“I am not quite sure, but I think it’s about sixty. I am not a mathematician.”
“Then I must have painted three hundred,” said the unabashed Whistler.
It was at this at-home later on that Whistler made his often-quoted mot—not for the first time, I believe. A pretty woman said something clever, and Wilde, who could be a courtier, gallantly remarked that he wished he had said it.
“Never mind, Oscar,” said Whistler, who owed him one for the gibe about the Dieppe route; “you will have said it.”
They were really very fine that afternoon, because they were so thoroughly disgusted at not having more people to show off before; showing off is a weakness of many authors and artists and actors, though Bernard Shaw is the only one that I remember who has had the frankness to admit it in Who’s Who.
We used to begin receiving at nine for the sake of people who had trains to catch to distant suburbs—as Jerome K. Jerome remarked, “other people always live in such out-of-the-way places”—and kept the house open till the last person condescended to go away, which was generally about three. Any one who had been introduced to us was welcome to come, and to bring any of his friends with him, and in this way we met some of the most interesting people who came to the flat during our twenty years of tenancy. For instance, Herbert Bunning, the composer, whose opera La Princesse Osra, presented at Covent Garden, was drawn from Anthony Hope’s novel by a permission which I obtained for him, brought with him one night M. Feuillerat, who married Paul Bourget’s delightful sister, and Madame Feuillerat. M. Feuillerat in his turn brought with him Emile Verhaeren, one of the greatest living Belgian poets. M. Feuillerat himself was at the time professor of English literature in the university at Rennes, and both he and Madame Feuillerat spoke admirable English. On another Friday they were going to bring Paul Bourget himself, but he did not fulfil his intention of coming to England at the time.
Another distinguished foreigner who came about the same time was Maarten Maartens, a Dutch country gentleman whose real name is Joost Marius Maarten Willem van der Poorten-Schwartz. Hearing so much of his beautiful chateau in Holland, I asked him how he could tear himself away so much as he did. His reply was that for nine months in the year the weather in Holland was awful, and for the other three generally awful. This great writer had an epigrammatic way of expressing himself. He said that an eminent critic, who constituted himself his patron when he was in England, had warned him not to go to the Authors’ Club (of which I was the Honorary Secretary), because most of the people who went there were very small fry. He said that he had taken no notice of the warning because he had observed that his informant wore a piece of pink sarcenet ribbon for a tie, and that he, Maarten Maartens, knew enough of the Englishman’s idea of dress to be aware that the critic could not be a judge of ties, and wear pink sarcenet ribbon; and he argued that a man so self-satisfied and so ignorant about ties might be equally self-satisfied and ignorant about Authors’ clubs. I asked him if he had written any books in Dutch. He said, “No, what is the good, when there are so few people to write for? Only Dutchmen speak Dutch. It was a choice of writing in English or German, if I was to have an audience, and I chose English.”
Georg Brandes, the great Danish critic, who had so much to do with the recognition of Ibsen, told me when he came to our flat and I asked him a similar question, that in his later books he had taken to writing in other languages for the same reason. He was extremely interested, I remember, in Sergius Stepniak, the exiled Russian revolutionary, as was the then permanent head of the Foreign Office, whom I approached with some diffidence on the subject when they were both dining at a Club dinner of which I had the arrangements. Stepniak, whom I always found, in my intercourse with him, a very amiable man, had all the stage appearance of a villain, with his coal-black hair, his knotty, bulbous forehead, his black Tartar eyes, black beard and sombre complexion.
Of Zola, a studious-looking man with a brown beard, a rather tilted nose, and pince-nez, I have spoken in another chapter.
Anatole France I never met till quite recently, at a little party at John Lane’s. He was as abounding in simpatica as Zola was wanting in it. He was rather short, and held his head sideways like the late Conte de Paris, with his closely-cropped beard buried in his chest. But he had unmistakably the air of a great man, and extraordinarily bright and sympathetic eyes—a captivating personality.