When to Be Young Was Heaven: Genius in the Nineties

I

WHISTLER had said, ‘Of course you will settle in Chelsea.’ The men who counted most for me lived there — Sickert, Steer, Ricketts, and Shannon. The name itself, soft and creamy, suggested the eighteenth century, Whistler’s early etchings, Cremorne, old courts and rag shops. I was at first disappointed with the long King’s Road, a shabbier Oxford Street, with its straggling, dirty, stucco mid-century houses and shops. But the riverside along Cheyne Row was beautiful — what noble houses! And there were Lindsay Row and Cheyne Row and Paradise Walk, and the Physic Gardens and the Vale.

Beardsley was living in Cambridge Terrace, Pimlico, with his mother and his sister Mabel. The walls of his rooms were distempered a violent orange, the doors and skirtings were painted black; his taste was all for the bizarre and exotic. Later it became somewhat chastened.

I had picked up a Japanese book in Paris, with pictures so outrageous that its possession was an embarrassment. It pleased Beardsley, however, so I gave it to him. The next time I went to see him, he had taken out the most indecent prints from the book and hung them around his bedroom.

Beardsley affected an extreme cynicism which was startling at times. He spoke enormities; mots were the mode, and, provided they were sufficiently witty, anything might be said. Did n’t someone say of Aubrey that even his lungs were affected? It was a time when everyone, in the wake of Whistler, wanted to take out a patent for brilliant sayings. Referring to my bad memory, Beardsley remarked, ‘It doesn’t matter what good things one says in front of Billy; he’s sure to forget them.’

One was always aware of the eager, feverish brilliance of the consumptive, in haste to absorb as much of life as he could in the brief space he instinctively knew was his sorrowful portion. Poor Aubrey — he was a tragic figure! It was as though the gods had said, ‘Only four years more will be allowed you; but in those four years you shall experience what others take forty years to learn.’ Knowledge he seemed to absorb through his pores. Always at his drawing desk, he still found time to read an astonishing variety of books. He knew his Balzac from cover to cover, and explored the courts and alleys of French and English seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century literature. Intensely musical, too, he seemed to know the airs of all the operas. No wonder Oscar thought him wonderful, and chose him at once as the one artist to illustrate his Salome.

Since the first appearance of his work in the Studio, Beardsley’s drawings were constantly abused; none of the illustrators of the day would say a word in his favor. Worse still, they joined the howling crowd in crying for Beardsley to be put in the stocks. Their stupidity, meanness, and blindness were even more abnormal than was Beardsley’s genius. A similar outcry arose over Max Beerbohm’s first essays; in fact, we were all to be lumped together as ‘decadents.’ On the other hand, a few people hailed Beardsley as one of the greatest draftsmen who had ever appeared; such exaggerated praise is scarcely less irritating than stupid abuse.

II

Cunninghame-Graham was one of the most picturesque and picaresque figures of the day, and extremely entertaining. He had a witty and caustic tongue, told the best Scotch stories I had ever heard, wrote, fenced, and rode a frisky horse with a long tail, all in an equally gallant manner, I liked to see him putting his fingers through his long, thick, golden-red hair, making it stand high above his fine, narrow, aristocratic forehead. Twirling his moustaches, and holding his handsome person proudly erect, he would stride into the room with the swagger of a Gaucho and the elegance of a swordsman.

He insisted on taking me, graceless as I was, to Angelo’s, then in St. James’s Street, that I too might learn to fence. Whether I acquired any grace from the lessons I doubt; but I enjoyed the strenuous exercise, and the Regency atmosphere of Angelo’s, while Max and Beardsley, who used somet imes to join me there, looked on, fascinated by the survival of this classic establishment — now, alas, a memory only!

I often think now how Beardsley must have envied us, who were so robust and full of life. He must have known how slender were his own chances of living; yet he showed no sign. The two earliest letters he wrote me, in 1803, refer to illness, and to difficulties with Lane, which I shared.

Beardsley was one of the first, and one of the few, to appraise Max’s caricatures at their true value. He was equally quick to appreciate his writing, and a warm friendship sprang up between the two. Nor was Max slow to see the beauty of Beardsley’s work; indeed, his caricatures at this time bear witness to his sympathy with Aubrey’s style. Max wrote, soon after leaving Oxford: —

Whilst I write I am coming of age: I was born twenty-one years ago to-day and am ever so sorry that I cannot possibly come and live with you in Scarborough as you so charmingly ask me. I have to go into the country to-morrow for a week to stay with relations and cannot possibly put them off. Why do I write on this odd paper? Because it was wrapped up with two very lovely drawings by Aubrey Beardsley which J. Lane has just given me. They lie before me as I write: I am enamored of them. So is John Lane: he said: ‘How lucky I am to have got hold of this young Beardsley: look at the technique of his drawings! What workmanship! He never goes over the edges!’ He never said anything of the kind, but the criticism is suggestive for you, dear Will. And characteristic of Art’s middleman, the Publisher — for of such is the Chamber of Horrors. How brilliant I am! I forget whether you like Salome or not. Salome is the play of which the drawings are illustrative. I have just been reading it again — and like it immensely — there is much, I think, in it that is beautiful, much lovely writing — I almost wonder Oscar does n’t dramatize it.

