ae”
of. WRistGe.

SMITHSONIAN
INSTITUTION

GAG

fancy glosses the real, and in childlike
faith you hold to it.

Those lost fish, the fisherman’s hall-
mark! The mysterious bond that brings
together all that go down to the rivers.
They never tire of telling, they never tire
of listening, for all who cast, know; it is
the world-wide sympathy that mellows
and binds the craft, the genialest craft
under the sun.

With their knees under the table they
sat and listened to the time-mossed sto-
ries, interest ever new and keen in their
hearts. Don Danuelo brought from his
pocket a flask of rare old Scotch, and
standing raised his glass.

“Gentlemen, to the lost fish! May

their memory never grow old, nor their
pounds less.”
Before we had quite cleared the table,
the Don apologetically wagged his head,
and conceded there was skill in casting a
line and dropping a fly — and, if he were
younger — there was no telling —

The Judge generously hastened to ad-
mit that in some cases roe might be used
and the man remain a fisherman. He
courteously offered to eat his fiery words
and soften his adamantine rule, bluntly
laid down, with an occasional extenuating
exception. The Judge was didactic, but
just and great-hearted as to wounding
feelings.

The Sejior rose from his coffee.

“Gentlemen,” he said, ‘it has been
a God-given day. I wish you a good-
night.”

That sweep of his bow included us all;
and he was gone, and more than the man
went with him; we all felt the loss.

The Judge and the Don moved to the
chimney corner, and talked over reaches
and pools, disputing as to shadow and
sun, the superiority of this over that side

Three Fishers

527

of the river, and minutely analyzed the
habits of trout.

When the last dish was shelved, and
the tired little woman was setting bread,
I heard the tramp, tramp of the Sefior’s
feet on the upper porch. I knew he was
searching the stars and casting into
deeper pools of thought than those of
earth.

How cleanly, how frugally he lived, one
with the stars, the trees, the birds, the
restless river, an angling rod, and a book
of philosophy for companions. Alone in
the world, he peopled it for himself; and
in closeness to nature he had crept very
close to his God. It was our privilege to
have been of his company.

What sordid husks our bodies are for
beautiful souls! Don Danuelo to me was
all tenderness and consideration. I fancy
in memory of that near one, who sleeps
long in the old Mexican home, his heart
was softened to all women. And the
Judge! His chivalry was most prized
when he brought me pufis of delicate
milkweed, glistening cascara-sagrada ber-
ries, and sprays of coral-beaded honey-
suckle. ‘The Sefior laid at my feet remem-
brances of his old far-away home and
honey of sweetness and wisdom from his
beloved book, which shortened the days.

And I, only an ugly, withered, lone wo-
man, who had wandered to the moun-
tains, praying for health, of no comfort,
beauty, nor sweetness to any one, received
the largesse of their graciousness.

“A God-given day!” Good-night, Se-
fior, Don Danuelo, Judge. May it be a
God-given night for all three of you! May
your baskets of the morrow be heaped
and shining, each to his heart’s desire.

And I close my eyes and sleep safe,
knowing that there are yet hearts beating
in the world for the old and friendless. ~

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF WHISTLER

BY SIDNEY STARR

WHEN one speuks of Whistler now, it
is with the consciousness that he is ac-
cepted as among the masters of painting.
“C'est un grand seigneur de la peinture
qui s’en est allé,” says Arséne Alexandre.

To have known Whistler and the atti-
tude of the art world and the picture-
gallery-going public from 1873 to 1892,
is, strange as it may sound, to wonder
how this has come about; to wonder why
people speak reverently of pictures so
recently thought ridiculous, and to specu-
late as to how many would think them
so now, had they but the courage. As
indeed one man has, who paid what he
thought a “steep price” to get “a Whis-
tler,” and confesses he can see nothing
in it, wonders what artists do see, and
could sell it for three or four times the
sum he gave for it, yet keeps it in his
possession.

I speak of Whistler as a painter only.
As an etcher, I remember, London
thought him “very clever,” although Sir
Seymour Haden had said that of his two
collections he would part with his Rem-
brandts rather than his Whistlers. Crit-
ics nearly all spoke of his etchings with
respect, until his finest period, when they
pointed out how greatly he had deterior-
ated. For Whistler’s painting, too, by the
way, “clever” was the word. Sir John
Millais’s dictum, given in his Life and
Letters by his son, is: “Clever a fellow as
he [Whistler] is — a man who has never

learnt the grammar of his art, whose

drawing is as faulty as it can be, he thinks
nothing of drawing a woman all out of
proportion, with impossible legs and arms
proceeding from no one knows where.
Any affectation of superiority in style has
its effect on certain minds, and attracts a
certain number of followers.” And Mr.
Archibald Stuart-Wortley says: “Once
528

he [Millais] seized me by the arm and
made me go round the Grosvenor Gal-
lery with him. He stopped longer than
usual before a shadowy graceful portrait
of a lady, by one of the most famous
painters of our day — an arrangement in
pink and gray, or rose and silver, shall
I call it? At last, ‘It’s damned clever,
it’s a damned sight too clever,’ and he
dragged me on.” This was about 1884,
and the famous painter was, of course,
Whistler ; the portrait one of Lady Meux.
But it seems Whistler somehow learned
enough of the grammar of art to change
the adjective; “clever” is not the word
now at all.

