CHAPTER XXIX: THE BRITISH ARTISTS. THE RISE. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN

EIGHTY-FOUR TO EIGHTEEN EIGHTY-SIX.

In the autumn of 1884, Whistler joined the Society of British Artists. Years later, when a British Artist was dining with us, Whistler came in. "A delightful evening," he said, towards midnight, the British Artist having gone, "but what was it for the British Artist sitting there, face to face with his late President?" And then, he told us how he became connected with the Society:

"Well, you know, one day at my studio in Chelsea, a deputation arrived--Ayerst Ingram and one or two others. And there they were--and I received them charmingly, of course--and they represented to me that the British Artists' was an old and distinguished Society, possibly as old as the Academy, and maybe older, and they had come to ask me if I would do them the honour of becoming a member. It was only right I should know that the Society's fortunes were at a low ebb, but they wished to put new life into it. I felt the ceremony of the occasion. Whatever the Society was at the moment, it had a past, and they were there with all official authority to pay me a compliment. I accepted the offer with appropriate courtesy. As always, I understood the ceremonial of the occasion--and then, almost as soon as I was made a member I was elected President."

In the summer of 1906 Sir Alfred East, President of the British Artists, and the Council, with the courtesy Whistler would have approved, gave us permission to consult the minute-books. The first mention of Whistler is in the minutes of the half-yearly general meeting, November 21, 1884, held at the Suffolk Street Galleries, when it was proposed "that Mr. Whistler be invited to join the Society as a member. A discussion took place concerning the law of electing Mr. Whistler by ballot, when it was proposed by Mr. Bayliss, seconded by Mr. Cauty, that the law relating to the election of members be suspended." This was carried, and the _Times_ (December 3, 1884) said: "Artistic society was startled by the news that this most wayward, most un-English of painters had found a home among the men of Suffolk Street, of all people in the world."

Whistler had never belonged to any society in England, and had never been asked, though we believe he was a Freemason; at any rate he had a pair of sleeve buttons with masonic emblems--apparently--on them. He was fifty, an age when most men have "arrived" officially, if they "arrive" at all. Up to this moment he had stood apart from every school and group and movement in the country. He was as much a foreigner as when he came, a quarter of a century before, from Paris. He was a puzzle to the people, more American than English in appearance, manners, and standards. His short, slight figure, dark colouring and abundant curls, his vivacity of gesture, his American accent, his gaiety, his sense of honour, his quick resentment of an insult, were foreign and, therefore, to be suspected, and his personality increased the suspicion with which his art was regarded. Recent writers have analysed his work and pointed out where it is American, French, Japanese. But to his contemporaries it did not matter what these tendencies were, the result was not English. His art, in its aims and methods, was different from theirs, to them he seemed in deliberate opposition, ruled by caprice, straining after novelty and notoriety.

When Whistler came to England, art was the Academy, an Academy that had strangled the traditions of art and set up sentiment and anecdote. Wilkie explained the ideal of the nineteenth-century Academician when he said that "to know the taste of the public--to learn what will best please the employer--is, to an artist, the most valuable of all knowledge"; and the Royal Academy has only carried on the canny tradition. The classic machines of Leighton, Tadema, and Poynter appealed to the artless scholar; the idylls of Millais, Marcus Stone, and Leslie to the artless sentimentalist. Watts preached sermons for the artless serious, Stacy Marks raised a laugh in the artless humorist, Herbert and Long edified the artless pious. Every taste was catered to. Everybody could understand, and art had never been so popular in England. The Academy became a social power. As art was the last thing looked for on the walls, so the artist was the last thing looked for in the Academician. The situation is summed up in Whistler's reply to a group of ladies who were praising Leighton:

"He is such a wonderful musician! such a gallant colonel! such a brilliant orator! such a dignified President! such a charming host! such an amazing linguist!" they chorused. "H'm, paints, too, don't he, among his other accomplishments?" said Whistler.

It was an extraordinary state of affairs. "Art," was little more than an excuse for intrigues and trivialities. Men who were thought daring in rebellion and leaders of secessions did not improve matters. The Pre-Raphaelites were absorbed in subject, though it was of another kind, and though they paid greater attention to technique and preached, as reformers always have, a return to Nature. Their insistence upon detail and finish, instead of opening their eyes, closed them more hopelessly by making it a duty to see nothing save unimportant facts, and to copy these like a machine. The exception, Alfred Stevens, who neither stooped to the taste of public or patron, nor confused the artist with the missionary, was as complete a pariah as Whistler, and he died unknown and unrecognised.

