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.