The Gentle Art of Making Enemies Part 18

"All of which gems, I am sincerely thankful to say, I cannot appreciate."

"As we have hinted, the series does not represent any Venice that we much care to remember; for who wants to remember the degradation of what has been n.o.ble, the foulness of what has been fair?"

_'Arry[32] in the "Times."_

[Note 32: _REFLECTION:_

The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them because he knoweth not how to go to the City.

[Ill.u.s.tration]]

"Disastrous failures."--_F. Wedmore._

"Failures that are complete and failures that are partial."--_F.

Wedmore._

"A publicity rarely bestowed upon failures at all."

_F. Wedmore, Nineteenth Century._

[Sidenote:

_"Voila ce que l'on dit de moi Dans la Gazette de Hollande."_]

"Therefore is judgment far from us, neither doth justice overtake us. We wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness."

"We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes; we stumble at noonday as in the night."

"We roar all like bears."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_Taking the Bait_

[Sidenote: _The Academy_, Feb. 24, 1883.]

By the simple process of applying snippets of published sentences to works of art to which the original comments were never meant to have reference, and sometimes, too, by lively misquotation--as when a writer who "did not wish to understate" Mr. Whistler's merit is made to say he "did not wish to understand" it, Mr. Whistler has counted on good-humouredly confounding criticism. He has entertained but not persuaded; and if his literary efforts with the scissors and the paste-pot might be taken with any seriousness we should have to rebuke him for his feat. But we are far from doing so. He desired, it seems, to say that he and Velasquez were both above criticism. An artist in literature would have said it in fewer words; but indulgence may fairly be granted to the less a.s.sured methods of an amateur in authorship.

F. WEDMORE.

_An Apology_

[Sidenote: _The World_, Feb. 28, 1883.]

Atlas--There are those, they tell me, who have the approval of the people--and live! For them the _succes d'estime_; for me, O Atlas, the _succes d'execration_--the only tribute possible from the Mob to the Master! This I have now n.o.bly achieved. _Glissons!_ In the hour of my triumph let me not neglect my ambulance.

Mr. Frederick Wedmore--a critic--one of the wounded--complains that by dexterously subst.i.tuting "understand" for "understate," I have dealt unfairly by him, and wrongly rendered his writing. Let me hasten to acknowledge the error, and apologise. My carelessness is culpable, and the misprint without excuse; for naturally I have all along known, and the typographer should have been duly warned, that with Mr. Wedmore, as with his brethren, it is always a matter of understating, and not at all one of understanding.

_Quant aux autres_--well, with the exception of "'Arry," who really is dead, they will recover. Scalped and disfigured, they are not mortally hurt; and--would you believe it?--possessed with an infinite capacity for continuing, they have already returned, nothing doubting, to their limited literature, of which I have exhausted the stock.--Yours, _en pa.s.sant_,

Chelsea.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_"Jeux Innocents" in t.i.te Street_

[Sidenote: _The World_, Dec. 26, 1883.]

Mr. Whistler's final breakfast of the year was given on Sunday last.

The hospitable master has fresh wonders in store for his friends in the new year; for, not content with treating his next-door critic after the manner that Portuguese sailors treat the Apostle Judas at Easter-tide, he is said to have perfected a new instrument of torture.

This invention is of the nature of a camera obscura, whereby, by a crafty "arrangement" of reflectors, he promises to display in his own studio, to his friends, "'Arry at the White House," under all the appropriate circ.u.mstances that might be expected of a "Celebrity at Home."

ATLAS.

_A Line from the Lands End_

[Sidenote: _The World_, Jan. 2, 1884.]

Delightful! Atlas--I have read here, to the idle miners--culture in their manners curiously, at this season, blended with intoxication--your brilliant and graphic description of 'Arry at the other end of my arrangement in telescopic lenses.

The sensitive sons of the Cornish caves, by instinct refined, revel in the writhing of the resurrected 'Arry.

Our natures are evidently of the same dainty brutality. Cruelty to the critic after demise, is a revelation, and the story of 'Arry pursued with post-mortem, and, for Sunday demonstration, kept by galvanism from his grave, is to them most fascinating.

I have, my sympathetic Atlas, the success that might have been Edgar Poe's, could he have read to such an audience the horrible "Case of Mr. Waldemar."