Chapter VIII: Part 8

But alas! Edwin was small and had a low forehead and squint eyes. He didn't care for books--all he would do was draw pictures. Now, all children make pictures--before they can read, they draw. And before they can draw they get the family shears and cut the pictures out of "Harper's Weekly." This boy cut pictures out of "Harper's Weekly" when he wore dresses, and when George William Curtis first filled the Easy Chair. Edwin cut out the pictures, not because they were especially bad, but because he, like all other children, was an artist in the germ; and the artist instinct is to detach the thing, lift it out, set it apart, and then give it away.

All children draw pictures, I said, and this is true, but most children can be cured of the habit by patience and an occasional box on the ear, judiciously administered. All children are sculptors, too; that is to say, they want to make things out of mud or dough or wax or putty; but no mother who sets her heart on clean guimpes and pinafores can afford for a moment to indulge in such inclinations. To give children dough, putty and the shears would keep your house in a pretty litter--lawksadaisy!

Mrs. Abbey hid the shears, put the "Harper's" on a high shelf and took the boy's pencils away, and threw the putty out into Fourth Street, below Vine. Then the boy had tantrums, and as a compromise got all his playthings back.

Yes, this squat, beetle-browed, and bow-legged boy had his way. Beetle-browed, bow-legged folks usually do. Caesar and Cromwell had bow-legs, so had Napoleon, and so have Pierpont Morgan and James J. Hill. Charles the First was knock-kneed. Knock-knees are a deformity; bow-legs an accident. Bulldogs have bow-legs; hounds are knock-kneed. Bow-legs mean will plus--a determination to do--the child insists on walking before the cartilage has turned to bone. Spirit is stronger than matter--hence the Greek curve.

Little Edwin Abbey ran the Abbey household and drew because he wanted to--on sidewalks, white steps, kitchen-wall, or the fly- leaves in books.

Rumor has it that Edwin Abbey did not get along very well at school --instead of getting his lessons he drew pictures, and thirty years ago such conduct was proof of total depravity. Like the amateur blacksmith who started to make a horseshoe and finally contented himself with a fizzle, the Abbeys gave up theology and law, and decided that if Edwin became a good printer it would be enough. And then, how often printers became writers--then editors and finally proprietors! Edwin might yet own the "Ledger" and have a collection of four hundred seventy-two clocks.

Through a mutual friend, Mr. Childs was interviewed and Edwin was set to work in the Typesetting Department of the "Ledger." Evenings and an hour three times a week he sketched in the free class at the Academy of Art.

How long he remained in the newspaper work, I do not know, but there came a day when Mr. Childs and his minions, having no use for Edwin, gave him a letter of recommendation to the Art Department of "Harper's Weekly."

That George W. Childs had a really firm friendship for young Abbey, there is no doubt. He followed his career with fatherly interest, and was the first man, so far as I know, who had the prophetic vision to see that he would become a great artist. George W. Childs was a many-sided man. He had a clear head for business, was a judge of human nature, a patron of the arts, a collector of rare and curious things, and wrote with clearness, force and elegance. Men of such strong personality have decided likings, and they also have decided aversions. The pet aversion of Childs was tobacco. All through the "Ledger" office were startling signs, "No smoking!" It was never, "Please do not smoke," or "Smoking interferes with Insurance!" Not these--the order was imperative. And the mutability of human affairs, as well as life's little ironies, is now shown in the fact that the name and fame of George W. Childs is deathless through a wonderful five-cent cigar.

Whether the use of tobacco had anything to do with young Abbey's breaking with his "Ledger" friends, is a question. Tradition has it that Childs extracted from the youth a promise, on his going away, that he would never use the weed. The Union Square records fail us at times, but it is believed that Abbey kept his promise for fully three weeks.

"Edwin Abbey learned to swim by jumping into deep water," says Henry James. A young man in the Art Department of an absurdly punctual periodical, before the Era of the Halftone, just had to draw, and that was all there was about it.

Things were happening uptown, downtown, over in Boston, and out as far as Buffalo--and the young men in the Art Department were sent to make pictures. The experience of a reporter develops facility--you have to do the assignment. To write well and rapidly on any subject, the position of reporter on an old-time daily approached the ideal. Even the drone became animated, when the copy must be in inside of two hours. The way to learn to write is to write. But young men will not write of their own free will; the literary first-mate in way of a Managing Editor with a loaded club of expletives is necessary. Or, stay! there is another way to stimulate the ganglionic cells and become dexterous in the cosmic potentiality--the Daily Theme sent to a woman who thinks and feels. That is the way that Goethe acquired his style. There were love-letters that crossed each other daily, and after years of this practise--the sparks a-flying--Goethe found himself the greatest stylist of his day. Love taught him.

To write for a daily paper is a great drill, only you must not keep at it too long or you will find yourself bound to the wheel, a part of the roaring machinery.

Combine the daily paper with the daily love-letter and you have the ideal condition for forming a literary style; and should you drop out one, why, cleave to the second, would be the advice of a theorist.

