For two or three years Oscar Wilde was so much with Whistler that everyone who went to the studio found him there, just as everyone who went into society saw them together. Wilde had come up from Oxford not long before the Ruskin trial, with a reputation as a brilliant undergraduate, winner of the Newdigate prize, and he now posed as the apostle of "Beauty." Many a reputation is lost between Oxford and London, but his was strengthened. Oscar's witty sayings were repeated and his youth seemed to excuse his pose. Whistler impressed him. At Oxford Wilde had followed Ruskin, and broken stones on the road which was to lead the young to art; he had read with Pater, he had accepted the teaching of Morris and Burne-Jones, and their master Rossetti. But Ruskin was impossible to follow, Pater was a recluse, Rossetti's health was broken, the prehistoric Fabians, Morris and Burne-Jones, were the foci of a little group of their own. When Wilde came to London Whistler was the focus of the world. Whistler was sought out, Wilde tried to play up. In Tite Street blue and white was used, not as a symbol of faith, but every day; flowers bloomed, not as a pledge of "culture," but for their colour and form; beauty was accepted as no discovery, but as the aim of art since the first artist drew a line and saw that it was beautiful. Whistler knew all this. Wilde fumbled with it.
Whistler was flattered by Wilde. He was looked upon as the world's jester when Wilde fawned upon him. Other young men gathered about Whistler had name and reputation to make. But Wilde's name was in every man's mouth; he glittered with the glory of the work he was to do. He was the most promising poet of his generation and he was amusing. There was a charm in his personality. We remember when we met him on his lecture tour in America, and hardly knew whether the magnificence on the platform where, in velvet knickerbockers, he faced with calmness rows of college boys each bearing a lily, and stood with composure their collective emotion as he sipped a glass of water, was more wonderful than his gaiety when we talked with him afterwards. It has been said that he gave the best of himself in his talk. If Whistler liked always to have a companion, his pleasure was increased when he found someone as brilliant. Wilde spent hours in the studio, he came to Whistler's Sunday breakfasts, he assisted at Whistler's private views. Whistler went with him everywhere. There were few functions at which they were not present. At receptions the company divided into two groups, one round Whistler, the other round Wilde. It was the fashion to compare them. To the world that ran after them, that thought itself honoured, or notorious, by their presence, they seemed inseparable.
The trouble began when Whistler discovered how small was Wilde's knowledge of art; he could never endure anybody in the studio who did not understand. Whistler wrote of Wilde as a man "with no more sense of a picture than of the fit of a coat." The Gentle Art shows that Whistler was furious with Wilde's borrowing from him. That Wilde took his good where he found it is neither more nor less than what has always been done—what Whistler did. But the genius, from the good thus taken, evolves something of his own. Wilde was content to shine personally and let the great things expected of him wait. When it was a question of wit, there was no one to whom Wilde could go except Whistler. It is all expressed in the old story: "I wish I had said that, Whistler." "You will, Oscar, you will." In matters of art Wilde had everything to learn from Whistler, who, though ever generous, resented Wilde's preaching in the provinces the truths which he had taught for years. This is all in The Gentle Art. "Oscar" had "the courage of the opinions ... of others!" and again: "Oscar went forth as my St. John, but, forgetting that humility should be his chief characteristic and unable to withstand the unaccustomed respect with which his utterances were received, he not only trifled with my shoe, but bolted with the latchet!"
Mr. Cole, in 1884, noted in his diary that Whistler "was strong on Oscar Wilde's notions of art which he derived from him (Jimmy)." Mr. Herbert Vivian tells the story of a dinner given by Whistler after Wilde had been lecturing:
"'Now, Oscar, tell us what you said to them,' Whistler kept insisting, and Wilde had to repeat all the phrases, while Whistler rose and made solemn bows, with his hand across his breast, in mock acceptance of his guests' applause.... The cruel part of the plagiarism lay in the fact that, when Whistler published his Ten O'Clock, many people thought it had all been taken from Wilde's lecture."
Whistler grew more and more exasperated by the use Wilde made of him. Their intimacy was closest in the early eighties when Whistler was bewildering the world deliberately; Wilde copied him clumsily. The world, that did not know them, mistook one for the other and thought Whistler as much an æsthete as Wilde. When Patience was produced, and when it was revived a few years ago, Bunthorne, who was Wilde, appeared with Whistler's black curls and white lock, moustache, tuft, eye-glass, and laughed with Whistler's "Ha ha!" Whistler, seeing Wilde in a Polish cap and "green overcoat befrogged and wonderfully befurred," desired him to "restore those things to Nathan's, and never again let me find you masquerading the streets of my Chelsea in the combined costumes of Kossuth and Mr. Mantalini!" To be in danger of losing his pose before the world was bad enough, but to be mistaken for another man who rendered him ridiculous was worse. No one has summed up the position better than the Times in a notice of Wilde's Collected Works:
"With a mind not a jot less keen than Whistler's, he had none of the conviction, the high faith, for which Whistler found it worth while to defy the crowd. Wilde had poses to attract the crowd. And the difference was this, that while Whistler was a prophet who liked to play Pierrot, Wilde grew into a Pierrot who liked to play the prophet."
If Whistler ever played Pierrot, it was with a purpose. Where art was concerned he was serious. Wilde was serious about nothing. His two topics were "self and art," and his interest in both was part of his bid for notoriety. He might jest about himself, but flippancy, if art was his subject, was to Whistler a crime. The only way he showed his resentment was by refusing to take Wilde seriously about anything. Even when Wilde was married, he was not allowed to forget, for Whistler telegraphed to the church, "Fear I may not be able to reach you in time for the ceremony. Don't wait." Later, in Paris, he called Wilde "Oscar, bourgeois malgré lui," a witticism none could appreciate better than the Parisians. As soon as he began to make a jest of Wilde he ended the companionship to which, while it lasted, London society owed much gaiety.
The relation between Whistler and artists now coming to the studio was less that of friends than of Master and Followers, as they called themselves. He was forty-six when he returned from Venice, and there were few men of the new generation who shared none of the doubts of his contemporaries, but believed in him. The devotion of this group became infatuation. They were ready to do anything for him. Families became estranged and engagements were broken off because of him. They fought his battles; ran his errands, spied out the land for him; published his letters, and read them to everybody. They formed a court about him. They exaggerated everything, even their devotion, and became caricatures of him, as excessive in imitation as in devotion. He denied the right of any, save the artist, to speak authoritatively of art; they started a club to train the classes—Princes, Prime Ministers, Patrons, Ambassadors, Members of Parliament—to blind faith in Master and Followers. Whistler mixed masses of colours on the palette, keeping them under water in saucers. The Followers mixed theirs in vegetable dishes and kept them in milk-cans, labelled Floor, Face, Hair, Lips. He had a table-palette; they adopted it, but added hooks to hang their cans of paint on. He used his paint very liquid—the "sauce" of the Nocturnes; they used such quantities of medium that as much went on the floor as on the canvas, and, before a picture was blocked in, they were wading in liquid masterpieces. Many of his brushes were large; they worked with whitewash brushes. They copied his personal peculiarities. One evening at a dinner when he wore a white waistcoat and all the buttons, because of the laundress, came out, a Follower, seeing it buttonless, hurried from the room, and returned with his bulging, sure that he was in the movement.