PORTRAIT OF MISS WOAKES
In the possession of Messrs. Knvedler & Co.
"Manet did very good work, of course, but then Manet was always l'écolier—the student with a certain sense of things in paint, and that is all!—he never understood that art is a positive science, one step in it leading to another. He painted, you know, in la manière noire, the dark pictures that look very well when you come to them at Durand-Ruel's, after wandering through rooms of screaming blues and violets and greens, but he was so little in earnest that midway in his career he took to the blues and violets and greens himself. You know, it is the trouble with so many; they paint in one way—brilliant colour, say—they see something, like Ribot, and, dear me, they think, we had better try to do this too, and they do and, well, really, you know, in the end they do nothing for themselves!"
He was furious with the critic who stated that his medal was awarded for The Little White Girl. The statement was offensive because, he said, "the critics are always passing over recent work for early masterpieces, though all are masterpieces; there is no better, no worse; the work has always gone on, it has grown, not changed, and the pictures I am painting now are full of qualities they cannot understand to-day any better than they understood The Little White Girl at the time it was painted."
This was an argument he often used. A few evenings after, he told a man, who suggested that Millet's later work was not so good because he was married and had to make both ends meet, "You're wrong. An artist's work is never better, never worse; it must be always good, in the end as in the beginning, if he is an artist, if it is in him to do anything at all. He would not be influenced by the chance of a wife or anything of that kind. He is always the artist."
He was annoyed because critics could not see a truth which to him was simple and obvious. His annoyance culminated when the Magazine of Art not only said the Grand Prix was awarded for The Little White Girl, but protested against the award, because the picture was painted before the ten years' limit imposed by the French authorities, a protest printed in other papers. Whistler could not bear this in silence, for it looked like an effort to deprive him of his first high award from a Paris Exhibition. The attack was disgraceful. Whistler's two other pictures were his most recent, and, as we have said, The Little White Girl was specially invited. As soon as he was well enough, he came to us several times, with Mr. William Webb, his solicitor, to talk the affair over. As a result, an apology was demanded, and made. This belittling of certain pictures in favour of others, with its inevitable inference, offended him, in the end as in the beginning. Mr. Sargent writes us an instance of his manner of carrying off the offence before the world. Somebody brought him a commission for a painting, stipulating that it should be "a serious work." Whistler's answer was that he "could not break with the traditions of a lifetime."
Another worry he should have been spared was a dispute with one of the tenants at the Rue du Bac, a trivial matter which, in his nervous state, loomed large and made him unnecessarily miserable. The carpets of the lady on the floor above him were shaken out of her windows into his garden, and it could not be stopped. He tried the law, but was told he must have disinterested witnesses outside the family. If he engaged a detective, a month might pass before she would do it again. But it chanced that, while beating a carpet, it fell into his garden, and his servants refused to give it up. The lady went to law and his lawyer advised him to return the carpet. It depressed him hopelessly, and as he had long ceased to live in the Rue du Bac, we could not understand why he should have heard of so petty a domestic squabble.
Ill and worried as he was, our work at intervals came to a standstill. When he felt better and stronger the talks went on, but at moments he seemed almost to fear that the book would prove an obituary. Once he said to us that we "wanted to make an Old Master of me before my time," and we had too much respect and affection for him to add to his worries by our importunity. With the late autumn his weakness developed into serious illness. By the middle of November he was extremely anxious about himself, for his cough would not go. The doctor's diagnosis, he said, was "lowered in tone: probably the result of living in the midst of English pictures." A sea journey was advised, and Tangier suggested for the winter. When he was with us he could not conceal his anxiety. If he sneezed, he hurried away. He fell asleep before dinner was over; sometimes he could hardly keep awake through the evening. Once or twice he seemed to be more than asleep, when there was nothing to do but to rouse him, which was not easy, and we were extremely frightened until we could, and, indeed, until J. got him back to Garlant's. He would never trust himself to the night air until Augustine had mixed him a hot "grog." Tangier did not appeal to him, and he asked J. to go with him to Gibraltar, stay a while at Malaga, and then come back by Madrid to see at last the pictures he had always wanted to see. He was hurt when J.'s work made it impossible for him to leave London.
