International studio (20.1903)

Ztf/z

evening mist clothes tiie riverside with poetry, as
withaveii, and the poor buildings iosethemseives
in the dim sky, and the taii chimneys become
campanih, and the warehouses are palaces in the
night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens,
and fairyland is before us — then the wayfarer
hastens home; the workingman and the cultured
one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to
understand, as they have ceased to see ; and Nature,
who for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite
song to the artist alone, her son and her master —
her son in that he loves her, her master in that he
knows hen To him her secrets are unfolded; to
him her lessons have become gradually clear. He
looks at her flower, not with the enlarging lens,
that he may gather facts for the botanist, but with
the light of the one who sees in her choice selection
of brilliant tones and delicate tints suggestion of
future harmonies."
In this last sentence he betrays the
of his artistic purpose, which was to extract from
Nature her abstract appeal to the sense of sight,
even as the chemist distils from flowers the fra-
grance that will appeal to the sense of smell, or as
a musician from the throbbing of his brain brings
forth the abstract harmonies of sound. In the
pride of his art he claimed for it an independent
value that needed no bolstering up with words.
He would, if possible, have made it entirely inde-
pendent of ideas. It is a theory of art almost too
quintessential for human nature's daily food ; per-
haps even essentially opposed to the conditions of
our being. For between the actions of our mind,
which we can interpret by words, and the action
of our senses there are subtle analogies. We are
told that the Japanese have so cultivated the sense
of smell as to be able to correspond by means of
perfumes ; and our own limited experience may not
be unaware of the mental suggestion, partially ex-
pressible in words, which certain perfumes yield us.
Nor is music less pregnant with suggestion to the
mind. It conveys no direct thought, but variously
stimulates different minds to feel after something,
which is partly reducible to verbal expression and
partly not. For it is this elusive quality in a work
of art which gives it pungency of suggestion and
enduring interest, just as a woman, to hold the heart
of a man, must preserve some savor of inaccessible
mystery. Of what is obviously and fully realized,
cliv

if it yield no further suggestion, human nature soon
tires.
This value of eiusiveness in is the great truth
which Whistler revived, and we may find it most
irresistibly expressed hi those pictures, landscapes
or portraits, wherein the human appeal is most
clearly felt. For, being human, we cannot free
ourselves of an overwhelming interest in what is
human. Children are the subjects of most absorb-
ing interest to children, and we, the oldest of us,
are only older children.
The is penetrated with this
quality of elusiveness ; phantom shapes glimmering
in misty, ethereal light, a spirit picture, rendering
the impressions which such a scene in nature
gently makes upon the imagination. So gently,
that, while we are filled with sensation, they are
vague, unrealizable ; our spirit is allured to infinite
longings in the very unattainableness of which there
is a poignancy of cleansing sadness. If you have
come under the spell of this enchantment in the
actual presence of Nature, you recognize it instantly
in this picture ; if you have not, the picture may
lead you to find it.
What the artist has given us is not the facts of
nature, but their effect upon the spirit; interpreting
the dream or spirit world, of which the actual is the
solid basis. "The landscapes of Whistler are places
of dreamland," says Miither; "landscapes of the
mind, summoned with closed eyes and set free
from everything coarse and material, breathed upon
the picture and encompassed with mysteries." It
was not the forms of nature ^ which interested
him, but their significance to the spirit; the sugges-
tion of beauty which they yielded to the imagination.
To quote Miither again : " Like the Japanese, but
with brilliant refinements such as never occurred,
even to the greatest painters, this wonderful har-
monist has the art of simplifying and of spiritualiz-
ing, retaining the mere essence of forms, and of
colors, only what is transient, subtle, musical."
The same is true of his portraits. Whistler did
not ignore form, — very far from it; but it was the
effect of form, in its relation to the character of the
subject and in its relation to considerations of ab-
stract beauty, that alone seemed to him to be worth
interpretation. In a material age he made his artis-
tic protest against the accepted axiom that "seeing
is believing" ; teaching and proving in his works