WHISTLER.*
Is Mr. and Mrs. Pennell had deliberately set out to damage the personal reputation of Whistler to the greatest possible extent they could not have succeeded more perfectly. The irony of the situation is that their contention is now, as it always has been, that Whistler was perfect, inasmuch as he was beyond and above ordinary rules of conduct and equally great as a man as an artist. The present volume is the result of a journal kept during the later years of the painter's life. But it is a good deal more than this, and indeed is a supplementary biography to the one already written by Mr. Pennell. So here we have a very intimate survey of Whistler and the result is to make all admirers of his art wish that of his life nothing was known. Whistler was described by Swinburne as " clever, certainly very clever, but a little viper." The viper consistently abused England and the English, but lived here. He was never tired of talking of military affairs during the Boer War and praising our enemies to the skies, and was always boasting about West Point, but as a young man he carefully kept in Europe during the American Civil War. His vanity was unappeasable and his manners detestable ; if he was invited to a dinner-party he made it a rule to be very late, so as to call attention to himself. He habitually abused the Academy and resented not being elected a member of it, and Mr. Pennell says that his exclusion was the work of the American members of that body. He quarrelled with old friends on the smallest provocation, especially if they were not ready at all times to bow down and worship his every whim. He discarded the mistress whose beauty had inspired some of the finest of his early work and who had befriended his son, taking as her successor another woman who devoted herself to him in the days of his lowest financial ebb ; only to cast her off when he married. It is strange that Mr. and Mrs. Pennell maintain a constant tone of panegyric throughout the book on- the personal side. On the purely artistic side there is no question of Whistler's greatness, and when the dreary egotism and sordid vanity of the man are forgotten, the authentic masterpieces of the artist will remain. What an irony it seems that the most devoted Mends should do all they can to keep alive that which is least worthy.
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