CHAPTER XXVIII: THE TEN O'CLOCK. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN EIGHTY-FOUR TO

EIGHTEEN EIGHTY-EIGHT.

Into _The Ten O'Clock_ Whistler put all he had learned of art, all he knew to be unchangeable and everlasting. Mr. W. C. Alexander has told us that when he listened to _The Ten O'Clock_ at Prince's Hall, nothing in it was new to him; he had heard it for years from Whistler over the dinner-table. The only new thing was Whistler's determination to say in public what he had said in private. He was busy with this in the autumn and winter of 1884-85. He would come at strange hours and read a page to Mr. Cole, in whose diary, from October until February, note follows note of his visits:

"_October 24_ (1884). Whistler to dine. We passed the evening writing out his views on Ruskin, art, etc.

"_October 27._ Jimmy to dinner, continuing notes as to himself and art.

"_October 28._ Writing out Whistler's notes for him.

"_October 29._ Jimmy to dine. Writing notes as to his opinions on art matters, and discussing whether to offer them for publication to _English Illustrated Magazine_ edited by Comyns Carr, or to whom?"

Mr. G. A. Holmes, in his Chelsea house, was often roused by the sharp ring and double-knock, followed by Whistler with a page or paragraph for his approval. Mr. Menpes writes that "scores of times--I might almost say hundreds of times--he paced up and down the Embankment at night, repeating to me sentences from the marvellous lecture." A marvellous story. During a few days' illness at his brother's in Wimpole Street, where, when ill, he went, Mrs. Whistler recalled him sitting, propped up by pillows, reading passages to the doctor and herself.

His plan for an article in the _English Illustrated Magazine_ came to nothing. In November 1884 Lord Powerscourt, Mr. Ludovici says in the _Art Journal_ (July 1906), invited Whistler to Ireland to distribute prizes at an art school and speak to the students, and nothing was more appropriate than the notes he had written down.

Mr. Cole records:

"_November 19_ (1884). Whistler called and told us how he was invited to Ireland, where he was sending some of his works, and would lecture in Dublin."

The invitation came from the Dublin Sketching Club, which held its exhibitions in Leinster Hall. Three other Americans--Sargent, Julian Story, and Ralph Curtis--were invited. No such collection of Whistler's work had been seen out of London. Mr. Booth Pearsall, the honorary secretary, sends us this account:

"He was exceedingly generous to a club of strangers, lending them twenty-five of his works. This collection included the _Mother_, _Lady Meux_, _Carlyle_, a number of Nocturnes, and other oils, water-colours, and pastels. The pictures had to be hung together in a group. As I was so interested in them, with Mr. Whistler's permission, I had them photographed. He never asked for rights or commission, but, in the most gracious, generous way, gave us the permission to use the negatives as we liked. The exhibition was hardly opened before the critical music began, and in the papers and in conversation, a regular tempest arose that was highly diverting to Mr. Whistler. He begged me to send him everything said about the exhibition, and his letters show he quite enjoyed all the ferment. The whole of Dublin was convulsed, and many went to Molesworth Street to see the exhibition who rarely went to see anything of the kind. Then a terrible convulsion took place in the club: a group of members we had admitted, who photographed, got together, and drew up resolutions, that never again should such pictures be exhibited. None of these men could even paint. The talent of the club replied by having Mr. Whistler elected as hon. member, and it was carried, despite intense resistance. I took an active part in all this. It was with a view to helping Mr. Whistler that I did my best to have his _Ten O'Clock_ given in Dublin. He was at first disposed to come over, but other matters prevented, and the matter dropped. During the time of the exhibition, I tried my utmost to sell the pictures, and an offer was made by a friend to purchase the _Mother_ and the _Carlyle_, which seemed to promise well, but ultimately stopped. I did induce the friend to purchase _Piccadilly_, which had been No. 9, _Nocturne in Grey and Gold--Piccadilly_ (water-colour), in his exhibition in Bond Street that May [Dowdeswell's]. He was very much pleased indeed, and sent the Right Hon. Jonathan Hogg, P.C., a receipt, greatly to Mr. Hogg's amusement, for an impression was rife that he never did attend to business. I know from friends, who knew Mr. Whistler, how much pleased he was, not only with the purchase of his pictures, but with the commotion that the exhibition caused."