‘I almost wonder Oscar doesn’t dramatize it’! Max had uncanny premonitions; soon came the news that the censor would n’t sanction the performance of Salome. Wilde was very angry. Sarah Bernhardt had offered to play the part of Salome, but the censor was obdurate; no objection was raised to the publication of the play in book form, yet its presentation on the stage was forbidden.

One of Beardsley’s most ardent supporters was Robert Ross. He was a general favorite. Although not himself a creative person, he had, in those days especially, a genius for friendship. No man had a wider circle of friends than he. He had a delightful nature, was an admirable story-teller, and a wit; above all he was able to get the best out of those he admired. Oscar Wilde was never wittier than when at Ross’s parties; the same was true of Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm.

Ross was a member of the Hogarth Club. On one occasion he had been entertaining a party, one of whom was Oscar Wilde, and after dinner we adjourned to the Hogarth Club. As we entered the room, an old member of the Club, ostentatiously staring at Wilde, rose from his chair and made for the door. One or two other members also got up. Everyone felt uncomfortable. Wilde, aware of what, was happening, strode up to the member who was about to leave and haughtily exclaimed: ' How dare you insult a member of your own club? I am Mr. Ross’s guest — an insult to me is an insult to him. I insist upon your apologizing to Mr. Ross.’ The member addressed had nothing to do but to pretend very lamely that no insult had been intended, and he and the others returned to their seats. I thought this showed great pluck on Oscar’s part.

But Wilde could scarcely complain if sinister rumors were beginning to circulate. In Beardsley was no such perversity; and Beardsley, now that we look back on his few years of hectic, hurried life, is a touching and lovable figure. But at the time, with his butterfly ties, his too smart clothes with their hard, padded shoulders, his face — as Oscar said — ‘like a silver hatchet’ under his spreading chestnut hair, parted in the middle and arranged low over his forehead, his staccato voice and jumpy, restless manners, he appeared a portent of change symbolic of the movement which was associated — and was to end — with the last years of the century.

III

Sargent I met soon after I had settled in Chelsea. I had, of course, seen his paintings at the Royal Academy and at the Salon, and admired their brilliant virtuosity, though I did n’t think of him as inhabiting the same mansion as Whistler and Degas, Monet and Renoir. But on meeting Sargent I was at once aware of something large and dignified in his nature, something imposing in his person and manner, which set. him apart and commanded respect. Like Henry James, he had the English correctness of most Europeanized Americans, which brought a certain je ne sais quoi of self-consciousness into his relations with his friends. We all acknowledged his immense accomplishment as a painter to be far beyond anything of which we were capable. But the disparity between his gifts and our own we were inclined to discount, by thinking that we had qualities that somehow placed us among the essential artists, while he, in spite of his great gifts, remained outside the charmed circle. I was used to hearing both Whistler and Degas speak disparagingly of Sargent’s work; even Helleu, Bold ini, and Gandara regarded him more as a brilliant executant than as an artist of high rank.

Sargent , when he painted the size of life, placed his canvas on a level with the model, walked back until canvas and sitter were equal before his eye, and was thus able to estimate the construction and values of his representation. He drew with his brush, beginning with the shadows, and gradually evolving his figure from the background by means of large, loose volumes of shadow, half tones and light, regardless of features or refinements of form, finally bringing the masses of light and shade closer together, and thus assembling the figure. He painted with large brushes and a full palette, using oil and turpentine freely as a medium. When he repainted, he would smudge and efface the part he wished to reconstruct, and begin again from a shapeless mass. He never used what was underneath.

I had acquired the habit of standing near to my canvas, some way from the model. If one paints sight-size there is method in this practice too; but often my figure was larger than sight-size, and I struggled in consequence with difficulties which, had I followed Sargent’s example, I must have avoided. There is a common and mistaken belief that we instinctively feel the right way of doing things. The contrary is true. Take any instrument — the common scythe, or the woodman’s axe; when at first we are shown the correct way of handling such tools, it seems unnatural and awkward. Efficient use has to be painfully acquired. So with brush and pencil. They, too, are tools, and must be correctly handled; and the placing of the canvas near to, or at a given distance from, the subject, so that the sitter and image can be compared together, is an essential factor of representative painting. Painters often deplore the loss of tradition, and speak with regret of the days when artists ground their own colors; but knowledge of the visual methods of the older painters, rather than of their technical practices, seems to me of equal if not greater importance.

