Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  Strangely original, a rare and unique thing, is this picture, yet we know whence it came, and may easily appreciate the influences that brought it into being. Exquisite and happy combination of the art of an entire nation and the genius of one man-the soul of Japan incarnate in the body of the immortal Spaniard. It was Japan that counselled the strange grace of the silhouette, and it was that country, too, that inspired in a dim, far-off way those subtly sweet and magical passages from grey to green, from green again to changing evanescent grey. But a higher intelligence massed and impelled those chords of green and grey than ever manifested itself in Japanese fan or screen; the means are simpler, the effect is greater, and by the side of this picture the best Japanese work seems only facile superficial improvisation. In the picture itself there is really little of Japan. The painter merely understood all that Japan might teach. He went to the very root, appropriating only the innermost essence of its art. We Westerns had thought it sufficient to copy Nature, but the Japanese knew it was better to observe Nature. The whole art of Japan is selection, and Japan taught Mr. Whistler, or impressed upon Mr. Whistler, the imperative necessity of selection. No Western artist of the present or of past time — no, not Velasquez himself — ever selected from the model so tenderly as Mr. Whistler; Japan taught him to consider Nature as a storehouse whence the artist may pick and choose, combining the fragments of his choice into an exquisite whole. Sir John Millais’ art is the opposite; there we find no selection; the model is copied — and sometimes only with sufficient technical skill.

  But this picture is throughout a selection from the model; nowhere has anything been copied brutally, yet the reality of the girl is not sacrificed.

  The picture represents a girl of ten or eleven. She is dressed according to the fashion of twenty years ago — a starched muslin frock, a small overskirt pale brown, white stockings, square-toed black shoes. She stands, her left foot advanced, holding in her left hand a grey felt hat adorned with a long plume reaching nearly to the ground. The wall behind her is grey with a black wainscot. On the left, far back in the picture, on a low stool, some grey-green drapery strikes the highest note of colour in the picture. On the right, in the foreground, some tall daisies come into the picture, and two butterflies flutter over the girl’s blonde head. This picture seems to exist principally in the seeing! I mean that the execution is so strangely simple that the thought, “If I could only see the model like that, I think Icould do it myself”, comes spontaneously into the mind. And this spontaneous thought is excellent criticism, for three-parts of Mr. Whistler’s art lies in the seeing; no one ever saw Nature so artistically. Notice on the left the sharp line of the white frock cutting against the black wainscoting. Were that line taken away, how much would the picture lose! Look at the leg that is advanced, and tell me if you can detect the modelling. There is modelling, I know, but there are no vulgar roundnesses. Apparently, only a flat tint; but there is on the bone a light, hardly discernible; and this light is sufficient. And the leg that is turned away, the thick, chubby ankle of the child, how admirable in drawing; and that touch of darker colour, how it tells the exact form of the bone! To indicate is the final accomplishment of the painter’s art, and I know no indication like that ankle bone. And now passing from the feet to the face, notice, I beg of you to notice — it is one of the points in the picture — that jaw bone. The face is seen in three-quarter, and to focus the interest in the face the painter has slightly insisted on the line of the jaw bone, which, taken in conjunction with the line of the hair, brings into prominence the oval of the face. In Nature that charming oval only appeared at moments. The painter seized one of those moments, and called it into our consciousness as a musician with certain finger will choose to give prominence to a certain note in a chord.