In December Whistler gave up the struggle to brave the London winter, and decided to sail for Gibraltar, on the way to Tangier and Algiers, with Mr. Birnie Philip, his brother-in-law, to take care of him. Sir Thomas Sutherland, Chairman of the P. & O. Company, arranged for every comfort on the voyage. But, as usual, there were complications at the last moment—as usual, the fearful trouble of getting off from his studio. Everybody was pressed into his service and kept busy, all the waiters in the hotel were in attendance. The day before he was to start he discovered that his etching plates needed to be regrounded and he sent them to J., who agreed to do what he could at such short notice, but warned him that there was not time to ground the plates properly and that very likely they would be spoiled. Whistler sent for them in the evening and, instead of leaving them out to dry until the morning, wrapped them up and packed them among the linen in his trunk. It was extraordinary that a man so careful about his work should always have wanted somebody else to ground his plates or prepare his canvases, or do something as important, that he should have done for himself, and that oftener than not he should have wanted it, as on this occasion, at the last moment. However, with the help of his friends and the waiters and his family, he was got ready in time, and on December 14 he started for the South.
CHAPTER XLVI: IN SEARCH OF HEALTH.
THE YEARS NINETEEN HUNDRED AND ONE AND NINETEEN HUNDRED AND TWO.
As soon as Whistler got away from London he was unhappy. At Tangier the wind was icy, at Algiers it rained, and everywhere when it was clear the sky was "hard" and the sea was "black." Snow was falling at Marseilles, and he was kept in his room for a couple of weeks, so ill he had to send for a doctor, and he was only comforted when he found the doctor delightful. Corsica was recommended and, as "Napoleon's Island," attracted Whistler. When he was well enough Mr. Birnie Philip left him, and he sailed alone for Ajaccio. Here he stayed at the Hôtel Schweizerhof. The weather at first was abominable, so cold and the wind so treacherous that he could not work out of doors, and he felt his loneliness acutely. Fortunately he made a friend of the Curator of the Museum, and Mr. Heinemann joined him for a time. They loitered about together in the quaint little town, went to see the house where Napoleon was born—"a great experience"—spent many rainy hours in the café where Mr. Heinemann taught him to play dominoes, a resource not only then but the rest of his life. They played for the price of their coffee, and Whistler cheated with a brilliancy that made him easily a winner, but that horrified a German who sometimes took a hand, though the naïveté of Whistler's "system" could not have deceived a child.
He was by no means idle, and he brought back a series of exquisite pen and pencil drawings begun at Tangier. A few water-colours were made, and when the weather gave him a chance he worked on his copper-plates. He bit one or two that J. had grounded in London, and the ground came off. He did not know how, or did not have the courage to prevent it. We can only wonder again that a man who made such wonderful plates did not know what to do, or did not dare do it, in difficulties of this sort, preferring to rely upon somebody else. He had drawn on some of the other plates before he began to bite any of them, and he may have done more than have as yet been seen. In Mr. Howard Mansfield's and the Grolier catalogues only one plate in Corsica is recorded, in both called The Bohemians. But as J. grounded ten or a dozen for Whistler, and as he spoke to us of more than once bitten, it is probable that the plates exist. "All my dainty work lost," he wrote to us from Corsica, and it looked as if the shadow had fallen upon our friendship. But he understood, and the shadow passed as quickly as it came. There were other schemes. One day, after his return, he told Mr. Clifford Addams that he had seen a great black-bearded shepherd, on a horse, carrying a long pole, coming down a hill-side, of whom he wanted to make a large equestrian portrait. But he never started it. He felt he was not able.
