And yet the final significance of the nocturne in the world of art is still an open question. Time alone can decide its value. The rest is mere hypothesis. Many--and I only talk of people who understand--argue that despite its perfection, the nocturne represents a minor phase of art. Of course, a nocturne, no matter how beautiful, cannot compete in importance with the "Portrait of Carlyle," or "The Artist's Mother." Size does not mean much, but it means something. A small painting can be as exquisite in workmanship as a large one, but it can never rise to the same dignity of expression. A frescoe by Chavannes would lose much if executed in the size of the average easel picture.
But the nocturne stands for something in modern art which lends it special importance, aside of all workmanship and beauty of pictorial treatment. It represents a return to the art of painting for painting's sake. Every art, may it be music, poetry, dancing, sculpture or painting, has its own peculiar technique, which the technically ignorant person cannot appreciate. Poetry which has no formal conventions is inconceivable. And, in a similar manner, painting has the charm of texture and brushwork, the charm of how the paint is actually put on and displayed on the canvas. The æsthetic satisfaction derived from an art is in exact proportion to one's knowledge of the art's technique.
This largely explains the general public's indifference to art. And the everlasting fight between the artist and the public has been on these lines. The plea of the modern experimentist that all poetry of painting should be in the paint, which also Whistler advanced, is a just one if not carried to extremes. Absolute paucity of idea is as unfavourable as story-telling. The intrinsic beauty of a painting lies in the method of painting, and the only guide for the painter is colour and the general arrangement--not a method learned by rote, not an arrangement garroted by a thousand rules which others have invented, but that personal style or rhythm which is inveterately the painter's own. So Whistler's style is beautiful because it is personal. His revolt was against story-telling, against the genre pictures, which adulterated painting with the skill of the novel writer. It is for future æsthetics to decide whether the introduction of musical ideals is not just as dangerous as the intermixture of any other art. There is no doubt, however, that the new combination grants a higher pleasure to the connoisseur at present. Music is the most fashionable and, perhaps, most widely understood art to-day.