Thinking of these things, it is interest-
ing to go back to those years and recall
what Whistler himself told me of his atti-
tude toward the world of painting, toward
the world that accepts or rejects painting,
and to recall situations in which I saw
him and noted what he said and did. No
artist of our time, leaving us, has been the
subject of so much writing, so many recol-
lections. Never has unliterary painting
caused so much literature. Not since
Ruskin wrote has there been such word-
painting about pictures. Before 1892
little of this appeared. In the above quo-
tations Sir John Millais voices fairly well
the whole tone of the leading journals. In
France M. Duret, in England George
Moore, Walter Sickert, and Joseph Pen-
nell seem the only writers imbued with a
spirit of appreciation. Whistler himself
had, it is true, devoted the Ten O'clock
and The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
to painting in words his art and his atti-
tude. And perhaps his own writing in-
spired much that has followed. In this
he was not only literary himself, but the
cause of literature in others. And how
characteristic that when Mr. Spielmann,

Personal Recollections of Whistler

an art critic, spoke of his “quaintly ac-
quired” copy of the lecture as “smart but
misleading,” Whistler should pause to
note, “that if the lecture had not seemed
misleading to him it would surely not
have been worth uttering at all.”

England in the seventies and eighties
accepted as her picture-makers, roughly
speaking, the Royal Academy for oil
pictures and the “Old Society” for water-
colors. The Grosvenor Gallery was more
or less an annex to the Academy, with the
exception of one or two men and Whis-
tler; the former painting the serious pic-
tures, the latter a poseur whose painting,
as ‘Tom Taylor wrote at the time, “be-
longs to the region of chaff.’’ With Whis-
tler the position was the same — himself
and the others; but the definition was
reversed: Whistler most seriously occu-
pied with his personal vision, his sense of
beauty; while the others were painting
pictures with which he had little or no
sympathy. 'To him they were “the com-
mercial-travellers of Art, whose works
are their wares and whose exchange is
the Academy.”

Whistler told me an incident which
states the situation in two sentences. It
seems that about 1874 there was talk of
his portrait of Carlyle being bought for
the nation. Sir George Scharf, then cura-
tor of the National Portrait Gallery, came
to Mr. Graves’s gallery in Pall Mall to
see “the Carlyle” in this connection.
Voicing precisely his public, all he said
was, as he looked at it, —

“Well, and has painting come to
this!”

“T told Mr. Graves,” said Whistler,
“that he should have said, ‘No, it
has n’t.’”

It was some seventeen or eighteen
years later that “the Carlyle” was
bought for Glasgow, and it is these years
that are interesting — the years of Whis-
tler’s fighting, during which I saw him
continually, and when he was often in
need of money. For it was not until 1892
that he sold his pictures to any great
extent, or for anything like the prices

VOL. 101-NO. 4

529

achieved by “the commercial-travellers
of Art.”

Whistler’s jaunty carriage before the
world of London is well known. He was
courage personified during this time of
fluctuating finances, pawning his large
gold medal from Paris one day, lending
£500 to the Society of British Artists the
next. He often found “a long face and a
short account at the bank,” as he said
one day. Once he spoke in the manner of
an injured child of the sums So-and-So,
R. A., made, while he had little or no-
thing. I told him he could not expect to
live like a prince and paint like a prince;
that the R. A.’s painted to please the pub-
lic and reaped their reward.

“T don’t think they do,” he demurred,
“T think they paint as well as they can.”

“People like, as they say, ‘to look
into a picture.’ They adore Tadema’s
pictures because they can ‘look into’ the
marble,” I told him.

“Well,” said Whistler, “they can look
into mine, they’re simple enough. Yes,
I suppose they'do love to see what they
call ‘earnest work,’ but they ought not to
see it. My only objection to Tadema’s
pictures is that they are unfinished.”

I spoke of one R. A. as being a better
painter than another, pointing out the
difference.

“Well,” he said indifferently, “it’s a
nasty difference.”

I spoke of the young men then exhibit-
ing, some of whom are now R. A.’s or
A. R. A.’s.

“They are all tarred,” said he, “with
the same brush; they are of the schools.”

Of one, who was held to be Eng-
land’s most brilliant young artist, “Yes,”
he said thoughtfully, “he’s clever, but
there’s something common in everything
he does, so what ’s the use of it?”

