Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

As a companion I found him delightful, and his hospitality at the several houses he successively occupied in Chelsea, however restricted it might occasionally prove owing to his shifting financial fortunes, had an inimitable grace and distinction peculiarly his own; though there were some, however, whose more exacting appetite was not always content with the slender material of those delightful little breakfasts over which he so perfectly presided.

To me the charm of the host sufficed to cover any deficiency in the feast, even in those days when he laughingly told me that his fishmonger was the only tradesman who could afford to deal with him. But I remember meeting, during one of these periods of narrow resources, a foreign painter who at one time had felt himself greatly favoured by an invitation to Cheyne Walk. I asked him if he had seen anything of Whistler lately, to which he replied, “Ah no, not now so much. He ask me a leetle while ago to breakfarst, and I go. My cab-fare two shilling, ’arf-crown. I arrive, very nice. Gold fish in bowl, very pretty. But breakfarst—one egg, one toast, no more! Ah no! My cab-fare, two shilling, ’arf-crown. For me no more!”

This, I think, was an exaggerated picture of the limits which Whistler was sometimes compelled to set to his hospitality. I know, for my own part at any rate, that these breakfasts were always delightful, and sometimes, when the mood took him, he would go himself into the kitchen and prepare a “plat” of his own devising, thus giving a final charm to his graceful entertainments.

His talk on these occasions, swift in its wit and always ready in repartee, was not, however, often of a kind that bears recording, so much depended upon the man himself, his personality and his manner, and so much upon the exact appropriateness of every word he uttered to the mood of the occasion. There was always about him a substratum of impish mischief which gave flavour and colour either to his criticism or his appreciation.

Once I remember, when a friend at the table was gravely reproaching him upon his lack of admiration of certain examples of Dresden china, Whistler still remained entirely impenitent and unconvinced until his friend was tempted to round off his rebuke by the somewhat audacious protest, “But, my dear Jimmy, you are not catholic in your taste,” to which Jimmy supplied the lightning retort, “No, that’s true. I only care for what’s good.”

Sometimes his remarks were almost startling in their reckless daring, and were apt to produce in the company in which he found himself a feeling of consternation. Once at an assembly at Lady Lindsay’s, on the entry of a painter whose face seemed to bear on that night even more than its wonted gravity of expression, Jimmy went up to the new-comer and in his shrillest tones remarked to him, “My dear,—your face is your fortune,” ending this outrageous compliment with one of those wild laughs that sounded like the war-whoop of an Indian who has just scalped his foe.

Of literature, in the wider sense of the term, I never discovered that Whistler had any profound knowledge, though when he wanted a quotation to heighten the sarcasm of any biting sentence it was happily chosen, and most often, strangely enough, such quotation would be taken from Dickens, whose humour strongly appealed to him.

But he was an artist first and last; and when not preoccupied with the things of his art, he so far resembled Millais that he loved to feel the pulse of the life of his time as it was exhibited in general society.

Towards men, especially those for whom he had no great liking, he was scathing and unsparing in the exercise of a wit that took small account of any conventional limitation, but towards women he was unfailingly courteous, with something of almost chivalrous deference of bearing and manner. Of all the painters of his time the man whom he most respected was, I think, Albert Moore; and the affinity was natural enough, for Moore, like Whistler, deliberately excluded from his art all reference to emotion and passion, and sought, within rigorous limitations, for a grace that owed nothing to any art but his own.

In Moore this was due to an accepted principle that was patiently obeyed; in Whistler it was intuitive instinct. In his case there was no need of any process of exclusion. Life, as it came into the region of his art, only appealed to him in virtue of those qualities he sought to present, and it was by no deliberate choice but by natural inclination that he left the entire story of human emotion and human passion untouched and untold.