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 même 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.