is every effect he must rely wholly on the words
that he chooses, and on the order in which he ranges them, and on his
choice among the few hard-and-fast symbols of punctuation. He must so
use those slender means that they shall express all that he himself can
express through his voice and face and hands, or all that he would thus
express if he were a good talker. Usually, the good talker is a dead
failure when he tries to express himself in writing. For that matter,
so is the bad talker. But the bad talker has the better chance of
success, inasmuch as the inexpressiveness of his voice and face and
hands will have sharpened his scent for words and phrases that shall in
themselves convey such meanings as he has to express. Whistler was that
rare phenomenon, the good talker who could write as well as he talked.
Read any page of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and you will hear a
voice in it, and see a face in it, and see gestures in it. And none of
these is quite like any other known to you. It matters not that you
never knew Whistler, never even set eyes on him. You see him and know
him here. The voice drawls slowly, quickening to a kind of snap at the
end of every sentence, and sometimes rising to a sudden screech of
laughter; and, all the while, the fine fierce eyes of the talker are
flashing out at you, and his long nervous fingers are tracing
extravagant arabesques in the air. No! you need never have seen
Whistler to know what he was like. He projected through printed words
the clean-cut image and clear-ringing echo of himself. He was a born
writer, achieving perfection through pains which must have been
infinite for that we see at first sight no trace of them at all.

Like himself, necessarily, his style was cosmopolitan and eccentric. It
comprised Americanisms and Cockneyisms and Parisian argot, with
constant reminiscences of the authorised version of the Old Testament,
and with chips off Molie're, and with shreds and tags of what-not
snatched from a hundred-and-one queer corners. It was, in fact, an
Autolycine style. It was a style of the maddest motley, but of motley
so deftly cut and fitted to the figure, and worn with such an air, as
to become a gracious harmony for all beholders.

After all, what matters is not so much the vocabulary as the manner in
which the vocabulary is used. Whistler never failed to find right
words, and the right cadence for a dignified meaning, when dignity was
his aim. 'And when the