Genius in the Nineties

I

THE Académie Julian was a congeries of studios crowded with students, the walls thick with palette scrapings, hot, airless, and extremely noisy. The new students were greeted with cries, with personal comments calculated, had we understood them, to make us blush, but with nothing worse. Perhaps this was still to come. Wild rumors were current about what students had sometimes to undergo.

To find a place among the closely packed easels and tabourets was not easy. It seemed that wherever one settled one was in somebody’s way. Happily Studd, who had arrived at Julian’s before me, took me under his wing and found me a corner in which I could work. He also proposed I should join him at his hotel, just across the river, opposite the Louvre. This was in the rue de Beaune, a little old street parallel to the rue du Bac, running into the rue de Lille. Nothing could have suited me better. First of all there was the hotel itself, the Hôtel de France et de Lorraine, established at the time of the first Empire and little changed since. It belonged, indeed, to descendants of the original proprietors, — old-fashioned, courteous people, — and was largely frequented by military men and Royalist families. Here I found a modest room, at the price of sixty francs monthly; modest, but delightful in character. Bed, chest of drawers, chairs, carpet, even the curtains were pure ‘Empire.’ A valet, François, looked after us — an imposing figure with bushy side whiskers, looking as though he had walked straight out of a Gavarni lithograph. Excellent François! As intelligent as you were attentive and good-natured, I think of you still with gratitude and affection.

Living at this hotel, besides Studd, there was Kenneth Frazier, a gifted American painter who had been at Bushey under Herkomer and was now also working at Julian’s, and Herbert Fisher, a young and learned history don from New College, who was attending lectures at the Sorbonne, sitting at the feet of Taine and Renan.

Students from all over the world crowded the studios. There were Russians, Turks, Egyptians, Serbs, Rumanians, Finns, Swedes, Germans, Englishmen and Scotchmen, and many Americans, besides a great number of Frenchmen. By what means Julian had attracted all these people was a mystery. He was said to have had an adventurous career, to have been a prize fighter, — he looked like one, — and to have sat as a model. He himself used to tell the story of how, at his wit’s end for a living, he hired a studio, put a huge advertisement, ‘Académic de Peinture,’ outside, and waited day after day, lonely and disconsolate; but there was no response. One day he heard a step on the stairs; a youth looked in, saw no one, was about to retire, when Julian rushed forward, pulled him back, placed an easel before him, himself mounted the model stand — ‘and l’Académie Julian was founded!' More students followed; another studio was added, and finally the big ateliers in the rue du Faubourg St. Denis were taken, and a separate atelier for ladies was opened.

Julian himself knew nothing of the arts. He had persuaded a number of well-known painters and sculptors to act as visiting professors, and the Académie Julian became, after the Beaux Arts, the largest and most renowned of the Paris schools.

The most famous of the professors was Bouguereau, whose name was a household word in Europe and America. His name also typified, among those we now call ‘highbrows,’ all that was most false and sentimental in popular painting — peinture léchée, the French called it. I avoided the studios he visited, and chose to work under Jules Lefebvre, Benjamin Constant, and Lucien Doucet.

Lefebvre, a skillful but thoroughly conventional painter of the nude, was personally straightforward and unaffected. Doucet, a suave and polished Parisian, had more sympathy for the experimental eccentricities current in the studios. There was something enigmatic in his character. It was puzzling to find a man, obviously intelligent and, in his way, a brilliant draftsman, entirely dominated by the Salon conventions of the time. Benjamin Constant, a powerful but brutal painter with a florid taste, one of the props of the old Salon, I remember as a less regular visitor.

At the Académic there were no rules, and, save for a massier in each studio who was expected to prevent flagrant disorder, there was no discipline. I believe the professors were unpaid. You elected to study under one or more of these, working in the studios they visited. Over the entrance to the studios were written Ingres’s words: Le dessin est la probité de l’art (Drawing is the essential honesty of art) and Cherchez le caractère dans la nature (Look for character in nature).

We drew with charcoal on Ingres paper; the system in vogue was to divide the figure into four parts, measuring with charcoal held at arm’s length, and using a plumb line to get the figure standing well on its feet. No one attempted to draw sight-size, but the figure would usually fill the sheet of paper.

So great was the number of students, two models, not always of the same sex, usually sat in each studio. Our easels were closely wedged together; the atmosphere was stifling, the noise at times deafening. Sometimes for a few minutes there was silence; then suddenly the men would burst into song. Songs of all kinds and all nations were sung. The Frenchmen were extraordinarily quick to catch foreign tunes and the sounds of foreign words. There was merciless chaff among the students, and frequently practical jokes, some of them very cruel.

Doucet was exceedingly kind to me. He frequently asked me to his studio, and gave me introductions to artists, among others to Rochegrosse, Bracquemond, and Forain.

Forain was then working chiefly for the Courrier Français, week by week producing the mordant drawings and legends which were afterward published as La Comédie Parisienne. On an auspicious day, armed with Doucet’s letter, I set out to find him. On reaching his studio, I noticed a quantity of furniture, including one or two easels, in the street. Before I could ring, a youngish man with a brown, fanlike beard appeared at the entrance; he turned out to be the admired artist himself. The furniture in the street was his; he was being sold up. This, I found out later, not infrequently happened. Forain is now, I am told, one of the wealthiest artists in Paris. Such changes of fortune are not infrequent, but there was little to show in those days that Forain would arrive at his present eminence.

Doucet had told me to show Forain my own drawings. These were done on thin brown paper in sketchbooks specially made by Newmans for John Swan. Forain’s comments on the drawings were no doubt appropriately polite, but for the sketchbooks, bound in pleasant green cloth strengthened by leather, he expressed unstinted admiration. Could I get him some? Yes indeed; I was only too proud and ready. How many? Three or four. Four were ordered. Needless to say, the good Forain never thought of asking for the account, and I was far too shy to proffer it. My finances, in consequence, were crippled for a month.

II

The Paris Exhibition of 1889 is confused, in my mind, with the Exhibition of 1899. Whether it was there or at Durand Ruel’s Galleries in the rue le Pelletier that I first saw paintings by Courbet and Manet, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, and Puvis de Chavannes, I cannot now recollect; but I soon became a convert to Impressionism, and a more ardent one than either Studd or Frazier. Fisher also declared himself a convinced disciple. We all admired Bastion Lepage, Dagnan-Bouveret, and especially Cazin; and even quite pedestrian artists like Eliot and AmanJean. Watts and Rossetti were, for the time, obscured. But not Millet; his two paintings at the Louvre were strangely moving. The Apple Orchard seemed to me then, as it has ever since, a perfect painting; and the church at Grandville more austere, and equally complete.

Delacroix I did not understand; though I did n’t then know the word ‘baroque,’ his paintings, compared with others at the Louvre, appeared somewhat as those of Tiepolo or Le Brun would appear in a church to a lover of Giotto or Piero della Francesca.

The great Rubens decorations were also above me then; I was unable to see the superhuman qualities of the painting on account of the falseness of the heroics. Ingres seemed to me the fine flower of academic painting — I was told I ought to admire him, but he failed to stir me.

Botticelli was to us then what I suppose El Greco to be to youngsters to-day; Rembrandt’s Butcher’s Shop seemed to me the last word in realistic painting; and his picture of the Good Samaritan, the slight indication of blood on the ground to show where the wounded man had lain before being lifted up and carried away, opened my eyes to Rembrandt’s almost Biblical imagination.

Another picture which moved me strangely was Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin — those beautiful women, with their pure necks and virginal persons, whose color alone, so clear and spotless in its delicate purity, gave one a glimpse of Paradise.

I noticed, when I went to the Louvre after returning from Giverny, that many pictures seemed to smell too much of the workroom, of actual paint and varnish. But Fra Angelico’s and some others among the primitives, never. Sometimes, both in the country and in my studio, I would feel that nothing had ever been perfectly painted, that everything remained still to be done, despite the genius of the old painters. Hence one’s interest in Manet and Courbet, who at least, I thought, saw the world with fresh eyes.

But when I saw the life of the fields, the passion of the harvest, men and women reaping and binding, and the great carts and horses being led to and fro in the fields, loaded with corn and hay, I marveled how completely Millet had expressed one side of human life. I felt dimly even then that he was the best balanced among French artists, uniting perfectly color, design, and draftsmanship with exactitude of observation, heightened by the inspiration of a great subject matter.

I remember Frazier’s saying that Watts held the painting of hair and beard to be the most difficult part of a portrait, and my ridiculing this statement; and Frazier rightly asked what experience gave me the right to judge the conclusions of a ripe painter like Watts.

III

During the first weeks in Paris our gastronomic exaltation quite equaled our æsthetic enthusiasm. The discovery of vol-au-vent, oœur a la crème, of omelettes of many kinds, within the measure of one’s pocket, made luncheon and dinner a daily adventure. It was no form of dissipation which had to be paid for then or thereafter; so these golden hours spent at French tables were taken as a gift of the gods, accepted gratefully, and with modest libations. Even the grave Fisher grew lyrical over the éperlans frits, the truite à la rivière, the rouget; and where in England, save in private houses, can one find the fat, juicy steaks, the choux à la crème, the young and melting carrots, the aubergines? Was it not my friend Eric Gill who wrote that while God does n’t particularly approve of luxury, at least he wants it in good taste? To French people, cooking is a serious matter, and to be particular about one’s food seems to them right and reasonable. That an ill-cooked dish should at once be rejected is, in France, taken for granted. An active critical faculty is applied in Paris to art and literature and the drama as well as to cooking.

Herbert Fisher gave me some idea of the history of Paris, and took me to the Sainte-Chapelle and to Notre Dame. Fisher used to attend Taine’s and Renan’s lectures at the Collège de France, or the Sorbonne; at times, too, he would meet them personally, when Studd, Frazier, and I would wait his return, to hear all he had to tell about these great men. On one of these occasions Taine advised Fisher to study medicine for three years! A historian should know something of mental effects on human action. Fisher did n’t take Taine’s advice. Fisher met Renan when Déroulède was preaching the revanche; Renan thought Déroulède a dangerous influence. Let France not risk a decision by the sword; rather let her, like Greece, lead the world as a great civilizing power. She can have no more glorious future.

Fisher returned from these interviews aglow with enthusiasm. Despite a somewhat grand manner, he had a very human and affectionate character, and we valued his company among us. He shared, too, our enthusiasm for French art and literature; so perhaps he gained something from his association with us painters.

What plays I saw during my first year I have forgotten, all save one. I went with Duvent to the Gymnase to see a new play by Alphonse Daudet, La Lutte pour la Vie. I could follow it fairly well, but one word, constantly repeated, puzzled me — ‘strugforliffeur.’ What did it mean? I asked Duvent. ‘Why,’ said Duvent, ‘it is an English word.’ ‘Surely not,’ I said. But he insisted, and finally I realized that struggler for life was intended!

Early in the summer I returned to England, staying with Fisher at Oxford on my way to the north. One day Fisher came in and threw a book on the table, saying he wished me to read it; it was by a nephew of Burne-Jones. He was curious to know my opinion of its merits. The book was Plain Tales from the Hills.

In October, I returned to Paris. The left bank was very well for poets and scholars, but Montmartre was essentially the artists’ quarter. Puvis de Chavannes had a studio on the Place Pigalle, while Alfred Stevens lived close by, and in the rue Victor Massé lived Degas. At Montmartre also were the Nouvelle Athènes and the Père Lathuille, where Manet, Zola, Pissarro, and Monet — indeed, all the original Impressionists — used to meet. The temptation, therefore, to cross the river and live on the heights was too strong to resist. So I left my beautiful Empire room and my safe, solid friends for a land unknown. I was only seventeen years old, and though in many ways timid by nature, I had a blind faith in my star. Dangerous things might happen to other people, but somehow I should be protected.

The rue Ravignan lies above the Place Pigalle and the Boulevard de Clichy. At the top of the street is an irregular open space, bounded on the north by a flight of steps and railings, just below which are the studios. Above the steps was the pavilion of an eighteenth-century country house; beyond lay old quiet streets, scattered villas with deserted gardens, and terrains vagues. In a low, rambling building, which probably still exists (I went there some years later with Augustus John to call on Picasso), were the studios, mere wooden sheds with large windows; but great was my pride at working in any place which could so be called.

To the Rat Mort there often came the Belgian painter, Alfred Stevens, a magnificent old ruin, broad-shouldered, white-haired, with a fine head and a powerful frame still erect in spite of his years. He was charming to young people, often taking us across to his studio close by in the rue Alfred Stevens (named after him), where he showed us his pictures. Poor Alfred Stevens! He had been one of the great figures of the Second Empire; all the great ladies of that glittering period had passed through his studio. A great lover of women, he had lived splendidly, earning largely; he had been wildly extravagant, and although he had once owned a whole street, he was now reduced to living in a modest atelier and a couple of rooms. More unfortunate still, he had debts, and was driven to paint numbers of small pictures for dealers. His instinct was for highly wrought painting, for precious and delicately handled pigment.

Still, everyone treated ‘le Père Stevens’ with great respect, for not only had he been a great figure, but he had been a great painter as well. All that remained of the treasures he had lavishly collected was a small picture which he told us was by Holbein — the portrait of a man, clean-shaved, against a green background. He would fetch it out, and, drawing aside a little curtain which protected the surface, he would say each time, ‘We are going to see whether his beard has grown overnight,’ so living did he feel this work to be. One day he climbed up to the rue Ravignan to see my drawings. Le Pére Stevens was a great talker, and it was a privilege to hear him hold forth in his powerful old voice on the Flemish masters, or to hear his comments on contemporary painters. He had a particular dislike for Carrière’s work, — ‘That man paints like a pig!' — but he was the first French painter I heard give high praise to Whistler.

IV

I doubt whether the present generation of young artists and writers admires its older contemporaries as we admired some of ours. Admired seems too weak a word. To me Whistler was almost a legendary figure, whom I never thought to meet in the flesh. I must have felt very shy on the occasion when I was first introduced to him. Mrs. Whistler, an ample and radiant figure, who was, I think, amused and pleased at our obvious reverence for her husband (I say our reverence, for Studd, Frazier, and Howard Cushing had also been bidden to meet ‘the master’), put me at once at my ease, asking us all to come and see them when they were settled in their new apartment in the rue du Bac.

Was it possible I was really to meet the great man again, and in his own house? They were to be at home on Sundays, she said; but, before the next Sunday came round, early one morning there came a knock at my door, and who should walk into my studio but Whistler himself. I was quite unprepared for his visit, and somewhat abashed, at which Whistler was pleased, I think, for he laughed and walked lightly round, examined all I had hung on the walls, rolled a cigarette, and asked to see what I was doing. My friends Studd and Frazier must have spoken generously to Whistler of my efforts; there was a strong element of curiosity in his nature — the reason, I think, of his visit. The next day came a little note asking me to dine, accompanied by a copy of one of his brownpaper pamphlets, with an inscription signed with his butterfly.

He had found an enchanting apartment set far back in the rue du Bac, a small, late-eighteenth-century pavilion which he had completely transformed, as he usually did with his houses. The outer door, painted a beautiful green and white, gave promise of what was within — a small and exquisite interior, a sitting room simply furnished with a few pieces of Empire furniture, and a dining room filled with his famous blue and white china and beautiful old silver. There was a Japanese bird cage in the middle of the table, whereon he and Mrs. Whistler used to make lovely trailing arrangements of flowers in blue and white bowls and little tongueshaped dishes. There was a single picture on one of the dining-room walls, but none, I think, in the sitting room.

Outside was a good-sized garden, into which, one day, Whistler’s favorite parrot flew. Neither coaxing nor food would tempt it down; it finally died from starvation. Next door was a convent, from which came the frequent sound of the nuns chanting. Whistler liked old ways, and this added to the charm of his Paris retreat.

Keen-eyed Whistler! Fixing one with his monocle, quick, curious, now genial, now suspicious. One walked delicately, but in an enchanted garden, with him. He found amusement, I think, in my inexperienced mind and provincial ways. I remember his joy when, during a dinner party at his house, my white tie — I was only just learning to tie my own tie — came slowly undone. He wanted always to know what one was doing, whom one was seeing. There was a certain gaunt, wan, Botticelli-like model (she was a friend of Ary Renan) who sat to me a good deal, and he pretended to believe me in love with her. He liked to assume that I lived a Don Juanlike career — a fancy he had that was half embarrassing, half flattering to a foolish youth. But his chaff was tempered by a charming interest in our work, which he always treated with respect. For anyone he admitted to his friendship must needs be an artist — how could he be otherwise?

Whistler complained bitterly of his treatment in England. He never tired of disparaging England and all things English. His strictures were sometimes amusing, but at times a little tiresome. One afternoon the Whistlers took me to a party — at the American Ambassador’s, I think — where a famous American dancer was to dance. On the way Whistler said something about the British flag covering a union — of hypocrites. In her last dance Loie Fuller was arrayed in the American flag, and I whispered to Whistler that I was bound to admit that the Stars and Stripes at any rate concealed very little.

Whistler enjoyed a jest of this kind; indeed, he allowed one a good deal of latitude, so long as one was ‘accepted,’ and he often repeated the indiscretions of ‘the vicar,’ as he called me, with amusement.

He used to produce derogatory press cuttings from his pocket and read them aloud; meanwhile I would ask myself why he took notice of such trivialities. Was he not Whistler, the acknowledged master? I know now that great artists are as fallible as small ones, that small things annoy them as much as great ones do; but I had much less knowledge of human nature then. And because I was dazzled by Whistler’s brilliant wit, by his exquisite taste, and of course by the beauty of his work, I thought his powers beyond question, and I was puzzled that anyone else should fail to think likewise. He was so obviously a prince among men.

There was something extraordinarily attractive, too, about his whole person. He wore a short black coat, white waistcoat, white ducks, and pumps, a low collar and a slim black tie, carefully arranged with one long end crossing his waistcoat. He had beautiful hands, and there was a certain cleanness and finish about the lines of his face, the careful arrangement of his hair and of his eyebrows. On Sunday afternoons, while talking to his visitors, he usually had a little copper plate in his hands, on which he would scratch from time to time. But at this time I think he did more lithographs than etchings. He was experimenting with colored lithographs, and it was at his studio in the rue Notre Dame des Champs that he made the beautiful drawings, on a special kind of transfer paper, from his favorite model, Carmen.

In spite of his constant reference to the stupidity of the English and the intelligence of the French, I doubt whether Whistler’s work was so well understood in Paris as it was in London. It was rather the cosmopolitan painters — Boldini, Gandara, Helleu, Tissot, Jacques Blanche — who knew and understood him and his work. He was generally considered a mere shadow of Velasquez and Manet; something of a poseur, in fact, as Wilde was in England.

One evening Lautrec came up to the rue Ravignan to tell us about a new singer, a friend of Xanrof, who was to appear at the Moulin Rouge for the first time. Anquetin, Dujardin, Victor José, and some others were coming, and he wanted us to join them to give her a good send-off; she was intelligent, not ordinary, and might easily fail to please a public fed on Paulus. Besides, she was to come on early, and the early turns were given to sparsely filled seats.

We went; a young girl appeared, of virginal aspect, slender, pale, without rouge. Her songs were not virginal — on the contrary; but the frequenters of the Moulin were not easily frightened. They stared bewildered at this novel association of innocence with Xanrof’s horrific double entente; stared, stayed, and broke into delighted applause. Her success was immediate; crowds came nightly to the Moulin to hear her, and the name of Yvette Guilbert became famous in a week.

Later she went to the Divan Japonais, where Lautrec was able to watch her more closely; he was very much alive to the piquancy of her appearance and her rendering of the songs she chose. It amused Lautrec to find formulas for a person’s appearance, which he reduced to the simplest expression; he had one for Rodin, another for Degas, and one, as cruel as any, for himself. But, for some perverse reason, his drawings of Yvette were among the most savage he ever made.

Nearly forty years afterward, going to see Yvette in her dressing room after one of her recitals in London, I reminded her of her first appearance that night at the Moulin. She looked quite startled to hear again of Lautrec and Willette. ‘They are all dead now,’ she said in a tragic voice. Yvette herself remains the great artist she was, but with something ampler and richer in her interpretations. But it was not easy to recognize in the stately matron the slim little chiffonnée Yvette of the Moulin. V

To Paris came more than once Mr. and Mrs. Jack Gardner. Mrs. Gardner was already famous as a collector of pictures, as a fastidious and somewhat eccentric woman, and for her great necklace of black pearls. She was notorious as a non-beauty, a fact she had the wit to recognize. Sargent had painted a striking portrait of her, in a plain black dress, very décolletéc, and wearing her pearls. She was a warm supporter of Sargent throughout her life, but she fully recognized Whistler’s genius. Thinking she might be interested in my work, Whistler asked me to meet Mrs. Gardner at dinner. She was curious, too, about the bohemian corners of Paris, and Whistler had advised her to have me act as her guide. So I took her to hear Yvette at the Divan Japonais and Xanrof at the Chat Noir, and to hear Bruant sing his songs at his cabaret. She herself entertained lavishly at her small and modestlooking hotel in the rue de la Paix.

Mrs. Gardner was anxious to acquire a Whistler. Why she thought this a perilous project I had no idea, — Whistler was surely not averse from selling his pictures, — but she thought that I might be useful and she took me with her to the studio in the rue Notre Dame des Champs. Whistler was in his most genial mood, and showed a number of his canvases, among which was a lovely sea piece with sailing ships. Mrs. Gardner nudged me; I could see she was eager to have it. ‘Why don’t you put it under your arm and carry it off?’ I whispered. She was always ready for any unusual adventure, and she boldly told Whistler that she was going to take the picture with her. Whistler laughed and did nothing to stop her.

She told us later that on her asking Whistler how much she owed him for this beautiful work Whistler named three hundred pounds as the price. How absurdly small a sum this seems to-day! When Studd paid two hundred pounds for one of Monet’s haystacks and the same price for a painting by Picard, it was the talk of Paris.

VI

Whistler used to say that I carried out what in others was merely gesture; this of course was pure flattery. But, with its many faults, my work at this time was generously noticed by older artists. It attracted the notice of Degas, who sent word, oddly enough through a little model of his who came often to our table at the Café de la Rochefoucauld, that I might, if I cared, pay him a visit. Degas as well as Whistler! And but two years before I was drawing casts at the Slade School and longing to know one or two of the older students.

Although I was always somewhat excited when visiting Whistler, his curiosity to know what I had been doing, whom I had been seeing, his friendly chaff, would put me at ease. With Degas, I was never quite comfortable. To begin with, nervous people are apt, when speaking in a foreign tongue, to say rather what comes into their heads than what they mean. Moreover, Degas’s character was more austere and uncompromising than Whistler’s.

Compared with Degas, Whistler seemed almost worldly in many respects. Indeed, Degas was the only man of whom Whistler was a little afraid. ‘Whistler, you behave as though you had no talent,’ Degas had said once to him; and again when Whistler, chin high, monocle in his eye, frock-coated, top-hatted, and carrying a tall cane, walked triumphantly into a restaurant where Degas was sitting: ‘Whistler, you have forgotten your muff.’ And about the flat-brimmed hat which Whistler fancied Degas said: ‘Yes, it suits you well enough; but it won’t be that that will give us back Alsace and Lorraine.’

Degas was famous, and feared, for his terrible mots. He was unsparing in his comments on men who failed in fidelity to the artistic conscience. Flattery, usefulness, and subservience provided, in some cases, the key to intimacy with Whistler; with Degas integrity of character was a sine qua non of friendship. One thing he had in common with Whistler — a temperamental respect for the aristocratic tradition, the ‘West Point’ code of honor; a French West Point, which included anti-Republican and anti-Semitic tendencies, which later made him a strong partisan of the militarists and anti-Dreyfusards.

He heartily disliked the cosmopolitanism which was ousting the narrower but more finely tempered French culture — destroying it, indeed, so he thought; hence he wanted to save what he could of French art from the newrich American collector, then already beginning to cast his efficient nets, baited with dollars, in Parisian waters. He was buying as many drawings by Ingres as he could, and had also acquired half a dozen of his paintings, as well as many drawings by Daumier and Delacroix. Daumier he placed high among the nineteenth-century painters. ‘If Raphael,’ he said, ‘returned to life and looked at Gérome’s pictures, he would say, “Connu"; but if he saw a drawing by Daumier, “Look — that’s interesting, and by a master hand,” he would say.’ Degas owned several large slips of Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, two of which are now in the National Gallery. A dealer bought the original painting, and, being unable to dispose of so large a canvas, cut it up and sold the fragments separately; most of these Degas was able to secure. He had, besides, two beautiful still-life paintings by Manet, one of a single pear, and one of a man. He had thought Manet overworldly: ‘Why, you’re as well known as Garibaldi. What more do you want?’ Degas chaffed him once. Manet’s answer came pat: ‘In that case, my friend, you are above sea level.’

Degas spoke with particular admiration of Manet, regretting that he had not appreciated him enough during his lifetime. Whistler habitually belittled Manet’s work, disliking to hear us praise it. Like Whistler, Degas had a poor opinion of Cézanne as an artist.

Degas was a confirmed bachelor of simple habits. He occupied two apartments, one above the other, in the rue Victor Massé, over which a devoted old servant ruled and guarded the painter against intruders. The walls of the lower flat were hung with his beloved French masters, while upstairs he kept his own numerous works. With those whom he had once admitted to his friendship he threw off much of his reserve, and showed and discussed his treasures. I eagerly listened to his affectionate tributes; he never tired of lingering over the beauties of his Ingres drawings. He pressed me to look out for unknown originals which, he believed, were in England; for Ingres had employed a tout in Rome and in this way got many commissions from English tourists before he became famous.