All of which would show that Whistler
had but little time for any but his own
work, as indeed few great men have,
much as we like to think to the contrary.
He told me a story demonstrating this
most clearly. His Nocturne in Blue and
Gold, Valparaiso, was in the Hill Collec-

530 Personal Recollections of Whistler

tion in Brighton. Mr. Hill had two gal-
leries and a well-known collection, event-
ually sold at Christie’s. Whistler went
down to see Mr. Hill, and said he, —

“T was shown into the galleries, and of
course took a chair and sat looking at my
beautiful Nocturne; then, as there was
nothing else to do, I went to sleep.”

Mr. Hill came in later to find him
— dreaming of it probably. And I re-
member when Walter Sickert, a pupil of
Whistler, in an article on the Manchester
“Art Treasures” Exhibition, spoke of
Lord Leighton’s Harvest Moon in terms
of praise, a telegram came from Whistler,
Chelsea, to Sickert, Hampstead, in these
words, —

“The Harvest Moon rises over Hamp-
stead and the cocks of Chelsea crow.”

But with those of his circle with whom
Whistler was not quarreling, never was a
kinder, a more delightful friend. And it
was in those days that he said, “Yes, we
are always forgiving Walter.”

Alas! for another pupil, soon in dis-
grace, never forgiven, who, when scent-
ing the end of Whistler’s presidency of
the Royal Society of British Artists, and
foreseeing a sinking ship, handed in his
resignation some months ahead of time.
Whistler said with a grim smile, “The
early rat.”

He was disposed of in the Gentle Art
of Making Enemies, in Whistler’s best
manner, without mentioning his name,
and a final, “You will blow out your
brains, of course.”

Mr. Singer, in his monograph on Whis-
tler, describes in some detail the continu-
ous quarrels, and the long line of friends
passing down and out. But with some
few at least he never quarreled, — G.
H. Boughton, R. A., Albert Moore, and
others I could name. That Moore and
Boughton were men loved by their
friends and held in high esteem by their
brother artists, would seem little to the
point, if Whistler found occasion for
quarrel. Boughton, an Academician,
whose work “was prettier than most of
’em,” and Moore, whose work he said

was beautiful, were his friends to the end.
Of the work of others I have heard him
speak in praise on occasion, — of that of
C. E. Holloway whom he helped as he did
many another; of that of Charles Keene
and A. B. Houghton, over whose draw-
ings of American subjects, and illustra-
tions to Don Quixote, he grew quite en-
thusiastic one evening, talking to Mrs.
Whistler and myself, in the blue dining-
room of his house in Chelsea.

But in Bond Street, his battle-ground,
he was usually the Whistler of the “gen-
tle answer that sometimes turneth not
away wrath.’ Going into the Fine Art
Society’s Galleries with him one day, we
met at the door a once popular R. A.,
now knighted I believe, whom I knew
only by sight and so went on into the gal-
leries, leaving the two talking. On Whis-
tler’s coming to me I said, — on mischief
intent, —

“Who on earth was that to whom you
spoke ?”

“Really, now,” he answered, “I for-
get, but whoever it was, it’s some one of
no importance, you know, no importance
whatever.”

It was in Bond Street too that Whistler
went into the gallery, then full of Doré’s
pictures, and asked the man who solicited
subscriptions for engravings of the works
on view, if a certain Academician’s large
religious picture was not on exhibition
there.

“No; that,” said the man, “is much
lower down.”

“Impossible,” said the delighted Whis-
tler.

Yes, Whistler could be hard on his
“commercial-travellers of Art.” When
President of the Royal Society of British
Artists, he was oblivious to every interest
but the quality of the work shown. When
asked to hang the pictures one year in the
Walker Art Gallery of Liverpool, he was
occupied in making the butterfly’s sting
felt in very truth on the walls; on one
wall at least, which to the people and
to one artist, was the most important,
Whistler placed Sir Luke Fildes’s Doc-

Personal Recollections of Whistler

tor in the centre. ‘The picture showed
a, doctor watching a sick child. Around
this he grouped all the pictures he could
find of dying people, convalescents, and
the like, with a still-life of medicine
bottles which he was delighted to dis-
cover. Of course the hanging of this wall
caused comment. “But,” as Whistler
said, when with ill-concealed glee he re-
lated the story, “I told them” —and he
shook his forefinger impressively — “I
told them I wished to emphasize that
particular school.”

“And what did you put on the oppo-
site wall?” I asked.

“Oh, Leighton’s—I really forget
what it was.”

“But that is different, you know,”
said I.

“No,” he said with a somewhat be-
wildered look at my ignorance, “it’s
really the same thing.”

