ART.

MR. WHISTLER'S PICTURES AT GOUPIL'S.

IN the House of Art there are many mansions, and the next- door neighbours are frequently not on speaking terms. The two-pair back enjoys a north exposure, and has constructed a theory that proves the south impossible ; and the tenant of the first-floor suite has no confidence in views from the attics. This was pleasingly demonstrated when Mr. Ruskin, whose lecture-room commands a crowded Turnerian landscape, denounced the nightfall of Chelsea as fraudulent, because it suppresses so much earnest and laborious fact; and when an artist whose windows give upon Early Italy, demonstrated that a Whistler was not a Titian, and thought that therein lay anything to damage a Whistler. Mr. Whistler him- self is a notable hand at the logic of painting, as well as a master of its practice; with the same lightness of touch and wit of statement that mark his pictures, he has sketched their apology—if apology were the word—and so reckless has he been in the campaign against those who profess to paint their own souls because they cannot paint other people's bodies, that by the implication of his titles he has given away half the qualities of his own pictures, and made his followers the dupes of a repartee. Already the whipped critic is making haste to become the pedant of a new jargon, to treat what he confusedly calls " literature " as the accursed thing, and to reduce pictures to terms of the retina. And all the while the author of the Nocturnes is a poetic epigrammatist of the first water, and his " arrangement " of his mother is as delicate a rendering of a soul as this century's painting has to show.

But to put this inconvenience in the forefront would be to forget the many services to the logic of his art that Mr. Whistler has done. It has been the sport of his leisure to prick many a pompous fallacy ; he has done for painting what Sir Thomas Browne essayed to do for science in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica when he pinned out such plausible and picturesque opinions as, That Elephants have no joints, That the Peacock is ashamed of its legs, and that other about the Providence of Pismires. In the presence of the arguments for good painting now at Goupil's, it is a wholesome exercise to resume some of those ancient fallacies. Thus r.—OF THE NATURE OF THE ARTIST.

That an artist is a product of his age. This is too gross a flattery surely for even a voter to believe. The critics will take credit next for having forced the artist against his will to produce the Nocturnes. When his age has not succeeded

in suppressing an artist, it flatters itself that it had a tendency- to produce him.

That an artist is a national product, and that there is such a thing as British painting. Two and two make four in China, and red and blue, wherever they were first dug up, make purple even in England. Hiro-Shige of Japan made night- pieces of the Bridge at Yeddo, with a moon shining and rockets bursting over the water and the barges ; Corot of Ville d'Avray was very bold, and dared to leave out the out- lines of things at times when they don't exist, painting not trees but their adumbration : those ideas are as applicable in Chelsea as where accident first appointed their inventor, for a pictorial harmony is not a patois.

That earnestness in an artist is an excuse for bad painting.. The fact is of course otherwise; it only makes the painting worse. To investigate the artist's virtues, his megrims, or his accomplishments in the hope of estimating thereby or eluci- dating his art, is like attempting to account for a telegram by the fact that the messenger stopped to play marbles or had St. Vitus's dance. Nor is it safe to argue from the gaiety of the artist to the worthlessness of his productions.

11.—OF THE SUBJECT OF PAINTING.

That every prospect pleases,—in other words, that Nature is alwaysright. Not even her critic is always right, though his are infrequent; he has let one doubtful sunset through. But what lessons in the emphasis, not of rude presentment, but of perfect choice and omission, are the two marines, the green and the blue, with their incomparable expression of the fullness of the sea and the flitting of sails !

That man (in modern dress) is necessarily vile. There are- three conclusive confutations of this on one wall, where the fashion of the dress is dated to a season, all its momentary elegance kept, but fitted to a lasting harmony. A very dark harmony, it is objected. Yes ; the dresses happened to be dark, and the dresses suggested the treatment. The Carlyle,. again,—how grey ! Yes, for Carlyle was not polydredal in his habits, and to array him in motley and spangles would be an inexpressive proceeding. But if you will please to step into the next room, you will see a white dress setting the key for a scheme as radiant as these are sober.

III.-OF THE NATURE OF PICTURES.

