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 Bohème_
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
Suède 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 "_Après vous, madame! Après
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-siècle_. 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.