The closing of the school in Paris occupied and worried him, and he was arranging for a show of pastels and prints at the Luxembourg. One pleasure, of which he wrote to us, came from "new honours" in Dresden, where he was awarded a gold medal and elected "unanimously to the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts." He was more tired than he admitted in his letters, dwelling little on his fatigue, and insisting that the doctor in Marseilles found nothing was the matter with him. But he was never strong after the autumn of 1900, and earlier than this the doctor in London warned his friends that he was failing.
He was more hopeful because at Ajaccio he said he had discovered what was the matter with him:
"At first, though I got through little, I never went out without a sketch-book or an etching-plate. I was always meaning to work, always thinking I must. Then the Curator offered me the use of his studio. The first day I was there he watched me, but said nothing until the afternoon. Then—'But, Mr. Whistler, I have looked at you, I have been watching. You are all nerves, you do nothing. You try to, but you cannot settle down to it. What you need is rest—to do nothing—not to try to do anything.' And all of a sudden, you know, it struck me that I had never rested, that I never had done nothing, that it was the one thing I needed. And I put myself down to doing nothing—amazing, you know. No more sketch-books, no more plates. I just sat in the sun and slept. I was cured. You know, Joseph must sit in the sun and sleep. Write and tell him so."
He was sufficiently recovered to take his old joy in the "Islanders," into the midst of whom he fell on the P. & O. steamer coming back from Marseilles:
"Nobody but English on board, and, after months of not seeing them, really they were amazing: there they all were at dinner, you know—the women in low gowns, the men in dinner jackets. They might look a trifle green, they might suddenly run when the ship rolled—but what matter? There they were—men in dinner jackets, stewards behind their chairs in dinner jackets—and so all's right with the country! And, do you know, it made the whole business clear to me down there in South Africa. At home every Englishman does his duty—appears in his dinner jacket at the dinner hour—and so, what difference what the Boers are doing? All is well with England! You know, you might just as well dress to ride in an omnibus!"
Whistler returned from Corsica at the beginning of May in excellent spirits. He came to us on the day of his arrival. We give one small incident that followed because it shows the simplicity he was careful to conceal from the world he liked to mystify. J. was in Italy and E., that afternoon, on her way back from the Continent. At our door he met our French maid, Augustine, starting for Charing Cross, and he walked with her to the station, where she was to meet E., while she gave him the news. Her account was that everybody stared, which was not surprising. He, always a conspicuous figure, was the more so in his long brown overcoat and round felt hat, en voyage, while she wore a big white apron and was en cheveux. Moreover, their conversation was animated. She invited him to dinner, promising him dishes which she knew would tempt him, and he accepted. He appeared a little before eight. "Positively shocking and no possible excuse for it," he said, "but, well, here I am!"
Work was taken up in the studio, our talks were resumed, his interest in the Boer War grew, the heat he had not found in the South was supplied by London in June and July, and from the heat he gained strength. He came and went, as of old, between Garlant's Hotel and Buckingham Street, until he declared that the cabbies in the Strand knew him as well as the cabbies in Chelsea. It had ever been his boast that he was known to almost every cabman in London, as, indeed, he was. The tales of his encounters with them were numerous, for, if lavish in big things, he could sometimes be "narrow" in small, and his drives occasionally ended in differences. The only time we knew the cabby to score was one day this year, when J. was walking from the studio with him. "Kibby, kibby," Whistler cried to a passing cab, not seeing the "fare" inside. The cabman drew up, looked down at him, looked him over, and said, "Where did yer buy yer 'at? Go, get yer 'air cut!" and drove off at a gallop. Whistler, safe inside an omnibus, laughed at the adventure.
But the summer was full of adventures. Another afternoon he and J. were walking in the Strand when a well-known English artist stopped him with, "Why, my dear old Jimmie, how are you? I haven't seen you or spoken to you for twenty years!" Whistler turned slowly to J. and said, "Joseph, do you know this person?" And the person fled. "H'm," said Whistler, "hasn't spoken to me for twenty years—guess it will be another twenty before he dares again.
