The Painter’s Poetry

Whistler made a specialty of the night. It was his habit to stroll along the river Thames in moonlight, observing the effects of heavy fog cloaking the warehouses that lined the water. After gazing at a scene for some passage of time, he would turn his back or close his eyes and recite the particulars to a companion charged with correcting lapses in his visual recollection. In the studio the next day, or even later, once his memory was sufficiently indistinct, Whistler would commit his lingering impressions to canvas, painting the dim, subdued, nearly abstract compositions he called Nocturnes.

In much the same way, Whistler composed and rehearsed the "Ten O'Clock," an oration that took place in a London auditorium on a cold winter's night in 1885. To practice, he would pace the solitary riverbank in the nocturnal environment that suited him best, testing his memory of the manuscript as he practiced projecting his voice and pausing for dramatic effect. The ideas Whistler rehearsed were not new—they had supported his artistic practice for years—but they had never been presented all at once, orderly and elegant, before a spellbound audience. The title itself, which alluded to the daring hour of the premiere performance, was a sort of synecdoche of the night, lending the lecture an aura of sophistication laced with eccentricity. Whistler insisted on retaining it even when the address was repeated at a more conventional time, for the cryptic title announced a break with expectation. "Every dull bat and beetle spouts at eight o'clock," Whistler is supposed to have said. He would talk at the ten, making an occasion of an event.[1]

That polished performance was the first of two Ten O'Clocks—the spoken, unpublished one, with the title in quotation marks. As a speech, it vanished as soon as the words were spoken, never again to be voiced or heard in exactly the same way. A manuscript copy survives, but we have no way of knowing how closely Whistler kept to his script. Like an actor, he learned his speech by heart, creating the uncanny sense that his carefully crafted address was delivered extemporaneously. Occasional asides and elaborations (also scripted) added to the illusion that he was thinking up his byzantine sentences as he went along. Although recited rather than read, the "Ten O'Clock" was technically a lecture—"an institutionalized holding of the floor," as Erving Goffmann defines it, "in which one speaker imparts his views on a subject."[2] Nevertheless, the "Ten O'Clock" was never identified as such in any of the publicity surrounding its performance, and we are told that Whistler "would not hear of his remarks being called a 'lecture.'"[3] He must have considered the word too dour and pedantic—certainly too pedestrian—to convey the spritely elegance of his monologue.

Whistler also would have objected to the academic connotations of the term. The purpose of his presentation was not to educate the members of the audience but to persuade them to adopt his point of view and modify their behavior accordingly. In aiming to influence rather than instruct, the "Ten O'Clock" comes closer to a sermon, as suggested by Whistler's proclamation, in the opening line, that he appeared on the platform "in the character of The Preacher." Pulpit oratory was the kind of public speaking Whistler knew best: as a child he had been compelled to suffer through sermons in church, sometimes three times a week, and in the early 1860s, when his devout mother took up residence with him in London, he accompanied her to Christ's Church, Chelsea, to listen to "an Evangelical teacher" named Mr. Robinson.[4] With the "Ten O'Clock," Whistler slipped easily into the character and conventions of the sermon, enumerating the sins of his congregants before concluding with the promise of a Second Coming—the messianic appearance, in this case, of the next true artist.

As a preacher, or a prophet, with a serious message to impart, Whistler adopted the highest of the rhetorical styles. This was partly a matter of decorum: if the "Ten O'Clock" had been composed in a lower register, the subject—art—might have been taken as an everyday thing, available to all, and the artist as an ordinary being, no different from the common man. The grandiloquent prose occasionally modulates into the middle style—still mannered but less ornate—in passages, for instance, where Whistler discourses on the "middlemen" of art, non-artist professionals in the art world. There are times, too, when he employs antiquated words and phraseology to mock the preoccupation with the past that characterized the populist manifestation of aestheticism known as the Aesthetic Movement. When talking about art, however—whom he figures as a goddess—Whistler aims for numinosity, which demands a level of language high above the everyday.

As a child of the nineteenth century, Whistler would have studied classical rhetoric in school. He may have forgotten the Greek and Latin nomenclature, but he remembered the sound of the various schemes, reinforced by his familiarity with the King James Bible. In the "Ten O'Clock," Whistler unleashes every rhetorical device in his repertoire—periodic and hypotactic sentences, metaphors and personifications, abundant alliteration, hyperbole and irony, and such figures as anaphora (repeating a word at the start of successive clauses), asyndeton (dispensing with conjunctions), and especially anastrophe (inverting the normal word order). This grand style, studded with Latinate words and ingenious epithets, is decidedly undemocratic, appropriate for articulating a theory of the aristocracy of art.