To draw pictures is simply one way of telling a story. Abbey told the story, and there was soon evidence in better work that he was telling it for Some One. Get a complete file of "Harper's Weekly," say from Eighteen Hundred Seventy-two to Eighteen Hundred Ninety, and you can trace the Evolution of the Art of Edwin Abbey. If any of the Abbey pictures have been removed, the books are chiefly valuable as junk; but if the set can be advertised, as I saw one yesterday, "with all of Abbey's drawings, warranted intact," the set of books commands a price. People are now wisely collecting "Harper's" simply because Abbey was once a part of the Art Department. And the value of the books will increase with the years, for they trace the gradual but sure evolution of a great and lofty soul.

Edwin Abbey was nineteen years old when he accepted a position--more properly, secured a job--in the Art Department of Harper's. The records of the office show his salary was seven dollars a week--but it did not stay at that figure always. The young man did not get along well at school, and he was not a success as a printer; but he could focus his force at the end of a pencil, and he did. Transplantation often turns a weed into a flower. It seems a hard saying and a grievous one, but the salvation of many a soul turns on getting away from one's own family. They are wise parents that do not prove a handicap to their children. The good old-fashioned idea was that parents were wholly responsible for their children's coming into the world, and that, therefore, they owned them body and soul until they reached their majority--and even then the restraint was little removed. "Well, and what are you going to make of William?" and "To whom are you going to marry Fanny?" were once common questions. And all the while the fact remains that the child is not God's gift to parents. Children are only God-given tenants. Use them well if you would have them remain with you as the joy of love and life and light. Give the child love and then more love and then love and freedom to live his God-given life. Then all the precepts you would give him for his own good, he will absorb from you and you need not say a word. Trying to teach a child by telling him is worthless and puts you in a bad light. A child has not lost his heavenly vision and sees you as you are, not minding what you say.

At Harper's Abbey came into competition with strong men. In the office was a young fellow by the name of Reinhart and another by the name of Alexander--they used to call him Alexander the Great, and he has nearly proved his title.

A little later came Howard Pyle, Joseph Fennel and Alfred Parsons. Young Abbey did his work with much good-cheer, and sought to place himself with the best. For a time he drew just like Alexander, then like Reinhart; next, Parsons was his mentor. Finally he drifted out on a sea of his own, and this seems to have been in the year of the Centennial Exhibition. Harper's sent the young man over to Philadelphia, or perhaps he went of his own accord; anyway, he haunted the art-rooms at the Exhibition, and got a lesson there that spurred his genius as it had never been spurred before.

He was then twenty-four years old. His salary had been increased to ten dollars a week, fifteen, twenty-five: if he wanted money for "expenses" he applied to the cashier. There is more good honest velvet in an Expense-Account than in the Stock Exchange, which true saying has nothing to do with Abbey. At the "Centennial" Abbey discovered the Arthurian Legend--fell over it, just as William Morris fell over the Icelandic Sagas when past fifty. Abbey had been called the "Stage-Coachman" at Harper's, because he had developed a faculty for picturing old taverns at that exciting moment when horses were being changed and the driver, in a bell-crowned white hat and wonderful waistcoat, tosses his lines to a fellow in tight hair-cut and still tighter breeches, and a woman in big hoops gets out of the stage with many bandboxes and a birdcage. The way Abbey breathed into the scene the breath of life was wonderful--just a touch of comedy, without caricature! "If it is in Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six, give it to Abbey," said the Managing Editor, with a growl--for Managing Editors, being beasts, always growl.

Abbey and Parsons had walked to Philadelphia and back, taking two weeks for the trip, sketching on the way stagecoaches, taverns, tall houses and old wooden bridges, all pinned together--just these and nothing else, save Independence Hall. Later, they went to Boston and did Faneuil Hall, inside and out, King's Chapel and the State House, and a house or two out Quincyway, including the Adams cottage, where lived two Presidents, and where now resides one William Spear, the only honorary male member of the Daughters of the Revolution. Mr. Spear dominates the artistic bailiwick and performs antique antics for Art's sake: it was Mr. Spear who posed as Tony Lumpkin for Mr. Abbey.

Abbey had done Washington Irving's Knickerbocker tales and the various "Washington's Headquarters." He worked exclusively in black and white--crayon, pencil or pen and ink. His hand had taken on a style--powdered wigs, spit-curls, hoops, flaring sunbonnets, cocked hats and the tallyho! These were his properties. He worked from model plus imagination. He had exhausted the antique in America--he thirsted to refresh his imagination in England. The Centennial Exhibition had done its deadly work--Abbey and Parsons were dissatisfied--they wanted to see more. Back of the stagecoach times lay the days of the castle. Back of the musket was the blunderbuss, and back of these were the portcullis, the moat, the spear and coats of mail.

A deluxe edition of "Herrick" was proposed by the Publishing Department: some say the Art Department made the suggestion. Anyway, there was a consultation in the manager's office, and young Abbey was to go to England to look up the scene and with his pencil bring the past up to the present.

Abbey was going to England, that is just all there was about it, and Harper and Brothers did not propose to lose their hold upon him. Salary was waived, but expenses were advanced, and the understanding was that Abbey was Harper's man. This was in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-eight, with Abbey's twenty-sixth birthday yet to come. Abbey had gone around and bidden everybody good-by, including his old-time chum, Alfred Parsons. Parsons was going to the dock to see him off.

"I wish you were going, too," said Edwin, huskily. "I believe I will," said Alfred, swallowing hard. And he did.

