Whistler spent the summer of 1898 chiefly in London, going first to Mr. Heinemann's at Whitehall Court, then to Garlant's Hotel. The delightful evenings of the year before began again for us, and there was a fresh interest for him in the war between the United States and Spain. "It was a wonderful and beautiful war," he thought, "the Spaniards were gentlemen," and his pockets were filled with newspaper clippings to prove it. If we pointed out a blunder on the part of our soldiers, if we gave chance a share in our victories, he was furious:
"Why say if any but Spaniards had been at the top of San Juan, we never would have got there? Why question the if? The facts are all that count. No fight could be more beautifully managed. I am telling you! I, a West Point man, know. What if Cervera did get whipped? What if he was pulled up from the sea looking like a wad of cotton that had been soaked in an ink-bottle? What of it? Didn't the whole United States Navy, headed by the admirals, receive him as the Commander of the Spanish Fleet should be received?"
He was going out more and seeing more people. But his interest in society was less, and evidently he preferred the quiet of the evenings with us. Chance encounters in our flat were often an entertainment. One we recall most vividly was with Frederick Sandys, whom he had not met for thirty years. Sandys was with us in the late afternoon when Whistler knocked his exaggerated postman's knock that could not be mistaken, followed by the resounding peal of the bell. They gave each other a chilly recognition and sat down. Sandys was agitated, but there was no escape. Whistler looked like Boldini's portrait, but soon they began to talk, and they talked till the early hours of the morning as if they were back at Rossetti's, Sandys in the white waistcoat with gold buttons, but bent with age, Whistler straight and erect, but wrinkled and grey.
He returned to Paris late in the autumn, settling there for the winter. Except for his attacks of illness, there was but one interruption to his work. Mr. Heinemann was married at Porto d'Anzio in February 1899, and Whistler went to Italy as best man. This was his only visit to Rome. He was disappointed. To us he described the city as "a bit of an old ruin alongside of a railway station where I saw Mrs. Potter Palmer." And he added:
"Rome was awful—a hard sky all the time, a glaring sun and a strong wind. After I left the railway station, there were big buildings more like Whiteley's than anything I expected in the Eternal City. St. Peter's was fine, with its great yellow walls, the interior too big, perhaps, but you had only got to go inside to know where Wren got his ideas—how he, well, you know, robbed Peter's to build Paul's! And I liked the Vatican, the Swiss Guards, great big fellows, lolling about, as in Dumas; they made you think of D'Artagnan, Aramis, and the others. And Michael Angelo? A tremendous fellow, yes; the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, interesting as pictures, but with all the legs and arms of the figures sprawling everywhere, I could not see the decoration. There can be no decoration without repose; a tremendous fellow, but not so much in the David and other things I was shown in Rome and Florence as in that one unfinished picture at the National Gallery. There is often elegance in the loggie of Raphael, but the big frescoes of the stanze did not interest me."
Velasquez's portrait of Innocent X. in the Doria Palace he, apparently, did not see.
During the journey to Porto d'Anzio, Princess ——, one of the wedding guests, who heard vaguely that Whistler was an artist, inquired of him:
"Monsieur fait de la peinture, n'est-ce pas?"
"Oui, Princesse."
"On me l'avait dit. Moi aussi, j'en fais, Monsieur."