above the horizon. The story was just the same, but told with what another accent! Volupté' dropped from their hands. Thenceforth, when they wanted that particular tale, they opened Balzac's Lys dans la Vallée.'

X.

It was in 1834 that Sainte-Beuve came to an open rupture with Victor Hugo. There was some threat of a duel which Renduel, their publisher, prevented. There was some talk, too, (on Sainte-Beuve's part) of entering Holy Orders like his hero Amaury. (Oh do!' exclaimed George Sand; How nice! I will confess to you!')-But it ended there. Madame Victor Hugo had not the grace to die, like the Marquise de Couaën, and save the situation. She lived, poor woman, inextricably caught in an intolerable position, between the lover and the husband who hated each other. In vain she tried to make their peace, turning first to one, then to the other. Perhaps at heart she preferred Victor Hugo, as who would not? Pity, we think, had always been the well-head of her feeling for Sainte-Beuve; it was, however, deep enough to keep her for three more years the heroine of his 'Livre d'Amour.' But when her daughter Léopoldine grew old enough to be confirmed, Madame Hugo, in a pious mother's natural desire for a soul re-whitened with which to approach the Holy Table, found strength to break the last link which bound her to Sainte-Beuve. The critic was heart-broken and furious, nor could he ever believe that his liege-lady had grown tired of him. 'It is all,' he would say, 'some stupendous ruse of Polyphème's-quelque noire et grossière machination qui sent son Cyclope'; and he launched his anathema at Adèle-not for faithlessness, but for the more pardonable and conceivable crime of une 'stupide crédulité.'

'Once upon a time,' he wrote in later days, ' a man loved a beauty without brains and a genius without judgment.' It was, he imagined, his own history. He never forgave his companions in Armida's garden for the great disenchantment which they had undergone together.

In 1830 it had seemed so easy to change the world. The carnation had appeared on the very point of producing an ear of corn; and here were the same sweet crimson flowers still blooming, year in, year out-sweet enough and red enough, but in no wise miraculous. To gather such as they, there is no need to dally in enchanted places. Of the

little band of companions, not one had realised his dream. Sainte-Beuve was not a great poet nor a lover happy in unalterable fidelity. Victor Hugo, more than ever famous, had lost the key of his dear earthly paradise. Lamennais had not succeeded in bringing the Church home to the people, and he himself lay under the ban of excommunication. The problems of capital and labour still perplexed the world, despite the projects of the Saint-Simonians, whose association had been dissolved by law in 1833. All the hopes and all the dreams that they had shared in common appeared now to Sainte-Beuve as a mere midsummer night's dream, signifying nothing.

Passion, Liberty, Religion had passed through his life like a whirlwind; but they had left nothing behind them. Henceforth, professedly sceptic, he occupied himself with the analysis of those faiths in which he had once believed, and his history of Port-Royal is in some sort an anatomy of religious experience. If truth can be attained, he hoped for it thenceforward, not through a sudden revelation from above, but from the positive tests of practical knowledge. 'J'herborise,' he said. Je suis un naturaliste des esprits.' In a letter to Bersot, written in 1863, he sums up the doctrine of all his later years: 'Si j'avais une devise ce serait ❝ “le Vrai—le Vrai seul," et que le beau et le bien s'en tirent comme ils peuvent.'

Thus, after an excursion into the regions of Romance and Religion, Sainte-Beuve returned to the teaching of Lamarck, but with a more intimate sense of the fluid mobility of all things, of their constant and gradual transformation, even in the moral world. And, by transferring to history and psychology the methods of natural history, he lived to inaugurate in France the cult of Science.

ART. VIII.—THE WORK OF JAMES MONEILL

WHISTLER.

1. Histoire de J. McN. Whistler et de son Euvre. Par THÉODORE DURET. (Paris: H. Floury, 1904.)

2. The Art of James McNeill Whistler: An Appreciation. By T. R. WAY and G. R. DENNIS. (London: G. Bell & Sons.

1901.)

3. Mr. Whistler's Lithographs. By T. R. WAY. 1896.

4. Whistler as I Knew Him. By MORTIMER MENPES. (A. & C. Black.)

5. Mr. Whistler's Etchings. By FREDERICK WEDmore.

6. Memorial Exhibition of the Works of the late J. McN. Whistler (organised by the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers): Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings, Etchings, and Lithographs. 1905.

7. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. WHISTLER. (London: Heinemann. 1890.)