Whistler did not give up the idea of a lecture. Archibald Forbes heard him read, was impressed, and introduced him to Mrs. D'Oyly Carte. She had managed a lecture tour for Forbes, now she agreed to arrange an evening for Whistler. She told us of his attention to detail. "The idea was absolutely his," she wrote us, "and all I did was to see to the business arrangements. You can imagine how enthusiastic he was over it all, and how he made one enthusiastic too." She was about to produce _The Mikado_, and, sure that he would find her in her office at the Savoy Theatre, he would appear there every evening to talk things over, or would send Mr. Walter Sickert with a message. Whistler delighted in her office, a tiny room lit by a lamp on her desk, making strange effects, but his only records of his many visits are in the etchings, _Savoy Scaffolding_ and _Miss Lenoir_, Mrs. D'Oyly Carte's name before her marriage. Prince's Hall was taken. Whistler suggested the hour. People were not to rush to him from dinner as to the theatre; therefore ten was as early as one could expect them, and the hour gave the name--_The Ten O'Clock_. He designed the ticket, he had it enlarged into a poster, he chose the offices where tickets should be sold. There was a rehearsal at Prince's Hall on February 19 (1885), Mrs. D'Oyly Carte and some of the Followers sitting in front to tell him if his voice carried. Whistler had his lecture by heart, his delivery was excellent, he needed no coaching, only an occasional warning to raise his voice. It was because he feared his voice would not carry that he gave his nightly rehearsals on the Embankment, Mr. Menpes says.

On February 20, 1885, the hall was crowded. Reporters expressed the general feeling when they wondered whether "the eccentric artist was going to sketch, to pose, to sing, or to rhapsodise," and were frankly astonished when the "amiable eccentric" chose to appear simply as "a jaunty, unabashed, composed, and self-satisfied gentleman, armed with an opera hat and an eye-glass." Others were amazed to see him "attired in faultless evening dress." The Followers compared the figure in black against the black background to the _Sarasate_, and they recall his hat carefully placed on the table and the long cane as carefully stood against the wall. Oscar Wilde called him "a miniature Mephistopheles mocking the majority." The unprejudiced saw the dignity of his presence and felt the truth and beauty of his words. Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt writes us:

"It is always a delight to remember that actually once Mr. Whistler was really shy. Those who had the pleasure of hearing the first _Ten O'Clock_ remember that when he came before his puzzled and distinguished audience there were a few minutes of very palpable stage-fright."

He had notes, but he seldom referred to them. He held his audience from the first, and Mrs. D'Oyly Carte recalled the hush in the hall when he came to his description of London transfigured, a fairyland in the night. "I went to laugh and I stayed to praise," is the late Lewis F. Day's account to us, and others were generous enough to make the same admission. Whistler forced his audience to listen because he spoke with conviction. _The Ten O'Clock_ was the statement of truths which his contemporaries were doing their best to forget. When we read it to-day, our surprise is that things so obvious needed saying. Yet the need exists to-day more than ever. Almost every one of Whistler's propositions and statements has been traduced or ignored by critics, who are incapable of leading thought or are dealers in disguise, and painters compare their puny selves and petty financial scrapes to Whistler's magnificent efforts and complete success in his battles for art and his reputation.

