`And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry,
as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky,
and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces
in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland
is before us...' That is as perfect, in its dim and delicate beauty,
as any of his painted `nocturnes.' But his aim was more often to pour
ridicule and contempt. And herein the weirdness of his natural
vocabulary and the patchiness of his reading were of very real value
to him. Take the opening words of his letter to Tom Taylor: `Dead for
a ducat, dead! my dear Tom: and the rattle has reached me by post.
Sans rancune, say you? Bah! you scream unkind threats and die
badly...' And another letter to the same unfortunate man: `Why, my
dear old Tom, I never was serious with you, even when you were among
us. Indeed, I killed you quite, as who should say, without
seriousness, "A rat! A rat!" you know, rather cursorily...' There the
very lack of coherence in the style, as of a man gasping and choking
with laughter, drives the insults home with a horrible precision.
Notice the technical skill in the placing of `you know, rather
cursorily' at the end of the sentence. Whistler was full of such
tricks--tricks that could never have been played by him, could never
have occurred to him, had he acquired the professional touch And not a
letter in the book but has some such little sharp felicity of cadence
or construction.
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