Is the art of Whistler a brave,
barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with
the spirit of a schoolboy? . . . Out of America has come a sweet and
startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man." This sweet
and startling cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that Mr.
Chesterton has chosen to illustrate his ludicrous paradox, the two
American geniuses who have lived outside their own country, absorbed the
art ideals of the older, more sophisticated civilizations, and lost
touch with the youthful spirit, the still almost barbaric violence, the
ongoing rush and progress of America. It is worthy of remark that Mr.
James has always maintained that Mark Twain was capable of amusing only
very primitive persons; and Whistler, with his acid _diablerie_, was
wholly alien in spirit to the boisterous humour of Mark Twain. That
other brilliant but incoherent interpreter of American life, Mr. Charles
Whibley, bound to the presupposed paradox of America's pathetic
senescence and total deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case
in the vehement assertion that America's greatest national interpreter
is--Mark Twain!
To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost and exclusively, the
humorist--with his shrieking Philistinism, his dominant sense for the
colossally incongruous, his spontaneous faculty for staggering,
ludicrous contrast.
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