enote: _REFLECTION:_

"If" indeed!

[Illustration]]

[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_

"Cups and fans and screens," and Hamilton vases, and
figurines of Tanagra, and other "waterflies."

[Illustration]]

Let us begin at the end, as all reasonable people always do: we shall
find that Mr. Whistler concedes to Greek art a place beside Japanese.
Now this, on his own showing, will never do; it crosses, it
contravenes, it nullifies, it pulverizes his theory or his principle
of artistic limitation. If Japanese art is right in confining itself
to what can be "broidered upon the fan"--and the gist of the whole
argument is in favour of this assumption--then the sculpture which
appeals, indeed, first of all to our perception of beauty, to the
delight of the eye, to the wonder and the worship of the instinct or
the sense, but which in every possible instance appeals also to far
other intuitions and far other sympathies than these, is as absolutely
wrong, as demonstrably inferior, as any picture or as any carving
which may be so degenerate and so debased as to concern itself with a
story or a subject. Assuredly Phidias thought of other things than
"arrangements"[34] in marble--as certainly as AEschylus thought of
other things than "arrangements" in metre. Nor, I am sorely afraid,
can the adored Velasquez be promoted to a seat "at the foot of
Fusi-yama." Japanese art is not merely the incomparable achievement of
certain harmonies in colour; _it is the negation, the immolation, the
annihilation of everything else_. By the code which accepts as the highest
of models and of masterpieces the cups and fans and screens with which
"the poor world" has been as grievously "pestered" of late years as ever
it was in Shakespeare's time "with such waterflies"--"diminutives of
nature"--as excited the scorn of his moralizing cynic, Velasquez is as
unquestionably condemned as is Raphael or Titian. It is true that this
miraculous power of hand (?)[35] makes beautiful for us the deformity
of dwarfs, and dignifies the degradation of princes; but that
is not the question. It is true, again, that Mr. Whistler's own merest
"arrangements" in colour are lovely and effective;[36] but his
portraits, to speak of these alone, are liable to the damning and
intolerable imputation of possessing not merely other qualities than
these, but qualities which actually appeal--I blush to re