tly what we cannot be
always sure of, as we stroll down Piccadilly in the glaring vulgarity of
the noonday, or lounge in the park with a foolish sunset as a background.
Were we able to carry our chiaroscuro about with us, as we do our
umbrellas, all would be well; but this being impossible, I hardly think
that pretty and delightful people will continue to wear a style of dress
as ugly as it is useless and as meaningless as it is monstrous, even on
the chance of such a master as Mr. Whistler spiritualising them into a
symphony or refining them into a mist. For the arts are made for life,
and not life for the arts.

Nor do I feel quite sure that Mr. Whistler has been himself always true
to the dogma he seems to lay down, that a painter should paint only the
dress of his age and of his actual surroundings: far be it from me to
burden a butterfly with the heavy responsibility of its past: I have
always been of opinion that consistency is the last refuge of the
unimaginative: but have we not all seen, and most of us admired, a
picture from his hand of exquisite English girls strolling by an opal sea
in the fantastic dresses of Japan? Has not Tite Street been thrilled
with the tidings that the models of Chelsea were posing to the master, in
peplums, for pastels?

Whatever comes from Mr Whistler's brush is far too perfect in its
loveliness to stand or fall by any intellectual dogmas on art, even by
his own: for Beauty is justified of all her children, and cares nothing
for explanations: but it is impossible to look through any collection of
modern pictures in London, from Burlington House to the Grosvenor
Gallery, without feeling that the professional model is ruining painting
and reducing it to a condition of mere pose and pastiche.

Are we not all weary of him, that venerable impostor fresh from the steps
of the Piazza di Spagna, who, in the leisure moments that he can spare
from his customary organ, makes the round of the studios and is waited
for in Holland Park? Do we not all recognise him, when, with the gay
insouciance of his nation, he reappears on the walls of our summer
exhibitions as everything that he is not, and as nothing that he is,
glaring at us here as a patriarch of Canaan, here beaming as a brigand
from the Abruzzi? Popular is he, this poor peripatetic professor of
posing, with those whose joy it is to paint the posthumous portrait of
the last philanthropist who in his lifetime had neglected to be
pho