evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry,
as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky,
and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces
in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is
before us...' That is as perfect, in its dim and delicate beauty, as
any of his painted 'nocturnes.' But his aim was more often to pour
ridicule and contempt. And herein the weirdness of his natural
vocabulary and the patchiness of his reading were of very real value to
him. Take the opening words of his letter to Tom Taylor: 'Dead for a
ducat, dead! my dear Tom: and the rattle has reached me by post. Sans
rancune, say you? Bah! you scream unkind threats and die badly...' And
another letter to the same unfortunate man: 'Why, my dear old Tom, I
never was serious with you, even when you were among us. Indeed, I
killed you quite, as who should say, without seriousness, "A rat! A
rat!" you know, rather cursorily...' There the very lack of coherence
in the style, as of a man gasping and choking with laughter, drives the
insults home with a horrible precision. Notice the technical skill in
the placing of 'you know, rather cursorily' at the end of the sentence.
Whistler was full of such tricks--tricks that could never have been
played by him, could never have occurred to him, had he acquired the
professional touch And not a letter in the book but has some such
little sharp felicity of cadence or construction.

The letters, of course, are the best thing in the book, and the best of
the letters are the briefest. An exquisite talent like Whistler's,
whether in painting or in writing, is always at its best on a small
scale. On a large scale it strays and is distressed. Thus the 'Ten
o'Clock,' from which I took that passage about the evening mist and the
riverside, does not leave me with a sense of artistic satisfaction. It
lacks structure. It is not a roundly conceived whole: it is but a row
of fragments. Were it otherwise, Whistler could never have written so
perfectly the little letters. For no man who can finely grasp a big
theme can play exquisitely round a little one.

Nor can any man who excels in scoffing at his fellows excel also in
taking abstract subjects seriously. Certainly, the little letters are
Whistler's passport among the elect of literature. Luckily, I can judge
them without prejudice. Whether in this or that case Whistler was in
the right or in the wron