"November 24 (1877). Went to Whistler's, met Sir Garnet Wolseley. Whistler etched him; got two first proofs, second one touched, 42s. Met Pellegrini and Godwin."
Whistler went everywhere, and knew everybody, though he did not allow everybody to know him. When somebody said to him, "The Prince of Wales says he knows you," Whistler's answer was, "That's only his side." He lived at a rate that would have killed most men, and at an expense in details that was fabulous. "I never dined alone for years," he said. If no one was coming to him, if no one had invited him, he dined at a club. He was a familiar figure, at different periods, in the Arts, Chelsea, and Hogarth Clubs, the Arundel, the Beaufort Grill Club, or, for supper, at the Beefsteak Club. Many of his letters, for a period, were dated from "The Fielding." He was once put up at the Savile, he told us, but heard no more about it; and at the Savage, but that, he said, "is a club to belong to, never to go to." At the Reform, had he thought of it, he lost all chance of election one night when his laugh woke up the old gentleman whose snores were equally loud in the reading-room. An amusing proof of the number of his clubs is Mr. Alden Weir's story of passing through London and being asked to dine by Whistler, who suggested first one club, then another, and drove him about to half a dozen or more, at each getting out of the cab alone and coming back to say nobody of any account was there, or the dinner was not good, or some other excuse; and, at last, with an apology, driving him home to Chelsea, where a large party waited and an excellent dinner was served, and Mr. Weir was the one guest not in evening dress, for Whistler kept the party waiting still longer while he changed. In the Lindsey Row days Whistler sometimes dined in a cheap French restaurant, "good of its kind," with Albert Moore and Homer Martin, a man he delighted in. Many artists dined there, he said, and would sit and talk until late. "But then, you know, the sort of Englishman who is entirely outside all these things, and likes to think he is 'in it,' began to come too, and that ruined it."
To Pagani's, in Great Portland Street, a tiny place then, he went with Pelligrini and others. He was often at the Café Royal in the eighties with Oscar Wilde; towards the end, Mr. Heinemann, Mr. E. G. Kennedy, and we were apt to be with him, when, if he ordered the dinner, Poulet en casserole was the principal dish, and sweet champagne the wine. Never shall we forget a dinner there, in 1899, to Mr. Freer, who had just bought a picture. We and Mr. Heinemann were the other guests. Much as Whistler wished to be amiable to Mr. Freer, he was tired, and, somehow, the dinner was not right, and there were scenes in our corner behind the screen. Mr. Freer felt it necessary to entertain the party, which he did by talking pictures like a new critic, and Japanese prints like a cultured school-ma'am. Whistler slept loudly and we tried to be attentive, until at length, at some psychological moment in Hiroshige's life or in Mr. Freer's collection, Whistler snored such a tremendous snore that he woke himself up, crying: "Good Heavens! Who is snoring?"
Whistler had the faculty of being late when invited to dinner. One official evening, he arrived an hour after the time. "We are so hungry, Mr. Whistler!" said his host. "What a good sign!" was his answer. At times he felt "like a little devil," and he told us of one of these occasions:
"I arrived. In the middle of the drawing-room table was the new Fortnightly Review, wet from the press; in it an article on Méryon by Wedmore, and there was Wedmore—the distinguished guest. I felt the excitement over the great man, and the great things he had been doing. Wedmore took the hostess in to dinner; I was on her other side, seeing things, bent on making the most of them. And I talked of critics, of Wedmore, as though I did not know who sat opposite. And I was nudged, my foot kicked under the table. But I talked. And whenever the conversation turned on Méryon, or Wedmore's article, or other serious things, I told another story, and I laughed—ha ha!—and they couldn't help it, they all laughed with me, and Wedmore was forgotten, and I was the hero of the evening. And Wedmore has never forgiven me."
Whistler went a great deal to the theatre in the seventies and eighties, and was always at first nights. Occasionally he acted in amateur theatricals. In 1876 he played in Under the Umbrella, at the Albert Hall, and was elated by a paragraph on his performance in the Daily News. He showed himself at private views and at the ceremonies society approves. To see and to be seen was part of the social game, and the world, meeting him everywhere, mistook him for the Butterfly for which he seemed to pose.
CHAPTER XVI: THE PEACOCK ROOM.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-FOUR TO EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-SEVEN.
For a year after the exhibition in Pall Mall, Whistler did not show any paintings. Artists said his pictures were not serious because not finished. Whistler retorted that theirs "might be finished, but—well—they never had been begun." Such remarks were not favoured by hanging committees. Probably Royal Academicians were honest, though malicious. Lord Redesdale remembered one whose work is forgotten, who used to say that Whistler was losing his eyesight, that he could not see there was no paint on his canvas. Mr. G. A. Holmes told us that a few artists in Chelsea, though they disliked him personally, thought him a man with new ideas who threw new light on art; Henry Moore said to Mr. Holmes that Whistler put more atmosphere into his pictures than any man living. But Academicians, as a rule, were afraid of him and Whistler would tell Mr. Holmes: "Well, you know, they want to treat me like a sheet of note-paper, and crumple me up!"
His prints were hung in exhibitions, many lent by Anderson Rose to the Liverpool Art Club in October 1874, and a few months afterwards to the Hartley Institution at Southampton. Shortly before the Liverpool show opened, Mr. Ralph Thomas issued the first catalogue of Whistler's etchings: A Catalogue of the Etchings and Dry-points of James Abbott MacNeil Whistler, London, Privately Printed by John Russell Smith, of 36 Soho Square. Of the fifty copies printed, only twenty-five were for sale, so that it became at once rare. Mr. Percy Thomas etched Whistler's portrait of himself with his brushes as frontispiece. Mr. Ralph Thomas described the plates, and as he had been with Whistler when many were made and printed, he was far better qualified than any of his successors. It is much to be regretted that Wedmore did not follow Thomas's excellent beginning.