Whistler was a great artist in the technical sense; that is, he learned to put paint on canvas in such a way as to convey an impression of reality, not merely physical but emotional and spiritual. He was a terrific worker, as any man must be to succeed in the fierce competition of modern life. He took his art with seriousness; and it happened that twice in his lifetime something lifted him above the empty theories in which he gloried. The first time was when he painted his mother. Here was a gentle, sensitive, sweet-faced, devout Presbyterian old lady, with whom all his childhood memories were bound up; he painted her sitting with her hands in her lap, and her gray hair brushed down and covered with an old-fashioned lace cap. He called it “Arrangement in Black and Gray”; and that is all right, because black and gray are old lady’s colors. But he would have described the painting even better if he had given it a moral title: “Arrangement in Reverence and Affection.” And then came Carlyle; poor, bewildered, dyspeptic, struggling old prophet from Scotland, he looked at Whistler’s portrait of his mother and loved it, and consented to let the painter do the same thing for him. So here is another study, posed in the same way, and called “Arrangement in Black and Gray,” instead of “Arrangement in Pity and Pathos.” These two pictures have human feeling and moral meaning; therefore they are the two which have been reproduced, and which everybody knows and loves. That is the answer to Whistler’s art theories; but of course it is an answer which he himself would have scorned--he would have made a witticism on it, and got out a new edition of “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.” “This victory is not yours,” says Mrs. Ogi. “It is Death’s.” CHAPTER XCVII THE DUEL OF WIT Some years ago a story was told me concerning a certain eminent man in England. This man came from the common people; he possesses one of the finest minds in England, and he is the champion of all things generous and free in letters and life. The lady who told me the story, herself a well-known novelist, was writing about the particular section of society from which this man sprung, and in which he had lived his boyhood; she needed an item of local color, and asked him how such people pronounce a certain word. The man flushed, and demanded: “How should I know?” I thought this story one of the most awful I had ever heard; and the lady novelist was shocked when she saw how I took it, for she had not meant to tell anything so serious about her friend. She tried to explain to me, it wasn’t really so bad as it seemed; the pressure of caste feeling is so strong in England that a man is irresistibly driven to cover up his humiliating past.