The Managing Editor growled furiously, but to no avail, for the Cunarder that bore the boys was then well out toward the Banks.

It was an American that discovered Stratford; and it is the Peter's pence of American tourists that now largely support the town. At Stratford, Washington Irving jostles the Master for the first place, and when we drink at the George W. Childs fountain we piously pour a libation to all three.

Like all bookish and artistic Americans, when Abbey and Parsons thought of England they thought of Shakespeare's England--the England that Washington Irving had made plain.

Washington Irving seemed very close to our young men--London held them only a few days and then they started for Stratford. They went afoot, as became men who carried crayons that scorned the steam- horse. They took the road for Oxford and stopped at the tavern where the gossips aver that the author of "Love's Labor's Lost" made love to the landlord's wife--a thing I never would believe, e'en though I knew 't were true. From Oxford the young men made their way to storied Warwick, where the portcullis is raised--or lowered, I do not remember which--every evening at sundown to tap of drum. It is the same old Warwick Castle that Shakespeare knew; the same cedars of Lebanon that he saw; the same screaming peacocks; the same circling rooks and daws, and down across the lazy Avon over the meadows the same skylark vibrates the happy air.

Young Abbey saw these things, just as Washington Irving saw them, and he saw them just as the boy William Shakespeare saw them.

Nine miles from Warwick lies Stratford. But at Stratford the tourist is loosed; the picnicker is abroad; the voice of the pedant is heard in the land, and the Baconian is upon us. Abbey and Parsons stopped at the Red Horse Inn and slept in the room that Washington Irving occupied, and they do say now that Irving occupied every room in the house. Stratford was not to the liking of our friends. They wanted to be in the Shakespeare country for six months, that was what the Managing Editor said--six months, mind you. But they did not want to study the tourist. They wanted to be just a little off the beaten track of travel, away from the screech of the locomotive, where they could listen and hear the echoes of a tallyho horn, the crack of the driver's whip, and the clatter of the coming stagecoach.

The village of Broadway is twelve miles from Stratford, and five miles from the nearest railway-station. The worst thing about the place for a New-Yorker is the incongruity of the name.

In Broadway not a new house has been built for a century, and several of the buildings date back four hundred years. Abbey and Parsons found a house they were told was built in Fifteen Hundred Sixty-three. The place was furnished complete, done by those who had been dust a hundred years. The rafters overhead were studded with handmade nails, where used to hang the flitches of bacon and bunches of dried herbs; the cooking would have to be performed in the fireplace or in the Dutch oven; funny little cupboards were in the corners; and out behind the cottage stretched a God's half-acre of the prettiest flower-garden ever seen, save the one at Bordentown where lived Abbey's ladylove.

The rent was ten pounds a year. They jumped at it--and would have taken it just the same had it been twice as much.

An old woman who lived across the street was hired as housekeeper, and straightway our artists threw down their kits and said, like Lincoln, "We have moved." The beauty and serene peace of middle England is passing words. No wonder the young artists could not paint for several weeks--they just drank it in.

Finally they settled down to work--Seventeenth-Century models were all around, and a look up the single street would do for a picture. Parsons painted what he saw; Abbey painted what he saw plus what he imagined.

Six months went by, and the growls of the Managing Editor back in New York were quieted with a few sketches. Parsons had tried water- color with good results; and Abbey followed with an Arthurian sketch--a local swain as model.

Several pictures had been sent down to London--which is up--and London approved. Abbey was elected a member of "The Aquarellists," just as a little later the Royal Academy was to open its doors, unsolicited, for him.

Two years had gone, and new arrangements must be made with Harper's. Abbey returned to America with a trunkful of sketches--enough good stuff to illustrate several "Herricks." He remained in New York eight months, long enough to see the book safely launched, and to close up his business affairs in Philadelphia.

And the Shakespeare country has been his home ever since.

An artist's work is his life--where he can work best is his home. Patriotism isn't quite so bad as old Ursa Major said, but the word is not to be found in the bright lexicon of Art. The artist knows no country. His home is the world, and those who love the beautiful are his brethren.

Abbey has remained in England, not that he loves America less, nor England more, but because the Shakespeare country has a flavor of antiquity about it that fits his artistic mood--it is a good place to work. An artist's work is his life.

At "Morgan Hall," Fairford, only a few miles from where Abbey first made his home in England, he now lives and works. Near by lives Mary Anderson, excellent and gentle woman, wife and mother, who used to storm the one-night stands most successfully. The place is old, vine-clad, built in sections running over a space of three hundred years. So lost is it amid the great spreading beeches that you have to look twice before you see the house from the road.

Happily married to a most worthy woman whose only thought is to minister to her household, the days pass. That Mrs. Abbey never doubts her liege is not only the greatest artist, but the greatest man in all England, is a most pleasing fact. She believes in him, and she gives him peace. The Kansas Contingent may question whether a woman's career is complete who thus lives within her home, and for her household, but to me the old-fashioned virtues seem very hard to improve upon. Industry, truth, trust and abiding loyalty--what a bulwark of defense for a man who has a message for the world!

