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Though no one now regards Whistler as a dilettante, it is true that in portrait-painting he was a good beginner, finished about a dozen of the hundreds of portraits he began. Once he took so long over a child-portrait "that whole families sat for it from the eldest to the youngest . . . until the original sitter returned from America, the mother of five children, to find the painting still unfinished."
Biographer Laver's picture is lively, sympathetic, allots Painter Whistler a place in the sun which would not have satisfied his subject, but which seems to fit his subject's shadow.
Speaking of Insects
THE LIFE OF THE ANT—Maurice Maeterlinck—Day ($2).
Said Solomon (rhetorically) to the Sluggard: "Go to the ant!" No sluggard, but a scientific inquirer whose researches have not damped his mystical inquisitiveness, Maurice Maeterlinck has gone to the ant, observed its actions, noted down many a formicine phenomenon in this exciting little book.
Myrmecologists divide ants into eight series, have listed 6,000 species. Says Maeterlinck: all the higher species have a communistic unselfishness inconceivable to Man, a consequent social discipline superior to any human government. Some ants have organized armies, wage offensive wars; some own slaves; some keep herds of "cattle" (plant lice); some cultivate mushrooms. For non-carnivorous ants (the great majority) the greatest pleasure in life seems to be disgorging for others the food they have laboriously ac cumulated: "For her [the ant] regurgitation must be an act as delightful as is for us the degustation of the choicest meats and wines. It seems evident that in this act nature has incorporated pleasures analogous to those of the love of which she is deprived."
Myrmecology sets Mystic Maeterlinck musing; he thinks the ant may be an example, not only to the sluggard, but to the whole race. "One day we shall learn, as all the creatures that share this earth with us have already learned, to content ourselves with life . . . and we shall find, perhaps, when we know how to live it, that life is enough. ... I believe that the ant is far less unhappy than the very happiest of men."
The Author. Maurice Maeterlinck, 68, Belgian mystic, playwright, scientist, does not live in Belgium because he says Belgium does not approve of artists. In his villa near Nice he lives with his young second wife (he divorced Georgette LeBlanc in 1919). Other books: The Life of the Bee, The Blue Bird, Pellcas et Melisande.
* Sales to date: over 100,000.
* The other: John Singer Sargent.