That the best picture seems to step from its frame, or make a- hole in the wall; otherwise, that the object of painting is illusion, whereas the object is not an illusion of Nature, but a decoration by way of an allusion to Nature. A picture is the furniture of a wall, as well as a souvenir of a pleasant effect outside ; and for a picture to bulge beyond its frame, or burrow behind it, is as bad manners as for a man to come into a room with his hat on. The perception of this is whab is called " flatness " in Whistlers.

That "finish" means putting in the details that another person, from his inventory acquaintance with what he calls your- subject, expects. To estimate a picture by the amount of detail in it, is like estimating a piece of music by the number of semiquavers in it.

That the quality of paint ought to be like the texture of the. things represented. This is like setting an orchestra to imitate a farmyard. Painting is a translation into a medium that has. qualities of its own to be respected and enjoyed.

IV.-OF THE LIMITATIONS OF PAINTING.

It is here that the critic seems to suggest a fallacy of his own,—namely, That the interpretation of a painter's " arrange- ments " of form and colour is no part of the game. To adopt this article would be to make our logic turn pedant ; for the- pictures are wiser than their titles. That a colour-pattern might be made from things so as not to suggest the things, and not to depend for its interest on the suggestion, is possible enough; but such an art is not the art of Mr; Whistler. When he spread the carpet and draped the figures of his balcony scene, he did not turn the back- ground of grey London into an arbitrary screen, keeping- nothing of its origin but the harmonious greys. The picture- is an arrangement of ideas as well as one of colours, an antithesis of Japan and Battersea, and the tenderness of the greys is enhanced by their cold and dingy source. The Nocturnes are but subtler examples of the same imaginative turn. Because the recognisable in them is reduced to its most evanescent terms, the recognition is the keener pleasure; the blue-and-gold patchwork is delicate in itself, but it is poetic also, because it is redeemed out of a familiar squalor. This by daylight was a mudbank, by night is silver; the fine lace- work was chimneys and crazy bridge by day, and it is lamp-posts and railway lights that are read as topaz and emerald. Still less ambiguous are triumphs like the Little White Girl, where Rossetti is beaten on his own ground of expression and even of human type, by an infinitely better painter; or the Sym- phony in White, where one figure, indeed, plays an almost purely furniture part by the arrangement of the cream of her dress and the notes of her flesh ; but the other is all this, and a living soul besides.

The symbol of the Butterfly was perhaps all along the cryptic expression of a myth. Psyche grew tired of the Pre-Raphaelite Palace of Art, and of the exigent behaviour of Cupid, who assumed more and more a mystical and pontifical bearing, and affected a hieroglyphic taste in features ; nor could Proserpine's complexion be called good. So she betook herself to the kindly Jupiter, and he forthwith disguised her as a Butterfly. The Butterfly went forth, and pretended not to be the Soul, but spent its time incognito in great enjoyment, encouraged by the derision of many serious persons. It flattered to the Spanish treasure- house, and there was told the secret of what light and air will do with flesh. And it dreamed of human dignity and charm thus embodied ; and called them " arrangements " in the catalogue. They were scoffed at accordingly. It went further; to the land where life is a perpetual toy-symphony under blossoming trees, and the motives of people are purely decorative, or so it seems, for the little pink and green poems in the corners are in Japanese, and no one knows Japanese. And the Butterfly remembered the River that runs by the House of Life and under Battersea Bridge, and the flowers and the dresses and,the faces at home, and they all began to put off their constraint, and come together like playing music. It visited, too, the groves where the Frenchman watched for the last caress of light, and for the vast abstracting hand of darkness that resumes tree after tree till the Forest begins to speak.

Now, when the Butterfly revealed these things to British eyes, there arose great clamour, and no critic would give it a certificate for industry, sobriety, and truthfulness. Then the Butterfly arose in its wrath, and broke the critics on the wheel, and theirs is now a discredited trade, and they are forced to begrudge and disparage more recent talents.

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Hail, artist ! "destined to the eternity of admirations," whose living name is already secure as if it had inherited the honours and immunities of the famous dead ! Conspirator with the Moon, accomplice of the Night, by the alchemy of whose eyes we are made free of a magical Town and River, with gardens of fiery flowers and fountains, and see the perishing faces of our time made immortal, the finer essence of their flesh

embalmed in the distinction of thy spirit,—take station among thy peers, the creators of visible delight !

D. S. M.