his art has had to fight
against the competition of the photograph and has been partially
vulgarized by the struggle of the exhibitions, it has yet remained, upon
the whole, comprehensible and human; so that much of the soundest art of
the past century has gone into portraiture. It is the painters of
pictures, landscape or genre, who have most suffered from the
misunderstanding between artist and public. Without guidance some of
them have hewed a path to deserved success. Others have wandered into
strange byways and no-thoroughfares.

The nineteenth century is strewn with the wrecks of such misunderstood
and misunderstanding artists, but it was about the sixties when their
searching for a way began to lead them in certain clearly marked
directions. There are three paths, in especial, which have been followed
since then by adventurous spirits: the paths of aestheticism, of
scientific naturalism, and of pure self-expression; the paths of
Whistler, of Monet, and of Cezanne.

Whistler was an artist of refined and delicate talent with great
weaknesses both in temperament and training; being also a very clever
man and a brilliant controversialist, he proceeded to erect a theory
which should prove his weaknesses to be so many virtues, and he nearly
succeeded in convincing the world of its validity. Finding the
representation of nature very difficult, he decided that art should not
concern itself with representation but only with the creation of
"arrangements" and "symphonies." Having no interest in the subject of
pictures, he proclaimed that pictures should have no subjects and that
any interest in the subject is vulgar. As he was a cosmopolitan with no
local ties, he maintained that art had never been national; and as he
was out of sympathy with his time, he taught that "art happens" and that
"there never was an artistic period." According to the Whistlerian
gospel, the artist not only has now no point of contact with the public,
but he should not have and never has had any. He has never been a man
among other men, but has been a dreamer "who sat at home with the women"
and made pretty patterns of line and color because they pleased him. And
the only business of the public is to accept "in silence" what he
chooses to give them.

This kind of rootless art he practised. Some of the patterns he produced
are delightful, but they are without imagination, without passion,
without joy in the material and visible world--the dainty