  There must have been a day in Mr. Whistler’s life when the artists of Japan convinced him once and for ever of the primary importance of selection. In Velasquez, too, there is selection, and very often it is in the same direction as Mr. Whistler’s, but the selection is never, I think, so much insisted upon; and sometimes in Velasquez there is, as in the portrait of the Admiral in the National Gallery, hardly any selection — I mean, of course, conscious selection. Velasquez sometimes brutally accepted Nature for what she was worth; this Mr. Whistler never does. But it was Velasquez that gave consistency and strength to what in Mr. Whistler might have run into an art of trivial but exquisite decoration. Velasquez, too, had a voice in the composition of the palette generally, so sober, so grave. The palette of Velasquez is the opposite of the palette of Rubens; the fantasy of Rubens’ palette created the art of Watteau, Turner, Gainsborough; it obtained throughout the eighteenth century in England and in France. Chardin was the one exception. Alone amid the eighteenth century painters he chose the palette of Velasquez in preference to that of Rubens, and in the nineteenth century Whistler too has chosen it. It was Velasquez who taught Mr. Whistler that flowing, limpid execution. In the painting of that blonde hair there is something more than a souvenir of the blonde hair of the Infante in the salle carrée in the Louvre. There is also something of Velasquez in the black notes of the shoes. Those blacks — are they not perfectly observed? How light and dry the colour is! How heavy and shiny it would have become in other hands! Notice, too, that in the frock nowhere is there a single touch of pure white, and yet it is all white — a rich, luminous white that makes every other white in the gallery seem either chalky or dirty. What an enchantment and a delight the handling is! How flowing, how supple, infinitely and beautifully sure, the music of perfect accomplishment! In the portrait of the mother the execution seems slower, hardly so spontaneous. For this, no doubt, the subject is accountable. But this little girl is the very finest flower, and the culminating point of Mr. Whistler’s art. The eye travels over the canvas seeking a fault. In vain; nothing has been omitted that might have been included, nothing has been included that might have been omitted. There is much in Velasquez that is stronger, but nothing in this world ever seemed to me so perfect as this picture.

  The portrait of Carlyle has been painted about an arabesque similar, I might almost say identical, to that of the portrait of the mother. But as is usually the case, the attempt to repeat a success has resulted a failure. Mr. Whistler has sought to vary the arabesque in the direction of greater naturalness. He has broken the severity of the line, which the lace handkerchief and the hands scarcely stayed in the first picture, by placing the philosopher’s hat upon his knees, he has attenuated the symmetry of the picture-frames on the walls, and has omitted the black curtain which drops through the earlier picture. And all these alterations seemed to me like so many leaks through which the eternal something of the first design has run out. A pattern like that of the egg and dart cannot be disturbed, and Columbus himself cannot rediscover America. And, turning from the arabesque to the painting, we notice at once that the balance of colour, held with such exquisite grace by the curtain on one side and the dress on the other, is absent in the later work; and if we examine the colours separately we cannot fail to apprehend the fact that the blacks in the later are not nearly so beautiful as those in the earlier picture. The blacks of the philosopher’s coat and rug are neither as rich, not as rare, nor as deep as the blacks of the mother’s gown. Never have the vital differences and the beauty of this colour been brought out as in that gown and that curtain, never even in Hals, who excels all other painters in this use of black. Mr. Whistler’s failure with the first colour, when we compare the two pictures, is exceeded by his failure with the second colour. We miss the beauty of those extraordinary and exquisite high notes — the cap and cuffs; and the place of the rich, palpitating greys, so tremulous in the background of the earlier picture, is taken by an insignificant grey that hardly seems necessary or helpful to the coat and rug, and is only just raised out of the commonplace by the dim yellow of two picture-frames. It must be admitted, however, that the yellow is perfectly successful; it may be almost said to be what is most attractive in the
picture. The greys in chin, beard, and hair must, however, be admitted to be beautiful, although they are not so full of charm as the greys in the portrait of Miss Alexander.