There is a goodly brood of little Abbeys--I dare not say how many. I believe it was nine a year ago, with an addition since. They run wild and free along the hedgerows and under the beeches, and if it rains there are the stables, kennels and the finest attic that ever was.

Back of the house and attached to it Mr. Abbey has built a studio forty feet wide by seventy-five long, and twenty feet high. It is more than a studio--it is a royal workshop such as Michelangelo might have used for equestrian statues, or cartoons to decorate a palace for the Pope. Dozens of pictures, large and small, are upon the easels. Arms, armor, furniture, are all about, while on the shelves are vases and old china enough to fill the heart of a collector to surfeit. In chests and wardrobes are velvets, brocades and antique stuffs and costumes, all labeled, numbered and catalogued, so as to be had when wanted.

This studio was built especially to accommodate the paintings for the Boston Public Library. The commission was given in Eighteen Hundred Ninety, and the last of the decorations has just been put in place, in this year of grace, Nineteen Hundred One. Abbey's paintings in the Boston Public Library cover in all something over a thousand square feet of space, and form quite the noblest specimen of mural decoration in America.

Orders were given to John S. Sargent and Puvis de Chavannes at the same time that contracts were closed with Abbey. Chavannes was the first man to get his staging up and the first to get it down. He died two years ago, so it is hardly meet to draw a moral about the excellence of doing things with neatness and dispatch. Sargent's "Prophets" cover scarcely one-tenth of the space assigned him, and the rest is bare white walls, patiently awaiting his brush. Recently he was asked when he would complete the task, and he replied, "Never, unless I learn to paint better than I do now--Abbey has discouraged me!"

I need not attempt to describe Abbey's work in the Boston Library--a full account of it can be found in the first magazine you pick up. But it is a significant fact that Abbey himself is not wholly pleased with it. "Give me a little time," he says, "and I'll do something worth while."

These words were spoken half in jest, but there is no doubt that the artist, now in the fulness of his powers, in perfect health, in love with life, sees before him work to do of such vast worth that all that lies behind seems but a preparation for that which is yet to come.

The question is sometimes asked, "What becomes of all the Valedictorians and Class-Day Poets?" I can give information as to two parties for whom inquiry is made: the Valedictorian of my Class is now a worthy Floorwalker in Siegel, Cooper and Company's; and I was the Class-Day Poet. Both of us had our eyes on the Goal. We stood on the threshold and looked out upon the World preparatory to going forth, seizing it by the tail and snapping its head off for our own delectation.

We had our eyes fixed on the Goal--it might better have been the Gaol.

It was a very absurd thing for us to fix our eyes on the Goal. It strained our vision and took our attention from our work.

To think of the Goal is to travel the distance over and over in your mind and dwell on how awfully far off it is. We have so little mind --doing business on such a small capital of intellect--that to wear it threadbare looking for a far-off thing is to get hopelessly stranded in Siegel, Cooper and Company's.

Siegel, Cooper and Company's is all right, too, but the point is this--it wasn't the Goal!

A goodly dash of indifference is a requisite in the formula for doing a great work.

Nobody knows what the Goal is--we are sailing under sealed orders. Do your work today, doing it the best you can, and live one day at a time. The man that does this is conserving his God-given energy, and not spinning it out into tenuous spider-threads that Fate will probably brush away.

To do your work well today is the surest preparation for something better tomorrow--the past is gone, the future we can not reach, the present only is ours. Each day's work is a preparation for the next.

Live in the present--the Day is here, the time is Now.

Edwin A. Abbey seems to be the perfect type of man, who by doing all his work well, with no vaulting ambitions, has placed himself right in the line of evolution. He is evolving into something better, stronger and nobler all the time. That is the only thing worth praying for--to be in the line of evolution.

WHISTLER

Art happens--no hovel is safe from it, no Prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence can not bring it about, and puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy, and coarse farce. --_The "Ten-o'Clock" Lecture_

The Eternal Paradox of Things is revealed in the fact that the men who have toiled most for peace, beauty and harmony have usually lived out their days in discord, and in several instances died a malefactor's death. Just how much discord is required in God's formula for a successful life, no one knows, but it must have a use, for it is always there.

Seen from a distance, out of the range of the wordy shrapnel, the literary scrimmage is amusing. "Gulliver's Travels" made many a heart ache, but it only gladdens ours. Pope's "Dunciad" sent shivers of fear down the spine of all artistic England, but we read it for the rhyme, and insomnia. Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" gave back to the critics what they had given out--to their great surprise and indignation, and our amusement. Keats died from the stab of a pen, they say, and whether 't was true or not we know that now a suit of Cheviot is sufficient shield. "We love him for the enemies he has made"--to have friends is a great gain, but to achieve an enemy is distinction.

Ruskin's "Modern Painters" is a reply to the contumely that sought to smother Turner under an avalanche of abuse; but since the enemy inspired it, and it made the name and fame of both Ruskin and Turner, why should they not hunt out the rogues in Elysium and purchase ambrosia?

Whistler's "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" is a bit of sharpshooter sniping at the man who was brave enough to come to the rescue of Turner, and who afterward proved his humanity by adopting the tactics of the enemy, working the literary stinkpot to repel impressionistic boarders.

No friend could have done for Whistler what Ruskin did. Before Ruskin threw an ink-bottle at him, as Martin Luther did at the Devil, he was one of several; after the bout he was as one set apart.