In appearance Degas had something of Henley and something of Meredith, but was too heavy for Meredith and too fine-featured for Henley. His raised brows and heavy-lidded eyes gave him an aspect of aloofness; and in spite of his baggy clothes he looked the aristocrat that he was.

VII

One or two things I saw at the rue Victor Massé remain in my memory: a beautiful pastel of a woman lying on a settee in a bright blue dress, a work which I have not seen again, nor seen reproduced; a small wax model of a horse leaping to one side, which Degas made use of in a well-known composition of jockeys riding. This was the most highly finished of the maquettes which I saw at the rue Victor Massé. Until then I was unaware that Degas modeled. He owned some casts of an Indian dancing figure, the first examples of Indian sculpture I had seen.

Degas was then making studies of laundresses ironing, and of women tubbing or at their toilettes. Some of these were redrawn again and again on tracing paper pinned over drawings already made; this practice allowed for correction and simplification, and was common with artists in France. Degas rarely painted directly from nature. He spoke once of Manet’s dependence in this respect: ‘I do not feel the necessity of losing consciousness before Nature,’ he mocked.

He complained much of his eyesight. Young people to-day, who prefer the later work of Degas and of Renoir, hardly realize how much of its looser character was due to their failing sight. Degas, in the nineties, was still able to see fairly clearly; but toward the end of his life he was obliged to use the broadest materials, working on a large scale, hesitating, awkward, scarcely able to find his way over the canvas or paper.

He was by nature drawn to subtleties of character and to intricate forms and movements. He had the Parisian curiosity for life in its most objective forms. At one with the Impressionists in rejecting the artificial subject matter of the Salon painters, he looked to everyday life for his subjects; but he differed from Manet and his other contemporaries in the rhythmical poise of his figures and the perfecting of detail. He found in the life of the stage and the intricate steps of the ballet, with its background of fantasy, an inexhaustible subject matter, which allowed for the color and movement of romantic art, yet provided the clear form dear to the classical spirit . He delighted in the strange plumage of the filles d’opéra, as they moved into the circle of the limelight or stood, their skirts standing out above their pink legs, chattering together in the wings. The starling-like flock of young girls, obedient to the baton of the maître de danse, Degas rendered with astonishing delicacy of observation.

Degas never forgot that he was once a pupil of Ingres. Indeed, he described at length, on one of my first visits, his early relations with Ingres; how fearfully he approached him, showing his drawings and asking whether he might, in all modesty, look forward to being, some day, an artist; Ingres replying that it was too grave a thing, too serious a responsibility, to be thought of — better devote himself to some other pursuit. How he went again and yet again, pleading that he had reconsidered, from every point of view, his idea of equipping himself to become a painter and that he realized his temerity, but could not bring himself to abandon all his hopes. Ingres finally relented, saying, ‘What you are considering doing is serious, very serious; but if you really wish, nevertheless, to be an artist, well then, sir, make lines — nothing but lines.’ One of Ingres’s sayings which came back to Degas was ’He who lives only to himself is out of luck.’ Degas had lately been at Montauban, Ingres’s birthplace, where the greater number of his studies are preserved. He was full of his visit, and of the surpassing beauty of the drawings.

When I got back to England I was indignant at the general misapprehension of Degas’s character; for instance, he was fiercely assailed by Sir William Richmond on account of a picture, L’Absinthe, which had lately been shown in London — a portrait of Desboutins the etcher, sitting with a woman at a table at the Nouvelle Athènes. Desboutins was, as a matter of fact, a good, sober, bourgeois artist, a familiar and picturesque figure in Montmartre. Degas himself lived very austerely; no breath of scandal had ever touched him. He once told us an amusing story of how, being constantly twitted by his friends about his complete indifference to the other sex, he felt he must make some demonstration of gallantry. Finding that one of the little dancers who sat for him was going to America, he thought this an opportunity for the appropriate gesture. He booked a passage on the boat following hers, reached New York, remained quietly on board, and returned to France. Impossible to do more, he said, than show himself capable of pursuing a lady all the way from Paris to New York!

(The next installment will picture Pater, Verlaine, Daudet, and Beerbohm)