The position in France was different. French officialism respected tradition. The art of the academic painters might be frigid, conventional, dull, but it was never petty and trivial, never strove to please by escape from drawing and colour. Gleyre, Ary Scheffer, Couture were the masters Whistler found in Paris. Their successors--Gérôme, Jean-Paul Laurens, Bouguereau, Bonnat--did not altogether throw their dignity as artists to the winds of popularity, or sacrifice it to social ambition. The rebels in France were not actuated by moral or literary motives, but broke away from conservatism. Rebellion sent Holman Hunt to Palestine, Rossetti to mediævalism, Burne-Jones to legend; it kept Courbet at home, for the true was the beautiful and truth was to be found in the life and the people about him. Moreover, the painter was to see these things through, not a microscope, but his eyes. No man who looks upon a broad landscape can count the blades of grass in a field, or the leaves of ivy on a wall, or the stars in the heavens; the eye can take in only the whole, enveloped in atmosphere, bathed in light, shrouded in darkness, all things keeping their places in their planes. While in England the artist was searching the Scriptures and the Encyclopædia for subject, in France he was training his eye to see things as they are and his hand to render them. This preoccupation with Nature, and the study of tone, gave artists new pictorial and technical problems, and subject counted for nothing except as an aid to their right solution. It is curious to contrast the work of the men in France and England of the same generation as Whistler. Fantin-Latour grouped his friends about the portrait of Delacroix, Leighton rearranged a procession of early Florentines carrying the Madonna of Cimabue through his idea of the streets. Manet noted the play of light and colour in the bull-rings of Spain, Tadema rebuilt on his canvas what he thought were the arenas of ancient Rome. Degas chose his models among the washerwomen and ballet-girls of modern Paris, Rossetti borrowing his subjects from Dante.

Whistler, from his first picture, was as preoccupied with the beauty in the "familiar" as his French fellow students. What might have happened had he remained in France, it is idle to discuss. Coming to England he developed in his own way, and this was a way with which English painters had no sympathy. He was so isolated that nothing has been more difficult for the historian of modern art than to place, to classify him. Some authorities have included him among the Realists. His work eventually differed from that of Courbet and Courbet's disciples, but he was always as much a realist as they in his preference for the world in which he lived, and in his study of the relations of the things he found in it. He never wavered, except when he painted the Japanese pictures, and then he was not led astray by anecdote or sentiment, but by the beauty that had drifted from Japan into his house and studio. London, dirty, gloomy, despised by most artists, with its little shops and taverns in the fog-bound streets; the Thames, with its ugly warehouses and gaunt factories in the mist-laden night; the crinolines of the sixties; the clinging, tight draperies of the seventies, became beautiful as he saw them. He made no effort to reform Nature, only reserving his right to select the elements that were beautiful and could be brought together, as notes in music, to create harmony, putting into practice his teaching of _The Ten O'Clock_. He sought colour, mass, not detail. The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to leave out less than a camera, he wanted to put in no more than came within his vision. He turned his back on history and archæology, and filled his canvas with beauty of line and form. And he struggled to perfect his technical methods, to make of them a perfect medium by which to express this beauty, to reconcile what he could see in Nature with what his brush could render. The Pre-Raphaelites laboured over their canvas, inch by inch; he painted his whole picture at once that unity might result. The Academicians lost their way in literary labyrinths; he lingered on the river, learning its secrets, he watched the movement, the pose of people about him. The modern exhibition forced most painters into violent colour and exaggerated action, he made no concession, though he was ready to submit his pictures to the same tests as theirs.

It was inevitable that his English contemporaries could make nothing of him and his work. The Academician saw but emptiness in his paintings. To the Pre-Raphaelites they were slovenly and superficial. Holman Hunt said of him that he knew where to leave off, and was careful in the avoidance of difficulties; Millais thought him "a great power of mischief among young men, a man who had never learnt the grammar of his art." The critics took their cue from the painters, the more willingly because art criticism then meant analysis of the subject of a picture, and there was no subject in Whistler's work to analyse. Yet he never objected to subject. It was only the blind critics and the blind painters of the day who said he did, and their stupidity is still aped. The great pictures for him were Velasquez's _Meniñas_ Franz Hals' _Family_, Tintoretto's _Milky Way_: the greatest subject-pictures in the world. All he objected to was the cheap drivel or sentiment of the painter whose mind or whose audience never rose above Mummie's Darling or the Mustard Pot, the real British school trampled on by Hogarth. The public, following their leaders, were convinced that Whistler's work was empty, slight, trivial, an insult to their intelligence, unless they took it as a jest. Nothing explains the popular conception of him better than the readiness to see eccentricity even in methods which he, "heir to all the ages," had inherited. His long-handled brushes and his manner of placing sitter and canvas were eccentric, though they had been Gainsborough's a century before. To say that a picture was finished from the beginning was no less eccentric, though it was Baudelaire's axiom that the author foresees the last line of his work when he writes the first. It is easier to make than to lose the reputation for eccentricity, fatal to success in a land of conservatism. Whistler saw the Englishmen who had studied in Paris with him laden with honours; Poynter a prosperous painter, Leighton a perfect President, Du Maurier the popular idol of _Punch_, Armstrong a State functionary at South Kensington, while he remained, officially, on the outside, at fifty less honoured than at twenty-five, because, it was said, that he had not realised the promise of his youth.

