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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Nights, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Nights
+       Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties
+
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 29, 2008  [eBook #24452]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHTS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Paul Dring, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
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+      or
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+
+
+
+
+
+NIGHTS
+
+Rome Venice London Paris
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+LIFE OF
+JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
+
+BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+AND JOSEPH PENNELL
+
+THOROUGHLY REVISED, FIFTH EDITION
+
+The Authorized Life, with much new matter added which was not available
+at the time of issue of the elaborate two-volume edition, now out of
+print. Fully illustrated with 97 plates reproduced from Whistler's
+works. Crown octavo. XX-450 pages, Whistler binding, deckle edge. $8.50
+net. Three-quarter grain levant, $7.50 net.
+
+OUR PHILADELPHIA
+
+BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+ILLUSTRATED BY JOSEPH PENNELL
+
+An intimate personal record in text and in picture of the lives of the
+famous author and artist in the city whose recent story will be to many
+an absolute surprise--a city with a brilliant history, great beauty,
+immense wealth. Mr. Pennell's one hundred and five illustrations, made
+especially for this volume, will be a revelation in their interest and
+as art inspired by the love of his native town. Quarto, 7-1/2 by 10
+inches, XIV-552 pages. Handsomely bound in red buckram, boxed. $7.50
+net.
+
+JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES
+OF THE PANAMA CANAL
+
+_FIFTH PRINTING_
+
+Twenty-eight reproductions of lithographs made on the Isthmus of Panama,
+January-March, 1912, with Mr. Pennell's introduction, giving his
+experiences and impressions, and a full description of each picture.
+Volume 7-1/4 by 10 inches. Beautifully printed on dull-finished paper.
+Lithograph by Mr. Pennell on cover. $1.25 net.
+
+JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES
+IN THE LAND OF TEMPLES
+
+Forty reproductions of lithographs made in the Land of Temples,
+March-June, 1913, together with impressions and notes by the artist.
+Introduction by W.H.D. Rouse, Litt. D. Crown quarto, printed on
+dull-finished paper, lithograph by Mr. Pennell on cover. $1.25 net.
+
+[Illustration: Painting by J. McLure Hamilton
+"J--."]
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+NIGHTS
+
+Rome Venice
+in the Ćsthetic Eighties
+
+London Paris
+in the Fighting Nineties
+
+by
+
+ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+
+With Sixteen Illustrations
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Philadelphia and London
+J. B. Lippincott Company
+MCMXVI
+
+Copyright, 1916, by J. B. Lippincott Company
+
+Published March, 1916
+
+Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company
+at the Washington Square Press
+Philadelphia, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+There are times when we recall old memories much as we take down old
+favourites from our bookshelves, just to see how they have worn, how
+they have stood the test of years. Sometimes the books have worn so well
+that we cannot put them away until we have read every word to the very
+last again, we have not done with the memories until we have lived again
+through every moment of the past to which they belong. It is in this
+spirit that I brought my Nights of long ago to the test, and, finding
+that for me they stand it triumphantly and are still as vivid and
+vociferous and full of life as they were of old, I have not had the
+courage to loose my hold upon them and let them drift back once more
+into unfriendly silence.
+
+It contributes to my pleasure in this revival of my Nights, that I have
+been helped in many ways to give more substantial form to the familiar
+ghosts who wander through them. My debt of gratitude is great. Mr.
+William Nicholson has been willing for me to use his portrait of Henley
+and from Mrs. Henley I have the bust by Rodin. Mr. Frederick H. Evans
+has lent me the very interesting photograph he made of Beardsley, to
+whom he was so good a friend, and to Mr. John Lane, the publisher of the
+_Yellow Book_, I owe Beardsley's sketch of Harland. To Mr. John Ross I
+am indebted for the drawing of Phil May by himself never before
+published, to the Houghton Mifflin Company for the portrait of Vedder,
+to Mr. Duveneck for the painting of himself by Mr. Joseph de Camp. The
+photograph of Iwan-Müller and George W. Steevens reminds me of the day
+so long since when I went with them and Mrs. Steevens to Mr. Frederick
+Hollyer's and we were all photographed in turn, so that this record of
+the visit seems surely mine by right. It was Mr. Hollyer, too, who
+photographed the fine portrait "Bob" Stevenson painted of himself, and
+it was Mrs. Stevenson who gave me my copy of it. I have Mr. J. McLure
+Hamilton's permission to publish his portrait of J--, while J--has been
+so generous with his prints, portraits of old backgrounds of the Nights,
+that I can add this book to the many in which I have profited by his
+collaboration. I have also to thank the Editor of the _Atlantic
+Monthly_, in which my Nights in Rome and in Venice first appeared, for
+his consent to their re-publication now in book form.
+
+                          ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+
+3. Adelphi Terrace House, London
+      December 25, 1915
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    I. DAYS: A WORD TO EXPLAIN  11
+
+   II. NIGHTS: IN ROME          27
+
+  III. NIGHTS: IN VENICE        71
+
+   IV. NIGHTS: IN LONDON       115
+
+    V. NIGHTS: IN PARIS        225
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                   PAGE
+
+  "J--"                              _Frontispiece_
+    From the Painting by J. McLure Hamilton
+
+  OLD AND NEW ROME                                   35
+    From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
+
+  ELIHU VEDDER                                       56
+
+  FRANK DUVENECK                                     76
+    From the Painting by Joseph R. DeCamp
+
+  THE CAFÉ ORIENTALE, VENICE                         82
+    From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
+
+  OUT OF OUR LONDON WINDOWS                         122
+    From the Mezzotint by Joseph Pennell
+
+  W.E. HENLEY                                       125
+    From the Bust by Auguste Rodin
+
+  W.E. HENLEY                                       127
+    From the Painting by William Nicholson
+
+  IWAN-MÜLLER AND GEORGE W. STEEVENS                154
+    From a Photograph by Frederick Hollyer
+
+  "BOB" STEVENSON                                   160
+    From the Painting by Himself
+
+  HENRY HARLAND                                     172
+    From the Drawing by Aubrey Beardsley
+
+  AUBREY BEARDSLEY                                  178
+    From the Photograph by Frederick H. Evans
+
+  PHIL MAY IN CAP AND BELLS                         193
+    From a previously unpublished Drawing by Himself
+
+  IN THE CHAMPS-ELYSÉES, PARIS                      235
+    From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
+
+  THE HALF HOUR BEFORE DINNER, PARIS                244
+    From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
+
+  ARISTIDE BRUANT OF THE CABARET DU MIRLITON, PARIS 290
+    From the Poster by Toulouse-Lautrec
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+DAYS
+
+A WORD TO EXPLAIN
+
+
+
+
+NIGHTS
+
+DAYS
+
+A WORD TO EXPLAIN
+
+I
+
+
+If I wrote the story of my days during these last thirty years, it would
+be the story of hard work. No doubt the work often looked to others
+uncommonly like play, but it was work all the same.
+
+From the start it must have struck those who did not understand and
+who were interested, or curious enough to spare a thought, that my
+principal occupation was to amuse myself. When I was young, in
+America the "trip to Europe" was considered the crowning pleasure,
+or symbol of pleasure, within the possibility of hope for even those
+who were most given to pleasure. In Philadelphia it also stood for
+money--not necessarily wealth, but the comfortably assured income
+that made existence behind Philadelphia's spacious red brick fronts
+the average Philadelphian's right. And it was with this trip that J.
+and I began our life together. But misleading as was the impression
+made to all whom it did not concern, great satisfaction as it was to
+my family, who saw in it the ease and comfort it represented to the
+Philadelphian, we ourselves, with the best will in the world, could
+imagine it no holiday for us, nor accept it as the symbol of the
+correct Philadelphia income. Our pleasure was in the fact of the
+many and definite commissions which obliged us to go to Europe to
+earn any sort of an income, correct or otherwise--commissions
+without which we could have faced neither the trip nor marriage. I
+can remember that during the two or three weeks between our wedding
+and our sailing we were both kept busy, J. with drawings he had to
+finish for the _Century_, and I with the last touches to an article
+for the _Atlantic_. And if the days on the boat gave us breathing
+space, if not much work, except in preparation, was done, the reason
+was that the new commissions commenced only with our landing at
+Liverpool.
+
+From the moment of our arrival in England I see in memory my life by day
+as one long vista of work. It is mostly a beautiful vista, the more
+beautiful, I am ready to admit, because the work I owed the beauty to
+forced me to keep my eyes open and my wits about me. Under the
+circumstances, I simply could not afford to let what small powers of
+observation I possess grow rusty, for, no matter what else might happen,
+I had to turn my journey into some sort of readable "copy" afterwards.
+If I know parts of Europe fairly well, I am indebted not to the
+fashionable need of taking waters, not to following the approved routes
+of travel, not to meeting my fellow countrymen in hotels as alike as two
+peas no matter how different the capitals to which they belong, not to
+any fatuous preference of another country to my own, but to the work
+that brought us to England and the Continent and has kept us there, with
+fresh commissions, ever since.
+
+It was work that sent us from end to end of Great Britain and gave me my
+knowledge of the land. As I look back to those remote days after our
+arrival in Liverpool, I see J. and myself on an absurd, old-fashioned,
+long-superannuated Rotary tandem tricycle riding along winding roads and
+lanes, between the hedgerows and under the elms English prose and verse
+had long since made familiar, in and out of little grey or red villages
+clustered round the old church tower, passing through great towns of
+many factories and high smoke-belching chimneys, halting for months
+under the shadow of some old castle or cathedral that had been
+appointed one of our stations by the way. Or I see us both trudging on
+foot, knapsacks on our backs, climbing up and down the brown and purple
+hills of the Highlands, circling the peaceful lochs, skirting the swift
+mountain streams, tramping along the lonely roads of the far Hebrides:
+summer after summer journeying to the beautiful places the usual tourist
+in Britain journeys to for pleasure, but where we went because papers
+and magazines at home, with a wisdom we applauded, had asked us to go
+and make the drawings and write the articles by which we paid our way in
+the world.
+
+And it was work that sent us from end to end of France, and now in
+looking back I see J. and myself on the neat, compact Humber
+tandem,--then so new-fashioned, to-day as out-moded as the
+Rotary,--riding along straight poplared roads, through well-ordered
+forests and over wild hills, between vineyards, one year under the grey
+skies of Flanders or among the lagoons of Picardy and another under the
+brilliant sunshine of Provence or through the rich pastures of the sweet
+Bourbonnais, in and out of ancient villages and towns as full of romance
+as their names, with halts as long under the shadow of still nobler
+churches and fairer castles, getting to know the people and their ways
+and how pleasant life is in the land where beauty and thrift, gaiety and
+toil, courtesy and wit, go ever hand in hand.
+
+And again it was work that sent us still further south, to Italy which
+in my younger years I had longed for the more because I fancied it as
+inaccessible to me as Lhassa or the Grande Chartreuse. And again down
+the beautiful vista of work I see J. and myself still on the neat
+compact Humber, but now pushing up long white zigzags to grim
+hill-towns, rushing down the same zigzags into radiant valleys of fruit
+and flowers, winding between vineyards where the vines were festooned
+from tree to tree, and fields where huge, white, wide-horned oxen pulled
+the plough, bumping over the stones of old Roman roads, parting with the
+wonderful tandem only for the long stay in wonderful Rome and wonderful
+Venice.
+
+And again it was work that sent us, now each on a safety bicycle--a
+change that explains how time was flying--by the canals and on the flat
+roads of Belgium and Holland; into Germany, through the Harz with Heine
+for guide, by the castled Rhine and Moselle that may have lost their
+reputation for a while but that can never lose their loveliness; into
+Austria, on to Hungary, up in the Carpathians and to those heights from
+which the Russian Army but the other day looked down upon the Hungarian
+plain; into Spain, to sun-burnt Andalusia, for weeks in the Alhambra, to
+windy Madrid, for days in the Prado; into Switzerland, the "Playground
+of Europe," where our work must have seemed more than ever like play as
+we climbed, on our cycles and on foot, over the highest of the high
+Alpine passes, one after the other; again into Italy; again into France;
+again through England; again--but they were too numerous to count, all
+those journeys that claimed so many of my days and taught me, while I
+worked, all I have learned of Europe.
+
+Of such well-travelled roads anyway, it may be said people have heard as
+much as people can stand, and therefore I am wise to hold my peace about
+days spent upon them. But on the best-travelled road adventure lies in
+wait for the traveller who seeks it, chance awaits the discoverer who
+knows his business. Why, to this day J. and I are appealed to for facts
+about Le Puy because a quarter of a century ago we made our discovery of
+the town as the Most Picturesque Place in the World and sought our
+adventure by proclaiming the fact in print. But our discoveries might
+have been greater, our adventures more daring, and I should be silent
+about them now for quite another and far more sensible reason, and this
+is that I was not silent at the time. The tale of those old days is
+told.
+
+
+II
+
+Other journeys I made had no less an air of holiday-taking and meant no
+less hard labour. For most men work is bounded by the four walls of the
+office or the factory, or the shop, or the school, and rigidly regulated
+by hours, and they consequently suspect the amateur or the dawdler in
+the artist or writer who works where and when and as he pleases.
+Journalism has led me into pleasant places but never by the path of
+idleness. Rare has been the month of May that has not found me in Paris,
+not for the sunshine and gaiety that draw the tourist to it in that gay
+sunlit season, but for industrious days, with my eyes and catalogue and
+note-book, in the _Salons_. Few have been the International Exhibitions,
+from Glasgow to Ghent, from Antwerp to Venice, that I have missed, and
+if in my devoted attendance I might easily have been mistaken for the
+tireless pleasure-seeker, if I got what fun I could at odd moments out
+of my opportunities, never was I without my inseparable note-book and
+pencil in my hand or in my pocket, never without good, long, serious
+articles to be written in my hotel bedroom. Even in London when I might
+have passed for the idlest stroller along Bond Street or Piccadilly on
+an idle afternoon, oftener than not I have been bound for a gallery
+somewhere with the prospect of long hours' writing as the result of it.
+But though the task varied, the tale of these days as well has been
+told, and has duly appeared in the long columns of many a paper, in the
+long articles of many a magazine.
+
+
+III
+
+As time went on, my journeys were fewer and J. took his oftener by
+himself. A new variety of task was set me that left so little leisure
+for the galleries that I gave up "doing" them for my London papers. My
+days went to the making of books which, whether I wrote them alone or in
+collaboration with J., required my undivided attention. When these were
+such books as the Life of My Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, or the Life
+of Whistler, they called for research, days of reading in the Art
+Library at South Kensington, the British Museum, the London Library,
+days of seeing people and places, days of travelling, days of
+correspondence, days upon days at my desk writing--these days crowded
+with interesting incident, curious surprises, amusing talk, hours of
+hope, hours of black despair--in their own way days of discovery and
+adventure. But in this case again the tale has been told and I am not so
+foolish as to sit down and tell it anew, sorely as I may be tempted.
+Anybody who reads further will find that the principal truth my nights
+have revealed to me is that the man who is interested--really
+interested--in something, does not want to talk, and often cannot think,
+about anything else. But it does not follow that he can make sure of
+listeners as keen to hear about it. The writer may, in his enthusiasm,
+write the same book twice, but even if it prove a "best-seller" the
+first time, he runs a risk the second of seeing it disposed of as a
+remainder.
+
+
+IV
+
+So it has been throughout my working life: my day's task has had no
+other object than to get itself chronicled in print. If _what_ the work
+was that filled my day is not known, it could not interest anybody were
+I to write about it now. If _how_ I worked during all those long hours
+is to me an all-absorbing subject and edifying spectacle, I am not so
+vain as not to realize that I must be the only person to find it so.
+Most men--and women too--were brought into the world to work, but most
+of them would be so willing to shirk the obligation that the best they
+ask is to be allowed to forget their own labours while they can, and not
+to be bothered with a report of other people's. By nature I am inclined
+to Charles Lamb's belief that a man--or a woman--cannot have too little
+to do and too much time to do it in. But necessity having forced me to
+give over my days to work, it happens that I, personally, would from
+sheer force of habit find days without it a bore. However, I would not,
+for that reason, argue that work is its own reward to any save the
+genius, or that methods of work are of importance to any save the
+workman who employs them.
+
+Whatever man's endurance may be, I know one weak woman whose powers of
+work are limited. There was never anybody to regulate my day of work
+save myself, since I am glad to say it has not been my lot to waste the
+golden years of my life in an office, and I am not the stern task-master
+or tiresome trade-unionist who insists upon so many hours and so much
+work in them, and will make not an inch of allowance either more or
+less. Sometimes my hours were more, sometimes they were less, but always
+my energy was apt to slacken with the slackening of the day. I never
+found inspiration in the midnight oil and oceans of coffee. I have
+always wanted my solid eight hours of sleep, and would not shrink from
+nine or ten if they fitted in with a worker's life. Youth often gave me
+the courage I have not now to take up work again--a promised article,
+necessary reading, making notes, copying--at night. But youth never
+induced me to rely upon this night work if I could help it. My nearest
+approach to a rule was that at the end of the day I was at liberty to
+play, that my nights at least could be free of work.
+
+The play to many might pass for a mild form of mild amusement, for it
+usually consisted in nothing more riotous than meeting my friends and
+talking with them. But I confess that the talk and the quality of it,
+the meeting and its informality did strike me as so singularly
+stimulating as to verge upon the riotous. The manner of playing was
+entirely new to me in the beginning. All conventions bind with a heavy
+chain, but none with a heavier than the Philadelphia variety. Spruce
+Street nights had never been so free and so vociferous and so late, and,
+being a good Philadelphian, I am not sure if the nights that succeeded
+have yet lost for me their novelty. As a consequence, if, in looking
+back, my days appear to be wholly monopolized by work, my nights seem
+consecrated as wholly to amusement. The poet's "hideous" is the last
+adjective I could apply to the night my busy day sank into.
+
+How I worked may concern nobody save myself, but how I played I cannot
+help hoping has a wider interest. Those old nights were typical of a
+period, and they threw me with many people, contemporaries of J.'s and
+mine, who did much to make that period what it was. The nights as gay,
+as stimulating, that I have spent in other people's houses I have not
+the courage to recall except in the utmost privacy. Pepys and N.P.
+Willis in their time, no less than a whole army of Pamelas and
+Priscillas in ours, have shown the lengths and indiscretions to which so
+intimate a breach of hospitality may lead. I have had my experience. For
+some years a house with closely curtained windows has reproached me
+daily for not understanding that the man who invites the world to stare
+at him and is not happy if it won't, objects when his neighbours say
+lightly what they see. I am every bit as afraid to speak openly of
+those people who shared our nights and who, with us, have outlived them.
+Cowardice long since convinced me that it is not of the dead, but of the
+living, only good should be spoken--and if good cannot be spoken, what
+then? However, it is not in pursuit of problems that I have busied
+myself in reviving those old nights, but rather for the pleasure we all
+of us have, as the years go on, in feeling our way back along the
+Corridors of Time and living our past over again in memory. If I go
+further and live mine over again in print, it is because I like to think
+the fault will not lie with me if it altogether dies--I have given it,
+anyway, the chance of a longer lease of life.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+NIGHTS
+
+IN ROME
+
+
+
+
+IN ROME
+
+I
+
+
+It will give an idea of what ages ago those nights were, and of the
+youth I brought to them, if I say that I arrived in Rome on the first
+tandem tricycle ever seen in Italy.
+
+I can look back to it now with pride, for I was, in my way, a pioneer,
+but there was not much to be proud about at the time. Rome was so little
+impressed that J., my fellow pioneer, and I,--J. and I who in every town
+on the way from Florence had been the delight of the gaping crowd, J.
+and I who in all those beautiful October days on the white roads of
+Italy had suffered from nothing save the excess of the people's amiable
+attentions,--scarcely showed ourselves beyond the _Porta del Popolo_ and
+the Piazza of the same name, before we were arrested for driving the
+tandem furiously through the _Corso_--as if anybody could drive anything
+furiously through the _Corso_ at the hour before sunset, when all the
+world comes home from the _Borghese_. But two policemen, drawing their
+swords as if they meant business, commanded us to dismount and, between
+them, we walked ignominiously to the hotel, pushing the tricycle; and
+an astonished and not in the least admiring crowd followed; and the
+policeman asked us for a _lira_, which we refused, taking it for a proof
+of the corruption of modern Rome--and they were so within their legal
+rights that I do not care to say for how many more than one we were
+asked a few weeks later by the Syndic, whom we could not refuse; and
+altogether I do not think we were to blame if, after the policemen and
+the swords and the crowd had gone and the tricycle was locked up, and we
+wandered from the hotel in the gathering dusk, we were the two most
+ill-tempered young people who ever set out to enjoy their first night in
+Rome.
+
+Nor was our temper improved when J.'s instinct, which in a strange place
+takes him straight where he wants to go, having got us into the
+_Ghetto_, failed to get us out again. The _Ghetto_ itself was all right,
+so what a _Ghetto_ ought to be that had I been the Romans, I would not
+have pulled it down, I would have preserved it as a historical
+monument,--dirty, dark and mysterious, a labyrinth of narrow crooked
+streets, lined with tall grim houses, filled with melodramatic shadows
+and dim figures skulking in them, but a nightmare of a labyrinth which
+kept bringing us forever back to the same spot. And we could not dine
+on picturesqueness, and we would not have dined in any of the
+murderous-looking houses at any price, and at last J. admitted that
+there were times when a native might be a better guide than instinct,
+and in his best Italian he asked the way of two men who were passing.
+One, who wore the tweeds and flannel shirt by which in calmer moments we
+must have recognized him, pulled the other by the sleeve and growled in
+English: "Come on, don't bother about the beastly foreigners!" I can
+afford to forgive him to-day when I remember what his incivility cost
+him not only that night, when we would not let him off until he had
+shown us out of the _Ghetto_, but on a succession of our nights in Rome,
+Fate having neatly arranged that at the one house whose doors were
+opened to us he should be a constant visitor.
+
+Other doors might have opened had we had the clothes in which to knock
+at them. But we had come to Rome for four days with no more baggage than
+the tandem could carry, and we stayed four months without adding to it.
+We could have sent for our trunks, of course, or we could have bought
+new things in the Roman shops, but we did neither, I can hardly say why
+except that the story of our journey had to be finished, and other
+delightful articles we had crossed the Atlantic to do were waiting, and
+these were commissions that could not be neglected, since they were the
+capital upon which we had started out on our married life five months
+before. And our Letter of Credit was small, and Youth is stern with
+itself;--or, more likely, we did not trouble simply because it saved so
+much more trouble not to. No woman would have to be taught by Ibsen or
+anybody else how to live her own life, were she willing to live it in
+shabby clothes. It is not an easy thing to do, I know. I share the
+weakness of most women in feeling it a disgrace, or a misfortune, to be
+caught in the wrong clothes in the right place. But that year in Rome I
+had not outgrown the first ardours of work and, besides, in the old
+days, a cycle seemed an excuse for any and all degrees of shabbiness. In
+my short skirts, at a time when short skirts were not the mode, covered
+with mud, and carrying a tiny bag, I have walked into the biggest hotels
+of Europe without a tremor, conscious that the cycle at the door was my
+triumphant apology. The cyclist's dress, like the nun's uniform, was a
+universal passport, and I have never had the cleverness to invent
+another to replace it since I gave up cycling.
+
+
+II
+
+If we could not spend our nights in other people's houses, neither could
+we spend them in the rooms we had taken for ourselves at the top of one
+of the highest houses on the top of one of the highest hills in Rome.
+There was no objection to the rooms: they were charming, but we had
+found them on a warm November day when the sun was streaming in through
+the windows that looked far and wide over the town, and beyond to the
+_Campagna_, and still beyond to a shining line on the horizon we knew
+was the Mediterranean, and we did not ask about anything save the price,
+which to our surprise we could pay, and so we moved in at once. Nor for
+days, as we sat at our work in the sunlight, the windows open and Rome
+at our feet, did we imagine there could be anything to ask about, except
+if, by asking, we could prevail upon the _Padrona's_ son-in-law to go
+and blow his melancholy cornet anywhere rather than on the roof directly
+over our heads. Living in rooms was the nearest approach I had made in
+all my life to housekeeping, I was still in a state of wonderment at
+everything in Rome, from Romulus and Remus on the morning pat of butter
+to the November roses in full bloom on the Pincian, I was quite content
+to let practical affairs and domestic details look out for
+themselves--or, perhaps it would be more true to say that I never gave
+them a thought.
+
+But even in Rome the sun must set and November nights grow chill, and a
+night came when, after a day of rain, a fire would have been pleasant,
+and suddenly we discovered there was no place to make it in. It had
+never occurred to us that there could not be, fresh as we were from the
+land where heat in the house is as much a matter of course as a sun in
+the sky. At first we wrapped ourselves in shawls and blankets, hired the
+_padrona's_ biggest _scaldino_, and called it an experience. After a few
+evenings we decided it was an experience we could do without and, like
+all miserable Romans who have no fireplace, we settled down to spending
+our nights in the restaurants and _cafés_ of Rome.
+
+I doubt if I should care to spend my nights that way now; a quarter of a
+century has added unexpected charm to a dinner-table and fireside of my
+own; but no Arabian Nights could then have been fuller of entertainment
+than the Roman Nights that drove us from home in search of warmth and
+food. In Philadelphia there never had been a suspicion of chance, a
+shadow of adventure about my dinner. It was as inevitable as six
+o'clock and as inevitably eaten in the seclusion of the Philadelphia
+second-story back-building dining-room, if not of my family, then of one
+or another of my friends. In Rome it became a delightful uncertainty
+that transformed the six flights of stairs leading to it from our rooms
+into the "Road to Anywhere". That road was by no means an easy one to
+climb up again and if we could help it, we never climbed down more than
+once a day, usually a little before dusk, a few hours earlier when we
+were in a rare holiday mood, and always in time for a long or short
+tramp before dinner. If we came to a church we dropped into it, or a
+gallery, or a palace, or a garden, when we were in time. We followed the
+streets wherever they might lead,--along the brand-new _Via Nazionale_
+to the Forum or the narrow alleys to St. Peter's, beyond the gates to
+the _Campagna_--seeing a good deal of Rome without setting out
+deliberately to see anything. When we were hungry, we stopped at the
+first _Trattoria_ we passed, provided it looked as if we could afford
+it, and the chance dinner in a chance place at a chance hour was the
+biggest adventure of all that had crowded the way to it.
+
+[Illustration: Etching by Joseph Pennell
+OLD AND NEW ROME]
+
+One night the _Trattoria_ happened to be the _Posta_ in a narrow
+street back of the _Piazza Colonna_. It was small: not more than
+twenty could have dined there together in any comfort. It was
+beautifully clean. And the _padrone_, his son, and the one
+waiter--all the establishment--greeted us with that enchanting smile
+to which, during my first year in Italy, I fell only too ready a
+victim. Once we had dined at the _Posta_, we found it so pleasant
+that we fell into the habit of getting hungry in its neighbourhood.
+
+I have since got to know many more famous or pretentious restaurants,
+but never have dinners tasted so good as at this little Roman
+_trattoria_ where we had to consider the _centesimi_ in the price of
+every dish, and the quarter of a flask of cheap _Chianti_ shared between
+us was an extravagance, and we ate with the appetite that came of having
+eaten nothing all day save rolls and coffee for breakfast, and fruit and
+rolls for lunch, that we might afford a dinner at night. And I have
+dined in many restaurants of gilded and mirrored magnificence, but in
+none I thought so well decorated as the _Posta_ with its bare walls and
+coarse clean linen and no ornament at all, except the stand in the
+centre where we could pick out our fruit or our vegetable. Nor has any
+restaurant, crowded with the creations of Paquin and Worth, seemed more
+brilliant than the _Posta_ filled with officers. In Philadelphia I had
+never seen an army officer in uniform in my life; at the _Posta_ I saw
+hardly anything else. We were surrounded by lieutenants and captains and
+colonels, and as I watched them come and go with clank and clatter of
+spurs and swords, and military salutes at the door, and military cloaks
+thrown dramatically off and on, and gold braid shining, I began to think
+a big standing army worth the money to any country, on condition that it
+always went in uniform--on condition, I might now add, that this uniform
+is not khaki, then not yet heard of. When the old spare, grizzled
+General, always the last, appeared and all the other officers rose upon
+his entrance, our dinner was dignified into a ceremony. Sometimes, I
+fancied he felt his importance more than anybody, for he is the only man
+I have ever known courageous enough in public to begin his dinner with
+cake and finish it with soup.
+
+Now and then, on very special occasions, when we had sent off an article
+or received a cheque, we went to the _Falcone_ and celebrated the event
+by feasting on _Maccheroni alla Napolitana_, _Cinghale all'Agra Dolce_
+and wine of Orvieto. The _Falcone_ was another accident of our tramps,
+though we afterwards found it starred in Baedeker. It looked the
+centuries old it was said to be, such a shabby, sombre crypt of a
+restaurant that I accepted without question the tradition it cherished
+of itself as a haunt of the Cćsars, and was prepared to believe the
+waiters when they pointed out the mark of the Imperial head on the
+greasy walls, just as the waiters of the Cheshire Cheese in London point
+to the mark of Dr. Johnson's, while the flamboyancy of the cooking
+revealed to me the real reason of the decline and fall of Rome. I am
+afraid I should be telling the story of our own decline and fall had we
+sent off articles and received cheques every day. Fortunately, the
+intervals were long between the feasts, but unfortunately our digestion
+can never again be imperilled at the _Falcone_, for they tell me it has
+gone with the _Ghetto_ and so many other things in the Rome I knew and
+loved.
+
+By the middle of the winter we gave up the _Posta_ and went to the
+_Cavour_ instead. I don't know how we had the heart to, for the _Cavour_
+never had the same charm for us, we never got to like it so well. It was
+too large and popular for friendliness, the officers carried their
+ceremony and gorgeousness to a room apart, and the _padrone_ and his
+waiters were too busy for more than one fixed smile of general welcome.
+But then there, if we paid for our dinner by the month, it cost us next
+to nothing by the day, and our Letter of Credit allowed as narrow a
+margin for sentiment as for clothes. Moreover, the dinner was good as
+well as cheap. And when the streets of Rome were rivers of rain, as they
+often were that winter, it was brought to our rooms in a dinner pail by
+a waiter, after he had first come half a mile to submit the _menu_ to
+us, and in that cold, bleak interior, wrapped in blankets, a _scaldino_
+at our feet, a newspaper for tablecloth, we made a picnic of it,
+freezing, but thankful not to be drowned. And on great holidays, the
+_padrone_ spared us a smile all to ourselves as he offered us, with the
+compliments of the season, a plate of _torrone_ and a bottle of old wine
+from his vineyard.
+
+
+III
+
+With dinner the night was but beginning and smiles must have faded had
+we lingered over it indefinitely. I learned to my astonishment, however,
+that hours could be, or rather were expected to be, devoted to the
+drinking of one small cup of coffee, and that always near the
+_trattoria_ was a _café_[A] which provided the coffee and, at the cost
+of a few cents, could become our home for as long and as late as might
+suit us. In Philadelphia after dinner coffee had been swallowed
+promptly, in the back parlour if we were dining alone, in the front if
+people were dining with us, and I was startled to find it in Rome an
+excuse to loaf at a convenient distance from the domestic hearth for
+Romans with apparently nothing to do and all their time to do it in.
+
+[Footnote A: _Note._--Let me anticipate the amiable critic--and say that
+I know this is not the Italian spelling of _café_. I use the French
+spelling here, as in later chapters where it belongs, for the sake of
+uniformity throughout.]
+
+It is an arrangement I take now as a matter of course. But then, it must
+be borne in mind, for me only five months separated Rome from
+Philadelphia, and Philadelphia bonds are not easily broken. I suspected
+something wrong in so agreeable a custom, as youth usually does in the
+pleasant things of life, and as a Philadelphian always does in the
+unaccustomed, and at first, when we went to the ancient _Greco_, I tried
+to believe it was entirely the result of J.'s interest in a place where
+artists had drunk coffee for generations. When we deserted it because,
+despite its traditions, nobody went there any longer save a few
+grey-bearded old men and a few gold-laced hall porters, and the dulness
+fell like a pall upon us, and the atmosphere was rank, and when we
+patronized instead a brand-new _café_ in the _Corso_ that called itself
+in French the _Café de Venise_ and in English the _Meet of Best
+Society_, I put down the attraction to the _Daily News_, to which the
+_café_ subscribed, and for which in those days Andrew Lang was writing
+the leaders everybody was reading. But Lang could not reconcile us to
+the nightly _Gran Concerto_ of a piano, a flute and a violin of
+indifferent merit concealed in a thicket of artificial trees, and the
+_Best Society_ meant tourists, and after we had shocked a family of New
+England friends by inviting them to share its tawdry pleasures with us,
+and after a few evenings had given us, unaccompanied, all and more than
+we could stand of it, we exchanged it for a _café_ without a past and
+with no aspirations as the Meet of any save the usual _café_ society of
+a big Italian town. By this time I had ceased to worry about excuses and
+had settled down to idleness and coffee with as little scruple as the
+natives.
+
+The _café_ we chose was the _Nazionale Aragno_ in the Corso, the largest
+and most gorgeous in Rome. The three or four rooms that opened one out
+of the other had a magnificence that we could never have achieved in
+furnished rooms and would not have wanted to if we could, and a
+succession of mirrors multiplied them indefinitely. We leaned
+luxuriously against blue plush, gilding glittered wherever gilding could
+on white walls, waiters rushed about with little shining nickel-plated
+trays held high above their heads, spurs and swords clanked and
+clattered, by the middle of the evening not a table was vacant.
+
+It was simply the usual big Continental _café_, but to me as new and
+strange as everything else in the wonderful life in the wonderful world
+into which I had strayed from the old familiar ways of Philadelphia,
+with a long halt between only in England where the _café_ does not
+exist. To the marble-topped tables, the gilding, mirrors and plush,
+novelty lent a charm they have never had since and probably would soon
+have lost had we been left to contemplate them in solitary state, as it
+seemed probable we should. For we knew nobody in Rome except Sandro, the
+youthful enthusiastic Roman cyclist we had picked up in Montepulciano,
+cycled with through the Val di Chiana on a sunny October Sunday, and run
+across again in Rome where he amiably showed us the hospitality of the
+capital by occasionally drinking coffee with us at our expense, and by
+once introducing a friend, a tall, slim, good-looking young man of such
+elegance of manner and such a princely air of condescension, that Sandro
+himself was impressed and joined us again, later on the same evening, to
+explain our privilege in having entertained the Queen's hair-dresser
+unawares. Foreigners did not often find their way into the _Nazionale_.
+They were almost as few in number as women, who were very few, for as
+women in Rome never dined,--or so I gathered from my observations at the
+_Posta_, the _Falcone_ and the _Cavour_,--they never drank coffee. Only
+on Sundays would they descend upon the _café_ with their husbands and
+children, and then it was to devour ices and cakes at a rate that
+convinced me they devoured little else from one Sunday to the next. When
+I asked for the _Times_--they took the _Times_ at the _Nazionale_--the
+waiter almost invariably answered: "It reads itself, the _Signore
+Tedesco_ has it," and the _Signore Tedesco_, a mild German student who
+for his daily lesson in English read the advertisement columns from
+beginning to end, was the only foreigner who appeared regularly at any
+table save our own.
+
+And yet at ours, before I could say how it came about, a little group
+collected, and every evening in the furthest room J. and I began to hold
+an informal reception which gave us all the advantages of social life
+and none of its responsibilities. We could preside in the travel-worn
+tweeds of cycling and not bother because we were not dressed; we could
+welcome our friends the more cordially because, as we did not provide
+the entertainment, it was no offence to us if they did not like it, nor
+to them if we failed to sit it out. In the _café_ we found the "oblivion
+of care," the same "freedom from solitude," though not the big words to
+express it, which Dr. Johnson "experienced" in a tavern. Were all social
+functions run on the same broad principles, society would not be half
+the strain it is upon everybody's patience and good-nature and purse.
+
+Almost all the group were artists. In those days artists and students
+were no longer rushing to Rome as the one place to study art in, nor had
+the effort begun to revive its old reputation among them. Still a good
+many were always about. Some lived there, others, like ourselves, were
+spending the winter, or else were just passing through, and, once we had
+collected the group round our table, I do not believe we were ever left
+to pass an evening alone.
+
+Artists were as great a novelty to me as the _café_--I had been married
+so short a time that J. had not ceased to be a problem, if he ever
+has--and nothing was more amazing to me than the talk. Its volubility
+took my breath away. I thought of the back parlour at home after dinner,
+my Father playing interminable games of Patience, the rest of us deep in
+our books until bed-time. And these men talked as if talk was the only
+business, the only occupation of life.
+
+Still more surprising was the subject of their talk. If they had so much
+to say that it made me grateful I was born a listener, they had only one
+thing to say it about. It was art from the moment we met until we
+parted, though we might sit over our coffee for hours. Often it was next
+morning when J. and I reached the house at the top of the hill, and he
+dragged the huge key from his pocket, undid the ponderous lock and
+struck the overgrown match, or undersized candle, by which the Roman lit
+himself to his rooms, and we panted up our six flights afraid ours would
+not last, for we had but the one supplied by the restaurant.
+
+The quality of the talk was as amazing: bewildering, revolutionary, to
+anybody who had never heard art talked about by artists, as I never had
+before I met J. All I had thought right turned out to be wrong, all I
+had never thought of was right, all that was essential to the critic of
+art, to the Ruskin-bred, had nothing to do with it whatever. History,
+dates, periods, schools, sentiment, meaning, attributions, Morelli only
+as yet threatening to succeed Ruskin as prophet of art, were not worth
+discussion or thought. The concern was for art as a trade--the trade
+which creates beauty; the vital questions were treatment, colour,
+values, tone, mediums. The price of pictures and the gains of artists,
+those absorbing topics of the great little men in England to-day, were
+never mentioned: the man who sold was looked down on, rather. There were
+nights when I went away believing that nothing mattered in the world
+except the ground on a copper plate, or the grain of a canvas, or the
+paint in a tube, so long and heated and bitter had been the controversy
+over it. They might all be artists, but they were of a hundred opinions
+as to the exact meaning of right and wrong, and they could wrangle over
+mediums until the German student looked up in reproof from his columns
+of advertisements and the Romans shrugged their shoulders at the curious
+manners and short tempers of the _forestiere_. But there was one point
+upon which I never knew them not to be of one mind, and this was the
+supreme importance of art. If I ventured to disagree--which I was far
+too timid to do often--they were down upon me like a flash, abusing me
+for being so blind as not to see the truth in Rome, of all places, where
+of a tremendous past nothing was left but the work of the masters who
+built and adorned the city, or who sang and chronicled its splendours.
+
+
+IV
+
+The noise of their talk is still loud in my ears, but many of the
+talkers have grown dim in my memory. Of some of the older men I cannot
+recall the faces, not even the names; some of the younger I remember
+better, partly I suppose because they were young and starting out in
+life with us, partly because one or two later on made their names heard
+of by many people outside of the _Nazionale_ and far beyond Rome.
+
+I could not easily forget the young Architect who was then getting ready
+to conquer Philadelphia--to borrow a phrase from Zola, as seems but
+appropriate in writing of the Eighties--for which great end all the
+knowledge of the _Beaux-Arts_ could not have served him as well as his
+conviction that the architecture of Europe had waited for him to
+discover it. He had never been abroad before and he could not believe
+that anybody else had. He would come to our little corner from his
+prowls in Rome and tell men, who had lived there for more years than he
+had hours, all about the churches and palaces and galleries, like a new
+Columbus revealing to his astonished audience the wonders of a New
+World. And it amused me to see how patiently the older men listened,
+sparing his illusions, no doubt because they heard in his ardent,
+confident, decidedly dictatorial voice the voice of their own youth
+calling. He carried his convictions home with him unspoiled, and his
+first building--a hospital or something of the kind--was a monument to
+his discoveries, a record of his adventures among the masterpieces of
+Europe, beginning on the ground floor as the Strozzi Palace, developing
+into various French castles, and finishing on the top as a Swiss
+_châlet_, atrocious as architecture, but amusing as autobiography. All
+his buildings were more or less reminiscent, and told again in stone the
+story so often told in words at the _Nazionale_, for Death was kind and
+claimed him before he had ceased to be the discoverer to become himself.
+
+Donoghue too has gone, Donoghue the sculptor who as I knew him in Rome
+was so overflowing with life, so young that I felt inclined to credit
+him with the gift of immortal youth, so big and handsome and gay that
+wherever he went laughter went with him. He too was a discoverer, but
+his discovery was of Paris and the Latin Quarter. It had filled a year
+between Chicago, where he had been Oscar Wilde's discovery, and Rome,
+and he had had time to work off his first fantastic exuberance as
+discoverer before I met him. "Donoghue is all right," they would say of
+him at the _Nazionale_; "he has got past the brass buttons and pink
+swallow tail stage, even if he does cling to low collars and tight pants
+and spats."
+
+Certainly, he had got so far as to think he ought to be beginning to
+work, and he was in despair because he could not find in Rome a youth as
+beautiful as himself to pose for his Young Sophocles. To listen to him
+was to believe that Narcissus had come to life again. We would meet him
+during our afternoon rambles in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, when
+he would stop and take half an hour to assure us he hadn't time to stop,
+he was hunting for a model he had just heard of, and then he would drop
+into the _Nazionale_ at night to report his want of progress, for no
+model ever came up to his standard. He referred to his own beauty with
+the frank simplicity and vanity of a child--a real Post-Impressionist;
+not one by pose, for there was not a trace of pose in him. I wish I
+could say how astonishing he was to me. Life has since thrown many young
+artists and writers my way and I am used to their conceits and
+affectations and splendid belief in themselves. But my experience then
+was of the most limited and bound by Philadelphia convention, and I
+cannot imagine a greater contrast than between the Philadelphia youth to
+whom I was accustomed, talking of the last reception and the next party
+over his chicken salad at the Dancing Class, and Donoghue talking
+dispassionately of his own surpassing beauty over a small cup of coffee
+at the _Nazionale_.
+
+Donoghue was a child, not merely in his vanity, but in everything, with
+the schoolboy's sense of fun. I never knew him happier than the evening
+he hurried to the _café_ from his visit to the Coliseum by moonlight to
+tell us of his joke on the Americans he found waiting there in silence
+for the guide's announcement that the moon was in the proper place for
+their proper emotion. A friend was with him.
+
+"And I said: '_Sprichst du Deutsch?_' very loud as we passed," was
+Donoghue's story. "And he answered as loud as he could: '_Nichts!
+Nichts!_' And I said: '_Zwei Bier_,' and of course the Americans took us
+for Germans. Then we hid in the shadows a little further on and we both
+yelled together at the top of our voices, 'Three cheers for Cleveland!'
+and the Americans jumped, and they forgot the moon, and they wouldn't
+listen to the guide, and I tell you it was just great."
+
+I was not overcome myself with the wit or humour of the jest, but
+Donoghue was, and he roared with laughter until none of us could help
+roaring with him in sheer sympathy. He was as enchanted with his method
+of learning Italian. He was reading Wilkie Collins and Bret Harte in an
+Italian translation, and when he yawned in our faces and left the _café_
+early, it was because the night before the Dago's _Woman in White_ or
+_Luck of Roaring Camp_ had kept him up until long after dawn, though
+really he knew it was a waste of time since anybody had only to get
+himself half seas over and he'd talk any darned lingo in the world.
+
+He joined us less often after he gave up the hopeless hunt for the model
+who never was found and whom it would have been useless anyway to find,
+for Donoghue always spent his quarter's allowance the day he got it, and
+most models could not wait three months to be paid. To this conclusion
+he came soon after the first of the year and settled down seriously to
+posing for himself and, as the world knows, the Young Sophocles was
+finished in the course of time and a very fine statue it is said to be.
+But even if he did desert our table he would still seem to me in memory
+the centre of the little group gathered about it, had it not been for
+Forepaugh.
+
+Of course his name was not Forepaugh--though something very like it--but
+Forepaugh answers my every purpose. For though I did know his name I did
+not know then, and I do not know now, who he was and why he was. I do
+not think anybody ever knew anything about him except that he was
+Forepaugh, which meant, according to his own reckoning, the most
+wonderful person on earth. He was one of the sort of men whose habit is
+to turn up wherever you may happen to be, in whatever part of the world,
+with no apparent reason for being there except to talk to you,--the last
+time we met was in a remote corner of Kensington Gardens in London,
+where he took up the talk just where we had left off at the _Nazionale_
+in Rome--and as it is years since he has turned up anywhere to talk to
+us, I fear he has joined the Philadelphia Architect and Donoghue where
+he will talk no more.
+
+In sheer physical power of speech he was without a rival and none
+surpassed him in appreciation of his eloquence. His interest never
+flagged so long as he held the floor, though when we wanted him to
+listen to us, he did not attempt to conceal his indifference. We could
+not tell him anything, for there was nothing about which he did not know
+more than we could hope to. He, at any rate, had no doubt of his own
+omniscience. Judging from the intimate details with which he regaled us,
+he was equally in the confidence of the Vatican and the Quirinal,
+equally at home with the Blacks and the Whites. The secrets of the Roman
+aristocracy were his, he was the first to hear the scandals of the
+foreign colony. The opera depended upon his patronage and balls
+languished without him, though I could never understand how or why, so
+rarely did he leave us to enjoy them. Every archćologist, every scholar,
+every historian in Rome appealed to him for help, and as for art, it was
+folly for others to pretend to speak of it in his presence. He called
+himself an artist and for a time he used to go with J. to Gigi's, the
+life school where artists then in Rome often went of an afternoon to
+draw from the model. But J. never saw him there with as much as a scrap
+of paper or a pencil in his hands, and nobody ever saw him at work
+anywhere. For what he did not do he made up by telling us of what he
+might do. His were the pictures unpainted which, like the songs unsung,
+are always the best. He condescended to approve of the Old Masters,
+assured that the masterpieces he might choose to produce must rank with
+theirs, but he never forgot the great gulf fixed between himself and the
+Modern Masters, whose pictures were worthy of his approval only when he
+had been their inspiration. It was fortunate for American Art that
+scarcely an American artist could be named whom Forepaugh had not
+inspired. And if he praised Abbey and Millet more than most, it was
+because he had posed for both and could answer for it that Millet's
+porch, or studio, or dining-room, which had had the honour of serving as
+his background, was as true as the figure of himself set against it.
+
+Like all talkers who know too much, Forepaugh had, what Carlyle called,
+a terrible faculty for developing into a bore. Some of our little group
+would run when they saw him at the door, others took malicious pleasure
+in interrupting him and suddenly changing the conversation in the hope
+to catch him tripping. But out of all such tests he came triumphantly. I
+never thought him more wonderful than the evening when somebody abruptly
+began to talk about Theosophy in the middle of one of his confidences
+about the Italian Court. It was no use. Without stopping to take breath,
+at once Forepaugh began to tell us the most marvellous theosophical
+adventures, which he knew not by hearsay, but because he had passed
+through them himself. We might express an opinion: he stated facts. And
+it seemed that he had no more intimate friend than Sinnett, and that to
+Sinnett he had confessed his scepticism, asking for a sign, a
+manifestation, and that one afternoon when they were smoking over their
+coffee and cognac after lunch in Sinnett's chambers, then on the third
+floor of a house near the Oxford Street end of Bond Street--Forepaugh
+was carefully exact in his details--Sinnett smiled mysteriously but said
+nothing except to warn him to hold on tight to the table. And up rose
+the table, with the litter of coffee cups, cigars, and cognac, up rose
+the two chairs, one at either end with Sinnett and Forepaugh sitting on
+them, and away they floated out of the open window--it was a June
+afternoon--and along Bond Street, above the carriages and the hansoms
+and omnibuses and the people as far as Piccadilly, and round the lamp
+post by Egyptian Hall, up Bond Street again, and in at the window. "Hold
+on," said Sinnett, and "I never held on to anything as tight in my life
+as I did to that table," said Forepaugh in conclusion.
+
+He always reminded me of the man who so annoyed my Uncle, Charles
+Godfrey Leland, by always knowing, doing, or having everything better or
+bigger than anybody else. "Why, if I were to tell him I had an elephant
+in my back yard," my Uncle used to say, "he would at once invite me to
+see the mastodon in his." Forepaugh had a mastodon up his sleeve for
+everybody else's elephant.
+
+
+V
+
+[Illustration: By Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company
+ELIHU VEDDER]
+
+If Forepaugh gave us a great deal of information we had no possible use
+for and talked us to despair, he was really a good fellow whom we should
+have missed from our table. And it was through him J. and I were first
+made welcome in that one house open to us, to which I have been all this
+time in coming. For it was Forepaugh who told Vedder we were in Rome,
+and Vedder, once he knew it, would not hear of our shutting his door
+in our own faces, nor would Mrs. Vedder, whatever the condition of our
+wardrobe.
+
+Vedder may have revealed many things in his recent _Digressions_, but
+not the extent of the hospitality he and his wife showed to the American
+who was a stranger in Rome, where, even then, they had been long at
+home. Mrs. Vedder carried her amiability to the point of climbing our
+six flights of stairs and calling on me in the rooms that suited us
+admirably for our work but were less adapted to afternoon receptions,
+and she would have gone further and shown me how to adapt them by moving
+every bit of furniture from where it was and arranging it all over
+again. Not the least part of her friendliness was not to mind when I did
+not fall in with her plans, as I couldn't, since so long as the sun
+shone in at the windows all was right with the rooms as far as I could
+see. I was in the absurd stage of industry when I did not care where my
+Roman furniture stood so long as my Roman tasks got done. Even our
+_padrona_ told me her surprise that, foreigner as I was, I seemed to do
+as much work as she did, which I accepted as a compliment. After that
+first attempt Mrs. Vedder did not return to climb our six flights, but
+she would not let us off from climbing her four or five.
+
+Often as we took advantage of their hospitality, we never found the
+Vedders alone and, chiefly American as was the group at their fireside,
+it was never without a foreigner or two. The first person we were
+introduced to on the first visit was the Englishman who would have
+deserted us in the _Ghetto_ had we let him have his way, and who, when
+he saw us, looked as if he wished the Vedders had learned to be less
+indiscriminate in their hospitality. We had the satisfaction of knowing
+that we made him supremely uncomfortable. He frowned upon us then as he
+continued to all through the winter. He could not forgive us for having
+found him out and was evidently afraid we were going to tell everybody
+about it. He was something very learned and was occupied in writing a
+book on Ancient Rome; later he became something more important at South
+Kensington. But no degree of learning and importance helped him to
+forget, or anyway to forgive. At chance meetings years afterwards in
+London he frowned, as no doubt he would still had he not long since gone
+to the land where I hope all frowns are smoothed from his frowning brow.
+
+If he frowned, there was another Englishman who smiled: an elderly man
+with the imperturbable serenity of a Buddha. He also had written books,
+I believe. I remember articles by him, with art for subject, in the
+_Portfolio_ at a time when everybody had taken to writing about art, and
+I think his name was Davies. But it would be more in character to forget
+that he ever worked or had a name. When I was in Rome he had risen above
+activity and toil to the contemplative life and, I suppose, to the
+income that made it possible. One night he explained his philosophy to
+me. Men could not be happy without sunshine, he thought. The sun was
+house, food, clothes, furniture, identity, everything, and as most of
+the year in England sunshine was not to be had at any price, he had come
+to live in Rome where almost all the year it was his for nothing. He sat
+on the Pincian or in other gardens during the day, doing nothing in the
+sunshine--that was living. And he urged me to follow his example and not
+to wait until half my life had been wasted in the pursuit of happiness
+where it was not to be found. He may have been right, but I never needed
+to become a philosopher to value the virtue of indolence,--my trouble is
+that I have never had the money to pay for it. Any man has the ability
+to do nothing, a great authority has said, and I can answer for one
+woman who has more than her fair share of it. I have always envied the
+North American Indians for their enjoyment of what it seems Burke
+attributed to them: "the highest boon of Heaven, supreme and perpetual
+indolence."
+
+As regular a visitor was a huge long-bearded Norwegian who looked a
+prophet and was an artist, and who spent most of the winter in the study
+of Marion Crawford's novels, I cannot imagine why, as they roused him to
+fury.
+
+"Marion Crawford," he would thunder at us as if somehow we were
+responsible, "Bah! He is a weak imitator of Bulwer, that is all, and he
+has not Bulwer's power of construction. He is not Bulwer. No. He is a
+weakling. Bah!"
+
+My only quarrel with Marion Crawford's books was that they never excited
+strong emotion in me, one way or the other, and I was so puzzled by his
+excitement that I remember I went to the trouble of getting out _Mr.
+Isaacs_ and _A Roman Singer_ from Piali's Library in the _Piazza di
+Spagna_, that centre of learning and literature for the English in Rome
+where, one day when I asked for Pepys's Diary, they offered me Marcus
+Ward's. A new course of Marion Crawford left me as puzzled as ever for
+the reason of the Norwegian's rage, and I was the more impressed with
+the possibilities of a temperament that could heat itself to such a
+degree at so lukewarm a fire.
+
+We were as certain to find this fiery Norseman and the two Englishmen
+any night we called as Vedder himself. Other men came and went, amongst
+them a few Italians and Frenchmen and more Americans, Coleman for one
+among them, but none could have appeared as regularly, so much fainter
+is the impression they have left with me. Naturally, they were mostly
+artists and at Vedder's, as at the _café_, the talk was chiefly of art.
+There was little of his work to see, for his studio was some distance
+from his apartment. But it was enough to see Vedder himself or, for that
+matter, enough to hear him. In his own house he led the talk, even
+Forepaugh having small chance against him. He was as prolific, a
+splendidly determined and animated talker. It was stimulating just to
+watch him talk. He was never still, he rarely sat down, he was always
+moving about, walking up and down, at times breaking into song and even
+dance. He was then in his prime, large, with a fine expressive face, and
+as American in his voice, in his manner, in his humour as if he had
+never crossed the Atlantic. The true American never gets Europeanized,
+nor does he want to, however long he may stay on the wrong side of the
+Atlantic. When I was with Vedder, Broadway always seemed nearer than the
+_Corso_.
+
+He had recently finished the illustrations for the _Rubaiyat_ and the
+book was published while we were in Rome. It was never long out of his
+talk. He would tell us the history of every design and of every model or
+pot in it. He exulted in the stroke of genius by which he had invented a
+composition or a pose. I have heard him describe again and again how he
+drew the flight of a spirit from a model, outstretched and flopping up
+and down on a feather bed laid upon the studio floor, until she almost
+fainted from fatigue, while he worked from a hammock slung just above. I
+recall his delight when a friend of Fitzgerald's sent him Fitzgerald's
+photograph with many compliments, asking for his in return. And he
+rejoiced in the story of Dr. Chamberlain filling a difficult tooth for
+the Queen and all the while singing the praises of the _Rubaiyat_ until
+she ordered a copy of the _édition de luxe_. In looking back, I always
+seem to see Mrs. Vedder pasting notices into a scrap book, and to hear
+Vedder declaiming Omar's quatrains and describing his own drawings.
+There was one evening when he came to a dead stop in his walk and his
+talk, and shaking a dramatic finger at us all, said:
+
+"I tell you what it is. I am not Vedder. I am Omar Khayyam!"
+
+"No," drawled the voice of a disgusted artist who had not got a word in
+for more than an hour, "No, you're not. You're the Great I Am!"
+
+Vedder laughed with the rest of us, but I am not sure he liked it. He
+could and did enjoy a joke, even if at his expense. I remember his
+delight one night in telling the story of an old lady who had visited
+his studio during the day and who sat so long in front of one of his
+pictures he thought it was having its effect, but whose only comment at
+the end of several minutes was: "That's a pretty frame you have there!"
+He was sensitive to criticism, however, though he carried it off with a
+laugh. Clarence Cook was one of the critics of his Omar who offended
+him.
+
+"It's funny," Vedder said, "all my life I've hurt Clarence's feelings.
+He always has been sure I have done my work for no other reason than to
+irritate him, and now that's the way he feels about the Omar."
+
+The laugh was not so ready when Andrew Lang--I think it was Lang--wrote
+that Vedder's Omar Khayyam was not of Persia, but of Skaneateles. And
+after I suggested that it was really of Rome, and some mistaken friend
+at home sent my article to Vedder, I never thought him quite so cordial.
+
+
+VI
+
+And so the winter passed. For us there was always a refuge from our cold
+rooms at the _café_ or at Vedder's, and it was seldom we did not profit
+by it.
+
+Occasionally during our rambles we stumbled unexpectedly upon old
+friends "doing Italy" and genuinely glad to see us, as we were to see
+them, inviting us to their hotels at every risk of the disapproval of
+manager and porters and waiters; and so powerful was the influence of
+Rome and the _café_ that now the marvel was to sit and listen to talk
+about Philadelphia, and where everybody was going for the summer, and
+who was getting married, and who had died, and what Philadelphia was
+thinking and doing, as if, after all, there were still benighted people
+in the world who believed not in art, but in Philadelphia as of supreme
+importance.
+
+Occasionally we made new friends outside of our pleasant _café_ life. I
+have forgotten how, though I have not forgotten it was in Rome, thanks
+to a letter of introduction from Dr. Garnett of the British Museum, that
+we first met Miss Harriet Waters Preston, who, for her part, had already
+introduced me to Mistral--how many Americans had heard of Mistral before
+she translated _Mirčio_?--and who now accepted us, cycling tweeds and
+all, notwithstanding the shock they must have been to the admirably
+appointed _pension_ where she stayed. She also climbed our six flights,
+her niece and collaborator, Miss Louise Dodge, with her, probably both
+busy that winter collecting facts for their _Private Life of the
+Romans_, and where could they have found a more perfect background for
+the past they were studying than when they looked down from our windows
+over Rome, to the _Campagna_ beyond, and upon the horizon the shining
+line that we knew was the Mediterranean,--over all the beauty that has
+not changed in the meanwhile, though old streets and old villas and old
+slums have vanished. And at these times, in the talk, not Philadelphia,
+but literature was for a while art's rival.
+
+And there were days when we played truant and climbed down in the
+morning's first freshness from the high room overlooking Rome and the
+work that had to be done in it, and loafed all day in Roman galleries
+and at Roman ceremonies, or strayed to places further afield--Tivoli,
+Albano, Ostia, Marino, Rocca di Papa,--getting back to Rome with feet
+too tired to take us anywhere except up our six flights again. And there
+were nights when the affairs of Rome drew us from the _café_. I remember
+once our little group interrupted their interminable arguments long
+enough to see the Tiber in flood, down by the _Ripetta_, where people
+were going about in boats, and Rome looked like the Venice to which I
+had then never been, and we met King Humbert and Queen Margherita in his
+American trotting wagon driving down alone so as to show their sympathy,
+for, whatever they may not have done, they always appeared in person
+when their people were in trouble: not so many weeks before we had
+watched the enthusiasm with which the Romans greeted King Humbert on his
+return from visiting the cholera-stricken town of Naples. And I remember
+on _Befana_ Night we adjourned to the _Piazza Navona_ to blow horns and
+reed whistles into other people's ears and to have them blown into ours.
+For the humours of the Carnival there was no need to leave the _café_,
+where one _Pulcinello_ after another broke into our talk with witticisms
+that kept the _café_ in an uproar, and for me destroyed whatever
+sentiment there might have been in the thought that this was my last
+night in Rome--the last of the friendly nights of talk in the
+_Nazionale_ to which we always returned no matter how far we might
+occasionally stray from it--the friendly nights of talk when I learned
+my folly in ever having believed that anything in the world mattered,
+that anything in the world existed, save art.
+
+_Pulcinello_, the newest of our Roman friends, went with us from Rome,
+following us to Naples, a familiar face to lighten our homesickness for
+the rooms full of sunshine at the top of the high house on the top of
+the high hill, and for the blue plush and the gilding and the mirrors
+and the talk of the _Nazionale_.
+
+And _Pulcinello_ went with us to Pompeii, reappearing during our nights
+at the _Albergo del Sole_, that most delightful and impossible of all
+the inns that ever were. It may have vanished in the quarter of a
+century that has passed since the February day I came to it, when the
+sky was as blue as the sea, and a soft cloud hung over Vesuvius, and
+flowers were sweet in the land--can anyone who ever smelt it forget the
+sweetness of the flowering bean in the wide fields near the Bay of
+Naples? But Pompeii could never be the same without the _Sole_. And it
+was made for our shabbiness, its three tumbled-down little houses ranged
+round the three sides of an unkempt, mud-floored court; our bedroom
+without lock or latch and with a mirror cracked from side to side like
+the Lady of Shalott's, though for other reasons; the dining-room with
+earthen floor, walls decorated by a modern-primitive fresco of the
+_padrone_ holding a plate of _maccheroni_ in one hand and a flask of
+_Lachrima Christi_ in the other, a central column spreading out branches
+like a tree and bearing for fruit row upon row of still unopened
+bottles, a door free to all the stray monks and beggars of Pompeii--to
+all the fowls too, including the gorgeous peacock that strolled in after
+its evening walk with the young Swiss artist on the flat roof of the inn
+where, together, they went before dinner to watch the sunset.
+
+Throughout dinner, at the head of the long table where we sat with the
+Swiss artist and an old German professor of art and an older Italian
+archćologist, the talk, as at the _Nazionale_, was of art, so that it
+also, like _Pulcinello_, crying his jests through the window or at our
+elbow, made me feel at home. While we helped ourselves from that amazing
+dish into which you stuck a fork and pulled out a bit of chicken or
+duck or beef or mutton or sausage; while the old professor and
+archćologist absent-mindedly stretched a hand to the column behind them,
+and plucked from it bottle after bottle of wine; while the beggars
+whined at the open door, and the monks begged at our side, and
+_Pulcinello_ capered and jested and sang; while the American tourists at
+the other end of the table deplored the disorder and noise until we sent
+them the longest and most expensive way up Vesuvius to get rid of them;
+while the fowls fought for the crumbs;--the talk was still of art and
+again of art, in the end as in the beginning. I might not understand
+half of it, coming as it did in a confused torrent of German, Italian,
+French, and English, but the nights at the _Sole_, like the nights at
+the _Nazionale_, made this one truth clear: that nothing matters in the
+world, that nothing exists in the world, save art.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+NIGHTS
+
+IN VENICE
+
+
+
+
+IN VENICE
+
+I
+
+
+We reached Venice at an unearthly hour of a March morning and the first
+thing I knew of it somebody was shouting, "_Venezia!_" and I was
+startled from a sound sleep, and porters were scrambling for our bags,
+and we were stumbling after them, up a long platform, between a crowd of
+men in hotel caps yelling: "_Danieli!_" "_Britannia!_" and I hardly
+heard what, out into a fog as impenetrable as night or London. The
+muffled, ghostly cries of "_gundola! gundola!_" from invisible
+gondoliers on invisible waters would have sent me back into the station
+even had there been a chance to find so modest a hotel as the _Casa
+Kirsch_ open so preposterously early, and my first impressions of Venice
+were gathered in the freezing, foggy station restaurant where J. and I
+drank our coffee and yawned, and I would have thought Ruskin a fraud
+with his purple passage describing the traveller's arrival in Venice
+upon which I had based my expectations, had I been wide enough awake to
+think of anything at all, and the hours stretched themselves into
+centuries before a touch of yellow in the fog suggested a sun shining
+in some remote world, and we crawled under the cover of one of the dim
+black boats that emerged vaguely, a shadow from the shadows.
+
+I had looked forward to my first _gondola_ ride for that "little first
+Venetian thrill" that Venice owes to the stranger. But I did not thrill,
+I shivered with cold and damp and fog as the _gondola_ pushed through
+the yellow gloom in the sort of silence you can feel, and tall houses
+towered suddenly and horribly above us, and strange yells broke the
+stillness before and behind, when another black boat with a black figure
+at the stern, came out of the gloom, scraped and bumped our side, and
+was swallowed up again.
+
+And after we were on the landing of the _Casa Kirsch_, and up in our
+rooms, and the fog lifted, and the sun shone, and we looked out of our
+windows with all Venice in our faces, and J. took me to see the town, my
+impressions were still foggy with sleep. For, from Pompeii, where there
+had been work, to Venice where there was to be more, we had hurried by
+one of those day-and-night flights to which J. has never accustomed me,
+the hurried, crowded pauses at Naples and Orvieto and Florence and Pisa
+and Lucca and Pistoia turning the journey into a beautiful nightmare of
+which all I was now seeing became but a part: the _Riva_, canals, sails,
+_Bersaglieri_, the Ducal Palace, the Bridge of Sighs, St. Mark's, the
+_Piazza_, _gondolas_, women in black, white sunlight, pigeons, tourists,
+the _Campanile_, following one upon another with the inconsequence of
+troubled dreams. And then we were on the _Rialto_ and J. was saying "Of
+course you know that?" and I was answering "Of course, the Bridge of
+Sighs!" and the many years between have not blunted the edge of his
+disgust or my remorse. But my disgrace drove me back to the _Casa
+Kirsch_, to sleep for fifteen blessed hours before looking at one other
+beautiful thing or troubling my head about what we were to do with our
+days and our nights in Venice.
+
+
+II
+
+What we were to do with our days settled itself the next morning as soon
+as I woke. For Venice, out of my window, was rising from the sea with
+the dawn, everything it ought to have been the morning before, and I had
+no desire to move from a room that looked down upon the _Riva_, and
+across to _San Giorgio_, and beyond the island--and sail-strewn lagoon
+to the low line of the _Lido_, and above to the vastness of the
+Venetian sky.
+
+Nor was there trouble in providing for our nights. Before I left home a
+romantic friend had pictured me in Venice, wrapped in black lace,
+forever floating in a _gondola_ under the moon. But my Roman winter had
+taught me how much more likely the gas-light of some little _trattoria_
+and _café_ was to shine upon me in my well-worn tweeds, my education
+having got so far advanced that any other end to my day of work could
+not seem possible. The only question was upon which of the many little
+_trattorie_ and _cafés_ in Venice our choice should fall, and this was
+decided for us by Duveneck, whom we ran across that same morning in the
+_Piazza_, and who told us that he slept in the _Casa Kirsch_, dined at
+the _Antica Panada_, and drank coffee at the _Orientale_, which was as
+much as to say that we might too if we liked. And of course we liked,
+for it is a great compliment when a man in Venice, or any Italian
+town,--especially if he is of the importance and distinction to which
+Duveneck had already attained,--makes you free to join him at dinner and
+over after-dinner coffee. It is more than a compliment. It launches you
+in Venice as to be presented at court launches you in London.
+
+[Illustration: Painting by Joseph R. De Camp
+FRANK DUVENECK]
+
+We began that night to dine at the _Panada_ and drink coffee at the
+_Orientale_, and we kept on dining at the _Panada_ and drinking coffee
+at the _Orientale_ every night we were in Venice; except when it was a
+_festa_ and we followed Duveneck to the _Calcino_, where various Royal
+Academicians sustained the respectability Ruskin gave it by his
+patronage and Symonds tried to live up to; or when there was music in
+the _Piazza_ and, happy to do whatever Duveneck did, we went with him to
+the _Quadri_ or _Florian's_; or when it stormed, as it can in March, and
+all day from my window I had looked down upon the dripping _Riva_ and
+the wind-waved Lagoon and lines of fishing boats moored to the banks,
+and no living creatures except the gulls, and the little white woolly
+dogs on the fishing boats covered with sails, and the sailors miserably
+huddled together, and gondoliers in yellow oilskins, and the
+_Bersaglieri_ in hoods--what the _Bersaglieri_ were doing there even in
+sunshine was one of the mysteries of Venice;--then we went with Duveneck
+no further than the kitchen of the _Casa Kirsch_, for he hated, as we
+hated, the _table d'hôte_ from which, there as everywhere, German
+tourists were talking away every other nationality.
+
+The kitchen was a huge room, with high ceiling, and brass and copper
+pots and pans on the whitewashed walls, and a dim light about the
+cooking stove, and dark shadowy corners. The _padrona_ laid the cloth
+for us in an alcove opposite the great fireplace, while she and her
+family sat at a table against the wall to the right, and the old cook
+ate at a bare table in the middle, and the maid-servant sat on a stool
+by the fire with her plate in her lap, and the man-servant stood in the
+corner with his plate on the dresser. Having thus expressed their
+respect for class distinctions, they felt no further obligation, but
+they all helped equally in cooking and serving, talked together the
+whole time, quarrelled, called each other names, and laughed at the old
+man's stories told in the Venetian which I only wish I had understood
+then as well as I did a few weeks later, when it was too late, for, with
+the coming of spring, there were no storms to keep us from the _Panada_.
+
+Just where the _Panada_ was I would not attempt to say; not from any
+desire to keep it secret, which would be foolish, for Baedeker long
+since found it out; but simply because I could not very well show the
+way to a place I never could find for myself. I knew it was somewhere
+round the corner from the _Piazza_, but I never rounded that corner
+alone without becoming involved in a labyrinth of little _calli_. Nor
+would I attempt to say why the artists chose it and why, because they
+did, we should, for it was then the dirtiest, noisiest, and most crowded
+_trattoria_ in Venice, though the last time I was there, years
+afterwards, it was so spick and span, with another room and more waiters
+to relieve the congestion, that I could not believe it really was the
+_Panada_ and, with the inconsistency natural under the circumstances,
+did not like it half so well.
+
+No matter whether we got there early or late, the _Panada_ was always
+full. As soon as we sat down we began our dinner by wiping our glasses,
+plates, forks, spoons, and knives on our napkins, making such a habit of
+it that I remember afterwards at a dinner-party in London catching
+myself with my glass in my hand and stopping only just in time, while
+Duveneck, on another occasion, got as far as the silver before he was
+held up by the severe eye of his hostess. Probably it was because nobody
+could hear what anybody said that everybody talked together. I cannot
+recall a moment when stray musicians were not strumming on guitars and
+mandolins, and the oyster man was not shrieking: "_Ostreche!_ _Fresche!
+Ostreche!_" though nobody paid the least attention to him or ever bought
+one of his oysters. And above the uproar was the continuous cry: "_Ecco
+me! Vengo subito! Mezzo Verona! Due Calomai! Vengo subito! Ecco me!_" of
+the waiters, who, though they never ceased to announce their coming,
+were so slow to come that many diners brought a course or two in their
+pockets to occupy them during the intervals.
+
+The little Venetian at the next table was sure to produce a bunch of
+radishes while he waited for his soup; on market days, when there was
+more of a crowd than ever, few of the many baked potatoes eaten at
+almost every table had seen the inside of the _Panada's_ oven; often the
+shops that fill the Venetian _calli_ with the perpetual smell of frying
+and where the brasses and the blue-and-white used to shine, were
+patronized on the way--if dinner has to be collected in the streets, no
+town, even in Italy, offers such facilities as Venice. From _Minestra_
+to fruit and cheese, the Venetian in a few minutes' walk may pick up a
+substantial dinner and carry it to the rooms or the street corner where
+it is his habit to dine. Vance, the painter, who sometimes favoured us
+at our table with his company, went further and, after he had taken off
+his coat and put on his hat and emptied his pockets, seldom troubled the
+establishment to provide him with more than a glass, a plate, a knife,
+and a fork, for the price of a _quinto_ of Verona. His first, and as it
+turned out his last, more extravagant order, was the event of the
+season. The _padrone_ discussed it with him and a message was sent to
+the cook that the dish was _di bistecca_. When it came it was not cooked
+enough to suit Vance. A second was cooked too much. The third was done
+to a turn. In the bill, however, were the three, and voices were
+lowered, mandolins and guitars were stilled, the oyster man forgot his
+shriek, during the five awful minutes when Vance and the _padrone_ had
+it out. After that Vance made another _trattoria_ the richer by his
+daily _quinto_.
+
+J. and I had our five minutes with the _padrone_ later on once when
+Rossi, our waiter, was so slow that our patience gave out and we shook
+the dust of the _Panada_ from our feet. But we could not shake off
+Rossi. He had arrived with our dinner just as we were vanishing from the
+door and was made to pay for it. After that his leisure was spent in
+trying to make us pay him back and he would appear at our bedroom door,
+or waylay us on the _Riva_, or follow us into the _Orientale_, or run
+us down in the _Piazza_, demanding the money as a right, begging for it
+as a charity, reducing it by a _centesimo_ every time until we had only
+to wait long enough for the debt to be wiped out. But this was at the
+end of our stay in Venice, and months of dining at the _Panada_ had
+passed before then.
+
+
+III
+
+[Illustration: Etching by Joseph Pennell
+THE CAFÉ ORIENTALE, VENICE]
+
+I would be as puzzled to explain the attraction of the _Orientale_ on
+the _Riva_, unless it was the opportunity it offered for economy. In the
+_Piazza_, at the _Quadri_ and _Florian's_, which are to the other
+_cafés_ of Venice what St. Mark's is to the other churches, coffee was
+twenty _centesimi_ and the waiter expected five more, but at the
+_Orientale_ it was eighteen and the waiter was satisfied with the change
+from twenty, which meant for us the saving every night of almost half a
+cent. The _Orientale_ was by comparison as quiet and deserted as the
+_Panada_ was crowded and noisy. Outside, tables looked upon the Lagoon
+and the façade of _San Giorgio_, white in the night. In a big, new,
+gilded room sailors and sergeants played checkers and more serious
+Venetians worked out dismal problems in chess. But Duveneck's corner was
+in the older, shabby, stuffy, low-ceilinged room, and having once
+settled there we never wanted to move. As a rule we shared it with only
+an elderly Englishman and his son who read the _Standard_ in the
+opposite corner--after our race with them to the _café_, the winners
+getting the one English paper first--and we were seldom intruded upon or
+interrupted except by the occasional visit of the _caramei_ man with his
+brass tray of candied fruit, impaled on thin sticks, like little birds
+on a skewer, which led us into our one extravagance.
+
+Had the old room been seedier and duller--dull our company never was--I
+still would have seen it through the glamour of youth and thought it the
+one place in which to study Venice and Venetian life. But nobody who
+ever sat there with us could have complained of dulness so long as
+Duveneck presided at our table. In Duveneck's case I cannot help
+breaking my golden rule never to speak in print of the living--rules
+were made to be broken. And why shouldn't I? I might as well not write
+at all about our nights in Venice as to leave him out of them, he who
+held them together and fashioned them into what they were. In the
+_Atlantic_, as a makeshift, I called him Inglehart, the disguise under
+which he figures in one of Howells's novels. But why not call him
+boldly by his name when Inglehart is the thinnest and flimsiest of
+masks, as friends of his were quick to tell me, and Duveneck means so
+much more to all who know--and all who do not know are not worth
+bothering about. It was only yesterday at San Francisco that the artists
+of America gave an unmistakable proof of what their opinion of Duveneck
+is now. In the Eighties "the boys" already thought as much of him and a
+hundred times more.
+
+Duveneck, as I remember him then--I have seen him but once since--was
+large, fair, golden-haired, with long drooping golden moustache, of a
+type apt to suggest indolence and indifference. As he lolled against the
+red velvet cushions smoking his Cavour, enjoying the talk of others as
+much as his own or more--for he had the talent of eloquent silence when
+he chose to cultivate it--his eyes half shut, smiling with casual
+benevolence, he may have looked to a stranger incapable of action, and
+as if he did not know whether he was alone or not, and cared less. And
+yet he had a big record of activity behind him, young as he was; he
+always inspired activity in others, he was rarely without a large and
+devoted following. He it was who drew "the boys" to Munich, then from
+Munich to Florence, and then from Florence to Venice, and "the boys"
+have passed into the history of American Art and the history of
+Venice--wouldn't that give me away and explain who he was if I called
+him Inglehart dozens of times over? And he also it was who packed them
+off again before they learnt how easy it is to be content in Venice
+without doing anything at all, though I used to fancy that he would have
+been rather glad to indulge in that content himself. How far he was from
+the pleasant Venetian habit of idling all day, his Venetian etchings, at
+which he was working that spring--the etchings that on their appearance
+in London were the innocent cause of a stirring chapter in _The Gentle
+Art_--are an enduring proof. And I knew a good deal of what was going on
+in his studio at the time, for J. spent many busy hours with him there,
+while I, left to my own devices, stared industriously from the windows
+of the _Casa Kirsch_, making believe I was gathering material, or
+strolled along the _Riva_ pretending it was to market for my midday
+meal, though the baker was almost next door, and the man from whom I
+bought the little dried figs that nowhere are so dried and shrivelled up
+as in Venice, was seldom more than a minute away. I can see now, when I
+consider how my Venetian days were spent, that I came perilously near
+to sinking to the deepest depths of Venetian idleness myself.
+
+We were never alone with Duveneck at the _Orientale_. The American
+Consul was sure to drop in, as he had for so many years that half his
+occupation would have gone if he hadn't dropped in any longer. Martin
+joined us because he loved to argue anybody into a temper and, as he was
+an awful bore, succeeded with most people. He could drive me to proving
+that white was black, to overturning all my most cherished idols, or to
+forgetting my timidity and laying down the law upon any point of art he
+might bring up. Duveneck alone refused to be roused and Martin, who
+could not understand or accept his failure, was forever coming back,
+making himself a bigger bore than ever, by trying again. But Shinn was
+the only man I ever knew to put Duveneck into something like a temper,
+and that was by asking him deferentially one night if he did not think
+St. Mark's a very fine church--the next minute, however, calming him
+down by inviting him out "in my gandler."
+
+Arnold was as regular in attendance. He found the _café_ as comfortable
+a place to sleep in as any other. Like Sancho Panza he had a talent for
+sleeping. He had made his name and fame as one of the Harvard baseball
+team in I will not say what year, and sleep had been his chief
+occupation ever since. No end of stories were going the round of the
+studios and _cafés_--he invited them without wanting it or meaning to.
+He was supposed to be in Venice to study with Duveneck, at whose studio
+he was said to arrive regularly at the same hour every morning. And as
+regularly he was snoring before he had been sitting in front of his
+easel for ten minutes. During his nap, Duveneck would come round and
+shake him and before he slept again put a touch to the study and, as
+Arnold promptly dozed off, would work on it until it was finished, and
+unless it slid down the canvas with the quantity of bitumen Arnold
+used--there was one story of the beautiful eyes in a beautiful portrait,
+before they could be stopped, sliding into the chin of the pretty girl
+who was posing--Arnold, waking up eventually, would carry off the
+painting unconscious that he had not finished it himself. Nobody can say
+how many Duvenecks are masquerading at home as Arnolds while their
+owners wonder why Arnold has never since done any work a tenth as good.
+
+The one thing that roused him was baseball, and he was in fine form on
+the afternoons when he and a few other enthusiasts spent an hour or so
+on the Lido for practice. The Englishmen did not believe in the
+prodigies they heard of him as a baseball player. It wasn't easy for
+anybody to believe that a man who was always tumbling off to sleep on
+the slightest provocation could play anything decently. But I was told
+that one day he was wide enough awake to be irritated, and he bet them a
+dinner he could pitch the swell British cricketer among them three balls
+not any one of which the Briton could catch. And on Easter Monday they
+all went over to the Lido. The Briton asked for a high ball: it skimmed
+along near the ground and then rose over his head as he stooped for it.
+He asked for a low one: it came straight for his nose and, when he
+dodged it, dropped and went between his legs. He asked for a medium one:
+it curved away out to the right, he rushed for it, it curved back again
+and took him in his manly bosom. The rest of the Britons and "the boys,"
+they say, enjoyed the dinner more than he did. Such was the affair as it
+was described to me and confirmed by gossip. I pretend to no authority
+on a subject I understand so little as balls and the pitching of them.
+
+A better contrast to Arnold could not have been found than the artist
+with the part Spanish, part German name who called himself a Frenchman,
+and who aimed to give his pose the mystery that crept, or bounded when
+encouraged, into his incessant talk. I am afraid his chief encouragement
+came from me. The others were as irritated by his dabbling in magic as
+most of us had been in Rome by Forepaugh's theosophic adventures. But he
+amused me; he did not deal in the prose of his brand of magic, the
+Black, of which so much was beginning to be heard, and still more was to
+be heard, in Paris. He was all innuendo and strange hints and whispered
+secrets, and I-could-if-I-woulds. One of my recent winters had been
+devoted, not to dabbling in magic, for which I have not the temperament,
+but to reading the literature of magic or of all things psychical, and I
+could then, though I could not now, have passed a fairly good
+examination in the modern authorities, from Madame Blavatsky to Louis
+Jacolliot. Therefore I proved a sympathetic listener and heard, for my
+pains, of the revival of old religions, and above all of old rites, and
+of his dignity as high-priest, a figure of mystery and command moving
+here and there among shadowy disciples in shadowy sanctuaries. For one
+sunk such fathoms deep in mystery he was surprisingly concerned for the
+outward sign. Like Huysmans's hero, he believed in the significance of
+the material background, entertaining me with a detailed description of
+his apartment in Paris, and I have not yet lost the vision he permitted
+me of a bedroom hung and painted with scarlet, and of himself enshrined
+in it, magnificent in scarlet silk pajamas. Probably it was to deceive
+the world that he carried a tiny paint-box. I never saw him open it.
+
+But most constant of our little party was Jobbins, our one Englishman,
+who came in late to the _Orientale_--where, or if, he dined none of us
+could say--with the stool and canvas and paint-box he had been carrying
+about all day from one _campo_, or _calle_, or _canale_, to another, in
+search of a subject. Jobbins's trouble was that he had passed too
+brilliantly through South Kensington to do the teaching for which he was
+trained, or to be willing to do anything but paint great pictures the
+subjects for which he could never find; his mistake was to want to paint
+them in Venice where there is nothing to paint that has not been painted
+hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times before; and his misfortune
+was not to seek in adversity the comfort and hope which the philosopher
+believes to be its reward. He had become, as a consequence, the weariest
+man who breathed. It made me tired to look at him. Later, he was forced
+to abandon his high ambition and he accepted a good post as teacher
+somewhere in India. But he lived a short time to enjoy it and I am sure
+he was homesick for Venice, and the search after the impossible, and the
+old days when he was so abominably hard up that even J. and I were
+richer. Of the complete crash by which we all gained--including the man
+who got the Whistler painted on the back of a Jobbins panel--I still
+have reminders in a brass plaque and bits of embroideries hung up on our
+walls and brocades made into screens, which J. bought from him to save
+the situation, at the risk of creating a new one from which somebody
+would have to save us.
+
+For all his weariness, Jobbins looked ridiculously young. He insisted
+that this was what lost him his one chance of selling a picture. He was
+painting in the Frari a subject which he vainly hoped was his own, when
+an American family of three came and stared over his shoulder.
+
+"Why, it's going to be a picture!" the small child discovered.
+
+"And he such a boy too!" the mother marvelled.
+
+"Then it can't be of any value," the father said in the loud cheerful
+voice in which American and English tourists in Venice make their most
+personal comments, convinced that nobody can understand, though every
+other person they meet is a fellow countryman. A story used to be told
+of Bunney at work in the _Piazza_, on his endless study of St. Mark's
+for Ruskin, one bitter winter morning, when three English girls, wrapped
+in furs, passed. One stopped behind him:
+
+"Oh Maud! Ethel!" she called, "do come back and see what this poor
+shivering old wretch is doing."
+
+The talk in our corner of the _Orientale_ kept us in the past until I
+began to fear that, just as some people grow prematurely grey, so J. and
+I, not a year married, had prematurely reached the time for creeping in
+close about the fire--or a _café_ table--and telling grey tales of what
+we had been. It was a very different past from that which tourists were
+then bullied by Ruskin into believing should alone concern them in
+Venice--indeed, my greatest astonishment in this astonishing year was
+that, while the people who were not artists but posed as knowing all
+about art did nothing but quote Ruskin, artists never quoted him, and
+never mentioned him except to show how little use they had for him. But
+then, as I was beginning to find out, it is the privilege of the artist
+to think what he knows and to say what he thinks. We were none of us
+tourists at our little table, we were none of us seeing sights, being
+far too busy doing the work we were in Venice to do; and no matter what
+Ruskin and Baedeker taught, "the boys" gave the date which overshadowed
+for us every other in Venetian history. Nothing that had happened in
+Venice before or after counted, though "the boys" themselves were in
+their turn a good deal overshadowed by Whistler, who had been there with
+them for a while.
+
+It was extraordinary how the Whistler tradition had developed and
+strengthened in the little more than four years since he had left
+Venice. I had never met him then, though J. had a few months before in
+London. I hardly hoped ever to meet him; I certainly could not expect
+that the day would come when he would be our friend, with us constantly,
+letting us learn far more about him and far more intimately than from
+all the talk at a _café_ table of those who already knew him, accepted
+him as a master, and loved him as a man. But had my knowledge of him
+come solely from those months in Venice I should still have realized the
+power of his personality and the force of his influence. He seemed to
+pervade the place, to colour the atmosphere. He had stayed in Venice
+only about a year. In the early Eighties little had been written of him
+except in contempt or ridicule. But to the artist he had become as
+essentially a part of Venice, his work as inseparable from its
+associations, as the Venetian painters like Carpaccio and Tintoretto who
+had lived and worked there all their lives and about whom a voluminous
+literature had grown up, culminating in the big and little volumes by
+Ruskin upon which the public crowding to Venice based their artistic
+creed. During those old nights I heard far more of the few little inches
+of Whistler's etchings and of Whistler's pastels than of the great
+expanse of Tintoretto's _Paradise_ or of Carpaccio's decorations in the
+little church of _San Giorgio degli Schiavoni_. The fact made and has
+left the greater impression because the winter in Rome had not worn off,
+for me, the novelty of artists' talk or quite accustomed me to their
+point of view, to their surprising independence in not accepting the
+current and easy doctrine that everything old is sacred, everything
+modern insignificant. Because a painter happened to paint a couple of
+hundred years or more ago did not place him above their criticism;
+because he happened to paint to-day was apt to make him more
+interesting to them.
+
+At the _Orientale_ the talk could never keep very long from Whistler. It
+might be of art--question of technique, of treatment, of arrangement, of
+any or all the artist's problems--and sooner or later it would be
+referred to what Whistler did or did not. Or the talk might grow
+reminiscent and again it was sure to return to Whistler. Not only at the
+_Orientale_, but at any _café_ or restaurant or house or gallery where
+two or three artists were gathered together, Whistler stories were
+always told before the meeting broke up. It was then we first heard the
+gold-fish story, and the devil-in-the-glass story, and the
+Wolkoff-pastel story, and the farewell-feast story, and the innumerable
+stories labelled and pigeon-holed by "the boys" for future use, and so
+recently told by J. and myself in the greatest story of all--the story
+of his Life--that it is too soon for me to tell them again. Up till then
+I had shared the popular idea of him as a man who might be ridiculed,
+abused, feared, hated, anything rather than loved. But none of the men
+in Venice could speak of him without affection. "Not a bad chap,"
+Jobbins would forget his weariness to say, "not half a bad chap!" and
+one night he told one of the few Whistler stories never yet told in
+print, except in the _Atlantic Monthly_ where this chapter was first
+published.
+
+"He rather liked me," said Jobbins, "liked to have me about, and to help
+on Sundays when he showed his pastels. But that wasn't my game, you
+know, and I got tired of it, and one Sunday when lots of people were
+there and he asked me to bring out that drawing of a _calle_ with tall
+houses, and away up above clothes hung out to dry, and a pair of
+trousers in the middle, I said: 'Have you got a title for it, Whistler?'
+'No,' he said. 'Well,' I said, 'call it an _Arrangement in Trousers_,'
+and everybody laughed. I'd have sneaked away, for he was furious. But he
+wouldn't let me, kept his eye on me, though he didn't say a word until
+they'd all gone. Then he looked at me rather with that Shakespeare
+fellow's _Et tu Brute_ look: 'Why, Jobbins, you, who are so amiable?'
+That was all. No, not half a bad chap."
+
+Now and then talk of Whistler and "the boys" reminded Duveneck of his
+own student days, and would lead him into personal reminiscences, when
+the stories were of his adventures; sometimes on Bavarian roads, singing
+and fiddling his way from village to village, or in Bavarian convents,
+teaching drawing to pretty novices, receiving commissions from stern
+Reverend Mothers; and sometimes in American towns painting the earliest
+American mural decoration that prepared the way, through various stages,
+for the latest American series of all--at the San Francisco Exposition
+where Duveneck was acclaimed as the American master of to-day. But in
+his story, as he told it to us, he had not got as far as Florence when a
+new turn was given to his reminiscences and to our evening talk by the
+descent upon Venice of the men from Munich.
+
+
+IV
+
+They were only three--McFarlane, Anthony and Thompson, shall I call
+them?--but they had not journeyed all the way from Munich to talk about
+"the boys" and to drop sentimental tears over old love tales. They were
+off on an Easter holiday and meant to make the most of it. Because
+Duveneck was Duveneck they gave up the gayer _cafés_ in the _Piazza_ to
+be with him in the sleepy old _Orientale_. But they were not going to
+let it stay a sleepy old _Orientale_ if they could help themselves.
+Their very first evening Duveneck called for two glasses of milk--to
+steady his nerves, he said, though he politely attributed the
+unsteadiness not to this new excitement but to the tea he had been
+drinking. People drifted to our room from outside and from the new room
+to see what the noise was about, until there was not a table to be had.
+The old Englishman and his son put down the _Standard_ and laughed with
+us. The _caramei_ man went away with an empty tray, I do believe the
+only time he was ever bought out in his life, and McFarlane treated us
+all to _tamarindo_ to drink with the fruit, and he wound up his horrible
+extravagance by buying a copy of the Venetian paper "the boys" used to
+call the _Barabowow_. It was nothing short of a Venetian orgy.
+
+Nor did the transformation end here. The men from Munich were so smart,
+especially McFarlane, in white waistcoat, with a flower in his
+button-hole and a gold-headed cane in his hand, that we were shocked
+into the consciousness of our shabbiness. Duveneck, who, until then, had
+been happy in an old ulster with holes in the pockets and rips in the
+seams, dazzled the _café_ by appearing in a jaunty spring overcoat. J.
+exchanged his old trousers with a green stain of acid down the leg for
+the new pair he had hitherto worn only when he went to call on the
+Bronsons or to dine with Mr. Horatio Brown, where I could not go
+because I was so much more hopelessly unprepared to dine anywhere
+outside the _Panada_ or the Kitchen of the _Casa Kirsch_. But in the
+_Merceria_ I could at least supply myself with gloves and veils, while
+Jobbins unearthed a fresh cravat from somewhere. And we began to feel
+apologetic for the dinginess and general down-at-heeledness of Venice
+which bored the men from Munich to extinction--really they were so
+bored, they said, that all day they found themselves looking forward to
+the _caramei_ man as the town's one excitement. I thought the
+illuminations on Easter Sunday evening, when the _Piazza_ was "a
+fairyland in the night," and the music deafened us, and the Bengal
+lights blinded us, would help to give them a livelier impression; but,
+though they came with us to _Florian's_, it was plain they pitied us for
+being so pleased.
+
+They couldn't, for the life of them, see why the place had been so
+cracked up by Ruskin. Nothing was right. The _Piazza_ was just simply
+the town's meeting place and centre of gossip, like the country village
+store, only on a more architectural and uncomfortable scale. The canals
+were breeding holes for malaria. The streets wouldn't be put up with as
+alleys at home. The language was not worth learning. At the _Panada_,
+after we had given our order for dinner, McFarlane would murmur
+languidly '_Lo stesso_' and declare it to be the one useful word in the
+Italian dictionary; to this Johnson added a mysterious '_Sensa crab_'
+when Rossi suggested '_piccoli fees_' under the delusion that he was
+talking English; while Anthony was quite content with the vocabulary the
+other two supplied him. The climate was as deplorable: either wet and
+cold, when the Italian _scaldino_ wasn't a patch on the German stove and
+a _gondola_ became a freezing machine; or warm and enervating when they
+couldn't keep awake.
+
+They dozed in their _gondola_, they yawned in St. Mark's and the Ducal
+Palace and in all the other churches and palaces, and in front of all
+the old doorways and bridges and boat-building yards and _traghettos_
+and fishing boats and wells and "bits" that Camillo, their gondolier,
+was inhuman enough to wake them up to look at. The beauty of Venice was
+exaggerated, or if they did come to a "subject" that made them pull
+their sketch books out of their pockets, Camillo was at once bothering
+them to do it from just where Guardi, or Canaletto, or Rico, or
+Whistler, or Ruskin, or some other old boy had painted, etched, or
+drawn it--Whistler alone had finished Venice for every artist who came
+after him and they were tired of his very name, and never wanted to have
+his etchings and pastels thrown in their faces again. What they would
+like to do was to discover the Italian town or village where no artist
+had ever been seen and the word art had never been uttered.
+
+But it was Venetian painting that got most on their nerves. They had
+given it a fair chance, they protested. "Trot out your Tintorettos,"
+they said to Camillo every morning, and he carried them off to the
+Palace, and the Academy, and more churches than they thought there were
+in the world, and at last to the _Scuola di San Rocco_. And there a
+solemn man in spectacles took them in hand. They said to him too: "Trot
+our your Tintorettos," and he led them up to a big, dingy canvas, and
+they said: "Trot out your next," and they went the rounds of them all,
+and they asked, "Where's your Duveneck?" and he said he had never heard
+of Duveneck, and they said, "Why, he's here!" and they left him hunting,
+and were back in their _gondola_ in ten minutes, and they guessed they
+could do with Rubens! I trembled to think of the shock to tourists and
+my highly intellectual friends at home, religiously studying Baedeker
+and reading Ruskin, could they have heard the men from Munich talking of
+art and of Venice. And I must have been painfully scandalized had I not
+got so much further on with my education as to have a glimmering of the
+truth Whistler was trying to beat into the unwilling head of the British
+public--that an artist knows more about art than the man who isn't an
+artist, and has the best right to an opinion on the subject.
+
+Perhaps their disappointment in Venice was the reason of their
+pre-occupation with Munich. Certainly "Now, at Munich" was the beginning
+and end of the talk as "when 'the boys' were here" had been before they
+came. They would not admit that anything good could exist outside of
+Munich. I remember Duveneck once suggesting that Paris was the best
+place for the student, to whom it was a help just to see what was going
+on around him.
+
+"But what does go on round the student there?" McFarlane interrupted.
+"It's all fads in Paris. What do they talk about in Paris to-day but
+values? [This, remember, was more than a quarter of a century ago.]
+That's all they teach the student, all they think of. Look at Bisbing's
+picture last year. They all raved over it, said it was the _clou_ of
+the Salon, medalled it, bought it for the Luxembourg, and I don't know
+what all. And what was it?--Pale green sheep in the foreground, pale
+green mountains in the background, so pale you could shoot peas through
+them. That's what you have to do now to make a success in Paris--get
+your values so that you can shoot peas through 'em. And what will it be
+to-morrow? And what help is it to the student, anyway?"
+
+But one thing certain is, that whatever the fads and movements in the
+Paris studios happened to be, the American student in those days did see
+what was going on in Paris, and just to see, just to feel it, was, as
+Duveneck held, a help, an inspiration. To-day, living in his own
+_pensions_, studying in his own schools, loafing in his own clubs, he
+does not take any interest in what is going on outside of them and will
+talk about what "the Frenchmen are doing" as if he were still in
+Kalamazoo or Oshkosh.
+
+What the student, in Duveneck's and McFarlane's time saw going on round
+him in Munich was, as well as I could make out, chiefly balls and
+pageants. To this day I cannot help thinking of life in Munich as one
+long spectacle and dance. Duveneck, who could talk with calmness of his
+painting, was stirred to animation when he recalled the costumes he had
+invented for himself and his friends. He could not conceal his pride in
+the success of a South Sea Islander he had designed, the effect achieved
+by the simple means of burnt Sienna rubbed into the poor man, but so
+vigorously that it took months to get it out again, and a blanket which
+he mislaid towards morning so that his walk home at dawn, like a savage
+skulking in the shadows, was a triumph of realism. Pride, too, coloured
+Duveneck's account of the appearance of the Socialist Carpenter of his
+creation who made a huge sensation by inciting to riot in the streets of
+an elaborate Old Munich--the origin of Old London and Old Paris and all
+the sham Old Towns that Exhibitions have long since staled for us. But
+his masterpiece was the Dissipated Gentleman, like all masterpieces a
+marvel of simplicity--hired evening clothes, a good long roll in the
+muddiest gutter on the way to the ball, and it was done; but the art,
+Duveneck said, was in the rolling, which in this case, under his
+direction, was so masterly that at the door the Dissipated Gentleman was
+mistaken for the real thing and, if friends had not come up in the nick
+of time, the door would have been shut in his face.
+
+Duveneck was as enthusiastic over the Charles V. ball, though all the
+artists of Munich contributed to its splendour, working out their
+costumes with such respect for truth and so regardless of cost that for
+months and years afterwards not a bit of old brocade or lace was to be
+had in the antiquity shops of Bavaria. And the students were responsible
+for the siege of an old castle outside the town, and in their
+archćological ardour persuaded the Museum to lend the armour and arms of
+the correct date, and, in their appreciation of the favour, fought with
+so much restraint that the casualties were a couple of spears snapped.
+And, in my recollection, their recollections stood for such truth and
+gorgeousness that when England, years afterwards, took to celebrating
+its past with pageants, more than once I found myself thinking how much
+better they order these things in Munich!
+
+And from the studios came the inspiration for that ball Munich talks of
+to this day in which all the nations were represented. There was a Hindu
+temple, a Chinese pagoda, and an Indian wigwam. But the crowning touch
+was the Esquimaux hut. Placed in a hall apart, at the foot of a great
+stairway, it was built of some composition in which pitch was freely
+used, lit by tallow candles, and hung with herrings offered for sale by
+nine Esquimaux dressed in woollen imitation of skins with the furry side
+turned out. All evening the hut was surrounded, only towards midnight
+could the crowd be induced to move on to some fresh attraction. In the
+moment's lull, one of the Esquimaux was tying up a new line of herrings
+when he brushed a candle with his arm. In a second he was blazing.
+Another ran to his rescue. In another second the hut was a furnace and
+nine men were in flames, with pitch and wool for fuel. One of the few
+people still lounging about the hut, fearing a panic, gave the signal to
+the band, who struck up _Carmen_. Never since, McFarlane said, had he
+listened to the music of _Carmen_, never again could he listen to it,
+without seeing the burning hut, the men rushing out of it with the
+flames leaping high above them, tearing at the blazing wool, in their
+agony turning and twisting as in some wild fantastic dance, while above
+the music he could hear the laughter of the crowd, who thought it a
+joke--a new scene in the spectacle.
+
+He snatched a rug from somewhere and tried to throw it over one of the
+men, but the man flew past to the top of the great stairway. There he
+was seized and rolled over and over on the carpet until the flames were
+out. He got up, walked downstairs, asked for beer, drank it to the
+dregs, and fell dead with the glass in his hand--the first to die, the
+first freed from his agony. Of the nine, but two survived. Seven lay
+with their hut, a charred heap upon the ground, before the laughing
+crowd realized what a pageant of horror Fate had planned for them.
+
+Munich stories, before the night was over, had to be washed down with
+Munich beer, which, at that time as still, I fancy, was best at Bauer's.
+By some unwritten law, inscrutable as the written, it was decreed that,
+though I might sit all evening the only woman at our table in the
+_Orientale_--oftener than not the only woman in the _café_--it was not
+"the thing" for me to go on to Bauer's. Therefore, first, the whole
+company would see me home. It was a short stroll along the _Riva_, but
+the Lagoon, dim and shadowy, stretched away beyond us, dimmer islands
+resting on its waters, the lights of the boats sprinkling it with gold
+under the high Venetian sky sprinkled with stars; and so beautiful was
+it, and so sweet the April night, that the men from Munich could not
+hold out against the enchantment of Venice in spring. I felt it a
+concession when McFarlane admitted the loveliness of Venice by
+starlight, and his languor dropped from him under the spell, and I knew
+the game of boredom was up when, in this starlight, he decided that,
+after all, there might be more in the Tintorettos than he thought if
+only he had time to study them. But Easter holidays do not last for
+ever, and the day soon came when the men from Munich had to go back to
+where all was for the best in the best of all towns, but where no doubt,
+on the principle that we always prefer what we have not got at the
+moment, they told "the fellows" in the _Bier Kellars_ that only in
+Venice was life worth while, that Rubens was dingy, and that they
+guessed they could do with Tintoretto.
+
+
+V
+
+Somehow, we were never the same after they left us; not, I fancy,
+because we missed them, but because we could hold out still less than
+they against the spring. When the sun was so warm and the air so soft,
+when in the little canals wistaria bloomed over high brick walls, when
+boatloads of flowers came into Venice with the morning, when at noon the
+_Riva_ was strewn with sleepers--then indoors and work became an
+impertinence. On the slightest excuse J. and Duveneck no longer shut
+themselves in the studio, I gave up collecting material from my window
+and lunch from the _Riva_, Jobbins interrupted his search and Martin his
+argument, the Consul fought shy of the old corner in the _café_. And in
+the languid laziness that stole upon Venice, as well as upon us, I
+penetrated for the first time to the inner meaning of the chapter in his
+_Venetian Life_ that Howells labels _Comincia far Caldo_, the season
+when repose takes you to her inner heart and you learn her secrets, when
+at last you know _why_ it was an Abyssinian maid who played upon her
+dulcimer, at last you recognize in Xanadu the land where you were born.
+
+There was never a _festa_ in the _Piazza_ that we were not there,
+watching or walking with the bewildering procession of elegant young
+Venetians, and peasants from the mainland, and officers, and soldiers,
+and gondoliers with big caps set jauntily on their curls, and beautiful
+girls in the gay fringed shawls that have disappeared from Venice and
+the wooden shoes that once made an endless clatter along the _Riva_ but
+are heard no more, and Greeks, and Armenians, and priests, and beggars,
+passing up and down between the arcades and the _café_ tables that
+overflowed far into the square, St. Mark's more unreal in its splendour
+than ever with its domes and galleries and traceries against the blue
+of the Venetian night.
+
+There was never a side-show on the _Riva_ that we did not interrupt our
+work to go and see it; whether it was the circus in the little tent,
+with the live pony, the most marvellous of all sights in Venice; or the
+acrobats tumbling on their square of carpet; or the blindfolded,
+toothless old fortune-teller, whose shrill voice I can still hear
+mumbling "_Una volta soltanta per Napoli!_" when she was asked if
+Naples, this coming summer, as the last, would be ravaged by cholera.
+She was right, for in the town, cleaned out of picturesqueness, cholera
+could not again do its work in the old wholesale fashion.
+
+There was never an excursion to the Islands that we did not join it. To
+visit some of the further Islands was not so easy in those days, except
+for tourists with a fortune to spend on _gondolas_, and we were grateful
+to the occasional little steamboat that undertook to get us there,
+though with a crowd and noise and a brass band, for all the world like
+an excursion to Coney Island, and though most people, except the
+grateful natives, were obediently believing with Ruskin that it was the
+symbol of the degeneracy of Venice and would have thought themselves
+disgraced forever if they were seen on it. But the Lagoon was as
+beautiful from the noisy, fussy little steamboat as from a _gondola_,
+the sails of the fishing boats touching it with as brilliant colour, the
+Islands lying as peacefully upon its shining waters, the bells of the
+many _campanili_ coming as sweetly to our ears, the sky above as pure
+and radiant; and it mattered not how we reached the Islands, they were
+as enchanting when we landed.
+
+One wonderful day was at Torcello, where nothing could mar the
+loveliness of its solitude and desolation, its old cathedral full of
+strange mosaics and stranger memories, the green space in front that was
+once a _Piazza_ tangled with blossoms and sweet-scented in the May
+sunshine, the purple hills on the mainland melting into the pale sky.
+And a second day as wonderful was at Burano, with its rose-flushed
+houses and gardens and traditions of noise and quarrels, and the girls
+who followed the boat along the bank and pelted us with roses until
+Jobbins vowed he would go and live there--and he did, but a market boat
+brought him back in a week. And other excursions took us to Chioggia,
+the canals there alive with fishing boats and the banks with fishermen
+mending their nets; and to Murano, busy and beautiful both, with the
+throb of its glass furnaces and the peace of the fields where the dead
+sleep; and again and again to the _Lido_ where green meadows were
+sprinkled with daisies and birds were singing.
+
+More wonderful were the nights, coming home, when the gold had faded
+from sea and sky, the palaces and towers of Venice rising low on the
+horizon as in a City of Dreams, the Lagoon turned by the moon into a
+sheet of silver, lights like great fireflies stealing over the water,
+ghostly _gondolas_ gliding past,--then we were the real Lotus Eaters
+drifting to the only Lotus Land where all things have rest.
+
+The fussy little steamboat, I found, could rock ambition to sleep as
+well as a _gondola_, and life seemed to offer nothing better than an
+endless succession of days and nights spent on its deck bound for
+wherever it might bear us. I understood and sympathized with the men who
+lay asleep all day in the sunshine on the _Riva_ and who sang all night
+on the bridge below our windows. What is more, I envied them and wished
+they would take me into partnership. Were they not putting into practice
+the philosophy our ancient friend Davies had preached to me in Rome? But
+only the Venetian can master the secret of doing nothing with nothing to
+do it on, and if J. and I were to hope for figs with our bread, or even
+for bread by itself, we had to move on to the next place where work
+awaited us. And so the last of our nights in Venice came before spring
+had ripened into summer, and the last of our mornings when porters again
+scrambled for our bags, and we again stumbled after them up the long
+platform; and then there were again yells, but this time of "_Partenza_"
+and "_Pronti_," and the train hurried us away from the _Panada_, and the
+_Orientale_, and the Lagoon, to a world where no lotus grows and life is
+all labour.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+NIGHTS IN LONDON
+
+
+
+
+IN LONDON
+
+I
+
+
+I cannot remember how or why we began our Thursday nights. I rather
+think they began themselves and we kept them up to protect our days
+against our friends.
+
+It was an unusually busy time with us--or perhaps I ought to say with
+me, for, to my knowledge, J. has never known the time that was anything
+else. After our years of wandering, years of hotels and rooms and
+lodgings, we had just settled in London in the first place we had ever
+called our own--the old chambers in the old Buckingham Street house
+overlooking the river; I was doing more regular newspaper work than I
+had ever done before or ever hope to do again; we were in the
+Eighteen-Nineties, and I need neither the magnifying glasses through
+which age has the reputation of looking backward, nor the clever young
+men of to-day who write about that delectable decade and no doubt
+deplore my indiscretion in being alive to write about it myself, to show
+me how very much more amusing and interesting life was then than now.
+
+There is no question that people, especially people doing our sort of
+work, were much more awake in the Nineties, much more alive, much more
+keen about everything, even a fight, or above all a fight, if they
+thought a fight would clear the air. Those clever young men,
+self-appointed historians of a period they know only by hearsay, may
+deplore or envy its decadence. But because a small clique wrote anćmic
+verse and bragged of the vices for which they had not the strength,
+because a few youthful artists invented new methods of expression the
+outsider did not understand, that does not mean decadence. A period of
+revolt against decadence, of insurrection, of vigorous warfare it seemed
+to me who lived and worked through it. The Yellow Nineties, the Glorious
+Nineties, the Naughty Nineties, the Rococo Nineties, are descriptions I
+have seen, but the Fighting Nineties would be mine. As I recall those
+stimulating days, the prevailing attitude of the artist in his studio,
+the author at his desk, the critic at his task, was that of Henley's Man
+in the Street:
+
+  Hands in your pockets, eyes on the pavement,
+    Where in the world is the fun of it all?
+  But a row--but a rush--but a face for your fist.
+    Then a crash through the dark--and a fall.
+
+Scarcely an important picture was painted, an important illustration
+published, an important book written, an important criticism made, that
+it did not lead to battle. Few of the Young Men of the Nineties
+accomplished all the triumphant things they thought they could, but the
+one thing they never failed to do and to let the world know they were
+doing was to fight, and they loved nothing better--coats off, sleeves
+rolled up, arms squared. Whatever happened was to them a challenge.
+Whistler began the Nineties with his Exhibition at the Groupil Gallery
+and it was a rout for the enemy. The harmless portrait of Desboutin by
+Degas was hung at the New English Art Club and straightaway artists and
+critics were bludgeoning each other in the press. Men were elected to
+the Royal Academy, pictures were bought by the Chantrey Bequest; new
+papers and magazines were started by young enthusiasts with something to
+say and no place to say it in; new poets, yearning for degeneracy, read
+their poems to each other in a public house they preferred to
+re-christen a tavern; new printing presses were founded to prove the
+superiority of the esoteric few; new criticism--new because honest and
+intelligent--was launched; everything suddenly became _fin-de-sičcle_
+in the passing catchword of the day borrowed from Paris; every fad of
+the Continent was adopted; but no matter what it might be, the incident,
+or work, or publication that roused any interest at all was the signal
+for the clash of arms, for the row and the rush. Everybody had to be in
+revolt, though it might not always have been easy to say against just
+what. I remember once, at the show of a group of young painters who
+fancied themselves fiery Independents, running across Felix Buhot, the
+most inflammable man in the world, and his telling me, with his wild
+eyes more aflame than usual, that he could smell the powder. He was not
+far wrong, if his metaphor was a trifle out of proportion to those very
+self-conscious young rebels. A good deal of powder was flying about in
+the Nineties, and when powder flies, whatever else may come of it, one
+thing sure is that nobody can sleep and most people want to talk.
+
+I had not been in London a year before I knew that there the _café_ was
+not the place to talk in. I have dreary memories of the first efforts J.
+and I, fresh from Italy, made to go on leading the easy, free-from-care
+life in restaurants and _cafés_ we had led in Rome and Venice. But it
+was not to be done. The distances were too great, the weather too
+atrocious, the little restaurants too impossible, the big restaurants
+too beyond our purse, and the only real _café_ was the _Café Royal_. At
+an earlier date Whistler had drawn his followers to it. In the Nineties
+Frederick Sandys was one of its most familiar figures. Even now,
+especially on Saturday nights, young men, in long hair and strange hats
+and laboriously unconventional clothes, are to be met there, looking a
+trifle solemnized by their share in so un-English an entertainment. For
+this is the trouble: The _café_ is not an English institution and
+something in the atmosphere tells you right away that it isn't. It
+might, it may still, serve us for an occasion, its mirrors and gilding
+and red velvet pleasantly reminiscent, but for night after night it
+would not answer at all as the _Nazionale_ had answered in Rome, the
+_Orientale_ in Venice.
+
+However, Buckingham Street made a good substitute as an extremely
+convenient centre for talk, and its convenience was so well taken
+advantage of that, at this distance of time, I am puzzled to see how we
+ever got any work done. J. and I have never been given to inhospitality,
+and we both liked the talk. But the day of reckoning came when, sitting
+down to lunch one morning, we realized that it was the first time we
+had eaten that simple meal alone for we could not remember how long.
+The lunch for which no preparation is made and at which the company is
+uninvited but amusing may be one of the most agreeable of feasts, but we
+knew too well that if we went on cutting short our days of work to enjoy
+it, we ran the risk of no lunch ever again for ourselves, let alone for
+anybody else.
+
+To be interrupted in the evening did not matter so much, though our
+evenings were not altogether free of work--nor are J.'s even yet, the
+years proving less kind in moulding him to the indolence to which, with
+age, I often find myself pleasantly yielding. Our friends, when we
+stopped them dropping in by day, began dropping in by night instead, and
+one group of friends to whom Thursday night was particularly well
+adapted for the purpose gradually turned their dropping in from a chance
+into a habit until, before we knew it, we were regularly at home every
+Thursday after dinner.
+
+[Illustration: Mezzotint by Joseph Pennell
+OUT OF OUR LONDON WINDOWS]
+
+The entertainment, if it can be called by so fine a name, always
+retained something of the character of chance with which it began. We
+sent out no invitations, we attempted no formality. Nobody was asked to
+play at anything or to listen to anything. Nobody was expected to
+dress, though anybody who wanted to could--everybody was welcome in the
+clothes they wore, whether they came straight from the studio or a
+dinner. If eventually I provided sandwiches--in addition to the tobacco
+always at hand in the home of the man who smokes and the
+whiskey-and-soda without which an Englishman cannot exist through an
+evening--it was because I got too hungry not to need something to eat
+before the last of the company had said good-night. We did not offer
+even the comfort of space. Once the small dining-room that had been
+Etty's studio, and the not over-large room that was J.'s, and the
+nondescript room that was drawing-room and my workroom combined, were
+packed solid, there was no place to overflow into except the short,
+narrow entrance hall, and I still grow hot at the thought of what became
+of hats and coats if it also was filled. I can never forget the
+distressing evening when in the bathroom--which, with the ingenuity of
+the designer of flats, had been fitted in at the end of the narrow hall
+and was the reason of its shortness--I caught William Penn devouring the
+gloves of an artist's wife who I do not believe has forgiven him to this
+day; nor the still more distressing occasion when I discovered Bobbie,
+William's poor timid successor, curled up on a brand-new bonnet of
+feathers and lace.
+
+But it was the very informality, so long as it led to no crimes on the
+part of our badly brought-up cats, that attracted the friends who were
+as busy and hard-working as ourselves,--this, and the freedom to talk
+without being silenced for the music that no talker wants to hear when
+he can listen to his own voice, or for the dances that nobody wants to
+watch if he can follow his own argument, or for the introductions that
+invariably interrupt at the wrong moment, or for the games and
+innumerable devices without which intelligent human beings are not
+supposed to be able to survive an evening in each other's company. The
+idle who play golf all day and bridge all night, who cannot eat in the
+short intervals between without music, believe that talk has gone out of
+fashion. My experience had been in Rome and Venice, was then in London,
+and is now, that men and women who have something to talk about are
+always anxious to talk about it, if only the opportunity is given to
+them, and the one attraction we offered was just this opportunity for
+people who had been doing more or less the same sort of work all day to
+meet and talk about it all night--the reason why, despite heat and
+discomfort, despite meagre fare and the risk to hats and coats, Thursday
+after Thursday crowded our rooms to suffocation as soon as evening came.
+
+[Illustration: Bust by Rodin
+W.E. HENLEY]
+
+
+II
+
+As, in memory, I listen to the endless talk of our Thursday nights, the
+leading voice, when not J.'s, is Henley's, which is natural since it was
+Henley, followed by his Young Men,--our name for his devoted staff
+always in attendance at his office and out of it,--who got so into the
+habit of dropping in to see us on Thursday night that we got into the
+habit of staying at home to see him. For Thursday was the night when the
+_National Observer_, which he was editing at the time, went to press and
+Ballantynes, the printers, were not more than five minutes away in
+Covent Garden. At about ten his work was over and he and his Young Men
+were free to do nothing save talk for the rest of the week if they
+chose--and they usually did choose--and Buckingham Street was a handy
+place to begin it in. Our rooms were already fairly well packed,
+pleasantly smoky, and echoing with the agreeable roar of battle when
+they arrived.
+
+I like to remember Henley as I saw him then, especially if my quite
+superfluous feeling of responsibility as hostess had brought me on some
+equally superfluous mission into the little hall at the moment of his
+arrival. As the door opened he would stand there at the threshold, his
+tall soft black hat still crowning his massive head, leaning on his
+crutch and stick as he waited to take breath after his climb up our
+three flights of stone stairs--"Did I really ever climb those stairs at
+Buckingham Street?"--he asked me the last time I saw him, some years
+later, at Worthing when he was ill and broken, and I have often
+marvelled myself how he managed it. But breathless as he might be, he
+always laughed his greeting. I cannot think of Henley as he was in his
+prime, to borrow a word that was a favourite with him, without hearing
+his laugh and seeing his face illuminated by it. Rarely has a man so
+hampered by his body kept his spirit so gay. He was meant to be a
+splendid creature physically and fate made of him a helpless
+cripple--who was it once described him as "the wounded Titan"? Everybody
+knows the story: he made sure that everybody should by telling it in his
+_Hospital Verses_. But everybody cannot know who did not know him how
+bravely he accepted his disaster. It seemed to me characteristic once
+when a young cousin of mine, a girl at the most susceptible age of
+hero-worship, meeting him for the first time in our chambers and
+volunteering, in the absence of anybody else available, to fetch the cab
+he needed, thought his allowing her to go on such an errand for him the
+eccentricity of genius and never suspected his lameness until he stood
+up and took his crutch from the corner. There was nothing about him to
+suggest the cripple.
+
+[Illustration: Painting by William Nicholson
+W.E. HENLEY]
+
+He was a remarkably handsome man, despite his disability, tall and large
+and fair, a noble head and profile, a shock of red hair, short red
+beard, keen pale blue eyes, his indomitable gaiety filling his face with
+life and animation, smoothing out the lines of pain and care. He was so
+striking in every way, his individuality so strangely marked that the
+wonder is the good portrait of him should be the exception. Nicholson,
+when painting him, was a good deal preoccupied with the big soft hat and
+blue shirt and flowing tie, feeling their picturesque value, and turned
+him into a brigand, a land pirate, to the joy of Henley, whom I always
+suspected of feeling this value himself and dressing as he did for the
+sake of picturesqueness. Simon Bussy seemed to see, not Henley, but
+Stevenson's caricature--the John Silver of _Treasure Island_, the
+cripple with the face as big as a ham. Even Whistler failed and never
+printed more than one or two proofs of the lithograph for which Henley
+sat. Rodin came nearest success, his bust giving the dignity and
+ruggedness and character of head and profile both. He and Nicholson
+together go far to explain the man.
+
+Unfortunately there is no biography at all. Charles Whibley was to have
+written the authorized life, but the world still waits. Cope Cornford
+attempted a sketch, but scarcely the shadow of Henley emerges from its
+pages. Because he thundered and denounced and condemned and slashed to
+pieces in the _National Observer_, his contemporaries imagined that
+Henley did nothing anywhere at any time save thunder and denounce and
+condemn and slash to pieces and that he was altogether a fierce,
+choleric, intolerant, impossible sort of a person. The chances are few
+now realize that Henley was enough of an influence in his generation for
+it to have mattered to anybody what manner of man he was. A glimpse of
+him remains here and there. Stevenson has left the description of his
+personality, so strong that he was felt in a room before he was seen.
+His vigour and his manliness, survive in his work, but cannot quite
+explain the commanding power he was in his generation, while neither he
+nor his friends have shewn, as it should be shewn, the other side to his
+character, the gay, the kindly side, so that I feel almost as if I owed
+it to his memory to put on record my impressions of my first meeting
+with him, since it was only this side he then gave me the chance to see.
+
+I wonder sometimes why I had never met Henley before. When J. and I came
+to London he was editing the _Magazine of Art_, a little later he
+managed the _Art Journal_, and in both he published a number of J.'s
+drawings, and we had letters from him. We went to houses where he often
+visited. I remember hearing him announced once at the Robinsons' in
+Earl's Terrace, but Miss Mary Robinson, as she was then--Madame Duclaux
+as she is now--left everybody in the drawing-room while she went to see
+him downstairs, because of his lameness she said, but partly, I
+fancied, because she wanted to keep him to herself to discuss a new
+series of articles. She had just "come out" in literature and was as
+fluttered by her every new appearance in print as most girls are by
+theirs in a ball-room. In other houses, more than once I just missed
+him, I had never got nearer than business correspondence when he left
+London to edit the _Scots Observer_ in Edinburgh, and he stayed there
+until the _Scots_ became the _National Observer_ with its offices in
+London.
+
+I had heard more than enough about him in the meanwhile. The man who
+says what he believes to be the truth--the man who sits in, and talks
+from, the chair of the scorners--is bound to get himself hated, and
+Henley came in for his fair share of abuse. As somebody says, truth
+never goes without a scratched face.
+
+But, like all men hated by the many, Henley inspired devotion in the few
+who, in his case, were not only devoted themselves but eager to make
+their friends devoted too. When he got back to London one of his Young
+Men, whom I do not see why I should not call Charles Whibley, insisted
+that J. and I must meet Henley first in the right way, that all our
+future relations with him depended upon it, and that this right way
+would be for him to ask Henley and ourselves, and nobody else, to dinner
+in his rooms.
+
+When the evening came J. was off on a journey for work and I went alone
+to Fig-Tree House--the little old house, with a poor shabby London
+apology of a fig-tree in front, on Milbank Street by the riverside,
+which, with Henley's near Great College Street office round the corner,
+has disappeared in the fury of municipal town-disfigurement. A popular
+young man, in making his plans, cannot afford to reckon without his
+friends. Four uninvited guests, all men, had arrived before me, a fifth
+appeared as I did, and he was about the last man any of the party could
+have wanted at that particular moment--a good and old and intimate
+friend of Stevenson's, whose own name I am too discreet to mention but
+to whom, for reasons I am also too discreet to explain, I may give that
+of Michael Finsbury instead. Whoever has read _The Wrong Box_ knows that
+Michael Finsbury enjoyed intervals of relaxation from work, knows also
+the nature of the relaxation. I had struck him at the high tide of one
+of these intervals. It was terribly awkward for everybody, especially
+for me. I have got now to an age when I could face that sort of
+awkwardness with equanimity, even with amusement. But I was young then,
+I had not lived down my foolish shyness, and I would have run if, in my
+embarrassment, I had had the courage,--would have run anyhow, I do
+believe, if it had not been for Henley. He seized the situation and
+mastered it. He had the reputation of being the most brutal of men, but
+he showed a delicacy that few could have surpassed or equalled under
+the circumstances. He simply forced me to forget the presence of the
+objectionable Michael Finsbury, who at the other end of the table, I
+learned afterwards, was overwhelming his neighbours with a worse
+embarrassment than mine by finding me every bit as objectionable as I
+found him, and saying so with a frankness it was not in me to emulate.
+
+The force Henley used with such success was simply his talk. He did not
+let my attention wander for one minute, so full of interest was all he
+had to say, while the enthusiasm with which he said it became
+contagious. I can remember to this day how he made me see a miracle in
+the mere number of the Velasquezes in the Prado, an adventure in every
+hansom drive through the London streets, an event in the dressing of the
+salad for dinner--how he transformed life into one long Arabian Nights'
+Entertainment, which is why I suppose it has always been my pride that
+his poem called by that name he dedicated to me. And so the evening that
+began as one of the most embarrassing in my experience ended as one of
+the most delightful, and the man whom I had trembled to meet because of
+his reputation with those who did not know him or understand intolerance
+in a just cause, won me over completely by his kindness, his
+consideration, his charm.
+
+Henley delighted in talk, that was why he talked so well. On Thursday
+night his crutch would be left with his big hat at the front door; then,
+one hand leaning on his cane, the other against the wall for support, he
+would hobble over to the chair waiting for him, usually by the window
+for he loved to look out on the river, and there, seldom moving except
+to stand bending over with both arms on the back of the chair, which was
+his way of resting, and always with his Young Men round him, the talk
+would begin and the talk would last until only my foolish ideas of
+civility kept me up to listen. As a woman, I had not then, nor have I
+yet, ceased to be astonished by man's passion for talking shop and his
+power of going on with it forever. My explanation of this special power
+used to be that the occupation supplied him by the necessity of keeping
+his pipe or his cigarette or his cigar going, with the inevitable
+interruptions and pauses and movement, and the excitement of the eternal
+hunt for the matches, made the difference and helped to keep him
+awake--there is nothing more difficult for me personally than to sit
+still long when my hands are idle, unless I am reading. But the women I
+know who smoke are not men's equals in the capacity for endless talk and
+the reason must be to seek elsewhere. He who divines it will have gone
+far to solving the tedious problem of sex.
