Who knew the errant life of the highway, of the starlit desert and windy mountain slopes better than the story-teller of old, who wandered from town to village, from camp to solitary tent, all over the face of the earth, telling his simple tales to those who cared to listen? He was the wayfarer who lived in his life the Odyssey of the eternal Wanderer, and whose words reflected in quaint imaginative excursions the adventures of strange men and women he had met in lonely forests and crowded city streets.

Every nomadic tribe, every nation, every country, has had its singer of songs, its chanter of religious hymns, its troubadour, its vagrom poet, some story-teller of the beautiful. They have vanished, and the story is now repeated by the professional poet and artist. He no longer treads the highways and the listeners no longer offer him the hospitality of a night's shelter. He lives the life of the large cities; he hastens from place to place, he mingles with the crowd but passes unseen as nobody will listen to his stories. More than ever is he the vagrom man, unless he tells his story of the Beautiful in such a novel, fascinating way that Art, "the whimsical goddess," will open the book of life and inscribe his name. Then his townspeople, his nation, a whole continent, the entire world may claim him.

Whistler travelled many highways and lo, when he arrived at the age of sixty a weary, restless wanderer in the realm of art, three nations—England, France and America—claimed him as their own.

Born in America, obtaining his education partly in America and partly in St. Petersburg, Russia, living the rest of his life in Europe, dividing his time almost equally between Paris and London, he was a cosmopolitan in the true sense of the word, and that is what he wished to be considered. He loved England and loved France, but he felt quite indifferent towards America. In Paris he had spent his student years, and he was drawn to this city by many bonds of attachments and friendships that lasted for life. And it was France who gave him that final great recognition of his genius when it purchased "The Artist's Mother" portrait for the Luxembourg, and made him an officer of the Legion of Honour. In England, on the other hand, he fought the great battles of his life for social as well as artistic recognition. In England he married, and was for many years one of the most conspicuous characters of London art and social life.

America really did nothing for him, and he did nothing for America. He never came back to America—during forty-eight years—after leaving it as a young man of twenty-one. He never exhibited in America until his name as a painter was one of the best known in Europe. He even preferred to exhibit his work with English artists in international exhibitions. We all remember the General Hawkins incident in 1889. Whistler only became known to America after his death through memorial exhibitions.

Now, of course, we like to claim him, and do so with ostentation. Expatriots are always claimed by their native country when they have achieved success or performed some remarkable act that has aroused the wonder of nations. Nobody cares whether Mr. Jack Johnson lived on the Place Monceau, or died on the Riviera.

To the analytical mind it is of little consequence whether he will go down in history as an American, English or Frenchman, as he was one of the great artists of the nineteenth century with an international significance. In the case of artists like Burne-Jones, Israels, Boldini, Fortuny, Lenbach, Segantini, it may be of more importance, as they are local talents.

Whistler's predilections were natural. He was too shrewd a promoter of his own artistic welfare not to make the best of this dispute of nations. He could not have prevented it anyhow, and the question of his nationality will be disputed for many years to come. Of course, one can simply settle the matter by saying that as he was born in America of American parents, he is an American.

The English differ; they choose to do in this case what we have always done with our immigrants. After a person has lived for any length of time in the country we make him a citizen and consider him an American. How about Carl Schurz, General Siegel and Roebling, the bridge builder? They were all born abroad and yet their names are inscribed on our roll of honour. Of what nationality was Lafcadio Hearn, who, born on the Ionian Islands, of Irish and Greek parentage, living for years in New Orleans and New York, finally selected Japan as the country of his choice, where he lived the remainder of his life and was buried? And yet we class him as an American writer. It seems that the party most concerned in it; the personality itself, should decide the question. Hearn wished to be considered a Japanese. We are not quite sure what Whistler's opinion was on the matter. He claimed to be a cosmopolitan. But that is no answer, as it does not settle the dispute. It leaves others to settle it, and the trouble starts anew.

There is another much subtler point, open to argument. Is his art in any sense American? Has it a flavour, a peculiarity of its own, that could be derived from any source except that of American birth and parentage? To this question I answer emphatically yes. True enough his subject matter was, with the exception of "L'AmÉricaine" and a few portraits, strictly Continental. But the spirit was strictly Japanese and—American. Or, I would rather say, his form of art conception was Oriental, but the essence, the under-rhythm of his personality, was after all American. He was somewhat of a snob and a precieux, like his friend Comte Montesquiou. He had all the polished manners, the spirit, the grace of a foreign aristocrat and yet he was neither a Frenchman nor an Englishman in his habits or views on art. He remained an alien, as any man in a foreign climate must remain to some extent, when the change of domicile is made as late as the twentieth year.

His wit and sarcasm was American. It was not pointless, neither brusque nor frivolous but it was at times flat like Mark Twain's. His self-exploitation revealed the shrewdness of an intellectual Barnum. His attitude in society was that of a "Yankee at King Arthur's Court." Besides there are vague traits in his art which reveal the premises of his origin. His women, "The Fur Jacket," "Lady Archibald Campbell," "L'AmÉricaine," and "Miss Alexander," have a natural finesse, direct grace and elegant frailty that can be found nowhere but in America. His power of adaptability, his disregard for ancient culture for modern purposes, his technical fanaticism, his adventurous tastes and theories, all have an American physiognomy. If there is anything that will make him an American it is the aptitude for labour, free association, and practical adaptation.

That he left America never to return again is no compliment to our country, but he, no doubt, acted wisely. If we remember the sad unsuccessful lives of Whitman and Poe, we shun to think what might have become of Whistler had he stayed on these shores. He, no doubt, would have become one of our best painters, but he would never have become the Whistler we know to-day.

ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK AND WHITE: "L'AMÉRICAINE."

Like all our painters of merit, Fuller, Abbott Thayer, Winslow Homer, Homer Martin, to mention but a few, he would have retired into solitude, he would have become a hermit at a much earlier stage in his career. In England it was revolt, fight and victory; here it would have been stagnation. There would have been no fight because there would have been nobody to fight with.

When a man is young, he is strong because he is impulsive and because he has absolute faith in his beliefs. As he grows older his views broaden, he is not quite as certain of himself, and there will come a time when he will vacillate from one point to another, trying his faculties in different directions and searching for the final path on which his inborn talent may blossom forth in fullest strength and beauty. This is the time when a man needs encouragement, some patron no matter how stingy, some order no matter how humble, some friends and supporters who champion his cause—or he will succumb. He may not give up the battle, but his development will be marred and retarded for years.

American life is not particularly kind to budding geniuses, either in the period of revolt or of later evolution. There is no gainsaying we are a very material race just now. And it is nowise peculiar that it should be so. We do not expect much from Australia and Canada in the way of art. Why should we of the United States, where there are vast territories in very much the same primitive condition as in other emigrant countries? Of course there are certain parts and centres in this country which can boast of a culture dating back a few centuries, but the population has always lived in turmoil and conflict. Self-assertion and self-improvement are the ideals of any man who has changed his domicile, in the one hope to better his material welfare. In a country which is so vast as ours and which has at times an increase of ten thousand aliens a week, the national pride in intellectual accomplishments cannot run high.

All that wealth can do is done at present. We have numerous private collections of rare excellence and will have National Galleries and Kensington Museums in due time, but, as Whistler has said, art is not a matter of education, or of royal, civic or municipal encouragement. It is a growth and the soil must be ripe for it. No doubt, in due time collectors will divert some of their attention from the battered relics of past ages to the quite as admirable productions of their contemporaries. It would be pleasant to find that people cease the worship of dubious pictures by Old Masters as the one certain and infallible proof of enlightenment.

The artist of to-day has to subsist on the Spartan principle; he has either to do or to die. These are no stimulants to inspiration. He has to dig it all out of himself. That engenders martyrdom. And very few, particularly those equipped with lesser talent, are willing to give up a half-way respectable existence for a life in a garret and a long wait until fame knocks at the door. Nearly all the great European artists had their struggle and lived in hovels. The American is less willing to enter upon such a precarious existence, as he realizes that if he accepts it, he may have to stay in a garret until the end of his life. American artists do not assist each other. Each goes his own way, partly under the stress of conditions, because the vastness of the country and larger towns permits no closer association; and partly by choice, by personal inclination or professional reasons. There is but little intellectual intercourse. The atmospheric conditions are just as beautiful here as anywhere. And so are the subjects equally beautiful and plentiful. It would be ridiculous to deny it. Yet it takes courage to be a pioneer. It needs leisure, some incentive and sympathy. No man is inexhaustible. He needs some encouragement from outside; and if it fails to come he will grow indifferent. He may open up a restaurant, or become an illustrator on a comic paper. Deserters of this kind may not represent an irreparable loss, as they were never ensign-bearers, nor ever stood in the firing line.

"They were not carved as from iron or wood,
Cut with an axe, or hammered with sledge,
Till the man shows strong and good."

as Daniel Dawson sang, another young poet who fell by the wayside.

Our conditions are not conducive to the evolution and exploitation of a genius. Graft and prohibition laws, whose evil influences are felt in all strata of society, also injure artistic progress, if not directly, surely by the stress of public opinion. Such conditions would no doubt have retarded the progress of even a man like Whistler for years. If a man has not the means to sip his demi-tasse at Florian's, in Venice on the piazza, he can not make any etchings or lithographs of the Campanile. And if a man cannot afford to buy plates and an etching press he cannot make any etchings at all. And that is the fate of hundreds of artists in our larger cities.

No, to go to Paris and then to find another congenial abode in Europe, to settle there, to live his own life, and to do in art what he wanted to do was the wisest move Whistler ever made. It helped him to expand and to mature the great talent that was slumbering within him, ever since he stared, lost in wonder, at the Velasquez of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg.

Whistler admired the Greek as much as anybody, but this emotional reverence did not hinder him from smashing some traditions of ancient beauty to pieces. Greek art was so perfect that for centuries no artist could escape its influence. All the Old Masters were nursed on the marble breasts of Grecian goddesses. In all art schools the white corpses of plaster cast facsimiles were worshipped on bended knee. The pupils never dared to glance about. They did not see the beauty of the world around them. They could perceive it only through Greek conventions. This had to cease. There was no life blood in these artificial constructions. But tradition was so deeply ingrained in Western Æstheticisms that it lingered on for centuries, until Manet entered the studio, opened the windows, let in the light, and Monet took the young students by the arm, pushed them into the open air and led them to the meadows and riverside, and the open road.

Whistler, in the meanwhile, had scoured the whole horizon of art, and beheld a new dawn in the East. There he saw an old civilization, as deep and broad as ours. It was just at a stage when modern materialism had begun to wash out some of its finest colours. Art was deteriorating in the East under the stress of missionaries and merchants. An era of manufacture had set in. Could not the noble, unselfish spirit of old Japan be kept alive, revived,—amalgamated with our art, and be made to pour new life into our valiant dreams of beauty!

You remember what Whistler said of the primitive artist. The words are worth repeating:

"In the beginning, man went forth each day—some to do battle, some to the chase, others, again, to dig and delve in the fields—all that they might gain and live, or lose and die. Until there was found among them one, differing from the rest, whose pursuits attracted him not, and so he stayed by the tents with the women, and traced strange devices with a burnt stick upon a gourd.