THE

HE time has not come for a biography of James McNeill Whistler, such as should deserve the name of a biography. What we have at present are sketches, appreciations, chiefly of the painter's art, touching slightly upon the character of the man. This last may not be left entirely out of consideration. Whistler was more than merely a painter: he was by nature and by election a combatant; and chance decreed that he should be in this country the champion of a certain theory of art and ideal of painting. Fighting at first very much alone, he gathered about him, as time went on, a band of adherents; among such his first biographers were sure to be found. Now there was this further peculiarity about Whistler: he not only doubled his functions as painter and gladiator, he was in himself of duplex nature. More than almost any other real personage, not less than Daudet's famous Tartarin de Tarascon, he consisted of two beings, not indeed a Whistler-Quichotte and a Whistler-Sancho Panza, but a Whistler-artiste and a Whistler-gamin: one cannot use a milder word; Whistler's enemies would have used a harsher. On many occasions it was the Whistler-gamin who seemed to have the greater power of attracting allies. Due credit then should be given to M. Théodore Duret, whose 'Histoire de J. McN. Whistler et de son Œuvre' is the most important contribution

their

we have as yet towards an appreciation of the painter. For in M. Duret we have none of the usual extravagances of the Whistlerite. He is an out-and-out admirer; but he expresses his admiration soberly, not always with complete justice, but without bitterness. Messrs. T. R. Way and G. R. Dennis write in a vein of superlative appreciation; "The Art of James McNeill Whistler' was designed as an offering to the master' himself. And such an offering must have been superlative to avoid offence. In Mr. Mortimer Menpes we have a sort of emancipated disciple. Mr. Menpes himself came at last under the lash of a wit which was sparing of few. But the fact has not turned him from an admirer into a detractor; and though his Whistler ' as I Knew Him' lacks any literary grace, we have to thank it for some intimate touches which are necessary to our understanding of the Whistler of every-day.

The chief (or should we rather say the superficial?) cause for which Whistler contended in his talk, in his pamphlets and lectures, is now reckoned a gained cause. By the majority of contemporary painters, indeed, it is considered so utterly triumphant that there is nothing left to say on the other side. Briefly stated, it is the elimination of 'literature' from painting, from the plastic arts. The essential of this evangel Whistler expressed in its most plausible guise in the first of the famous 'propositions prefixed to the catalogue of his etchings of Venice exhibited in 1886. Proposition No. 1 says:

That in Art it is criminal to go beyond the means used

in its exercise.'

Clearly the art which is illustrative, which is literary, does this. It depends not upon itself alone, and by association calls up ideas which itself can never express. And, as a fact, not only in Whistler's own early days, but through all the history of painting, the attitude of the 'general' has been to look outside the picture itself to its associations with literature or history. We have said it was partly chance which made Whistler such a 'promachos' in this question; it was the accident that he chose to domesticate himself in England, which was holding back very obstinately from the movement' in France or elsewhere, wherever any 'movement' could be discerned. All the young painters among whom Whistler was thrown during his salad days in Paris were in one way or another (consciously or u consciously) championing the same doctrine-that, as the æsthete said in Punch,' the beauty of a picture was in the

'picchah' or it was nowhere. The master Delacroix, master to all the younger school in France, might be reckoned the practical exponent of this creed, as opposed, for example, to the popular Delaroche. Édouard Manet, one of 'les jeunes' among Whistler's contemporaries in Paris, was a notable fighter for the same principle. It may indeed be disputed that Manet introduced much beauty into his work; but it is beyond contest that, more almost than any painter of our time, he turned literature' out of doors.

But Art in England, under the influence of Ruskin, held back altogether from this tendency. There is not in itself harm in the conservative attitude which was England's. The argument, whatever contemporary painters may think, is not all one way. The course of the arts, too, is never a rectilinear course; at best it is in a spiral; and the movement of one generation almost always produces a reaction in the next; so that the country which hangs back-like the man who has preserved an old hat or coat-has a good chance of finding itself at the top of the fashion. At this moment England is holding back in just the same way from the 'movement' in fiction and the drama, in the first more especially. Almost all the other European peoples possessing a literature have taken, rightly or wrongly, a somewhat new view of fiction. They have, in the composition of their novels and their dramas, adopted very literally Shakespeare's image of the mirror, translating the idea in Stendhal's sense, when he wrote: Le roman est un miroir qui se promène sur la grande route.' But England has never given in to this definition; and her novel is still essentially, what it was with Miss Austen, with Dickens, or with Thackeray, a means for drawing amusement out of life. We are not, then, obliged to decide upon the ultimate value of the battle which Whistler fought. It is necessary for the vitality of any art that such contentions should be; the swing of the pendulum is a part in the advance of the hourhand.

James Abbott Whistler, so was he christened-he assumed in addition his mother's name of McNeill-was born, it is almost but not absolutely certain (the painter was a mystifier in such things *), at Lowell, Massachusetts, on

*In the trial Whistler v. Ruskin' Whistler stated that he was born at St. Petersburg. He meant, Mr. Way suggests, that he was born artistically there.' Or did he mean to take eight years from his

VOL. CCI. NO. CCCCXII.

G G