In his Tite Street studio Whistler had
shown me some canvases, one of them a
Venus in low tones of ivory and gray-
blue, bathed in the warm evening after-
glow, a note of red on the ivory drapery,
and spoke of painting a larger canvas
of it soon. He never did. The study
hung some years later between the win-
dows of his dining-room in Cheyne Walk.
Later we rode on our way to dine at the
Café Royal. Whistler leaned forward in
the hansom and looked at the Green Park

in the dusk, sweet and fresh after the.

rain; at the long line of lights reflected
shimmering in the wet Piccadilly pave-
ment, and said, —

“Starr, I have not dined, as you know,
so you need not think I say this in any
but a cold and careful spirit; it is better
to live on bread and cheese and paint
beautiful things, than to live like Dives
and paint pot-boilers. But a painter
really should not have to worry about —
‘various,’ you know. Poverty may induce
industry, but it does not produce the fine
flower of painting. The test is not pov-
erty, it’s money. Give a painter money
and see what he ’ll do; if he does not
paint, his work is well lost to the world.

531

If I had had — say, £3000 a year, what
beautiful things I could have done!”

Then he laughed and told me that
Carlyle said he liked Whistler’s portrait
of him because Whistler had given him
clean linen. Watts, Carlyle said, had
painted a portrait of him and given him
a green collar.

I first met Whistler one night at a par-
ty in Richmond Terrace, Whitehall. He
was standing near a bank of flowers, an
amused quizzical look on his face; the
woman to whom he was talking was
laughing. The daughter of the house
introduced me to him. He said he had
seen a picture of mine in Liverpool — “a
picture amongst the paint,” he said, and
told me always to paint things exactly as
I saw them. He always did. “Young
men think they should paint like this or
that painter. Be quite simple, no fussy
foolishness, you know; and don’t try to
be what they call ‘ strong.” When a pic-
ure ‘smells of paint,’” he said slowly,
“it’s what they call ‘strong.’”

Whistler painted things exactly as he
saw them. How absurd that seemed to
people when I in my youthful enthusi-
asm told them that he did, that he had
told me he did. And indeed I am puz-
zled now, as I said in the beginning, to
think that people covet his pictures. For
what should they care about an art so
elusive, painting so dependent on its ex-
quisite quality for its appeal; a painter so
absorbed in the painter’s poetry, so full
of the “amazing invention” that puts
“form and color into such perfect har-
mony that exquisiteness is the result.”

Perhaps it is not the beauty of the work
but the personality of the painter that
wrought this miracle. For it is.not like
that of Burne-Jones, who conjured with
the. glamour of old stories, visions of
“faerie lands forlorn” (the poor con-
struction of his sexless figures is unseen
by his admirers, allured by the obvious
sense of beauty) ; nor that of Rossetti, who -
“painted poems and wrote pictures; ”
nor that of Millais, who in his youth was
in the position of Whistler, in that it was

532

Millais and the others. For Millais, in
his earlier years an artist, said, “People
had better buy my pictures now, when I
am working for fame, than a few years
later, when I shall be married and work-
ing for a wife and children,” — giving
them stories in his marvelous canvases,
and later again stories or “catchy”’ titles
with his obvious pot-boilers, of which
he had forewarned his world. Whistler
cared for none of this. It was the miracu-
lous birth of the picture, the appearance
of effortless completion that he desired
more and more. To this end he adopted,
from the first, a method — “a scientific
proceeding,” he said, — probably the
simplest ever used by any painter and for
his purpose the most unerring. He never
changed it, save to paint more thinly as
time went on, as did Velasquez.

The first words Whistler said to me on
my first visit to his studio were, “It don’t
smell of paint, does it?” He was paint-
ing a portrait of Sir Henry Cole, then
director of the South Kensington Muse-
um, — a tall dark portrait of a man ina
long cloak of dark blue. turned back over
the right shoulder, a man with a ruddy
face and a white stubby beard. Before
he spoke he put a slow decisive stroke on
the right cheek-bone and then stood back.
The sitting was over, and that was the
last stroke he put on that canvas. The
portrait was never finished, for Sir Henry
Cole died soon after, and I never knew
Whistler to touch a canvas without the
sitter.

When a student in 1874, I had seen
Whistler’s first exhibition in Pall Mall,
and wrote to a friend, “You can paint a
dress-suit black, if you like, — and Whis-
tler can make a canvas look like the water
and sky of the Thames at night, and not
like paint.”

Of the portrait of Miss Alexander,
George Moore wrote in 1892 as “surely
the loveliest in the world.” Mr. Christian
Brinton, understanding it so charmingly,
writes in a recent article, “The greatest
galleries of the world can show nothing
more lovely, more appealing, or more sen-

Personal Recollections of Whistler

sitive.” But in 1883 at the Private View
of the Grosvenor Gallery, what an absurd,
“ugly ” thing every one thought it, even
the artists, with few exceptions. The
critics had nothing but abuse for it, as
witness : —

“A large etching in oil, a ‘rhapsody in |
raw child and cobwebs,’ by Mr. Whis-
tler,” from The Artist ; and “Mr. Whis-
tler’s single contribution is a child’s por-
rath: Gres uncompromisingly vulgar,”
from The Magazine of Art. e

But perhaps “ this is the only tribute
possible from the Mob to the Master,”

though the names of the journals, since

dead, would seem misleading. Joseph
Pennell points out in his preface to The
Works of Charles Keene, that the English
critics did not speak of Charles Keene as
a great artist until he was dead, and then
they misunderstood his work. W. E.
Henley says that R. A. M. Stevenson
created art criticism in England. That
before his criticisms, culminating in the
book on Velasquez, art criticism did not
exist. Both Pennell and Henley seem se-
vere, but a study of the subject inclines
one to agree with them.

