themselves where was the innovator in this calculated reduction of
tones, in these formal harmonies, in this constant synthesis, sought
with far more disregard for superfluous detail than Hals, for
instance, had ever dared to show. The still more critical, while
admitting the beauty and the grace of this art, must have often asked
themselves what, after all, has this painter invented, what new
subject-matter has he introduced into art?

It was with the night that Mr. Whistler set his seal and sign-manual
upon art; above all others he is surely the interpreter of the night.
Until he came the night of the painter was as ugly and insignificant
as any pitch barrel; it was he who first transferred to canvas the
blue transparent darkness which folds the world from sunset to
sunrise. The purple hollow, and all the illusive distances of the
gas-lit river, are Mr. Whistler's own. It was not the unhabited night
of lonely plain and desolate tarn that he chose to interpret, but the
difficult populous city night--the night of tall bridges and vast
water rained through with lights red and grey, the shores lined with
the lamps of the watching city. Mr. Whistler's night is the vast blue
and golden caravanry, where the jaded and the hungry and the
heavy-hearted lay down their burdens, and the contemplative freed from
the deceptive reality of the day understand humbly and pathetically
the casualness of our habitation, and the limitlessreality of a plan,
the intention of which we shall never know. Mr. Whistler's nights are
the blue transparent darknesses which are half of the world's life.
Sometimes he foregoes even the aid of earthly light, and his picture
is but luminous blue shadow, delicately graduated, as in the nocturne
in M. Duret's collection--purple above and below, a shadow in the
middle of the picture--a little less and there would be nothing.