When we think of Whistler, if we listen closely we can hear the echo of shrill calls of recrimination, muffled reveilles of alarm-- pamphlet answering unto pamphlet across seas of misunderstanding-- vituperations manifold, and recurring themes of rabid ribaldry--all forming a lurid Symphony in Red.

John Davidson has dedicated a book to his enemy, thus:

"Unwilling Friend, let not thy spite abate: help me with scorn, and strengthen me with hate."

The general tendency to berate the man of superior talent would seem to indicate, as before suggested, that disparagement has some sort of compensation in it. Possibly it is the governor that keeps things from going too fast--the opposition of forces that holds the balance true. But almost everything can be overdone; and the fact remains that without encouragement and faith from without, the stoutest heart will in time grow faint and doubt itself. It hears the yelping of the pack, and there creeps in the question, "What if they are right?" Then come the longing and the necessity for the word of praise, the clasp of a kindly hand, and the look that reassures.

Occasionally the undiscerning make remarks, slightly tinged with muriatic acid, concerning the ancient and honorable cult known as the Mutual Admiration Society. My firm belief is, that no man ever did or can do a great work alone--he must be backed up by the Mutual Admiration Society. It may be a very small Society--in truth, I have known Chapters where there were only two members, but there was such trust, such faith, such a mutual uplift, that an atmosphere was formed wherein great work was done.

In Galilee even the Son of God could do no great work, on account of the unbelief of the people. "Fellowship is heaven and lack of fellowship is hell," said William Morris. And he had known both.

Some One must believe in you. And through touching finger-tips with this Some One, we may get in the circuit, and thus reach out to all. Self-Reliance is very excellent, but as for independence, there is no such thing. We are a part of the great Universal Life; and as one must win approval from himself, so he must receive corroboration from others: having this approval from the Elect Few, the opinions of the many matter little.

How little we know of the aspirations that wither unexpressed, and of the hopes that perish for want of the right word spoken at the right time! Out in the orchard, as I write, I see thousands and thousands of beautiful blossoms that will never become fruit for lack of vitalization--they die because they are alone.

Thoughts materialize into deeds only when Some One vitalizes by approval. Every good thing is loved into life.

Great men have ever come in groups, and the Mutual Admiration Society always figures largely. To enumerate instances would be to inflict good folks with triteness and truism. I do not wish to rob my reader of his rights--think it out for yourself, beginning with Concord and Cambridge, working backward adown the centuries.

There are two Whistlers. One tender as a woman, sensitive as a child--thirsting for love, friendship and appreciation--a dreamer of dreams, seeing visions and mounting to the heavens on the wings of his soaring fancy. This is the real Whistler. And there has always been a small Mutual Admiration Society that has appreciated, applauded and loved this Whistler; to them he has always been "Jimmy."

The other Whistler is the jaunty little man in the funny, straight- brimmed high hat--cousin to the hat John D. Long wore for twenty years. This man in the long black coat, carrying a bamboo wand, who adjusts his monocle and throws off an epigram, who confounds the critics, befogs the lawyers, affronts millionaires from Colorado, and plays pitch and toss with words, is the Whistler known to newspaperdom. And Grub Street calls him "Jimmy," too, but the voice of Grub Street is guttural and in it is no tender cadence--it is tone that tells, not the mere word: I have been addressed with an endearing phrase when the words stabbed. Grub Street sees only the one man and goes straightway after him with a snickersnee. To use the language of Judge Gaynor, "This artistic Jacques of the second part protects the great and tender soul of the party of the first part."

That is it--his name is Jacques: Whistler is a fool. The fools were the wisest men at court. Shakespeare, who dearly loved a fool, belonging to the breed himself, placed his wisest sayings into the mouths of men who wore the motley. When he adorned a man with cap and bells, it was as though he had given bonds for both that man's humanity and intelligence.

Neither Shakespeare nor any other writer of good books ever dared depart so violently from truth as to picture a fool whose heart was filled with pretense and perfidy. The fool is not malicious. Stupid people may think he is, because his language is charged with the lightning's flash; but these be the people who do not know the difference between an incubator and an eggplant.

Touchstone, with unfailing loyalty, follows his master with quip and quirk into exile. When all, even his daughters, had forsaken King Lear, the fool bares himself to the storm and covers the shaking old man with his own cloak; and when in our day we meet the avatars of Trinculo, Costard, Mercutio and Jacques, we find they are men of tender susceptibilities, generous hearts and lavish souls.

Whistler shakes his cap, flourishes his bauble, tosses that fine head, and with tongue in cheek, asks questions and propounds conundrums that pedantry can never answer. Hence the ink-bottle, with its mark on the walls at Eisenach, and at Coniston.

Every man of worth is two men--sometimes many. In fact, Doctor George Vincent, the psychologist, says, "We never treat two persons in exactly the same manner." If this is so, and I suspect it is, the person we are with dictates our mental process and thus controls our manners--he calls out the man he wishes to see. Certain sides of our nature are revealed only to certain persons. And I can understand, too, how there can be a Holy of Holies, closed and barred forever against all except the One. And in the absence of this One, I can also understand how the person can go through life, and father, mother, brothers, sisters, friends and companions never guess the latent excellence that lies concealed. We defend and protect this Holy of Holies from the vulgar gaze.