When the Miss Alexander hung in the
Goupil Gallery in the Whistler exhibi-
tion of 1892, it had gained in beauty.
Whether the original coat of varnish had

_ been rubbed off, I do not know, but a

coat of varnish had recently been put on
it. The picture was more delicate in
quality, the whites having gained trans-
lucence in the ten years or so of its life.
Certainly just before the exhibition,
Whistler had told me of the man \in
Berners Street, Oxford Street, “‘ the finest
picture-restorer in the world,” whose
broad thumb was then taking the origin-
al coat of varnish from one of his larger
canvases, he did not say which. George
Moore and I were looking at this portrait,
hung at one end of the large room in the
old galleries in Bond Street, but we were
not long allowed to forget that our idea
of the beautiful was not popular. A large
pompous person, with a party of ladies in
his wake, stopped before it and said with ~

Personal Recollections of Whistler 533

a sweep of the arm, “If I could endorse
these things. I would, but I can’t.”

Those were his very words. I said to
Moore, “He has no need to say that, all
he has to do is to stand there.” —

When the Miss Alexander was in the
studio before it went to the Grosvenor,
Whistler told me that Tom Taylor, art
critic of The Times, came to seeit. ‘There
were other visitors. Taylor said, ‘ Ah,
yes, um;” then remarked that the up-
right line in the paneling of the wall was
wrong and the picture would be better
without it, adding, ‘Of course it’s a
matter of taste.” To which Whistler re-
plied, “I thought that perhaps for once
you were going to get away without hay-
ing said anything foolish; but remember,
so that you may not make the mistake
again, it ’s not a matter of taste at all, it is
a matter of knowledge. Good-by.”’

It was curious to note the effect of
Whistler’s pictures in a general exhibi-
tion, the intrusion of his art among
the hitherto little-disturbed ideals of the
British public. A work by Whistler made
all others on that wall appear as if done
by one man, of the same colors, key, and
facture, whatever the subject. It was
startling, and one felt the truth of his
statement that “They were all tarred
with the same brush.” And once The
Fur-Jacket hung in the Goupil Galleries
and on the opposite wall a large Fortuny.
One would imagine that the Fortuny
would sparkle and the Whistler would
look sombre. No, the beautiful tone of
the whole canvas, the delicate flush on
the face of the figure by Whistler made
the Fortuny look “black,” in spite of its
emerald greens, pinks, and yellows.

Of Whistler’s presidency of the Royal
Society of British Artists and his en-
deavor to make it an “ art-centre,” I
shall speak only of such things as are not
well known, or not known at all — a dif-
ficult thing to do in this connection. He
exhibited in the society some of his best
work. His first contribution, I think, was
the portrait of Mrs. Louis Huth. This
beautiful canvas is but little known;

the first reproduction I have seen of it
since his death is in The Work of James
McNeill Whistler, by Elizabeth Luther
Cary. It was painted some years before
its exhibition in the Royal Society. In
earlier years Whistler painted many por-
traits showing the face in profile. Later,
one may observe he nearly always chose
the full face. Walter Sickert asked him
why he no longer painted profiles. “‘Oh,
the blue Alsatian Mountains,” said he.

As I was a member of the society and
on the hanging-committee twice during
his active career, I naturally saw the ef-
fect which Whistler’s personality and the
enforcing of his principles had on the
* British ” that afterwards “‘ remained,’’
as well as on the “ artists” who “‘ came
out.” Whistler gained from Queen Vic-
toria permission to prefix the title
* Royal,” much coveted by art societies
in London, and invited the present King
and Queen, then the Prince and Princess
of Wales, to visit the exhibition. The
Prince, on coming up the staircase, asked
the President what the society was, say-
ing that he had “never heard of it.” The
society is the oldest in London with the
exception of the Royal Academy, but
the appropriate answer was with Whis-
tler, and he said, ‘“‘ Sir, it dates from
to-day.”

The Prince laughed good-naturedly,
and then learned of the society’s anti-
quity and of the charter it alone possessed.
Whistler told me that the Princess par-
ticularly liked my picture, and on my
showing gratification, said with a diaboli-
cal twinkle in his eye, “‘But she also liked
that,” and pointed to one by a “ British ”
artist artfully hidden in a corner.

There came a press-day when Whis-
tler’s picture was not there, only the
frame on the wall. It was the custom of
the society, instituted before Whistler’s
time and not discontinued by him, to
provide for the press a well-spread table
and such comfort as a good cellar con-
tains, to cheer them as they appraised the
pictures. Telegrams were sent imploring
the placing of the President’s canvas. But

534

the only answer that came was, “The
Press have ye always with you. Feed
my lambs.”

