of the candidates were adults. Constantine had built a baptistery near the Anastasis, and it must have contained a font of some size, as the rite was one of total immersion.

It was followed by the Anointing, answering to our Confirmation, and the clothing with white garments, after which the candidates turned to the East and recited the Lord's Prayer. These ceremonies were performed in the night of Easter Eve-the 'Vigils,' as Etheria calls them. As the dawn rose over the Mount of Olives, the newly baptised issued in their white robes from the baptistery, and were escorted by the Bishop first to the Anastasis and then to the Great Basilica, where, with the rising sun, the Easter Eucharist was celebrated, at which the neophytes received their First Communion, and with this impressive scene Etheria's pages dealing with Christian worship at Jerusalem must be closed.

M. L. McCLURE.

THE PLACE OF WHISTLER

Ir is now nearly a year since by the death of one who was a man of genius and of profound individuality-the terms are almost synonymous—the world that talks of Art was set to wondering what it was that had been really lost. So different, so opposed, have been the comments of people who have seized a pen, that the wonder, the uncertainty, must have lasted. Who had indeed gone? Was it a Master who had brought a revelation, and who held the key to all truths; a greater painter than Velasquez; the peer, more than the peer, of Rembrandt? Or was it a mannerist, smart, brilliant, versed in the jugglery of chic-a painter and etcher sworn to eccentricity: and whom only the genuineness of his shallow opinions saved from the disgrace of a charlatan?

Really it was neither the one nor the other-but that is a fact which the slow English public is not greatly to be blamed for not having thus far discerned. Whistler was condemned on the one hand-condemned: nay, often actually ignored-by the fogey of academic' prejudice, or 'scientific' investigation, by the adorer of such beauty as may have had the luck to be consecrated by an existence of at least four hundred years-by the student who persuades himself that the garb of the Antiquary suffices for the pose of the Connoisseur. Whistler was praised-was praised without qualification on the other hand, by sectarian painters steeped in no knowledge, breathing no air, but that of the modern studio. Their opinions had no basis; their judgments no justification; they recorded their votes without claim; no franchise was theirs. And everybody who had known Whistler a little, and had an anecdote or two about him, was transformed, in imagination, into his chosen friend, and while recording, with remunerative reverence, quite the most trivial of his words and deeds, these chosen ones would have us understand that it was they who were responsible for nearly everything serious that the artist had done. Over a closed grave, was there ever before such effusive pushing or pressure? This man had known Whistler, and had served him years ago. Everything that Whistler had done excellently had been done in those years. That man was the boon confidant of later days. Before those days, nothing was known surely-before then, everything was myth. So, egotists

disputed; so, nobodies were advertised. And the true Whistler after all? To be discerned not then: not then to be indicated.

And now the dust is laid; the clamour a little hushed. It may be possible, now, to form a judgment with justice-to express it with calm.

Even those who have had only a casual acquaintance with the life performance of Whistler must have been struck with the variety of the mediums used by him for its accomplishment. It is almost easier to name those mediums or channels of expression he avoided than those that he employed. He did not work in Mezzotint. He did not work in Line Engraving. The rare, yet occasionally revived, practice of Silver-point drawing he never resorted to. But he painted in Oils; he painted in Water Colour; Pastels he made so admirably that he may even be held responsible for prettily spurring on' some heavier-footed comrades to make them badly; dainty was his touch with the Pencil; with M. Fantin-Latour he shares the honours of the happy revival of artistic Lithography; and in the art of Etching, whatever may have been his limitations, his place, by reason of his qualities, is by the side of Rembrandt and of Méryon.

What was the cause of Whistler's always enterprising, experimental employment of as many mediums as I have named-each with its own special conditions, its technical difficulties? Industry was not the cause. For upon the merely industrious he poured out his scorn. Industry may be an endowment of the duffer.' Work must excuse itself by its quality.' Apart from quality, work had for Whistler no virtue. Amusement he understood-laughtercompanionableness-indolence even. But work-mere work-Adam's curse, under the shadow of which it was foolish, if not criminal, for Man to remain. No! There were in effect two reasons that prompted Whistler to the exercise of mediums so numerous-to the acquisition of the various technical skill those mediums demanded. One of them was his possession of a deep artistic sense of the appropriate and the fitting. So much an artist was he, that hardly once in his long career did he mistake, misuse, the medium in which was to be executed with delight his given, momentary task. Another reason was his enjoyment of change. Pertinacity did not desert him, when pertinacity was wanted. But he loved change. He hated grooves. They were fatal to freshness fatal to spontaneity. Though he did not invent, he would surely have approved of the dictum, Failure is to form habits.' It was not for nothing that his emblem was the butterfly. The 'soul of things,' if you like; but at least a soul inconstant, transitory; flitting here, flitting there; and so alive. That he was volatile-in his way almost feminine-counts for a part of his charm. He had Watteau's sensitiveness, and a lighter wit. Not his-it

never could have been his-the soul of Holbein-the unshaken soul of Dürer.