There are two ways to guard and keep alive the sacred fires; one is to flee to convent, monastery or mountain and there live alone with God; the other is to mix and mingle with men and wear a coat of mail in way of manner.

Women whose hearts are well-nigh bursting with grief will often be the gayest of the gay; men whose souls are corroding with care-- weighted down with sorrow too great for speech--are often those who set the table in a roar.

The assumed manner, continued, evolves into a pose. Pose means position, and the pose is usually a position of defense. All great people are poseurs.

Men pose so as to keep the mob back while they can do their work. Without the pose, the garden of a poet's fancy would look like McKinley's front yard at Canton in the fall of Ninety-six. That is to say, without the pose the poet would have no garden, no fancy, no nothing--and there would be no poet. Yet I am quite willing to admit that a man might assume a pose and yet have nothing to protect; but I stoutly maintain that pose in such a one is transparent to every one as the poles that support a scarecrow, simply because the pose never becomes habitual.

With the great man pose becomes a habit--and then it is not a pose. When a man lies and admits he lies, he tells the truth.

Whistler has been called the greatest poseur of his day; and yet he is the most sincere and truthful of men--the very antithesis of hypocrisy and sham. No man ever hated pretense more.

Whistler is an artist, and the soul of the man is revealed in his work--not in his hat, nor yet his bamboo cane, nor his long black coat, much less the language which he uses, Talleyrand-like, to conceal his thought. Art has been his wife, his children and his religion. Art has said to him, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," and he has obeyed the mandate.

That picture of his mother in the Luxembourg is the most serious thing in the whole collection--so gentle, so modest, so appealing, so charged with tenderness. It is classed by the most competent critics of today along with the greatest works of the old masters. We find upon the official roster of the fine arts of France this tribute opposite the name of Whistler, "Portrait of the mother of the author, a masterpiece destined for the eternal admiration of future generations, combining in its tone-power and magnificence the qualities of a Rembrandt, a Titian, a Velasquez." The picture does not challenge you--you have to hunt it out, and you have to bring something to it, else 't will not reveal itself. There is no decrepitude in the woman's face and form, but someway you read into the picture the story of a great and tender love and a long life of useful effort. And now as the evening shadows gather, about to fade off into gloom, the old mother sits there alone, poised, serene: husband gone, children gone--her work is done. Twilight comes. She thinks of the past in gratitude, and gazes wistfully out into the future, unafraid. It is the tribute that every well-born son would like to pay to the mother who loved him into being, whose body nourished him, whose loving arms sustained him, whose unfaltering faith and appreciation encouraged him to do and to become. She was his wisest critic, his best friend--his mother!

The father of Whistler the artist, Major George Washington Whistler, was a graduate of West Point, and a member of the United States Corps of Engineers. He was an active, practical and useful man--a skilful draftsman and mathematician, and a man of affairs who could undertake a difficult task and carry it through to completion.

Such men are always needed, in the army and out of it. Responsibility gravitates to the man who can shoulder it. Such men as Major Whistler are not tied to a post--they go where they are needed.

When George Washington Whistler was a cadet at West Point, there came to visit the place Doctor Swift and his beautiful young daughter, Mary. She took the Military School by storm; at least, she held captive the hearts of all the young men there--so they said. And in very truth the heart of one young man was prisoner, for Major Whistler married Miss Swift soon after.

To them were born Deborah, the Major's only daughter, who married Doctor Seymour Hayden of London, a famous surgeon and still more famous etcher; George, who became an engineer and railway manager; and two years later, Joseph.

And when Joe was two years old, this beautiful wife, aged twenty- three, passed away, and young Major Whistler and his three babies were left alone.

At West Point Whistler had a friend named McNeill, son of Doctor C. D. McNeill, of Wilmington, North Carolina--a classmate--with whom he had been closely associated since graduation. McNeill had a sister, Anna Matilda, a great soul, serious and strong. At length Whistler took his motherless brood--including himself--to her and she accepted them all. I bow my head to the stepmother who loves into manhood and womanhood children whom another has loved into life. She must have a great heart already expanded by love to do this. Naturally the mother-love grows with the child--that is what children are for, to enlarge the souls of the parents. But at the beginning of womanhood, Anna Matilda McNeill was great enough to enfold in her heart and arms the children of the man she loved and make them hers.

In the year Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four, Major Whistler and his wife were living in Lowell, Massachusetts, where the Major was superintending the construction of the first of those wonderful waterways that tirelessly turn ten thousand spindles.

And Fate would have it so, that here at Lowell, in a little house on Worthing Street, was born the first of the five sons of Major Whistler and his wife, Anna Matilda. And they called the name of the child James Abbott McNeill Whistler--an awful big name for a very small baby.

About the time this peevish little pigmy was put into short dresses, his father resigned his position in the United States Army to accept a like position with the Czar of Russia. The first railroad constructed in Russia, from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, was built under the superintendence of Major Whistler, who also designed various bridges, viaducts, tunnels and other engineering feats for Adam Zad, who walks like a man, and who paid him princely sums for his services.

