dreadful responsibility of admiring anything, and nothing could have
exceeded their enthusiasm when they were told by Mr. Whistler that no
matter how vulgar their dresses were, or how hideous their surroundings
at home, still it was possible that a great painter, if there was such a
thing, could, by contemplating them in the twilight and half closing his
eyes, see them under really picturesque conditions, and produce a picture
which they were not to attempt to understand, much less dare to enjoy.
Then there were some arrows, barbed and brilliant, shot off, with all the
speed and splendour of fireworks, and the archaeologists, who spend their
lives in verifying the birthplaces of nobodies, and estimate the value of
a work of art by its date or its decay; at the art critics who always
treat a picture as if it were a novel, and try and find out the plot; at
dilettanti in general and amateurs in particular; and (O mea culpa!) at
dress reformers most of all. 'Did not Velasquez paint crinolines? What
more do you want?'

Having thus made a holocaust of humanity, Mr. Whistler turned to nature,
and in a few moments convicted her of the Crystal Palace, Bank holidays,
and a general overcrowding of detail, both in omnibuses and in
landscapes, and then, in a passage of singular beauty, not unlike one
that occurs in Corot's letters, spoke of the artistic value of dim dawns
and dusks, when the mean facts of life are lost in exquisite and
evanescent effects, when common things are touched with mystery and
transfigured with beauty, when the warehouses become as palaces and the
tall chimneys of the factory seem like campaniles in the silver air.

Finally, after making a strong protest against anybody but a painter
judging of painting, and a pathetic appeal to the audience not to be
lured by the aesthetic movement into having beautiful things about them,
Mr. Whistler concluded his lecture with a pretty passage about Fusiyama