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The Editor of "The Speaker" allowed me to publish from time to timechapters of a book on art. These chapters have been gathered from themass of art journalism which had grown about them, and I reprint themin the sequence originally intended.
I have studied Mr. Whistler and thought about him this many a year.His character was for a long time incomprehensible to me; it containedelements apparently so antagonistic, so mutually destructive, that Ihad to confess my inability to bring him within any imaginablepsychological laws, and classed him as one of the enigmas of life. ButNature is never illogical; she only seems so, because our sight is notsufficient to see into her intentions; and with study my psychologicaldifficulties dwindled, and now the man stands before me exquisitelyunderstood, a perfect piece of logic. All that seemed discordant anddiscrepant in his nature has now become harmonious and inevitable; thestrangest and most erratic actions of his life now seem natural andconsequential (I use the word in its grammatical sense) contradictionsare reconciled, and looking at the man I see the pictures, and lookingat the pictures I see the man.
But at the outset the difficulties were enormous. It was like anewly-discovered Greek text, without punctuation or capital letters.Here was a man capable of painting portraits, perhaps not quite sofull of grip as the best work done by Velasquez and Hals, only justfalling short of these masters at the point where they were strongest,but plainly exceeding them in graciousness of intention, and subtlehappiness of design, who would lay down his palette and run to anewspaper office to polish the tail of an epigram which he waslaunching against an unfortunate critic who had failed to distinguishbetween an etching and a pen-and-ink drawing! Here was a man who,though he had spent the afternoon painting like the greatest, wouldspend his evenings in frantic disputes over dinner-tables about theultimate ownership of a mild joke, possibly good enough for Punch,something that any one might have said, and that most of us havingsaid it would have forgotten! It will be conceded that suchdivagations are difficult to reconcile with the possession of artisticfaculties of the highest