While his affectations in art, his “harmonies,” “symphonies” and “arrangements” in blue and gold, and gray and green, and so on _ad nauseam_, might seem to set him down among the Barnums of art, with the poseurs of the æsthetic, Whistler’s work shows him to be a man of undoubted genius, a most uncomfortable and irritating genius perhaps, but still a genius whose brilliancy is flawed by his aggressive ego-mania. When we have discounted all the theatrical “isms” in which he frames his art, we are compelled to recognize the fact that he is an artist whose work will live. No ordinary man, no merely artistic charlatan, could make the impression on the age that Whistler has done. Whistler is a writer of deliciously clever and disagreeable things; he has a literary quality whose acidity has etched his personality on this decade; he is a brilliant talker, overflowing with quirk and bon mot, satire and repartee, alert and resourceful in the battle of wits, and he is easily the central figure at the social functions he honors, outshining all other lights, out-roaring other lions, a meteor among the stars. While English in his remote racial root, his forbears lived long enough in Ulster to extract from the soil and atmosphere of Ireland that Celtic wit and pugnacity, that brilliance and originality so characteristic of the man. The transplantation of his immediate ancestors to American soil added to the mental celerity and nervous alertness of his fiber, giving to his personality that Gaelic flavor which the English-speaking races acquire under our skies in sloughing off the heavy heritage of insularity of the land of fogs. Great talents are seldom transmitted from one generation to another, yet certain characteristics which are physiological rather than psychological, may mark the branches of a common family tree. Whistler owes his intellectual qualities to his racial fiber, to his mixture of blood and the changing environments of his ancestors; they are in fact highly developed racial characteristics, while his artistic instincts—raised in him to the plane of genius—are a family inheritance. His wit, humor and mental dynamics he owes to his Irish fathers; his merciless mockery, his acidulous aggressiveness, his satirical sardonism, are the Calvinism of his Scottish strain run to seed and sprouting in the soil of Bohemia: a sparkling champagne, which has been spoiled with vinegar. The son of a great father, standing in the glare of a great light, has his own brilliance minimized and is deprived of that natural light and shade so necessary to his artistic proportion. If he be great himself, his contemporaries will institute comparisons that are ever odious, unless their greatness be in different directions. On the other hand, when the son is great his glory only adds to the aureole of the great father.