To this lecture we owe the most interesting profession of artistic faith ever made by an artist. At the time it was given there was a reaction, outside the Academy, against the anecdote and sentiment of Victorian art. Ruskin through his books, the Pre-Raphaelites through their pictures, had spread the doctrine that art was a question of ethics and industry. Pater preached that it belonged to the past, William Morris taught that it sprang from the people and to the people must return. Strange, sad-coloured creatures clad themselves in strange, sad-coloured garments and admired each other. Many besides Oscar Wilde profitably peddled in the provinces what they prigged or picked up; artists proclaimed the political importance of art; parsons discovered in it a new salvation. "Art was upon the town," as Whistler said. But ethics and business, fashion and socialism had captured it. _The Ten O'Clock_ was a protest against the crimes committed in the name of art, against the belief that art belonged to the past or concerned the people, that its object was to teach or to elevate. "Art and Joy go together," he said, the world's masters were never reformers, never missionaries, but, content with their surroundings, found beauty everywhere. There was no great past, no mean present, for art, no drawing of lines between the marbles of the Greek and the fans and broideries of Japan. There was no artistic period, no art-loving people. Art happened, and, in a few eloquent words, he told the history of its happening and the coming of the cheap and tawdry, when the taste of the tradesman supplanted the science of the artist, and the multitude rejoiced. Art is a science--the science by which the artist picks and chooses and groups the elements contained in Nature, that beauty may result. For "Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong." He has been so frequently misunderstood that it may be well to emphasise the meaning of these two assertions, the rock upon which his faith was founded. Art happens because the artist may happen anywhere at any time; art is a science not because painters maintain that it is concerned with laws of light or chemistry of colours or scientific problems, but because it is exact in its methods and in its results. The artist can leave no more to chance than the chemist or the botanist or the biologist. Knowledge may and does increase and develop, but the laws of art are unalterable. Because art is a science the critic who is not an artist speaks without authority and would prize a picture as a "hieroglyph or symbol of story," or for anything save the painter's poetry which is the reason for its existence, "the amazing invention that shall have put form and colour into such perfect harmony, that exquisiteness is the result." The conditions of art are degraded by these "middlemen," the critics, and by the foolish who would go back because the thumb of the mountebank jerked the other way. He laughed at the pretence of the State as fosterer of art--art that roams as she will, from the builders of the Parthenon to the opium-eaters of Nankin, from the Master at Madrid to Hokusai at the foot of Fusiyama. His denial of an artistic period or an art-loving people was his defence of art against those who would bound it by dates and confine it within topographical limits. He meant, not that a certain period might not produce artists and people to appreciate them, but that art is independent of time and place, "seeking and finding the beautiful in all conditions and in all times, as did her high priest, Rembrandt, when he saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks.

"As did Tintoret and Paul Veronese, among the Venetians, while not halting to change the brocaded silks for the classic draperies of Athens.

"As did, at the Court of Philip, Velasquez, whose Infantas, clad in inæsthetic hoops, are, as works of Art, of the same quality as the Elgin Marbles."

As did, he might have added, Whistler, during the reign of Victoria, in his portraits and Nocturnes which have carried on the art of the world.

His argument was clear and his facts, misunderstood, are becoming the _clichés_ of this generation. Critics, photographers, even Royal Academicians have appropriated the truths of _The Ten O'Clock_, for strange things are happening to the memory of the Idle Apprentice. He made his points wittily; he chose his words and rounded his sentences with the feeling for the beautiful that ruled his painting. _The Ten O'Clock_ has passed into literature. Those Sunday wrestlings with Scripture in Lowell, that getting of the Psalms by heart at Stonington developed a style the literary artist may envy. This style in _Art and Art Critics_ had its roughness. He pruned and chastened it in his letters to the papers, devoting infinite thought and trouble to them, for he, more than most men, believed that whatever he had to do was worth doing with all his might. He would write and rewrite them, and drive editors mad by coming at the busiest hour to correct the proof, working over it an hour or more, and then returning to change a word or a comma, while press and printers waited, and he got so excited once he forgot his eye-glass--and the editor stole it, and, of course, later lost it. In his correspondence he was as scrupulous, and we have known him make a rough draft of a letter to his bootmaker in Paris, and ask us to dictate it to him while he wrote his fair copy, as a final touch addressing it to M. ----, _Maître Bottier_. In _The Ten O'Clock_ he brought his style to perfection. His philosophy, based on the eternal truths of art, was expressed with the beauty that endures for all time.

