In memoriam, James McNeill Whistler

IN MEMORIAM.

JAMES McNeill whistler.

LONDON, ■

February 20ih, /go 5

^ '2t.

IN MEMORIAM.

JAMES McNeill whistler.

LONDON,

February 20th, igo^.

Tht rights of Translation and
Reproduction are reserved.

A SPEECH DELIVERED BY

PROFESSOR WALTER RALEIGH

AT THE CAFE ROYAL, LONDON, AT
THE BANQUET ON THE OCCASION
OF THE OPENING OF THE WHISTLER
MEMORIAL EXHIBITION.

February 20tk, igoj.

PUBLISHED BY WILLIAM HEINEMANN
FOR THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF
SCULPTORS, PAINTERS, AND GRAVERS,
AT THE NEW GALLERY, AND PRINTED
AT THE BALLANTYNE PRESS, LONDON.

Mr. President, my Lords, and Gentlemen, —

We are met to celebrate the memory of a
very great man, and to do honour to the work in
which he has perpetuated that memory. Mr. Whistler
was a man good at many things ; he was a wit, and a
warrior, and the most versatile of craftsmen. But
he was more than this ; and it is as a creator and
servant of beauty that he claims our remembrance
to-night. Beauty, and beauty only, he said, was the
justification and aim and end of a work of art. Surely,
in the history of the world, there has seldom been such
a collection of the works of one man which was per-
vaded and inspired and possessed by the desire of
beauty as the wonderful collection now to be exhibited
in the New Gallery is pervaded and inspired and
possessed. Every touch and every line in those
canvases and prints bears its part in the unceasing
quest and shares in the triumph of the capture. The
labour is over ; and we are permitted to take our
pleasure, every man according to his capacity, in the
rich reward.

You will not expect me, I am sure, in the face ot
these pictures, to discuss or expound any theories of
art. The practice is better. Not the most brilliant
of his theoretic utterances could express Mr. Whistler
a hundredth part so adequately as these works of his.
Indeed, his own theories, though they are neat and
pointed and polished, edged with wit, and often
animated by a profound knowledge, seem to me to
fall far short of expressing him. He taught his age
to look at a picture, not through it ; and the lesson
was a needed one. But in his zeal to reprove the
public for their preoccupation with incident and
morality, he was apt to deny to his pictures qualities
which, after all, they have. Call a picture what you
will, a pattern, or a symphony, or an arrangement, or
(if you like) call it merely a picture, still this is true of
it : that when an artist has done his best at symphony,
or arrangement, there comes to him sometimes an
unsought increment on his effort ; something that he
did not consciously work for, perhaps does not even
know that he has attained. In Mr. Whistler's figure-
pieces there is often a tenderness and grace and pathos
of human emotion which is unaccounted for by the
theory, but which is his no less than the more purely
optical qualities that he laid stress on. The intensity
of his purpose overshoots itself and reveals to him
more than he is seeking.

He stood aloof — more completely aloof, perhaps,
than most other great artists have done — from the
movements and schools of his own time. His early
work belongs to a notable time of artistic ferment.
The Pre-Raphaelites were teaching what I may call
their new morality of vision ; the Impressionists were
working out their new psychology of vision. He
belonged to neither school. He picked up hints and
suggestions, no doubt, from these and a hundred
other sources, but in the main he was independent
and original — in the right sense of that word. That
is to say, he began at the beginning ; in each of his
works he creates afresh, as it were ; he accepts every
subject as presenting a new problem to be grappled
with, a new set of conditions to be studied and sub-
dued, by new devices, to the service of beauty. I am
not decrying the utility of "schools" if I say that the
most robust and splendid of them may interfere, by
the very greatness of their traditions, with that inces-
sant watchfulness, that alert vitality, and that readiness
for new experiment which is found in all Mr. Whistler's
work. It is the misfortune of the schools that they
give a false importance to acquisitive and imitative
talent. And there is one school, at least, which is
apt to cramp the work even of a man of genius — the
school of his own past successes. If the love of ease
entices him, his very triumphs become his enemies,

lO

by tempting him into formula and repetition. But to
the end of his Ufe, Mr. Whistler never rested upon
success ; he went on seeking for new worlds to
conquer. " If you want to rest," he once said to a
friend who complained that there was no easy-chair
in his house — " if you want to rest you had better go
to bed" — and the remark might be taken as the motto
of his artistic career; as the motto, indeed, of the
career of any artist.

An alertness like this finds its ample reward. It
keeps a man's intelligence and sympathies open for
new lessons from Art and Nature. It was by his
sleepless activity of mind that Mr. Whistler was
enabled to become the interpreter, and the pioneer
in Europe, of the art of the Japanese. In this, I
believe, he was something of a discoverer, and brought
from the East, not gold nor spices, but a new charm.
He may be said to have inaugurated, in the happiest
way, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance — an Alliance which,
in the realm of Art, is neither offensive nor defensive,
but devoted to mutual appreciation and mutual
delight — a kind of friendly tournament on the Field
of the Cloth of Gold. And, besides Japan, there was
another great teacher from whom he never ceased to
learn — the Goddess Nature, whom he was wont to
patronise with a certain humorous bravado. She had
so much he did not want, that he was inclined to
regard her as a busybody, an officious and too im-
portunate saleswoman, pressing her garish stores of
goods on his attention. Yet how much did he not
learn from his sensitive and untiring observation of
Nature ? When did he cease to study her moving
benediction of light ? The public of his time asked
a painter for recognisable and clearly defined pictorial
symbols of common objects. But these objects, to an
eye not blinded by habit, exist in a strange submarine

world, a shifting and glimmering sea of light and air.
It was this sea that Mr. Whistler cared for — this sea
in its gentlest undulating moods; and, although I
dare not judge others by my own case, yet I believe
there are many artists who were taught by his work,
as I, in my layman's ignorance, was taught, to take a
keener pleasure in observing how light caresses the
surfaces of things, and how air softens their outlines.

