It would be incomplete in any memoir of Whistler to omit the most thrilling battle of his life. To all adventurers there comes at last the event which knocks all their venturousness out of them or is the beginning of a triumphant way. Whistler had been before the footlights a long time, but it was his contact with Professor Ruskin which brought him into the full lime-light, which he was so much prepared to enjoy. Ruskin paid him the only tribute strength can pay to strength when it is not on the same side—with a prophetic instinct that as regards picture exhibitions Whistler’s art was the sign of a coming, and licentious, freedom from the old rules of the game. He saw in Whistler’s work the end of old fair things, the laws of those old things all set aside. In reading the so well-known criticism of Whistler one has a feeling that after all Ruskin has only half expressed his feelings in it—however it resulted in the famous libel action. Whistler received one farthing damages, which sum he afterwards magnanimously returned to his eminent critic, as his contribution towards the subscription set on foot to pay Ruskin’s legal expenses.
Ruskin’s criticism was as follows:—
“For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”
The case came on in the Court of Exchequer Division before Baron Huddleston on November 15, 1878, Whistler claiming £1000 damages. “The labours of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!” asked the Attorney-General representing Ruskin. “No,” replied Whistler, “I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.” “Do you think now that you could make me see the beauty of that picture?” asked the Attorney-General. “No!” he replied. “Do you know I fear it would be as hopeless as for the musician to pour his notes into the ear of a deaf man.” In resuming the Attorney-General said: “Let them examine the nocturne in blue and silver, said to represent Battersea Bridge. What was that structure in the middle? Was it a telescope or a fire-escape? Was it like Battersea Bridge? What were the figures at the top of the bridge? And if they were horses and carts, how in the name of fortune were they to get off?”
Mr. W. P. Frith, R.A., was examined and in his evidence said that in his opinion Mr. Whistler’s pictures were not serious works of art. In the margin of the account of the trial in “The Gentle Art” Whistler quotes from that painter’s “It was just a toss up whether I became an artist or an auctioneer,” and adds, “He must have tossed up.” There was a time when policemen had to keep the crowd away from Frith’s Margate Sands. There was a time when Whistler’s pictures were hissed when they were put on the easel at Christie’s? If the attitude towards these so different kinds of art is changed, it is the resolution Whistler showed in life as well as in his art that changed it. And have we not in the above interchange of points of view at the court the whole vexed question—the issue around which the battle of Whistler’s life always raged? Whistler explained to the court that his whole scheme was only to bring about a certain harmony of colour. He tried to dispel the illusion that the painter’s craft forms itself upon the desire to communicate a story. It may be so with the literary craft, but there is no life in the drawing or painting that is not inspired by the delight of the artist in the mere outside of things. Where there is the expression of that delight, there may be the expression of much beside, of the spiritual meanings behind all beauty—though Whistler did not take this flight in his reply. He himself tried to limit the meaning of art almost as narrowly as Ruskin. He had this advantage over Ruskin, that whatever he said about painting was from the inside knowledge of his genius in painting. Ruskin’s genius was always approaching that subject from the outside. We could not on any account dispense with what was said at any time by either of them. It was impossible for them to see each other except as enemies across a wide gulf, all speech with each other drowned by the rapids of misunderstanding. The gulf is nearly bridged. In viewing art in its relation to life no one wrote more profoundly than Ruskin, but he failed in knowledge of the beautiful and inner mysterious delights of the craft of painting. Whilst exalting the mission of painting, he degraded its craft, he seemed to fail in appreciation of the fact that at its highest this is as mystical as inspired—and as unaccountable as the craft in Shelley’s lyrics. The number of rules he laid down, the gospels he preached upon them reveal always the irritating scholiast and pedant. How eloquently Whistler expresses his irritation in the Ten o’clock lecture!