A smoking-concert followed during the
exhibition. At this one critic said to the
master, “Your picture is not up to your
mark, it is not good this time.”

“You should not say it is n’t good, you
should say you don’t like it, and then, you
know, you ’re perfectly safe; now come
and have something you do like, have
some whiskey,” said Whistler.

But on the adverse vote being cast
which ended his leadership of and con-
nection with the society, he said to a
group of the men he was leaving, “Now I
understand the feelings of all those who,
since the world began, have tried to save
their fellow-men.”

Albert Moore’s comment to Whistler
on this episode was, “If I had a flying-
machine, do you think I ’d hitch it to an
old omnibus ?”

But Whistler’s example in the society
was the most artistic blow ever aimed at
the Royal Academy. ‘‘ Royal Commis-
sions ” had glanced off, attacks from out-
siders had missed their aim, but Whis-
tler’s eventually resulted in the Inter-
national Society of Sculptors, Painters,
and Gravers, and landed squarely on
the closed jaw. Only once, I think, did
Whistler revisit his old society’s rooms.
It was when a picture of Lord Leigh-
ton’s had been secured and hung in a
centre. The members led their visitor
up to it and pointed with pride to their
acquisition. Putting his monocle in his
eye and surveying the canvas, “Yes,”
said he, “it’s quite beautiful, like a dia-
mond in the sty.”

In the Tite Street studio Whistler
closed the large door and used a narrow
one, three steps leading up to it. Leaving
this door open, he would go down the
steps and stand in the passage to look at
his work. Through the door, the light
coming from the large window on the left,
one saw the tall canvas. The portrait
finished, one forgot the canvas and be-
came conscious only of M. Duret, Sara-

Personal Recollections of Whistler

sate, or Rosa Corder in the late after-
noon light. I remember one afternoon he
met me at the front door and led me by
the arm to the foot of the steps, saying.
“There he is, eh? Is n’t that it, eh? All
balanced by the bow, you know. See how
he stands!” It was Sarasate. And when
the portrait was exhibited Whistler said,
“They talk about my painting Sarasate
standing in a coal-cellar, and stupidities
like that. I only know that he looked just
as he does in my picture when I saw him
play in St. James’s Hall.”

Once I found him looking thought-
fully at the portrait of a lady whose hus-
band had just left the studio, having
come to see it, now that it was finished.

“That,” said he, indicating the por-
trait, “is a crime. I have been so long
over it and the man has been so nice
about it, that I feel ashamed of myself.
He seemed to like that very much,”
pointing to a life-sized figure of a little
Chelsea girl, standing legs apart, arms
akimbo, with a white pinafore and rosy
cheeks. “ Do you know, I think I ’ll pack
that in the case with the portrait and
send it to him as a gift.” And he did.

We walked from the studio to his house
in The Vale, and on the way he told me
he had given up smoking. “'The ease
with which I did it,” said he, “ is delight-
ful to me. I just let it go, that’s all;”’
and he waved it away with his wand
in a yellow-gloved hand. Later he again
made tiny cigarettes, in the intervals of
work or in the evening after dinner.

There was a young American painter
then in England, Aubrey Hunt, and a
good painter he was. After the private
view of,a collection of his pictures, a
party of four, one of whom was Whistler
and another the art critic of a London
paper, were seated around a table con-
versing and commenting. All at once
Whistler said, —

“What are you going to say about
Aubrey Hunt’s pictures in your paper,
Willie ?”

“Oh, I shall say just what I think,
you know.”

Personal Recollections of Whistler

“No, you won't, Willie, you'll say
they ’re damned good, that’s all.”

“Oh, but I could n’t do that, you
know.”

“Why not, Willie ? Albert Wolff saw a
play, and his criticism in his paper con-
sisted of two lines, the title of the play,
and his opinion, thus : —

“* Le Roi s’ Amuse.

“Tl étatt seul.’

“You just put,

“* Aubrey Hunt’s Pictures.

“<'They are damned good.’ ”

Upon further protests Whistler said,

“17d do it if I were you, and hand in
my resignation at the same time, and —
what a perfect exit, you know!”

All London came to Prince’s Hall to
hear Whistler deliver his Ten O'clock.
The following comments which I heard
are illuminating: —

E. A. Abbey said he thought he had
heard it all before.

Lady - said, “ Yes, he is a very
clever man.”

On the platform behind the curtain his
old fellow student, now Sir Edward
Poynter, P. R. A., shook hands with the
lecturer, saying, “I congratulate you,
Whistler; you said a great many things
that, er— ought to be said,” and rapidly
vanished.

M. Duret remarked to me, “‘ He was
describing himself, he and Hokusai are
the two great artists.”

After this, Whistler turned to me and
said, “Did you see ’em [the critics]?
They were all sittin’ in a row close up,
on my left; did you see me shake my
finger at ’em?”

