"Here are these people thousands of years older in civilisation than us, with a religion thousands of years older than ours, and our missionaries go out there and tell them who God is. It is simply preposterous, you know, that for what Europe and America consider a question of honour one blue pot should be risked."
Another evening when he said this to a larger audience, one of the party asked him if art did not always mark the decadence of a country. "Well, you know," said Whistler, "a good many countries manage to go to the dogs without it."
The month of July in London was unusually hot, and for the first time we heard Whistler complain of the heat, in which, as a rule, he revelled, though he dressed for it at dinner in white duck trousers and waistcoat with his dinner-jacket, and in the street exchanged his silk hat for a wide-brimmed soft grey felt, or a "dandy" straw. He was restless, anxious to stay in his studio, but, for the sake of Miss Birnie Philip and her mother, anxious to go to the country or by the sea. Looking from our windows, he would say that, with the river there and the Embankment Gardens gay with music and people, we were in no need to leave town, and we were sure he envied us. One day he went to Amersham, near London, with the idea of staying there and painting two landscapes somebody wanted. Mr. Wimbush took him.
"You know, really, I can't say that, towards twilight, it is not pretty in a curious way, but not really pretty after all—it's all country, and the country is detestable."
Eventually he took a house at Sutton, near Dublin, persuaded Mrs. and Miss Birnie Philip to go there, and then promptly left with Mr. Elwell for Holland. He told Mr. Sidney Starr once that only one landscape interested him, the landscape of London. But he made an exception of Holland. When he was reminded that there is no country there, he said to us:
"That's just why I like it—no great, full-blown, shapeless trees as in England, but everything neat and trim, and the trunks of the trees painted white, and the cows wear quilts, and it is all arranged and charming. And look at the skies! They talk about the blue skies of Italy; the skies of Italy are not blue, they are black. You do not see blue skies except in Holland and here, where you get great white clouds, and then the spaces between are blue! And in Holland there is atmosphere, and that means mystery. There is mystery here, too, and the people don't want it. What they like is when the east wind blows, when you can look across the river and count the wires in the canary bird's cage on the other side."
He stayed a week at Domburg, a small seashore village near Middelburg. With its little red roofs nestling among the sand-dunes and its wide beach under the skies he loved, he thought it enchanting, and made a few water-colours which he showed us afterwards in the studio. The place, he said, was not yet exploited, and at Madame Elout's he found good wine and a Dordrecht banker who talked of the Boers and assured him they were all right, the Dutch would see to that. A visit to Ireland followed. He went full of expectations, for as the descendant of the Irish Whistlers he called himself an Irishman. We have a note of his stay there from the late Sir William Armstrong, Director of the National Gallery of Ireland:
"He took a house, 'Craigie' the name of it, at Sutton, six miles from Dublin, on the spit of sand which connects the Hill of Howth with the mainland (as the Neutral Ground unites 'Gib.' with Spain) on the north side of Dublin Bay. There he excited the curiosity of the natives by at once papering up the windows on the north side of the house, for half their height, with brown paper. He came to dinner with me one night, stipulating that he should be allowed to depart at 9.30, as he was such an early goer to bed. We dined accordingly at 7, and his Jehu, with the only closed fly the northern half of County Dublin could supply, was punctually at the door at the hour named. There he had to wait for three hours, for it was not until 12.30 that the delightful flow of Whistler's eloquence came to an end, and that he extracted himself from the deep arm-chair which had been his pulpit for four hours and a half. His talk had been great, and we had confined ourselves to little exclamatory appreciations and gazes of rapt adoration! I spent an hour or two with him in the Irish National Gallery. I found him there lying on the handrail before a sketch of Hogarth (George II. and his family) and declaring it was the most beautiful picture in the world. The only other remark on any particular picture which I can now recall is his saying of my own portrait by Walter Osborne, 'It has a skin, it has a skin!' He soon grew tired of Sutton and Ireland, and when I called at Craigie a few days after the dinner he had flown. He did not forget to send a graceful word to my wife, signed with his name and Butterfly."
He did little work during his visit. The house was on the wrong side of the bay, the weather was wretched, but Chester, on the way home, was "charming and full of possibilities."