ut the poet is the supreme artist, for he
is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and
is lord over all life and all arts; and so to the poet beyond all others
are these mysteries known; to Edgar Allan Poe and to Baudelaire, not to
Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche. However, I should not enjoy anybody
else's lectures unless in a few points I disagreed with them, and Mr.
Whistler's lecture last night was, like everything that he does, a
masterpiece. Not merely for its clever satire and amusing jests will it
be remembered, but for the pure and perfect beauty of many of its
passages--passages delivered with an earnestness which seemed to amaze
those who had looked on Mr. Whistler as a master of persiflage merely,
and had not known him as we do, as a master of painting also. For that
he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting is my opinion.
And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.

THE RELATION OF DRESS TO ART: A NOTE IN BLACK AND WHITE ON MR. WHISTLER'S
LECTURE

(Pall Mall Gazette, February 28, 1885.)

'How can you possibly paint these ugly three-cornered hats?' asked a
reckless art critic once of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 'I see light and shade
in them,' answered the artist. 'Les grands coloristes,' says Baudelaire,
in a charming article on the artistic value of frock coats, 'les grands
coloristes savent faire de la couleur avec un habit noir, une cravate
blanche, et un fond gris.'

'Art seeks and finds the beautiful in all times, as did her high priest
Rembrandt, when he saw the picturesque grandeur of the Jews' quarter of
Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks,' were
the fine and simple words used by Mr. Whistler in one of the most
valuable passages of his lecture. The most valuable, that is, to the
painter: for there is nothing of which the ordinary English painter needs
more to be reminded than that the true artist does not wait for life to
be made picturesque for him, but sees life under picturesque conditions
always--under conditions, that is to say, which are at once new and
delightful. But between the attitude of the painter towards the public
and the attitude of a people towards art, there is a wide difference.
That, under certain conditions of light and shade, what is ugly in fact
may in its effect become beautiful, is true; and this, indeed, is the
real modernite of art: but these conditions are exac