ancient Greek believed in an ideal standard of beauty to which the whole universe had to conform. The modern artist, on the other hand, sees beauty only in such moments as are entirely individual to the forms and conditions of life he desires to portray. And as it pains him that his conception of beauty will die with him, he becomes an artist through the very endeavour of preserving at least a few fragments of it for his fellow-men. With Whistler, this conception was largely a sense for tone, a realization of some dream in black and silvery grey, in pale gold or greenish blues. A vague flare of colour in some dark tonality was, to him, the island in the desert which he had to seek, unable to rest until he had found it. He saw life in visions, and his subjects were merely means to express them. In his "Lady Archibald Campbell" he cared more for black and grey gradations and the yellow note of the buskin than for the fair sitter. The figure is, so to speak, invented in the character of the colour arrangement. Whistler once said he would like best to paint for an audience that could dispense with the representation of objects and figures, with all pictorial actualities, and be satisfied solely with the music of colour.

And why should we not profit by his lesson, and learn to look at pictures as we look at the flush of the evening sky, at a passing cloud, at the vision of a beautiful woman, or at a white chrysanthemum!