62 
PACIFIC ERA 
tones that lie wrapped about the central core of grays. His grays themselves 
pulsate with imprisoned colors. Years ago I had said of the old Chinese 
school of coloring, that it conceived of color as a flower growing out of a 
soil of grays. But in European art I have seen this thought exemplified only 
in the work of Whistler. 
But though Whistler’s key to larger range be stolen from the East, it 
must not be supposed that he falls out of relation to past European achievement. 
If his work be of universal value, and not freakish, it must have points of 
contact with all old greatnesses. It is just because he is, first and last, a 
genuine creator, that his ideas in line, tone and color,—drawn up from objective 
affinities rather than personal whims,—are charged with the widest range of 
analogy. In his lovely series of pastel studies of young girls, for instance, 
girls gauzily draped,—we see an instantaneous flash of the supple line that 
early Greeks modelled into their clay figurines. In his grander figure work 
in oil,—such as the eight supreme “Arrangements,” kept by him in his studio 
till his death, and now, as it were, bequeathed to the American people through 
Mr. Freer,—the long drapery lines rise to such a height of spontaneous splendor 
that they court comparison with Phidias on the one hand, and with the greatest 
Chinese painter, Ririomin, on the other. In his portraits Whistler uses for 
their own beauty ranges of tone that Valasquez unconsciously tried for realistic 
ends. His greatest landscapes recall the fifteenth century Japanese, Sesshu, 
whose work he never saw. It is, of course, not meant to declare here that 
Whistler is as great in' their own line as all these masters; still less that he 
is the greatest artist of the world. But we do say that he is central in this 
sense, that, in the wide play of his experimenting with absolute beauty, he 
struck again and again, without consciousness of imitation, and often in com¬ 
plete ignorance, the characteristic beauties of the most remote masters, both 
Western and Eastern. And it is this modern centrality in which Mr. Freer 
discerns his supreme importance. 
In passing now to the second grand division of Mr. Freer’s collection, the 
pottery, we may well ask why he should have juxtaposed with anything so 
humanly central as Whistler’s life-work such a special and narrow art of 
decoration. The relation, however, is not an accident, but a clear outcome 
of Mr. Freer’s unique aesthetic penetration, and it is this same penetration to 
ultimate quality that occasions his banishment of porcelain. The tones of the 
latter seem hard and obvious, like brand-new water colors gleaming from white 
bristol boards. The softer and rougher grounds of pottery are, to pursue the 
analogy, more like the old, coarse tinted papers, on which both old and modern 
masters have loved to try their suggestive sketches. And just here is revealed 
the first kinship between Whistler’s painting, and warmly glazed ceramics,— 
that he himself sought for old paper sheets, ancient Dutch and Flemish hand- 
laid textures, over which to throw his pigments like translucent enamels. 