Unless it be thanks only to some half dozen masterpieces, not as a painter, not as a stern draughtsman of the figure, will Whistler live by the side of the greatest artists on wall surface or canvas, or on the sheet of drawing paper. If to realise with precision either texture or anatomy was not in truth his aim, scarcely more was it his aim-though indeed it was occasionally his achievement-to sound the depths of character. Character was not the thing in life that most interested him. If it had been, Dramatic Painting and Anecdotic Painting, with their inevitable approach to some qualities of Literature, would not have annoyed him so much. I am not disparaging for a moment the painting he liked, the painting he practised--I am only trying to define what it was, and what it was not. It had first of all to be Decorative-and decorative it succeeded in being. Whatever it represented, it was suffered, tolerated, approved, by himself, on condition that it was at least an agreeable pattern of colour and line. Nature suggested it; but it was not bound by Nature. Fact was in it, in abundance-fact most penetratingly seen-but from the fetters of fact its freedom was expressly and constantly declared. The grass was too green, Boucher said to Lancret. And Lancret answered, Je suis de votre sentiment: la Nature manque d'harmonie et de séduction.' Harmony must be given, seductiveness given, Whistler opined and protested; and his art, sometimes boldly accepting Nature, sometimes exquisitely refines on and sometimes brilliantly rejects it.

But that is not the attitude of mind of a great painter generally, unless he be a decorative painter, only or mainly: unless he be, for instance, to name artists of different ideals, yet with this one thing in common, a Tintoret, a Veronese, a Pietro da Cortona, a Boucher, a Puvis de Chavannes. Of Whistler, it was constantly the attitude of mind; and among the very greatest decorative painters of the world he might have been, had he had Tintoret's opulent palette, or the majesty of Veronese's draughtsmanship, or the remote, suave dignity of the design of Puvis de Chavannes.

His principle that a pictorial work must before everything be decorative, he applied in different degrees. Frankly and simply decorative he was but on rare occasions-the greatest of them, the opportunity best offered and best seized, being the occasion that presented itself when he had his way with Mr. Leyland's diningroom, and, beginning, I believe, with the modest aim of accommodating a little the work already there to some framed work of his that was to be hung amongst it, wrought gradually, yet with a perfection as complete as if one thought had guided him from the beginning-wrought gradually the Peacock Room.' Much oftener, in cabinet picture, in framed canvas, whether definite and professed

portrait, or pleasant grouping of draped models, or vision of the Town or River in grey daylight or in the mystery of night or dawn, his painting, decorative undoubtedly, was a concession-no abandonment of principle, but a compromise that recognised the rights of Truth and of Fancy. For Fact and Beauty-so often incompatible-he found a modus vivendi. Sometimes much effort, much invention, much ingenuity-what he would have called much science'-was required to make this compromise effective: and there were always required instinct and fine taste. But sometimes of obvious, necessary effort there was very little; Nature herself sang in tune; and so we have such a picture as Mr. Alexander's 'Nocturne in Silver and Blue,' Mr. McCulloch's Valparaiso Harbour,' or the silvery and brown-grey vision of London in Ice.'

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I am not sure that Nature sang in tune' when she created Thomas Carlyle-or was the fault that of circumstances? Anyhow it is instructive to reflect upon the effort that was needed, that was made, that was finely concealed, when Mr. Whistler built up gradually that Carlyle portrait whose pathetic simplicity is the adornment of Glasgow. I hope the Corporation of Glasgow, which had the wisdom to buy the portrait, has had the wisdom to buy lately a first drawing for it, that was exhibited, this winter, at the Goupil Gallery, so that the contrast may for students be discernible between the Carlyle of the first impression, the Carlyle of obvious fact, the prosaic Carlyle-a 'grave liver,' indeed, in Wordsworth's phrase, but mainly still the thoughtful peasant-and the Carlyle of the great portrait-painter's poetry, the Carlyle of Whistler's completed vision. And because I have said already that Character was not the thing in which Whistler was chiefly interested, I am the more anxious to protest that when it did interest him his understanding of it was profound. His portrait of his Motherlodged happily in the Luxembourg-is a masterpiece of refinement and quietude, resignation and reverie. When character interested him, it was generally either the naïveté or pretty pensiveness of Youth, or the accumulated experience, the wisdom and the tenderness, of an Age that still stops short of a too visible decay. For the first, see the 'Little Rose of Lyme Regis,' or the etching of 'Fanny Leyland.' For the last, see the sprightly elderliness of the Mère Gérard '—it is in an etching again-and the etching of 'La Vieille aux Loques,' which it is true is the record of a countenance and figure into which the sadness of some incapacity—be it only that of deep fatigue-has already stolen. The Master Smith of Lyme Regis' a brawny being, painted with the full sympathy of any great artist for any excellent craftsman-is an instance of Whistler's rarer but still occasional interest in the character of middle-aged people who, while he paints them, are yet in the stress and in the noonday heat of life.