The methods of Velasquez and Hals were not unlike Sargent’s; but how Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt painted is unknown to us; for, while they were masters of rhythmical construction, they were able to reproduce, in their studies, the subtle details of eyes and lips, of hands and finger nails, with no loss of breadth. How they achieved an appearance of unity, as seen from a distance, combined with the clear, satisfying rendering of features visible only when close to the model, is a mystery to painters. Sargent had made admirable copies after both Velasquez and Hals, and had closely studied their methods. He could indicate hands and heads and figures with surprising felicity; but he too often failed to reveal the solidity and radiance of form.

But we are apt to forget that each one of us can use only those gifts, great or small, which the gods have given him. It is the use we make of our gifts, not the character of the gifts themselves, which merits praise, or else blame. And no man made fuller or more honorable use of his talents than Sargent.

Yet I never felt quite comfortable in front of his paintings or drawings. I admired and respected, but I never loved. Again and again, feeling my own inability acutely, I have said to myself, ’Sargent would have achieved triumphantly where you have fumbled and failed,’ and have blamed myself for having criticized a man of such evident stature; but I could never overcome a certain hesitation in paying full tribute to Sargent’s paintings, a hesitation which stood in the way of full intimacy.

I felt that something essential was lacking in Sargent . He was like a hungry man with a superb digestion, who need not be too particular what he eats. Sargent’s unappeased appetite for work allowed him to paint everything and anything without selection, anywhere, at any time. It was this uncritical hunger for mere painting which distinguished him from the French and English painters whom he rivaled, and often surpassed, in facility. He accepted all problems set before him with equal zest; it was for him to solve each one successfully, He never relied solely on his facility, but gave all his energies to each task.

I was touched by Sargent’s generous enthusiasm for Manet and Monet, for Rodin and Whistler; for, as I said, I had heard Degas and Whistler speak disparagingly of Sargent as a skillful portrait painter who differed little from the better Salon painters then in fashion. He was allowed to be Carolus Duran’s most capable disciple, but not a markedly personal artist. With the exception of Rodin, I never heard anyone in Paris acknowledge the worth of Sargent’s performance.

Even Helleu, his closest friend, whose work Sargent adulated, regarded him with a patronizing eye — a worthy painter, a dear good fellow, but scarcely an artist.

On the other hand, at the Royal Academy, where, having settled in England, he exhibited regularly, Sargent appeared as a daring innovator. Although he had as many commissions as he could execute, they came chiefly from Americans. In London his warmest admirers were the wealthy Jews. But it would be a mistake to suppose that Sargent preferred the aristocratic to the Jewish type, that he painted Jews because they happened to be his chief clients. On the contrary, he admired and thoroughly enjoyed painting the energetic features of the men and the exotic beauty of the women of Semitic race. He urged me to paint Jews, as being at once the most interesting models and the most reliable patrons. The more conservative English were at first shy of facing the cold light of Sargent’s studio; the absurd legend that he brought out the worst side of his sitters’ characters also helped to keep people away.

There was neither flattery nor satire in his portraits; his problem was to make his work visually convincing. Not for him any short cuts; his integrity was unquestionable. And yet in his brilliant rendering of the men and women who sat to him he seemed to miss something of the mystery of life. I remember how this sense of the dramatic element of good portraiture came on me when looking one day at photographs of Titian’s and Giorgione’s portraits of young men, so proud in their bearing, and from whom death, I suddenly felt, was never far off. But what relation have Sargent’s men and women to the drama of life and death? Sargent rarely succeeded in removing his figures from the model stand, from the Louis XV or XVI chair or settee dear to the new rich; from pearl necklaces and glittering medals, and Worth dresses of velvet and satin. Looking, too, at his out-of-door work, so accidental in composition, at those sparkling paintings of flickering sunlight over mountains and plains, over trees and buildings, I felt as though they had sprung up before him by a sort of magic: feverish, transitory apparitions with no past and no future, which would fade away after he folded up his easel and painting stool.

But this was, after all, the real Sargent; for the qualities I missed in his painting were qualities he did not particularly admire in others. It was not the gravity of Velasquez and Hals that he cared for so much as their perfection of handling. Similarly with his admiration for Manet; it was for Manet’s brilliance of execution that he preferred him to austerer painters like Fantin-Latour and Legros. Cézanne’s work he altogether disliked. Oddly enough, when later I was painting Jews in the East End, he thought I was aiming at too abstract a representation, and wanted me to paint scenes in Petticoat Lane, or the interiors of tailors’ shops, as showing the more intimate side of Jewish life. Yet it was just this lack of intimacy that I missed in his portraits. But then, Sargent himself had little of this intimacy in his own life. His studio was that of a cultivated cosmopolitan, filled with French, Italian, and Spanish furniture and bric-a-brac; he could scarcely be expected to paint people in the middle-class interiors in which Degas, Fantin-Latour, and Cézanne saw their sitters.

