finely endowed. All of the much that we
admire in Walter Pater's prose comes of the lucky chance that he was an
amateur, and never knew his business. Had Fate thrown him out of Oxford
upon the world, the world would have been the richer for the prose of
another John Addington Symonds, and would have forfeited Walter Pater's
prose. In other words, we should have lost a half-crown and found a
shilling. Had Fate withdrawn from Whistler his vision for form and
colour, leaving him only his taste for words and phrases and cadences,
Whistler would have settled solidly down to the art of writing, and
would have mastered it, and, mastering it, have lost that especial
quality which the Muse grants only to them who approach her timidly,
bashfully, as suitors.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Whistler would never, in any case, have
acquired the professional touch in writing. For we know that he never
acquired it in the art to which he dedicated all but the surplus of his
energy. Compare him with the other painters of his day. He was a child
in comparison with them. They, with sure science, solved roughly and
readily problems of modelling and drawing and what not that he never
dared to meddle with. It has often been said that his art was an art of
evasion. But the reason of the evasion was reverence. He kept himself
reverently at a distance. He knew how much he could not do, nor was he
ever confident even of the things that he could do; and these things,
therefore, he did superlatively well, having to grope for the means in
the recesses of his soul. The particular quality of exquisiteness and
freshness that gives to all his work, whether on canvas or on stone or
on copper, a distinction from and above any contemporary work, and
makes it dearer to our eyes and hearts, is a quality that came to him
because he was an amateur, and that abided with him because he never
ceased to be an amateur. He was a master through his lack of mastery.
In the art of writing, too, he was a master through his lack of
mastery. There is an almost exact parallel between the two sides of his
genius. Nothing could be more absurd than the general view of him as a
masterly professional on the one side and a trifling amateur on the
other. He was, certainly, a painter who wrote; but, by the slightest
movement of Fate's little finger, he might have been a writer who
painted, and this essay have been written not by me from my standpoint,
but by some painter, eager to s