What is the meaning of this art doctrine so defiantly enunciated? The answer is, it is an extension of the artist’s egotism; the snobbery of his profession and his caste, in every way and from every point of view an anti-social and predatory thing. Here we are in London, the heart and brain of the British Empire, at that time the greatest agency of exploitation in the world. Here is wealth and fashion, representing the wrung-out sweat and blood, not merely of enslaved British workers, but of enslaved hundreds of millions of black and brown and yellow races. Here dwell the masters, and they wish to flaunt their splendor; heedless of the groans and the agony, the clamor of all the misery of mankind, they command a dining-room painted over with gold and blue peacocks, or hung with portraits of their splendid predatory selves and their lovely parasitic females. And here come the swarms of painters competing for their attention, seeking to flatter their vanity and awe their ignorance. One hornet a little more venomous than the rest is able to impress his hornetry upon them, to stir their greed by the possibility that his paintings may some day be sold for thousands of pounds. So they decide to have themselves “done” by this strange genius. They come to his studio and spend months of torment standing or sitting for him, while he fusses and frets, and paints and wipes out and paints again, taking infinite pains to see that the ladies’ dresses are made of exactly the right quality of muslin, cut and stitched in exactly the right way--because there is one certain precise kind of muslin dress which is art, and any other kind is something else. All this is called “beauty”; all this has laws, so Whistler tells us, as definite and determinable as the laws of physics or chemistry. Beauty is a thing permanent and immortal, and independent of all other qualities--morality, justice, health, truth, honesty. The answer is: all this is poisonous nonsense, handed out to the rich by those who exploit their vanity. Art without morality is simply art produced for patrons who have no morality by artists who have no morality. As to the permanence of such art, the answer is that its standards are at every moment subject to the attack of more clever devisers of new forms of folly and pretense. The proper way to cut a muslin dress today is an absurd way to cut it tomorrow; and the same applies to harmonies of color and outlines of form. The Turks cherish fatness in women, because they like to be comfortable in their harems; the early Christians thought that emaciation was beautiful, because it prepared them for heaven; Whistler, wishing to flatter the aristocratic conceit of his patrons, paints them abnormally tall and lean, because that is the snobbish notion in fashion at the moment.