His published writings, as one reads them to-day, are extravagantly brilliant, but hardly sincere, even from a Whistlerian point of view. Take from the _Ten O’Clock_, for instance, the oft-quoted sentence: “There never was an artistic period, there never was an art-loving nation.” A measure of truth lies under that, but Whistler knew that he exaggerated it, overstated it. Again the statement that “Art happens--no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about, and puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy and coarse farce.” Here is another half-truth, but so arbitrarily insisted upon that one infers that art is really an isolated and unrelated phenomenon on the earth. Whistler knew better than that. Nothing “happens” in this world. There is a cause for every effect. Once more the remark about “the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.” But he himself never was so foolish as to believe such nonsense. It was merely a rococo way of saying that art could not handle a sunset in a satisfactory manner, and that his art, in particular, preferred a twilight or a midnight. The _Ten O’Clock_ indeed explains Whistler’s art better than any other, and, of course, that was why it was written. His own limitations and necessities could not have been better set forth than by the sentence: “Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong.” He wanted to put a conventionalized nature into a decorative pattern, and he justified it by saying that a realistic nature is “usually wrong.” It is somewhat of a piece with his remark that “there are too many trees in the country.” There were--for Whistler’s art. But it is useless to point out the superficial in the Whistler arguments--the falseness of analogy, for instance, in comparing national art with national mathematics. That statement was made to produce a laugh, and it succeeded. It is even stupid to point out the want of logic or historical truth in the _Ten O’Clock_. One might as well try to break Whistler’s own butterfly on a wheel. The lecture was written and delivered to astonish the natives. And it did. It was a charming bit of extravagance, beautifully written for platform delivery, and a delightful piece of literature for fireside reading. Had it been logical, temperate, well-guarded in its utterances, it would have fallen flat. It fitted the occasion, was a work of art in itself, and no more “happened” than Whistler’s pictures and etchings.