Americans not only fill the teeth of royalty, but we furnish the Old World machinery, ideas and men. For every twenty-five thousand men they supply us, we send them back one, and the one we send them is worth more than the twenty-five thousand they send us. Schenectady is today furnishing the engines and supplying engineers to teach engineers for the transcontinental Siberian railway. When you take "The Flying Scotchman" from London to Edinburgh you ride in a Pullman car, with all the appurtenances, even to a Gould coupler, a Westinghouse air-brake, and a dusky George from North Carolina, who will hit you three times with the butt of a brush-broom and expect a bob as recompense. You feel quite at home.

Then when you see that the Metropolitan Railway of London is managed by a man from Chicago, and that all trains of "the underground" are being equipped with the Edison incandescent light; and you note further that a New York man has morganized the transatlantic steamship-lines, you agree with William T. Stead that, "America may be raw and crude, but she is producing a race of men--men of power, who can think and act." Coupled with the Englishman's remarkable book, "The Americanization of the World," there is an art criticism by Bernard Shaw, who comes from a race that will not pay rent, strangely enough living in London, content, with no political aspirations, who says, "The three greatest painters of the time are of American parentage--Abbey, Sargent and Whistler; and of these, Whistler has had greater influence on the artists of today than any other man of his time."

But let us swing back and take a look at the Whistlers in Russia. Little Jimmy never had a childhood: the nearest he came to it was when his parents camped one Summer with the "construction gang." That Summer with the workers and toilers, among the horses, living out of doors--eating at the campfire and sleeping under the sky--was the boy's one glimpse of paradise. "My ambition then was to be the foreman of a construction gang--and it is yet," said the artist in describing that brief, happy time to a friend.

The child of well-to-do parents, but homeless, living in hotels and boarding-houses, is awfully handicapped. Children are only little animals, and travel is their bane and scourge. They belong on the ground, among the leaves and flowers and tall grass--in the trees or digging in sand piles. Hotel hallways, table-d'hote dinners and the clash of travel, are all terrible perversions of Nature's intent.

Yet the boy survived--eager, nervous, energetic. He acquired the Russian language, of course, and then he learned to speak French, as all good Russians must. "He speaks French like a Russ," is the highest compliment a Parisian can pay you.

The boy's mother was his tutor, companion, playmate. They read together, drew pictures together, and played the piano, four hands.

Honors came to the hard-working engineer--decorations, ribbons, medals, money--and more work. The poor man was worked to death. The Czar paid every honor to the living and dead that royalty can give. When the family left Saint Petersburg with the body of their loved one, His Imperial Majesty ordered his private carriage to be placed at their disposal. And honors awaited the dead here. A monument in the cemetery at Stonington, Connecticut, erected by the Society of American Engineers, marks the spot where he sleeps. The stricken mother was back in America, and James was duly entered at West Point. The mother's ideal was her husband--in his life she had lived and moved--and that James should do what he had done, become the manly man that he had become, was her highest wish.

The boy was already an acceptable draftsman, and under the tutelage of Professor Robert Weir he made progress. West Point does not teach such a soft and feminine thing as picture-painting--it draws plans of redoubts and fortifications, makes maps, and figures on the desirability of tunnels, pontoons and hidden mines. Robert Weir taught all these things, and on Saturdays painted pictures for his own amusement. In the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington is a taste of his quality--the large panel entitled, "The Departure of the Pilgrims."

Tradition has it that young Whistler assisted his teacher on this work.

Weir succeeded in getting his pupil heartily sick of the idea of grim-visaged war as a business. He hated the thought of doing things on order, especially killing men when told. "The soldier's profession is only one remove from the business of Jack Ketch, who hangs men and then salves his conscience with the plea that some one told him to do it," said Whistler. If he remained at West Point he would become an army officer and Uncle Sam or the Czar would own him and order him to do things.

Weir declared he was absurd, but the Post Surgeon said he was nervous and needed a change. In truth, West Point disliked Jimmy as much as he disliked West Point, and he was recommended for discharge. Mother and son sailed away for London, intending to come back in time for the next term.

The young man took one souvenir from West Point that was to stand by him. In a sham battle, during a charge, his horse went down, and the cavalcade behind went right over horse and rider. When picked up and carried out of the scrimmage, Cadet Whistler was unconscious, and the doctors said his skull was fractured. However, his whipcord vitality showed itself in a quick recovery; but a white lock of hair soon appeared to mark the injured spot, to be a badge of distinction and a delight to the caricaturist forever. In London the mother and son found lodgings out towards Chelsea. No doubt the literary traditions attracted them. Only a few squares away lived Rossetti, with a wonderful collection of blue china, giving lessons in painting. There were weekly receptions at his house, where came Burne-Jones, William Morris, Madox Brown and many other excellent people. Down a narrow street near by, lived a grumpy Scotchman, by the name of Carlyle, whose portrait Whistler was later to paint, and although Carlyle had no use for Rossetti, yet Mrs. Whistler and her boy liked them both. It came time to return to America if the young man was to graduate at West Point. But they decided to go over to Paris so James could study art for a few months.

They never came back to America.

Whistler, the coxcomb, had Ruskin haled before the tribunal and demanded a thousand pounds as salve for his injured feelings because the author of "Stones of Venice" was colorblind, lacking in imagination, and possessed of a small magazine wherein he briskly told of men, women and things he did not especially admire.

