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 Reynière, 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 Athènes_ 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.