But herein Sargent was true, and wisely true, to himself. On the other hand, when he gave up portrait painting to devote himself solely to his Boston decorations, he showed unworldliness and a touching desire to escape from the slavery of the model stand; but his shortcomings were at once revealed. The American element in his nature asserted itself; he approached the scene of the Divine Comedy not with the great Mantuan, not with the noble Giotto, nor yet with the passionate El Greco, but with Edwin Abbey by his side.

Truth to tell, Sargent’s taste and judgment in painting were very unexpected. He was a keen admirer not only of Hals and Velasquez, but also of El Greco and of Tiepolo, and, what was more strange, of the early work of Rossetti. He was an ardent musician. When I was painting with him, he always improvised on the piano while the model was resting. He had many musical friends, chief among them Faure, whom he invited to England to stay with him and took endless trouble to introduce to musical people in London, inviting them to his studio to hear Fauré play his own compositions.

IV

Bernard Shaw I had met soon after I settled in Chelsea. He was then chiefly known as a journalist, at this time writing musical criticism for the World, and as a Fabian closely associated with Sidney Webb. Already he had ardent admirers, and ardent detractors. Roger Fry likened him to Christ. I could n’t see the resemblance; but I admired Shaw for one thing especially — he did not wait until he was famous to behave like a great man. In fact, he had early singled himself out from among his fellows as a remarkable character. He had all the ease and assurance, the endearing right-headedness and wrong-headedness, the overweening outspokenness, that English society recognizes so generously now that the whole world has acclaimed him. But he worked long and hard to be accepted in the position he so candidly assumed. He declared that he missed no opportunity of attending meetings and speaking in opposition to other speakers, no matter how little he knew of their subjects. Thus, by these mental gymnastics, he fortified his natural gift of speech and his mental alertness.

Shaw was a wild man in public, violent, aggressive, and paradoxical; in private he was the instinctive gentleman, ever on the side of the oppressed and unpopular, tender-hearted and generous, though he had little enough in those days to be generous with. He lived with his mother and sister in a flat in Fitzroy Square, fending, I imagine, for them as well as for himself. Although he assumed antagonism to art for art’s sake, and was more associated with Morris and Fabian ideas than with those of Whistler, he was very friendly with all of us, and lent his support to the more adventurous activities of the younger artists and writers.

Considerably older than Beardsley, Max, and myself, he was one of Max’s firmest supporters, and one of the first to realize Beardsley’s genius. To me he was genially encouraging; he was one of my earliest sitters, and I may claim to have been a staunch defender of Shaw at a time when people generally regarded him as little more than a crank or a charlatan. I have been amused at the belated acknowledgment of Shaw’s genius by men who, in the days of which I am writing, would not allow a word in his defense. It is not the rats who desert a sinking ship, but those who so sleekly invade the home-coming one, that I object to so much.

No man has shown less resentment at contempt and hostility than Shaw. He held his head high, and kept his temper and poured out his wit. Every gallant cause has had his support. Ideas were ever to him what the fox is to the hunter — to be pursued through bush, through briar, over hill, down dale, for the joy of the chase. I always felt that Shaw was more interested in the platonic or theoretical aspect of things and of people than in things and people themselves. In my opinion he does n’t see people or things as they are; neither comeliness nor plainness is evident to him; his eyes and ears are attentive to his own vision, to the sound of his own voice. If his vision is not often the artist’s, and if his talk is more like the boxer’s use of a punch ball — hitting this way and that, to left and to right, upward and down — than his bout with a living opponent, it keeps him, as the boxer is kept, in wonderful fettle. No step was ever lighter, no eye fresher, no tongue freer or cleaner than Shaw’s. No decadence in him; he is a figure apart, brilliant, genial, wholesome, a great wit, a gallant foe and a staunch friend, a Swift without bitterness, sharer and castigator of the follies of mankind, whose cap, though of Jaeger, is worn as gayly as motley.

I loved Shaw; he again was of those I could not imagine harboring mean or ignoble thoughts — a true knight without fear and without reproach. Yet many men deemed him a cad, a vulgarian, a dangerous charlatan, while he went his way, head high, body alert, ready to spring at the sight of wrong, injustice, or stupidity. His attacks on the first two might have been overlooked; on the third they were unforgivable — the fellow was not only a busybody, but impertinent.

