“May 13, 1879, 34 Jermyn Street, London.—This morning I went with Mrs. Duncan Stewart and a very large party to Whistler’s studio—a huge place in Chelsea. We were invited to see his pictures, but there was only one there—‘The Loves of the Lobsters.’ It was supposed to represent Niagara, but looked as if the artist had upset the inkstand and left Providence to work out its own results. In the midst of the black chaos were two lobsters curvetting opposite each other and looking as if they were done with red sealing-wax. ‘I wonder you did not paint the lobsters making love before they were boiled,’ aptly observed a lady visitor. ‘Oh, I never thought of that,’ said Whistler! It was a joke, I suppose. The little man, with his plume of white hair (‘the Whistler tuft,’ he calls it) waving on his forehead, frisked about the room looking most strange and uncanny, and rather diverted himself over our disappointment in coming so far and finding nothing to see. People admire like sheep his pictures in the Grosvenor Gallery, following each other’s lead because it is the fashion.”
“May 14, Sunday.—An immense luncheon at Mrs. Cavendish Bentinck’s. I sat near Mr. Herbert, the artist of the great fresco in the House of Lords. He described things over which he became almost inspired—how in the Bodleian he found an old MS. about the Magdalen which made him determine to go off at once to St. Maximin in Provence (near La Sainte Baume, the mountain hermitage where she died) to see her skull: that when he reached St. Maximin, he found that the skull was in a glass case upon the altar, where he could not really examine it, and he was told that it was never allowed even to kings and emperors: that he represented with such fervour his object in making the pilgrimage, that at last the priests of the church consented to his sending twelve miles for a vitrier and having the case removed: then he was allowed to place a single candle behind, and in that moment, as he described it, with glowing face and voice trembling with emotion—‘I saw the outline of her profile; the Magdalen herself, that dear friend of our Blessed Lord, was revealed to me.’
“Miss Leslie, who was sitting near, asked how it was known that the Magdalen came to St. Maximin. ‘How can you help knowing it,’ said Mr. Herbert, ‘when it is all written in the Acts of the Apostles!!’”