James McNeill Whistler wrote a book; he gave it a title: “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies as Pleasingly Exemplified in Many Instances, Wherein the Serious Ones of this Earth, Carefully Exasperated, Have Been Prettily Spurred on to Unseemliness and Indiscretion, While Overcome by an Undue Sense of Right.” The pages of this book are covered with butterflies which the painter adopted as the signature for his work. These butterflies are defiant, care-free, insolent; manifestly, some one has taken great pains with them, and with the volume through which they flutter. Studying it, we learn what kind of man it takes to succeed as a leisure-class portrait-painter. Whistler was born in Boston, his father being a major in the United States Army. We have seen him “let out” from West Point; he was “deficient in chemistry.” He went to Paris and lived the Bohemian student life for some years, and imbibed those ideas concerning the non-moral nature of art, which are a symptom of the disintegration of our ruling classes. Whistler settled in London. He was unknown and an American; he had new ideas about painting, and the Royal Academy would have nothing to do with him, so he had to fight his way. A fiery little man, with wavy black locks and one very singular white lock over his forehead, he trained his eyebrows to stand out fiercely, and wore a little imperial and a monocle, and carried a very long cane, and a white chrysanthemum always in his buttonhole. He cultivated truculence, and his life was a succession of conspicuous libel suits and public quarrels, kept alive by letters to the newspapers. To a little group of his intimates Whistler could be a charming companion and host; but when he went out into the world, he put on armor like a hard-shelled crab, and was ready to bite the head off the first person who got in his way. He would hit a man in the eye for differing with him indiscreetly; once in a theater he beat a critic over the head with his cane. In deadly seriousness he challenged George Moore to a duel, and appointed seconds, and published Moore’s failure to reply. Because he was dissatisfied with the price paid him for the portrait of a certain lady, he painted out the lady’s face. He undertook to decorate a dining-room for a wealthy shipowner, and became fascinated with the idea of covering walls and ceiling with an endless number of peacocks in gold and blue. He worked over this in a frenzy for months. The shipowner wanted his house, but could not have it; Whistler turned it into an art gallery, and brought the critics as to a public show. The man had agreed to pay five hundred guineas for the decorating; in consideration of the unforeseen amount of work, he raised the price to a thousand. But Whistler insisted upon two thousand, and flew into a furious rage with the man, and carried the row into the newspapers, and painted most odious caricatures of the man and exhibited them publicly.