We were abroad a great part of the summer of 1901, and when we got back his weakness had returned with the cold and the damp and the fog. He had realised the uselessness of keeping up his apartment and studio in Paris, the state of his health making it impossible for him to live in the one or to climb to the other, and business in connection with closing them took him to Paris in October. Towards the beginning of the month he was ill in bed at Garlant's Hotel, and towards the end at Mr. Heinemann's in Norfolk Street. When well enough to go out he was afraid to come to us in the evening: "Buckingham Street at night, you know, a dangerous, if fascinating place!" He would not dine where he could not sleep, he said, "J'y dîne, j'y dort," and in our small flat he knew there was no corner for him. Early in November he moved to Tallant's Hotel, North Audley Street, and there he was very ill and more alarmed than ever. "This time I am very much bowled over, unable to think," he told E. when she went to see him, and, though he laughed, he was depressed by his landlady's recommendation of his room as the one where Lord —— died. "I tried to make her understand," he said, "that what I wanted was a room to live in." He looked the worse because in illness, as in health, he had the faculty of inventing extraordinary costumes. E. remembers him there, after he was able to get up, in black trousers, a white silk night-shirt flowing loose, and a short black coat.
Illness made Whistler more of a wanderer, and for months he was denied the rest he knew he needed. From Tallant's, in November, he went to Mrs. Birnie Philip's in Tite Street, Chelsea. Here he never asked his friends, and we saw less of him. The first week in December he left London for Bath, where he took rooms in one of the big Crescents, and where he thought he could work. There were shops in which to hunt for "old silver and things," in a vague way people seemed to know him, and, on the whole, Bath pleased him. He lost few excuses, however, for coming to London, and was in town almost all of January. On some days he was surprisingly well. He went to the Old Masters Exhibition at the Royal Academy especially to see the Kingston Lacy Las Meniñas, and he told us the same day:
"It is full of things only Velasquez could have done—the heads a little weak perhaps—but so much, or everything, that no one else could have painted like that. And up in a strange place they call the Diploma Gallery I saw the Spanish Phillip's copy of Las Meniñas, full of atmosphere really, and dim understanding."
Ochtervelt's Lady Standing at a Spinet interested him, suggesting a favourite theme:
"The Dutchmen knew how to paint—they had respect for the surface of a picture; the modern painter has no respect for anything but his own cleverness, and he is sometimes so clever that his work is like that of a bad boy, and I'm not sure that he ought not to be taken out and whipped for it. Cleverness!—well, cleverness has nothing to do with art; there can be the same sort of cleverness in painting as that of the popular officer who cuts an orange into fancy shapes after dinner."
He was severe on contemporary artists who forgot the standard of the Louvre, the only standard he recognised. Of Conder he said, "Il est trop joli pour être beau!" and of a follower of Rodin, "He makes a landscape out of a man." When he saw Watts' Hope his comment was, "The hope that maketh the heart sick." Watts he always called "ce faux Titien." "Except in England, would anything short of perfection in art be praised?" he said. "Why approve the tolerable picture any more than the tolerable egg?" A sitter dissatisfied with his portrait told Whistler it was not good. "Do you call it a good piece of art?" he asked. "Well," said Whistler, "do you call yourself a good piece of Nature?"
One day a man rushed into a hat store and, as Whistler was hatless, being fitted, bellowed, "I say, this hat don't fit." "Your coat don't, either," Whistler answered.