The critics treated Whistler's lecture as they treated his exhibitions. The _Daily News_ was almost alone in owning that its quality was a surprise. The _Times_ had the country with it when it said that "the audience, hoping for an hour's amusement from the eccentric genius of the artist, were not disappointed." "The eccentric freak of an amiable, humorous, and accomplished gentleman," was the _Daily Telegraph's_ opinion. Oscar Wilde, in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, was shocked that an artist should talk of art, and was unwilling to accept the fact that only a painter is a judge of painting. This was natural, for as an authority on art Wilde had made himself ridiculous. Nor could he assent to much that Whistler said, for, as a lecturer, he had been a perambulating advertisement for the æsthetic movement, against which _The Ten O'Clock_ was a protest. But he was more generous than other critics in acknowledging the beauty of the lecture and the earnestness of the lecturer, though he could not finish his notice without one parting shot at the man whose target he had often been: "that he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting is my opinion. And I may add that, in this opinion, Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs." This was not the sort of thing Whistler could pass over. His answer led to a correspondence which made another chapter in _The Gentle Art_.

Whistler repeated _The Ten O'Clock_ several times; early in March before the British Artists, and later in the same month (the 24th) before the University Art Society at Cambridge, where he spent the night with Sir Sidney Colvin, who writes us, "beyond the mere fact that Whistler dined with me in Hall and had some chat there with Prince Edward--an amiable youth who was a little scared at the idea of having to talk art (of which he was blankly ignorant) but whom Whistler soon put at his ease; I have no precise recollection of what passed." What a pity!

On April 30 he gave his lecture at Oxford. Mr. Sidney Starr "went down with Whistler and his brother, 'Doctor Willie,' to the Mitre. The lecture hall was small, with primitive benches, and the audience was small. The lecture was delivered impressively, but lacking the original emphasis and sparkle. Whistler hated to do anything twice over, and this was the fourth time."

The fifth time was about the same date, at the Royal Academy Students' Club in Golden Square, an unexplained accident, and the sixth at the Fine Art Society's. Dr. Moncure Conway wrote us a year before his death that he heard _The Ten O'Clock_ at Lady Jeune's, but Lady Jeune does not recollect it. Whistler we are sure would have remembered and recorded it. There was a suggestion, which came to nothing, of taking it on an American tour and to Paris. It was heard twice more in London, once at the Grosvenor Gallery in February 1888. Val Prinsep recalled Whistler's "pressing invitation" for him and Leighton to attend:

"During the time he was president of the British Artists, he and the other heads of art sometimes were asked to dine by our President (Leighton). 'Rather late to ask _me_, don't you think?' Whistler remarked. After dinner, he pressed Leighton and me to come to his lecture, which was to be delivered a few days after. 'What's the use of me coming?' Leighton said sadly. 'You know I should not agree with what you said, my dear Whistler!' 'Oh,' cried Whistler, 'come all the same; nobody takes me seriously, don't you know!'"

It was heard for the last time three years later (1891) at the Chelsea Arts Club, which had just started and proposed to hold lectures and discussions; it now gives fancy-dress balls and boxing matches. Before the club found a home it was suggested that the first of these meetings should be at the Cadogan Pier Hotel, and Whistler was invited to read _The Ten O'Clock_, but his answer was, "No, gentlemen, let us go to no beer hotel," and _The Ten O'Clock_ was put off until the clubhouse in the King's Road was opened.

_The Ten O'Clock_, originally set up by Mr. Way, was published by Messrs. Chatto and Windus in the spring of 1888. It had much the same reception when it was printed as when it was delivered. The only criticism Whistler took seriously was an article by Swinburne in the _Fortnightly Review_ for June 1888.

Swinburne objected to Whistler's praise of Japanese art, to his rigid line between art and literature, to his incursion as "brilliant amateur" into the region of letters, to his denial of the possibility of an artistic period or an art-loving people, and to much else besides. All this might have passed, but Swinburne went further. He questioned the seriousness of Whistler. He twisted Whistler's meaning to suit his weighty humour, and then, in a surprising vein of insolence, re-echoed the popular verdict. The witty tongue must be thrust into the smiling cheek, he thought, when Whistler wrote, "Art and Joy go together," which meant, according to Swinburne, that tragic art is not art at all.