To modern ears (and some Victorian ones), the "Ten O'Clock" sounds contrived and curiously encumbered with the ornament that Whistler expunged from his visual style. Yet the extravagant oratory may be seen as a translation into words of the privileging of form that distinguishes his visual art. Whistler makes rhetorical devices obvious in the "Ten O'Clock" in the same way he allows the weave of the canvas to show through the paint in a Nocturne—as a way of calling attention to the surface, to defeating the "habit" he recognized in his contemporaries of looking "not at a picture, but through it." "There is no self-revelation" in Whistler's writing, as James Laver noted, "but a hard metallic surface below which it is impossible to penetrate."[5]

One problem with appreciating the lecture today is that we know it only as a printed text—the second, published Ten O'Clock, with the title in italics. The booklet, published toward the end of May 1888, is neither an exact transcript of the original performance nor an altogether original work of art but something like the silhouette of an ephemeral event. Although the idiosyncratic punctuation of the extant manuscript allows us to imagine the cadences of Whistler's speech and the extent of his pauses, many of the graphical indicators were regularized when the words were set in type—expressive dashes converted to standard commas, and question marks and periods solidly inserted at the ends of sentences originally left hanging in the air. On the printed page, the sentences are arranged in conventional prose style, with blocks of justified text interrupted only by the indents marking paragraphs and occasional, expansive passages of empty white space.

In the published text, therefore, nearly every indication of orality has been expunged, encouraging us to read, and to judge, the "Ten O'Clock" lecture as a prose essay. Yet the standards of written prose do not govern an oration: we are reminded of Whistler's disdain of critics who reviewed paintings as though they were novels. The primary purpose of prose, as one contemporary writer insisted, is to get a meaning across: "The less a prose-writer thinks about words the better. . . . They are subservient to the meaning, and the most perfect prose style is the one which calls least attention to itself."[6] But the "Ten O'Clock," which was always intended to be listened to, depends at least as much on sound as sense. The meaning is there, but secondarily, like the subject matter of Whistler's paintings, made subordinate in their titles to their form: Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother, for example, or Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge.

In reading the "Ten O'Clock," the rhetorical schemes are easier to identify and assimilate if the conventions of prose typography are set aside:

This man,

who took no joy in the ways of his brethren—

who cared not for conquest,

and fretted in the field—

this designer of quaint-patterns—

this deviser of the beautiful—

who perceived in Nature about him curious curvings,

as faces are seen in the fire—

this dreamer apart,

was the first artist.

Prose passages that seem convoluted and confused (or simply extravagantly punctuated) are rendered intelligible when recast on the page. Similarly, with a change in formatting, the poetic structure of Whistler's address becomes apparent:

In the citron wing of the pale butterfly

With its dainty spots of orange

He sees before him the stately halls of fair gold

With their slender saffron pillars

And is taught how the delicate drawing high upon the walls

Shall be traced in tender tones of orpiment

And repeated by the base in notes of graver hue.

In fact, the lecture was at least partly conceived as a poem, as Whistler allowed to Stéphane Mallarmé, the poet who provided the French translation.[7]

It can be beneficial, then, to see even the most famously poetic passage in the "Ten O'Clock" printed as poetry. Its winsome clauses and lilting cadences become conspicuous when the lines are set as verse:

And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil

And the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky

And the tall chimneys become campanili

And the warehouses are palaces in the night

And the whole city hangs in the heavens

And fairy-land is before us—

Then the wayfarer hastens home

The working man and the cultured one

The wise man and the one of pleasure

Cease to understand as they have ceased to see

And Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune

Sings her exquisite song to the artist alone

Her son and her master—

Her son in that he loves her

Her master in that he knows her.

When seen this way, it is nearly impossible to consider the "Ten O'Clock" as expository writing with a utilitarian purpose, and absurd to evaluate it according to the conventional standards of written prose: transparency, concision, and simplicity. Altering the pattern of the words on the page leads us to expect something different from the text. We are neither surprised nor dismayed to encounter opacity, the quality that keeps our attention fixed on the surface, on the words themselves; and the ambiguity that descends upon the "Ten O'Clock" like a veil of fog becomes, after all, a positive value. As Mary Ann Caws acknowledges, the "Ten O'Clock" is "an undeniably superb example of an extended, epic prose poem. It must represent, even to a disbeliever in Whistler's genius, and there are some, one of the most remarkable pieces ever written by a visual artist."[8]

[1] "More Personal and Social Notes," New York Tribune, 25 Jan 1885, 3.

[2] Erving Goffman Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 165.

[3] Helen Lenoir quoted in "Interview with a Theatrical Manageress," South Australian Weekly Chronicle, 8 Aug 1885, 5.

[4] Anna Whistler to James H. Gamble, 10-11 Feb 1864, GUW 06522.

[5] James Laver, Whistler (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 233.

[6] "Some Tendencies of Prose Style," Edinburgh Review 190 (Oct 1899): 364.

[7] See Whistler to Stéphane Mallarmé, 10 May 1888, Bibl. Jacques Doucet, in Nigel Thorp, "Close to Perfection: Whistler sets out his views on art to his translator Stéphane Mallarmé," unpublished article, 2015.

[8] Mary Ann Caws, "Translation and the Art of Friendship: Signed Mallarmé & Whistler," Yearbook of Comparative & General Literature 42 (1994), 119-20.