edges, because a paper-knife is one of the things
that have the gift of invisibility whenever they are wanted; and
because one's thumb, in prising open the pages, so often affects the
text. Many volumes have I thus mutilated, and I hope that in the
sale-rooms of a sentimental posterity they may fetch higher prices than
their duly uncut duplicates. So long as my thumb tatters merely the
margin, I am quite equanimous. If I were reading a First Folio
Shakespeare by my fireside, and if the matchbox were ever so little
beyond my reach, I vow I would light my cigarette with a spill made
from the margin of whatever page I were reading. I am neat,
scrupulously neat, in regard to the things I care about; but a book, as
a book, is not one of these things.

Of course, a book may happen to be in itself a beautiful object. Such a
book I treat tenderly, as one would a flower. And such a book is, in
its brown-papered boards, whereon gleam little gilt italics and a
little gilt butterfly, Whistler's Gentle Art of Making Enemies. It
happens to be also a book which I have read again and again--a book
that has often travelled with me. Yet its cover is as fresh as when
first, some twelve years since, it came into my possession. A flower
freshly plucked, one would say--a brown-and-yellow flower, with a
little gilt butterfly fluttering over it. And its inner petals, its
delicately proportioned pages, are as white and undishevelled as though
they never had been opened. The book lies open before me, as I write. I
must be careful of my pen's transit from inkpot to MS.

Yet, I know, many worthy folk would like the book blotted out of
existence. These are they who understand and love the art of painting,
but neither love nor understand writing as an art. For them The Gentle
Art of Making Enemies is but something unworthy of a great man.
Certainly, it is a thing incongruous with a great hero. And for most
people it is painful not to regard a great man as also a great hero;
hence all the efforts to explain away the moral characteristics
deducible from The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and to prove that
Whistler, beneath a prickly surface, was saturated through and through
with the quintessence of the Sermon on the Mount.

Well! hero-worship is a very good thing. It is a wholesome exercise
which we ought all to take, now and again. Only, let us not strain
ourselves by overdoing it. Let us not indulge in it too constantly. Let
hero-worship be reser