One or two evenings he risked the night air to come to us and his talk was as gay and brilliant—reminiscent, critical, "wicked," as the mood took him, and at times serious. We remember his earnestness when he recalled the séances and spiritual manifestations at Rossetti's, in which he believed. He could not understand the people who pretended to doubt the existence of another world and the hereafter. His faith was strong, though vague when there was question of analysing it. Probably he never tried to reduce it to dogma and doctrine, and, in that sense, he was "the amateur" he described himself in jest. If his inclination turned to any special creed it was to Catholicism. "The beauty of ritual is with the Catholics," he said. But his work left him no time to study these problems, and his belief perhaps was stimulated by the mystery in which it was lost. He would have been more amused and interested than anybody could he have foreseen the messages to be received from him by an artist, and the book to be written by him for an author, and the portrait to be made by him for a medium, after his death.
On other days London apparently was tiring him and he dozed off and on through his visits. He expended much energy in sending some old pieces of silver to the doctor at Marseilles and the Curator at Ajaccio, who had been kind to him. He was full of these little courtesies and never forgot kindness, just as he never failed to show it to those who appealed to him, whether it was to find a publisher for an unsuccessful illustrator, or a gallery for an unsuccessful painter, or even, as we know happened once, to support a morphomaniac for months.
A shorter visit to town was made solely to attend a meeting of the International Society because his presence was particularly desired. This was one of the occasions that proved the sincerity and activity of his devotion to the Society and its affairs. It is a satisfaction that this devotion was appreciated and that the loyalty of the Council was not shaken during his lifetime.
In March Whistler came back to Tite Street, but, as we have said, he asked no one while he stayed with "the Ladies," his name for his mother- and sisters-in-law. There was one almost clandestine meeting with Professor Sauter, Whistler's desire to hear about the Boers, to whom he "never referred, of course, in the presence of the Ladies," becoming too strong to be endured, and he could rely upon Sauter for sympathy and the latest news. It was an interval of mystery in the studio. No one was invited, few were admitted, nothing was heard of the work being done. Whistler liked to keep up an effect of mystery in his movements, but we have never known him to carry it so far as during the first month or so after his return from Bath. At last J. was summoned. Whistler would not let him come further than the ante-room, talking to him through the open door or the thin partition, but presently, probably forgetting, called him into the studio and went on painting, and he forgot the mystery. Whistler felt he had little strength and devoted that little to his work. But, even in ill-health, he could not live without people about him, and he soon fell back into his old ways. Miss Birnie Philip was now almost always in the studio with him. In April he showed us the portrait of Mr. Richard A. Canfield, whose acquaintance he made at this time, unfortunately, for he introduced Mr. Canfield to "the Ladies," and the introduction resulted in the loss of one of his friends. Miss Birnie Philip was sitting to him, he was working on the portrait of Miss Kinsella, the Venus, and the little heads, and he was adding to the series of pastels. He was bothered about the show of his prints and pastels which M. Bénédite wished to make at the Luxembourg, and he was anxious to hand over the details to J., who could not see to them as he was away constantly this year. Whistler looked forward to the show because of the official character it would have, though after recent purchases of pictures for the Luxembourg he said, "You know, really, I told Bénédite, if this goes on I am afraid I must take my 'Mummy' from his Hotel." He was worried also about a show at the Caxton Club in Chicago, where it was proposed to reproduce his etchings without his permission. But when the Club found he objected the matter dropped.
To avoid further wandering, for which he was no longer equal, he took a house in Chelsea, where he had lived almost thirty years: he had been absent hardly more than ten. Mrs. and Miss Birnie Philip went to live with him. The house, not many doors west of old Chelsea Church, was No. 74 Cheyne Walk, built by Mr. C. R. Ashbee, and it stood on the site of a fish-shop of which Whistler had made a lithograph. There was a spacious studio at the back in which, in his words, he returned to his "old scheme of grey." Its drawbacks were that it was on a lower level than the street, reached by a descent of two or three steps from the entrance hall, and that the rest of the house was sacrificed to it. Two flights of stairs led up to the drawing-room where, in glass cases running round the room, he placed his blue-and-white. The dining-room was on this floor, but another flight of stairs had to be climbed to get to the bedrooms in the garrets. Almost all the windows opening upon the river were placed so high, and filled with such small panes, that little could be seen from them of the beauty of the Thames and its banks so dear to Whistler. The street door was of beaten copper and the house was full of decorative touches, which, he said, "make me wonder what I am doing here anyhow—the whole, you know, a successful example of the disastrous effect of art upon the British middle classes." Into this house he moved in April.
