PACIFIC ERA 
61 
tions. Now it was a trial of some new alignment, or tossing polygonal beauty 
in his spaces. Now it was a year’s long search for an evanescent, Shelley-like 
note in color. His “unfinished sketches” and most meagre etchings are not 
so much imperfect and transient studies as the striking of so many complete 
chords, which the addition of a single touch would shatter into noise. Nature 
became to him infinitely richer in pictorial suggestions, because a thousand set¬ 
tings of subjects, before tabooed, flashed upon his freed eye as beautiful, and 
for this insight, Japanese art, and especially the prints of Hiroshige, gave him 
positive suggestion. For the first time in them he saw a part of a horse, or a 
slice of a man, set prominently in the lateral frame of a composition; and a 
tree, or a hanging cloth, or a human head, obtruded into the foreground. Any 
group of spots making new harmonious cuttings of the primary canvas-rectangle 
became not only admissible, but urgent. It is this chiefly that sets Whistler 
apart from Western art, without making him a mere copier of Eastern. He is 
the first to grasp fully and creatively the oriental principle in order to express 
occidental feeling. Whistler thus stands forever at the meeting-point of the 
two great continental streams; he is the nodule, the universalizer, the interpreter 
of East to West, and of West to East. 
The positivity of Whistler’s work does not end in line; but pours over into 
breadth of dark-and-light massing. Here other Westerns had already started 
a revolution against the tyranny of shadow. The greater truth of local lights 
and of atmospheric planes was already acknowledged. Effect, removed as 
far as possible from the plaster-cast stage, no longer had to rely on an ex¬ 
aggerated “rounding-up.” But Whistler, in going so much farther than a mere 
recognition of this truth, finds, in exploring for their own sake this new wealth 
of tonal beauties, a wealth of natural truth which no realist, however enlight¬ 
ened, could suspect. He is the first occidental to express firmly, and in 
almost flat planes, pearly films of grays so subtly differentiated that, without 
blending, each seems to vibrate and deliquesce into its neighbor. Here he be¬ 
comes far less brutal, and limited to the range of harsh contrasts than Rem¬ 
brandt and Manet. He models in middletones, like a modern amateur photo¬ 
grapher. He makes us see infinite beauty, where men before saw nothing. He 
discovers for Western practice the affinities of synthetic dark-and-light,— 
much as Bach revealed for all time the possibilities of musical harmony. 
In color Whistler’s explorations are even more positive and illuminating. 
Filling his strange angels, warming his shifting values, endless new color chords, 
quiet, flower-like, pungent, and with clinging affinities, leap into play. The 
heavy scarlet and crimsons of a Venetian robe, the deep ultramarines of an 
Italian sky, and the warm orange gilding of sunlight on flesh,—no such limits 
of obvious progression will he allow. His flesh in twilight shadow may be¬ 
come a plum purple, contrasted with browns that seem to cool like drying 
earth. His scarlets are small tongues of flame, vibrating through ribbons and 
flower-petals. He, first of occidentals, has explored the infinite ranges of 