  But if Mr. Whistler had only failed in these matters, he might have still produced a masterpiece. But there is a graver criticism to be urged against the picture. A portrait is an exact reflection of the painter’s state of soul at the moment of sitting down to paint. We read in the picture what he really desired; for what he really desired is in the picture, and his hesitations tell us what he only desired feebly. Every passing distraction, every weariness, every loss of interest in the model, all is written upon the canvas. Above all, he tells us most plainly what he thought about his model — whether he was moved by love or contempt; whether his moods were critical or reverential. And what the canvas under consideration tells most plainly is that Mr. Whistler never forgot his own personality in that of the ancient philosopher. He came into the room as chirpy and anecdotal as usual, in no way discountenanced or put about by the presence of his venerable and illustrious sitter. He had heard that the Chelsea sage wrote histories which were no doubt very learned, but he felt no particular interest in the matter. Of reverence, respect, or intimate knowledge of Carlyle there is no trace on the canvas; and looked at from this side the picture may be said to be the most American of all Mr. Whistler’s works. “I am quite as big a man as you”, to put it bluntly, was Mr. Whistler’s attitude of mind while painting Carlyle. I do not contest the truth of the opinion. I merely submit that that is not the frame of mind in which great portraiture is done.

  The drawing is large, ample, and vigorous, beautifully understood, but not very profound or intimate: the picture seems to have been accomplished easily, and in excellent health and spirits. The painting is in Mr. Whistler’s later and most characteristic manner. For many years — for certainly twenty years — his manner has hardly varied at all. He uses his colour very thin, so thinly that it often hardly amounts to more than a glaze, and painting is laid over painting, like skin upon skin. Regarded merely as brushwork, the face of the sage could hardly be surpassed; the modelling is that beautiful flat modelling, of which none except Mr. Whistler possesses the secrets. What the painter saw he rendered with incomparable skill. The vision of the rugged pensiveness of the old philosophers is as beautiful and as shallow as a page of De Quincey. We are carried away in a flow of exquisite eloquence, but the painter has not told us one significant fact about his model, his nationality, his temperament, his rank, his manner of life. We learn in a general way that he was a thinker; but it would have been impossible to draw the head at all and conceal so salient a characteristic. Mr. Whistler’s portrait reveals certain general observations of life; but has he given one single touch intimately characteristic of his model?

  But if the portrait of Carlyle, when looked at from a certain side, must be admitted to be not wholly satisfactory, what shall be said of the portrait of Lady Meux? The dress is a luminous and harmonious piece of colouring, the material has its weight and its texture and its character of fold; but of the face it is difficult to say more than that it keeps its place in the picture. Very often the faces in Mr. Whistler’s portraits are the least interesting part of the picture; his sitter’s face does not seem to interest him more than the cuffs, the carpet, the butterfly, which hovers about the screen. After this admission, it will seem to many that it is waste of time to consider further Mr. Whistler’s claim to portraiture. This is not so. Mr. Whistler is a great portrait painter, though he cannot take measurements or follow an outline like Holbein.

  Like most great painters, he has known how to introduce harmonious variation into his style by taking from others just as much of their sense of beauty as his own nature might successfully assimilate. I have spoken of his assimilation and combination of the art of Velasquez, and the entire art of Japan, but a still more striking instance of the power of assimilation, which, strange as it may seem, only the most original natures possess, is to hand in the early but extremely beautiful picture, La femme en blanc. In the Chelsea period of his life Mr. Whistler saw a great deal of that singular man, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Intensely Italian, though he had never seen Italy; and though writing no language but ours, still writing it with a strange hybrid grace, bringing into it the rich and voluptuous colour and fragrance of the south, expressing in picture and poem nothing but an uneasy haunting sense of Italy — opulence of women, not of the south, nor yet of the north, Italian celebration, mystic altar linen, and pomp of gold vestment and legendary pane. Of such hauntings Rossetti’s life and art were made.

  His hold on poetic form was surer than his hold on pictorial form, wherein his art is hardly more than poetic reminiscence of Italian missal and window pane. Yet even as a painter his attractiveness cannot be denied, nor yet the influence he has exercised on English art. Though he took nothing from his contemporaries, all took from him, poets and painters alike. Not even Mr. Whistler could refrain, and in La femme en blanc he took from Rossetti his manner of feeling and seeing. The type of woman is the same — beauty of dreaming eyes and abundant hair. And in this picture we find a poetic interest, a moral sense, if I may so phrase it, nowhere else to be detected, though you search Mr. Whistler’s work from end to end. The woman stands idly dreaming by her mirror. She is what is her image in the glass, an appearance that has come, and that will go leaving no more trace than her reflection on the glass when she herself has moved away. She sees in her dream the world like passing shadows thrown on an illuminated cloth. She thinks of her soft, white, and opulent beauty which fills her white dress; her chin is lifted, and above her face shines the golden tumult of her hair.

