If the “Gentle Art” did not exist as it does in its harmony in brown, English literature would lack a volume which is in itself a bit of art and unique of its kind. There is nothing at all like it, and only Whistler could have done it. The book is a perfect expression of one side of his many-sided and extraordinary personality, and as such is therefore a work of art, and, at the same time, material which cannot be spared if the man is to be thoroughly understood; but it reveals the side which is least worth understanding, it accentuates traits which are inconsequential, and it gives the public an entirely erroneous impression, because the public find it easy to buy and read the book, but difficult to so much as see the pictures, and quite impossible to understand them when they do see them. In Whistler’s life the writing of the few lines and the putting together of the matter contained in the “Gentle Art” occupied an almost infinitesimal fraction of his leisure hours, whereas for fifty years he painted, etched, and lithographed industriously; yet, so far as the public of England and America is concerned, his controversies overshadow his art; while to the French, who happily could not read the book, he is known only as an artist. * * * * * Criticism of art afforded Whistler a world of amusement, and the art critic was his especial aversion. “That writers should destroy writings to the benefit of writing” seemed to him just, but that writers should criticise painting seemed to him altogether illogical. And he quotes the critic of the _Times_, who said of Velasquez’s “Las Menimas” that it was “slovenly in execution, poor in color,--being little but a combination of neutral grays and ugly in its forms.” And he shows how the same great critic praised a Turner that turned out to be no Turner. When this particular critic died, a few years ago, Whistler sorrowfully said, “I have hardly a warm personal enemy left.” And he showed how one said that Daubigny had neither drawing nor color, and another that the works of Corot to the first impression of an Englishman “are the sketches of an amateur,” and another that everything Courbet touches “becomes unpleasant.” All these by the most eminent critics in the land,--men whose say-so in days gone by made and unmade, for the time being, the reputations of artists. And he grouped together a number of Ruskin’s dogmatic utterances, where in his enthusiasm for certain men he condemned others who were infinitely superior,--as, for instance, where he praises without limitations the work of the forgotten Prout, and says that Rembrandt’s colors are wrong from beginning to end, and that “Vulgarity, dulness, or impiety will indeed always express themselves through art in brown and gray, as in Rembrandt;” and again where he places Rubens above Titian and Raphael, and compares an unknown Mulready with Albert Dürer, to the disadvantage of the latter.