60 
PACIFIC ERA 
led by Japanese work much further,—not only through a strengthening to solve 
problems already conceived, but through a suggestion of new ranges of 
aesthetic quality, utterly strange species of beauty, that had never been sus¬ 
pected, or at least fully stated, in earlier Western art. It was to explore this 
rich world of combinations, in their own right, that now became for Whistler 
the steady aim of his life. 
To those students of Whistler’s art who are forbidden by temperament or 
education from grasping the power of oriental, it may seem as if this special 
claim for the former were beside the point. For them Whistler’s strength 
is only a mastery of representative technique akin to what had already been 
developed in Europe, two centuries before by such men as Hals and Velas¬ 
quez, and it is true that the fresh genius of these former masters, as of some 1 
still earlier Venetians, had penetrated to a new universal, a purely pictorial 
method, as distinct from the general overweighting of European painting with 
canons of sculpture. Their painting ceased to be an attempt to copy on a flat 
plane the effects of colored statues set in an artificial studio light; and asserted 
itself as a strong suggestion of a more lyrical treatment of human realations, 
in terms of lovely firm spacing, and of rich surface-harmony. But the germ 
of their occasional example did not take root in the heart of an eighteenth 
century Europe proud of its classic renaissance; and even to-day the bulk of our 
modern critics are hampered by the old Western prejudice that art is properly 
a stiffer kind of expressive language. 
When we read a descriptive book, the words, which are mere symbols, 
drop out of sight, that we ma'y focus attention upon the thought which they 
convey. To the old-fashioned connoisseur and critic, the technique of painting 
seems, in like manner, to be a set of symbols, lines and colors, which should 
fall back from the plane of a consciousness properly filled with their thought- 
burden. It is, among other things, this great heresy that modern innovation 
has broken down. Older masters, who defied it in practice, hardly dared to 
repudiate it in principle. But we now know that lines, and areas of cool 
dark, and synthetic colors are far more than a visual language, or set of 
symbols; more, too, than sensuous and superficial ornament; that they consti¬ 
tute, in their own right, a highly organic universe; that they are self-subsistent 
and orderly progressions of individual beauty, capable of almost infinite varia¬ 
tion and extension; and that, though bound up with the feeling of the thought 
implied, they are as positive and transcendent as the world of pure instrumental 
music. Subject, indeed, is not thus lost; but rather absorbed by, or translated 
into, the beauty of the form,—quite as the thought of a lyric poem becomes 
transfigured in its graceful garb of words. 
Now it remained for Whistler, not quite to discover this important truth, 
but to suspect and sound the incredible vastness and variety implicit in this 
frankly accepted lyrical world of vision. This is the substance of his whole 
career, all too short to complete the survey, and never wasting time in repeti- 