The Ten O’clock was given at Oxford
in April. I went down with Whistler
and his brother, “ Doctor Willie,” to put
up at the historic Mitre. The lecture-hall
was small, with primitive benches, and
the audience was small in comparison
with that of London. The lecture was
delivered impressively, but lacking the
original emphasis and sparkle. Whistler
hated to do anything twice over, and this
was the third time; but it was on record.

535

When asked to make a drawing of one
of his pictures for some publication or
other, he had said, “You cannot lay
your egg twice.”

So on our return to the hotel there was
no word of the lecture: Mr. Manners, the
original sentry in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
opera of “ Iolanthe,”’ who was staying at
the Mitre, was asked to come into our
room, and he sang for us “'The Con-
templative Sentry,” the second verse
slightly altered to our ears, as thus : —

When in that house R. A.’s divide,

If they ’ve a brain and cerebellum too,

They ’ve got to leave that brain outside,

And vote just as their leaders tell ’em to.

But then the prospect of a lot

Of Artists all in close proximity,

A-thinking for themselves is what

No man ean face with equanimity.

Next day the master firmly refused to
spend time in Oxford: “In the spring
landscape was loveliest in London.”

On Cheyne Walk, not many doors from
the house in which Rossetti secluded
himself, was in the latter years of his life
that of Whistler, with its old-world gar-
den, where beyond the lawn and the mul-
berry-tree were the flower-beds and the
summer-house; on Sunday afternoons in
summer here stood the tea-table, and the
master and his wife were at home. Some-
times Whistler would make a lithograph
of his guests sitting about the table, not
talking as he worked, dressed in a blue
serge suit, the “ pilot-coat”’ buttoned,
the ends of his black ribbon tie floating
over the lapels, his narrow-brimmed
straw hat, with black ribbon band, a-tilt
over his nose. Or if he were writing a let-
ter to the paper, he would read it to them.
With the Gentle Art of Making Enemies
fresh in the field and Albert Moore in his
audience, he read one Sunday the trial
scene with dramatic significance. Often
it was my good fortune to stay for dinner
and spend the evening en famille. Many
interesting things happened in the blue
and white dining-room; here evolved the
construction of annotations to the de-
struction of the annotated in the Gentle
Art; while the lovely little gold and

536

green frog, Mrs. Whistler’s model for de-
corations in a book of fairy-tales, would
jump, turning a back somersault from
her finger, three feet to the Nankin cen-
trepiece. Sometimes Whistler would play
the devil’s tattoo on the table and look
the part so well that I would say, —

“Would you do all that to them?”

Then Mrs. Whistler would say, “Oh,
Jimmy, you ’ll be rich, I’m sure, soon;
look at his eyebrows, Mr. Starr; people
with eyebrows like that always get rich.”

Once I was speaking of B. R. Hay-
don’s vivid autobiography, and Whis-
tler looked up from the copper-plate of
The Tragetto, which he was retouching
with dry-point, saying, “Yes, Haydon,
it seems, went into his studio, locked
the door, and before beginning to work,
prayed God to enable him to paint for
the glory of England. Then seizing a
large brush, full of bitumen, he attacked
his huge canvas, and of course — God
fled.”

Only once, that remember, did Whis-
tler speak to me of the early days in Lind-
sey Row. One summer night after dinner
and the mild game of whist, which Whis-
tler, Mrs. Whistler, her sister, and I used
to play, the master had taken me to the
door to look at the river. The night lured
us down the path to the gate and then on
by Don Saltero’s walk and Lindsey Row,
and Whistler told me of The Balcony, at
which we had been looking in his studio
before dinner, and other things he had
painted there, in the room with windows
facing south, — and how beautiful the
things observed, how difficult to execute
in that south light! Then, indicating Bat-
tersea Reach lying bathed in the mysteri-
ous bloom of a summer night, he said,
“ Starr, now please point out the detail
which Burne-Jones said my nocturnes
lack; of course you can see it, now,
please.”

We walked back, and “ New ” Bat-
tersea Bridge was before us; his “ old ”
bridge was gone. But that was not trou-
bling him, he had ensured its life well
enough. I asked him if the southern ex-

Personal Recollections of Whistler

posure of the room in which he was then
working troubled him.

“Yes,” he said, “it did; but Ruskin
lives in the North, you know, and a south-
ern exposure troubled him, rather, eh ?”’

