Asked why he was so unpleasant to so many people, he gave the characteristic reply, “Early in life I made the discovery that I was charming, and if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away too keep from being bored to death.” Characteristic, too, is the dedication of the present volume, indicating his voluntary alienation from men, “To The rare Few, who, early in Life, have rid Themselves of the Friendship of the Many, these pathetic Papers are inscribed.”

Whistler was neither charming nor delightful to his teachers at West Point. Once, when he could not give the date for the battle of Buena Vista, an event of the Mexican War, the professor asked him good-naturedly what he would do at a dinner table were he asked the same question. He retorted, indignantly, “Do? Why, I should refuse to associate with people who could talk of such things at dinner.”

Pyrrhic victories like this caused him, who had flunked out of West Point, subsequently to lose his job as a draftsman in the United States Coast Guard. Following his natural bent by concentrating on art, he led the kind of dissolute life in London and Paris for which he would have been ostracized in his native country. He had servants and drank costly champagne even when he owned nothing but debts. To attract attention, he dressed like a music-hall artist, and from the more conservative Degas he elicited the remark: “If you were not a genius, you would be the most ridiculous man in Paris.”