+
+Of Henley the talker, at least, one portrait remains. He was the
+original of Stevenson's Burly--the talker who would roar you down, bury
+his face in his hands, undergo passions of revolt and agony, letting
+loose a spring torrent of words. There was always a wild flood and storm
+of talk wherever Henley might be. He and his Young Men were the most
+clamorous group of the clamorous Nineties, though curiously their
+clamour seems faint in the ears of the present authorities on that noisy
+period. I have read one of these authorities' description of the London
+of the Nineties dressed in a powder puff, dancing beneath Chinese
+lanterns, being as wicked as could be in artificial rose-gardens. But
+had Henley and his Young Men suspected the existence of a London like
+that, they would have overthrown it with their voices, as Joshua
+overthrew the walls of Jericho with his trumpets. To other authorities
+the Nineties represent an endless orgy of societies--Independent Theatre
+Societies, Fabian Societies, Browning Societies, every possible kind of
+societies--but the _National Observer_, with its keen scent for shams,
+was as ready to pounce upon any and all of them for the good of their
+health, and to upbraid their members as cranks. It was a paper that
+existed to protest against just this sort of thing, as against most
+other things in a sentimental and artificial and reforming and ignorant
+world. It made as much noise in print as its editorial staff made in
+talk. The main function of criticism, according to Henley, was to
+increase the powers of depreciation rather than of appreciation, and
+what a healthy doctrine it is! As editor, he roared down his opponents
+no less lustily than he roared them down as talkers, and he had the
+strong wit and the strong heart that a man must have, or so it is said,
+to know when to tell the truth, which, with him, was always. He could
+not stand anything like affectation, or what people were calling
+ćstheticism and decadence. To him, literature was literature and art was
+art, and not puling sentiment, affected posturing, lilies and
+sunflowers. The _National Observer_ was the housetop from which he
+shouted for all who passed to hear that it did not matter twopence what
+the dabbler wanted to express if he could not express it, if he had not
+the technique of his medium at his fingers' ends and under his perfect
+control. A man might indulge in noble and beautiful ideas, and if he did
+not know how to put them in beautiful words or in beautiful paint or in
+beautiful sound, he was anathema, to be cast into outer darkness where
+there is gnashing of teeth--the doctrine of art for art's sake which the
+advanced young leaders of the new generation assure me is hopelessly out
+of date. Pretence of any kind was as the red rag; "bleat" was the
+unpardonable sin; the man who was "human" was the man to be praised. I
+would not pretend to say who invented this meaning for the word "human."
+Perhaps Louis Stevenson. As far back as 1880, in a letter from Davos
+describing the people "in a kind of damned hotel" where he had put up, I
+find him using it as Henley and his Young Men used it later:
+
+  Eleven English Parsons, all
+    Entirely inoffensive; four
+  True human beings--what I call
+    Human--the deuce a cipher more.
+
+Stevenson may even then have learned it from Henley. But however that
+may have been, "bleat" and "human" were the two words ever recurring
+like a refrain in the columns of the _National Observer_, ever the
+beginning and end of argument in the heated atmosphere of Buckingham
+Street.
+
+In my memory, every Thursday night stands for a battle. Henley was then
+always at his best. His week's task was done, he was not due at his
+house in Addiscombe until the next day, for he always stayed in his
+Great College Street rooms from Monday to Friday--and the night was
+before him. At first I trembled a little at the smell of powder under my
+own roof, at turning our chambers into the firing line when friends came
+to them to pass a peaceful friendly evening--the Roman and Venetian
+_cafés_ and restaurants of my earlier experience had been common ground
+on which combatants shared equal rights or, better, no rights at all. It
+was probably my old Philadelphia bringing up that made me question the
+propriety of the same freedom at home, that made me doubt its being
+quite "the thing" when J., who is an excellent fighter though a
+Philadelphian, met Henley in a clash of words. But I quickly got
+accustomed to the fight and enjoyed it and would not have had it
+otherwise.
+
+Some friends who came, I must confess, enjoyed it less, especially if
+they were still smarting from a recent attack in the _National
+Observer_. There were evenings when it took a good deal of skilful
+manoeuvring on everybody's part to keep Henley and his victims at a
+safe distance from each other. More than once in later days Walter Crane
+laughed with us at the memory of a Thursday night, just after he had
+been torn to pieces in the best _National Observer_ style, when he
+gradually realized that he was being kept a prisoner in the corner into
+which he had been driven on his arrival, and he could not understand why
+until, breaking loose, he discovered Henley in the next room. Our alarm
+was not surprising, knowing as we did what a valiant fighter Crane was
+himself: as a socialist waving the red flag in the face of the world, as
+an artist forever rushing into the papers to defend his theories of art,
+as a man refusing to see his glory in passing by an offence. Not very
+long before, J. had exasperated him in print, by the honest expression
+of an opinion he did not happen to like, into threats of a big stick
+ready for attack the next time J. ventured upon his walks abroad. I need
+not add that J. did not bother to stay at home, that the big stick never
+materialized, that, though this was only the first of many fights
+between the two, Walter Crane was our friend to the end. But the little
+episode gives the true spirit of the Nineties.
+
+I can still see Beardsley dodging from group to group to escape Henley,
+for he never recovered from the fright of the first encounter. He told
+me the story at the time. He had gone, by special appointment, to call
+on Henley, under his arm the little portfolio he was rarely without in
+those early days, ready and enchanted as he always was to show his
+drawings to anybody willing to look at them. As he went up the two
+flights of stairs to Henley's Great College Street rooms, he heard a
+voice, loud, angry, terrifying; at the top, through an open door, he saw
+a youth standing in the middle of the room listening in abject terror to
+a large red man at a desk whom he knew instinctively to be Henley;--one
+glance, and he turned and fled, down the stairs, into the street, the
+little portfolio under his arm, his pace never slackening until he got
+well beyond the Houses of Parliament, through the Horse Guards into the
+Park.
+
+Other friends would not come at all on Thursday because of Henley, just
+as later more than one stayed away altogether because of Whistler. I was
+wretchedly nervous when they did come and brave a face-to-face meeting.
+Henley was not the sort of man to shirk a fight in the open. The
+principal reason for his unpopularity was just that habit of his of
+saying what he thought no matter where or when or to whom. He did not
+spare his friends, for he would not have kept them as friends had they
+not held some opinions worth his attacking, and they understood and
+respected him for it. Moreover, he said what he had to say in the
+plainest language. He roared his adversary down in good, strong,
+picturesque English, if that was any consolation, and with a splendidly
+rugged eloquence.
+
+I wish I could remember the words as well as the roar. Henley's
+eloquence cannot be forgotten by those who ever once listened to him,
+but his wit was not, like Whistler's, so keen nor his thrust so direct
+that the phrase, the one word of the retort or the attack, was
+unforgettable. He had his little affectations of speech as of style, and
+they added to its picturesqueness. But it was what he said that counted,
+the talk itself that probably inspired more sound thought and sound
+writing than most talk heard in the England of the Nineties. But it fell
+unrecorded on paper and memory could not be trusted after all these
+years.
+
+It is the greater pity because his books are few. He was poor when he
+started in life; almost at once he married; he was generous to a fault,
+and the generous man never yet lived who was not pursued by parasites;
+and as he was obliged to earn money and as his books were not of the
+stuff that makes the "best sellers," his criticism of life and art was
+expressed mainly in journalism.
+
+Unfortunately, no just idea of the amount or the quality of his
+journalistic work is now to be had even from the files of the _National
+Observer_. He had a way of editing every article sent in to him until it
+became more than a fair imitation of his own. I can sympathize with his
+object--the artist's desire for harmony, for the unity of the paper as a
+whole. But if he succeeded, as he did, it was at the sacrifice of the
+force, the effect, the character of individual contributions, and nobody
+can now say for sure which were Henley's save those he re-published in
+book form. When articles I wrote for him appeared in print, it was an
+open question with me whether I had the right to call them mine and to
+take any money for them. His _Views and Reviews_ gathered from the
+_National Observer_ and other papers and periodicals, his three or four
+small volumes of verse, the plays he wrote with Stevenson, an anthology
+or two, a few books of his editing, are scarcely sufficient to explain
+to the present generation his importance in his day and why his
+influence made itself felt in literature as keenly as Whistler's in
+art, through all the movements and excitements and enthusiasms of the
+Nineties. The joyous wars that marked the beginning of my life in
+London, when not led by Whistler's "Ha! Ha!" were commanded by Henley's
+roar.
+
+No man was ever more in need of a Boswell than Henley. Dr. Weir Mitchell
+once complained to me that in America nobody waited upon great men to
+report their sayings, while in England a young man was always somewhere
+near with a clean cuff to scribble them on. The enthusiast, with his
+cuff an impatient blank, never hung about Henley. Anyway, that was not
+what our Thursday evenings were for. Of all his Young Men who climbed up
+the Buckingham Street stairs with him on Thursday night and sat round
+him, his devoted disciples, until they climbed down the Buckingham
+Street stairs with him again, not one seems to have hit upon this useful
+way of proving his devotion.
+
+I do not need to be told that this was no excuse for my not having my
+cuff ready. But, foolishly perhaps, I too often spent my Thursday nights
+oppressed by other cares. For one thing, I could seldom keep my weekly
+article on Cookery out of my mind. Without it Saturday's _Pall-Mall_, I
+felt, would lose its brilliancy and my bank account, I knew, would grow
+appreciably less, and Friday was my day for writing it. A serious
+question therefore was, how, if I did not get to bed until two or three
+or four o'clock on Friday morning, was I to sit down at my desk at nine
+and be the brilliant authority on Eating that I thought I was?
+
+Another distraction grew out of my mistaken sense of duty as hostess, my
+feeling of responsibility in providing for all a share in the cheerful
+smell of powder and the stimulating sound of strife.
+
+Also, men being at best selfish animals, their wives, whose love of
+battle was less, were often an anxiety.
+
+These seemed big things at the time, though in retrospect they have
+dwindled into trifles that I had no business to let come between me and
+my opportunities to store up for future generations talk as brilliant as
+any on record. Of course I heard a great deal of it, and what I missed
+at home on our Thursday nights, I made up for at Henley's, and at
+friends' houses on many other occasions, and few can answer better than
+I for the quality of Henley's talk if I have forgotten the actual words.
+Its strength was its simple directness,--no posing, no phrasing, no
+attitudinizing for effect. This, I know, was always what most struck
+people when they first met him on our Thursday nights, especially
+Americans, for with us in America the man who has won the reputation of
+greatness too often seems afraid he will lose it if he does not forever
+advertise it by fireworks of cleverness and wit.
+
+Henley's talk had too a strange mixture of the brutal and the tender,
+the rough and the fine, a blending of the highest things with what might
+seem to the ordinary man the most trivial. I asked two old friends of
+his the other day what they remembered best of him and of his talk. The
+answer of one was: "He was certainly the most stupendous Jove-like
+creature who ever lived, and I did not in the least mind his calling me
+Billy, which I have always hated from others." The second answer was:
+"He talked as he wrote, and I know of nothing more characteristic of his
+talking and his writing than that tragic poem in which, with his heart
+crying for the child he had adored and lost, he could compare himself to
+'an old black rotter of a boat' past service, and could see, when
+criticised for it, nothing discordant in that slang _rotter_ dropped
+into such verse!" A good deal of Henley is in both answers. This
+curious blend must have especially struck everybody who saw him and
+listened to him in his own home. I can recall summer Sunday afternoons
+at Addiscombe, with Henley sitting on a rug spread on the lawn behind
+his house, Mrs. Henley at his side, his eyes following with twinkling
+tenderness his little daughter as she ran backwards and forwards busy
+with the manifold cares of childhood, while all the time, to his Young
+Men gathered round him, he was thundering against the last book, or the
+last picture show, or the last new music, in language not unworthy of
+Defoe or Smollett, for Henley could call a spade not only a spade but a
+steam shovel when so minded. He could soar to the heights and dive to
+the depths in the same breath.
+
+But Henley's talk was animated above all by the intense and virile love
+of life that I was so conscious of in him personally, that reveals
+itself in every line he wrote, and that is what I liked best about him.
+He was so alive, so exhilarated with the sense of being alive. The
+tremendous vitality of the man, that should have found its legitimate
+outlet in physical activity, seemed to have gone instead into his
+thought and his expression of it--as if the very fact that fate forced
+him to remain a looker-on had made him the more sensitive to the
+beauty, the joy, the challenge in everything life gave him to look at.
+He could wrest romance even out of the drear, drab hospital--there is
+another characteristic glimpse in one of Stevenson's letters, a picture
+of Henley sitting up in his hospital bed, his hair and beard all
+tangled, "talking as cheerfully as if he had been in a King's palace, or
+the great King's palace of the blue air."
+
+His interest in life was far too large and all-embracing for him to be
+indifferent to the smallest or most insignificant part of it. He had
+none of the disdain for everyday details, none of the fear of the
+commonplace that oppresses many men who think themselves great. Nothing
+that lived came amiss to his philosophy or his pleasure. He could talk
+as brilliantly upon the affairs of the kitchen as upon those of state,
+he could appreciate gossip as well as verse, he could laugh over an
+absurdity as easily as he could extol the masterpiece. Romance for him
+was everywhere--in the slang of the cockney of the Strand as in a
+symphony by Berlioz, in 'Arriet's feathers as in the "Don Diegos" of the
+Prado--the mere sound of the title in his mouth became a tribute to the
+master he honoured above most--in the patter of the latest Lion-comique
+of the Halls as in the prose of Meredith or Borrow, in the disreputable
+cat stealing home through the dull London dawn as in the Romanticists
+emerging from the chill of Classicism--in everything, big and little, in
+which he felt the life so dear to him throbbing.
+
+And he loved always the visible sign through which the appeal came. I
+have seen him lean, spell-bound, from our windows on a blue summer
+night, thrilled by the presence out there of Cleopatra's Needle, the
+pagan symbol flaunting its slenderness against river and sky, while in
+the distance the dome of St. Paul's, the Christian symbol, hung a
+phantom upon the heavens. His pleasure in the friendship of men of rank
+and family might have savoured of snobbishness had not one understood
+how much they stood for to him as symbols. I am sure he could fancy
+himself with these friends that same King of Babylon who thrills in the
+lover of his poem. I used to think that for him all the drama of
+_Admiral Guinea_, one of the plays he wrote with Stevenson, was
+concentrated in the tap-tap of the blind man's stick. In his _Hospital
+Verses_, his _London Voluntaries_, his every _Rhyme_ and _Rhythm_, the
+outward sign is the expression of the emotion, the thought that is in
+him. And coming down to more ordinary matters--ordinary, that is, to
+most people--I shall never forget, once when I was in Spain and he wrote
+to me there, his decoration of my name on the envelope with the finest
+ceremonial prefix of the ceremonious Spanish code which to him
+represented the splendour of the land of Don Diego and Don Quixote.
+
+It was this faculty of entering into the heart, the spirit of life and
+all things in it that made him the inspiring companion and friend he
+was, that widened his sympathies until he, whose intolerance was a
+byword with his contemporaries, showed himself tolerant of everything
+save sham and incompetence. The men who would tell you in their day, who
+will tell you now, of the great debt they owe to Henley, are men of the
+most varied interests, whose style and subject both might have been
+expected to prove a great gulf to separate them. Ask Arthur Morrison
+straight from the East End, or FitzMaurice Kelly fresh from Spain; ask
+W.B. Blakie preoccupied with the modern development of the printed book,
+or Wells adrift in a world of his own invention; ask Kipling steeped in
+the real, or Barrie lost in the Kail-Yard; ask Kenneth Grahame on his
+Olympian heights or George S. Street deep in his study of the prig--ask
+any one of these men and a score besides what Henley's sympathy,
+Henley's outstretched hand, meant to him, and some idea of the breadth
+of his judgment and taste and helpfulness may be had. Why he could
+condescend even to me when, in my brave ignorance, I undertook to write
+that weekly column on Cookery for the _Pall-Mall_. He it was who gave me
+Dumas's _Dictionnaire de la Cuisine_, the corner-stone of my collection
+of cookery books--a fact in which I see so much of Henley that I feel as
+if the stranger to him who to-day takes the volume down from my shelves
+and reads on the fly-leaf the simple inscription, "To E.R.P. d.d.
+W.E.H.," in his little crooked and crabbed writing, must see in it the
+eloquent clue to his personality that it is to me.
+
+
+III
+
+I have said that Henley seldom came to us--as indeed he seldom went
+anywhere or, for that matter, seldom stayed at home--without a
+contingent of his Young Men in attendance. I do not believe I could ever
+have gone to his rooms in Great College Street, or to his house at
+Addiscombe, or in later, sadder days to the other, rather gloomy, house
+on the riverside at Barnes,--turned into some sort of college the last
+time I passed, with a long bare students' table in the downstairs
+dining-room where I had been warmed and thrilled by so much exhilarating
+talk,--that some of his Young Men were not there before me or did not
+come in before I left. In London, on his journeys to and fro, they
+surrounded him as a bodyguard. If on those old Thursday nights, his was
+the loudest voice, theirs played up to it untiringly. There were no half
+measures about them. As warriors in the cause of art and literature,
+they reserved nothing from their devotion to their leader, they
+exhausted every possibility of that form of flattery usually considered
+the greatest. They fought Henley's battles with hardly less valour,
+hardly milder roaring. On Thursday, they had been working with him all
+day and all evening, they probably had lunched together, and dined
+together, and yet so far from showing any desire to separate on their
+arrival in our rooms, they immediately grouped themselves again round
+Henley.
+
+It was curious, anyway, how strong the tendency was with all the company
+to break up into groups. Work was the common bond, but there was also a
+special bond in each different kind of work. On my round as hostess I
+was sure to find the writers in one corner, the artists in another, the
+architects in a third--though to this day it is a question with me why
+we should have had enough architects to make a group and, more puzzling,
+why, having them, they should have been so unpopular, unless it was
+because of their air of prosperity and respectability, always as correct
+in appearance as if there was a possible client at the door. I can still
+recall the triumphant glee, out of all proportion to the cause, of one
+of Henley's Young Men the Thursday night he came to tell me that all the
+architects were safe out of the way in the studio, and "I have shut both
+doors," he added, "and now that we are rid of them we can talk." As if
+any of Henley's Young Men under any circumstances ever did anything
+else.
+
+Some of Henley's staff, if I remember, never came to us, others came
+only occasionally, but a few failed us as rarely as Henley himself. The
+Thursday night was the exception that did not see Charles Whibley at
+Henley's right hand even as he was in the pages of the _National
+Observer_, not merely ready for the fight but provoking it, insisting
+upon it, forcing it, boisterous in battle, looking like an
+undergraduate, talking like a pastmaster of the art of invective, with a
+little stammer that gave point to his lightest commonplace. Rarely
+lagging very far behind came Marriott Watson, young, tall, blonde,
+good-looking--a something exotic, foreign in the good looks that I put
+down to New Zealand, for I suppose New Zealand as well as America has
+produced a type--not quite so truculent in talk as in print, more
+inclined to fight with a smile. A third was Wilfred Pollock, forgotten
+save by his friends I am afraid; and a fourth, Vernon Blackburn, who
+began life as a monk at Fort Augustus and finished it as a musical
+critic, he too I fear scarcely more than a name; and a fifth, Jack
+Stuart, and a sixth, Harold Parsons, and a seventh, and an eighth, and I
+can hardly now say how many more long since dead, now for me vague
+ghosts from out that old past so overflowing with life.
+
+When William Waldorf Astor bought the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and started
+the weekly _Pall Mall Budget_ and the monthly _Pall Mall Magazine_, he
+presented Henley with two or three new Young Men and added to our
+company on Thursday nights, little as he had either of these
+achievements in view. His plunge into newspaper proprietorship was one
+of the newspaper ventures that counted for most in the Nineties. It was
+a venture inclining to amateurism in detail, but run on business, not
+romantic, lines and therefore it was less talked about than those
+purely amateur plunges into journalism which gave the Nineties so much
+of their picturesqueness. But all the same, we saw revolution in it, the
+possibility of wholesale regeneration, the inauguration of a new era,
+when "sham" would be exposed, and "Bleat" silenced, and art grow "Human"
+once more. In the _Budget_ and the _Magazine_ it was likewise to be
+proved that America and France were not alone in understanding and
+valuing the art of illustration:--vain hopes!
+
+Henley and his Young Men rejoiced in a new sphere for fighting, certain
+of a brilliant victory, since they were to have a share in the command.
+Astor, with a fine fling for independence--his only one in public--or
+else with that old gentlemanly dream of a newspaper "written by
+gentlemen for gentlemen," had captured his editors in regions where
+editors are not usually hunted--Henry Cust, heir to a title, for the
+_Gazette_, Lord Frederick Hamilton, his title already inherited, for the
+_Magazine_. Fleet Street shrugged its shoulders, laughed a little, not
+believing title and rank to have the same value in journalism as in
+society. Cust, to do him justice, agreed with Fleet Street, and, knowing
+that he was without experience, had the sense to appeal for help to
+those with it. By good luck he went to Henley, who was not free to do
+much for the paper save give it his advice, offer it those of his Young
+Men whom he could spare, and take under his wing the new Young Men it
+invented for itself. When new enthusiasts fell into Henley's train, it
+was never long before they followed him to Buckingham Street on Thursday
+nights.
+
+I could scarcely label as anybody's Young Man Iwan-Müller, huge, half
+Russian, half English, all good comrade, who had come up from Manchester
+and the editorship of a leading paper there to be Cust's Assistant
+Editor. He was nearly Henley's contemporary, but he did not, for such a
+trifle as age, let any one of Henley's Young Men exceed him in devotion,
+and his laugh became the unfailing accompaniment of Henley's talk, so
+much so that I am convinced if Henley still leads the talk in the land
+beyond the grave, Iwan-Müller still punctuates it with the big bracing
+laugh that was as big as himself.
+
+[Illustration: Photograph by Frederick Hollyer
+IWAN-MÜLLER AND GEORGE W. STEEVENS]
+
+At the other extreme, younger than the youngest of the Young Men he
+joined, came George W. Steevens, fresh from Oxford, Balliol Prize
+Scholar, shy and carrying it off, in the Briton's way, with appalling
+rudeness and more appalling silence. I remember J., upon whose nerves as
+well as mine this silence got, taking me apart one Thursday evening
+to tell me that if that young Oxford prig was too superior to talk to
+anybody, why then he was too superior to come to us at all, and he must
+be made to understand it. Eventually he learned to talk, with us
+anyway--he was always a silent man with most people. And I got to know
+him well, to like him, to admire him,--to respect him too through the
+long summer when his friends were doing their best to dissuade him from
+his proposed marriage with a woman many years older than he. The men of
+the _National Observer_ and the _Pall Mall_ were such keen fighters that
+they could not be kind or sentimental--and they grew maudlinly
+sentimental over Steevens's engagement--without a fight for it. They
+thought he was making a mistake, forgetting that it was his business,
+not theirs, if he was. He fought alone against them, but he held his
+place like a man and won. Our Thursday nights had come to an end before
+he went to America, to Germany, to Khartoum with Kitchener, to South
+Africa, where he passed into the great silence that no protest of ours,
+or any man's can break. If his work was overrated, he himself as I knew
+him was as kind and brave as in Henley's verse to his memory.
+
+Others of the same group, the writers' group, who flit across the scene
+in my memory are less intimately associated with Henley. Harold Frederic
+wrote for him occasionally--wrote few things, indeed, more amusing than
+his _Observations in Philistia_, a satire first published in the
+_National Observer_--but his chief business was the novel and the _New
+York Times_ correspondence. He was an able man, something more than the
+typical clever American journalist, a writer of books that deserve to be
+remembered but that have hardly outlived him. He was an amusing
+companion, the sort of man it was delightful to run across by chance in
+unexpected places, for which reason my most agreeable recollections of
+him are not in Buckingham Street but in the streets and _cafés_ of
+Berlin and Vienna that summer he was studying Jews in Southeastern
+Europe, and first knew there were Jews in Vienna when J., who afterwards
+began to study them for himself, introduced him to the _Juden Gasse_. He
+liked a good dinner, and gave us more than one, and he was an amusing
+talker over it and also on our Thursday nights until he got to the stage
+he always did get to of telling tales of his boyhood when he carried
+milk to the big people in his part of the Mohawk Valley, was dazzled by
+his first vision of Brussels carpet on their floors, and determined to
+have Brussels carpet on his own before he was many years older, and I
+can answer for it that, by the time I knew him, his house was all
+Brussels carpet from top to bottom. They were most creditable tales and
+entertaining too at a first hearing, but they staled, as all tales must,
+with repetition.
+
+S.R. Crockett never wrote anything for Henley. Henley would have been
+outraged by the bare suggestion, and Crockett the writer was never
+handled with the gloves by Henley's Young Men in the _National
+Observer_. But with Crockett himself they had no quarrel. We all liked
+him--a large red and white Scotchman, the Scots strong in every word he
+spoke, hustling us all off for a fish dinner at Greenwich on the
+strength of his first big cheque for royalties; or as happy to spend the
+evening sitting on our floor and diverting William Penn with the ball of
+paper on the end of a string that William never wearied of pursuing,
+partly for his amusement, partly because, with his innate politeness, he
+knew it contributed to ours.
+
+I cannot imagine a Thursday night without Rosamund
+Marriott-Watson,--Graham R. Tomson as she was then,--beautiful,
+reminiscent of Rossetti in her tall, willowy slimness, with her long
+neck like a column and her great halo of black hair and her big brown
+eyes, appealing, confinding, beseeching. Fashion as she, the poetess,
+extolled it week by week in the _National Observer_, became a poem with
+a stately measure in frocks and hats, a flowing rhythm in every frill
+and furbelow. I lost sight of her later, for reasons neither here nor
+there, but it pleases me to know that not many months before her death
+she looked back to those years as her happiest when weekly, almost
+daily, she was going up and down the Buckingham Street stairs which her
+ghost, she said, must haunt until they go the way of too many old stairs
+leading up to old London chambers. Violet Hunt was almost as faithful.
+And both contributed, as I did, a weekly column--mine that amazing
+article on cookery--to the _Pall Mall's_ daily _Wares of Autolycus_,
+daily written by women and I daresay believed by us to be the most
+entertaining array of unconsidered trifles that any Autolycus had ever
+offered to any eager world. Graham Tomson was even moved to commemorate
+our collaboration in verse the inspiration of which is not far to seek,
+but of which all I remember now is the beginning:
+
+  O, there's Mrs. Meynell and Mrs. Pennell,
+        There's Violet Hunt and me!
+
+for Mrs. Meynell contributed a fourth column, though she never
+contributed her presence to Buckingham Street.
+
+Once or twice, George Moore hovered from group to group, his childlike
+eyes of wonder protruding, wide open, and his ears open too, no doubt,
+for, if I can judge from his several books of reminiscences, his ears
+have rarely been closed to talk going on about him. After reading the
+Irish series I should suspect him not only of well-opened ears but of an
+inexhaustible supply of cuffs safely stored up his sleeves. Bernard Shaw
+honoured us occasionally, but I have learned that, bent as he is upon
+talking about himself, whatever he has to say, he grows more fastidious
+when others talk about him and say what they have to. Now and then,
+Henry Norman, journalist, his title and seat in Parliament yet to come,
+dropped in. Now and then Miss Preston and Miss Dodge came, both in
+London to finish in the British Museum the studies begun in Rome. Rarely
+a week passed that James G. Legge was not with us, then deep in his work
+at the Home Office but full of joy in everything that was most joyful in
+the Nineties--its fights, its books, its prints, its posters. And I
+might name many besides, some forgotten, some dead, some seen no more
+by me, life being often more cruel than death in the separations and
+divisions it makes. But two voices above the others are almost as
+persistent in my ears as Henley's--the voices of Bob Stevenson and Henry
+Harland.
+
+
+IV
+
+I have no fancy for nicknames in any place or at any time. I have
+suffered too much from my own. But I dislike the familiarity of them
+above all in print. And yet, I could no more call Bob Stevenson anything
+save Bob than I could venture to abbreviate the Robert or the Louis of
+his cousin. He had been given in baptism a more formal name--in fact, he
+had been given three of unquestioned dignity: Robert Alan Mowbray. But I
+doubt if anybody had ever known him by them or if he had ever used them
+himself. When he wrote he signed his fine array of initials, and when he
+was not R.A.M.S., he was Bob.
+
+[Illustration: Painting by Himself
+"BOB" STEVENSON]
+
+It seems to me now a curious chance, as well as a piece of good luck,
+that the two most eloquent of the company in Louis Stevenson's _Talk and
+Talkers_ should have come to us on our Thursday nights, for Bob was the
+Spring-Heeled Jack, "the loud, copious, and intolerant talker" of
+that essay just as Henley was the Burly.
+
+He was not more spring-heeled in his talk than in evading capture for
+it. In his later years he made few visits. If we wanted him we had to
+gather him up by the wayside and bring him home with us. The newspaper
+work I was doing then took me the rounds of the London galleries on
+press days and, as he was the art critic of the _Pall Mall_, I was
+continually coming across him busy about the same work in Bond Street or
+Piccadilly. Nothing pleased me better than to meet him on these
+occasions, for he could make the dull show that I, in my dull way, was
+finding dull the most entrancing entertainment in London. His every
+visit to a gallery was to him an adventure and every picture a romance,
+and the best of it for his friends was that he would willingly share the
+inspiration which he, but nobody else, could find in the most
+uninspiring canvas, an inspiration to criticism that is, not to
+admiration--he never wavered in his allegiance to the "Almighty Swells"
+of Art. Once he began to talk I did not care to have him stop, and I
+would say, "Why not come to Buckingham Street with me? You have not seen
+J. for a long while." He would vow he couldn't, he must get back to Kew
+to do his article. I would insist a little, he would waver a little, and
+at last he would agree to a minute's talk with J., excusing himself to
+himself by protesting that Buckingham Street was on his way to the
+Underground, as it was if he chose to go out of his way to make it so.
+Before he knew it, the minute had stretched out to our dinner hour when
+he was persuaded that he would save time by dining with us, as he must
+dine somewhere; if he went right afterwards, he could still be back at
+Kew in plenty of time to finish his article for the last post.
+
+Of course he never did go right afterwards--what talker ever did go
+right anywhere immediately after dinner when the real talk is only
+beginning? Presently people would filter in and now, well adrift on the
+flood of his own eloquence, nothing could interrupt him and he was the
+last to leave us, the later it grew the more easily induced to stay
+because he knew that the last train and the last post and all the last
+things of the day had gone and that he must now wait for the first
+things of the morning.
+
+If I could talk like Bob Stevenson I would not be interrupted either.
+Greater excitement could not be had out of the most exciting story of
+adventure, and I do not believe he knew until he got to the end any
+more where his talk was going to lead him than the reader knows how the
+story is going to turn out until the last chapter is reached. Louis
+Stevenson described certain qualities of his talk, but made no effort to
+give the talk itself, and in Bob's case, as in Henley's, it was the talk
+itself that counted. There was no acting in it as in Henley's or in
+Whistler's--no burying of his head in his hands and violent gestures--no
+well-placed laugh and familiar phrase. The talk came in a steady stream,
+laughter occasionally in the voice, but no break, no movement, no
+dramatic action--the sanest doctrine set forth with almost insane
+ingenuity, for he was always the "wild dog outside the kennel" who
+wouldn't imitate and hence kept free, as Louis Stevenson told him;
+extraordinary things treated quite as a matter of course; brilliant
+flashes of imbecility passed for cool well-balanced argument; until
+often I would suddenly gasp, wondering into what impossible world I had
+strayed after him. And he would tell the most extravagant tales, he
+would confide the most paradoxical philosophy, the most topsy-turvy
+ethics, with a fantastic seriousness, never approached except in the
+Arabian Nights of Prince Florizel for the puppets of whose adventures,
+as for Spring-Heeled Jack, he was the sitter. It was a delightful
+accomplishment, but dangerous when applied to actual life. I cannot
+forget his advice once to a friend on the verge of a serious step that
+might sink him into nobody could foretell what social quagmire. Bob
+could see in it only the adventure and the joy of adventure, not the
+price fate was bound to demand for it. To him the mistake was the unlit
+lamp, the ungirt loin--the adventure lost--and, life being what it is, I
+am not sure that he was not right.
+
+I think his talk struck me as the more extraordinary because he looked
+so little like it. In the Nineties he had taken to the Jaegers that
+usually stand for vegetarianism, teetotalism, hygiene--all the drab
+things of life. He wore even a Jaeger hat and Jaeger boots--as complete
+an advertisement for Jaeger as old Joseph Finsbury was for his Doctor.
+No costume could have seemed so altogether out of character with the
+fantastic, delightful, extravagant creature inside of it, though,
+really, none could have been more in character. It had always been Bob's
+way to play the game of life by dressing the part of the moment. Before
+I met him I had been told of his influence over Louis Stevenson, whose
+debt to him for ideas and conceits was said to be immeasurable, and
+nobody who knew Bob has doubted it. I feel convinced that Louis owed to
+him also his touch of the fantastic, the unusual, in dress, since it
+belonged so entirely to Bob and was no less entirely in keeping with his
+attitude towards the universe and his place in it--his tendency of
+always probing the real for the romantic.
+
+Knowing one cousin and the books of the other, I should say it was Bob
+who, in their childhood, originated the drama of the Lantern-Bearers and
+the evil-smelling lantern under the great coat, symbol of adventure and
+daring--that it was Bob who, in their gay youth, evolved the black
+flannel shirts to which they owed the honour of being, with Lord
+Salisbury, the only Britons ever refused admission to the Casino at
+Monte Carlo, and which were worn by the Stennis Brothers in _The
+Wrecker_,--that it was Bob who impressed upon Louis the importance of
+being dressed for the scene until he surpassed himself in his amazing
+get-up for the _Epilogue to an Inland Voyage_. Bob's own disguises
+rarely got into print, but in Will Low's _Chronicle of Friendships_
+there is a photograph of him in his student days, figuring as a sort of
+brigand of old-fashioned comic opera, that shows he did not from the
+beginning shirk the obligations he imposed upon others. I remember a
+huge ring, inherited from his father to whom the Czar had given it for
+engineering services in Russia, which he kept for formal occasions so
+that when I saw it covering his finger, almost his hand, at the dinner
+to which we had both been invited, I understood that to him the occasion
+was one of ceremony and he never failed to regulate his conduct
+accordingly. I was glad the ring did not appear on our Thursday nights,
+so much freer of formality, and therefore more amusing, was he without
+it. The large perfection of his Jaegers in his last years was no less
+symbolic; in them he was dressed for the rôle of middle age which he,
+who had the gift of eternal youth, had already reached when I first knew
+him. It was a rôle to which, at the time, I attributed his concern about
+his health--his anxiety to know if we, any of us, had influenza before
+he would come home with me, his rush from the room or the house at a
+sniff or a sneeze. The truth is Bob shared Henley's love of the visible
+sign, or it may be nearer the truth to say that he shared his own love
+of it with Henley and his cousin who rarely, either of them, wrote
+anything in which it is not felt.
+
+But Henley loved the visible sign for itself--the romance was actually
+in the tap-tap of the blind man's staff, in the pagan obelisk towering
+above the Christian river. Bob loved the visible sign for the hint it
+gave to his imagination, the adventure upon which it sent him galloping.
+He could build up a romance out of anything and nothing--he was the
+modern Scheherezade, but, as time went on, with nobody to repeat his
+stories. He could have made the fortune of any number of young men with
+their cuffs ready, but the only young man who ever did use his cuff was
+Louis Stevenson when they were young together. Bob had not the energy to
+put down his stories himself--he would not have written a word for
+publication had he not been forced to. For him the romance would have
+been lost in the labour of recording it, and, anyway, he was always
+consistent in not doing more work than he was obliged to in order to
+live. He had not the talent for combining, or identifying, his pleasure
+with his work. Painting was the profession for which he had been
+trained, but with it he amused himself and, as far as I know, never made
+a penny out of it. When he talked he would have lost his joy in the
+invention, the fabrication, had he thought he must turn it to profit. Of
+the curious twist of his imagination there remains but the faint
+reflection here and there in Prince Florizel and the romantic
+adventurers swaggering and talking splendid nonsense through the earlier
+tales by Louis Stevenson, whose books grew less and less fantastic as
+his path and Bob's spread wider apart. Even in the earlier tales Bob
+will not be discovered by future generations who have lost the key.
+
+For the sake of posterity, if not for my own, I would have been wiser on
+Thursday nights to think less of my next morning's article than of his
+inventions. As it is, I retain merely a general impression and an
+occasional detail of his talk. I am glad I remember, for one thing, his
+unfailing prejudice in favour of his friends, so amiable was the side of
+his character it revealed--though it revealed also his weakness as
+critic. He had a positive genius for veiling prosaic facts with romance
+where the people he liked were concerned. How often have we laughed at
+his amiability to a painter of the commonplace who had happened to be
+his fellow-student in Paris, whose work, as a consequence, his friendly
+imagination filled with the fine things that to us were conspicuously
+missing, and whose name he dragged into every criticism he wrote, even
+into his Monograph on Velasquez, nor could he be laughed, or argued out
+of it.
+
+And I am glad I remember another trick of his imagination, though it was
+like to end in disaster for us all, so equally characteristic was it of
+his genius in weaving romance from prose. He was talking one evening of
+wine, upon which he had large--Continental--ideas, declaring he would
+not have it in his house unless all his family, including the servants,
+could drink it without stint and also without thought of
+expense--though, if I am not mistaken, his household staff consisted
+chiefly of a decent old Scotchwoman who would have scorned wine as a
+device of the foreigner. The triumphant ring of his voice is still in my
+ears as he announced that he had found a merchant who could provide him
+with just the wine he wanted, good, pure, light, white or red, an
+ordinary brand for sevenpence a bottle, a superior brand for eightpence.
+
+The marvel of it all was that we believed in that wine and when the
+company left for home, the merchant's address was in almost everybody's
+pocket. It was not a bad wine in the sample bottles J. and I received a
+day or two later, nothing much to boast of, but harmless. For the
+further cheapness promised we next ordered it by the case, one of red
+and one of white--a rare bargain we thought. But in the end it was the
+most expensive wine it has ever been our misfortune to invest in. For
+when it came in cases it was so potent that nobody could drink as much
+as a glass without going to sleep. I never had it analyzed, but, after a
+couple of bottles, I did not dare to put it on the table again, or to
+use it even for cooking or as vinegar. To balance our accounts, we did
+without wine of any kind, or at any price, for many a week to come. But
+we had our revenge. In the course of a few months Bob's wine merchant
+was summoned before the magistrate for manufacturing Bordeaux and
+Burgundies out of Greek currants and more reprehensible materials in the
+backyard of his unpretending riverside house, and it was one of our
+Thursday night fellow victims who had the pleasure of exposing him in
+the _Daily Chronicle_. Bob did not share our resentment. He had his
+pleasure in the charm his imagination gave to every drop of the few
+bottles he drank and managed not to die of.
+
+I began to notice in the galleries and on Thursday nights that Bob
+became more and more engrossed in the question of his health and quicker
+to fly at a sniff or a sneeze. The time came when no persuasion could
+bring him home with me. He described symptoms rather than pictures, his
+interest in anything in the shape of paint weakened. I fancied that he
+was romancing, that he was playing the hypochondriac as part of his rôle
+of middle-age, and I thought it a pity. It might provide a new
+entertainment for him, but it deprived us of the entertainment of his
+company. Then I hardly met him at all, or if I did he was too nervous to
+linger before each painting or drawing, to gossip about it and
+everything under the sun. He would walk through the galleries with one
+leg dragging a little--the visible sign, I would say to myself, amused
+to see that he could turn romance into reality as easily as reality into
+romance. He would start for Kew right off, without any loitering,
+without any delicious pretending that he was going in the very next
+train and then not going until the very next train meant the very next
+day. But before long I learned that there was no romance about it, that
+it was grim reality, the grimmer to me because I had taken it so
+lightly. His illness was mere rumour at first, for few people went to
+his house in far Kew to see him. It was more than rumour when he ceased
+altogether to appear in the galleries, for we knew he was dependent
+upon art criticism for his butter, if not for most of his bread. I had
+not got as far as belief in his illness before the news came that he had
+set out upon the greatest adventure of all and that no more would
+Buckingham Street be transfigured in the light of his romancing,
+glorified by his inexhaustible fancy. I owed him much: the charm of the
+personality of "this delightful and wonderful creature" in Henley's
+words of him, pleasure from his talk, stimulus from his criticism, and I
+wish I had had the common sense to do what I could to make him live as a
+pleasure and a stimulus to others. My mistake on our Thursday nights was
+to keep my cuff clean, my note-book empty.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch by Aubrey Beardsley
+HENRY HARLAND]
+
+
+V
+
+In the case of Henry Harland my conscience makes me no such reproach. If
+ever a man became his own Boswell it was he, though I do not suppose
+anything was further from his mind when he sat down to write. But as he
+talked, so he wrote--he could not help himself--and all who have read
+the witty, gay, whimsical, fantastic talk of his heroes and heroines,
+especially in his last three books, have listened to him. He, no less
+than his Adrian Willes--even if quite another man was the model--never
+understood how it was possible for people to be bored. Flaubert once
+said in a letter, "Life is so hideous that the only way of enduring it
+is to avoid it." But Harland believed in plunging into it headlong and
+getting everything that is to be got out of it. He had eyes to see that
+"life is just one sequence of many-coloured astonishments", and the
+colours were the gayer when he came to our Thursday nights because he
+was still so young.
+
+He and Mrs. Harland had been in London only a few years, his career as
+Sydney Luska was behind him, his career as Henry Harland was before him,
+he was full of life, energy, enthusiasm, deep in long novels, busy for
+the _Daily Chronicle_, writing as hard as he talked, and he talked every
+bit as hard as Bob Stevenson.
+
+Like Bob, he seemed to love talk more than anything, but he must have
+loved work as Bob never loved it, for he put the quality of his talk
+into what he wrote. Bob Stevenson's writing never suggested his talk. I
+might find his point of view and his amiable prejudices in his criticism
+and his books--only he could have written his _Velasquez_ quite as he
+wrote it--but nowhere do I find a touch, a trace of the Lantern-Bearer
+or Prince Florizel or the Young Man with the Cream Tarts. But I never
+get far away from Harland in his novels. I re-read them a short time
+ago, and they were a magic carpet to bear me straight back to Buckingham
+Street, and the crowded, smoky rooms overlooking the river, and the old
+years when we were all young together.
+
+A delightful thing about Harland was that he did not care to monopolize
+the talk, to talk everybody else down. On the contrary, I doubt if he
+was ever happier than when he roused, provoked, stimulated everybody to
+talk with him. I remember in particular an evening when J. and I were
+dining with him and Mrs. Harland at their Kensington flat, and Mr. and
+Mrs. Edmund Gosse were there, and Mr. and Mrs. W.J. Fisher--Fisher was
+then editor of the _Daily Chronicle_ and Mrs. Fisher was still Adrienne
+Dayrolles on the stage--and Louis Austen, a handy man of journalism, and
+when, happening to turn for a minute from Harland by whom I was sitting,
+and to look round the table, I found I was the only one of the party not
+talking--and we had got no farther than the fish! But I flatter myself I
+have few rivals as an accomplished listener.
+
+Often Harland had the floor to himself simply because everybody else
+wanted to listen too. When what he calls in one of his books "the
+restorative spirit of nonsense" descended upon him, his talk could
+whisk off the whole Thursday night crowd, before they knew it, to that
+delectable Land of Nonsense to which he was an inspired guide. Nobody
+understood better how to set up the absurd and the impossible in the
+garb of truth. An old admirer of his reminded me not long since of a
+tale he used to tell, almost with tears in his voice, of the _petit
+patissier_ who was hurrying through the streets of Paris to deliver
+_brioches_ and tarts to customers and who, crossing the Boulevards, was
+knocked down by a big three-horse omnibus. And as the crowd collected
+and the _sergent-de-ville_ arrived, he was seen painfully and
+deliberately freeing his one uninjured arm, feeling carefully in pocket
+after pocket, and, as he drew his last breath, holding up triumphantly
+the exact number of francs the Parisian on foot then had to pay for
+venturing rashly to get in the way of the Paris driver. And Harland told
+it all with such eloquence that it was some minutes before those who
+listened realised he was laughing and began to laugh with him. And the
+tale was typical of many others he loved to tell. As his talk led the
+way to the Land of Nonsense, so he himself could of a sudden whirl us
+all off to a restaurant, or a park, or an excursion we had not thought
+of an hour, a minute before. Many a time, instead of sitting solemnly
+at home reading or working as we had meant to, we would be going down
+the river in a penny steamboat, or drinking coffee at the _Café Royal_
+or tea in Kensington Gardens--but Harland as an inspired guide was at
+his best in Paris I always thought, perhaps because in Paris he had so
+much larger scope than in London.
+
+He impressed one as a man who never tired, or who never gave in to being
+tired, either at work or at play--a man who, knowing his days would be
+few on this earth, found each fair as it passed and, if he could not bid
+it stay, was at least determined to fill it as full as it would hold.
+There was no resisting his restless energy when with him, and it was
+because he could so little resist it himself, that he was continually
+seeking new outlets--new forms for its expression. He had just the
+temperament to take up with the mode of the Nineties that drove the
+Young Men to asserting themselves and upholding their doctrines in
+papers and magazines of their own. The pedant may trace the fashion back
+to the _Hobby-horse_ of the Eighties, or, in a further access of
+pedantry to the _Germ_ of the early Fifties. He may follow its growth as
+late as the _Blast_ of yesterday and _The Gypsy_ of to-day. But I do
+not have to go further than my book shelves, I have only to look and see
+there the _Dial_ and the _Yellow Book_ and the _Savoy_ and the
+_Butterfly_ and the _Pageant_ and the _Dome_ and the _Evergreen_, each
+with its special train of memories and associations, and I know better
+than the greatest pedant of them all that the fashion, no matter when it
+began, no matter when it may end, belongs as essentially to the Nineties
+as the fashion for the crinoline belongs to the Sixties. Harland was not
+original in wanting to set up a pulpit for himself--the originality was
+in the design for it. The _Yellow Book_ was not like any other quarterly
+from which any other young man or group did his preaching.
+
+
+VI
+
+Harland shared his pulpit. He would not have found the same design for
+it without Beardsley, nor would our Thursday nights, where a good deal
+of that design was thought out and talked out, have been the same
+without Beardsley. I would find it hard, even had there been no _Yellow
+Book_, not to remember Harland and Beardsley together. For it was from
+Mrs. Harland that we first heard of the wonderful youth, unknown still,
+an insignificant clerk in some Insurance Company, who made the most
+amazing drawings--it was she who first sent him to us that J. might look
+at his work and help him to escape from the office he hated and from the
+toils of Burne-Jones and the Kelmscott Press in which he was entangled.
+
+[Illustration: Photograph by Frederick H. Evans
+AUBREY BEARDSLEY]
+
+He came, the first time, one afternoon in the winter dusk--a boy, tall
+and slight, long narrow pale clean-shaven face, hair parted in the
+middle and hanging over his forehead, nose prominent, eyes alight,
+certain himself of the worth of his drawings, too modest not to fear
+that other artists might not agree with him. The drawings in his little
+portfolio were mostly for the _Morte d' Arthur_, with one or two of
+those, now cherished by the collector, that have a hint of the Japanese
+under whose influence he momentarily passed. J. enjoys the reputation,
+which he deserves, of telling the truth always, no matter how unpleasant
+to those to whom he tells it. Truth to Beardsley was pleasant and his
+face was radiant when he left us. J. has also the courage of his
+convictions, and all he said to Beardsley he repeated promptly to the
+public in the first number of _The Studio_, a magazine started not as a
+pulpit but as a commercial enterprise--started, however, at the right
+moment to be kindled into life and steered toward success by the
+enthusiasm and the energy of the Young Men of the Nineties.
+
+Beardsley was bound to become known whether articles were written about
+him or not. But J.'s was the first and made recognition come the sooner.
+The heads of many young men grow giddy with the first success; at the
+exultant top of the winding stair that leads to it, they no longer see
+those who gave them a hand when they balanced on the lowest rung. But
+Beardsley was not made that way. He kept his head cool, his eyesight
+clear. He never forgot. Gratitude coloured the friendship with us that
+followed, even in the days when he was one of the most talked about men
+in London. He knew that always by his work alone he would be judged at
+Buckingham Street, and to J. he brought his drawings and his books for
+criticism. He brought his schemes as well, just as he brought the youth
+not only of years but of temperament to our Thursday nights. He came
+almost as regularly as Henley and Henley's Young Men, adding his young
+voice to the uproar of discussion, as full of life as if he too, like
+Harland, grudged a minute of the years he knew for him were counted. In
+no other house where it was my pleasure to meet him did he seem to me to
+show to such advantage. In his own home I thought him overburdened by
+the scheme of decoration he had planned for it. In many houses to which
+he was asked he was amiable enough to assume the pose expected of him.
+The lion-hunters hoped that Beardsley would be like his drawings.
+Strange, decadent, morbid, bizarre, weird, were adjectives bestowed upon
+them, and he played up to the adjectives for the edification or
+mystification of the people who invented them and for his own infinite
+amusement. But with us he did not have to play up to anything and could
+be just the simple, natural youth he was--as simple and natural as I
+have always found the really great, more interested in his work than
+most young men, and keener for success.
+
+I like to insist upon his simplicity because people now, who judge him
+by his drawings, would so much rather insist upon his perversity and his
+affectation. How can you reconcile that sort of thing with simplicity?
+They will ask, pointing to drawings of little mocking satyrs and twisted
+dwarfs and grotesques and extravagant forms and leering faces and a
+suggestion of one can hardly say what. But it might as well be asked why
+the medićval artist delighted to carve homely, familiar scenes and
+incidents, and worse, in the holiest places, to lavish his ingenuity
+upon the demons and devils above the doors leading into his great
+churches; why a philosopher like Rabelais chose to express the wisest
+thought in the most indecent fooling; why every genius does not look out
+upon life and the world with the same eyes and find the same method to
+record what he sees. Some men can only marvel with Louis Stevenson at
+the wide contrast between the "prim obliterated polite face of life" and
+its "orgiastic foundations"; others are only reconciled to it by the
+humour in the contrast or by the pity invoked by its victims. What makes
+the genius is just the fact that he looks out upon life, that he feels,
+that he uses his eyes, in his own way; also, that he invents his own
+methods of expression. Beardsley saw the satire of life, he loved the
+grotesque which has so gone out of date in our matter-of-fact day that
+we almost forget what it means, and no doubt disease gave a morbid twist
+to his vision and imagination. But, above all, he was young, splendidly
+young: young when he began work, young when he finished work. He had the
+curiosity as to the world and everything in it that is the divine right
+of youth, and he had the gaiety, the exuberance, the flamboyancy, the
+fun of the youth destined to do and to triumph. Already, in his later
+work, are signs of the passing of the first youthful stage of his art.
+It is suggestive to contrast the conventional landscapes with the
+grinning little monstrosities in some of the illustrations for the _Rape
+of the Lock_; the few drawings for his _Volpone_ have a dignity he had
+not hitherto achieved.
+
+Nobody can be surprised if some of the gaiety and exuberance and fun
+got no less into his manner towards the people whose habit is to
+shield their eyes with the spectacles of convention. Beardsley had a
+keen sense of humour that helped him to snatch all the joy there is
+in the old, time-honoured, youthful game of getting on the nerves of
+established respectability. Naturally, so Robert Ross, his friend,
+has said of him, "he possessed what is _called_ an artificial
+manner"; that is, his manner was called affected, as was his art,
+because it wasn't exactly like everybody else's. I have never yet
+come across the genius whose manner was exactly like everybody
+else's, and shyness, self-consciousness, counted for something in
+his, at least at the start. He had only to exaggerate this manner,
+or mannerism, to set London talking. It was the easier because
+rumours quickly began to go about of the darkened room in which he
+worked, of his turning night into day and day into night like
+Huysmans's hero, and of this or of that strange habit or taste,
+until people began to see all sorts of things in him that weren't
+there, just as they read all sorts of things into his drawings that
+he never put into them, always seeking what they were determined to
+find. To many there was uncanniness in the very extent of his
+knowledge, in his wide reading, in his mastery of more than one art,
+for, if he had not been an artist, he most assuredly would have been
+a musician or a writer. Added to all this, was the abnormal notice
+he attracted almost at once, the diligence with which he was
+imitated and parodied and the rapidity with which a Beardsley type
+leaped into fashion.
+
+Of course Beardsley enjoyed it. What youth of his age would not have
+enjoyed the excitement of such a success? It would have been morbid at
+his age not to enjoy it. He never seemed to me more simply himself than
+when he was relating his adventures and laughing at them with all the
+fresh, gay laughter of the boy--the wonderful boy--he was. Arthur Symons
+wrote of him, I have forgotten where, that he admired himself
+enormously. I should say that he was amused by himself enormously and
+was quite ready to pose and to bewilder for the sake of the amusement
+it brought him. He was never spoiled nor misled by either his fame or
+his notoriety.
+
+It was so Beardsley's habit to consult J. that he would have asked
+advice, if Harland had not, for _The Yellow Book_ which went through
+several stages of its preliminary planning in the old Buckingham Street
+chambers. Among the vivid memories of our Thursday nights one is of
+Harland taking J. apart for long, intimate discussions in a corner of
+the studio, and another of Beardsley taking him off for confidences as
+intimate and long, and my impression in looking back, though I may be
+mistaken, is that each had his personal little scheme for a journal of
+his own before he decided to share it with the other. It was
+characteristic of the friendliness of both that they should have
+insisted upon J. figuring in the first number. As vivid in my memory is
+the warm spring morning when Beardsley, his face beaming with joy,
+called to give me an early copy of this first number, with a little
+inscription from him on the fly-leaf--I have just taken down the volume
+from the near book shelf--"To Mrs. Pennell from Aubrey Beardsley" I
+read, as commonplace an inscription as ever artist or author wrote, but,
+reading it, I see as if it were yesterday the sunlit Buckingham Street
+room where I used to work, William Penn curled up on my desk, and,
+coming in the door, the radiant youth with the gay-covered book in his
+hands.
+
+And there followed the dinner--the amazing dinner as unlike the usual
+formal dinner of inauguration as could be. It was given in an upper room
+of the Hotel d'Italie in Old Compton Street and was as free of ceremony
+as our Thursday nights. The men were in dress suits or tweeds as they
+chose, the women in evening or tailor gowns according to their
+convenience. I have an impression that more people came than were
+expected and that it was all the waiters could do to serve them. I know
+I was much more concerned with my discomfort to find that Harland and
+Beardsley, for the first time in my experience, had forgotten how to
+talk. Everybody else was talking. I can still see the animated faces and
+hear the animated voices of Mrs. Harland and John Oliver Hobbes and
+Ménie Muriel Dowie and Kenneth Grahame and George Moore and John Lane
+and Max Beerbohm, and all the brand-new writers prepared to shock, or to
+"uplift," or to pull down old altars and set up new ones, or any other
+of the fine things that were to make the _Yellow Book_ a force and
+famous. But also I can still feel the heavy, unnatural silence of the
+two editors from which I was the chief sufferer, to me having fallen
+the honour of sitting in the centre of the high table between them. J.
+was away and, in his absence, I was distinguished by this mark of
+Beardsley's appreciation and Harland's friendliness. I was greatly
+flattered, but less entertained. They were both as nervous as débutantes
+at a first party. Shrinking from the shadow cast before by their coming
+speeches, neither of them had as much as a word to throw me. Nor could
+they concentrate their distracted thoughts upon the _menu_--plate after
+plate was taken away untouched, while I kept on emptying mine in
+self-defence, to pass the time, wondering if, in my rôle of the _Pall
+Mall's_ "greedy Autolycus," my friends would now convict me of the sin
+of public eating as well as what they had been pleased to pretend was my
+habit of "private eating," for not otherwise, they would assure me,
+could they account for the unfailing flamboyancy of my weekly article on
+cookery. Seated between the two men, in their hours of ease when they
+were not editors, my trouble would have been to listen to both at the
+same moment and to get a word in edgewise. However, when the speeches
+were over the strain was relaxed. The evening ended in the accustomed
+floods of talk;--on the way from the Hotel d'Italie; at the Bodley
+Head, John Lane's new premises in the Albany to which he took us all
+that we might see the place from which the _Yellow Book_ was to be
+published; round a little table with a red-and-white checked cover in
+the basement of the Monico, the company now reduced to Harland and Mrs.
+Harland, Beardsley, Max Beerbohm and two or three others whose faces
+have grown dim in my memory, everybody as unwilling to break up the
+meeting as on Thursday nights in our Buckingham Street rooms. And with
+these ceremonies the _Yellow Book_ was launched into life.
+
+I am not sure what the _Yellow Book_ means to others--to those others
+who buy it now in the thirteen volumes of the new edition and prize it
+as a strange record of a strange period, from which they feel as far
+removed as we felt from the Sixties. But to me, the bright yellow-bound
+volumes mean youth, gay, irresponsible, credulous, hopeful youth, and
+Thursday night at Buckingham Street in full swing. To be sure the
+_Yellow Book_ was never so young as it was planned to be. It did not
+represent only _les Jeunes_, who would have kept it all to themselves in
+their first mad, exuberant, reckless springtime. But they were not
+strong enough to stand alone, as _les Jeunes_ seldom are, or have been
+through the ages. It was more original in its art than in its
+literature. Some of the youngest writers were "discoveries" of Henley's,
+while some who actually were "discovered" by the _Yellow Book_ have
+faded out of sight. Many were men of name and fame well established.
+Hamerton, almost at the end of his career, Henry James in the full
+splendour of his maturity, Edmund Gosse with his reputation already
+assured, were as welcome as the youngest of the young men and women who
+had never printed a line before. So identified with "this passage of
+literary history"--in his words--was Henry James that he has recorded
+the preliminary visit of "a young friend [Harland of course], a
+Kensington neighbour and an ardent man of letters," with "a young friend
+of his own," in whom there is no mistaking Beardsley, "to bespeak my
+interest for a periodical about to take birth in his hands, on the most
+original 'lines' and with the happiest omen." But there was youth in
+this readiness for hero-worship--youth in this tribute to the older men
+whose years could not dim the brilliance nor lessen the power of their
+work in the eyes of the new generation--the fragrance of youth exudes
+from the pages of the _Yellow Book_ as I turn them over again, in
+places the fragrance of infancy, the young contributors so young as to
+seem scarcely out of their swaddling clothes. At the time the energy and
+zest put into it had an equal savour of youth. And altogether it gave us
+all a great deal to talk about, so that I see in it now a sort of link
+to join on Thursday nights the different groups from their opposing
+corners, supplying to writers and artists one subject of the same
+interest to both. It even opened the door to the architects, one of whom
+went so far as to neglect architecture and to emulate Ibsen in a play.
+
+The last thing I foresaw for the _Yellow Book_ was a speedy end or, for
+the matter of that, any end at all, so overflowing was it with the
+spirit of youth and energy, war and enthusiasm. But the end came
+surprisingly soon. To remind me, were I in danger of forgetting, another
+book stands on our shelves close to the First Volume of the _Yellow
+Book_:--the First Volume of the _Savoy_, on its fly-leaf again
+Beardsley's inscription simple as himself, "Mrs. Pennell, with kindest
+regards from Aubrey Beardsley," and only a little less than two years
+between the dates of the two. And the beginning of the _Savoy_ meant the
+end of the _Yellow Book_, whose life was short after Beardsley left it.
+Why he left it has nothing to do with the story of our Thursday nights,
+when no obstacle, great or small, would have been put in its way by us
+who held youth and energy, war and enthusiasm above most things in
+demand and honour. But I question if the time has come for the full
+telling of the story, wherever or with whom the blame may lie. That an
+objection was raised to Beardsley's presence in the _Yellow Book_,
+though without Beardsley there would have been no _Yellow Book_, is
+known and has been told in print, the reason being that Victorian sham
+prudery and respectability had not been totally wiped out for all the
+hard fighting of the Fighting Nineties. Beardsley was not slain, he was
+not defeated, at once he reappeared on the battle-field with the
+_Savoy_, Arthur Symons his fellow editor. But by now the enemy never yet
+conquered on this earth held him in deadly grip, and the fight he had to
+fight sent him from London to Bournemouth, to Saint-Germain, to Dieppe,
+to Mentone in search of health. He was the youngest of that old Thursday
+night crowd and he was the first to go, and the _Savoy_ went with him,
+and before he had gone our Thursday nights were already but a landmark
+in memory, so quickly does the flame of youth burn out.
+
+
+VII
+
+By another of our happy chances Phil May came as assiduously on our
+Thursday nights as Beardsley, and they were two of the artists, though
+their art was as the poles apart, who had most influence on the
+black-and-white of the Nineties--it will be seen from this that I
+refrain from saying what I think of J. and his influence, but it is
+considered almost as indiscreet, almost as bad form, to admit the
+excellence or importance of one's husband's work as to pretend to any in
+one's own.
+
+If no drawings could have been less like Beardsley's than Phil May's
+neither could two men have been more utterly unlike. Some friends of
+Beardsley's believe that he was happiest where there was most noise,
+most people, most show, which, however, was not my impression. But when
+there was the noise of people about him, he might be relied upon to
+contribute his share and to take part in whatever show was going. I
+question if Phil May was happy at all unless in the midst of many people
+and much noise, whether at home or abroad, but to their noise, anyway,
+he had not the least desire to add. Beardsley was fond of talk, always
+had something to say, was always eager to say it. All Phil May asked
+was not to be expected to say anything, to be allowed to smile amiably
+his dissent or approval. Had the rest of our company been of his mind in
+the matter, it would not have been so much easier for us to start the
+talk at once than to stop it at a reasonable hour, our Thursday nights
+would not have been so deafening with talk that I do not yet understand
+why the other tenants in the house did not unite in an indignant protest
+to the landlord.
+
+It was not laziness that kept him silent. He had not a touch of laziness
+in his composition. His drawings look so simple that people thought they
+were dashed off at odd moments. But over them he took the infinite pains
+and time considered by the wise to be the true secret of genius. It may
+be he expressed himself so well in lines he had no use for words. The
+one indisputable fact is that he would do anything to escape talking. I
+recall a night--not a Thursday night though he finished it in our
+rooms--when he had been invited to lecture to a Woman's Club at the
+Society of Arts. He appeared on the platform with a formidable-looking
+MS. in his hand, but he put it down at once and spent his appointed hour
+in making drawings on big sheets of paper arranged for an occasional
+illustration. He had more to say than I ever heard him say anywhere,
+when we got back to Buckingham Street. The MS. was all right, he assured
+us, a capital lecture written for him by a friend, but it began "Far be
+it from me" something or other, he didn't wait to see what, for, as far
+as he got, it did not sound like him, did it? and we could honestly
+agree that it did not.
+
+[Illustration: Drawing by Himself
+PHIL MAY IN CAP AND BELLS]
+
+He could talk. I must not give the idea that he could not. I know some
+of his friends who do not share or accept unqualified my memory of him
+as a silent man. But he talked most and best when he had but a single
+companion, and nothing could persuade me that he was not always
+relieved, when the chance came, to let others do the talking for him.
+
+I do not know what the attraction was that made everybody like him, not
+merely the riffraff and the loafers who hung about his studio and
+waylaid him in the street for what they could get out of him, but all
+sorts of people who asked for nothing save his company--I could never
+define the attraction to myself. It was not his looks. Even before his
+last years, when he was the image of J.J. Shannon's portrait of him, his
+appearance was not prepossessing. He dressed well according to his
+ideals. Beardsley was not more of a dandy; but Beardsley was the dandy
+of Piccadilly or the Boulevards, Phil May was the dandy of the
+race-course. He brought with him that inevitable, indescribable look
+that the companionship of horses gives and that in those days broke out
+largely in short, wide-spreading covert coats and big pearl buttons. I
+have always been grateful to the man who enlivens the monotony of dress
+by a special fashion of his own, provided it belongs to him. The horsy
+costume did belong to May, for he rode and hunted and was a good deal
+with horses, but it was borrowed by some of his admirers until it
+degenerated into almost as great an affectation as the artist's velvet
+jacket and long hair, or the high stock and baggy corduroys of the Latin
+Quarter imported into Chelsea. When the Beggarstaff Brothers, as Pryde
+and Nicholson called themselves in those old days, would wander casually
+into our rooms at the end of six or eight feet of poster that they had
+brought to show J. and that needed a great deal of manipulation to bring
+in at all, they looked as if the stable, not the studio, was their
+workshop. And one young genius of an illustrator, who could not afford
+to ride, and who I do not believe had ever been on a horse in his life,
+could not mount the bus in his near suburb without putting on riding
+breeches. But Phil May's dress was as essentially his as his silence.
+
+Neither his looks nor his silence, however original and personal, could
+have been the cause of the charm he undeniably possessed. I think he was
+one of the people whom one feels are nice instinctively, without any
+reason. He was sympathetic and responsive, serious when the occasion
+called for it, foolish when folly was in order. It wasn't only in his
+drawings that he was ready to wear the cap and bells. I know an artist,
+one of whose cherished memories of Phil May is of the Christmas Eve when
+they both rang Lord Leighton's door-bell and ran away and back to Phil
+May's studio on the other side of the road, and Phil May was as pleased
+as if it had been a masterpiece for _Punch_. He was naturally
+kind,--amiable perhaps because it was the simplest thing to be. In his
+own house his amiability forced him to break his silence, but his
+remarks then, as far as I heard them, were usually confined to the
+monotonous offer "Have a cigar!" "Have a whiskey-and-soda!" or "Have a
+drawing!" if anyone happened to express admiration for his work. Had we
+accepted this last offer every time it was made to us, we would have a
+fine collection of Phil May's, while, as it is, we do not own as much
+as a single sketch given to us by him. Visitors who did not share our
+scruples have found their steady attendance at his Sunday nights one of
+the best investments they ever made.
+
+Away from his own house, on our Thursday nights, relieved of the
+necessity to offer anything, this being now our business, his
+conversation was more limited than in his own place. My memory of him is
+of an ugly, delightful, smiling, silent man, sitting astride a chair,
+his arms resting on the back, a big cigar in his mouth, and around him a
+band of devoted admirers as fully prepared and equipped to do the
+talking for him as he was to let them do it. He held his court as
+royally among illustrators as Henley among his Young Men, and if nobody
+contributed so little to the talk as Phil May, around nobody else,
+except Henley, did so much of the talk centre.
+
+In my recollections of Phil May astride his chair on Thursday nights,
+Hartrick and Sullivan are never very long absent. Nobody knew better
+than they the beauty of his work--to hear them talk about his line was
+to be convinced that the supreme interest in life was the expressive
+quality of a line made with pen in black ink on a piece of white paper.
+The appearance of _The_ _Parson and the Painter_ was one of the events
+of the Nineties--though it was not boomed into notoriety as were the
+performances of some other illustrators of the period as ingenious as
+Barnum in the art of advertisement--and there was not an artist who did
+not hail May as a master. But Hartrick and Sullivan went further. They
+were not only such good artists themselves that they could appreciate
+genius in others, they were young enough not to be afraid of their
+enthusiasms. They gave the effect of being with May, with whom they
+often arrived and stayed until the deplorably early hour of the morning
+at which he started for home, in order that they might watch over him,
+and, indeed, he needed watching. He was not readier in offering than in
+giving anything he was asked for, which was one reason why there was
+always a procession of waiters and actors and jockeys out of work at his
+front door--why his pockets were always empty. They even discovered the
+same genius in May's talk as in his drawing, though the mystery was when
+they heard the talk. To this day they will quote Phil May while I wonder
+how it is that while for me Henley's talk has not lost its thunder, nor
+Bob Stevenson's its brilliant flashes of imbecility, nor Harland's its
+whimsical twist, nor Beardsley's its fresh gaiety, nothing of Phil
+May's remains save the familiar refrain "Have a cigar!" "Have a
+whiskey-and-soda!" "Have a drawing!"
+
+Obsessed by my old-fashioned notion as hostess that people could not
+enjoy themselves unless they were kept moving, persisting in my vain
+efforts to break up the groups into which the company invariably fell,
+again and again I would lure Hartrick and Sullivan away from Phil May.
+But it was no use. What they all wanted was to talk not only about their
+shop but their own particular counter in it, and no sooner was my back
+turned than there they were in the same groups again, Hartrick and
+Sullivan watching over Phil May, supported by Raven Hill and Edgar
+Wilson, both then deeply involved in youth's game of shocking the
+_bourgeois_ by showing on the pages of _Pick-Me-Up_ how the matter of
+illustration was ordered in France, and presently starting a magazine of
+their own to show it the better, and to do their share as ardent rebels
+in the big fight of the Nineties. On my shelves, close by the first
+number of _The Yellow Book_ and of the _Savoy_ is the first volume of
+_The Butterfly_ and on its fly-leaf is the inscription: "To Elizabeth
+Robins Pennell with L. Raven Hill's kind regards," no more startlingly
+original than Beardsley's inscriptions, but to me full of meaning and
+memories. I cannot look at it without seeing myself fluttering from one
+to another of the old Buckingham Street rooms, heavy with the smell of
+smoke and powder, thunderous not only with the knocking--naturally I
+quote the Ibsen phrase everybody was quoting in the Nineties--but the
+banging, the battering, the bombarding of the younger generation at the
+Victorian door against which it was desperate work to make any
+impression at all.
+
+
+VIII
+
+In my less responsible intervals it amused me to find the painters
+running their own shop, or their own little counter, quite apart from
+the illustrators, and carrying on all by themselves their own special
+campaign against that obdurate Victorian door. Their campaign, as they
+ran it, required less talk than most, for they were chiefly men of the
+New English Art Club--the men who gave the shows where Felix Buhot smelt
+the powder--the men who were considered apostles of defiance when the
+inner group held their once-famous exhibition as "London
+Impressionists"--the men about whom the critics for a while did nothing
+save talk--but men who had the reputation of talking so little
+themselves that, when a man came up for election in their Club, his
+talent for silence was said to be as important a consideration with them
+as his talent for art. Not that the silence of any one of them could
+rival Phil May's in eloquence--they never learned to say nothing with
+his charm. Often the poverty of their conversation had the effect of
+being involuntary, as if they might have had plenty to say had they
+known how to say it. More than one struggled to rid himself of his
+talent with at least an air of success.
+
+The big booming voice of Charles W. Furse was frequently heard, but in
+it a suspicion of an Academic note unfamiliar in our midst, so that,
+young as he was, combative, enthusiastic, "a good fellow" as they say in
+England, still in his Whistler and rebel period, his friends predicted
+for him the Presidency of the Royal Academy. The first time I ever saw
+him was the year he was showing at the New English two large upright,
+full-length portraits of women, highly reminiscent of Whistler, and, on
+press day, was being turned out of the gallery by the critics who, in
+revolutionizing criticism, were fighting against the old-fashioned
+Victorian idea of press views with the artists busy log-rolling and an
+elaborate lunch, or at least whiskey and cigars behind a screen. The
+New English men compromised by staying away, but they clung to the
+lunch, a feast chiefly for their commissionaire and their salesman and
+the grey-haired critic, a survival, who could not reconcile himself to
+change and whom I heard once, in another gallery, pronounce the show
+admirable, "perfect really, your show, but for one thing missing--a
+decanter and cigars on the table." Furse, who had not heard the critic's
+cry for reform and could not understand his banishment, lingered in the
+passage, button-holing everybody who came out, trying to pick up a hint
+as to what we were all going to say about him. He considered himself a
+red-hot rebel and the prophetic picture of him scaling Academic heights
+annoyed him extremely, though he so soon became an Associate of the
+Academy that I think, had he lived, time would have proved the prophets
+right.
+
+Walter Sickert's voice, too, was frequently heard at the beginning of a
+Thursday night, but his promise of brilliancy never struck me as leading
+anywhere in particular, my personal impression being that with his talk,
+as with his art, the fulfilment scarcely justified the promise.
+
+D.S. MacColl, young arch-rebel at the time little as the formal official
+of to-day suggests it, his bombarding of the Victorian door directed
+chiefly from the sober columns of the _Spectator_, and later of the
+_Saturday Review_, was always well armed with words for the Thursday
+night battle, conscientious in distributing his blows and shaping them
+in strict deference to his sense of style, just a touch of the preacher
+perhaps in his voice and in his fight for art and freedom, as he was the
+first to acknowledge; more than once I have heard him explain
+apologetically that his right place was the pulpit for which he had been
+designed.
+
+Arthur Tomson, one of the best friends in the world, was a spirited
+revolutionary who went to the length of founding and editing a paper of
+his own to promote revolution--the _Art Weekly_, which, not being able
+to afford illustrations, conducted its warfare solely by its articles,
+and strong, fearless, knock-you-down articles they were since we all
+wrote for the paper while it lasted. It did not last long, however, but
+shared the fate of most revolutionary sheets with more brains than
+capital. Arthur Tomson himself, out of print, was a quiet, if staunch
+fighter, another of the old Thursday night group who knew that his years
+on this earth were to be short. He was not the gayer for it as Harland
+and Beardsley were, but the sadder, it may be because he foresaw the
+end long before it came, and he was given to the melancholy that found
+expression in so many of his paintings.
+
+Wilson Steer, Tonks, Professor Brown passed, and no more, across the
+stage of our Thursday nights, all three, as I remember them, scrupulous
+in upholding the reputation for silence of their Club. Conder flitted in
+and out of our rooms, always agreeable but not the man to lift up his
+voice in a crowd.
+
+Occasionally, a visitor from abroad appeared--Felix Buhot every Thursday
+that one winter, or, more rarely Paul Renouard, in London for the
+_Graphic_, his appearance an event for the illustrators who already
+reverenced him as a veteran. Or else it was a representative, a
+publisher, of _les Jeunes_ over there, bringing fresh stimulus, fresh
+incentive, especially if his coming meant fresh orders and fresh
+opportunity to say what had to be said freely and without restraint.
+Once it was Jules Roque from Paris, of the _Courrier Français_ in which
+he published the drawings of Louis Legrand and Forain and other artists
+accepted as models by the young men of our Thursday nights who believed
+in themselves the more defiantly when asked to figure in such good
+company. Once it was Meier Graefe from Berlin, big, handsome,
+enterprising, not yet encumbered with Post-Impressionism and its
+outshoots, seeking American and British contributors to the German
+_Pan_, a magazine as big and enterprising as himself if not always as
+handsome, and the younger generation of London had the comfort of
+knowing that if the Victorian door in England held firm, the door of
+Europe had opened to them.
+
+Occasionally one of the older, the very much older generation came in to
+make us feel the younger for his presence--none more imposing than
+Sandys, most distinguished in his old age, wearing the white waistcoat
+that was the life-long symbol of his dandyism, full of Pre-Raphaelite
+reminiscences, and reminiscences of the Italian Primitives could not
+have seemed more remote. J. sometimes met Holman Hunt in other
+haunts--at dinners of the Society of Illustrators and elsewhere--and
+reported him to me as a talker who could, in the quantity and
+aggressiveness of his talk, have given points to Henley and Henley's
+Young Men, so I regret that he never was with us to talk over
+Pre-Raphaelite days with Sandys. The only other possible representative
+of Pre-Raphaelitism who came was Walter Crane, if so he can be called,
+for the tradition fell lightly on his shoulders, was a mere re-echo in
+his work; the only one of Sandys's contemporaries was Whistler, and
+their meeting of which J. and I have written in another place, does not
+belong to the story of our Thursday nights, for they were a thing of the
+past when Whistler returned from Paris, where he had gone to live almost
+as they began.
+
+Nor did Sandys often appear on Thursdays. He seemed to prefer the
+evenings when we were alone, to my surprise, for the homage he received
+when he did come on Thursday must have been pleasant. Drawings of his
+hung prominently in our rooms, J. then haunting the salesrooms for the
+originals of the Sixties as industriously as the barrows and shops for
+their reproductions. And to the man who prefers fame to reach him during
+his lifetime, surely it should have been an agreeable experience to sit,
+or to be enthroned as it were, in so friendly an atmosphere, with some
+of his own finest work on the wall behind him for background, and
+surrounded by a worshipping group asking nothing better than to be
+allowed to sit at his feet and listen to his every word--which was a
+sacrifice for his worshippers in Buckingham Street who rejoiced in the
+sound of their own voices as did most of the company. But the Nineties
+are not more wonderful and stimulating to the young men of to-day who
+look back to them so admiringly, than the Sixties were to us whom they
+kept up into the small hours of many a Friday morning, inexhaustible as
+a subject of our talk, and Sandys, standing for the Sixties and all we
+found in them so admirable, could command any sacrifice. The respect for
+the Sixties was an article of faith, a dogma of dogmas in the Nineties.
+If the now younger generation write articles and books about the
+Nineties--those amazing documents in which I scarcely recognise an age I
+thought I knew by heart--we were still more zealous in writing books
+about the Sixties. And we collected the drawings and publications of the
+Sixties. When J. and I now allowed ourselves an afternoon out, it was to
+wander from Holywell Street to Mile End Road, from Piccadilly to
+Holborn, searching the booksellers' barrows and shops for the unsightly,
+gaudy, badly-bound volumes that contained the illustrations of the
+Sixties--illustrations ranked amongst the finest ever made. Our
+bookshelves that are still filled with them represent one of the most
+animated phases of the Nineties. And we looked upon the "men of the
+Sixties" as masters, among them giving to Sandys a leading place.
+
+If he was not any longer doing the work for which we took off our hat to
+him, he certainly looked the leader--tall, handsome, dignified, just
+enough of a stoop in his shoulders to become his age, his dress
+irreproachable, the white waistcoat immaculate, pale yellow hair parted
+in the middle and beautifully brushed, beard not patriarchal exactly but
+eminently correct and well cared for, manners princely. It was clear
+that he liked the rôle of master and his voice was in keeping with the
+part. But he was a master who presided at his best over a small
+audience, and, no doubt knowing it, he avoided our Thursdays.
+
+He was also a master given to small gossip. We heard from him less of
+art, its aims and ideals, its mediums and methods, than of the sayings
+and doings of the Pre-Raphaelites who were his friends and
+contemporaries. The name of "Gabriel" was ever in his mouth. It was
+Rossetti whom he most loved--or love is not the word, less of affection
+revealed in his memories than a sense of injury, as if it had somehow
+been the fault of "Gabriel" and the others that he had not come off as
+well as they, though of all "Gabriel" had been most active in seeing
+him through the tight places he so successfully got himself into. This,
+no doubt, was the reason Rossetti felt entitled to a little laugh now
+and then over Sandys's difficulties. Sandys was a man who needed to be
+seen through tight places until the end, as we had occasion to know by
+the urgent note he sent us on a Saturday night, more than once, from the
+_Café Royal_, his favourite haunt in his later years, where a variety of
+unavoidable accidents, with a curious faculty for repeating themselves,
+would keep him prisoner until his friends came to his relief.
+
+He was full of anecdote, which was quite in the order of things, the
+Sixties having supplied anecdote for a whole library of books and
+magazines. Could I tell Sandys's stories with Sandys's voice I should be
+tempted to repeat them yet once again, though many were told us also by
+Whistler, and these J. and I have recorded in the Life. Whistler told
+them better, with more truth because with more gaiety and joy in their
+absurdity. And yet, the solemnity of Sandys added a personal flavour,
+gave them a character nobody else could give. I have not forgotten how
+he turned into a parable the tale of the cross-eyed maid in the Morris
+Shop in Red Lion Square, whose eyes were knocked straight by a shock
+the company of Morris, Marshall, and Faulkner administered deliberately,
+and then were knocked crooked again by a shock they had not provided for
+or against. And, as Sandys recalled them, the strange beasts in
+"Gabriel's" house and garden might have been let loose from out of the
+Apocalypse. But Sandys's voice has been stilled forever and the
+anecdotes have been published oftener, I do believe, than any others in
+the world's rich store of _clichés_. The great of his day had all the
+Boswells they wanted--a retinue of admirers and cuffs ready--at their
+head William Michael Rossetti to pour out book after book about his
+brother, to leave little untold about the group that revolved round
+"Gabriel." Even the third generation, with Ford Madox Hueffer to lead,
+has taken up the task. The anecdotes have grown familiar, but it is
+something to have heard them from the men who were their heroes.
+
+
+IX
+
+Well--our Thursdays were pleasant, an inspiration while they lasted, and
+for a time I thought they must last as long as we did. But nothing
+pleasant endures forever, the bravest inspiration flickers and dies
+almost before we realize its flaring. The stern duty of Friday morning
+always haunted me in anticipation, for I have never been able to take
+lightly the work I do with so much difficulty, and Friday morning itself
+often brought even J. up with a sharp turn to face the fact that man was
+born into the world to labour in the sweat of his brow, and not simply
+to talk all night until no work was left in him.
+
+That may have been one reason for our giving up so agreeable a custom.
+Another perhaps came from the discovery that the freedom of our Thursday
+nights was sometimes abused. A certain type of Englishman would travel a
+mile and more for anything he did not have to pay for, even if it was
+for nothing more substantial than a cigarette, a sandwich, a
+whiskey-and-soda. There were evenings when, looking round the packed
+dining-room, it would occur to me that I did not recognise half the
+people in it. Friends introduced friends and they introduced other
+friends until, in bewilderment, I asked myself if our Thursday night was
+ours or somebody else's. And I fancied a tendency to treat it as if it
+were somebody else's,--to take an ell when we meant to give no more than
+an inch, and J. was as little inclined as I to furnish a new proof of
+the wise old proverb. One day a would-be wit who was regular in his
+attendance and his talk, and who should have known better, asked J.,
+"Are you still running your Thursday Club?" and so helped to precipitate
+the end. We were not running a Club for anybody, and if the fame of our
+Thursday night filled our rooms with people who behaved as if we were,
+the sooner we got rid of them the better.
+
+Besides, as the weeks and the months and the years went on, many who had
+come and talked and fought our Thursday night through ceased to come
+altogether. Where I failed in breaking up the groups Time, with its
+cruel thoroughness, succeeded and began to scatter them far and wide.
+Death stilled voices that had been loudest. The _National Observer_
+passed out of Henley's hands and Henley himself into the Valley of the
+Shadow. Bob Stevenson said his last good-night to us. Beardsley,
+Harland, Arthur Tomson, George Steevens, Phil May, Furse,
+Iwan-Müller--one after another of our old friends, one after another of
+those old masters of talk set out on the journey into the Great Silence.
+It is hard to believe they have gone. I remember how, when they were
+with us and the talk was at its maddest and somebody would suddenly take
+breath long enough to look out of our windows, whose curtains were
+never drawn upon the one spectacle we could offer--the river with the
+boats trailing their lights down its shadowy reaches, and the Embankment
+with the lights of the hansoms flying to and fro, and the bridges with
+the procession of lights from the omnibuses and cabs and the trails of
+burning cloud from the trains--Henley would say, "How it lives, how it
+throbs with life out there!" and I would think to myself, "And how it
+lives, how it throbs with life in here!"--with a life too intense, it
+seemed, ever to wear itself out. And yet now only two or three of the
+old friends of the old Thursday nights are left to look down with us
+upon the river where it flows below our windows--upon the moving lights
+of London's great traffic, upon London's great life and great beauty,
+and great movement without end.
+
+It is not only the dead we have lost. Time has made other changes as sad
+as any wrought by Death. The young have grown old,--have thrown off
+youth's "proud livery" for the sombre garment of age. The years have
+turned the rebel of yesterday into the Royal Academician of to-day. The
+inspired young prophet who protested week by week against mediocrity in
+paint, settled down to keeping the mediocre paintings against which his
+protests were loudest. He who thundered against the degeneracy of
+journalism accepted the patronage of the titled promoter of the
+half-penny press. Architects carried their respectability to the
+professional chair it adorns, and illustrators rested in the comfortable
+berths provided by _Punch_. Friendships cooled, and friends who never
+missed a Thursday look the other way when they meet us in the street.
+
+Close to me, as I write, is a bookcase on whose shelves Henley and
+Henley's Young Men--Marriott Watson, George Steevens, Charles Whibley,
+Leonard Whibley, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Morrison, G.S.
+Street--jostle each other in the big and little volumes that were to
+create the world anew. The small green-bound Henleys stand in a row.
+_Salome_, _The Rape of the Lock_, _Volpone_, with Beardsley's
+illustrations, are flanked by the more pretentious performances of the
+Kelmscott Press and the Vale Press and the other Presses aspiring with
+much advertisement to do what the Constables of Edinburgh did so much
+better as a matter of course, and, as a reminder of this truth, the
+_Montaigne_ of the _Tudor Series_ is there and the _Apuleius_ and the
+_Heliodorus_, each with its inscription. And the little slim volume,
+neatly bound by Zaehnsdorf, called _Allahakbarries_--now a prize for
+the collector I am told--immortalizes one recreation at least of
+Henley's Young Men. For it is Barrie's report of the Cricket Team
+largely made up of these Young Men, of whom he was Captain and who used
+to play at Shere on the never-to-be-forgotten summer days when beautiful
+Graham Tomson and I were graciously invited as Patronesses, and little
+Madge Henley--her death shortly afterwards proving Henley's own death
+blow--figured as "Captain's Girl" and the _National Observer_ office as
+"Practice Ground." And if Henley did not drag himself down with us to
+the pretty Surrey village, he seemed to preside over us all, so much so
+that when J. and I had the little book bound and added the photographs
+Harold Frederic--"Photographer" in the report--made of the Team, we
+included one of Henley, and altogether the tiny volume is as eloquent a
+document of the Nineties and of Henley and Henley's Young Men as we
+have, and I wonder what the collector of those snares for the American
+now catalogued by the bookseller as "Association Books" would not give
+to own it. And close by our _Allahakbarries_, Henry Harland's
+_Mademoiselle Miss_ meets in the old friendly companionship Steevens's
+_Land of the Dollar_ and Graham Tomson's _Poems_ and Bob Stevenson's
+_Velasquez_ and Harold Frédéric's _Return of the O'Mahoney_ and Bernard
+Shaw's _Cashel Byron's Profession_ in its rare paper cover, and George
+Moore's _Strike_ at _Arlingford_, and Marriott Watson's _Diogenes of
+London_, and--but of what use to go through the list, the long
+catalogue, to the end? Ghosts greet me from those shelves, ghosts from
+the old Thursdays, from the radiant days when youth was merging into
+middle age--surely the best period in one's existence--days into which
+the breath of life never can be breathed again. We could not revive the
+old nights if we would. I suppose nobody now reads Zola, but we read him
+in the Nineties and I have always been haunted by his description in
+_L'Oeuvre_ of the last reunion of the friends who, in their eager youth,
+had meant to conquer Paris and who used to meet to plan their campaign
+over a dinner as meagre as their income and gay as their hopes. But
+when, after years during which money and fame had been heaped up by more
+than one and disappointment and despair lavished in equal measure upon
+others, they ventured to dine together again, and the dinner was good
+and well served as it never had been of old, it turned to dust and ashes
+in their mouths--a funeral feast. Dust and ashes would be our fare were
+we so foolish as again to open our doors on the Thursday night
+consecrated to youth and its battles long ago.
+
+
+X
+
+If we have had no more Thursday nights, it does not follow that we have
+had no other nights. The habit of years is not so easily broken, and our
+habit was, and is, at night to gather people about us and to talk. Only,
+after the Nineties, or rather before the end of the Nineties, we never
+settled again with weekly regularity upon one special night out of the
+seven for the purpose--on the contrary, we took, and we now take, our
+nights as they came and come.
+
+They have not been, for that, the less interesting and amusing, not less
+loud with the sound of battle, not less fragrant with the smell of
+smoke. It was just after our Thursday nights, for instance, that we
+began what I might call our Whistler nights, and a more stimulating
+talker than Whistler never talked, a more stimulating fighter never
+fought. I do not mean in the impossible way meant by those whose
+judgment of him rests solely on _The Gentle Art_. They think he fought
+for no other end than to make enemies when, really, he enjoyed far more
+the good give-and-take argument that preserved to him his friends,
+provided those friends fought fair and did not play the coward, or the
+toady, to escape the combat.
+
+J. and I have written his Life in vain if everybody who cares to know
+anything about him does not know that from 1895 and 1896, the greater
+part of his time was spent in London and that many of his nights were
+then given to us, more particularly towards the end of the amazing
+decade. We paid for the privilege by the loss of some of our friends
+who, for one reason or another, cultivated a wholesome fear of Whistler.
+Men who had been most constant in dropping in, dropped in no
+longer--nor, in many cases, have they ever begun to drop in again. More
+than one would have run miles to escape the chance encounter, trembling
+with apprehension when in a desperate visit they seemed to court it, and
+often the several doors opening into our little hall served as important
+a part in preventing a meeting between Whistler and the enemy as the
+doors in the old-fashioned farce played in the husband and wife game of
+hide-and-seek.
+
+It was not too big a price to pay. Whistler's talk was worth a great
+deal, and the twelve years that have passed since we lost it forever
+have not lessened its value for us. Ours is a sadder world since we have
+ceased to hear the memorable and unmistakable knock and ring at our
+front door, the prelude to the talk, rousing the whole house until every
+tenant in the other chambers and the housekeeper in her rooms below knew
+when Whistler came to see us. Our nights, since those he animated and
+made as "joyous" as he liked to be in his hours of play and battle, have
+lost their savour. We are perpetually referring to them, quoting,
+regretting them. Even Augustine looks back to them as making a pleasant
+epoch in her life. Often she will remind me of this night or that,
+declaring we have grown dull without him--but do I remember the night
+when M. Whistlaire argued so hard and with such violence that the print
+of the rabbit fell from the wall in its frame, the glass shivering in a
+thousand pieces, just when M. Kennedy was so angry we thought he was
+going to walk away forever, and how after that there could be no more
+arguing, and M. Whistlaire laughed as she swept up the pieces, and M.
+Kennedy did not walk away alone, but later they both walked away
+together, arm-in-arm, to the hotel where they always stayed?--and do I
+remember how, during the Boer War, he would come and dine with me alone,
+his pockets stuffed with newspaper clippings, and how he would put them
+by his plate, and how long we would sit at table because he would read
+every one of them to me, with that gay laugh nobody laughs
+nowadays?--and do I remember that other evening when he and Monsieur
+disputed and disputed she didn't know about what, and how excited they
+got, and how he kept banging the table with his knife, the sharp edge
+down, until he cut a long slit in the cloth, and it was our best
+tablecloth too?--and do I remember the long stories he would tell us
+some evenings and his little mocking laugh when she, who could not
+understand a word, knew he was saying something malicious about
+somebody?--and do I remember how he liked a good dinner and her cooking
+because it was French, and how he would never refuse when she promised
+him her _pot-au-feu_ or one of her salads--and do I remember one after
+another of those old nights the like of which we shall never see again?
+Do I remember indeed? They fill too big a space in memory, they
+overshadow too well the lesser nights with lesser men, they were too
+joyous an episode in our thirty long years of talk for me ever to
+forget them. The three classical knocks of the _Théâtre Français_ could
+not announce more certainly a night of beauty or wit or fun or romance
+than the violent ring and the resounding knock at the old battered door
+of the Buckingham Street chambers where, for Whistler, the oak was never
+sported.
+
+But of our Whistler nights we have already made the record--this is
+another tale that is already told. I think Whistler knew their value as
+well as we did, knew what they cost us in the loss of friends, knew what
+he had given us in return, knew what he had revealed to us of himself in
+all friendliness, and that this was the reason he looked to us for the
+record not only of his nights with us, but of his life. Once he had
+confided that charge to us, the old Buckingham Street nights grew more
+marvellous still, full of reminiscences, of comment, of criticism, of
+friendliness, his talk none the less stimulating and splendid because,
+at his request, the cuff or note-book was always ready. And they
+continued until the long tragic weeks and months when he was first
+afraid to go out at night and then unable to, and when the talks were by
+day instead--not quite the same in the last, the saddest months of all,
+for weakness and thoughts of the work yet to be done and the feebleness
+that kept him from doing it fell like a black cloud over all our
+meetings, even those where the old gaiety asserted itself for a moment
+and the old light of battle gleamed again in his eyes. To the end he
+liked the talk no less than we, for to the end he sent for us, to the
+end he would see us when few besides were admitted. There, for those who
+would like to question his friendship with us, for those who believe
+that Whistler never could keep a friend because he never wanted to, is
+the proof dear to us of the good friend he could be when his friendship
+was not abused or taken advantage of behind his back.
+
+Many other nights besides there have been--long series of American
+nights--John Van Dyke nights I might say, Timothy Cole nights,--but no,
+I am not going to name names and make a catalogue, I am not going to
+write their story, I am not going to run the risks of the folly I have
+protested against. I have confessed my safe belief that of the living
+only good should be spoken, and good only when it is within the bounds
+of discretion. It is not my ambition to rival at home the unpopularity
+of N.P. Willis in England after the first of his indiscretions, which
+seem discretion itself now in the light of to-day's yellow and society
+journalism.
+
+And there have been English nights--many--nights with old friends who
+are faithful and new friends who are devoted--nights of late so like the
+old Thursday nights that both Hartrick and Sullivan, now twenty years
+older and with no Phil May to revolve round, asked why those old
+memorable gay nights could not be revived? But would they be gay? Would
+they not turn out the dust and ashes, the worse than Lenten fare, from
+which I shrink? Would they not, as I have said, prove as mournful as
+that banquet of Zola's Conquerors of Paris?
+
+Recently there have been Belgian nights--nights with those Belgian
+artists whose habit was never to travel at all until they started on
+their journey as exiles to London--a journey to which the end in a
+return journey seems to them so tediously long in coming. And there have
+been War nights when the clash of our battle, in the grim consciousness
+of that other battle not so far away, is less cheerful. And there have
+been nights with the great search-lights over the Thames that tell us as
+much as those young insistent voices in Buckingham Street could tell,
+but only of things so tragic and so sombre that I am the more eager to
+finish the story of our London nights with our Thursdays, in the years
+when we were burdened by no more serious fighting than the endless fight
+of friend with friend, of fellow worker with fellow worker, fought in
+the good cause of work and play, faith and doubt, fear and hope--a
+stirring fight, but one in which words are the weapons, one which can
+never be won or lost, since no two can ever be found to agree when they
+talk for pleasure, nor any one man forced to agree with himself for all
+time.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+NIGHTS
+
+IN PARIS
+
+
+
+
+IN PARIS
+
+I
+
+
+I still go to Paris every year in May when the _Salons_ open, but now I
+go alone. The lilacs and horse-chestnuts, that J. used to reproach me
+for never keeping out of the articles it was my business to write there,
+still bloom in the _Champs-Elysées_ and the _Bois_, but now I am no
+longer tempted to drag them into my MS. The spring nights still are
+beautiful on the _Boulevards_ and _Quais_ but only ghosts walk with me
+along the old familiar ways, only ghosts sit with me at table in
+restaurants where once I always ate in company. Paris has lost half its
+charm since the days when, as regularly as spring came round, I was one
+of the little group of critics and artists and friends from London who
+met in it for a week among the pictures.
+
+It was much the same group, if smaller, that met on our Thursday nights
+in London. Some of us went for work, to "do" the _Salons_ after we had
+"done" the Royal Academy and the New Gallery, then the Academy's only
+London rival: Bob Stevenson for the _Pall Mall_, D.S. MacColl for the
+_Spectator_, Charles Whibley for the _National Observer_. J., during
+several years, spared the time from more important things to fight as
+critic the empty criticism of the moment, the old-fashioned criticism
+that recognised no masterpiece outside of Burlington House and saw
+nothing in a picture or a drawing save a story: a thankless task, for
+already the old-fashioned criticism threatens to become the
+new-fashioned again. I, for my part, was kept as busy as I knew how to
+be, and busier, for the _Nation_ and my London papers. Others went
+because they were artists and wanted to see what Paris was doing and May
+was the season when Paris was doing most and was most liberal in letting
+everybody see it. Beardsley and Furse seldom failed, and I do not
+suppose a year passed that we did not chance upon one or more unexpected
+friends in a gallery or a _café_ and add them to our party. Sometimes a
+Publisher was with us, his affairs an excuse for a holiday, or sometimes
+an Architect to show the poor foreigner how respectable British
+respectability can be and, incidentally, to make his a guarantee of ours
+that we could have dispensed with. Harland and Mrs. Harland were always
+there, I do believe for sheer love of Paris in the May-time, and I
+rather think theirs was the wisest reason of all.
+
+During no week throughout my hard-working year did I have to work
+harder than during that May week spent in Paris. I am inclined now, in
+the more leisurely period of life at which I have arrived, to admire
+myself when I recall how many articles I had to write, how many prints
+and drawings, statues and pictures, I had to look at in order to write
+them, and my success in never leaving my editors in the lurch. My
+admiration is the greater because nobody could know as well as I how
+slow I have always been with my work and also, to do myself justice, how
+conscientious, as I do not mind saying, though to be called
+conscientious by anybody else would seem to me only less offensive than
+to be called good-natured or amiable. As a critic I never could get to
+the point of writing round the pictures and saying nothing about them
+like many I knew for whom five minutes in a gallery sufficed, nor, to be
+frank, did I try to. Neither could I hang an article on one picture. I
+might envy George Moore, for an interval the critic of the _Speaker_,
+now the London _Nation_, because he could and did. I can remember him at
+an Academy Press View making the interminable round with a business-like
+briskness until, perhaps in the first hour and the last room, he would
+come upon the painting that gave him the peg for his eloquence, make an
+elaborate study of it, tell us his task was finished, and hurry off
+exultant. But envy him as I might, I couldn't borrow his briskness. I
+had to plod on all morning and again all afternoon until the Academy
+closed, to look at every picture before I could be sure which was the
+right peg or whether there might not be a dozen pegs and more. And I had
+to collect elaborate notes, not daring to trust to my memory alone, and
+after that to re-write pages that did not satisfy me. Just to see the
+Academy meant an honest day's labour and in Paris there were two
+_Salons_, each immeasurably bigger, and innumerable smaller shows into
+the bargain. And yet, that laborious May week never seemed to me so much
+toil as pleasure.
+
+There was a great deal about Paris the toil left me no chance to find
+out. I should not like to say how many of its sights I have failed
+regularly to see during the visit I have paid to it every year now for
+over a quarter of a century. But at least I have learned the best thing
+worth knowing about it, which is that in no other town can toil look so
+uncommonly like pleasure, in no other town is it so easy to play hard
+and to work hard at the same time: precisely the truth the Baedeker
+student has a knack of missing, the truth the special kind of foreigner,
+for whom Paris would not be Paris if he could not believe it the
+abomination of desolation, goes out of his way to miss. I have met some
+of my own countrymen who have seen everything in Paris but never Paris
+itself--the old story of not seeing the wood for the trees--and who are
+absolutely convinced that it is a town in which all the people think of
+is amusement and that a more frivolous creature than the Parisian never
+existed. From their comfortable seat of judgment in the correct hotels
+and the correct show places, they cannot look as far as the schools and
+factories that make Paris the centre of learning for the world and of
+industry for France, and they are in their way every bit as dense as the
+English who take their pleasure so seriously they cannot understand the
+French who take their work gaily. "_Des blagueurs męme au feu_," a
+Belgian officer the other day described to me the French soldiers who
+had been fighting at his side, and I think it rather finer to face
+Death--or Work--laughing than in tears. If Paris were not so gay on the
+surface I am sure I should not find it so stimulating, though how it
+would be if I lived there I have never dared put to the test, unwilling
+to run whatever risk there might be if I did. I prefer to keep Paris in
+reserve for a working holiday or, indeed, any sort of holiday, a
+preference which, if Heine is to be trusted, I share with _le bon Dieu_
+of the old French proverb who, when he is bored in Heaven, opens a
+window and looks down upon the _Boulevards_ of Paris.
+
+At the first sight, the first sound, the first smell of Paris, the
+holiday feeling stirred within us. The minute we arrived we began to
+play at our work as we never did in London, as it never would have
+occurred to us there that we could.
+
+The Academy, only the week before, had given us the same chance to meet,
+the same chance to talk, the same chance to lunch together, and of the
+lunch it had got to be our habit to make a Press Day function. Nowadays
+at the Academy Press View, when I am hungry, I run up to Stewart's at
+the corner of Bond Street for a couple of sandwiches, and excellent they
+are, but, as I eat them in my solitary corner, no flight of my sluggish
+imagination can make them seem to me more than a stern necessity. There
+was, however, a festive air about the old Press Day lunch when, towards
+one o'clock, some six or eight of us adjourned to Solferino's, another
+vanished landmark of my younger days in London. It was in Rupert Street,
+the street of Prince Florizel's Divan, which was appropriate, for Bob
+Stevenson was always with us and but for Bob Prince Florizel might never
+have existed to run a Divan in Rupert or any other street. Solferino's
+had a Barsac that Bob liked to order, chiefly I fancy for all it
+represented to him of Paris and Lavenue's and Barbizon and student days,
+and the old memories warming him over it as lunch went on, he would
+unfold one theory of art after another until suddenly a critic, more
+nervous than the rest, would take out his watch, and the hour he saw
+there would send us post-haste back to Piccadilly and the Academy, which
+at that time thought one Press Day sufficient.
+
+But the lunch that seemed a festivity at Solferino's never gave us the
+holiday sense Paris filled us with from the early hour in the morning
+when, after our little breakfast, we met downstairs in the unpretentious
+hotel in the Rue St. Roch where most of us stayed--if we did not stay
+instead at the Hotel de l'Univers et Portugal for the sake of the name.
+The Rue St. Roch was convenient and if we were willing to climb to the
+top of the narrow house, where the smell of dinner hung heavy on the
+stairs all through the afternoon and evening, we could have our room for
+the next to nothing at all that suited our purse, and the
+dining-room--the Coffee Room in gilt letters on its door would have
+frightened us from it in any case--was so tiny it was a kindness to the
+_patron_ not to come back for the midday breakfast or the dinner that we
+could not have been induced to eat in the hotel, under any
+circumstances, for half the big price he charged. The day's talk was
+already in full swing as we steamed down the Seine, or walked under the
+arcade of the _Rue de Rivoli_ and along the _Quais_, in the cool of the
+May morning, to the new _Salon_ which was then in the _Champ-de-Mars_.
+And one morning at the _Salon_ made it clear to me, as years at the
+Academy could not, why French criticism permits itself to speak of art
+as a "game" and of the artist's work as "amusing" and "gay." There were
+words that got into my article as persistently as the lilacs and the
+horse-chestnuts.
+
+
+II
+
+If we brought to Paris a talent for talk and youth for enjoyment, Paris
+at the moment was providing liberally more than we could talk about or
+had time to enjoy. London may have been wide awake--for London--in the
+Nineties, but it was half asleep compared to Paris and would not have
+been awake at all if it had not gone to Paris for the "new" it
+bragged of so loud in art and every excitement it cultivated, and for
+the "_fin-de-siécle,_" that chance phrase passed lightly from mouth to
+mouth in Paris of which it made a serious classification.
+
+[Illustration: Etching by Joseph Pennell
+IN THE CHAMPS-ELYSÉES]
+
+I have watched with sympathetic amusement these late years one new
+movement, one new revolt after another, started and led by little men
+who have not the strength to move anything or the independence to revolt
+against anything, except in their boast of it, and who would be
+frightened by the bigness of a movement and revolt like the Secession
+from the old _Salon_ that followed the International Exposition of 1889.
+I feel how long ago the Nineties were when I hear the young people in
+Paris to-day talk of the two _Salons_ as the _Artistes-Français_ and the
+_Beaux-Arts_. In the Nineties we, who watched the parting of the ways,
+knew them only as the Old _Salon_ and the New _Salon_ because that is
+what we saw in them and what they really were--unless we distinguished
+them as the _Champ-de-Mars Salon_ and the _Champs-Elysées Salon_, for
+another ten years were to pass before there was a _Grand Palais_ for
+both to move into. We could not write about either without a reminder of
+the age of the one and the youth of the other, the Old _Salon_
+remaining the home of the tradition that has become hide-bound
+convention, and the new _Salon_ offering headquarters to the tradition
+that is being "carried on," as we were forever pointing out, borrowing
+the phrase from Whistler. We were given in the Nineties to borrowing the
+things Whistler said and wrote, for we knew, if it is not every critic
+who does to-day, that he was as great a master of art criticism as of
+art.
+
+What the men who undertook to carry on tradition did for us was to
+arrange a good show. They had to, if it meant taking off their coats and
+rolling up their sleeves and putting themselves down to it in grim
+earnest, for it was the only way they could justify their action and the
+existence of their Society, and their choice of a President, the very
+name of Meissonier seeming to stand for anything rather than secession
+and experiment and revolt. For the first few exhibitions many of the
+older men got together small collections of their earlier work that had
+not been shown publicly for years, and the new _Salon's_ way of
+arranging each man's work in a separate group or panel made it tell with
+all the more effect. And then there was the excitement of coming upon
+paintings or statues long familiar, but only by reputation or
+reproduction. I cannot forget how we thrilled in front of Whistler's
+_Rosa Corder_, which we were none of us, except Bob Stevenson, old
+enough to have seen when Whistler first exhibited it in London and Paris
+to a public unwilling to leave him in any doubt as to its indifference,
+how we talked and talked and talked until we had not time that morning
+to look at one other painting in the gallery, how it was not the fault
+of our articles if everybody did not squander upon it the attention
+refused not much more than a decade before. And the younger men of the
+moment had to summon up every scrap of individuality they possessed to
+be admitted, and not to be admitted meant too much conservatism or too
+much independence. And credentials of fine work had to be presented by
+the artists from all over the world--Americans, Scandinavians, Dutchmen,
+Belgians, Russians, Italians, Germans, Austrians, Spaniards,--who
+couldn't believe they had come off if the New _Salon_ did not let them
+in, and half the time they hadn't. And with all it was just for the
+pride of being there, they were not out for medals, since the New
+_Salon_ gave no awards. And altogether there was about as wide a gulf of
+principle and performance as could be between the two _Salons_ that are
+now separated by not much more than the turnstiles in the one building
+that shelters them both.
+
+And sparks of originality gleamed here and there; the passion for
+adventure had not flickered out--at every step through the galleries
+some subject for the discussion we exulted in stopped us short. It might
+be Impressionism, Sisley still showing if Monet did not, and Vibrism and
+Pointillism and all the other _isms_ springing up and out of it. It
+might be Rosicrucianism and Symbolism which had just come in, and Sar
+Péladan--does anybody to-day read the Sar's long tedious books, bought
+by us with such zeal and promptly left to grow dusty on our
+shelves?--and Huysmans and their fellow teachers of Magic and members of
+the _Rose-Croix_ were being interpreted in paint and in black-and-white,
+and if the interpretations did not interpret to so prosaic a mind as
+mine, it mattered the less because they were often excuse for a fine
+design. And the square brush mark lingered, and much was heard of the
+broken brush mark, and values had not ceased to be absorbing, nor _la
+peinture au premier coup_ and _la peinture en plein air_ to be wrangled
+over. And a religious wave from nobody knew where swept artists to the
+Scriptures for motives and sent them for a background, not with Holman
+Hunt to Palestine, but to their own surroundings, their own country, to
+the light and atmosphere each knew best--Lhermitte's Christ suffered
+little children to come unto Him in a French peasant's cottage;
+Edelfelt's Christ walked in the sunlight of the North; Jean Béraud's
+Christ found Simon the Pharisee at home in a Parisian club; and no
+landscape, realistic, impressionistic, decorative, was complete unless a
+familiar figure or group came straying into it from out the Bible. Much
+that was done perished with the group or the fad that gave it birth,
+much when suddenly come upon now on the walls of the provincial gallery
+looks disconcertingly old-fashioned. But nevertheless, the movement, the
+energy, the life of the Nineties was a healthy enemy to that stagnation
+which is a death trap for art.
+
+And Black-and-White was a section to be visited in the freshness of the
+morning, not to be put off, like the dull, shockingly over-crowded
+little room at the Academy, to the last hurried moments of fatigue--a
+section to devote the day to and then to leave only for the bookstall or
+bookshop where we could invest the money we had not to spare in the
+books and magazines and papers illustrated by Carlos Schwabe and Khnopf
+and Steinlen and Willette and Caran D'Ache and Louis Legrand and Forain
+and the men whose work in the original we had been studying and laying
+down the law about for hours. And the artist's new invention, his new
+experiment, came as surely as the spring--now the original wood block
+and now the colour print, one year the draughtsman's Holbein-inspired
+portrait and another the poster that excited us into collecting Chéret
+and Toulouse-Lautrec at a feverish rate and facing afterwards, as best
+we could, the problem of what in the world to do with a collection that
+nothing smaller than a railroad station or the hoardings could
+accommodate.
+
+And the Sculpture court was not the accustomed chill waste, dreary as
+the yard crowded with marble tombstones. If nobody else had been in
+it--and many were--Rodin was there to heat the atmosphere, his name
+kindling a flame of criticism long before his work was reached. Beyond
+his name he was barely known in London, where I remember then seeing no
+work of his except his bust of Henley, who, during a visit to Paris, I
+believe his only one, had sat to Rodin and then, ever after, with the
+splendid enthusiasm he lavished on his friends, had preached Rodin. But
+in Paris at the New _Salon_ there was always plenty of the work to
+explain why the name was such a firebrand--disturbing, exciting,
+faction-making--as I look back, culminating in the melodramatic Balzac
+that would have kept us in hot debate for all eternity had there not
+been innumerable things to interest us as much and more.
+
+The critic has simply to take his task as we took ours and not another
+occupation in life can prove so brimming over with excitement. In the
+early Nineties I had not a doubt that it could always be taken like
+that. I would not have believed the most accredited prophet who
+prophesied that we would outlive our interest in the New _Salon_. And
+yet, a year came when, of the old group, only D.S. MacColl and I met in
+the _Champ-de-Mars_ and he, with boredom in his face and voice, assured
+me he had found nothing in it from end to end except a silk panel
+decorated by Conder, and so helped to kill any belief I still cherished
+in the emotion that does not wear itself out with time.
+
+However, this melancholy meeting was not until the Nineties were nearing
+their end, and up till then our days were an orgy of art criticism and
+excitement in it. In Paris, as in Rome, as in Venice, as in London,
+only night set me free for the pleasure that was apart from work. As a
+rule, none of us dared at the _Salons_ to interrupt our work there even
+to make a function of the midday breakfast, as we did of lunch at the
+Academy, the days in Paris being so remarkably short for all we had to
+do in them. We were forced to treat it as a mere halt, regrettable but
+unavoidable, in the day's appointed task, whether we ate it at the
+_Salon_ to save time or in some near little restaurant to save money.
+Often we were tempted, and few temptations are more difficult to resist
+than the unfolding of the big, soft French napkin at noon and the
+arrival of the radishes and butter and the long crisp French bread. When
+I was alone I escaped by going to one of the little tables in that
+gloomy corner of the _Salon_ restaurant where there was no napkin to be
+unfolded, no radishes and butter to lead to indiscretion, and nothing
+more elaborate was served than a sandwich or a _brioche_, a cup of
+coffee or the glass of Madeira which sentiment makes it a duty for the
+good Philadelphian to drink whenever and wherever it comes his way. The
+temptation being so strong, it is useless to pretend that we never fell.
+If we had not, I should not have memories of breakfasts in the _Salon_,
+under the trees at Ledoyen's, on the _Tour Eiffel_, in the classic shade
+of the Palais Royal from which all the old houses had not been swept
+away, and as far from the scene of work as the close neighborhood of the
+_Bourse_ where we could scarcely have got by accident. But the thought
+of the work waiting was for me the disquieting mummy served with every
+course of the feast. Not until the _Salon_ door closed upon my drooping
+back and weary feet, turning me out whether I would or no, in the late
+hours of the afternoon, was I at liberty to remember how many other
+things there are in life besides work.
+
+
+III
+
+The hour when all Paris had settled down to the business of pleasure--to
+proving itself the abomination of desolation to those who were already
+too sure to be in need of a proof--was an enchanting hour to find one's
+self at liberty. The heat of the day was over, the air was cool, the
+light golden, the important question of dining could be considered in
+comfort on enticing little chairs in the shady alleys of the
+_Champs-Elysées_ or, better still, on little chairs no less enticing
+with little tables in front of them at the nearest _café_, where an
+_apéritif_ was to be sipped even if it were no more deadly than a
+_groseille_ or a _grenadine_. What the _apéritif_ was did not matter;
+what did, was the reason it gave for half an hour's loafing before
+dinner with all the loafing town.
+
+[Illustration: Etching by Joseph Pennell
+THE HALF HOUR BEFORE DINNER]
+
+Had we lived in Paris, no doubt we would have done as we did in Rome and
+Venice and have gone every night to the same restaurant where the same
+greeting from the same smiling _patron_ and the same table in the same
+corner awaited us. But change and experiment and a good deal of
+preliminary discussion over an _apéritif_ were more in the order of a
+week's visit. As a rule, we preferred the small restaurant that was
+cheap, as we were most of us impecunious, also the restaurant that was
+out-of-doors, out-of-doors turning the simplest dinner into a feast.
+However, nobody yet was really ever young who was never reckless.
+Occasionally we dined joyously beyond our means, and one memorable year
+we devoted our nights to giving each other dinners where the best
+dinners were to be had. Those alone who are blest with little money and
+the obligation of making that little can appreciate the splendour of our
+recklessness, just as those alone who work all day and eat sparingly can
+have the proper regard for a good dinner. I do not regret the
+recklessness, I am not much the poorer for it to-day whatever I was at
+the time, and I should have missed something out of life had I not once
+dined recklessly in Paris. Moreover, our special business was the study
+of art and in Paris dining and art are one, though the foolish man in
+less civilized countries preaches that to eat for any other purpose than
+to live is gluttony. The clear intellect of the French saves them from
+that mistake, and I have entertained hopes for the future of my own
+country ever since one wise American,--Henry T. Finck,--discovering the
+truth that the French have always had the common sense to know,
+proclaimed it in a book which I have honoured by placing it in my
+Collection of Cookery Books with Grimod de la Reyničre, Brillat-Savarin
+and Dumas.
+
+At the time we were more concerned with the dinner than the philosophy
+of dining. Our one aim was to dine well, whether it was the right thing
+or the wrong, even whether or no it sent us back to London bankrupt. We
+did not flinch before the price we paid, and if we were too wise to
+measure the value of the dinner by its cost, we were proud of the
+bigness of the bill as the "visible sign," the guarantee of success. It
+was a tremendous triumph for J. when he paid the biggest of all, which
+he did, not so much because he set out to deliberately as because, by
+the choice of chance, he had invited us to Voisin's in the Rue St.
+Honoré, where the red-cushioned seats, the mirrors, the white paint, the
+discreet gilding, the air of retirement, the few elderly, rotund,
+meditative diners, each dining with himself, were all typical of the old
+classical Paris restaurant, and assured us beforehand of a good dinner
+and a price in keeping. That we ate asparagus from Argenteuil and
+_petites fraises des bois_ I know because the season was spring; that
+the wine was good I also know because the reputation of Voisin's cellar
+permitted of no other. And I am as sure that the _menu_ was so short
+that ours would have seemed the dinner of an anchorite in the City of
+London, for if we could not dine often we were masters of the art of
+dining when we did, and we understood, as the Lord Mayor and the City
+Companies of London, celebrated for their dinners, do not, that dining
+is not an art when the last course cannot be enjoyed as much as the
+first. As I keep the family accounts, I was obliged to pay in another
+way for J.'s triumph at Voisin's when I got back to London and faced a
+deficit that had to be balanced somehow in my weekly bills for the rest
+of the month. But, at least, if abstaining has to be done, London is
+the easiest place to abstain in as Paris is the best to dine in.
+
+The Publisher who was with us that year gave his dinner at the LaPérouse
+on the _Quai des Grands-Augustins_, and it was not his fault if he fell
+short of J.'s triumph by a few francs. The giver of a dinner at the
+LaPérouse in the happy past enjoyed the fearful pleasure of not knowing
+how much he was spending until he called for his bill, price being too
+trivial a detail for a place in the _menu_, and usually when the bill
+came it exceeded his most ambitious hopes. The Publisher must have hit
+upon Friday, for the perfume of _Bouillabaisse_ mingles with my memories
+of the dinner in the little low _entresol_ where, by stooping down and
+craning our necks, we could see the towers of _Notre-Dame_ from the
+window, and where the big, tall, handsome, black-bearded _patron_,
+alarmingly out of scale with the room, came to make sure of our pleasure
+in his dishes--he would rather the bill had gone unpaid than have seen
+the dinner neglected. I think there was a bottle of some special
+Burgundy in its cradle, for rarely in his life, I fancy, has the
+Publisher felt so in need of being fortified. Early in the day he had
+been guilty of the astonishing indiscretion, as it then seemed, of
+buying three Van Goghs. For this happened years before anybody had begun
+to buy Van Gogh--years before anybody had begun to hear of Van
+Gogh--years before Post-Impressionism had been invented and had launched
+its crop of Cubists and Futurists and Vorticists as direct descendants
+of Van Gogh and Cézanne who would assuredly have been the first to
+repudiate them. The Publisher had gone unsuspectingly, confidingly, with
+J. to _Montmartre_ and there, among other haunts, into the now
+celebrated little shop where the paintings Van Gogh used to give in
+exchange for paints littered the whole place, and where the dealer
+thought it a bargain if, for a few francs, he could get rid of canvases
+that now fetch their hundreds and thousands of pounds. J. would have
+invested had he had the few francs. Not having them, he persuaded the
+Publisher to, and to buy three of the best into the bargain, and never
+did his own empty pockets stand in the way of a more profitable
+investment, for had he bought not all but only a few in this wilderness
+of Van Goghs, and had he sold them again as he would never have done, we
+might now, if we chose, dine every night at the LaPérouse or Voisin's
+and prepare for the reckoning without a tremor. If I write of the
+buying of these pictures as if they were stocks and shares, it is
+because that is the way the creators of the "Van Gogh-Cézanne-Gauguin
+boom" have appraised them, appealing to the modern collector who
+collects for the money in art, not the beauty. That night at the
+LaPérouse the Publisher was dazed by his unexpected rashness as art
+patron; to-day, when he points to the one of the three paintings still
+hanging on his walls, he flatters himself that he discovered Van Gogh
+before the multitude.
+
+Bob Stevenson took us to dine at Lavenue's in Montparnasse, and if he
+had not of his own free will we should have compelled him to. He
+belonged there. At Lavenue's he and Louis Stevenson dined when they were
+young in Paris, it was always cropping up in Bob's talk of the old days,
+it plays its part--"the restaurant where no one need be ashamed to
+entertain the master"--in the opening chapters of _The Wrecker_, which I
+think as entertaining as any chapters Louis Stevenson ever wrote in that
+or any other book. The dinner, of which I recall nothing in particular,
+did not interest me as much as the place itself. To see Bob Stevenson at
+Lavenue's was like seeing Manet at the _Nouvelle Athčnes_ or Dr. Johnson
+at the Cheshire Cheese, and to make the background complete Alexander
+Harrison, with two or three American painters of his generation, was
+dining at a near table.
+
+He shall be nameless who gave the dinner at Marguery's. The dinner was
+all it should have been, for we ate the sole called after the house. It
+was the provider of it who proved wanting. I was brought up to believe
+that the host, when there is a host, should pay his bill. A large part
+of my life has been spent in getting rid of the things I was brought up
+to believe, but this particular belief I have never been able to shed
+and I confess I was taken aback--let me put it at that--when the white
+paper neatly folded in a plate, served at the end of dinner, was passed
+on to one of the guests. If the debt then run into was not paid does not
+much matter after all these years, or perhaps if it was not it has the
+more interest for the curious observer of modes and moods. In this case,
+the whole incident could be reduced to a kindness on the part of the
+debtor, sacrificing himself to show how right Bob Stevenson was when he
+said, as Robert Louis Stevenson repeated after him in print, that while
+the Anglo-Saxon can and does boast that he is not as Frenchmen in
+certain matters of morals, it is his misfortune to be as little like
+them in their vigorous definition of honesty and the obligation of
+paying their debts.
+
+That the fifth dinner was at the _Tour d'Argent_ is not an achievement
+to be particularly proud of. On the contrary, it appears to me a trifle
+banal as I look back to it, for fashion was at the time sending
+Americans and English to the _Tour d'Argent_ just as it was driving them
+on beautiful spring days into that horribly crowded afternoon tea place
+in the _Rue Daunou_--wasn't it?--or to order their new gowns at the new
+dressmakers in the _Rue de la Paix_, or to do any of the hundred and one
+other things that proved them up to the times, at home in Paris,
+initiated into _le dernier cri_ or whatever new phrase they thought set
+the seal upon Parisian smartness. Frédéric's face was as well known as
+Ibsen's which it so resembled, his sanded floor was the talk of the
+tourists, the distinguished foreigner struggled to have his name on
+Frédéric's _menu_, and as for Frédéric's pressed duck it had degenerated
+into as everyday a commonplace as an oyster stew in New York or a chop
+from the grill in London. The bill at the end of the evening might be
+all that the occasion demanded of the man who was giving the dinner, but
+his choice of restaurant could not convict him of originality, or of
+sentiment either. But I do not know why I grumble when the dinner was so
+good. The _Tour d'Argent_ had not fallen as most restaurants fall when
+they attract patrons from across the Channel. Frédéric's cooking was
+beyond reproach. Even the theatrical ceremony over his pressed duck
+could not spoil its flavour.
+
+The sixth evening saw us at _Prunier's_, eating the oysters that it
+would have been useless to go to _Prunier's_ and not to eat (we must
+have been in Paris unusually early in May that year), and if it was not
+the season to eat the snails for which _Prunier's_ is equally renowned,
+my heart was not broken. It may give me away to confess that I do not
+like them, since snails are one of the unconsidered trifles that no
+Autolycus posing as _gourmet_ should turn a disdainful back upon. But
+what can I do? It is a case of Dr. Fell, and that is the beginning and
+end of it. And if it wasn't the season for snails, and if I wouldn't
+have eaten them if it had been, in _Prunier's_ gilded halls other
+delicacies are served, and when I summon up remembrance of those dinners
+past, _Prunier's_ does not exactly take a back seat.
+
+But naturally, the most important dinner in my opinion was mine at the
+_Cabaret Lyonnais_ in the _Rue de Port-Mahon_, where never again can I
+invite my friends, for the _Cabaret_ has gone into the land of shadows
+with so many of the group who sat round my table. At the time, there was
+no looking back, no sad straying into a dead past to spoil a good
+dinner--at the worst, a fleeting moment of discomfort when we selected
+the tench swimming in the tank close to our table and saw them carried
+off to the kitchen to be cooked for us. It was the custom of the house,
+intended to be a pleasing assurance that our fish was fresh, but a
+custom with just a savour in it of cannibalism. I have never cared to be
+on speaking terms with the creatures I am about to eat. I squirm when I
+see the lobster for my salad squirming, though I know the risk if it
+should not squirm at all. Had I lived in the country among my own
+chickens and pigs and lambs, I should have been long since a confirmed
+vegetarian. But to go to the _Cabaret Lyonnais_ unwilling to swallow my
+scruples with my fish would have been as useless as to go to Simpson's
+in London and object to a cut from the joint, as I do object, which is
+why I seldom go. Anyway, we did not have to see the beef killed for the
+_filet_ which at the _Cabaret_ we were expected to eat after the tench
+and with the potatoes to which the city of Lyons also gives its name, so
+associating itself forever with the perfume of the onion. And, as in
+the Provinces, the wine was the _petit vin gris_ which I never can drink
+without a vision of the straight, white, poplar-lined roads of France,
+sunshine, a tandem tricycle or two bicycles, J. and myself perched upon
+them, and by the way friendly little inns with a good breakfast or
+dinner waiting, and a big carafe of the pale light wine served with it.
+That my dinner was comparatively cheap would at normal times have been
+for me delightfully in its favour. But that it was the cheapest of all
+in that week of dinners meant that I came out last in the race when, by
+every law of justice, I should have been first. In Paris as in London my
+"greedy column," as my friends called it with the straightforwardness
+peculiar to friends, had to be written every week for the _Pall Mall_
+and mine was the enviable position of finding my copy in eating good
+dinners no less than in going to the _Salons_. If any one had an
+irreproachable excuse for extravagant living, it was I.
+
+But even I, with the excuse, could not afford the extravagance--one
+weekly article did not pay for one cheap dinner for eight--at the
+_Cabaret Lyonnais_. And as the rest of the party were without the excuse
+and no better equipped for the extravagance, we never again gave each
+other dinners on the same lavish scale and rarely on any scale,
+henceforward ordering them on the principle of what Philadelphia in my
+youth called "a Jersey treat." I do not say that economy was invariably
+our rule. We could be, on occasions, so rash that before our week was up
+we had to begin to count our francs, put by for the boat sandwich and
+the reluctant tips of the return journey, and eat the last meals of all
+in the Duval, which, if admirable as a place to economize in, is no more
+conducive to gaiety than a London A.B.C. shop or Childs's in New York.
+Once we were so reduced that at noon I was left to a lonely _brioche_ at
+the _Salon_, and the men went to breakfast at the nearest cabman's
+eating-house, where they made the sensation of their lives, without
+meaning to and without finding in it any special compensation. The most
+respectable of the respectable architectural group of our Thursday
+nights was of the party and where he went the top hat and frock coat, in
+which I used to think he must have been born, went too. If his
+fashion-plate correctness--men wore frock coats then--made him
+conspicuous at our Thursday nights it can be imagined what he was
+sitting with his coat tails in the gutter at the cabman's table where
+the glazed hat and the three-caped coat of the Paris _cocher_ set the
+fashion. He had the grace to be ashamed of himself, often apologizing
+for his clothes and assuring us that he could not help himself, which
+was his reason, I fancy, for accepting at an early age the professorial
+chair where the decorum of his hat and coat was in need of no apology.
+
+
+IV
+
+I have said we were young. It seems superfluous to add that now and
+then, in the sunshine of the perfect May day, with the call of the
+lilacs and the horse-chestnuts getting into our heads as well as into my
+copy, the _Salon_ grew stuffy beyond endurance, work became a crime, and
+we put up our catalogues and note-books before the closing hour and
+hurried anywhere just to be out-of-doors, as if our sole profession in
+life was to idle it away. After all, only the prig can be in Paris when
+May is there and not play truant sometimes.
+
+The year Paris chose our week to show how hot it can be in May when it
+has a mind to, was the year I got to learn something of the Paris
+suburbs. The joyous expedition which ended our every day that year was
+so in the spirit of Harland that I should be inclined to look upon him
+as the tempter, had we not, with the usual amiability of the tempted,
+met him more than half way. Still, he excelled us all in the knack of
+collecting us from our work, no matter how it had scattered us or in
+what quarter of the town we might be, and carrying us off suddenly out
+of it in directions we none of us had dreamed of the minute before, just
+as he would collect and carry us off suddenly in London. Only, he was
+more resourceful in Paris because in Paris more resources were made to
+his hand. There are as beautiful places round London--that is, beautiful
+in the English way--as round Paris, but they do not invite to a holiday
+with the charm no sensible man can resist. The loveliness of Hampton
+Court and Richmond and Hampstead Heath and the River is not to be denied
+and yet, gay as the English playing there manage to look, the only
+genuine gaiety is the Bank Holiday maker's. Tradition consecrates the
+loveliness bordering upon Paris to the gaiety to which Gavarni and
+Mürger are the most sympathetic guides, and none could have been more to
+Harland's fancy. He was very like his own favourite heroes, or I ought
+to say his own favourite heroes were very like him. For it is Harland
+who talks through his own pages with his own charming fantastic blend of
+philosophy and nonsense, Harland who refuses to believe in an age of
+prose and prudence, Harland who is determined to see the romance, the
+squalor, the pageantry, the humour of this jumble-show of a world, not
+merely at ease from the stalls, but struggling with the principal _rôle_
+on the stage, or prompting from behind the scenes. When he was bent upon
+leading us to the same near, inside, part in the spectacle, it was
+extraordinary how, as if by inspiration, he always hit upon the right
+expedition for the time of the year and the mood of the moment.
+
+I remember the afternoon he said St. Cloud it seemed as inevitable that
+we must go there as if St. Cloud had been our one thought all day long,
+the evening reward promised for our day's labour; just as on the boat
+steaming down the Seine and in the park wandering under the trees and
+among the ruins, I felt that the afternoon was the one of all others
+predestined for our delight there. The beauty provided by St. Cloud and
+the mood we brought for its enjoyment met at the hour appointed from all
+eternity.
+
+Artists, it is supposed, and not without reason, are trained to see
+beauty more clearly and therefore to feel it more acutely than other
+people. But my long experience has taught me that it is the lover of
+beauty who can dare to be flippant in the face of it, just as it is the
+devout who can afford to talk familiarly of holy things. Besides,
+artists work so hard that they have the sense to know how important it
+is to be foolish at the right time. That is the secret of all the
+delicious absurdities of what the French called the _Vie de Bohčme_
+until the outsider who did not understand made a tiresome _cliché_ of
+it. The right time for our folly we felt was the golden May evening and
+the right place a beautiful Paris suburb, time and place consecrated to
+folly by generations of artists and students. Below us, at St. Cloud,
+stretched the wide beautiful French landscape, with its classical
+symmetry and its note of sadness, in the pure clear light of France, the
+Seine winding through it towards Paris; round us was the park as
+classical in its lines and masses, and with its note of sadness the
+stronger because of the tragic memories that haunt it; in the foreground
+were my companions agreeably playing the fool and posing as living
+statues on the broken columns: he whose solemnity of demeanour accorded
+with his belief that his real sphere was the pulpit, throwing out an
+unaccustomed leg as Mercury on one column, and on another the Architect,
+an apologetic Apollo in frock coat with silk hat for lyre. In my
+lightheartedness, and accustomed to the ways of the English, I thought
+them absurd but funny. A French family, however, who passed by chance
+looked as if they wondered, as the French have wondered for centuries,
+at the sadness with which the Englishman takes his pleasures.
+
+Beardsley was one of the party. It was the first time he was with us in
+Paris, the first time, for that matter, he had ever been there. He had
+clutched beforehand, like the youth he was, at the pleasure the visit
+promised, and I remember his joy in coming to tell me of it one morning
+in Buckingham Street. I remember too how amazing I thought it that, when
+he got there, he seemed at once to know Paris in the mysterious way he
+knew everything.
+
+We had not heard of his arrival until we ran across him at the
+_Vernissage_ in the New _Salon_. I think he had planned the dramatic
+effect of the chance meeting, counting upon the impression he would make
+as we met. I have said he was always a good deal of a dandy and I could
+see at what pains he had been to invent the costume he thought Paris and
+art demanded of him. He was in grey, a harmony carefully and quite
+exquisitely carried out, grey coat, grey waistcoat, grey trousers, grey
+Sučde gloves, grey soft felt hat, grey tie which, in compliment to the
+French, was large and loose. An impression of this grey elegance is in
+the portrait of him by Blanche, painted, I think, the same year. As he
+came through the galleries towards us with the tripping step that was
+characteristic of him, a little light cane swinging in his hand, he was
+the most striking figure in them, dividing the stares of the staring
+_Vernissage_ crowd with the _clou_ of the year's New _Salon_: that
+portrait by Aman-Jean of his wife, with her hair parted in the middle
+and brought simply down over her ears, which set a mode copied before
+the season was over by women it disfigured, heroines who could dare the
+unbecoming if fashion decreed it. Beardsley knew he was being stared at
+and of course liked it, and probably would not have exchanged places
+with anybody there, not even with Carolus-Duran when, splendidly
+barbered, in gorgeous waistcoat, and with an air of casualness, the
+_cher maître et président_ strolled into the restaurant at the supreme
+moment, carefully chosen, all the crowd there before him, their
+breakfast ordered, their first pangs of hunger stilled, and their
+attention and enthusiasm at liberty for the greeting he counted upon,
+and got.
+
+It may be that this scene of the older generation's triumph and the
+power of officialism in art told on Beardsley's nerves, or it may be it
+was simply because he was still young enough to believe nobody had ever
+been young before, but certainly by evening he had worked himself up
+into a fine frenzy of revolt. When we had got through our foolish game
+of living statues, and had settled down to dinner in a little
+restaurant, where a parrot's greeting of "_Aprčs vous, madame! Aprčs
+vous, monsieur!_" had vouched for the excellence of its manners, and
+where we could look across the river and see for ourselves how true were
+the effects that Cazin used to paint and that seemed so false to those
+who knew nothing of French twilight, and when Beardsley had finished his
+first glass of very ordinary wine well watered, he let us know what he
+thought about _les vieux_ and their stultifying observance of worn-out
+laws and principles.
+
+That started Bob Stevenson, who saw an argument and, for the sake of it,
+became ponderously patriarchal, hoary with convention. In point of
+years, it is true, he was older than any of us, but no matter what his
+age according to the Family Bible he was to the end, and would have
+been had he lived to be a hundred, the youngest in spirit of any company
+into which he ever strayed or could stray. His way, however, was, as
+Louis Stevenson described it, "to trans-migrate" himself into the
+character or pose he assumed for the moment and no Heavy Father was ever
+heavier than he that night at St. Cloud. He spoke with the air of
+superior knowledge calculated to aggravate youth. With years, he assured
+Beardsley, men learned to value law and order in art, as in the state,
+at their worth; and, more and more inspired by his theme, as was his
+way, he grew preposterously wise and irritating, and he talked himself
+so successfully into every exasperating virtue of age that I could not
+wonder at the fierceness with which Beardsley turned upon him and
+denounced him roundly as conventional and academic and prejudiced and
+old-fashioned and all that to youth is most odious and that to Bob, when
+not playing a part, was most impossible. In harmony with his new _rôle_,
+he showed himself a miracle of forbearance under Beardsley's reproaches
+and sententious beyond endurance, actually called Beardsley young, his
+cardinal offence, for the young hate nothing so much as to be reminded
+of the youth for which the old envy them. Bob's almost every sentence
+began with the unendurable "at my age," which irritated Beardsley the
+more, while we roared at the farce of it in the mouth of one to whom
+years never made or could make a particle of difference. He wound up by
+the warning in soothing tones that Beardsley, in his turn burdened with
+years, would understand, would be able to make allowances, as all must
+as they grow older, or life would be an endless battle for the
+individual as for the race. Beardsley, luckily for himself, did not live
+to lose his illusions, and I fancy that to not one of us who listened to
+their talk did it occur that we were in danger of losing ours with age,
+so immortal does youth seem while it lasts.
+
+The adventure of other afternoons worked out so surprisingly in
+Harland's vein that he might have invented it for his books or we might
+have borrowed it from them. The encounter with a peacock at a _café_ in
+the _Bois_, to which he swept us off at the end of the hottest of those
+hot May days, was one of many that he afterwards made use of. Had he
+not, I might hesitate to recall it, knowing as I do that its wit must be
+lost upon the younger generation of to-day who face life and work with a
+severity, a solemnity, that alarms me. Their inability to take
+themselves with gaiety is what makes the young men of the Twentieth
+Century so hopelessly different from the young men of the
+Eighteen-Nineties. Their high moral ideal and concern with social
+problems would not permit them to see anything to laugh at in the
+experiment of feeding a peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, but it
+struck us, in our deplorable frivolity, as humorous at the time, our
+consciences the less disturbed because the bird was led into temptation
+in the manner of one to whom it was no new thing to yield. Harland, when
+he wrote the story with the mock seriousness he was master of, suggested
+that the crime was in its having been committed by an irreproachable
+British author, the sober father of a family. More momentous to us,
+accessories to the crime, was the fact that the cake stuck, a
+conspicuous lump, in the peacock's conspicuous throat. For what seemed
+hours we waited in tense agitation, torn between our desire to make sure
+the lump would disappear and our fears of discovery before it did. But
+the peacock was a gentleman in his cups and reeled away to swallow the
+lump and, I hope, to sleep off his debauch, in some more secluded spot
+where, if he were discovered, we should not be suspected.
+
+There was another afternoon I wonder Harland did not make use of which,
+had I been in a pedantic mood, I might have taken as an object-lesson in
+the art and occupation of shocking the _bourgeois_. We had been tempted
+and had yielded as unreservedly as the peacock, with the difference that
+our temptation took the form of the sunshine and the convenience of the
+train service at St. Lazare. No sane person with such sunshine
+out-of-doors could stay shut up in the _Salon_ and a train was ready at
+St. Lazare, whenever we chose to catch it, to carry us off to
+Versailles. We were on our way at once after our midday breakfast.
+
+Versailles was too beautiful on that beautiful day to ask anything of us
+except to live in the beauty, to make it ours for the moment; too
+beautiful to spare us time for bothering about those who had been there
+before us; too beautiful to allow the guide-book's fine print and maps
+and diagrams to blind our eyes to the one essential fact that the sun
+was shining, that the trees were in the greenest growth of their
+May-time, that the flowers were radiant with the fulfilment of spring
+and the promise of summer. As a place full of history we must have known
+it, had we never heard its name. History stared at us from the grey
+palace walls, history waylaid us in the formal alleys, lurked in the
+formal waters, haunted the formal gardens, overshadowed all the leafy
+pleasant places. There is no getting very far from history at Versailles
+no matter how hard one may try to. But we had no intention to let the
+dead past blot out the new life rekindling--to give its chill to the
+young spring day and its sadness to the foolish young people out for a
+holiday--to wither the fresh beauty that makes it good just to be alive,
+just to have eyes to see and freedom to use them.
+
+I can write this now, but I would not have dared to say it then. Not
+only I, but every one of us, would have been as ashamed to be caught
+indulging in sentiment, or "bleating," as the _National Observer_. The
+chances are we were talking as much nonsense as could be talked to the
+minute, for there was nothing we liked to talk better, nothing that
+served us so well to disguise the emotion we thought out of place in the
+world in which so obviously the self-respecting man's business was to
+fight. But if I had not felt the beauty it would not now, so many years
+after, remain as my most vivid impression of the day.
+
+We had Versailles to ourselves at first. We were alone in the park,
+alone in the alleys and avenues, alone in the gardens,--and the palace
+and its paintings could not tempt us in out of the sunshine. But such
+good luck naturally did not last and while we were loitering near the
+great fountain we saw a party of women with the eager, harassed,
+conscientious look that marks the personally-conducted school-ma'am on
+tour, bearing briskly down upon us, each with a red book in one hand, a
+pencil in the other, all engrossed in the personally-conducted
+school-ma'am's holiday task of checking off the sight disposed of,
+pigeon-holing the last guide-book fact verified. Their methodical
+progress was an offence to us in the mood we were in, would be an
+offence on a May day to the right-minded in any mood. I admit they could
+have turned upon us and asked what we were, anyway, but tourists as,
+after a fashion, no doubt we were. But they could not have accused us of
+the horrible conscientiousness, the deadly determination to see the
+correct things and to think the correct thoughts about them that dulls
+the personally-conducted to the world's real beauty and its meaning--the
+same tendency of the multitude to follow like sheep the accepted leader
+and never venture to explore fresh fields for themselves, that drove
+Hugo to writing his _Hernani_, and Gautier to wearing his red
+waistcoat, and all the other Romanticists to their favourite pastime of
+shocking the _bourgeois_. Versailles was so wonderful on the face of it
+that we resented the presence of people who needed a book to tell them
+so and to explain why; and we made our protest against the _bourgeois_
+in our own fashion or, to be exact, in Furse's fashion. He was then
+blessedly young, fresh from the schools and not yet sobered by Academic
+honours, though already a youthful member of the New English Art Club,
+from whom an attitude of general defiance was required. He raged and
+raved in his big booming voice, declared that tourists ought to be wiped
+off the face of the earth, that the women were a hideous blot on the
+landscape, that the guide-books were disgracefully out of tone, that it
+was unbearable and he wasn't going to bear it, and by his sudden
+satisfied smile I saw he had found out how not to. As the school-ma'ams
+came within earshot:
+
+"It's beastly hot," he boomed to us, "what do you say to a swim?"
+
+And he took off his coat, he took off his waistcoat, he took off his
+necktie, he unbuttoned his collar,--but already the school-ma'ams had
+scuttled away, the more daring glancing back once or twice as they
+went, their dismay tempered by curiosity.
+
+Furse was pleased as a child over his success, vowed he was ready for
+all the tourists impudent enough to think they had a right to share
+Versailles with us, and, when a group of Germans talked their guttural
+way towards us, he had us all down on our knees, before we knew it,
+nibbling at the grass like so many Nebuchadnezzars escaped from
+Charenton--an amazing sight that brought the chorus of "Colossals" to an
+abrupt stop, and sent the Germans flying.
+
+It may be objected that we were behaving in a fashion that children
+would be sent to bed without any supper for, that it was worse than
+childish to take pleasure in shocking innocent tourists much better
+behaved than ourselves. But there wasn't any pleasure in it. If we set
+out to shock them, it was to get rid of them, that was all we wanted,
+and it made me see that the succession of young rebels who have loved to
+_épater le bourgeois_ never wanted anything more either--except the
+self-conscious young rebels who play at rebellion because they fancy it
+the surest and quickest way "to arrive."
+
+It is less easy to say why a beautiful day at Versailles should have
+sent us back to Paris singing American songs--or to give credit, if
+credit is due, it was the rest of the party who returned to the music of
+their own voices; I, who to my sorrow cannot as much as turn a tune,
+never am so imprudent as to raise my voice in song and so add my discord
+to any singing in public or in private. Had they been heard above the
+noise of the train, the explanation of those who saw us when we got to
+St. Lazare probably would have been that we were a company of nigger
+minstrels. By accident, or sheer inattention, when we climbed upstairs
+on the double-decked suburban train, we chose the car just behind the
+locomotive and memory has not cleaned away the black that covered our
+faces when we climbed down again.
+
+It was all very foolish--and no less foolish were the afternoons in the
+depths of Fontainebleau or the sunlit green thickets of
+Saint-Germain--no less foolish any of those afternoons in the forest or
+the park to which a long drive by train, or tram, had carried us. And I
+am prepared to admit the folly to-day as I sit at my elderly desk and
+look out to the London sky, grey and drear as if the spring had gone
+with my youth. But if I never again can be so foolish, at least I am
+thankful that once I could, that once long ago I was young in Paris,
+"the enchanted city with its charming smile for youth,"--that once I
+believed in folly and, in so believing, had learned more of the true
+philosophy of life than the most industrious student can ever dig out of
+his books.
+
+
+V
+
+The afternoon at Versailles was the rare exception. We were too keen
+about our work, or too dependent on it, to play truant often, however
+gay the sunshine and convenient the trains. Nor was it any great
+hardship not to, especially after we had broken loose once or twice so
+successfully as to make sure we had not forgotten how. If we did stay in
+the _Salon_ until we were turned out, the last to leave, Paris was
+neither so dull nor so ugly at night that we need sigh for the suburbs.
+It was an amusement simply to drink our coffee in front of a _café_, to
+go on with the talk that must have had a beginning sometime somewhere,
+but that never got anywhere near an end, and to watch the life of the
+Paris streets.
+
+I had got my initiation into _café_ life that first year in Italy and
+had finished my education by cycle on French roads, where every evening
+taught me the difference between the country where there is a _café_ to
+pass an hour in over a glass of coffee after dinner, and England where
+choice in the small town then lay between immediate bed or the
+intolerable gloom of the Coffee Room. It is the real democrat like the
+Frenchman or the Italian who knows how to take his ease in a _café_; the
+Englishman, who hasn't an inkling of what the democracy he boasts of
+means, fights shy of it. He does not mind making use of it when he is
+away from home, but he is likely to be thanking his stars all the time
+that in his part of the world nothing so promiscuous is possible. I
+tried to point out its advantages once to an English University man.
+
+"Aoh!" he said, "you know at Oxford we had our wines and we weren't
+bothered by people."
+
+But it is just the people part of it that is amusing, the more so if the
+background is the Street of a French or an Italian town.
+
+Some nights we went to the _Café de la Paix_ on the _Rive Droite_; other
+nights, to the _Café d'Harcourt_ on the _Rive Gauche_; and occasionally
+to the _Café de la Régence_ where many artists went, especially foreign
+artists, and more especially Scandinavians. I seem to retain a vision of
+Thaulow, a blond giant more than fitting in the corner of the little
+raised enclosure in the front of the _café_. My one other recollection
+is of a story I heard there, though of the painter who told it I can
+recall only that he was a Belgian. If I recall the story so well, it
+must be because it struck me at the time as characteristic and in memory
+became forever after associated with the little open space I was looking
+over to as I listened, amused and interested, while the flower women
+pushed past their barrows piled high with the big round bunches of
+budding lilies-of-the-valley you see nowhere save in Paris. It is
+impossible for me to think of the _café_ without thinking of the little
+_Place_, nor of the little _Place_ without at once hearing again the
+artist's voice lingering joyfully over the adventures of his youth.
+
+The story was one of a kind I had often listened to at the _Nazionale_
+in Rome and the _Orientale_ in Venice--a story of student days--a story
+of two young painters coming to Paris in their first ripe enthusiasm,
+with devotion to squander upon the masters, upon none more lavishly than
+upon Jules Breton, which explains what ages ago it was and how young
+they must have been. They were at the _Salon_, standing in silent
+worship before Breton's peasant woman with a scythe against a garish
+sunset, when they heard behind them an adoring voice saying the things
+they were thinking to one they knew must be the _cher maître_ himself,
+and they felt if they could once shake his hand life could hold no
+higher happiness. The worship of the young is pleasant to the old.
+Breton let them shake his hand and, more, he kept them at his side until
+his visit to the _Salon_ was finished, and then sent them away walking
+on air. They were leaving the next day. In the morning they went to the
+_Rue de Rivoli_ to buy toys to take home to their little brothers and
+sisters, and one selected a dog and the other a mill, and when wound up
+the dog played the drum and cymbals and the mill turned its wheel and,
+children themselves, they were ravished and would not have the toys
+wrapped up but carried them back in their arms to the hotel, stopping in
+the _Avenue de l'Opéra_ to wind up the mill and see the wheel go round
+again. And as they stood enchanted, the mill wheel turning and turning,
+who should come towards them but the _cher Maître_. It was too late to
+run, too late to hide the mill with its turning wheel and the dog with
+its foolish drum. They longed to sink through the ground in their
+mortification--they, the serious students of yesterday, to be caught
+to-day playing like silly children in the open street. But how
+ineffable is the condescension of the great! The master joined them.
+
+"_Tiens_," he said, "and the wheel, it goes round? But it works
+beautifully. Let us wind it up again!"
+
+Cannot you see the little comedy,--the fine old prophet with the red
+ribbon in his button-hole, the two trembling, adoring students, the toy
+with its revolving wheel, all in the gay sunlight of the _Avenue de
+l'Opéra_, and not a passer-by troubling to look because it was Paris
+where men are not ashamed to be themselves. The two painters preserved
+this impression of the kindness of the master long after they ceased to
+worship at the shrine of the peasant with her scythe posed against the
+sunset.
+
+One duty the Boulevards of the Left Bank imposed upon us in the Nineties
+was the search for Verlaine and Bibi-la-Purée, and many another poet for
+all time and celebrity for the day, in the _cafés_ where they waited to
+be found and I do not doubt were deeply disappointed if nobody came to
+find them. The fame of these great men, who were easily accessible when
+the _café_ they went to happened to be known, had crossed to London with
+so much else London was labelling _fin-de-sičcle_. To have met them, to
+be able to speak of them in intimate terms, to be authorities on the
+special vice of each, was the ambition of the yearning young decadents
+on the British side of the Channel, who imagined in the intimacy a proof
+of their own emancipation from it would have been hard to say what,
+their own genius for revolution if it was not clear what reason they had
+to revolt. We, who cultivated a withering scorn for decadence and the
+affectation of it, were moved by nothing more serious or ambitious than
+youth's natural desire to see and to know everything that is going on,
+and we could not have been very ardent in our search, for I never
+remember once, on the nights we devoted to the hunt, tracking these
+lions to their lair. However, at least one of our party had better luck
+when he started on the hunt without us. According to a rumour at the
+time, the respectable British author, sober father of a family, who fed
+the peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, was once seen in broad daylight
+with the _Reine de Golconde_ on his arm, walking down the _Boul' Mich'_
+at the head of a band of poets.
+
+Verlaine I did meet, but it was in London, where admiring, or
+philanthropic, young Englishmen brought him one winter to lecture and
+the subject as announced was "Contemporary French Poetry," and through
+all these years I have managed to preserve the small sheet of
+announcement with Arthur Symons's name and "kind regards" written below,
+a personal little document, for it was Symons who got up the show, and
+he and Herbert P. Horne who sold the tickets. Instead of lecturing,
+Verlaine read his verses to the scanty audience, all of whom knew each
+other, in the dim light of Barnard's Inn Hall, and the music of their
+rhythm was in his voice so that I was not conscious of the satyr-like
+repulsiveness of his face and head so long as he was reading. When he
+was not reading, the repulsiveness was to me overpowering and I shrank
+from his very presence. Nor was the shrinking less when I talked with
+him the night after his lecture, at a dinner where my place was next to
+his. He was like a loathsome animal with his decadent face, his yellow
+skin, and his little bestial eyes lighting up obscenely as he told me of
+the two women who would fight for the money in his pockets when he got
+back to Paris. Beyond this I have no recollection of his talk. The
+prospect before him apparently absorbed his interest, was the only good
+he had got out of his visit to London. The beauty of his own beautiful
+poems, I felt in disgust, should have made such vicious sordidness
+impossible. It revolted me that a man so degraded and hideous physically
+could write the verse I had loved ever since his _Romances sans Paroles_
+first fell into my hands, or, writing it, could be content to remain
+what he was. To be sure, the genius is rare whom it is not a
+disappointment to meet, and the hero-worshipper may be thankful when his
+great man is guilty of nothing worse than the famous writer in
+Tchekhof's play--so famous as to have his name daily in the papers and
+his photograph in shop windows--whose crime was to condescend to fish
+and to be pleased when he caught something.
+
+
+VI
+
+The Nineties would not let us off from another entertainment as
+characteristic--as _fin-de-sičcle_, the Englishman under the impression
+that he knew his Paris would have classified it--nor did we want to be
+let off, though it lured us indoors.
+
+The big theatres had no attraction: to sit out a long play in a hot
+playhouse was not our idea of what spring nights were made for. Neither
+had the "Hells" and "Heavens," the fatuous, vulgar, indecent
+performances with catchpenny names, run for the foreigner who went to
+Paris so that he might for the rest of his life throw up hands of
+horror and say what an immoral place it was.
+
+Once or twice we tried the out-door _Café-Chantant_, and we heard Paulus
+in the days when all Paris went to hear him, and Yvette Guilbert when
+she was still slim and wore the V-shaped bodice and the long black
+gloves, as you may see her in Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs.
+
+Once or twice we tried the big stuffy music-halls, also adapted to
+supply the travelling student of morals with the specimens he was in
+search of, but not dropping all local character in the effort. We seemed
+to owe it to the memory of Manet to go to the _Folies-Bergčre_ which
+cannot be forgotten so long as his extraordinary painting of the barmaid
+in the ugly fashions of the late Seventies is saved to the world. That
+natural desire of youth just to see and to know, that had carried us up
+and down the _Boulevards_ of the _Rive Gauche_ in pursuit of its poets,
+sent us to the _Casino de Paris_ and the _Moulin Rouge_. But a first
+visit did not inspire us with a desire for a second, though I would not
+have missed the _Casino_ if only for the imperishable memory of the most
+solemn of our critics dancing there with a patroness of the house and
+looking about as cheerful as a martyr at the stake, nor the _Moulin_
+_Rouge_ for another memory as imperishable of the most socially
+pretentious leaving his partner, after his dance, with the "thanks
+awfully" of the provincial ball-room. I thought both dull places which
+nothing save their reputation could have recommended, even to those
+determined young decadents in London who were no prouder of their
+friendship with Bibi and Verlaine than of their freedom of the French
+music-halls, and who wrote of them with a pretence of profound knowledge
+calculated to _épater le bourgeois_ at home, referring by name with easy
+familiarity to the dancers in the _Quadrille Naturaliste_, as celebrated
+in its way as Bibi in his, and explaining solemnly the _chahut_ and the
+_grand écart_ and _le port d'armes_ and every evolution in that
+unpleasant dance. How it brought it all back to me the other day when I
+found in _The Gypsy_--the direct but belated offspring of _The Savoy_--a
+poem to _Nini-patte-en-l'air_. And does anybody now know or care who
+Nini-patte-en-l'air was? Or who _La Goulue_ and the rest? Would anybody
+now go a step to see the _Quadrille_ were any graceless acrobats left to
+dance it? These things belonged to the lightest of light fashions that
+passed with the Nineties, and the _Moulin Rouge_ itself could burn down
+to the ground a few months ago and hardly a voice be heard in lament or
+reminiscence. Upon such rapidly shifting sands did the young would-be
+revolutionaries of London build their House of Decadence.
+
+The entertainment worth the exchange of the pure May night for a
+smoke-laden, stuffy interior was in none of these places. Where we
+looked for it--and found it--was in the little _café_ or _cabaret_--the
+_cabaret artistique_ as it was then known in Paris--with a flair for the
+genius the world is so long in discovering, where the young poet read
+his verses, the young musician interpreted his music, the young artist
+showed his work in any manner the chance was given him to, to say
+nothing of the posters he sometimes designed for it and decorated Paris
+with: theatre and performance and advertisement impossible in any other
+town or any other atmosphere. London is too clumsy. Berlin is too
+ponderous, New York has not the right material home-grown, and the
+spirit of the original dies in the self-conscious imitation. Even in
+Paris a Baedeker star is its death-blow, the private guide's attention
+spells immediate ruin, nor can it survive more legitimate honours at
+home when they come. Like most good things it has its times and its
+seasons, and it was in the Nineties it gave forth its finest blossoms.
+We knew it was a pleasure to be snatched this year, for next who could
+say where it might be, and we set out to snatch it with the same
+diligence we had devoted one spring to eating dinners and another to
+playing in the suburbs, though we could make no pretence in a week to
+exhaust it.
+
+Night after night we dined, we drank our coffee at the nearest _café_,
+we scrambled to the top of the big omnibus with the three white horses,
+now as dead as the performance it was taking us to, we journeyed across
+Paris to see or to hear the work of the young genius on the threshold of
+fame or oblivion. And if in an access of conscientiousness we had felt
+the need--as we never did--of a reason for our eagerness, we might have
+had it in the way our evening's entertainment invariably turned out to
+be the legitimate sequel of our day's work. For there wasn't a _cabaret_
+of them all that did not reflect somehow the things we had been busy
+studying and wrangling over ever since our arrival in Paris, the merit
+they shared in common being their pre-occupation with the art and
+literature of the day to which they belonged. The tiresome performance
+known as a _Revue_, which is all the vogue just now in the London
+music-halls, undertakes to do something of the same kind: to be, that
+is, a reflection of the events and interests and popular excitements of
+the day. But the wide gulf between the music-hall _Revue_ and the old
+_Cabaret_ performance is that art and literature could not, by hook or
+by crook, be dragged into the average Englishman's scheme of life.
+
+If one night the end of the journey was the _Tréteau de Tabarin_--the
+hot and uncomfortable little room rigged up as a theatre, with hard
+rough wooden benches for the audience, and vague lights, and bare and
+dingy stage where men and women whose names I have forgotten read and
+recited and sang the _chansons rosses_ that "all Paris" flocked there to
+hear--it was to have the argument from which we had freshly come
+continued and settled by one of the inspired young poets. For my chief
+remembrance is of the irreverent youth who summed up our daily dispute
+over Rodin's great melodramatic Balzac, with frowning brows and goitrous
+throat, wrapped in shapeless dressing-gown, that stood that spring in
+the centre of the sculpture court at the New _Salon_, and the summing up
+was in verse only a Frenchman could write, the satire the more bitter
+because the wit was so fine.
+
+A second night when we climbed the lumbering omnibus, we were bound for
+the _Chat Noir_. It had already moved from its first primitive quarters
+but had not yet degenerated into a regular show place, advertised in
+Paris and taken by Salis on tour through the provinces. Here, our
+justification was to find that everything, from the sign of the Black
+Cat, then hanging at the door and now hanging, a national possession, in
+the Carnavalet Museum, and the cat-decorations in the _café_ and the
+drawings and paintings on the wall, to the performance in the big room
+upstairs, was by the men over whose work we had been arguing all day at
+the _Salon_ and buying in the reproductions at the bookstalls and
+bookshops on the way back.
+
+To see that performance upstairs we had each to pay five francs at the
+door, and we paid them as willingly as if they did not represent
+breakfast and dinner for the next day, and so many other people paid
+them with equal willingness that the room was crowded, though the show
+was of a kind that the same public in any town except Paris would have
+paid twice that sum to stay away from. Imagine Poe attracting customers
+for a New York saloon-keeper by reciting his poems! Imagine Keene or
+Beardsley making the fortunes of a London public-house by decorating
+its walls and showing his pictures on a screen! Or imagine the public of
+to-day, debauched by the "movies" and the music-hall "sketch," knowing
+that there is such a thing as poetry or art to listen to and look at!
+
+But Salis,--the great Salis, inventor, proprietor, director of the _Chat
+Noir_, dealt only in poetry and art and music, and this is sufficient to
+give him a place in the history of the period, even if he were the mere
+exploiter filling his pockets by pilfering other people's brains that he
+was accused of being by his enemies. He crowded his _café_ by letting
+poets whom nobody had heard of and whose destiny--some of them, Maurice
+Donnay for one--as staid Academicians nobody could have foreseen, try
+their verses for the first time in public; by giving the same splendid
+opportunity to musicians as obscure then, whatever heights at least
+two--Charpentier and Debussy--were afterwards to reach; and by allowing
+the artist, while the poet was the interpreter in beautiful words and
+the musician in beautiful sound, to show his wonderful little dramas in
+black-and-white, the _Ombres Chinoises_ that were the crowning glory of
+the night's performance. From days in the _Salons_, from the illustrated
+papers and magazines and books we filled our bags with to take back to
+London, we could not measure the full powers of men like Willette and
+Caran d'Ache and Rivičre and Louis Morin until we had seen also _The
+Prodigal Son_, _The March of the Stars_, and all the stories they told
+in those dramatic silhouettes--those marvellous little black figures,
+cut in tin, only a few inches high, moving across a white space small in
+due proportion, but so designed and posed and grouped by the artist as
+to give the swing and the movement and the passing of great armies until
+one could almost fancy one heard the drums beat and the trumpets call,
+or to suggest the grandeur and solemnity of the desert, the vastness of
+the sky, the mystery of the night. They have been imitated. Only a few
+months ago I saw an imitation in a London music-hall, with all that late
+inventions in photography and electric light could do for it. But no
+touch of genius was in the little figures and the elaboration was no
+more than clever stagecraft. The simplicity of the _Chat Noir_ was gone,
+and gone the gaiety of the performers, and the pretence of gaiety is
+sadder than tragedy. Salis knew how to catch his poet, his musician, his
+artist, young,--that is where he scored.
+
+It is possible that I was the more impressed by the beauty of the show
+because it was not of that side of the _Chat Noir_ I had heard most. Its
+British admirers or critics, when they got back to London, had far more
+to say of it as a haunt of vice, if not as decadents to parade their
+wide and experienced knowledge of Paris, then as students who had gone
+there very likely to gather further confirmation of the popular British
+belief in Paris as the headquarters of vice and frivolity. To this day
+the hero or heroine of the British novel who is led astray is apt to
+cross the Channel for the purpose. It was a delicate matter to
+accomplish this in the Nineties when the novelist happened to be a
+woman, for even the "New Woman" cry, if it armed her with her own
+front-door key, could not draw all the bolts and bars of convention for
+her. I can remember the plight of the highly correct Englishwoman, upon
+whom British fiction depended for its respectability, who wanted to send
+her young hero from the English provinces to the _Chat Noir_ in the
+course of a rake's progress, and who avoided facing the contamination
+herself by shifting to her husband the task of collecting the necessary
+local colour on the spot. She did well, for had she gone she could not
+have been so scandalized as the young Briton in her book was obliged to
+be for the sake of the story. Those who had eyes and ears for it could
+see and hear all the license they wanted, those who had eyes and ears
+for the beauty could rest content with that, and as far as my impression
+of the place goes, Salis, if he allowed license at the _Chat Noir_,
+refused to put up with either the affectation or the advertisement of
+it. I cannot forget the night when a young American woman took her
+cigarette case from her pocket and lit a cigarette. It would not have
+seemed a desperate deed in proper England where every other woman had
+begun to smoke in public, probably more in public than in private, for
+with many smoking was part of the "New Woman" crusade--"I never liked
+smoking," an ardent leader in the cause told me once, "but I smoked
+until we won the right to." France, or Salis, however, still drew a
+rigid line that refused women the same right in France, and with the
+American's first whiff he was bidding her good-night and politely, but
+firmly, showing her the door.
+
+A third night, and I do not know that it was not the most amusing, the
+end of our journey was Bruant's _Cabaret du Mirliton_, in the remote
+_Boulevard Rochechouart_. I daresay there was not one of us who did not
+own a copy of Bruant's _Dans la Rue_, but we had bought it less because
+of his verses--some of us had not read a line of them--than because of
+Steinlen's illustrations, and I can still hear Harland upbraiding us for
+our literary indifference and urging it as a duty that we should not
+only read Bruant's songs, but go at once to hear him sing them. Harland
+had the provoking talent of looking as if his stories were the last
+thing he was bothering about, as if he was too busy enjoying the
+spectacle of life to think of work, when he was really working as hard
+as the hardest-working of us all. And as it was not very long after that
+his _Mademoiselle Miss_ appeared, I have an idea that he hurried us off
+to Bruant's not solely to improve our literary taste, but quite as much
+to collect incidents for that gay little tale.
+
+[Illustration: Poster by Toulouse-Lautrec
+ARISTIDE BRUANT OF THE CABARET DU MIRLITON]
+
+Bruant ran the _Mirliton_ on the principle that the less easily pleasure
+is come by, the more it will be prized. There was no walking in as at
+the ordinary _café_, no paying for admission as upstairs at the _Chat
+Noir_. Instead, it amused him to keep people who wanted to get in
+standing outside his door while he examined them through a little
+grille, an amusement which, in our case, he prolonged until I was sure
+he did not like our looks and would send us away, and that the reason
+was the responsibility he laid upon us all for the frock coat and top
+hat which the Architect could never manage to keep out of sight, skulk
+as he might in the background. But, of course, Bruant had no intention
+of sending us away and he kept up his little farce only to the point
+where our disappointment was on the verge of turning into impatience. It
+simply meant that he did not hold to the hail-fellow-well-met
+free-and-easiness which was the pose of Salis at the _Chat Noir_, but,
+at the _Mirliton_, was all for ceremony and dramatic effect. At the
+psychological moment he opened the door himself, a splendid creature,
+half brigand, half Breton peasant, in brown corduroy jacket and
+knee-breeches, high boots, red silk handkerchief tied loosely round his
+neck, big wide-brimmed hat on the back of his head, the passing pose of
+a poet who, I am told, rejoiced to give it up for a costume fitted to
+the more congenial pastime of raising potatoes. To have seen
+Toulouse-Lautrec's poster of him and his _Cabaret_ was to recognize him
+at a glance.
+
+To the noise of a strident chorus in choice _argot_, which I was
+told I should be thankful I did not understand, Bruant showed us
+into his _café_. It was more like an amateur museum, with its big
+Fifteenth Century fireplace, and its brasses and tapestries on the
+walls, and if the huge _Mirliton_ hanging from the ceiling was not
+remarkable as a work of art, it should now, as historic symbol of
+the Nineties, have a place at the _Carnavalet_ by the side of the
+sign of the _Chat Noir_. When we had time to look round, we saw that
+the severe ordeal through which we had passed had admitted us into
+the company of a few youths in the high stocks and long hair of the
+_Quartier Latin_, a _petit piou-piou_ or so, two or three stray
+workmen, women whom perhaps it would be more discreet not to attempt
+to classify, all seated at little tables and harmlessly occupied in
+drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The place was free from
+tourists, we were the only foreigners, the handsome Aristide
+evidently sang his songs for the pleasure of himself and the people.
+
+It was after we had sat down at our little table and given the order
+required of us that the incidents of the evening began to play so neatly
+and effectively into Harland's plot. A scowl was on Bruant's handsome
+face as he strode up and down his _café_-museum, for the striding, it
+seemed, was only part of the regular performance. He should at the same
+time have been singing the songs we had come to hear, and he could not
+without the pianist who accompanied him, and the pianist had chosen
+this night of all others to be late. The scowl deepened, I felt
+something like a stir of uneasiness through the room, and I did not
+wonder, for Bruant looked as if he had a temper it might be dangerous to
+trifle with. And then the strange thing happened and, to our surprise
+and his, our party whom he had met with such disdain saved the
+situation. How we did it may be read, with the variations necessary to
+fit his tale, in Harland's book. We had our own musician--her name was
+not Mademoiselle Miss--and when she discovered what was the matter, and
+why Bruant was scowling so abominably, she was moved by the sympathy of
+one artist for another and offered her services. Bruant led her to the
+piano, she accompanied him as best she could, the music being new to
+her, he sang us his _St. Lazare_ and _La Soularde_, all the while
+striding up and down with magnificent swagger, and was about to begin a
+third of his most famous songs when the pianist arrived, his
+unmistakable fright quickly lost in his bewilderment at being received
+with an amiability he had not any right to expect, and allowed to slip
+into his place at the piano unrebuked. Bruant, with the manners, the
+courteous dignity, of a prince, led our Mademoiselle Miss back to us,
+ordered bocks for her, for me--the only other woman at our table--and
+for himself, touched his with his lips, bowed, was gone and singing
+again before we could show that we had not yet learned to drain our
+glasses in the fashion approved of at the _Mirliton_.
+
+So far Harland used this little episode much as it happened and made the
+most of it--I hope the curious who consult his story will be able to
+distinguish between his realism and his romance. But being mere man he
+missed the sequel which to the original of his Mademoiselle Miss and to
+me was the most dramatic and disturbing event of the evening. Gradually,
+as we sat at our table, watching Bruant and the company, it dawned upon
+us that Bruant did not exhaust the formalities of his entertainment upon
+the coming guest but reserved one for the parting guest which in our
+judgment was scarcely so amusing. For to every woman who left his
+_café_, Bruant's goodbye was a hearty kiss on both cheeks. We had the
+sense to know that, as we had come to the _Mirliton_ of our own free
+will, we had no more right to quarrel with its rules than to refuse to
+show our press ticket at the _Salon_ turnstile, or to give up our
+umbrellas at the door of the _Louvre_, or to question the regulations of
+any other place in Paris we chose to go to. If we insisted upon being
+made the exceptions to the farewell ceremony, and if Bruant would not
+let us off, could we resent it? And if the men of our party resented it
+for us, and if Bruant resented their resentment, how would that improve
+matters?
+
+It was about as unpleasant a predicament as I have ever found myself in.
+We talked it over, but could see no way out of it, and in our discomfort
+kept urging the men to stay for just one more song and then just one
+more, greatly to their amazement, for they were accustomed to not
+wanting to go and having to beg us to stay. The evil moment, however,
+could not be put off indefinitely, and, with our hearts in our boots, we
+at last got up from the table. We might have spared ourselves our agony.
+Bruant, with the instinct and intelligence of the Frenchman, realized
+our embarrassment and I hope I am right in thinking he had his laugh
+over us all to himself, so much more than a laugh did we owe him. For
+what he did when we got to the door was to shake hands with us
+ceremoniously, each in turn, to repeat his thanks for our visit and his
+gratitude to the musician for her services, to take off his wide-brimmed
+hat--the only time that night--and to bow us out into the darkness of
+the _Boulevard Rochechouart_.
+
+Following the example of Mademoiselle Miss in the story, unless it was
+she who was following ours, we finished the evening which had begun at
+the _Mirliton_ by eating supper at the _Rat Mort_. It was an experience
+I cared less to repeat even than the visits to the _Casino de Paris_ and
+the _Moulin Rouge_. As light and satisfying a supper could have been
+eaten in many other places, late as was the hour. Neither wit nor art
+entered into the entertainment as at the _Chat Noir_ and Bruant's. Vice
+was at no trouble to disguise itself. On the contrary, it made rather a
+cynical display, I thought, and cynicism in vice is never agreeable. I
+give my impressions. I may be wrong. I have not forgotten that the
+harmless portrait by Degas of Desboutin at the _Nouvelle Athčnes_
+scandalized all London in the Nineties. Everything depends on the point
+of view.
+
+Anyway, another adventure I liked better was still to come before that
+long Paris night was at an end. It was so characteristic of Harland and
+his joy in the humorous and the absurd that I do not quite see why he
+did not let his Mademoiselle Miss share it. Outside the _Rat Mort_, in
+the early hours of the next morning, we picked up an old-fashioned
+one-horse, closed cab, built to hold two people, and of a type almost as
+extinct in Paris as the three-horse omnibus. It was the only cab in
+sight and we packed into and outside of it, not two but eight. As it
+crawled down one of the steep streets from _Montmartre_ there was a
+creak, the horse stopped and, as quickly as I tell it, the bottom was
+out of the cab and we were in the street. Harland, as if prepared all
+along for just such a disaster, whisked the top hat so conspicuous in
+everything we did from the astonished Architect's head, handed it round,
+made a pitiful tale of _le pauvr' cocher_ and his hungry wife and
+children, and implored us to show, now or never, the charitable stuff we
+were made of. Considering it was the end of a long evening, he collected
+a fairly decent number of francs and presented them to the _cocher_ with
+an eloquent speech, which it was a pity someone could not have taken
+down in shorthand for him to use in his next story. The _cocher_, the
+least concerned of the group, thanked us with a broad grin, drew up his
+broken cab close to the sidewalk, took the horse from the shaft,
+clambered on its back, rode as fast as he could go down the street, and
+disappeared into the night. A _sergent-de-ville_, who had been looking
+on, shrugged his shoulders; in his opinion, _cet animal lŕ_ was in luck
+and probably would like nothing better than the same accident every
+night, provided at the time he was driving ladies and gentlemen of such
+generosity. _Allez!_ Didn't we know the cab was heavily insured, all
+Paris cabs were, we had made him a handsome present--_Voilŕ tout!_
+
+And so wonderful is it to be young and in Paris that we laughed our way
+back as we trudged on foot through the now dark and empty and silent
+streets between _Montmartre_ and our rooms. I doubt if I could laugh now
+at the fatigue of it. Of all the many ghosts that walk with me along the
+old familiar ways, the one keeping most obstinately at my side is that
+of my own youth, reminding me of the prosaic, elderly woman I am, who,
+even if the zest for adventure remained, would be ashamed to be caught
+plunging into follies like those of the old foolish nights in Paris that
+never can be again, or who, if not ashamed, would be without the energy
+to see them through to the end.
+
+
+VII
+
+In Paris, as in London, a further ramble down those crowded, haunted,
+resounding Corridors of Time would lead me to many other nights of
+gaiety and friendliness and loud persistent talk.
+
+Again, I would have my Whistler nights, the background now not our
+chambers, but the memorable apartment in the Rue du Bac
+_rez-de-chaussée_ opening upon the spacious garden where, in the
+twilight, often we lingered to listen to the Missionary Monks in their
+spacious garden on the other side of the wall, singing the canticles for
+the Month of Mary so dear to me from my convent days--nights in the
+dining-room with its beautiful blue-and-white china, the long table and
+the Japanese "something like a birdcage" hanging over it in the centre,
+many once-friendly faces all about me, Whistler presiding in his place
+or filling the glasses of his guests as he passed from one to the other,
+always talking, saying things as nobody else could have said them,
+witty, serious, exasperating, delightful things, laughing the gay laugh
+or the laugh of malice that said as much as his words;--nights in the
+blue and white drawing-room, with the painting of Venus over the mantel,
+and the stately Empire chairs, and the table a litter of papers among
+which was always the last correspondence to be read, interrupted by his
+own comments that to those who heard were the best part of it--nights
+that will never perish as long as even one man, or woman, who shared in
+them lives to remember;--Whistler nights even after Whistler had left us
+for the land where there is neither night nor day: nights these with the
+old friends who had loved him, with the painter Oulevey and the sculptor
+Drouet who had been his fellow students, with Théodore Duret who had
+been faithful during his years of greatest trial, friends who rejoiced
+in talking of Whistler and of all that had gone to make him the great
+personality and the greater artist; but of the Whistler nights in Paris,
+as in London, I have already made the record with J. The story of them
+is told.
+
+And along the same rich Corridors, I would come to nights only less
+worth preserving in the studios of artists, American and English, who
+studied and worked and lived in Paris--nights that have bequeathed to me
+the impression of great space, and lofty ceilings, and many canvases,
+and big easels, and bits of tapestry, and the gleam of old brass and
+pottery, and excellent dinners, and, of course, vehement talk, and a
+friendly war of words--nights with men irrevocably in the movement,
+whose work was conspicuous on the walls of the New _Salon_ and had
+probably, a few hours earlier, kept us busy arguing in front of it and
+writing voluminous notes in our note-books--nights not the least
+stirring and tempestuous of the many I have spent in Paris, but nights
+of which my safe rule of silence where the living are concerned forbids
+me to tell the tale.
+
+And one special year stands out when the little hotel in the Rue St.
+Roch was deserted for the Grand Hotel, and when all the nights seemed
+swallowed up in the International Society's business--not the
+International Society of Anarchists, but the International Society of
+Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in London, which, in those terribly
+enterprising Nineties, sent its deputation--J. included in it--to
+collect all that was most individual and distinguished in the _Salons_
+for its next Exhibition. It was a year of many wanderings in many
+directions to many studios of French artists, or foreign artists working
+in Paris--a year of many meetings of many artists night after night. But
+this clearly is not a story for me to tell, since the International was
+J.'s concern, not mine. In the hours away from my work I looked on, an
+outsider, but an amused outsider, marvelling as I have never ceased to
+marvel since the faraway nights in Rome, at the inexhaustible wealth of
+art as a subject of talk wherever artists are gathered together.
+
+And rambling still further into that past, I would stumble into
+American nights--nights with old friends, established there or passing
+through and run across by chance--nights of joy in being with my own
+people again, of hearing not English, but my native tongue and having
+life readjusted to the American point of view. Nobody knows how good it
+is to be with one's fellow-countrymen who has not been years away from
+them. But these also are nights that come within the forbidden zone--the
+zone where Silence is Golden.
+
+
+VIII
+
+I have put down these memories of Paris nights and my yearly visit to
+Paris in the year when, for the first time since I began my work in its
+galleries, no _Salon_ has opened to take me there in the springtime.
+With the coming of May the lilacs and horse-chestnuts bloomed with the
+old beauty and fragrance along the _Champs-Elysées_ outside the _Grand
+Palais_, but inside no prints and paintings were on the walls, no
+statues in the great courts. To those admitted, the only exhibition was
+of the wounded, the maimed, the dying. Does it mean, I wonder, the end
+of all old days and nights for me in Paris, as the war that has shut
+fast the _Salon_ door means the end of the old order of things in the
+Europe I have known? Shall I never go to Paris again in the season of
+lilacs and horse-chestnuts? Already I have ceased to meet my old friends
+by day in front of the picture of the year and to quarrel with them over
+it by night at a _café_ table, or in the peaceful twilight of the
+suburban town and park and garden. Am I to lose as well the link with
+the past I had in the _Salon_, am I to lose perhaps Paris? Who can say
+at the moment of my writing, when the echo of shells and bullets is
+thundering in my ears? The pleasure of what has been becomes the dearer
+possession in the mad upheaval that threatens to sweep all trace of it
+away, and so I cling to the remembrance of my Paris nights the more
+tenderly and even with the hope, if far-fetched, that others may
+understand the tenderness. Youth sees little beyond youth, but as the
+years go on I begin to believe youth exists for no other end than to
+supply the incidents that age transforms into memories to warm itself
+by. If I have reached the time for looking back, I have my compensation
+in the invigorating glow, for all its sadness, that I get from my new
+occupation.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Abbey, Edwin A., 54
+
+  Addiscombe, Henley's house at, 137, 145, 149
+
+  "Admiral Guinea," by Henley, 147
+
+  Albano, 66
+
+  Albergo del Sole, Pompeii, 67
+
+  "Allahakbarries," 214, 215
+
+  Aman-Jean, E., 261
+
+  American Consul at Venice, 86
+
+  American tourists, 91
+
+  American visitors, 221
+
+  Anthony, Venice, 97
+
+  Antica Panada, 76
+
+  "Arabian Nights' Entertainment," by Henley, 132
+
+  Arnold, at Venice, 86, 87
+
+  "Arrangement in Trousers," 96
+
+  Arrested, 29
+
+  Art critics in Paris, 227-229
+
+  Artists in Rome, 44-64
+
+  "Art Journal," London, 129
+
+  "Art Weekly," London, 202
+
+  "Association Books," 214
+
+  Astor, William Waldorf, 152, 153
+
+  "Atlantic Monthly," 83, 96
+
+  Augustine (Mme. Bertin), 218
+
+  Austen, Louis, 174
+
+
+  Ballantyne & Co., 125
+
+  Barnes, Henley's house at, 149
+
+  Barrie, J.M., 148, 214
+
+  Baseball, 87, 88
+
+  Bauer's, at Venice, 107
+
+  Beardsley, Aubrey, 138, 177-191, 197, 211, 228, 260-264
+
+  Beardsley's illness, 190
+
+  Beaux-Arts, Paris, 47
+
+  Beerbohm, Max, 185, 187
+
+  Befana Night, 66
+
+  Beggarstaff Brothers, 194
+
+  Belgian exiles, 222
+
+  Belgium, 17
+
+  Béraud, Jean, 239
+
+  Bibi-la-Purée, 276, 281
+
+  Bicycle, 17, 32, 254
+
+  Bisbing, Henry S., 102
+
+  Black magic, 89
+
+  Black and white at the Salons, 239
+
+  Blackburn, Vernon, 152
+
+  Blakie, W.B., 148
+
+  Blanche, J.E., 261
+
+  "Blast, The," 176
+
+  "Bodley Head," 187
+
+  Boer War, 219
+
+  Borghese, The, 29
+
+  "Boys, The," at Venice, 84, 88, 93, 95, 96, 102
+
+  Breton, Jules, 274
+
+  Bridge of Sighs, Venice, 75
+
+  Brillat-Savarin, 245
+
+  British Museum, 65
+
+  Bronsons, the, at Venice, 98
+
+  Brown, Horatio, at Venice, 98
+
+  Brown, Professor Fred, 203
+
+  Bruant, Aristide, 289-295
+
+  Buckingham Street, our rooms in, 117, 121, 125, 126, 129-223, 142, 158,
+                                   161, 172, 174, 179, 199, 220, 260
+
+  Buhot, Felix, 120, 199, 203
+
+  Bunney at Venice, 92
+
+  Burano, 111
+
+  Burlington House, 228
+
+  Burly, Stevenson's, 134
+
+  Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 178
+
+  Bussy, Simon, 127
+
+  "Butterfly," the, 177, 198
+
+
+  Cabaret du Mirliton, Paris, 289, 295
+    Lyonnais, Paris, 252, 254
+
+  Café d'Harcourt, Paris, 273
+    de la Paix, Paris, 273
+    de la Régence, Paris, 273
+    de Venise, Rome, 41
+    Nazionale Aragno, Rome, 41, 43, 49, 52, 67, 121, 274
+    Orientale, Venice, 76, 82-97, 107, 113, 121, 274
+    Royal, London, 121, 176, 208
+
+  Cafés at Rome, 34, 40-44 at Venice, 76-113
+
+  Calcino, Venice, 77
+
+  Campagna, the, 33, 35, 65
+
+  Campanile, the, Venice, 75
+
+  Canaletto, 100
+
+  "Captain's Girl," 214
+
+  Carlyle, Thomas, 54
+
+  Carnavalet Museum, 285, 292
+
+  Carolus-Duran, 261
+
+  Carpaccio, 94
+
+  Casa Kirsch, Venice, 73, 74, 75,77
+
+  Casino de Paris, 280, 296
+
+  Cavour, the, Rome, 38, 43
+
+  Cazin, C., 262
+
+  Cézanne, Paul, 248, 249
+
+  Chamberlain, Dr., 62
+
+  Champ de Mars, 234
+
+  Champs-Elysées, 227, 243, 302
+
+  Chantrey bequest, 119
+
+  Charles V ball, at Munich, 105
+
+  Charpentier, E., 286
+
+  Chat Noir, the, Paris, 285-291
+
+  Chéret, Jules, 240
+
+  Cheshire Cheese, the, London, 38
+
+  Chioggia, 111
+
+  "Chronicle of Friendships," by Will Low, 165
+
+  Church of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice, 94
+
+  Cleopatra's Needle, 147
+
+  Clothes, 31-32, 44, 57, 76, 98, 123, 185, 193-194, 207, 255, 260, 261
+
+  Cole, Timothy, 221
+
+  Coleman at Rome, 61
+
+  Conder, Charles, 203, 241
+
+  Coney Island, 110
+
+  Constable, T. and A., 213
+
+  Cook, Clarence, 63
+
+  Cookery, the Author's articles on, 142, 149, 158, 186
+
+  Cooking books, 245
+
+  Corder, Rosa, 237
+
+  Cornford, Cope, 128
+
+  "Courrier Français," Paris, 203
+
+  Covent Garden, 125
+
+  Crane, Walter, 138, 204
+
+  Crawford, Marion, 60
+
+  Crockett, S.R., 157
+
+  Cubists, the, 248
+
+  Cust, Henry, 153
+
+
+  D'Ache, Caran, 240, 287
+
+  "Daily Chronicle," the, London, 170, 173, 174
+
+  "Daily News," London, 41
+
+  Davies, 59, 112
+
+  Dayrolles, Adrienne (Mrs. W.J. Fisher), 174
+
+  Debussy, Achille Claude, 286
+
+  Degas, H.G.E., 119, 296
+
+  Desboutin, 296
+
+  "Dial, The," London, 177
+
+  Dinners in Paris, 244-247
+
+  "Diogenes of London," 215
+
+  Discussions over art, 46-65
+
+  Dodge, Miss Louise, 65, 159
+
+  "Dome," the, London, 177
+
+  Donnay, Maurice, 286
+
+  Donoghue the sculptor, 48-49, 50, 53
+
+  Dowie, Ménie Muriel, 185
+
+  Drouet, C., 300
+
+  Ducal Palace, Venice, 75, 100
+
+  Duclaux, Madame, 129
+
+  Dumas's Dictionnaire de la Cuisine, 149, 245
+
+  Duret, Théodore, 300
+
+  Duveneck, Frank, 76-108
+
+
+  Edelfelt, 239
+
+  Eighteen-eighties, 27-114
+
+  Eighteen-nineties, 115-304
+    Their so-called decadence, 118
+
+  English tourists, 92
+
+  Etty, William, 123
+
+  "Evergreen," the, London, 177
+
+
+  Falcone, the, Rome, 37, 38, 43
+
+  Fig-Tree House, 130
+
+  Fighting nineties, 118
+
+  Finck, Henry T., 245
+
+  "Finsbury, Michael," 131, 132
+
+  Fisher, W.J., 174
+
+  Fitzgerald, Edward, 62
+
+  Flaubert, Gustave, 173
+
+  Florence, 29, 74, 84, 97
+
+  Florian's, Venice, 77, 82, 99
+
+  Florizel, Prince, 163, 168, 173, 232
+
+  Folies-Bergčre, Paris, 280
+
+  Fontainebleau, Forest of, 271
+
+  Forain, 203, 240
+
+  "Forepaugh," 52-56, 89
+
+  Frederic, Harold, 156, 214, 215
+
+  Furse, Charles W., 200, 201, 211, 228, 269, 270
+
+  Futurists, the, 248
+
+
+  Garnett, Dr. Edward, 65
+
+  Gauguin, 249
+
+  Gautier, Theophile, 268
+
+  Gavarni, 257
+
+  "Gazette, Pall Mall," 153
+
+  "Gentle Art of Making Enemies, The," 85, 217
+
+  "Germ, The," 176
+
+  German tourists, 77, 270
+
+  Germany, 17
+
+  Ghetto, Rome, 30
+
+  Gigi, 53
+
+  Gosse, Edmund, 174, 188
+
+  Goupil Gallery, London, 119
+
+  Graefe, Meier, 204
+
+  Grahame, Kenneth, 148, 185, 213
+
+  Grand Palais, Paris, 302
+
+  "Graphic," the, London, 203
+
+  Great College Street office, Henley's, 130-137, 139, 149
+
+  "Greedy Autolycus," 186, 254
+
+  Guardi, 100
+
+  Guilbert, Yvette, 280
+
+  "Gypsy, The," 176, 281
+
+
+  Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 188
+
+  Hamilton, Lord Frederick, 153
+
+  Harland, Henry, 160, 172-177, 197, 211, 228, 257, 258, 264, 265, 266,
+                  290-294, 297
+
+  Harrison, Alexander, 250
+
+  Harte, Bret, 51
+
+  Hartrick and Sullivan, 196, 198, 222
+
+  Henley, Madge, 214
+
+  Henley, William Ernest, 118, 125-149, 163, 166, 196, 197, 211, 213, 240
+
+  Henley's "Young Men," 125, 133, 134, 142, 145, 149, 150, 176, 179, 196,
+                        213, 214
+
+  Hill, L. Raven, 198
+
+  Hobbes, John Oliver (Mrs. Cragie), 185
+
+  "Hobby-horse," the, 176
+
+  Horne, Herbert P., 278
+
+  "Hospital Verses," 126, 147
+
+  Hostess, author as, 126, 198
+
+  Hotel de l'Univers et Portugal, Paris, 233
+      d'Italie, London, 185, 187
+
+  Howells, William Dean, 83, 109
+
+  Hueffer, Ford Madox, 209
+
+  Hugo, Victor, 268
+
+  Hunt, Holman, 204, 239
+
+  Hunt, Violet, 158
+
+  Huysmans, Joris Karl, 89, 238
+
+
+  Ibsen, 199, 251
+
+  Impressionism, 238
+
+  Indolence, 22, 60, 84, 86, 108, 112, 122
+
+  "Inland Voyage, An," 165
+
+  International Exhibitions, 19
+
+  International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, 301
+
+  Italian Primitives, 204
+
+  Italy, 17, 29
+
+  Iwan-Müller, 154, 211
+
+
+  "J--" (Joseph Pennell), 13, 20, 24, 29, 40, 44, 45, 53, 73, 81, 85, 91,
+                          98, 108, 113, 117, 120, 121, 122, 129, 130, 137,
+                          154, 161, 174, 178, 179, 184, 204, 205, 210, 214,
+                          217, 227, 228, 245, 254, 301
+
+  James, Henry, 188
+
+  Japanese art, 178
+
+  Jobbins, 90, 95, 111
+
+  Journalism, 19, 117, 228-229
+
+  Journeyings in Europe, 15-19
+
+
+  Kelly, FitzMaurice, 148
+
+  Kelmscott Press, 178, 213
+
+  Kennedy, E.G., 218, 219
+
+  Kensington Gardens, London, 52, 176
+
+  Khayyam, Omar, 62, 63
+
+  Khnopf, 240
+
+  Kipling, Rudyard, 148, 213
+
+  Kitchener, Lord, 155
+
+
+  La Pérouse, Paris, 247
+
+  Lagoon, the, Venice, 77, 107, 111, 112
+
+  Lamb, Charles, 22
+
+  "Land of the Dollar," 215
+
+  Lane, John, 185, 187
+
+  Lang, Andrew, 41, 63
+
+  "Lantern Bearers, The," 165, 173
+
+  Latin Quarter, 194
+
+  Lavenue's, Paris, 249
+
+  Le Puy, 18
+
+  Legge, James G., 159
+
+  Legrand, Louis, 203, 240
+
+  Leighton, Lord, 195
+
+  Leland, Charles Godfrey, 20, 56
+
+  Lhermitte, 239
+
+  Lido, the, 76, 88, 112
+
+  London, 38, 115-223, 253
+
+  "London Impressionists," 199
+
+  "London Voluntaries," by Henley, 147
+
+  Low, Will, 165
+
+  Lucca, 74
+
+  Luska, Sydney (Henry Harland), 173
+
+  Luxembourg, Paris, 103
+
+
+  MacColl, D.S., 201, 227, 241
+
+  "Mademoiselle Miss," 290, 294, 296
+
+  "Magazine of Art," London, 129
+
+  Manet, Edouard, 249, 280
+
+  Margherita, Queen, 66
+
+  Marguery's, Paris, 250
+
+  Marino, 66
+
+  Marriott-Watson, Rosamund, 157
+
+  Martin, at Venice, 86
+
+  May, Phil, 191-199, 211, 222
+
+  McFarlane, Venice, 97, 98, 100, 106, 107
+
+  Meissonier, J.L.E., 236
+
+  Merceria, the, Venice, 99
+
+  Meynell, Mrs. Alice, 158, 159
+
+  Millet, F.D., 54
+
+  Mistral, 65
+
+  Mitchell, Dr. S. Weir, 142
+
+  Monet, Claude, 238
+
+  Montepulciano, 42
+
+  Montmartre, 297
+
+  Moore, George, 159, 185, 215, 229
+
+  Morelli, 46
+
+  Morin, Louis, 287
+
+  Morris, William, 209
+
+  Morrison, Arthur, 148, 213
+
+  "Morte d'Arthur," illustrated by Beardsley, 178
+
+  Moulin Rouge, 280, 281, 296
+
+  Munich, 84, 97, 98, 102
+    Accident at ball, 105
+
+  Murano, 111
+
+  Mürger, Henri, 257
+
+  Music of "Carmen," the, 106
+
+
+  Naples, 66, 67, 74, 110
+
+  "Nation," the, London, 228, 229
+
+  "National Observer," London, 125, 128, 130, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141,
+                               151, 155, 157, 211, 214, 229, 267
+
+  New English Art Club, London, 119, 199, 200, 201, 269
+
+  New Gallery, 227
+
+  New York "Times," 156
+
+  Nicholson, William, 127, 128, 194
+
+  Norman, Henry, 159
+
+  Norwegian at Rome, the, 60
+
+  Nouvelle Athčnes, the, Paris, 249
+
+
+  "Observations in Philistia," by Harold Frederic, 156
+
+  Orvieto, 74
+
+  Ostia, 66
+
+  Oulevey, H., 300
+
+
+  "Pageant," the, London, 177
+
+  Palais Royal, 243
+
+  Pall-Mall, the, "Budget," "Gazette" and "Magazine," 142, 149, 152, 155,
+                                                      161, 186, 227, 254
+
+  "Pan," London, 204.
+
+  Panada, the, Venice, 78-82
+
+  Paris, 19, 227-303
+    Studios, 102-103
+
+  "Parson and the Painter, The," 197
+
+  Parsons, Harold, 152
+
+  Paulus, 280
+
+  "Penn, William," 123, 157, 185
+
+  Philadelphia, 13, 23, 34, 37, 40, 50, 64, 137, 242, 255
+
+  Piazza Navona, Rome, 66
+
+  "Pick-me-up," 198
+
+  Pincian, the, Rome, 33, 59
+
+  Pisa, 74
+
+  Pistoia, 74
+
+  Pointillism, 238
+
+  Pollock, Wilfred, 152
+
+  Pompeii, 67
+
+  Porta del Popolo, Rome, 29
+
+  "Portfolio, The," 59
+
+  Posta, the, Rome, 43
+
+  Post-impressionism, 204, 248
+
+  Pre-Raphaelitism, 204, 207
+
+  Preston, Miss Harriet Waters, 65, 159
+
+  "Private Life of the Romans," 65
+
+  Prunier's, Paris, 252
+
+  Pryde, James, 194
+
+  Pulcinello, 67-69
+
+  "Punch," 213
+
+
+  "Rape of the Lock," illustrated by Beardsley, 182, 213
+
+  Rat Mort, Paris, 296
+
+  Renouard, Paul, 203
+
+  "Return of the O'Mahoney," 215
+
+  Reyničre, Grimod de la, 245
+
+  Rico, 100
+
+  Rivičre, 287
+
+  Robinson, Miss Mary, 129
+
+  Rocca di Papa, 66
+
+  Rodin, Auguste, 128, 240, 271, 284
+
+  Rome, 27-69, 121
+
+  Rooms at Rome, 33-34, 64
+
+  Roque, Jules, 203
+
+  Rosicrucianism, 238
+
+  Ross, Robert, 182
+
+  Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 207, 209
+
+  Rossetti, William Michael, 209
+
+  Royal Academy, 77, 119, 200, 212, 227, 232
+
+  Rubaiyat, illustrated by Vedder, 62
+
+  Rubens, 101, 108
+
+  Ruskin, John, 46, 73, 77, 92, 94, 99, 100, 102, 110
+
+  Ruskin, never quoted by artists, 92
+
+
+  Sailing for Europe, 14
+
+  Salis, 285, 286, 287, 289, 291
+
+  Salisbury, Lord, 165
+
+  "Salome," illustrated by Beardsley, 213
+
+  Salons, the, Paris, 103
+
+  Sandro, 42, 43
+
+  Sandys, Frederick, 121, 204-208
+
+  San Francisco Exposition, 84, 97
+
+  San Giorgio, Venice, 75, 82
+
+  San Péladan, 238
+
+  "Saturday Review," London, 202
+
+  "Savoy, The," 189, 190, 198, 281
+
+  Schwabe, Carlos, 239
+
+  "Scots Observer," Edinburgh, 129
+
+  Shannon, J.J., 193
+
+  Shaw, George Bernard, 159, 215
+
+  Shinn, at Venice, 86
+
+  Sickert, Walter, 201
+
+  Simpson's, London, 253
+
+  Sisley, Alfred, 238
+
+  Sixties, illustrations of the, 205, 206, 208
+
+  Societies in the nineties, 134
+
+  Solferino's, London, 232, 233
+
+  South Kensington, London, 58, 90
+
+  "Speaker, The," London, 229
+
+  "Spectator," London, 202, 227
+
+  "Spring-heeled Jack," 160, 164
+
+  Spring in Venice, 108
+
+  "Standard," London, 83, 98
+
+  St. Cloud, Paris, 258, 259, 263
+
+  Steer, Wilson, 203
+
+  Steevens, George W., 154, 211, 213, 215
+
+  Steinlen, 240, 290
+
+  Stennis Brothers, 165
+
+  Stevenson, "Bob" (Robert Alan Mowbray), 160, 162, 170, 173, 197, 211,
+                                          227, 233, 237, 249, 250, 262
+
+  Stevenson, Robert Louis, 127, 128, 136, 146, 160, 163, 164, 167, 181,
+                           249, 250, 263
+
+  Stewarts, London, 232
+
+  St. Mark's, Venice, 75, 86, 100, 109
+
+  St. Paul's, London, 147
+
+  Street, George S., 148, 213
+
+  "Strike at Arlingford, The," 215
+
+  Stuart, Jack, 152
+
+  "Studio, The," 178
+
+  Symbolism, 238
+
+  Symonds, John Addington, 77
+
+  Symons, Arthur, 183, 190, 278
+
+
+  "Talk and Talkers," 160
+
+  Talk on Thursday nights, 124-125
+
+  Thaulow, Fritz, 273
+
+  Théâtre Français, 220
+
+  Theosophy, 55
+
+  Thompson, Venice, 97
+
+  Thursday nights, our, 117, 122-125, 129, 142, 168, 177, 223, 255
+
+  "Times," London, 43
+
+  Tintoretto, 94, 108
+
+  Tivoli, 66
+
+  Tomson, Arthur, 202, 211
+
+  Tomson, Graham R., 157, 158, 214, 215
+
+  Tonks, 203
+
+  Torcello, 111
+
+  Toulouse-Lautrec, H. de, 240, 280, 291
+
+  Tour d'Argent, Paris, 251, 252
+
+  Trattoria Cavour, Rome, 38, 43
+    Falcone, 37-38, 43
+    Posta, Rome, 36-39, 43
+
+  "Treasure Island," 127
+
+  Tréteau de Tabarin, Paris, 284
+
+  Tricycle, 15, 16, 29, 254
+
+  Tudor classics, the, 214
+
+
+  Val di Chiana, 42
+
+  Vale Press, 213
+
+  Vance, the painter, 80
+
+  Van Dyke, John, 221
+
+  Van Gogh, 248, 249
+
+  Vedder, Elihu, 56-64
+
+  Velasquez, 132, 169, 173, 215
+
+  "Venetian Life," by W.D. Howells, 109
+
+  Venetian painting, 101
+
+  Venice, 66, 71-113
+
+  Verlaine, Paul, 276-277, 281
+
+  Versailles, 266, 267, 269, 270, 272
+
+  Vesuvius, 67, 69
+
+  Vibrism, 238
+
+  Victoria, Queen, 62
+
+  Victorian prejudice, 190, 199, 202, 204
+
+  "Views and Reviews," by Henley, 141
+
+  Voisin's, Paris, 246
+
+  "Volpone," illustrated by Beardsley, 182, 213
+
+  Vorticists, 248
+
+
+  "Wares of Autolycus," 158
+
+  Watson, Marriott, 151, 213-215
+
+  Wells, H.G., 148
+
+  Whibley, Charles, 128, 130, 151, 213, 227
+
+  Whibley, Leonard, 213
+
+  Whistler, James McNeill, 20, 91, 93, 94, 95, 100, 102, 119, 128, 139,
+                           140, 142, 163, 200, 205, 208, 216, 218, 220,
+                           221, 236, 237, 299, 300
+
+  Wilde, Oscar, 49
+
+  Willes, Adrian, 172
+
+  Willette, 240, 287
+
+  Willis, N.P., 222
+
+  Wilson, Edgar, 198
+
+  Worthing, Henley at, 126
+
+  "Wounded Titan, The," 126
+
+  "Wrecker, The," 165, 249
+
+  "Wrong Box, The," 131
+
+
+  "Yellow Book, The," 177,184, 185-190, 198
+
+
+  Zaehnsdorf, 214
+
+  Zola, Emile, 47, 215, 222
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+Transcribers Note
+
+The following changes were made to the text:
+   Hobby-Horse to Hobby-horse. London--V--paragraph 6
+   Murger to Mürger. Paris--IV--paragraph 2
+   Index--(Church of San Giorgio degli) Schiaroni to Schiavoni.
+   Index--(Courrier) Francais to Français
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHTS***
+
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Nights, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Nights</p>
+<p>       Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties</p>
+<p>Author: Elizabeth Robins Pennell</p>
+<p>Release Date: January 29, 2008  [eBook #24452]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHTS***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Paul Dring, Suzanne Shell,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/icover01.jpg" width="400" height="587"
+alt="coverpage" title="coverpage" />
+</div>
+
+
+<h1>NIGHTS</h1>
+<h3>ROME &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; VENICE &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+    LONDON &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; PARIS</h3>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p class="center">
+<b>LIFE OF<br />
+JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER</b><br />
+<small>BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL<br />
+AND JOSEPH PENNELL<br />
+THOROUGHLY REVISED, FIFTH EDITION</small></p>
+
+
+<p>The Authorized Life, with much new matter added which was not available
+at the time of issue of the elaborate two-volume edition, now out of
+print. Fully illustrated with 97 plates reproduced from Whistler's
+works. Crown octavo. XX-450 pages, Whistler binding, deckle edge. $8.50
+net. Three-quarter grain levant, $7.50 net.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<b>OUR PHILADELPHIA</b><br />
+<small>BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL<br />
+ILLUSTRATED BY JOSEPH PENNELL</small>
+</p>
+
+<p>An intimate personal record in text and in picture of the lives of the
+famous author and artist in the city whose recent story will be to many
+an absolute surprise&mdash;a city with a brilliant history, great beauty,
+immense wealth. Mr. Pennell's one hundred and five illustrations, made
+especially for this volume, will be a revelation in their interest and
+as art inspired by the love of his native town. Quarto, 7˝ by 10
+inches, XIV-552 pages. Handsomely bound in red buckram, boxed. $7.50
+net.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<b>JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES<br />
+OF THE PANAMA CANAL</b><br />
+<i><small>FIFTH PRINTING</small></i>
+</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-eight reproductions of lithographs made on the Isthmus of Panama,
+January-March, 1912, with Mr. Pennell's introduction, giving his
+experiences and impressions, and a full description of each picture.
+Volume 7ź by 10 inches. Beautifully printed on dull-finished paper.
+Lithograph by Mr. Pennell on cover. $1.25 net.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<b>JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES<br />
+IN THE LAND OF TEMPLES</b>
+</p>
+
+<p>Forty reproductions of lithographs made in the Land of Temples,
+March-June, 1913, together with impressions and notes by the artist.
+Introduction by W.H.D. Rouse, Litt. D. Crown quarto, printed on
+dull-finished paper, lithograph by Mr. Pennell on cover. $1.25 net.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/acol01.jpg" width="500" height="369" alt="Painting by J. McLure Hamilton
+&quot;J&mdash;.&quot;" title="&quot;J&mdash;.&quot;" />
+<span class="caption">Painting by J. McLure Hamilton<br />
+"J&mdash;."</span>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/itp01.jpg" width="500" height="827" alt="Title Page" title="Title Page" />
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY<br />
+<br />
+PUBLISHED MARCH, 1916<br />
+<br />
+PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY<br />
+AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS<br />
+PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.<br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>There are times when we recall old memories much as we take down old
+favourites from our bookshelves, just to see how they have worn, how
+they have stood the test of years. Sometimes the books have worn so well
+that we cannot put them away until we have read every word to the very
+last again, we have not done with the memories until we have lived again
+through every moment of the past to which they belong. It is in this
+spirit that I brought my Nights of long ago to the test, and, finding
+that for me they stand it triumphantly and are still as vivid and
+vociferous and full of life as they were of old, I have not had the
+courage to loose my hold upon them and let them drift back once more
+into unfriendly silence.</p>
+
+<p>It contributes to my pleasure in this revival of my Nights, that I have
+been helped in many ways to give more substantial form to the familiar
+ghosts who wander through them. My debt of gratitude is great. Mr.
+William Nicholson has been willing for me to use his portrait of Henley
+and from Mrs. Henley I have the bust by Rodin. Mr. Frederick H. Evans
+has lent me the very interesting photograph he made of Beardsley, to
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+
+whom he was so good a friend, and to Mr. John Lane, the publisher of the
+<i>Yellow Book</i>, I owe Beardsley's sketch of Harland. To Mr. John Ross I
+am indebted for the drawing of Phil May by himself never before
+published, to the Houghton Mifflin Company for the portrait of Vedder,
+to Mr. Duveneck for the painting of himself by Mr. Joseph de Camp. The
+photograph of Iwan-M&uuml;ller and George W. Steevens reminds me of the day
+so long since when I went with them and Mrs. Steevens to Mr. Frederick
+Hollyer's and we were all photographed in turn, so that this record of
+the visit seems surely mine by right. It was Mr. Hollyer, too, who
+photographed the fine portrait "Bob" Stevenson painted of himself, and
+it was Mrs. Stevenson who gave me my copy of it. I have Mr. J. McLure
+Hamilton's permission to publish his portrait of J&mdash;, while J&mdash;has been
+so generous with his prints, portraits of old backgrounds of the Nights,
+that I can add this book to the many in which I have profited by his
+collaboration. I have also to thank the Editor of the <i>Atlantic
+Monthly</i>, in which my Nights in Rome and in Venice first appeared, for
+his consent to their re-publication now in book form.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="smcap"><span style="margin-left: 20em;">Elizabeth Robins Pennell</span></span><br />
+3. Adelphi Terrace House, London<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">December 25, 1915</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" width="50%" cellspacing="2" summary="Contents">
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">I.</td><td align="left"><small>DAYS: &nbsp; A WORD TO
+  EXPLAIN</small></td><td></td><td></td><td align="right"><a href="#I">11</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">II.</td><td align="left"><small>NIGHTS: &nbsp; IN ROME</small></td>
+  <td></td><td></td><td align="right"><a href="#II">27</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">III.</td><td align="left"><small>NIGHTS: &nbsp; IN VENICE</small></td>
+  <td></td><td></td><td align="right"><a href="#III">71</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">IV.</td><td align="left"><small>NIGHTS: &nbsp; IN LONDON</small></td>
+  <td></td><td></td><td align="right"><a href="#IV">115</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">V.</td><td align="left"><small>NIGHTS: &nbsp; IN PARIS</small></td>
+  <td></td><td></td><td align="right"><a href="#V">225</a></td>
+ </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="1" width="60%" cellspacing="0" summary="Illustrations">
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">"J&mdash;"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_2"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Painting by J. McLure Hamilton</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Old and New Rome</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Etching by Joseph Pennell</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Elihu Vedder</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_56">56</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Frank Duveneck</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_76">76</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Painting by Joseph R. DeCamp</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Caf&eacute; Orientale, Venice</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_82">82</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Etching by Joseph Pennell</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Out of Our London Windows</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_122">122</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Mezzotint by Joseph Pennell</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">W.E. Henley</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_125">125</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Bust by Auguste Rodin</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">W.E. Henley</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Painting by William Nicholson</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Iwan-M&uuml;ller and George W. Steevens</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_154">154</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From a Photograph by Frederick Hollyer</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">"Bob" Stevenson</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_160">160</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Painting by Himself</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Henry Harland</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_172">172</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Drawing by Aubrey Beardsley</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Aubrey Beardsley</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_178">178</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Photograph by Frederick H. Evans</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Phil May in Cap and Bells</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From a previously unpublished Drawing by Himself</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">In the Champs-Elys&eacute;es, Paris</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Etching by Joseph Pennell</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Half Hour Before Dinner, Paris</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Etching by Joseph Pennell</td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Aristide Bruant of the Cabaret du Mirliton, Paris</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_290">290</a></td>
+ </tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From the Poster by Toulouse-Lautrec</td>
+ </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h2>DAYS</h2>
+
+<h3>A WORD TO EXPLAIN</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>NIGHTS</h1>
+
+<h2>DAYS</h2>
+
+<h3>A WORD TO EXPLAIN</h3>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>If I wrote the story of my days during these last thirty years, it would
+be the story of hard work. No doubt the work often looked to others
+uncommonly like play, but it was work all the same.</p>
+
+<p>From the start it must have struck those who did not understand and who
+were interested, or curious enough to spare a thought, that my principal
+occupation was to amuse myself. When I was young, in America the "trip
+to Europe" was considered the crowning pleasure, or symbol of pleasure,
+within the possibility of hope for even those who were most given to
+pleasure. In Philadelphia it also stood for money&mdash;not necessarily
+wealth, but the comfortably assured income that made existence behind
+Philadelphia's spacious red brick fronts the average Philadelphian's
+right. And it was with this trip that J. and I
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+
+began our life together.
+But misleading as was the impression made to all whom it did not
+concern, great satisfaction as it was to my family, who saw in it the
+ease and comfort it represented to the Philadelphian, we ourselves, with
+the best will in the world, could imagine it no holiday for us, nor
+accept it as the symbol of the correct Philadelphia income. Our pleasure
+was in the fact of the many and definite commissions which obliged us to
+go to Europe to earn any sort of an income, correct or
+otherwise&mdash;commissions without which we could have faced neither the
+trip nor marriage. I can remember that during the two or three weeks
+between our wedding and our sailing we were both kept busy, J. with
+drawings he had to finish for the <i>Century</i>, and I with the last touches
+to an article for the <i>Atlantic</i>. And if the days on the boat gave us
+breathing space, if not much work, except in preparation, was done, the
+reason was that the new commissions commenced only with our landing at
+Liverpool.</p>
+
+<p>From the moment of our arrival in England I see in memory my life by day
+as one long vista of work. It is mostly a beautiful vista, the more
+beautiful, I am ready to admit, because the work I owed the beauty to
+forced me to keep my eyes open and my wits about me. Under the
+circumstances,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+
+I simply could not afford to let what small powers of
+observation I possess grow rusty, for, no matter what else might happen,
+I had to turn my journey into some sort of readable "copy" afterwards.
+If I know parts of Europe fairly well, I am indebted not to the
+fashionable need of taking waters, not to following the approved routes
+of travel, not to meeting my fellow countrymen in hotels as alike as two
+peas no matter how different the capitals to which they belong, not to
+any fatuous preference of another country to my own, but to the work
+that brought us to England and the Continent and has kept us there, with
+fresh commissions, ever since.</p>
+
+<p>It was work that sent us from end to end of Great Britain and gave me my
+knowledge of the land. As I look back to those remote days after our
+arrival in Liverpool, I see J. and myself on an absurd, old-fashioned,
+long-superannuated Rotary tandem tricycle riding along winding roads and
+lanes, between the hedgerows and under the elms English prose and verse
+had long since made familiar, in and out of little grey or red villages
+clustered round the old church tower, passing through great towns of
+many factories and high smoke-belching chimneys, halting for months
+under the shadow of some old castle or
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+
+cathedral that had been
+appointed one of our stations by the way. Or I see us both trudging on
+foot, knapsacks on our backs, climbing up and down the brown and purple
+hills of the Highlands, circling the peaceful lochs, skirting the swift
+mountain streams, tramping along the lonely roads of the far Hebrides:
+summer after summer journeying to the beautiful places the usual tourist
+in Britain journeys to for pleasure, but where we went because papers
+and magazines at home, with a wisdom we applauded, had asked us to go
+and make the drawings and write the articles by which we paid our way in
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>And it was work that sent us from end to end of France, and now in
+looking back I see J. and myself on the neat, compact Humber
+tandem,&mdash;then so new-fashioned, to-day as out-moded as the
+Rotary,&mdash;riding along straight poplared roads, through well-ordered
+forests and over wild hills, between vineyards, one year under the grey
+skies of Flanders or among the lagoons of Picardy and another under the
+brilliant sunshine of Provence or through the rich pastures of the sweet
+Bourbonnais, in and out of ancient villages and towns as full of romance
+as their names, with halts as long under the shadow of still nobler
+churches and fairer castles, getting
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+
+to know the people and their ways
+and how pleasant life is in the land where beauty and thrift, gaiety and
+toil, courtesy and wit, go ever hand in hand.</p>
+
+<p>And again it was work that sent us still further south, to Italy which
+in my younger years I had longed for the more because I fancied it as
+inaccessible to me as Lhassa or the Grande Chartreuse. And again down
+the beautiful vista of work I see J. and myself still on the neat
+compact Humber, but now pushing up long white zigzags to grim
+hill-towns, rushing down the same zigzags into radiant valleys of fruit
+and flowers, winding between vineyards where the vines were festooned
+from tree to tree, and fields where huge, white, wide-horned oxen pulled
+the plough, bumping over the stones of old Roman roads, parting with the
+wonderful tandem only for the long stay in wonderful Rome and wonderful
+Venice.</p>
+
+<p>And again it was work that sent us, now each on a safety bicycle&mdash;a
+change that explains how time was flying&mdash;by the canals and on the flat
+roads of Belgium and Holland; into Germany, through the Harz with Heine
+for guide, by the castled Rhine and Moselle that may have lost their
+reputation for a while but that can never
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+
+lose their loveliness; into
+Austria, on to Hungary, up in the Carpathians and to those heights from
+which the Russian Army but the other day looked down upon the Hungarian
+plain; into Spain, to sun-burnt Andalusia, for weeks in the Alhambra, to
+windy Madrid, for days in the Prado; into Switzerland, the "Playground
+of Europe," where our work must have seemed more than ever like play as
+we climbed, on our cycles and on foot, over the highest of the high
+Alpine passes, one after the other; again into Italy; again into France;
+again through England; again&mdash;but they were too numerous to count, all
+those journeys that claimed so many of my days and taught me, while I
+worked, all I have learned of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Of such well-travelled roads anyway, it may be said people have heard as
+much as people can stand, and therefore I am wise to hold my peace about
+days spent upon them. But on the best-travelled road adventure lies in
+wait for the traveller who seeks it, chance awaits the discoverer who
+knows his business. Why, to this day J. and I are appealed to for facts
+about Le Puy because a quarter of a century ago we made our discovery of
+the town as the Most Picturesque Place in the World and sought our
+adventure
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+
+by proclaiming the fact in print. But our discoveries might
+have been greater, our adventures more daring, and I should be silent
+about them now for quite another and far more sensible reason, and this
+is that I was not silent at the time. The tale of those old days is
+told.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Other journeys I made had no less an air of holiday-taking and meant no
+less hard labour. For most men work is bounded by the four walls of the
+office or the factory, or the shop, or the school, and rigidly regulated
+by hours, and they consequently suspect the amateur or the dawdler in
+the artist or writer who works where and when and as he pleases.
+Journalism has led me into pleasant places but never by the path of
+idleness. Rare has been the month of May that has not found me in Paris,
+not for the sunshine and gaiety that draw the tourist to it in that gay
+sunlit season, but for industrious days, with my eyes and catalogue and
+note-book, in the <i>Salons</i>. Few have been the International Exhibitions,
+from Glasgow to Ghent, from Antwerp to Venice, that I have missed, and
+if in my devoted attendance I might easily have been mistaken for the
+tireless pleasure-seeker, if I got what fun I could at odd
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+
+moments out
+of my opportunities, never was I without my inseparable note-book and
+pencil in my hand or in my pocket, never without good, long, serious
+articles to be written in my hotel bedroom. Even in London when I might
+have passed for the idlest stroller along Bond Street or Piccadilly on
+an idle afternoon, oftener than not I have been bound for a gallery
+somewhere with the prospect of long hours' writing as the result of it.
+But though the task varied, the tale of these days as well has been
+told, and has duly appeared in the long columns of many a paper, in the
+long articles of many a magazine.</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>As time went on, my journeys were fewer and J. took his oftener by
+himself. A new variety of task was set me that left so little leisure
+for the galleries that I gave up "doing" them for my London papers. My
+days went to the making of books which, whether I wrote them alone or in
+collaboration with J., required my undivided attention. When these were
+such books as the Life of My Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, or the Life
+of Whistler, they called for research, days of reading in the Art
+Library at South Kensington, the British Museum, the London Library,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+
+days of seeing people and places, days of travelling, days of
+correspondence, days upon days at my desk writing&mdash;these days crowded
+with interesting incident, curious surprises, amusing talk, hours of
+hope, hours of black despair&mdash;in their own way days of discovery and
+adventure. But in this case again the tale has been told and I am not so
+foolish as to sit down and tell it anew, sorely as I may be tempted.
+Anybody who reads further will find that the principal truth my nights
+have revealed to me is that the man who is interested&mdash;really
+interested&mdash;in something, does not want to talk, and often cannot think,
+about anything else. But it does not follow that he can make sure of
+listeners as keen to hear about it. The writer may, in his enthusiasm,
+write the same book twice, but even if it prove a "best-seller" the
+first time, he runs a risk the second of seeing it disposed of as a
+remainder.</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>So it has been throughout my working life: my day's task has had no
+other object than to get itself chronicled in print. If <i>what</i> the work
+was that filled my day is not known, it could not interest anybody were
+I to write about it now. If
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+
+<i>how</i> I worked during all those long hours
+is to me an all-absorbing subject and edifying spectacle, I am not so
+vain as not to realize that I must be the only person to find it so.
+Most men&mdash;and women too&mdash;were brought into the world to work, but most
+of them would be so willing to shirk the obligation that the best they
+ask is to be allowed to forget their own labours while they can, and not
+to be bothered with a report of other people's. By nature I am inclined
+to Charles Lamb's belief that a man&mdash;or a woman&mdash;cannot have too little
+to do and too much time to do it in. But necessity having forced me to
+give over my days to work, it happens that I, personally, would from
+sheer force of habit find days without it a bore. However, I would not,
+for that reason, argue that work is its own reward to any save the
+genius, or that methods of work are of importance to any save the
+workman who employs them.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever man's endurance may be, I know one weak woman whose powers of
+work are limited. There was never anybody to regulate my day of work
+save myself, since I am glad to say it has not been my lot to waste the
+golden years of my life in an office, and I am not the stern task-master
+or tiresome trade-unionist who
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+
+insists upon so many hours and so much
+work in them, and will make not an inch of allowance either more or
+less. Sometimes my hours were more, sometimes they were less, but always
+my energy was apt to slacken with the slackening of the day. I never
+found inspiration in the midnight oil and oceans of coffee. I have
+always wanted my solid eight hours of sleep, and would not shrink from
+nine or ten if they fitted in with a worker's life. Youth often gave me
+the courage I have not now to take up work again&mdash;a promised article,
+necessary reading, making notes, copying&mdash;at night. But youth never
+induced me to rely upon this night work if I could help it. My nearest
+approach to a rule was that at the end of the day I was at liberty to
+play, that my nights at least could be free of work.</p>
+
+<p>The play to many might pass for a mild form of mild amusement, for it
+usually consisted in nothing more riotous than meeting my friends and
+talking with them. But I confess that the talk and the quality of it,
+the meeting and its informality did strike me as so singularly
+stimulating as to verge upon the riotous. The manner of playing was
+entirely new to me in the beginning. All conventions bind with a heavy
+chain, but none with a heavier than the Philadelphia
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+
+variety. Spruce
+Street nights had never been so free and so vociferous and so late, and,
+being a good Philadelphian, I am not sure if the nights that succeeded
+have yet lost for me their novelty. As a consequence, if, in looking
+back, my days appear to be wholly monopolized by work, my nights seem
+consecrated as wholly to amusement. The poet's "hideous" is the last
+adjective I could apply to the night my busy day sank into.</p>
+
+<p>How I worked may concern nobody save myself, but how I played I cannot
+help hoping has a wider interest. Those old nights were typical of a
+period, and they threw me with many people, contemporaries of J.'s and
+mine, who did much to make that period what it was. The nights as gay,
+as stimulating, that I have spent in other people's houses I have not
+the courage to recall except in the utmost privacy. Pepys and N.P.
+Willis in their time, no less than a whole army of Pamelas and
+Priscillas in ours, have shown the lengths and indiscretions to which so
+intimate a breach of hospitality may lead. I have had my experience. For
+some years a house with closely curtained windows has reproached me
+daily for not understanding that the man who invites the world to stare
+at him and is not happy if it won't, objects when his neighbours say
+lightly what
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+
+they see. I am every bit as afraid to speak openly of
+those people who shared our nights and who, with us, have outlived them.
+Cowardice long since convinced me that it is not of the dead, but of the
+living, only good should be spoken&mdash;and if good cannot be spoken, what
+then? However, it is not in pursuit of problems that I have busied
+myself in reviving those old nights, but rather for the pleasure we all
+of us have, as the years go on, in feeling our way back along the
+Corridors of Time and living our past over again in memory. If I go
+further and live mine over again in print, it is because I like to think
+the fault will not lie with me if it altogether dies&mdash;I have given it,
+anyway, the chance of a longer lease of life.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h2>NIGHTS</h2>
+
+<h3>IN ROME</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IN ROME</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+
+<p>It will give an idea of what ages ago those nights were, and of the
+youth I brought to them, if I say that I arrived in Rome on the first
+tandem tricycle ever seen in Italy.</p>
+
+<p>I can look back to it now with pride, for I was, in my way, a pioneer,
+but there was not much to be proud about at the time. Rome was so little
+impressed that J., my fellow pioneer, and I,&mdash;J. and I who in every town
+on the way from Florence had been the delight of the gaping crowd, J.
+and I who in all those beautiful October days on the white roads of
+Italy had suffered from nothing save the excess of the people's amiable
+attentions,&mdash;scarcely showed ourselves beyond the <i>Porta del Popolo</i> and
+the Piazza of the same name, before we were arrested for driving the
+tandem furiously through the <i>Corso</i>&mdash;as if anybody could drive anything
+furiously through the <i>Corso</i> at the hour before sunset, when all the
+world comes home from the <i>Borghese</i>. But two policemen, drawing their
+swords as if they meant business, commanded us to dismount and, between
+them, we walked ignominiously to
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+
+the hotel, pushing the tricycle; and
+an astonished and not in the least admiring crowd followed; and the
+policeman asked us for a <i>lira</i>, which we refused, taking it for a proof
+of the corruption of modern Rome&mdash;and they were so within their legal
+rights that I do not care to say for how many more than one we were
+asked a few weeks later by the Syndic, whom we could not refuse; and
+altogether I do not think we were to blame if, after the policemen and
+the swords and the crowd had gone and the tricycle was locked up, and we
+wandered from the hotel in the gathering dusk, we were the two most
+ill-tempered young people who ever set out to enjoy their first night in
+Rome.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was our temper improved when J.'s instinct, which in a strange place
+takes him straight where he wants to go, having got us into the
+<i>Ghetto</i>, failed to get us out again. The <i>Ghetto</i> itself was all right,
+so what a <i>Ghetto</i> ought to be that had I been the Romans, I would not
+have pulled it down, I would have preserved it as a historical
+monument,&mdash;dirty, dark and mysterious, a labyrinth of narrow crooked
+streets, lined with tall grim houses, filled with melodramatic shadows
+and dim figures skulking in them, but a nightmare of a labyrinth which
+kept bringing us
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+
+forever back to the same spot. And we could not dine
+on picturesqueness, and we would not have dined in any of the
+murderous-looking houses at any price, and at last J. admitted that
+there were times when a native might be a better guide than instinct,
+and in his best Italian he asked the way of two men who were passing.
+One, who wore the tweeds and flannel shirt by which in calmer moments we
+must have recognized him, pulled the other by the sleeve and growled in
+English: "Come on, don't bother about the beastly foreigners!" I can
+afford to forgive him to-day when I remember what his incivility cost
+him not only that night, when we would not let him off until he had
+shown us out of the <i>Ghetto</i>, but on a succession of our nights in Rome,
+Fate having neatly arranged that at the one house whose doors were
+opened to us he should be a constant visitor.</p>
+
+<p>Other doors might have opened had we had the clothes in which to knock
+at them. But we had come to Rome for four days with no more baggage than
+the tandem could carry, and we stayed four months without adding to it.
+We could have sent for our trunks, of course, or we could have bought
+new things in the Roman shops, but we did neither, I can hardly say why
+except that the story of our journey had to be
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+
+finished, and other
+delightful articles we had crossed the Atlantic to do were waiting, and
+these were commissions that could not be neglected, since they were the
+capital upon which we had started out on our married life five months
+before. And our Letter of Credit was small, and Youth is stern with
+itself;&mdash;or, more likely, we did not trouble simply because it saved so
+much more trouble not to. No woman would have to be taught by Ibsen or
+anybody else how to live her own life, were she willing to live it in
+shabby clothes. It is not an easy thing to do, I know. I share the
+weakness of most women in feeling it a disgrace, or a misfortune, to be
+caught in the wrong clothes in the right place. But that year in Rome I
+had not outgrown the first ardours of work and, besides, in the old
+days, a cycle seemed an excuse for any and all degrees of shabbiness. In
+my short skirts, at a time when short skirts were not the mode, covered
+with mud, and carrying a tiny bag, I have walked into the biggest hotels
+of Europe without a tremor, conscious that the cycle at the door was my
+triumphant apology. The cyclist's dress, like the nun's uniform, was a
+universal passport, and I have never had the cleverness to invent
+another to replace it since I gave up cycling.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>If we could not spend our nights in other people's houses, neither could
+we spend them in the rooms we had taken for ourselves at the top of one
+of the highest houses on the top of one of the highest hills in Rome.
+There was no objection to the rooms: they were charming, but we had
+found them on a warm November day when the sun was streaming in through
+the windows that looked far and wide over the town, and beyond to the
+<i>Campagna</i>, and still beyond to a shining line on the horizon we knew
+was the Mediterranean, and we did not ask about anything save the price,
+which to our surprise we could pay, and so we moved in at once. Nor for
+days, as we sat at our work in the sunlight, the windows open and Rome
+at our feet, did we imagine there could be anything to ask about, except
+if, by asking, we could prevail upon the <i>Padrona's</i> son-in-law to go
+and blow his melancholy cornet anywhere rather than on the roof directly
+over our heads. Living in rooms was the nearest approach I had made in
+all my life to housekeeping, I was still in a state of wonderment at
+everything in Rome, from Romulus and Remus on the morning pat of butter
+to the November roses in full bloom on the Pincian, I
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+
+was quite content
+to let practical affairs and domestic details look out for
+themselves&mdash;or, perhaps it would be more true to say that I never gave
+them a thought.</p>
+
+<p>But even in Rome the sun must set and November nights grow chill, and a
+night came when, after a day of rain, a fire would have been pleasant,
+and suddenly we discovered there was no place to make it in. It had
+never occurred to us that there could not be, fresh as we were from the
+land where heat in the house is as much a matter of course as a sun in
+the sky. At first we wrapped ourselves in shawls and blankets, hired the
+<i>padrona's</i> biggest <i>scaldino</i>, and called it an experience. After a few
+evenings we decided it was an experience we could do without and, like
+all miserable Romans who have no fireplace, we settled down to spending
+our nights in the restaurants and <i>caf&eacute;s</i> of Rome.</p>
+
+<p>I doubt if I should care to spend my nights that way now; a quarter of a
+century has added unexpected charm to a dinner-table and fireside of my
+own; but no Arabian Nights could then have been fuller of entertainment
+than the Roman Nights that drove us from home in search of warmth and
+food. In Philadelphia there never had been a suspicion of chance, a
+shadow
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+
+of adventure about my dinner. It was as inevitable as six
+o'clock and as inevitably eaten in the seclusion of the Philadelphia
+second-story back-building dining-room, if not of my family, then of one
+or another of my friends. In Rome it became a delightful uncertainty
+that transformed the six flights of stairs leading to it from our rooms
+into the "Road to Anywhere". That road was by no means an easy one to
+climb up again and if we could help it, we never climbed down more than
+once a day, usually a little before dusk, a few hours earlier when we
+were in a rare holiday mood, and always in time for a long or short
+tramp before dinner. If we came to a church we dropped into it, or a
+gallery, or a palace, or a garden, when we were in time. We followed the
+streets wherever they might lead,&mdash;along the brand-new <i>Via Nazionale</i>
+to the Forum or the narrow alleys to St. Peter's, beyond the gates to
+the <i>Campagna</i>&mdash;seeing a good deal of Rome without setting out
+deliberately to see anything. When we were hungry, we stopped at the
+first <i>Trattoria</i> we passed, provided it looked as if we could afford
+it, and the chance dinner in a chance place at a chance hour was the
+biggest adventure of all that had crowded the way to it.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol02.jpg" width="500" height="661" alt="Etching by Joseph Pennell
+" title="OLD AND NEW ROME" />
+<span class="caption">Etching by Joseph Pennell<br />
+OLD AND NEW ROME</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>One night the <i>Trattoria</i> happened to be the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+
+<i>Posta</i> in a narrow street
+back of the <i>Piazza Colonna</i>. It was small: not more than twenty could
+have dined there together in any comfort. It was beautifully clean. And
+the <i>padrone</i>, his son, and the one waiter&mdash;all the
+establishment&mdash;greeted us with that enchanting smile to which, during my
+first year in Italy, I fell only too ready a victim. Once we had dined
+at the <i>Posta</i>, we found it so pleasant that we fell into the habit of
+getting hungry in its neighbourhood.</p>
+
+<p>I have since got to know many more famous or pretentious restaurants,
+but never have dinners tasted so good as at this little Roman
+<i>trattoria</i> where we had to consider the <i>centesimi</i> in the price of
+every dish, and the quarter of a flask of cheap <i>Chianti</i> shared between
+us was an extravagance, and we ate with the appetite that came of having
+eaten nothing all day save rolls and coffee for breakfast, and fruit and
+rolls for lunch, that we might afford a dinner at night. And I have
+dined in many restaurants of gilded and mirrored magnificence, but in
+none I thought so well decorated as the <i>Posta</i> with its bare walls and
+coarse clean linen and no ornament at all, except the stand in the
+centre where we could pick out our fruit or our vegetable. Nor has any
+restaurant, crowded with the creations of
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+
+Paquin and Worth, seemed more
+brilliant than the <i>Posta</i> filled with officers. In Philadelphia I had
+never seen an army officer in uniform in my life; at the <i>Posta</i> I saw
+hardly anything else. We were surrounded by lieutenants and captains and
+colonels, and as I watched them come and go with clank and clatter of
+spurs and swords, and military salutes at the door, and military cloaks
+thrown dramatically off and on, and gold braid shining, I began to think
+a big standing army worth the money to any country, on condition that it
+always went in uniform&mdash;on condition, I might now add, that this uniform
+is not khaki, then not yet heard of. When the old spare, grizzled
+General, always the last, appeared and all the other officers rose upon
+his entrance, our dinner was dignified into a ceremony. Sometimes, I
+fancied he felt his importance more than anybody, for he is the only man
+I have ever known courageous enough in public to begin his dinner with
+cake and finish it with soup.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then, on very special occasions, when we had sent off an article
+or received a cheque, we went to the <i>Falcone</i> and celebrated the event
+by feasting on <i>Maccheroni alla Napolitana</i>, <i>Cinghale all'Agra Dolce</i>
+and wine of Orvieto. The <i>Falcone</i> was another accident of our tramps,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+
+though we afterwards found it starred in Baedeker. It looked the
+centuries old it was said to be, such a shabby, sombre crypt of a
+restaurant that I accepted without question the tradition it cherished
+of itself as a haunt of the C&aelig;sars, and was prepared to believe the
+waiters when they pointed out the mark of the Imperial head on the
+greasy walls, just as the waiters of the Cheshire Cheese in London point
+to the mark of Dr. Johnson's, while the flamboyancy of the cooking
+revealed to me the real reason of the decline and fall of Rome. I am
+afraid I should be telling the story of our own decline and fall had we
+sent off articles and received cheques every day. Fortunately, the
+intervals were long between the feasts, but unfortunately our digestion
+can never again be imperilled at the <i>Falcone</i>, for they tell me it has
+gone with the <i>Ghetto</i> and so many other things in the Rome I knew and
+loved.</p>
+
+<p>By the middle of the winter we gave up the <i>Posta</i> and went to the
+<i>Cavour</i> instead. I don't know how we had the heart to, for the <i>Cavour</i>
+never had the same charm for us, we never got to like it so well. It was
+too large and popular for friendliness, the officers carried their
+ceremony and gorgeousness to a room apart, and
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+
+the <i>padrone</i> and his
+waiters were too busy for more than one fixed smile of general welcome.
+But then there, if we paid for our dinner by the month, it cost us next
+to nothing by the day, and our Letter of Credit allowed as narrow a
+margin for sentiment as for clothes. Moreover, the dinner was good as
+well as cheap. And when the streets of Rome were rivers of rain, as they
+often were that winter, it was brought to our rooms in a dinner pail by
+a waiter, after he had first come half a mile to submit the <i>menu</i> to
+us, and in that cold, bleak interior, wrapped in blankets, a <i>scaldino</i>
+at our feet, a newspaper for tablecloth, we made a picnic of it,
+freezing, but thankful not to be drowned. And on great holidays, the
+<i>padrone</i> spared us a smile all to ourselves as he offered us, with the
+compliments of the season, a plate of <i>torrone</i> and a bottle of old wine
+from his vineyard.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>With dinner the night was but beginning and smiles must have faded had
+we lingered over it indefinitely. I learned to my astonishment, however,
+that hours could be, or rather were expected to be, devoted to the
+drinking of one small cup of coffee, and that always near the
+<i>trattoria</i> was a <i>caf&eacute;</i>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+
+<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a>
+
+which provided the coffee and, at the cost
+of a few cents, could become our home for as long and as late as might
+suit us. In Philadelphia after dinner coffee had been swallowed
+promptly, in the back parlour if we were dining alone, in the front if
+people were dining with us, and I was startled to find it in Rome an
+excuse to loaf at a convenient distance from the domestic hearth for
+Romans with apparently nothing to do and all their time to do it in.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a>
+
+<i>Note.</i>&mdash;Let me anticipate the amiable critic&mdash;and say that
+I know this is not the Italian spelling of <i>caf&eacute;</i>. I use the French
+spelling here, as in later chapters where it belongs, for the sake of
+uniformity throughout.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is an arrangement I take now as a matter of course. But then, it must
+be borne in mind, for me only five months separated Rome from
+Philadelphia, and Philadelphia bonds are not easily broken. I suspected
+something wrong in so agreeable a custom, as youth usually does in the
+pleasant things of life, and as a Philadelphian always does in the
+unaccustomed, and at first, when we went to the ancient <i>Greco</i>, I tried
+to believe it was entirely the result of J.'s interest in a place where
+artists had drunk coffee for generations. When we deserted it because,
+despite its traditions, nobody went there any longer save a few
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+
+grey-bearded old men and a few gold-laced hall porters, and the dulness
+fell like a pall upon us, and the atmosphere was rank, and when we
+patronized instead a brand-new <i>caf&eacute;</i> in the <i>Corso</i> that called itself
+in French the <i>Caf&eacute; de Venise</i> and in English the <i>Meet of Best
+Society</i>, I put down the attraction to the <i>Daily News</i>, to which the
+<i>caf&eacute;</i> subscribed, and for which in those days Andrew Lang was writing
+the leaders everybody was reading. But Lang could not reconcile us to
+the nightly <i>Gran Concerto</i> of a piano, a flute and a violin of
+indifferent merit concealed in a thicket of artificial trees, and the
+<i>Best Society</i> meant tourists, and after we had shocked a family of New
+England friends by inviting them to share its tawdry pleasures with us,
+and after a few evenings had given us, unaccompanied, all and more than
+we could stand of it, we exchanged it for a <i>caf&eacute;</i> without a past and
+with no aspirations as the Meet of any save the usual <i>caf&eacute;</i> society of
+a big Italian town. By this time I had ceased to worry about excuses and
+had settled down to idleness and coffee with as little scruple as the
+natives.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>caf&eacute;</i> we chose was the <i>Nazionale Aragno</i> in the Corso, the largest
+and most gorgeous in Rome. The three or four rooms that opened one
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> out
+
+of the other had a magnificence that we could never have achieved in
+furnished rooms and would not have wanted to if we could, and a
+succession of mirrors multiplied them indefinitely. We leaned
+luxuriously against blue plush, gilding glittered wherever gilding could
+on white walls, waiters rushed about with little shining nickel-plated
+trays held high above their heads, spurs and swords clanked and
+clattered, by the middle of the evening not a table was vacant.</p>
+
+<p>It was simply the usual big Continental <i>caf&eacute;</i>, but to me as new and
+strange as everything else in the wonderful life in the wonderful world
+into which I had strayed from the old familiar ways of Philadelphia,
+with a long halt between only in England where the <i>caf&eacute;</i> does not
+exist. To the marble-topped tables, the gilding, mirrors and plush,
+novelty lent a charm they have never had since and probably would soon
+have lost had we been left to contemplate them in solitary state, as it
+seemed probable we should. For we knew nobody in Rome except Sandro, the
+youthful enthusiastic Roman cyclist we had picked up in Montepulciano,
+cycled with through the Val di Chiana on a sunny October Sunday, and run
+across again in Rome where he amiably showed us the hospitality of the
+capital by occasionally
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+
+drinking coffee with us at our expense, and by
+once introducing a friend, a tall, slim, good-looking young man of such
+elegance of manner and such a princely air of condescension, that Sandro
+himself was impressed and joined us again, later on the same evening, to
+explain our privilege in having entertained the Queen's hair-dresser
+unawares. Foreigners did not often find their way into the <i>Nazionale</i>.
+They were almost as few in number as women, who were very few, for as
+women in Rome never dined,&mdash;or so I gathered from my observations at the
+<i>Posta</i>, the <i>Falcone</i> and the <i>Cavour</i>,&mdash;they never drank coffee. Only
+on Sundays would they descend upon the <i>caf&eacute;</i> with their husbands and
+children, and then it was to devour ices and cakes at a rate that
+convinced me they devoured little else from one Sunday to the next. When
+I asked for the <i>Times</i>&mdash;they took the <i>Times</i> at the <i>Nazionale</i>&mdash;the
+waiter almost invariably answered: "It reads itself, the <i>Signore
+Tedesco</i> has it," and the <i>Signore Tedesco</i>, a mild German student who
+for his daily lesson in English read the advertisement columns from
+beginning to end, was the only foreigner who appeared regularly at any
+table save our own.</p>
+
+<p>And yet at ours, before I could say how it
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+
+came about, a little group
+collected, and every evening in the furthest room J. and I began to hold
+an informal reception which gave us all the advantages of social life
+and none of its responsibilities. We could preside in the travel-worn
+tweeds of cycling and not bother because we were not dressed; we could
+welcome our friends the more cordially because, as we did not provide
+the entertainment, it was no offence to us if they did not like it, nor
+to them if we failed to sit it out. In the <i>caf&eacute;</i> we found the "oblivion
+of care," the same "freedom from solitude," though not the big words to
+express it, which Dr. Johnson "experienced" in a tavern. Were all social
+functions run on the same broad principles, society would not be half
+the strain it is upon everybody's patience and good-nature and purse.</p>
+
+<p>Almost all the group were artists. In those days artists and students
+were no longer rushing to Rome as the one place to study art in, nor had
+the effort begun to revive its old reputation among them. Still a good
+many were always about. Some lived there, others, like ourselves, were
+spending the winter, or else were just passing through, and, once we had
+collected the group
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+
+round our table, I do not believe we were ever left
+to pass an evening alone.</p>
+
+<p>Artists were as great a novelty to me as the <i>caf&eacute;</i>&mdash;I had been married
+so short a time that J. had not ceased to be a problem, if he ever
+has&mdash;and nothing was more amazing to me than the talk. Its volubility
+took my breath away. I thought of the back parlour at home after dinner,
+my Father playing interminable games of Patience, the rest of us deep in
+our books until bed-time. And these men talked as if talk was the only
+business, the only occupation of life.</p>
+
+<p>Still more surprising was the subject of their talk. If they had so much
+to say that it made me grateful I was born a listener, they had only one
+thing to say it about. It was art from the moment we met until we
+parted, though we might sit over our coffee for hours. Often it was next
+morning when J. and I reached the house at the top of the hill, and he
+dragged the huge key from his pocket, undid the ponderous lock and
+struck the overgrown match, or undersized candle, by which the Roman lit
+himself to his rooms, and we panted up our six flights afraid ours would
+not last, for we had but the one supplied by the restaurant.</p>
+
+<p>The quality of the talk was as amazing: bewildering, revolutionary, to
+anybody who had
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+
+never heard art talked about by artists, as I never had
+before I met J. All I had thought right turned out to be wrong, all I
+had never thought of was right, all that was essential to the critic of
+art, to the Ruskin-bred, had nothing to do with it whatever. History,
+dates, periods, schools, sentiment, meaning, attributions, Morelli only
+as yet threatening to succeed Ruskin as prophet of art, were not worth
+discussion or thought. The concern was for art as a trade&mdash;the trade
+which creates beauty; the vital questions were treatment, colour,
+values, tone, mediums. The price of pictures and the gains of artists,
+those absorbing topics of the great little men in England to-day, were
+never mentioned: the man who sold was looked down on, rather. There were
+nights when I went away believing that nothing mattered in the world
+except the ground on a copper plate, or the grain of a canvas, or the
+paint in a tube, so long and heated and bitter had been the controversy
+over it. They might all be artists, but they were of a hundred opinions
+as to the exact meaning of right and wrong, and they could wrangle over
+mediums until the German student looked up in reproof from his columns
+of advertisements and the Romans shrugged their shoulders at the curious
+manners and short tempers of the <i>forestiere</i>.
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+
+ But there was one point
+upon which I never knew them not to be of one mind, and this was the
+supreme importance of art. If I ventured to disagree&mdash;which I was far
+too timid to do often&mdash;they were down upon me like a flash, abusing me
+for being so blind as not to see the truth in Rome, of all places, where
+of a tremendous past nothing was left but the work of the masters who
+built and adorned the city, or who sang and chronicled its splendours.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>The noise of their talk is still loud in my ears, but many of the
+talkers have grown dim in my memory. Of some of the older men I cannot
+recall the faces, not even the names; some of the younger I remember
+better, partly I suppose because they were young and starting out in
+life with us, partly because one or two later on made their names heard
+of by many people outside of the <i>Nazionale</i> and far beyond Rome.</p>
+
+<p>I could not easily forget the young Architect who was then getting ready
+to conquer Philadelphia&mdash;to borrow a phrase from Zola, as seems but
+appropriate in writing of the Eighties&mdash;for which great end all the
+knowledge of the <i>Beaux-Arts</i> could not have served him as well as his
+conviction
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+
+that the architecture of Europe had waited for him to
+discover it. He had never been abroad before and he could not believe
+that anybody else had. He would come to our little corner from his
+prowls in Rome and tell men, who had lived there for more years than he
+had hours, all about the churches and palaces and galleries, like a new
+Columbus revealing to his astonished audience the wonders of a New
+World. And it amused me to see how patiently the older men listened,
+sparing his illusions, no doubt because they heard in his ardent,
+confident, decidedly dictatorial voice the voice of their own youth
+calling. He carried his convictions home with him unspoiled, and his
+first building&mdash;a hospital or something of the kind&mdash;was a monument to
+his discoveries, a record of his adventures among the masterpieces of
+Europe, beginning on the ground floor as the Strozzi Palace, developing
+into various French castles, and finishing on the top as a Swiss
+<i>ch&acirc;let</i>, atrocious as architecture, but amusing as autobiography. All
+his buildings were more or less reminiscent, and told again in stone the
+story so often told in words at the <i>Nazionale</i>, for Death was kind and
+claimed him before he had ceased to be the discoverer to become himself.</p>
+
+<p>Donoghue too has gone, Donoghue the sculptor
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+
+who as I knew him in Rome
+was so overflowing with life, so young that I felt inclined to credit
+him with the gift of immortal youth, so big and handsome and gay that
+wherever he went laughter went with him. He too was a discoverer, but
+his discovery was of Paris and the Latin Quarter. It had filled a year
+between Chicago, where he had been Oscar Wilde's discovery, and Rome,
+and he had had time to work off his first fantastic exuberance as
+discoverer before I met him. "Donoghue is all right," they would say of
+him at the <i>Nazionale</i>; "he has got past the brass buttons and pink
+swallow tail stage, even if he does cling to low collars and tight pants
+and spats."</p>
+
+<p>Certainly, he had got so far as to think he ought to be beginning to
+work, and he was in despair because he could not find in Rome a youth as
+beautiful as himself to pose for his Young Sophocles. To listen to him
+was to believe that Narcissus had come to life again. We would meet him
+during our afternoon rambles in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, when
+he would stop and take half an hour to assure us he hadn't time to stop,
+he was hunting for a model he had just heard of, and then he would drop
+into the <i>Nazionale</i> at night to report his want of progress,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+for no
+model ever came up to his standard. He referred to his own beauty with
+the frank simplicity and vanity of a child&mdash;a real Post-Impressionist;
+not one by pose, for there was not a trace of pose in him. I wish I
+could say how astonishing he was to me. Life has since thrown many young
+artists and writers my way and I am used to their conceits and
+affectations and splendid belief in themselves. But my experience then
+was of the most limited and bound by Philadelphia convention, and I
+cannot imagine a greater contrast than between the Philadelphia youth to
+whom I was accustomed, talking of the last reception and the next party
+over his chicken salad at the Dancing Class, and Donoghue talking
+dispassionately of his own surpassing beauty over a small cup of coffee
+at the <i>Nazionale</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Donoghue was a child, not merely in his vanity, but in everything, with
+the schoolboy's sense of fun. I never knew him happier than the evening
+he hurried to the <i>caf&eacute;</i> from his visit to the Coliseum by moonlight to
+tell us of his joke on the Americans he found waiting there in silence
+for the guide's announcement that the moon was in the proper place for
+their proper emotion. A friend was with him.</p>
+
+<p>"And I said: '<i>Sprichst du Deutsch?</i>' very loud
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+
+as we passed," was
+Donoghue's story. "And he answered as loud as he could: '<i>Nichts!
+Nichts!</i>' And I said: '<i>Zwei Bier</i>,' and of course the Americans took us
+for Germans. Then we hid in the shadows a little further on and we both
+yelled together at the top of our voices, 'Three cheers for Cleveland!'
+and the Americans jumped, and they forgot the moon, and they wouldn't
+listen to the guide, and I tell you it was just great."</p>
+
+<p>I was not overcome myself with the wit or humour of the jest, but
+Donoghue was, and he roared with laughter until none of us could help
+roaring with him in sheer sympathy. He was as enchanted with his method
+of learning Italian. He was reading Wilkie Collins and Bret Harte in an
+Italian translation, and when he yawned in our faces and left the <i>caf&eacute;</i>
+early, it was because the night before the Dago's <i>Woman in White</i> or
+<i>Luck of Roaring Camp</i> had kept him up until long after dawn, though
+really he knew it was a waste of time since anybody had only to get
+himself half seas over and he'd talk any darned lingo in the world.</p>
+
+<p>He joined us less often after he gave up the hopeless hunt for the model
+who never was found and whom it would have been useless anyway
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+
+to find,
+for Donoghue always spent his quarter's allowance the day he got it, and
+most models could not wait three months to be paid. To this conclusion
+he came soon after the first of the year and settled down seriously to
+posing for himself and, as the world knows, the Young Sophocles was
+finished in the course of time and a very fine statue it is said to be.
+But even if he did desert our table he would still seem to me in memory
+the centre of the little group gathered about it, had it not been for
+Forepaugh.</p>
+
+<p>Of course his name was not Forepaugh&mdash;though something very like it&mdash;but
+Forepaugh answers my every purpose. For though I did know his name I did
+not know then, and I do not know now, who he was and why he was. I do
+not think anybody ever knew anything about him except that he was
+Forepaugh, which meant, according to his own reckoning, the most
+wonderful person on earth. He was one of the sort of men whose habit is
+to turn up wherever you may happen to be, in whatever part of the world,
+with no apparent reason for being there except to talk to you,&mdash;the last
+time we met was in a remote corner of Kensington Gardens in London,
+where he took up the talk just where we had left off at the <i>Nazionale</i>
+in Rome&mdash;and as it is years since he
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+
+ has turned up anywhere to talk to
+us, I fear he has joined the Philadelphia Architect and Donoghue where
+he will talk no more.</p>
+
+<p>In sheer physical power of speech he was without a rival and none
+surpassed him in appreciation of his eloquence. His interest never
+flagged so long as he held the floor, though when we wanted him to
+listen to us, he did not attempt to conceal his indifference. We could
+not tell him anything, for there was nothing about which he did not know
+more than we could hope to. He, at any rate, had no doubt of his own
+omniscience. Judging from the intimate details with which he regaled us,
+he was equally in the confidence of the Vatican and the Quirinal,
+equally at home with the Blacks and the Whites. The secrets of the Roman
+aristocracy were his, he was the first to hear the scandals of the
+foreign colony. The opera depended upon his patronage and balls
+languished without him, though I could never understand how or why, so
+rarely did he leave us to enjoy them. Every arch&aelig;ologist, every scholar,
+every historian in Rome appealed to him for help, and as for art, it was
+folly for others to pretend to speak of it in his presence. He called
+himself an artist and for a time he used to go with J. to Gigi's, the
+life school where artists then in Rome
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+
+ often went of an afternoon to
+draw from the model. But J. never saw him there with as much as a scrap
+of paper or a pencil in his hands, and nobody ever saw him at work
+anywhere. For what he did not do he made up by telling us of what he
+might do. His were the pictures unpainted which, like the songs unsung,
+are always the best. He condescended to approve of the Old Masters,
+assured that the masterpieces he might choose to produce must rank with
+theirs, but he never forgot the great gulf fixed between himself and the
+Modern Masters, whose pictures were worthy of his approval only when he
+had been their inspiration. It was fortunate for American Art that
+scarcely an American artist could be named whom Forepaugh had not
+inspired. And if he praised Abbey and Millet more than most, it was
+because he had posed for both and could answer for it that Millet's
+porch, or studio, or dining-room, which had had the honour of serving as
+his background, was as true as the figure of himself set against it.</p>
+
+<p>Like all talkers who know too much, Forepaugh had, what Carlyle called,
+a terrible faculty for developing into a bore. Some of our little group
+would run when they saw him at the door, others took malicious pleasure
+in interrupting
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+
+him and suddenly changing the conversation in the hope
+to catch him tripping. But out of all such tests he came triumphantly. I
+never thought him more wonderful than the evening when somebody abruptly
+began to talk about Theosophy in the middle of one of his confidences
+about the Italian Court. It was no use. Without stopping to take breath,
+at once Forepaugh began to tell us the most marvellous theosophical
+adventures, which he knew not by hearsay, but because he had passed
+through them himself. We might express an opinion: he stated facts. And
+it seemed that he had no more intimate friend than Sinnett, and that to
+Sinnett he had confessed his scepticism, asking for a sign, a
+manifestation, and that one afternoon when they were smoking over their
+coffee and cognac after lunch in Sinnett's chambers, then on the third
+floor of a house near the Oxford Street end of Bond Street&mdash;Forepaugh
+was carefully exact in his details&mdash;Sinnett smiled mysteriously but said
+nothing except to warn him to hold on tight to the table. And up rose
+the table, with the litter of coffee cups, cigars, and cognac, up rose
+the two chairs, one at either end with Sinnett and Forepaugh sitting on
+them, and away they floated out of the open window&mdash;it was a June
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+
+afternoon&mdash;and along Bond Street, above the carriages and the hansoms
+and omnibuses and the people as far as Piccadilly, and round the lamp
+post by Egyptian Hall, up Bond Street again, and in at the window. "Hold
+on," said Sinnett, and "I never held on to anything as tight in my life
+as I did to that table," said Forepaugh in conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>He always reminded me of the man who so annoyed my Uncle, Charles
+Godfrey Leland, by always knowing, doing, or having everything better or
+bigger than anybody else. "Why, if I were to tell him I had an elephant
+in my back yard," my Uncle used to say, "he would at once invite me to
+see the mastodon in his." Forepaugh had a mastodon up his sleeve for
+everybody else's elephant.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol03.jpg" width="500" height="631" alt="By Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company
+ELIHU VEDDER" title="ELIHU VEDDER" />
+<span class="caption">By Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company<br />
+ELIHU VEDDER</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>If Forepaugh gave us a great deal of information we had no possible use
+for and talked us to despair, he was really a good fellow whom we should
+have missed from our table. And it was through him J. and I were first
+made welcome in that one house open to us, to which I have been all this
+time in coming. For it was Forepaugh who told Vedder we were in Rome,
+and Vedder,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+
+once he knew it, would not hear of our shutting his door
+in our own faces, nor would Mrs. Vedder, whatever the condition of our
+wardrobe.</p>
+
+<p>Vedder may have revealed many things in his recent <i>Digressions</i>, but
+not the extent of the hospitality he and his wife showed to the American
+who was a stranger in Rome, where, even then, they had been long at
+home. Mrs. Vedder carried her amiability to the point of climbing our
+six flights of stairs and calling on me in the rooms that suited us
+admirably for our work but were less adapted to afternoon receptions,
+and she would have gone further and shown me how to adapt them by moving
+every bit of furniture from where it was and arranging it all over
+again. Not the least part of her friendliness was not to mind when I did
+not fall in with her plans, as I couldn't, since so long as the sun
+shone in at the windows all was right with the rooms as far as I could
+see. I was in the absurd stage of industry when I did not care where my
+Roman furniture stood so long as my Roman tasks got done. Even our
+<i>padrona</i> told me her surprise that, foreigner as I was, I seemed to do
+as much work as she did, which I accepted as a compliment. After that
+first attempt Mrs. Vedder did not return to climb our six flights, but
+she would
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+
+ not let us off from climbing her four or five.</p>
+
+<p>Often as we took advantage of their hospitality, we never found the
+Vedders alone and, chiefly American as was the group at their fireside,
+it was never without a foreigner or two. The first person we were
+introduced to on the first visit was the Englishman who would have
+deserted us in the <i>Ghetto</i> had we let him have his way, and who, when
+he saw us, looked as if he wished the Vedders had learned to be less
+indiscriminate in their hospitality. We had the satisfaction of knowing
+that we made him supremely uncomfortable. He frowned upon us then as he
+continued to all through the winter. He could not forgive us for having
+found him out and was evidently afraid we were going to tell everybody
+about it. He was something very learned and was occupied in writing a
+book on Ancient Rome; later he became something more important at South
+Kensington. But no degree of learning and importance helped him to
+forget, or anyway to forgive. At chance meetings years afterwards in
+London he frowned, as no doubt he would still had he not long since gone
+to the land where I hope all frowns are smoothed from his frowning brow.</p>
+
+<p>If he frowned, there was another Englishman
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+
+ who smiled: an elderly man
+with the imperturbable serenity of a Buddha. He also had written books,
+I believe. I remember articles by him, with art for subject, in the
+<i>Portfolio</i> at a time when everybody had taken to writing about art, and
+I think his name was Davies. But it would be more in character to forget
+that he ever worked or had a name. When I was in Rome he had risen above
+activity and toil to the contemplative life and, I suppose, to the
+income that made it possible. One night he explained his philosophy to
+me. Men could not be happy without sunshine, he thought. The sun was
+house, food, clothes, furniture, identity, everything, and as most of
+the year in England sunshine was not to be had at any price, he had come
+to live in Rome where almost all the year it was his for nothing. He sat
+on the Pincian or in other gardens during the day, doing nothing in the
+sunshine&mdash;that was living. And he urged me to follow his example and not
+to wait until half my life had been wasted in the pursuit of happiness
+where it was not to be found. He may have been right, but I never needed
+to become a philosopher to value the virtue of indolence,&mdash;my trouble is
+that I have never had the money to pay for it. Any man has the ability
+to do nothing, a great authority has
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+
+ said, and I can answer for one
+woman who has more than her fair share of it. I have always envied the
+North American Indians for their enjoyment of what it seems Burke
+attributed to them: "the highest boon of Heaven, supreme and perpetual
+indolence."</p>
+
+<p>As regular a visitor was a huge long-bearded Norwegian who looked a
+prophet and was an artist, and who spent most of the winter in the study
+of Marion Crawford's novels, I cannot imagine why, as they roused him to
+fury.</p>
+
+<p>"Marion Crawford," he would thunder at us as if somehow we were
+responsible, "Bah! He is a weak imitator of Bulwer, that is all, and he
+has not Bulwer's power of construction. He is not Bulwer. No. He is a
+weakling. Bah!"</p>
+
+<p>My only quarrel with Marion Crawford's books was that they never excited
+strong emotion in me, one way or the other, and I was so puzzled by his
+excitement that I remember I went to the trouble of getting out <i>Mr.
+Isaacs</i> and <i>A Roman Singer</i> from Piali's Library in the <i>Piazza di
+Spagna</i>, that centre of learning and literature for the English in Rome
+where, one day when I asked for Pepys's Diary, they offered me Marcus
+Ward's. A new course of Marion Crawford left me as puzzled as ever for
+the reason of the Norwegian's
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+
+rage, and I was the more impressed with
+the possibilities of a temperament that could heat itself to such a
+degree at so lukewarm a fire.</p>
+
+<p>We were as certain to find this fiery Norseman and the two Englishmen
+any night we called as Vedder himself. Other men came and went, amongst
+them a few Italians and Frenchmen and more Americans, Coleman for one
+among them, but none could have appeared as regularly, so much fainter
+is the impression they have left with me. Naturally, they were mostly
+artists and at Vedder's, as at the <i>caf&eacute;</i>, the talk was chiefly of art.
+There was little of his work to see, for his studio was some distance
+from his apartment. But it was enough to see Vedder himself or, for that
+matter, enough to hear him. In his own house he led the talk, even
+Forepaugh having small chance against him. He was as prolific, a
+splendidly determined and animated talker. It was stimulating just to
+watch him talk. He was never still, he rarely sat down, he was always
+moving about, walking up and down, at times breaking into song and even
+dance. He was then in his prime, large, with a fine expressive face, and
+as American in his voice, in his manner, in his humour as if he had
+never crossed the Atlantic. The true American never gets Europeanized,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+
+nor does he want to, however long he may stay on the wrong side of the
+Atlantic. When I was with Vedder, Broadway always seemed nearer than the
+<i>Corso</i>.</p>
+
+<p>He had recently finished the illustrations for the <i>Rubaiyat</i> and the
+book was published while we were in Rome. It was never long out of his
+talk. He would tell us the history of every design and of every model or
+pot in it. He exulted in the stroke of genius by which he had invented a
+composition or a pose. I have heard him describe again and again how he
+drew the flight of a spirit from a model, outstretched and flopping up
+and down on a feather bed laid upon the studio floor, until she almost
+fainted from fatigue, while he worked from a hammock slung just above. I
+recall his delight when a friend of Fitzgerald's sent him Fitzgerald's
+photograph with many compliments, asking for his in return. And he
+rejoiced in the story of Dr. Chamberlain filling a difficult tooth for
+the Queen and all the while singing the praises of the <i>Rubaiyat</i> until
+she ordered a copy of the <i>&eacute;dition de luxe</i>. In looking back, I always
+seem to see Mrs. Vedder pasting notices into a scrap book, and to hear
+Vedder declaiming Omar's quatrains and describing his own drawings.
+There was one evening when he
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+
+came to a dead stop in his walk and his
+talk, and shaking a dramatic finger at us all, said:</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you what it is. I am not Vedder. I am Omar Khayyam!"</p>
+
+<p>"No," drawled the voice of a disgusted artist who had not got a word in
+for more than an hour, "No, you're not. You're the Great I Am!"</p>
+
+<p>Vedder laughed with the rest of us, but I am not sure he liked it. He
+could and did enjoy a joke, even if at his expense. I remember his
+delight one night in telling the story of an old lady who had visited
+his studio during the day and who sat so long in front of one of his
+pictures he thought it was having its effect, but whose only comment at
+the end of several minutes was: "That's a pretty frame you have there!"
+He was sensitive to criticism, however, though he carried it off with a
+laugh. Clarence Cook was one of the critics of his Omar who offended
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"It's funny," Vedder said, "all my life I've hurt Clarence's feelings.
+He always has been sure I have done my work for no other reason than to
+irritate him, and now that's the way he feels about the Omar."</p>
+
+<p>The laugh was not so ready when Andrew Lang&mdash;I think it was Lang&mdash;wrote
+that Vedder's
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
+
+ Omar Khayyam was not of Persia, but of Skaneateles. And
+after I suggested that it was really of Rome, and some mistaken friend
+at home sent my article to Vedder, I never thought him quite so cordial.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>And so the winter passed. For us there was always a refuge from our cold
+rooms at the <i>caf&eacute;</i> or at Vedder's, and it was seldom we did not profit
+by it.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally during our rambles we stumbled unexpectedly upon old
+friends "doing Italy" and genuinely glad to see us, as we were to see
+them, inviting us to their hotels at every risk of the disapproval of
+manager and porters and waiters; and so powerful was the influence of
+Rome and the <i>caf&eacute;</i> that now the marvel was to sit and listen to talk
+about Philadelphia, and where everybody was going for the summer, and
+who was getting married, and who had died, and what Philadelphia was
+thinking and doing, as if, after all, there were still benighted people
+in the world who believed not in art, but in Philadelphia as of supreme
+importance.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally we made new friends outside of our pleasant <i>caf&eacute;</i> life. I
+have forgotten how,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
+
+ though I have not forgotten it was in Rome, thanks
+to a letter of introduction from Dr. Garnett of the British Museum, that
+we first met Miss Harriet Waters Preston, who, for her part, had already
+introduced me to Mistral&mdash;how many Americans had heard of Mistral before
+she translated <i>Mir&egrave;io</i>?&mdash;and who now accepted us, cycling tweeds and
+all, notwithstanding the shock they must have been to the admirably
+appointed <i>pension</i> where she stayed. She also climbed our six flights,
+her niece and collaborator, Miss Louise Dodge, with her, probably both
+busy that winter collecting facts for their <i>Private Life of the
+Romans</i>, and where could they have found a more perfect background for
+the past they were studying than when they looked down from our windows
+over Rome, to the <i>Campagna</i> beyond, and upon the horizon the shining
+line that we knew was the Mediterranean,&mdash;over all the beauty that has
+not changed in the meanwhile, though old streets and old villas and old
+slums have vanished. And at these times, in the talk, not Philadelphia,
+but literature was for a while art's rival.</p>
+
+<p>And there were days when we played truant and climbed down in the
+morning's first freshness from the high room overlooking Rome and the
+work that had to be done in it, and loafed all day
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>
+
+ in Roman galleries
+and at Roman ceremonies, or strayed to places further afield&mdash;Tivoli,
+Albano, Ostia, Marino, Rocca di Papa,&mdash;getting back to Rome with feet
+too tired to take us anywhere except up our six flights again. And there
+were nights when the affairs of Rome drew us from the <i>caf&eacute;</i>. I remember
+once our little group interrupted their interminable arguments long
+enough to see the Tiber in flood, down by the <i>Ripetta</i>, where people
+were going about in boats, and Rome looked like the Venice to which I
+had then never been, and we met King Humbert and Queen Margherita in his
+American trotting wagon driving down alone so as to show their sympathy,
+for, whatever they may not have done, they always appeared in person
+when their people were in trouble: not so many weeks before we had
+watched the enthusiasm with which the Romans greeted King Humbert on his
+return from visiting the cholera-stricken town of Naples. And I remember
+on <i>Befana</i> Night we adjourned to the <i>Piazza Navona</i> to blow horns and
+reed whistles into other people's ears and to have them blown into ours.
+For the humours of the Carnival there was no need to leave the <i>caf&eacute;</i>,
+where one <i>Pulcinello</i> after another broke into our talk with witticisms
+that kept the <i>caf&eacute;</i> in an uproar, and
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+
+ for me destroyed whatever
+sentiment there might have been in the thought that this was my last
+night in Rome&mdash;the last of the friendly nights of talk in the
+<i>Nazionale</i> to which we always returned no matter how far we might
+occasionally stray from it&mdash;the friendly nights of talk when I learned
+my folly in ever having believed that anything in the world mattered,
+that anything in the world existed, save art.</p>
+
+<p><i>Pulcinello</i>, the newest of our Roman friends, went with us from Rome,
+following us to Naples, a familiar face to lighten our homesickness for
+the rooms full of sunshine at the top of the high house on the top of
+the high hill, and for the blue plush and the gilding and the mirrors
+and the talk of the <i>Nazionale</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And <i>Pulcinello</i> went with us to Pompeii, reappearing during our nights
+at the <i>Albergo del Sole</i>, that most delightful and impossible of all
+the inns that ever were. It may have vanished in the quarter of a
+century that has passed since the February day I came to it, when the
+sky was as blue as the sea, and a soft cloud hung over Vesuvius, and
+flowers were sweet in the land&mdash;can anyone who ever smelt it forget the
+sweetness of the flowering bean in the wide fields near the Bay of
+Naples? But Pompeii could never be
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+
+the same without the <i>Sole</i>. And it
+was made for our shabbiness, its three tumbled-down little houses ranged
+round the three sides of an unkempt, mud-floored court; our bedroom
+without lock or latch and with a mirror cracked from side to side like
+the Lady of Shalott's, though for other reasons; the dining-room with
+earthen floor, walls decorated by a modern-primitive fresco of the
+<i>padrone</i> holding a plate of <i>maccheroni</i> in one hand and a flask of
+<i>Lachrima Christi</i> in the other, a central column spreading out branches
+like a tree and bearing for fruit row upon row of still unopened
+bottles, a door free to all the stray monks and beggars of Pompeii&mdash;to
+all the fowls too, including the gorgeous peacock that strolled in after
+its evening walk with the young Swiss artist on the flat roof of the inn
+where, together, they went before dinner to watch the sunset.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout dinner, at the head of the long table where we sat with the
+Swiss artist and an old German professor of art and an older Italian
+arch&aelig;ologist, the talk, as at the <i>Nazionale</i>, was of art, so that it
+also, like <i>Pulcinello</i>, crying his jests through the window or at our
+elbow, made me feel at home. While we helped ourselves from that amazing
+dish into which you stuck a fork
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+
+ and pulled out a bit of chicken or
+duck or beef or mutton or sausage; while the old professor and
+arch&aelig;ologist absent-mindedly stretched a hand to the column behind them,
+and plucked from it bottle after bottle of wine; while the beggars
+whined at the open door, and the monks begged at our side, and
+<i>Pulcinello</i> capered and jested and sang; while the American tourists at
+the other end of the table deplored the disorder and noise until we sent
+them the longest and most expensive way up Vesuvius to get rid of them;
+while the fowls fought for the crumbs;&mdash;the talk was still of art and
+again of art, in the end as in the beginning. I might not understand
+half of it, coming as it did in a confused torrent of German, Italian,
+French, and English, but the nights at the <i>Sole</i>, like the nights at
+the <i>Nazionale</i>, made this one truth clear: that nothing matters in the
+world, that nothing exists in the world, save art.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h2>NIGHTS</h2>
+<h3>IN VENICE</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IN VENICE</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>We reached Venice at an unearthly hour of a March morning and the first
+thing I knew of it somebody was shouting, "<i>Venezia!</i>" and I was
+startled from a sound sleep, and porters were scrambling for our bags,
+and we were stumbling after them, up a long platform, between a crowd of
+men in hotel caps yelling: "<i>Danieli!</i>" "<i>Britannia!</i>" and I hardly
+heard what, out into a fog as impenetrable as night or London. The
+muffled, ghostly cries of "<i>gundola! gundola!</i>" from invisible
+gondoliers on invisible waters would have sent me back into the station
+even had there been a chance to find so modest a hotel as the <i>Casa
+Kirsch</i> open so preposterously early, and my first impressions of Venice
+were gathered in the freezing, foggy station restaurant where J. and I
+drank our coffee and yawned, and I would have thought Ruskin a fraud
+with his purple passage describing the traveller's arrival in Venice
+upon which I had based my expectations, had I been wide enough awake to
+think of anything at all, and the hours stretched themselves into
+centuries before
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+
+ a touch of yellow in the fog suggested a sun shining
+in some remote world, and we crawled under the cover of one of the dim
+black boats that emerged vaguely, a shadow from the shadows.</p>
+
+<p>I had looked forward to my first <i>gondola</i> ride for that "little first
+Venetian thrill" that Venice owes to the stranger. But I did not thrill,
+I shivered with cold and damp and fog as the <i>gondola</i> pushed through
+the yellow gloom in the sort of silence you can feel, and tall houses
+towered suddenly and horribly above us, and strange yells broke the
+stillness before and behind, when another black boat with a black figure
+at the stern, came out of the gloom, scraped and bumped our side, and
+was swallowed up again.</p>
+
+<p>And after we were on the landing of the <i>Casa Kirsch</i>, and up in our
+rooms, and the fog lifted, and the sun shone, and we looked out of our
+windows with all Venice in our faces, and J. took me to see the town, my
+impressions were still foggy with sleep. For, from Pompeii, where there
+had been work, to Venice where there was to be more, we had hurried by
+one of those day-and-night flights to which J. has never accustomed me,
+the hurried, crowded pauses at Naples and Orvieto and Florence and Pisa
+and Lucca and Pistoia turning the journey into a beautiful
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+
+ nightmare of
+which all I was now seeing became but a part: the <i>Riva</i>, canals, sails,
+<i>Bersaglieri</i>, the Ducal Palace, the Bridge of Sighs, St. Mark's, the
+<i>Piazza</i>, <i>gondolas</i>, women in black, white sunlight, pigeons, tourists,
+the <i>Campanile</i>, following one upon another with the inconsequence of
+troubled dreams. And then we were on the <i>Rialto</i> and J. was saying "Of
+course you know that?" and I was answering "Of course, the Bridge of
+Sighs!" and the many years between have not blunted the edge of his
+disgust or my remorse. But my disgrace drove me back to the <i>Casa
+Kirsch</i>, to sleep for fifteen blessed hours before looking at one other
+beautiful thing or troubling my head about what we were to do with our
+days and our nights in Venice.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>What we were to do with our days settled itself the next morning as soon
+as I woke. For Venice, out of my window, was rising from the sea with
+the dawn, everything it ought to have been the morning before, and I had
+no desire to move from a room that looked down upon the <i>Riva</i>, and
+across to <i>San Giorgio</i>, and beyond the island&mdash;and sail-strewn lagoon
+to the low line of
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+
+ the <i>Lido</i>, and above to the vastness of the
+Venetian sky.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was there trouble in providing for our nights. Before I left home a
+romantic friend had pictured me in Venice, wrapped in black lace,
+forever floating in a <i>gondola</i> under the moon. But my Roman winter had
+taught me how much more likely the gas-light of some little <i>trattoria</i>
+and <i>caf&eacute;</i> was to shine upon me in my well-worn tweeds, my education
+having got so far advanced that any other end to my day of work could
+not seem possible. The only question was upon which of the many little
+<i>trattorie</i> and <i>caf&eacute;s</i> in Venice our choice should fall, and this was
+decided for us by Duveneck, whom we ran across that same morning in the
+<i>Piazza</i>, and who told us that he slept in the <i>Casa Kirsch</i>, dined at
+the <i>Antica Panada</i>, and drank coffee at the <i>Orientale</i>, which was as
+much as to say that we might too if we liked. And of course we liked,
+for it is a great compliment when a man in Venice, or any Italian
+town,&mdash;especially if he is of the importance and distinction to which
+Duveneck had already attained,&mdash;makes you free to join him at dinner and
+over after-dinner coffee. It is more than a compliment. It launches you
+in Venice as to be presented at court launches you in London.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol04.jpg" width="500" height="681" alt="Painting by Joseph R. De Camp
+FRANK DUVENECK" title="FRANK DUVENECK" />
+<span class="caption">Painting by Joseph R. De Camp<br />
+FRANK DUVENECK</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+
+We began that night to dine at the <i>Panada</i> and drink coffee at the
+<i>Orientale</i>, and we kept on dining at the <i>Panada</i> and drinking coffee
+at the <i>Orientale</i> every night we were in Venice; except when it was a
+<i>festa</i> and we followed Duveneck to the <i>Calcino</i>, where various Royal
+Academicians sustained the respectability Ruskin gave it by his
+patronage and Symonds tried to live up to; or when there was music in
+the <i>Piazza</i> and, happy to do whatever Duveneck did, we went with him to
+the <i>Quadri</i> or <i>Florian's</i>; or when it stormed, as it can in March, and
+all day from my window I had looked down upon the dripping <i>Riva</i> and
+the wind-waved Lagoon and lines of fishing boats moored to the banks,
+and no living creatures except the gulls, and the little white woolly
+dogs on the fishing boats covered with sails, and the sailors miserably
+huddled together, and gondoliers in yellow oilskins, and the
+<i>Bersaglieri</i> in hoods&mdash;what the <i>Bersaglieri</i> were doing there even in
+sunshine was one of the mysteries of Venice;&mdash;then we went with Duveneck
+no further than the kitchen of the <i>Casa Kirsch</i>, for he hated, as we
+hated, the <i>table d'h&ocirc;te</i> from which, there as everywhere, German
+tourists were talking away every other nationality.</p>
+
+<p>The kitchen was a huge room, with high ceiling,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+
+ and brass and copper
+pots and pans on the whitewashed walls, and a dim light about the
+cooking stove, and dark shadowy corners. The <i>padrona</i> laid the cloth
+for us in an alcove opposite the great fireplace, while she and her
+family sat at a table against the wall to the right, and the old cook
+ate at a bare table in the middle, and the maid-servant sat on a stool
+by the fire with her plate in her lap, and the man-servant stood in the
+corner with his plate on the dresser. Having thus expressed their
+respect for class distinctions, they felt no further obligation, but
+they all helped equally in cooking and serving, talked together the
+whole time, quarrelled, called each other names, and laughed at the old
+man's stories told in the Venetian which I only wish I had understood
+then as well as I did a few weeks later, when it was too late, for, with
+the coming of spring, there were no storms to keep us from the <i>Panada</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Just where the <i>Panada</i> was I would not attempt to say; not from any
+desire to keep it secret, which would be foolish, for Baedeker long
+since found it out; but simply because I could not very well show the
+way to a place I never could find for myself. I knew it was somewhere
+round the corner from the <i>Piazza</i>, but I never
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+
+ rounded that corner
+alone without becoming involved in a labyrinth of little <i>calli</i>. Nor
+would I attempt to say why the artists chose it and why, because they
+did, we should, for it was then the dirtiest, noisiest, and most crowded
+<i>trattoria</i> in Venice, though the last time I was there, years
+afterwards, it was so spick and span, with another room and more waiters
+to relieve the congestion, that I could not believe it really was the
+<i>Panada</i> and, with the inconsistency natural under the circumstances,
+did not like it half so well.</p>
+
+<p>No matter whether we got there early or late, the <i>Panada</i> was always
+full. As soon as we sat down we began our dinner by wiping our glasses,
+plates, forks, spoons, and knives on our napkins, making such a habit of
+it that I remember afterwards at a dinner-party in London catching
+myself with my glass in my hand and stopping only just in time, while
+Duveneck, on another occasion, got as far as the silver before he was
+held up by the severe eye of his hostess. Probably it was because nobody
+could hear what anybody said that everybody talked together. I cannot
+recall a moment when stray musicians were not strumming on guitars and
+mandolins, and the oyster man was not shrieking: "<i>Ostreche!</i>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+
+<i>Fresche!
+Ostreche!</i>" though nobody paid the least attention to him or ever bought
+one of his oysters. And above the uproar was the continuous cry: "<i>Ecco
+me! Vengo subito! Mezzo Verona! Due Calomai! Vengo subito! Ecco me!</i>" of
+the waiters, who, though they never ceased to announce their coming,
+were so slow to come that many diners brought a course or two in their
+pockets to occupy them during the intervals.</p>
+
+<p>The little Venetian at the next table was sure to produce a bunch of
+radishes while he waited for his soup; on market days, when there was
+more of a crowd than ever, few of the many baked potatoes eaten at
+almost every table had seen the inside of the <i>Panada's</i> oven; often the
+shops that fill the Venetian <i>calli</i> with the perpetual smell of frying
+and where the brasses and the blue-and-white used to shine, were
+patronized on the way&mdash;if dinner has to be collected in the streets, no
+town, even in Italy, offers such facilities as Venice. From <i>Minestra</i>
+to fruit and cheese, the Venetian in a few minutes' walk may pick up a
+substantial dinner and carry it to the rooms or the street corner where
+it is his habit to dine. Vance, the painter, who sometimes favoured us
+at our table with his company, went
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>
+
+further and, after he had taken off
+his coat and put on his hat and emptied his pockets, seldom troubled the
+establishment to provide him with more than a glass, a plate, a knife,
+and a fork, for the price of a <i>quinto</i> of Verona. His first, and as it
+turned out his last, more extravagant order, was the event of the
+season. The <i>padrone</i> discussed it with him and a message was sent to
+the cook that the dish was <i>di bistecca</i>. When it came it was not cooked
+enough to suit Vance. A second was cooked too much. The third was done
+to a turn. In the bill, however, were the three, and voices were
+lowered, mandolins and guitars were stilled, the oyster man forgot his
+shriek, during the five awful minutes when Vance and the <i>padrone</i> had
+it out. After that Vance made another <i>trattoria</i> the richer by his
+daily <i>quinto</i>.</p>
+
+<p>J. and I had our five minutes with the <i>padrone</i> later on once when
+Rossi, our waiter, was so slow that our patience gave out and we shook
+the dust of the <i>Panada</i> from our feet. But we could not shake off
+Rossi. He had arrived with our dinner just as we were vanishing from the
+door and was made to pay for it. After that his leisure was spent in
+trying to make us pay him back and he would appear at our bedroom door,
+or waylay us
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+
+ on the <i>Riva</i>, or follow us into the <i>Orientale</i>, or run
+us down in the <i>Piazza</i>, demanding the money as a right, begging for it
+as a charity, reducing it by a <i>centesimo</i> every time until we had only
+to wait long enough for the debt to be wiped out. But this was at the
+end of our stay in Venice, and months of dining at the <i>Panada</i> had
+passed before then.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol05.jpg" width="500" height="380" alt="Etching by Joseph Pennell
+THE CAF&Eacute; ORIENTALE, VENICE" title="CAF&Eacute; ORIENTALE, VENICE" />
+<span class="caption">Etching by Joseph Pennell<br />
+THE CAF&Eacute; ORIENTALE, VENICE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I would be as puzzled to explain the attraction of the <i>Orientale</i> on
+the <i>Riva</i>, unless it was the opportunity it offered for economy. In the
+<i>Piazza</i>, at the <i>Quadri</i> and <i>Florian's</i>, which are to the other
+<i>caf&eacute;s</i> of Venice what St. Mark's is to the other churches, coffee was
+twenty <i>centesimi</i> and the waiter expected five more, but at the
+<i>Orientale</i> it was eighteen and the waiter was satisfied with the change
+from twenty, which meant for us the saving every night of almost half a
+cent. The <i>Orientale</i> was by comparison as quiet and deserted as the
+<i>Panada</i> was crowded and noisy. Outside, tables looked upon the Lagoon
+and the fa&ccedil;ade of <i>San Giorgio</i>, white in the night. In a big, new,
+gilded room sailors and sergeants played checkers and more serious
+Venetians worked out dismal problems in chess. But Duveneck's corner was
+in the older, shabby,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+
+ stuffy, low-ceilinged room, and having once
+settled there we never wanted to move. As a rule we shared it with only
+an elderly Englishman and his son who read the <i>Standard</i> in the
+opposite corner&mdash;after our race with them to the <i>caf&eacute;</i>, the winners
+getting the one English paper first&mdash;and we were seldom intruded upon or
+interrupted except by the occasional visit of the <i>caramei</i> man with his
+brass tray of candied fruit, impaled on thin sticks, like little birds
+on a skewer, which led us into our one extravagance.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>Had the old room been seedier and duller&mdash;dull our company never was&mdash;I
+still would have seen it through the glamour of youth and thought it the
+one place in which to study Venice and Venetian life. But nobody who
+ever sat there with us could have complained of dulness so long as
+Duveneck presided at our table. In Duveneck's case I cannot help
+breaking my golden rule never to speak in print of the living&mdash;rules
+were made to be broken. And why shouldn't I? I might as well not write
+at all about our nights in Venice as to leave him out of them, he who
+held them together and fashioned them into what they were. In the
+<i>Atlantic</i>, as a makeshift, I called him Inglehart, the disguise under
+which he figures in one of Howells's novels.
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+
+ But why not call him
+boldly by his name when Inglehart is the thinnest and flimsiest of
+masks, as friends of his were quick to tell me, and Duveneck means so
+much more to all who know&mdash;and all who do not know are not worth
+bothering about. It was only yesterday at San Francisco that the artists
+of America gave an unmistakable proof of what their opinion of Duveneck
+is now. In the Eighties "the boys" already thought as much of him and a
+hundred times more.</p>
+
+<p>Duveneck, as I remember him then&mdash;I have seen him but once since&mdash;was
+large, fair, golden-haired, with long drooping golden moustache, of a
+type apt to suggest indolence and indifference. As he lolled against the
+red velvet cushions smoking his Cavour, enjoying the talk of others as
+much as his own or more&mdash;for he had the talent of eloquent silence when
+he chose to cultivate it&mdash;his eyes half shut, smiling with casual
+benevolence, he may have looked to a stranger incapable of action, and
+as if he did not know whether he was alone or not, and cared less. And
+yet he had a big record of activity behind him, young as he was; he
+always inspired activity in others, he was rarely without a large and
+devoted following. He it was who drew "the boys" to Munich, then from
+Munich to Florence, and then from Florence
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+
+ to Venice, and "the boys"
+have passed into the history of American Art and the history of
+Venice&mdash;wouldn't that give me away and explain who he was if I called
+him Inglehart dozens of times over? And he also it was who packed them
+off again before they learnt how easy it is to be content in Venice
+without doing anything at all, though I used to fancy that he would have
+been rather glad to indulge in that content himself. How far he was from
+the pleasant Venetian habit of idling all day, his Venetian etchings, at
+which he was working that spring&mdash;the etchings that on their appearance
+in London were the innocent cause of a stirring chapter in <i>The Gentle
+Art</i>&mdash;are an enduring proof. And I knew a good deal of what was going on
+in his studio at the time, for J. spent many busy hours with him there,
+while I, left to my own devices, stared industriously from the windows
+of the <i>Casa Kirsch</i>, making believe I was gathering material, or
+strolled along the <i>Riva</i> pretending it was to market for my midday
+meal, though the baker was almost next door, and the man from whom I
+bought the little dried figs that nowhere are so dried and shrivelled up
+as in Venice, was seldom more than a minute away. I can see now, when I
+consider how my Venetian days were spent, that I came perilously
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+
+ near
+to sinking to the deepest depths of Venetian idleness myself.</p>
+
+<p>We were never alone with Duveneck at the <i>Orientale</i>. The American
+Consul was sure to drop in, as he had for so many years that half his
+occupation would have gone if he hadn't dropped in any longer. Martin
+joined us because he loved to argue anybody into a temper and, as he was
+an awful bore, succeeded with most people. He could drive me to proving
+that white was black, to overturning all my most cherished idols, or to
+forgetting my timidity and laying down the law upon any point of art he
+might bring up. Duveneck alone refused to be roused and Martin, who
+could not understand or accept his failure, was forever coming back,
+making himself a bigger bore than ever, by trying again. But Shinn was
+the only man I ever knew to put Duveneck into something like a temper,
+and that was by asking him deferentially one night if he did not think
+St. Mark's a very fine church&mdash;the next minute, however, calming him
+down by inviting him out "in my gandler."</p>
+
+<p>Arnold was as regular in attendance. He found the <i>caf&eacute;</i> as comfortable
+a place to sleep in as any other. Like Sancho Panza he had a talent for
+sleeping. He had made his name and fame
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+
+as one of the Harvard baseball
+team in I will not say what year, and sleep had been his chief
+occupation ever since. No end of stories were going the round of the
+studios and <i>caf&eacute;s</i>&mdash;he invited them without wanting it or meaning to.
+He was supposed to be in Venice to study with Duveneck, at whose studio
+he was said to arrive regularly at the same hour every morning. And as
+regularly he was snoring before he had been sitting in front of his
+easel for ten minutes. During his nap, Duveneck would come round and
+shake him and before he slept again put a touch to the study and, as
+Arnold promptly dozed off, would work on it until it was finished, and
+unless it slid down the canvas with the quantity of bitumen Arnold
+used&mdash;there was one story of the beautiful eyes in a beautiful portrait,
+before they could be stopped, sliding into the chin of the pretty girl
+who was posing&mdash;Arnold, waking up eventually, would carry off the
+painting unconscious that he had not finished it himself. Nobody can say
+how many Duvenecks are masquerading at home as Arnolds while their
+owners wonder why Arnold has never since done any work a tenth as good.</p>
+
+<p>The one thing that roused him was baseball, and he was in fine form on
+the afternoons when he and a few other enthusiasts spent an hour or
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+
+ so
+on the Lido for practice. The Englishmen did not believe in the
+prodigies they heard of him as a baseball player. It wasn't easy for
+anybody to believe that a man who was always tumbling off to sleep on
+the slightest provocation could play anything decently. But I was told
+that one day he was wide enough awake to be irritated, and he bet them a
+dinner he could pitch the swell British cricketer among them three balls
+not any one of which the Briton could catch. And on Easter Monday they
+all went over to the Lido. The Briton asked for a high ball: it skimmed
+along near the ground and then rose over his head as he stooped for it.
+He asked for a low one: it came straight for his nose and, when he
+dodged it, dropped and went between his legs. He asked for a medium one:
+it curved away out to the right, he rushed for it, it curved back again
+and took him in his manly bosom. The rest of the Britons and "the boys,"
+they say, enjoyed the dinner more than he did. Such was the affair as it
+was described to me and confirmed by gossip. I pretend to no authority
+on a subject I understand so little as balls and the pitching of them.</p>
+
+<p>A better contrast to Arnold could not have been found than the artist
+with the part Spanish, part German name who called himself a Frenchman,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+
+and who aimed to give his pose the mystery that crept, or bounded when
+encouraged, into his incessant talk. I am afraid his chief encouragement
+came from me. The others were as irritated by his dabbling in magic as
+most of us had been in Rome by Forepaugh's theosophic adventures. But he
+amused me; he did not deal in the prose of his brand of magic, the
+Black, of which so much was beginning to be heard, and still more was to
+be heard, in Paris. He was all innuendo and strange hints and whispered
+secrets, and I-could-if-I-woulds. One of my recent winters had been
+devoted, not to dabbling in magic, for which I have not the temperament,
+but to reading the literature of magic or of all things psychical, and I
+could then, though I could not now, have passed a fairly good
+examination in the modern authorities, from Madame Blavatsky to Louis
+Jacolliot. Therefore I proved a sympathetic listener and heard, for my
+pains, of the revival of old religions, and above all of old rites, and
+of his dignity as high-priest, a figure of mystery and command moving
+here and there among shadowy disciples in shadowy sanctuaries. For one
+sunk such fathoms deep in mystery he was surprisingly concerned for the
+outward sign. Like Huysmans's hero, he believed
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+
+ in the significance of
+the material background, entertaining me with a detailed description of
+his apartment in Paris, and I have not yet lost the vision he permitted
+me of a bedroom hung and painted with scarlet, and of himself enshrined
+in it, magnificent in scarlet silk pajamas. Probably it was to deceive
+the world that he carried a tiny paint-box. I never saw him open it.</p>
+
+<p>But most constant of our little party was Jobbins, our one Englishman,
+who came in late to the <i>Orientale</i>&mdash;where, or if, he dined none of us
+could say&mdash;with the stool and canvas and paint-box he had been carrying
+about all day from one <i>campo</i>, or <i>calle</i>, or <i>canale</i>, to another, in
+search of a subject. Jobbins's trouble was that he had passed too
+brilliantly through South Kensington to do the teaching for which he was
+trained, or to be willing to do anything but paint great pictures the
+subjects for which he could never find; his mistake was to want to paint
+them in Venice where there is nothing to paint that has not been painted
+hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times before; and his misfortune
+was not to seek in adversity the comfort and hope which the philosopher
+believes to be its reward. He had become, as a consequence, the weariest
+man who breathed. It made me tired to look at him. Later,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+
+ he was forced
+to abandon his high ambition and he accepted a good post as teacher
+somewhere in India. But he lived a short time to enjoy it and I am sure
+he was homesick for Venice, and the search after the impossible, and the
+old days when he was so abominably hard up that even J. and I were
+richer. Of the complete crash by which we all gained&mdash;including the man
+who got the Whistler painted on the back of a Jobbins panel&mdash;I still
+have reminders in a brass plaque and bits of embroideries hung up on our
+walls and brocades made into screens, which J. bought from him to save
+the situation, at the risk of creating a new one from which somebody
+would have to save us.</p>
+
+<p>For all his weariness, Jobbins looked ridiculously young. He insisted
+that this was what lost him his one chance of selling a picture. He was
+painting in the Frari a subject which he vainly hoped was his own, when
+an American family of three came and stared over his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it's going to be a picture!" the small child discovered.</p>
+
+<p>"And he such a boy too!" the mother marvelled.</p>
+
+<p>"Then it can't be of any value," the father said in the loud cheerful
+voice in which American
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
+
+ and English tourists in Venice make their most
+personal comments, convinced that nobody can understand, though every
+other person they meet is a fellow countryman. A story used to be told
+of Bunney at work in the <i>Piazza</i>, on his endless study of St. Mark's
+for Ruskin, one bitter winter morning, when three English girls, wrapped
+in furs, passed. One stopped behind him:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh Maud! Ethel!" she called, "do come back and see what this poor
+shivering old wretch is doing."</p>
+
+<p>The talk in our corner of the <i>Orientale</i> kept us in the past until I
+began to fear that, just as some people grow prematurely grey, so J. and
+I, not a year married, had prematurely reached the time for creeping in
+close about the fire&mdash;or a <i>caf&eacute;</i> table&mdash;and telling grey tales of what
+we had been. It was a very different past from that which tourists were
+then bullied by Ruskin into believing should alone concern them in
+Venice&mdash;indeed, my greatest astonishment in this astonishing year was
+that, while the people who were not artists but posed as knowing all
+about art did nothing but quote Ruskin, artists never quoted him, and
+never mentioned him except to show how little use they had for him. But
+then, as I was beginning to find out, it is the privilege of
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+
+ the artist
+to think what he knows and to say what he thinks. We were none of us
+tourists at our little table, we were none of us seeing sights, being
+far too busy doing the work we were in Venice to do; and no matter what
+Ruskin and Baedeker taught, "the boys" gave the date which overshadowed
+for us every other in Venetian history. Nothing that had happened in
+Venice before or after counted, though "the boys" themselves were in
+their turn a good deal overshadowed by Whistler, who had been there with
+them for a while.</p>
+
+<p>It was extraordinary how the Whistler tradition had developed and
+strengthened in the little more than four years since he had left
+Venice. I had never met him then, though J. had a few months before in
+London. I hardly hoped ever to meet him; I certainly could not expect
+that the day would come when he would be our friend, with us constantly,
+letting us learn far more about him and far more intimately than from
+all the talk at a <i>caf&eacute;</i> table of those who already knew him, accepted
+him as a master, and loved him as a man. But had my knowledge of him
+come solely from those months in Venice I should still have realized the
+power of his personality and the force of his influence. He seemed
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+
+ to
+pervade the place, to colour the atmosphere. He had stayed in Venice
+only about a year. In the early Eighties little had been written of him
+except in contempt or ridicule. But to the artist he had become as
+essentially a part of Venice, his work as inseparable from its
+associations, as the Venetian painters like Carpaccio and Tintoretto who
+had lived and worked there all their lives and about whom a voluminous
+literature had grown up, culminating in the big and little volumes by
+Ruskin upon which the public crowding to Venice based their artistic
+creed. During those old nights I heard far more of the few little inches
+of Whistler's etchings and of Whistler's pastels than of the great
+expanse of Tintoretto's <i>Paradise</i> or of Carpaccio's decorations in the
+little church of <i>San Giorgio degli Schiavoni</i>. The fact made and has
+left the greater impression because the winter in Rome had not worn off,
+for me, the novelty of artists' talk or quite accustomed me to their
+point of view, to their surprising independence in not accepting the
+current and easy doctrine that everything old is sacred, everything
+modern insignificant. Because a painter happened to paint a couple of
+hundred years or more ago did not place him above their criticism;
+because he happened to
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+
+ paint to-day was apt to make him more
+interesting to them.</p>
+
+<p>At the <i>Orientale</i> the talk could never keep very long from Whistler. It
+might be of art&mdash;question of technique, of treatment, of arrangement, of
+any or all the artist's problems&mdash;and sooner or later it would be
+referred to what Whistler did or did not. Or the talk might grow
+reminiscent and again it was sure to return to Whistler. Not only at the
+<i>Orientale</i>, but at any <i>caf&eacute;</i> or restaurant or house or gallery where
+two or three artists were gathered together, Whistler stories were
+always told before the meeting broke up. It was then we first heard the
+gold-fish story, and the devil-in-the-glass story, and the
+Wolkoff-pastel story, and the farewell-feast story, and the innumerable
+stories labelled and pigeon-holed by "the boys" for future use, and so
+recently told by J. and myself in the greatest story of all&mdash;the story
+of his Life&mdash;that it is too soon for me to tell them again. Up till then
+I had shared the popular idea of him as a man who might be ridiculed,
+abused, feared, hated, anything rather than loved. But none of the men
+in Venice could speak of him without affection. "Not a bad chap,"
+Jobbins would forget his weariness to say, "not half a bad chap!" and
+one night he told
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+
+one of the few Whistler stories never yet told in
+print, except in the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> where this chapter was first
+published.</p>
+
+<p>"He rather liked me," said Jobbins, "liked to have me about, and to help
+on Sundays when he showed his pastels. But that wasn't my game, you
+know, and I got tired of it, and one Sunday when lots of people were
+there and he asked me to bring out that drawing of a <i>calle</i> with tall
+houses, and away up above clothes hung out to dry, and a pair of
+trousers in the middle, I said: 'Have you got a title for it, Whistler?'
+'No,' he said. 'Well,' I said, 'call it an <i>Arrangement in Trousers</i>,'
+and everybody laughed. I'd have sneaked away, for he was furious. But he
+wouldn't let me, kept his eye on me, though he didn't say a word until
+they'd all gone. Then he looked at me rather with that Shakespeare
+fellow's <i>Et tu Brute</i> look: 'Why, Jobbins, you, who are so amiable?'
+That was all. No, not half a bad chap."</p>
+
+<p>Now and then talk of Whistler and "the boys" reminded Duveneck of his
+own student days, and would lead him into personal reminiscences, when
+the stories were of his adventures; sometimes on Bavarian roads, singing
+and fiddling his way from village to village, or in Bavarian convents,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+
+teaching drawing to pretty novices, receiving commissions from stern
+Reverend Mothers; and sometimes in American towns painting the earliest
+American mural decoration that prepared the way, through various stages,
+for the latest American series of all&mdash;at the San Francisco Exposition
+where Duveneck was acclaimed as the American master of to-day. But in
+his story, as he told it to us, he had not got as far as Florence when a
+new turn was given to his reminiscences and to our evening talk by the
+descent upon Venice of the men from Munich.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>They were only three&mdash;McFarlane, Anthony and Thompson, shall I call
+them?&mdash;but they had not journeyed all the way from Munich to talk about
+"the boys" and to drop sentimental tears over old love tales. They were
+off on an Easter holiday and meant to make the most of it. Because
+Duveneck was Duveneck they gave up the gayer <i>caf&eacute;s</i> in the <i>Piazza</i> to
+be with him in the sleepy old <i>Orientale</i>. But they were not going to
+let it stay a sleepy old <i>Orientale</i> if they could help themselves.
+Their very first evening Duveneck called for two glasses of milk&mdash;to
+steady his nerves, he said, though he politely attributed
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+
+ the
+unsteadiness not to this new excitement but to the tea he had been
+drinking. People drifted to our room from outside and from the new room
+to see what the noise was about, until there was not a table to be had.
+The old Englishman and his son put down the <i>Standard</i> and laughed with
+us. The <i>caramei</i> man went away with an empty tray, I do believe the
+only time he was ever bought out in his life, and McFarlane treated us
+all to <i>tamarindo</i> to drink with the fruit, and he wound up his horrible
+extravagance by buying a copy of the Venetian paper "the boys" used to
+call the <i>Barabowow</i>. It was nothing short of a Venetian orgy.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did the transformation end here. The men from Munich were so smart,
+especially McFarlane, in white waistcoat, with a flower in his
+button-hole and a gold-headed cane in his hand, that we were shocked
+into the consciousness of our shabbiness. Duveneck, who, until then, had
+been happy in an old ulster with holes in the pockets and rips in the
+seams, dazzled the <i>caf&eacute;</i> by appearing in a jaunty spring overcoat. J.
+exchanged his old trousers with a green stain of acid down the leg for
+the new pair he had hitherto worn only when he went to call on the
+Bronsons or to dine with Mr. Horatio Brown,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+
+ where I could not go
+because I was so much more hopelessly unprepared to dine anywhere
+outside the <i>Panada</i> or the Kitchen of the <i>Casa Kirsch</i>. But in the
+<i>Merceria</i> I could at least supply myself with gloves and veils, while
+Jobbins unearthed a fresh cravat from somewhere. And we began to feel
+apologetic for the dinginess and general down-at-heeledness of Venice
+which bored the men from Munich to extinction&mdash;really they were so
+bored, they said, that all day they found themselves looking forward to
+the <i>caramei</i> man as the town's one excitement. I thought the
+illuminations on Easter Sunday evening, when the <i>Piazza</i> was "a
+fairyland in the night," and the music deafened us, and the Bengal
+lights blinded us, would help to give them a livelier impression; but,
+though they came with us to <i>Florian's</i>, it was plain they pitied us for
+being so pleased.</p>
+
+<p>They couldn't, for the life of them, see why the place had been so
+cracked up by Ruskin. Nothing was right. The <i>Piazza</i> was just simply
+the town's meeting place and centre of gossip, like the country village
+store, only on a more architectural and uncomfortable scale. The canals
+were breeding holes for malaria. The streets wouldn't be put up with as
+alleys at home.
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+
+ The language was not worth learning. At the <i>Panada</i>,
+after we had given our order for dinner, McFarlane would murmur
+languidly '<i>Lo stesso</i>' and declare it to be the one useful word in the
+Italian dictionary; to this Johnson added a mysterious '<i>Sensa crab</i>'
+when Rossi suggested '<i>piccoli fees</i>' under the delusion that he was
+talking English; while Anthony was quite content with the vocabulary the
+other two supplied him. The climate was as deplorable: either wet and
+cold, when the Italian <i>scaldino</i> wasn't a patch on the German stove and
+a <i>gondola</i> became a freezing machine; or warm and enervating when they
+couldn't keep awake.</p>
+
+<p>They dozed in their <i>gondola</i>, they yawned in St. Mark's and the Ducal
+Palace and in all the other churches and palaces, and in front of all
+the old doorways and bridges and boat-building yards and <i>traghettos</i>
+and fishing boats and wells and "bits" that Camillo, their gondolier,
+was inhuman enough to wake them up to look at. The beauty of Venice was
+exaggerated, or if they did come to a "subject" that made them pull
+their sketch books out of their pockets, Camillo was at once bothering
+them to do it from just where Guardi, or Canaletto, or Rico, or
+Whistler, or Ruskin, or some other old boy had painted,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+
+ etched, or
+drawn it&mdash;Whistler alone had finished Venice for every artist who came
+after him and they were tired of his very name, and never wanted to have
+his etchings and pastels thrown in their faces again. What they would
+like to do was to discover the Italian town or village where no artist
+had ever been seen and the word art had never been uttered.</p>
+
+<p>But it was Venetian painting that got most on their nerves. They had
+given it a fair chance, they protested. "Trot out your Tintorettos,"
+they said to Camillo every morning, and he carried them off to the
+Palace, and the Academy, and more churches than they thought there were
+in the world, and at last to the <i>Scuola di San Rocco</i>. And there a
+solemn man in spectacles took them in hand. They said to him too: "Trot
+our your Tintorettos," and he led them up to a big, dingy canvas, and
+they said: "Trot out your next," and they went the rounds of them all,
+and they asked, "Where's your Duveneck?" and he said he had never heard
+of Duveneck, and they said, "Why, he's here!" and they left him hunting,
+and were back in their <i>gondola</i> in ten minutes, and they guessed they
+could do with Rubens! I trembled to think of the shock to tourists and
+my highly intellectual friends at
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+
+ home, religiously studying Baedeker
+and reading Ruskin, could they have heard the men from Munich talking of
+art and of Venice. And I must have been painfully scandalized had I not
+got so much further on with my education as to have a glimmering of the
+truth Whistler was trying to beat into the unwilling head of the British
+public&mdash;that an artist knows more about art than the man who isn't an
+artist, and has the best right to an opinion on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps their disappointment in Venice was the reason of their
+preoccupation with Munich. Certainly "Now, at Munich" was the beginning
+and end of the talk as "when 'the boys' were here" had been before they
+came. They would not admit that anything good could exist outside of
+Munich. I remember Duveneck once suggesting that Paris was the best
+place for the student, to whom it was a help just to see what was going
+on around him.</p>
+
+<p>"But what does go on round the student there?" McFarlane interrupted.
+"It's all fads in Paris. What do they talk about in Paris to-day but
+values? [This, remember, was more than a quarter of a century ago.]
+That's all they teach the student, all they think of. Look at Bisbing's
+picture last year. They all raved over it, said
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
+
+ it was the <i>clou</i> of
+the Salon, medalled it, bought it for the Luxembourg, and I don't know
+what all. And what was it?&mdash;Pale green sheep in the foreground, pale
+green mountains in the background, so pale you could shoot peas through
+them. That's what you have to do now to make a success in Paris&mdash;get
+your values so that you can shoot peas through 'em. And what will it be
+to-morrow? And what help is it to the student, anyway?"</p>
+
+<p>But one thing certain is, that whatever the fads and movements in the
+Paris studios happened to be, the American student in those days did see
+what was going on in Paris, and just to see, just to feel it, was, as
+Duveneck held, a help, an inspiration. To-day, living in his own
+<i>pensions</i>, studying in his own schools, loafing in his own clubs, he
+does not take any interest in what is going on outside of them and will
+talk about what "the Frenchmen are doing" as if he were still in
+Kalamazoo or Oshkosh.</p>
+
+<p>What the student, in Duveneck's and McFarlane's time saw going on round
+him in Munich was, as well as I could make out, chiefly balls and
+pageants. To this day I cannot help thinking of life in Munich as one
+long spectacle and dance. Duveneck, who could talk with calmness of his
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+
+painting, was stirred to animation when he recalled the costumes he had
+invented for himself and his friends. He could not conceal his pride in
+the success of a South Sea Islander he had designed, the effect achieved
+by the simple means of burnt Sienna rubbed into the poor man, but so
+vigorously that it took months to get it out again, and a blanket which
+he mislaid towards morning so that his walk home at dawn, like a savage
+skulking in the shadows, was a triumph of realism. Pride, too, coloured
+Duveneck's account of the appearance of the Socialist Carpenter of his
+creation who made a huge sensation by inciting to riot in the streets of
+an elaborate Old Munich&mdash;the origin of Old London and Old Paris and all
+the sham Old Towns that Exhibitions have long since staled for us. But
+his masterpiece was the Dissipated Gentleman, like all masterpieces a
+marvel of simplicity&mdash;hired evening clothes, a good long roll in the
+muddiest gutter on the way to the ball, and it was done; but the art,
+Duveneck said, was in the rolling, which in this case, under his
+direction, was so masterly that at the door the Dissipated Gentleman was
+mistaken for the real thing and, if friends had not come up in the nick
+of time, the door would have been shut in his face.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+
+Duveneck was as enthusiastic over the Charles V. ball, though all the
+artists of Munich contributed to its splendour, working out their
+costumes with such respect for truth and so regardless of cost that for
+months and years afterwards not a bit of old brocade or lace was to be
+had in the antiquity shops of Bavaria. And the students were responsible
+for the siege of an old castle outside the town, and in their
+arch&aelig;ological ardour persuaded the Museum to lend the armour and arms of
+the correct date, and, in their appreciation of the favour, fought with
+so much restraint that the casualties were a couple of spears snapped.
+And, in my recollection, their recollections stood for such truth and
+gorgeousness that when England, years afterwards, took to celebrating
+its past with pageants, more than once I found myself thinking how much
+better they order these things in Munich!</p>
+
+<p>And from the studios came the inspiration for that ball Munich talks of
+to this day in which all the nations were represented. There was a Hindu
+temple, a Chinese pagoda, and an Indian wigwam. But the crowning touch
+was the Esquimaux hut. Placed in a hall apart, at the foot of a great
+stairway, it was built of some composition in which pitch was freely
+used, lit by
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+
+ tallow candles, and hung with herrings offered for sale by
+nine Esquimaux dressed in woollen imitation of skins with the furry side
+turned out. All evening the hut was surrounded, only towards midnight
+could the crowd be induced to move on to some fresh attraction. In the
+moment's lull, one of the Esquimaux was tying up a new line of herrings
+when he brushed a candle with his arm. In a second he was blazing.
+Another ran to his rescue. In another second the hut was a furnace and
+nine men were in flames, with pitch and wool for fuel. One of the few
+people still lounging about the hut, fearing a panic, gave the signal to
+the band, who struck up <i>Carmen</i>. Never since, McFarlane said, had he
+listened to the music of <i>Carmen</i>, never again could he listen to it,
+without seeing the burning hut, the men rushing out of it with the
+flames leaping high above them, tearing at the blazing wool, in their
+agony turning and twisting as in some wild fantastic dance, while above
+the music he could hear the laughter of the crowd, who thought it a
+joke&mdash;a new scene in the spectacle.</p>
+
+<p>He snatched a rug from somewhere and tried to throw it over one of the
+men, but the man flew past to the top of the great stairway. There he
+was seized and rolled over and over on the carpet
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+
+ until the flames were
+out. He got up, walked downstairs, asked for beer, drank it to the
+dregs, and fell dead with the glass in his hand&mdash;the first to die, the
+first freed from his agony. Of the nine, but two survived. Seven lay
+with their hut, a charred heap upon the ground, before the laughing
+crowd realized what a pageant of horror Fate had planned for them.</p>
+
+<p>Munich stories, before the night was over, had to be washed down with
+Munich beer, which, at that time as still, I fancy, was best at Bauer's.
+By some unwritten law, inscrutable as the written, it was decreed that,
+though I might sit all evening the only woman at our table in the
+<i>Orientale</i>&mdash;oftener than not the only woman in the <i>caf&eacute;</i>&mdash;it was not
+"the thing" for me to go on to Bauer's. Therefore, first, the whole
+company would see me home. It was a short stroll along the <i>Riva</i>, but
+the Lagoon, dim and shadowy, stretched away beyond us, dimmer islands
+resting on its waters, the lights of the boats sprinkling it with gold
+under the high Venetian sky sprinkled with stars; and so beautiful was
+it, and so sweet the April night, that the men from Munich could not
+hold out against the enchantment of Venice in spring. I felt it a
+concession when McFarlane admitted the loveliness of Venice by
+starlight, and his
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+
+ languor dropped from him under the spell, and I knew
+the game of boredom was up when, in this starlight, he decided that,
+after all, there might be more in the Tintorettos than he thought if
+only he had time to study them. But Easter holidays do not last for
+ever, and the day soon came when the men from Munich had to go back to
+where all was for the best in the best of all towns, but where no doubt,
+on the principle that we always prefer what we have not got at the
+moment, they told "the fellows" in the <i>Bier Kellars</i> that only in
+Venice was life worth while, that Rubens was dingy, and that they
+guessed they could do with Tintoretto.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>Somehow, we were never the same after they left us; not, I fancy,
+because we missed them, but because we could hold out still less than
+they against the spring. When the sun was so warm and the air so soft,
+when in the little canals wistaria bloomed over high brick walls, when
+boatloads of flowers came into Venice with the morning, when at noon the
+<i>Riva</i> was strewn with sleepers&mdash;then indoors and work became an
+impertinence. On the slightest excuse J. and Duveneck no longer shut
+themselves in the studio,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+
+ I gave up collecting material from my window
+and lunch from the <i>Riva</i>, Jobbins interrupted his search and Martin his
+argument, the Consul fought shy of the old corner in the <i>caf&eacute;</i>. And in
+the languid laziness that stole upon Venice, as well as upon us, I
+penetrated for the first time to the inner meaning of the chapter in his
+<i>Venetian Life</i> that Howells labels <i>Comincia far Caldo</i>, the season
+when repose takes you to her inner heart and you learn her secrets, when
+at last you know <i>why</i> it was an Abyssinian maid who played upon her
+dulcimer, at last you recognize in Xanadu the land where you were born.</p>
+
+<p>There was never a <i>festa</i> in the <i>Piazza</i> that we were not there,
+watching or walking with the bewildering procession of elegant young
+Venetians, and peasants from the mainland, and officers, and soldiers,
+and gondoliers with big caps set jauntily on their curls, and beautiful
+girls in the gay fringed shawls that have disappeared from Venice and
+the wooden shoes that once made an endless clatter along the <i>Riva</i> but
+are heard no more, and Greeks, and Armenians, and priests, and beggars,
+passing up and down between the arcades and the <i>caf&eacute;</i> tables that
+overflowed far into the square, St. Mark's more unreal in its splendour
+than ever with its domes and galleries
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+
+and traceries against the blue
+of the Venetian night.</p>
+
+<p>There was never a side-show on the <i>Riva</i> that we did not interrupt our
+work to go and see it; whether it was the circus in the little tent,
+with the live pony, the most marvellous of all sights in Venice; or the
+acrobats tumbling on their square of carpet; or the blindfolded,
+toothless old fortune-teller, whose shrill voice I can still hear
+mumbling "<i>Una volta soltanta per Napoli!</i>" when she was asked if
+Naples, this coming summer, as the last, would be ravaged by cholera.
+She was right, for in the town, cleaned out of picturesqueness, cholera
+could not again do its work in the old wholesale fashion.</p>
+
+<p>There was never an excursion to the Islands that we did not join it. To
+visit some of the further Islands was not so easy in those days, except
+for tourists with a fortune to spend on <i>gondolas</i>, and we were grateful
+to the occasional little steamboat that undertook to get us there,
+though with a crowd and noise and a brass band, for all the world like
+an excursion to Coney Island, and though most people, except the
+grateful natives, were obediently believing with Ruskin that it was the
+symbol of the degeneracy of Venice and would have thought themselves
+disgraced
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+
+ forever if they were seen on it. But the Lagoon was as
+beautiful from the noisy, fussy little steamboat as from a <i>gondola</i>,
+the sails of the fishing boats touching it with as brilliant colour, the
+Islands lying as peacefully upon its shining waters, the bells of the
+many <i>campanili</i> coming as sweetly to our ears, the sky above as pure
+and radiant; and it mattered not how we reached the Islands, they were
+as enchanting when we landed.</p>
+
+<p>One wonderful day was at Torcello, where nothing could mar the
+loveliness of its solitude and desolation, its old cathedral full of
+strange mosaics and stranger memories, the green space in front that was
+once a <i>Piazza</i> tangled with blossoms and sweet-scented in the May
+sunshine, the purple hills on the mainland melting into the pale sky.
+And a second day as wonderful was at Burano, with its rose-flushed
+houses and gardens and traditions of noise and quarrels, and the girls
+who followed the boat along the bank and pelted us with roses until
+Jobbins vowed he would go and live there&mdash;and he did, but a market boat
+brought him back in a week. And other excursions took us to Chioggia,
+the canals there alive with fishing boats and the banks with fishermen
+mending their nets; and to Murano, busy and beautiful both, with the
+throb of its glass furnaces
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+
+ and the peace of the fields where the dead
+sleep; and again and again to the <i>Lido</i> where green meadows were
+sprinkled with daisies and birds were singing.</p>
+
+<p>More wonderful were the nights, coming home, when the gold had faded
+from sea and sky, the palaces and towers of Venice rising low on the
+horizon as in a City of Dreams, the Lagoon turned by the moon into a
+sheet of silver, lights like great fireflies stealing over the water,
+ghostly <i>gondolas</i> gliding past,&mdash;then we were the real Lotus Eaters
+drifting to the only Lotus Land where all things have rest.</p>
+
+<p>The fussy little steamboat, I found, could rock ambition to sleep as
+well as a <i>gondola</i>, and life seemed to offer nothing better than an
+endless succession of days and nights spent on its deck bound for
+wherever it might bear us. I understood and sympathized with the men who
+lay asleep all day in the sunshine on the <i>Riva</i> and who sang all night
+on the bridge below our windows. What is more, I envied them and wished
+they would take me into partnership. Were they not putting into practice
+the philosophy our ancient friend Davies had preached to me in Rome? But
+only the Venetian can master the secret of doing nothing with nothing to
+do it on,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+
+and if J. and I were to hope for figs with our bread, or even
+for bread by itself, we had to move on to the next place where work
+awaited us. And so the last of our nights in Venice came before spring
+had ripened into summer, and the last of our mornings when porters again
+scrambled for our bags, and we again stumbled after them up the long
+platform; and then there were again yells, but this time of "<i>Partenza</i>"
+and "<i>Pronti</i>," and the train hurried us away from the <i>Panada</i>, and the
+<i>Orientale</i>, and the Lagoon, to a world where no lotus grows and life is
+all labour.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+<h2>NIGHTS</h2>
+<h3>IN LONDON</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>IN LONDON</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>I cannot remember how or why we began our Thursday nights. I rather
+think they began themselves and we kept them up to protect our days
+against our friends.</p>
+
+<p>It was an unusually busy time with us&mdash;or perhaps I ought to say with
+me, for, to my knowledge, J. has never known the time that was anything
+else. After our years of wandering, years of hotels and rooms and
+lodgings, we had just settled in London in the first place we had ever
+called our own&mdash;the old chambers in the old Buckingham Street house
+overlooking the river; I was doing more regular newspaper work than I
+had ever done before or ever hope to do again; we were in the
+Eighteen-Nineties, and I need neither the magnifying glasses through
+which age has the reputation of looking backward, nor the clever young
+men of to-day who write about that delectable decade and no doubt
+deplore my indiscretion in being alive to write about it myself, to show
+me how very much more amusing and interesting life was then than now.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+
+There is no question that people, especially people doing our sort of
+work, were much more awake in the Nineties, much more alive, much more
+keen about everything, even a fight, or above all a fight, if they
+thought a fight would clear the air. Those clever young men,
+self-appointed historians of a period they know only by hearsay, may
+deplore or envy its decadence. But because a small clique wrote an&aelig;mic
+verse and bragged of the vices for which they had not the strength,
+because a few youthful artists invented new methods of expression the
+outsider did not understand, that does not mean decadence. A period of
+revolt against decadence, of insurrection, of vigorous warfare it seemed
+to me who lived and worked through it. The Yellow Nineties, the Glorious
+Nineties, the Naughty Nineties, the Rococo Nineties, are descriptions I
+have seen, but the Fighting Nineties would be mine. As I recall those
+stimulating days, the prevailing attitude of the artist in his studio,
+the author at his desk, the critic at his task, was that of Henley's Man
+in the Street:</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+Hands in your pockets, eyes on the pavement,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: -1em;">Where in the world is the fun of it all?</span><br />
+But a row&mdash;but a rush&mdash;but a face for your fist.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Then a crash through the dark&mdash;and a fall.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+
+Scarcely an important picture was painted, an important illustration
+published, an important book written, an important criticism made, that
+it did not lead to battle. Few of the Young Men of the Nineties
+accomplished all the triumphant things they thought they could, but the
+one thing they never failed to do and to let the world know they were
+doing was to fight, and they loved nothing better&mdash;coats off, sleeves
+rolled up, arms squared. Whatever happened was to them a challenge.
+Whistler began the Nineties with his Exhibition at the Groupil Gallery
+and it was a rout for the enemy. The harmless portrait of Desboutin by
+Degas was hung at the New English Art Club and straightaway artists and
+critics were bludgeoning each other in the press. Men were elected to
+the Royal Academy, pictures were bought by the Chantrey Bequest; new
+papers and magazines were started by young enthusiasts with something to
+say and no place to say it in; new poets, yearning for degeneracy, read
+their poems to each other in a public house they preferred to
+re-christen a tavern; new printing presses were founded to prove the
+superiority of the esoteric few; new criticism&mdash;new because honest and
+intelligent&mdash;was launched; everything suddenly became <i>fin-de-si&egrave;cle</i>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+
+
+in the passing catchword of the day borrowed from Paris; every fad of
+the Continent was adopted; but no matter what it might be, the incident,
+or work, or publication that roused any interest at all was the signal
+for the clash of arms, for the row and the rush. Everybody had to be in
+revolt, though it might not always have been easy to say against just
+what. I remember once, at the show of a group of young painters who
+fancied themselves fiery Independents, running across Felix Buhot, the
+most inflammable man in the world, and his telling me, with his wild
+eyes more aflame than usual, that he could smell the powder. He was not
+far wrong, if his metaphor was a trifle out of proportion to those very
+self-conscious young rebels. A good deal of powder was flying about in
+the Nineties, and when powder flies, whatever else may come of it, one
+thing sure is that nobody can sleep and most people want to talk.</p>
+
+<p>I had not been in London a year before I knew that there the <i>caf&eacute;</i> was
+not the place to talk in. I have dreary memories of the first efforts J.
+and I, fresh from Italy, made to go on leading the easy, free-from-care
+life in restaurants and <i>caf&eacute;s</i> we had led in Rome and Venice. But it
+was not to be done. The distances were too great,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+
+ the weather too
+atrocious, the little restaurants too impossible, the big restaurants
+too beyond our purse, and the only real <i>caf&eacute;</i> was the <i>Caf&eacute; Royal</i>. At
+an earlier date Whistler had drawn his followers to it. In the Nineties
+Frederick Sandys was one of its most familiar figures. Even now,
+especially on Saturday nights, young men, in long hair and strange hats
+and laboriously unconventional clothes, are to be met there, looking a
+trifle solemnized by their share in so un-English an entertainment. For
+this is the trouble: The <i>caf&eacute;</i> is not an English institution and
+something in the atmosphere tells you right away that it isn't. It
+might, it may still, serve us for an occasion, its mirrors and gilding
+and red velvet pleasantly reminiscent, but for night after night it
+would not answer at all as the <i>Nazionale</i> had answered in Rome, the
+<i>Orientale</i> in Venice.</p>
+
+<p>However, Buckingham Street made a good substitute as an extremely
+convenient centre for talk, and its convenience was so well taken
+advantage of that, at this distance of time, I am puzzled to see how we
+ever got any work done. J. and I have never been given to inhospitality,
+and we both liked the talk. But the day of reckoning came when, sitting
+down to lunch one morning, we realized that it was the first time we
+had
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+
+ eaten that simple meal alone for we could not remember how long.
+The lunch for which no preparation is made and at which the company is
+uninvited but amusing may be one of the most agreeable of feasts, but we
+knew too well that if we went on cutting short our days of work to enjoy
+it, we ran the risk of no lunch ever again for ourselves, let alone for
+anybody else.</p>
+
+<p>To be interrupted in the evening did not matter so much, though our
+evenings were not altogether free of work&mdash;nor are J.'s even yet, the
+years proving less kind in moulding him to the indolence to which, with
+age, I often find myself pleasantly yielding. Our friends, when we
+stopped them dropping in by day, began dropping in by night instead, and
+one group of friends to whom Thursday night was particularly well
+adapted for the purpose gradually turned their dropping in from a chance
+into a habit until, before we knew it, we were regularly at home every
+Thursday after dinner.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol06.jpg" width="500" height="414" alt="Mezzotint by Joseph Pennell
+OUT OF OUR LONDON WINDOWS" title="OUT OF OUR LONDON WINDOWS" />
+<span class="caption">Mezzotint by Joseph Pennell<br />
+OUT OF OUR LONDON WINDOWS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The entertainment, if it can be called by so fine a name, always
+retained something of the character of chance with which it began. We
+sent out no invitations, we attempted no formality. Nobody was asked to
+play at anything or to listen to anything. Nobody was expected to
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+
+dress, though anybody who wanted to could&mdash;everybody was welcome in the
+clothes they wore, whether they came straight from the studio or a
+dinner. If eventually I provided sandwiches&mdash;in addition to the tobacco
+always at hand in the home of the man who smokes and the
+whiskey-and-soda without which an Englishman cannot exist through an
+evening&mdash;it was because I got too hungry not to need something to eat
+before the last of the company had said good-night. We did not offer
+even the comfort of space. Once the small dining-room that had been
+Etty's studio, and the not over-large room that was J.'s, and the
+nondescript room that was drawing-room and my workroom combined, were
+packed solid, there was no place to overflow into except the short,
+narrow entrance hall, and I still grow hot at the thought of what became
+of hats and coats if it also was filled. I can never forget the
+distressing evening when in the bathroom&mdash;which, with the ingenuity of
+the designer of flats, had been fitted in at the end of the narrow hall
+and was the reason of its shortness&mdash;I caught William Penn devouring the
+gloves of an artist's wife who I do not believe has forgiven him to this
+day; nor the still more distressing occasion when I discovered Bobbie,
+William's poor timid successor,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+
+ curled up on a brand-new bonnet of
+feathers and lace.</p>
+
+<p>But it was the very informality, so long as it led to no crimes on the
+part of our badly brought-up cats, that attracted the friends who were
+as busy and hard-working as ourselves,&mdash;this, and the freedom to talk
+without being silenced for the music that no talker wants to hear when
+he can listen to his own voice, or for the dances that nobody wants to
+watch if he can follow his own argument, or for the introductions that
+invariably interrupt at the wrong moment, or for the games and
+innumerable devices without which intelligent human beings are not
+supposed to be able to survive an evening in each other's company. The
+idle who play golf all day and bridge all night, who cannot eat in the
+short intervals between without music, believe that talk has gone out of
+fashion. My experience had been in Rome and Venice, was then in London,
+and is now, that men and women who have something to talk about are
+always anxious to talk about it, if only the opportunity is given to
+them, and the one attraction we offered was just this opportunity for
+people who had been doing more or less the same sort of work all day to
+meet and talk about it all night&mdash;the reason why, despite
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+
+heat and
+discomfort, despite meagre fare and the risk to hats and coats, Thursday
+after Thursday crowded our rooms to suffocation as soon as evening came.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 340px;">
+<img src="images/icol07.jpg" width="340" height="600" alt="Bust by Rodin
+W.E. HENLEY" title="W.E. HENLEY" />
+<span class="caption">Bust by Rodin<br />
+W.E. HENLEY</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>As, in memory, I listen to the endless talk of our Thursday nights, the
+leading voice, when not J.'s, is Henley's, which is natural since it was
+Henley, followed by his Young Men,&mdash;our name for his devoted staff
+always in attendance at his office and out of it,&mdash;who got so into the
+habit of dropping in to see us on Thursday night that we got into the
+habit of staying at home to see him. For Thursday was the night when the
+<i>National Observer</i>, which he was editing at the time, went to press and
+Ballantynes, the printers, were not more than five minutes away in
+Covent Garden. At about ten his work was over and he and his Young Men
+were free to do nothing save talk for the rest of the week if they
+chose&mdash;and they usually did choose&mdash;and Buckingham Street was a handy
+place to begin it in. Our rooms were already fairly well packed,
+pleasantly smoky, and echoing with the agreeable roar of battle when
+they arrived.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>I like to remember Henley as I saw him then, especially if my quite
+superfluous feeling of responsibility
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+
+ as hostess had brought me on some
+equally superfluous mission into the little hall at the moment of his
+arrival. As the door opened he would stand there at the threshold, his
+tall soft black hat still crowning his massive head, leaning on his
+crutch and stick as he waited to take breath after his climb up our
+three flights of stone stairs&mdash;"Did I really ever climb those stairs at
+Buckingham Street?"&mdash;he asked me the last time I saw him, some years
+later, at Worthing when he was ill and broken, and I have often
+marvelled myself how he managed it. But breathless as he might be, he
+always laughed his greeting. I cannot think of Henley as he was in his
+prime, to borrow a word that was a favourite with him, without hearing
+his laugh and seeing his face illuminated by it. Rarely has a man so
+hampered by his body kept his spirit so gay. He was meant to be a
+splendid creature physically and fate made of him a helpless
+cripple&mdash;who was it once described him as "the wounded Titan"? Everybody
+knows the story: he made sure that everybody should by telling it in his
+<i>Hospital Verses</i>. But everybody cannot know who did not know him how
+bravely he accepted his disaster. It seemed to me characteristic once
+when a young cousin of mine, a girl at the most
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>
+
+ susceptible age of
+hero-worship, meeting him for the first time in our chambers and
+volunteering, in the absence of anybody else available, to fetch the cab
+he needed, thought his allowing her to go on such an errand for him the
+eccentricity of genius and never suspected his lameness until he stood
+up and took his crutch from the corner. There was nothing about him to
+suggest the cripple.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol08.jpg" width="500" height="659" alt="Painting by William Nicholson
+W.E. HENLEY" title="W.E. HENLEY" />
+<span class="caption">Painting by William Nicholson<br />
+W.E. HENLEY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>He was a remarkably handsome man, despite his disability, tall and large
+and fair, a noble head and profile, a shock of red hair, short red
+beard, keen pale blue eyes, his indomitable gaiety filling his face with
+life and animation, smoothing out the lines of pain and care. He was so
+striking in every way, his individuality so strangely marked that the
+wonder is the good portrait of him should be the exception. Nicholson,
+when painting him, was a good deal preoccupied with the big soft hat and
+blue shirt and flowing tie, feeling their picturesque value, and turned
+him into a brigand, a land pirate, to the joy of Henley, whom I always
+suspected of feeling this value himself and dressing as he did for the
+sake of picturesqueness. Simon Bussy seemed to see, not Henley, but
+Stevenson's caricature&mdash;the John Silver of <i>Treasure Island</i>, the
+cripple with the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+
+ face as big as a ham. Even Whistler failed and never
+printed more than one or two proofs of the lithograph for which Henley
+sat. Rodin came nearest success, his bust giving the dignity and
+ruggedness and character of head and profile both. He and Nicholson
+together go far to explain the man.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately there is no biography at all. Charles Whibley was to have
+written the authorized life, but the world still waits. Cope Cornford
+attempted a sketch, but scarcely the shadow of Henley emerges from its
+pages. Because he thundered and denounced and condemned and slashed to
+pieces in the <i>National Observer</i>, his contemporaries imagined that
+Henley did nothing anywhere at any time save thunder and denounce and
+condemn and slash to pieces and that he was altogether a fierce,
+choleric, intolerant, impossible sort of a person. The chances are few
+now realize that Henley was enough of an influence in his generation for
+it to have mattered to anybody what manner of man he was. A glimpse of
+him remains here and there. Stevenson has left the description of his
+personality, so strong that he was felt in a room before he was seen.
+His vigour and his manliness, survive in his work, but cannot quite
+explain the commanding
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+
+ power he was in his generation, while neither he
+nor his friends have shewn, as it should be shewn, the other side to his
+character, the gay, the kindly side, so that I feel almost as if I owed
+it to his memory to put on record my impressions of my first meeting
+with him, since it was only this side he then gave me the chance to see.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder sometimes why I had never met Henley before. When J. and I came
+to London he was editing the <i>Magazine of Art</i>, a little later he
+managed the <i>Art Journal</i>, and in both he published a number of J.'s
+drawings, and we had letters from him. We went to houses where he often
+visited. I remember hearing him announced once at the Robinsons' in
+Earl's Terrace, but Miss Mary Robinson, as she was then&mdash;Madame Duclaux
+as she is now&mdash;left everybody in the drawing-room while she went to see
+him downstairs, because, of his lameness she said, but partly, I
+fancied, because she wanted to keep him to herself to discuss a new
+series of articles. She had just "come out" in literature and was as
+fluttered by her every new appearance in print as most girls are by
+theirs in a ball-room. In other houses, more than once I just missed
+him, I had never got nearer than business correspondence when he left
+London to edit the <i>Scots Observer</i>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+
+ in Edinburgh, and he stayed there
+until the <i>Scots</i> became the <i>National Observer</i> with its offices in
+London.</p>
+
+<p>I had heard more than enough about him in the meanwhile. The man who
+says what he believes to be the truth&mdash;the man who sits in, and talks
+from, the chair of the scorners&mdash;is bound to get himself hated, and
+Henley came in for his fair share of abuse. As somebody says, truth
+never goes without a scratched face.</p>
+
+<p>But, like all men hated by the many, Henley inspired devotion in the few
+who, in his case, were not only devoted themselves but eager to make
+their friends devoted too. When he got back to London one of his Young
+Men, whom I do not see why I should not call Charles Whibley, insisted
+that J. and I must meet Henley first in the right way, that all our
+future relations with him depended upon it, and that this right way
+would be for him to ask Henley and ourselves, and nobody else, to dinner
+in his rooms.</p>
+
+<p>When the evening came J. was off on a journey for work and I went alone
+to Fig-Tree House&mdash;the little old house, with a poor shabby London
+apology of a fig-tree in front, on Milbank Street by the riverside,
+which, with Henley's near Great College Street office round the corner,
+has disappeared
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+
+ in the fury of municipal town-disfigurement. A popular
+young man, in making his plans, cannot afford to reckon without his
+friends. Four uninvited guests, all men, had arrived before me, a fifth
+appeared as I did, and he was about the last man any of the party could
+have wanted at that particular moment&mdash;a good and old and intimate
+friend of Stevenson's, whose own name I am too discreet to mention but
+to whom, for reasons I am also too discreet to explain, I may give that
+of Michael Finsbury instead. Whoever has read <i>The Wrong Box</i> knows that
+Michael Finsbury enjoyed intervals of relaxation from work, knows also
+the nature of the relaxation. I had struck him at the high tide of one
+of these intervals. It was terribly awkward for everybody, especially
+for me. I have got now to an age when I could face that sort of
+awkwardness with equanimity, even with amusement. But I was young then,
+I had not lived down my foolish shyness, and I would have run if, in my
+embarrassment, I had had the courage,&mdash;would have run anyhow, I do
+believe, if it had not been for Henley. He seized the situation and
+mastered it. He had the reputation of being the most brutal of men, but
+he showed a delicacy that few could have surpassed
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+
+ or equalled under
+the circumstances. He simply forced me to forget the presence of the
+objectionable Michael Finsbury, who at the other end of the table, I
+learned afterwards, was overwhelming his neighbours with a worse
+embarrassment than mine by finding me every bit as objectionable as I
+found him, and saying so with a frankness it was not in me to emulate.</p>
+
+<p>The force Henley used with such success was simply his talk. He did not
+let my attention wander for one minute, so full of interest was all he
+had to say, while the enthusiasm with which he said it became
+contagious. I can remember to this day how he made me see a miracle in
+the mere number of the Velasquezes in the Prado, an adventure in every
+hansom drive through the London streets, an event in the dressing of the
+salad for dinner&mdash;how he transformed life into one long Arabian Nights'
+Entertainment, which is why I suppose it has always been my pride that
+his poem called by that name he dedicated to me. And so the evening that
+began as one of the most embarrassing in my experience ended as one of
+the most delightful, and the man whom I had trembled to meet because of
+his reputation with those who did not know him or understand intolerance
+in a just cause, won me over completely
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+
+ by his kindness, his
+consideration, his charm.</p>
+
+<p>Henley delighted in talk, that was why he talked so well. On Thursday
+night his crutch would be left with his big hat at the front door; then,
+one hand leaning on his cane, the other against the wall for support, he
+would hobble over to the chair waiting for him, usually by the window
+for he loved to look out on the river, and there, seldom moving except
+to stand bending over with both arms on the back of the chair, which was
+his way of resting, and always with his Young Men round him, the talk
+would begin and the talk would last until only my foolish ideas of
+civility kept me up to listen. As a woman, I had not then, nor have I
+yet, ceased to be astonished by man's passion for talking shop and his
+power of going on with it forever. My explanation of this special power
+used to be that the occupation supplied him by the necessity of keeping
+his pipe or his cigarette or his cigar going, with the inevitable
+interruptions and pauses and movement, and the excitement of the eternal
+hunt for the matches, made the difference and helped to keep him
+awake&mdash;there is nothing more difficult for me personally than to sit
+still long when my hands are idle, unless I
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+
+ am reading. But the women I
+know who smoke are not men's equals in the capacity for endless talk and
+the reason must be to seek elsewhere. He who divines it will have gone
+far to solving the tedious problem of sex.</p>
+
+<p>Of Henley the talker, at least, one portrait remains. He was the
+original of Stevenson's Burly&mdash;the talker who would roar you down, bury
+his face in his hands, undergo passions of revolt and agony, letting
+loose a spring torrent of words. There was always a wild flood and storm
+of talk wherever Henley might be. He and his Young Men were the most
+clamorous group of the clamorous Nineties, though curiously their
+clamour seems faint in the ears of the present authorities on that noisy
+period. I have read one of these authorities' description of the London
+of the Nineties dressed in a powder puff, dancing beneath Chinese
+lanterns, being as wicked as could be in artificial rose-gardens. But
+had Henley and his Young Men suspected the existence of a London like
+that, they would have overthrown it with their voices, as Joshua
+overthrew the walls of Jericho with his trumpets. To other authorities
+the Nineties represent an endless orgy of societies&mdash;Independent Theatre
+Societies, Fabian Societies, Browning Societies,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+
+ every possible kind of
+societies&mdash;but the <i>National Observer</i>, with its keen scent for shams,
+was as ready to pounce upon any and all of them for the good of their
+health, and to upbraid their members as cranks. It was a paper that
+existed to protest against just this sort of thing, as against most
+other things in a sentimental and artificial and reforming and ignorant
+world. It made as much noise in print as its editorial staff made in
+talk. The main function of criticism, according to Henley, was to
+increase the powers of depreciation rather than of appreciation, and
+what a healthy doctrine it is! As editor, he roared down his opponents
+no less lustily than he roared them down as talkers, and he had the
+strong wit and the strong heart that a man must have, or so it is said,
+to know when to tell the truth, which, with him, was always. He could
+not stand anything like affectation, or what people were calling
+&aelig;stheticism and decadence. To him, literature was literature and art was
+art, and not puling sentiment, affected posturing, lilies and
+sunflowers. The <i>National Observer</i> was the housetop from which he
+shouted for all who passed to hear that it did not matter twopence what
+the dabbler wanted to express if he could not express it, if he had not
+the technique of his
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+
+ medium at his fingers' ends and under his perfect
+control. A man might indulge in noble and beautiful ideas, and if he did
+not know how to put them in beautiful words or in beautiful paint or in
+beautiful sound, he was anathema, to be cast into outer darkness where
+there is gnashing of teeth&mdash;the doctrine of art for art's sake which the
+advanced young leaders of the new generation assure me is hopelessly out
+of date. Pretence of any kind was as the red rag; "bleat" was the
+unpardonable sin; the man who was "human" was the man to be praised. I
+would not pretend to say who invented this meaning for the word "human."
+Perhaps Louis Stevenson. As far back as 1880, in a letter from Davos
+describing the people "in a kind of damned hotel" where he had put up, I
+find him using it as Henley and his Young Men used it later:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+Eleven English Parsons, all<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Entirely inoffensive; four</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">True human beings&mdash;what I call</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">Human&mdash;the deuce a cipher more.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson may even then have learned it from Henley. But however that
+may have been, "bleat" and "human" were the two words ever recurring
+like a refrain in the columns of the <i>National Observer</i>, ever the
+beginning and end
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+
+of argument in the heated atmosphere of Buckingham
+Street.</p>
+
+<p>In my memory, every Thursday night stands for a battle. Henley was then
+always at his best. His week's task was done, he was not due at his
+house in Addiscombe until the next day, for he always stayed in his
+Great College Street rooms from Monday to Friday&mdash;and the night was
+before him. At first I trembled a little at the smell of powder under my
+own roof, at turning our chambers into the firing line when friends came
+to them to pass a peaceful friendly evening&mdash;the Roman and Venetian
+<i>caf&eacute;s</i> and restaurants of my earlier experience had been common ground
+on which combatants shared equal rights or, better, no rights at all. It
+was probably my old Philadelphia bringing up that made me question the
+propriety of the same freedom at home, that made me doubt its being
+quite "the thing" when J., who is an excellent fighter though a
+Philadelphian, met Henley in a clash of words. But I quickly got
+accustomed to the fight and enjoyed it and would not have had it
+otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>Some friends who came, I must confess, enjoyed it less, especially if
+they were still smarting from a recent attack in the <i>National
+Observer</i>. There were evenings when it took a good deal of
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+
+ skilful
+man&oelig;uvring on everybody's part to keep Henley and his victims at a
+safe distance from each other. More than once in later days Walter Crane
+laughed with us at the memory of a Thursday night, just after he had
+been torn to pieces in the best <i>National Observer</i> style, when he
+gradually realized that he was being kept a prisoner in the corner into
+which he had been driven on his arrival, and he could not understand why
+until, breaking loose, he discovered Henley in the next room. Our alarm
+was not surprising, knowing as we did what a valiant fighter Crane was
+himself: as a socialist waving the red flag in the face of the world, as
+an artist forever rushing into the papers to defend his theories of art,
+as a man refusing to see his glory in passing by an offence. Not very
+long before, J. had exasperated him in print, by the honest expression
+of an opinion he did not happen to like, into threats of a big stick
+ready for attack the next time J. ventured upon his walks abroad. I need
+not add that J. did not bother to stay at home, that the big stick never
+materialized, that, though this was only the first of many fights
+between the two, Walter Crane was our friend to the end. But the little
+episode gives the true spirit of the Nineties.</p>
+
+<p>I can still see Beardsley dodging from group
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>
+
+ to group to escape Henley,
+for he never recovered from the fright of the first encounter. He told
+me the story at the time. He had gone, by special appointment, to call
+on Henley, under his arm the little portfolio he was rarely without in
+those early days, ready and enchanted as he always was to show his
+drawings to anybody willing to look at them. As he went up the two
+flights of stairs to Henley's Great College Street rooms, he heard a
+voice, loud, angry, terrifying; at the top, through an open door, he saw
+a youth standing in the middle of the room listening in abject terror to
+a large red man at a desk whom he knew instinctively to be Henley;&mdash;one
+glance, and he turned and fled, down the stairs, into the street, the
+little portfolio under his arm, his pace never slackening until he got
+well beyond the Houses of Parliament, through the Horse Guards into the
+Park.</p>
+
+<p>Other friends would not come at all on Thursday because of Henley, just
+as later more than one stayed away altogether because of Whistler. I was
+wretchedly nervous when they did come and brave a face-to-face meeting.
+Henley was not the sort of man to shirk a fight in the open. The
+principal reason for his unpopularity was just that habit of his of
+saying what he
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+
+ thought no matter where or when or to whom. He did not
+spare his friends, for he would not have kept them as friends had they
+not held some opinions worth his attacking, and they understood and
+respected him for it. Moreover, he said what he had to say in the
+plainest language. He roared his adversary down in good, strong,
+picturesque English, if that was any consolation, and with a splendidly
+rugged eloquence.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I could remember the words as well as the roar. Henley's
+eloquence cannot be forgotten by those who ever once listened to him,
+but his wit was not, like Whistler's, so keen nor his thrust so direct
+that the phrase, the one word of the retort or the attack, was
+unforgettable. He had his little affectations of speech as of style, and
+they added to its picturesqueness. But it was what he said that counted,
+the talk itself that probably inspired more sound thought and sound
+writing than most talk heard in the England of the Nineties. But it fell
+unrecorded on paper and memory could not be trusted after all these
+years.</p>
+
+<p>It is the greater pity because his books are few. He was poor when he
+started in life; almost at once he married; he was generous to a fault,
+and the generous man never yet lived who was
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+
+ not pursued by parasites;
+and as he was obliged to earn money and as his books were not of the
+stuff that makes the "best sellers," his criticism of life and art was
+expressed mainly in journalism.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, no just idea of the amount or the quality of his
+journalistic work is now to be had even from the files of the <i>National
+Observer</i>. He had a way of editing every article sent in to him until it
+became more than a fair imitation of his own. I can sympathize with his
+object&mdash;the artist's desire for harmony, for the unity of the paper as a
+whole. But if he succeeded, as he did, it was at the sacrifice of the
+force, the effect, the character of individual contributions, and nobody
+can now say for sure which were Henley's save those he re-published in
+book form. When articles I wrote for him appeared in print, it was an
+open question with me whether I had the right to call them mine and to
+take any money for them. His <i>Views and Reviews</i> gathered from the
+<i>National Observer</i> and other papers and periodicals, his three or four
+small volumes of verse, the plays he wrote with Stevenson, an anthology
+or two, a few books of his editing, are scarcely sufficient to explain
+to the present generation his importance in his day and why his
+influence
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+
+ made itself felt in literature as keenly as Whistler's in
+art, through all the movements and excitements and enthusiasms of the
+Nineties. The joyous wars that marked the beginning of my life in
+London, when not led by Whistler's "Ha! Ha!" were commanded by Henley's
+roar.</p>
+
+<p>No man was ever more in need of a Boswell than Henley. Dr. Weir Mitchell
+once complained to me that in America nobody waited upon great men to
+report their sayings, while in England a young man was always somewhere
+near with a clean cuff to scribble them on. The enthusiast, with his
+cuff an impatient blank, never hung about Henley. Anyway, that was not
+what our Thursday evenings were for. Of all his Young Men who climbed up
+the Buckingham Street stairs with him on Thursday night and sat round
+him, his devoted disciples, until they climbed down the Buckingham
+Street stairs with him again, not one seems to have hit upon this useful
+way of proving his devotion.</p>
+
+<p>I do not need to be told that this was no excuse for my not having my
+cuff ready. But, foolishly perhaps, I too often spent my Thursday nights
+oppressed by other cares. For one thing, I could seldom keep my weekly
+article on Cookery out of my mind. Without it Saturday's <i>Pall-Mall</i>,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+
+ I
+felt, would lose its brilliancy and my bank account, I knew, would grow
+appreciably less, and Friday was my day for writing it. A serious
+question therefore was, how, if I did not get to bed until two or three
+or four o'clock on Friday morning, was I to sit down at my desk at nine
+and be the brilliant authority on Eating that I thought I was?</p>
+
+<p>Another distraction grew out of my mistaken sense of duty as hostess, my
+feeling of responsibility in providing for all a share in the cheerful
+smell of powder and the stimulating sound of strife.</p>
+
+<p>Also, men being at best selfish animals, their wives, whose love of
+battle was less, were often an anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>These seemed big things at the time, though in retrospect they have
+dwindled into trifles that I had no business to let come between me and
+my opportunities to store up for future generations talk as brilliant as
+any on record. Of course I heard a great deal of it, and what I missed
+at home on our Thursday nights, I made up for at Henley's, and at
+friends' houses on many other occasions, and few can answer better than
+I for the quality of Henley's talk if I have forgotten the actual words.
+Its strength was its simple
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+
+ directness,&mdash;no posing, no phrasing, no
+attitudinizing for effect. This, I know, was always what most struck
+people when they first met him on our Thursday nights, especially
+Americans, for with us in America the man who has won the reputation of
+greatness too often seems afraid he will lose it if he does not forever
+advertise it by fireworks of cleverness and wit.</p>
+
+<p>Henley's talk had too a strange mixture of the brutal and the tender,
+the rough and the fine, a blending of the highest things with what might
+seem to the ordinary man the most trivial. I asked two old friends of
+his the other day what they remembered best of him and of his talk. The
+answer of one was: "He was certainly the most stupendous Jove-like
+creature who ever lived, and I did not in the least mind his calling me
+Billy, which I have always hated from others." The second answer was:
+"He talked as he wrote, and I know of nothing more characteristic of his
+talking and his writing than that tragic poem in which, with his heart
+crying for the child he had adored and lost, he could compare himself to
+'an old black rotter of a boat' past service, and could see, when
+criticised for it, nothing discordant in that slang <i>rotter</i> dropped
+into such verse!" A good deal of Henley is in
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+
+both answers. This
+curious blend must have especially struck everybody who saw him and
+listened to him in his own home. I can recall summer Sunday afternoons
+at Addiscombe, with Henley sitting on a rug spread on the lawn behind
+his house, Mrs. Henley at his side, his eyes following with twinkling
+tenderness his little daughter as she ran backwards and forwards busy
+with the manifold cares of childhood, while all the time, to his Young
+Men gathered round him, he was thundering against the last book, or the
+last picture show, or the last new music, in language not unworthy of
+Defoe or Smollett, for Henley could call a spade not only a spade but a
+steam shovel when so minded. He could soar to the heights and dive to
+the depths in the same breath.</p>
+
+<p>But Henley's talk was animated above all by the intense and virile love
+of life that I was so conscious of in him personally, that reveals
+itself in every line he wrote, and that is what I liked best about him.
+He was so alive, so exhilarated with the sense of being alive. The
+tremendous vitality of the man, that should have found its legitimate
+outlet in physical activity, seemed to have gone instead into his
+thought and his expression of it&mdash;as if the very fact that fate forced
+him to remain a looker-on had made him the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+
+ more sensitive to the
+beauty, the joy, the challenge in everything life gave him to look at.
+He could wrest romance even out of the drear, drab hospital&mdash;there is
+another characteristic glimpse in one of Stevenson's letters, a picture
+of Henley sitting up in his hospital bed, his hair and beard all
+tangled, "talking as cheerfully as if he had been in a King's palace, or
+the great King's palace of the blue air."</p>
+
+<p>His interest in life was far too large and all-embracing for him to be
+indifferent to the smallest or most insignificant part of it. He had
+none of the disdain for everyday details, none of the fear of the
+commonplace that oppresses many men who think themselves great. Nothing
+that lived came amiss to his philosophy or his pleasure. He could talk
+as brilliantly upon the affairs of the kitchen as upon those of state,
+he could appreciate gossip as well as verse, he could laugh over an
+absurdity as easily as he could extol the masterpiece. Romance for him
+was everywhere&mdash;in the slang of the cockney of the Strand as in a
+symphony by Berlioz, in 'Arriet's feathers as in the "Don Diegos" of the
+Prado&mdash;the mere sound of the title in his mouth became a tribute to the
+master he honoured above most&mdash;in the patter of the latest Lion-comique
+of the Halls as in the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+
+ prose of Meredith or Borrow, in the disreputable
+cat stealing home through the dull London dawn as in the Romanticists
+emerging from the chill of Classicism&mdash;in everything, big and little, in
+which he felt the life so dear to him throbbing.</p>
+
+<p>And he loved always the visible sign through which the appeal came. I
+have seen him lean, spell-bound, from our windows on a blue summer
+night, thrilled by the presence out there of Cleopatra's Needle, the
+pagan symbol flaunting its slenderness against river and sky, while in
+the distance the dome of St. Paul's, the Christian symbol, hung a
+phantom upon the heavens. His pleasure in the friendship of men of rank
+and family might have savoured of snobbishness had not one understood
+how much they stood for to him as symbols. I am sure he could fancy
+himself with these friends that same King of Babylon who thrills in the
+lover of his poem. I used to think that for him all the drama of
+<i>Admiral Guinea</i>, one of the plays he wrote with Stevenson, was
+concentrated in the tap-tap of the blind man's stick. In his <i>Hospital
+Verses</i>, his <i>London Voluntaries</i>, his every <i>Rhyme</i> and <i>Rhythm</i>, the
+outward sign is the expression of the emotion, the thought that is in
+him. And coming down to more ordinary matters&mdash;ordinary, that is, to
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+
+most people&mdash;I shall never forget, once when I was in Spain and he wrote
+to me there, his decoration of my name on the envelope with the finest
+ceremonial prefix of the ceremonious Spanish code which to him
+represented the splendour of the land of Don Diego and Don Quixote.</p>
+
+<p>It was this faculty of entering into the heart, the spirit of life and
+all things in it that made him the inspiring companion and friend he
+was, that widened his sympathies until he, whose intolerance was a
+byword with his contemporaries, showed himself tolerant of everything
+save sham and incompetence. The men who would tell you in their day, who
+will tell you now, of the great debt they owe to Henley, are men of the
+most varied interests, whose style and subject both might have been
+expected to prove a great gulf to separate them. Ask Arthur Morrison
+straight from the East End, or FitzMaurice Kelly fresh from Spain; ask
+W.B. Blakie preoccupied with the modern development of the printed book,
+or Wells adrift in a world of his own invention; ask Kipling steeped in
+the real, or Barrie lost in the Kail-Yard; ask Kenneth Grahame on his
+Olympian heights or George S. Street deep in his study of the prig&mdash;ask
+any one of these men and a score besides what Henley's sympathy,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+
+Henley's outstretched hand, meant to him, and some idea of the breadth
+of his judgment and taste and helpfulness may be had. Why he could
+condescend even to me when, in my brave ignorance, I undertook to write
+that weekly column on Cookery for the <i>Pall-Mall</i>. He it was who gave me
+Dumas's <i>Dictionnaire de la Cuisine</i>, the corner-stone of my collection
+of cookery books&mdash;a fact in which I see so much of Henley that I feel as
+if the stranger to him who to-day takes the volume down from my shelves
+and reads on the fly-leaf the simple inscription, "To E.R.P. d.d.
+W.E.H.," in his little crooked and crabbed writing, must see in it the
+eloquent clue to his personality that it is to me.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>I have said that Henley seldom came to us&mdash;as indeed he seldom went
+anywhere or, for that matter, seldom stayed at home&mdash;without a
+contingent of his Young Men in attendance. I do not believe I could ever
+have gone to his rooms in Great College Street, or to his house at
+Addiscombe, or in later, sadder days to the other, rather gloomy, house
+on the riverside at Barnes,&mdash;turned into some sort of college the last
+time I passed, with a long bare students' table in the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>
+
+ downstairs
+dining-room where I had been warmed and thrilled by so much exhilarating
+talk,&mdash;that some of his Young Men were not there before me or did not
+come in before I left. In London, on his journeys to and fro, they
+surrounded him as a bodyguard. If on those old Thursday nights, his was
+the loudest voice, theirs played up to it untiringly. There were no half
+measures about them. As warriors in the cause of art and literature,
+they reserved nothing from their devotion to their leader, they
+exhausted every possibility of that form of flattery usually considered
+the greatest. They fought Henley's battles with hardly less valour,
+hardly milder roaring. On Thursday, they had been working with him all
+day and all evening, they probably had lunched together, and dined
+together, and yet so far from showing any desire to separate on their
+arrival in our rooms, they immediately grouped themselves again round
+Henley.</p>
+
+<p>It was curious, anyway, how strong the tendency was with all the company
+to break up into groups. Work was the common bond, but there was also a
+special bond in each different kind of work. On my round as hostess I
+was sure to find the writers in one corner, the artists in another, the
+architects in a third&mdash;though to this
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+
+day it is a question with me why
+we should have had enough architects to make a group and, more puzzling,
+why, having them, they should have been so unpopular, unless it was
+because of their air of prosperity and respectability, always as correct
+in appearance as if there was a possible client at the door. I can still
+recall the triumphant glee, out of all proportion to the cause, of one
+of Henley's Young Men the Thursday night he came to tell me that all the
+architects were safe out of the way in the studio, and "I have shut both
+doors," he added, "and now that we are rid of them we can talk." As if
+any of Henley's Young Men under any circumstances ever did anything
+else.</p>
+
+<p>Some of Henley's staff, if I remember, never came to us, others came
+only occasionally, but a few failed us as rarely as Henley himself. The
+Thursday night was the exception that did not see Charles Whibley at
+Henley's right hand even as he was in the pages of the <i>National
+Observer</i>, not merely ready for the fight but provoking it, insisting
+upon it, forcing it, boisterous in battle, looking like an
+undergraduate, talking like a pastmaster of the art of invective, with a
+little stammer that gave point to his lightest commonplace. Rarely
+lagging very far behind came Marriott
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+
+ Watson, young, tall, blonde,
+good-looking&mdash;a something exotic, foreign in the good looks that I put
+down to New Zealand, for I suppose New Zealand as well as America has
+produced a type&mdash;not quite so truculent in talk as in print, more
+inclined to fight with a smile. A third was Wilfred Pollock, forgotten
+save by his friends I am afraid; and a fourth, Vernon Blackburn, who
+began life as a monk at Fort Augustus and finished it as a musical
+critic, he too I fear scarcely more than a name; and a fifth, Jack
+Stuart, and a sixth, Harold Parsons, and a seventh, and an eighth, and I
+can hardly now say how many more long since dead, now for me vague
+ghosts from out that old past so overflowing with life.</p>
+
+<p>When William Waldorf Astor bought the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i> and started
+the weekly <i>Pall Mall Budget</i> and the monthly <i>Pall Mall Magazine</i>, he
+presented Henley with two or three new Young Men and added to our
+company on Thursday nights, little as he had either of these
+achievements in view. His plunge into newspaper proprietorship was one
+of the newspaper ventures that counted for most in the Nineties. It was
+a venture inclining to amateurism in detail, but run on business, not
+romantic, lines and therefore it was less talked about than those
+purely
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+
+amateur plunges into journalism which gave the Nineties so much
+of their picturesqueness. But all the same, we saw revolution in it, the
+possibility of wholesale regeneration, the inauguration of a new era,
+when "sham" would be exposed, and "Bleat" silenced, and art grow "Human"
+once more. In the <i>Budget</i> and the <i>Magazine</i> it was likewise to be
+proved that America and France were not alone in understanding and
+valuing the art of illustration:&mdash;vain hopes!</p>
+
+<p>Henley and his Young Men rejoiced in a new sphere for fighting, certain
+of a brilliant victory, since they were to have a share in the command.
+Astor, with a fine fling for independence&mdash;his only one in public&mdash;or
+else with that old gentlemanly dream of a newspaper "written by
+gentlemen for gentlemen," had captured his editors in regions where
+editors are not usually hunted&mdash;Henry Cust, heir to a title, for the
+<i>Gazette</i>, Lord Frederick Hamilton, his title already inherited, for the
+<i>Magazine</i>. Fleet Street shrugged its shoulders, laughed a little, not
+believing title and rank to have the same value in journalism as in
+society. Cust, to do him justice, agreed with Fleet Street, and, knowing
+that he was without experience, had the sense to appeal for help to
+those with it. By good luck he went to Henley,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+
+who was not free to do
+much for the paper save give it his advice, offer it those of his Young
+Men whom he could spare, and take under his wing the new Young Men it
+invented for itself. When new enthusiasts fell into Henley's train, it
+was never long before they followed him to Buckingham Street on Thursday
+nights.</p>
+
+<p>I could scarcely label as anybody's Young Man Iwan-M&uuml;ller, huge, half
+Russian, half English, all good comrade, who had come up from Manchester
+and the editorship of a leading paper there to be Cust's Assistant
+Editor. He was nearly Henley's contemporary, but he did not, for such a
+trifle as age, let any one of Henley's Young Men exceed him in devotion,
+and his laugh became the unfailing accompaniment of Henley's talk, so
+much so that I am convinced if Henley still leads the talk in the land
+beyond the grave, Iwan-M&uuml;ller still punctuates it with the big bracing
+laugh that was as big as himself.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol09.jpg" width="500" height="342" alt="Photograph by Frederick Hollyer
+IWAN-M&Uuml;LLER AND GEORGE W. STEEVENS" title="IWAN-M&Uuml;LLER AND GEORGE W. STEEVENS" />
+<span class="caption">Photograph by Frederick Hollyer<br />
+IWAN-M&Uuml;LLER AND GEORGE W. STEEVENS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>At the other extreme, younger than the youngest of the Young Men he
+joined, came George W. Steevens, fresh from Oxford, Balliol Prize
+Scholar, shy and carrying it off, in the Briton's way, with appalling
+rudeness and more appalling silence. I remember J., upon whose nerves as
+well as mine this silence got, taking me apart one
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+
+Thursday evening
+to tell me that if that young Oxford prig was too superior to talk to
+anybody, why then he was too superior to come to us at all, and he must
+be made to understand it. Eventually he learned to talk, with us
+anyway&mdash;he was always a silent man with most people. And I got to know
+him well, to like him, to admire him,&mdash;to respect him too through the
+long summer when his friends were doing their best to dissuade him from
+his proposed marriage with a woman many years older than he. The men of
+the <i>National Observer</i> and the <i>Pall Mall</i> were such keen fighters that
+they could not be kind or sentimental&mdash;and they grew maudlinly
+sentimental over Steevens's engagement&mdash;without a fight for it. They
+thought he was making a mistake, forgetting that it was his business,
+not theirs, if he was. He fought alone against them, but he held his
+place like a man and won. Our Thursday nights had come to an end before
+he went to America, to Germany, to Khartoum with Kitchener, to South
+Africa, where he passed into the great silence that no protest of ours,
+or any man's can break. If his work was overrated, he himself as I knew
+him was as kind and brave as in Henley's verse to his memory.</p>
+
+<p>Others of the same group, the writers' group,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+
+ who flit across the scene
+in my memory are less intimately associated with Henley. Harold Frederic
+wrote for him occasionally&mdash;wrote few things, indeed, more amusing than
+his <i>Observations in Philistia</i>, a satire first published in the
+<i>National Observer</i>&mdash;but his chief business was the novel and the <i>New
+York Times</i> correspondence. He was an able man, something more than the
+typical clever American journalist, a writer of books that deserve to be
+remembered but that have hardly outlived him. He was an amusing
+companion, the sort of man it was delightful to run across by chance in
+unexpected places, for which reason my most agreeable recollections of
+him are not in Buckingham Street but in the streets and <i>caf&eacute;s</i> of
+Berlin and Vienna that summer he was studying Jews in Southeastern
+Europe, and first knew there were Jews in Vienna when J., who afterwards
+began to study them for himself, introduced him to the <i>Juden Gasse</i>. He
+liked a good dinner, and gave us more than one, and he was an amusing
+talker over it and also on our Thursday nights until he got to the stage
+he always did get to of telling tales of his boyhood when he carried
+milk to the big people in his part of the Mohawk Valley, was dazzled by
+his first vision of Brussels carpet on their floors, and
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
+
+ determined to
+have Brussels carpet on his own before he was many years older, and I
+can answer for it that, by the time I knew him, his house was all
+Brussels carpet from top to bottom. They were most creditable tales and
+entertaining too at a first hearing, but they staled, as all tales must,
+with repetition.</p>
+
+<p>S.R. Crockett never wrote anything for Henley. Henley would have been
+outraged by the bare suggestion, and Crockett the writer was never
+handled with the gloves by Henley's Young Men in the <i>National
+Observer</i>. But with Crockett himself they had no quarrel. We all liked
+him&mdash;a large red and white Scotchman, the Scots strong in every word he
+spoke, hustling us all off for a fish dinner at Greenwich on the
+strength of his first big cheque for royalties; or as happy to spend the
+evening sitting on our floor and diverting William Penn with the ball of
+paper on the end of a string that William never wearied of pursuing,
+partly for his amusement, partly because, with his innate politeness, he
+knew it contributed to ours.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot imagine a Thursday night without Rosamund
+Marriott-Watson,&mdash;Graham R. Tomson as she was then,&mdash;beautiful,
+reminiscent of Rossetti in her tall, willowy slimness, with her
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+
+ long
+neck like a column and her great halo of black hair and her big brown
+eyes, appealing, confinding, beseeching. Fashion as she, the poetess,
+extolled it week by week in the <i>National Observer</i>, became a poem with
+a stately measure in frocks and hats, a flowing rhythm in every frill
+and furbelow. I lost sight of her later, for reasons neither here nor
+there, but it pleases me to know that not many months before her death
+she looked back to those years as her happiest when weekly, almost
+daily, she was going up and down the Buckingham Street stairs which her
+ghost, she said, must haunt until they go the way of too many old stairs
+leading up to old London chambers. Violet Hunt was almost as faithful.
+And both contributed, as I did, a weekly column&mdash;mine that amazing
+article on cookery&mdash;to the <i>Pall Mall's</i> daily <i>Wares of Autolycus</i>,
+daily written by women and I daresay believed by us to be the most
+entertaining array of unconsidered trifles that any Autolycus had ever
+offered to any eager world. Graham Tomson was even moved to commemorate
+our collaboration in verse the inspiration of which is not far to seek,
+but of which all I remember now is the beginning:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+O, there's Mrs. Meynell and Mrs. Pennell,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">There's Violet Hunt and me!</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+
+for Mrs. Meynell contributed a fourth column, though she never
+contributed her presence to Buckingham Street.</p>
+
+<p>Once or twice, George Moore hovered from group to group, his childlike
+eyes of wonder protruding, wide open, and his ears open too, no doubt,
+for, if I can judge from his several books of reminiscences, his ears
+have rarely been closed to talk going on about him. After reading the
+Irish series I should suspect him not only of well-opened ears but of an
+inexhaustible supply of cuffs safely stored up his sleeves. Bernard Shaw
+honoured us occasionally, but I have learned that, bent as he is upon
+talking about himself, whatever he has to say, he grows more fastidious
+when others talk about him and say what they have to. Now and then,
+Henry Norman, journalist, his title and seat in Parliament yet to come,
+dropped in. Now and then Miss Preston and Miss Dodge came, both in
+London to finish in the British Museum the studies begun in Rome. Rarely
+a week passed that James G. Legge was not with us, then deep in his work
+at the Home Office but full of joy in everything that was most joyful in
+the Nineties&mdash;its fights, its books, its prints, its posters. And I
+might name many besides, some forgotten, some dead, some seen no
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+
+ more
+by me, life being often more cruel than death in the separations and
+divisions it makes. But two voices above the others are almost as
+persistent in my ears as Henley's&mdash;the voices of Bob Stevenson and Henry
+Harland.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>I have no fancy for nicknames in any place or at any time. I have
+suffered too much from my own. But I dislike the familiarity of them
+above all in print. And yet, I could no more call Bob Stevenson anything
+save Bob than I could venture to abbreviate the Robert or the Louis of
+his cousin. He had been given in baptism a more formal name&mdash;in fact, he
+had been given three of unquestioned dignity: Robert Alan Mowbray. But I
+doubt if anybody had ever known him by them or if he had ever used them
+himself. When he wrote he signed his fine array of initials, and when he
+was not R.A.M.S., he was Bob.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol10.jpg" width="500" height="618" alt="Painting by Himself
+&quot;BOB&quot; STEVENSON" title="&quot;BOB&quot; STEVENSON" />
+<span class="caption">Painting by Himself<br />
+&quot;BOB&quot; STEVENSON</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It seems to me now a curious chance, as well as a piece of good luck,
+that the two most eloquent of the company in Louis Stevenson's <i>Talk and
+Talkers</i> should have come to us on our Thursday nights, for Bob was the
+Spring-Heeled Jack, "the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+
+loud, copious, and intolerant talker" of
+that essay just as Henley was the Burly.</p>
+
+<p>He was not more spring-heeled in his talk than in evading capture for
+it. In his later years he made few visits. If we wanted him we had to
+gather him up by the wayside and bring him home with us. The newspaper
+work I was doing then took me the rounds of the London galleries on
+press days and, as he was the art critic of the <i>Pall Mall</i>, I was
+continually coming across him busy about the same work in Bond Street or
+Piccadilly. Nothing pleased me better than to meet him on these
+occasions, for he could make the dull show that I, in my dull way, was
+finding dull the most entrancing entertainment in London. His every
+visit to a gallery was to him an adventure and every picture a romance,
+and the best of it for his friends was that he would willingly share the
+inspiration which he, but nobody else, could find in the most
+uninspiring canvas, an inspiration to criticism that is, not to
+admiration&mdash;he never wavered in his allegiance to the "Almighty Swells"
+of Art. Once he began to talk I did not care to have him stop, and I
+would say, "Why not come to Buckingham Street with me? You have not seen
+J. for a long while." He would vow he couldn't, he must get back to
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+
+ Kew
+to do his article. I would insist a little, he would waver a little, and
+at last he would agree to a minute's talk with J., excusing himself to
+himself by protesting that Buckingham Street was on his way to the
+Underground, as it was if he chose to go out of his way to make it so.
+Before he knew it, the minute had stretched out to our dinner hour when
+he was persuaded that he would save time by dining with us, as he must
+dine somewhere; if he went right afterwards, he could still be back at
+Kew in plenty of time to finish his article for the last post.</p>
+
+<p>Of course he never did go right afterwards&mdash;what talker ever did go
+right anywhere immediately after dinner when the real talk is only
+beginning? Presently people would filter in and now, well adrift on the
+flood of his own eloquence, nothing could interrupt him and he was the
+last to leave us, the later it grew the more easily induced to stay
+because he knew that the last train and the last post and all the last
+things of the day had gone and that he must now wait for the first
+things of the morning.</p>
+
+<p>If I could talk like Bob Stevenson I would not be interrupted either.
+Greater excitement could not be had out of the most exciting story of
+adventure, and I do not believe he knew until
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+
+ he got to the end any
+more where his talk was going to lead him than the reader knows how the
+story is going to turn out until the last chapter is reached. Louis
+Stevenson described certain qualities of his talk, but made no effort to
+give the talk itself, and in Bob's case, as in Henley's, it was the talk
+itself that counted. There was no acting in it as in Henley's or in
+Whistler's&mdash;no burying of his head in his hands and violent gestures&mdash;no
+well-placed laugh and familiar phrase. The talk came in a steady stream,
+laughter occasionally in the voice, but no break, no movement, no
+dramatic action&mdash;the sanest doctrine set forth with almost insane
+ingenuity, for he was always the "wild dog outside the kennel" who
+wouldn't imitate and hence kept free, as Louis Stevenson told him;
+extraordinary things treated quite as a matter of course; brilliant
+flashes of imbecility passed for cool well-balanced argument; until
+often I would suddenly gasp, wondering into what impossible world I had
+strayed after him. And he would tell the most extravagant tales, he
+would confide the most paradoxical philosophy, the most topsy-turvy
+ethics, with a fantastic seriousness, never approached except in the
+Arabian Nights of Prince Florizel for the puppets of whose adventures,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+
+as for Spring-Heeled Jack, he was the sitter. It was a delightful
+accomplishment, but dangerous when applied to actual life. I cannot
+forget his advice once to a friend on the verge of a serious step that
+might sink him into nobody could foretell what social quagmire. Bob
+could see in it only the adventure and the joy of adventure, not the
+price fate was bound to demand for it. To him the mistake was the unlit
+lamp, the ungirt loin&mdash;the adventure lost&mdash;and, life being what it is, I
+am not sure that he was not right.</p>
+
+<p>I think his talk struck me as the more extraordinary because he looked
+so little like it. In the Nineties he had taken to the Jaegers that
+usually stand for vegetarianism, teetotalism, hygiene&mdash;all the drab
+things of life. He wore even a Jaeger hat and Jaeger boots&mdash;as complete
+an advertisement for Jaeger as old Joseph Finsbury was for his Doctor.
+No costume could have seemed so altogether out of character with the
+fantastic, delightful, extravagant creature inside of it, though,
+really, none could have been more in character. It had always been Bob's
+way to play the game of life by dressing the part of the moment. Before
+I met him I had been told of his influence over Louis Stevenson, whose
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+
+debt to him for ideas and conceits was said to be immeasurable, and
+nobody who knew Bob has doubted it. I feel convinced that Louis owed to
+him also his touch of the fantastic, the unusual, in dress, since it
+belonged so entirely to Bob and was no less entirely in keeping with his
+attitude towards the universe and his place in it&mdash;his tendency of
+always probing the real for the romantic.</p>
+
+<p>Knowing one cousin and the books of the other, I should say it was Bob
+who, in their childhood, originated the drama of the Lantern-Bearers and
+the evil-smelling lantern under the great coat, symbol of adventure and
+daring&mdash;that it was Bob who, in their gay youth, evolved the black
+flannel shirts to which they owed the honour of being, with Lord
+Salisbury, the only Britons ever refused admission to the Casino at
+Monte Carlo, and which were worn by the Stennis Brothers in <i>The
+Wrecker</i>,&mdash;that it was Bob who impressed upon Louis the importance of
+being dressed for the scene until he surpassed himself in his amazing
+get-up for the <i>Epilogue to an Inland Voyage</i>. Bob's own disguises
+rarely got into print, but in Will Low's <i>Chronicle of Friendships</i>
+there is a photograph of him in his student days, figuring as a sort of
+brigand of old-fashioned comic opera, that shows he did not from the
+beginning
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+
+ shirk the obligations he imposed upon others. I remember a
+huge ring, inherited from his father to whom the Czar had given it for
+engineering services in Russia, which he kept for formal occasions so
+that when I saw it covering his finger, almost his hand, at the dinner
+to which we had both been invited, I understood that to him the occasion
+was one of ceremony and he never failed to regulate his conduct
+accordingly. I was glad the ring did not appear on our Thursday nights,
+so much freer of formality, and therefore more amusing, was he without
+it. The large perfection of his Jaegers in his last years was no less
+symbolic; in them he was dressed for the r&ocirc;le of middle age which he,
+who had the gift of eternal youth, had already reached when I first knew
+him. It was a r&ocirc;le to which, at the time, I attributed his concern about
+his health&mdash;his anxiety to know if we, any of us, had influenza before
+he would come home with me, his rush from the room or the house at a
+sniff or a sneeze. The truth is Bob shared Henley's love of the visible
+sign, or it may be nearer the truth to say that he shared his own love
+of it with Henley and his cousin who rarely, either of them, wrote
+anything in which it is not felt.</p>
+
+<p>But Henley loved the visible sign for itself&mdash;the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+
+ romance was actually
+in the tap-tap of the blind man's staff, in the pagan obelisk towering
+above the Christian river. Bob loved the visible sign for the hint it
+gave to his imagination, the adventure upon which it sent him galloping.
+He could build up a romance out of anything and nothing&mdash;he was the
+modern Scheherezade, but, as time went on, with nobody to repeat his
+stories. He could have made the fortune of any number of young men with
+their cuffs ready, but the only young man who ever did use his cuff was
+Louis Stevenson when they were young together. Bob had not the energy to
+put down his stories himself&mdash;he would not have written a word for
+publication had he not been forced to. For him the romance would have
+been lost in the labour of recording it, and, anyway, he was always
+consistent in not doing more work than he was obliged to in order to
+live. He had not the talent for combining, or identifying, his pleasure
+with his work. Painting was the profession for which he had been
+trained, but with it he amused himself and, as far as I know, never made
+a penny out of it. When he talked he would have lost his joy in the
+invention, the fabrication, had he thought he must turn it to profit. Of
+the curious twist of his imagination there remains but the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+
+ faint
+reflection here and there in Prince Florizel and the romantic
+adventurers swaggering and talking splendid nonsense through the earlier
+tales by Louis Stevenson, whose books grew less and less fantastic as
+his path and Bob's spread wider apart. Even in the earlier tales Bob
+will not be discovered by future generations who have lost the key.</p>
+
+<p>For the sake of posterity, if not for my own, I would have been wiser on
+Thursday nights to think less of my next morning's article than of his
+inventions. As it is, I retain merely a general impression and an
+occasional detail of his talk. I am glad I remember, for one thing, his
+unfailing prejudice in favour of his friends, so amiable was the side of
+his character it revealed&mdash;though it revealed also his weakness as
+critic. He had a positive genius for veiling prosaic facts with romance
+where the people he liked were concerned. How often have we laughed at
+his amiability to a painter of the commonplace who had happened to be
+his fellow-student in Paris, whose work, as a consequence, his friendly
+imagination filled with the fine things that to us were conspicuously
+missing, and whose name he dragged into every criticism he wrote, even
+into his Monograph
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+
+ on Velasquez, nor could he be laughed, or argued out
+of it.</p>
+
+<p>And I am glad I remember another trick of his imagination, though it was
+like to end in disaster for us all, so equally characteristic was it of
+his genius in weaving romance from prose. He was talking one evening of
+wine, upon which he had large&mdash;Continental&mdash;ideas, declaring he would
+not have it in his house unless all his family, including the servants,
+could drink it without stint and also without thought of
+expense&mdash;though, if I am not mistaken, his household staff consisted
+chiefly of a decent old Scotchwoman who would have scorned wine as a
+device of the foreigner. The triumphant ring of his voice is still in my
+ears as he announced that he had found a merchant who could provide him
+with just the wine he wanted, good, pure, light, white or red, an
+ordinary brand for sevenpence a bottle, a superior brand for eightpence.</p>
+
+<p>The marvel of it all was that we believed in that wine and when the
+company left for home, the merchant's address was in almost everybody's
+pocket. It was not a bad wine in the sample bottles J. and I received a
+day or two later, nothing much to boast of, but harmless. For the
+further cheapness promised we next ordered it
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+
+ by the case, one of red
+and one of white&mdash;a rare bargain we thought. But in the end it was the
+most expensive wine it has ever been our misfortune to invest in. For
+when it came in cases it was so potent that nobody could drink as much
+as a glass without going to sleep. I never had it analyzed, but, after a
+couple of bottles, I did not dare to put it on the table again, or to
+use it even for cooking or as vinegar. To balance our accounts, we did
+without wine of any kind, or at any price, for many a week to come. But
+we had our revenge. In the course of a few months Bob's wine merchant
+was summoned before the magistrate for manufacturing Bordeaux and
+Burgundies out of Greek currants and more reprehensible materials in the
+backyard of his unpretending riverside house, and it was one of our
+Thursday night fellow victims who had the pleasure of exposing him in
+the <i>Daily Chronicle</i>. Bob did not share our resentment. He had his
+pleasure in the charm his imagination gave to every drop of the few
+bottles he drank and managed not to die of.</p>
+
+<p>I began to notice in the galleries and on Thursday nights that Bob
+became more and more engrossed in the question of his health and quicker
+to fly at a sniff or a sneeze. The time came when
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+
+ no persuasion could
+bring him home with me. He described symptoms rather than pictures, his
+interest in anything in the shape of paint weakened. I fancied that he
+was romancing, that he was playing the hypochondriac as part of his r&ocirc;le
+of middle-age, and I thought it a pity. It might provide a new
+entertainment for him, but it deprived us of the entertainment of his
+company. Then I hardly met him at all, or if I did he was too nervous to
+linger before each painting or drawing, to gossip about it and
+everything under the sun. He would walk through the galleries with one
+leg dragging a little&mdash;the visible sign, I would say to myself, amused
+to see that he could turn romance into reality as easily as reality into
+romance. He would start for Kew right off, without any loitering,
+without any delicious pretending that he was going in the very next
+train and then not going until the very next train meant the very next
+day. But before long I learned that there was no romance about it, that
+it was grim reality, the grimmer to me because I had taken it so
+lightly. His illness was mere rumour at first, for few people went to
+his house in far Kew to see him. It was more than rumour when he ceased
+altogether to appear in the galleries, for we knew he was dependent
+upon
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>
+
+ art criticism for his butter, if not for most of his bread. I had
+not got as far as belief in his illness before the news came that he had
+set out upon the greatest adventure of all and that no more would
+Buckingham Street be transfigured in the light of his romancing,
+glorified by his inexhaustible fancy. I owed him much: the charm of the
+personality of "this delightful and wonderful creature" in Henley's
+words of him, pleasure from his talk, stimulus from his criticism, and I
+wish I had had the common sense to do what I could to make him live as a
+pleasure and a stimulus to others. My mistake on our Thursday nights was
+to keep my cuff clean, my note-book empty.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol11.jpg" width="500" height="649" alt="Sketch by Aubrey Beardsley
+HENRY HARLAND" title="HENRY HARLAND" />
+<span class="caption">Sketch by Aubrey Beardsley<br />
+HENRY HARLAND</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>In the case of Henry Harland my conscience makes me no such reproach. If
+ever a man became his own Boswell it was he, though I do not suppose
+anything was further from his mind when he sat down to write. But as he
+talked, so he wrote&mdash;he could not help himself&mdash;and all who have read
+the witty, gay, whimsical, fantastic talk of his heroes and heroines,
+especially in his last three books, have listened to him. He, no less
+than his Adrian Willes&mdash;even if quite another man was the model&mdash;never
+understood
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+
+ how it was possible for people to be bored. Flaubert once
+said in a letter, "Life is so hideous that the only way of enduring it
+is to avoid it." But Harland believed in plunging into it headlong and
+getting everything that is to be got out of it. He had eyes to see that
+"life is just one sequence of many-coloured astonishments", and the
+colours were the gayer when he came to our Thursday nights because he
+was still so young.</p>
+
+<p>He and Mrs. Harland had been in London only a few years, his career as
+Sydney Luska was behind him, his career as Henry Harland was before him,
+he was full of life, energy, enthusiasm, deep in long novels, busy for
+the <i>Daily Chronicle</i>, writing as hard as he talked, and he talked every
+bit as hard as Bob Stevenson.</p>
+
+<p>Like Bob, he seemed to love talk more than anything, but he must have
+loved work as Bob never loved it, for he put the quality of his talk
+into what he wrote. Bob Stevenson's writing never suggested his talk. I
+might find his point of view and his amiable prejudices in his criticism
+and his books&mdash;only he could have written his <i>Velasquez</i> quite as he
+wrote it&mdash;but nowhere do I find a touch, a trace of the Lantern-Bearer
+or Prince Florizel or the Young Man with the Cream Tarts. But I never
+get far away from Harland
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+
+ in his novels. I re-read them a short time
+ago, and they were a magic carpet to bear me straight back to Buckingham
+Street, and the crowded, smoky rooms overlooking the river, and the old
+years when we were all young together.</p>
+
+<p>A delightful thing about Harland was that he did not care to monopolize
+the talk, to talk everybody else down. On the contrary, I doubt if he
+was ever happier than when he roused, provoked, stimulated everybody to
+talk with him. I remember in particular an evening when J. and I were
+dining with him and Mrs. Harland at their Kensington flat, and Mr. and
+Mrs. Edmund Gosse were there, and Mr. and Mrs. W.J. Fisher&mdash;Fisher was
+then editor of the <i>Daily Chronicle</i> and Mrs. Fisher was still Adrienne
+Dayrolles on the stage&mdash;and Louis Austen, a handy man of journalism, and
+when, happening to turn for a minute from Harland by whom I was sitting,
+and to look round the table, I found I was the only one of the party not
+talking&mdash;and we had got no farther than the fish! But I flatter myself I
+have few rivals as an accomplished listener.</p>
+
+<p>Often Harland had the floor to himself simply because everybody else
+wanted to listen too. When what he calls in one of his books "the
+restorative spirit of nonsense" descended upon
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+
+ him, his talk could
+whisk off the whole Thursday night crowd, before they knew it, to that
+delectable Land of Nonsense to which he was an inspired guide. Nobody
+understood better how to set up the absurd and the impossible in the
+garb of truth. An old admirer of his reminded me not long since of a
+tale he used to tell, almost with tears in his voice, of the <i>petit
+patissier</i> who was hurrying through the streets of Paris to deliver
+<i>brioches</i> and tarts to customers and who, crossing the Boulevards, was
+knocked down by a big three-horse omnibus. And as the crowd collected
+and the <i>sergent-de-ville</i> arrived, he was seen painfully and
+deliberately freeing his one uninjured arm, feeling carefully in pocket
+after pocket, and, as he drew his last breath, holding up triumphantly
+the exact number of francs the Parisian on foot then had to pay for
+venturing rashly to get in the way of the Paris driver. And Harland told
+it all with such eloquence that it was some minutes before those who
+listened realised he was laughing and began to laugh with him. And the
+tale was typical of many others he loved to tell. As his talk led the
+way to the Land of Nonsense, so he himself could of a sudden whirl us
+all off to a restaurant, or a park, or an excursion we had not thought
+of an hour, a
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+
+ minute before. Many a time, instead of sitting solemnly
+at home reading or working as we had meant to, we would be going down
+the river in a penny steamboat, or drinking coffee at the <i>Caf&eacute; Royal</i>
+or tea in Kensington Gardens&mdash;but Harland as an inspired guide was at
+his best in Paris I always thought, perhaps because in Paris he had so
+much larger scope than in London.</p>
+
+<p>He impressed one as a man who never tired, or who never gave in to being
+tired, either at work or at play&mdash;a man who, knowing his days would be
+few on this earth, found each fair as it passed and, if he could not bid
+it stay, was at least determined to fill it as full as it would hold.
+There was no resisting his restless energy when with him, and it was
+because he could so little resist it himself, that he was continually
+seeking new outlets&mdash;new forms for its expression. He had just the
+temperament to take up with the mode of the Nineties that drove the
+Young Men to asserting themselves and upholding their doctrines in
+papers and magazines of their own. The pedant may trace the fashion back
+to the <i>Hobby-horse</i> of the Eighties, or, in a further access of
+pedantry to the <i>Germ</i> of the early Fifties. He may follow its growth as
+late as the <i>Blast</i> of yesterday and <i>The Gypsy</i> of to-day. But I do
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+
+not have to go further than my book shelves, I have only to look and see
+there the <i>Dial</i> and the <i>Yellow Book</i> and the <i>Savoy</i> and the
+<i>Butterfly</i> and the <i>Pageant</i> and the <i>Dome</i> and the <i>Evergreen</i>, each
+with its special train of memories and associations, and I know better
+than the greatest pedant of them all that the fashion, no matter when it
+began, no matter when it may end, belongs as essentially to the Nineties
+as the fashion for the crinoline belongs to the Sixties. Harland was not
+original in wanting to set up a pulpit for himself&mdash;the originality was
+in the design for it. The <i>Yellow Book</i> was not like any other quarterly
+from which any other young man or group did his preaching.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>Harland shared his pulpit. He would not have found the same design for
+it without Beardsley, nor would our Thursday nights, where a good deal
+of that design was thought out and talked out, have been the same
+without Beardsley. I would find it hard, even had there been no <i>Yellow
+Book</i>, not to remember Harland and Beardsley together. For it was from
+Mrs. Harland that we first heard of the wonderful youth, unknown still,
+an insignificant clerk in some In
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+
+surance Company, who made the most
+amazing drawings&mdash;it was she who first sent him to us that J. might look
+at his work and help him to escape from the office he hated and from the
+toils of Burne-Jones and the Kelmscott Press in which he was entangled.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol12.jpg" width="500" height="677" alt="Photograph by Frederick H. Evans
+AUBREY BEARDSLEY" title="AUBREY BEARDSLEY" />
+<span class="caption">Photograph by Frederick H. Evans<br />
+AUBREY BEARDSLEY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>He came, the first time, one afternoon in the winter dusk&mdash;a boy, tall
+and slight, long narrow pale clean-shaven face, hair parted in the
+middle and hanging over his forehead, nose prominent, eyes alight,
+certain himself of the worth of his drawings, too modest not to fear
+that other artists might not agree with him. The drawings in his little
+portfolio were mostly for the <i>Morte d' Arthur</i>, with one or two of
+those, now cherished by the collector, that have a hint of the Japanese
+under whose influence he momentarily passed. J. enjoys the reputation,
+which he deserves, of telling the truth always, no matter how unpleasant
+to those to whom he tells it. Truth to Beardsley was pleasant and his
+face was radiant when he left us. J. has also the courage of his
+convictions, and all he said to Beardsley he repeated promptly to the
+public in the first number of <i>The Studio</i>, a magazine started not as a
+pulpit but as a commercial enterprise&mdash;started, however, at the right
+moment to be kindled into life<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> and steered toward success by the
+enthusiasm and the energy of the Young Men of the Nineties.</p>
+
+<p>Beardsley was bound to become known whether articles were written about
+him or not. But J.'s was the first and made recognition come the sooner.
+The heads of many young men grow giddy with the first success; at the
+exultant top of the winding stair that leads to it, they no longer see
+those who gave them a hand when they balanced on the lowest rung. But
+Beardsley was not made that way. He kept his head cool, his eyesight
+clear. He never forgot. Gratitude coloured the friendship with us that
+followed, even in the days when he was one of the most talked about men
+in London. He knew that always by his work alone he would be judged at
+Buckingham Street, and to J. he brought his drawings and his books for
+criticism. He brought his schemes as well, just as he brought the youth
+not only of years but of temperament to our Thursday nights. He came
+almost as regularly as Henley and Henley's Young Men, adding his young
+voice to the uproar of discussion, as full of life as if he too, like
+Harland, grudged a minute of the years he knew for him were counted. In
+no other house where it was my pleasure to meet him did he seem to me to
+show to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> such advantage. In his own home I thought him overburdened by
+the scheme of decoration he had planned for it. In many houses to which
+he was asked he was amiable enough to assume the pose expected of him.
+The lion-hunters hoped that Beardsley would be like his drawings.
+Strange, decadent, morbid, bizarre, weird, were adjectives bestowed upon
+them, and he played up to the adjectives for the edification or
+mystification of the people who invented them and for his own infinite
+amusement. But with us he did not have to play up to anything and could
+be just the simple, natural youth he was&mdash;as simple and natural as I
+have always found the really great, more interested in his work than
+most young men, and keener for success.</p>
+
+<p>I like to insist upon his simplicity because people now, who judge him
+by his drawings, would so much rather insist upon his perversity and his
+affectation. How can you reconcile that sort of thing with simplicity?
+They will ask, pointing to drawings of little mocking satyrs and twisted
+dwarfs and grotesques and extravagant forms and leering faces and a
+suggestion of one can hardly say what. But it might as well be asked why
+the medi&aelig;val artist delighted to carve homely, familiar scenes and
+incidents, and worse,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> in the holiest places, to lavish his ingenuity
+upon the demons and devils above the doors leading into his great
+churches; why a philosopher like Rabelais chose to express the wisest
+thought in the most indecent fooling; why every genius does not look out
+upon life and the world with the same eyes and find the same method to
+record what he sees. Some men can only marvel with Louis Stevenson at
+the wide contrast between the "prim obliterated polite face of life" and
+its "orgiastic foundations"; others are only reconciled to it by the
+humour in the contrast or by the pity invoked by its victims. What makes
+the genius is just the fact that he looks out upon life, that he feels,
+that he uses his eyes, in his own way; also, that he invents his own
+methods of expression. Beardsley saw the satire of life, he loved the
+grotesque which has so gone out of date in our matter-of-fact day that
+we almost forget what it means, and no doubt disease gave a morbid twist
+to his vision and imagination. But, above all, he was young, splendidly
+young: young when he began work, young when he finished work. He had the
+curiosity as to the world and everything in it that is the divine right
+of youth, and he had the gaiety, the exuberance, the flamboyancy, the
+fun of the youth destined to do and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> to triumph. Already, in his later
+work, are signs of the passing of the first youthful stage of his art.
+It is suggestive to contrast the conventional landscapes with the
+grinning little monstrosities in some of the illustrations for the <i>Rape
+of the Lock</i>; the few drawings for his <i>Volpone</i> have a dignity he had
+not hitherto achieved.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody can be surprised if some of the gaiety and exuberance and fun got
+no less into his manner towards the people whose habit is to shield
+their eyes with the spectacles of convention. Beardsley had a keen sense
+of humour that helped him to snatch all the joy there is in the old,
+time-honoured, youthful game of getting on the nerves of established
+respectability. Naturally, so Robert Ross, his friend, has said of him,
+"he possessed what is <i>called</i> an artificial manner"; that is, his
+manner was called affected, as was his art, because it wasn't exactly
+like everybody else's. I have never yet come across the genius whose
+manner was exactly like everybody else's, and shyness,
+self-consciousness, counted for something in his, at least at the start.
+He had only to exaggerate this manner, or mannerism, to set London
+talking. It was the easier because rumours quickly began to go about of
+the darkened room in which he worked, of his turning night<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> into day and
+day into night like Huysmans's hero, and of this or of that strange
+habit or taste, until people began to see all sorts of things in him
+that weren't there, just as they read all sorts of things into his
+drawings that he never put into them, always seeking what they were
+determined to find. To many there was uncanniness in the very extent of
+his knowledge, in his wide reading, in his mastery of more than one art,
+for, if he had not been an artist, he most assuredly would have been a
+musician or a writer. Added to all this, was the abnormal notice he
+attracted almost at once, the diligence with which he was imitated and
+parodied and the rapidity with which a Beardsley type leaped into
+fashion.</p>
+
+<p>Of course Beardsley enjoyed it. What youth of his age would not have
+enjoyed the excitement of such a success? It would have been morbid at
+his age not to enjoy it. He never seemed to me more simply himself than
+when he was relating his adventures and laughing at them with all the
+fresh, gay laughter of the boy&mdash;the wonderful boy&mdash;he was. Arthur Symons
+wrote of him, I have forgotten where, that he admired himself
+enormously. I should say that he was amused by himself enormously and
+was quite ready to pose and to bewilder for the sake of the amuse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>ment
+it brought him. He was never spoiled nor misled by either his fame or
+his notoriety.</p>
+
+<p>It was so Beardsley's habit to consult J. that he would have asked
+advice, if Harland had not, for <i>The Yellow Book</i> which went through
+several stages of its preliminary planning in the old Buckingham Street
+chambers. Among the vivid memories of our Thursday nights one is of
+Harland taking J. apart for long, intimate discussions in a corner of
+the studio, and another of Beardsley taking him off for confidences as
+intimate and long, and my impression in looking back, though I may be
+mistaken, is that each had his personal little scheme for a journal of
+his own before he decided to share it with the other. It was
+characteristic of the friendliness of both that they should have
+insisted upon J. figuring in the first number. As vivid in my memory is
+the warm spring morning when Beardsley, his face beaming with joy,
+called to give me an early copy of this first number, with a little
+inscription from him on the fly-leaf&mdash;I have just taken down the volume
+from the near book shelf&mdash;"To Mrs. Pennell from Aubrey Beardsley" I
+read, as commonplace an inscription as ever artist or author wrote, but,
+reading it, I see as if it were yesterday the sunlit Buckingham Street
+room where I used<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> to work, William Penn curled up on my desk, and,
+coming in the door, the radiant youth with the gay-covered book in his
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>And there followed the dinner&mdash;the amazing dinner as unlike the usual
+formal dinner of inauguration as could be. It was given in an upper room
+of the Hotel d'Italie in Old Compton Street and was as free of ceremony
+as our Thursday nights. The men were in dress suits or tweeds as they
+chose, the women in evening or tailor gowns according to their
+convenience. I have an impression that more people came than were
+expected and that it was all the waiters could do to serve them. I know
+I was much more concerned with my discomfort to find that Harland and
+Beardsley, for the first time in my experience, had forgotten how to
+talk. Everybody else was talking. I can still see the animated faces and
+hear the animated voices of Mrs. Harland and John Oliver Hobbes and
+M&eacute;nie Muriel Dowie and Kenneth Grahame and George Moore and John Lane
+and Max Beerbohm, and all the brand-new writers prepared to shock, or to
+"uplift," or to pull down old altars and set up new ones, or any other
+of the fine things that were to make the <i>Yellow Book</i> a force and
+famous. But also I can still feel the heavy, unnatural silence of the
+two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> editors from which I was the chief sufferer, to me having fallen
+the honour of sitting in the centre of the high table between them. J.
+was away and, in his absence, I was distinguished by this mark of
+Beardsley's appreciation and Harland's friendliness. I was greatly
+flattered, but less entertained. They were both as nervous as d&eacute;butantes
+at a first party. Shrinking from the shadow cast before by their coming
+speeches, neither of them had as much as a word to throw me. Nor could
+they concentrate their distracted thoughts upon the <i>menu</i>&mdash;plate after
+plate was taken away untouched, while I kept on emptying mine in
+self-defence, to pass the time, wondering if, in my r&ocirc;le of the <i>Pall
+Mall's</i> "greedy Autolycus," my friends would now convict me of the sin
+of public eating as well as what they had been pleased to pretend was my
+habit of "private eating," for not otherwise, they would assure me,
+could they account for the unfailing flamboyancy of my weekly article on
+cookery. Seated between the two men, in their hours of ease when they
+were not editors, my trouble would have been to listen to both at the
+same moment and to get a word in edgewise. However, when the speeches
+were over the strain was relaxed. The evening ended in the accustomed
+floods of talk;&mdash;on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> way from the Hotel d'Italie; at the Bodley
+Head, John Lane's new premises in the Albany to which he took us all
+that we might see the place from which the <i>Yellow Book</i> was to be
+published; round a little table with a red-and-white checked cover in
+the basement of the Monico, the company now reduced to Harland and Mrs.
+Harland, Beardsley, Max Beerbohm and two or three others whose faces
+have grown dim in my memory, everybody as unwilling to break up the
+meeting as on Thursday nights in our Buckingham Street rooms. And with
+these ceremonies the <i>Yellow Book</i> was launched into life.</p>
+
+<p>I am not sure what the <i>Yellow Book</i> means to others&mdash;to those others
+who buy it now in the thirteen volumes of the new edition and prize it
+as a strange record of a strange period, from which they feel as far
+removed as we felt from the Sixties. But to me, the bright yellow-bound
+volumes mean youth, gay, irresponsible, credulous, hopeful youth, and
+Thursday night at Buckingham Street in full swing. To be sure the
+<i>Yellow Book</i> was never so young as it was planned to be. It did not
+represent only <i>les Jeunes</i>, who would have kept it all to themselves in
+their first mad, exuberant, reckless springtime. But they were not
+strong enough to stand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> alone, as <i>les Jeunes</i> seldom are, or have been
+through the ages. It was more original in its art than in its
+literature. Some of the youngest writers were "discoveries" of Henley's,
+while some who actually were "discovered" by the <i>Yellow Book</i> have
+faded out of sight. Many were men of name and fame well established.
+Hamerton, almost at the end of his career, Henry James in the full
+splendour of his maturity, Edmund Gosse with his reputation already
+assured, were as welcome as the youngest of the young men and women who
+had never printed a line before. So identified with "this passage of
+literary history"&mdash;in his words&mdash;was Henry James that he has recorded
+the preliminary visit of "a young friend [Harland of course], a
+Kensington neighbour and an ardent man of letters," with "a young friend
+of his own," in whom there is no mistaking Beardsley, "to bespeak my
+interest for a periodical about to take birth in his hands, on the most
+original 'lines' and with the happiest omen." But there was youth in
+this readiness for hero-worship&mdash;youth in this tribute to the older men
+whose years could not dim the brilliance nor lessen the power of their
+work in the eyes of the new generation&mdash;the fragrance of youth exudes
+from the pages of the <i>Yellow Book</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> as I turn them over again, in
+places the fragrance of infancy, the young contributors so young as to
+seem scarcely out of their swaddling clothes. At the time the energy and
+zest put into it had an equal savour of youth. And altogether it gave us
+all a great deal to talk about, so that I see in it now a sort of link
+to join on Thursday nights the different groups from their opposing
+corners, supplying to writers and artists one subject of the same
+interest to both. It even opened the door to the architects, one of whom
+went so far as to neglect architecture and to emulate Ibsen in a play.</p>
+
+<p>The last thing I foresaw for the <i>Yellow Book</i> was a speedy end or, for
+the matter of that, any end at all, so overflowing was it with the
+spirit of youth and energy, war and enthusiasm. But the end came
+surprisingly soon. To remind me, were I in danger of forgetting, another
+book stands on our shelves close to the First Volume of the <i>Yellow
+Book</i>:&mdash;the First Volume of the <i>Savoy</i>, on its fly-leaf again
+Beardsley's inscription simple as himself, "Mrs. Pennell, with kindest
+regards from Aubrey Beardsley," and only a little less than two years
+between the dates of the two. And the beginning of the <i>Savoy</i> meant the
+end of the <i>Yellow Book</i>, whose life was short<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> after Beardsley left it.
+Why he left it has nothing to do with the story of our Thursday nights,
+when no obstacle, great or small, would have been put in its way by us
+who held youth and energy, war and enthusiasm above most things in
+demand and honour. But I question if the time has come for the full
+telling of the story, wherever or with whom the blame may lie. That an
+objection was raised to Beardsley's presence in the <i>Yellow Book</i>,
+though without Beardsley there would have been no <i>Yellow Book</i>, is
+known and has been told in print, the reason being that Victorian sham
+prudery and respectability had not been totally wiped out for all the
+hard fighting of the Fighting Nineties. Beardsley was not slain, he was
+not defeated, at once he reappeared on the battle-field with the
+<i>Savoy</i>, Arthur Symons his fellow editor. But by now the enemy never yet
+conquered on this earth held him in deadly grip, and the fight he had to
+fight sent him from London to Bournemouth, to Saint-Germain, to Dieppe,
+to Mentone in search of health. He was the youngest of that old Thursday
+night crowd and he was the first to go, and the <i>Savoy</i> went with him,
+and before he had gone our Thursday nights were already but a landmark
+in memory, so quickly does the flame of youth burn out.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>VII</h3>
+
+<p>By another of our happy chances Phil May came as assiduously on our
+Thursday nights as Beardsley, and they were two of the artists, though
+their art was as the poles apart, who had most influence on the
+black-and-white of the Nineties&mdash;it will be seen from this that I
+refrain from saying what I think of J. and his influence, but it is
+considered almost as indiscreet, almost as bad form, to admit the
+excellence or importance of one's husband's work as to pretend to any in
+one's own.</p>
+
+<p>If no drawings could have been less like Beardsley's than Phil May's
+neither could two men have been more utterly unlike. Some friends of
+Beardsley's believe that he was happiest where there was most noise,
+most people, most show, which, however, was not my impression. But when
+there was the noise of people about him, he might be relied upon to
+contribute his share and to take part in whatever show was going. I
+question if Phil May was happy at all unless in the midst of many people
+and much noise, whether at home or abroad, but to their noise, anyway,
+he had not the least desire to add. Beardsley was fond of talk, always
+had something to say, was always eager to say it. All Phil May<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> asked
+was not to be expected to say anything, to be allowed to smile amiably
+his dissent or approval. Had the rest of our company been of his mind in
+the matter, it would not have been so much easier for us to start the
+talk at once than to stop it at a reasonable hour, our Thursday nights
+would not have been so deafening with talk that I do not yet understand
+why the other tenants in the house did not unite in an indignant protest
+to the landlord.</p>
+
+<p>It was not laziness that kept him silent. He had not a touch of laziness
+in his composition. His drawings look so simple that people thought they
+were dashed off at odd moments. But over them he took the infinite pains
+and time considered by the wise to be the true secret of genius. It may
+be he expressed himself so well in lines he had no use for words. The
+one indisputable fact is that he would do anything to escape talking. I
+recall a night&mdash;not a Thursday night though he finished it in our
+rooms&mdash;when he had been invited to lecture to a Woman's Club at the
+Society of Arts. He appeared on the platform with a formidable-looking
+MS. in his hand, but he put it down at once and spent his appointed hour
+in making drawings on big sheets of paper arranged for an occasional
+illustration. He had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> more to say than I ever heard him say anywhere,
+when we got back to Buckingham Street. The MS. was all right, he assured
+us, a capital lecture written for him by a friend, but it began "Far be
+it from me" something or other, he didn't wait to see what, for, as far
+as he got, it did not sound like him, did it? and we could honestly
+agree that it did not.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol13.jpg" width="500" height="734" alt="Drawing by Himself
+PHIL MAY IN CAP AND BELLS" title="PHIL MAY IN CAP AND BELLS" />
+<span class="caption">Drawing by Himself<br />
+PHIL MAY IN CAP AND BELLS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>He could talk. I must not give the idea that he could not. I know some
+of his friends who do not share or accept unqualified my memory of him
+as a silent man. But he talked most and best when he had but a single
+companion, and nothing could persuade me that he was not always
+relieved, when the chance came, to let others do the talking for him.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know what the attraction was that made everybody like him, not
+merely the riffraff and the loafers who hung about his studio and
+waylaid him in the street for what they could get out of him, but all
+sorts of people who asked for nothing save his company&mdash;I could never
+define the attraction to myself. It was not his looks. Even before his
+last years, when he was the image of J.J. Shannon's portrait of him, his
+appearance was not prepossessing. He dressed well according to his
+ideals. Beardsley was not more of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> a dandy; but Beardsley was the dandy
+of Piccadilly or the Boulevards, Phil May was the dandy of the
+race-course. He brought with him that inevitable, indescribable look
+that the companionship of horses gives and that in those days broke out
+largely in short, wide-spreading covert coats and big pearl buttons. I
+have always been grateful to the man who enlivens the monotony of dress
+by a special fashion of his own, provided it belongs to him. The horsy
+costume did belong to May, for he rode and hunted and was a good deal
+with horses, but it was borrowed by some of his admirers until it
+degenerated into almost as great an affectation as the artist's velvet
+jacket and long hair, or the high stock and baggy corduroys of the Latin
+Quarter imported into Chelsea. When the Beggarstaff Brothers, as Pryde
+and Nicholson called themselves in those old days, would wander casually
+into our rooms at the end of six or eight feet of poster that they had
+brought to show J. and that needed a great deal of manipulation to bring
+in at all, they looked as if the stable, not the studio, was their
+workshop. And one young genius of an illustrator, who could not afford
+to ride, and who I do not believe had ever been on a horse in his life,
+could not mount the bus in his near suburb<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> without putting on riding
+breeches. But Phil May's dress was as essentially his as his silence.</p>
+
+<p>Neither his looks nor his silence, however original and personal, could
+have been the cause of the charm he undeniably possessed. I think he was
+one of the people whom one feels are nice instinctively, without any
+reason. He was sympathetic and responsive, serious when the occasion
+called for it, foolish when folly was in order. It wasn't only in his
+drawings that he was ready to wear the cap and bells. I know an artist,
+one of whose cherished memories of Phil May is of the Christmas Eve when
+they both rang Lord Leighton's door-bell and ran away and back to Phil
+May's studio on the other side of the road, and Phil May was as pleased
+as if it had been a masterpiece for <i>Punch</i>. He was naturally
+kind,&mdash;amiable perhaps because it was the simplest thing to be. In his
+own house his amiability forced him to break his silence, but his
+remarks then, as far as I heard them, were usually confined to the
+monotonous offer "Have a cigar!" "Have a whiskey-and-soda!" or "Have a
+drawing!" if anyone happened to express admiration for his work. Had we
+accepted this last offer every time it was made to us, we would have a
+fine collection of Phil May's, while,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> as it is, we do not own as much
+as a single sketch given to us by him. Visitors who did not share our
+scruples have found their steady attendance at his Sunday nights one of
+the best investments they ever made.</p>
+
+<p>Away from his own house, on our Thursday nights, relieved of the
+necessity to offer anything, this being now our business, his
+conversation was more limited than in his own place. My memory of him is
+of an ugly, delightful, smiling, silent man, sitting astride a chair,
+his arms resting on the back, a big cigar in his mouth, and around him a
+band of devoted admirers as fully prepared and equipped to do the
+talking for him as he was to let them do it. He held his court as
+royally among illustrators as Henley among his Young Men, and if nobody
+contributed so little to the talk as Phil May, around nobody else,
+except Henley, did so much of the talk centre.</p>
+
+<p>In my recollections of Phil May astride his chair on Thursday nights,
+Hartrick and Sullivan are never very long absent. Nobody knew better
+than they the beauty of his work&mdash;to hear them talk about his line was
+to be convinced that the supreme interest in life was the expressive
+quality of a line made with pen in black ink on a piece of white paper.
+The appearance of <i>The</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> <i>Parson and the Painter</i> was one of the events
+of the Nineties&mdash;though it was not boomed into notoriety as were the
+performances of some other illustrators of the period as ingenious as
+Barnum in the art of advertisement&mdash;and there was not an artist who did
+not hail May as a master. But Hartrick and Sullivan went further. They
+were not only such good artists themselves that they could appreciate
+genius in others, they were young enough not to be afraid of their
+enthusiasms. They gave the effect of being with May, with whom they
+often arrived and stayed until the deplorably early hour of the morning
+at which he started for home, in order that they might watch over him,
+and, indeed, he needed watching. He was not readier in offering than in
+giving anything he was asked for, which was one reason why there was
+always a procession of waiters and actors and jockeys out of work at his
+front door&mdash;why his pockets were always empty. They even discovered the
+same genius in May's talk as in his drawing, though the mystery was when
+they heard the talk. To this day they will quote Phil May while I wonder
+how it is that while for me Henley's talk has not lost its thunder, nor
+Bob Stevenson's its brilliant flashes of imbecility, nor Harland's its
+whimsical twist, nor Beardsley's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> its fresh gaiety, nothing of Phil
+May's remains save the familiar refrain "Have a cigar!" "Have a
+whiskey-and-soda!" "Have a drawing!"</p>
+
+<p>Obsessed by my old-fashioned notion as hostess that people could not
+enjoy themselves unless they were kept moving, persisting in my vain
+efforts to break up the groups into which the company invariably fell,
+again and again I would lure Hartrick and Sullivan away from Phil May.
+But it was no use. What they all wanted was to talk not only about their
+shop but their own particular counter in it, and no sooner was my back
+turned than there they were in the same groups again, Hartrick and
+Sullivan watching over Phil May, supported by Raven Hill and Edgar
+Wilson, both then deeply involved in youth's game of shocking the
+<i>bourgeois</i> by showing on the pages of <i>Pick-Me-Up</i> how the matter of
+illustration was ordered in France, and presently starting a magazine of
+their own to show it the better, and to do their share as ardent rebels
+in the big fight of the Nineties. On my shelves, close by the first
+number of <i>The Yellow Book</i> and of the <i>Savoy</i> is the first volume of
+<i>The Butterfly</i> and on its fly-leaf is the inscription: "To Elizabeth
+Robins Pennell with L. Raven Hill's kind regards," no more startlingly
+original than Beards<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>ley's inscriptions, but to me full of meaning and
+memories. I cannot look at it without seeing myself fluttering from one
+to another of the old Buckingham Street rooms, heavy with the smell of
+smoke and powder, thunderous not only with the knocking&mdash;naturally I
+quote the Ibsen phrase everybody was quoting in the Nineties&mdash;but the
+banging, the battering, the bombarding of the younger generation at the
+Victorian door against which it was desperate work to make any
+impression at all.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VIII</h3>
+
+<p>In my less responsible intervals it amused me to find the painters
+running their own shop, or their own little counter, quite apart from
+the illustrators, and carrying on all by themselves their own special
+campaign against that obdurate Victorian door. Their campaign, as they
+ran it, required less talk than most, for they were chiefly men of the
+New English Art Club&mdash;the men who gave the shows where Felix Buhot smelt
+the powder&mdash;the men who were considered apostles of defiance when the
+inner group held their once-famous exhibition as "London
+Impressionists"&mdash;the men about whom the critics for a while did nothing
+save talk&mdash;but men who had the reputation of talking so little
+themselves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> that, when a man came up for election in their Club, his
+talent for silence was said to be as important a consideration with them
+as his talent for art. Not that the silence of any one of them could
+rival Phil May's in eloquence&mdash;they never learned to say nothing with
+his charm. Often the poverty of their conversation had the effect of
+being involuntary, as if they might have had plenty to say had they
+known how to say it. More than one struggled to rid himself of his
+talent with at least an air of success.</p>
+
+<p>The big booming voice of Charles W. Furse was frequently heard, but in
+it a suspicion of an Academic note unfamiliar in our midst, so that,
+young as he was, combative, enthusiastic, "a good fellow" as they say in
+England, still in his Whistler and rebel period, his friends predicted
+for him the Presidency of the Royal Academy. The first time I ever saw
+him was the year he was showing at the New English two large upright,
+full-length portraits of women, highly reminiscent of Whistler, and, on
+press day, was being turned out of the gallery by the critics who, in
+revolutionizing criticism, were fighting against the old-fashioned
+Victorian idea of press views with the artists busy log-rolling and an
+elaborate lunch, or at least whiskey and cigars behind a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> screen. The
+New English men compromised by staying away, but they clung to the
+lunch, a feast chiefly for their commissionaire and their salesman and
+the grey-haired critic, a survival, who could not reconcile himself to
+change and whom I heard once, in another gallery, pronounce the show
+admirable, "perfect really, your show, but for one thing missing&mdash;a
+decanter and cigars on the table." Furse, who had not heard the critic's
+cry for reform and could not understand his banishment, lingered in the
+passage, button-holing everybody who came out, trying to pick up a hint
+as to what we were all going to say about him. He considered himself a
+red-hot rebel and the prophetic picture of him scaling Academic heights
+annoyed him extremely, though he so soon became an Associate of the
+Academy that I think, had he lived, time would have proved the prophets
+right.</p>
+
+<p>Walter Sickert's voice, too, was frequently heard at the beginning of a
+Thursday night, but his promise of brilliancy never struck me as leading
+anywhere in particular, my personal impression being that with his talk,
+as with his art, the fulfilment scarcely justified the promise.</p>
+
+<p>D.S. MacColl, young arch-rebel at the time little as the formal official
+of to-day suggests it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> his bombarding of the Victorian door directed
+chiefly from the sober columns of the <i>Spectator</i>, and later of the
+<i>Saturday Review</i>, was always well armed with words for the Thursday
+night battle, conscientious in distributing his blows and shaping them
+in strict deference to his sense of style, just a touch of the preacher
+perhaps in his voice and in his fight for art and freedom, as he was the
+first to acknowledge; more than once I have heard him explain
+apologetically that his right place was the pulpit for which he had been
+designed.</p>
+
+<p>Arthur Tomson, one of the best friends in the world, was a spirited
+revolutionary who went to the length of founding and editing a paper of
+his own to promote revolution&mdash;the <i>Art Weekly</i>, which, not being able
+to afford illustrations, conducted its warfare solely by its articles,
+and strong, fearless, knock-you-down articles they were since we all
+wrote for the paper while it lasted. It did not last long, however, but
+shared the fate of most revolutionary sheets with more brains than
+capital. Arthur Tomson himself, out of print, was a quiet, if staunch
+fighter, another of the old Thursday night group who knew that his years
+on this earth were to be short. He was not the gayer for it as Harland
+and Beardsley<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> were, but the sadder, it may be because he foresaw the
+end long before it came, and he was given to the melancholy that found
+expression in so many of his paintings.</p>
+
+<p>Wilson Steer, Tonks, Professor Brown passed, and no more, across the
+stage of our Thursday nights, all three, as I remember them, scrupulous
+in upholding the reputation for silence of their Club. Conder flitted in
+and out of our rooms, always agreeable but not the man to lift up his
+voice in a crowd.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally, a visitor from abroad appeared&mdash;Felix Buhot every Thursday
+that one winter, or, more rarely Paul Renouard, in London for the
+<i>Graphic</i>, his appearance an event for the illustrators who already
+reverenced him as a veteran. Or else it was a representative, a
+publisher, of <i>les Jeunes</i> over there, bringing fresh stimulus, fresh
+incentive, especially if his coming meant fresh orders and fresh
+opportunity to say what had to be said freely and without restraint.
+Once it was Jules Roque from Paris, of the <i>Courrier Fran&ccedil;ais</i> in which
+he published the drawings of Louis Legrand and Forain and other artists
+accepted as models by the young men of our Thursday nights who believed
+in themselves the more defiantly when asked to figure in such good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+company. Once it was Meier Graefe from Berlin, big, handsome,
+enterprising, not yet encumbered with Post-Impressionism and its
+outshoots, seeking American and British contributors to the German
+<i>Pan</i>, a magazine as big and enterprising as himself if not always as
+handsome, and the younger generation of London had the comfort of
+knowing that if the Victorian door in England held firm, the door of
+Europe had opened to them.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally one of the older, the very much older generation came in to
+make us feel the younger for his presence&mdash;none more imposing than
+Sandys, most distinguished in his old age, wearing the white waistcoat
+that was the life-long symbol of his dandyism, full of Pre-Raphaelite
+reminiscences, and reminiscences of the Italian Primitives could not
+have seemed more remote. J. sometimes met Holman Hunt in other
+haunts&mdash;at dinners of the Society of Illustrators and elsewhere&mdash;and
+reported him to me as a talker who could, in the quantity and
+aggressiveness of his talk, have given points to Henley and Henley's
+Young Men, so I regret that he never was with us to talk over
+Pre-Raphaelite days with Sandys. The only other possible representative
+of Pre-Raphaelitism who came was Walter Crane, if so he can be called,
+for the tra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>dition fell lightly on his shoulders, was a mere re-echo in
+his work; the only one of Sandys's contemporaries was Whistler, and
+their meeting of which J. and I have written in another place, does not
+belong to the story of our Thursday nights, for they were a thing of the
+past when Whistler returned from Paris, where he had gone to live almost
+as they began.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did Sandys often appear on Thursdays. He seemed to prefer the
+evenings when we were alone, to my surprise, for the homage he received
+when he did come on Thursday must have been pleasant. Drawings of his
+hung prominently in our rooms, J. then haunting the salesrooms for the
+originals of the Sixties as industriously as the barrows and shops for
+their reproductions. And to the man who prefers fame to reach him during
+his lifetime, surely it should have been an agreeable experience to sit,
+or to be enthroned as it were, in so friendly an atmosphere, with some
+of his own finest work on the wall behind him for background, and
+surrounded by a worshipping group asking nothing better than to be
+allowed to sit at his feet and listen to his every word&mdash;which was a
+sacrifice for his worshippers in Buckingham Street who rejoiced in the
+sound of their own voices as did most of the company.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> But the Nineties
+are not more wonderful and stimulating to the young men of to-day who
+look back to them so admiringly, than the Sixties were to us whom they
+kept up into the small hours of many a Friday morning, inexhaustible as
+a subject of our talk, and Sandys, standing for the Sixties and all we
+found in them so admirable, could command any sacrifice. The respect for
+the Sixties was an article of faith, a dogma of dogmas in the Nineties.
+If the now younger generation write articles and books about the
+Nineties&mdash;those amazing documents in which I scarcely recognise an age I
+thought I knew by heart&mdash;we were still more zealous in writing books
+about the Sixties. And we collected the drawings and publications of the
+Sixties. When J. and I now allowed ourselves an afternoon out, it was to
+wander from Holywell Street to Mile End Road, from Piccadilly to
+Holborn, searching the booksellers' barrows and shops for the unsightly,
+gaudy, badly-bound volumes that contained the illustrations of the
+Sixties&mdash;illustrations ranked amongst the finest ever made. Our
+bookshelves that are still filled with them represent one of the most
+animated phases of the Nineties. And we looked upon the "men of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+Sixties" as masters, among them giving to Sandys a leading place.</p>
+
+<p>If he was not any longer doing the work for which we took off our hat to
+him, he certainly looked the leader&mdash;tall, handsome, dignified, just
+enough of a stoop in his shoulders to become his age, his dress
+irreproachable, the white waistcoat immaculate, pale yellow hair parted
+in the middle and beautifully brushed, beard not patriarchal exactly but
+eminently correct and well cared for, manners princely. It was clear
+that he liked the r&ocirc;le of master and his voice was in keeping with the
+part. But he was a master who presided at his best over a small
+audience, and, no doubt knowing it, he avoided our Thursdays.</p>
+
+<p>He was also a master given to small gossip. We heard from him less of
+art, its aims and ideals, its mediums and methods, than of the sayings
+and doings of the Pre-Raphaelites who were his friends and
+contemporaries. The name of "Gabriel" was ever in his mouth. It was
+Rossetti whom he most loved&mdash;or love is not the word, less of affection
+revealed in his memories than a sense of injury, as if it had somehow
+been the fault of "Gabriel" and the others that he had not come off as
+well as they, though of all "Ga<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>briel" had been most active in seeing
+him through the tight places he so successfully got himself into. This,
+no doubt, was the reason Rossetti felt entitled to a little laugh now
+and then over Sandys's difficulties. Sandys was a man who needed to be
+seen through tight places until the end, as we had occasion to know by
+the urgent note he sent us on a Saturday night, more than once, from the
+<i>Caf&eacute; Royal</i>, his favourite haunt in his later years, where a variety of
+unavoidable accidents, with a curious faculty for repeating themselves,
+would keep him prisoner until his friends came to his relief.</p>
+
+<p>He was full of anecdote, which was quite in the order of things, the
+Sixties having supplied anecdote for a whole library of books and
+magazines. Could I tell Sandys's stories with Sandys's voice I should be
+tempted to repeat them yet once again, though many were told us also by
+Whistler, and these J. and I have recorded in the Life. Whistler told
+them better, with more truth because with more gaiety and joy in their
+absurdity. And yet, the solemnity of Sandys added a personal flavour,
+gave them a character nobody else could give. I have not forgotten how
+he turned into a parable the tale of the cross-eyed maid in the Morris
+Shop in Red Lion Square, whose eyes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> were knocked straight by a shock
+the company of Morris, Marshall, and Faulkner administered deliberately,
+and then were knocked crooked again by a shock they had not provided for
+or against. And, as Sandys recalled them, the strange beasts in
+"Gabriel's" house and garden might have been let loose from out of the
+Apocalypse. But Sandys's voice has been stilled forever and the
+anecdotes have been published oftener, I do believe, than any others in
+the world's rich store of <i>clich&eacute;s</i>. The great of his day had all the
+Boswells they wanted&mdash;a retinue of admirers and cuffs ready&mdash;at their
+head William Michael Rossetti to pour out book after book about his
+brother, to leave little untold about the group that revolved round
+"Gabriel." Even the third generation, with Ford Madox Hueffer to lead,
+has taken up the task. The anecdotes have grown familiar, but it is
+something to have heard them from the men who were their heroes.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IX</h3>
+
+<p>Well&mdash;our Thursdays were pleasant, an inspiration while they lasted, and
+for a time I thought they must last as long as we did. But nothing
+pleasant endures forever, the bravest inspiration flickers and dies
+almost before we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> realize its flaring. The stern duty of Friday morning
+always haunted me in anticipation, for I have never been able to take
+lightly the work I do with so much difficulty, and Friday morning itself
+often brought even J. up with a sharp turn to face the fact that man was
+born into the world to labour in the sweat of his brow, and not simply
+to talk all night until no work was left in him.</p>
+
+<p>That may have been one reason for our giving up so agreeable a custom.
+Another perhaps came from the discovery that the freedom of our Thursday
+nights was sometimes abused. A certain type of Englishman would travel a
+mile and more for anything he did not have to pay for, even if it was
+for nothing more substantial than a cigarette, a sandwich, a
+whiskey-and-soda. There were evenings when, looking round the packed
+dining-room, it would occur to me that I did not recognise half the
+people in it. Friends introduced friends and they introduced other
+friends until, in bewilderment, I asked myself if our Thursday night was
+ours or somebody else's. And I fancied a tendency to treat it as if it
+were somebody else's,&mdash;to take an ell when we meant to give no more than
+an inch, and J. was as little inclined as I to furnish a new proof of
+the wise old proverb. One day a would-be wit who was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> regular in his
+attendance and his talk, and who should have known better, asked J.,
+"Are you still running your Thursday Club?" and so helped to precipitate
+the end. We were not running a Club for anybody, and if the fame of our
+Thursday night filled our rooms with people who behaved as if we were,
+the sooner we got rid of them the better.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, as the weeks and the months and the years went on, many who had
+come and talked and fought our Thursday night through ceased to come
+altogether. Where I failed in breaking up the groups Time, with its
+cruel thoroughness, succeeded and began to scatter them far and wide.
+Death stilled voices that had been loudest. The <i>National Observer</i>
+passed out of Henley's hands and Henley himself into the Valley of the
+Shadow. Bob Stevenson said his last good-night to us. Beardsley,
+Harland, Arthur Tomson, George Steevens, Phil May, Furse,
+Iwan-M&uuml;ller&mdash;one after another of our old friends, one after another of
+those old masters of talk set out on the journey into the Great Silence.
+It is hard to believe they have gone. I remember how, when they were
+with us and the talk was at its maddest and somebody would suddenly take
+breath long enough to look out of our windows, whose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> curtains were
+never drawn upon the one spectacle we could offer&mdash;the river with the
+boats trailing their lights down its shadowy reaches, and the Embankment
+with the lights of the hansoms flying to and fro, and the bridges with
+the procession of lights from the omnibuses and cabs and the trails of
+burning cloud from the trains&mdash;Henley would say, "How it lives, how it
+throbs with life out there!" and I would think to myself, "And how it
+lives, how it throbs with life in here!"&mdash;with a life too intense, it
+seemed, ever to wear itself out. And yet now only two or three of the
+old friends of the old Thursday nights are left to look down with us
+upon the river where it flows below our windows&mdash;upon the moving lights
+of London's great traffic, upon London's great life and great beauty,
+and great movement without end.</p>
+
+<p>It is not only the dead we have lost. Time has made other changes as sad
+as any wrought by Death. The young have grown old,&mdash;have thrown off
+youth's "proud livery" for the sombre garment of age. The years have
+turned the rebel of yesterday into the Royal Academician of to-day. The
+inspired young prophet who protested week by week against mediocrity in
+paint, settled down to keeping the mediocre paintings against<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> which his
+protests were loudest. He who thundered against the degeneracy of
+journalism accepted the patronage of the titled promoter of the
+half-penny press. Architects carried their respectability to the
+professional chair it adorns, and illustrators rested in the comfortable
+berths provided by <i>Punch</i>. Friendships cooled, and friends who never
+missed a Thursday look the other way when they meet us in the street.</p>
+
+<p>Close to me, as I write, is a bookcase on whose shelves Henley and
+Henley's Young Men&mdash;Marriott Watson, George Steevens, Charles Whibley,
+Leonard Whibley, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Morrison, G.S.
+Street&mdash;jostle each other in the big and little volumes that were to
+create the world anew. The small green-bound Henleys stand in a row.
+<i>Salome</i>, <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>, <i>Volpone</i>, with Beardsley's
+illustrations, are flanked by the more pretentious performances of the
+Kelmscott Press and the Vale Press and the other Presses aspiring with
+much advertisement to do what the Constables of Edinburgh did so much
+better as a matter of course, and, as a reminder of this truth, the
+<i>Montaigne</i> of the <i>Tudor Series</i> is there and the <i>Apuleius</i> and the
+<i>Heliodorus</i>, each with its inscription. And the little slim volume,
+neatly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> bound by Zaehnsdorf, called <i>Allahakbarries</i>&mdash;now a prize for
+the collector I am told&mdash;immortalizes one recreation at least of
+Henley's Young Men. For it is Barrie's report of the Cricket Team
+largely made up of these Young Men, of whom he was Captain and who used
+to play at Shere on the never-to-be-forgotten summer days when beautiful
+Graham Tomson and I were graciously invited as Patronesses, and little
+Madge Henley&mdash;her death shortly afterwards proving Henley's own death
+blow&mdash;figured as "Captain's Girl" and the <i>National Observer</i> office as
+"Practice Ground." And if Henley did not drag himself down with us to
+the pretty Surrey village, he seemed to preside over us all, so much so
+that when J. and I had the little book bound and added the photographs
+Harold Frederic&mdash;"Photographer" in the report&mdash;made of the Team, we
+included one of Henley, and altogether the tiny volume is as eloquent a
+document of the Nineties and of Henley and Henley's Young Men as we
+have, and I wonder what the collector of those snares for the American
+now catalogued by the bookseller as "Association Books" would not give
+to own it. And close by our <i>Allahakbarries</i>, Henry Harland's
+<i>Mademoiselle Miss</i> meets in the old friendly companionship Stee<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>vens's
+<i>Land of the Dollar</i> and Graham Tomson's <i>Poems</i> and Bob Stevenson's
+<i>Velasquez</i> and Harold Frederic's <i>Return of the O'Mahoney</i> and Bernard
+Shaw's <i>Cashel Byron's Profession</i> in its rare paper cover, and George
+Moore's <i>Strike</i> at <i>Arlingford</i>, and Marriott Watson's <i>Diogenes of
+London</i>, and&mdash;but of what use to go through the list, the long
+catalogue, to the end? Ghosts greet me from those shelves, ghosts from
+the old Thursdays, from the radiant days when youth was merging into
+middle age&mdash;surely the best period in one's existence&mdash;days into which
+the breath of life never can be breathed again. We could not revive the
+old nights if we would. I suppose nobody now reads Zola, but we read him
+in the Nineties and I have always been haunted by his description in
+<i>L'Oeuvre</i> of the last reunion of the friends who, in their eager youth,
+had meant to conquer Paris and who used to meet to plan their campaign
+over a dinner as meagre as their income and gay as their hopes. But
+when, after years during which money and fame had been heaped up by more
+than one and disappointment and despair lavished in equal measure upon
+others, they ventured to dine together again, and the dinner was good
+and well served as it never had been of old, it turned to dust and ashes
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> their mouths&mdash;a funeral feast. Dust and ashes would be our fare were
+we so foolish as again to open our doors on the Thursday night
+consecrated to youth and its battles long ago.</p>
+
+
+<h3>X</h3>
+
+<p>If we have had no more Thursday nights, it does not follow that we have
+had no other nights. The habit of years is not so easily broken, and our
+habit was, and is, at night to gather people about us and to talk. Only,
+after the Nineties, or rather before the end of the Nineties, we never
+settled again with weekly regularity upon one special night out of the
+seven for the purpose&mdash;on the contrary, we took, and we now take, our
+nights as they came and come.</p>
+
+<p>They have not been, for that, the less interesting and amusing, not less
+loud with the sound of battle, not less fragrant with the smell of
+smoke. It was just after our Thursday nights, for instance, that we
+began what I might call our Whistler nights, and a more stimulating
+talker than Whistler never talked, a more stimulating fighter never
+fought. I do not mean in the impossible way meant by those whose
+judgment of him rests solely on <i>The Gentle Art</i>. They think he fought
+for no other end than to make enemies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> when, really, he enjoyed far more
+the good give-and-take argument that preserved to him his friends,
+provided those friends fought fair and did not play the coward, or the
+toady, to escape the combat.</p>
+
+<p>J. and I have written his Life in vain if everybody who cares to know
+anything about him does not know that from 1895 and 1896, the greater
+part of his time was spent in London and that many of his nights were
+then given to us, more particularly towards the end of the amazing
+decade. We paid for the privilege by the loss of some of our friends
+who, for one reason or another, cultivated a wholesome fear of Whistler.
+Men who had been most constant in dropping in, dropped in no
+longer&mdash;nor, in many cases, have they ever begun to drop in again. More
+than one would have run miles to escape the chance encounter, trembling
+with apprehension when in a desperate visit they seemed to court it, and
+often the several doors opening into our little hall served as important
+a part in preventing a meeting between Whistler and the enemy as the
+doors in the old-fashioned farce played in the husband and wife game of
+hide-and-seek.</p>
+
+<p>It was not too big a price to pay. Whistler's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> talk was worth a great
+deal, and the twelve years that have passed since we lost it forever
+have not lessened its value for us. Ours is a sadder world since we have
+ceased to hear the memorable and unmistakable knock and ring at our
+front door, the prelude to the talk, rousing the whole house until every
+tenant in the other chambers and the housekeeper in her rooms below knew
+when Whistler came to see us. Our nights, since those he animated and
+made as "joyous" as he liked to be in his hours of play and battle, have
+lost their savour. We are perpetually referring to them, quoting,
+regretting them. Even Augustine looks back to them as making a pleasant
+epoch in her life. Often she will remind me of this night or that,
+declaring we have grown dull without him&mdash;but do I remember the night
+when M. Whistlaire argued so hard and with such violence that the print
+of the rabbit fell from the wall in its frame, the glass shivering in a
+thousand pieces, just when M. Kennedy was so angry we thought he was
+going to walk away forever, and how after that there could be no more
+arguing, and M. Whistlaire laughed as she swept up the pieces, and M.
+Kennedy did not walk away alone, but later they both walked away
+together, arm-in-arm, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> the hotel where they always stayed?&mdash;and do I
+remember how, during the Boer War, he would come and dine with me alone,
+his pockets stuffed with newspaper clippings, and how he would put them
+by his plate, and how long we would sit at table because he would read
+every one of them to me, with that gay laugh nobody laughs
+nowadays?&mdash;and do I remember that other evening when he and Monsieur
+disputed and disputed she didn't know about what, and how excited they
+got, and how he kept banging the table with his knife, the sharp edge
+down, until he cut a long slit in the cloth, and it was our best
+tablecloth too?&mdash;and do I remember the long stories he would tell us
+some evenings and his little mocking laugh when she, who could not
+understand a word, knew he was saying something malicious about
+somebody?&mdash;and do I remember how he liked a good dinner and her cooking
+because it was French, and how he would never refuse when she promised
+him her <i>pot-au-feu</i> or one of her salads&mdash;and do I remember one after
+another of those old nights the like of which we shall never see again?
+Do I remember indeed? They fill too big a space in memory, they
+overshadow too well the lesser nights with lesser men, they were too
+joyous an episode in our thirty long years of talk for me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> ever to
+forget them. The three classical knocks of the <i>Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Fran&ccedil;ais</i> could
+not announce more certainly a night of beauty or wit or fun or romance
+than the violent ring and the resounding knock at the old battered door
+of the Buckingham Street chambers where, for Whistler, the oak was never
+sported.</p>
+
+<p>But of our Whistler nights we have already made the record&mdash;this is
+another tale that is already told. I think Whistler knew their value as
+well as we did, knew what they cost us in the loss of friends, knew what
+he had given us in return, knew what he had revealed to us of himself in
+all friendliness, and that this was the reason he looked to us for the
+record not only of his nights with us, but of his life. Once he had
+confided that charge to us, the old Buckingham Street nights grew more
+marvellous still, full of reminiscences, of comment, of criticism, of
+friendliness, his talk none the less stimulating and splendid because,
+at his request, the cuff or note-book was always ready. And they
+continued until the long tragic weeks and months when he was first
+afraid to go out at night and then unable to, and when the talks were by
+day instead&mdash;not quite the same in the last, the saddest months of all,
+for weakness and thoughts of the work yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> to be done and the feebleness
+that kept him from doing it fell like a black cloud over all our
+meetings, even those where the old gaiety asserted itself for a moment
+and the old light of battle gleamed again in his eyes. To the end he
+liked the talk no less than we, for to the end he sent for us, to the
+end he would see us when few besides were admitted. There, for those who
+would like to question his friendship with us, for those who believe
+that Whistler never could keep a friend because he never wanted to, is
+the proof dear to us of the good friend he could be when his friendship
+was not abused or taken advantage of behind his back.</p>
+
+<p>Many other nights besides there have been&mdash;long series of American
+nights&mdash;John Van Dyke nights I might say, Timothy Cole nights,&mdash;but no,
+I am not going to name names and make a catalogue, I am not going to
+write their story, I am not going to run the risks of the folly I have
+protested against. I have confessed my safe belief that of the living
+only good should be spoken, and good only when it is within the bounds
+of discretion. It is not my ambition to rival at home the unpopularity
+of N.P. Willis in England after the first of his indiscretions, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+seem discretion itself now in the light of to-day's yellow and society
+journalism.</p>
+
+<p>And there have been English nights&mdash;many&mdash;nights with old friends who
+are faithful and new friends who are devoted&mdash;nights of late so like the
+old Thursday nights that both Hartrick and Sullivan, now twenty years
+older and with no Phil May to revolve round, asked why those old
+memorable gay nights could not be revived? But would they be gay? Would
+they not turn out the dust and ashes, the worse than Lenten fare, from
+which I shrink? Would they not, as I have said, prove as mournful as
+that banquet of Zola's Conquerors of Paris?</p>
+
+<p>Recently there have been Belgian nights&mdash;nights with those Belgian
+artists whose habit was never to travel at all until they started on
+their journey as exiles to London&mdash;a journey to which the end in a
+return journey seems to them so tediously long in coming. And there have
+been War nights when the clash of our battle, in the grim consciousness
+of that other battle not so far away, is less cheerful. And there have
+been nights with the great search-lights over the Thames that tell us as
+much as those young insistent voices in Buckingham Street could tell,
+but only of things so tragic and so sombre that I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> am the more eager to
+finish the story of our London nights with our Thursdays, in the years
+when we were burdened by no more serious fighting than the endless fight
+of friend with friend, of fellow worker with fellow worker, fought in
+the good cause of work and play, faith and doubt, fear and hope&mdash;a
+stirring fight, but one in which words are the weapons, one which can
+never be won or lost, since no two can ever be found to agree when they
+talk for pleasure, nor any one man forced to agree with himself for all
+time.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h2>NIGHTS</h2>
+
+<h3>IN PARIS</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IN PARIS</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+
+<p>I still go to Paris every year in May when the <i>Salons</i> open, but now I
+go alone. The lilacs and horse-chestnuts, that J. used to reproach me
+for never keeping out of the articles it was my business to write there,
+still bloom in the <i>Champs-Elys&eacute;es</i> and the <i>Bois</i>, but now I am no
+longer tempted to drag them into my MS. The spring nights still are
+beautiful on the <i>Boulevards</i> and <i>Quais</i> but only ghosts walk with me
+along the old familiar ways, only ghosts sit with me at table in
+restaurants where once I always ate in company. Paris has lost half its
+charm since the days when, as regularly as spring came round, I was one
+of the little group of critics and artists and friends from London who
+met in it for a week among the pictures.</p>
+
+<p>It was much the same group, if smaller, that met on our Thursday nights
+in London. Some of us went for work, to "do" the <i>Salons</i> after we had
+"done" the Royal Academy and the New Gallery, then the Academy's only
+London rival: Bob Stevenson for the <i>Pall Mall</i>, D.S. MacColl for the
+<i>Spectator</i>, Charles Whibley for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> <i>National Observer</i>. J., during
+several years, spared the time from more important things to fight as
+critic the empty criticism of the moment, the old-fashioned criticism
+that recognised no masterpiece outside of Burlington House and saw
+nothing in a picture or a drawing save a story: a thankless task, for
+already the old-fashioned criticism threatens to become the
+new-fashioned again. I, for my part, was kept as busy as I knew how to
+be, and busier, for the <i>Nation</i> and my London papers. Others went
+because they were artists and wanted to see what Paris was doing and May
+was the season when Paris was doing most and was most liberal in letting
+everybody see it. Beardsley and Furse seldom failed, and I do not
+suppose a year passed that we did not chance upon one or more unexpected
+friends in a gallery or a <i>caf&eacute;</i> and add them to our party. Sometimes a
+Publisher was with us, his affairs an excuse for a holiday, or sometimes
+an Architect to show the poor foreigner how respectable British
+respectability can be and, incidentally, to make his a guarantee of ours
+that we could have dispensed with. Harland and Mrs. Harland were always
+there, I do believe for sheer love of Paris in the May-time, and I
+rather think theirs was the wisest reason of all.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>During no week throughout my hard-working year did I have to work
+harder than during that May week spent in Paris. I am inclined now, in
+the more leisurely period of life at which I have arrived, to admire
+myself when I recall how many articles I had to write, how many prints
+and drawings, statues and pictures, I had to look at in order to write
+them, and my success in never leaving my editors in the lurch. My
+admiration is the greater because nobody could know as well as I how
+slow I have always been with my work and also, to do myself justice, how
+conscientious, as I do not mind saying, though to be called
+conscientious by anybody else would seem to me only less offensive than
+to be called good-natured or amiable. As a critic I never could get to
+the point of writing round the pictures and saying nothing about them
+like many I knew for whom five minutes in a gallery sufficed, nor, to be
+frank, did I try to. Neither could I hang an article on one picture. I
+might envy George Moore, for an interval the critic of the <i>Speaker</i>,
+now the London <i>Nation</i>, because he could and did. I can remember him at
+an Academy Press View making the interminable round with a business-like
+briskness until, perhaps in the first hour and the last room, he would
+come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> upon the painting that gave him the peg for his eloquence, make an
+elaborate study of it, tell us his task was finished, and hurry off
+exultant. But envy him as I might, I couldn't borrow his briskness. I
+had to plod on all morning and again all afternoon until the Academy
+closed, to look at every picture before I could be sure which was the
+right peg or whether there might not be a dozen pegs and more. And I had
+to collect elaborate notes, not daring to trust to my memory alone, and
+after that to re-write pages that did not satisfy me. Just to see the
+Academy meant an honest day's labour and in Paris there were two
+<i>Salons</i>, each immeasurably bigger, and innumerable smaller shows into
+the bargain. And yet, that laborious May week never seemed to me so much
+toil as pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>There was a great deal about Paris the toil left me no chance to find
+out. I should not like to say how many of its sights I have failed
+regularly to see during the visit I have paid to it every year now for
+over a quarter of a century. But at least I have learned the best thing
+worth knowing about it, which is that in no other town can toil look so
+uncommonly like pleasure, in no other town is it so easy to play hard
+and to work hard at the same time: precisely the truth the Baedeker<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+student has a knack of missing, the truth the special kind of foreigner,
+for whom Paris would not be Paris if he could not believe it the
+abomination of desolation, goes out of his way to miss. I have met some
+of my own countrymen who have seen everything in Paris but never Paris
+itself&mdash;the old story of not seeing the wood for the trees&mdash;and who are
+absolutely convinced that it is a town in which all the people think of
+is amusement and that a more frivolous creature than the Parisian never
+existed. From their comfortable seat of judgment in the correct hotels
+and the correct show places, they cannot look as far as the schools and
+factories that make Paris the centre of learning for the world and of
+industry for France, and they are in their way every bit as dense as the
+English who take their pleasure so seriously they cannot understand the
+French who take their work gaily. "<i>Des blagueurs m&ecirc;me au feu</i>," a
+Belgian officer the other day described to me the French soldiers who
+had been fighting at his side, and I think it rather finer to face
+Death&mdash;or Work&mdash;laughing than in tears. If Paris were not so gay on the
+surface I am sure I should not find it so stimulating, though how it
+would be if I lived there I have never dared put to the test, unwilling
+to run whatever risk there might be if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> I did. I prefer to keep Paris in
+reserve for a working holiday or, indeed, any sort of holiday, a
+preference which, if Heine is to be trusted, I share with <i>le bon Dieu</i>
+of the old French proverb who, when he is bored in Heaven, opens a
+window and looks down upon the <i>Boulevards</i> of Paris.</p>
+
+<p>At the first sight, the first sound, the first smell of Paris, the
+holiday feeling stirred within us. The minute we arrived we began to
+play at our work as we never did in London, as it never would have
+occurred to us there that we could.</p>
+
+<p>The Academy, only the week before, had given us the same chance to meet,
+the same chance to talk, the same chance to lunch together, and of the
+lunch it had got to be our habit to make a Press Day function. Nowadays
+at the Academy Press View, when I am hungry, I run up to Stewart's at
+the corner of Bond Street for a couple of sandwiches, and excellent they
+are, but, as I eat them in my solitary corner, no flight of my sluggish
+imagination can make them seem to me more than a stern necessity. There
+was, however, a festive air about the old Press Day lunch when, towards
+one o'clock, some six or eight of us adjourned to Solferino's, another
+vanished landmark of my younger days in London. It was in Rupert Street,
+the street of Prince Florizel's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> Divan, which was appropriate, for Bob
+Stevenson was always with us and but for Bob Prince Florizel might never
+have existed to run a Divan in Rupert or any other street. Solferino's
+had a Barsac that Bob liked to order, chiefly I fancy for all it
+represented to him of Paris and Lavenue's and Barbizon and student days,
+and the old memories warming him over it as lunch went on, he would
+unfold one theory of art after another until suddenly a critic, more
+nervous than the rest, would take out his watch, and the hour he saw
+there would send us post-haste back to Piccadilly and the Academy, which
+at that time thought one Press Day sufficient.</p>
+
+<p>But the lunch that seemed a festivity at Solferino's never gave us the
+holiday sense Paris filled us with from the early hour in the morning
+when, after our little breakfast, we met downstairs in the unpretentious
+hotel in the Rue St. Roch where most of us stayed&mdash;if we did not stay
+instead at the Hotel de l'Univers et Portugal for the sake of the name.
+The Rue St. Roch was convenient and if we were willing to climb to the
+top of the narrow house, where the smell of dinner hung heavy on the
+stairs all through the afternoon and evening, we could have our room for
+the next to nothing at all that suited our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> purse, and the
+dining-room&mdash;the Coffee Room in gilt letters on its door would have
+frightened us from it in any case&mdash;was so tiny it was a kindness to the
+<i>patron</i> not to come back for the midday breakfast or the dinner that we
+could not have been induced to eat in the hotel, under any
+circumstances, for half the big price he charged. The day's talk was
+already in full swing as we steamed down the Seine, or walked under the
+arcade of the <i>Rue de Rivoli</i> and along the <i>Quais</i>, in the cool of the
+May morning, to the new <i>Salon</i> which was then in the <i>Champ-de-Mars</i>.
+And one morning at the <i>Salon</i> made it clear to me, as years at the
+Academy could not, why French criticism permits itself to speak of art
+as a "game" and of the artist's work as "amusing" and "gay." There were
+words that got into my article as persistently as the lilacs and the
+horse-chestnuts.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>If we brought to Paris a talent for talk and youth for enjoyment, Paris
+at the moment was providing liberally more than we could talk about or
+had time to enjoy. London may have been wide awake&mdash;for London&mdash;in the
+Nineties, but it was half asleep compared to Paris and would not have
+been awake at all if it had not gone to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> Paris for the "new" it
+bragged of so loud in art and every excitement it cultivated, and for
+the "<i>fin-de-si&eacute;cle,</i>" that chance phrase passed lightly from mouth to
+mouth in Paris of which it made a serious classification.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol14.jpg" width="500" height="398" alt="Etching by Joseph Pennell
+IN THE CHAMPS-ELYS&Eacute;ES" title="THE CHAMPS-ELYS&Eacute;ES" />
+<span class="caption">Etching by Joseph Pennell<br />
+IN THE CHAMPS-ELYS&Eacute;ES</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I have watched with sympathetic amusement these late years one new
+movement, one new revolt after another, started and led by little men
+who have not the strength to move anything or the independence to revolt
+against anything, except in their boast of it, and who would be
+frightened by the bigness of a movement and revolt like the Secession
+from the old <i>Salon</i> that followed the International Exposition of 1889.
+I feel how long ago the Nineties were when I hear the young people in
+Paris to-day talk of the two <i>Salons</i> as the <i>Artistes-Fran&ccedil;ais</i> and the
+<i>Beaux-Arts</i>. In the Nineties we, who watched the parting of the ways,
+knew them only as the Old <i>Salon</i> and the New <i>Salon</i> because that is
+what we saw in them and what they really were&mdash;unless we distinguished
+them as the <i>Champ-de-Mars Salon</i> and the <i>Champs-Elys&eacute;es Salon</i>, for
+another ten years were to pass before there was a <i>Grand Palais</i> for
+both to move into. We could not write about either without a reminder of
+the age of the one and the youth of the other, the Old <i>Salon</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+remaining the home of the tradition that has become hide-bound
+convention, and the new <i>Salon</i> offering headquarters to the tradition
+that is being "carried on," as we were forever pointing out, borrowing
+the phrase from Whistler. We were given in the Nineties to borrowing the
+things Whistler said and wrote, for we knew, if it is not every critic
+who does to-day, that he was as great a master of art criticism as of
+art.</p>
+
+<p>What the men who undertook to carry on tradition did for us was to
+arrange a good show. They had to, if it meant taking off their coats and
+rolling up their sleeves and putting themselves down to it in grim
+earnest, for it was the only way they could justify their action and the
+existence of their Society, and their choice of a President, the very
+name of Meissonier seeming to stand for anything rather than secession
+and experiment and revolt. For the first few exhibitions many of the
+older men got together small collections of their earlier work that had
+not been shown publicly for years, and the new <i>Salon's</i> way of
+arranging each man's work in a separate group or panel made it tell with
+all the more effect. And then there was the excitement of coming upon
+paintings or statues long familiar, but only by reputation or
+reproduction. I cannot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> forget how we thrilled in front of Whistler's
+<i>Rosa Corder</i>, which we were none of us, except Bob Stevenson, old
+enough to have seen when Whistler first exhibited it in London and Paris
+to a public unwilling to leave him in any doubt as to its indifference,
+how we talked and talked and talked until we had not time that morning
+to look at one other painting in the gallery, how it was not the fault
+of our articles if everybody did not squander upon it the attention
+refused not much more than a decade before. And the younger men of the
+moment had to summon up every scrap of individuality they possessed to
+be admitted, and not to be admitted meant too much conservatism or too
+much independence. And credentials of fine work had to be presented by
+the artists from all over the world&mdash;Americans, Scandinavians, Dutchmen,
+Belgians, Russians, Italians, Germans, Austrians, Spaniards,&mdash;who
+couldn't believe they had come off if the New <i>Salon</i> did not let them
+in, and half the time they hadn't. And with all it was just for the
+pride of being there, they were not out for medals, since the New
+<i>Salon</i> gave no awards. And altogether there was about as wide a gulf of
+principle and performance as could be between the two <i>Salons</i> that are
+now separated by not much more than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> the turnstiles in the one building
+that shelters them both.</p>
+
+<p>And sparks of originality gleamed here and there; the passion for
+adventure had not flickered out&mdash;at every step through the galleries
+some subject for the discussion we exulted in stopped us short. It might
+be Impressionism, Sisley still showing if Monet did not, and Vibrism and
+Pointillism and all the other <i>isms</i> springing up and out of it. It
+might be Rosicrucianism and Symbolism which had just come in, and Sar
+P&eacute;ladan&mdash;does anybody to-day read the Sar's long tedious books, bought
+by us with such zeal and promptly left to grow dusty on our
+shelves?&mdash;and Huysmans and their fellow teachers of Magic and members of
+the <i>Rose-Croix</i> were being interpreted in paint and in black-and-white,
+and if the interpretations did not interpret to so prosaic a mind as
+mine, it mattered the less because they were often excuse for a fine
+design. And the square brush mark lingered, and much was heard of the
+broken brush mark, and values had not ceased to be absorbing, nor <i>la
+peinture au premier coup</i> and <i>la peinture en plein air</i> to be wrangled
+over. And a religious wave from nobody knew where swept artists to the
+Scriptures for motives and sent them for a back<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>ground, not with Holman
+Hunt to Palestine, but to their own surroundings, their own country, to
+the light and atmosphere each knew best&mdash;Lhermitte's Christ suffered
+little children to come unto Him in a French peasant's cottage;
+Edelfelt's Christ walked in the sunlight of the North; Jean B&eacute;raud's
+Christ found Simon the Pharisee at home in a Parisian club; and no
+landscape, realistic, impressionistic, decorative, was complete unless a
+familiar figure or group came straying into it from out the Bible. Much
+that was done perished with the group or the fad that gave it birth,
+much when suddenly come upon now on the walls of the provincial gallery
+looks disconcertingly old-fashioned. But nevertheless, the movement, the
+energy, the life of the Nineties was a healthy enemy to that stagnation
+which is a death trap for art.</p>
+
+<p>And Black-and-White was a section to be visited in the freshness of the
+morning, not to be put off, like the dull, shockingly over-crowded
+little room at the Academy, to the last hurried moments of fatigue&mdash;a
+section to devote the day to and then to leave only for the bookstall or
+bookshop where we could invest the money we had not to spare in the
+books and magazines and papers illustrated by Carlos Schwabe and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> Khnopf
+and Steinlen and Willette and Caran D'Ache and Louis Legrand and Forain
+and the men whose work in the original we had been studying and laying
+down the law about for hours. And the artist's new invention, his new
+experiment, came as surely as the spring&mdash;now the original wood block
+and now the colour print, one year the draughtsman's Holbein-inspired
+portrait and another the poster that excited us into collecting Ch&eacute;ret
+and Toulouse-Lautrec at a feverish rate and facing afterwards, as best
+we could, the problem of what in the world to do with a collection that
+nothing smaller than a railroad station or the hoardings could
+accommodate.</p>
+
+<p>And the Sculpture court was not the accustomed chill waste, dreary as
+the yard crowded with marble tombstones. If nobody else had been in
+it&mdash;and many were&mdash;Rodin was there to heat the atmosphere, his name
+kindling a flame of criticism long before his work was reached. Beyond
+his name he was barely known in London, where I remember then seeing no
+work of his except his bust of Henley, who, during a visit to Paris, I
+believe his only one, had sat to Rodin and then, ever after, with the
+splendid enthusiasm he lavished on his friends, had preached<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> Rodin. But
+in Paris at the New <i>Salon</i> there was always plenty of the work to
+explain why the name was such a firebrand&mdash;disturbing, exciting,
+faction-making&mdash;as I look back, culminating in the melodramatic Balzac
+that would have kept us in hot debate for all eternity had there not
+been innumerable things to interest us as much and more.</p>
+
+<p>The critic has simply to take his task as we took ours and not another
+occupation in life can prove so brimming over with excitement. In the
+early Nineties I had not a doubt that it could always be taken like
+that. I would not have believed the most accredited prophet who
+prophesied that we would outlive our interest in the New <i>Salon</i>. And
+yet, a year came when, of the old group, only D.S. MacColl and I met in
+the <i>Champ-de-Mars</i> and he, with boredom in his face and voice, assured
+me he had found nothing in it from end to end except a silk panel
+decorated by Conder, and so helped to kill any belief I still cherished
+in the emotion that does not wear itself out with time.</p>
+
+<p>However, this melancholy meeting was not until the Nineties were nearing
+their end, and up till then our days were an orgy of art criticism and
+excitement in it. In Paris, as in Rome, as in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> Venice, as in London,
+only night set me free for the pleasure that was apart from work. As a
+rule, none of us dared at the <i>Salons</i> to interrupt our work there even
+to make a function of the midday breakfast, as we did of lunch at the
+Academy, the days in Paris being so remarkably short for all we had to
+do in them. We were forced to treat it as a mere halt, regrettable but
+unavoidable, in the day's appointed task, whether we ate it at the
+<i>Salon</i> to save time or in some near little restaurant to save money.
+Often we were tempted, and few temptations are more difficult to resist
+than the unfolding of the big, soft French napkin at noon and the
+arrival of the radishes and butter and the long crisp French bread. When
+I was alone I escaped by going to one of the little tables in that
+gloomy corner of the <i>Salon</i> restaurant where there was no napkin to be
+unfolded, no radishes and butter to lead to indiscretion, and nothing
+more elaborate was served than a sandwich or a <i>brioche</i>, a cup of
+coffee or the glass of Madeira which sentiment makes it a duty for the
+good Philadelphian to drink whenever and wherever it comes his way. The
+temptation being so strong, it is useless to pretend that we never fell.
+If we had not, I should not have memories of breakfasts in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> <i>Salon</i>,
+under the trees at Ledoyen's, on the <i>Tour Eiffel</i>, in the classic shade
+of the Palais Royal from which all the old houses had not been swept
+away, and as far from the scene of work as the close neighborhood of the
+<i>Bourse</i> where we could scarcely have got by accident. But the thought
+of the work waiting was for me the disquieting mummy served with every
+course of the feast. Not until the <i>Salon</i> door closed upon my drooping
+back and weary feet, turning me out whether I would or no, in the late
+hours of the afternoon, was I at liberty to remember how many other
+things there are in life besides work.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>The hour when all Paris had settled down to the business of pleasure&mdash;to
+proving itself the abomination of desolation to those who were already
+too sure to be in need of a proof&mdash;was an enchanting hour to find one's
+self at liberty. The heat of the day was over, the air was cool, the
+light golden, the important question of dining could be considered in
+comfort on enticing little chairs in the shady alleys of the
+<i>Champs-Elys&eacute;es</i> or, better still, on little chairs no less enticing
+with little tables in front of them at the nearest <i>caf&eacute;</i>, where an
+<i>ap&eacute;ritif</i> was to be sipped even if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> it were no more deadly than a
+<i>groseille</i> or a <i>grenadine</i>. What the <i>ap&eacute;ritif</i> was did not matter;
+what did, was the reason it gave for half an hour's loafing before
+dinner with all the loafing town.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol15.jpg" width="500" height="389" alt="Etching by Joseph Pennell
+THE HALF HOUR BEFORE DINNER" title="THE HALF HOUR BEFORE DINNER" />
+<span class="caption">Etching by Joseph Pennell<br />
+THE HALF HOUR BEFORE DINNER</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Had we lived in Paris, no doubt we would have done as we did in Rome and
+Venice and have gone every night to the same restaurant where the same
+greeting from the same smiling <i>patron</i> and the same table in the same
+corner awaited us. But change and experiment and a good deal of
+preliminary discussion over an <i>ap&eacute;ritif</i> were more in the order of a
+week's visit. As a rule, we preferred the small restaurant that was
+cheap, as we were most of us impecunious, also the restaurant that was
+out-of-doors, out-of-doors turning the simplest dinner into a feast.
+However, nobody yet was really ever young who was never reckless.
+Occasionally we dined joyously beyond our means, and one memorable year
+we devoted our nights to giving each other dinners where the best
+dinners were to be had. Those alone who are blest with little money and
+the obligation of making that little can appreciate the splendour of our
+recklessness, just as those alone who work all day and eat sparingly can
+have the proper regard for a good dinner. I do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> not regret the
+recklessness, I am not much the poorer for it to-day whatever I was at
+the time, and I should have missed something out of life had I not once
+dined recklessly in Paris. Moreover, our special business was the study
+of art and in Paris dining and art are one, though the foolish man in
+less civilized countries preaches that to eat for any other purpose than
+to live is gluttony. The clear intellect of the French saves them from
+that mistake, and I have entertained hopes for the future of my own
+country ever since one wise American,&mdash;Henry T. Finck,&mdash;discovering the
+truth that the French have always had the common sense to know,
+proclaimed it in a book which I have honoured by placing it in my
+Collection of Cookery Books with Grimod de la Reyni&egrave;re, Brillat-Savarin
+and Dumas.</p>
+
+<p>At the time we were more concerned with the dinner than the philosophy
+of dining. Our one aim was to dine well, whether it was the right thing
+or the wrong, even whether or no it sent us back to London bankrupt. We
+did not flinch before the price we paid, and if we were too wise to
+measure the value of the dinner by its cost, we were proud of the
+bigness of the bill as the "visible sign," the guarantee of success. It
+was a tremendous triumph for J. when he paid the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> biggest of all, which
+he did, not so much because he set out to deliberately as because, by
+the choice of chance, he had invited us to Voisin's in the Rue St.
+Honor&eacute;, where the red-cushioned seats, the mirrors, the white paint, the
+discreet gilding, the air of retirement, the few elderly, rotund,
+meditative diners, each dining with himself, were all typical of the old
+classical Paris restaurant, and assured us beforehand of a good dinner
+and a price in keeping. That we ate asparagus from Argenteuil and
+<i>petites fraises des bois</i> I know because the season was spring; that
+the wine was good I also know because the reputation of Voisin's cellar
+permitted of no other. And I am as sure that the <i>menu</i> was so short
+that ours would have seemed the dinner of an anchorite in the City of
+London, for if we could not dine often we were masters of the art of
+dining when we did, and we understood, as the Lord Mayor and the City
+Companies of London, celebrated for their dinners, do not, that dining
+is not an art when the last course cannot be enjoyed as much as the
+first. As I keep the family accounts, I was obliged to pay in another
+way for J.'s triumph at Voisin's when I got back to London and faced a
+deficit that had to be balanced somehow in my weekly bills for the rest
+of the month. But, at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> least, if abstaining has to be done, London is
+the easiest place to abstain in as Paris is the best to dine in.</p>
+
+<p>The Publisher who was with us that year gave his dinner at the LaP&eacute;rouse
+on the <i>Quai des Grands-Augustins</i>, and it was not his fault if he fell
+short of J.'s triumph by a few francs. The giver of a dinner at the
+LaP&eacute;rouse in the happy past enjoyed the fearful pleasure of not knowing
+how much he was spending until he called for his bill, price being too
+trivial a detail for a place in the <i>menu</i>, and usually when the bill
+came it exceeded his most ambitious hopes. The Publisher must have hit
+upon Friday, for the perfume of <i>Bouillabaisse</i> mingles with my memories
+of the dinner in the little low <i>entresol</i> where, by stooping down and
+craning our necks, we could see the towers of <i>Notre-Dame</i> from the
+window, and where the big, tall, handsome, black-bearded <i>patron</i>,
+alarmingly out of scale with the room, came to make sure of our pleasure
+in his dishes&mdash;he would rather the bill had gone unpaid than have seen
+the dinner neglected. I think there was a bottle of some special
+Burgundy in its cradle, for rarely in his life, I fancy, has the
+Publisher felt so in need of being fortified. Early in the day he had
+been guilty of the astonishing in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>discretion, as it then seemed, of
+buying three Van Goghs. For this happened years before anybody had begun
+to buy Van Gogh&mdash;years before anybody had begun to hear of Van
+Gogh&mdash;years before Post-Impressionism had been invented and had launched
+its crop of Cubists and Futurists and Vorticists as direct descendants
+of Van Gogh and C&eacute;zanne who would assuredly have been the first to
+repudiate them. The Publisher had gone unsuspectingly, confidingly, with
+J. to <i>Montmartre</i> and there, among other haunts, into the now
+celebrated little shop where the paintings Van Gogh used to give in
+exchange for paints littered the whole place, and where the dealer
+thought it a bargain if, for a few francs, he could get rid of canvases
+that now fetch their hundreds and thousands of pounds. J. would have
+invested had he had the few francs. Not having them, he persuaded the
+Publisher to, and to buy three of the best into the bargain, and never
+did his own empty pockets stand in the way of a more profitable
+investment, for had he bought not all but only a few in this wilderness
+of Van Goghs, and had he sold them again as he would never have done, we
+might now, if we chose, dine every night at the LaP&eacute;rouse or Voisin's
+and prepare for the reckoning without a tremor. If I write of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+buying of these pictures as if they were stocks and shares, it is
+because that is the way the creators of the "Van Gogh-C&eacute;zanne-Gauguin
+boom" have appraised them, appealing to the modern collector who
+collects for the money in art, not the beauty. That night at the
+LaP&eacute;rouse the Publisher was dazed by his unexpected rashness as art
+patron; to-day, when he points to the one of the three paintings still
+hanging on his walls, he flatters himself that he discovered Van Gogh
+before the multitude.</p>
+
+<p>Bob Stevenson took us to dine at Lavenue's in Montparnasse, and if he
+had not of his own free will we should have compelled him to. He
+belonged there. At Lavenue's he and Louis Stevenson dined when they were
+young in Paris, it was always cropping up in Bob's talk of the old days,
+it plays its part&mdash;"the restaurant where no one need be ashamed to
+entertain the master"&mdash;in the opening chapters of <i>The Wrecker</i>, which I
+think as entertaining as any chapters Louis Stevenson ever wrote in that
+or any other book. The dinner, of which I recall nothing in particular,
+did not interest me as much as the place itself. To see Bob Stevenson at
+Lavenue's was like seeing Manet at the <i>Nouvelle Ath&egrave;nes</i> or Dr. Johnson
+at the Cheshire Cheese, and to make the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> background complete Alexander
+Harrison, with two or three American painters of his generation, was
+dining at a near table.</p>
+
+<p>He shall be nameless who gave the dinner at Marguery's. The dinner was
+all it should have been, for we ate the sole called after the house. It
+was the provider of it who proved wanting. I was brought up to believe
+that the host, when there is a host, should pay his bill. A large part
+of my life has been spent in getting rid of the things I was brought up
+to believe, but this particular belief I have never been able to shed
+and I confess I was taken aback&mdash;let me put it at that&mdash;when the white
+paper neatly folded in a plate, served at the end of dinner, was passed
+on to one of the guests. If the debt then run into was not paid does not
+much matter after all these years, or perhaps if it was not it has the
+more interest for the curious observer of modes and moods. In this case,
+the whole incident could be reduced to a kindness on the part of the
+debtor, sacrificing himself to show how right Bob Stevenson was when he
+said, as Robert Louis Stevenson repeated after him in print, that while
+the Anglo-Saxon can and does boast that he is not as Frenchmen in
+certain matters of morals, it is his misfortune to be as little like
+them in their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> vigorous definition of honesty and the obligation of
+paying their debts.</p>
+
+<p>That the fifth dinner was at the <i>Tour d'Argent</i> is not an achievement
+to be particularly proud of. On the contrary, it appears to me a trifle
+banal as I look back to it, for fashion was at the time sending
+Americans and English to the <i>Tour d'Argent</i> just as it was driving them
+on beautiful spring days into that horribly crowded afternoon tea place
+in the <i>Rue Daunou</i>&mdash;wasn't it?&mdash;or to order their new gowns at the new
+dressmakers in the <i>Rue de la Paix</i>, or to do any of the hundred and one
+other things that proved them up to the times, at home in Paris,
+initiated into <i>le dernier cri</i> or whatever new phrase they thought set
+the seal upon Parisian smartness. Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric's face was as well known as
+Ibsen's which it so resembled, his sanded floor was the talk of the
+tourists, the distinguished foreigner struggled to have his name on
+Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric's <i>menu</i>, and as for Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric's pressed duck it had degenerated
+into as everyday a commonplace as an oyster stew in New York or a chop
+from the grill in London. The bill at the end of the evening might be
+all that the occasion demanded of the man who was giving the dinner, but
+his choice of restaurant could not convict him of originality,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> or of
+sentiment either. But I do not know why I grumble when the dinner was so
+good. The <i>Tour d'Argent</i> had not fallen as most restaurants fall when
+they attract patrons from across the Channel. Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric's cooking was
+beyond reproach. Even the theatrical ceremony over his pressed duck
+could not spoil its flavour.</p>
+
+<p>The sixth evening saw us at <i>Prunier's</i>, eating the oysters that it
+would have been useless to go to <i>Prunier's</i> and not to eat (we must
+have been in Paris unusually early in May that year), and if it was not
+the season to eat the snails for which <i>Prunier's</i> is equally renowned,
+my heart was not broken. It may give me away to confess that I do not
+like them, since snails are one of the unconsidered trifles that no
+Autolycus posing as <i>gourmet</i> should turn a disdainful back upon. But
+what can I do? It is a case of Dr. Fell, and that is the beginning and
+end of it. And if it wasn't the season for snails, and if I wouldn't
+have eaten them if it had been, in <i>Prunier's</i> gilded halls other
+delicacies are served, and when I summon up remembrance of those dinners
+past, <i>Prunier's</i> does not exactly take a back seat.</p>
+
+<p>But naturally, the most important dinner in my opinion was mine at the
+<i>Cabaret Lyonnais</i> in the <i>Rue de Port-Mahon</i>, where never again<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> can I
+invite my friends, for the <i>Cabaret</i> has gone into the land of shadows
+with so many of the group who sat round my table. At the time, there was
+no looking back, no sad straying into a dead past to spoil a good
+dinner&mdash;at the worst, a fleeting moment of discomfort when we selected
+the tench swimming in the tank close to our table and saw them carried
+off to the kitchen to be cooked for us. It was the custom of the house,
+intended to be a pleasing assurance that our fish was fresh, but a
+custom with just a savour in it of cannibalism. I have never cared to be
+on speaking terms with the creatures I am about to eat. I squirm when I
+see the lobster for my salad squirming, though I know the risk if it
+should not squirm at all. Had I lived in the country among my own
+chickens and pigs and lambs, I should have been long since a confirmed
+vegetarian. But to go to the <i>Cabaret Lyonnais</i> unwilling to swallow my
+scruples with my fish would have been as useless as to go to Simpson's
+in London and object to a cut from the joint, as I do object, which is
+why I seldom go. Anyway, we did not have to see the beef killed for the
+<i>filet</i> which at the <i>Cabaret</i> we were expected to eat after the tench
+and with the potatoes to which the city of Lyons also gives its name, so
+asso<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>ciating itself forever with the perfume of the onion. And, as in
+the Provinces, the wine was the <i>petit vin gris</i> which I never can drink
+without a vision of the straight, white, poplar-lined roads of France,
+sunshine, a tandem tricycle or two bicycles, J. and myself perched upon
+them, and by the way friendly little inns with a good breakfast or
+dinner waiting, and a big carafe of the pale light wine served with it.
+That my dinner was comparatively cheap would at normal times have been
+for me delightfully in its favour. But that it was the cheapest of all
+in that week of dinners meant that I came out last in the race when, by
+every law of justice, I should have been first. In Paris as in London my
+"greedy column," as my friends called it with the straightforwardness
+peculiar to friends, had to be written every week for the <i>Pall Mall</i>
+and mine was the enviable position of finding my copy in eating good
+dinners no less than in going to the <i>Salons</i>. If any one had an
+irreproachable excuse for extravagant living, it was I.</p>
+
+<p>But even I, with the excuse, could not afford the extravagance&mdash;one
+weekly article did not pay for one cheap dinner for eight&mdash;at the
+<i>Cabaret Lyonnais</i>. And as the rest of the party were without the excuse
+and no better equipped for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> the extravagance, we never again gave each
+other dinners on the same lavish scale and rarely on any scale,
+henceforward ordering them on the principle of what Philadelphia in my
+youth called "a Jersey treat." I do not say that economy was invariably
+our rule. We could be, on occasions, so rash that before our week was up
+we had to begin to count our francs, put by for the boat sandwich and
+the reluctant tips of the return journey, and eat the last meals of all
+in the Duval, which, if admirable as a place to economize in, is no more
+conducive to gaiety than a London A.B.C. shop or Childs's in New York.
+Once we were so reduced that at noon I was left to a lonely <i>brioche</i> at
+the <i>Salon</i>, and the men went to breakfast at the nearest cabman's
+eating-house, where they made the sensation of their lives, without
+meaning to and without finding in it any special compensation. The most
+respectable of the respectable architectural group of our Thursday
+nights was of the party and where he went the top hat and frock coat, in
+which I used to think he must have been born, went too. If his
+fashion-plate correctness&mdash;men wore frock coats then&mdash;made him
+conspicuous at our Thursday nights it can be imagined what he was
+sitting with his coat tails in the gutter at the cabman's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> table where
+the glazed hat and the three-caped coat of the Paris <i>cocher</i> set the
+fashion. He had the grace to be ashamed of himself, often apologizing
+for his clothes and assuring us that he could not help himself, which
+was his reason, I fancy, for accepting at an early age the professorial
+chair where the decorum of his hat and coat was in need of no apology.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>I have said we were young. It seems superfluous to add that now and
+then, in the sunshine of the perfect May day, with the call of the
+lilacs and the horse-chestnuts getting into our heads as well as into my
+copy, the <i>Salon</i> grew stuffy beyond endurance, work became a crime, and
+we put up our catalogues and note-books before the closing hour and
+hurried anywhere just to be out-of-doors, as if our sole profession in
+life was to idle it away. After all, only the prig can be in Paris when
+May is there and not play truant sometimes.</p>
+
+<p>The year Paris chose our week to show how hot it can be in May when it
+has a mind to, was the year I got to learn something of the Paris
+suburbs. The joyous expedition which ended our every day that year was
+so in the spirit of Har<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>land that I should be inclined to look upon him
+as the tempter, had we not, with the usual amiability of the tempted,
+met him more than half way. Still, he excelled us all in the knack of
+collecting us from our work, no matter how it had scattered us or in
+what quarter of the town we might be, and carrying us off suddenly out
+of it in directions we none of us had dreamed of the minute before, just
+as he would collect and carry us off suddenly in London. Only, he was
+more resourceful in Paris because in Paris more resources were made to
+his hand. There are as beautiful places round London&mdash;that is, beautiful
+in the English way&mdash;as round Paris, but they do not invite to a holiday
+with the charm no sensible man can resist. The loveliness of Hampton
+Court and Richmond and Hampstead Heath and the River is not to be denied
+and yet, gay as the English playing there manage to look, the only
+genuine gaiety is the Bank Holiday maker's. Tradition consecrates the
+loveliness bordering upon Paris to the gaiety to which Gavarni and
+M&uuml;rger are the most sympathetic guides, and none could have been more to
+Harland's fancy. He was very like his own favourite heroes, or I ought
+to say his own favourite heroes were very like him. For it is Harland<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+who talks through his own pages with his own charming fantastic blend of
+philosophy and nonsense, Harland who refuses to believe in an age of
+prose and prudence, Harland who is determined to see the romance, the
+squalor, the pageantry, the humour of this jumble-show of a world, not
+merely at ease from the stalls, but struggling with the principal <i>r&ocirc;le</i>
+on the stage, or prompting from behind the scenes. When he was bent upon
+leading us to the same near, inside, part in the spectacle, it was
+extraordinary how, as if by inspiration, he always hit upon the right
+expedition for the time of the year and the mood of the moment.</p>
+
+<p>I remember the afternoon he said St. Cloud it seemed as inevitable that
+we must go there as if St. Cloud had been our one thought all day long,
+the evening reward promised for our day's labour; just as on the boat
+steaming down the Seine and in the park wandering under the trees and
+among the ruins, I felt that the afternoon was the one of all others
+predestined for our delight there. The beauty provided by St. Cloud and
+the mood we brought for its enjoyment met at the hour appointed from all
+eternity.</p>
+
+<p>Artists, it is supposed, and not without reason, are trained to see
+beauty more clearly and there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>fore to feel it more acutely than other
+people. But my long experience has taught me that it is the lover of
+beauty who can dare to be flippant in the face of it, just as it is the
+devout who can afford to talk familiarly of holy things. Besides,
+artists work so hard that they have the sense to know how important it
+is to be foolish at the right time. That is the secret of all the
+delicious absurdities of what the French called the <i>Vie de Boh&egrave;me</i>
+until the outsider who did not understand made a tiresome <i>clich&eacute;</i> of
+it. The right time for our folly we felt was the golden May evening and
+the right place a beautiful Paris suburb, time and place consecrated to
+folly by generations of artists and students. Below us, at St. Cloud,
+stretched the wide beautiful French landscape, with its classical
+symmetry and its note of sadness, in the pure clear light of France, the
+Seine winding through it towards Paris; round us was the park as
+classical in its lines and masses, and with its note of sadness the
+stronger because of the tragic memories that haunt it; in the foreground
+were my companions agreeably playing the fool and posing as living
+statues on the broken columns: he whose solemnity of demeanour accorded
+with his belief that his real sphere was the pulpit, throwing out an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>
+unaccustomed leg as Mercury on one column, and on another the Architect,
+an apologetic Apollo in frock coat with silk hat for lyre. In my
+lightheartedness, and accustomed to the ways of the English, I thought
+them absurd but funny. A French family, however, who passed by chance
+looked as if they wondered, as the French have wondered for centuries,
+at the sadness with which the Englishman takes his pleasures.</p>
+
+<p>Beardsley was one of the party. It was the first time he was with us in
+Paris, the first time, for that matter, he had ever been there. He had
+clutched beforehand, like the youth he was, at the pleasure the visit
+promised, and I remember his joy in coming to tell me of it one morning
+in Buckingham Street. I remember too how amazing I thought it that, when
+he got there, he seemed at once to know Paris in the mysterious way he
+knew everything.</p>
+
+<p>We had not heard of his arrival until we ran across him at the
+<i>Vernissage</i> in the New <i>Salon</i>. I think he had planned the dramatic
+effect of the chance meeting, counting upon the impression he would make
+as we met. I have said he was always a good deal of a dandy and I could
+see at what pains he had been to invent the costume he thought Paris and
+art demanded of him. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> was in grey, a harmony carefully and quite
+exquisitely carried out, grey coat, grey waistcoat, grey trousers, grey
+Su&egrave;de gloves, grey soft felt hat, grey tie which, in compliment to the
+French, was large and loose. An impression of this grey elegance is in
+the portrait of him by Blanche, painted, I think, the same year. As he
+came through the galleries towards us with the tripping step that was
+characteristic of him, a little light cane swinging in his hand, he was
+the most striking figure in them, dividing the stares of the staring
+<i>Vernissage</i> crowd with the <i>clou</i> of the year's New <i>Salon</i>: that
+portrait by Aman-Jean of his wife, with her hair parted in the middle
+and brought simply down over her ears, which set a mode copied before
+the season was over by women it disfigured, heroines who could dare the
+unbecoming if fashion decreed it. Beardsley knew he was being stared at
+and of course liked it, and probably would not have exchanged places
+with anybody there, not even with Carolus-Duran when, splendidly
+barbered, in gorgeous waistcoat, and with an air of casualness, the
+<i>cher ma&icirc;tre et pr&eacute;sident</i> strolled into the restaurant at the supreme
+moment, carefully chosen, all the crowd there before him, their
+breakfast ordered, their first pangs of hunger stilled, and their
+atten<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>tion and enthusiasm at liberty for the greeting he counted upon,
+and got.</p>
+
+<p>It may be that this scene of the older generation's triumph and the
+power of officialism in art told on Beardsley's nerves, or it may be it
+was simply because he was still young enough to believe nobody had ever
+been young before, but certainly by evening he had worked himself up
+into a fine frenzy of revolt. When we had got through our foolish game
+of living statues, and had settled down to dinner in a little
+restaurant, where a parrot's greeting of "<i>Apr&egrave;s vous, madame! Apr&egrave;s
+vous, monsieur!</i>" had vouched for the excellence of its manners, and
+where we could look across the river and see for ourselves how true were
+the effects that Cazin used to paint and that seemed so false to those
+who knew nothing of French twilight, and when Beardsley had finished his
+first glass of very ordinary wine well watered, he let us know what he
+thought about <i>les vieux</i> and their stultifying observance of worn-out
+laws and principles.</p>
+
+<p>That started Bob Stevenson, who saw an argument and, for the sake of it,
+became ponderously patriarchal, hoary with convention. In point of
+years, it is true, he was older than any of us, but no matter what his
+age according to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> the Family Bible he was to the end, and would have
+been had he lived to be a hundred, the youngest in spirit of any company
+into which he ever strayed or could stray. His way, however, was, as
+Louis Stevenson described it, "to trans-migrate" himself into the
+character or pose he assumed for the moment and no Heavy Father was ever
+heavier than he that night at St. Cloud. He spoke with the air of
+superior knowledge calculated to aggravate youth. With years, he assured
+Beardsley, men learned to value law and order in art, as in the state,
+at their worth; and, more and more inspired by his theme, as was his
+way, he grew preposterously wise and irritating, and he talked himself
+so successfully into every exasperating virtue of age that I could not
+wonder at the fierceness with which Beardsley turned upon him and
+denounced him roundly as conventional and academic and prejudiced and
+old-fashioned and all that to youth is most odious and that to Bob, when
+not playing a part, was most impossible. In harmony with his new <i>r&ocirc;le</i>,
+he showed himself a miracle of forbearance under Beardsley's reproaches
+and sententious beyond endurance, actually called Beardsley young, his
+cardinal offence, for the young hate nothing so much as to be reminded
+of the youth for which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> the old envy them. Bob's almost every sentence
+began with the unendurable "at my age," which irritated Beardsley the
+more, while we roared at the farce of it in the mouth of one to whom
+years never made or could make a particle of difference. He wound up by
+the warning in soothing tones that Beardsley, in his turn burdened with
+years, would understand, would be able to make allowances, as all must
+as they grow older, or life would be an endless battle for the
+individual as for the race. Beardsley, luckily for himself, did not live
+to lose his illusions, and I fancy that to not one of us who listened to
+their talk did it occur that we were in danger of losing ours with age,
+so immortal does youth seem while it lasts.</p>
+
+<p>The adventure of other afternoons worked out so surprisingly in
+Harland's vein that he might have invented it for his books or we might
+have borrowed it from them. The encounter with a peacock at a <i>caf&eacute;</i> in
+the <i>Bois</i>, to which he swept us off at the end of the hottest of those
+hot May days, was one of many that he afterwards made use of. Had he
+not, I might hesitate to recall it, knowing as I do that its wit must be
+lost upon the younger generation of to-day who face life and work with a
+severity, a solemnity, that alarms<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> me. Their inability to take
+themselves with gaiety is what makes the young men of the Twentieth
+Century so hopelessly different from the young men of the
+Eighteen-Nineties. Their high moral ideal and concern with social
+problems would not permit them to see anything to laugh at in the
+experiment of feeding a peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, but it
+struck us, in our deplorable frivolity, as humorous at the time, our
+consciences the less disturbed because the bird was led into temptation
+in the manner of one to whom it was no new thing to yield. Harland, when
+he wrote the story with the mock seriousness he was master of, suggested
+that the crime was in its having been committed by an irreproachable
+British author, the sober father of a family. More momentous to us,
+accessories to the crime, was the fact that the cake stuck, a
+conspicuous lump, in the peacock's conspicuous throat. For what seemed
+hours we waited in tense agitation, torn between our desire to make sure
+the lump would disappear and our fears of discovery before it did. But
+the peacock was a gentleman in his cups and reeled away to swallow the
+lump and, I hope, to sleep off his debauch, in some more secluded spot
+where, if he were discovered, we should not be suspected.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>There was another afternoon I wonder Harland did not make use of which,
+had I been in a pedantic mood, I might have taken as an object-lesson in
+the art and occupation of shocking the <i>bourgeois</i>. We had been tempted
+and had yielded as unreservedly as the peacock, with the difference that
+our temptation took the form of the sunshine and the convenience of the
+train service at St. Lazare. No sane person with such sunshine
+out-of-doors could stay shut up in the <i>Salon</i> and a train was ready at
+St. Lazare, whenever we chose to catch it, to carry us off to
+Versailles. We were on our way at once after our midday breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>Versailles was too beautiful on that beautiful day to ask anything of us
+except to live in the beauty, to make it ours for the moment; too
+beautiful to spare us time for bothering about those who had been there
+before us; too beautiful to allow the guide-book's fine print and maps
+and diagrams to blind our eyes to the one essential fact that the sun
+was shining, that the trees were in the greenest growth of their
+May-time, that the flowers were radiant with the fulfilment of spring
+and the promise of summer. As a place full of history we must have known
+it, had we never heard its name. History stared at us from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> the grey
+palace walls, history waylaid us in the formal alleys, lurked in the
+formal waters, haunted the formal gardens, overshadowed all the leafy
+pleasant places. There is no getting very far from history at Versailles
+no matter how hard one may try to. But we had no intention to let the
+dead past blot out the new life rekindling&mdash;to give its chill to the
+young spring day and its sadness to the foolish young people out for a
+holiday&mdash;to wither the fresh beauty that makes it good just to be alive,
+just to have eyes to see and freedom to use them.</p>
+
+<p>I can write this now, but I would not have dared to say it then. Not
+only I, but every one of us, would have been as ashamed to be caught
+indulging in sentiment, or "bleating," as the <i>National Observer</i>. The
+chances are we were talking as much nonsense as could be talked to the
+minute, for there was nothing we liked to talk better, nothing that
+served us so well to disguise the emotion we thought out of place in the
+world in which so obviously the self-respecting man's business was to
+fight. But if I had not felt the beauty it would not now, so many years
+after, remain as my most vivid impression of the day.</p>
+
+<p>We had Versailles to ourselves at first. We were alone in the park,
+alone in the alleys and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> avenues, alone in the gardens,&mdash;and the palace
+and its paintings could not tempt us in out of the sunshine. But such
+good luck naturally did not last and while we were loitering near the
+great fountain we saw a party of women with the eager, harassed,
+conscientious look that marks the personally-conducted school-ma'am on
+tour, bearing briskly down upon us, each with a red book in one hand, a
+pencil in the other, all engrossed in the personally-conducted
+school-ma'am's holiday task of checking off the sight disposed of,
+pigeon-holing the last guide-book fact verified. Their methodical
+progress was an offence to us in the mood we were in, would be an
+offence on a May day to the right-minded in any mood. I admit they could
+have turned upon us and asked what we were, anyway, but tourists as,
+after a fashion, no doubt we were. But they could not have accused us of
+the horrible conscientiousness, the deadly determination to see the
+correct things and to think the correct thoughts about them that dulls
+the personally-conducted to the world's real beauty and its meaning&mdash;the
+same tendency of the multitude to follow like sheep the accepted leader
+and never venture to explore fresh fields for themselves, that drove
+Hugo to writing his <i>Hernani</i>, and Gautier to wearing his red
+waist<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>coat, and all the other Romanticists to their favourite pastime of
+shocking the <i>bourgeois</i>. Versailles was so wonderful on the face of it
+that we resented the presence of people who needed a book to tell them
+so and to explain why; and we made our protest against the <i>bourgeois</i>
+in our own fashion or, to be exact, in Furse's fashion. He was then
+blessedly young, fresh from the schools and not yet sobered by Academic
+honours, though already a youthful member of the New English Art Club,
+from whom an attitude of general defiance was required. He raged and
+raved in his big booming voice, declared that tourists ought to be wiped
+off the face of the earth, that the women were a hideous blot on the
+landscape, that the guide-books were disgracefully out of tone, that it
+was unbearable and he wasn't going to bear it, and by his sudden
+satisfied smile I saw he had found out how not to. As the school-ma'ams
+came within earshot:</p>
+
+<p>"It's beastly hot," he boomed to us, "what do you say to a swim?"</p>
+
+<p>And he took off his coat, he took off his waistcoat, he took off his
+necktie, he unbuttoned his collar,&mdash;but already the school-ma'ams had
+scuttled away, the more daring glancing back once<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> or twice as they
+went, their dismay tempered by curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>Furse was pleased as a child over his success, vowed he was ready for
+all the tourists impudent enough to think they had a right to share
+Versailles with us, and, when a group of Germans talked their guttural
+way towards us, he had us all down on our knees, before we knew it,
+nibbling at the grass like so many Nebuchadnezzars escaped from
+Charenton&mdash;an amazing sight that brought the chorus of "Colossals" to an
+abrupt stop, and sent the Germans flying.</p>
+
+<p>It may be objected that we were behaving in a fashion that children
+would be sent to bed without any supper for, that it was worse than
+childish to take pleasure in shocking innocent tourists much better
+behaved than ourselves. But there wasn't any pleasure in it. If we set
+out to shock them, it was to get rid of them, that was all we wanted,
+and it made me see that the succession of young rebels who have loved to
+<i>&eacute;pater le bourgeois</i> never wanted anything more either&mdash;except the
+self-conscious young rebels who play at rebellion because they fancy it
+the surest and quickest way "to arrive."</p>
+
+<p>It is less easy to say why a beautiful day at Versailles should have
+sent us back to Paris sing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>ing American songs&mdash;or to give credit, if
+credit is due, it was the rest of the party who returned to the music of
+their own voices; I, who to my sorrow cannot as much as turn a tune,
+never am so imprudent as to raise my voice in song and so add my discord
+to any singing in public or in private. Had they been heard above the
+noise of the train, the explanation of those who saw us when we got to
+St. Lazare probably would have been that we were a company of nigger
+minstrels. By accident, or sheer inattention, when we climbed upstairs
+on the double-decked suburban train, we chose the car just behind the
+locomotive and memory has not cleaned away the black that covered our
+faces when we climbed down again.</p>
+
+<p>It was all very foolish&mdash;and no less foolish were the afternoons in the
+depths of Fontainebleau or the sunlit green thickets of
+Saint-Germain&mdash;no less foolish any of those afternoons in the forest or
+the park to which a long drive by train, or tram, had carried us. And I
+am prepared to admit the folly to-day as I sit at my elderly desk and
+look out to the London sky, grey and drear as if the spring had gone
+with my youth. But if I never again can be so foolish, at least I am
+thankful that once I could, that once long ago I was young in Paris,
+"the enchanted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> city with its charming smile for youth,"&mdash;that once I
+believed in folly and, in so believing, had learned more of the true
+philosophy of life than the most industrious student can ever dig out of
+his books.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>The afternoon at Versailles was the rare exception. We were too keen
+about our work, or too dependent on it, to play truant often, however
+gay the sunshine and convenient the trains. Nor was it any great
+hardship not to, especially after we had broken loose once or twice so
+successfully as to make sure we had not forgotten how. If we did stay in
+the <i>Salon</i> until we were turned out, the last to leave, Paris was
+neither so dull nor so ugly at night that we need sigh for the suburbs.
+It was an amusement simply to drink our coffee in front of a <i>caf&eacute;</i>, to
+go on with the talk that must have had a beginning sometime somewhere,
+but that never got anywhere near an end, and to watch the life of the
+Paris streets.</p>
+
+<p>I had got my initiation into <i>caf&eacute;</i> life that first year in Italy and
+had finished my education by cycle on French roads, where every evening
+taught me the difference between the country<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> where there is a <i>caf&eacute;</i> to
+pass an hour in over a glass of coffee after dinner, and England where
+choice in the small town then lay between immediate bed or the
+intolerable gloom of the Coffee Room. It is the real democrat like the
+Frenchman or the Italian who knows how to take his ease in a <i>caf&eacute;</i>; the
+Englishman, who hasn't an inkling of what the democracy he boasts of
+means, fights shy of it. He does not mind making use of it when he is
+away from home, but he is likely to be thanking his stars all the time
+that in his part of the world nothing so promiscuous is possible. I
+tried to point out its advantages once to an English University man.</p>
+
+<p>"Aoh!" he said, "you know at Oxford we had our wines and we weren't
+bothered by people."</p>
+
+<p>But it is just the people part of it that is amusing, the more so if the
+background is the Street of a French or an Italian town.</p>
+
+<p>Some nights we went to the <i>Caf&eacute; de la Paix</i> on the <i>Rive Droite</i>; other
+nights, to the <i>Caf&eacute; d'Harcourt</i> on the <i>Rive Gauche</i>; and occasionally
+to the <i>Caf&eacute; de la R&eacute;gence</i> where many artists went, especially foreign
+artists, and more especially Scandinavians. I seem to retain a vision of
+Thaulow, a blond giant more than fitting in the corner of the little
+raised enclosure in the front<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> of the <i>caf&eacute;</i>. My one other recollection
+is of a story I heard there, though of the painter who told it I can
+recall only that he was a Belgian. If I recall the story so well, it
+must be because it struck me at the time as characteristic and in memory
+became forever after associated with the little open space I was looking
+over to as I listened, amused and interested, while the flower women
+pushed past their barrows piled high with the big round bunches of
+budding lilies-of-the-valley you see nowhere save in Paris. It is
+impossible for me to think of the <i>caf&eacute;</i> without thinking of the little
+<i>Place</i>, nor of the little <i>Place</i> without at once hearing again the
+artist's voice lingering joyfully over the adventures of his youth.</p>
+
+<p>The story was one of a kind I had often listened to at the <i>Nazionale</i>
+in Rome and the <i>Orientale</i> in Venice&mdash;a story of student days&mdash;a story
+of two young painters coming to Paris in their first ripe enthusiasm,
+with devotion to squander upon the masters, upon none more lavishly than
+upon Jules Breton, which explains what ages ago it was and how young
+they must have been. They were at the <i>Salon</i>, standing in silent
+worship before Breton's peasant woman with a scythe against a garish
+sunset, when they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> heard behind them an adoring voice saying the things
+they were thinking to one they knew must be the <i>cher ma&icirc;tre</i> himself,
+and they felt if they could once shake his hand life could hold no
+higher happiness. The worship of the young is pleasant to the old.
+Breton let them shake his hand and, more, he kept them at his side until
+his visit to the <i>Salon</i> was finished, and then sent them away walking
+on air. They were leaving the next day. In the morning they went to the
+<i>Rue de Rivoli</i> to buy toys to take home to their little brothers and
+sisters, and one selected a dog and the other a mill, and when wound up
+the dog played the drum and cymbals and the mill turned its wheel and,
+children themselves, they were ravished and would not have the toys
+wrapped up but carried them back in their arms to the hotel, stopping in
+the <i>Avenue de l'Op&eacute;ra</i> to wind up the mill and see the wheel go round
+again. And as they stood enchanted, the mill wheel turning and turning,
+who should come towards them but the <i>cher Ma&icirc;tre</i>. It was too late to
+run, too late to hide the mill with its turning wheel and the dog with
+its foolish drum. They longed to sink through the ground in their
+mortification&mdash;they, the serious students of yesterday, to be caught
+to-day playing like silly children in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> open street. But how
+ineffable is the condescension of the great! The master joined them.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Tiens</i>," he said, "and the wheel, it goes round? But it works
+beautifully. Let us wind it up again!"</p>
+
+<p>Cannot you see the little comedy,&mdash;the fine old prophet with the red
+ribbon in his button-hole, the two trembling, adoring students, the toy
+with its revolving wheel, all in the gay sunlight of the <i>Avenue de
+l'Op&eacute;ra</i>, and not a passer-by troubling to look because it was Paris
+where men are not ashamed to be themselves. The two painters preserved
+this impression of the kindness of the master long after they ceased to
+worship at the shrine of the peasant with her scythe posed against the
+sunset.</p>
+
+<p>One duty the Boulevards of the Left Bank imposed upon us in the Nineties
+was the search for Verlaine and Bibi-la-Pur&eacute;e, and many another poet for
+all time and celebrity for the day, in the <i>caf&eacute;s</i> where they waited to
+be found and I do not doubt were deeply disappointed if nobody came to
+find them. The fame of these great men, who were easily accessible when
+the <i>caf&eacute;</i> they went to happened to be known, had crossed to London with
+so much else London was labelling <i>fin-de-si&egrave;cle</i>. To have met them, to
+be able to speak of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> them in intimate terms, to be authorities on the
+special vice of each, was the ambition of the yearning young decadents
+on the British side of the Channel, who imagined in the intimacy a proof
+of their own emancipation from it would have been hard to say what,
+their own genius for revolution if it was not clear what reason they had
+to revolt. We, who cultivated a withering scorn for decadence and the
+affectation of it, were moved by nothing more serious or ambitious than
+youth's natural desire to see and to know everything that is going on,
+and we could not have been very ardent in our search, for I never
+remember once, on the nights we devoted to the hunt, tracking these
+lions to their lair. However, at least one of our party had better luck
+when he started on the hunt without us. According to a rumour at the
+time, the respectable British author, sober father of a family, who fed
+the peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, was once seen in broad daylight
+with the <i>Reine de Golconde</i> on his arm, walking down the <i>Boul' Mich'</i>
+at the head of a band of poets.</p>
+
+<p>Verlaine I did meet, but it was in London, where admiring, or
+philanthropic, young Englishmen brought him one winter to lecture and
+the subject as announced was "Contemporary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> French Poetry," and through
+all these years I have managed to preserve the small sheet of
+announcement with Arthur Symons's name and "kind regards" written below,
+a personal little document, for it was Symons who got up the show, and
+he and Herbert P. Horne who sold the tickets. Instead of lecturing,
+Verlaine read his verses to the scanty audience, all of whom knew each
+other, in the dim light of Barnard's Inn Hall, and the music of their
+rhythm was in his voice so that I was not conscious of the satyr-like
+repulsiveness of his face and head so long as he was reading. When he
+was not reading, the repulsiveness was to me overpowering and I shrank
+from his very presence. Nor was the shrinking less when I talked with
+him the night after his lecture, at a dinner where my place was next to
+his. He was like a loathsome animal with his decadent face, his yellow
+skin, and his little bestial eyes lighting up obscenely as he told me of
+the two women who would fight for the money in his pockets when he got
+back to Paris. Beyond this I have no recollection of his talk. The
+prospect before him apparently absorbed his interest, was the only good
+he had got out of his visit to London. The beauty of his own beautiful
+poems, I felt in disgust, should have made such vicious sordidness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+impossible. It revolted me that a man so degraded and hideous physically
+could write the verse I had loved ever since his <i>Romances sans Paroles</i>
+first fell into my hands, or, writing it, could be content to remain
+what he was. To be sure, the genius is rare whom it is not a
+disappointment to meet, and the hero-worshipper may be thankful when his
+great man is guilty of nothing worse than the famous writer in
+Tchekhof's play&mdash;so famous as to have his name daily in the papers and
+his photograph in shop windows&mdash;whose crime was to condescend to fish
+and to be pleased when he caught something.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>The Nineties would not let us off from another entertainment as
+characteristic&mdash;as <i>fin-de-si&egrave;cle</i>, the Englishman under the impression
+that he knew his Paris would have classified it&mdash;nor did we want to be
+let off, though it lured us indoors.</p>
+
+<p>The big theatres had no attraction: to sit out a long play in a hot
+playhouse was not our idea of what spring nights were made for. Neither
+had the "Hells" and "Heavens," the fatuous, vulgar, indecent
+performances with catchpenny names, run for the foreigner who went to
+Paris so that he might for the rest of his life throw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> up hands of
+horror and say what an immoral place it was.</p>
+
+<p>Once or twice we tried the out-door <i>Caf&eacute;-Chantant</i>, and we heard Paulus
+in the days when all Paris went to hear him, and Yvette Guilbert when
+she was still slim and wore the V-shaped bodice and the long black
+gloves, as you may see her in Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs.</p>
+
+<p>Once or twice we tried the big stuffy music-halls, also adapted to
+supply the travelling student of morals with the specimens he was in
+search of, but not dropping all local character in the effort. We seemed
+to owe it to the memory of Manet to go to the <i>Folies-Berg&egrave;re</i> which
+cannot be forgotten so long as his extraordinary painting of the barmaid
+in the ugly fashions of the late Seventies is saved to the world. That
+natural desire of youth just to see and to know, that had carried us up
+and down the <i>Boulevards</i> of the <i>Rive Gauche</i> in pursuit of its poets,
+sent us to the <i>Casino de Paris</i> and the <i>Moulin Rouge</i>. But a first
+visit did not inspire us with a desire for a second, though I would not
+have missed the <i>Casino</i> if only for the imperishable memory of the most
+solemn of our critics dancing there with a patroness of the house and
+looking about as cheerful as a martyr at the stake, nor the <i>Moulin</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+<i>Rouge</i> for another memory as imperishable of the most socially
+pretentious leaving his partner, after his dance, with the "thanks
+awfully" of the provincial ball-room. I thought both dull places which
+nothing save their reputation could have recommended, even to those
+determined young decadents in London who were no prouder of their
+friendship with Bibi and Verlaine than of their freedom of the French
+music-halls, and who wrote of them with a pretence of profound knowledge
+calculated to <i>&eacute;pater le bourgeois</i> at home, referring by name with easy
+familiarity to the dancers in the <i>Quadrille Naturaliste</i>, as celebrated
+in its way as Bibi in his, and explaining solemnly the <i>chahut</i> and the
+<i>grand &eacute;cart</i> and <i>le port d'armes</i> and every evolution in that
+unpleasant dance. How it brought it all back to me the other day when I
+found in <i>The Gypsy</i>&mdash;the direct but belated offspring of <i>The Savoy</i>&mdash;a
+poem to <i>Nini-patte-en-l'air</i>. And does anybody now know or care who
+Nini-patte-en-l'air was? Or who <i>La Goulue</i> and the rest? Would anybody
+now go a step to see the <i>Quadrille</i> were any graceless acrobats left to
+dance it? These things belonged to the lightest of light fashions that
+passed with the Nineties, and the <i>Moulin Rouge</i> itself could burn down
+to the ground a few months ago<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> and hardly a voice be heard in lament or
+reminiscence. Upon such rapidly shifting sands did the young would-be
+revolutionaries of London build their House of Decadence.</p>
+
+<p>The entertainment worth the exchange of the pure May night for a
+smoke-laden, stuffy interior was in none of these places. Where we
+looked for it&mdash;and found it&mdash;was in the little <i>caf&eacute;</i> or <i>cabaret</i>&mdash;the
+<i>cabaret artistique</i> as it was then known in Paris&mdash;with a flair for the
+genius the world is so long in discovering, where the young poet read
+his verses, the young musician interpreted his music, the young artist
+showed his work in any manner the chance was given him to, to say
+nothing of the posters he sometimes designed for it and decorated Paris
+with: theatre and performance and advertisement impossible in any other
+town or any other atmosphere. London is too clumsy. Berlin is too
+ponderous, New York has not the right material home-grown, and the
+spirit of the original dies in the self-conscious imitation. Even in
+Paris a Baedeker star is its death-blow, the private guide's attention
+spells immediate ruin, nor can it survive more legitimate honours at
+home when they come. Like most good things it has its times and its
+seasons, and it was in the Nineties it gave forth its finest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> blossoms.
+We knew it was a pleasure to be snatched this year, for next who could
+say where it might be, and we set out to snatch it with the same
+diligence we had devoted one spring to eating dinners and another to
+playing in the suburbs, though we could make no pretence in a week to
+exhaust it.</p>
+
+<p>Night after night we dined, we drank our coffee at the nearest <i>caf&eacute;</i>,
+we scrambled to the top of the big omnibus with the three white horses,
+now as dead as the performance it was taking us to, we journeyed across
+Paris to see or to hear the work of the young genius on the threshold of
+fame or oblivion. And if in an access of conscientiousness we had felt
+the need&mdash;as we never did&mdash;of a reason for our eagerness, we might have
+had it in the way our evening's entertainment invariably turned out to
+be the legitimate sequel of our day's work. For there wasn't a <i>cabaret</i>
+of them all that did not reflect somehow the things we had been busy
+studying and wrangling over ever since our arrival in Paris, the merit
+they shared in common being their pre-occupation with the art and
+literature of the day to which they belonged. The tiresome performance
+known as a <i>Revue</i>, which is all the vogue just now in the London
+music-halls, under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>takes to do something of the same kind: to be, that
+is, a reflection of the events and interests and popular excitements of
+the day. But the wide gulf between the music-hall <i>Revue</i> and the old
+<i>Cabaret</i> performance is that art and literature could not, by hook or
+by crook, be dragged into the average Englishman's scheme of life.</p>
+
+<p>If one night the end of the journey was the <i>Tr&eacute;teau de Tabarin</i>&mdash;the
+hot and uncomfortable little room rigged up as a theatre, with hard
+rough wooden benches for the audience, and vague lights, and bare and
+dingy stage where men and women whose names I have forgotten read and
+recited and sang the <i>chansons rosses</i> that "all Paris" flocked there to
+hear&mdash;it was to have the argument from which we had freshly come
+continued and settled by one of the inspired young poets. For my chief
+remembrance is of the irreverent youth who summed up our daily dispute
+over Rodin's great melodramatic Balzac, with frowning brows and goitrous
+throat, wrapped in shapeless dressing-gown, that stood that spring in
+the centre of the sculpture court at the New <i>Salon</i>, and the summing up
+was in verse only a Frenchman could write, the satire the more bitter
+because the wit was so fine.</p>
+
+<p>A second night when we climbed the lumber<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>ing omnibus, we were bound for
+the <i>Chat Noir</i>. It had already moved from its first primitive quarters
+but had not yet degenerated into a regular show place, advertised in
+Paris and taken by Salis on tour through the provinces. Here, our
+justification was to find that everything, from the sign of the Black
+Cat, then hanging at the door and now hanging, a national possession, in
+the Carnavalet Museum, and the cat-decorations in the <i>caf&eacute;</i> and the
+drawings and paintings on the wall, to the performance in the big room
+upstairs, was by the men over whose work we had been arguing all day at
+the <i>Salon</i> and buying in the reproductions at the bookstalls and
+bookshops on the way back.</p>
+
+<p>To see that performance upstairs we had each to pay five francs at the
+door, and we paid them as willingly as if they did not represent
+breakfast and dinner for the next day, and so many other people paid
+them with equal willingness that the room was crowded, though the show
+was of a kind that the same public in any town except Paris would have
+paid twice that sum to stay away from. Imagine Poe attracting customers
+for a New York saloon-keeper by reciting his poems! Imagine Keene or
+Beardsley making the fortunes of a London public-house by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> decorating
+its walls and showing his pictures on a screen! Or imagine the public of
+to-day, debauched by the "movies" and the music-hall "sketch," knowing
+that there is such a thing as poetry or art to listen to and look at!</p>
+
+<p>But Salis,&mdash;the great Salis, inventor, proprietor, director of the <i>Chat
+Noir</i>, dealt only in poetry and art and music, and this is sufficient to
+give him a place in the history of the period, even if he were the mere
+exploiter filling his pockets by pilfering other people's brains that he
+was accused of being by his enemies. He crowded his <i>caf&eacute;</i> by letting
+poets whom nobody had heard of and whose destiny&mdash;some of them, Maurice
+Donnay for one&mdash;as staid Academicians nobody could have foreseen, try
+their verses for the first time in public; by giving the same splendid
+opportunity to musicians as obscure then, whatever heights at least
+two&mdash;Charpentier and Debussy&mdash;were afterwards to reach; and by allowing
+the artist, while the poet was the interpreter in beautiful words and
+the musician in beautiful sound, to show his wonderful little dramas in
+black-and-white, the <i>Ombres Chinoises</i> that were the crowning glory of
+the night's performance. From days in the <i>Salons</i>, from the illustrated
+papers and magazines and books we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> filled our bags with to take back to
+London, we could not measure the full powers of men like Willette and
+Caran d'Ache and Rivi&egrave;re and Louis Morin until we had seen also <i>The
+Prodigal Son</i>, <i>The March of the Stars</i>, and all the stories they told
+in those dramatic silhouettes&mdash;those marvellous little black figures,
+cut in tin, only a few inches high, moving across a white space small in
+due proportion, but so designed and posed and grouped by the artist as
+to give the swing and the movement and the passing of great armies until
+one could almost fancy one heard the drums beat and the trumpets call,
+or to suggest the grandeur and solemnity of the desert, the vastness of
+the sky, the mystery of the night. They have been imitated. Only a few
+months ago I saw an imitation in a London music-hall, with all that late
+inventions in photography and electric light could do for it. But no
+touch of genius was in the little figures and the elaboration was no
+more than clever stagecraft. The simplicity of the <i>Chat Noir</i> was gone,
+and gone the gaiety of the performers, and the pretence of gaiety is
+sadder than tragedy. Salis knew how to catch his poet, his musician, his
+artist, young,&mdash;that is where he scored.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible that I was the more impressed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> by the beauty of the show
+because it was not of that side of the <i>Chat Noir</i> I had heard most. Its
+British admirers or critics, when they got back to London, had far more
+to say of it as a haunt of vice, if not as decadents to parade their
+wide and experienced knowledge of Paris, then as students who had gone
+there very likely to gather further confirmation of the popular British
+belief in Paris as the headquarters of vice and frivolity. To this day
+the hero or heroine of the British novel who is led astray is apt to
+cross the Channel for the purpose. It was a delicate matter to
+accomplish this in the Nineties when the novelist happened to be a
+woman, for even the "New Woman" cry, if it armed her with her own
+front-door key, could not draw all the bolts and bars of convention for
+her. I can remember the plight of the highly correct Englishwoman, upon
+whom British fiction depended for its respectability, who wanted to send
+her young hero from the English provinces to the <i>Chat Noir</i> in the
+course of a rake's progress, and who avoided facing the contamination
+herself by shifting to her husband the task of collecting the necessary
+local colour on the spot. She did well, for had she gone she could not
+have been so scandalized as the young Briton in her book was obliged to
+be for the sake<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> of the story. Those who had eyes and ears for it could
+see and hear all the license they wanted, those who had eyes and ears
+for the beauty could rest content with that, and as far as my impression
+of the place goes, Salis, if he allowed license at the <i>Chat Noir</i>,
+refused to put up with either the affectation or the advertisement of
+it. I cannot forget the night when a young American woman took her
+cigarette case from her pocket and lit a cigarette. It would not have
+seemed a desperate deed in proper England where every other woman had
+begun to smoke in public, probably more in public than in private, for
+with many smoking was part of the "New Woman" crusade&mdash;"I never liked
+smoking," an ardent leader in the cause told me once, "but I smoked
+until we won the right to." France, or Salis, however, still drew a
+rigid line that refused women the same right in France, and with the
+American's first whiff he was bidding her good-night and politely, but
+firmly, showing her the door.</p>
+
+<p>A third night, and I do not know that it was not the most amusing, the
+end of our journey was Bruant's <i>Cabaret du Mirliton</i>, in the remote
+<i>Boulevard Rochechouart</i>. I daresay there was not one of us who did not
+own a copy of Bruant's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> <i>Dans la Rue</i>, but we had bought it less because
+of his verses&mdash;some of us had not read a line of them&mdash;than because of
+Steinlen's illustrations, and I can still hear Harland upbraiding us for
+our literary indifference and urging it as a duty that we should not
+only read Bruant's songs, but go at once to hear him sing them. Harland
+had the provoking talent of looking as if his stories were the last
+thing he was bothering about, as if he was too busy enjoying the
+spectacle of life to think of work, when he was really working as hard
+as the hardest-working of us all. And as it was not very long after that
+his <i>Mademoiselle Miss</i> appeared, I have an idea that he hurried us off
+to Bruant's not solely to improve our literary taste, but quite as much
+to collect incidents for that gay little tale.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/icol16.jpg" width="500" height="692" alt="Poster by Toulouse-Lautrec
+ARISTIDE BRUANT OF THE CABARET DU MIRLITON" title="ARISTIDE BRUANT OF THE CABARET DU MIRLITON" />
+<span class="caption">Poster by Toulouse-Lautrec<br />
+ARISTIDE BRUANT OF THE CABARET DU MIRLITON</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Bruant ran the <i>Mirliton</i> on the principle that the less easily pleasure
+is come by, the more it will be prized. There was no walking in as at
+the ordinary <i>caf&eacute;</i>, no paying for admission as upstairs at the <i>Chat
+Noir</i>. Instead, it amused him to keep people who wanted to get in
+standing outside his door while he examined them through a little
+grille, an amusement which, in our case, he prolonged until I was sure
+he did not like our looks and would send us away, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> that the reason
+was the responsibility he laid upon us all for the frock coat and top
+hat which the Architect could never manage to keep out of sight, skulk
+as he might in the background. But, of course, Bruant had no intention
+of sending us away and he kept up his little farce only to the point
+where our disappointment was on the verge of turning into impatience. It
+simply meant that he did not hold to the hail-fellow-well-met
+free-and-easiness which was the pose of Salis at the <i>Chat Noir</i>, but,
+at the <i>Mirliton</i>, was all for ceremony and dramatic effect. At the
+psychological moment he opened the door himself, a splendid creature,
+half brigand, half Breton peasant, in brown corduroy jacket and
+knee-breeches, high boots, red silk handkerchief tied loosely round his
+neck, big wide-brimmed hat on the back of his head, the passing pose of
+a poet who, I am told, rejoiced to give it up for a costume fitted to
+the more congenial pastime of raising potatoes. To have seen
+Toulouse-Lautrec's poster of him and his <i>Cabaret</i> was to recognize him
+at a glance.</p>
+
+<p>To the noise of a strident chorus in choice <i>argot</i>, which I was told I
+should be thankful I did not understand, Bruant showed us into his
+<i>caf&eacute;</i>. It was more like an amateur museum, with its big Fifteenth
+Century fireplace, and its brasses<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> and tapestries on the walls, and if
+the huge <i>Mirliton</i> hanging from the ceiling was not remarkable as a
+work of art, it should now, as historic symbol of the Nineties, have a
+place at the <i>Carnavalet</i> by the side of the sign of the <i>Chat Noir</i>.
+When we had time to look round, we saw that the severe ordeal through
+which we had passed had admitted us into the company of a few youths in
+the high stocks and long hair of the <i>Quartier Latin</i>, a <i>petit
+piou-piou</i> or so, two or three stray workmen, women whom perhaps it
+would be more discreet not to attempt to classify, all seated at little
+tables and harmlessly occupied in drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.
+The place was free from tourists, we were the only foreigners, the
+handsome Aristide evidently sang his songs for the pleasure of himself
+and the people.</p>
+
+<p>It was after we had sat down at our little table and given the order
+required of us that the incidents of the evening began to play so neatly
+and effectively into Harland's plot. A scowl was on Bruant's handsome
+face as he strode up and down his <i>caf&eacute;</i>-museum, for the striding, it
+seemed, was only part of the regular performance. He should at the same
+time have been singing the songs we had come to hear, and he could not
+with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>out the pianist who accompanied him, and the pianist had chosen
+this night of all others to be late. The scowl deepened, I felt
+something like a stir of uneasiness through the room, and I did not
+wonder, for Bruant looked as if he had a temper it might be dangerous to
+trifle with. And then the strange thing happened and, to our surprise
+and his, our party whom he had met with such disdain saved the
+situation. How we did it may be read, with the variations necessary to
+fit his tale, in Harland's book. We had our own musician&mdash;her name was
+not Mademoiselle Miss&mdash;and when she discovered what was the matter, and
+why Bruant was scowling so abominably, she was moved by the sympathy of
+one artist for another and offered her services. Bruant led her to the
+piano, she accompanied him as best she could, the music being new to
+her, he sang us his <i>St. Lazare</i> and <i>La Soularde</i>, all the while
+striding up and down with magnificent swagger, and was about to begin a
+third of his most famous songs when the pianist arrived, his
+unmistakable fright quickly lost in his bewilderment at being received
+with an amiability he had not any right to expect, and allowed to slip
+into his place at the piano unrebuked. Bruant, with the manners, the
+courteous dignity, of a prince, led our Mademoiselle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> Miss back to us,
+ordered bocks for her, for me&mdash;the only other woman at our table&mdash;and
+for himself, touched his with his lips, bowed, was gone and singing
+again before we could show that we had not yet learned to drain our
+glasses in the fashion approved of at the <i>Mirliton</i>.</p>
+
+<p>So far Harland used this little episode much as it happened and made the
+most of it&mdash;I hope the curious who consult his story will be able to
+distinguish between his realism and his romance. But being mere man he
+missed the sequel which to the original of his Mademoiselle Miss and to
+me was the most dramatic and disturbing event of the evening. Gradually,
+as we sat at our table, watching Bruant and the company, it dawned upon
+us that Bruant did not exhaust the formalities of his entertainment upon
+the coming guest but reserved one for the parting guest which in our
+judgment was scarcely so amusing. For to every woman who left his
+<i>caf&eacute;</i>, Bruant's goodbye was a hearty kiss on both cheeks. We had the
+sense to know that, as we had come to the <i>Mirliton</i> of our own free
+will, we had no more right to quarrel with its rules than to refuse to
+show our press ticket at the <i>Salon</i> turnstile, or to give up our
+umbrellas at the door of the <i>Louvre</i>, or to question the regulations of
+any other place in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> Paris we chose to go to. If we insisted upon being
+made the exceptions to the farewell ceremony, and if Bruant would not
+let us off, could we resent it? And if the men of our party resented it
+for us, and if Bruant resented their resentment, how would that improve
+matters?</p>
+
+<p>It was about as unpleasant a predicament as I have ever found myself in.
+We talked it over, but could see no way out of it, and in our discomfort
+kept urging the men to stay for just one more song and then just one
+more, greatly to their amazement, for they were accustomed to not
+wanting to go and having to beg us to stay. The evil moment, however,
+could not be put off indefinitely, and, with our hearts in our boots, we
+at last got up from the table. We might have spared ourselves our agony.
+Bruant, with the instinct and intelligence of the Frenchman, realized
+our embarrassment and I hope I am right in thinking he had his laugh
+over us all to himself, so much more than a laugh did we owe him. For
+what he did when we got to the door was to shake hands with us
+ceremoniously, each in turn, to repeat his thanks for our visit and his
+gratitude to the musician for her services, to take off his wide-brimmed
+hat&mdash;the only time that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> night&mdash;and to bow us out into the darkness of
+the <i>Boulevard Rochechouart</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Following the example of Mademoiselle Miss in the story, unless it was
+she who was following ours, we finished the evening which had begun at
+the <i>Mirliton</i> by eating supper at the <i>Rat Mort</i>. It was an experience
+I cared less to repeat even than the visits to the <i>Casino de Paris</i> and
+the <i>Moulin Rouge</i>. As light and satisfying a supper could have been
+eaten in many other places, late as was the hour. Neither wit nor art
+entered into the entertainment as at the <i>Chat Noir</i> and Bruant's. Vice
+was at no trouble to disguise itself. On the contrary, it made rather a
+cynical display, I thought, and cynicism in vice is never agreeable. I
+give my impressions. I may be wrong. I have not forgotten that the
+harmless portrait by Degas of Desboutin at the <i>Nouvelle Ath&egrave;nes</i>
+scandalized all London in the Nineties. Everything depends on the point
+of view.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, another adventure I liked better was still to come before that
+long Paris night was at an end. It was so characteristic of Harland and
+his joy in the humorous and the absurd that I do not quite see why he
+did not let his Mademoiselle Miss share it. Outside the <i>Rat Mort</i>, in
+the early hours of the next morning, we picked up an old-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>fashioned
+one-horse, closed cab, built to hold two people, and of a type almost as
+extinct in Paris as the three-horse omnibus. It was the only cab in
+sight and we packed into and outside of it, not two but eight. As it
+crawled down one of the steep streets from <i>Montmartre</i> there was a
+creak, the horse stopped and, as quickly as I tell it, the bottom was
+out of the cab and we were in the street. Harland, as if prepared all
+along for just such a disaster, whisked the top hat so conspicuous in
+everything we did from the astonished Architect's head, handed it round,
+made a pitiful tale of <i>le pauvr' cocher</i> and his hungry wife and
+children, and implored us to show, now or never, the charitable stuff we
+were made of. Considering it was the end of a long evening, he collected
+a fairly decent number of francs and presented them to the <i>cocher</i> with
+an eloquent speech, which it was a pity someone could not have taken
+down in shorthand for him to use in his next story. The <i>cocher</i>, the
+least concerned of the group, thanked us with a broad grin, drew up his
+broken cab close to the sidewalk, took the horse from the shaft,
+clambered on its back, rode as fast as he could go down the street, and
+disappeared into the night. A <i>sergent-de-ville</i>, who had been looking
+on, shrugged his shoulders; in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> his opinion, <i>cet animal l&agrave;</i> was in luck
+and probably would like nothing better than the same accident every
+night, provided at the time he was driving ladies and gentlemen of such
+generosity. <i>Allez!</i> Didn't we know the cab was heavily insured, all
+Paris cabs were, we had made him a handsome present&mdash;<i>Voil&agrave; tout!</i></p>
+
+<p>And so wonderful is it to be young and in Paris that we laughed our way
+back as we trudged on foot through the now dark and empty and silent
+streets between <i>Montmartre</i> and our rooms. I doubt if I could laugh now
+at the fatigue of it. Of all the many ghosts that walk with me along the
+old familiar ways, the one keeping most obstinately at my side is that
+of my own youth, reminding me of the prosaic, elderly woman I am, who,
+even if the zest for adventure remained, would be ashamed to be caught
+plunging into follies like those of the old foolish nights in Paris that
+never can be again, or who, if not ashamed, would be without the energy
+to see them through to the end.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VII</h3>
+
+<p>In Paris, as in London, a further ramble down those crowded, haunted,
+resounding Corridors of Time would lead me to many other nights of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>
+gaiety and friendliness and loud persistent talk.</p>
+
+<p>Again, I would have my Whistler nights, the background now not our
+chambers, but the memorable apartment in the Rue du Bac
+<i>rez-de-chauss&eacute;e</i> opening upon the spacious garden where, in the
+twilight, often we lingered to listen to the Missionary Monks in their
+spacious garden on the other side of the wall, singing the canticles for
+the Month of Mary so dear to me from my convent days&mdash;nights in the
+dining-room with its beautiful blue-and-white china, the long table and
+the Japanese "something like a birdcage" hanging over it in the centre,
+many once-friendly faces all about me, Whistler presiding in his place
+or filling the glasses of his guests as he passed from one to the other,
+always talking, saying things as nobody else could have said them,
+witty, serious, exasperating, delightful things, laughing the gay laugh
+or the laugh of malice that said as much as his words;&mdash;nights in the
+blue and white drawing-room, with the painting of Venus over the mantel,
+and the stately Empire chairs, and the table a litter of papers among
+which was always the last correspondence to be read, interrupted by his
+own comments that to those who heard were the best part of it&mdash;nights
+that will never perish as long as even one man, or woman,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> who shared in
+them lives to remember;&mdash;Whistler nights even after Whistler had left us
+for the land where there is neither night nor day: nights these with the
+old friends who had loved him, with the painter Oulevey and the sculptor
+Drouet who had been his fellow students, with Th&eacute;odore Duret who had
+been faithful during his years of greatest trial, friends who rejoiced
+in talking of Whistler and of all that had gone to make him the great
+personality and the greater artist; but of the Whistler nights in Paris,
+as in London, I have already made the record with J. The story of them
+is told.</p>
+
+<p>And along the same rich Corridors, I would come to nights only less
+worth preserving in the studios of artists, American and English, who
+studied and worked and lived in Paris&mdash;nights that have bequeathed to me
+the impression of great space, and lofty ceilings, and many canvases,
+and big easels, and bits of tapestry, and the gleam of old brass and
+pottery, and excellent dinners, and, of course, vehement talk, and a
+friendly war of words&mdash;nights with men irrevocably in the movement,
+whose work was conspicuous on the walls of the New <i>Salon</i> and had
+probably, a few hours earlier, kept us busy arguing in front of it and
+writing voluminous notes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> in our note-books&mdash;nights not the least
+stirring and tempestuous of the many I have spent in Paris, but nights
+of which my safe rule of silence where the living are concerned forbids
+me to tell the tale.</p>
+
+<p>And one special year stands out when the little hotel in the Rue St.
+Roch was deserted for the Grand Hotel, and when all the nights seemed
+swallowed up in the International Society's business&mdash;not the
+International Society of Anarchists, but the International Society of
+Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in London, which, in those terribly
+enterprising Nineties, sent its deputation&mdash;J. included in it&mdash;to
+collect all that was most individual and distinguished in the <i>Salons</i>
+for its next Exhibition. It was a year of many wanderings in many
+directions to many studios of French artists, or foreign artists working
+in Paris&mdash;a year of many meetings of many artists night after night. But
+this clearly is not a story for me to tell, since the International was
+J.'s concern, not mine. In the hours away from my work I looked on, an
+outsider, but an amused outsider, marvelling as I have never ceased to
+marvel since the faraway nights in Rome, at the inexhaustible wealth of
+art as a subject of talk wherever artists are gathered together.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>And rambling still further into that past, I would stumble into
+American nights&mdash;nights with old friends, established there or passing
+through and run across by chance&mdash;nights of joy in being with my own
+people again, of hearing not English, but my native tongue and having
+life readjusted to the American point of view. Nobody knows how good it
+is to be with one's fellow-countrymen who has not been years away from
+them. But these also are nights that come within the forbidden zone&mdash;the
+zone where Silence is Golden.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VIII</h3>
+
+<p>I have put down these memories of Paris nights and my yearly visit to
+Paris in the year when, for the first time since I began my work in its
+galleries, no <i>Salon</i> has opened to take me there in the springtime.
+With the coming of May the lilacs and horse-chestnuts bloomed with the
+old beauty and fragrance along the <i>Champs-Elys&eacute;es</i> outside the <i>Grand
+Palais</i>, but inside no prints and paintings were on the walls, no
+statues in the great courts. To those admitted, the only exhibition was
+of the wounded, the maimed, the dying. Does it mean, I wonder, the end
+of all old days and nights for me in Paris, as the war that has shut
+fast the <i>Salon</i> door means the end<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> of the old order of things in the
+Europe I have known? Shall I never go to Paris again in the season of
+lilacs and horse-chestnuts? Already I have ceased to meet my old friends
+by day in front of the picture of the year and to quarrel with them over
+it by night at a <i>caf&eacute;</i> table, or in the peaceful twilight of the
+suburban town and park and garden. Am I to lose as well the link with
+the past I had in the <i>Salon</i>, am I to lose perhaps Paris? Who can say
+at the moment of my writing, when the echo of shells and bullets is
+thundering in my ears? The pleasure of what has been becomes the dearer
+possession in the mad upheaval that threatens to sweep all trace of it
+away, and so I cling to the remembrance of my Paris nights the more
+tenderly and even with the hope, if far-fetched, that others may
+understand the tenderness. Youth sees little beyond youth, but as the
+years go on I begin to believe youth exists for no other end than to
+supply the incidents that age transforms into memories to warm itself
+by. If I have reached the time for looking back, I have my compensation
+in the invigorating glow, for all its sadness, that I get from my new
+occupation.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span></p>
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+Abbey, Edwin A., <a href="#Page_54">54</a><br />
+<br />
+Addiscombe, Henley's house at, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a><br />
+<br />
+"Admiral Guinea," by Henley, <a href="#Page_147">147</a><br />
+<br />
+Albano, <a href="#Page_66">66</a><br />
+<br />
+Albergo del Sole, Pompeii, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+"Allahakbarries," <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+Aman-Jean, E., <a href="#Page_261">261</a><br />
+<br />
+American Consul at Venice, <a href="#Page_86">86</a><br />
+<br />
+American tourists, <a href="#Page_91">91</a><br />
+<br />
+American visitors, <a href="#Page_221">221</a><br />
+<br />
+Anthony, Venice, <a href="#Page_97">97</a><br />
+<br />
+Antica Panada, <a href="#Page_76">76</a><br />
+<br />
+"Arabian Nights' Entertainment," by Henley, <a href="#Page_132">132</a><br />
+<br />
+Arnold, at Venice, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a><br />
+<br />
+"Arrangement in Trousers," <a href="#Page_96">96</a><br />
+<br />
+Arrested, <a href="#Page_29">29</a><br />
+<br />
+Art critics in Paris, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>-<a href="#Page_229">229</a><br />
+<br />
+Artists in Rome, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>-<a href="#Page_64">64</a><br />
+<br />
+"Art Journal," London, <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br />
+<br />
+"Art Weekly," London, <a href="#Page_202">202</a><br />
+<br />
+"Association Books," <a href="#Page_214">214</a><br />
+<br />
+Astor, William Waldorf, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a><br />
+<br />
+"Atlantic Monthly," <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a><br />
+<br />
+Augustine (Mme. Bertin), <a href="#Page_218">218</a><br />
+<br />
+Austen, Louis, <a href="#Page_174">174</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Ballantyne &amp; Co., <a href="#Page_125">125</a><br />
+<br />
+Barnes, Henley's house at, <a href="#Page_149">149</a><br />
+<br />
+Barrie, J.M., <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a><br />
+<br />
+Baseball, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a><br />
+<br />
+Bauer's, at Venice, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br />
+<br />
+Beardsley, Aubrey, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_177">177</a>-<a href="#Page_191">191</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_260">260</a>-<a href="#Page_264">264</a><br />
+<br />
+Beardsley's illness, <a href="#Page_190">190</a><br />
+<br />
+Beaux-Arts, Paris, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br />
+<br />
+Beerbohm, Max, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a><br />
+<br />
+Befana Night, <a href="#Page_66">66</a><br />
+<br />
+Beggarstaff Brothers, <a href="#Page_194">194</a><br />
+<br />
+Belgian exiles, <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br />
+<br />
+Belgium, <a href="#Page_17">17</a><br />
+<br />
+B&eacute;raud, Jean, <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<br />
+Bibi-la-Pur&eacute;e, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+Bicycle, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a><br />
+<br />
+Bisbing, Henry S., <a href="#Page_102">102</a><br />
+<br />
+Black magic, <a href="#Page_89">89</a><br />
+<br />
+Black and white at the Salons, <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<br />
+Blackburn, Vernon, <a href="#Page_152">152</a><br />
+<br />
+Blakie, W.B., <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br />
+<br />
+Blanche, J.E., <a href="#Page_261">261</a><br />
+<br />
+"Blast, The," <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+<br />
+"Bodley Head," <a href="#Page_187">187</a><br />
+<br />
+Boer War, <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br />
+<br />
+Borghese, The, <a href="#Page_29">29</a><br />
+<br />
+"Boys, The," at Venice, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_102">102</a><br />
+<br />
+Breton, Jules, <a href="#Page_274">274</a><br />
+<br />
+Bridge of Sighs, Venice, <a href="#Page_75">75</a><br />
+<br />
+Brillat-Savarin, <a href="#Page_245">245</a><br />
+<br />
+British Museum, <a href="#Page_65">65</a><br />
+<br />
+Bronsons, the, at Venice, <a href="#Page_98">98</a><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+<br />
+Brown, Horatio, at Venice, <a href="#Page_98">98</a><br />
+<br />
+Brown, Professor Fred, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+Bruant, Aristide, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>-<a href="#Page_295">295</a><br />
+<br />
+Buckingham Street, our rooms in, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_129">129</a>-<a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_158">158</a>,<br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 14.5em;"><a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Buhot, Felix, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+Bunney at Venice, <a href="#Page_92">92</a><br />
+<br />
+Burano, <a href="#Page_111">111</a><br />
+<br />
+Burlington House, <a href="#Page_228">228</a><br />
+<br />
+Burly, Stevenson's, <a href="#Page_134">134</a><br />
+<br />
+Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, <a href="#Page_178">178</a><br />
+<br />
+Bussy, Simon, <a href="#Page_127">127</a><br />
+<br />
+"Butterfly," the, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Cabaret du Mirliton, Paris, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lyonnais, Paris, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Caf&eacute; d'Harcourt, Paris, <a href="#Page_273">273</a><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">de la Paix, Paris, <a href="#Page_273">273</a></span><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">de la R&eacute;gence, Paris, <a href="#Page_273">273</a></span><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">de Venise, Rome, <a href="#Page_41">41</a></span><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nazionale Aragno, Rome, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_274">274</a></span><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Orientale, Venice, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>-<a href="#Page_97">97</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></span><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Royal, London, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Caf&eacute;s at Rome, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>-<a href="#Page_44">44</a><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Venice, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>-<a href="#Page_113">113</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Calcino, Venice, <a href="#Page_77">77</a><br />
+<br />
+Campagna, the, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a><br />
+<br />
+Campanile, the, Venice, <a href="#Page_75">75</a><br />
+<br />
+Canaletto, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br />
+<br />
+"Captain's Girl," <a href="#Page_214">214</a><br />
+<br />
+Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_54">54</a><br />
+<br />
+Carnavalet Museum, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a><br />
+<br />
+Carolus-Duran, <a href="#Page_261">261</a><br />
+<br />
+Carpaccio, <a href="#Page_94">94</a><br />
+<br />
+Casa Kirsch, Venice, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>,<a href="#Page_77">77</a><br />
+<br />
+Casino de Paris, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br />
+<br />
+Cavour, the, Rome, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a><br />
+<br />
+Cazin, C., <a href="#Page_262">262</a><br />
+<br />
+C&eacute;zanne, Paul, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+Chamberlain, Dr., <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br />
+<br />
+Champ de Mars, <a href="#Page_234">234</a><br />
+<br />
+Champs-Elys&eacute;es, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a><br />
+<br />
+Chantrey bequest, <a href="#Page_119">119</a><br />
+<br />
+Charles V ball, at Munich, <a href="#Page_105">105</a><br />
+<br />
+Charpentier, E., <a href="#Page_286">286</a><br />
+<br />
+Chat Noir, the, Paris, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>-<a href="#Page_291">291</a><br />
+<br />
+Ch&eacute;ret, Jules, <a href="#Page_240">240</a><br />
+<br />
+Cheshire Cheese, the, London, <a href="#Page_38">38</a><br />
+<br />
+Chioggia, <a href="#Page_111">111</a><br />
+<br />
+"Chronicle of Friendships," by Will Low, <a href="#Page_165">165</a><br />
+<br />
+Church of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice, <a href="#Page_94">94</a><br />
+<br />
+Cleopatra's Needle, <a href="#Page_147">147</a><br />
+  <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+<br />
+Clothes, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>-<a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_193">193</a>-<a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_261">261</a><br />
+<br />
+Cole, Timothy, <a href="#Page_221">221</a><br />
+<br />
+Coleman at Rome, <a href="#Page_61">61</a><br />
+<br />
+Conder, Charles, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br />
+<br />
+Coney Island, <a href="#Page_110">110</a><br />
+<br />
+Constable, T. and A., <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Cook, Clarence, <a href="#Page_63">63</a><br />
+<br />
+Cookery, the Author's articles on, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_186">186</a><br />
+<br />
+Cooking books, <a href="#Page_245">245</a><br />
+<br />
+Corder, Rosa, <a href="#Page_237">237</a><br />
+<br />
+Cornford, Cope, <a href="#Page_128">128</a><br />
+<br />
+"Courrier Français," Paris, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+Covent Garden, <a href="#Page_125">125</a><br />
+<br />
+Crane, Walter, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br />
+<br />
+Crawford, Marion, <a href="#Page_60">60</a><br />
+<br />
+Crockett, S.R., <a href="#Page_157">157</a><br />
+<br />
+Cubists, the, <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+<br />
+Cust, Henry, <a href="#Page_153">153</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+D'Ache, Caran, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a><br />
+<br />
+"Daily Chronicle," the, London, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a><br />
+<br />
+"Daily News," London, <a href="#Page_41">41</a><br />
+<br />
+Davies, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a><br />
+<br />
+Dayrolles, Adrienne (Mrs. W.J. Fisher), <a href="#Page_174">174</a><br />
+<br />
+Debussy, Achille Claude, <a href="#Page_286">286</a><br />
+<br />
+Degas, H.G.E., <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br />
+<br />
+Desboutin, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br />
+<br />
+"Dial, The," London, <a href="#Page_177">177</a><br />
+<br />
+Dinners in Paris, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>-<a href="#Page_247">247</a><br />
+<br />
+"Diogenes of London," <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+Discussions over art, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>-<a href="#Page_65">65</a><br />
+<br />
+Dodge, Miss Louise, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br />
+<br />
+"Dome," the, London, <a href="#Page_177">177</a><br />
+<br />
+Donnay, Maurice, <a href="#Page_286">286</a><br />
+<br />
+Donoghue the sculptor, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>-<a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a><br />
+<br />
+Dowie, M&eacute;nie Muriel, <a href="#Page_185">185</a><br />
+<br />
+Drouet, C., <a href="#Page_300">300</a><br />
+<br />
+Ducal Palace, Venice, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br />
+<br />
+Duclaux, Madame, <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br />
+<br />
+Dumas's Dictionnaire de la Cuisine, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a><br />
+<br />
+Duret, Th&eacute;odore, <a href="#Page_300">300</a><br />
+<br />
+Duveneck, Frank, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>-<a href="#Page_108">108</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Edelfelt, <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<br />
+Eighteen-eighties, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>-<a href="#Page_113">114</a><br />
+<br />
+Eighteen-nineties, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>-<a href="#Page_303">304</a><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Their so-called decadence, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></span><br />
+<br />
+English tourists, <a href="#Page_92">92</a><br />
+<br />
+Etty, William, <a href="#Page_123">123</a><br />
+<br />
+"Evergreen," the, London, <a href="#Page_177">177</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Falcone, the, Rome, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a><br />
+<br />
+Fig-Tree House, <a href="#Page_130">130</a><br />
+<br />
+Fighting nineties, <a href="#Page_118">118</a><br />
+<br />
+Finck, Henry T., <a href="#Page_245">245</a><br />
+<br />
+"Finsbury, Michael," <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a><br />
+<br />
+Fisher, W.J., <a href="#Page_174">174</a><br />
+<br />
+Fitzgerald, Edward, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br />
+<br />
+Flaubert, Gustave, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+  <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+<br />
+Florence, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a><br />
+<br />
+Florian's, Venice, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a><br />
+<br />
+Florizel, Prince, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a><br />
+<br />
+Folies-Berg&egrave;re, Paris, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br />
+<br />
+Fontainebleau, Forest of, <a href="#Page_271">271</a><br />
+<br />
+Forain, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a><br />
+<br />
+"Forepaugh," <a href="#Page_52">52</a>-<a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a><br />
+<br />
+Frederic, Harold, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+Furse, Charles W., <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a><br />
+<br />
+Futurists, the, <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Garnett, Dr. Edward, <a href="#Page_65">65</a><br />
+<br />
+Gauguin, <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+Gautier, Theophile, <a href="#Page_268">268</a><br />
+<br />
+Gavarni, <a href="#Page_257">257</a><br />
+<br />
+"Gazette, Pall Mall," <a href="#Page_153">153</a><br />
+<br />
+"Gentle Art of Making Enemies, The," <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a><br />
+<br />
+"Germ, The," <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+<br />
+German tourists, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a><br />
+<br />
+Germany, <a href="#Page_17">17</a><br />
+<br />
+Ghetto, Rome, <a href="#Page_30">30</a><br />
+<br />
+Gigi, <a href="#Page_53">53</a><br />
+<br />
+Gosse, Edmund, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+<br />
+Goupil Gallery, London, <a href="#Page_119">119</a><br />
+<br />
+Graefe, Meier, <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br />
+<br />
+Grahame, Kenneth, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Grand Palais, Paris, <a href="#Page_302">302</a><br />
+<br />
+"Graphic," the, London, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+Great College Street office, Henley's, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>-<a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a><br />
+<br />
+"Greedy Autolycus," <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a><br />
+<br />
+Guardi, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br />
+<br />
+Guilbert, Yvette, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br />
+<br />
+"Gypsy, The," <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+<br />
+Hamilton, Lord Frederick, <a href="#Page_153">153</a><br />
+<br />
+Harland, Henry, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>-<a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_264">264</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>,<br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 7.2em;"><a href="#Page_290">290</a>-<a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Harrison, Alexander, <a href="#Page_250">250</a><br />
+<br />
+Harte, Bret, <a href="#Page_51">51</a><br />
+<br />
+Hartrick and Sullivan, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br />
+<br />
+Henley, Madge, <a href="#Page_214">214</a><br />
+<br />
+Henley, William Ernest, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>-<a href="#Page_149">149</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a><br />
+<br />
+Henley's "Young Men," <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>,<br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 10.2em;"><a href="#Page_213">213</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_214">214</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Hill, L. Raven, <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+Hobbes, John Oliver (Mrs. Cragie), <a href="#Page_185">185</a><br />
+<br />
+"Hobby-horse," the, <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+<br />
+Horne, Herbert P., <a href="#Page_278">278</a><br />
+<br />
+"Hospital Verses," <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a><br />
+<br />
+Hostess, author as, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+Hotel de l'Univers et Portugal, Paris, <a href="#Page_233">233</a><br />
+  <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+  <span style="margin-left: 2em;">d'Italie, London, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Howells, William Dean, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a><br />
+<br />
+Hueffer, Ford Madox, <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+<br />
+Hugo, Victor, <a href="#Page_268">268</a><br />
+<br />
+Hunt, Holman, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<br />
+Hunt, Violet, <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br />
+<br />
+Huysmans, Joris Karl, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Ibsen, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a><br />
+<br />
+Impressionism, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br />
+<br />
+Indolence, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a><br />
+<br />
+"Inland Voyage, An," <a href="#Page_165">165</a><br />
+<br />
+International Exhibitions, <a href="#Page_19">19</a><br />
+<br />
+International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br />
+<br />
+Italian Primitives, <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br />
+<br />
+Italy, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a><br />
+<br />
+Iwan-M&uuml;ller, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+"J&mdash;" (Joseph Pennell), <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>,<br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 9.75em;"><a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_137">137</a>,</span><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 9.75em;"><a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_214">214</a>,</span><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 9.75em;"><a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a></span><br />
+<br />
+James, Henry, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+<br />
+Japanese art, <a href="#Page_178">178</a><br />
+<br />
+Jobbins, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a><br />
+<br />
+Journalism, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>-<a href="#Page_229">229</a><br />
+<br />
+Journeyings in Europe, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>-<a href="#Page_19">19</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Kelly, FitzMaurice, <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br />
+<br />
+Kelmscott Press, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Kennedy, E.G., <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br />
+<br />
+Kensington Gardens, London, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+<br />
+Khayyam, Omar, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a><br />
+<br />
+Khnopf, <a href="#Page_240">240</a><br />
+<br />
+Kipling, Rudyard, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Kitchener, Lord, <a href="#Page_155">155</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+La P&eacute;rouse, Paris, <a href="#Page_247">247</a><br />
+<br />
+Lagoon, the, Venice, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a><br />
+<br />
+Lamb, Charles, <a href="#Page_22">22</a><br />
+<br />
+"Land of the Dollar," <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+Lane, John, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a><br />
+<br />
+Lang, Andrew, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a><br />
+<br />
+"Lantern Bearers, The," <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+<br />
+Latin Quarter, <a href="#Page_194">194</a><br />
+<br />
+Lavenue's, Paris, <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+Le Puy, <a href="#Page_18">18</a><br />
+<br />
+Legge, James G., <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br />
+<br />
+Legrand, Louis, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a><br />
+<br />
+Leighton, Lord, <a href="#Page_195">195</a><br />
+<br />
+Leland, Charles Godfrey, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a><br />
+<br />
+Lhermitte, <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<br />
+Lido, the, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a><br />
+<br />
+London, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>-<a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a><br />
+<br />
+"London Impressionists," <a href="#Page_199">199</a><br />
+<br />
+"London Voluntaries," by Henley, <a href="#Page_147">147</a><br />
+<br />
+Low, Will, <a href="#Page_165">165</a><br />
+<br />
+Lucca, <a href="#Page_74">74</a><br />
+  <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+<br />
+Luska, Sydney (Henry Harland), <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+<br />
+Luxembourg, Paris, <a href="#Page_103">103</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+MacColl, D.S., <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br />
+<br />
+"Mademoiselle Miss," <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br />
+
+<br />
+"Magazine of Art," London, <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br />
+<br />
+Manet, Edouard, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br />
+<br />
+Margherita, Queen, <a href="#Page_66">66</a><br />
+<br />
+Marguery's, Paris, <a href="#Page_250">250</a><br />
+<br />
+Marino, <a href="#Page_66">66</a><br />
+<br />
+Marriott-Watson, Rosamund, <a href="#Page_157">157</a><br />
+<br />
+Martin, at Venice, <a href="#Page_86">86</a><br />
+<br />
+May, Phil, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>-<a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br />
+<br />
+McFarlane, Venice, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br />
+<br />
+Meissonier, J.L.E., <a href="#Page_236">236</a><br />
+<br />
+Merceria, the, Venice, <a href="#Page_99">99</a><br />
+<br />
+Meynell, Mrs. Alice, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br />
+<br />
+Millet, F.D., <a href="#Page_54">54</a><br />
+<br />
+Mistral, <a href="#Page_65">65</a><br />
+<br />
+Mitchell, Dr. S. Weir, <a href="#Page_142">142</a><br />
+<br />
+Monet, Claude, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br />
+<br />
+Montepulciano, <a href="#Page_42">42</a><br />
+<br />
+Montmartre, <a href="#Page_297">297</a><br />
+<br />
+Moore, George, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a><br />
+<br />
+Morelli, <a href="#Page_46">46</a><br />
+<br />
+Morin, Louis, <a href="#Page_287">287</a><br />
+<br />
+Morris, William, <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+<br />
+Morrison, Arthur, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+"Morte d'Arthur," illustrated by Beardsley, <a href="#Page_178">178</a><br />
+<br />
+Moulin Rouge, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br />
+<br />
+Munich, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Accident at ball, <a href="#Page_105">105</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Murano, <a href="#Page_111">111</a><br />
+<br />
+M&uuml;rger, Henri, <a href="#Page_257">257</a><br />
+<br />
+Music of "Carmen," the, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Naples, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a><br />
+<br />
+"Nation," the, London, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a><br />
+<br />
+"National Observer," London, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>,<br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 13em;"><a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></span><br />
+<br />
+New English Art Club, London, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a><br />
+<br />
+New Gallery, <a href="#Page_227">227</a><br />
+<br />
+New York "Times," <a href="#Page_156">156</a><br />
+<br />
+Nicholson, William, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a><br />
+<br />
+Norman, Henry, <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br />
+<br />
+Norwegian at Rome, the, <a href="#Page_60">60</a><br />
+<br />
+Nouvelle Ath&egrave;nes, the, Paris, <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+"Observations in Philistia," by Harold Frederic, <a href="#Page_156">156</a><br />
+<br />
+Orvieto, <a href="#Page_74">74</a><br />
+<br />
+Ostia, <a href="#Page_66">66</a><br />
+<br />
+Oulevey, H., <a href="#Page_300">300</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+"Pageant," the, London, <a href="#Page_177">177</a><br />
+<br />
+Palais Royal, <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br />
+<br />
+Pall-Mall, the, "Budget," "Gazette" and "Magazine," <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_155">155</a>,<br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 22em;"><a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_254">254</a></span>
+<br />
+  <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>
+"Pan," London, <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br />
+<br />
+Panada, the, Venice, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>-<a href="#Page_82">82</a><br />
+<br />
+Paris, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>-<a href="#Page_303">303</a><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Studios, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>-<a href="#Page_103">103</a></span><br />
+<br />
+"Parson and the Painter, The," <a href="#Page_197">197</a><br />
+<br />
+Parsons, Harold, <a href="#Page_152">152</a><br />
+<br />
+Paulus, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br />
+<br />
+"Penn, William," <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a><br />
+<br />
+Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br />
+<br />
+Piazza Navona, Rome, <a href="#Page_66">66</a><br />
+<br />
+"Pick-me-up," <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+Pincian, the, Rome, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<br />
+Pisa, <a href="#Page_74">74</a><br />
+<br />
+Pistoia, <a href="#Page_74">74</a><br />
+<br />
+Pointillism, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br />
+<br />
+Pollock, Wilfred, <a href="#Page_152">152</a><br />
+<br />
+Pompeii, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+Porta del Popolo, Rome, <a href="#Page_29">29</a><br />
+<br />
+"Portfolio, The," <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<br />
+Posta, the, Rome, <a href="#Page_43">43</a><br />
+<br />
+Post-impressionism, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+<br />
+Pre-Raphaelitism, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a><br />
+<br />
+Preston, Miss Harriet Waters, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br />
+<br />
+"Private Life of the Romans," <a href="#Page_65">65</a><br />
+<br />
+Prunier's, Paris, <a href="#Page_252">252</a><br />
+<br />
+Pryde, James, <a href="#Page_194">194</a><br />
+<br />
+Pulcinello, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>-<a href="#Page_69">69</a><br />
+<br />
+"Punch," <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+"Rape of the Lock," illustrated by Beardsley, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Rat Mort, Paris, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br />
+<br />
+Renouard, Paul, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+"Return of the O'Mahoney," <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+Reyni&egrave;re, Grimod de la, <a href="#Page_245">245</a><br />
+<br />
+Rico, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br />
+<br />
+Rivi&egrave;re, <a href="#Page_287">287</a><br />
+<br />
+Robinson, Miss Mary, <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br />
+<br />
+Rocca di Papa, <a href="#Page_66">66</a><br />
+<br />
+Rodin, Auguste, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_284">284</a><br />
+<br />
+Rome, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>-<a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a><br />
+<br />
+Rooms at Rome, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>-<a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br />
+<br />
+Roque, Jules, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+Rosicrucianism, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br />
+<br />
+Ross, Robert, <a href="#Page_182">182</a><br />
+<br />
+Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+<br />
+Rossetti, William Michael, <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+<br />
+Royal Academy, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a><br />
+<br />
+Rubaiyat, illustrated by Vedder, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br />
+<br />
+Rubens, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a><br />
+<br />
+Ruskin, John, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a><br />
+<br />
+Ruskin, never quoted by artists, <a href="#Page_92">92</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Sailing for Europe, <a href="#Page_14">14</a><br />
+<br />
+Salis, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_291">291</a><br />
+<br />
+Salisbury, Lord, <a href="#Page_165">165</a><br />
+<br />
+"Salome," illustrated by Beardsley, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Salons, the, Paris, <a href="#Page_103">103</a><br />
+<br />
+Sandro, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a><br />
+<br />
+Sandys, Frederick, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>-<a href="#Page_208">208</a><br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>
+San Francisco Exposition, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a><br />
+<br />
+San Giorgio, Venice, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a><br />
+<br />
+San P&eacute;ladan, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br />
+<br />
+"Saturday Review," London, <a href="#Page_202">202</a><br />
+<br />
+"Savoy, The," <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+Schwabe, Carlos, <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<br />
+"Scots Observer," Edinburgh, <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br />
+<br />
+Shannon, J.J., <a href="#Page_193">193</a><br />
+<br />
+Shaw, George Bernard, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+Shinn, at Venice, <a href="#Page_86">86</a><br />
+<br />
+Sickert, Walter, <a href="#Page_201">201</a><br />
+<br />
+Simpson's, London, <a href="#Page_253">253</a><br />
+<br />
+Sisley, Alfred, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br />
+<br />
+Sixties, illustrations of the, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a><br />
+<br />
+Societies in the nineties, <a href="#Page_134">134</a><br />
+<br />
+Solferino's, London, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a><br />
+<br />
+South Kensington, London, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a><br />
+<br />
+"Speaker, The," London, <a href="#Page_229">229</a><br />
+<br />
+"Spectator," London, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a><br />
+<br />
+"Spring-heeled Jack," <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a><br />
+<br />
+Spring in Venice, <a href="#Page_108">108</a><br />
+<br />
+"Standard," London, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Cloud, Paris, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a><br />
+<br />
+Steer, Wilson, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+Steevens, George W., <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+Steinlen, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a><br />
+<br />
+Stennis Brothers, <a href="#Page_165">165</a><br />
+<br />
+Stevenson, "Bob" (Robert Alan Mowbray), <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>,<br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 18em;"><a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Stevenson, Robert Louis, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>,<br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 10.5em;"><a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Stewarts, London, <a href="#Page_232">232</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Mark's, Venice, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Paul's, London, <a href="#Page_147">147</a><br />
+<br />
+Street, George S., <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+"Strike at Arlingford, The," <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+Stuart, Jack, <a href="#Page_152">152</a><br />
+<br />
+"Studio, The," <a href="#Page_178">178</a><br />
+<br />
+Symbolism, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br />
+<br />
+Symonds, John Addington, <a href="#Page_77">77</a><br />
+<br />
+Symons, Arthur, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+"Talk and Talkers," <a href="#Page_160">160</a><br />
+<br />
+Talk on Thursday nights, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>-<a href="#Page_125">125</a><br />
+<br />
+Thaulow, Fritz, <a href="#Page_273">273</a><br />
+<br />
+Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Fran&ccedil;ais, <a href="#Page_220">220</a><br />
+<br />
+Theosophy, <a href="#Page_55">55</a><br />
+<br />
+Thompson, Venice, <a href="#Page_97">97</a><br />
+<br />
+Thursday nights, our, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>-<a href="#Page_125">125</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br />
+<br />
+"Times," London, <a href="#Page_43">43</a><br />
+<br />
+Tintoretto, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a><br />
+<br />
+Tivoli, <a href="#Page_66">66</a><br />
+<br />
+Tomson, Arthur, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>
+<br />
+Tomson, Graham R., <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+Tonks, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+Torcello, <a href="#Page_111">111</a><br />
+<br />
+Toulouse-Lautrec, H. de, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a><br />
+<br />
+Tour d'Argent, Paris, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a><br />
+<br />
+Trattoria Cavour, Rome, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Falcone, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>-<a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a></span><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Posta, Rome, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>-<a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a></span><br />
+<br />
+"Treasure Island," <a href="#Page_127">127</a><br />
+<br />
+Tr&eacute;teau de Tabarin, Paris, <a href="#Page_284">284</a><br />
+<br />
+Tricycle, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a><br />
+<br />
+Tudor classics, the, <a href="#Page_214">214</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Val di Chiana, <a href="#Page_42">42</a><br />
+<br />
+Vale Press, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Vance, the painter, <a href="#Page_80">80</a><br />
+<br />
+Van Dyke, John, <a href="#Page_221">221</a><br />
+<br />
+Van Gogh, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+Vedder, Elihu, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>-<a href="#Page_64">64</a><br />
+<br />
+Velasquez, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+"Venetian Life," by W.D. Howells, <a href="#Page_109">109</a><br />
+<br />
+Venetian painting, <a href="#Page_101">101</a><br />
+<br />
+Venice, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>-<a href="#Page_113">113</a><br />
+<br />
+Verlaine, Paul, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>-<a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+Versailles, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a><br />
+<br />
+Vesuvius, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br />
+<br />
+Vibrism, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br />
+<br />
+Victoria, Queen, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br />
+<br />
+Victorian prejudice, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br />
+<br />
+"Views and Reviews," by Henley, <a href="#Page_141">141</a><br />
+<br />
+Voisin's, Paris, <a href="#Page_246">246</a><br />
+<br />
+"Volpone," illustrated by Beardsley, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Vorticists, <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+"Wares of Autolycus," <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br />
+<br />
+Watson, Marriott, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>-<a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+<br />
+Wells, H.G., <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br />
+<br />
+Whibley, Charles, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a><br />
+<br />
+Whibley, Leonard, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Whistler, James McNeill, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>,<br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 10.5em;"><a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>,</span><br />
+  <span style="margin-left: 10.5em;"><a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>,
+  <a href="#Page_300">300</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Wilde, Oscar, <a href="#Page_49">49</a><br />
+<br />
+Willes, Adrian, <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br />
+<br />
+Willette, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a><br />
+<br />
+Willis, N.P., <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br />
+<br />
+Wilson, Edgar, <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+Worthing, Henley at, <a href="#Page_126">126</a><br />
+<br />
+"Wounded Titan, The," <a href="#Page_126">126</a><br />
+<br />
+"Wrecker, The," <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+"Wrong Box, The," <a href="#Page_131">131</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+"Yellow Book, The," <a href="#Page_177">177</a>,<a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>-<a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Zaehnsdorf, <a href="#Page_214">214</a><br />
+<br />
+Zola, Emile, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="center">
+Transcribers Note<br />
+<br />
+The following changes were made to the text:<br />
+<br />
+Hobby-Horse to Hobby-horse (page 176)<br />
+Murger to M&uuml;rger (page 257)<br />
+Index&mdash;(Church of San Giorgio degli) Schiaroni to Schiavoni.<br />
+Index&mdash;(Courrier) Francais to Français
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHTS***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Nights, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Nights
+       Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties
+
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 29, 2008  [eBook #24452]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHTS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Paul Dring, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 24452-h.htm or 24452-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/4/5/24452/24452-h/24452-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/4/5/24452/24452-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+NIGHTS
+
+Rome Venice London Paris
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+LIFE OF
+JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
+
+BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+AND JOSEPH PENNELL
+
+THOROUGHLY REVISED, FIFTH EDITION
+
+The Authorized Life, with much new matter added which was not available
+at the time of issue of the elaborate two-volume edition, now out of
+print. Fully illustrated with 97 plates reproduced from Whistler's
+works. Crown octavo. XX-450 pages, Whistler binding, deckle edge. $8.50
+net. Three-quarter grain levant, $7.50 net.
+
+OUR PHILADELPHIA
+
+BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+ILLUSTRATED BY JOSEPH PENNELL
+
+An intimate personal record in text and in picture of the lives of the
+famous author and artist in the city whose recent story will be to many
+an absolute surprise--a city with a brilliant history, great beauty,
+immense wealth. Mr. Pennell's one hundred and five illustrations, made
+especially for this volume, will be a revelation in their interest and
+as art inspired by the love of his native town. Quarto, 7-1/2 by 10
+inches, XIV-552 pages. Handsomely bound in red buckram, boxed. $7.50
+net.
+
+JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES
+OF THE PANAMA CANAL
+
+_FIFTH PRINTING_
+
+Twenty-eight reproductions of lithographs made on the Isthmus of Panama,
+January-March, 1912, with Mr. Pennell's introduction, giving his
+experiences and impressions, and a full description of each picture.
+Volume 7-1/4 by 10 inches. Beautifully printed on dull-finished paper.
+Lithograph by Mr. Pennell on cover. $1.25 net.
+
+JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES
+IN THE LAND OF TEMPLES
+
+Forty reproductions of lithographs made in the Land of Temples,
+March-June, 1913, together with impressions and notes by the artist.
+Introduction by W.H.D. Rouse, Litt. D. Crown quarto, printed on
+dull-finished paper, lithograph by Mr. Pennell on cover. $1.25 net.
+
+[Illustration: Painting by J. McLure Hamilton
+"J--."]
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+NIGHTS
+
+Rome Venice
+in the AEsthetic Eighties
+
+London Paris
+in the Fighting Nineties
+
+by
+
+ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+
+With Sixteen Illustrations
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Philadelphia and London
+J. B. Lippincott Company
+MCMXVI
+
+Copyright, 1916, by J. B. Lippincott Company
+
+Published March, 1916
+
+Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company
+at the Washington Square Press
+Philadelphia, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+There are times when we recall old memories much as we take down old
+favourites from our bookshelves, just to see how they have worn, how
+they have stood the test of years. Sometimes the books have worn so well
+that we cannot put them away until we have read every word to the very
+last again, we have not done with the memories until we have lived again
+through every moment of the past to which they belong. It is in this
+spirit that I brought my Nights of long ago to the test, and, finding
+that for me they stand it triumphantly and are still as vivid and
+vociferous and full of life as they were of old, I have not had the
+courage to loose my hold upon them and let them drift back once more
+into unfriendly silence.
+
+It contributes to my pleasure in this revival of my Nights, that I have
+been helped in many ways to give more substantial form to the familiar
+ghosts who wander through them. My debt of gratitude is great. Mr.
+William Nicholson has been willing for me to use his portrait of Henley
+and from Mrs. Henley I have the bust by Rodin. Mr. Frederick H. Evans
+has lent me the very interesting photograph he made of Beardsley, to
+whom he was so good a friend, and to Mr. John Lane, the publisher of the
+_Yellow Book_, I owe Beardsley's sketch of Harland. To Mr. John Ross I
+am indebted for the drawing of Phil May by himself never before
+published, to the Houghton Mifflin Company for the portrait of Vedder,
+to Mr. Duveneck for the painting of himself by Mr. Joseph de Camp. The
+photograph of Iwan-Mueller and George W. Steevens reminds me of the day
+so long since when I went with them and Mrs. Steevens to Mr. Frederick
+Hollyer's and we were all photographed in turn, so that this record of
+the visit seems surely mine by right. It was Mr. Hollyer, too, who
+photographed the fine portrait "Bob" Stevenson painted of himself, and
+it was Mrs. Stevenson who gave me my copy of it. I have Mr. J. McLure
+Hamilton's permission to publish his portrait of J--, while J--has been
+so generous with his prints, portraits of old backgrounds of the Nights,
+that I can add this book to the many in which I have profited by his
+collaboration. I have also to thank the Editor of the _Atlantic
+Monthly_, in which my Nights in Rome and in Venice first appeared, for
+his consent to their re-publication now in book form.
+
+                          ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+
+3. Adelphi Terrace House, London
+      December 25, 1915
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    I. DAYS: A WORD TO EXPLAIN  11
+
+   II. NIGHTS: IN ROME          27
+
+  III. NIGHTS: IN VENICE        71
+
+   IV. NIGHTS: IN LONDON       115
+
+    V. NIGHTS: IN PARIS        225
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                   PAGE
+
+  "J--"                              _Frontispiece_
+    From the Painting by J. McLure Hamilton
+
+  OLD AND NEW ROME                                   35
+    From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
+
+  ELIHU VEDDER                                       56
+
+  FRANK DUVENECK                                     76
+    From the Painting by Joseph R. DeCamp
+
+  THE CAFE ORIENTALE, VENICE                         82
+    From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
+
+  OUT OF OUR LONDON WINDOWS                         122
+    From the Mezzotint by Joseph Pennell
+
+  W.E. HENLEY                                       125
+    From the Bust by Auguste Rodin
+
+  W.E. HENLEY                                       127
+    From the Painting by William Nicholson
+
+  IWAN-MUeLLER AND GEORGE W. STEEVENS                154
+    From a Photograph by Frederick Hollyer
+
+  "BOB" STEVENSON                                   160
+    From the Painting by Himself
+
+  HENRY HARLAND                                     172
+    From the Drawing by Aubrey Beardsley
+
+  AUBREY BEARDSLEY                                  178
+    From the Photograph by Frederick H. Evans
+
+  PHIL MAY IN CAP AND BELLS                         193
+    From a previously unpublished Drawing by Himself
+
+  IN THE CHAMPS-ELYSEES, PARIS                      235
+    From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
+
+  THE HALF HOUR BEFORE DINNER, PARIS                244
+    From the Etching by Joseph Pennell
+
+  ARISTIDE BRUANT OF THE CABARET DU MIRLITON, PARIS 290
+    From the Poster by Toulouse-Lautrec
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+DAYS
+
+A WORD TO EXPLAIN
+
+
+
+
+NIGHTS
+
+DAYS
+
+A WORD TO EXPLAIN
+
+I
+
+
+If I wrote the story of my days during these last thirty years, it would
+be the story of hard work. No doubt the work often looked to others
+uncommonly like play, but it was work all the same.
+
+From the start it must have struck those who did not understand and
+who were interested, or curious enough to spare a thought, that my
+principal occupation was to amuse myself. When I was young, in
+America the "trip to Europe" was considered the crowning pleasure,
+or symbol of pleasure, within the possibility of hope for even those
+who were most given to pleasure. In Philadelphia it also stood for
+money--not necessarily wealth, but the comfortably assured income
+that made existence behind Philadelphia's spacious red brick fronts
+the average Philadelphian's right. And it was with this trip that J.
+and I began our life together. But misleading as was the impression
+made to all whom it did not concern, great satisfaction as it was to
+my family, who saw in it the ease and comfort it represented to the
+Philadelphian, we ourselves, with the best will in the world, could
+imagine it no holiday for us, nor accept it as the symbol of the
+correct Philadelphia income. Our pleasure was in the fact of the
+many and definite commissions which obliged us to go to Europe to
+earn any sort of an income, correct or otherwise--commissions
+without which we could have faced neither the trip nor marriage. I
+can remember that during the two or three weeks between our wedding
+and our sailing we were both kept busy, J. with drawings he had to
+finish for the _Century_, and I with the last touches to an article
+for the _Atlantic_. And if the days on the boat gave us breathing
+space, if not much work, except in preparation, was done, the reason
+was that the new commissions commenced only with our landing at
+Liverpool.
+
+From the moment of our arrival in England I see in memory my life by day
+as one long vista of work. It is mostly a beautiful vista, the more
+beautiful, I am ready to admit, because the work I owed the beauty to
+forced me to keep my eyes open and my wits about me. Under the
+circumstances, I simply could not afford to let what small powers of
+observation I possess grow rusty, for, no matter what else might happen,
+I had to turn my journey into some sort of readable "copy" afterwards.
+If I know parts of Europe fairly well, I am indebted not to the
+fashionable need of taking waters, not to following the approved routes
+of travel, not to meeting my fellow countrymen in hotels as alike as two
+peas no matter how different the capitals to which they belong, not to
+any fatuous preference of another country to my own, but to the work
+that brought us to England and the Continent and has kept us there, with
+fresh commissions, ever since.
+
+It was work that sent us from end to end of Great Britain and gave me my
+knowledge of the land. As I look back to those remote days after our
+arrival in Liverpool, I see J. and myself on an absurd, old-fashioned,
+long-superannuated Rotary tandem tricycle riding along winding roads and
+lanes, between the hedgerows and under the elms English prose and verse
+had long since made familiar, in and out of little grey or red villages
+clustered round the old church tower, passing through great towns of
+many factories and high smoke-belching chimneys, halting for months
+under the shadow of some old castle or cathedral that had been
+appointed one of our stations by the way. Or I see us both trudging on
+foot, knapsacks on our backs, climbing up and down the brown and purple
+hills of the Highlands, circling the peaceful lochs, skirting the swift
+mountain streams, tramping along the lonely roads of the far Hebrides:
+summer after summer journeying to the beautiful places the usual tourist
+in Britain journeys to for pleasure, but where we went because papers
+and magazines at home, with a wisdom we applauded, had asked us to go
+and make the drawings and write the articles by which we paid our way in
+the world.
+
+And it was work that sent us from end to end of France, and now in
+looking back I see J. and myself on the neat, compact Humber
+tandem,--then so new-fashioned, to-day as out-moded as the
+Rotary,--riding along straight poplared roads, through well-ordered
+forests and over wild hills, between vineyards, one year under the grey
+skies of Flanders or among the lagoons of Picardy and another under the
+brilliant sunshine of Provence or through the rich pastures of the sweet
+Bourbonnais, in and out of ancient villages and towns as full of romance
+as their names, with halts as long under the shadow of still nobler
+churches and fairer castles, getting to know the people and their ways
+and how pleasant life is in the land where beauty and thrift, gaiety and
+toil, courtesy and wit, go ever hand in hand.
+
+And again it was work that sent us still further south, to Italy which
+in my younger years I had longed for the more because I fancied it as
+inaccessible to me as Lhassa or the Grande Chartreuse. And again down
+the beautiful vista of work I see J. and myself still on the neat
+compact Humber, but now pushing up long white zigzags to grim
+hill-towns, rushing down the same zigzags into radiant valleys of fruit
+and flowers, winding between vineyards where the vines were festooned
+from tree to tree, and fields where huge, white, wide-horned oxen pulled
+the plough, bumping over the stones of old Roman roads, parting with the
+wonderful tandem only for the long stay in wonderful Rome and wonderful
+Venice.
+
+And again it was work that sent us, now each on a safety bicycle--a
+change that explains how time was flying--by the canals and on the flat
+roads of Belgium and Holland; into Germany, through the Harz with Heine
+for guide, by the castled Rhine and Moselle that may have lost their
+reputation for a while but that can never lose their loveliness; into
+Austria, on to Hungary, up in the Carpathians and to those heights from
+which the Russian Army but the other day looked down upon the Hungarian
+plain; into Spain, to sun-burnt Andalusia, for weeks in the Alhambra, to
+windy Madrid, for days in the Prado; into Switzerland, the "Playground
+of Europe," where our work must have seemed more than ever like play as
+we climbed, on our cycles and on foot, over the highest of the high
+Alpine passes, one after the other; again into Italy; again into France;
+again through England; again--but they were too numerous to count, all
+those journeys that claimed so many of my days and taught me, while I
+worked, all I have learned of Europe.
+
+Of such well-travelled roads anyway, it may be said people have heard as
+much as people can stand, and therefore I am wise to hold my peace about
+days spent upon them. But on the best-travelled road adventure lies in
+wait for the traveller who seeks it, chance awaits the discoverer who
+knows his business. Why, to this day J. and I are appealed to for facts
+about Le Puy because a quarter of a century ago we made our discovery of
+the town as the Most Picturesque Place in the World and sought our
+adventure by proclaiming the fact in print. But our discoveries might
+have been greater, our adventures more daring, and I should be silent
+about them now for quite another and far more sensible reason, and this
+is that I was not silent at the time. The tale of those old days is
+told.
+
+
+II
+
+Other journeys I made had no less an air of holiday-taking and meant no
+less hard labour. For most men work is bounded by the four walls of the
+office or the factory, or the shop, or the school, and rigidly regulated
+by hours, and they consequently suspect the amateur or the dawdler in
+the artist or writer who works where and when and as he pleases.
+Journalism has led me into pleasant places but never by the path of
+idleness. Rare has been the month of May that has not found me in Paris,
+not for the sunshine and gaiety that draw the tourist to it in that gay
+sunlit season, but for industrious days, with my eyes and catalogue and
+note-book, in the _Salons_. Few have been the International Exhibitions,
+from Glasgow to Ghent, from Antwerp to Venice, that I have missed, and
+if in my devoted attendance I might easily have been mistaken for the
+tireless pleasure-seeker, if I got what fun I could at odd moments out
+of my opportunities, never was I without my inseparable note-book and
+pencil in my hand or in my pocket, never without good, long, serious
+articles to be written in my hotel bedroom. Even in London when I might
+have passed for the idlest stroller along Bond Street or Piccadilly on
+an idle afternoon, oftener than not I have been bound for a gallery
+somewhere with the prospect of long hours' writing as the result of it.
+But though the task varied, the tale of these days as well has been
+told, and has duly appeared in the long columns of many a paper, in the
+long articles of many a magazine.
+
+
+III
+
+As time went on, my journeys were fewer and J. took his oftener by
+himself. A new variety of task was set me that left so little leisure
+for the galleries that I gave up "doing" them for my London papers. My
+days went to the making of books which, whether I wrote them alone or in
+collaboration with J., required my undivided attention. When these were
+such books as the Life of My Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, or the Life
+of Whistler, they called for research, days of reading in the Art
+Library at South Kensington, the British Museum, the London Library,
+days of seeing people and places, days of travelling, days of
+correspondence, days upon days at my desk writing--these days crowded
+with interesting incident, curious surprises, amusing talk, hours of
+hope, hours of black despair--in their own way days of discovery and
+adventure. But in this case again the tale has been told and I am not so
+foolish as to sit down and tell it anew, sorely as I may be tempted.
+Anybody who reads further will find that the principal truth my nights
+have revealed to me is that the man who is interested--really
+interested--in something, does not want to talk, and often cannot think,
+about anything else. But it does not follow that he can make sure of
+listeners as keen to hear about it. The writer may, in his enthusiasm,
+write the same book twice, but even if it prove a "best-seller" the
+first time, he runs a risk the second of seeing it disposed of as a
+remainder.
+
+
+IV
+
+So it has been throughout my working life: my day's task has had no
+other object than to get itself chronicled in print. If _what_ the work
+was that filled my day is not known, it could not interest anybody were
+I to write about it now. If _how_ I worked during all those long hours
+is to me an all-absorbing subject and edifying spectacle, I am not so
+vain as not to realize that I must be the only person to find it so.
+Most men--and women too--were brought into the world to work, but most
+of them would be so willing to shirk the obligation that the best they
+ask is to be allowed to forget their own labours while they can, and not
+to be bothered with a report of other people's. By nature I am inclined
+to Charles Lamb's belief that a man--or a woman--cannot have too little
+to do and too much time to do it in. But necessity having forced me to
+give over my days to work, it happens that I, personally, would from
+sheer force of habit find days without it a bore. However, I would not,
+for that reason, argue that work is its own reward to any save the
+genius, or that methods of work are of importance to any save the
+workman who employs them.
+
+Whatever man's endurance may be, I know one weak woman whose powers of
+work are limited. There was never anybody to regulate my day of work
+save myself, since I am glad to say it has not been my lot to waste the
+golden years of my life in an office, and I am not the stern task-master
+or tiresome trade-unionist who insists upon so many hours and so much
+work in them, and will make not an inch of allowance either more or
+less. Sometimes my hours were more, sometimes they were less, but always
+my energy was apt to slacken with the slackening of the day. I never
+found inspiration in the midnight oil and oceans of coffee. I have
+always wanted my solid eight hours of sleep, and would not shrink from
+nine or ten if they fitted in with a worker's life. Youth often gave me
+the courage I have not now to take up work again--a promised article,
+necessary reading, making notes, copying--at night. But youth never
+induced me to rely upon this night work if I could help it. My nearest
+approach to a rule was that at the end of the day I was at liberty to
+play, that my nights at least could be free of work.
+
+The play to many might pass for a mild form of mild amusement, for it
+usually consisted in nothing more riotous than meeting my friends and
+talking with them. But I confess that the talk and the quality of it,
+the meeting and its informality did strike me as so singularly
+stimulating as to verge upon the riotous. The manner of playing was
+entirely new to me in the beginning. All conventions bind with a heavy
+chain, but none with a heavier than the Philadelphia variety. Spruce
+Street nights had never been so free and so vociferous and so late, and,
+being a good Philadelphian, I am not sure if the nights that succeeded
+have yet lost for me their novelty. As a consequence, if, in looking
+back, my days appear to be wholly monopolized by work, my nights seem
+consecrated as wholly to amusement. The poet's "hideous" is the last
+adjective I could apply to the night my busy day sank into.
+
+How I worked may concern nobody save myself, but how I played I cannot
+help hoping has a wider interest. Those old nights were typical of a
+period, and they threw me with many people, contemporaries of J.'s and
+mine, who did much to make that period what it was. The nights as gay,
+as stimulating, that I have spent in other people's houses I have not
+the courage to recall except in the utmost privacy. Pepys and N.P.
+Willis in their time, no less than a whole army of Pamelas and
+Priscillas in ours, have shown the lengths and indiscretions to which so
+intimate a breach of hospitality may lead. I have had my experience. For
+some years a house with closely curtained windows has reproached me
+daily for not understanding that the man who invites the world to stare
+at him and is not happy if it won't, objects when his neighbours say
+lightly what they see. I am every bit as afraid to speak openly of
+those people who shared our nights and who, with us, have outlived them.
+Cowardice long since convinced me that it is not of the dead, but of the
+living, only good should be spoken--and if good cannot be spoken, what
+then? However, it is not in pursuit of problems that I have busied
+myself in reviving those old nights, but rather for the pleasure we all
+of us have, as the years go on, in feeling our way back along the
+Corridors of Time and living our past over again in memory. If I go
+further and live mine over again in print, it is because I like to think
+the fault will not lie with me if it altogether dies--I have given it,
+anyway, the chance of a longer lease of life.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+NIGHTS
+
+IN ROME
+
+
+
+
+IN ROME
+
+I
+
+
+It will give an idea of what ages ago those nights were, and of the
+youth I brought to them, if I say that I arrived in Rome on the first
+tandem tricycle ever seen in Italy.
+
+I can look back to it now with pride, for I was, in my way, a pioneer,
+but there was not much to be proud about at the time. Rome was so little
+impressed that J., my fellow pioneer, and I,--J. and I who in every town
+on the way from Florence had been the delight of the gaping crowd, J.
+and I who in all those beautiful October days on the white roads of
+Italy had suffered from nothing save the excess of the people's amiable
+attentions,--scarcely showed ourselves beyond the _Porta del Popolo_ and
+the Piazza of the same name, before we were arrested for driving the
+tandem furiously through the _Corso_--as if anybody could drive anything
+furiously through the _Corso_ at the hour before sunset, when all the
+world comes home from the _Borghese_. But two policemen, drawing their
+swords as if they meant business, commanded us to dismount and, between
+them, we walked ignominiously to the hotel, pushing the tricycle; and
+an astonished and not in the least admiring crowd followed; and the
+policeman asked us for a _lira_, which we refused, taking it for a proof
+of the corruption of modern Rome--and they were so within their legal
+rights that I do not care to say for how many more than one we were
+asked a few weeks later by the Syndic, whom we could not refuse; and
+altogether I do not think we were to blame if, after the policemen and
+the swords and the crowd had gone and the tricycle was locked up, and we
+wandered from the hotel in the gathering dusk, we were the two most
+ill-tempered young people who ever set out to enjoy their first night in
+Rome.
+
+Nor was our temper improved when J.'s instinct, which in a strange place
+takes him straight where he wants to go, having got us into the
+_Ghetto_, failed to get us out again. The _Ghetto_ itself was all right,
+so what a _Ghetto_ ought to be that had I been the Romans, I would not
+have pulled it down, I would have preserved it as a historical
+monument,--dirty, dark and mysterious, a labyrinth of narrow crooked
+streets, lined with tall grim houses, filled with melodramatic shadows
+and dim figures skulking in them, but a nightmare of a labyrinth which
+kept bringing us forever back to the same spot. And we could not dine
+on picturesqueness, and we would not have dined in any of the
+murderous-looking houses at any price, and at last J. admitted that
+there were times when a native might be a better guide than instinct,
+and in his best Italian he asked the way of two men who were passing.
+One, who wore the tweeds and flannel shirt by which in calmer moments we
+must have recognized him, pulled the other by the sleeve and growled in
+English: "Come on, don't bother about the beastly foreigners!" I can
+afford to forgive him to-day when I remember what his incivility cost
+him not only that night, when we would not let him off until he had
+shown us out of the _Ghetto_, but on a succession of our nights in Rome,
+Fate having neatly arranged that at the one house whose doors were
+opened to us he should be a constant visitor.
+
+Other doors might have opened had we had the clothes in which to knock
+at them. But we had come to Rome for four days with no more baggage than
+the tandem could carry, and we stayed four months without adding to it.
+We could have sent for our trunks, of course, or we could have bought
+new things in the Roman shops, but we did neither, I can hardly say why
+except that the story of our journey had to be finished, and other
+delightful articles we had crossed the Atlantic to do were waiting, and
+these were commissions that could not be neglected, since they were the
+capital upon which we had started out on our married life five months
+before. And our Letter of Credit was small, and Youth is stern with
+itself;--or, more likely, we did not trouble simply because it saved so
+much more trouble not to. No woman would have to be taught by Ibsen or
+anybody else how to live her own life, were she willing to live it in
+shabby clothes. It is not an easy thing to do, I know. I share the
+weakness of most women in feeling it a disgrace, or a misfortune, to be
+caught in the wrong clothes in the right place. But that year in Rome I
+had not outgrown the first ardours of work and, besides, in the old
+days, a cycle seemed an excuse for any and all degrees of shabbiness. In
+my short skirts, at a time when short skirts were not the mode, covered
+with mud, and carrying a tiny bag, I have walked into the biggest hotels
+of Europe without a tremor, conscious that the cycle at the door was my
+triumphant apology. The cyclist's dress, like the nun's uniform, was a
+universal passport, and I have never had the cleverness to invent
+another to replace it since I gave up cycling.
+
+
+II
+
+If we could not spend our nights in other people's houses, neither could
+we spend them in the rooms we had taken for ourselves at the top of one
+of the highest houses on the top of one of the highest hills in Rome.
+There was no objection to the rooms: they were charming, but we had
+found them on a warm November day when the sun was streaming in through
+the windows that looked far and wide over the town, and beyond to the
+_Campagna_, and still beyond to a shining line on the horizon we knew
+was the Mediterranean, and we did not ask about anything save the price,
+which to our surprise we could pay, and so we moved in at once. Nor for
+days, as we sat at our work in the sunlight, the windows open and Rome
+at our feet, did we imagine there could be anything to ask about, except
+if, by asking, we could prevail upon the _Padrona's_ son-in-law to go
+and blow his melancholy cornet anywhere rather than on the roof directly
+over our heads. Living in rooms was the nearest approach I had made in
+all my life to housekeeping, I was still in a state of wonderment at
+everything in Rome, from Romulus and Remus on the morning pat of butter
+to the November roses in full bloom on the Pincian, I was quite content
+to let practical affairs and domestic details look out for
+themselves--or, perhaps it would be more true to say that I never gave
+them a thought.
+
+But even in Rome the sun must set and November nights grow chill, and a
+night came when, after a day of rain, a fire would have been pleasant,
+and suddenly we discovered there was no place to make it in. It had
+never occurred to us that there could not be, fresh as we were from the
+land where heat in the house is as much a matter of course as a sun in
+the sky. At first we wrapped ourselves in shawls and blankets, hired the
+_padrona's_ biggest _scaldino_, and called it an experience. After a few
+evenings we decided it was an experience we could do without and, like
+all miserable Romans who have no fireplace, we settled down to spending
+our nights in the restaurants and _cafes_ of Rome.
+
+I doubt if I should care to spend my nights that way now; a quarter of a
+century has added unexpected charm to a dinner-table and fireside of my
+own; but no Arabian Nights could then have been fuller of entertainment
+than the Roman Nights that drove us from home in search of warmth and
+food. In Philadelphia there never had been a suspicion of chance, a
+shadow of adventure about my dinner. It was as inevitable as six
+o'clock and as inevitably eaten in the seclusion of the Philadelphia
+second-story back-building dining-room, if not of my family, then of one
+or another of my friends. In Rome it became a delightful uncertainty
+that transformed the six flights of stairs leading to it from our rooms
+into the "Road to Anywhere". That road was by no means an easy one to
+climb up again and if we could help it, we never climbed down more than
+once a day, usually a little before dusk, a few hours earlier when we
+were in a rare holiday mood, and always in time for a long or short
+tramp before dinner. If we came to a church we dropped into it, or a
+gallery, or a palace, or a garden, when we were in time. We followed the
+streets wherever they might lead,--along the brand-new _Via Nazionale_
+to the Forum or the narrow alleys to St. Peter's, beyond the gates to
+the _Campagna_--seeing a good deal of Rome without setting out
+deliberately to see anything. When we were hungry, we stopped at the
+first _Trattoria_ we passed, provided it looked as if we could afford
+it, and the chance dinner in a chance place at a chance hour was the
+biggest adventure of all that had crowded the way to it.
+
+[Illustration: Etching by Joseph Pennell
+OLD AND NEW ROME]
+
+One night the _Trattoria_ happened to be the _Posta_ in a narrow
+street back of the _Piazza Colonna_. It was small: not more than
+twenty could have dined there together in any comfort. It was
+beautifully clean. And the _padrone_, his son, and the one
+waiter--all the establishment--greeted us with that enchanting smile
+to which, during my first year in Italy, I fell only too ready a
+victim. Once we had dined at the _Posta_, we found it so pleasant
+that we fell into the habit of getting hungry in its neighbourhood.
+
+I have since got to know many more famous or pretentious restaurants,
+but never have dinners tasted so good as at this little Roman
+_trattoria_ where we had to consider the _centesimi_ in the price of
+every dish, and the quarter of a flask of cheap _Chianti_ shared between
+us was an extravagance, and we ate with the appetite that came of having
+eaten nothing all day save rolls and coffee for breakfast, and fruit and
+rolls for lunch, that we might afford a dinner at night. And I have
+dined in many restaurants of gilded and mirrored magnificence, but in
+none I thought so well decorated as the _Posta_ with its bare walls and
+coarse clean linen and no ornament at all, except the stand in the
+centre where we could pick out our fruit or our vegetable. Nor has any
+restaurant, crowded with the creations of Paquin and Worth, seemed more
+brilliant than the _Posta_ filled with officers. In Philadelphia I had
+never seen an army officer in uniform in my life; at the _Posta_ I saw
+hardly anything else. We were surrounded by lieutenants and captains and
+colonels, and as I watched them come and go with clank and clatter of
+spurs and swords, and military salutes at the door, and military cloaks
+thrown dramatically off and on, and gold braid shining, I began to think
+a big standing army worth the money to any country, on condition that it
+always went in uniform--on condition, I might now add, that this uniform
+is not khaki, then not yet heard of. When the old spare, grizzled
+General, always the last, appeared and all the other officers rose upon
+his entrance, our dinner was dignified into a ceremony. Sometimes, I
+fancied he felt his importance more than anybody, for he is the only man
+I have ever known courageous enough in public to begin his dinner with
+cake and finish it with soup.
+
+Now and then, on very special occasions, when we had sent off an article
+or received a cheque, we went to the _Falcone_ and celebrated the event
+by feasting on _Maccheroni alla Napolitana_, _Cinghale all'Agra Dolce_
+and wine of Orvieto. The _Falcone_ was another accident of our tramps,
+though we afterwards found it starred in Baedeker. It looked the
+centuries old it was said to be, such a shabby, sombre crypt of a
+restaurant that I accepted without question the tradition it cherished
+of itself as a haunt of the Caesars, and was prepared to believe the
+waiters when they pointed out the mark of the Imperial head on the
+greasy walls, just as the waiters of the Cheshire Cheese in London point
+to the mark of Dr. Johnson's, while the flamboyancy of the cooking
+revealed to me the real reason of the decline and fall of Rome. I am
+afraid I should be telling the story of our own decline and fall had we
+sent off articles and received cheques every day. Fortunately, the
+intervals were long between the feasts, but unfortunately our digestion
+can never again be imperilled at the _Falcone_, for they tell me it has
+gone with the _Ghetto_ and so many other things in the Rome I knew and
+loved.
+
+By the middle of the winter we gave up the _Posta_ and went to the
+_Cavour_ instead. I don't know how we had the heart to, for the _Cavour_
+never had the same charm for us, we never got to like it so well. It was
+too large and popular for friendliness, the officers carried their
+ceremony and gorgeousness to a room apart, and the _padrone_ and his
+waiters were too busy for more than one fixed smile of general welcome.
+But then there, if we paid for our dinner by the month, it cost us next
+to nothing by the day, and our Letter of Credit allowed as narrow a
+margin for sentiment as for clothes. Moreover, the dinner was good as
+well as cheap. And when the streets of Rome were rivers of rain, as they
+often were that winter, it was brought to our rooms in a dinner pail by
+a waiter, after he had first come half a mile to submit the _menu_ to
+us, and in that cold, bleak interior, wrapped in blankets, a _scaldino_
+at our feet, a newspaper for tablecloth, we made a picnic of it,
+freezing, but thankful not to be drowned. And on great holidays, the
+_padrone_ spared us a smile all to ourselves as he offered us, with the
+compliments of the season, a plate of _torrone_ and a bottle of old wine
+from his vineyard.
+
+
+III
+
+With dinner the night was but beginning and smiles must have faded had
+we lingered over it indefinitely. I learned to my astonishment, however,
+that hours could be, or rather were expected to be, devoted to the
+drinking of one small cup of coffee, and that always near the
+_trattoria_ was a _cafe_[A] which provided the coffee and, at the cost
+of a few cents, could become our home for as long and as late as might
+suit us. In Philadelphia after dinner coffee had been swallowed
+promptly, in the back parlour if we were dining alone, in the front if
+people were dining with us, and I was startled to find it in Rome an
+excuse to loaf at a convenient distance from the domestic hearth for
+Romans with apparently nothing to do and all their time to do it in.
+
+[Footnote A: _Note._--Let me anticipate the amiable critic--and say that
+I know this is not the Italian spelling of _cafe_. I use the French
+spelling here, as in later chapters where it belongs, for the sake of
+uniformity throughout.]
+
+It is an arrangement I take now as a matter of course. But then, it must
+be borne in mind, for me only five months separated Rome from
+Philadelphia, and Philadelphia bonds are not easily broken. I suspected
+something wrong in so agreeable a custom, as youth usually does in the
+pleasant things of life, and as a Philadelphian always does in the
+unaccustomed, and at first, when we went to the ancient _Greco_, I tried
+to believe it was entirely the result of J.'s interest in a place where
+artists had drunk coffee for generations. When we deserted it because,
+despite its traditions, nobody went there any longer save a few
+grey-bearded old men and a few gold-laced hall porters, and the dulness
+fell like a pall upon us, and the atmosphere was rank, and when we
+patronized instead a brand-new _cafe_ in the _Corso_ that called itself
+in French the _Cafe de Venise_ and in English the _Meet of Best
+Society_, I put down the attraction to the _Daily News_, to which the
+_cafe_ subscribed, and for which in those days Andrew Lang was writing
+the leaders everybody was reading. But Lang could not reconcile us to
+the nightly _Gran Concerto_ of a piano, a flute and a violin of
+indifferent merit concealed in a thicket of artificial trees, and the
+_Best Society_ meant tourists, and after we had shocked a family of New
+England friends by inviting them to share its tawdry pleasures with us,
+and after a few evenings had given us, unaccompanied, all and more than
+we could stand of it, we exchanged it for a _cafe_ without a past and
+with no aspirations as the Meet of any save the usual _cafe_ society of
+a big Italian town. By this time I had ceased to worry about excuses and
+had settled down to idleness and coffee with as little scruple as the
+natives.
+
+The _cafe_ we chose was the _Nazionale Aragno_ in the Corso, the largest
+and most gorgeous in Rome. The three or four rooms that opened one out
+of the other had a magnificence that we could never have achieved in
+furnished rooms and would not have wanted to if we could, and a
+succession of mirrors multiplied them indefinitely. We leaned
+luxuriously against blue plush, gilding glittered wherever gilding could
+on white walls, waiters rushed about with little shining nickel-plated
+trays held high above their heads, spurs and swords clanked and
+clattered, by the middle of the evening not a table was vacant.
+
+It was simply the usual big Continental _cafe_, but to me as new and
+strange as everything else in the wonderful life in the wonderful world
+into which I had strayed from the old familiar ways of Philadelphia,
+with a long halt between only in England where the _cafe_ does not
+exist. To the marble-topped tables, the gilding, mirrors and plush,
+novelty lent a charm they have never had since and probably would soon
+have lost had we been left to contemplate them in solitary state, as it
+seemed probable we should. For we knew nobody in Rome except Sandro, the
+youthful enthusiastic Roman cyclist we had picked up in Montepulciano,
+cycled with through the Val di Chiana on a sunny October Sunday, and run
+across again in Rome where he amiably showed us the hospitality of the
+capital by occasionally drinking coffee with us at our expense, and by
+once introducing a friend, a tall, slim, good-looking young man of such
+elegance of manner and such a princely air of condescension, that Sandro
+himself was impressed and joined us again, later on the same evening, to
+explain our privilege in having entertained the Queen's hair-dresser
+unawares. Foreigners did not often find their way into the _Nazionale_.
+They were almost as few in number as women, who were very few, for as
+women in Rome never dined,--or so I gathered from my observations at the
+_Posta_, the _Falcone_ and the _Cavour_,--they never drank coffee. Only
+on Sundays would they descend upon the _cafe_ with their husbands and
+children, and then it was to devour ices and cakes at a rate that
+convinced me they devoured little else from one Sunday to the next. When
+I asked for the _Times_--they took the _Times_ at the _Nazionale_--the
+waiter almost invariably answered: "It reads itself, the _Signore
+Tedesco_ has it," and the _Signore Tedesco_, a mild German student who
+for his daily lesson in English read the advertisement columns from
+beginning to end, was the only foreigner who appeared regularly at any
+table save our own.
+
+And yet at ours, before I could say how it came about, a little group
+collected, and every evening in the furthest room J. and I began to hold
+an informal reception which gave us all the advantages of social life
+and none of its responsibilities. We could preside in the travel-worn
+tweeds of cycling and not bother because we were not dressed; we could
+welcome our friends the more cordially because, as we did not provide
+the entertainment, it was no offence to us if they did not like it, nor
+to them if we failed to sit it out. In the _cafe_ we found the "oblivion
+of care," the same "freedom from solitude," though not the big words to
+express it, which Dr. Johnson "experienced" in a tavern. Were all social
+functions run on the same broad principles, society would not be half
+the strain it is upon everybody's patience and good-nature and purse.
+
+Almost all the group were artists. In those days artists and students
+were no longer rushing to Rome as the one place to study art in, nor had
+the effort begun to revive its old reputation among them. Still a good
+many were always about. Some lived there, others, like ourselves, were
+spending the winter, or else were just passing through, and, once we had
+collected the group round our table, I do not believe we were ever left
+to pass an evening alone.
+
+Artists were as great a novelty to me as the _cafe_--I had been married
+so short a time that J. had not ceased to be a problem, if he ever
+has--and nothing was more amazing to me than the talk. Its volubility
+took my breath away. I thought of the back parlour at home after dinner,
+my Father playing interminable games of Patience, the rest of us deep in
+our books until bed-time. And these men talked as if talk was the only
+business, the only occupation of life.
+
+Still more surprising was the subject of their talk. If they had so much
+to say that it made me grateful I was born a listener, they had only one
+thing to say it about. It was art from the moment we met until we
+parted, though we might sit over our coffee for hours. Often it was next
+morning when J. and I reached the house at the top of the hill, and he
+dragged the huge key from his pocket, undid the ponderous lock and
+struck the overgrown match, or undersized candle, by which the Roman lit
+himself to his rooms, and we panted up our six flights afraid ours would
+not last, for we had but the one supplied by the restaurant.
+
+The quality of the talk was as amazing: bewildering, revolutionary, to
+anybody who had never heard art talked about by artists, as I never had
+before I met J. All I had thought right turned out to be wrong, all I
+had never thought of was right, all that was essential to the critic of
+art, to the Ruskin-bred, had nothing to do with it whatever. History,
+dates, periods, schools, sentiment, meaning, attributions, Morelli only
+as yet threatening to succeed Ruskin as prophet of art, were not worth
+discussion or thought. The concern was for art as a trade--the trade
+which creates beauty; the vital questions were treatment, colour,
+values, tone, mediums. The price of pictures and the gains of artists,
+those absorbing topics of the great little men in England to-day, were
+never mentioned: the man who sold was looked down on, rather. There were
+nights when I went away believing that nothing mattered in the world
+except the ground on a copper plate, or the grain of a canvas, or the
+paint in a tube, so long and heated and bitter had been the controversy
+over it. They might all be artists, but they were of a hundred opinions
+as to the exact meaning of right and wrong, and they could wrangle over
+mediums until the German student looked up in reproof from his columns
+of advertisements and the Romans shrugged their shoulders at the curious
+manners and short tempers of the _forestiere_. But there was one point
+upon which I never knew them not to be of one mind, and this was the
+supreme importance of art. If I ventured to disagree--which I was far
+too timid to do often--they were down upon me like a flash, abusing me
+for being so blind as not to see the truth in Rome, of all places, where
+of a tremendous past nothing was left but the work of the masters who
+built and adorned the city, or who sang and chronicled its splendours.
+
+
+IV
+
+The noise of their talk is still loud in my ears, but many of the
+talkers have grown dim in my memory. Of some of the older men I cannot
+recall the faces, not even the names; some of the younger I remember
+better, partly I suppose because they were young and starting out in
+life with us, partly because one or two later on made their names heard
+of by many people outside of the _Nazionale_ and far beyond Rome.
+
+I could not easily forget the young Architect who was then getting ready
+to conquer Philadelphia--to borrow a phrase from Zola, as seems but
+appropriate in writing of the Eighties--for which great end all the
+knowledge of the _Beaux-Arts_ could not have served him as well as his
+conviction that the architecture of Europe had waited for him to
+discover it. He had never been abroad before and he could not believe
+that anybody else had. He would come to our little corner from his
+prowls in Rome and tell men, who had lived there for more years than he
+had hours, all about the churches and palaces and galleries, like a new
+Columbus revealing to his astonished audience the wonders of a New
+World. And it amused me to see how patiently the older men listened,
+sparing his illusions, no doubt because they heard in his ardent,
+confident, decidedly dictatorial voice the voice of their own youth
+calling. He carried his convictions home with him unspoiled, and his
+first building--a hospital or something of the kind--was a monument to
+his discoveries, a record of his adventures among the masterpieces of
+Europe, beginning on the ground floor as the Strozzi Palace, developing
+into various French castles, and finishing on the top as a Swiss
+_chalet_, atrocious as architecture, but amusing as autobiography. All
+his buildings were more or less reminiscent, and told again in stone the
+story so often told in words at the _Nazionale_, for Death was kind and
+claimed him before he had ceased to be the discoverer to become himself.
+
+Donoghue too has gone, Donoghue the sculptor who as I knew him in Rome
+was so overflowing with life, so young that I felt inclined to credit
+him with the gift of immortal youth, so big and handsome and gay that
+wherever he went laughter went with him. He too was a discoverer, but
+his discovery was of Paris and the Latin Quarter. It had filled a year
+between Chicago, where he had been Oscar Wilde's discovery, and Rome,
+and he had had time to work off his first fantastic exuberance as
+discoverer before I met him. "Donoghue is all right," they would say of
+him at the _Nazionale_; "he has got past the brass buttons and pink
+swallow tail stage, even if he does cling to low collars and tight pants
+and spats."
+
+Certainly, he had got so far as to think he ought to be beginning to
+work, and he was in despair because he could not find in Rome a youth as
+beautiful as himself to pose for his Young Sophocles. To listen to him
+was to believe that Narcissus had come to life again. We would meet him
+during our afternoon rambles in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, when
+he would stop and take half an hour to assure us he hadn't time to stop,
+he was hunting for a model he had just heard of, and then he would drop
+into the _Nazionale_ at night to report his want of progress, for no
+model ever came up to his standard. He referred to his own beauty with
+the frank simplicity and vanity of a child--a real Post-Impressionist;
+not one by pose, for there was not a trace of pose in him. I wish I
+could say how astonishing he was to me. Life has since thrown many young
+artists and writers my way and I am used to their conceits and
+affectations and splendid belief in themselves. But my experience then
+was of the most limited and bound by Philadelphia convention, and I
+cannot imagine a greater contrast than between the Philadelphia youth to
+whom I was accustomed, talking of the last reception and the next party
+over his chicken salad at the Dancing Class, and Donoghue talking
+dispassionately of his own surpassing beauty over a small cup of coffee
+at the _Nazionale_.
+
+Donoghue was a child, not merely in his vanity, but in everything, with
+the schoolboy's sense of fun. I never knew him happier than the evening
+he hurried to the _cafe_ from his visit to the Coliseum by moonlight to
+tell us of his joke on the Americans he found waiting there in silence
+for the guide's announcement that the moon was in the proper place for
+their proper emotion. A friend was with him.
+
+"And I said: '_Sprichst du Deutsch?_' very loud as we passed," was
+Donoghue's story. "And he answered as loud as he could: '_Nichts!
+Nichts!_' And I said: '_Zwei Bier_,' and of course the Americans took us
+for Germans. Then we hid in the shadows a little further on and we both
+yelled together at the top of our voices, 'Three cheers for Cleveland!'
+and the Americans jumped, and they forgot the moon, and they wouldn't
+listen to the guide, and I tell you it was just great."
+
+I was not overcome myself with the wit or humour of the jest, but
+Donoghue was, and he roared with laughter until none of us could help
+roaring with him in sheer sympathy. He was as enchanted with his method
+of learning Italian. He was reading Wilkie Collins and Bret Harte in an
+Italian translation, and when he yawned in our faces and left the _cafe_
+early, it was because the night before the Dago's _Woman in White_ or
+_Luck of Roaring Camp_ had kept him up until long after dawn, though
+really he knew it was a waste of time since anybody had only to get
+himself half seas over and he'd talk any darned lingo in the world.
+
+He joined us less often after he gave up the hopeless hunt for the model
+who never was found and whom it would have been useless anyway to find,
+for Donoghue always spent his quarter's allowance the day he got it, and
+most models could not wait three months to be paid. To this conclusion
+he came soon after the first of the year and settled down seriously to
+posing for himself and, as the world knows, the Young Sophocles was
+finished in the course of time and a very fine statue it is said to be.
+But even if he did desert our table he would still seem to me in memory
+the centre of the little group gathered about it, had it not been for
+Forepaugh.
+
+Of course his name was not Forepaugh--though something very like it--but
+Forepaugh answers my every purpose. For though I did know his name I did
+not know then, and I do not know now, who he was and why he was. I do
+not think anybody ever knew anything about him except that he was
+Forepaugh, which meant, according to his own reckoning, the most
+wonderful person on earth. He was one of the sort of men whose habit is
+to turn up wherever you may happen to be, in whatever part of the world,
+with no apparent reason for being there except to talk to you,--the last
+time we met was in a remote corner of Kensington Gardens in London,
+where he took up the talk just where we had left off at the _Nazionale_
+in Rome--and as it is years since he has turned up anywhere to talk to
+us, I fear he has joined the Philadelphia Architect and Donoghue where
+he will talk no more.
+
+In sheer physical power of speech he was without a rival and none
+surpassed him in appreciation of his eloquence. His interest never
+flagged so long as he held the floor, though when we wanted him to
+listen to us, he did not attempt to conceal his indifference. We could
+not tell him anything, for there was nothing about which he did not know
+more than we could hope to. He, at any rate, had no doubt of his own
+omniscience. Judging from the intimate details with which he regaled us,
+he was equally in the confidence of the Vatican and the Quirinal,
+equally at home with the Blacks and the Whites. The secrets of the Roman
+aristocracy were his, he was the first to hear the scandals of the
+foreign colony. The opera depended upon his patronage and balls
+languished without him, though I could never understand how or why, so
+rarely did he leave us to enjoy them. Every archaeologist, every scholar,
+every historian in Rome appealed to him for help, and as for art, it was
+folly for others to pretend to speak of it in his presence. He called
+himself an artist and for a time he used to go with J. to Gigi's, the
+life school where artists then in Rome often went of an afternoon to
+draw from the model. But J. never saw him there with as much as a scrap
+of paper or a pencil in his hands, and nobody ever saw him at work
+anywhere. For what he did not do he made up by telling us of what he
+might do. His were the pictures unpainted which, like the songs unsung,
+are always the best. He condescended to approve of the Old Masters,
+assured that the masterpieces he might choose to produce must rank with
+theirs, but he never forgot the great gulf fixed between himself and the
+Modern Masters, whose pictures were worthy of his approval only when he
+had been their inspiration. It was fortunate for American Art that
+scarcely an American artist could be named whom Forepaugh had not
+inspired. And if he praised Abbey and Millet more than most, it was
+because he had posed for both and could answer for it that Millet's
+porch, or studio, or dining-room, which had had the honour of serving as
+his background, was as true as the figure of himself set against it.
+
+Like all talkers who know too much, Forepaugh had, what Carlyle called,
+a terrible faculty for developing into a bore. Some of our little group
+would run when they saw him at the door, others took malicious pleasure
+in interrupting him and suddenly changing the conversation in the hope
+to catch him tripping. But out of all such tests he came triumphantly. I
+never thought him more wonderful than the evening when somebody abruptly
+began to talk about Theosophy in the middle of one of his confidences
+about the Italian Court. It was no use. Without stopping to take breath,
+at once Forepaugh began to tell us the most marvellous theosophical
+adventures, which he knew not by hearsay, but because he had passed
+through them himself. We might express an opinion: he stated facts. And
+it seemed that he had no more intimate friend than Sinnett, and that to
+Sinnett he had confessed his scepticism, asking for a sign, a
+manifestation, and that one afternoon when they were smoking over their
+coffee and cognac after lunch in Sinnett's chambers, then on the third
+floor of a house near the Oxford Street end of Bond Street--Forepaugh
+was carefully exact in his details--Sinnett smiled mysteriously but said
+nothing except to warn him to hold on tight to the table. And up rose
+the table, with the litter of coffee cups, cigars, and cognac, up rose
+the two chairs, one at either end with Sinnett and Forepaugh sitting on
+them, and away they floated out of the open window--it was a June
+afternoon--and along Bond Street, above the carriages and the hansoms
+and omnibuses and the people as far as Piccadilly, and round the lamp
+post by Egyptian Hall, up Bond Street again, and in at the window. "Hold
+on," said Sinnett, and "I never held on to anything as tight in my life
+as I did to that table," said Forepaugh in conclusion.
+
+He always reminded me of the man who so annoyed my Uncle, Charles
+Godfrey Leland, by always knowing, doing, or having everything better or
+bigger than anybody else. "Why, if I were to tell him I had an elephant
+in my back yard," my Uncle used to say, "he would at once invite me to
+see the mastodon in his." Forepaugh had a mastodon up his sleeve for
+everybody else's elephant.
+
+
+V
+
+[Illustration: By Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company
+ELIHU VEDDER]
+
+If Forepaugh gave us a great deal of information we had no possible use
+for and talked us to despair, he was really a good fellow whom we should
+have missed from our table. And it was through him J. and I were first
+made welcome in that one house open to us, to which I have been all this
+time in coming. For it was Forepaugh who told Vedder we were in Rome,
+and Vedder, once he knew it, would not hear of our shutting his door
+in our own faces, nor would Mrs. Vedder, whatever the condition of our
+wardrobe.
+
+Vedder may have revealed many things in his recent _Digressions_, but
+not the extent of the hospitality he and his wife showed to the American
+who was a stranger in Rome, where, even then, they had been long at
+home. Mrs. Vedder carried her amiability to the point of climbing our
+six flights of stairs and calling on me in the rooms that suited us
+admirably for our work but were less adapted to afternoon receptions,
+and she would have gone further and shown me how to adapt them by moving
+every bit of furniture from where it was and arranging it all over
+again. Not the least part of her friendliness was not to mind when I did
+not fall in with her plans, as I couldn't, since so long as the sun
+shone in at the windows all was right with the rooms as far as I could
+see. I was in the absurd stage of industry when I did not care where my
+Roman furniture stood so long as my Roman tasks got done. Even our
+_padrona_ told me her surprise that, foreigner as I was, I seemed to do
+as much work as she did, which I accepted as a compliment. After that
+first attempt Mrs. Vedder did not return to climb our six flights, but
+she would not let us off from climbing her four or five.
+
+Often as we took advantage of their hospitality, we never found the
+Vedders alone and, chiefly American as was the group at their fireside,
+it was never without a foreigner or two. The first person we were
+introduced to on the first visit was the Englishman who would have
+deserted us in the _Ghetto_ had we let him have his way, and who, when
+he saw us, looked as if he wished the Vedders had learned to be less
+indiscriminate in their hospitality. We had the satisfaction of knowing
+that we made him supremely uncomfortable. He frowned upon us then as he
+continued to all through the winter. He could not forgive us for having
+found him out and was evidently afraid we were going to tell everybody
+about it. He was something very learned and was occupied in writing a
+book on Ancient Rome; later he became something more important at South
+Kensington. But no degree of learning and importance helped him to
+forget, or anyway to forgive. At chance meetings years afterwards in
+London he frowned, as no doubt he would still had he not long since gone
+to the land where I hope all frowns are smoothed from his frowning brow.
+
+If he frowned, there was another Englishman who smiled: an elderly man
+with the imperturbable serenity of a Buddha. He also had written books,
+I believe. I remember articles by him, with art for subject, in the
+_Portfolio_ at a time when everybody had taken to writing about art, and
+I think his name was Davies. But it would be more in character to forget
+that he ever worked or had a name. When I was in Rome he had risen above
+activity and toil to the contemplative life and, I suppose, to the
+income that made it possible. One night he explained his philosophy to
+me. Men could not be happy without sunshine, he thought. The sun was
+house, food, clothes, furniture, identity, everything, and as most of
+the year in England sunshine was not to be had at any price, he had come
+to live in Rome where almost all the year it was his for nothing. He sat
+on the Pincian or in other gardens during the day, doing nothing in the
+sunshine--that was living. And he urged me to follow his example and not
+to wait until half my life had been wasted in the pursuit of happiness
+where it was not to be found. He may have been right, but I never needed
+to become a philosopher to value the virtue of indolence,--my trouble is
+that I have never had the money to pay for it. Any man has the ability
+to do nothing, a great authority has said, and I can answer for one
+woman who has more than her fair share of it. I have always envied the
+North American Indians for their enjoyment of what it seems Burke
+attributed to them: "the highest boon of Heaven, supreme and perpetual
+indolence."
+
+As regular a visitor was a huge long-bearded Norwegian who looked a
+prophet and was an artist, and who spent most of the winter in the study
+of Marion Crawford's novels, I cannot imagine why, as they roused him to
+fury.
+
+"Marion Crawford," he would thunder at us as if somehow we were
+responsible, "Bah! He is a weak imitator of Bulwer, that is all, and he
+has not Bulwer's power of construction. He is not Bulwer. No. He is a
+weakling. Bah!"
+
+My only quarrel with Marion Crawford's books was that they never excited
+strong emotion in me, one way or the other, and I was so puzzled by his
+excitement that I remember I went to the trouble of getting out _Mr.
+Isaacs_ and _A Roman Singer_ from Piali's Library in the _Piazza di
+Spagna_, that centre of learning and literature for the English in Rome
+where, one day when I asked for Pepys's Diary, they offered me Marcus
+Ward's. A new course of Marion Crawford left me as puzzled as ever for
+the reason of the Norwegian's rage, and I was the more impressed with
+the possibilities of a temperament that could heat itself to such a
+degree at so lukewarm a fire.
+
+We were as certain to find this fiery Norseman and the two Englishmen
+any night we called as Vedder himself. Other men came and went, amongst
+them a few Italians and Frenchmen and more Americans, Coleman for one
+among them, but none could have appeared as regularly, so much fainter
+is the impression they have left with me. Naturally, they were mostly
+artists and at Vedder's, as at the _cafe_, the talk was chiefly of art.
+There was little of his work to see, for his studio was some distance
+from his apartment. But it was enough to see Vedder himself or, for that
+matter, enough to hear him. In his own house he led the talk, even
+Forepaugh having small chance against him. He was as prolific, a
+splendidly determined and animated talker. It was stimulating just to
+watch him talk. He was never still, he rarely sat down, he was always
+moving about, walking up and down, at times breaking into song and even
+dance. He was then in his prime, large, with a fine expressive face, and
+as American in his voice, in his manner, in his humour as if he had
+never crossed the Atlantic. The true American never gets Europeanized,
+nor does he want to, however long he may stay on the wrong side of the
+Atlantic. When I was with Vedder, Broadway always seemed nearer than the
+_Corso_.
+
+He had recently finished the illustrations for the _Rubaiyat_ and the
+book was published while we were in Rome. It was never long out of his
+talk. He would tell us the history of every design and of every model or
+pot in it. He exulted in the stroke of genius by which he had invented a
+composition or a pose. I have heard him describe again and again how he
+drew the flight of a spirit from a model, outstretched and flopping up
+and down on a feather bed laid upon the studio floor, until she almost
+fainted from fatigue, while he worked from a hammock slung just above. I
+recall his delight when a friend of Fitzgerald's sent him Fitzgerald's
+photograph with many compliments, asking for his in return. And he
+rejoiced in the story of Dr. Chamberlain filling a difficult tooth for
+the Queen and all the while singing the praises of the _Rubaiyat_ until
+she ordered a copy of the _edition de luxe_. In looking back, I always
+seem to see Mrs. Vedder pasting notices into a scrap book, and to hear
+Vedder declaiming Omar's quatrains and describing his own drawings.
+There was one evening when he came to a dead stop in his walk and his
+talk, and shaking a dramatic finger at us all, said:
+
+"I tell you what it is. I am not Vedder. I am Omar Khayyam!"
+
+"No," drawled the voice of a disgusted artist who had not got a word in
+for more than an hour, "No, you're not. You're the Great I Am!"
+
+Vedder laughed with the rest of us, but I am not sure he liked it. He
+could and did enjoy a joke, even if at his expense. I remember his
+delight one night in telling the story of an old lady who had visited
+his studio during the day and who sat so long in front of one of his
+pictures he thought it was having its effect, but whose only comment at
+the end of several minutes was: "That's a pretty frame you have there!"
+He was sensitive to criticism, however, though he carried it off with a
+laugh. Clarence Cook was one of the critics of his Omar who offended
+him.
+
+"It's funny," Vedder said, "all my life I've hurt Clarence's feelings.
+He always has been sure I have done my work for no other reason than to
+irritate him, and now that's the way he feels about the Omar."
+
+The laugh was not so ready when Andrew Lang--I think it was Lang--wrote
+that Vedder's Omar Khayyam was not of Persia, but of Skaneateles. And
+after I suggested that it was really of Rome, and some mistaken friend
+at home sent my article to Vedder, I never thought him quite so cordial.
+
+
+VI
+
+And so the winter passed. For us there was always a refuge from our cold
+rooms at the _cafe_ or at Vedder's, and it was seldom we did not profit
+by it.
+
+Occasionally during our rambles we stumbled unexpectedly upon old
+friends "doing Italy" and genuinely glad to see us, as we were to see
+them, inviting us to their hotels at every risk of the disapproval of
+manager and porters and waiters; and so powerful was the influence of
+Rome and the _cafe_ that now the marvel was to sit and listen to talk
+about Philadelphia, and where everybody was going for the summer, and
+who was getting married, and who had died, and what Philadelphia was
+thinking and doing, as if, after all, there were still benighted people
+in the world who believed not in art, but in Philadelphia as of supreme
+importance.
+
+Occasionally we made new friends outside of our pleasant _cafe_ life. I
+have forgotten how, though I have not forgotten it was in Rome, thanks
+to a letter of introduction from Dr. Garnett of the British Museum, that
+we first met Miss Harriet Waters Preston, who, for her part, had already
+introduced me to Mistral--how many Americans had heard of Mistral before
+she translated _Mireio_?--and who now accepted us, cycling tweeds and
+all, notwithstanding the shock they must have been to the admirably
+appointed _pension_ where she stayed. She also climbed our six flights,
+her niece and collaborator, Miss Louise Dodge, with her, probably both
+busy that winter collecting facts for their _Private Life of the
+Romans_, and where could they have found a more perfect background for
+the past they were studying than when they looked down from our windows
+over Rome, to the _Campagna_ beyond, and upon the horizon the shining
+line that we knew was the Mediterranean,--over all the beauty that has
+not changed in the meanwhile, though old streets and old villas and old
+slums have vanished. And at these times, in the talk, not Philadelphia,
+but literature was for a while art's rival.
+
+And there were days when we played truant and climbed down in the
+morning's first freshness from the high room overlooking Rome and the
+work that had to be done in it, and loafed all day in Roman galleries
+and at Roman ceremonies, or strayed to places further afield--Tivoli,
+Albano, Ostia, Marino, Rocca di Papa,--getting back to Rome with feet
+too tired to take us anywhere except up our six flights again. And there
+were nights when the affairs of Rome drew us from the _cafe_. I remember
+once our little group interrupted their interminable arguments long
+enough to see the Tiber in flood, down by the _Ripetta_, where people
+were going about in boats, and Rome looked like the Venice to which I
+had then never been, and we met King Humbert and Queen Margherita in his
+American trotting wagon driving down alone so as to show their sympathy,
+for, whatever they may not have done, they always appeared in person
+when their people were in trouble: not so many weeks before we had
+watched the enthusiasm with which the Romans greeted King Humbert on his
+return from visiting the cholera-stricken town of Naples. And I remember
+on _Befana_ Night we adjourned to the _Piazza Navona_ to blow horns and
+reed whistles into other people's ears and to have them blown into ours.
+For the humours of the Carnival there was no need to leave the _cafe_,
+where one _Pulcinello_ after another broke into our talk with witticisms
+that kept the _cafe_ in an uproar, and for me destroyed whatever
+sentiment there might have been in the thought that this was my last
+night in Rome--the last of the friendly nights of talk in the
+_Nazionale_ to which we always returned no matter how far we might
+occasionally stray from it--the friendly nights of talk when I learned
+my folly in ever having believed that anything in the world mattered,
+that anything in the world existed, save art.
+
+_Pulcinello_, the newest of our Roman friends, went with us from Rome,
+following us to Naples, a familiar face to lighten our homesickness for
+the rooms full of sunshine at the top of the high house on the top of
+the high hill, and for the blue plush and the gilding and the mirrors
+and the talk of the _Nazionale_.
+
+And _Pulcinello_ went with us to Pompeii, reappearing during our nights
+at the _Albergo del Sole_, that most delightful and impossible of all
+the inns that ever were. It may have vanished in the quarter of a
+century that has passed since the February day I came to it, when the
+sky was as blue as the sea, and a soft cloud hung over Vesuvius, and
+flowers were sweet in the land--can anyone who ever smelt it forget the
+sweetness of the flowering bean in the wide fields near the Bay of
+Naples? But Pompeii could never be the same without the _Sole_. And it
+was made for our shabbiness, its three tumbled-down little houses ranged
+round the three sides of an unkempt, mud-floored court; our bedroom
+without lock or latch and with a mirror cracked from side to side like
+the Lady of Shalott's, though for other reasons; the dining-room with
+earthen floor, walls decorated by a modern-primitive fresco of the
+_padrone_ holding a plate of _maccheroni_ in one hand and a flask of
+_Lachrima Christi_ in the other, a central column spreading out branches
+like a tree and bearing for fruit row upon row of still unopened
+bottles, a door free to all the stray monks and beggars of Pompeii--to
+all the fowls too, including the gorgeous peacock that strolled in after
+its evening walk with the young Swiss artist on the flat roof of the inn
+where, together, they went before dinner to watch the sunset.
+
+Throughout dinner, at the head of the long table where we sat with the
+Swiss artist and an old German professor of art and an older Italian
+archaeologist, the talk, as at the _Nazionale_, was of art, so that it
+also, like _Pulcinello_, crying his jests through the window or at our
+elbow, made me feel at home. While we helped ourselves from that amazing
+dish into which you stuck a fork and pulled out a bit of chicken or
+duck or beef or mutton or sausage; while the old professor and
+archaeologist absent-mindedly stretched a hand to the column behind them,
+and plucked from it bottle after bottle of wine; while the beggars
+whined at the open door, and the monks begged at our side, and
+_Pulcinello_ capered and jested and sang; while the American tourists at
+the other end of the table deplored the disorder and noise until we sent
+them the longest and most expensive way up Vesuvius to get rid of them;
+while the fowls fought for the crumbs;--the talk was still of art and
+again of art, in the end as in the beginning. I might not understand
+half of it, coming as it did in a confused torrent of German, Italian,
+French, and English, but the nights at the _Sole_, like the nights at
+the _Nazionale_, made this one truth clear: that nothing matters in the
+world, that nothing exists in the world, save art.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+NIGHTS
+
+IN VENICE
+
+
+
+
+IN VENICE
+
+I
+
+
+We reached Venice at an unearthly hour of a March morning and the first
+thing I knew of it somebody was shouting, "_Venezia!_" and I was
+startled from a sound sleep, and porters were scrambling for our bags,
+and we were stumbling after them, up a long platform, between a crowd of
+men in hotel caps yelling: "_Danieli!_" "_Britannia!_" and I hardly
+heard what, out into a fog as impenetrable as night or London. The
+muffled, ghostly cries of "_gundola! gundola!_" from invisible
+gondoliers on invisible waters would have sent me back into the station
+even had there been a chance to find so modest a hotel as the _Casa
+Kirsch_ open so preposterously early, and my first impressions of Venice
+were gathered in the freezing, foggy station restaurant where J. and I
+drank our coffee and yawned, and I would have thought Ruskin a fraud
+with his purple passage describing the traveller's arrival in Venice
+upon which I had based my expectations, had I been wide enough awake to
+think of anything at all, and the hours stretched themselves into
+centuries before a touch of yellow in the fog suggested a sun shining
+in some remote world, and we crawled under the cover of one of the dim
+black boats that emerged vaguely, a shadow from the shadows.
+
+I had looked forward to my first _gondola_ ride for that "little first
+Venetian thrill" that Venice owes to the stranger. But I did not thrill,
+I shivered with cold and damp and fog as the _gondola_ pushed through
+the yellow gloom in the sort of silence you can feel, and tall houses
+towered suddenly and horribly above us, and strange yells broke the
+stillness before and behind, when another black boat with a black figure
+at the stern, came out of the gloom, scraped and bumped our side, and
+was swallowed up again.
+
+And after we were on the landing of the _Casa Kirsch_, and up in our
+rooms, and the fog lifted, and the sun shone, and we looked out of our
+windows with all Venice in our faces, and J. took me to see the town, my
+impressions were still foggy with sleep. For, from Pompeii, where there
+had been work, to Venice where there was to be more, we had hurried by
+one of those day-and-night flights to which J. has never accustomed me,
+the hurried, crowded pauses at Naples and Orvieto and Florence and Pisa
+and Lucca and Pistoia turning the journey into a beautiful nightmare of
+which all I was now seeing became but a part: the _Riva_, canals, sails,
+_Bersaglieri_, the Ducal Palace, the Bridge of Sighs, St. Mark's, the
+_Piazza_, _gondolas_, women in black, white sunlight, pigeons, tourists,
+the _Campanile_, following one upon another with the inconsequence of
+troubled dreams. And then we were on the _Rialto_ and J. was saying "Of
+course you know that?" and I was answering "Of course, the Bridge of
+Sighs!" and the many years between have not blunted the edge of his
+disgust or my remorse. But my disgrace drove me back to the _Casa
+Kirsch_, to sleep for fifteen blessed hours before looking at one other
+beautiful thing or troubling my head about what we were to do with our
+days and our nights in Venice.
+
+
+II
+
+What we were to do with our days settled itself the next morning as soon
+as I woke. For Venice, out of my window, was rising from the sea with
+the dawn, everything it ought to have been the morning before, and I had
+no desire to move from a room that looked down upon the _Riva_, and
+across to _San Giorgio_, and beyond the island--and sail-strewn lagoon
+to the low line of the _Lido_, and above to the vastness of the
+Venetian sky.
+
+Nor was there trouble in providing for our nights. Before I left home a
+romantic friend had pictured me in Venice, wrapped in black lace,
+forever floating in a _gondola_ under the moon. But my Roman winter had
+taught me how much more likely the gas-light of some little _trattoria_
+and _cafe_ was to shine upon me in my well-worn tweeds, my education
+having got so far advanced that any other end to my day of work could
+not seem possible. The only question was upon which of the many little
+_trattorie_ and _cafes_ in Venice our choice should fall, and this was
+decided for us by Duveneck, whom we ran across that same morning in the
+_Piazza_, and who told us that he slept in the _Casa Kirsch_, dined at
+the _Antica Panada_, and drank coffee at the _Orientale_, which was as
+much as to say that we might too if we liked. And of course we liked,
+for it is a great compliment when a man in Venice, or any Italian
+town,--especially if he is of the importance and distinction to which
+Duveneck had already attained,--makes you free to join him at dinner and
+over after-dinner coffee. It is more than a compliment. It launches you
+in Venice as to be presented at court launches you in London.
+
+[Illustration: Painting by Joseph R. De Camp
+FRANK DUVENECK]
+
+We began that night to dine at the _Panada_ and drink coffee at the
+_Orientale_, and we kept on dining at the _Panada_ and drinking coffee
+at the _Orientale_ every night we were in Venice; except when it was a
+_festa_ and we followed Duveneck to the _Calcino_, where various Royal
+Academicians sustained the respectability Ruskin gave it by his
+patronage and Symonds tried to live up to; or when there was music in
+the _Piazza_ and, happy to do whatever Duveneck did, we went with him to
+the _Quadri_ or _Florian's_; or when it stormed, as it can in March, and
+all day from my window I had looked down upon the dripping _Riva_ and
+the wind-waved Lagoon and lines of fishing boats moored to the banks,
+and no living creatures except the gulls, and the little white woolly
+dogs on the fishing boats covered with sails, and the sailors miserably
+huddled together, and gondoliers in yellow oilskins, and the
+_Bersaglieri_ in hoods--what the _Bersaglieri_ were doing there even in
+sunshine was one of the mysteries of Venice;--then we went with Duveneck
+no further than the kitchen of the _Casa Kirsch_, for he hated, as we
+hated, the _table d'hote_ from which, there as everywhere, German
+tourists were talking away every other nationality.
+
+The kitchen was a huge room, with high ceiling, and brass and copper
+pots and pans on the whitewashed walls, and a dim light about the
+cooking stove, and dark shadowy corners. The _padrona_ laid the cloth
+for us in an alcove opposite the great fireplace, while she and her
+family sat at a table against the wall to the right, and the old cook
+ate at a bare table in the middle, and the maid-servant sat on a stool
+by the fire with her plate in her lap, and the man-servant stood in the
+corner with his plate on the dresser. Having thus expressed their
+respect for class distinctions, they felt no further obligation, but
+they all helped equally in cooking and serving, talked together the
+whole time, quarrelled, called each other names, and laughed at the old
+man's stories told in the Venetian which I only wish I had understood
+then as well as I did a few weeks later, when it was too late, for, with
+the coming of spring, there were no storms to keep us from the _Panada_.
+
+Just where the _Panada_ was I would not attempt to say; not from any
+desire to keep it secret, which would be foolish, for Baedeker long
+since found it out; but simply because I could not very well show the
+way to a place I never could find for myself. I knew it was somewhere
+round the corner from the _Piazza_, but I never rounded that corner
+alone without becoming involved in a labyrinth of little _calli_. Nor
+would I attempt to say why the artists chose it and why, because they
+did, we should, for it was then the dirtiest, noisiest, and most crowded
+_trattoria_ in Venice, though the last time I was there, years
+afterwards, it was so spick and span, with another room and more waiters
+to relieve the congestion, that I could not believe it really was the
+_Panada_ and, with the inconsistency natural under the circumstances,
+did not like it half so well.
+
+No matter whether we got there early or late, the _Panada_ was always
+full. As soon as we sat down we began our dinner by wiping our glasses,
+plates, forks, spoons, and knives on our napkins, making such a habit of
+it that I remember afterwards at a dinner-party in London catching
+myself with my glass in my hand and stopping only just in time, while
+Duveneck, on another occasion, got as far as the silver before he was
+held up by the severe eye of his hostess. Probably it was because nobody
+could hear what anybody said that everybody talked together. I cannot
+recall a moment when stray musicians were not strumming on guitars and
+mandolins, and the oyster man was not shrieking: "_Ostreche!_ _Fresche!
+Ostreche!_" though nobody paid the least attention to him or ever bought
+one of his oysters. And above the uproar was the continuous cry: "_Ecco
+me! Vengo subito! Mezzo Verona! Due Calomai! Vengo subito! Ecco me!_" of
+the waiters, who, though they never ceased to announce their coming,
+were so slow to come that many diners brought a course or two in their
+pockets to occupy them during the intervals.
+
+The little Venetian at the next table was sure to produce a bunch of
+radishes while he waited for his soup; on market days, when there was
+more of a crowd than ever, few of the many baked potatoes eaten at
+almost every table had seen the inside of the _Panada's_ oven; often the
+shops that fill the Venetian _calli_ with the perpetual smell of frying
+and where the brasses and the blue-and-white used to shine, were
+patronized on the way--if dinner has to be collected in the streets, no
+town, even in Italy, offers such facilities as Venice. From _Minestra_
+to fruit and cheese, the Venetian in a few minutes' walk may pick up a
+substantial dinner and carry it to the rooms or the street corner where
+it is his habit to dine. Vance, the painter, who sometimes favoured us
+at our table with his company, went further and, after he had taken off
+his coat and put on his hat and emptied his pockets, seldom troubled the
+establishment to provide him with more than a glass, a plate, a knife,
+and a fork, for the price of a _quinto_ of Verona. His first, and as it
+turned out his last, more extravagant order, was the event of the
+season. The _padrone_ discussed it with him and a message was sent to
+the cook that the dish was _di bistecca_. When it came it was not cooked
+enough to suit Vance. A second was cooked too much. The third was done
+to a turn. In the bill, however, were the three, and voices were
+lowered, mandolins and guitars were stilled, the oyster man forgot his
+shriek, during the five awful minutes when Vance and the _padrone_ had
+it out. After that Vance made another _trattoria_ the richer by his
+daily _quinto_.
+
+J. and I had our five minutes with the _padrone_ later on once when
+Rossi, our waiter, was so slow that our patience gave out and we shook
+the dust of the _Panada_ from our feet. But we could not shake off
+Rossi. He had arrived with our dinner just as we were vanishing from the
+door and was made to pay for it. After that his leisure was spent in
+trying to make us pay him back and he would appear at our bedroom door,
+or waylay us on the _Riva_, or follow us into the _Orientale_, or run
+us down in the _Piazza_, demanding the money as a right, begging for it
+as a charity, reducing it by a _centesimo_ every time until we had only
+to wait long enough for the debt to be wiped out. But this was at the
+end of our stay in Venice, and months of dining at the _Panada_ had
+passed before then.
+
+
+III
+
+[Illustration: Etching by Joseph Pennell
+THE CAFE ORIENTALE, VENICE]
+
+I would be as puzzled to explain the attraction of the _Orientale_ on
+the _Riva_, unless it was the opportunity it offered for economy. In the
+_Piazza_, at the _Quadri_ and _Florian's_, which are to the other
+_cafes_ of Venice what St. Mark's is to the other churches, coffee was
+twenty _centesimi_ and the waiter expected five more, but at the
+_Orientale_ it was eighteen and the waiter was satisfied with the change
+from twenty, which meant for us the saving every night of almost half a
+cent. The _Orientale_ was by comparison as quiet and deserted as the
+_Panada_ was crowded and noisy. Outside, tables looked upon the Lagoon
+and the facade of _San Giorgio_, white in the night. In a big, new,
+gilded room sailors and sergeants played checkers and more serious
+Venetians worked out dismal problems in chess. But Duveneck's corner was
+in the older, shabby, stuffy, low-ceilinged room, and having once
+settled there we never wanted to move. As a rule we shared it with only
+an elderly Englishman and his son who read the _Standard_ in the
+opposite corner--after our race with them to the _cafe_, the winners
+getting the one English paper first--and we were seldom intruded upon or
+interrupted except by the occasional visit of the _caramei_ man with his
+brass tray of candied fruit, impaled on thin sticks, like little birds
+on a skewer, which led us into our one extravagance.
+
+Had the old room been seedier and duller--dull our company never was--I
+still would have seen it through the glamour of youth and thought it the
+one place in which to study Venice and Venetian life. But nobody who
+ever sat there with us could have complained of dulness so long as
+Duveneck presided at our table. In Duveneck's case I cannot help
+breaking my golden rule never to speak in print of the living--rules
+were made to be broken. And why shouldn't I? I might as well not write
+at all about our nights in Venice as to leave him out of them, he who
+held them together and fashioned them into what they were. In the
+_Atlantic_, as a makeshift, I called him Inglehart, the disguise under
+which he figures in one of Howells's novels. But why not call him
+boldly by his name when Inglehart is the thinnest and flimsiest of
+masks, as friends of his were quick to tell me, and Duveneck means so
+much more to all who know--and all who do not know are not worth
+bothering about. It was only yesterday at San Francisco that the artists
+of America gave an unmistakable proof of what their opinion of Duveneck
+is now. In the Eighties "the boys" already thought as much of him and a
+hundred times more.
+
+Duveneck, as I remember him then--I have seen him but once since--was
+large, fair, golden-haired, with long drooping golden moustache, of a
+type apt to suggest indolence and indifference. As he lolled against the
+red velvet cushions smoking his Cavour, enjoying the talk of others as
+much as his own or more--for he had the talent of eloquent silence when
+he chose to cultivate it--his eyes half shut, smiling with casual
+benevolence, he may have looked to a stranger incapable of action, and
+as if he did not know whether he was alone or not, and cared less. And
+yet he had a big record of activity behind him, young as he was; he
+always inspired activity in others, he was rarely without a large and
+devoted following. He it was who drew "the boys" to Munich, then from
+Munich to Florence, and then from Florence to Venice, and "the boys"
+have passed into the history of American Art and the history of
+Venice--wouldn't that give me away and explain who he was if I called
+him Inglehart dozens of times over? And he also it was who packed them
+off again before they learnt how easy it is to be content in Venice
+without doing anything at all, though I used to fancy that he would have
+been rather glad to indulge in that content himself. How far he was from
+the pleasant Venetian habit of idling all day, his Venetian etchings, at
+which he was working that spring--the etchings that on their appearance
+in London were the innocent cause of a stirring chapter in _The Gentle
+Art_--are an enduring proof. And I knew a good deal of what was going on
+in his studio at the time, for J. spent many busy hours with him there,
+while I, left to my own devices, stared industriously from the windows
+of the _Casa Kirsch_, making believe I was gathering material, or
+strolled along the _Riva_ pretending it was to market for my midday
+meal, though the baker was almost next door, and the man from whom I
+bought the little dried figs that nowhere are so dried and shrivelled up
+as in Venice, was seldom more than a minute away. I can see now, when I
+consider how my Venetian days were spent, that I came perilously near
+to sinking to the deepest depths of Venetian idleness myself.
+
+We were never alone with Duveneck at the _Orientale_. The American
+Consul was sure to drop in, as he had for so many years that half his
+occupation would have gone if he hadn't dropped in any longer. Martin
+joined us because he loved to argue anybody into a temper and, as he was
+an awful bore, succeeded with most people. He could drive me to proving
+that white was black, to overturning all my most cherished idols, or to
+forgetting my timidity and laying down the law upon any point of art he
+might bring up. Duveneck alone refused to be roused and Martin, who
+could not understand or accept his failure, was forever coming back,
+making himself a bigger bore than ever, by trying again. But Shinn was
+the only man I ever knew to put Duveneck into something like a temper,
+and that was by asking him deferentially one night if he did not think
+St. Mark's a very fine church--the next minute, however, calming him
+down by inviting him out "in my gandler."
+
+Arnold was as regular in attendance. He found the _cafe_ as comfortable
+a place to sleep in as any other. Like Sancho Panza he had a talent for
+sleeping. He had made his name and fame as one of the Harvard baseball
+team in I will not say what year, and sleep had been his chief
+occupation ever since. No end of stories were going the round of the
+studios and _cafes_--he invited them without wanting it or meaning to.
+He was supposed to be in Venice to study with Duveneck, at whose studio
+he was said to arrive regularly at the same hour every morning. And as
+regularly he was snoring before he had been sitting in front of his
+easel for ten minutes. During his nap, Duveneck would come round and
+shake him and before he slept again put a touch to the study and, as
+Arnold promptly dozed off, would work on it until it was finished, and
+unless it slid down the canvas with the quantity of bitumen Arnold
+used--there was one story of the beautiful eyes in a beautiful portrait,
+before they could be stopped, sliding into the chin of the pretty girl
+who was posing--Arnold, waking up eventually, would carry off the
+painting unconscious that he had not finished it himself. Nobody can say
+how many Duvenecks are masquerading at home as Arnolds while their
+owners wonder why Arnold has never since done any work a tenth as good.
+
+The one thing that roused him was baseball, and he was in fine form on
+the afternoons when he and a few other enthusiasts spent an hour or so
+on the Lido for practice. The Englishmen did not believe in the
+prodigies they heard of him as a baseball player. It wasn't easy for
+anybody to believe that a man who was always tumbling off to sleep on
+the slightest provocation could play anything decently. But I was told
+that one day he was wide enough awake to be irritated, and he bet them a
+dinner he could pitch the swell British cricketer among them three balls
+not any one of which the Briton could catch. And on Easter Monday they
+all went over to the Lido. The Briton asked for a high ball: it skimmed
+along near the ground and then rose over his head as he stooped for it.
+He asked for a low one: it came straight for his nose and, when he
+dodged it, dropped and went between his legs. He asked for a medium one:
+it curved away out to the right, he rushed for it, it curved back again
+and took him in his manly bosom. The rest of the Britons and "the boys,"
+they say, enjoyed the dinner more than he did. Such was the affair as it
+was described to me and confirmed by gossip. I pretend to no authority
+on a subject I understand so little as balls and the pitching of them.
+
+A better contrast to Arnold could not have been found than the artist
+with the part Spanish, part German name who called himself a Frenchman,
+and who aimed to give his pose the mystery that crept, or bounded when
+encouraged, into his incessant talk. I am afraid his chief encouragement
+came from me. The others were as irritated by his dabbling in magic as
+most of us had been in Rome by Forepaugh's theosophic adventures. But he
+amused me; he did not deal in the prose of his brand of magic, the
+Black, of which so much was beginning to be heard, and still more was to
+be heard, in Paris. He was all innuendo and strange hints and whispered
+secrets, and I-could-if-I-woulds. One of my recent winters had been
+devoted, not to dabbling in magic, for which I have not the temperament,
+but to reading the literature of magic or of all things psychical, and I
+could then, though I could not now, have passed a fairly good
+examination in the modern authorities, from Madame Blavatsky to Louis
+Jacolliot. Therefore I proved a sympathetic listener and heard, for my
+pains, of the revival of old religions, and above all of old rites, and
+of his dignity as high-priest, a figure of mystery and command moving
+here and there among shadowy disciples in shadowy sanctuaries. For one
+sunk such fathoms deep in mystery he was surprisingly concerned for the
+outward sign. Like Huysmans's hero, he believed in the significance of
+the material background, entertaining me with a detailed description of
+his apartment in Paris, and I have not yet lost the vision he permitted
+me of a bedroom hung and painted with scarlet, and of himself enshrined
+in it, magnificent in scarlet silk pajamas. Probably it was to deceive
+the world that he carried a tiny paint-box. I never saw him open it.
+
+But most constant of our little party was Jobbins, our one Englishman,
+who came in late to the _Orientale_--where, or if, he dined none of us
+could say--with the stool and canvas and paint-box he had been carrying
+about all day from one _campo_, or _calle_, or _canale_, to another, in
+search of a subject. Jobbins's trouble was that he had passed too
+brilliantly through South Kensington to do the teaching for which he was
+trained, or to be willing to do anything but paint great pictures the
+subjects for which he could never find; his mistake was to want to paint
+them in Venice where there is nothing to paint that has not been painted
+hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times before; and his misfortune
+was not to seek in adversity the comfort and hope which the philosopher
+believes to be its reward. He had become, as a consequence, the weariest
+man who breathed. It made me tired to look at him. Later, he was forced
+to abandon his high ambition and he accepted a good post as teacher
+somewhere in India. But he lived a short time to enjoy it and I am sure
+he was homesick for Venice, and the search after the impossible, and the
+old days when he was so abominably hard up that even J. and I were
+richer. Of the complete crash by which we all gained--including the man
+who got the Whistler painted on the back of a Jobbins panel--I still
+have reminders in a brass plaque and bits of embroideries hung up on our
+walls and brocades made into screens, which J. bought from him to save
+the situation, at the risk of creating a new one from which somebody
+would have to save us.
+
+For all his weariness, Jobbins looked ridiculously young. He insisted
+that this was what lost him his one chance of selling a picture. He was
+painting in the Frari a subject which he vainly hoped was his own, when
+an American family of three came and stared over his shoulder.
+
+"Why, it's going to be a picture!" the small child discovered.
+
+"And he such a boy too!" the mother marvelled.
+
+"Then it can't be of any value," the father said in the loud cheerful
+voice in which American and English tourists in Venice make their most
+personal comments, convinced that nobody can understand, though every
+other person they meet is a fellow countryman. A story used to be told
+of Bunney at work in the _Piazza_, on his endless study of St. Mark's
+for Ruskin, one bitter winter morning, when three English girls, wrapped
+in furs, passed. One stopped behind him:
+
+"Oh Maud! Ethel!" she called, "do come back and see what this poor
+shivering old wretch is doing."
+
+The talk in our corner of the _Orientale_ kept us in the past until I
+began to fear that, just as some people grow prematurely grey, so J. and
+I, not a year married, had prematurely reached the time for creeping in
+close about the fire--or a _cafe_ table--and telling grey tales of what
+we had been. It was a very different past from that which tourists were
+then bullied by Ruskin into believing should alone concern them in
+Venice--indeed, my greatest astonishment in this astonishing year was
+that, while the people who were not artists but posed as knowing all
+about art did nothing but quote Ruskin, artists never quoted him, and
+never mentioned him except to show how little use they had for him. But
+then, as I was beginning to find out, it is the privilege of the artist
+to think what he knows and to say what he thinks. We were none of us
+tourists at our little table, we were none of us seeing sights, being
+far too busy doing the work we were in Venice to do; and no matter what
+Ruskin and Baedeker taught, "the boys" gave the date which overshadowed
+for us every other in Venetian history. Nothing that had happened in
+Venice before or after counted, though "the boys" themselves were in
+their turn a good deal overshadowed by Whistler, who had been there with
+them for a while.
+
+It was extraordinary how the Whistler tradition had developed and
+strengthened in the little more than four years since he had left
+Venice. I had never met him then, though J. had a few months before in
+London. I hardly hoped ever to meet him; I certainly could not expect
+that the day would come when he would be our friend, with us constantly,
+letting us learn far more about him and far more intimately than from
+all the talk at a _cafe_ table of those who already knew him, accepted
+him as a master, and loved him as a man. But had my knowledge of him
+come solely from those months in Venice I should still have realized the
+power of his personality and the force of his influence. He seemed to
+pervade the place, to colour the atmosphere. He had stayed in Venice
+only about a year. In the early Eighties little had been written of him
+except in contempt or ridicule. But to the artist he had become as
+essentially a part of Venice, his work as inseparable from its
+associations, as the Venetian painters like Carpaccio and Tintoretto who
+had lived and worked there all their lives and about whom a voluminous
+literature had grown up, culminating in the big and little volumes by
+Ruskin upon which the public crowding to Venice based their artistic
+creed. During those old nights I heard far more of the few little inches
+of Whistler's etchings and of Whistler's pastels than of the great
+expanse of Tintoretto's _Paradise_ or of Carpaccio's decorations in the
+little church of _San Giorgio degli Schiavoni_. The fact made and has
+left the greater impression because the winter in Rome had not worn off,
+for me, the novelty of artists' talk or quite accustomed me to their
+point of view, to their surprising independence in not accepting the
+current and easy doctrine that everything old is sacred, everything
+modern insignificant. Because a painter happened to paint a couple of
+hundred years or more ago did not place him above their criticism;
+because he happened to paint to-day was apt to make him more
+interesting to them.
+
+At the _Orientale_ the talk could never keep very long from Whistler. It
+might be of art--question of technique, of treatment, of arrangement, of
+any or all the artist's problems--and sooner or later it would be
+referred to what Whistler did or did not. Or the talk might grow
+reminiscent and again it was sure to return to Whistler. Not only at the
+_Orientale_, but at any _cafe_ or restaurant or house or gallery where
+two or three artists were gathered together, Whistler stories were
+always told before the meeting broke up. It was then we first heard the
+gold-fish story, and the devil-in-the-glass story, and the
+Wolkoff-pastel story, and the farewell-feast story, and the innumerable
+stories labelled and pigeon-holed by "the boys" for future use, and so
+recently told by J. and myself in the greatest story of all--the story
+of his Life--that it is too soon for me to tell them again. Up till then
+I had shared the popular idea of him as a man who might be ridiculed,
+abused, feared, hated, anything rather than loved. But none of the men
+in Venice could speak of him without affection. "Not a bad chap,"
+Jobbins would forget his weariness to say, "not half a bad chap!" and
+one night he told one of the few Whistler stories never yet told in
+print, except in the _Atlantic Monthly_ where this chapter was first
+published.
+
+"He rather liked me," said Jobbins, "liked to have me about, and to help
+on Sundays when he showed his pastels. But that wasn't my game, you
+know, and I got tired of it, and one Sunday when lots of people were
+there and he asked me to bring out that drawing of a _calle_ with tall
+houses, and away up above clothes hung out to dry, and a pair of
+trousers in the middle, I said: 'Have you got a title for it, Whistler?'
+'No,' he said. 'Well,' I said, 'call it an _Arrangement in Trousers_,'
+and everybody laughed. I'd have sneaked away, for he was furious. But he
+wouldn't let me, kept his eye on me, though he didn't say a word until
+they'd all gone. Then he looked at me rather with that Shakespeare
+fellow's _Et tu Brute_ look: 'Why, Jobbins, you, who are so amiable?'
+That was all. No, not half a bad chap."
+
+Now and then talk of Whistler and "the boys" reminded Duveneck of his
+own student days, and would lead him into personal reminiscences, when
+the stories were of his adventures; sometimes on Bavarian roads, singing
+and fiddling his way from village to village, or in Bavarian convents,
+teaching drawing to pretty novices, receiving commissions from stern
+Reverend Mothers; and sometimes in American towns painting the earliest
+American mural decoration that prepared the way, through various stages,
+for the latest American series of all--at the San Francisco Exposition
+where Duveneck was acclaimed as the American master of to-day. But in
+his story, as he told it to us, he had not got as far as Florence when a
+new turn was given to his reminiscences and to our evening talk by the
+descent upon Venice of the men from Munich.
+
+
+IV
+
+They were only three--McFarlane, Anthony and Thompson, shall I call
+them?--but they had not journeyed all the way from Munich to talk about
+"the boys" and to drop sentimental tears over old love tales. They were
+off on an Easter holiday and meant to make the most of it. Because
+Duveneck was Duveneck they gave up the gayer _cafes_ in the _Piazza_ to
+be with him in the sleepy old _Orientale_. But they were not going to
+let it stay a sleepy old _Orientale_ if they could help themselves.
+Their very first evening Duveneck called for two glasses of milk--to
+steady his nerves, he said, though he politely attributed the
+unsteadiness not to this new excitement but to the tea he had been
+drinking. People drifted to our room from outside and from the new room
+to see what the noise was about, until there was not a table to be had.
+The old Englishman and his son put down the _Standard_ and laughed with
+us. The _caramei_ man went away with an empty tray, I do believe the
+only time he was ever bought out in his life, and McFarlane treated us
+all to _tamarindo_ to drink with the fruit, and he wound up his horrible
+extravagance by buying a copy of the Venetian paper "the boys" used to
+call the _Barabowow_. It was nothing short of a Venetian orgy.
+
+Nor did the transformation end here. The men from Munich were so smart,
+especially McFarlane, in white waistcoat, with a flower in his
+button-hole and a gold-headed cane in his hand, that we were shocked
+into the consciousness of our shabbiness. Duveneck, who, until then, had
+been happy in an old ulster with holes in the pockets and rips in the
+seams, dazzled the _cafe_ by appearing in a jaunty spring overcoat. J.
+exchanged his old trousers with a green stain of acid down the leg for
+the new pair he had hitherto worn only when he went to call on the
+Bronsons or to dine with Mr. Horatio Brown, where I could not go
+because I was so much more hopelessly unprepared to dine anywhere
+outside the _Panada_ or the Kitchen of the _Casa Kirsch_. But in the
+_Merceria_ I could at least supply myself with gloves and veils, while
+Jobbins unearthed a fresh cravat from somewhere. And we began to feel
+apologetic for the dinginess and general down-at-heeledness of Venice
+which bored the men from Munich to extinction--really they were so
+bored, they said, that all day they found themselves looking forward to
+the _caramei_ man as the town's one excitement. I thought the
+illuminations on Easter Sunday evening, when the _Piazza_ was "a
+fairyland in the night," and the music deafened us, and the Bengal
+lights blinded us, would help to give them a livelier impression; but,
+though they came with us to _Florian's_, it was plain they pitied us for
+being so pleased.
+
+They couldn't, for the life of them, see why the place had been so
+cracked up by Ruskin. Nothing was right. The _Piazza_ was just simply
+the town's meeting place and centre of gossip, like the country village
+store, only on a more architectural and uncomfortable scale. The canals
+were breeding holes for malaria. The streets wouldn't be put up with as
+alleys at home. The language was not worth learning. At the _Panada_,
+after we had given our order for dinner, McFarlane would murmur
+languidly '_Lo stesso_' and declare it to be the one useful word in the
+Italian dictionary; to this Johnson added a mysterious '_Sensa crab_'
+when Rossi suggested '_piccoli fees_' under the delusion that he was
+talking English; while Anthony was quite content with the vocabulary the
+other two supplied him. The climate was as deplorable: either wet and
+cold, when the Italian _scaldino_ wasn't a patch on the German stove and
+a _gondola_ became a freezing machine; or warm and enervating when they
+couldn't keep awake.
+
+They dozed in their _gondola_, they yawned in St. Mark's and the Ducal
+Palace and in all the other churches and palaces, and in front of all
+the old doorways and bridges and boat-building yards and _traghettos_
+and fishing boats and wells and "bits" that Camillo, their gondolier,
+was inhuman enough to wake them up to look at. The beauty of Venice was
+exaggerated, or if they did come to a "subject" that made them pull
+their sketch books out of their pockets, Camillo was at once bothering
+them to do it from just where Guardi, or Canaletto, or Rico, or
+Whistler, or Ruskin, or some other old boy had painted, etched, or
+drawn it--Whistler alone had finished Venice for every artist who came
+after him and they were tired of his very name, and never wanted to have
+his etchings and pastels thrown in their faces again. What they would
+like to do was to discover the Italian town or village where no artist
+had ever been seen and the word art had never been uttered.
+
+But it was Venetian painting that got most on their nerves. They had
+given it a fair chance, they protested. "Trot out your Tintorettos,"
+they said to Camillo every morning, and he carried them off to the
+Palace, and the Academy, and more churches than they thought there were
+in the world, and at last to the _Scuola di San Rocco_. And there a
+solemn man in spectacles took them in hand. They said to him too: "Trot
+our your Tintorettos," and he led them up to a big, dingy canvas, and
+they said: "Trot out your next," and they went the rounds of them all,
+and they asked, "Where's your Duveneck?" and he said he had never heard
+of Duveneck, and they said, "Why, he's here!" and they left him hunting,
+and were back in their _gondola_ in ten minutes, and they guessed they
+could do with Rubens! I trembled to think of the shock to tourists and
+my highly intellectual friends at home, religiously studying Baedeker
+and reading Ruskin, could they have heard the men from Munich talking of
+art and of Venice. And I must have been painfully scandalized had I not
+got so much further on with my education as to have a glimmering of the
+truth Whistler was trying to beat into the unwilling head of the British
+public--that an artist knows more about art than the man who isn't an
+artist, and has the best right to an opinion on the subject.
+
+Perhaps their disappointment in Venice was the reason of their
+pre-occupation with Munich. Certainly "Now, at Munich" was the beginning
+and end of the talk as "when 'the boys' were here" had been before they
+came. They would not admit that anything good could exist outside of
+Munich. I remember Duveneck once suggesting that Paris was the best
+place for the student, to whom it was a help just to see what was going
+on around him.
+
+"But what does go on round the student there?" McFarlane interrupted.
+"It's all fads in Paris. What do they talk about in Paris to-day but
+values? [This, remember, was more than a quarter of a century ago.]
+That's all they teach the student, all they think of. Look at Bisbing's
+picture last year. They all raved over it, said it was the _clou_ of
+the Salon, medalled it, bought it for the Luxembourg, and I don't know
+what all. And what was it?--Pale green sheep in the foreground, pale
+green mountains in the background, so pale you could shoot peas through
+them. That's what you have to do now to make a success in Paris--get
+your values so that you can shoot peas through 'em. And what will it be
+to-morrow? And what help is it to the student, anyway?"
+
+But one thing certain is, that whatever the fads and movements in the
+Paris studios happened to be, the American student in those days did see
+what was going on in Paris, and just to see, just to feel it, was, as
+Duveneck held, a help, an inspiration. To-day, living in his own
+_pensions_, studying in his own schools, loafing in his own clubs, he
+does not take any interest in what is going on outside of them and will
+talk about what "the Frenchmen are doing" as if he were still in
+Kalamazoo or Oshkosh.
+
+What the student, in Duveneck's and McFarlane's time saw going on round
+him in Munich was, as well as I could make out, chiefly balls and
+pageants. To this day I cannot help thinking of life in Munich as one
+long spectacle and dance. Duveneck, who could talk with calmness of his
+painting, was stirred to animation when he recalled the costumes he had
+invented for himself and his friends. He could not conceal his pride in
+the success of a South Sea Islander he had designed, the effect achieved
+by the simple means of burnt Sienna rubbed into the poor man, but so
+vigorously that it took months to get it out again, and a blanket which
+he mislaid towards morning so that his walk home at dawn, like a savage
+skulking in the shadows, was a triumph of realism. Pride, too, coloured
+Duveneck's account of the appearance of the Socialist Carpenter of his
+creation who made a huge sensation by inciting to riot in the streets of
+an elaborate Old Munich--the origin of Old London and Old Paris and all
+the sham Old Towns that Exhibitions have long since staled for us. But
+his masterpiece was the Dissipated Gentleman, like all masterpieces a
+marvel of simplicity--hired evening clothes, a good long roll in the
+muddiest gutter on the way to the ball, and it was done; but the art,
+Duveneck said, was in the rolling, which in this case, under his
+direction, was so masterly that at the door the Dissipated Gentleman was
+mistaken for the real thing and, if friends had not come up in the nick
+of time, the door would have been shut in his face.
+
+Duveneck was as enthusiastic over the Charles V. ball, though all the
+artists of Munich contributed to its splendour, working out their
+costumes with such respect for truth and so regardless of cost that for
+months and years afterwards not a bit of old brocade or lace was to be
+had in the antiquity shops of Bavaria. And the students were responsible
+for the siege of an old castle outside the town, and in their
+archaeological ardour persuaded the Museum to lend the armour and arms of
+the correct date, and, in their appreciation of the favour, fought with
+so much restraint that the casualties were a couple of spears snapped.
+And, in my recollection, their recollections stood for such truth and
+gorgeousness that when England, years afterwards, took to celebrating
+its past with pageants, more than once I found myself thinking how much
+better they order these things in Munich!
+
+And from the studios came the inspiration for that ball Munich talks of
+to this day in which all the nations were represented. There was a Hindu
+temple, a Chinese pagoda, and an Indian wigwam. But the crowning touch
+was the Esquimaux hut. Placed in a hall apart, at the foot of a great
+stairway, it was built of some composition in which pitch was freely
+used, lit by tallow candles, and hung with herrings offered for sale by
+nine Esquimaux dressed in woollen imitation of skins with the furry side
+turned out. All evening the hut was surrounded, only towards midnight
+could the crowd be induced to move on to some fresh attraction. In the
+moment's lull, one of the Esquimaux was tying up a new line of herrings
+when he brushed a candle with his arm. In a second he was blazing.
+Another ran to his rescue. In another second the hut was a furnace and
+nine men were in flames, with pitch and wool for fuel. One of the few
+people still lounging about the hut, fearing a panic, gave the signal to
+the band, who struck up _Carmen_. Never since, McFarlane said, had he
+listened to the music of _Carmen_, never again could he listen to it,
+without seeing the burning hut, the men rushing out of it with the
+flames leaping high above them, tearing at the blazing wool, in their
+agony turning and twisting as in some wild fantastic dance, while above
+the music he could hear the laughter of the crowd, who thought it a
+joke--a new scene in the spectacle.
+
+He snatched a rug from somewhere and tried to throw it over one of the
+men, but the man flew past to the top of the great stairway. There he
+was seized and rolled over and over on the carpet until the flames were
+out. He got up, walked downstairs, asked for beer, drank it to the
+dregs, and fell dead with the glass in his hand--the first to die, the
+first freed from his agony. Of the nine, but two survived. Seven lay
+with their hut, a charred heap upon the ground, before the laughing
+crowd realized what a pageant of horror Fate had planned for them.
+
+Munich stories, before the night was over, had to be washed down with
+Munich beer, which, at that time as still, I fancy, was best at Bauer's.
+By some unwritten law, inscrutable as the written, it was decreed that,
+though I might sit all evening the only woman at our table in the
+_Orientale_--oftener than not the only woman in the _cafe_--it was not
+"the thing" for me to go on to Bauer's. Therefore, first, the whole
+company would see me home. It was a short stroll along the _Riva_, but
+the Lagoon, dim and shadowy, stretched away beyond us, dimmer islands
+resting on its waters, the lights of the boats sprinkling it with gold
+under the high Venetian sky sprinkled with stars; and so beautiful was
+it, and so sweet the April night, that the men from Munich could not
+hold out against the enchantment of Venice in spring. I felt it a
+concession when McFarlane admitted the loveliness of Venice by
+starlight, and his languor dropped from him under the spell, and I knew
+the game of boredom was up when, in this starlight, he decided that,
+after all, there might be more in the Tintorettos than he thought if
+only he had time to study them. But Easter holidays do not last for
+ever, and the day soon came when the men from Munich had to go back to
+where all was for the best in the best of all towns, but where no doubt,
+on the principle that we always prefer what we have not got at the
+moment, they told "the fellows" in the _Bier Kellars_ that only in
+Venice was life worth while, that Rubens was dingy, and that they
+guessed they could do with Tintoretto.
+
+
+V
+
+Somehow, we were never the same after they left us; not, I fancy,
+because we missed them, but because we could hold out still less than
+they against the spring. When the sun was so warm and the air so soft,
+when in the little canals wistaria bloomed over high brick walls, when
+boatloads of flowers came into Venice with the morning, when at noon the
+_Riva_ was strewn with sleepers--then indoors and work became an
+impertinence. On the slightest excuse J. and Duveneck no longer shut
+themselves in the studio, I gave up collecting material from my window
+and lunch from the _Riva_, Jobbins interrupted his search and Martin his
+argument, the Consul fought shy of the old corner in the _cafe_. And in
+the languid laziness that stole upon Venice, as well as upon us, I
+penetrated for the first time to the inner meaning of the chapter in his
+_Venetian Life_ that Howells labels _Comincia far Caldo_, the season
+when repose takes you to her inner heart and you learn her secrets, when
+at last you know _why_ it was an Abyssinian maid who played upon her
+dulcimer, at last you recognize in Xanadu the land where you were born.
+
+There was never a _festa_ in the _Piazza_ that we were not there,
+watching or walking with the bewildering procession of elegant young
+Venetians, and peasants from the mainland, and officers, and soldiers,
+and gondoliers with big caps set jauntily on their curls, and beautiful
+girls in the gay fringed shawls that have disappeared from Venice and
+the wooden shoes that once made an endless clatter along the _Riva_ but
+are heard no more, and Greeks, and Armenians, and priests, and beggars,
+passing up and down between the arcades and the _cafe_ tables that
+overflowed far into the square, St. Mark's more unreal in its splendour
+than ever with its domes and galleries and traceries against the blue
+of the Venetian night.
+
+There was never a side-show on the _Riva_ that we did not interrupt our
+work to go and see it; whether it was the circus in the little tent,
+with the live pony, the most marvellous of all sights in Venice; or the
+acrobats tumbling on their square of carpet; or the blindfolded,
+toothless old fortune-teller, whose shrill voice I can still hear
+mumbling "_Una volta soltanta per Napoli!_" when she was asked if
+Naples, this coming summer, as the last, would be ravaged by cholera.
+She was right, for in the town, cleaned out of picturesqueness, cholera
+could not again do its work in the old wholesale fashion.
+
+There was never an excursion to the Islands that we did not join it. To
+visit some of the further Islands was not so easy in those days, except
+for tourists with a fortune to spend on _gondolas_, and we were grateful
+to the occasional little steamboat that undertook to get us there,
+though with a crowd and noise and a brass band, for all the world like
+an excursion to Coney Island, and though most people, except the
+grateful natives, were obediently believing with Ruskin that it was the
+symbol of the degeneracy of Venice and would have thought themselves
+disgraced forever if they were seen on it. But the Lagoon was as
+beautiful from the noisy, fussy little steamboat as from a _gondola_,
+the sails of the fishing boats touching it with as brilliant colour, the
+Islands lying as peacefully upon its shining waters, the bells of the
+many _campanili_ coming as sweetly to our ears, the sky above as pure
+and radiant; and it mattered not how we reached the Islands, they were
+as enchanting when we landed.
+
+One wonderful day was at Torcello, where nothing could mar the
+loveliness of its solitude and desolation, its old cathedral full of
+strange mosaics and stranger memories, the green space in front that was
+once a _Piazza_ tangled with blossoms and sweet-scented in the May
+sunshine, the purple hills on the mainland melting into the pale sky.
+And a second day as wonderful was at Burano, with its rose-flushed
+houses and gardens and traditions of noise and quarrels, and the girls
+who followed the boat along the bank and pelted us with roses until
+Jobbins vowed he would go and live there--and he did, but a market boat
+brought him back in a week. And other excursions took us to Chioggia,
+the canals there alive with fishing boats and the banks with fishermen
+mending their nets; and to Murano, busy and beautiful both, with the
+throb of its glass furnaces and the peace of the fields where the dead
+sleep; and again and again to the _Lido_ where green meadows were
+sprinkled with daisies and birds were singing.
+
+More wonderful were the nights, coming home, when the gold had faded
+from sea and sky, the palaces and towers of Venice rising low on the
+horizon as in a City of Dreams, the Lagoon turned by the moon into a
+sheet of silver, lights like great fireflies stealing over the water,
+ghostly _gondolas_ gliding past,--then we were the real Lotus Eaters
+drifting to the only Lotus Land where all things have rest.
+
+The fussy little steamboat, I found, could rock ambition to sleep as
+well as a _gondola_, and life seemed to offer nothing better than an
+endless succession of days and nights spent on its deck bound for
+wherever it might bear us. I understood and sympathized with the men who
+lay asleep all day in the sunshine on the _Riva_ and who sang all night
+on the bridge below our windows. What is more, I envied them and wished
+they would take me into partnership. Were they not putting into practice
+the philosophy our ancient friend Davies had preached to me in Rome? But
+only the Venetian can master the secret of doing nothing with nothing to
+do it on, and if J. and I were to hope for figs with our bread, or even
+for bread by itself, we had to move on to the next place where work
+awaited us. And so the last of our nights in Venice came before spring
+had ripened into summer, and the last of our mornings when porters again
+scrambled for our bags, and we again stumbled after them up the long
+platform; and then there were again yells, but this time of "_Partenza_"
+and "_Pronti_," and the train hurried us away from the _Panada_, and the
+_Orientale_, and the Lagoon, to a world where no lotus grows and life is
+all labour.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+NIGHTS IN LONDON
+
+
+
+
+IN LONDON
+
+I
+
+
+I cannot remember how or why we began our Thursday nights. I rather
+think they began themselves and we kept them up to protect our days
+against our friends.
+
+It was an unusually busy time with us--or perhaps I ought to say with
+me, for, to my knowledge, J. has never known the time that was anything
+else. After our years of wandering, years of hotels and rooms and
+lodgings, we had just settled in London in the first place we had ever
+called our own--the old chambers in the old Buckingham Street house
+overlooking the river; I was doing more regular newspaper work than I
+had ever done before or ever hope to do again; we were in the
+Eighteen-Nineties, and I need neither the magnifying glasses through
+which age has the reputation of looking backward, nor the clever young
+men of to-day who write about that delectable decade and no doubt
+deplore my indiscretion in being alive to write about it myself, to show
+me how very much more amusing and interesting life was then than now.
+
+There is no question that people, especially people doing our sort of
+work, were much more awake in the Nineties, much more alive, much more
+keen about everything, even a fight, or above all a fight, if they
+thought a fight would clear the air. Those clever young men,
+self-appointed historians of a period they know only by hearsay, may
+deplore or envy its decadence. But because a small clique wrote anaemic
+verse and bragged of the vices for which they had not the strength,
+because a few youthful artists invented new methods of expression the
+outsider did not understand, that does not mean decadence. A period of
+revolt against decadence, of insurrection, of vigorous warfare it seemed
+to me who lived and worked through it. The Yellow Nineties, the Glorious
+Nineties, the Naughty Nineties, the Rococo Nineties, are descriptions I
+have seen, but the Fighting Nineties would be mine. As I recall those
+stimulating days, the prevailing attitude of the artist in his studio,
+the author at his desk, the critic at his task, was that of Henley's Man
+in the Street:
+
+  Hands in your pockets, eyes on the pavement,
+    Where in the world is the fun of it all?
+  But a row--but a rush--but a face for your fist.
+    Then a crash through the dark--and a fall.
+
+Scarcely an important picture was painted, an important illustration
+published, an important book written, an important criticism made, that
+it did not lead to battle. Few of the Young Men of the Nineties
+accomplished all the triumphant things they thought they could, but the
+one thing they never failed to do and to let the world know they were
+doing was to fight, and they loved nothing better--coats off, sleeves
+rolled up, arms squared. Whatever happened was to them a challenge.
+Whistler began the Nineties with his Exhibition at the Groupil Gallery
+and it was a rout for the enemy. The harmless portrait of Desboutin by
+Degas was hung at the New English Art Club and straightaway artists and
+critics were bludgeoning each other in the press. Men were elected to
+the Royal Academy, pictures were bought by the Chantrey Bequest; new
+papers and magazines were started by young enthusiasts with something to
+say and no place to say it in; new poets, yearning for degeneracy, read
+their poems to each other in a public house they preferred to
+re-christen a tavern; new printing presses were founded to prove the
+superiority of the esoteric few; new criticism--new because honest and
+intelligent--was launched; everything suddenly became _fin-de-siecle_
+in the passing catchword of the day borrowed from Paris; every fad of
+the Continent was adopted; but no matter what it might be, the incident,
+or work, or publication that roused any interest at all was the signal
+for the clash of arms, for the row and the rush. Everybody had to be in
+revolt, though it might not always have been easy to say against just
+what. I remember once, at the show of a group of young painters who
+fancied themselves fiery Independents, running across Felix Buhot, the
+most inflammable man in the world, and his telling me, with his wild
+eyes more aflame than usual, that he could smell the powder. He was not
+far wrong, if his metaphor was a trifle out of proportion to those very
+self-conscious young rebels. A good deal of powder was flying about in
+the Nineties, and when powder flies, whatever else may come of it, one
+thing sure is that nobody can sleep and most people want to talk.
+
+I had not been in London a year before I knew that there the _cafe_ was
+not the place to talk in. I have dreary memories of the first efforts J.
+and I, fresh from Italy, made to go on leading the easy, free-from-care
+life in restaurants and _cafes_ we had led in Rome and Venice. But it
+was not to be done. The distances were too great, the weather too
+atrocious, the little restaurants too impossible, the big restaurants
+too beyond our purse, and the only real _cafe_ was the _Cafe Royal_. At
+an earlier date Whistler had drawn his followers to it. In the Nineties
+Frederick Sandys was one of its most familiar figures. Even now,
+especially on Saturday nights, young men, in long hair and strange hats
+and laboriously unconventional clothes, are to be met there, looking a
+trifle solemnized by their share in so un-English an entertainment. For
+this is the trouble: The _cafe_ is not an English institution and
+something in the atmosphere tells you right away that it isn't. It
+might, it may still, serve us for an occasion, its mirrors and gilding
+and red velvet pleasantly reminiscent, but for night after night it
+would not answer at all as the _Nazionale_ had answered in Rome, the
+_Orientale_ in Venice.
+
+However, Buckingham Street made a good substitute as an extremely
+convenient centre for talk, and its convenience was so well taken
+advantage of that, at this distance of time, I am puzzled to see how we
+ever got any work done. J. and I have never been given to inhospitality,
+and we both liked the talk. But the day of reckoning came when, sitting
+down to lunch one morning, we realized that it was the first time we
+had eaten that simple meal alone for we could not remember how long.
+The lunch for which no preparation is made and at which the company is
+uninvited but amusing may be one of the most agreeable of feasts, but we
+knew too well that if we went on cutting short our days of work to enjoy
+it, we ran the risk of no lunch ever again for ourselves, let alone for
+anybody else.
+
+To be interrupted in the evening did not matter so much, though our
+evenings were not altogether free of work--nor are J.'s even yet, the
+years proving less kind in moulding him to the indolence to which, with
+age, I often find myself pleasantly yielding. Our friends, when we
+stopped them dropping in by day, began dropping in by night instead, and
+one group of friends to whom Thursday night was particularly well
+adapted for the purpose gradually turned their dropping in from a chance
+into a habit until, before we knew it, we were regularly at home every
+Thursday after dinner.
+
+[Illustration: Mezzotint by Joseph Pennell
+OUT OF OUR LONDON WINDOWS]
+
+The entertainment, if it can be called by so fine a name, always
+retained something of the character of chance with which it began. We
+sent out no invitations, we attempted no formality. Nobody was asked to
+play at anything or to listen to anything. Nobody was expected to
+dress, though anybody who wanted to could--everybody was welcome in the
+clothes they wore, whether they came straight from the studio or a
+dinner. If eventually I provided sandwiches--in addition to the tobacco
+always at hand in the home of the man who smokes and the
+whiskey-and-soda without which an Englishman cannot exist through an
+evening--it was because I got too hungry not to need something to eat
+before the last of the company had said good-night. We did not offer
+even the comfort of space. Once the small dining-room that had been
+Etty's studio, and the not over-large room that was J.'s, and the
+nondescript room that was drawing-room and my workroom combined, were
+packed solid, there was no place to overflow into except the short,
+narrow entrance hall, and I still grow hot at the thought of what became
+of hats and coats if it also was filled. I can never forget the
+distressing evening when in the bathroom--which, with the ingenuity of
+the designer of flats, had been fitted in at the end of the narrow hall
+and was the reason of its shortness--I caught William Penn devouring the
+gloves of an artist's wife who I do not believe has forgiven him to this
+day; nor the still more distressing occasion when I discovered Bobbie,
+William's poor timid successor, curled up on a brand-new bonnet of
+feathers and lace.
+
+But it was the very informality, so long as it led to no crimes on the
+part of our badly brought-up cats, that attracted the friends who were
+as busy and hard-working as ourselves,--this, and the freedom to talk
+without being silenced for the music that no talker wants to hear when
+he can listen to his own voice, or for the dances that nobody wants to
+watch if he can follow his own argument, or for the introductions that
+invariably interrupt at the wrong moment, or for the games and
+innumerable devices without which intelligent human beings are not
+supposed to be able to survive an evening in each other's company. The
+idle who play golf all day and bridge all night, who cannot eat in the
+short intervals between without music, believe that talk has gone out of
+fashion. My experience had been in Rome and Venice, was then in London,
+and is now, that men and women who have something to talk about are
+always anxious to talk about it, if only the opportunity is given to
+them, and the one attraction we offered was just this opportunity for
+people who had been doing more or less the same sort of work all day to
+meet and talk about it all night--the reason why, despite heat and
+discomfort, despite meagre fare and the risk to hats and coats, Thursday
+after Thursday crowded our rooms to suffocation as soon as evening came.
+
+[Illustration: Bust by Rodin
+W.E. HENLEY]
+
+
+II
+
+As, in memory, I listen to the endless talk of our Thursday nights, the
+leading voice, when not J.'s, is Henley's, which is natural since it was
+Henley, followed by his Young Men,--our name for his devoted staff
+always in attendance at his office and out of it,--who got so into the
+habit of dropping in to see us on Thursday night that we got into the
+habit of staying at home to see him. For Thursday was the night when the
+_National Observer_, which he was editing at the time, went to press and
+Ballantynes, the printers, were not more than five minutes away in
+Covent Garden. At about ten his work was over and he and his Young Men
+were free to do nothing save talk for the rest of the week if they
+chose--and they usually did choose--and Buckingham Street was a handy
+place to begin it in. Our rooms were already fairly well packed,
+pleasantly smoky, and echoing with the agreeable roar of battle when
+they arrived.
+
+I like to remember Henley as I saw him then, especially if my quite
+superfluous feeling of responsibility as hostess had brought me on some
+equally superfluous mission into the little hall at the moment of his
+arrival. As the door opened he would stand there at the threshold, his
+tall soft black hat still crowning his massive head, leaning on his
+crutch and stick as he waited to take breath after his climb up our
+three flights of stone stairs--"Did I really ever climb those stairs at
+Buckingham Street?"--he asked me the last time I saw him, some years
+later, at Worthing when he was ill and broken, and I have often
+marvelled myself how he managed it. But breathless as he might be, he
+always laughed his greeting. I cannot think of Henley as he was in his
+prime, to borrow a word that was a favourite with him, without hearing
+his laugh and seeing his face illuminated by it. Rarely has a man so
+hampered by his body kept his spirit so gay. He was meant to be a
+splendid creature physically and fate made of him a helpless
+cripple--who was it once described him as "the wounded Titan"? Everybody
+knows the story: he made sure that everybody should by telling it in his
+_Hospital Verses_. But everybody cannot know who did not know him how
+bravely he accepted his disaster. It seemed to me characteristic once
+when a young cousin of mine, a girl at the most susceptible age of
+hero-worship, meeting him for the first time in our chambers and
+volunteering, in the absence of anybody else available, to fetch the cab
+he needed, thought his allowing her to go on such an errand for him the
+eccentricity of genius and never suspected his lameness until he stood
+up and took his crutch from the corner. There was nothing about him to
+suggest the cripple.
+
+[Illustration: Painting by William Nicholson
+W.E. HENLEY]
+
+He was a remarkably handsome man, despite his disability, tall and large
+and fair, a noble head and profile, a shock of red hair, short red
+beard, keen pale blue eyes, his indomitable gaiety filling his face with
+life and animation, smoothing out the lines of pain and care. He was so
+striking in every way, his individuality so strangely marked that the
+wonder is the good portrait of him should be the exception. Nicholson,
+when painting him, was a good deal preoccupied with the big soft hat and
+blue shirt and flowing tie, feeling their picturesque value, and turned
+him into a brigand, a land pirate, to the joy of Henley, whom I always
+suspected of feeling this value himself and dressing as he did for the
+sake of picturesqueness. Simon Bussy seemed to see, not Henley, but
+Stevenson's caricature--the John Silver of _Treasure Island_, the
+cripple with the face as big as a ham. Even Whistler failed and never
+printed more than one or two proofs of the lithograph for which Henley
+sat. Rodin came nearest success, his bust giving the dignity and
+ruggedness and character of head and profile both. He and Nicholson
+together go far to explain the man.
+
+Unfortunately there is no biography at all. Charles Whibley was to have
+written the authorized life, but the world still waits. Cope Cornford
+attempted a sketch, but scarcely the shadow of Henley emerges from its
+pages. Because he thundered and denounced and condemned and slashed to
+pieces in the _National Observer_, his contemporaries imagined that
+Henley did nothing anywhere at any time save thunder and denounce and
+condemn and slash to pieces and that he was altogether a fierce,
+choleric, intolerant, impossible sort of a person. The chances are few
+now realize that Henley was enough of an influence in his generation for
+it to have mattered to anybody what manner of man he was. A glimpse of
+him remains here and there. Stevenson has left the description of his
+personality, so strong that he was felt in a room before he was seen.
+His vigour and his manliness, survive in his work, but cannot quite
+explain the commanding power he was in his generation, while neither he
+nor his friends have shewn, as it should be shewn, the other side to his
+character, the gay, the kindly side, so that I feel almost as if I owed
+it to his memory to put on record my impressions of my first meeting
+with him, since it was only this side he then gave me the chance to see.
+
+I wonder sometimes why I had never met Henley before. When J. and I came
+to London he was editing the _Magazine of Art_, a little later he
+managed the _Art Journal_, and in both he published a number of J.'s
+drawings, and we had letters from him. We went to houses where he often
+visited. I remember hearing him announced once at the Robinsons' in
+Earl's Terrace, but Miss Mary Robinson, as she was then--Madame Duclaux
+as she is now--left everybody in the drawing-room while she went to see
+him downstairs, because of his lameness she said, but partly, I
+fancied, because she wanted to keep him to herself to discuss a new
+series of articles. She had just "come out" in literature and was as
+fluttered by her every new appearance in print as most girls are by
+theirs in a ball-room. In other houses, more than once I just missed
+him, I had never got nearer than business correspondence when he left
+London to edit the _Scots Observer_ in Edinburgh, and he stayed there
+until the _Scots_ became the _National Observer_ with its offices in
+London.
+
+I had heard more than enough about him in the meanwhile. The man who
+says what he believes to be the truth--the man who sits in, and talks
+from, the chair of the scorners--is bound to get himself hated, and
+Henley came in for his fair share of abuse. As somebody says, truth
+never goes without a scratched face.
+
+But, like all men hated by the many, Henley inspired devotion in the few
+who, in his case, were not only devoted themselves but eager to make
+their friends devoted too. When he got back to London one of his Young
+Men, whom I do not see why I should not call Charles Whibley, insisted
+that J. and I must meet Henley first in the right way, that all our
+future relations with him depended upon it, and that this right way
+would be for him to ask Henley and ourselves, and nobody else, to dinner
+in his rooms.
+
+When the evening came J. was off on a journey for work and I went alone
+to Fig-Tree House--the little old house, with a poor shabby London
+apology of a fig-tree in front, on Milbank Street by the riverside,
+which, with Henley's near Great College Street office round the corner,
+has disappeared in the fury of municipal town-disfigurement. A popular
+young man, in making his plans, cannot afford to reckon without his
+friends. Four uninvited guests, all men, had arrived before me, a fifth
+appeared as I did, and he was about the last man any of the party could
+have wanted at that particular moment--a good and old and intimate
+friend of Stevenson's, whose own name I am too discreet to mention but
+to whom, for reasons I am also too discreet to explain, I may give that
+of Michael Finsbury instead. Whoever has read _The Wrong Box_ knows that
+Michael Finsbury enjoyed intervals of relaxation from work, knows also
+the nature of the relaxation. I had struck him at the high tide of one
+of these intervals. It was terribly awkward for everybody, especially
+for me. I have got now to an age when I could face that sort of
+awkwardness with equanimity, even with amusement. But I was young then,
+I had not lived down my foolish shyness, and I would have run if, in my
+embarrassment, I had had the courage,--would have run anyhow, I do
+believe, if it had not been for Henley. He seized the situation and
+mastered it. He had the reputation of being the most brutal of men, but
+he showed a delicacy that few could have surpassed or equalled under
+the circumstances. He simply forced me to forget the presence of the
+objectionable Michael Finsbury, who at the other end of the table, I
+learned afterwards, was overwhelming his neighbours with a worse
+embarrassment than mine by finding me every bit as objectionable as I
+found him, and saying so with a frankness it was not in me to emulate.
+
+The force Henley used with such success was simply his talk. He did not
+let my attention wander for one minute, so full of interest was all he
+had to say, while the enthusiasm with which he said it became
+contagious. I can remember to this day how he made me see a miracle in
+the mere number of the Velasquezes in the Prado, an adventure in every
+hansom drive through the London streets, an event in the dressing of the
+salad for dinner--how he transformed life into one long Arabian Nights'
+Entertainment, which is why I suppose it has always been my pride that
+his poem called by that name he dedicated to me. And so the evening that
+began as one of the most embarrassing in my experience ended as one of
+the most delightful, and the man whom I had trembled to meet because of
+his reputation with those who did not know him or understand intolerance
+in a just cause, won me over completely by his kindness, his
+consideration, his charm.
+
+Henley delighted in talk, that was why he talked so well. On Thursday
+night his crutch would be left with his big hat at the front door; then,
+one hand leaning on his cane, the other against the wall for support, he
+would hobble over to the chair waiting for him, usually by the window
+for he loved to look out on the river, and there, seldom moving except
+to stand bending over with both arms on the back of the chair, which was
+his way of resting, and always with his Young Men round him, the talk
+would begin and the talk would last until only my foolish ideas of
+civility kept me up to listen. As a woman, I had not then, nor have I
+yet, ceased to be astonished by man's passion for talking shop and his
+power of going on with it forever. My explanation of this special power
+used to be that the occupation supplied him by the necessity of keeping
+his pipe or his cigarette or his cigar going, with the inevitable
+interruptions and pauses and movement, and the excitement of the eternal
+hunt for the matches, made the difference and helped to keep him
+awake--there is nothing more difficult for me personally than to sit
+still long when my hands are idle, unless I am reading. But the women I
+know who smoke are not men's equals in the capacity for endless talk and
+the reason must be to seek elsewhere. He who divines it will have gone
+far to solving the tedious problem of sex.
+
+Of Henley the talker, at least, one portrait remains. He was the
+original of Stevenson's Burly--the talker who would roar you down, bury
+his face in his hands, undergo passions of revolt and agony, letting
+loose a spring torrent of words. There was always a wild flood and storm
+of talk wherever Henley might be. He and his Young Men were the most
+clamorous group of the clamorous Nineties, though curiously their
+clamour seems faint in the ears of the present authorities on that noisy
+period. I have read one of these authorities' description of the London
+of the Nineties dressed in a powder puff, dancing beneath Chinese
+lanterns, being as wicked as could be in artificial rose-gardens. But
+had Henley and his Young Men suspected the existence of a London like
+that, they would have overthrown it with their voices, as Joshua
+overthrew the walls of Jericho with his trumpets. To other authorities
+the Nineties represent an endless orgy of societies--Independent Theatre
+Societies, Fabian Societies, Browning Societies, every possible kind of
+societies--but the _National Observer_, with its keen scent for shams,
+was as ready to pounce upon any and all of them for the good of their
+health, and to upbraid their members as cranks. It was a paper that
+existed to protest against just this sort of thing, as against most
+other things in a sentimental and artificial and reforming and ignorant
+world. It made as much noise in print as its editorial staff made in
+talk. The main function of criticism, according to Henley, was to
+increase the powers of depreciation rather than of appreciation, and
+what a healthy doctrine it is! As editor, he roared down his opponents
+no less lustily than he roared them down as talkers, and he had the
+strong wit and the strong heart that a man must have, or so it is said,
+to know when to tell the truth, which, with him, was always. He could
+not stand anything like affectation, or what people were calling
+aestheticism and decadence. To him, literature was literature and art was
+art, and not puling sentiment, affected posturing, lilies and
+sunflowers. The _National Observer_ was the housetop from which he
+shouted for all who passed to hear that it did not matter twopence what
+the dabbler wanted to express if he could not express it, if he had not
+the technique of his medium at his fingers' ends and under his perfect
+control. A man might indulge in noble and beautiful ideas, and if he did
+not know how to put them in beautiful words or in beautiful paint or in
+beautiful sound, he was anathema, to be cast into outer darkness where
+there is gnashing of teeth--the doctrine of art for art's sake which the
+advanced young leaders of the new generation assure me is hopelessly out
+of date. Pretence of any kind was as the red rag; "bleat" was the
+unpardonable sin; the man who was "human" was the man to be praised. I
+would not pretend to say who invented this meaning for the word "human."
+Perhaps Louis Stevenson. As far back as 1880, in a letter from Davos
+describing the people "in a kind of damned hotel" where he had put up, I
+find him using it as Henley and his Young Men used it later:
+
+  Eleven English Parsons, all
+    Entirely inoffensive; four
+  True human beings--what I call
+    Human--the deuce a cipher more.
+
+Stevenson may even then have learned it from Henley. But however that
+may have been, "bleat" and "human" were the two words ever recurring
+like a refrain in the columns of the _National Observer_, ever the
+beginning and end of argument in the heated atmosphere of Buckingham
+Street.
+
+In my memory, every Thursday night stands for a battle. Henley was then
+always at his best. His week's task was done, he was not due at his
+house in Addiscombe until the next day, for he always stayed in his
+Great College Street rooms from Monday to Friday--and the night was
+before him. At first I trembled a little at the smell of powder under my
+own roof, at turning our chambers into the firing line when friends came
+to them to pass a peaceful friendly evening--the Roman and Venetian
+_cafes_ and restaurants of my earlier experience had been common ground
+on which combatants shared equal rights or, better, no rights at all. It
+was probably my old Philadelphia bringing up that made me question the
+propriety of the same freedom at home, that made me doubt its being
+quite "the thing" when J., who is an excellent fighter though a
+Philadelphian, met Henley in a clash of words. But I quickly got
+accustomed to the fight and enjoyed it and would not have had it
+otherwise.
+
+Some friends who came, I must confess, enjoyed it less, especially if
+they were still smarting from a recent attack in the _National
+Observer_. There were evenings when it took a good deal of skilful
+manoeuvring on everybody's part to keep Henley and his victims at a
+safe distance from each other. More than once in later days Walter Crane
+laughed with us at the memory of a Thursday night, just after he had
+been torn to pieces in the best _National Observer_ style, when he
+gradually realized that he was being kept a prisoner in the corner into
+which he had been driven on his arrival, and he could not understand why
+until, breaking loose, he discovered Henley in the next room. Our alarm
+was not surprising, knowing as we did what a valiant fighter Crane was
+himself: as a socialist waving the red flag in the face of the world, as
+an artist forever rushing into the papers to defend his theories of art,
+as a man refusing to see his glory in passing by an offence. Not very
+long before, J. had exasperated him in print, by the honest expression
+of an opinion he did not happen to like, into threats of a big stick
+ready for attack the next time J. ventured upon his walks abroad. I need
+not add that J. did not bother to stay at home, that the big stick never
+materialized, that, though this was only the first of many fights
+between the two, Walter Crane was our friend to the end. But the little
+episode gives the true spirit of the Nineties.
+
+I can still see Beardsley dodging from group to group to escape Henley,
+for he never recovered from the fright of the first encounter. He told
+me the story at the time. He had gone, by special appointment, to call
+on Henley, under his arm the little portfolio he was rarely without in
+those early days, ready and enchanted as he always was to show his
+drawings to anybody willing to look at them. As he went up the two
+flights of stairs to Henley's Great College Street rooms, he heard a
+voice, loud, angry, terrifying; at the top, through an open door, he saw
+a youth standing in the middle of the room listening in abject terror to
+a large red man at a desk whom he knew instinctively to be Henley;--one
+glance, and he turned and fled, down the stairs, into the street, the
+little portfolio under his arm, his pace never slackening until he got
+well beyond the Houses of Parliament, through the Horse Guards into the
+Park.
+
+Other friends would not come at all on Thursday because of Henley, just
+as later more than one stayed away altogether because of Whistler. I was
+wretchedly nervous when they did come and brave a face-to-face meeting.
+Henley was not the sort of man to shirk a fight in the open. The
+principal reason for his unpopularity was just that habit of his of
+saying what he thought no matter where or when or to whom. He did not
+spare his friends, for he would not have kept them as friends had they
+not held some opinions worth his attacking, and they understood and
+respected him for it. Moreover, he said what he had to say in the
+plainest language. He roared his adversary down in good, strong,
+picturesque English, if that was any consolation, and with a splendidly
+rugged eloquence.
+
+I wish I could remember the words as well as the roar. Henley's
+eloquence cannot be forgotten by those who ever once listened to him,
+but his wit was not, like Whistler's, so keen nor his thrust so direct
+that the phrase, the one word of the retort or the attack, was
+unforgettable. He had his little affectations of speech as of style, and
+they added to its picturesqueness. But it was what he said that counted,
+the talk itself that probably inspired more sound thought and sound
+writing than most talk heard in the England of the Nineties. But it fell
+unrecorded on paper and memory could not be trusted after all these
+years.
+
+It is the greater pity because his books are few. He was poor when he
+started in life; almost at once he married; he was generous to a fault,
+and the generous man never yet lived who was not pursued by parasites;
+and as he was obliged to earn money and as his books were not of the
+stuff that makes the "best sellers," his criticism of life and art was
+expressed mainly in journalism.
+
+Unfortunately, no just idea of the amount or the quality of his
+journalistic work is now to be had even from the files of the _National
+Observer_. He had a way of editing every article sent in to him until it
+became more than a fair imitation of his own. I can sympathize with his
+object--the artist's desire for harmony, for the unity of the paper as a
+whole. But if he succeeded, as he did, it was at the sacrifice of the
+force, the effect, the character of individual contributions, and nobody
+can now say for sure which were Henley's save those he re-published in
+book form. When articles I wrote for him appeared in print, it was an
+open question with me whether I had the right to call them mine and to
+take any money for them. His _Views and Reviews_ gathered from the
+_National Observer_ and other papers and periodicals, his three or four
+small volumes of verse, the plays he wrote with Stevenson, an anthology
+or two, a few books of his editing, are scarcely sufficient to explain
+to the present generation his importance in his day and why his
+influence made itself felt in literature as keenly as Whistler's in
+art, through all the movements and excitements and enthusiasms of the
+Nineties. The joyous wars that marked the beginning of my life in
+London, when not led by Whistler's "Ha! Ha!" were commanded by Henley's
+roar.
+
+No man was ever more in need of a Boswell than Henley. Dr. Weir Mitchell
+once complained to me that in America nobody waited upon great men to
+report their sayings, while in England a young man was always somewhere
+near with a clean cuff to scribble them on. The enthusiast, with his
+cuff an impatient blank, never hung about Henley. Anyway, that was not
+what our Thursday evenings were for. Of all his Young Men who climbed up
+the Buckingham Street stairs with him on Thursday night and sat round
+him, his devoted disciples, until they climbed down the Buckingham
+Street stairs with him again, not one seems to have hit upon this useful
+way of proving his devotion.
+
+I do not need to be told that this was no excuse for my not having my
+cuff ready. But, foolishly perhaps, I too often spent my Thursday nights
+oppressed by other cares. For one thing, I could seldom keep my weekly
+article on Cookery out of my mind. Without it Saturday's _Pall-Mall_, I
+felt, would lose its brilliancy and my bank account, I knew, would grow
+appreciably less, and Friday was my day for writing it. A serious
+question therefore was, how, if I did not get to bed until two or three
+or four o'clock on Friday morning, was I to sit down at my desk at nine
+and be the brilliant authority on Eating that I thought I was?
+
+Another distraction grew out of my mistaken sense of duty as hostess, my
+feeling of responsibility in providing for all a share in the cheerful
+smell of powder and the stimulating sound of strife.
+
+Also, men being at best selfish animals, their wives, whose love of
+battle was less, were often an anxiety.
+
+These seemed big things at the time, though in retrospect they have
+dwindled into trifles that I had no business to let come between me and
+my opportunities to store up for future generations talk as brilliant as
+any on record. Of course I heard a great deal of it, and what I missed
+at home on our Thursday nights, I made up for at Henley's, and at
+friends' houses on many other occasions, and few can answer better than
+I for the quality of Henley's talk if I have forgotten the actual words.
+Its strength was its simple directness,--no posing, no phrasing, no
+attitudinizing for effect. This, I know, was always what most struck
+people when they first met him on our Thursday nights, especially
+Americans, for with us in America the man who has won the reputation of
+greatness too often seems afraid he will lose it if he does not forever
+advertise it by fireworks of cleverness and wit.
+
+Henley's talk had too a strange mixture of the brutal and the tender,
+the rough and the fine, a blending of the highest things with what might
+seem to the ordinary man the most trivial. I asked two old friends of
+his the other day what they remembered best of him and of his talk. The
+answer of one was: "He was certainly the most stupendous Jove-like
+creature who ever lived, and I did not in the least mind his calling me
+Billy, which I have always hated from others." The second answer was:
+"He talked as he wrote, and I know of nothing more characteristic of his
+talking and his writing than that tragic poem in which, with his heart
+crying for the child he had adored and lost, he could compare himself to
+'an old black rotter of a boat' past service, and could see, when
+criticised for it, nothing discordant in that slang _rotter_ dropped
+into such verse!" A good deal of Henley is in both answers. This
+curious blend must have especially struck everybody who saw him and
+listened to him in his own home. I can recall summer Sunday afternoons
+at Addiscombe, with Henley sitting on a rug spread on the lawn behind
+his house, Mrs. Henley at his side, his eyes following with twinkling
+tenderness his little daughter as she ran backwards and forwards busy
+with the manifold cares of childhood, while all the time, to his Young
+Men gathered round him, he was thundering against the last book, or the
+last picture show, or the last new music, in language not unworthy of
+Defoe or Smollett, for Henley could call a spade not only a spade but a
+steam shovel when so minded. He could soar to the heights and dive to
+the depths in the same breath.
+
+But Henley's talk was animated above all by the intense and virile love
+of life that I was so conscious of in him personally, that reveals
+itself in every line he wrote, and that is what I liked best about him.
+He was so alive, so exhilarated with the sense of being alive. The
+tremendous vitality of the man, that should have found its legitimate
+outlet in physical activity, seemed to have gone instead into his
+thought and his expression of it--as if the very fact that fate forced
+him to remain a looker-on had made him the more sensitive to the
+beauty, the joy, the challenge in everything life gave him to look at.
+He could wrest romance even out of the drear, drab hospital--there is
+another characteristic glimpse in one of Stevenson's letters, a picture
+of Henley sitting up in his hospital bed, his hair and beard all
+tangled, "talking as cheerfully as if he had been in a King's palace, or
+the great King's palace of the blue air."
+
+His interest in life was far too large and all-embracing for him to be
+indifferent to the smallest or most insignificant part of it. He had
+none of the disdain for everyday details, none of the fear of the
+commonplace that oppresses many men who think themselves great. Nothing
+that lived came amiss to his philosophy or his pleasure. He could talk
+as brilliantly upon the affairs of the kitchen as upon those of state,
+he could appreciate gossip as well as verse, he could laugh over an
+absurdity as easily as he could extol the masterpiece. Romance for him
+was everywhere--in the slang of the cockney of the Strand as in a
+symphony by Berlioz, in 'Arriet's feathers as in the "Don Diegos" of the
+Prado--the mere sound of the title in his mouth became a tribute to the
+master he honoured above most--in the patter of the latest Lion-comique
+of the Halls as in the prose of Meredith or Borrow, in the disreputable
+cat stealing home through the dull London dawn as in the Romanticists
+emerging from the chill of Classicism--in everything, big and little, in
+which he felt the life so dear to him throbbing.
+
+And he loved always the visible sign through which the appeal came. I
+have seen him lean, spell-bound, from our windows on a blue summer
+night, thrilled by the presence out there of Cleopatra's Needle, the
+pagan symbol flaunting its slenderness against river and sky, while in
+the distance the dome of St. Paul's, the Christian symbol, hung a
+phantom upon the heavens. His pleasure in the friendship of men of rank
+and family might have savoured of snobbishness had not one understood
+how much they stood for to him as symbols. I am sure he could fancy
+himself with these friends that same King of Babylon who thrills in the
+lover of his poem. I used to think that for him all the drama of
+_Admiral Guinea_, one of the plays he wrote with Stevenson, was
+concentrated in the tap-tap of the blind man's stick. In his _Hospital
+Verses_, his _London Voluntaries_, his every _Rhyme_ and _Rhythm_, the
+outward sign is the expression of the emotion, the thought that is in
+him. And coming down to more ordinary matters--ordinary, that is, to
+most people--I shall never forget, once when I was in Spain and he wrote
+to me there, his decoration of my name on the envelope with the finest
+ceremonial prefix of the ceremonious Spanish code which to him
+represented the splendour of the land of Don Diego and Don Quixote.
+
+It was this faculty of entering into the heart, the spirit of life and
+all things in it that made him the inspiring companion and friend he
+was, that widened his sympathies until he, whose intolerance was a
+byword with his contemporaries, showed himself tolerant of everything
+save sham and incompetence. The men who would tell you in their day, who
+will tell you now, of the great debt they owe to Henley, are men of the
+most varied interests, whose style and subject both might have been
+expected to prove a great gulf to separate them. Ask Arthur Morrison
+straight from the East End, or FitzMaurice Kelly fresh from Spain; ask
+W.B. Blakie preoccupied with the modern development of the printed book,
+or Wells adrift in a world of his own invention; ask Kipling steeped in
+the real, or Barrie lost in the Kail-Yard; ask Kenneth Grahame on his
+Olympian heights or George S. Street deep in his study of the prig--ask
+any one of these men and a score besides what Henley's sympathy,
+Henley's outstretched hand, meant to him, and some idea of the breadth
+of his judgment and taste and helpfulness may be had. Why he could
+condescend even to me when, in my brave ignorance, I undertook to write
+that weekly column on Cookery for the _Pall-Mall_. He it was who gave me
+Dumas's _Dictionnaire de la Cuisine_, the corner-stone of my collection
+of cookery books--a fact in which I see so much of Henley that I feel as
+if the stranger to him who to-day takes the volume down from my shelves
+and reads on the fly-leaf the simple inscription, "To E.R.P. d.d.
+W.E.H.," in his little crooked and crabbed writing, must see in it the
+eloquent clue to his personality that it is to me.
+
+
+III
+
+I have said that Henley seldom came to us--as indeed he seldom went
+anywhere or, for that matter, seldom stayed at home--without a
+contingent of his Young Men in attendance. I do not believe I could ever
+have gone to his rooms in Great College Street, or to his house at
+Addiscombe, or in later, sadder days to the other, rather gloomy, house
+on the riverside at Barnes,--turned into some sort of college the last
+time I passed, with a long bare students' table in the downstairs
+dining-room where I had been warmed and thrilled by so much exhilarating
+talk,--that some of his Young Men were not there before me or did not
+come in before I left. In London, on his journeys to and fro, they
+surrounded him as a bodyguard. If on those old Thursday nights, his was
+the loudest voice, theirs played up to it untiringly. There were no half
+measures about them. As warriors in the cause of art and literature,
+they reserved nothing from their devotion to their leader, they
+exhausted every possibility of that form of flattery usually considered
+the greatest. They fought Henley's battles with hardly less valour,
+hardly milder roaring. On Thursday, they had been working with him all
+day and all evening, they probably had lunched together, and dined
+together, and yet so far from showing any desire to separate on their
+arrival in our rooms, they immediately grouped themselves again round
+Henley.
+
+It was curious, anyway, how strong the tendency was with all the company
+to break up into groups. Work was the common bond, but there was also a
+special bond in each different kind of work. On my round as hostess I
+was sure to find the writers in one corner, the artists in another, the
+architects in a third--though to this day it is a question with me why
+we should have had enough architects to make a group and, more puzzling,
+why, having them, they should have been so unpopular, unless it was
+because of their air of prosperity and respectability, always as correct
+in appearance as if there was a possible client at the door. I can still
+recall the triumphant glee, out of all proportion to the cause, of one
+of Henley's Young Men the Thursday night he came to tell me that all the
+architects were safe out of the way in the studio, and "I have shut both
+doors," he added, "and now that we are rid of them we can talk." As if
+any of Henley's Young Men under any circumstances ever did anything
+else.
+
+Some of Henley's staff, if I remember, never came to us, others came
+only occasionally, but a few failed us as rarely as Henley himself. The
+Thursday night was the exception that did not see Charles Whibley at
+Henley's right hand even as he was in the pages of the _National
+Observer_, not merely ready for the fight but provoking it, insisting
+upon it, forcing it, boisterous in battle, looking like an
+undergraduate, talking like a pastmaster of the art of invective, with a
+little stammer that gave point to his lightest commonplace. Rarely
+lagging very far behind came Marriott Watson, young, tall, blonde,
+good-looking--a something exotic, foreign in the good looks that I put
+down to New Zealand, for I suppose New Zealand as well as America has
+produced a type--not quite so truculent in talk as in print, more
+inclined to fight with a smile. A third was Wilfred Pollock, forgotten
+save by his friends I am afraid; and a fourth, Vernon Blackburn, who
+began life as a monk at Fort Augustus and finished it as a musical
+critic, he too I fear scarcely more than a name; and a fifth, Jack
+Stuart, and a sixth, Harold Parsons, and a seventh, and an eighth, and I
+can hardly now say how many more long since dead, now for me vague
+ghosts from out that old past so overflowing with life.
+
+When William Waldorf Astor bought the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and started
+the weekly _Pall Mall Budget_ and the monthly _Pall Mall Magazine_, he
+presented Henley with two or three new Young Men and added to our
+company on Thursday nights, little as he had either of these
+achievements in view. His plunge into newspaper proprietorship was one
+of the newspaper ventures that counted for most in the Nineties. It was
+a venture inclining to amateurism in detail, but run on business, not
+romantic, lines and therefore it was less talked about than those
+purely amateur plunges into journalism which gave the Nineties so much
+of their picturesqueness. But all the same, we saw revolution in it, the
+possibility of wholesale regeneration, the inauguration of a new era,
+when "sham" would be exposed, and "Bleat" silenced, and art grow "Human"
+once more. In the _Budget_ and the _Magazine_ it was likewise to be
+proved that America and France were not alone in understanding and
+valuing the art of illustration:--vain hopes!
+
+Henley and his Young Men rejoiced in a new sphere for fighting, certain
+of a brilliant victory, since they were to have a share in the command.
+Astor, with a fine fling for independence--his only one in public--or
+else with that old gentlemanly dream of a newspaper "written by
+gentlemen for gentlemen," had captured his editors in regions where
+editors are not usually hunted--Henry Cust, heir to a title, for the
+_Gazette_, Lord Frederick Hamilton, his title already inherited, for the
+_Magazine_. Fleet Street shrugged its shoulders, laughed a little, not
+believing title and rank to have the same value in journalism as in
+society. Cust, to do him justice, agreed with Fleet Street, and, knowing
+that he was without experience, had the sense to appeal for help to
+those with it. By good luck he went to Henley, who was not free to do
+much for the paper save give it his advice, offer it those of his Young
+Men whom he could spare, and take under his wing the new Young Men it
+invented for itself. When new enthusiasts fell into Henley's train, it
+was never long before they followed him to Buckingham Street on Thursday
+nights.
+
+I could scarcely label as anybody's Young Man Iwan-Mueller, huge, half
+Russian, half English, all good comrade, who had come up from Manchester
+and the editorship of a leading paper there to be Cust's Assistant
+Editor. He was nearly Henley's contemporary, but he did not, for such a
+trifle as age, let any one of Henley's Young Men exceed him in devotion,
+and his laugh became the unfailing accompaniment of Henley's talk, so
+much so that I am convinced if Henley still leads the talk in the land
+beyond the grave, Iwan-Mueller still punctuates it with the big bracing
+laugh that was as big as himself.
+
+[Illustration: Photograph by Frederick Hollyer
+IWAN-MUeLLER AND GEORGE W. STEEVENS]
+
+At the other extreme, younger than the youngest of the Young Men he
+joined, came George W. Steevens, fresh from Oxford, Balliol Prize
+Scholar, shy and carrying it off, in the Briton's way, with appalling
+rudeness and more appalling silence. I remember J., upon whose nerves as
+well as mine this silence got, taking me apart one Thursday evening
+to tell me that if that young Oxford prig was too superior to talk to
+anybody, why then he was too superior to come to us at all, and he must
+be made to understand it. Eventually he learned to talk, with us
+anyway--he was always a silent man with most people. And I got to know
+him well, to like him, to admire him,--to respect him too through the
+long summer when his friends were doing their best to dissuade him from
+his proposed marriage with a woman many years older than he. The men of
+the _National Observer_ and the _Pall Mall_ were such keen fighters that
+they could not be kind or sentimental--and they grew maudlinly
+sentimental over Steevens's engagement--without a fight for it. They
+thought he was making a mistake, forgetting that it was his business,
+not theirs, if he was. He fought alone against them, but he held his
+place like a man and won. Our Thursday nights had come to an end before
+he went to America, to Germany, to Khartoum with Kitchener, to South
+Africa, where he passed into the great silence that no protest of ours,
+or any man's can break. If his work was overrated, he himself as I knew
+him was as kind and brave as in Henley's verse to his memory.
+
+Others of the same group, the writers' group, who flit across the scene
+in my memory are less intimately associated with Henley. Harold Frederic
+wrote for him occasionally--wrote few things, indeed, more amusing than
+his _Observations in Philistia_, a satire first published in the
+_National Observer_--but his chief business was the novel and the _New
+York Times_ correspondence. He was an able man, something more than the
+typical clever American journalist, a writer of books that deserve to be
+remembered but that have hardly outlived him. He was an amusing
+companion, the sort of man it was delightful to run across by chance in
+unexpected places, for which reason my most agreeable recollections of
+him are not in Buckingham Street but in the streets and _cafes_ of
+Berlin and Vienna that summer he was studying Jews in Southeastern
+Europe, and first knew there were Jews in Vienna when J., who afterwards
+began to study them for himself, introduced him to the _Juden Gasse_. He
+liked a good dinner, and gave us more than one, and he was an amusing
+talker over it and also on our Thursday nights until he got to the stage
+he always did get to of telling tales of his boyhood when he carried
+milk to the big people in his part of the Mohawk Valley, was dazzled by
+his first vision of Brussels carpet on their floors, and determined to
+have Brussels carpet on his own before he was many years older, and I
+can answer for it that, by the time I knew him, his house was all
+Brussels carpet from top to bottom. They were most creditable tales and
+entertaining too at a first hearing, but they staled, as all tales must,
+with repetition.
+
+S.R. Crockett never wrote anything for Henley. Henley would have been
+outraged by the bare suggestion, and Crockett the writer was never
+handled with the gloves by Henley's Young Men in the _National
+Observer_. But with Crockett himself they had no quarrel. We all liked
+him--a large red and white Scotchman, the Scots strong in every word he
+spoke, hustling us all off for a fish dinner at Greenwich on the
+strength of his first big cheque for royalties; or as happy to spend the
+evening sitting on our floor and diverting William Penn with the ball of
+paper on the end of a string that William never wearied of pursuing,
+partly for his amusement, partly because, with his innate politeness, he
+knew it contributed to ours.
+
+I cannot imagine a Thursday night without Rosamund
+Marriott-Watson,--Graham R. Tomson as she was then,--beautiful,
+reminiscent of Rossetti in her tall, willowy slimness, with her long
+neck like a column and her great halo of black hair and her big brown
+eyes, appealing, confinding, beseeching. Fashion as she, the poetess,
+extolled it week by week in the _National Observer_, became a poem with
+a stately measure in frocks and hats, a flowing rhythm in every frill
+and furbelow. I lost sight of her later, for reasons neither here nor
+there, but it pleases me to know that not many months before her death
+she looked back to those years as her happiest when weekly, almost
+daily, she was going up and down the Buckingham Street stairs which her
+ghost, she said, must haunt until they go the way of too many old stairs
+leading up to old London chambers. Violet Hunt was almost as faithful.
+And both contributed, as I did, a weekly column--mine that amazing
+article on cookery--to the _Pall Mall's_ daily _Wares of Autolycus_,
+daily written by women and I daresay believed by us to be the most
+entertaining array of unconsidered trifles that any Autolycus had ever
+offered to any eager world. Graham Tomson was even moved to commemorate
+our collaboration in verse the inspiration of which is not far to seek,
+but of which all I remember now is the beginning:
+
+  O, there's Mrs. Meynell and Mrs. Pennell,
+        There's Violet Hunt and me!
+
+for Mrs. Meynell contributed a fourth column, though she never
+contributed her presence to Buckingham Street.
+
+Once or twice, George Moore hovered from group to group, his childlike
+eyes of wonder protruding, wide open, and his ears open too, no doubt,
+for, if I can judge from his several books of reminiscences, his ears
+have rarely been closed to talk going on about him. After reading the
+Irish series I should suspect him not only of well-opened ears but of an
+inexhaustible supply of cuffs safely stored up his sleeves. Bernard Shaw
+honoured us occasionally, but I have learned that, bent as he is upon
+talking about himself, whatever he has to say, he grows more fastidious
+when others talk about him and say what they have to. Now and then,
+Henry Norman, journalist, his title and seat in Parliament yet to come,
+dropped in. Now and then Miss Preston and Miss Dodge came, both in
+London to finish in the British Museum the studies begun in Rome. Rarely
+a week passed that James G. Legge was not with us, then deep in his work
+at the Home Office but full of joy in everything that was most joyful in
+the Nineties--its fights, its books, its prints, its posters. And I
+might name many besides, some forgotten, some dead, some seen no more
+by me, life being often more cruel than death in the separations and
+divisions it makes. But two voices above the others are almost as
+persistent in my ears as Henley's--the voices of Bob Stevenson and Henry
+Harland.
+
+
+IV
+
+I have no fancy for nicknames in any place or at any time. I have
+suffered too much from my own. But I dislike the familiarity of them
+above all in print. And yet, I could no more call Bob Stevenson anything
+save Bob than I could venture to abbreviate the Robert or the Louis of
+his cousin. He had been given in baptism a more formal name--in fact, he
+had been given three of unquestioned dignity: Robert Alan Mowbray. But I
+doubt if anybody had ever known him by them or if he had ever used them
+himself. When he wrote he signed his fine array of initials, and when he
+was not R.A.M.S., he was Bob.
+
+[Illustration: Painting by Himself
+"BOB" STEVENSON]
+
+It seems to me now a curious chance, as well as a piece of good luck,
+that the two most eloquent of the company in Louis Stevenson's _Talk and
+Talkers_ should have come to us on our Thursday nights, for Bob was the
+Spring-Heeled Jack, "the loud, copious, and intolerant talker" of
+that essay just as Henley was the Burly.
+
+He was not more spring-heeled in his talk than in evading capture for
+it. In his later years he made few visits. If we wanted him we had to
+gather him up by the wayside and bring him home with us. The newspaper
+work I was doing then took me the rounds of the London galleries on
+press days and, as he was the art critic of the _Pall Mall_, I was
+continually coming across him busy about the same work in Bond Street or
+Piccadilly. Nothing pleased me better than to meet him on these
+occasions, for he could make the dull show that I, in my dull way, was
+finding dull the most entrancing entertainment in London. His every
+visit to a gallery was to him an adventure and every picture a romance,
+and the best of it for his friends was that he would willingly share the
+inspiration which he, but nobody else, could find in the most
+uninspiring canvas, an inspiration to criticism that is, not to
+admiration--he never wavered in his allegiance to the "Almighty Swells"
+of Art. Once he began to talk I did not care to have him stop, and I
+would say, "Why not come to Buckingham Street with me? You have not seen
+J. for a long while." He would vow he couldn't, he must get back to Kew
+to do his article. I would insist a little, he would waver a little, and
+at last he would agree to a minute's talk with J., excusing himself to
+himself by protesting that Buckingham Street was on his way to the
+Underground, as it was if he chose to go out of his way to make it so.
+Before he knew it, the minute had stretched out to our dinner hour when
+he was persuaded that he would save time by dining with us, as he must
+dine somewhere; if he went right afterwards, he could still be back at
+Kew in plenty of time to finish his article for the last post.
+
+Of course he never did go right afterwards--what talker ever did go
+right anywhere immediately after dinner when the real talk is only
+beginning? Presently people would filter in and now, well adrift on the
+flood of his own eloquence, nothing could interrupt him and he was the
+last to leave us, the later it grew the more easily induced to stay
+because he knew that the last train and the last post and all the last
+things of the day had gone and that he must now wait for the first
+things of the morning.
+
+If I could talk like Bob Stevenson I would not be interrupted either.
+Greater excitement could not be had out of the most exciting story of
+adventure, and I do not believe he knew until he got to the end any
+more where his talk was going to lead him than the reader knows how the
+story is going to turn out until the last chapter is reached. Louis
+Stevenson described certain qualities of his talk, but made no effort to
+give the talk itself, and in Bob's case, as in Henley's, it was the talk
+itself that counted. There was no acting in it as in Henley's or in
+Whistler's--no burying of his head in his hands and violent gestures--no
+well-placed laugh and familiar phrase. The talk came in a steady stream,
+laughter occasionally in the voice, but no break, no movement, no
+dramatic action--the sanest doctrine set forth with almost insane
+ingenuity, for he was always the "wild dog outside the kennel" who
+wouldn't imitate and hence kept free, as Louis Stevenson told him;
+extraordinary things treated quite as a matter of course; brilliant
+flashes of imbecility passed for cool well-balanced argument; until
+often I would suddenly gasp, wondering into what impossible world I had
+strayed after him. And he would tell the most extravagant tales, he
+would confide the most paradoxical philosophy, the most topsy-turvy
+ethics, with a fantastic seriousness, never approached except in the
+Arabian Nights of Prince Florizel for the puppets of whose adventures,
+as for Spring-Heeled Jack, he was the sitter. It was a delightful
+accomplishment, but dangerous when applied to actual life. I cannot
+forget his advice once to a friend on the verge of a serious step that
+might sink him into nobody could foretell what social quagmire. Bob
+could see in it only the adventure and the joy of adventure, not the
+price fate was bound to demand for it. To him the mistake was the unlit
+lamp, the ungirt loin--the adventure lost--and, life being what it is, I
+am not sure that he was not right.
+
+I think his talk struck me as the more extraordinary because he looked
+so little like it. In the Nineties he had taken to the Jaegers that
+usually stand for vegetarianism, teetotalism, hygiene--all the drab
+things of life. He wore even a Jaeger hat and Jaeger boots--as complete
+an advertisement for Jaeger as old Joseph Finsbury was for his Doctor.
+No costume could have seemed so altogether out of character with the
+fantastic, delightful, extravagant creature inside of it, though,
+really, none could have been more in character. It had always been Bob's
+way to play the game of life by dressing the part of the moment. Before
+I met him I had been told of his influence over Louis Stevenson, whose
+debt to him for ideas and conceits was said to be immeasurable, and
+nobody who knew Bob has doubted it. I feel convinced that Louis owed to
+him also his touch of the fantastic, the unusual, in dress, since it
+belonged so entirely to Bob and was no less entirely in keeping with his
+attitude towards the universe and his place in it--his tendency of
+always probing the real for the romantic.
+
+Knowing one cousin and the books of the other, I should say it was Bob
+who, in their childhood, originated the drama of the Lantern-Bearers and
+the evil-smelling lantern under the great coat, symbol of adventure and
+daring--that it was Bob who, in their gay youth, evolved the black
+flannel shirts to which they owed the honour of being, with Lord
+Salisbury, the only Britons ever refused admission to the Casino at
+Monte Carlo, and which were worn by the Stennis Brothers in _The
+Wrecker_,--that it was Bob who impressed upon Louis the importance of
+being dressed for the scene until he surpassed himself in his amazing
+get-up for the _Epilogue to an Inland Voyage_. Bob's own disguises
+rarely got into print, but in Will Low's _Chronicle of Friendships_
+there is a photograph of him in his student days, figuring as a sort of
+brigand of old-fashioned comic opera, that shows he did not from the
+beginning shirk the obligations he imposed upon others. I remember a
+huge ring, inherited from his father to whom the Czar had given it for
+engineering services in Russia, which he kept for formal occasions so
+that when I saw it covering his finger, almost his hand, at the dinner
+to which we had both been invited, I understood that to him the occasion
+was one of ceremony and he never failed to regulate his conduct
+accordingly. I was glad the ring did not appear on our Thursday nights,
+so much freer of formality, and therefore more amusing, was he without
+it. The large perfection of his Jaegers in his last years was no less
+symbolic; in them he was dressed for the role of middle age which he,
+who had the gift of eternal youth, had already reached when I first knew
+him. It was a role to which, at the time, I attributed his concern about
+his health--his anxiety to know if we, any of us, had influenza before
+he would come home with me, his rush from the room or the house at a
+sniff or a sneeze. The truth is Bob shared Henley's love of the visible
+sign, or it may be nearer the truth to say that he shared his own love
+of it with Henley and his cousin who rarely, either of them, wrote
+anything in which it is not felt.
+
+But Henley loved the visible sign for itself--the romance was actually
+in the tap-tap of the blind man's staff, in the pagan obelisk towering
+above the Christian river. Bob loved the visible sign for the hint it
+gave to his imagination, the adventure upon which it sent him galloping.
+He could build up a romance out of anything and nothing--he was the
+modern Scheherezade, but, as time went on, with nobody to repeat his
+stories. He could have made the fortune of any number of young men with
+their cuffs ready, but the only young man who ever did use his cuff was
+Louis Stevenson when they were young together. Bob had not the energy to
+put down his stories himself--he would not have written a word for
+publication had he not been forced to. For him the romance would have
+been lost in the labour of recording it, and, anyway, he was always
+consistent in not doing more work than he was obliged to in order to
+live. He had not the talent for combining, or identifying, his pleasure
+with his work. Painting was the profession for which he had been
+trained, but with it he amused himself and, as far as I know, never made
+a penny out of it. When he talked he would have lost his joy in the
+invention, the fabrication, had he thought he must turn it to profit. Of
+the curious twist of his imagination there remains but the faint
+reflection here and there in Prince Florizel and the romantic
+adventurers swaggering and talking splendid nonsense through the earlier
+tales by Louis Stevenson, whose books grew less and less fantastic as
+his path and Bob's spread wider apart. Even in the earlier tales Bob
+will not be discovered by future generations who have lost the key.
+
+For the sake of posterity, if not for my own, I would have been wiser on
+Thursday nights to think less of my next morning's article than of his
+inventions. As it is, I retain merely a general impression and an
+occasional detail of his talk. I am glad I remember, for one thing, his
+unfailing prejudice in favour of his friends, so amiable was the side of
+his character it revealed--though it revealed also his weakness as
+critic. He had a positive genius for veiling prosaic facts with romance
+where the people he liked were concerned. How often have we laughed at
+his amiability to a painter of the commonplace who had happened to be
+his fellow-student in Paris, whose work, as a consequence, his friendly
+imagination filled with the fine things that to us were conspicuously
+missing, and whose name he dragged into every criticism he wrote, even
+into his Monograph on Velasquez, nor could he be laughed, or argued out
+of it.
+
+And I am glad I remember another trick of his imagination, though it was
+like to end in disaster for us all, so equally characteristic was it of
+his genius in weaving romance from prose. He was talking one evening of
+wine, upon which he had large--Continental--ideas, declaring he would
+not have it in his house unless all his family, including the servants,
+could drink it without stint and also without thought of
+expense--though, if I am not mistaken, his household staff consisted
+chiefly of a decent old Scotchwoman who would have scorned wine as a
+device of the foreigner. The triumphant ring of his voice is still in my
+ears as he announced that he had found a merchant who could provide him
+with just the wine he wanted, good, pure, light, white or red, an
+ordinary brand for sevenpence a bottle, a superior brand for eightpence.
+
+The marvel of it all was that we believed in that wine and when the
+company left for home, the merchant's address was in almost everybody's
+pocket. It was not a bad wine in the sample bottles J. and I received a
+day or two later, nothing much to boast of, but harmless. For the
+further cheapness promised we next ordered it by the case, one of red
+and one of white--a rare bargain we thought. But in the end it was the
+most expensive wine it has ever been our misfortune to invest in. For
+when it came in cases it was so potent that nobody could drink as much
+as a glass without going to sleep. I never had it analyzed, but, after a
+couple of bottles, I did not dare to put it on the table again, or to
+use it even for cooking or as vinegar. To balance our accounts, we did
+without wine of any kind, or at any price, for many a week to come. But
+we had our revenge. In the course of a few months Bob's wine merchant
+was summoned before the magistrate for manufacturing Bordeaux and
+Burgundies out of Greek currants and more reprehensible materials in the
+backyard of his unpretending riverside house, and it was one of our
+Thursday night fellow victims who had the pleasure of exposing him in
+the _Daily Chronicle_. Bob did not share our resentment. He had his
+pleasure in the charm his imagination gave to every drop of the few
+bottles he drank and managed not to die of.
+
+I began to notice in the galleries and on Thursday nights that Bob
+became more and more engrossed in the question of his health and quicker
+to fly at a sniff or a sneeze. The time came when no persuasion could
+bring him home with me. He described symptoms rather than pictures, his
+interest in anything in the shape of paint weakened. I fancied that he
+was romancing, that he was playing the hypochondriac as part of his role
+of middle-age, and I thought it a pity. It might provide a new
+entertainment for him, but it deprived us of the entertainment of his
+company. Then I hardly met him at all, or if I did he was too nervous to
+linger before each painting or drawing, to gossip about it and
+everything under the sun. He would walk through the galleries with one
+leg dragging a little--the visible sign, I would say to myself, amused
+to see that he could turn romance into reality as easily as reality into
+romance. He would start for Kew right off, without any loitering,
+without any delicious pretending that he was going in the very next
+train and then not going until the very next train meant the very next
+day. But before long I learned that there was no romance about it, that
+it was grim reality, the grimmer to me because I had taken it so
+lightly. His illness was mere rumour at first, for few people went to
+his house in far Kew to see him. It was more than rumour when he ceased
+altogether to appear in the galleries, for we knew he was dependent
+upon art criticism for his butter, if not for most of his bread. I had
+not got as far as belief in his illness before the news came that he had
+set out upon the greatest adventure of all and that no more would
+Buckingham Street be transfigured in the light of his romancing,
+glorified by his inexhaustible fancy. I owed him much: the charm of the
+personality of "this delightful and wonderful creature" in Henley's
+words of him, pleasure from his talk, stimulus from his criticism, and I
+wish I had had the common sense to do what I could to make him live as a
+pleasure and a stimulus to others. My mistake on our Thursday nights was
+to keep my cuff clean, my note-book empty.
+
+[Illustration: Sketch by Aubrey Beardsley
+HENRY HARLAND]
+
+
+V
+
+In the case of Henry Harland my conscience makes me no such reproach. If
+ever a man became his own Boswell it was he, though I do not suppose
+anything was further from his mind when he sat down to write. But as he
+talked, so he wrote--he could not help himself--and all who have read
+the witty, gay, whimsical, fantastic talk of his heroes and heroines,
+especially in his last three books, have listened to him. He, no less
+than his Adrian Willes--even if quite another man was the model--never
+understood how it was possible for people to be bored. Flaubert once
+said in a letter, "Life is so hideous that the only way of enduring it
+is to avoid it." But Harland believed in plunging into it headlong and
+getting everything that is to be got out of it. He had eyes to see that
+"life is just one sequence of many-coloured astonishments", and the
+colours were the gayer when he came to our Thursday nights because he
+was still so young.
+
+He and Mrs. Harland had been in London only a few years, his career as
+Sydney Luska was behind him, his career as Henry Harland was before him,
+he was full of life, energy, enthusiasm, deep in long novels, busy for
+the _Daily Chronicle_, writing as hard as he talked, and he talked every
+bit as hard as Bob Stevenson.
+
+Like Bob, he seemed to love talk more than anything, but he must have
+loved work as Bob never loved it, for he put the quality of his talk
+into what he wrote. Bob Stevenson's writing never suggested his talk. I
+might find his point of view and his amiable prejudices in his criticism
+and his books--only he could have written his _Velasquez_ quite as he
+wrote it--but nowhere do I find a touch, a trace of the Lantern-Bearer
+or Prince Florizel or the Young Man with the Cream Tarts. But I never
+get far away from Harland in his novels. I re-read them a short time
+ago, and they were a magic carpet to bear me straight back to Buckingham
+Street, and the crowded, smoky rooms overlooking the river, and the old
+years when we were all young together.
+
+A delightful thing about Harland was that he did not care to monopolize
+the talk, to talk everybody else down. On the contrary, I doubt if he
+was ever happier than when he roused, provoked, stimulated everybody to
+talk with him. I remember in particular an evening when J. and I were
+dining with him and Mrs. Harland at their Kensington flat, and Mr. and
+Mrs. Edmund Gosse were there, and Mr. and Mrs. W.J. Fisher--Fisher was
+then editor of the _Daily Chronicle_ and Mrs. Fisher was still Adrienne
+Dayrolles on the stage--and Louis Austen, a handy man of journalism, and
+when, happening to turn for a minute from Harland by whom I was sitting,
+and to look round the table, I found I was the only one of the party not
+talking--and we had got no farther than the fish! But I flatter myself I
+have few rivals as an accomplished listener.
+
+Often Harland had the floor to himself simply because everybody else
+wanted to listen too. When what he calls in one of his books "the
+restorative spirit of nonsense" descended upon him, his talk could
+whisk off the whole Thursday night crowd, before they knew it, to that
+delectable Land of Nonsense to which he was an inspired guide. Nobody
+understood better how to set up the absurd and the impossible in the
+garb of truth. An old admirer of his reminded me not long since of a
+tale he used to tell, almost with tears in his voice, of the _petit
+patissier_ who was hurrying through the streets of Paris to deliver
+_brioches_ and tarts to customers and who, crossing the Boulevards, was
+knocked down by a big three-horse omnibus. And as the crowd collected
+and the _sergent-de-ville_ arrived, he was seen painfully and
+deliberately freeing his one uninjured arm, feeling carefully in pocket
+after pocket, and, as he drew his last breath, holding up triumphantly
+the exact number of francs the Parisian on foot then had to pay for
+venturing rashly to get in the way of the Paris driver. And Harland told
+it all with such eloquence that it was some minutes before those who
+listened realised he was laughing and began to laugh with him. And the
+tale was typical of many others he loved to tell. As his talk led the
+way to the Land of Nonsense, so he himself could of a sudden whirl us
+all off to a restaurant, or a park, or an excursion we had not thought
+of an hour, a minute before. Many a time, instead of sitting solemnly
+at home reading or working as we had meant to, we would be going down
+the river in a penny steamboat, or drinking coffee at the _Cafe Royal_
+or tea in Kensington Gardens--but Harland as an inspired guide was at
+his best in Paris I always thought, perhaps because in Paris he had so
+much larger scope than in London.
+
+He impressed one as a man who never tired, or who never gave in to being
+tired, either at work or at play--a man who, knowing his days would be
+few on this earth, found each fair as it passed and, if he could not bid
+it stay, was at least determined to fill it as full as it would hold.
+There was no resisting his restless energy when with him, and it was
+because he could so little resist it himself, that he was continually
+seeking new outlets--new forms for its expression. He had just the
+temperament to take up with the mode of the Nineties that drove the
+Young Men to asserting themselves and upholding their doctrines in
+papers and magazines of their own. The pedant may trace the fashion back
+to the _Hobby-horse_ of the Eighties, or, in a further access of
+pedantry to the _Germ_ of the early Fifties. He may follow its growth as
+late as the _Blast_ of yesterday and _The Gypsy_ of to-day. But I do
+not have to go further than my book shelves, I have only to look and see
+there the _Dial_ and the _Yellow Book_ and the _Savoy_ and the
+_Butterfly_ and the _Pageant_ and the _Dome_ and the _Evergreen_, each
+with its special train of memories and associations, and I know better
+than the greatest pedant of them all that the fashion, no matter when it
+began, no matter when it may end, belongs as essentially to the Nineties
+as the fashion for the crinoline belongs to the Sixties. Harland was not
+original in wanting to set up a pulpit for himself--the originality was
+in the design for it. The _Yellow Book_ was not like any other quarterly
+from which any other young man or group did his preaching.
+
+
+VI
+
+Harland shared his pulpit. He would not have found the same design for
+it without Beardsley, nor would our Thursday nights, where a good deal
+of that design was thought out and talked out, have been the same
+without Beardsley. I would find it hard, even had there been no _Yellow
+Book_, not to remember Harland and Beardsley together. For it was from
+Mrs. Harland that we first heard of the wonderful youth, unknown still,
+an insignificant clerk in some Insurance Company, who made the most
+amazing drawings--it was she who first sent him to us that J. might look
+at his work and help him to escape from the office he hated and from the
+toils of Burne-Jones and the Kelmscott Press in which he was entangled.
+
+[Illustration: Photograph by Frederick H. Evans
+AUBREY BEARDSLEY]
+
+He came, the first time, one afternoon in the winter dusk--a boy, tall
+and slight, long narrow pale clean-shaven face, hair parted in the
+middle and hanging over his forehead, nose prominent, eyes alight,
+certain himself of the worth of his drawings, too modest not to fear
+that other artists might not agree with him. The drawings in his little
+portfolio were mostly for the _Morte d' Arthur_, with one or two of
+those, now cherished by the collector, that have a hint of the Japanese
+under whose influence he momentarily passed. J. enjoys the reputation,
+which he deserves, of telling the truth always, no matter how unpleasant
+to those to whom he tells it. Truth to Beardsley was pleasant and his
+face was radiant when he left us. J. has also the courage of his
+convictions, and all he said to Beardsley he repeated promptly to the
+public in the first number of _The Studio_, a magazine started not as a
+pulpit but as a commercial enterprise--started, however, at the right
+moment to be kindled into life and steered toward success by the
+enthusiasm and the energy of the Young Men of the Nineties.
+
+Beardsley was bound to become known whether articles were written about
+him or not. But J.'s was the first and made recognition come the sooner.
+The heads of many young men grow giddy with the first success; at the
+exultant top of the winding stair that leads to it, they no longer see
+those who gave them a hand when they balanced on the lowest rung. But
+Beardsley was not made that way. He kept his head cool, his eyesight
+clear. He never forgot. Gratitude coloured the friendship with us that
+followed, even in the days when he was one of the most talked about men
+in London. He knew that always by his work alone he would be judged at
+Buckingham Street, and to J. he brought his drawings and his books for
+criticism. He brought his schemes as well, just as he brought the youth
+not only of years but of temperament to our Thursday nights. He came
+almost as regularly as Henley and Henley's Young Men, adding his young
+voice to the uproar of discussion, as full of life as if he too, like
+Harland, grudged a minute of the years he knew for him were counted. In
+no other house where it was my pleasure to meet him did he seem to me to
+show to such advantage. In his own home I thought him overburdened by
+the scheme of decoration he had planned for it. In many houses to which
+he was asked he was amiable enough to assume the pose expected of him.
+The lion-hunters hoped that Beardsley would be like his drawings.
+Strange, decadent, morbid, bizarre, weird, were adjectives bestowed upon
+them, and he played up to the adjectives for the edification or
+mystification of the people who invented them and for his own infinite
+amusement. But with us he did not have to play up to anything and could
+be just the simple, natural youth he was--as simple and natural as I
+have always found the really great, more interested in his work than
+most young men, and keener for success.
+
+I like to insist upon his simplicity because people now, who judge him
+by his drawings, would so much rather insist upon his perversity and his
+affectation. How can you reconcile that sort of thing with simplicity?
+They will ask, pointing to drawings of little mocking satyrs and twisted
+dwarfs and grotesques and extravagant forms and leering faces and a
+suggestion of one can hardly say what. But it might as well be asked why
+the mediaeval artist delighted to carve homely, familiar scenes and
+incidents, and worse, in the holiest places, to lavish his ingenuity
+upon the demons and devils above the doors leading into his great
+churches; why a philosopher like Rabelais chose to express the wisest
+thought in the most indecent fooling; why every genius does not look out
+upon life and the world with the same eyes and find the same method to
+record what he sees. Some men can only marvel with Louis Stevenson at
+the wide contrast between the "prim obliterated polite face of life" and
+its "orgiastic foundations"; others are only reconciled to it by the
+humour in the contrast or by the pity invoked by its victims. What makes
+the genius is just the fact that he looks out upon life, that he feels,
+that he uses his eyes, in his own way; also, that he invents his own
+methods of expression. Beardsley saw the satire of life, he loved the
+grotesque which has so gone out of date in our matter-of-fact day that
+we almost forget what it means, and no doubt disease gave a morbid twist
+to his vision and imagination. But, above all, he was young, splendidly
+young: young when he began work, young when he finished work. He had the
+curiosity as to the world and everything in it that is the divine right
+of youth, and he had the gaiety, the exuberance, the flamboyancy, the
+fun of the youth destined to do and to triumph. Already, in his later
+work, are signs of the passing of the first youthful stage of his art.
+It is suggestive to contrast the conventional landscapes with the
+grinning little monstrosities in some of the illustrations for the _Rape
+of the Lock_; the few drawings for his _Volpone_ have a dignity he had
+not hitherto achieved.
+
+Nobody can be surprised if some of the gaiety and exuberance and fun
+got no less into his manner towards the people whose habit is to
+shield their eyes with the spectacles of convention. Beardsley had a
+keen sense of humour that helped him to snatch all the joy there is
+in the old, time-honoured, youthful game of getting on the nerves of
+established respectability. Naturally, so Robert Ross, his friend,
+has said of him, "he possessed what is _called_ an artificial
+manner"; that is, his manner was called affected, as was his art,
+because it wasn't exactly like everybody else's. I have never yet
+come across the genius whose manner was exactly like everybody
+else's, and shyness, self-consciousness, counted for something in
+his, at least at the start. He had only to exaggerate this manner,
+or mannerism, to set London talking. It was the easier because
+rumours quickly began to go about of the darkened room in which he
+worked, of his turning night into day and day into night like
+Huysmans's hero, and of this or of that strange habit or taste,
+until people began to see all sorts of things in him that weren't
+there, just as they read all sorts of things into his drawings that
+he never put into them, always seeking what they were determined to
+find. To many there was uncanniness in the very extent of his
+knowledge, in his wide reading, in his mastery of more than one art,
+for, if he had not been an artist, he most assuredly would have been
+a musician or a writer. Added to all this, was the abnormal notice
+he attracted almost at once, the diligence with which he was
+imitated and parodied and the rapidity with which a Beardsley type
+leaped into fashion.
+
+Of course Beardsley enjoyed it. What youth of his age would not have
+enjoyed the excitement of such a success? It would have been morbid at
+his age not to enjoy it. He never seemed to me more simply himself than
+when he was relating his adventures and laughing at them with all the
+fresh, gay laughter of the boy--the wonderful boy--he was. Arthur Symons
+wrote of him, I have forgotten where, that he admired himself
+enormously. I should say that he was amused by himself enormously and
+was quite ready to pose and to bewilder for the sake of the amusement
+it brought him. He was never spoiled nor misled by either his fame or
+his notoriety.
+
+It was so Beardsley's habit to consult J. that he would have asked
+advice, if Harland had not, for _The Yellow Book_ which went through
+several stages of its preliminary planning in the old Buckingham Street
+chambers. Among the vivid memories of our Thursday nights one is of
+Harland taking J. apart for long, intimate discussions in a corner of
+the studio, and another of Beardsley taking him off for confidences as
+intimate and long, and my impression in looking back, though I may be
+mistaken, is that each had his personal little scheme for a journal of
+his own before he decided to share it with the other. It was
+characteristic of the friendliness of both that they should have
+insisted upon J. figuring in the first number. As vivid in my memory is
+the warm spring morning when Beardsley, his face beaming with joy,
+called to give me an early copy of this first number, with a little
+inscription from him on the fly-leaf--I have just taken down the volume
+from the near book shelf--"To Mrs. Pennell from Aubrey Beardsley" I
+read, as commonplace an inscription as ever artist or author wrote, but,
+reading it, I see as if it were yesterday the sunlit Buckingham Street
+room where I used to work, William Penn curled up on my desk, and,
+coming in the door, the radiant youth with the gay-covered book in his
+hands.
+
+And there followed the dinner--the amazing dinner as unlike the usual
+formal dinner of inauguration as could be. It was given in an upper room
+of the Hotel d'Italie in Old Compton Street and was as free of ceremony
+as our Thursday nights. The men were in dress suits or tweeds as they
+chose, the women in evening or tailor gowns according to their
+convenience. I have an impression that more people came than were
+expected and that it was all the waiters could do to serve them. I know
+I was much more concerned with my discomfort to find that Harland and
+Beardsley, for the first time in my experience, had forgotten how to
+talk. Everybody else was talking. I can still see the animated faces and
+hear the animated voices of Mrs. Harland and John Oliver Hobbes and
+Menie Muriel Dowie and Kenneth Grahame and George Moore and John Lane
+and Max Beerbohm, and all the brand-new writers prepared to shock, or to
+"uplift," or to pull down old altars and set up new ones, or any other
+of the fine things that were to make the _Yellow Book_ a force and
+famous. But also I can still feel the heavy, unnatural silence of the
+two editors from which I was the chief sufferer, to me having fallen
+the honour of sitting in the centre of the high table between them. J.
+was away and, in his absence, I was distinguished by this mark of
+Beardsley's appreciation and Harland's friendliness. I was greatly
+flattered, but less entertained. They were both as nervous as debutantes
+at a first party. Shrinking from the shadow cast before by their coming
+speeches, neither of them had as much as a word to throw me. Nor could
+they concentrate their distracted thoughts upon the _menu_--plate after
+plate was taken away untouched, while I kept on emptying mine in
+self-defence, to pass the time, wondering if, in my role of the _Pall
+Mall's_ "greedy Autolycus," my friends would now convict me of the sin
+of public eating as well as what they had been pleased to pretend was my
+habit of "private eating," for not otherwise, they would assure me,
+could they account for the unfailing flamboyancy of my weekly article on
+cookery. Seated between the two men, in their hours of ease when they
+were not editors, my trouble would have been to listen to both at the
+same moment and to get a word in edgewise. However, when the speeches
+were over the strain was relaxed. The evening ended in the accustomed
+floods of talk;--on the way from the Hotel d'Italie; at the Bodley
+Head, John Lane's new premises in the Albany to which he took us all
+that we might see the place from which the _Yellow Book_ was to be
+published; round a little table with a red-and-white checked cover in
+the basement of the Monico, the company now reduced to Harland and Mrs.
+Harland, Beardsley, Max Beerbohm and two or three others whose faces
+have grown dim in my memory, everybody as unwilling to break up the
+meeting as on Thursday nights in our Buckingham Street rooms. And with
+these ceremonies the _Yellow Book_ was launched into life.
+
+I am not sure what the _Yellow Book_ means to others--to those others
+who buy it now in the thirteen volumes of the new edition and prize it
+as a strange record of a strange period, from which they feel as far
+removed as we felt from the Sixties. But to me, the bright yellow-bound
+volumes mean youth, gay, irresponsible, credulous, hopeful youth, and
+Thursday night at Buckingham Street in full swing. To be sure the
+_Yellow Book_ was never so young as it was planned to be. It did not
+represent only _les Jeunes_, who would have kept it all to themselves in
+their first mad, exuberant, reckless springtime. But they were not
+strong enough to stand alone, as _les Jeunes_ seldom are, or have been
+through the ages. It was more original in its art than in its
+literature. Some of the youngest writers were "discoveries" of Henley's,
+while some who actually were "discovered" by the _Yellow Book_ have
+faded out of sight. Many were men of name and fame well established.
+Hamerton, almost at the end of his career, Henry James in the full
+splendour of his maturity, Edmund Gosse with his reputation already
+assured, were as welcome as the youngest of the young men and women who
+had never printed a line before. So identified with "this passage of
+literary history"--in his words--was Henry James that he has recorded
+the preliminary visit of "a young friend [Harland of course], a
+Kensington neighbour and an ardent man of letters," with "a young friend
+of his own," in whom there is no mistaking Beardsley, "to bespeak my
+interest for a periodical about to take birth in his hands, on the most
+original 'lines' and with the happiest omen." But there was youth in
+this readiness for hero-worship--youth in this tribute to the older men
+whose years could not dim the brilliance nor lessen the power of their
+work in the eyes of the new generation--the fragrance of youth exudes
+from the pages of the _Yellow Book_ as I turn them over again, in
+places the fragrance of infancy, the young contributors so young as to
+seem scarcely out of their swaddling clothes. At the time the energy and
+zest put into it had an equal savour of youth. And altogether it gave us
+all a great deal to talk about, so that I see in it now a sort of link
+to join on Thursday nights the different groups from their opposing
+corners, supplying to writers and artists one subject of the same
+interest to both. It even opened the door to the architects, one of whom
+went so far as to neglect architecture and to emulate Ibsen in a play.
+
+The last thing I foresaw for the _Yellow Book_ was a speedy end or, for
+the matter of that, any end at all, so overflowing was it with the
+spirit of youth and energy, war and enthusiasm. But the end came
+surprisingly soon. To remind me, were I in danger of forgetting, another
+book stands on our shelves close to the First Volume of the _Yellow
+Book_:--the First Volume of the _Savoy_, on its fly-leaf again
+Beardsley's inscription simple as himself, "Mrs. Pennell, with kindest
+regards from Aubrey Beardsley," and only a little less than two years
+between the dates of the two. And the beginning of the _Savoy_ meant the
+end of the _Yellow Book_, whose life was short after Beardsley left it.
+Why he left it has nothing to do with the story of our Thursday nights,
+when no obstacle, great or small, would have been put in its way by us
+who held youth and energy, war and enthusiasm above most things in
+demand and honour. But I question if the time has come for the full
+telling of the story, wherever or with whom the blame may lie. That an
+objection was raised to Beardsley's presence in the _Yellow Book_,
+though without Beardsley there would have been no _Yellow Book_, is
+known and has been told in print, the reason being that Victorian sham
+prudery and respectability had not been totally wiped out for all the
+hard fighting of the Fighting Nineties. Beardsley was not slain, he was
+not defeated, at once he reappeared on the battle-field with the
+_Savoy_, Arthur Symons his fellow editor. But by now the enemy never yet
+conquered on this earth held him in deadly grip, and the fight he had to
+fight sent him from London to Bournemouth, to Saint-Germain, to Dieppe,
+to Mentone in search of health. He was the youngest of that old Thursday
+night crowd and he was the first to go, and the _Savoy_ went with him,
+and before he had gone our Thursday nights were already but a landmark
+in memory, so quickly does the flame of youth burn out.
+
+
+VII
+
+By another of our happy chances Phil May came as assiduously on our
+Thursday nights as Beardsley, and they were two of the artists, though
+their art was as the poles apart, who had most influence on the
+black-and-white of the Nineties--it will be seen from this that I
+refrain from saying what I think of J. and his influence, but it is
+considered almost as indiscreet, almost as bad form, to admit the
+excellence or importance of one's husband's work as to pretend to any in
+one's own.
+
+If no drawings could have been less like Beardsley's than Phil May's
+neither could two men have been more utterly unlike. Some friends of
+Beardsley's believe that he was happiest where there was most noise,
+most people, most show, which, however, was not my impression. But when
+there was the noise of people about him, he might be relied upon to
+contribute his share and to take part in whatever show was going. I
+question if Phil May was happy at all unless in the midst of many people
+and much noise, whether at home or abroad, but to their noise, anyway,
+he had not the least desire to add. Beardsley was fond of talk, always
+had something to say, was always eager to say it. All Phil May asked
+was not to be expected to say anything, to be allowed to smile amiably
+his dissent or approval. Had the rest of our company been of his mind in
+the matter, it would not have been so much easier for us to start the
+talk at once than to stop it at a reasonable hour, our Thursday nights
+would not have been so deafening with talk that I do not yet understand
+why the other tenants in the house did not unite in an indignant protest
+to the landlord.
+
+It was not laziness that kept him silent. He had not a touch of laziness
+in his composition. His drawings look so simple that people thought they
+were dashed off at odd moments. But over them he took the infinite pains
+and time considered by the wise to be the true secret of genius. It may
+be he expressed himself so well in lines he had no use for words. The
+one indisputable fact is that he would do anything to escape talking. I
+recall a night--not a Thursday night though he finished it in our
+rooms--when he had been invited to lecture to a Woman's Club at the
+Society of Arts. He appeared on the platform with a formidable-looking
+MS. in his hand, but he put it down at once and spent his appointed hour
+in making drawings on big sheets of paper arranged for an occasional
+illustration. He had more to say than I ever heard him say anywhere,
+when we got back to Buckingham Street. The MS. was all right, he assured
+us, a capital lecture written for him by a friend, but it began "Far be
+it from me" something or other, he didn't wait to see what, for, as far
+as he got, it did not sound like him, did it? and we could honestly
+agree that it did not.
+
+[Illustration: Drawing by Himself
+PHIL MAY IN CAP AND BELLS]
+
+He could talk. I must not give the idea that he could not. I know some
+of his friends who do not share or accept unqualified my memory of him
+as a silent man. But he talked most and best when he had but a single
+companion, and nothing could persuade me that he was not always
+relieved, when the chance came, to let others do the talking for him.
+
+I do not know what the attraction was that made everybody like him, not
+merely the riffraff and the loafers who hung about his studio and
+waylaid him in the street for what they could get out of him, but all
+sorts of people who asked for nothing save his company--I could never
+define the attraction to myself. It was not his looks. Even before his
+last years, when he was the image of J.J. Shannon's portrait of him, his
+appearance was not prepossessing. He dressed well according to his
+ideals. Beardsley was not more of a dandy; but Beardsley was the dandy
+of Piccadilly or the Boulevards, Phil May was the dandy of the
+race-course. He brought with him that inevitable, indescribable look
+that the companionship of horses gives and that in those days broke out
+largely in short, wide-spreading covert coats and big pearl buttons. I
+have always been grateful to the man who enlivens the monotony of dress
+by a special fashion of his own, provided it belongs to him. The horsy
+costume did belong to May, for he rode and hunted and was a good deal
+with horses, but it was borrowed by some of his admirers until it
+degenerated into almost as great an affectation as the artist's velvet
+jacket and long hair, or the high stock and baggy corduroys of the Latin
+Quarter imported into Chelsea. When the Beggarstaff Brothers, as Pryde
+and Nicholson called themselves in those old days, would wander casually
+into our rooms at the end of six or eight feet of poster that they had
+brought to show J. and that needed a great deal of manipulation to bring
+in at all, they looked as if the stable, not the studio, was their
+workshop. And one young genius of an illustrator, who could not afford
+to ride, and who I do not believe had ever been on a horse in his life,
+could not mount the bus in his near suburb without putting on riding
+breeches. But Phil May's dress was as essentially his as his silence.
+
+Neither his looks nor his silence, however original and personal, could
+have been the cause of the charm he undeniably possessed. I think he was
+one of the people whom one feels are nice instinctively, without any
+reason. He was sympathetic and responsive, serious when the occasion
+called for it, foolish when folly was in order. It wasn't only in his
+drawings that he was ready to wear the cap and bells. I know an artist,
+one of whose cherished memories of Phil May is of the Christmas Eve when
+they both rang Lord Leighton's door-bell and ran away and back to Phil
+May's studio on the other side of the road, and Phil May was as pleased
+as if it had been a masterpiece for _Punch_. He was naturally
+kind,--amiable perhaps because it was the simplest thing to be. In his
+own house his amiability forced him to break his silence, but his
+remarks then, as far as I heard them, were usually confined to the
+monotonous offer "Have a cigar!" "Have a whiskey-and-soda!" or "Have a
+drawing!" if anyone happened to express admiration for his work. Had we
+accepted this last offer every time it was made to us, we would have a
+fine collection of Phil May's, while, as it is, we do not own as much
+as a single sketch given to us by him. Visitors who did not share our
+scruples have found their steady attendance at his Sunday nights one of
+the best investments they ever made.
+
+Away from his own house, on our Thursday nights, relieved of the
+necessity to offer anything, this being now our business, his
+conversation was more limited than in his own place. My memory of him is
+of an ugly, delightful, smiling, silent man, sitting astride a chair,
+his arms resting on the back, a big cigar in his mouth, and around him a
+band of devoted admirers as fully prepared and equipped to do the
+talking for him as he was to let them do it. He held his court as
+royally among illustrators as Henley among his Young Men, and if nobody
+contributed so little to the talk as Phil May, around nobody else,
+except Henley, did so much of the talk centre.
+
+In my recollections of Phil May astride his chair on Thursday nights,
+Hartrick and Sullivan are never very long absent. Nobody knew better
+than they the beauty of his work--to hear them talk about his line was
+to be convinced that the supreme interest in life was the expressive
+quality of a line made with pen in black ink on a piece of white paper.
+The appearance of _The_ _Parson and the Painter_ was one of the events
+of the Nineties--though it was not boomed into notoriety as were the
+performances of some other illustrators of the period as ingenious as
+Barnum in the art of advertisement--and there was not an artist who did
+not hail May as a master. But Hartrick and Sullivan went further. They
+were not only such good artists themselves that they could appreciate
+genius in others, they were young enough not to be afraid of their
+enthusiasms. They gave the effect of being with May, with whom they
+often arrived and stayed until the deplorably early hour of the morning
+at which he started for home, in order that they might watch over him,
+and, indeed, he needed watching. He was not readier in offering than in
+giving anything he was asked for, which was one reason why there was
+always a procession of waiters and actors and jockeys out of work at his
+front door--why his pockets were always empty. They even discovered the
+same genius in May's talk as in his drawing, though the mystery was when
+they heard the talk. To this day they will quote Phil May while I wonder
+how it is that while for me Henley's talk has not lost its thunder, nor
+Bob Stevenson's its brilliant flashes of imbecility, nor Harland's its
+whimsical twist, nor Beardsley's its fresh gaiety, nothing of Phil
+May's remains save the familiar refrain "Have a cigar!" "Have a
+whiskey-and-soda!" "Have a drawing!"
+
+Obsessed by my old-fashioned notion as hostess that people could not
+enjoy themselves unless they were kept moving, persisting in my vain
+efforts to break up the groups into which the company invariably fell,
+again and again I would lure Hartrick and Sullivan away from Phil May.
+But it was no use. What they all wanted was to talk not only about their
+shop but their own particular counter in it, and no sooner was my back
+turned than there they were in the same groups again, Hartrick and
+Sullivan watching over Phil May, supported by Raven Hill and Edgar
+Wilson, both then deeply involved in youth's game of shocking the
+_bourgeois_ by showing on the pages of _Pick-Me-Up_ how the matter of
+illustration was ordered in France, and presently starting a magazine of
+their own to show it the better, and to do their share as ardent rebels
+in the big fight of the Nineties. On my shelves, close by the first
+number of _The Yellow Book_ and of the _Savoy_ is the first volume of
+_The Butterfly_ and on its fly-leaf is the inscription: "To Elizabeth
+Robins Pennell with L. Raven Hill's kind regards," no more startlingly
+original than Beardsley's inscriptions, but to me full of meaning and
+memories. I cannot look at it without seeing myself fluttering from one
+to another of the old Buckingham Street rooms, heavy with the smell of
+smoke and powder, thunderous not only with the knocking--naturally I
+quote the Ibsen phrase everybody was quoting in the Nineties--but the
+banging, the battering, the bombarding of the younger generation at the
+Victorian door against which it was desperate work to make any
+impression at all.
+
+
+VIII
+
+In my less responsible intervals it amused me to find the painters
+running their own shop, or their own little counter, quite apart from
+the illustrators, and carrying on all by themselves their own special
+campaign against that obdurate Victorian door. Their campaign, as they
+ran it, required less talk than most, for they were chiefly men of the
+New English Art Club--the men who gave the shows where Felix Buhot smelt
+the powder--the men who were considered apostles of defiance when the
+inner group held their once-famous exhibition as "London
+Impressionists"--the men about whom the critics for a while did nothing
+save talk--but men who had the reputation of talking so little
+themselves that, when a man came up for election in their Club, his
+talent for silence was said to be as important a consideration with them
+as his talent for art. Not that the silence of any one of them could
+rival Phil May's in eloquence--they never learned to say nothing with
+his charm. Often the poverty of their conversation had the effect of
+being involuntary, as if they might have had plenty to say had they
+known how to say it. More than one struggled to rid himself of his
+talent with at least an air of success.
+
+The big booming voice of Charles W. Furse was frequently heard, but in
+it a suspicion of an Academic note unfamiliar in our midst, so that,
+young as he was, combative, enthusiastic, "a good fellow" as they say in
+England, still in his Whistler and rebel period, his friends predicted
+for him the Presidency of the Royal Academy. The first time I ever saw
+him was the year he was showing at the New English two large upright,
+full-length portraits of women, highly reminiscent of Whistler, and, on
+press day, was being turned out of the gallery by the critics who, in
+revolutionizing criticism, were fighting against the old-fashioned
+Victorian idea of press views with the artists busy log-rolling and an
+elaborate lunch, or at least whiskey and cigars behind a screen. The
+New English men compromised by staying away, but they clung to the
+lunch, a feast chiefly for their commissionaire and their salesman and
+the grey-haired critic, a survival, who could not reconcile himself to
+change and whom I heard once, in another gallery, pronounce the show
+admirable, "perfect really, your show, but for one thing missing--a
+decanter and cigars on the table." Furse, who had not heard the critic's
+cry for reform and could not understand his banishment, lingered in the
+passage, button-holing everybody who came out, trying to pick up a hint
+as to what we were all going to say about him. He considered himself a
+red-hot rebel and the prophetic picture of him scaling Academic heights
+annoyed him extremely, though he so soon became an Associate of the
+Academy that I think, had he lived, time would have proved the prophets
+right.
+
+Walter Sickert's voice, too, was frequently heard at the beginning of a
+Thursday night, but his promise of brilliancy never struck me as leading
+anywhere in particular, my personal impression being that with his talk,
+as with his art, the fulfilment scarcely justified the promise.
+
+D.S. MacColl, young arch-rebel at the time little as the formal official
+of to-day suggests it, his bombarding of the Victorian door directed
+chiefly from the sober columns of the _Spectator_, and later of the
+_Saturday Review_, was always well armed with words for the Thursday
+night battle, conscientious in distributing his blows and shaping them
+in strict deference to his sense of style, just a touch of the preacher
+perhaps in his voice and in his fight for art and freedom, as he was the
+first to acknowledge; more than once I have heard him explain
+apologetically that his right place was the pulpit for which he had been
+designed.
+
+Arthur Tomson, one of the best friends in the world, was a spirited
+revolutionary who went to the length of founding and editing a paper of
+his own to promote revolution--the _Art Weekly_, which, not being able
+to afford illustrations, conducted its warfare solely by its articles,
+and strong, fearless, knock-you-down articles they were since we all
+wrote for the paper while it lasted. It did not last long, however, but
+shared the fate of most revolutionary sheets with more brains than
+capital. Arthur Tomson himself, out of print, was a quiet, if staunch
+fighter, another of the old Thursday night group who knew that his years
+on this earth were to be short. He was not the gayer for it as Harland
+and Beardsley were, but the sadder, it may be because he foresaw the
+end long before it came, and he was given to the melancholy that found
+expression in so many of his paintings.
+
+Wilson Steer, Tonks, Professor Brown passed, and no more, across the
+stage of our Thursday nights, all three, as I remember them, scrupulous
+in upholding the reputation for silence of their Club. Conder flitted in
+and out of our rooms, always agreeable but not the man to lift up his
+voice in a crowd.
+
+Occasionally, a visitor from abroad appeared--Felix Buhot every Thursday
+that one winter, or, more rarely Paul Renouard, in London for the
+_Graphic_, his appearance an event for the illustrators who already
+reverenced him as a veteran. Or else it was a representative, a
+publisher, of _les Jeunes_ over there, bringing fresh stimulus, fresh
+incentive, especially if his coming meant fresh orders and fresh
+opportunity to say what had to be said freely and without restraint.
+Once it was Jules Roque from Paris, of the _Courrier Francais_ in which
+he published the drawings of Louis Legrand and Forain and other artists
+accepted as models by the young men of our Thursday nights who believed
+in themselves the more defiantly when asked to figure in such good
+company. Once it was Meier Graefe from Berlin, big, handsome,
+enterprising, not yet encumbered with Post-Impressionism and its
+outshoots, seeking American and British contributors to the German
+_Pan_, a magazine as big and enterprising as himself if not always as
+handsome, and the younger generation of London had the comfort of
+knowing that if the Victorian door in England held firm, the door of
+Europe had opened to them.
