a!) at
dress reformers most of all. 'Did not Velasquez paint crinolines? What
more do you want?'

Having thus made a holocaust of humanity, Mr. Whistler turned to nature,
and in a few moments convicted her of the Crystal Palace, Bank holidays,
and a general overcrowding of detail, both in omnibuses and in
landscapes, and then, in a passage of singular beauty, not unlike one
that occurs in Corot's letters, spoke of the artistic value of dim dawns
and dusks, when the mean facts of life are lost in exquisite and
evanescent effects, when common things are touched with mystery and
transfigured with beauty, when the warehouses become as palaces and the
tall chimneys of the factory seem like campaniles in the silver air.

Finally, after making a strong protest against anybody but a painter
judging of painting, and a pathetic appeal to the audience not to be
lured by the aesthetic movement into having beautiful things about them,
Mr. Whistler concluded his lecture with a pretty passage about Fusiyama
on a fan, and made his bow to an audience which he had succeeded in
completely fascinating by his wit, his brilliant paradoxes, and, at
times, his real eloquence. Of course, with regard to the value of
beautiful surroundings I differ entirely from Mr. Whistler. An artist is
not an isolated fact; he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a
certain entourage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of
any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom
from a thistle. That an artist will find beauty in ugliness, le beau
dans l'horrible, is now a commonplace of the schools, the argot of the
atelier, but I strongly deny that charming people should be condemned to
live with magenta ottomans and Albert-blue curtains in their rooms in
order that some painter may observe the side-lights on the one and the
values of the other. Nor do I accept the dictum that only a painter is a
judge of painting. I say that only an artist is a judge of art; there is
a wide difference. As long as a painter is a painter merely, he should
not be allowed to talk of anything but mediums and megilp, and on those
subjects should be compelled to hold his tongue; it is only when he
becomes an artist that the secret laws of artistic creation are revealed
to him. For there are not many arts, but one art merely--poem, picture
and Parthenon, sonnet and statue--all are in their essence the same, and
he who knows one knows all. B