thing as nationality in art, and that you might as well speak of
English mathematics as of English art. We do not stop to inquire if
such answers contain one grain of truth; we know they do not--we stop
to consider them because we know that the criticism of a creative artist
never amounts to more than an ingenious defence of his own work--an
ingenious exaltation of a weakness (a weakness which perhaps none
suspects but himself) into a conspicuous merit.

Mr. Whistler has shared his life equally between America, France, and
England. He is the one solitary example of cosmopolitanism in art, for
there is nothing in his pictures to show that they come from the
north, the south, the east, or the west. They are compounds of all
that is great in Eastern and Western culture. Conscious of this, and
fearing that it might be used as an argument against his art, Mr.
Whistler threw over the entire history, not only of art, but of the
world; and declared boldly that art was, like science, not national,
but essentially cosmopolitan; and then, becoming aware of the anomaly
of his genius in his generation, Mr. Whistler undertook to explain
away the anomaly by ignoring the fifth century B.C. in Athens, the
fifteenth century in Italy, and the seventeenth in Holland, and humbly
submitting that artists never appeared in numbers like swallows, but
singly like aerolites. Now our task is not to disprove these
statements, but to work out the relationship between the author of the
"Butterfly Letters" and the painter of the portrait of "The Mother",
"Lady Archibald Campbell", "Miss Alexander", and the other forty-one
masterpieces that were on exhibition in the Goupil galleries.

There is, however, an intermediate step, which is to point out the
intimate relationship between the letter-writer and the physical man.
Although there is no internal evidence to show that the pictures were