  The picture is one of the most perfect that Mr. Whistler has painted; it is as perfect as the mother or Miss Alexander, and though it has not the beautiful, flowing, supple execution of the “symphony in white”, I prefer it for sake of its sheer perfection. It is more perfect than the symphony in white, though there is nothing in it quite so extraordinary as the loving gaiety of the young girl’s face. The execution of that face is as flowing, as spontaneous, and as bright as the most beautiful day of May. The white drapery clings like haze about the edge of the woods, and the flesh tints are pearly and evanescent as dew, and soft as the colour of a flowering mead. But the kneeling figure is not so perfect, and that is why I reluctantly give my preference to the woman by the mirror. Turning again to this picture, I would fain call attention to the azalias, which, in irresponsible decorative fashion, come into the right-hand corner. The delicate flowers show bright and clear on the black-leaded fire-grate; and it is in the painting of such detail that Mr. Whistler exceeds all painters. For purity of colour and the beauty of pattern, these flowers are surely as beautiful as anything that man’s hand has ever accomplished.

  Mr. Whistler has never tried to be original. He has never attempted to reproduce on canvas the discordant and discrepant extravagancies of Nature as M. Besnard and Mr. John Sargent have done. His style has always been marked by such extreme reserve that the critical must have sometimes inclined to reproach him with want of daring, and ask themselves where was the innovator in this calculated reduction of tones, in these formal harmonies, in this constant synthesis, sought with far more disregard for superfluous detail than Hals, for instance, had ever dared to show. The still more critical, while admitting the beauty and the grace of this art, must have often asked themselves what, after all, has this painter invented, what new subject-matter has he introduced into art?

  It was with the night that Mr. Whistler set his seal and sign-manual upon art; above all others he is surely the interpreter of the night. Until he came the night of the painter was as ugly and insignificant as any pitch barrel; it was he who first transferred to canvas the blue transparent darkness which folds the world from sunset to sunrise. The purple hollow, and all the illusive distances of the gas-lit river, are Mr. Whistler’s own. It was not the unhabited night of lonely plain and desolate tarn that he chose to interpret, but the dif
ficult populous city night — the night of tall bridges and vast water rained through with lights red and grey, the shores lined with the lamps of the watching city. Mr. Whistler’s night is the vast blue and golden caravanry, where the jaded and the hungry and the heavy-hearted lay down their burdens, and the contemplative freed from the deceptive reality of the day understand humbly and pathetically the casualness of our habitation, and the limitlessreality of a plan, the intention of which we shall never know. Mr. Whistler’s nights are the blue transparent darknesses which are half of the world’s life. Sometimes he foregoes even the aid of earthly light, and his picture is but luminous blue shadow, delicately graduated, as in the nocturne in M. Duret’s collection — purple above and below, a shadow in the middle of the picture — a little less and there would be nothing.

  There is the celebrated nocturne in the shape of a T — one pier of the bridge and part of the arch, the mystery of the barge, and the figure guiding the barge in the current, the strange luminosity of the fleeting river! lines of lights, vague purple and illusive distance, and all is so obviously beautiful that one pauses to consider how there could have been stupidity enough to deny it. Of less dramatic significance, but of equal esthetic value, is the nocturne known as “the Cremorne lights”. Here the night is strangely pale; one of those summer nights when a slight veil of darkness is drawn for an hour or more across the heavens. Another of quite extraordinary beauty, even in a series of extraordinarily beautiful things, is “Night on the Sea”. The waves curl white in the darkness, and figures are seen as in dreams; lights burn low, ships rock in the offing, and beyond them, lost in the night, a vague sense of illimitable sea.