In one respect his position had changed. His contemporaries did not alter their opinion, but younger artists accepted him and his teaching unquestioningly for a time. Though doubted and mistrusted, he had never been without influence. To look over old reviews and notices of exhibitions is to find references to the effect of his example. In the _Art Journal_ (June 1887), Sir Walter Armstrong traced the growing influence of French on English art to the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867 and to Whistler. But artists of the new generation went further than the admission of his influence; with the enthusiasm of youth, they proclaimed his greatness. He was their master--the one master in England. After his return from Venice, when his fortunes were at their lowest and the public held him in most contempt, this enthusiasm began to make itself heard and felt in the studios and the schools.

The British Artists, uncertain of their future, took desperate remedies. The Society was old, with distinguished chapters in its history. It was formed by one of the first groups who realised the necessity for an association in self-defence against the monopoly of the Academy. It dated back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. With the old Water Colour Society, it was considered only second in rank to the Academy. Its gallery was in Suffolk Street, near enough to the Academy to profit by any overflow of visitors, until the Academy moved from Trafalgar Square to Piccadilly. The old Water Colour Society was more independent, because it is devoted to a branch of art never acknowledged by the Academy, though every Academician tries to sneak in. But the British Artists suffered from this removal, and found a formidable rival in the Grosvenor Gallery. In Whistler, with his following, they seemed to see the man to drag them from the mire into which they had sunk. The older members hesitated--afraid of Whistler, afraid of the Academy, afraid of themselves. But the younger members carried the day.

Whistler worked hard for the Society from his election till his resignation. He attended his first meeting on December 1, 1884, and interested himself immediately in the affairs of the Society, though, according to Mr. Ludovici, this was the last thing the Society expected of him. He promptly invited his President and fellow members to breakfast in Tite Street, and, as promptly, was put on a committee for a smoking concert, a dull and ponderous function. He sent to the Winter Exhibition (1884-85) two pictures, _Arrangement in Black, No. II._, the portrait of Mrs. Louis Huth, not exhibited in London since 1874, and a water-colour, _A Little Red Note, Dordrecht_; in the Summer Exhibition (1885) he showed the _Sarasate_ for the first time. Mr. Cole wrote in his diary:

"_October 19th_ (1884). M. and I went to tea with Whistler to see his fine full-length of Sarasate, the violinist, for next year's Academy."

But whatever his original intention may have been, the _Sarasate_ went to Suffolk Street with several small Notes and Harmonies. If, in electing him, the British Artists hoped to attract attention to their exhibition, they were not disappointed. "The eccentric Mr. Whistler has gone to a neglected little gallery, the British Artists, which he will probably bring into fashion," Mr. (now Sir) Claude Phillips wrote in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_ (July 1885), and this is what happened. The distinction of the _Sarasate_ could not be denied. But in his other work he was pronounced "vastly amusing," the _Pall Mall Gazette_ seizing this occasion to remind him of "Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes' virtuous determination never to be as funny as he could. It is so bad for the young." Soon Whistler proposed that Sunday receptions should be given in the gallery, and that medals should be awarded. He got Mr. Menpes in as a water-colourist, thus establishing distinct sections in the Society, a scheme he carried out in the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, and he suggested that photographs of pictures shown should be sold in the gallery, an idea copied all over the world. For the Winter Exhibition of 1885-86 he had another interesting group, including the _Portrait of Mrs. Cassatt_ and a _Note in Green and Violet_. The _Mrs. Cassatt_ has not been exhibited in England since, and is one of the least known of his portraits. Mr. Cassatt, who was among the few believers in Whistler at this period, came from Paris to London in April 1883, especially to have it painted, and was with Mrs. Cassatt during the sittings at 13 Tite Street. She has vivid memories of the brilliant talk between the two men. It is amusing that Whistler, after having told them the story of _The Peacock Room_, should have himself arranged for them to see it, and that then they heard Leyland's story. Mrs. Cassatt wanted to be painted in an evening gown. Mr. Cassatt preferred her riding habit. "The very thing," said Whistler, and so in her riding habit and tall hat she stands on the canvas. Perhaps it was because of her disappointment that she could not see a likeness in the portrait. Whistler realised this, but, he told her, "After all, it's a Whistler." Mr. Cassatt, punctilious in these matters, paid Whistler for the painting before he returned to America. Two years passed, and still no portrait. Whistler had probably kept it back for the British Artists. Mr. Cassatt at last wrote. They had their reward for the delay. A letter of apologies came from Whistler and was followed by a case, with not only the portrait in it, but _The Chelsea Girl_, a painting as little known, and now reproduced for the first time as far as we have record.

