“You know of no reason why he should not have taken it all good-naturedly?”—“No. I thought it might have drawn from him something funny, something droll, to which I could have replied in kind. But, of course, a letter like his puts a reply out of the question. I think he must have been quite out of sorts to have allowed himself to get so angered.” “I believe Mr. Whistler has himself said things which the objects of them have not particularly relished!” “Why, he has gone about all his life in England making unkind remarks and publishing them. Here is a little book of his, _The Gentle Art of making Enemies_, and I am one of his victims. It is not very terrible what he says. It is rather droll. Listen! ‘Mr. du Maurier and Mr. Wilde, happening to meet in the rooms where Mr. Whistler was {168} holding his first exhibition of Venice jottings, the latter brought the two face to face, and, taking each by the arm, inquired, “I say, which one of you two invented the other, eh?”’ The obvious retort to that on my part would have been that if he did not take care I would invent him, but he had slipped away before either of us could get a word out. This is really too small a matter to refer to; but the explanation of this bit of drollery of Mr. Whistler’s is that it suggested that I was unknown until I began to draw Postlethwaite, the æsthetic character, out of whom I got some fun. Postlethwaite was said to be Mr. Oscar Wilde, but the character was founded, not on one person at all, but a whole school. As a matter of fact, I had been drawing for _Punch_ twenty years before the invention of Postlethwaite. However, that was Mr. Whistler’s little joke, and one would have thought that if he made jokes about me, he might have expected me to play the same game upon him without anticipating that I should hurt his feelings. Then Mr. Whistler implies that I am a foul friend, stating that I have thought a foul friend a finer fellow than an open enemy. I am neither his friend nor his enemy. I am a great admirer of his genius and his wit; but I cannot say that I could call myself his friend for thirty years past. We were intimate in the old days, but that is all. No, his whole letter is incomprehensible to me. Of course, he has been embittered through life, by reason of his genius not being recognised at its full value by the wide public, and it certainly has not. This circumstance, and possibly illness, may account for the leave he has taken of good manners. He talks of my pent-up envy and malice. I must ask you to believe that I am not {169} such a beast as that. I have no occasion either for malice or for envy, and, as I say, I should never have written even what I have, had I imagined it would give Mr. Whistler pain.”