"He was exceedingly generous to a club of strangers, lending them twenty-five of his works. This collection included the Mother, Lady Meux, Carlyle, a number of Nocturnes, and other oils, water-colours, and pastels. The pictures had to be hung together in a group. As I was so interested in them, with Mr. Whistler's permission, I had them photographed. He never asked for rights or commission, but, in the most gracious, generous way, gave us the permission to use the negatives as we liked. The exhibition was hardly opened before the critical music began, and in the papers and in conversation, a regular tempest arose that was highly diverting to Mr. Whistler. He begged me to send him everything said about the exhibition, and his letters show he quite enjoyed all the ferment. The whole of Dublin was convulsed, and many went to Molesworth Street to see the exhibition who rarely went to see anything of the kind. Then a terrible convulsion took place in the club: a group of members we had admitted, who photographed, got together, and drew up resolutions, that never again should such pictures be exhibited. None of these men could even paint. The talent of the club replied by having Mr. Whistler elected as hon. member, and it was carried, despite intense resistance. I took an active part in all this. It was with a view to helping Mr. Whistler that I did my best to have his Ten O'Clock given in Dublin. He was at first disposed to come over, but other matters prevented, and the matter dropped. During the time of the exhibition, I tried my utmost to sell the pictures, and an offer was made by a friend to purchase the Mother and the Carlyle, which seemed to promise well, but ultimately stopped. I did induce the friend to purchase Piccadilly, which had been No. 9, Nocturne in Grey and Gold—Piccadilly (water-colour), in his exhibition in Bond Street that May [Dowdeswell's]. He was very much pleased indeed, and sent the Right Hon. Jonathan Hogg, P.C., a receipt, greatly to Mr. Hogg's amusement, for an impression was rife that he never did attend to business. I know from friends, who knew Mr. Whistler, how much pleased he was, not only with the purchase of his pictures, but with the commotion that the exhibition caused."
Whistler did not give up the idea of a lecture. Archibald Forbes heard him read, was impressed, and introduced him to Mrs. D'Oyly Carte. She had managed a lecture tour for Forbes, now she agreed to arrange an evening for Whistler. She told us of his attention to detail. "The idea was absolutely his," she wrote us, "and all I did was to see to the business arrangements. You can imagine how enthusiastic he was over it all, and how he made one enthusiastic too." She was about to produce The Mikado, and, sure that he would find her in her office at the Savoy Theatre, he would appear there every evening to talk things over, or would send Mr. Walter Sickert with a message. Whistler delighted in her office, a tiny room lit by a lamp on her desk, making strange effects, but his only records of his many visits are in the etchings, Savoy Scaffolding and Miss Lenoir, Mrs. D'Oyly Carte's name before her marriage. Prince's Hall was taken.
Whistler suggested the hour. People were not to rush to him from dinner as to the theatre; therefore ten was as early as one could expect them, and the hour gave the name—The Ten O'Clock. He designed the ticket, he had it enlarged into a poster, he chose the offices where tickets should be sold. There was a rehearsal at Prince's Hall on February 19 (1885), Mrs. D'Oyly Carte and some of the Followers sitting in front to tell him if his voice carried. Whistler had his lecture by heart, his delivery was excellent, he needed no coaching, only an occasional warning to raise his voice. It was because he feared his voice would not carry that he gave his nightly rehearsals on the Embankment, Mr. Menpes says.
On February 20, 1885, the hall was crowded. Reporters expressed the general feeling when they wondered whether "the eccentric artist was going to sketch, to pose, to sing, or to rhapsodise," and were frankly astonished when the "amiable eccentric" chose to appear simply as "a jaunty, unabashed, composed, and self-satisfied gentleman, armed with an opera hat and an eye-glass." Others were amazed to see him "attired in faultless evening dress." The Followers compared the figure in black against the black background to the Sarasate, and they recall his hat carefully placed on the table and the long cane as carefully stood against the wall. Oscar Wilde called him "a miniature Mephistopheles mocking the majority." The unprejudiced saw the dignity of his presence and felt the truth and beauty of his words. Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt writes us:
"It is always a delight to remember that actually once Mr. Whistler was really shy. Those who had the pleasure of hearing the first Ten O'Clock remember that when he came before his puzzled and distinguished audience there were a few minutes of very palpable stage-fright."
He had notes, but he seldom referred to them. He held his audience from the first, and Mrs. D'Oyly Carte recalled the hush in the hall when he came to his description of London transfigured, a fairyland in the night. "I went to laugh and I stayed to praise," is the late Lewis F. Day's account to us, and others were generous enough to make the same admission. Whistler forced his audience to listen because he spoke with conviction. The Ten O'Clock was the statement of truths which his contemporaries were doing their best to forget. When we read it to-day, our surprise is that things so obvious needed saying. Yet the need exists to-day more than ever. Almost every one of Whistler's propositions and statements has been traduced or ignored by critics, who are incapable of leading thought or are dealers in disguise, and painters compare their puny selves and petty financial scrapes to Whistler's magnificent efforts and complete success in his battles for art and his reputation.
To this lecture we owe the most interesting profession of artistic faith ever made by an artist. At the time it was given there was a reaction, outside the Academy, against the anecdote and sentiment of Victorian art. Ruskin through his books, the Pre-Raphaelites through their pictures, had spread the doctrine that art was a question of ethics and industry. Pater preached that it belonged to the past, William Morris taught that it sprang from the people and to the people must return. Strange, sad-coloured creatures clad themselves in strange, sad-coloured garments and admired each other. Many besides Oscar Wilde profitably peddled in the provinces what they prigged or picked up; artists proclaimed the political importance of art; parsons discovered in it a new salvation. "Art was upon the town," as Whistler said. But ethics and business, fashion and socialism had captured it. The Ten O'Clock was a protest against the crimes committed in the name of art, against the belief that art belonged to the past or concerned the people, that its object was to teach or to elevate. "Art and Joy go together," he said, the world's masters were never reformers, never missionaries, but, content with their surroundings, found beauty everywhere. There was no great past, no mean present, for art, no drawing of lines between the marbles of the Greek and the fans and broideries of Japan. There was no artistic period, no art-loving people. Art happened, and, in a few eloquent words, he told the history of its happening and the coming of the cheap and tawdry, when the taste of the tradesman supplanted the science of the artist, and the multitude rejoiced. Art is a science—the science by which the artist picks and chooses and groups the elements contained in Nature, that beauty may result. For "Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong." He has been so frequently misunderstood that it may be well to emphasise the meaning of these two assertions, the rock upon which his faith was founded. Art happens because the artist may happen anywhere at any time; art is a science not because painters maintain that it is concerned with laws of light or chemistry of colours or scientific problems, but because it is exact in its methods and in its results. The artist can leave no more to chance than the chemist or the botanist or the biologist. Knowledge may and does increase and develop, but the laws of art are unalterable. Because art is a science the critic who is not an artist speaks without authority and would prize a picture as a "hieroglyph or symbol of story," or for anything save the painter's poetry which is the reason for its existence, "the amazing invention that shall have put form and colour into such perfect harmony, that exquisiteness is the result." The conditions of art are degraded by these "middlemen," the critics, and by the foolish who would go back because the thumb of the mountebank jerked the other way. He laughed at the pretence of the State as fosterer of art—art that roams as she will, from the builders of the Parthenon to the opium-eaters of Nankin, from the Master at Madrid to Hokusai at the foot of Fusiyama. His denial of an artistic period or an art-loving people was his defence of art against those who would bound it by dates and confine it within topographical limits. He meant, not that a certain period might not produce artists and people to appreciate them, but that art is independent of time and place, "seeking and finding the beautiful in all conditions and in all times, as did her high priest, Rembrandt, when he saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks.
