WHISTLER'S GRAVE IN CHISWICK CEMETERY ADJOINING CHISWICK CHURCHYARD
MONUMENT IN WHISTLER'S MEMORY AT THE UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY AT WEST POINT
He examined the catalogue, found fault with it because the McNeill, of which he was so proud, was misspelt, and he could not understand why there were comparatively fewer entries and shorter descriptions of his case than of others where history supplied an elaborate text.
Notwithstanding his state, he forgot none of the old courtesies. When, in November, Sir James Guthrie was elected to the Presidency of the Royal Scottish Academy, he telegraphed his congratulations, and was repaid by his pleasure when Guthrie, still a member of the Council of the International, telegraphed back, "Warmest thanks, my President." On New Year's Day (1903) we received the card of good wishes it was his custom to send to his friends—a visiting-card with greetings written by himself and signed with the Butterfly. Though he could not go to the meetings of the International, the business done at each had to be immediately reported, and when the annual dinner was given he considered every detail, even to the point of revising the menu and sending special directions for the salad. He had great pleasure in the degree of LL.D. conferred upon him by Glasgow University, at the suggestion of Sir James Guthrie and Professor Walter Raleigh. Dr. D. S. MacColl, at their request, we believe, and after consulting J., approached him first to make sure that the honour would be accepted. There was a gleam of the old "wickedness" when Dr. MacColl called. Whistler appointed a Sunday, asking him to lunch, but when he arrived at the appointed hour he was sent upstairs to the unused drawing-room and supplied with Reynolds', a Radical sheet adored by Whistler because of its wholesale abuse of the "Islander." And Whistler said: "When at last he was summoned to the studio, I told him it was the paper that of course he always wanted to read at the Club, but was ashamed to be seen with! And all through lunch I had nothing to say of art—I talked of nothing except West Point."
However, when MacColl had a chance to explain why he came, Whistler expressed his pleasure in receiving the degree. We recall his pains with his letter of acknowledgment after the official announcement came in March, his concern for the correct word and the well-turned phrase, his anxiety that there should be no mistake in the Principal's title and honorary initials. It illustrates his care for detail if we add that, before writing the address, he sent a note, submitting it, next door, to Mr. and Mrs. Walton, who were Scotch, he said, and would know. Another pleasure came from the deference shown him by the Art Department of the Universal Exposition of 1904 at St. Louis. Early in 1903 Professor Halsey C. Ives, Chief of the Art Department, was in London, and went with J. to call on Whistler and to ask him to serve as Chairman of the Committee, of which Sargent, Abbey, and J. were members, for the selection of work by American artists in England. The invitation was a formal recognition of Whistler's position, and he accepted, though he did not live to occupy the post.
These months were not without worries. News of books about him, in preparation or recently published, annoyed him, as he had hoped to prevent such enterprises by giving us his authority for the work to which his illness was a serious interruption. We called one afternoon when he was worrying himself into a fever over the latest attempt of which he had heard, and was unable to think or talk of anything except the insolence of people who undertook to write about him and prepare a biography without consulting him and his wishes. As he talked he complained of pains in his back, and his restlessness was distressing to see. Another afternoon, he was, on the contrary, chuckling over Mr. Elbert Hubbard's Whistler in the Little Journeys series. He read us passages:
"Really with this book I can be amused—I have to laugh. I don't know how many people have taken my name in print, and, you know, usually I am furious. But the intimate tone of this is something quite new. What would my dear Mummy—don't you know, as you see her with her folded hands at the Luxembourg—have said to this story of my father's courtship? And our stay in Russia—our arrival in London—why, the account of my mother and me coming to Chelsea and finding lodgings makes you almost see us—wanderers—bundles at the end of long sticks over our shoulders—arriving footsore and weary at the hour of sunset. Amazing!—it would be worth while, you know, to describe, not the book, but the effect on me reading it."