And what of this modernity? Intrinsically it is not a new thing, though taking on some special colour from its particular time of reappearance, being indeed a culture of manners rather than of convictions. It is analytical, for it is part of, or compelled by, the contemporary scientific movement; it is intolerant of restraint, except such as it chooses for itself; is callous when not personally interested, and finds its interest in subtleties; its faith is self-found and felt to be honoured by the discovery; in scope not so much broad and embracing as diffused and discriminating; for depth, it substitutes a carefulness about many things, and for sincerity a nice tactfulness. It is polished, dainty in taste and manners, seeking the essence of life in its most varified appeal to the senses, even sometimes in abnormal depravity. It is, in fact, the very antithesis of brawn and muscle, of hard and wholesome thinking, of the _bourgeoisie_ and Philistinism, through which a comfortable world is provided for modernity to bask in, either as a rarely delicate exotic or a upas tree. While Whistler as a man, in his attitude toward the world, has been the Beau Brummel of this nineteenth-century modernity, he has kept his art in a beautiful isolation, selecting for it only the choicest contributions of the spirit of the age and impressing upon them the fine distinction of his unique personality. Thus, while some of his contemporaries in the search for new sensations pushed their analysis into the gutter, his work has been invariably fragrant and pure. He has been a consistent apostle of beauty, of the sane and normal type of it. I do not mean beauty as it is commonly understood, for he has had his very personal ideas and his own modes of reaching them; but that the source in which he has always looked for them has been sane and normal; so that, amid the craving for new sensations and for new forms of expression, by which, like others, he has been affected, and with a taste also for notoriety and for shocking the vulgar, he has never in his art deviated from the sweet and wholesome. Nor has he lived without a strong faith. He has believed in himself without reservation, and just as absolutely in his art as he has formulated it. There is one god, and Whistler is its prophet; a creed narrow and intolerant, but abundantly justified, if you accept his god, which, again, is Whistler--the spiritual _ego_ within him to which all his life he has tried to give an adequate expression.