cycle of
masterpieces, of which the last is no more perfect than the first. Only
Irving's Petruchio stops me. But, then, he had not found himself. He was
not an artist.

"Why did Whistler paint him as Philip?" some one once asked me. How
dangerous to "ask why" about anyone so freakish as Jimmy Whistler. But I
answered then, and would answer now, that it was because, as Philip,
Henry, in his dress without much color (from the common point of view),
his long, gray legs, and Velasquez-like attitudes, looked like the kind
of thing which Whistler loved to paint. Velasquez had painted a real
Philip of the same race. Whistler would paint the actor who had created
the Philip of the stage.

I have a note from Whistler written to Henry at a later date which
refers to the picture, and suggests portraying him in all his
characters. It is common knowledge that the sitter never cared much
about the portrait. Henry had a strange affection for the wrong picture
of himself. He disliked the Bastien Lepage, the Whistler, and the
Sargent, which never even saw the light. He adored the weak, handsome
picture by Millais, which I must admit, all the same, held the mirror up
to one of the characteristics of Henry's face--its extreme refinement.
Whistler's Philip probably seemed to him not nearly showy enough.

Whistler I knew long before he painted the Philip. He gave me the most
lovely dinner-set of blue and white Nanking that any woman ever
possessed, and a set of Venetian glass, too good for a world where glass
is broken. He sent my little girl a tiny Japanese kimono when Liberty
was hardly a name. Many of his friends were my friends. He was with the
dearest of those friends when he died.

The most remarkable men I have known were, without a doubt, Whistler and
Oscar Wilde. This does not imply that I liked them better or admired
them more than the others, but there was something about both of them
more instantaneously individual and audacious than it is possible to
describe.

When I went with Coghlan to see Henry Irving's Philip I was no stranger
to his acting. I had been present with Tom Taylor, then dramatic critic
of _The Times_, at the famous first night at the Lyceum in 1874, when
Henry Irving put his fortune, counted not in gold, but in years of
scorned delights and laborious days--years of constant study and
reflection, of Spartan self-denial, and deep melancholy--I was present
when he put it all to the touch "to win or lose it