At the British Artists the _Note in Green and Violet_, a small pastel of a nude, created a far greater sensation than the portrait. About a month before the show opened, the late J. C. Horsley, R.A., had read, during a Church Congress, a paper no one would have given a thought to had not Whistler immortalised it. Horsley said:

"If those who talk and write so glibly as to the desirability of artists devoting themselves to the representation of the naked human form, only knew a tithe of the degradation enacted before the model is sufficiently hardened to her shameful calling, they would for ever hold their tongues and pens in supporting the practice. Is not clothedness a distinct type and feature of our Christian faith? All art representations of nakedness are out of harmony with it."

Whistler answered with "one of the little things that Providence sometimes sent him": "_Horsley soit qui mal y pense_," he wrote on a label, and fastened it to the _Note in Green and Violet_. The British Artists were alarmed, for to enter Suffolk Street was not to abandon hope of the Academy. The label was removed, not before it had been seen. The critic of the _Pall Mall_ referred to it as Whistler's "indignant protest against the idea that there is any immorality in the nude." Whistler, who knew when ridicule served better than indignation, wrote: "Art certainly requires no 'indignant protest' against the unseemliness of senility. _Horsley soit qui mal y pense_ is meanwhile a sweet sentiment--why more--and why 'morality'?" But the critic could not understand, and he was discovered one day "walking in Pall Mall with the nude on his arm."

The revenue of the Society had been rapidly decreasing, a deficit of five hundred pounds had to be faced. To meet it Whistler proposed that the luncheon to the Press be discontinued. It was an almost general custom then to feast the critics at press views of picture exhibitions. But in few was the cloth more lavishly spread than at the British Artists', in few were boxes of cigars and whiskies-and-sodas placed so conveniently. The younger critics resented it, the old ones lived for it. Press day, the dreariest in the year at the Royal Academy, was the most delightful at the British Artists', they said. Mr. Sidney Starr tells a story of one, when Whistler had not hung his picture, but only the frame:

"Telegrams were sent imploring the placing of the canvas. But the only answer that came was, 'The Press have ye always with you; feed my lambs.' A smoking-concert followed during the exhibition. At this, one critic said to the Master, 'Your picture is not up to your mark, it is not good this time.' 'You should not say it isn't good; you should say you don't like it, and then, you know, you're perfectly safe; now come and have something you do like, have some whisky,' said Whistler."

In the place of the luncheon, Whistler suggested a Sunday breakfast when members should pay for themselves and their guests. But members were horrified; his motion was lost.

In April 1886, Mr. William Graham's collection came up for auction at Christie's. The sale brought to it the buyers and admirers of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, many of whose pictures Graham had bought. Whistler's _Nocturne in Blue and Silver (Blue and Gold), Old Battersea Bridge_ belonged to him. When it appeared "there was a slight attempt at an ironical cheer, which being mistaken for serious applause, was instantly suppressed by an angry hiss all round," and it was sold for sixty pounds to Mr. R. H. C. Harrison. Whistler acknowledged through the _Observer_ (April 11, 1886), "the distinguished, though I fear unconscious, compliment so publicly paid." Such recognition rarely, he said, came to the painter during his lifetime, and to his friends he spoke of it as an unheard-of success, the first time such a thing had happened. The hisses in their ears, the British Artists were dismayed by his one contribution to the Summer Exhibition of 1886. This was a _Harmony in Blue and Gold_, a full-length of a girl in draperies of blue and green, leaning against a railing and holding a parasol, an arrangement, like the _Six Projects_, uniting classic design with Japanese detail. The draperies were transparent, and to defy Horsley and the British Matron was no part of the British Artists' policy. They were doubtless the more shocked when they read the comments in the Press. The most amusing revelation of British prudery, worth preserving as typical, appeared in the _Court and Society Review_ (June 24, 1886) in a letter, signed "A Country Collector," protesting against the praise of Mr. Malcolm Salaman, who was the art critic of that paper:

"I am invited to gaze at an unfinished, rubbishy sketch of a young woman, who, if she is not naked, ought to be, for she would then be more decent.... The figure is more naked than nude: the colour what there is of it, is distinctly unpleasant. For my part, sir, I will not believe in Mr. Whistler; my daughters have commanded me to admire him--I will _not_ admire him. How they can quietly stare at the ill-painted, sooty-faced young woman in 'blue and gold' passes me. But things are altered now, and my girls gaze with critical calmness and carefully balanced _pince-nez_ on that which would have sent their grandmothers shrieking from the gallery."

And Whistler, he declared, was a "poseur" and the picture "a colossal piece of pyramidal impudence."

Whistler was not represented at the Grosvenor, and at the _Salon_ only by the _Sarasate_, which went afterwards to the "XX" Club in Brussels. His show in 1886 was at Messrs. Dowdeswell's Gallery. They exhibited and published for him the _Set of Twenty-Six Etchings_, twenty-one of the plates done in Venice, the other five in England, the price fifty guineas. With the prints he issued the often-quoted _Propositions_, the first series; the laws, as he defined them, of etching. He said that in etching, as in every other art, the space covered should be in proportion to the means used for covering it, and that the delicacy of the needle demands the smallness of the plate; that the "Remarque," then in vogue, emanated from the amateur; that there should be no margin to receive a "Remarque"; and that the habit of margin also came from the outsider. For a few years these _Propositions_ were accepted by artists. At the present time they are ignored or defied, and the bigger the plate the better pleased is the etcher and his public. Later in the year, in May, Messrs. Dowdeswell arranged in their gallery a second series of _Notes--Harmonies--Nocturnes_. A few were in oil, a few in pencil, but the larger number were pastels and water-colours. They were studies of the nude, impressions of the sea at Dieppe and Dover, St. Ives and Trouville, the little shops of London and Paris, the skies and canals of Holland. Whistler decorated the room in Brown and Gold, choosing the brown paper for the walls, designing the mouldings of the dado. Mr. Walter Dowdeswell has the sketch of the scheme in raw umber, yellow ochre, raw sienna, and white; he has also preserved the brown-and-yellow hangings, and the yellow velarium. On the cover for the mantelpiece, the Butterfly, placed to one side, is without a sting. "Where is the sting?" Mr. Dowdeswell asked. "That," Whistler said, "is in my waistcoat pocket. I am keeping it for the critics." The exhibition was received with mingled praise and blame, and it would not have been a success financially had not Mr. H. S. Theobald, K.C., purchased all that earlier buyers left on Messrs. Dowdeswell's hands.

In the following summer Mr. Burr refused to stand again for the Presidency, and at a General Meeting (June 1, 1886), Whistler was elected. The excitement was intense. Whistler alone was calm and unmoved. Mr. Ingram, a scrutineer, remembers coming for Whistler's vote and being so excited that Whistler tried to reassure him: "Never mind, never mind, you've done your best!" The meeting adjourned to the Hogarth Club for supper. "_J'y suis, j'y reste_," Whistler wired his brother. The comic papers were full of caricatures, the serious papers of astonishment. He was hailed as "President Whistler" by his friends, and denounced by members of the Society as an artist with no claim to be called British. Younger painters rushed to his support, and one French critic, Marcel Roland, prophesied that, "_l'oeuvre de Whistler ne quittera son atelier que pour aller tout droit s'ennuyer à jamais sur les murs des grandes salles du Louvre. La place est marquée entre Paul Véronèse et Vélasquez._" It was suggested by Mr. Malcolm Salaman that "all the rising young painters to whom we must look for the future of British art will flock to the standard of Mr.--why not Sir James--Whistler, rather than to that of Sir Frederick Leighton"--a prophecy fulfilled in the early days of the International, while the question as to whether Whistler would have accepted a knighthood has lately been discussed. He would doubtlessly, could he have done so without losing his American citizenship, but he would not have sold his citizenship for it. Honorary rank and British orders could have been conferred upon him, as they are often upon foreign politicians, social nonentities, or useful financiers without loss of their citizenship. But in British orders, as Lord Melbourne said of the Garter, "there is no damn question of merit about it."

Whistler intended going to America in the fall, but the journey was postponed. He wrote to the _World_ (October 13, 1886), "this is no time for hesitation--one cannot continually disappoint a Continent," and he settled down to the task of directing the fortunes of a Society which looked to him for help, its members divided among themselves in their confidence in him as President.