"'Arter that, let's have a glass of wine,' said a famous countryman of Mr. Whistler's, on the memorable occasion when he was impelled to address his friend Mr. Brick in the immortal words, 'keep cool, Jefferson, don't bust.' The admonition may not improbably be required by the majority of readers who come suddenly and unawares upon this transcendent and pyramidal pleasantry. The laughing muse of the lecturer, '_quam Focus circumvolat_,' must have glanced round in expectation of the general appeal, 'After that, let us take breath.' And having done so, they must have remembered that they were not in a serious world; that they were in the fairyland of fans, in the paradise of pipkins, in the limbo of blue china, screens, pots, plates, jars, joss-houses, and all the fortuitous frippery of Fusiyama."

This is quoted as an example of Swinburnian humour. The rest of the article is offensive and ridiculous--the brilliant poet but ponderous prose writer trying to be funny--with references to the "jester of genius," to the "tumbler or clown," to the "gospel of the grin." It was this that hurt--that Swinburne, the poet, "also misunderstood," could laugh with the crowd at the "eccentricity" and levity of Whistler. Swinburne's criticism was easy to answer, and was answered in two of the comments printed, with extracts from the article, in _The Gentle Art_. "That tragic art is not art at all" is, Whistler wrote, Swinburne's "own inconsequence," and this _Reflection_ appears on the opposite margin:

"Is not, then, the funeral hymn a gladness to the singer, if the verse be beautiful?

"Certainly the funeral monument, to be worthy the Nation's sorrow buried beneath it, must first be a joy to the sculptor who designed it.

"The Bard's reasoning is of the People. The Tragedy is _theirs_. As one of them the _man_ may weep--yet will the artist rejoice, for to him is not 'a thing of beauty a joy for ever'?"

To the _World_ Whistler wrote the letter called "Freeing a Last Friend" in _The Gentle Art_. It is short, the sting in the concluding paragraph:

"Thank you, my dear! I have lost a _confrère_; but then, I have gained an acquaintance--one Algernon Swinburne--'outsider'--Putney."

The letter was sent to Swinburne before it appeared in the _World_. We have been told that it was received at Putney one Sunday morning when Mr. Watts-Dunton was to breakfast with Whistler. Suspecting that the letter might not be friendly, Mr. Watts-Dunton took it, unopened, with him to Chelsea and begged Whistler to withdraw it. Whistler refused. Mr. Watts-Dunton left the house without breakfasting, and the same day the letter was delivered to Swinburne, who, after reading it, pale with rage, swore that never again would he speak to Whistler. As a result, Mr. Watts-Dunton, we believe, was at pains to avoid Whistler, fearful of a rupture with him. Mr. Meredith had discovered years before that the springs in Whistler were prompt for the challenge, and it cannot be denied that he had reason to see a challenge in Swinburne's article. How much it hurt he did not conceal in _The Gentle Art_, where the extracts from Swinburne are followed immediately by _Et tu, Brute_, and there is nothing more dignified, almost pathetic, in the volume:

"... Cannot the man who wrote _Atalanta_, and the _Ballads Beautiful_--can he not be content to spend his life with _his_ work, which should be his love, and has for him no misleading doubt and darkness, that he should so stray about blindly in his brother's flower beds and bruise himself!...

"Who are you deserting your Muse, that you should insult my Goddess with familiarity, and the manners of approach common to the reasoners in the market-place? 'Hearken to me,' you cry, 'and I will point out how this man, who has passed his life in her worship, is a tumbler and a clown of the booths, how he who has produced that which I fain must acknowledge, is a jester in the ring!'

"Do we not speak the same language? Are we strangers, then, or, in our Father's house are there so many mansions that you lose your way, my brother, and cannot recognise your kin?...

"You have been misled, you have mistaken the pale demeanour and joined hands for an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual earnestness. For you, these are the serious ones, and, for them, you others are the serious matter. Their joke is their work. For me--why should I refuse myself the grim joy of this grotesque tragedy--and, with them now, you are all my joke!"

And Swinburne, in pitiful spite, we have been told, burned Whistler's letters, and tried to sell _La Mère Gérard_ which Whistler had given him. Later, Mr. Watts-Dunton is said to have stated that Whistler asked Swinburne to write the article, and also that he tried to make peace between them.