much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public face." This violent and alliterative phrase, although it may have given some pleasure to the painter who had a keen sense for good phrasing as well as for the value of publicity, aroused Whistler's resentment. Upon first meeting the criticism he said to Broughton, "It is the most debased style of criticism I have had thrown at me yet."

The immediate result was a libel suit in which Whistler won, for Ruskin was obliged to pay the costs of the trial, and one farthing to soothe the feelings of the insulted artist. He had asked for £1000; he got a farthing and more than the value of £1000 in free advertising,- to which, perhaps, he was not averse. The trial evoked countless letters to newspapers, and much discussion and attempted witticism. When the Figaro asked, "What is more natural than for a 'Whistler' to go in for 'airs'? Whistler is reported to have said, "Well, you know, I don't go so far as to Burne-Jones, but somebody ought to burn Jones's pictures."

Ruskin nowadays is lightly considered as an art critic, but the artist who sneers at the great wordpainter's art criticism must not forget that the whole brotherhood of artists is indebted to Ruskin for his popularizing of art. It is, perhaps, too much to ask of one man that he should discern the uncommon

beauty of both a Turner and a Whistler. The "Nocturnes" had no forerunners either in English or Continental art. Whistler was what the Germans call a "path-making genius." And Ruskin forgot that beauty has its own excuse for being, or, like the most of us, was blind to all save the conventional forms. The painter's art was not lawless, but was discovering a new law. Not absolutely original, for even genius is dependent upon suggestion. Shakspere was not the first to feel the majestic swing of the English heroic blank verse, nor did he originate his plots. Whistler caught his inspiration from Japanese art. In the '60's Hiroshige prints were hung on the wall of his studio. It is said the “T" shape of “The Old Battersea Bridge," or as it is sometimes called, "A Nocturne of Blue and Gold," is almost an exact copy of a Hiroshige design. Whistler accomplished the rare feat of successfully "combining the two great art elements of the world, those of the East and the West." Whistler, like the Japanese, wanted to leave something to the imagination. He looked upon Nature with the eye of a poet. That he has the soul of a poet can be felt not only by seeing his pictures but by reading his beautiful description of a river scene at night in his famous "Ten o'Clock " lecture,—

"When the evening mist clothes the river-side with 'poetry' as with a veil, and the poor buildings

lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us then the wayfarer hastens home, the workingman and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure cease to understand as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master; her son in that he loves her, and her master in that he knows her."

V

The "Artist's Mother" and his "Carlyle " are conceded to be Whistler's masterpieces; the one hanging in the Luxembourg, the other in the Gallery at Glasgow; a third, "Sarasate," one of the most famous, hangs in Pittsburg. With that fondness for giving his pictures odd titles, "The Mother" and "Carlyle " portraits are called " Arrangements in Gray and Black," while the "Sarasate" is an Arrangement in Black." Paris, Glasgow, Pittsburg, the homes of his most celebrated portraits! This would have appealed to the cosmopolite painter!

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Of all Whistler's paintings I suppose the most popular is the portrait of his mother. The artist admires it for its technique, the restraint of line and color, the quietness and dignity of the pose,