əˈbout

A Distinction

Atlas, you provoke me! The wisdom of ages means but little – I have said it. Faut être “dans le mouvement,” you dear old thing, or you are absolutely out of it!

You are misled, and mistake mere fact for the fiction of history, which is truth – and instructs – and is beautiful.

Now in truth, ‘Arry is dead – very dead.

Did I not, from between you shoulders, sally forth and slay him? – thereby instructing – and making history – and avenging the beautiful.

If within the distant Aïden, you can’t descry, “with sorrow laden,” the tiny soul of ‘Arry, it is because you no longer read your own small print, my Atlas! and the microbes of Eternity escape you.

Moreover, are not these things written in the chronicles of Chelsea, adown whose Embankment I still, Achilles-like, do drag the body of an afternoon?

This practice has doubtless completed the confusion of the wearied ones of Slade – and they of the Schools, accustomed to the culture of Colvin, whose polished scalp I with difficulty collected, ceasing to distinguish between the quick and the dead, will probably prop up our dear ‘Arry as professor, long to remain undetected in the Chair!

Atlas, tais-toi!– Let us not interfere!

James Abbott McNeill Whistler
The World
March 24, 1886

reprinted in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies