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
archæological 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.