Profoundly speaking, color has no other object than to please the eye. The story should be told, the moral pointed, in black and white. The use of color imitatively, or to accentuate the characterization, is as base as the use of sound imitatively. Color is to the eye precisely what sound is to the ear, and the highest use to which either can be put is the production of pure, not to say abstract, harmonies for the satisfaction of its respective sense. * * * * * As long ago as 1868 Swinburne, in a pamphlet on the Royal Academy exhibition of that year, said: “No task is harder than this translation from color into speech, when the speech must be so hoarse and feeble, when the color is so subtle and sublime. Music and verse might strike some string accordant in sound to such painting, but a version such as this is a psalm of Tate’s to a psalm of David’s. In all of the main strings touched are certain varying chords of blue and white, not without interludes of the bright and tender tones of floral purple or red. They all have immediate beauty, they all give the delight of natural things; they seem to have grown as a flower grows, not in any forcing house of ingenious and laborious cunning. This is, in my eyes, a special quality of Mr. Whistler’s genius; a freshness and fulness of the loveliest life of things, with a high, clear power upon them which seems to educe a picture as the sun does a blossom or a fruit.” In language too plain for the slightest misunderstanding he has himself told the world precisely what he meant his pictures to be, but the world will not take him at his word. Nearly thirty years ago, when the people wondered at his calling his works “symphonies,” “arrangements,” “harmonies,” and “nocturnes,” he wrote: “The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell. “My picture of a ‘Harmony in Gray and Gold’ is an illustration of my meaning,--a snow-scene with a single black figure and a lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know is that my combination of gray and gold is the basis of the picture. Now, this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp. “They say, ‘Why not call it “Trotty Veck,” and sell it for a round harmony of golden guineas?’ naively acknowledging that without baptism there is no ... market!’”[32] And farther on he said: “As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or color. “The great musicians knew this. Beethoven and the rest wrote music,--simply music; symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that.