On September 24, 1890, Mr. Cole, calling at Cheyne Walk, "found him painting some excellent portraits—very strong and fine." What all these were it is difficult to say, though one was the well-known Harmony in Black and Gold—Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, Whistler's fourth portrait of a man in evening dress. Another may have been the second portrait never finished, which Montesquiou described to Edmond de Goncourt, who made a note of it in his Journal (July 7, 1891):
"Montesquiou tells me that Whistler is now doing two portraits of him: one is in evening dress, with a fur cloak over his arm, the other in a great grey cloak with a high collar, and, just suggested, a necktie of a mauve not to be put into words, though his eyes express the colour of it. And Montesquiou is most interesting to listen to as he explains the method of painting of Whistler, to whom he gave seventeen sittings during the month spent in London. The first sketch-in of his subject is with Whistler a fury, a passion: one or two hours of this wild fever and the subject emerges complete in its envelope. Then sittings, long sittings, when, most of the time, the brush is brought close to the canvas but does not touch it, is thrown away, and another taken, and sometimes in three hours not more than fifty touches are given to the canvas, every touch, according to Whistler, lifting a veil from the sketch.
"Oh, sittings! when it seemed to Montesquiou that Whistler, by that intentness of observation, was draining from him his life, something of his individuality, and, in the end, he was so exhausted that he felt as if all his being was shrinking away, but happily he discovered a certain vin de coca that restored him after those terrible sittings."
J. went only once to No. 21 Cheyne Walk. Then it was to consult Whistler concerning Sir Hubert von Herkomer's publication of photogravures of pen-drawings in An Idyl, and description of them as etchings. Whistler received J. in the white-panelled dining-room, where he was breakfasting on an egg. Sickert came in and was at once sent out—with a letter. Whistler felt the seriousness of the offence, and he lent his support to W. E. Henley's National Observer, in which the affair was exposed and in which also the Queen was called upon to remove Herkomer from his post as Slade Professor at the University of Oxford.
From this time J. saw Whistler oftener, meeting him in clubs, in galleries, in friends' houses, occasionally at Solferino's, the little restaurant in Rupert Street which was for several years the meeting-place, a club really, for the staff of the National Observer. Nobody who ever lunched there on Press day at the Academy, or the New English Art Club, or the New Gallery is likely to forget the talk round the table in the corner. Never have we heard R. A. M.—"Bob"—Stevenson more brilliant, more paradoxical, more inspiriting than at these midday gatherings. Whistler's first encounter with Henley's paper, then edited in Edinburgh, was a sharp skirmish which, though he afterwards became friendly with Henley, he never forgot nor forgave. Henley was publishing a series of articles called Modern Men, among whom he included Whistler, "the Yankee with the methods of Barnum." The policy of the National Observer was to fight, everybody, everything, and it fought with spirit. But it had no patience with the battles of others. Of Whistler the artist it approved, but not of Whistler the writer of letters, whom it pronounced rowdy and unpleasant. "Malvolio-Macaire" was its name for him. At last, in noticing Sheridan Ford's Gentle Art, of which we shall presently have more to say, it continued in the same strain, and a copy of the paper containing the review, "with proud mark, in the blue pencil of office," was sent to Whistler. He answered with a laugh at "the thick thumb of your editorial refinement" pointed "in deprecation of my choice rowdyism." Two things came of the letter—one amusing, the other a better understanding. Whistler's answer finished with a "regret that the ridiculous 'Romeike' has not hitherto sent me your agreeable literature." Romeike objected; he had sent eight hundred and seven clippings to Whistler: he demanded an apology. Whistler gave it without hesitation: he had never thought of Romeike as a person, and he wrote, "if it be not actionable permit me to say that you really are delightful!!" No one could appreciate the wit, the fun of it all better than Henley, and he was the more eager to meet Whistler. His account of the meeting, when it came about, was coloured by the enthusiasm that made Henley the stimulating person he was. "And we met," he would say, throwing back his great head and laughing with joy, though he gave no details of the meeting. Henley managed to find "the earnest of romance" in everything that happened to him. "And there we were—Whistler and I—together!" he would repeat, as if it were the most dramatic situation that could be imagined.
The bond between them was their love of the Thames. Henley was the first to sing the beauty of the river that Whistler was the first to paint, and when he wrote the verses (No. XIII. in Rhymes and Rhythms) that give the feeling, the magical charm of the Nocturnes, he dedicated them to Whistler. Big and splendid as a Viking, exuberant, emphatic, Henley was not the type physically to interest Whistler. The sketch of him (made in 1896) is one of Whistler's least satisfactory lithographs, and only six impressions were pulled. But their relations were cordial, and when the National Observer was transferred to London and Henley returned with it, Whistler sometimes came to the dinners of the staff at Solferino's. Henley had gathered about him the younger literary men and journalists: Rudyard Kipling, "Bob" Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, Marriott Watson, G. S. Street, Vernon Blackburn, Fitzmaurice Kelly, Arthur Morrison, Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, George W. Steevens. After Mr. Astor bought the Pall Mall Gazette its staff was largely recruited from the National Observer, and Mr. Henry Cust, the editor, and Mr. Ivan-Muller, the assistant editor, joined the group in the room upstairs. When dinner was over and Henley was thundering at his end of the table, the rest listening, Whistler sometimes dropped in, and the contrast between him and Henley added to the gaiety of the evening: Henley, the "Burly" of Stevenson's essay on Talk and Talkers, "who would roar you down ... bury his face in his hands ... undergo passions of revolt and agony"; Whistler, who would find the telling word, let fly the shaft of wit that his eloquent hands emphasised with delicate, graceful gesture. His "Ha ha!" rose above Henley's boisterous intolerance. When "Bob" Stevenson was there—"Spring-Heel'd Jack"—the entertainment was complete. But each of the three talked his best when he held the floor, and we have known Whistler more brilliant when dining alone with us. From Solferino's, at a late hour when Henley, as always in his lameness, had been helped to his cab, Whistler and J. would retire with "Bob" Stevenson and a little group to the Savile, where everything under heaven was discussed by them, Professor Walter Raleigh, Reginald Blomfield, and Charles Furse frequently joining them, and they rarely left until the club was closed. Whistler would, in his turn, be seen to his cab on his way home, and a smaller group would listen to "Bob" between Piccadilly and Westminster Bridge, waiting for him to catch the first morning train to Kew.
Whistler seldom left without some parting shot which his friends remembered, though he was apparently unconscious of the effects of these bewildering little sayings as he returned to his house in Cheyne Walk. There he was often followed by his new friends and often visited by the few "artists" he had not cared to lose, especially Mr. Francis James and Mr. Theodore Roussel. A few Followers continued to flutter at his heels. Portraits of some of those who came to 21 Cheyne Walk are in the lithograph of The Garden: Mr. Walter Sickert, Mr. Sidney Starr, Mr. and Mrs. Brandon Thomas. Mr. Walter Sickert had married Miss Ellen Cobden, and she was a constant visitor. So also were Henry Harland, later editor of the Yellow Book, and Mrs. Harland; Wolcot Balestier, the enterprising youth who set out to corner the literature of the world, and who, with Mr. S. S. McClure, was bent on syndicating everybody, including Whistler; Miss Carrie Balestier, now Mrs. Rudyard Kipling; an American journalist called Haxton, with a stammer that Whistler adored to the point of borrowing it on occasions, though he never could manage the last stage when words that refused to be spoken had to be spelled. Another was André Raffalovitch, a Russian youth and poet, whose receptions brought together many amusing as well as fantastic elements of London society. But the most intimate friend he made at this period was Mr. William Heinemann, and this brings us to the great event of 1890, the publication of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.
CHAPTER XXXIV: "THE GENTLE ART."
THE YEAR EIGHTEEN NINETY.
For years Whistler's letters to the papers puzzled the people. George Moore laboured to account for them in Modern Painting by an elaborate theory of physical feebleness, and George Moore has been taken seriously in the provinces and America. One glimpse of Whistler at the printing-press, sleeves rolled up showing two strong arms, and the theory and the theorist would have been knocked out. The letters were not an eccentricity; they were not a weakness. From the first, written to the Athenæum in 1862, they had one aim, "to make history." Buried in the papers, they were lost; if the history were to be made they must be collected. They were collected and edited as The Gentle Art of Making Enemies as Pleasingly Exemplified in Many Instances, Wherein the Serious Ones of this Earth, Carefully Exasperated, Have Been Prettily Spurred on to Unseemliness and Indiscretion, While Overcome by an Undue Sense of Right.