These things it pleased Whistler to do, and he has done them with rare piquancy in the “Gentle Art.” If what is contained therein savors in aught of malice, let it be remembered that public, critics, painters were snapping at his heels during the years that he was doing the very work which public, critics, and painters now worship, and a lesser man would have yielded to the storm of adverse opinion and ridicule. With the exception of a few friends and admirers, he was absolutely without support during the period when an artist most needs encouragement. It is everlastingly to his credit that neither the ridicule of others--“the voice of the nation”--nor his own necessities, and they pressed heavily at times, caused him to swerve a hair’s breadth from what he believed to be worth doing in art. Nearly every great artist of whom we have any record has at one time or another in his career yielded to the temptation--frequently under pressure of dire necessity--to do something that would sell. No such reproach can be laid at Whistler’s door. * * * * * The galled critics complained that he did not treat them fairly,--that he selected small excerpts from voluminous essays; whereas, if he had reprinted the essays entire, language apparently plain would have been reversed in meaning. For instance, he of the _Times_, who had written of Velasquez, complained that the quotation gave “exactly the opposite impression to that which the article, taken as a whole, conveys.” It must have been an extraordinary article to transform what was quoted into praise; but Whistler, in reply, said: “Why squabble over your little article? You _did_ print what I quote, you know, Tom; and it is surely unimportant what more you may have written of the Master. That you should have written anything at all is your crime.” Ruskin never complained of anything Whistler wrote. The one utterance which caused the suit for libel was probably the first and last that passed his lips. The eloquent old man never did pay very much attention to what others thought of him; he was too busy with his own dreams and fancies. He did write what Whistler quoted about Rembrandt, but the whole passage is a lament over the lack of appreciation of color, and is as follows: