Whistler returned from Corsica at the beginning of May in excellent spirits. He came to us on the day of his arrival. We give one small incident that followed because it shows the simplicity he was careful to conceal from the world he liked to mystify. J. was in Italy and E., that afternoon, on her way back from the Continent. At our door he met our French maid, Augustine, starting for Charing Cross, and he walked with her to the station, where she was to meet E., while she gave him the news. Her account was that everybody stared, which was not surprising. He, always a conspicuous figure, was the more so in his long brown overcoat and round felt hat, en voyage, while she wore a big white apron and was en cheveux. Moreover, their conversation was animated. She invited him to dinner, promising him dishes which she knew would tempt him, and he accepted. He appeared a little before eight. "Positively shocking and no possible excuse for it," he said, "but, well, here I am!"
Work was taken up in the studio, our talks were resumed, his interest in the Boer War grew, the heat he had not found in the South was supplied by London in June and July, and from the heat he gained strength. He came and went, as of old, between Garlant's Hotel and Buckingham Street, until he declared that the cabbies in the Strand knew him as well as the cabbies in Chelsea. It had ever been his boast that he was known to almost every cabman in London, as, indeed, he was. The tales of his encounters with them were numerous, for, if lavish in big things, he could sometimes be "narrow" in small, and his drives occasionally ended in differences. The only time we knew the cabby to score was one day this year, when J. was walking from the studio with him. "Kibby, kibby," Whistler cried to a passing cab, not seeing the "fare" inside. The cabman drew up, looked down at him, looked him over, and said, "Where did yer buy yer 'at? Go, get yer 'air cut!" and drove off at a gallop. Whistler, safe inside an omnibus, laughed at the adventure.
But the summer was full of adventures. Another afternoon he and J. were walking in the Strand when a well-known English artist stopped him with, "Why, my dear old Jimmie, how are you? I haven't seen you or spoken to you for twenty years!" Whistler turned slowly to J. and said, "Joseph, do you know this person?" And the person fled. "H'm," said Whistler, "hasn't spoken to me for twenty years—guess it will be another twenty before he dares again.
We were abroad a great part of the summer of 1901, and when we got back his weakness had returned with the cold and the damp and the fog. He had realised the uselessness of keeping up his apartment and studio in Paris, the state of his health making it impossible for him to live in the one or to climb to the other, and business in connection with closing them took him to Paris in October. Towards the beginning of the month he was ill in bed at Garlant's Hotel, and towards the end at Mr. Heinemann's in Norfolk Street. When well enough to go out he was afraid to come to us in the evening: "Buckingham Street at night, you know, a dangerous, if fascinating place!" He would not dine where he could not sleep, he said, "J'y dîne, j'y dort," and in our small flat he knew there was no corner for him. Early in November he moved to Tallant's Hotel, North Audley Street, and there he was very ill and more alarmed than ever. "This time I am very much bowled over, unable to think," he told E. when she went to see him, and, though he laughed, he was depressed by his landlady's recommendation of his room as the one where Lord —— died. "I tried to make her understand," he said, "that what I wanted was a room to live in." He looked the worse because in illness, as in health, he had the faculty of inventing extraordinary costumes. E. remembers him there, after he was able to get up, in black trousers, a white silk night-shirt flowing loose, and a short black coat.
Illness made Whistler more of a wanderer, and for months he was denied the rest he knew he needed. From Tallant's, in November, he went to Mrs. Birnie Philip's in Tite Street, Chelsea. Here he never asked his friends, and we saw less of him. The first week in December he left London for Bath, where he took rooms in one of the big Crescents, and where he thought he could work. There were shops in which to hunt for "old silver and things," in a vague way people seemed to know him, and, on the whole, Bath pleased him. He lost few excuses, however, for coming to London, and was in town almost all of January. On some days he was surprisingly well. He went to the Old Masters Exhibition at the Royal Academy especially to see the Kingston Lacy Las Meniñas, and he told us the same day:
"It is full of things only Velasquez could have done—the heads a little weak perhaps—but so much, or everything, that no one else could have painted like that. And up in a strange place they call the Diploma Gallery I saw the Spanish Phillip's copy of Las Meniñas, full of atmosphere really, and dim understanding."
Ochtervelt's Lady Standing at a Spinet interested him, suggesting a favourite theme:
"The Dutchmen knew how to paint—they had respect for the surface of a picture; the modern painter has no respect for anything but his own cleverness, and he is sometimes so clever that his work is like that of a bad boy, and I'm not sure that he ought not to be taken out and whipped for it. Cleverness!—well, cleverness has nothing to do with art; there can be the same sort of cleverness in painting as that of the popular officer who cuts an orange into fancy shapes after dinner."
He was severe on contemporary artists who forgot the standard of the Louvre, the only standard he recognised. Of Conder he said, "Il est trop joli pour être beau!" and of a follower of Rodin, "He makes a landscape out of a man." When he saw Watts' Hope his comment was, "The hope that maketh the heart sick." Watts he always called "ce faux Titien." "Except in England, would anything short of perfection in art be praised?" he said. "Why approve the tolerable picture any more than the tolerable egg?" A sitter dissatisfied with his portrait told Whistler it was not good. "Do you call it a good piece of art?" he asked. "Well," said Whistler, "do you call yourself a good piece of Nature?"