"He's gone!"
"Who's gone?" I asked.
"My old friend Thomas Carlyle. He lived with me many a year, and I sold him to-day for a base thousand pounds." This with a touch of sadness, permitting the monocle to drop into his right hand, and gazing reflectively at the fire. Then, with a sudden turn towards me: "The Mun-eeee-ci-pal Corrrrporration o' Glasgie has purchased it for its Arrt Museum." The monocle was thrust to the eye again where it seemed to flash the question, "What do you think of that?"
I thought very well of it, and said something to the effect that it was a wise city which knew enough to buy such a masterpiece.
"Surprising, is n't it?" said Whistler, and then he told me that a committee of braw Scots had called at his studio to conduct the negotiations for Glasgow. His mimicry of the baillies I will not try to reproduce here. Type cannot present it. Action, expression, accent, all are lost. It was a delightful imitation, and I shouted with laughter when Whistler mounted the climax of his story:
"'But Mr. Wheestler,' said one of the baillies, by way of expostulation over the price I had modestly suggested, 'but Mr. Wheestler, this is a moderrn paainting, an' I ken that moderrn paintings mostly faade.'
"Behold me there," continued Whistler, "the Butterfly Rampant, hotly retorting, 'Gentlemen; you are mistaken. It is the damnation of modern paintings that they do not fade!'"
It was about the same time that France bought that other masterpiece, the portrait of "The Artist's Mother." Whistler came to tell me a few hours after the transfer to Paris had been arranged. He said quietly, as if he were touched deeply,
"France gives me honour, and I accept the invitation for Mother. Mother goes to the Luxembourg, and, after my death, to the Louvre. They pay her expenses, for what more does the honorarium amount to? It's only one hundred and twenty pounds. But one cannot sell one's Mother. She will be glad that I am represented in the Luxembourg, and later in the Louvre. I am glad it is Mother who will represent me."
And then, probably because he feared that he was dropping into sentiment, he broke off gaily with a jest about "another ghost who haunted the pavements of Chelsea", a critic stung to death by the Butterfly, "the late Harry Q—" still haunting Tite Street. "The late Harry", it may be said to children of the present hour, was quite as much alive as Whistler, and occupied—Whistler said "haunted"—the house which Jimmie had built and which he had lost in bankruptcy.