express nothing but his sense of beauty. For the rest of his nature, he found expression altogether outside his art in enthusiasm for life itself, its combats, difficulties, and its opportunities for saying brilliant things at dinner. His dinner conversation, I have been told, was like the abstract methods of his etching, always cryptic, full of suggestion,—wonderful conversation, full of short ejaculations which carried your imagination from one point to another with hints that seemed to throw open doorways into passages of thought leading right behind things.

He had a remarkable regard for purity of speech, as became the painter of such spiritual types of womanhood. It would seem that women liked him, and readily apprehended in his art his sensitive view of life. At table he drank but little and was a slender eater. When alone he would sometimes forget all about his meals, or eat scarcely anything; in later years, feeling the necessity of taking care of himself he would guard against his indifference by always seeking companionship when away from his house. His nervous disposition forced him to content himself with little sleep, his active brain keeping him awake conceiving witticisms and planning the battle for the morrow.

IV

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:—

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