There is the celebrated nocturne in the shape of a T--one pier of the
bridge and part of the arch, the mystery of the barge, and the figure
guiding the barge in the current, the strange luminosity of the
fleeting river! lines of lights, vague purple and illusive distance,
and all is so obviously beautiful that one pauses to consider how
there could have been stupidity enough to deny it. Of less dramatic
significance, but of equal esthetic value, is the nocturne known as
"the Cremorne lights". Here the night is strangely pale; one of those
summer nights when a slight veil of darkness is drawn for an hour or
more across the heavens. Another of quite extraordinary beauty, even
in a series of extraordinarily beautiful things, is "Night on the
Sea". The waves curl white in the darkness, and figures are seen as in
dreams; lights burn low, ships rock in the offing, and beyond them,
lost in the night, a vague sense of illimitable sea.

Out of the night Mr. Whistler has gathered beauty as august as Phidias
took from Greek youths. Nocturne II is the picture which Professor
Ruskin declared to be equivalent to flinging a pot of paint in the
face of the public. But that black night, filling the garden even to
the sky's obliteration, is not black paint but darkness. The whirl of
the St. Catherine wheel in the midst of this darkness amounts to a
miracle, and the exquisite drawing of the shower of falling fire would
arouse envy in Rembrandt, and prompt imitation. The line of the
watching crowd is only just indicated, and yet the garden is crowded.
There is another nocturne in which rockets are rising and falling, and
the drawing of these two showers of fire is so perfect, that when you
turn quickly towards the picture, the sparks really do ascend and
descend.

More than any other painter, Mr. Whistler's influence has made itself