Shaw had recently left the World to become dramatic critic of the Saturday Review, then owned by Frank Harris. Harris had had an adventurous career — he began life as a cowboy, like Cunninghame-Graham. Later he married a wealthy wife, wrote brilliant short stories, became a personality in London, and gained influence through his ownership of the Fortnightly Review. He was a daring and enlightened editor. After the Fortnightly he acquired the Saturday Review and gathered round him a dazzling group of writers: besides Bernard Shaw, D. S. MacColl, Churton Collins, Cunninghame-Graham, J. F. Runciman, and Max Beerbohm. Harris was a good talker, though as a talker he played what Wilde called ‘the Rugby game.’ He had a rich, deep voice, which rose and swelled like an organ as he charged into the conversation. With ample means, he was able to become a patron of art and literature.

These were Harris’s days of prosperity, when he entertained, usually at the Cafe Royal. I remember especially a dinner he gave there at which Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, Robbie Ross, and I were present. Harris on this occasion monopolized the conversation; even Wilde found it hard to get a word in. Harris told us an endless story, obviously inspired by the Étui de Nacre, while Oscar grew more and more restive; when at last it came to an end, Max said, ‘Now, Frank, Anatole France would have spoiled that story.’ But Harris was n’t thinskinned; he proceeded to tell us of all the great houses he frequented. This was more than Oscar could bear. ‘Yes, dear Frank,’ he exclaimed, ‘we believe you; you have dined in every house in London—once.’ The only time I heard him say an unkind thing.

Another day I was lunching with Max at the Cafe Royal when Harris was sitting near with a lady friend. As we passed his table he called out, twisting his moustaches, ‘You’re getting older, Will! I’m getting younger.’ ‘Well, Harris,’ I replied, ‘we can both do with it.’

V

I found among some notes which I made in 1895 the following account of Swinburne: —

August 10th, 1895
Go to The Pines, Putney. Swinburne gets up as I enter, rather like In on el Johnson in figure, the same chétif body, narrow shoulders, and nervous twitch of the hands, which, however, are strong and fine. A much fresher face than I should have imagined from hearsay, a fine nose, a tiny glazed green eye, and a curiously clear auburn moustache and a beard of a splendid red. How young he looks, notwithstanding his years! He was so nervous that of course I was embarrassed, and. Watts being there, we both talked at him, keeping our eyes off one another. Occasionally I would glance at his profile, less impressive, less ’like’ than his full face.
When at last the sitting began, no sitter ever gave me so much trouble, For, besides always changing his pose, he is so deaf that he could not hear me; and after sitting a short time a nervous restlessness seized on him, which held him the whole time. I felt a beast, sitting there torturing him. Nor did I feel that I could do anything worthy of him. When he saw the drawing he was kind enough to say, ’It must be like, for I see all my family in it.'
While I was drawing he recited a burlesque of Nichols, — ‘The Flea,’ he called it, — and he talked a good deal of recent criticism — a number of newspaper cuttings were strewn over a couch near the window. He speaks with the accent of an Oxford don and with a certain gayety, with gracious and rather old-fashioned manners. He behaved charmingly to old Watts. He had on a new suit of clothes, as though specially for a portrait, which seemed to cause him as much discomfort as sitting still. He was like a schoolboy let out of school when I sail! I would not bother him any longer. He then showed me a number of his treasures — odd views of different scenes, an early Burne-Jones drawing, photographs of people, including a fine one of Rossetti. Watts suggested I should make a drawing of this for Swinburne, but Swinburne asked me if I could make one from a rather poor engraving of George Dyer, Charles Lamb’s friend, one of his heroes. And this of course I promised to do.
Swinburne talked violently against the French, saying he had lost all interest in them since France had become a Republic, as they are always ready to fly at our throats and would crush us at any moment if they could. He praised Baudelaire as a poet, and said he liked Meredith, — as a man, — the same thing that Iveslie Stephen said of Browning one day at Hyde Park Gate.

After I had drawn Swinburne, Watts asked me to make a portrait of himself, and was very tiresome when sitting. He said that while drawing him Rossetti would consult his opinion, as I ought to do, and be guided by him. He was plainly afraid of a too realistic portrait, and his want of faith in my interpretation prevented my finishing the two drawings I began.

VI

I spent most of the summer of 1895 in France, painting landscapes and visiting old friends and old haunts in Paris.

During this visit I made a drawing of Huysmans, whom I had met before, at one of Edmond de Goncourt’s parties at the Grenier. Huysmans, a small, shrunken, nervous man, with a parchment skin, — looking rather like a fonctionnaire, I thought, with his bourgeois collar and tie and provincial clothes, — was then at work on La Cathédrale. He had become absorbed by Catholicism — so absorbed, indeed, that he was soon to retire from the world. He smoked cigarettes one after the other, rolling them incessantly between his quick slender fingers, yellow with nicotine. He asked about George Moore, who was writing about nuns, he had heard, but wondered — for he said that when he last met Moore, Moore did n’t know a Poor Clare from a Sister of Charity.

Going to see Degas, I took some drawings with me, as he had asked to see them. I found a visitor with him, and as Degas looked at my drawings this stranger glanced at them too. Before he left, he turned to me and asked me to come to see him. ‘M. Fantin-Latour,’ said Degas, in explanation. Fantin-Latour, of course! I thought his face seemed familiar. I should have known him through his self-portraits.

I found Fantin in a modest studio, in the rue des Beaux-Arts. The studio walls were covered with canvases, mostly unframed; these were flower and still-life studies, small nudes, interiors, several self-portraits at different ages, many studies and copies after the old masters, including a superb copy of the Marriage at Cana by Paul Veronese, and two large paintings, the Hommage a Delacroix and a portrait of two ladies — his wife and sister-in-law, I found out later.

Fantin lived quietly with his wife, seeing scarcely anyone, occupied with his painting, or pottering over prints and drawings, or else going to the Louvre, where he had passed so much of his life, copying. Everything about him was simple and unpretentious: a few commonplace chairs, a sofa, a small table, and many shabby, ample portfolios ranged against the walls.

Here was just such a studio as Daumier drew and painted. And Fantin himself, stout, baggily dressed, with list slippers on his feet and a green shade over his eyes, looked like one of Daumier’s artists. His talk was quiet and unpretentious; there were no fireworks or sharp wit, as with Whistler or Degas, yet what he said was wise and to the point. I wish I had made notes of his talk; it would have been worth while, for he probably knew more about methods of painting than any other artist living. And he had been associated with and had painted the most gifted men of his time, Manet and Baudelaire — and how many others!

In spite of his remarkable portrait compositions, — one of which, hanging in the Luxembourg, had long been familiar, — no one, he said, ever asked him to paint a portrait. But for his friend Mrs. Edwin Edwards, he would scarcely have been able to continue painting; through Mrs. Edwards he sold many of his flower pieces to English collectors, and this made him feel very friendly toward England. He had a high opinion of Millais — of his earlier work especially.

Fantin had been one of the pioneers of modern painting, but, though he knew his own paintings were out of fashion, I never heard him complain. When Degas and others acquired his Hommage à Delacroix, and offered it to the Louvre, Fantin was quietly pleased. He knew the world and its vanities too well to be elated.

What pleased me most was that Fantin, being a middle-class Frenchman, painted middle-class life. He was of the company of Chardin, Daumier, and Cezanne. In the portraits he painted there were no Coromandel screens or Louis XV settees; they were portraits of ordinary men and women sitting in the rooms where they lived. So, in his still-life paintings, the bottles of wine, the bread, fruit, and knives on the rough linen tablecloths, were what would be found on any French bourgeois table.

I always went to see Verlaine as often as I could. He was obviously far from well, and looked terribly yellow. He was still living with Eugenie Krantz in a single room — a little tidier, I think, than when I last saw them. One day I arrived to find he had gilded all the chairs with cheap bronze paint, and was childishly delighted with the effect. ‘That is how a poet should live,’ he said, ‘with golden furniture,’ and he laughed, half childishly, half cynically. No one ever seemed to visit him; at least I never met any of his old associates there. Only Cazals was faithful still.

As usual, Verlaine was in need of money. He complained, whenever Eugenie was out of the room, that she still robbed him of everything. I had been doing my best to get people in London to publish his poems. Heinemann was very good, taking several for the New Review and paying for them generously. Frank Harris, too, had published some of his poems in the Fortnightly Review. Verlaine complained that these were not always paid for, but this Harris emphatically denied.

In a few days, Verlaine told me, he would be fifty years old. I said we must celebrate the occasion; but the state of Verlaine’s log did not allow of his going out. I spoke to Eugenie and arranged for a little birthday party in Verlaine’s room. She was to get food sent up from a neighboring restaurant. Ray Lankester, who was on a visit to Paris, wanted to meet Verlaine, and I suggested his coming to the birthday party.

We arrived punctually, Ray Lankester carrying a large bouquet of flowers in which a choice bottle of wine was concealed. Eugenie was as amiable as she knew how to be, though her standard of charm was not a high one; she had an uncomfortable way of fawning on people who she thought might be useful. The flowers plus the wine pleased Verlaine’s fancy; he was in the best of spirits during lunch. But the next time I saw him he was depressed and full of misgivings. ‘ Restez sage’ he said to me, ‘take warning from me’; and as he leaned out of the window and looked down on the people in the street below he envied them, saying they were happy — they could still walk. He spoke feelingly of Francois Coppee and Mallarme as the two friends who had always been true to him.

I found saying good-bye a painful business. I did not expect to see him again, and when I spoke with enforced cheerfulness of coming to see him when I returned to Paris I felt that he too knew what was in my mind. The day after I left he sent me a note with a poem, ‘ Anniversaire,’ describing our birthday party. I was touched at his writing and dedicating a poem to me, the more so since I had promised to make him a drawing of the interior of Barnard’s Inn (a drawing he had asked for more than once) to remind him of his last visit to London, a promise I was not able to carry out.

My forebodings were only too true. A few weeks afterward I got a letter from Eugenie Krantz telling me Verlaine was dead. She added that he had kept a reproduction of one of my drawings hung over the bed on which he died. I wrote to inquire for further details, and received the following characteristic letter — the last, I think, I had from Eugenie.

Monsieur, I was very sorry that I did n’t know your address or your friends’, or I should have written to you before now to tell you of the death of this poor M. Paul Verlaine.
I thank you for bothering yourself about me.
You ask me if there is money owing to M. Paul Verlaine in England; yes, Monsieur, they still owe him 250 francs which I should be very glad to have because I am left without a penny. Good-bye, M. Will Rothenstein. Please be sure of my kindest wishes.
EUGÉNIE KRANTZ

Ugly and sordid as much of Verlaine’s life had been, there was something deeply endearing in his nature, something childlike and natural, which touched one’s heart. His figure remains, after thirty-five years, one of the most vivid among those that my memory evokes from a shadowy past.

VII

One morning I got a note from Max telling me of an important change in his life: —

I am so sorry about to-morrow — and hope you won’t be stranded. I have to go to see the Saturdayers to-morrow morning also G.B.S., from whom I had a note this evening asking me to take over his business now — his foot prevents him from going to any theatre, and he is to be moved out of London as soon as possible. So I have to go on the streets of journalism this week. An intellectual prostitute. I hope you won’t pass me by and refuse to draw me for the Juniorum. Any other day will do for me — after Friday.

This was the result of Shaw’s last article in the Saturday Review, ending: ‘The younger generation is knocking at the door; and as I open it there steps sprightly in the incomparable Max. I am off duty for ever and am going to sleep.’ What a charming tribute from the incomparable Shaw! A week later came a note from Max: ‘To-day, for the first, time in my life, I had a printer’s devil waiting for genius to correct its proof— very distinguished.’

This appointment suited Max perfectly. His tastes were modest: a few hansom cabs and telegrams; dinner now and then at Solferino’s; coffee at the Cafe Royal. Since he lived with his mother, his expenses were light; so these Saturday articles gave him ample pocket money. Every Thursday he shut himself up and wrote his weekly review; the rest of the week he was free to work or play.

I loved his room, distempered, as at Oxford, a sky-blue color, and hung with caricatures by Pellegrini. Max rarely left it, for he took no exercise; he kept well without it. True, he would emerge in the evenings to dine at Solferino’s or to visit a music hall, to hear Chevalier or Eugene Stratton or Cissy Loftus. He was fascinated by Cissy Loftus; she was the English counterpart of Yvette Guilbert. One day he wrote: —

If I were not afraid my people might keep it out of the newspapers, I should commit suicide to-morrow. Really I am rather miserable — I know what disappointment is.

In my unregenerate days, I was far too much of an egoist to seek for any pleasure save in the contemplation of myself: taking myself as the standard of perfection, I always found myself quite perfect and never was disappointed. But now I have become a truist and all is changed.

Yesterday I woke dimly in the morning, murmuring to myself, ‘To-night Don Juan is produced and from my stall I shall see my love in the white kirtle of a Haidee.’ I breakfast — and open the paper and find a dastardly postponement till Saturday next, ‘owing to an accident to one of the principal performers.’ Heigho! I suppose there is such a thing as Saturday next — do you think so, Will?

What was the accident? To whom had it happened? I went down to the Gaiety to ask and found that it was not, as I had almost hoped, the Lady Cecilia who had broken her heart for me — but only Mr. Robert Pateman who had sprained his ankle. To Solferino’s I went in solitary wretchedness and tried to forget the gates under a crown of vine leaves — but they only deepened the shadow upon my brow.

VIII

Hardy I had met at the Gosses’, earlier in the year. He had been to the studio once or twice, and I had made several attempts at a portrait. He took a kindly interest in the new series, and suggested someone — though, I thought, with hesitation — who might be included: Lady Jeune; also, more hopefully, George Gissing. He had lately published Jude the Obscure, and was so upset at its reception that he declared he would never write another novel.

The feeling about his picture of Oxford was so strong that he scarcely liked going to the Athenseum. He described how one day while he was sitting quietly reading, unobserved, as he hoped, he was suddenly aware of the menacing figure of a bishop striding toward him. Now he was in for it, he thought. Happily the bishop passed him by; but he was always in fear of being assailed. In future, he said, he would limit himself to writing verse. I cared deeply for his poems — truth to tell, even more for his poems than for his novels, though this was a taste then shared by few people; and I thought the simple drawing made by Hardy himself for the Wessex Poems dramatic and moving.

Hardy resented the constant charge of pessimism made against him. He tried to depict man’s life, its beauty and ugliness, its generosity and meanness. Far from darkening the picture, had he told the truth about village life, no one would have stood it, he said. I loved a thing he told about young trees when first planted — how, the instant their roots come in contact with the ground, they begin to sigh.

He remarked on the expression of the eyes in the drawing I made— he knew the look, he said, for he was often taken for a detective. He had a small dark bilberry eye which he cocked at you unexpectedly. He was so quiet and unassuming that he somehow put me in mind of a dew-pond on the downs.

I took Hardy’s advice and approached George Gissing. I had heard of Gissing from Frederic Harrison, whose sons Gissing had tutored soon after he left Manchester University. I liked him very much — a wistful, sensitive nature, a little saddened, I thought, and perhaps a little lacking in vitality, but with a tender sense of beauty. He had just come back from Italy, full of enthusiasm for the loveliness of the Italian scene; but had met with unexpected sorrow at home on hearing that one of his friends, with whom he had spent some of his happiest hours, had recently come to a tragic end. A man of rare culture, he said of his friend, with strong puritanical inhibitions; yet he had certain inclinations against which he had struggled in vain all his life. On account of these, and feeling he could fight them no longer, he had suddenly shot himself.

Gissing, much more than Hardy, seemed obsessed by the melancholy side of life. He was naturally a man of fastidious tastes, but had never had enough material success to satisfy them. I met him again while I was staying with Sickert at a hotel in Newhaven. Gissing came in looking lonely and depressed. Sickert and I were in our usual outrageous spirits; and I like to think that we enlivened Gissing for one long evening, and sent, him off next day in more cheerful mood.

I asked Mr. Hardy whether he would write a few lines on George Gissing, since he had suggested him as one of the subjects for the English Portraits. He wrote in reply: —

Strange as it may seem, I have not the requisite knowledge either. But I think I can help you to some one who could supply the lines. I send herewith an excellent little ‘appreciation’ of Mr. Gissing’s work by Henry James — and I think if you were to ask him he would shape some of the passages into what you require; or allow you to do it yourself. He could do it in a few minutes if willing; and certainly nobody else could do it so well.

I doubted Henry James’s doing anything in a few minutes. I forget whom I got to write on Gissing; of Henry James (who at this time wore a beard) I made two drawings. Then came Sargent.

While I was drawing Sargent he could n’t bear to remain idle; he puffed and fumed, and directly I had done he insisted on my sitting to him. He made a drawing on transfer paper, which was laid down on the stone by Goulding, six proofs only being pulled. One of these Sargent gave to Helleu, who asked for it, one went to the Print Boom of the British Museum, and two he gave to me. I asked Henry James to write a few lines for the Sargent portrait, and had the following very Jamesian reply: —

BATH HOTEL, BOURNEMOUTH
July 13, 1897
DEAR WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN,
I am afraid I am condemned, in answer to your note, to inflict on your artistic sense more than one shock; therefore let the outrage of this ponderous machinery deaden you a little at the start perhaps to what may follow. I am sorry to say, crudely speaking, that I don’t find myself able to promise you anything in the nature of a text for your characterization of Sargent. Why should not it, this characterization, be complete in itself? I am sure nothing will be wanting to it. At any rate, the ease as it stands with me is fairly simple and expressible: I have written so much and so hyperbolically and so often upon that great man that I scarce feel I have another word to say in public. I must reserve my ecstasies for conversation, at the peril of finding myself convivially silent in the face of future examples. Only the other day, or the other month ago, I sounded the silver trump in an American periodical — I mean on the occasion of his Academy picture. You painters are accustomed to such thunders of applause that the whole preparation for you in these matters is, I know, different. Yet I have thundered myself. After this, how shall I dare to say yes to your still more flattering proposal that I shall lay my own head on the block? You can so easily chop it off to vent any little irritation my impracticability may have caused you. However, please take it as a proof of my complete trust in your magnanimity if I answer: with pleasure — do with me whatever you think I now deserve. Only I fear I shall not be in town with any free day or hour to sit for a goodish while to come. Kindly let the matter stand over till we are gathered together again; but don’t doubt meanwhile how delighted I shall be to see the copy of your series which you are so good as to promise me.
Believe me yours most truly,
HENRY JAMES