+
+Occasionally one of the older, the very much older generation came in to
+make us feel the younger for his presence--none more imposing than
+Sandys, most distinguished in his old age, wearing the white waistcoat
+that was the life-long symbol of his dandyism, full of Pre-Raphaelite
+reminiscences, and reminiscences of the Italian Primitives could not
+have seemed more remote. J. sometimes met Holman Hunt in other
+haunts--at dinners of the Society of Illustrators and elsewhere--and
+reported him to me as a talker who could, in the quantity and
+aggressiveness of his talk, have given points to Henley and Henley's
+Young Men, so I regret that he never was with us to talk over
+Pre-Raphaelite days with Sandys. The only other possible representative
+of Pre-Raphaelitism who came was Walter Crane, if so he can be called,
+for the tradition fell lightly on his shoulders, was a mere re-echo in
+his work; the only one of Sandys's contemporaries was Whistler, and
+their meeting of which J. and I have written in another place, does not
+belong to the story of our Thursday nights, for they were a thing of the
+past when Whistler returned from Paris, where he had gone to live almost
+as they began.
+
+Nor did Sandys often appear on Thursdays. He seemed to prefer the
+evenings when we were alone, to my surprise, for the homage he received
+when he did come on Thursday must have been pleasant. Drawings of his
+hung prominently in our rooms, J. then haunting the salesrooms for the
+originals of the Sixties as industriously as the barrows and shops for
+their reproductions. And to the man who prefers fame to reach him during
+his lifetime, surely it should have been an agreeable experience to sit,
+or to be enthroned as it were, in so friendly an atmosphere, with some
+of his own finest work on the wall behind him for background, and
+surrounded by a worshipping group asking nothing better than to be
+allowed to sit at his feet and listen to his every word--which was a
+sacrifice for his worshippers in Buckingham Street who rejoiced in the
+sound of their own voices as did most of the company. But the Nineties
+are not more wonderful and stimulating to the young men of to-day who
+look back to them so admiringly, than the Sixties were to us whom they
+kept up into the small hours of many a Friday morning, inexhaustible as
+a subject of our talk, and Sandys, standing for the Sixties and all we
+found in them so admirable, could command any sacrifice. The respect for
+the Sixties was an article of faith, a dogma of dogmas in the Nineties.
+If the now younger generation write articles and books about the
+Nineties--those amazing documents in which I scarcely recognise an age I
+thought I knew by heart--we were still more zealous in writing books
+about the Sixties. And we collected the drawings and publications of the
+Sixties. When J. and I now allowed ourselves an afternoon out, it was to
+wander from Holywell Street to Mile End Road, from Piccadilly to
+Holborn, searching the booksellers' barrows and shops for the unsightly,
+gaudy, badly-bound volumes that contained the illustrations of the
+Sixties--illustrations ranked amongst the finest ever made. Our
+bookshelves that are still filled with them represent one of the most
+animated phases of the Nineties. And we looked upon the "men of the
+Sixties" as masters, among them giving to Sandys a leading place.
+
+If he was not any longer doing the work for which we took off our hat to
+him, he certainly looked the leader--tall, handsome, dignified, just
+enough of a stoop in his shoulders to become his age, his dress
+irreproachable, the white waistcoat immaculate, pale yellow hair parted
+in the middle and beautifully brushed, beard not patriarchal exactly but
+eminently correct and well cared for, manners princely. It was clear
+that he liked the role of master and his voice was in keeping with the
+part. But he was a master who presided at his best over a small
+audience, and, no doubt knowing it, he avoided our Thursdays.
+
+He was also a master given to small gossip. We heard from him less of
+art, its aims and ideals, its mediums and methods, than of the sayings
+and doings of the Pre-Raphaelites who were his friends and
+contemporaries. The name of "Gabriel" was ever in his mouth. It was
+Rossetti whom he most loved--or love is not the word, less of affection
+revealed in his memories than a sense of injury, as if it had somehow
+been the fault of "Gabriel" and the others that he had not come off as
+well as they, though of all "Gabriel" had been most active in seeing
+him through the tight places he so successfully got himself into. This,
+no doubt, was the reason Rossetti felt entitled to a little laugh now
+and then over Sandys's difficulties. Sandys was a man who needed to be
+seen through tight places until the end, as we had occasion to know by
+the urgent note he sent us on a Saturday night, more than once, from the
+_Cafe Royal_, his favourite haunt in his later years, where a variety of
+unavoidable accidents, with a curious faculty for repeating themselves,
+would keep him prisoner until his friends came to his relief.
+
+He was full of anecdote, which was quite in the order of things, the
+Sixties having supplied anecdote for a whole library of books and
+magazines. Could I tell Sandys's stories with Sandys's voice I should be
+tempted to repeat them yet once again, though many were told us also by
+Whistler, and these J. and I have recorded in the Life. Whistler told
+them better, with more truth because with more gaiety and joy in their
+absurdity. And yet, the solemnity of Sandys added a personal flavour,
+gave them a character nobody else could give. I have not forgotten how
+he turned into a parable the tale of the cross-eyed maid in the Morris
+Shop in Red Lion Square, whose eyes were knocked straight by a shock
+the company of Morris, Marshall, and Faulkner administered deliberately,
+and then were knocked crooked again by a shock they had not provided for
+or against. And, as Sandys recalled them, the strange beasts in
+"Gabriel's" house and garden might have been let loose from out of the
+Apocalypse. But Sandys's voice has been stilled forever and the
+anecdotes have been published oftener, I do believe, than any others in
+the world's rich store of _cliches_. The great of his day had all the
+Boswells they wanted--a retinue of admirers and cuffs ready--at their
+head William Michael Rossetti to pour out book after book about his
+brother, to leave little untold about the group that revolved round
+"Gabriel." Even the third generation, with Ford Madox Hueffer to lead,
+has taken up the task. The anecdotes have grown familiar, but it is
+something to have heard them from the men who were their heroes.
+
+
+IX
+
+Well--our Thursdays were pleasant, an inspiration while they lasted, and
+for a time I thought they must last as long as we did. But nothing
+pleasant endures forever, the bravest inspiration flickers and dies
+almost before we realize its flaring. The stern duty of Friday morning
+always haunted me in anticipation, for I have never been able to take
+lightly the work I do with so much difficulty, and Friday morning itself
+often brought even J. up with a sharp turn to face the fact that man was
+born into the world to labour in the sweat of his brow, and not simply
+to talk all night until no work was left in him.
+
+That may have been one reason for our giving up so agreeable a custom.
+Another perhaps came from the discovery that the freedom of our Thursday
+nights was sometimes abused. A certain type of Englishman would travel a
+mile and more for anything he did not have to pay for, even if it was
+for nothing more substantial than a cigarette, a sandwich, a
+whiskey-and-soda. There were evenings when, looking round the packed
+dining-room, it would occur to me that I did not recognise half the
+people in it. Friends introduced friends and they introduced other
+friends until, in bewilderment, I asked myself if our Thursday night was
+ours or somebody else's. And I fancied a tendency to treat it as if it
+were somebody else's,--to take an ell when we meant to give no more than
+an inch, and J. was as little inclined as I to furnish a new proof of
+the wise old proverb. One day a would-be wit who was regular in his
+attendance and his talk, and who should have known better, asked J.,
+"Are you still running your Thursday Club?" and so helped to precipitate
+the end. We were not running a Club for anybody, and if the fame of our
+Thursday night filled our rooms with people who behaved as if we were,
+the sooner we got rid of them the better.
+
+Besides, as the weeks and the months and the years went on, many who had
+come and talked and fought our Thursday night through ceased to come
+altogether. Where I failed in breaking up the groups Time, with its
+cruel thoroughness, succeeded and began to scatter them far and wide.
+Death stilled voices that had been loudest. The _National Observer_
+passed out of Henley's hands and Henley himself into the Valley of the
+Shadow. Bob Stevenson said his last good-night to us. Beardsley,
+Harland, Arthur Tomson, George Steevens, Phil May, Furse,
+Iwan-Mueller--one after another of our old friends, one after another of
+those old masters of talk set out on the journey into the Great Silence.
+It is hard to believe they have gone. I remember how, when they were
+with us and the talk was at its maddest and somebody would suddenly take
+breath long enough to look out of our windows, whose curtains were
+never drawn upon the one spectacle we could offer--the river with the
+boats trailing their lights down its shadowy reaches, and the Embankment
+with the lights of the hansoms flying to and fro, and the bridges with
+the procession of lights from the omnibuses and cabs and the trails of
+burning cloud from the trains--Henley would say, "How it lives, how it
+throbs with life out there!" and I would think to myself, "And how it
+lives, how it throbs with life in here!"--with a life too intense, it
+seemed, ever to wear itself out. And yet now only two or three of the
+old friends of the old Thursday nights are left to look down with us
+upon the river where it flows below our windows--upon the moving lights
+of London's great traffic, upon London's great life and great beauty,
+and great movement without end.
+
+It is not only the dead we have lost. Time has made other changes as sad
+as any wrought by Death. The young have grown old,--have thrown off
+youth's "proud livery" for the sombre garment of age. The years have
+turned the rebel of yesterday into the Royal Academician of to-day. The
+inspired young prophet who protested week by week against mediocrity in
+paint, settled down to keeping the mediocre paintings against which his
+protests were loudest. He who thundered against the degeneracy of
+journalism accepted the patronage of the titled promoter of the
+half-penny press. Architects carried their respectability to the
+professional chair it adorns, and illustrators rested in the comfortable
+berths provided by _Punch_. Friendships cooled, and friends who never
+missed a Thursday look the other way when they meet us in the street.
+
+Close to me, as I write, is a bookcase on whose shelves Henley and
+Henley's Young Men--Marriott Watson, George Steevens, Charles Whibley,
+Leonard Whibley, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Morrison, G.S.
+Street--jostle each other in the big and little volumes that were to
+create the world anew. The small green-bound Henleys stand in a row.
+_Salome_, _The Rape of the Lock_, _Volpone_, with Beardsley's
+illustrations, are flanked by the more pretentious performances of the
+Kelmscott Press and the Vale Press and the other Presses aspiring with
+much advertisement to do what the Constables of Edinburgh did so much
+better as a matter of course, and, as a reminder of this truth, the
+_Montaigne_ of the _Tudor Series_ is there and the _Apuleius_ and the
+_Heliodorus_, each with its inscription. And the little slim volume,
+neatly bound by Zaehnsdorf, called _Allahakbarries_--now a prize for
+the collector I am told--immortalizes one recreation at least of
+Henley's Young Men. For it is Barrie's report of the Cricket Team
+largely made up of these Young Men, of whom he was Captain and who used
+to play at Shere on the never-to-be-forgotten summer days when beautiful
+Graham Tomson and I were graciously invited as Patronesses, and little
+Madge Henley--her death shortly afterwards proving Henley's own death
+blow--figured as "Captain's Girl" and the _National Observer_ office as
+"Practice Ground." And if Henley did not drag himself down with us to
+the pretty Surrey village, he seemed to preside over us all, so much so
+that when J. and I had the little book bound and added the photographs
+Harold Frederic--"Photographer" in the report--made of the Team, we
+included one of Henley, and altogether the tiny volume is as eloquent a
+document of the Nineties and of Henley and Henley's Young Men as we
+have, and I wonder what the collector of those snares for the American
+now catalogued by the bookseller as "Association Books" would not give
+to own it. And close by our _Allahakbarries_, Henry Harland's
+_Mademoiselle Miss_ meets in the old friendly companionship Steevens's
+_Land of the Dollar_ and Graham Tomson's _Poems_ and Bob Stevenson's
+_Velasquez_ and Harold Frederic's _Return of the O'Mahoney_ and Bernard
+Shaw's _Cashel Byron's Profession_ in its rare paper cover, and George
+Moore's _Strike_ at _Arlingford_, and Marriott Watson's _Diogenes of
+London_, and--but of what use to go through the list, the long
+catalogue, to the end? Ghosts greet me from those shelves, ghosts from
+the old Thursdays, from the radiant days when youth was merging into
+middle age--surely the best period in one's existence--days into which
+the breath of life never can be breathed again. We could not revive the
+old nights if we would. I suppose nobody now reads Zola, but we read him
+in the Nineties and I have always been haunted by his description in
+_L'Oeuvre_ of the last reunion of the friends who, in their eager youth,
+had meant to conquer Paris and who used to meet to plan their campaign
+over a dinner as meagre as their income and gay as their hopes. But
+when, after years during which money and fame had been heaped up by more
+than one and disappointment and despair lavished in equal measure upon
+others, they ventured to dine together again, and the dinner was good
+and well served as it never had been of old, it turned to dust and ashes
+in their mouths--a funeral feast. Dust and ashes would be our fare were
+we so foolish as again to open our doors on the Thursday night
+consecrated to youth and its battles long ago.
+
+
+X
+
+If we have had no more Thursday nights, it does not follow that we have
+had no other nights. The habit of years is not so easily broken, and our
+habit was, and is, at night to gather people about us and to talk. Only,
+after the Nineties, or rather before the end of the Nineties, we never
+settled again with weekly regularity upon one special night out of the
+seven for the purpose--on the contrary, we took, and we now take, our
+nights as they came and come.
+
+They have not been, for that, the less interesting and amusing, not less
+loud with the sound of battle, not less fragrant with the smell of
+smoke. It was just after our Thursday nights, for instance, that we
+began what I might call our Whistler nights, and a more stimulating
+talker than Whistler never talked, a more stimulating fighter never
+fought. I do not mean in the impossible way meant by those whose
+judgment of him rests solely on _The Gentle Art_. They think he fought
+for no other end than to make enemies when, really, he enjoyed far more
+the good give-and-take argument that preserved to him his friends,
+provided those friends fought fair and did not play the coward, or the
+toady, to escape the combat.
+
+J. and I have written his Life in vain if everybody who cares to know
+anything about him does not know that from 1895 and 1896, the greater
+part of his time was spent in London and that many of his nights were
+then given to us, more particularly towards the end of the amazing
+decade. We paid for the privilege by the loss of some of our friends
+who, for one reason or another, cultivated a wholesome fear of Whistler.
+Men who had been most constant in dropping in, dropped in no
+longer--nor, in many cases, have they ever begun to drop in again. More
+than one would have run miles to escape the chance encounter, trembling
+with apprehension when in a desperate visit they seemed to court it, and
+often the several doors opening into our little hall served as important
+a part in preventing a meeting between Whistler and the enemy as the
+doors in the old-fashioned farce played in the husband and wife game of
+hide-and-seek.
+
+It was not too big a price to pay. Whistler's talk was worth a great
+deal, and the twelve years that have passed since we lost it forever
+have not lessened its value for us. Ours is a sadder world since we have
+ceased to hear the memorable and unmistakable knock and ring at our
+front door, the prelude to the talk, rousing the whole house until every
+tenant in the other chambers and the housekeeper in her rooms below knew
+when Whistler came to see us. Our nights, since those he animated and
+made as "joyous" as he liked to be in his hours of play and battle, have
+lost their savour. We are perpetually referring to them, quoting,
+regretting them. Even Augustine looks back to them as making a pleasant
+epoch in her life. Often she will remind me of this night or that,
+declaring we have grown dull without him--but do I remember the night
+when M. Whistlaire argued so hard and with such violence that the print
+of the rabbit fell from the wall in its frame, the glass shivering in a
+thousand pieces, just when M. Kennedy was so angry we thought he was
+going to walk away forever, and how after that there could be no more
+arguing, and M. Whistlaire laughed as she swept up the pieces, and M.
+Kennedy did not walk away alone, but later they both walked away
+together, arm-in-arm, to the hotel where they always stayed?--and do I
+remember how, during the Boer War, he would come and dine with me alone,
+his pockets stuffed with newspaper clippings, and how he would put them
+by his plate, and how long we would sit at table because he would read
+every one of them to me, with that gay laugh nobody laughs
+nowadays?--and do I remember that other evening when he and Monsieur
+disputed and disputed she didn't know about what, and how excited they
+got, and how he kept banging the table with his knife, the sharp edge
+down, until he cut a long slit in the cloth, and it was our best
+tablecloth too?--and do I remember the long stories he would tell us
+some evenings and his little mocking laugh when she, who could not
+understand a word, knew he was saying something malicious about
+somebody?--and do I remember how he liked a good dinner and her cooking
+because it was French, and how he would never refuse when she promised
+him her _pot-au-feu_ or one of her salads--and do I remember one after
+another of those old nights the like of which we shall never see again?
+Do I remember indeed? They fill too big a space in memory, they
+overshadow too well the lesser nights with lesser men, they were too
+joyous an episode in our thirty long years of talk for me ever to
+forget them. The three classical knocks of the _Theatre Francais_ could
+not announce more certainly a night of beauty or wit or fun or romance
+than the violent ring and the resounding knock at the old battered door
+of the Buckingham Street chambers where, for Whistler, the oak was never
+sported.
+
+But of our Whistler nights we have already made the record--this is
+another tale that is already told. I think Whistler knew their value as
+well as we did, knew what they cost us in the loss of friends, knew what
+he had given us in return, knew what he had revealed to us of himself in
+all friendliness, and that this was the reason he looked to us for the
+record not only of his nights with us, but of his life. Once he had
+confided that charge to us, the old Buckingham Street nights grew more
+marvellous still, full of reminiscences, of comment, of criticism, of
+friendliness, his talk none the less stimulating and splendid because,
+at his request, the cuff or note-book was always ready. And they
+continued until the long tragic weeks and months when he was first
+afraid to go out at night and then unable to, and when the talks were by
+day instead--not quite the same in the last, the saddest months of all,
+for weakness and thoughts of the work yet to be done and the feebleness
+that kept him from doing it fell like a black cloud over all our
+meetings, even those where the old gaiety asserted itself for a moment
+and the old light of battle gleamed again in his eyes. To the end he
+liked the talk no less than we, for to the end he sent for us, to the
+end he would see us when few besides were admitted. There, for those who
+would like to question his friendship with us, for those who believe
+that Whistler never could keep a friend because he never wanted to, is
+the proof dear to us of the good friend he could be when his friendship
+was not abused or taken advantage of behind his back.
+
+Many other nights besides there have been--long series of American
+nights--John Van Dyke nights I might say, Timothy Cole nights,--but no,
+I am not going to name names and make a catalogue, I am not going to
+write their story, I am not going to run the risks of the folly I have
+protested against. I have confessed my safe belief that of the living
+only good should be spoken, and good only when it is within the bounds
+of discretion. It is not my ambition to rival at home the unpopularity
+of N.P. Willis in England after the first of his indiscretions, which
+seem discretion itself now in the light of to-day's yellow and society
+journalism.
+
+And there have been English nights--many--nights with old friends who
+are faithful and new friends who are devoted--nights of late so like the
+old Thursday nights that both Hartrick and Sullivan, now twenty years
+older and with no Phil May to revolve round, asked why those old
+memorable gay nights could not be revived? But would they be gay? Would
+they not turn out the dust and ashes, the worse than Lenten fare, from
+which I shrink? Would they not, as I have said, prove as mournful as
+that banquet of Zola's Conquerors of Paris?
+
+Recently there have been Belgian nights--nights with those Belgian
+artists whose habit was never to travel at all until they started on
+their journey as exiles to London--a journey to which the end in a
+return journey seems to them so tediously long in coming. And there have
+been War nights when the clash of our battle, in the grim consciousness
+of that other battle not so far away, is less cheerful. And there have
+been nights with the great search-lights over the Thames that tell us as
+much as those young insistent voices in Buckingham Street could tell,
+but only of things so tragic and so sombre that I am the more eager to
+finish the story of our London nights with our Thursdays, in the years
+when we were burdened by no more serious fighting than the endless fight
+of friend with friend, of fellow worker with fellow worker, fought in
+the good cause of work and play, faith and doubt, fear and hope--a
+stirring fight, but one in which words are the weapons, one which can
+never be won or lost, since no two can ever be found to agree when they
+talk for pleasure, nor any one man forced to agree with himself for all
+time.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+NIGHTS
+
+IN PARIS
+
+
+
+
+IN PARIS
+
+I
+
+
+I still go to Paris every year in May when the _Salons_ open, but now I
+go alone. The lilacs and horse-chestnuts, that J. used to reproach me
+for never keeping out of the articles it was my business to write there,
+still bloom in the _Champs-Elysees_ and the _Bois_, but now I am no
+longer tempted to drag them into my MS. The spring nights still are
+beautiful on the _Boulevards_ and _Quais_ but only ghosts walk with me
+along the old familiar ways, only ghosts sit with me at table in
+restaurants where once I always ate in company. Paris has lost half its
+charm since the days when, as regularly as spring came round, I was one
+of the little group of critics and artists and friends from London who
+met in it for a week among the pictures.
+
+It was much the same group, if smaller, that met on our Thursday nights
+in London. Some of us went for work, to "do" the _Salons_ after we had
+"done" the Royal Academy and the New Gallery, then the Academy's only
+London rival: Bob Stevenson for the _Pall Mall_, D.S. MacColl for the
+_Spectator_, Charles Whibley for the _National Observer_. J., during
+several years, spared the time from more important things to fight as
+critic the empty criticism of the moment, the old-fashioned criticism
+that recognised no masterpiece outside of Burlington House and saw
+nothing in a picture or a drawing save a story: a thankless task, for
+already the old-fashioned criticism threatens to become the
+new-fashioned again. I, for my part, was kept as busy as I knew how to
+be, and busier, for the _Nation_ and my London papers. Others went
+because they were artists and wanted to see what Paris was doing and May
+was the season when Paris was doing most and was most liberal in letting
+everybody see it. Beardsley and Furse seldom failed, and I do not
+suppose a year passed that we did not chance upon one or more unexpected
+friends in a gallery or a _cafe_ and add them to our party. Sometimes a
+Publisher was with us, his affairs an excuse for a holiday, or sometimes
+an Architect to show the poor foreigner how respectable British
+respectability can be and, incidentally, to make his a guarantee of ours
+that we could have dispensed with. Harland and Mrs. Harland were always
+there, I do believe for sheer love of Paris in the May-time, and I
+rather think theirs was the wisest reason of all.
+
+During no week throughout my hard-working year did I have to work
+harder than during that May week spent in Paris. I am inclined now, in
+the more leisurely period of life at which I have arrived, to admire
+myself when I recall how many articles I had to write, how many prints
+and drawings, statues and pictures, I had to look at in order to write
+them, and my success in never leaving my editors in the lurch. My
+admiration is the greater because nobody could know as well as I how
+slow I have always been with my work and also, to do myself justice, how
+conscientious, as I do not mind saying, though to be called
+conscientious by anybody else would seem to me only less offensive than
+to be called good-natured or amiable. As a critic I never could get to
+the point of writing round the pictures and saying nothing about them
+like many I knew for whom five minutes in a gallery sufficed, nor, to be
+frank, did I try to. Neither could I hang an article on one picture. I
+might envy George Moore, for an interval the critic of the _Speaker_,
+now the London _Nation_, because he could and did. I can remember him at
+an Academy Press View making the interminable round with a business-like
+briskness until, perhaps in the first hour and the last room, he would
+come upon the painting that gave him the peg for his eloquence, make an
+elaborate study of it, tell us his task was finished, and hurry off
+exultant. But envy him as I might, I couldn't borrow his briskness. I
+had to plod on all morning and again all afternoon until the Academy
+closed, to look at every picture before I could be sure which was the
+right peg or whether there might not be a dozen pegs and more. And I had
+to collect elaborate notes, not daring to trust to my memory alone, and
+after that to re-write pages that did not satisfy me. Just to see the
+Academy meant an honest day's labour and in Paris there were two
+_Salons_, each immeasurably bigger, and innumerable smaller shows into
+the bargain. And yet, that laborious May week never seemed to me so much
+toil as pleasure.
+
+There was a great deal about Paris the toil left me no chance to find
+out. I should not like to say how many of its sights I have failed
+regularly to see during the visit I have paid to it every year now for
+over a quarter of a century. But at least I have learned the best thing
+worth knowing about it, which is that in no other town can toil look so
+uncommonly like pleasure, in no other town is it so easy to play hard
+and to work hard at the same time: precisely the truth the Baedeker
+student has a knack of missing, the truth the special kind of foreigner,
+for whom Paris would not be Paris if he could not believe it the
+abomination of desolation, goes out of his way to miss. I have met some
+of my own countrymen who have seen everything in Paris but never Paris
+itself--the old story of not seeing the wood for the trees--and who are
+absolutely convinced that it is a town in which all the people think of
+is amusement and that a more frivolous creature than the Parisian never
+existed. From their comfortable seat of judgment in the correct hotels
+and the correct show places, they cannot look as far as the schools and
+factories that make Paris the centre of learning for the world and of
+industry for France, and they are in their way every bit as dense as the
+English who take their pleasure so seriously they cannot understand the
+French who take their work gaily. "_Des blagueurs meme au feu_," a
+Belgian officer the other day described to me the French soldiers who
+had been fighting at his side, and I think it rather finer to face
+Death--or Work--laughing than in tears. If Paris were not so gay on the
+surface I am sure I should not find it so stimulating, though how it
+would be if I lived there I have never dared put to the test, unwilling
+to run whatever risk there might be if I did. I prefer to keep Paris in
+reserve for a working holiday or, indeed, any sort of holiday, a
+preference which, if Heine is to be trusted, I share with _le bon Dieu_
+of the old French proverb who, when he is bored in Heaven, opens a
+window and looks down upon the _Boulevards_ of Paris.
+
+At the first sight, the first sound, the first smell of Paris, the
+holiday feeling stirred within us. The minute we arrived we began to
+play at our work as we never did in London, as it never would have
+occurred to us there that we could.
+
+The Academy, only the week before, had given us the same chance to meet,
+the same chance to talk, the same chance to lunch together, and of the
+lunch it had got to be our habit to make a Press Day function. Nowadays
+at the Academy Press View, when I am hungry, I run up to Stewart's at
+the corner of Bond Street for a couple of sandwiches, and excellent they
+are, but, as I eat them in my solitary corner, no flight of my sluggish
+imagination can make them seem to me more than a stern necessity. There
+was, however, a festive air about the old Press Day lunch when, towards
+one o'clock, some six or eight of us adjourned to Solferino's, another
+vanished landmark of my younger days in London. It was in Rupert Street,
+the street of Prince Florizel's Divan, which was appropriate, for Bob
+Stevenson was always with us and but for Bob Prince Florizel might never
+have existed to run a Divan in Rupert or any other street. Solferino's
+had a Barsac that Bob liked to order, chiefly I fancy for all it
+represented to him of Paris and Lavenue's and Barbizon and student days,
+and the old memories warming him over it as lunch went on, he would
+unfold one theory of art after another until suddenly a critic, more
+nervous than the rest, would take out his watch, and the hour he saw
+there would send us post-haste back to Piccadilly and the Academy, which
+at that time thought one Press Day sufficient.
+
+But the lunch that seemed a festivity at Solferino's never gave us the
+holiday sense Paris filled us with from the early hour in the morning
+when, after our little breakfast, we met downstairs in the unpretentious
+hotel in the Rue St. Roch where most of us stayed--if we did not stay
+instead at the Hotel de l'Univers et Portugal for the sake of the name.
+The Rue St. Roch was convenient and if we were willing to climb to the
+top of the narrow house, where the smell of dinner hung heavy on the
+stairs all through the afternoon and evening, we could have our room for
+the next to nothing at all that suited our purse, and the
+dining-room--the Coffee Room in gilt letters on its door would have
+frightened us from it in any case--was so tiny it was a kindness to the
+_patron_ not to come back for the midday breakfast or the dinner that we
+could not have been induced to eat in the hotel, under any
+circumstances, for half the big price he charged. The day's talk was
+already in full swing as we steamed down the Seine, or walked under the
+arcade of the _Rue de Rivoli_ and along the _Quais_, in the cool of the
+May morning, to the new _Salon_ which was then in the _Champ-de-Mars_.
+And one morning at the _Salon_ made it clear to me, as years at the
+Academy could not, why French criticism permits itself to speak of art
+as a "game" and of the artist's work as "amusing" and "gay." There were
+words that got into my article as persistently as the lilacs and the
+horse-chestnuts.
+
+
+II
+
+If we brought to Paris a talent for talk and youth for enjoyment, Paris
+at the moment was providing liberally more than we could talk about or
+had time to enjoy. London may have been wide awake--for London--in the
+Nineties, but it was half asleep compared to Paris and would not have
+been awake at all if it had not gone to Paris for the "new" it
+bragged of so loud in art and every excitement it cultivated, and for
+the "_fin-de-siecle,_" that chance phrase passed lightly from mouth to
+mouth in Paris of which it made a serious classification.
+
+[Illustration: Etching by Joseph Pennell
+IN THE CHAMPS-ELYSEES]
+
+I have watched with sympathetic amusement these late years one new
+movement, one new revolt after another, started and led by little men
+who have not the strength to move anything or the independence to revolt
+against anything, except in their boast of it, and who would be
+frightened by the bigness of a movement and revolt like the Secession
+from the old _Salon_ that followed the International Exposition of 1889.
+I feel how long ago the Nineties were when I hear the young people in
+Paris to-day talk of the two _Salons_ as the _Artistes-Francais_ and the
+_Beaux-Arts_. In the Nineties we, who watched the parting of the ways,
+knew them only as the Old _Salon_ and the New _Salon_ because that is
+what we saw in them and what they really were--unless we distinguished
+them as the _Champ-de-Mars Salon_ and the _Champs-Elysees Salon_, for
+another ten years were to pass before there was a _Grand Palais_ for
+both to move into. We could not write about either without a reminder of
+the age of the one and the youth of the other, the Old _Salon_
+remaining the home of the tradition that has become hide-bound
+convention, and the new _Salon_ offering headquarters to the tradition
+that is being "carried on," as we were forever pointing out, borrowing
+the phrase from Whistler. We were given in the Nineties to borrowing the
+things Whistler said and wrote, for we knew, if it is not every critic
+who does to-day, that he was as great a master of art criticism as of
+art.
+
+What the men who undertook to carry on tradition did for us was to
+arrange a good show. They had to, if it meant taking off their coats and
+rolling up their sleeves and putting themselves down to it in grim
+earnest, for it was the only way they could justify their action and the
+existence of their Society, and their choice of a President, the very
+name of Meissonier seeming to stand for anything rather than secession
+and experiment and revolt. For the first few exhibitions many of the
+older men got together small collections of their earlier work that had
+not been shown publicly for years, and the new _Salon's_ way of
+arranging each man's work in a separate group or panel made it tell with
+all the more effect. And then there was the excitement of coming upon
+paintings or statues long familiar, but only by reputation or
+reproduction. I cannot forget how we thrilled in front of Whistler's
+_Rosa Corder_, which we were none of us, except Bob Stevenson, old
+enough to have seen when Whistler first exhibited it in London and Paris
+to a public unwilling to leave him in any doubt as to its indifference,
+how we talked and talked and talked until we had not time that morning
+to look at one other painting in the gallery, how it was not the fault
+of our articles if everybody did not squander upon it the attention
+refused not much more than a decade before. And the younger men of the
+moment had to summon up every scrap of individuality they possessed to
+be admitted, and not to be admitted meant too much conservatism or too
+much independence. And credentials of fine work had to be presented by
+the artists from all over the world--Americans, Scandinavians, Dutchmen,
+Belgians, Russians, Italians, Germans, Austrians, Spaniards,--who
+couldn't believe they had come off if the New _Salon_ did not let them
+in, and half the time they hadn't. And with all it was just for the
+pride of being there, they were not out for medals, since the New
+_Salon_ gave no awards. And altogether there was about as wide a gulf of
+principle and performance as could be between the two _Salons_ that are
+now separated by not much more than the turnstiles in the one building
+that shelters them both.
+
+And sparks of originality gleamed here and there; the passion for
+adventure had not flickered out--at every step through the galleries
+some subject for the discussion we exulted in stopped us short. It might
+be Impressionism, Sisley still showing if Monet did not, and Vibrism and
+Pointillism and all the other _isms_ springing up and out of it. It
+might be Rosicrucianism and Symbolism which had just come in, and Sar
+Peladan--does anybody to-day read the Sar's long tedious books, bought
+by us with such zeal and promptly left to grow dusty on our
+shelves?--and Huysmans and their fellow teachers of Magic and members of
+the _Rose-Croix_ were being interpreted in paint and in black-and-white,
+and if the interpretations did not interpret to so prosaic a mind as
+mine, it mattered the less because they were often excuse for a fine
+design. And the square brush mark lingered, and much was heard of the
+broken brush mark, and values had not ceased to be absorbing, nor _la
+peinture au premier coup_ and _la peinture en plein air_ to be wrangled
+over. And a religious wave from nobody knew where swept artists to the
+Scriptures for motives and sent them for a background, not with Holman
+Hunt to Palestine, but to their own surroundings, their own country, to
+the light and atmosphere each knew best--Lhermitte's Christ suffered
+little children to come unto Him in a French peasant's cottage;
+Edelfelt's Christ walked in the sunlight of the North; Jean Beraud's
+Christ found Simon the Pharisee at home in a Parisian club; and no
+landscape, realistic, impressionistic, decorative, was complete unless a
+familiar figure or group came straying into it from out the Bible. Much
+that was done perished with the group or the fad that gave it birth,
+much when suddenly come upon now on the walls of the provincial gallery
+looks disconcertingly old-fashioned. But nevertheless, the movement, the
+energy, the life of the Nineties was a healthy enemy to that stagnation
+which is a death trap for art.
+
+And Black-and-White was a section to be visited in the freshness of the
+morning, not to be put off, like the dull, shockingly over-crowded
+little room at the Academy, to the last hurried moments of fatigue--a
+section to devote the day to and then to leave only for the bookstall or
+bookshop where we could invest the money we had not to spare in the
+books and magazines and papers illustrated by Carlos Schwabe and Khnopf
+and Steinlen and Willette and Caran D'Ache and Louis Legrand and Forain
+and the men whose work in the original we had been studying and laying
+down the law about for hours. And the artist's new invention, his new
+experiment, came as surely as the spring--now the original wood block
+and now the colour print, one year the draughtsman's Holbein-inspired
+portrait and another the poster that excited us into collecting Cheret
+and Toulouse-Lautrec at a feverish rate and facing afterwards, as best
+we could, the problem of what in the world to do with a collection that
+nothing smaller than a railroad station or the hoardings could
+accommodate.
+
+And the Sculpture court was not the accustomed chill waste, dreary as
+the yard crowded with marble tombstones. If nobody else had been in
+it--and many were--Rodin was there to heat the atmosphere, his name
+kindling a flame of criticism long before his work was reached. Beyond
+his name he was barely known in London, where I remember then seeing no
+work of his except his bust of Henley, who, during a visit to Paris, I
+believe his only one, had sat to Rodin and then, ever after, with the
+splendid enthusiasm he lavished on his friends, had preached Rodin. But
+in Paris at the New _Salon_ there was always plenty of the work to
+explain why the name was such a firebrand--disturbing, exciting,
+faction-making--as I look back, culminating in the melodramatic Balzac
+that would have kept us in hot debate for all eternity had there not
+been innumerable things to interest us as much and more.
+
+The critic has simply to take his task as we took ours and not another
+occupation in life can prove so brimming over with excitement. In the
+early Nineties I had not a doubt that it could always be taken like
+that. I would not have believed the most accredited prophet who
+prophesied that we would outlive our interest in the New _Salon_. And
+yet, a year came when, of the old group, only D.S. MacColl and I met in
+the _Champ-de-Mars_ and he, with boredom in his face and voice, assured
+me he had found nothing in it from end to end except a silk panel
+decorated by Conder, and so helped to kill any belief I still cherished
+in the emotion that does not wear itself out with time.
+
+However, this melancholy meeting was not until the Nineties were nearing
+their end, and up till then our days were an orgy of art criticism and
+excitement in it. In Paris, as in Rome, as in Venice, as in London,
+only night set me free for the pleasure that was apart from work. As a
+rule, none of us dared at the _Salons_ to interrupt our work there even
+to make a function of the midday breakfast, as we did of lunch at the
+Academy, the days in Paris being so remarkably short for all we had to
+do in them. We were forced to treat it as a mere halt, regrettable but
+unavoidable, in the day's appointed task, whether we ate it at the
+_Salon_ to save time or in some near little restaurant to save money.
+Often we were tempted, and few temptations are more difficult to resist
+than the unfolding of the big, soft French napkin at noon and the
+arrival of the radishes and butter and the long crisp French bread. When
+I was alone I escaped by going to one of the little tables in that
+gloomy corner of the _Salon_ restaurant where there was no napkin to be
+unfolded, no radishes and butter to lead to indiscretion, and nothing
+more elaborate was served than a sandwich or a _brioche_, a cup of
+coffee or the glass of Madeira which sentiment makes it a duty for the
+good Philadelphian to drink whenever and wherever it comes his way. The
+temptation being so strong, it is useless to pretend that we never fell.
+If we had not, I should not have memories of breakfasts in the _Salon_,
+under the trees at Ledoyen's, on the _Tour Eiffel_, in the classic shade
+of the Palais Royal from which all the old houses had not been swept
+away, and as far from the scene of work as the close neighborhood of the
+_Bourse_ where we could scarcely have got by accident. But the thought
+of the work waiting was for me the disquieting mummy served with every
+course of the feast. Not until the _Salon_ door closed upon my drooping
+back and weary feet, turning me out whether I would or no, in the late
+hours of the afternoon, was I at liberty to remember how many other
+things there are in life besides work.
+
+
+III
+
+The hour when all Paris had settled down to the business of pleasure--to
+proving itself the abomination of desolation to those who were already
+too sure to be in need of a proof--was an enchanting hour to find one's
+self at liberty. The heat of the day was over, the air was cool, the
+light golden, the important question of dining could be considered in
+comfort on enticing little chairs in the shady alleys of the
+_Champs-Elysees_ or, better still, on little chairs no less enticing
+with little tables in front of them at the nearest _cafe_, where an
+_aperitif_ was to be sipped even if it were no more deadly than a
+_groseille_ or a _grenadine_. What the _aperitif_ was did not matter;
+what did, was the reason it gave for half an hour's loafing before
+dinner with all the loafing town.
+
+[Illustration: Etching by Joseph Pennell
+THE HALF HOUR BEFORE DINNER]
+
+Had we lived in Paris, no doubt we would have done as we did in Rome and
+Venice and have gone every night to the same restaurant where the same
+greeting from the same smiling _patron_ and the same table in the same
+corner awaited us. But change and experiment and a good deal of
+preliminary discussion over an _aperitif_ were more in the order of a
+week's visit. As a rule, we preferred the small restaurant that was
+cheap, as we were most of us impecunious, also the restaurant that was
+out-of-doors, out-of-doors turning the simplest dinner into a feast.
+However, nobody yet was really ever young who was never reckless.
+Occasionally we dined joyously beyond our means, and one memorable year
+we devoted our nights to giving each other dinners where the best
+dinners were to be had. Those alone who are blest with little money and
+the obligation of making that little can appreciate the splendour of our
+recklessness, just as those alone who work all day and eat sparingly can
+have the proper regard for a good dinner. I do not regret the
+recklessness, I am not much the poorer for it to-day whatever I was at
+the time, and I should have missed something out of life had I not once
+dined recklessly in Paris. Moreover, our special business was the study
+of art and in Paris dining and art are one, though the foolish man in
+less civilized countries preaches that to eat for any other purpose than
+to live is gluttony. The clear intellect of the French saves them from
+that mistake, and I have entertained hopes for the future of my own
+country ever since one wise American,--Henry T. Finck,--discovering the
+truth that the French have always had the common sense to know,
+proclaimed it in a book which I have honoured by placing it in my
+Collection of Cookery Books with Grimod de la Reyniere, Brillat-Savarin
+and Dumas.
+
+At the time we were more concerned with the dinner than the philosophy
+of dining. Our one aim was to dine well, whether it was the right thing
+or the wrong, even whether or no it sent us back to London bankrupt. We
+did not flinch before the price we paid, and if we were too wise to
+measure the value of the dinner by its cost, we were proud of the
+bigness of the bill as the "visible sign," the guarantee of success. It
+was a tremendous triumph for J. when he paid the biggest of all, which
+he did, not so much because he set out to deliberately as because, by
+the choice of chance, he had invited us to Voisin's in the Rue St.
+Honore, where the red-cushioned seats, the mirrors, the white paint, the
+discreet gilding, the air of retirement, the few elderly, rotund,
+meditative diners, each dining with himself, were all typical of the old
+classical Paris restaurant, and assured us beforehand of a good dinner
+and a price in keeping. That we ate asparagus from Argenteuil and
+_petites fraises des bois_ I know because the season was spring; that
+the wine was good I also know because the reputation of Voisin's cellar
+permitted of no other. And I am as sure that the _menu_ was so short
+that ours would have seemed the dinner of an anchorite in the City of
+London, for if we could not dine often we were masters of the art of
+dining when we did, and we understood, as the Lord Mayor and the City
+Companies of London, celebrated for their dinners, do not, that dining
+is not an art when the last course cannot be enjoyed as much as the
+first. As I keep the family accounts, I was obliged to pay in another
+way for J.'s triumph at Voisin's when I got back to London and faced a
+deficit that had to be balanced somehow in my weekly bills for the rest
+of the month. But, at least, if abstaining has to be done, London is
+the easiest place to abstain in as Paris is the best to dine in.
+
+The Publisher who was with us that year gave his dinner at the LaPerouse
+on the _Quai des Grands-Augustins_, and it was not his fault if he fell
+short of J.'s triumph by a few francs. The giver of a dinner at the
+LaPerouse in the happy past enjoyed the fearful pleasure of not knowing
+how much he was spending until he called for his bill, price being too
+trivial a detail for a place in the _menu_, and usually when the bill
+came it exceeded his most ambitious hopes. The Publisher must have hit
+upon Friday, for the perfume of _Bouillabaisse_ mingles with my memories
+of the dinner in the little low _entresol_ where, by stooping down and
+craning our necks, we could see the towers of _Notre-Dame_ from the
+window, and where the big, tall, handsome, black-bearded _patron_,
+alarmingly out of scale with the room, came to make sure of our pleasure
+in his dishes--he would rather the bill had gone unpaid than have seen
+the dinner neglected. I think there was a bottle of some special
+Burgundy in its cradle, for rarely in his life, I fancy, has the
+Publisher felt so in need of being fortified. Early in the day he had
+been guilty of the astonishing indiscretion, as it then seemed, of
+buying three Van Goghs. For this happened years before anybody had begun
+to buy Van Gogh--years before anybody had begun to hear of Van
+Gogh--years before Post-Impressionism had been invented and had launched
+its crop of Cubists and Futurists and Vorticists as direct descendants
+of Van Gogh and Cezanne who would assuredly have been the first to
+repudiate them. The Publisher had gone unsuspectingly, confidingly, with
+J. to _Montmartre_ and there, among other haunts, into the now
+celebrated little shop where the paintings Van Gogh used to give in
+exchange for paints littered the whole place, and where the dealer
+thought it a bargain if, for a few francs, he could get rid of canvases
+that now fetch their hundreds and thousands of pounds. J. would have
+invested had he had the few francs. Not having them, he persuaded the
+Publisher to, and to buy three of the best into the bargain, and never
+did his own empty pockets stand in the way of a more profitable
+investment, for had he bought not all but only a few in this wilderness
+of Van Goghs, and had he sold them again as he would never have done, we
+might now, if we chose, dine every night at the LaPerouse or Voisin's
+and prepare for the reckoning without a tremor. If I write of the
+buying of these pictures as if they were stocks and shares, it is
+because that is the way the creators of the "Van Gogh-Cezanne-Gauguin
+boom" have appraised them, appealing to the modern collector who
+collects for the money in art, not the beauty. That night at the
+LaPerouse the Publisher was dazed by his unexpected rashness as art
+patron; to-day, when he points to the one of the three paintings still
+hanging on his walls, he flatters himself that he discovered Van Gogh
+before the multitude.
+
+Bob Stevenson took us to dine at Lavenue's in Montparnasse, and if he
+had not of his own free will we should have compelled him to. He
+belonged there. At Lavenue's he and Louis Stevenson dined when they were
+young in Paris, it was always cropping up in Bob's talk of the old days,
+it plays its part--"the restaurant where no one need be ashamed to
+entertain the master"--in the opening chapters of _The Wrecker_, which I
+think as entertaining as any chapters Louis Stevenson ever wrote in that
+or any other book. The dinner, of which I recall nothing in particular,
+did not interest me as much as the place itself. To see Bob Stevenson at
+Lavenue's was like seeing Manet at the _Nouvelle Athenes_ or Dr. Johnson
+at the Cheshire Cheese, and to make the background complete Alexander
+Harrison, with two or three American painters of his generation, was
+dining at a near table.
+
+He shall be nameless who gave the dinner at Marguery's. The dinner was
+all it should have been, for we ate the sole called after the house. It
+was the provider of it who proved wanting. I was brought up to believe
+that the host, when there is a host, should pay his bill. A large part
+of my life has been spent in getting rid of the things I was brought up
+to believe, but this particular belief I have never been able to shed
+and I confess I was taken aback--let me put it at that--when the white
+paper neatly folded in a plate, served at the end of dinner, was passed
+on to one of the guests. If the debt then run into was not paid does not
+much matter after all these years, or perhaps if it was not it has the
+more interest for the curious observer of modes and moods. In this case,
+the whole incident could be reduced to a kindness on the part of the
+debtor, sacrificing himself to show how right Bob Stevenson was when he
+said, as Robert Louis Stevenson repeated after him in print, that while
+the Anglo-Saxon can and does boast that he is not as Frenchmen in
+certain matters of morals, it is his misfortune to be as little like
+them in their vigorous definition of honesty and the obligation of
+paying their debts.
+
+That the fifth dinner was at the _Tour d'Argent_ is not an achievement
+to be particularly proud of. On the contrary, it appears to me a trifle
+banal as I look back to it, for fashion was at the time sending
+Americans and English to the _Tour d'Argent_ just as it was driving them
+on beautiful spring days into that horribly crowded afternoon tea place
+in the _Rue Daunou_--wasn't it?--or to order their new gowns at the new
+dressmakers in the _Rue de la Paix_, or to do any of the hundred and one
+other things that proved them up to the times, at home in Paris,
+initiated into _le dernier cri_ or whatever new phrase they thought set
+the seal upon Parisian smartness. Frederic's face was as well known as
+Ibsen's which it so resembled, his sanded floor was the talk of the
+tourists, the distinguished foreigner struggled to have his name on
+Frederic's _menu_, and as for Frederic's pressed duck it had degenerated
+into as everyday a commonplace as an oyster stew in New York or a chop
+from the grill in London. The bill at the end of the evening might be
+all that the occasion demanded of the man who was giving the dinner, but
+his choice of restaurant could not convict him of originality, or of
+sentiment either. But I do not know why I grumble when the dinner was so
+good. The _Tour d'Argent_ had not fallen as most restaurants fall when
+they attract patrons from across the Channel. Frederic's cooking was
+beyond reproach. Even the theatrical ceremony over his pressed duck
+could not spoil its flavour.
+
+The sixth evening saw us at _Prunier's_, eating the oysters that it
+would have been useless to go to _Prunier's_ and not to eat (we must
+have been in Paris unusually early in May that year), and if it was not
+the season to eat the snails for which _Prunier's_ is equally renowned,
+my heart was not broken. It may give me away to confess that I do not
+like them, since snails are one of the unconsidered trifles that no
+Autolycus posing as _gourmet_ should turn a disdainful back upon. But
+what can I do? It is a case of Dr. Fell, and that is the beginning and
+end of it. And if it wasn't the season for snails, and if I wouldn't
+have eaten them if it had been, in _Prunier's_ gilded halls other
+delicacies are served, and when I summon up remembrance of those dinners
+past, _Prunier's_ does not exactly take a back seat.
+
+But naturally, the most important dinner in my opinion was mine at the
+_Cabaret Lyonnais_ in the _Rue de Port-Mahon_, where never again can I
+invite my friends, for the _Cabaret_ has gone into the land of shadows
+with so many of the group who sat round my table. At the time, there was
+no looking back, no sad straying into a dead past to spoil a good
+dinner--at the worst, a fleeting moment of discomfort when we selected
+the tench swimming in the tank close to our table and saw them carried
+off to the kitchen to be cooked for us. It was the custom of the house,
+intended to be a pleasing assurance that our fish was fresh, but a
+custom with just a savour in it of cannibalism. I have never cared to be
+on speaking terms with the creatures I am about to eat. I squirm when I
+see the lobster for my salad squirming, though I know the risk if it
+should not squirm at all. Had I lived in the country among my own
+chickens and pigs and lambs, I should have been long since a confirmed
+vegetarian. But to go to the _Cabaret Lyonnais_ unwilling to swallow my
+scruples with my fish would have been as useless as to go to Simpson's
+in London and object to a cut from the joint, as I do object, which is
+why I seldom go. Anyway, we did not have to see the beef killed for the
+_filet_ which at the _Cabaret_ we were expected to eat after the tench
+and with the potatoes to which the city of Lyons also gives its name, so
+associating itself forever with the perfume of the onion. And, as in
+the Provinces, the wine was the _petit vin gris_ which I never can drink
+without a vision of the straight, white, poplar-lined roads of France,
+sunshine, a tandem tricycle or two bicycles, J. and myself perched upon
+them, and by the way friendly little inns with a good breakfast or
+dinner waiting, and a big carafe of the pale light wine served with it.
+That my dinner was comparatively cheap would at normal times have been
+for me delightfully in its favour. But that it was the cheapest of all
+in that week of dinners meant that I came out last in the race when, by
+every law of justice, I should have been first. In Paris as in London my
+"greedy column," as my friends called it with the straightforwardness
+peculiar to friends, had to be written every week for the _Pall Mall_
+and mine was the enviable position of finding my copy in eating good
+dinners no less than in going to the _Salons_. If any one had an
+irreproachable excuse for extravagant living, it was I.
+
+But even I, with the excuse, could not afford the extravagance--one
+weekly article did not pay for one cheap dinner for eight--at the
+_Cabaret Lyonnais_. And as the rest of the party were without the excuse
+and no better equipped for the extravagance, we never again gave each
+other dinners on the same lavish scale and rarely on any scale,
+henceforward ordering them on the principle of what Philadelphia in my
+youth called "a Jersey treat." I do not say that economy was invariably
+our rule. We could be, on occasions, so rash that before our week was up
+we had to begin to count our francs, put by for the boat sandwich and
+the reluctant tips of the return journey, and eat the last meals of all
+in the Duval, which, if admirable as a place to economize in, is no more
+conducive to gaiety than a London A.B.C. shop or Childs's in New York.
+Once we were so reduced that at noon I was left to a lonely _brioche_ at
+the _Salon_, and the men went to breakfast at the nearest cabman's
+eating-house, where they made the sensation of their lives, without
+meaning to and without finding in it any special compensation. The most
+respectable of the respectable architectural group of our Thursday
+nights was of the party and where he went the top hat and frock coat, in
+which I used to think he must have been born, went too. If his
+fashion-plate correctness--men wore frock coats then--made him
+conspicuous at our Thursday nights it can be imagined what he was
+sitting with his coat tails in the gutter at the cabman's table where
+the glazed hat and the three-caped coat of the Paris _cocher_ set the
+fashion. He had the grace to be ashamed of himself, often apologizing
+for his clothes and assuring us that he could not help himself, which
+was his reason, I fancy, for accepting at an early age the professorial
+chair where the decorum of his hat and coat was in need of no apology.
+
+
+IV
+
+I have said we were young. It seems superfluous to add that now and
+then, in the sunshine of the perfect May day, with the call of the
+lilacs and the horse-chestnuts getting into our heads as well as into my
+copy, the _Salon_ grew stuffy beyond endurance, work became a crime, and
+we put up our catalogues and note-books before the closing hour and
+hurried anywhere just to be out-of-doors, as if our sole profession in
+life was to idle it away. After all, only the prig can be in Paris when
+May is there and not play truant sometimes.
+
+The year Paris chose our week to show how hot it can be in May when it
+has a mind to, was the year I got to learn something of the Paris
+suburbs. The joyous expedition which ended our every day that year was
+so in the spirit of Harland that I should be inclined to look upon him
+as the tempter, had we not, with the usual amiability of the tempted,
+met him more than half way. Still, he excelled us all in the knack of
+collecting us from our work, no matter how it had scattered us or in
+what quarter of the town we might be, and carrying us off suddenly out
+of it in directions we none of us had dreamed of the minute before, just
+as he would collect and carry us off suddenly in London. Only, he was
+more resourceful in Paris because in Paris more resources were made to
+his hand. There are as beautiful places round London--that is, beautiful
+in the English way--as round Paris, but they do not invite to a holiday
+with the charm no sensible man can resist. The loveliness of Hampton
+Court and Richmond and Hampstead Heath and the River is not to be denied
+and yet, gay as the English playing there manage to look, the only
+genuine gaiety is the Bank Holiday maker's. Tradition consecrates the
+loveliness bordering upon Paris to the gaiety to which Gavarni and
+Muerger are the most sympathetic guides, and none could have been more to
+Harland's fancy. He was very like his own favourite heroes, or I ought
+to say his own favourite heroes were very like him. For it is Harland
+who talks through his own pages with his own charming fantastic blend of
+philosophy and nonsense, Harland who refuses to believe in an age of
+prose and prudence, Harland who is determined to see the romance, the
+squalor, the pageantry, the humour of this jumble-show of a world, not
+merely at ease from the stalls, but struggling with the principal _role_
+on the stage, or prompting from behind the scenes. When he was bent upon
+leading us to the same near, inside, part in the spectacle, it was
+extraordinary how, as if by inspiration, he always hit upon the right
+expedition for the time of the year and the mood of the moment.
+
+I remember the afternoon he said St. Cloud it seemed as inevitable that
+we must go there as if St. Cloud had been our one thought all day long,
+the evening reward promised for our day's labour; just as on the boat
+steaming down the Seine and in the park wandering under the trees and
+among the ruins, I felt that the afternoon was the one of all others
+predestined for our delight there. The beauty provided by St. Cloud and
+the mood we brought for its enjoyment met at the hour appointed from all
+eternity.
+
+Artists, it is supposed, and not without reason, are trained to see
+beauty more clearly and therefore to feel it more acutely than other
+people. But my long experience has taught me that it is the lover of
+beauty who can dare to be flippant in the face of it, just as it is the
+devout who can afford to talk familiarly of holy things. Besides,
+artists work so hard that they have the sense to know how important it
+is to be foolish at the right time. That is the secret of all the
+delicious absurdities of what the French called the _Vie de Boheme_
+until the outsider who did not understand made a tiresome _cliche_ of
+it. The right time for our folly we felt was the golden May evening and
+the right place a beautiful Paris suburb, time and place consecrated to
+folly by generations of artists and students. Below us, at St. Cloud,
+stretched the wide beautiful French landscape, with its classical
+symmetry and its note of sadness, in the pure clear light of France, the
+Seine winding through it towards Paris; round us was the park as
+classical in its lines and masses, and with its note of sadness the
+stronger because of the tragic memories that haunt it; in the foreground
+were my companions agreeably playing the fool and posing as living
+statues on the broken columns: he whose solemnity of demeanour accorded
+with his belief that his real sphere was the pulpit, throwing out an
+unaccustomed leg as Mercury on one column, and on another the Architect,
+an apologetic Apollo in frock coat with silk hat for lyre. In my
+lightheartedness, and accustomed to the ways of the English, I thought
+them absurd but funny. A French family, however, who passed by chance
+looked as if they wondered, as the French have wondered for centuries,
+at the sadness with which the Englishman takes his pleasures.
+
+Beardsley was one of the party. It was the first time he was with us in
+Paris, the first time, for that matter, he had ever been there. He had
+clutched beforehand, like the youth he was, at the pleasure the visit
+promised, and I remember his joy in coming to tell me of it one morning
+in Buckingham Street. I remember too how amazing I thought it that, when
+he got there, he seemed at once to know Paris in the mysterious way he
+knew everything.
+
+We had not heard of his arrival until we ran across him at the
+_Vernissage_ in the New _Salon_. I think he had planned the dramatic
+effect of the chance meeting, counting upon the impression he would make
+as we met. I have said he was always a good deal of a dandy and I could
+see at what pains he had been to invent the costume he thought Paris and
+art demanded of him. He was in grey, a harmony carefully and quite
+exquisitely carried out, grey coat, grey waistcoat, grey trousers, grey
+Suede gloves, grey soft felt hat, grey tie which, in compliment to the
+French, was large and loose. An impression of this grey elegance is in
+the portrait of him by Blanche, painted, I think, the same year. As he
+came through the galleries towards us with the tripping step that was
+characteristic of him, a little light cane swinging in his hand, he was
+the most striking figure in them, dividing the stares of the staring
+_Vernissage_ crowd with the _clou_ of the year's New _Salon_: that
+portrait by Aman-Jean of his wife, with her hair parted in the middle
+and brought simply down over her ears, which set a mode copied before
+the season was over by women it disfigured, heroines who could dare the
+unbecoming if fashion decreed it. Beardsley knew he was being stared at
+and of course liked it, and probably would not have exchanged places
+with anybody there, not even with Carolus-Duran when, splendidly
+barbered, in gorgeous waistcoat, and with an air of casualness, the
+_cher maitre et president_ strolled into the restaurant at the supreme
+moment, carefully chosen, all the crowd there before him, their
+breakfast ordered, their first pangs of hunger stilled, and their
+attention and enthusiasm at liberty for the greeting he counted upon,
+and got.
+
+It may be that this scene of the older generation's triumph and the
+power of officialism in art told on Beardsley's nerves, or it may be it
+was simply because he was still young enough to believe nobody had ever
+been young before, but certainly by evening he had worked himself up
+into a fine frenzy of revolt. When we had got through our foolish game
+of living statues, and had settled down to dinner in a little
+restaurant, where a parrot's greeting of "_Apres vous, madame! Apres
+vous, monsieur!_" had vouched for the excellence of its manners, and
+where we could look across the river and see for ourselves how true were
+the effects that Cazin used to paint and that seemed so false to those
+who knew nothing of French twilight, and when Beardsley had finished his
+first glass of very ordinary wine well watered, he let us know what he
+thought about _les vieux_ and their stultifying observance of worn-out
+laws and principles.
+
+That started Bob Stevenson, who saw an argument and, for the sake of it,
+became ponderously patriarchal, hoary with convention. In point of
+years, it is true, he was older than any of us, but no matter what his
+age according to the Family Bible he was to the end, and would have
+been had he lived to be a hundred, the youngest in spirit of any company
+into which he ever strayed or could stray. His way, however, was, as
+Louis Stevenson described it, "to trans-migrate" himself into the
+character or pose he assumed for the moment and no Heavy Father was ever
+heavier than he that night at St. Cloud. He spoke with the air of
+superior knowledge calculated to aggravate youth. With years, he assured
+Beardsley, men learned to value law and order in art, as in the state,
+at their worth; and, more and more inspired by his theme, as was his
+way, he grew preposterously wise and irritating, and he talked himself
+so successfully into every exasperating virtue of age that I could not
+wonder at the fierceness with which Beardsley turned upon him and
+denounced him roundly as conventional and academic and prejudiced and
+old-fashioned and all that to youth is most odious and that to Bob, when
+not playing a part, was most impossible. In harmony with his new _role_,
+he showed himself a miracle of forbearance under Beardsley's reproaches
+and sententious beyond endurance, actually called Beardsley young, his
+cardinal offence, for the young hate nothing so much as to be reminded
+of the youth for which the old envy them. Bob's almost every sentence
+began with the unendurable "at my age," which irritated Beardsley the
+more, while we roared at the farce of it in the mouth of one to whom
+years never made or could make a particle of difference. He wound up by
+the warning in soothing tones that Beardsley, in his turn burdened with
+years, would understand, would be able to make allowances, as all must
+as they grow older, or life would be an endless battle for the
+individual as for the race. Beardsley, luckily for himself, did not live
+to lose his illusions, and I fancy that to not one of us who listened to
+their talk did it occur that we were in danger of losing ours with age,
+so immortal does youth seem while it lasts.
+
+The adventure of other afternoons worked out so surprisingly in
+Harland's vein that he might have invented it for his books or we might
+have borrowed it from them. The encounter with a peacock at a _cafe_ in
+the _Bois_, to which he swept us off at the end of the hottest of those
+hot May days, was one of many that he afterwards made use of. Had he
+not, I might hesitate to recall it, knowing as I do that its wit must be
+lost upon the younger generation of to-day who face life and work with a
+severity, a solemnity, that alarms me. Their inability to take
+themselves with gaiety is what makes the young men of the Twentieth
+Century so hopelessly different from the young men of the
+Eighteen-Nineties. Their high moral ideal and concern with social
+problems would not permit them to see anything to laugh at in the
+experiment of feeding a peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, but it
+struck us, in our deplorable frivolity, as humorous at the time, our
+consciences the less disturbed because the bird was led into temptation
+in the manner of one to whom it was no new thing to yield. Harland, when
+he wrote the story with the mock seriousness he was master of, suggested
+that the crime was in its having been committed by an irreproachable
+British author, the sober father of a family. More momentous to us,
+accessories to the crime, was the fact that the cake stuck, a
+conspicuous lump, in the peacock's conspicuous throat. For what seemed
+hours we waited in tense agitation, torn between our desire to make sure
+the lump would disappear and our fears of discovery before it did. But
+the peacock was a gentleman in his cups and reeled away to swallow the
+lump and, I hope, to sleep off his debauch, in some more secluded spot
+where, if he were discovered, we should not be suspected.
+
+There was another afternoon I wonder Harland did not make use of which,
+had I been in a pedantic mood, I might have taken as an object-lesson in
+the art and occupation of shocking the _bourgeois_. We had been tempted
+and had yielded as unreservedly as the peacock, with the difference that
+our temptation took the form of the sunshine and the convenience of the
+train service at St. Lazare. No sane person with such sunshine
+out-of-doors could stay shut up in the _Salon_ and a train was ready at
+St. Lazare, whenever we chose to catch it, to carry us off to
+Versailles. We were on our way at once after our midday breakfast.
+
+Versailles was too beautiful on that beautiful day to ask anything of us
+except to live in the beauty, to make it ours for the moment; too
+beautiful to spare us time for bothering about those who had been there
+before us; too beautiful to allow the guide-book's fine print and maps
+and diagrams to blind our eyes to the one essential fact that the sun
+was shining, that the trees were in the greenest growth of their
+May-time, that the flowers were radiant with the fulfilment of spring
+and the promise of summer. As a place full of history we must have known
+it, had we never heard its name. History stared at us from the grey
+palace walls, history waylaid us in the formal alleys, lurked in the
+formal waters, haunted the formal gardens, overshadowed all the leafy
+pleasant places. There is no getting very far from history at Versailles
+no matter how hard one may try to. But we had no intention to let the
+dead past blot out the new life rekindling--to give its chill to the
+young spring day and its sadness to the foolish young people out for a
+holiday--to wither the fresh beauty that makes it good just to be alive,
+just to have eyes to see and freedom to use them.
+
+I can write this now, but I would not have dared to say it then. Not
+only I, but every one of us, would have been as ashamed to be caught
+indulging in sentiment, or "bleating," as the _National Observer_. The
+chances are we were talking as much nonsense as could be talked to the
+minute, for there was nothing we liked to talk better, nothing that
+served us so well to disguise the emotion we thought out of place in the
+world in which so obviously the self-respecting man's business was to
+fight. But if I had not felt the beauty it would not now, so many years
+after, remain as my most vivid impression of the day.
+
+We had Versailles to ourselves at first. We were alone in the park,
+alone in the alleys and avenues, alone in the gardens,--and the palace
+and its paintings could not tempt us in out of the sunshine. But such
+good luck naturally did not last and while we were loitering near the
+great fountain we saw a party of women with the eager, harassed,
+conscientious look that marks the personally-conducted school-ma'am on
+tour, bearing briskly down upon us, each with a red book in one hand, a
+pencil in the other, all engrossed in the personally-conducted
+school-ma'am's holiday task of checking off the sight disposed of,
+pigeon-holing the last guide-book fact verified. Their methodical
+progress was an offence to us in the mood we were in, would be an
+offence on a May day to the right-minded in any mood. I admit they could
+have turned upon us and asked what we were, anyway, but tourists as,
+after a fashion, no doubt we were. But they could not have accused us of
+the horrible conscientiousness, the deadly determination to see the
+correct things and to think the correct thoughts about them that dulls
+the personally-conducted to the world's real beauty and its meaning--the
+same tendency of the multitude to follow like sheep the accepted leader
+and never venture to explore fresh fields for themselves, that drove
+Hugo to writing his _Hernani_, and Gautier to wearing his red
+waistcoat, and all the other Romanticists to their favourite pastime of
+shocking the _bourgeois_. Versailles was so wonderful on the face of it
+that we resented the presence of people who needed a book to tell them
+so and to explain why; and we made our protest against the _bourgeois_
+in our own fashion or, to be exact, in Furse's fashion. He was then
+blessedly young, fresh from the schools and not yet sobered by Academic
+honours, though already a youthful member of the New English Art Club,
+from whom an attitude of general defiance was required. He raged and
+raved in his big booming voice, declared that tourists ought to be wiped
+off the face of the earth, that the women were a hideous blot on the
+landscape, that the guide-books were disgracefully out of tone, that it
+was unbearable and he wasn't going to bear it, and by his sudden
+satisfied smile I saw he had found out how not to. As the school-ma'ams
+came within earshot:
+
+"It's beastly hot," he boomed to us, "what do you say to a swim?"
+
+And he took off his coat, he took off his waistcoat, he took off his
+necktie, he unbuttoned his collar,--but already the school-ma'ams had
+scuttled away, the more daring glancing back once or twice as they
+went, their dismay tempered by curiosity.
+
+Furse was pleased as a child over his success, vowed he was ready for
+all the tourists impudent enough to think they had a right to share
+Versailles with us, and, when a group of Germans talked their guttural
+way towards us, he had us all down on our knees, before we knew it,
+nibbling at the grass like so many Nebuchadnezzars escaped from
+Charenton--an amazing sight that brought the chorus of "Colossals" to an
+abrupt stop, and sent the Germans flying.
+
+It may be objected that we were behaving in a fashion that children
+would be sent to bed without any supper for, that it was worse than
+childish to take pleasure in shocking innocent tourists much better
+behaved than ourselves. But there wasn't any pleasure in it. If we set
+out to shock them, it was to get rid of them, that was all we wanted,
+and it made me see that the succession of young rebels who have loved to
+_epater le bourgeois_ never wanted anything more either--except the
+self-conscious young rebels who play at rebellion because they fancy it
+the surest and quickest way "to arrive."
+
+It is less easy to say why a beautiful day at Versailles should have
+sent us back to Paris singing American songs--or to give credit, if
+credit is due, it was the rest of the party who returned to the music of
+their own voices; I, who to my sorrow cannot as much as turn a tune,
+never am so imprudent as to raise my voice in song and so add my discord
+to any singing in public or in private. Had they been heard above the
+noise of the train, the explanation of those who saw us when we got to
+St. Lazare probably would have been that we were a company of nigger
+minstrels. By accident, or sheer inattention, when we climbed upstairs
+on the double-decked suburban train, we chose the car just behind the
+locomotive and memory has not cleaned away the black that covered our
+faces when we climbed down again.
+
+It was all very foolish--and no less foolish were the afternoons in the
+depths of Fontainebleau or the sunlit green thickets of
+Saint-Germain--no less foolish any of those afternoons in the forest or
+the park to which a long drive by train, or tram, had carried us. And I
+am prepared to admit the folly to-day as I sit at my elderly desk and
+look out to the London sky, grey and drear as if the spring had gone
+with my youth. But if I never again can be so foolish, at least I am
+thankful that once I could, that once long ago I was young in Paris,
+"the enchanted city with its charming smile for youth,"--that once I
+believed in folly and, in so believing, had learned more of the true
+philosophy of life than the most industrious student can ever dig out of
+his books.
+
+
+V
+
+The afternoon at Versailles was the rare exception. We were too keen
+about our work, or too dependent on it, to play truant often, however
+gay the sunshine and convenient the trains. Nor was it any great
+hardship not to, especially after we had broken loose once or twice so
+successfully as to make sure we had not forgotten how. If we did stay in
+the _Salon_ until we were turned out, the last to leave, Paris was
+neither so dull nor so ugly at night that we need sigh for the suburbs.
+It was an amusement simply to drink our coffee in front of a _cafe_, to
+go on with the talk that must have had a beginning sometime somewhere,
+but that never got anywhere near an end, and to watch the life of the
+Paris streets.
+
+I had got my initiation into _cafe_ life that first year in Italy and
+had finished my education by cycle on French roads, where every evening
+taught me the difference between the country where there is a _cafe_ to
+pass an hour in over a glass of coffee after dinner, and England where
+choice in the small town then lay between immediate bed or the
+intolerable gloom of the Coffee Room. It is the real democrat like the
+Frenchman or the Italian who knows how to take his ease in a _cafe_; the
+Englishman, who hasn't an inkling of what the democracy he boasts of
+means, fights shy of it. He does not mind making use of it when he is
+away from home, but he is likely to be thanking his stars all the time
+that in his part of the world nothing so promiscuous is possible. I
+tried to point out its advantages once to an English University man.
+
+"Aoh!" he said, "you know at Oxford we had our wines and we weren't
+bothered by people."
+
+But it is just the people part of it that is amusing, the more so if the
+background is the Street of a French or an Italian town.
+
+Some nights we went to the _Cafe de la Paix_ on the _Rive Droite_; other
+nights, to the _Cafe d'Harcourt_ on the _Rive Gauche_; and occasionally
+to the _Cafe de la Regence_ where many artists went, especially foreign
+artists, and more especially Scandinavians. I seem to retain a vision of
+Thaulow, a blond giant more than fitting in the corner of the little
+raised enclosure in the front of the _cafe_. My one other recollection
+is of a story I heard there, though of the painter who told it I can
+recall only that he was a Belgian. If I recall the story so well, it
+must be because it struck me at the time as characteristic and in memory
+became forever after associated with the little open space I was looking
+over to as I listened, amused and interested, while the flower women
+pushed past their barrows piled high with the big round bunches of
+budding lilies-of-the-valley you see nowhere save in Paris. It is
+impossible for me to think of the _cafe_ without thinking of the little
+_Place_, nor of the little _Place_ without at once hearing again the
+artist's voice lingering joyfully over the adventures of his youth.
+
+The story was one of a kind I had often listened to at the _Nazionale_
+in Rome and the _Orientale_ in Venice--a story of student days--a story
+of two young painters coming to Paris in their first ripe enthusiasm,
+with devotion to squander upon the masters, upon none more lavishly than
+upon Jules Breton, which explains what ages ago it was and how young
+they must have been. They were at the _Salon_, standing in silent
+worship before Breton's peasant woman with a scythe against a garish
+sunset, when they heard behind them an adoring voice saying the things
+they were thinking to one they knew must be the _cher maitre_ himself,
+and they felt if they could once shake his hand life could hold no
+higher happiness. The worship of the young is pleasant to the old.
+Breton let them shake his hand and, more, he kept them at his side until
+his visit to the _Salon_ was finished, and then sent them away walking
+on air. They were leaving the next day. In the morning they went to the
+_Rue de Rivoli_ to buy toys to take home to their little brothers and
+sisters, and one selected a dog and the other a mill, and when wound up
+the dog played the drum and cymbals and the mill turned its wheel and,
+children themselves, they were ravished and would not have the toys
+wrapped up but carried them back in their arms to the hotel, stopping in
+the _Avenue de l'Opera_ to wind up the mill and see the wheel go round
+again. And as they stood enchanted, the mill wheel turning and turning,
+who should come towards them but the _cher Maitre_. It was too late to
+run, too late to hide the mill with its turning wheel and the dog with
+its foolish drum. They longed to sink through the ground in their
+mortification--they, the serious students of yesterday, to be caught
+to-day playing like silly children in the open street. But how
+ineffable is the condescension of the great! The master joined them.
+
+"_Tiens_," he said, "and the wheel, it goes round? But it works
+beautifully. Let us wind it up again!"
+
+Cannot you see the little comedy,--the fine old prophet with the red
+ribbon in his button-hole, the two trembling, adoring students, the toy
+with its revolving wheel, all in the gay sunlight of the _Avenue de
+l'Opera_, and not a passer-by troubling to look because it was Paris
+where men are not ashamed to be themselves. The two painters preserved
+this impression of the kindness of the master long after they ceased to
+worship at the shrine of the peasant with her scythe posed against the
+sunset.
+
+One duty the Boulevards of the Left Bank imposed upon us in the Nineties
+was the search for Verlaine and Bibi-la-Puree, and many another poet for
+all time and celebrity for the day, in the _cafes_ where they waited to
+be found and I do not doubt were deeply disappointed if nobody came to
+find them. The fame of these great men, who were easily accessible when
+the _cafe_ they went to happened to be known, had crossed to London with
+so much else London was labelling _fin-de-siecle_. To have met them, to
+be able to speak of them in intimate terms, to be authorities on the
+special vice of each, was the ambition of the yearning young decadents
+on the British side of the Channel, who imagined in the intimacy a proof
+of their own emancipation from it would have been hard to say what,
+their own genius for revolution if it was not clear what reason they had
+to revolt. We, who cultivated a withering scorn for decadence and the
+affectation of it, were moved by nothing more serious or ambitious than
+youth's natural desire to see and to know everything that is going on,
+and we could not have been very ardent in our search, for I never
+remember once, on the nights we devoted to the hunt, tracking these
+lions to their lair. However, at least one of our party had better luck
+when he started on the hunt without us. According to a rumour at the
+time, the respectable British author, sober father of a family, who fed
+the peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, was once seen in broad daylight
+with the _Reine de Golconde_ on his arm, walking down the _Boul' Mich'_
+at the head of a band of poets.
+
+Verlaine I did meet, but it was in London, where admiring, or
+philanthropic, young Englishmen brought him one winter to lecture and
+the subject as announced was "Contemporary French Poetry," and through
+all these years I have managed to preserve the small sheet of
+announcement with Arthur Symons's name and "kind regards" written below,
+a personal little document, for it was Symons who got up the show, and
+he and Herbert P. Horne who sold the tickets. Instead of lecturing,
+Verlaine read his verses to the scanty audience, all of whom knew each
+other, in the dim light of Barnard's Inn Hall, and the music of their
+rhythm was in his voice so that I was not conscious of the satyr-like
+repulsiveness of his face and head so long as he was reading. When he
+was not reading, the repulsiveness was to me overpowering and I shrank
+from his very presence. Nor was the shrinking less when I talked with
+him the night after his lecture, at a dinner where my place was next to
+his. He was like a loathsome animal with his decadent face, his yellow
+skin, and his little bestial eyes lighting up obscenely as he told me of
+the two women who would fight for the money in his pockets when he got
+back to Paris. Beyond this I have no recollection of his talk. The
+prospect before him apparently absorbed his interest, was the only good
+he had got out of his visit to London. The beauty of his own beautiful
+poems, I felt in disgust, should have made such vicious sordidness
+impossible. It revolted me that a man so degraded and hideous physically
+could write the verse I had loved ever since his _Romances sans Paroles_
+first fell into my hands, or, writing it, could be content to remain
+what he was. To be sure, the genius is rare whom it is not a
+disappointment to meet, and the hero-worshipper may be thankful when his
+great man is guilty of nothing worse than the famous writer in
+Tchekhof's play--so famous as to have his name daily in the papers and
+his photograph in shop windows--whose crime was to condescend to fish
+and to be pleased when he caught something.
+
+
+VI
+
+The Nineties would not let us off from another entertainment as
+characteristic--as _fin-de-siecle_, the Englishman under the impression
+that he knew his Paris would have classified it--nor did we want to be
+let off, though it lured us indoors.
+
+The big theatres had no attraction: to sit out a long play in a hot
+playhouse was not our idea of what spring nights were made for. Neither
+had the "Hells" and "Heavens," the fatuous, vulgar, indecent
+performances with catchpenny names, run for the foreigner who went to
+Paris so that he might for the rest of his life throw up hands of
+horror and say what an immoral place it was.
+
+Once or twice we tried the out-door _Cafe-Chantant_, and we heard Paulus
+in the days when all Paris went to hear him, and Yvette Guilbert when
+she was still slim and wore the V-shaped bodice and the long black
+gloves, as you may see her in Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs.
+
+Once or twice we tried the big stuffy music-halls, also adapted to
+supply the travelling student of morals with the specimens he was in
+search of, but not dropping all local character in the effort. We seemed
+to owe it to the memory of Manet to go to the _Folies-Bergere_ which
+cannot be forgotten so long as his extraordinary painting of the barmaid
+in the ugly fashions of the late Seventies is saved to the world. That
+natural desire of youth just to see and to know, that had carried us up
+and down the _Boulevards_ of the _Rive Gauche_ in pursuit of its poets,
+sent us to the _Casino de Paris_ and the _Moulin Rouge_. But a first
+visit did not inspire us with a desire for a second, though I would not
+have missed the _Casino_ if only for the imperishable memory of the most
+solemn of our critics dancing there with a patroness of the house and
+looking about as cheerful as a martyr at the stake, nor the _Moulin_
+_Rouge_ for another memory as imperishable of the most socially
+pretentious leaving his partner, after his dance, with the "thanks
+awfully" of the provincial ball-room. I thought both dull places which
+nothing save their reputation could have recommended, even to those
+determined young decadents in London who were no prouder of their
+friendship with Bibi and Verlaine than of their freedom of the French
+music-halls, and who wrote of them with a pretence of profound knowledge
+calculated to _epater le bourgeois_ at home, referring by name with easy
+familiarity to the dancers in the _Quadrille Naturaliste_, as celebrated
+in its way as Bibi in his, and explaining solemnly the _chahut_ and the
+_grand ecart_ and _le port d'armes_ and every evolution in that
+unpleasant dance. How it brought it all back to me the other day when I
+found in _The Gypsy_--the direct but belated offspring of _The Savoy_--a
+poem to _Nini-patte-en-l'air_. And does anybody now know or care who
+Nini-patte-en-l'air was? Or who _La Goulue_ and the rest? Would anybody
+now go a step to see the _Quadrille_ were any graceless acrobats left to
+dance it? These things belonged to the lightest of light fashions that
+passed with the Nineties, and the _Moulin Rouge_ itself could burn down
+to the ground a few months ago and hardly a voice be heard in lament or
+reminiscence. Upon such rapidly shifting sands did the young would-be
+revolutionaries of London build their House of Decadence.
+
+The entertainment worth the exchange of the pure May night for a
+smoke-laden, stuffy interior was in none of these places. Where we
+looked for it--and found it--was in the little _cafe_ or _cabaret_--the
+_cabaret artistique_ as it was then known in Paris--with a flair for the
+genius the world is so long in discovering, where the young poet read
+his verses, the young musician interpreted his music, the young artist
+showed his work in any manner the chance was given him to, to say
+nothing of the posters he sometimes designed for it and decorated Paris
+with: theatre and performance and advertisement impossible in any other
+town or any other atmosphere. London is too clumsy. Berlin is too
+ponderous, New York has not the right material home-grown, and the
+spirit of the original dies in the self-conscious imitation. Even in
+Paris a Baedeker star is its death-blow, the private guide's attention
+spells immediate ruin, nor can it survive more legitimate honours at
+home when they come. Like most good things it has its times and its
+seasons, and it was in the Nineties it gave forth its finest blossoms.
+We knew it was a pleasure to be snatched this year, for next who could
+say where it might be, and we set out to snatch it with the same
+diligence we had devoted one spring to eating dinners and another to
+playing in the suburbs, though we could make no pretence in a week to
+exhaust it.
+
+Night after night we dined, we drank our coffee at the nearest _cafe_,
+we scrambled to the top of the big omnibus with the three white horses,
+now as dead as the performance it was taking us to, we journeyed across
+Paris to see or to hear the work of the young genius on the threshold of
+fame or oblivion. And if in an access of conscientiousness we had felt
+the need--as we never did--of a reason for our eagerness, we might have
+had it in the way our evening's entertainment invariably turned out to
+be the legitimate sequel of our day's work. For there wasn't a _cabaret_
+of them all that did not reflect somehow the things we had been busy
+studying and wrangling over ever since our arrival in Paris, the merit
+they shared in common being their pre-occupation with the art and
+literature of the day to which they belonged. The tiresome performance
+known as a _Revue_, which is all the vogue just now in the London
+music-halls, undertakes to do something of the same kind: to be, that
+is, a reflection of the events and interests and popular excitements of
+the day. But the wide gulf between the music-hall _Revue_ and the old
+_Cabaret_ performance is that art and literature could not, by hook or
+by crook, be dragged into the average Englishman's scheme of life.
+
+If one night the end of the journey was the _Treteau de Tabarin_--the
+hot and uncomfortable little room rigged up as a theatre, with hard
+rough wooden benches for the audience, and vague lights, and bare and
+dingy stage where men and women whose names I have forgotten read and
+recited and sang the _chansons rosses_ that "all Paris" flocked there to
+hear--it was to have the argument from which we had freshly come
+continued and settled by one of the inspired young poets. For my chief
+remembrance is of the irreverent youth who summed up our daily dispute
+over Rodin's great melodramatic Balzac, with frowning brows and goitrous
+throat, wrapped in shapeless dressing-gown, that stood that spring in
+the centre of the sculpture court at the New _Salon_, and the summing up
+was in verse only a Frenchman could write, the satire the more bitter
+because the wit was so fine.
+
+A second night when we climbed the lumbering omnibus, we were bound for
+the _Chat Noir_. It had already moved from its first primitive quarters
+but had not yet degenerated into a regular show place, advertised in
+Paris and taken by Salis on tour through the provinces. Here, our
+justification was to find that everything, from the sign of the Black
+Cat, then hanging at the door and now hanging, a national possession, in
+the Carnavalet Museum, and the cat-decorations in the _cafe_ and the
+drawings and paintings on the wall, to the performance in the big room
+upstairs, was by the men over whose work we had been arguing all day at
+the _Salon_ and buying in the reproductions at the bookstalls and
+bookshops on the way back.
+
+To see that performance upstairs we had each to pay five francs at the
+door, and we paid them as willingly as if they did not represent
+breakfast and dinner for the next day, and so many other people paid
+them with equal willingness that the room was crowded, though the show
+was of a kind that the same public in any town except Paris would have
+paid twice that sum to stay away from. Imagine Poe attracting customers
+for a New York saloon-keeper by reciting his poems! Imagine Keene or
+Beardsley making the fortunes of a London public-house by decorating
+its walls and showing his pictures on a screen! Or imagine the public of
+to-day, debauched by the "movies" and the music-hall "sketch," knowing
+that there is such a thing as poetry or art to listen to and look at!
+
+But Salis,--the great Salis, inventor, proprietor, director of the _Chat
+Noir_, dealt only in poetry and art and music, and this is sufficient to
+give him a place in the history of the period, even if he were the mere
+exploiter filling his pockets by pilfering other people's brains that he
+was accused of being by his enemies. He crowded his _cafe_ by letting
+poets whom nobody had heard of and whose destiny--some of them, Maurice
+Donnay for one--as staid Academicians nobody could have foreseen, try
+their verses for the first time in public; by giving the same splendid
+opportunity to musicians as obscure then, whatever heights at least
+two--Charpentier and Debussy--were afterwards to reach; and by allowing
+the artist, while the poet was the interpreter in beautiful words and
+the musician in beautiful sound, to show his wonderful little dramas in
+black-and-white, the _Ombres Chinoises_ that were the crowning glory of
+the night's performance. From days in the _Salons_, from the illustrated
+papers and magazines and books we filled our bags with to take back to
+London, we could not measure the full powers of men like Willette and
+Caran d'Ache and Riviere and Louis Morin until we had seen also _The
+Prodigal Son_, _The March of the Stars_, and all the stories they told
+in those dramatic silhouettes--those marvellous little black figures,
+cut in tin, only a few inches high, moving across a white space small in
+due proportion, but so designed and posed and grouped by the artist as
+to give the swing and the movement and the passing of great armies until
+one could almost fancy one heard the drums beat and the trumpets call,
+or to suggest the grandeur and solemnity of the desert, the vastness of
+the sky, the mystery of the night. They have been imitated. Only a few
+months ago I saw an imitation in a London music-hall, with all that late
+inventions in photography and electric light could do for it. But no
+touch of genius was in the little figures and the elaboration was no
+more than clever stagecraft. The simplicity of the _Chat Noir_ was gone,
+and gone the gaiety of the performers, and the pretence of gaiety is
+sadder than tragedy. Salis knew how to catch his poet, his musician, his
+artist, young,--that is where he scored.
+
+It is possible that I was the more impressed by the beauty of the show
+because it was not of that side of the _Chat Noir_ I had heard most. Its
+British admirers or critics, when they got back to London, had far more
+to say of it as a haunt of vice, if not as decadents to parade their
+wide and experienced knowledge of Paris, then as students who had gone
+there very likely to gather further confirmation of the popular British
+belief in Paris as the headquarters of vice and frivolity. To this day
+the hero or heroine of the British novel who is led astray is apt to
+cross the Channel for the purpose. It was a delicate matter to
+accomplish this in the Nineties when the novelist happened to be a
+woman, for even the "New Woman" cry, if it armed her with her own
+front-door key, could not draw all the bolts and bars of convention for
+her. I can remember the plight of the highly correct Englishwoman, upon
+whom British fiction depended for its respectability, who wanted to send
+her young hero from the English provinces to the _Chat Noir_ in the
+course of a rake's progress, and who avoided facing the contamination
+herself by shifting to her husband the task of collecting the necessary
+local colour on the spot. She did well, for had she gone she could not
+have been so scandalized as the young Briton in her book was obliged to
+be for the sake of the story. Those who had eyes and ears for it could
+see and hear all the license they wanted, those who had eyes and ears
+for the beauty could rest content with that, and as far as my impression
+of the place goes, Salis, if he allowed license at the _Chat Noir_,
+refused to put up with either the affectation or the advertisement of
+it. I cannot forget the night when a young American woman took her
+cigarette case from her pocket and lit a cigarette. It would not have
+seemed a desperate deed in proper England where every other woman had
+begun to smoke in public, probably more in public than in private, for
+with many smoking was part of the "New Woman" crusade--"I never liked
+smoking," an ardent leader in the cause told me once, "but I smoked
+until we won the right to." France, or Salis, however, still drew a
+rigid line that refused women the same right in France, and with the
+American's first whiff he was bidding her good-night and politely, but
+firmly, showing her the door.
+
+A third night, and I do not know that it was not the most amusing, the
+end of our journey was Bruant's _Cabaret du Mirliton_, in the remote
+_Boulevard Rochechouart_. I daresay there was not one of us who did not
+own a copy of Bruant's _Dans la Rue_, but we had bought it less because
+of his verses--some of us had not read a line of them--than because of
+Steinlen's illustrations, and I can still hear Harland upbraiding us for
+our literary indifference and urging it as a duty that we should not
+only read Bruant's songs, but go at once to hear him sing them. Harland
+had the provoking talent of looking as if his stories were the last
+thing he was bothering about, as if he was too busy enjoying the
+spectacle of life to think of work, when he was really working as hard
+as the hardest-working of us all. And as it was not very long after that
+his _Mademoiselle Miss_ appeared, I have an idea that he hurried us off
+to Bruant's not solely to improve our literary taste, but quite as much
+to collect incidents for that gay little tale.
+
+[Illustration: Poster by Toulouse-Lautrec
+ARISTIDE BRUANT OF THE CABARET DU MIRLITON]
+
+Bruant ran the _Mirliton_ on the principle that the less easily pleasure
+is come by, the more it will be prized. There was no walking in as at
+the ordinary _cafe_, no paying for admission as upstairs at the _Chat
+Noir_. Instead, it amused him to keep people who wanted to get in
+standing outside his door while he examined them through a little
+grille, an amusement which, in our case, he prolonged until I was sure
+he did not like our looks and would send us away, and that the reason
+was the responsibility he laid upon us all for the frock coat and top
+hat which the Architect could never manage to keep out of sight, skulk
+as he might in the background. But, of course, Bruant had no intention
+of sending us away and he kept up his little farce only to the point
+where our disappointment was on the verge of turning into impatience. It
+simply meant that he did not hold to the hail-fellow-well-met
+free-and-easiness which was the pose of Salis at the _Chat Noir_, but,
+at the _Mirliton_, was all for ceremony and dramatic effect. At the
+psychological moment he opened the door himself, a splendid creature,
+half brigand, half Breton peasant, in brown corduroy jacket and
+knee-breeches, high boots, red silk handkerchief tied loosely round his
+neck, big wide-brimmed hat on the back of his head, the passing pose of
+a poet who, I am told, rejoiced to give it up for a costume fitted to
+the more congenial pastime of raising potatoes. To have seen
+Toulouse-Lautrec's poster of him and his _Cabaret_ was to recognize him
+at a glance.
+
+To the noise of a strident chorus in choice _argot_, which I was
+told I should be thankful I did not understand, Bruant showed us
+into his _cafe_. It was more like an amateur museum, with its big
+Fifteenth Century fireplace, and its brasses and tapestries on the
+walls, and if the huge _Mirliton_ hanging from the ceiling was not
+remarkable as a work of art, it should now, as historic symbol of
+the Nineties, have a place at the _Carnavalet_ by the side of the
+sign of the _Chat Noir_. When we had time to look round, we saw that
+the severe ordeal through which we had passed had admitted us into
+the company of a few youths in the high stocks and long hair of the
+_Quartier Latin_, a _petit piou-piou_ or so, two or three stray
+workmen, women whom perhaps it would be more discreet not to attempt
+to classify, all seated at little tables and harmlessly occupied in
+drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The place was free from
+tourists, we were the only foreigners, the handsome Aristide
+evidently sang his songs for the pleasure of himself and the people.
+
+It was after we had sat down at our little table and given the order
+required of us that the incidents of the evening began to play so neatly
+and effectively into Harland's plot. A scowl was on Bruant's handsome
+face as he strode up and down his _cafe_-museum, for the striding, it
+seemed, was only part of the regular performance. He should at the same
+time have been singing the songs we had come to hear, and he could not
+without the pianist who accompanied him, and the pianist had chosen
+this night of all others to be late. The scowl deepened, I felt
+something like a stir of uneasiness through the room, and I did not
+wonder, for Bruant looked as if he had a temper it might be dangerous to
+trifle with. And then the strange thing happened and, to our surprise
+and his, our party whom he had met with such disdain saved the
+situation. How we did it may be read, with the variations necessary to
+fit his tale, in Harland's book. We had our own musician--her name was
+not Mademoiselle Miss--and when she discovered what was the matter, and
+why Bruant was scowling so abominably, she was moved by the sympathy of
+one artist for another and offered her services. Bruant led her to the
+piano, she accompanied him as best she could, the music being new to
+her, he sang us his _St. Lazare_ and _La Soularde_, all the while
+striding up and down with magnificent swagger, and was about to begin a
+third of his most famous songs when the pianist arrived, his
+unmistakable fright quickly lost in his bewilderment at being received
+with an amiability he had not any right to expect, and allowed to slip
+into his place at the piano unrebuked. Bruant, with the manners, the
+courteous dignity, of a prince, led our Mademoiselle Miss back to us,
+ordered bocks for her, for me--the only other woman at our table--and
+for himself, touched his with his lips, bowed, was gone and singing
+again before we could show that we had not yet learned to drain our
+glasses in the fashion approved of at the _Mirliton_.
+
+So far Harland used this little episode much as it happened and made the
+most of it--I hope the curious who consult his story will be able to
+distinguish between his realism and his romance. But being mere man he
+missed the sequel which to the original of his Mademoiselle Miss and to
+me was the most dramatic and disturbing event of the evening. Gradually,
+as we sat at our table, watching Bruant and the company, it dawned upon
+us that Bruant did not exhaust the formalities of his entertainment upon
+the coming guest but reserved one for the parting guest which in our
+judgment was scarcely so amusing. For to every woman who left his
+_cafe_, Bruant's goodbye was a hearty kiss on both cheeks. We had the
+sense to know that, as we had come to the _Mirliton_ of our own free
+will, we had no more right to quarrel with its rules than to refuse to
+show our press ticket at the _Salon_ turnstile, or to give up our
+umbrellas at the door of the _Louvre_, or to question the regulations of
+any other place in Paris we chose to go to. If we insisted upon being
+made the exceptions to the farewell ceremony, and if Bruant would not
+let us off, could we resent it? And if the men of our party resented it
+for us, and if Bruant resented their resentment, how would that improve
+matters?
+
+It was about as unpleasant a predicament as I have ever found myself in.
+We talked it over, but could see no way out of it, and in our discomfort
+kept urging the men to stay for just one more song and then just one
+more, greatly to their amazement, for they were accustomed to not
+wanting to go and having to beg us to stay. The evil moment, however,
+could not be put off indefinitely, and, with our hearts in our boots, we
+at last got up from the table. We might have spared ourselves our agony.
+Bruant, with the instinct and intelligence of the Frenchman, realized
+our embarrassment and I hope I am right in thinking he had his laugh
+over us all to himself, so much more than a laugh did we owe him. For
+what he did when we got to the door was to shake hands with us
+ceremoniously, each in turn, to repeat his thanks for our visit and his
+gratitude to the musician for her services, to take off his wide-brimmed
+hat--the only time that night--and to bow us out into the darkness of
+the _Boulevard Rochechouart_.
+
+Following the example of Mademoiselle Miss in the story, unless it was
+she who was following ours, we finished the evening which had begun at
+the _Mirliton_ by eating supper at the _Rat Mort_. It was an experience
+I cared less to repeat even than the visits to the _Casino de Paris_ and
+the _Moulin Rouge_. As light and satisfying a supper could have been
+eaten in many other places, late as was the hour. Neither wit nor art
+entered into the entertainment as at the _Chat Noir_ and Bruant's. Vice
+was at no trouble to disguise itself. On the contrary, it made rather a
+cynical display, I thought, and cynicism in vice is never agreeable. I
+give my impressions. I may be wrong. I have not forgotten that the
+harmless portrait by Degas of Desboutin at the _Nouvelle Athenes_
+scandalized all London in the Nineties. Everything depends on the point
+of view.
+
+Anyway, another adventure I liked better was still to come before that
+long Paris night was at an end. It was so characteristic of Harland and
+his joy in the humorous and the absurd that I do not quite see why he
+did not let his Mademoiselle Miss share it. Outside the _Rat Mort_, in
+the early hours of the next morning, we picked up an old-fashioned
+one-horse, closed cab, built to hold two people, and of a type almost as
+extinct in Paris as the three-horse omnibus. It was the only cab in
+sight and we packed into and outside of it, not two but eight. As it
+crawled down one of the steep streets from _Montmartre_ there was a
+creak, the horse stopped and, as quickly as I tell it, the bottom was
+out of the cab and we were in the street. Harland, as if prepared all
+along for just such a disaster, whisked the top hat so conspicuous in
+everything we did from the astonished Architect's head, handed it round,
+made a pitiful tale of _le pauvr' cocher_ and his hungry wife and
+children, and implored us to show, now or never, the charitable stuff we
+were made of. Considering it was the end of a long evening, he collected
+a fairly decent number of francs and presented them to the _cocher_ with
+an eloquent speech, which it was a pity someone could not have taken
+down in shorthand for him to use in his next story. The _cocher_, the
+least concerned of the group, thanked us with a broad grin, drew up his
+broken cab close to the sidewalk, took the horse from the shaft,
+clambered on its back, rode as fast as he could go down the street, and
+disappeared into the night. A _sergent-de-ville_, who had been looking
+on, shrugged his shoulders; in his opinion, _cet animal la_ was in luck
+and probably would like nothing better than the same accident every
+night, provided at the time he was driving ladies and gentlemen of such
+generosity. _Allez!_ Didn't we know the cab was heavily insured, all
+Paris cabs were, we had made him a handsome present--_Voila tout!_
+
+And so wonderful is it to be young and in Paris that we laughed our way
+back as we trudged on foot through the now dark and empty and silent
+streets between _Montmartre_ and our rooms. I doubt if I could laugh now
+at the fatigue of it. Of all the many ghosts that walk with me along the
+old familiar ways, the one keeping most obstinately at my side is that
+of my own youth, reminding me of the prosaic, elderly woman I am, who,
+even if the zest for adventure remained, would be ashamed to be caught
+plunging into follies like those of the old foolish nights in Paris that
+never can be again, or who, if not ashamed, would be without the energy
+to see them through to the end.
+
+
+VII
+
+In Paris, as in London, a further ramble down those crowded, haunted,
+resounding Corridors of Time would lead me to many other nights of
+gaiety and friendliness and loud persistent talk.
+
+Again, I would have my Whistler nights, the background now not our
+chambers, but the memorable apartment in the Rue du Bac
+_rez-de-chaussee_ opening upon the spacious garden where, in the
+twilight, often we lingered to listen to the Missionary Monks in their
+spacious garden on the other side of the wall, singing the canticles for
+the Month of Mary so dear to me from my convent days--nights in the
+dining-room with its beautiful blue-and-white china, the long table and
+the Japanese "something like a birdcage" hanging over it in the centre,
+many once-friendly faces all about me, Whistler presiding in his place
+or filling the glasses of his guests as he passed from one to the other,
+always talking, saying things as nobody else could have said them,
+witty, serious, exasperating, delightful things, laughing the gay laugh
+or the laugh of malice that said as much as his words;--nights in the
+blue and white drawing-room, with the painting of Venus over the mantel,
+and the stately Empire chairs, and the table a litter of papers among
+which was always the last correspondence to be read, interrupted by his
+own comments that to those who heard were the best part of it--nights
+that will never perish as long as even one man, or woman, who shared in
+them lives to remember;--Whistler nights even after Whistler had left us
+for the land where there is neither night nor day: nights these with the
+old friends who had loved him, with the painter Oulevey and the sculptor
+Drouet who had been his fellow students, with Theodore Duret who had
+been faithful during his years of greatest trial, friends who rejoiced
+in talking of Whistler and of all that had gone to make him the great
+personality and the greater artist; but of the Whistler nights in Paris,
+as in London, I have already made the record with J. The story of them
+is told.
+
+And along the same rich Corridors, I would come to nights only less
+worth preserving in the studios of artists, American and English, who
+studied and worked and lived in Paris--nights that have bequeathed to me
+the impression of great space, and lofty ceilings, and many canvases,
+and big easels, and bits of tapestry, and the gleam of old brass and
+pottery, and excellent dinners, and, of course, vehement talk, and a
+friendly war of words--nights with men irrevocably in the movement,
+whose work was conspicuous on the walls of the New _Salon_ and had
+probably, a few hours earlier, kept us busy arguing in front of it and
+writing voluminous notes in our note-books--nights not the least
+stirring and tempestuous of the many I have spent in Paris, but nights
+of which my safe rule of silence where the living are concerned forbids
+me to tell the tale.
+
+And one special year stands out when the little hotel in the Rue St.
+Roch was deserted for the Grand Hotel, and when all the nights seemed
+swallowed up in the International Society's business--not the
+International Society of Anarchists, but the International Society of
+Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in London, which, in those terribly
+enterprising Nineties, sent its deputation--J. included in it--to
+collect all that was most individual and distinguished in the _Salons_
+for its next Exhibition. It was a year of many wanderings in many
+directions to many studios of French artists, or foreign artists working
+in Paris--a year of many meetings of many artists night after night. But
+this clearly is not a story for me to tell, since the International was
+J.'s concern, not mine. In the hours away from my work I looked on, an
+outsider, but an amused outsider, marvelling as I have never ceased to
+marvel since the faraway nights in Rome, at the inexhaustible wealth of
+art as a subject of talk wherever artists are gathered together.
+
+And rambling still further into that past, I would stumble into
+American nights--nights with old friends, established there or passing
+through and run across by chance--nights of joy in being with my own
+people again, of hearing not English, but my native tongue and having
+life readjusted to the American point of view. Nobody knows how good it
+is to be with one's fellow-countrymen who has not been years away from
+them. But these also are nights that come within the forbidden zone--the
+zone where Silence is Golden.
+
+
+VIII
+
+I have put down these memories of Paris nights and my yearly visit to
+Paris in the year when, for the first time since I began my work in its
+galleries, no _Salon_ has opened to take me there in the springtime.
+With the coming of May the lilacs and horse-chestnuts bloomed with the
+old beauty and fragrance along the _Champs-Elysees_ outside the _Grand
+Palais_, but inside no prints and paintings were on the walls, no
+statues in the great courts. To those admitted, the only exhibition was
+of the wounded, the maimed, the dying. Does it mean, I wonder, the end
+of all old days and nights for me in Paris, as the war that has shut
+fast the _Salon_ door means the end of the old order of things in the
+Europe I have known? Shall I never go to Paris again in the season of
+lilacs and horse-chestnuts? Already I have ceased to meet my old friends
+by day in front of the picture of the year and to quarrel with them over
+it by night at a _cafe_ table, or in the peaceful twilight of the
+suburban town and park and garden. Am I to lose as well the link with
+the past I had in the _Salon_, am I to lose perhaps Paris? Who can say
+at the moment of my writing, when the echo of shells and bullets is
+thundering in my ears? The pleasure of what has been becomes the dearer
+possession in the mad upheaval that threatens to sweep all trace of it
+away, and so I cling to the remembrance of my Paris nights the more
+tenderly and even with the hope, if far-fetched, that others may
+understand the tenderness. Youth sees little beyond youth, but as the
+years go on I begin to believe youth exists for no other end than to
+supply the incidents that age transforms into memories to warm itself
+by. If I have reached the time for looking back, I have my compensation
+in the invigorating glow, for all its sadness, that I get from my new
+occupation.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Abbey, Edwin A., 54
+
+  Addiscombe, Henley's house at, 137, 145, 149
+
+  "Admiral Guinea," by Henley, 147
+
+  Albano, 66
+
+  Albergo del Sole, Pompeii, 67
+
+  "Allahakbarries," 214, 215
+
+  Aman-Jean, E., 261
+
+  American Consul at Venice, 86
+
+  American tourists, 91
+
+  American visitors, 221
+
+  Anthony, Venice, 97
+
+  Antica Panada, 76
+
+  "Arabian Nights' Entertainment," by Henley, 132
+
+  Arnold, at Venice, 86, 87
+
+  "Arrangement in Trousers," 96
+
+  Arrested, 29
+
+  Art critics in Paris, 227-229
+
+  Artists in Rome, 44-64
+
+  "Art Journal," London, 129
+
+  "Art Weekly," London, 202
+
+  "Association Books," 214
+
+  Astor, William Waldorf, 152, 153
+
+  "Atlantic Monthly," 83, 96
+
+  Augustine (Mme. Bertin), 218
+
+  Austen, Louis, 174
+
+
+  Ballantyne & Co., 125
+
+  Barnes, Henley's house at, 149
+
+  Barrie, J.M., 148, 214
+
+  Baseball, 87, 88
+
+  Bauer's, at Venice, 107
+
+  Beardsley, Aubrey, 138, 177-191, 197, 211, 228, 260-264
+
+  Beardsley's illness, 190
+
+  Beaux-Arts, Paris, 47
+
+  Beerbohm, Max, 185, 187
+
+  Befana Night, 66
+
+  Beggarstaff Brothers, 194
+
+  Belgian exiles, 222
+
+  Belgium, 17
+
+  Beraud, Jean, 239
+
+  Bibi-la-Puree, 276, 281
+
+  Bicycle, 17, 32, 254
+
+  Bisbing, Henry S., 102
+
+  Black magic, 89
+
+  Black and white at the Salons, 239
+
+  Blackburn, Vernon, 152
+
+  Blakie, W.B., 148
+
+  Blanche, J.E., 261
+
+  "Blast, The," 176
+
+  "Bodley Head," 187
+
+  Boer War, 219
+
+  Borghese, The, 29
+
+  "Boys, The," at Venice, 84, 88, 93, 95, 96, 102
+
+  Breton, Jules, 274
+
+  Bridge of Sighs, Venice, 75
+
+  Brillat-Savarin, 245
+
+  British Museum, 65
+
+  Bronsons, the, at Venice, 98
+
+  Brown, Horatio, at Venice, 98
+
+  Brown, Professor Fred, 203
+
+  Bruant, Aristide, 289-295
+
+  Buckingham Street, our rooms in, 117, 121, 125, 126, 129-223, 142, 158,
+                                   161, 172, 174, 179, 199, 220, 260
+
+  Buhot, Felix, 120, 199, 203
+
+  Bunney at Venice, 92
+
+  Burano, 111
+
+  Burlington House, 228
+
+  Burly, Stevenson's, 134
+
+  Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 178
+
+  Bussy, Simon, 127
+
+  "Butterfly," the, 177, 198
+
+
+  Cabaret du Mirliton, Paris, 289, 295
+    Lyonnais, Paris, 252, 254
+
+  Cafe d'Harcourt, Paris, 273
+    de la Paix, Paris, 273
+    de la Regence, Paris, 273
+    de Venise, Rome, 41
+    Nazionale Aragno, Rome, 41, 43, 49, 52, 67, 121, 274
+    Orientale, Venice, 76, 82-97, 107, 113, 121, 274
+    Royal, London, 121, 176, 208
+
+  Cafes at Rome, 34, 40-44 at Venice, 76-113
+
+  Calcino, Venice, 77
+
+  Campagna, the, 33, 35, 65
+
+  Campanile, the, Venice, 75
+
+  Canaletto, 100
+
+  "Captain's Girl," 214
+
+  Carlyle, Thomas, 54
+
+  Carnavalet Museum, 285, 292
+
+  Carolus-Duran, 261
+
+  Carpaccio, 94
+
+  Casa Kirsch, Venice, 73, 74, 75,77
+
+  Casino de Paris, 280, 296
+
+  Cavour, the, Rome, 38, 43
+
+  Cazin, C., 262
+
+  Cezanne, Paul, 248, 249
+
+  Chamberlain, Dr., 62
+
+  Champ de Mars, 234
+
+  Champs-Elysees, 227, 243, 302
+
+  Chantrey bequest, 119
+
+  Charles V ball, at Munich, 105
+
+  Charpentier, E., 286
+
+  Chat Noir, the, Paris, 285-291
+
+  Cheret, Jules, 240
+
+  Cheshire Cheese, the, London, 38
+
+  Chioggia, 111
+
+  "Chronicle of Friendships," by Will Low, 165
+
+  Church of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice, 94
+
+  Cleopatra's Needle, 147
+
+  Clothes, 31-32, 44, 57, 76, 98, 123, 185, 193-194, 207, 255, 260, 261
+
+  Cole, Timothy, 221
+
+  Coleman at Rome, 61
+
+  Conder, Charles, 203, 241
+
+  Coney Island, 110
+
+  Constable, T. and A., 213
+
+  Cook, Clarence, 63
+
+  Cookery, the Author's articles on, 142, 149, 158, 186
+
+  Cooking books, 245
+
+  Corder, Rosa, 237
+
+  Cornford, Cope, 128
+
+  "Courrier Francais," Paris, 203
+
+  Covent Garden, 125
+
+  Crane, Walter, 138, 204
+
+  Crawford, Marion, 60
+
+  Crockett, S.R., 157
+
+  Cubists, the, 248
+
+  Cust, Henry, 153
+
+
+  D'Ache, Caran, 240, 287
+
+  "Daily Chronicle," the, London, 170, 173, 174
+
+  "Daily News," London, 41
+
+  Davies, 59, 112
+
+  Dayrolles, Adrienne (Mrs. W.J. Fisher), 174
+
+  Debussy, Achille Claude, 286
+
+  Degas, H.G.E., 119, 296
+
+  Desboutin, 296
+
+  "Dial, The," London, 177
+
+  Dinners in Paris, 244-247
+
+  "Diogenes of London," 215
+
+  Discussions over art, 46-65
+
+  Dodge, Miss Louise, 65, 159
+
+  "Dome," the, London, 177
+
+  Donnay, Maurice, 286
+
+  Donoghue the sculptor, 48-49, 50, 53
+
+  Dowie, Menie Muriel, 185
+
+  Drouet, C., 300
+
+  Ducal Palace, Venice, 75, 100
+
+  Duclaux, Madame, 129
+
+  Dumas's Dictionnaire de la Cuisine, 149, 245
+
+  Duret, Theodore, 300
+
+  Duveneck, Frank, 76-108
+
+
+  Edelfelt, 239
+
+  Eighteen-eighties, 27-114
+
+  Eighteen-nineties, 115-304
+    Their so-called decadence, 118
+
+  English tourists, 92
+
+  Etty, William, 123
+
+  "Evergreen," the, London, 177
+
+
+  Falcone, the, Rome, 37, 38, 43
+
+  Fig-Tree House, 130
+
+  Fighting nineties, 118
+
+  Finck, Henry T., 245
+
+  "Finsbury, Michael," 131, 132
+
+  Fisher, W.J., 174
+
+  Fitzgerald, Edward, 62
+
+  Flaubert, Gustave, 173
+
+  Florence, 29, 74, 84, 97
+
+  Florian's, Venice, 77, 82, 99
+
+  Florizel, Prince, 163, 168, 173, 232
+
+  Folies-Bergere, Paris, 280
+
+  Fontainebleau, Forest of, 271
+
+  Forain, 203, 240
+
+  "Forepaugh," 52-56, 89
+
+  Frederic, Harold, 156, 214, 215
+
+  Furse, Charles W., 200, 201, 211, 228, 269, 270
+
+  Futurists, the, 248
+
+
+  Garnett, Dr. Edward, 65
+
+  Gauguin, 249
+
+  Gautier, Theophile, 268
+
+  Gavarni, 257
+
+  "Gazette, Pall Mall," 153
+
+  "Gentle Art of Making Enemies, The," 85, 217
+
+  "Germ, The," 176
+
+  German tourists, 77, 270
+
+  Germany, 17
+
+  Ghetto, Rome, 30
+
+  Gigi, 53
+
+  Gosse, Edmund, 174, 188
+
+  Goupil Gallery, London, 119
+
+  Graefe, Meier, 204
+
+  Grahame, Kenneth, 148, 185, 213
+
+  Grand Palais, Paris, 302
+
+  "Graphic," the, London, 203
+
+  Great College Street office, Henley's, 130-137, 139, 149
+
+  "Greedy Autolycus," 186, 254
+
+  Guardi, 100
+
+  Guilbert, Yvette, 280
+
+  "Gypsy, The," 176, 281
+
+
+  Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 188
+
+  Hamilton, Lord Frederick, 153
+
+  Harland, Henry, 160, 172-177, 197, 211, 228, 257, 258, 264, 265, 266,
+                  290-294, 297
+
+  Harrison, Alexander, 250
+
+  Harte, Bret, 51
+
+  Hartrick and Sullivan, 196, 198, 222
+
+  Henley, Madge, 214
+
+  Henley, William Ernest, 118, 125-149, 163, 166, 196, 197, 211, 213, 240
+
+  Henley's "Young Men," 125, 133, 134, 142, 145, 149, 150, 176, 179, 196,
+                        213, 214
+
+  Hill, L. Raven, 198
+
+  Hobbes, John Oliver (Mrs. Cragie), 185
+
+  "Hobby-horse," the, 176
+
+  Horne, Herbert P., 278
+
+  "Hospital Verses," 126, 147
+
+  Hostess, author as, 126, 198
+
+  Hotel de l'Univers et Portugal, Paris, 233
+      d'Italie, London, 185, 187
+
+  Howells, William Dean, 83, 109
+
+  Hueffer, Ford Madox, 209
+
+  Hugo, Victor, 268
+
+  Hunt, Holman, 204, 239
+
+  Hunt, Violet, 158
+
+  Huysmans, Joris Karl, 89, 238
+
+
+  Ibsen, 199, 251
+
+  Impressionism, 238
+
+  Indolence, 22, 60, 84, 86, 108, 112, 122
+
+  "Inland Voyage, An," 165
+
+  International Exhibitions, 19
+
+  International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, 301
+
+  Italian Primitives, 204
+
+  Italy, 17, 29
+
+  Iwan-Mueller, 154, 211
+
+
+  "J--" (Joseph Pennell), 13, 20, 24, 29, 40, 44, 45, 53, 73, 81, 85, 91,
+                          98, 108, 113, 117, 120, 121, 122, 129, 130, 137,
+                          154, 161, 174, 178, 179, 184, 204, 205, 210, 214,
+                          217, 227, 228, 245, 254, 301
+
+  James, Henry, 188
+
+  Japanese art, 178
+
+  Jobbins, 90, 95, 111
+
+  Journalism, 19, 117, 228-229
+
+  Journeyings in Europe, 15-19
+
+
+  Kelly, FitzMaurice, 148
+
+  Kelmscott Press, 178, 213
+
+  Kennedy, E.G., 218, 219
+
+  Kensington Gardens, London, 52, 176
+
+  Khayyam, Omar, 62, 63
+
+  Khnopf, 240
+
+  Kipling, Rudyard, 148, 213
+
+  Kitchener, Lord, 155
+
+
+  La Perouse, Paris, 247
+
+  Lagoon, the, Venice, 77, 107, 111, 112
+
+  Lamb, Charles, 22
+
+  "Land of the Dollar," 215
+
+  Lane, John, 185, 187
+
+  Lang, Andrew, 41, 63
+
+  "Lantern Bearers, The," 165, 173
+
+  Latin Quarter, 194
+
+  Lavenue's, Paris, 249
+
+  Le Puy, 18
+
+  Legge, James G., 159
+
+  Legrand, Louis, 203, 240
+
+  Leighton, Lord, 195
+
+  Leland, Charles Godfrey, 20, 56
+
+  Lhermitte, 239
+
+  Lido, the, 76, 88, 112
+
+  London, 38, 115-223, 253
+
+  "London Impressionists," 199
+
+  "London Voluntaries," by Henley, 147
+
+  Low, Will, 165
+
+  Lucca, 74
+
+  Luska, Sydney (Henry Harland), 173
+
+  Luxembourg, Paris, 103
+
+
+  MacColl, D.S., 201, 227, 241
+
+  "Mademoiselle Miss," 290, 294, 296
+
+  "Magazine of Art," London, 129
+
+  Manet, Edouard, 249, 280
+
+  Margherita, Queen, 66
+
+  Marguery's, Paris, 250
+
+  Marino, 66
+
+  Marriott-Watson, Rosamund, 157
+
+  Martin, at Venice, 86
+
+  May, Phil, 191-199, 211, 222
+
+  McFarlane, Venice, 97, 98, 100, 106, 107
+
+  Meissonier, J.L.E., 236
+
+  Merceria, the, Venice, 99
+
+  Meynell, Mrs. Alice, 158, 159
+
+  Millet, F.D., 54
+
+  Mistral, 65
+
+  Mitchell, Dr. S. Weir, 142
+
+  Monet, Claude, 238
+
+  Montepulciano, 42
+
+  Montmartre, 297
+
+  Moore, George, 159, 185, 215, 229
+
+  Morelli, 46
+
+  Morin, Louis, 287
+
+  Morris, William, 209
+
+  Morrison, Arthur, 148, 213
+
+  "Morte d'Arthur," illustrated by Beardsley, 178
+
+  Moulin Rouge, 280, 281, 296
+
+  Munich, 84, 97, 98, 102
+    Accident at ball, 105
+
+  Murano, 111
+
+  Muerger, Henri, 257
+
+  Music of "Carmen," the, 106
+
+
+  Naples, 66, 67, 74, 110
+
+  "Nation," the, London, 228, 229
+
+  "National Observer," London, 125, 128, 130, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141,
+                               151, 155, 157, 211, 214, 229, 267
+
+  New English Art Club, London, 119, 199, 200, 201, 269
+
+  New Gallery, 227
+
+  New York "Times," 156
+
+  Nicholson, William, 127, 128, 194
+
+  Norman, Henry, 159
+
+  Norwegian at Rome, the, 60
+
+  Nouvelle Athenes, the, Paris, 249
+
+
+  "Observations in Philistia," by Harold Frederic, 156
+
+  Orvieto, 74
+
+  Ostia, 66
+
+  Oulevey, H., 300
+
+
+  "Pageant," the, London, 177
+
+  Palais Royal, 243
+
+  Pall-Mall, the, "Budget," "Gazette" and "Magazine," 142, 149, 152, 155,
+                                                      161, 186, 227, 254
+
+  "Pan," London, 204.
+
+  Panada, the, Venice, 78-82
+
+  Paris, 19, 227-303
+    Studios, 102-103
+
+  "Parson and the Painter, The," 197
+
+  Parsons, Harold, 152
+
+  Paulus, 280
+
+  "Penn, William," 123, 157, 185
+
+  Philadelphia, 13, 23, 34, 37, 40, 50, 64, 137, 242, 255
+
+  Piazza Navona, Rome, 66
+
+  "Pick-me-up," 198
+
+  Pincian, the, Rome, 33, 59
+
+  Pisa, 74
+
+  Pistoia, 74
+
+  Pointillism, 238
+
+  Pollock, Wilfred, 152
+
+  Pompeii, 67
+
+  Porta del Popolo, Rome, 29
+
+  "Portfolio, The," 59
+
+  Posta, the, Rome, 43
+
+  Post-impressionism, 204, 248
+
+  Pre-Raphaelitism, 204, 207
+
+  Preston, Miss Harriet Waters, 65, 159
+
+  "Private Life of the Romans," 65
+
+  Prunier's, Paris, 252
+
+  Pryde, James, 194
+
+  Pulcinello, 67-69
+
+  "Punch," 213
+
+
+  "Rape of the Lock," illustrated by Beardsley, 182, 213
+
+  Rat Mort, Paris, 296
+
+  Renouard, Paul, 203
+
+  "Return of the O'Mahoney," 215
+
+  Reyniere, Grimod de la, 245
+
+  Rico, 100
+
+  Riviere, 287
+
+  Robinson, Miss Mary, 129
+
+  Rocca di Papa, 66
+
+  Rodin, Auguste, 128, 240, 271, 284
+
+  Rome, 27-69, 121
+
+  Rooms at Rome, 33-34, 64
+
+  Roque, Jules, 203
+
+  Rosicrucianism, 238
+
+  Ross, Robert, 182
+
+  Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 207, 209
+
+  Rossetti, William Michael, 209
+
+  Royal Academy, 77, 119, 200, 212, 227, 232
+
+  Rubaiyat, illustrated by Vedder, 62
+
+  Rubens, 101, 108
+
+  Ruskin, John, 46, 73, 77, 92, 94, 99, 100, 102, 110
+
+  Ruskin, never quoted by artists, 92
+
+
+  Sailing for Europe, 14
+
+  Salis, 285, 286, 287, 289, 291
+
+  Salisbury, Lord, 165
+
+  "Salome," illustrated by Beardsley, 213
+
+  Salons, the, Paris, 103
+
+  Sandro, 42, 43
+
+  Sandys, Frederick, 121, 204-208
+
+  San Francisco Exposition, 84, 97
+
+  San Giorgio, Venice, 75, 82
+
+  San Peladan, 238
+
+  "Saturday Review," London, 202
+
+  "Savoy, The," 189, 190, 198, 281
+
+  Schwabe, Carlos, 239
+
+  "Scots Observer," Edinburgh, 129
+
+  Shannon, J.J., 193
+
+  Shaw, George Bernard, 159, 215
+
+  Shinn, at Venice, 86
+
+  Sickert, Walter, 201
+
+  Simpson's, London, 253
+
+  Sisley, Alfred, 238
+
+  Sixties, illustrations of the, 205, 206, 208
+
+  Societies in the nineties, 134
+
+  Solferino's, London, 232, 233
+
+  South Kensington, London, 58, 90
+
+  "Speaker, The," London, 229
+
+  "Spectator," London, 202, 227
+
+  "Spring-heeled Jack," 160, 164
+
+  Spring in Venice, 108
+
+  "Standard," London, 83, 98
+
+  St. Cloud, Paris, 258, 259, 263
+
+  Steer, Wilson, 203
+
+  Steevens, George W., 154, 211, 213, 215
+
+  Steinlen, 240, 290
+
+  Stennis Brothers, 165
+
+  Stevenson, "Bob" (Robert Alan Mowbray), 160, 162, 170, 173, 197, 211,
+                                          227, 233, 237, 249, 250, 262
+
+  Stevenson, Robert Louis, 127, 128, 136, 146, 160, 163, 164, 167, 181,
+                           249, 250, 263
+
+  Stewarts, London, 232
+
+  St. Mark's, Venice, 75, 86, 100, 109
+
+  St. Paul's, London, 147
+
+  Street, George S., 148, 213
+
+  "Strike at Arlingford, The," 215
+
+  Stuart, Jack, 152
+
+  "Studio, The," 178
+
+  Symbolism, 238
+
+  Symonds, John Addington, 77
+
+  Symons, Arthur, 183, 190, 278
+
+
+  "Talk and Talkers," 160
+
+  Talk on Thursday nights, 124-125
+
+  Thaulow, Fritz, 273
+
+  Theatre Francais, 220
+
+  Theosophy, 55
+
+  Thompson, Venice, 97
+
+  Thursday nights, our, 117, 122-125, 129, 142, 168, 177, 223, 255
+
+  "Times," London, 43
+
+  Tintoretto, 94, 108
+
+  Tivoli, 66
+
+  Tomson, Arthur, 202, 211
+
+  Tomson, Graham R., 157, 158, 214, 215
+
+  Tonks, 203
+
+  Torcello, 111
+
+  Toulouse-Lautrec, H. de, 240, 280, 291
+
+  Tour d'Argent, Paris, 251, 252
+
+  Trattoria Cavour, Rome, 38, 43
+    Falcone, 37-38, 43
+    Posta, Rome, 36-39, 43
+
+  "Treasure Island," 127
+
+  Treteau de Tabarin, Paris, 284
+
+  Tricycle, 15, 16, 29, 254
+
+  Tudor classics, the, 214
+
+
+  Val di Chiana, 42
+
+  Vale Press, 213
+
+  Vance, the painter, 80
+
+  Van Dyke, John, 221
+
+  Van Gogh, 248, 249
+
+  Vedder, Elihu, 56-64
+
+  Velasquez, 132, 169, 173, 215
+
+  "Venetian Life," by W.D. Howells, 109
+
+  Venetian painting, 101
+
+  Venice, 66, 71-113
+
+  Verlaine, Paul, 276-277, 281
+
+  Versailles, 266, 267, 269, 270, 272
+
+  Vesuvius, 67, 69
+
+  Vibrism, 238
+
+  Victoria, Queen, 62
+
+  Victorian prejudice, 190, 199, 202, 204
+
+  "Views and Reviews," by Henley, 141
+
+  Voisin's, Paris, 246
+
+  "Volpone," illustrated by Beardsley, 182, 213
+
+  Vorticists, 248
+
+
+  "Wares of Autolycus," 158
+
+  Watson, Marriott, 151, 213-215
+
+  Wells, H.G., 148
+
+  Whibley, Charles, 128, 130, 151, 213, 227
+
+  Whibley, Leonard, 213
+
+  Whistler, James McNeill, 20, 91, 93, 94, 95, 100, 102, 119, 128, 139,
+                           140, 142, 163, 200, 205, 208, 216, 218, 220,
+                           221, 236, 237, 299, 300
+
+  Wilde, Oscar, 49
+
+  Willes, Adrian, 172
+
+  Willette, 240, 287
+
+  Willis, N.P., 222
+
+  Wilson, Edgar, 198
+
+  Worthing, Henley at, 126
+
+  "Wounded Titan, The," 126
+
+  "Wrecker, The," 165, 249
+
+  "Wrong Box, The," 131
+
+
+  "Yellow Book, The," 177,184, 185-190, 198
+
+
+  Zaehnsdorf, 214
+
+  Zola, Emile, 47, 215, 222
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+Transcribers Note
+
+The following changes were made to the text:
+   Hobby-Horse to Hobby-horse. London--V--paragraph 6
+   Murger to Muerger. Paris--IV--paragraph 2
+   Index--(Church of San Giorgio degli) Schiaroni to Schiavoni.
+   Index--(Courrier) Francais to Francais
+
+
+
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