The case was tried, and the jury decided for Whistler, giving him one farthing damages. But this was success--it threw the costs on Ruskin, and called the attention of the world to the absurdity of condemning things that are, at the last, a mere matter of individual taste.

Whistler was once asked by a fellow artist to criticize a wondrous chromatic combination that the man had thrown off in an idle hour. Jimmy adjusted his monocle and gazed long. "And what do you think of it?" asked the painter standing by. "Oh, just a little more green, a little more green [pause and slight cough] but that is your affair."

Whistler painted the "Nocturne," and that was his affair. If Ruskin did not think it beautiful, that was his affair; but when Ruskin went one step further and accused the painter of trying to hoodwink the world for a matter of guineas, attacking the man's motives, he exceeded the legitimate limits of criticism, and his public rebuke was deserved. In matter of strictest justice, however, it may be as well to say that Whistler was quite as blind to the beauty of Ruskin's efforts for the betterment of humanity as Ruskin was to the excellence of Whistler's pictures. And if Ruskin had been in the humor for litigation he might have sued Whistler and got a shilling damages because Whistler once averred: "The Society of Saint George is a scheme for badgering the unfortunate, and should be put down by the police. God knows the poor suffer enough without being patronized!"

Mr. Whistler was once summoned as a witness in a certain suit where the purchaser of a picture had refused to pay for it. The cross- examination ran something like this:

"You are a painter of pictures?"

"Yes."

"And know the value of pictures?"

"Oh, no!"

"At least you have your own ideas about values?"

"Certainly!"

"And you recommended the defendant to buy this picture for two hundred pounds?"

"I did."

"Mr. Whistler, it is reported that you received a goodly sum for this recommendation--is there anything in that?"

"Oh, nothing, I assure you [yawning]--nothing but the indelicacy of the suggestion."

The critics found much joy, several years ago, in tracing out the fact that Whistler spent a year at Madrid copying Velasquez. That he, like Sargent, has been benefited and inspired by the sublime art of the Spaniard there is no doubt, but there is nothing in the charge that he is an imitator of Velasquez, save the indelicacy of the suggestion.

It was a comparison of Velasquez and Whistler, and a warm assurance that his name would live with that of the great Spaniard, that led Whistler to launch that little question, now a classic, "Why drag in Velasquez?"

The great lesson that Whistler has taught the world is to observe; and this he got from the Japanese. Lafcadio Hearn has said that the average citizen of Japan detects tints and shades that are absolutely unseen by Western eyes. Livingston found tribes in Africa that had never seen pictures of any kind, and he had great difficulty in making them perceive that the figure of a man, drawn on a piece of paper a foot square, really was designed for a man.

"Man big--paper little--no good!" was the criticism of a chief. The chief wanted to hear the voice of the man before he would believe it was meant for a man. This savage chief was a great person, no doubt, in his own bailiwick, but he lacked imagination to bridge the gap between a real man and the repeated strokes of a pencil on a bit of paper.

The Japanese--any Japanese--would have been delighted by Whistler's "Nocturne." Ruskin wasn't. He had never seen the night, and therefore he declared that Whistler had "flung a pot of paint in the face of the public."

That men should dogmatize concerning things where the senses alone supply the evidence, is only another proof of man's limitations. We live in a peewee world which our senses create and declare that outside of what we see, smell, taste and hear there is nothing. It is twenty-five thousand miles around the earth--stellar space is not computable; and man can walk in a day about thirty miles. Above the ground he can jump about four feet. In a city his unaided ear can hear his friend call about two hundred feet. As for smell, he really has almost lost the sense; and taste, through the use of stimulants and condiments, has likewise nearly gone. Man can see and recognize another man a quarter of a mile away, but at the same distance is practically color-blind.

Yet we were all quite willing to set ourselves up as standards until science came with spectroscope, telephone, microscope and Roentgen ray to force upon us the fact that we are tiny, undeveloped and insignificant creatures, with sense quite unreliable and totally unfit for final decisions.

Whistler sees more than other men. He has taught us to observe, and he has taught the art world to select.

Oratory does not consist in telling it all--you select the truth you wish to drive home; in literature, in order to make your point, you must leave things out; and in painting you must omit. Selection is the vital thing.

The Japanese see one single lily-stalk swaying in the breeze and the hazy, luminous gray of the atmosphere in which it is bathed--just these two things. They give us these, and we are amazed and delighted.

Whistler has given us the night--not the black, inky, meaningless void which has always stood for evil; not the darkness, the mere absence of light, the prophet had in mind when he said, "And there shall be no night there"--not that. The prophet thought the night was objectionable, but we know that the continual glare of the sun would quickly destroy all animal or vegetable life. In fact, without the night there would be no animal or vegetable life, and no prophet would have existed to suggest the abolition of night as a betterment. In the night there are flowers that shed their finest perfume, lifting up their hearts in gladness, and all nature is renewed for the work of the coming day. We need the night for rest, for dreams, for forgetfulness. Whistler saw the night--this great, transparent, dark-blue fold that tucks us in for one-half our time. The jaded, the weary and the heavy-laden at last find peace--the day is done, the grateful night is here.