ved for heroes. And there was nothing heroic about
Whistler, except his unfaltering devotion to his own ideals in art. No
saint was he, and none would have been more annoyed than he by
canonisation; would he were here to play, as he would have played
incomparably, the devil's advocate! So far as he possessed the
Christian virtues, his faith was in himself, his hope was for the
immortality of his own works, and his charity was for the defects in
those works. He is known to have been an affectionate son, an
affectionate husband; but, for the rest, all the tenderness in him
seems to have been absorbed into his love for such things in nature as
were expressible through terms of his own art. As a man in relation to
his fellow-men, he cannot, from any purely Christian standpoint, be
applauded. He was inordinately vain and cantankerous. Enemies, as he
has wittily implied, were a necessity to his nature; and he seems to
have valued friendship (a thing never really valuable, in itself, to a
really vain man) as just the needful foundation for future enmity.
Quarrelling and picking quarrels, he went his way through life
blithely. Most of these quarrels were quite trivial and tedious. In the
ordinary way, they would have been forgotten long ago, as the trivial
and tedious details in the lives of other great men are forgotten. But
Whistler was great not merely in painting, not merely as a wit and
dandy in social life. He had, also, an extraordinary talent for
writing. He was a born writer. He wrote, in his way, perfectly; and his
way was his own, and the secret of it has died with him. Thus,
conducting them through the Post Office, he has conducted his squabbles
to immortality.

Immortality is a big word. I do not mean by it that so long as this
globe shall endure, the majority of the crawlers round it will spend
the greater part of their time in reading The Gentle Art of Making
Enemies. Even the pre-eminently immortal works of Shakespeare are read
very little. The average of time devoted to them by Englishmen cannot
(even though one assess Mr. Frank Harris at eight hours per diem, and
Mr. Sidney Lee at twenty-four) tot up to more than a small fraction of
a second in a lifetime reckoned by the Psalmist's limit. When I dub
Whistler an immortal writer, I do but mean that so long as there are a
few people interested in the subtler ramifications of English prose as
an art-form, so long will there be a few constantly-recurring readers
o