He reserved his energy for his work and went out scarcely at all. He did not dare risk the dinner given in May by London artists to Rodin, who, however, breakfasted with him a day or two after. We mention a detail that shows how sensitive Whistler was on certain subjects. M. Lantéri and Mr. Tweed came with Rodin, and this is Whistler's account to us later on the same day:
"It was all very charming. Rodin distinguished in every way—the breakfast very elegant—but—well, you know, you will understand. Before they came, naturally, I put my work out of sight, canvases up against the wall with their backs turned. And you know, never once, not even after breakfast, did Rodin ask to see anything, not that I wanted to show anything to Rodin, I needn't tell you—but in a man so distinguished it seemed a want of—well, of what West Point would have demanded under the circumstances."
No doubt Rodin thought, from the careful manner in which work was put out of sight, that he was not expected to refer to it. His opinion of Whistler we know, for he wrote it to us:
"Whistler était un peintre dont le dessin avait beaucoup de profondeurs, et celles-ci furent préparées par de bonnes études, car il a dû étudier assidument.
"Il sentait la forme, non seulement comme le font les bons peintres mais de la manière des bons sculpteurs. Il avait un sentiment extrêmement fin, qui a fait croire à quelques-uns que sa base n'était pas forte, mais elle était, au contraire, et forte et sûre.
"Il comprenait admirablement l'atmosphère, et un de ses tableaux qui m'a le plus vivement impressionné, 'La Tamise (barrage) à Chelsea,' est merveilleux au point de vue de la profondeur de l'espace. Le paysage en somme n'a rien; il n'y a que cette grande étendue d'atmosphère, rendue avec un art consommé.
"L'œuvre de Whistler ne perdra jamais par le temps; elle gagnera; car une de ses forces est l'énergie, une autre la délicatesse; mais la principale est l'étude du dessin."[13]
His visits to us were on Sundays, when he came for noonday breakfast, alone or with Miss Birnie Philip. If possible, we had people he liked or was interested in to meet him. One Sunday the late Mrs. Sarah Whitman, of Boston, and Miss Tuckerman were of the party, and Whistler, though he arrived tired and listless, recovered his animation before breakfast was over, and, for the new audience, described again the house in which he was so astonished to find himself, and again summed up the Boer campaign. Once he braved the night and dined, June 12—the last time he dined at our table—and was so wonderful we forgot how ill he was. We asked Mr. and Mrs. Harrison Morris and Professor Sauter, and Mr. Morris brought a message from General Wheeler, then in London and delighted to have news of Whistler, whom he remembered so well in the class above him at West Point. To be remembered by a distinguished West Point man was charming, but Whistler would not hear of General Wheeler being in the class below him; it was the class above; for Whistler did not choose to be older than anybody. We have spoken of his prejudices. He gave that evening an instance of one of the strongest. Something was said of the negro; he refused to see "any good in the nigger, he did not like the nigger," and that was the end of it. But Mr. Morris argued that it depended on the nigger; some he would be glad to invite to his house and to dinner. "Well, you know," said Whistler, "I should say that depends not on the nigger, but on the season of the year!" This reminds us of his argument another evening with Mrs. T. Fisher Unwin. But the negro had never had a chance, Mrs. Unwin protested. "Never had a chance!" said Whistler, "why, there, you know, there they all were starting out equal—the white man, the yellow man, the brown man, the red man, the black man—what better chance could the black man have? If he got left, well, it's because he couldn't keep up in the race."
