!

[Illustration]]

It is a cruel but an inevitable Nemesis which reduces even a man of
real genius, keen-witted and sharp-sighted, to the level of the critic
Jobson, to the level of the _dotard and the dunce_, when paradox is
discoloured by personality and merriment is distorted by malevolence.(!)
No man who really knows the qualities of Mr. Whistler's best work will
imagine that he really believes the highest expression of his art to
be realized in reproduction of the grin and glare, the smirk and leer,
of Japanese womanhood as represented in its professional types of
beauty; but to all appearance he would fain persuade us that he does.

In the latter of the two portraits to which I have already referred
there is an expression of living character.... This, however, is an
exception to the general rule of Mr. Whistler's way of work: an
exception, it may be alleged, which proves the rule. A single
infraction of the moral code, a single breach of artistic law,
suffices to vitiate the position of the preacher. And this is no
slight escapade, or casual aberration; it is a full and frank
defiance, a deliberate and elaborate denial, hurled right in the
face of Japanese jocosity, flung straight in the teeth of the theory
which condemns high art, under penalty of being considered
intelligent, to remain eternally on the grin.

[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_

A keen commercial summing up--excused by the "Great
Emperor!"

[Illustration]]

If it be objected that to treat this theorem gravely is "to consider
too curiously" the tropes and the phrases of _a jester_ of genius, I
have only to answer that it very probably may be so, but that the
excuse for such error must be sought in the existence of the genius. A
man of genius is scarcely at liberty to choose whether he shall or
shall not be considered as a serious figure--one to be acknowledged
and respected as an equal or a superior, not applauded and dismissed
as _a tumbler or a clown_. And if the better part of Mr. Whistler's
work as an artist is to be accepted as the work of a serious and
intelligent creature, it would seem incongruous and preposterous to
dismiss the more characteristic points of his theory as a lecturer
with the chuckle or the shrug of mere amusement or amazement.
Moreover, if considered as a joke, a mere joke, and nothing but a
joke, this gospel of the grin has hardly matter or meaning enou