The Falling Rocket was on the market
in those years, and could have been
bought for much less than its price in
1892. Messrs. Dowdeswell had it for
some time. I spoke of its beauty, quali-
ty, and so forth, one day to Mr. Walter
Dowdeswell, who said that apparently
few people thought as I did, for no one
seemed to wish to buy it. The Falling
Rocket is now in the Metropolitan Mu-
seum, lent by its owner, Mr. Samuel
Untermyer. When it came to America,
Whistler wrote a postscript to one of his
letters as follows : —

“Give us all details as to its safe arriv-
al, and as to how my lovely little ‘ Rock-
et’ is liked. You must tell them all about
‘its place in history.’ And let Mr. Unter-
mayer know that he possesses the famous
Nocturne that was the destruction of

Ruskin. . . .” (With the Butterfly sign-
manual.)
And in another: “ You know that Iam

greatly pleased, although the picture will
now be so far away. Still I certainly do
not wish my works in London. Already
since the exhibition in Bond Street sever-
al pictures have gone to America, and the
Ruskin lot will be furious about ‘The
Fallen Rocket.” Of course you must
write and tell me all about the picture —
how it looks and how it is liked. In short,
I look forward to your next with the
greatest possible interest.”

One more extract from a later letter
gives the atmosphere of 1892: —

“Our address is as you see, Paris,
—and I must say I am delighted with
the place. The dreariness and dullness
of London was at last too depressing
for anything — and after the exhibition
there was really nothing to stay for. In-
deed the exhibition itself summed up the ~
situation most beautifully. It was, as you
remember, a complete triumph — crown-
ing all my past victories. No farther

To a Greek Bootblack 537

fighting necessary — I could at last come
away to this land of light and joy where
honors are heaped upon me, and Peace
threatens to take up her abode in the gar-
den of our pretty pavilion. However, Ido
not promise that I shall not, from time to
time, run over to London, in order that
too great a sense of security may not come
upon the people!”

And now he was in Paris, and he had
his triumph. Fortune came to him, and
sorrow. Still his goddess remained with
him “ loving and fruitful.” She who had
‘* never turned aside in moments of hope
deferred —of insult—and of ribald mis-
understanding.”

“But his face was sadder with a shad-
ow of gravity like the twilight of his
Nocturnes, intangible, but very real. In
point of fact even at the moment of suc-
cess life pressed hard on Whistler. He
laughed it to scorn in his lordly fashion.
But Life can always take revenge if only
by wearing out the man who contemns it
just as effectually as the man who gives
in: *

1 Arséne Alexandre, in Les Arts, October,
1903.

Was Whistler lonely ? Perhaps so. Not
in the sense of companionship while his
wife lived, and he always had friends
who loved him; but the companionship
of those he seldom or never saw, the sense
of being in tune with “‘ some few of his
blood,” — he felt this loss. When Swin-
burne wrote his ill-considered article, he
felt that. He was writing the answer one
evening when I went in. He read it to
me. “ Why, O brother?” and, “‘ Do we
not speak the same language? Are we
strangers, then, or, in our Father’s house
are there so many mansions that you lose
your way, my brother, and cannot recog-
nize your kin?”

And he meant it as it is written. So he
did the reproof, “Who are you, deserting
your Muse, that you should insult my
Goddess with familiarity ?”’

It was in his voice, as was the contempt
in “ Poet and Peabody.” He spoke of
this afterwards and said he was lonely,
“but one expected it.” Mallarmé, too,
had told him that he wrote beautiful
things, but no one understood them, and
he was lonely, lonely, “comme le cerf — le
cerf de Fontainebleau.”

TO A GREEK BOOTBLACK

BY O. W. FIRKINS

In a dusk and scant retreat,
Fronting on the noisy street,

Six lads, quick of hands and feet,
Ply a trade for song unmeet,

In the passer’s careless view:
I, from Saxon loins that rose —
Churl or swain or serf— who knows? —
High-reared, propping heels and _ toes,
Brood in meditant repose

O’er the Greek who blacks my shoe.

Round black head that fronts my knees,
Cheeks whose tint might tempt the bees,

538

To a Greek Bootblack |

Profile scarcely formed to please
Myron or Praxiteles,

Yet of dainty mould and coy; cS
Eyes whose owner ne’er may guess is
What appealing tenderness,

Dream-like in their veiled recess,
Deep and dark their spheres express —

Longings alien to the boy.

Reascends the ancient exon:
Winds that o’er the broad Aigzean
Skyward lift the joyous pean,
Chanted as with pipes Pandan
O’er the Persian’s broken line;
Trail of purple-hemmed himations,
Foam and fragrance of libations,
Viols, harp and flute vibrations,
Olives, and the Chian vine.

Not for him the dream is spun;
From his lips, unheeding one,
In a hasting torrent run
Accents strange to Xenophon,
Tones Citheron never knew:
What to him the ages’ sickle?
What the thought that time is fickle?
Brisk, he takes the proffered nickel;
Eager, seeks the waiting shoe.

Meagre, in this narrowed sluice,

Flows the rich-hued Attic juice;

Shrunken ward of fallen Zeus,

I thy sandal should unloose —
Sandals — they are vanished too!

Sad eclipse of antique splendor !

Poor blue shirt and crossed suspender !

Tribute gladly would I render;

Tears, or smiles than tears more tender —
Little Greek that blacks my shoe.

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