So this damned Realism made an instinctive appeal to my painter's
vanity, and deriding all traditions, cried aloud with the confidence of
ignorance, "Back to Nature!" _Nature!_ ah, my friend, what mischief that
cry has done me. Where was there an apostle apter to receive this
doctrine, so convenient for me as it was--beautiful Nature, and all that
humbug? It is nothing but that. Well, the world was watching; and it saw
"The Piano," the "White Girl," the Thames subjects, the marines ...
canvases produced by a fellow who was puffed up with the conceit of
being able to prove to his comrades his magnificent gifts, qualities
which only needed a rigorous training to make their possessor to-day a
master, instead of a dissipated student. Ah, why was I not a pupil of
Ingres? I don't say that out of enthusiasm for his pictures; I have
only a moderate liking for them. Several of his canvases, which we have
looked at together, seem to me of a very questionable style, not at all
Greek, as people want to call it, but French, and viciously French. I
feel that we must go far beyond this, that there are far more beautiful
things to be done. Yet, I repeat, why was I not his pupil? What a master
he would have been for us! How salutary would have been his guidance!

_Whistler._


XXXIII

It has been said, "Who will deliver us from the Greeks and Romans?" Soon
we shall be saying, "Who will deliver us from realism?" Nothing is so
tiring as a constant close imitation of life. One comes back inevitably
to imaginative work. Homer's fictions will always be preferred to
historical truth, Rubens' fabulous magnificence to all the frippery
copied exactly from the lay figure.