In his account of the trial in “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” Whistler fills the margin with quotations from Ruskin so dexterously opposed to the matter in hand as seemingly to discredit for ever Ruskin’s writings upon art and the mode of thought therein. But at the bidding of Whistler, and those who boast his opinions second hand, we cannot abjure all this order of thought. One passage which Whistler quotes: “Vulgarity, dulness, or impiety will indeed always express themselves throughout, in brown and grey as in Rembrandt” is not without its bearing on his own art—which has since then quite altered the meaning of the word grey. And despite the perhaps unfortunate naming of Rembrandt one divines that Ruskin is here speaking in the light of the highest intuitive knowledge.
It must be remembered that in prose, which may accept its motif from anything, from art if it likes, Ruskin could sometimes lose himself as completely as Whistler often did in the beauty of his own art. And with the waters of beauty closing over their heads, one was as deaf and blind as the other. That trial was Ruskin’s Waterloo. If there is one thing that would make me doubt that Whistler was a great man, it is the fact that he never had a Waterloo, but perhaps that is reserved for those who have been successful right from the beginning. The light air with which Whistler carried his own early troubles is misleading as to their extent. Without the thread of coarser stuff that crossed his otherwise over-refined nature some such sadness of fate might have awaited him as awaited Meryon, the French etcher, for possessing motives too far in advance of those accepted by his time. For really at first no one hardly seemed to have understood the delicate order of things that Whistler was trying to do, especially in his later etchings, in which everything is a symbol counting upon our imagination; everything a pleasure to its creator and nothing a labour; every line one of nervous impulse, the whole etching an inspiration of such impulsive threads. In what loneliness he must have possessed his abnormal delicacy of perception. He hugged to himself the delusion that a knowledge of his craft enabled artists to understand him—but it is common for artists of abundant gifts not to have the necessary refinement of sense, and after all artists are not so numerous that these appreciators will be many. But in the wide world outside the studios there are many people thus delicately attuned, their numbers to be increased when Whistler in his subtlety of vision is less ahead of the world in point of evolution. He brought recognition to himself before his time by strident challenges, aggressive at every point and scornful—as they could not have been had the real nature of his superiority dawned on him at the first. In the first Thames etchings he has not received his revelation: they do not show his hand quite so conscientiously, nervously, awaiting its inspiration for every movement.
PLATE VI.—NOCTURNE, BLUE AND SILVER (In the possession of the Hon. Percy Wyndham)
Painted at Westminster, looking towards Lambeth. On the back of the picture is a card bearing the artist’s signature and the butterfly, with title “Westminster, Blue and Silver, J. McNeill Whistler, 2 Lindsay Houses, Old Chelsea.” This places the date of its execution about 1866.
PLATE VI.—NOCTURNE, BLUE AND SILVER
Nothing can make us realise the great significance of the Whistler influence in art more than the contrast between the esteem in which his etchings are now held and the early criticisms of them which he collected and scornfully embodied in his book. These are indeed the most depressing reading—and Whistler’s quaint termination to those pages, “they roar all like bears,” does very aptly express the feeling of desolation that must overcome any one who appreciates the spirit of his etchings. When praise is forthcoming it is only for the early etchings at the expense of those later ones in which he conceived such an inspired use of the needle. By the criticisms in this book we know the exhausting struggle and how right it was that a life, the first half of which had been spent thus, should have no “Waterloo,” but end with rest—and with honour, accorded to this “Merlin,” so evidently great, if only a few knew why.
It was 1878, the year of the Ruskin trial, that he started working in lithography as a medium, being initiated into the technicalities by Mr. Thomas Way. In the “Fair Women” Exhibition held by The International Society, which is open whilst I write, there are some lithographs by Whistler, which suggest purity of type and the charm of beautiful womanhood in a manner that puts to flight the claims of many a famous canvas in the gallery. It is the most delicate of all mediums; it suited his touch and the sensitive order of his perceptions.
After the Ruskin case Whistler left London for Venice for about a year; upon his return he exhibited at the Fine Art Society the first series of Venice pastels, and a little later at the same gallery fifty-three pastels of Venice. He also held exhibitions at the Dowdeswell Gallery in 1883, Etchings in 1884 in “Notes, Harmonies, and Nocturnes,” in 1886 all the time still continuing to exhibit at the Grosvenor Gallery some of his most famous portraits, nocturnes, and marines.