13

But the highest praise remains to tell. Wherever
artists are gathered together, Mr. Whistler cannot be
too much honoured for what has been well called
his " implacable conscience." He found no use on
this earth for critics. But there never lived a severer
critic of himself. Among all the temptations that
assail an artist he walked so absolutely unspotted and
unsubdued, with so confident a gaiety, that it seems
unfair to say that he resisted temptation ; it is almost
as if he had never been tempted. He would destroy
any of his works rather than leave a careless or inex-
pressive touch within the limits of the frame. He
would begin again a hundred times over, rather than
attempt, by patching, to make his work seem better
than it was. He was not content till he had got what
he wanted, and his work expressed himself at his best.
And this was the cause, I think, of his remarkably
strong sense of property in his pictures. They were
his children, a part of himself, and that they should
be sold into slavery, that anything so accidental and
external as the payment of money should alienate or
impair his rights in them, always seemed to him, I
think, a mere piece of inhumanity and impertinence
on the part ofthe law.

14

Consider the irony of things. Here was one of the
most serious-minded men that have ever Uved in this
world. For a long time he was widely and authori-
tatively regarded as a trifler and a jester, one who
evaded difficulties and sought a cheap reputation for
eccentricity. I will not remind you of any incidents
in the famous trial, though it still has its lessons for
artists and critics. Any one who takes up the full
report of that trial and reads it now, will rub his eyes
and wonder. It tells how the official worlds of Art
and Criticism were ranged against Mr. Whistler and a
few friends. Many of the witnesses no doubt re-
pented later of their evidence — of being so busy with
their tongues and so idle with their eyes. But no
man goes through an experience of this kind un-
touched. Mr. Whistler went on with his work — that
is the great thing — and provided himself with a de-
fence against the world. Laughter, which is often
used for defensive purposes by those who have good
wits and sensitive tempers, became his shield and
his spear. His attitude to the public was exactly the
attitude taken up by Robert Browning, who suffered
as long a period of neglect and mistake, in those lines
of The Ring and the Book :

" Well, British Public, ye who like me not,
(God love you !) and will have your proper laugh
At the dark question : — laugh it ! I laugh first."

15

Mr. Whistler always laughed first. So he carried
the war into the enemy's country. They treated the
business which was no less than a religion to him as
if it were a pretence and a trifle. What wonder if he
treated in the same spirit the business which was
most serious to them ? Politics, society, banking —
these also are serious affairs. But one who comes
across them in his moments of relaxation, after a long
and grim struggle with one of the most difficult crafts
in the world, may be excused if he finds in them
plentiful opportunities for amusement. After all, an
artist must be amused — it is the breath of his nostrils ;
he must find delight or make it, whether from under-
standing things, or from indulging his humour in
wilfully misunderstanding them. Where Mr. Whistler
found delight in misunderstanding, he also gave delight
by his child-like glee and by his powers of wit —
a wit not employed in great campaigns, but decorated
and tempered and worn by the side, or flourished in
the hand, as a fit addition to courtly dress.

It)

He gained recognition at last. Wherever a man oi
genius spends an arduous life in the lonely pursuit of
his aims, you find the same sequel, in posthumous sub-
scriptions, or on graven memorial stones, or in those
honorary degrees which are conferred by Universities
on famous veterans. I am glad to think that the
honorary degree which was conferred on Mr. Whistler
some two years ago by the University of Glasgow
gave him sincere pleasure. I know it was felt by
those whose votes conferred it, that if a living painter
was to be chosen from among the English-speaking
peoples for academic honours, there could be no
question what name to choose. I think the precedent
was a good one ; and I trust it will be followed up.
If a University is to represent all that is best in the
intelligence and skill of a nation, it can ill afford to
neglect the Fine Arts. Let the great artist take
refuge in isolation if he will, but do not force it upon
him. For, indeed, his work, though he refuses to
submit it to the popular suffrage, or to modify it by
the opinions of critics, is an asset of civilisation, a
possession for ever ; and his example is a model for
all workers in its unflagging persistence and in its
devotion to some of the greatest and best things that
are attainable by the frailty of our human nature.

Gentlemen, I give you the toast of

•'The Memory of Whistler."

CATALOGUE

OF THE BULK OF

The Library of the late

SIR WALTER RALEIGH, M. A

Professor of Eng-lish Literature, Oxford,

1904-1922.

On Sale by

B. H. BLACKWELL, LTD.

50 & 51 BROAD STREET

OXFORD

\o. 187

November, 1922

Sir Walter Raleigh, late Professor of

English Literature in Oxford

University.