Chapter 4

His "artistic" make-up of flat-brimmed hat, lemon-colored vest, curls, eyeglass, and beribboned cane sometimes upset the cockney crowd. R.A.M. Stevenson, cousin of Robert Louis, was working in his studio one day when the bell rang violently. He ran to the door just in time to rescue the symphony into which Whistler had turned himself from a growling mob.

"For God's sake, Stevenson," said Whistler, "save me from these howling brutes!"

He went home in a cab with all his trimmings.

* * * * *

Harper Pennington has revealed to us the origin of the "standing-room only" joke. It appears that there was hardly ever any furniture in Whistler's house. He was peculiarly parsimonious in the matter of chairs. This led to a remark of Corny Grain's which became famous.

"Ah, Jimmy! Glad to see you playing to such a full house!" said Dick (Corny) Grain when shaking hands before a Sunday luncheon, while glaring around the studio with his large, protruding eyes, in search of something to sit on.

"What do you mean?" asked Whistler.

"Standing-room only," replied the actor.

* * * * *

Henry Labouchere, who first met Whistler as a boy in Washington in the fifties, when he himself was an attaché of the British Legation, took the credit for bringing Whistler and his wife together. His story was denied by Mrs. Whistler's relatives, but is interesting enough to be recorded.

"I believe," wrote Mr. Labouchere in _Truth_, "I was responsible for his marriage to the widow of Mr. Godwin, the architect. She was a remarkably pretty woman and very agreeable, and both she and he were thorough Bohemians.

"I was dining with them and some others one evening at Earl's Court. They were obviously greatly attracted to each other, and in a vague sort of way they thought of marrying, so I took the matter in hand to bring things to a practical point.

"'Jimmy,' I said, 'will you marry Mrs. Godwin?'

"'Certainly.'

"'Mrs. Godwin,' I said, 'will you marry Jimmy?'

"'Certainly,' she replied.

"'When?' I asked.

"'Oh, some day,' said Whistler.

"'That won't do,' I said. 'We must have a date.'

"So they both agreed that I should choose the day, tell them what church to come to for the ceremony, provide a clergyman, and give the bride away.

"I fixed an early date and got them the chaplain of the House of Commons to perform the ceremony. It took place a few days later. After the ceremony was over we adjourned to Whistler's studio, where he had prepared a banquet. The banquet was on the table, but there were no chairs, so we sat on packing-cases. The happy pair, when I left, had not quite decided whether they would go that evening to Paris or remain in the studio.

"How unpractical they were was shown when I happened to meet the bride the day before the marriage in the street.

"'Don't forget to-morrow,' I said.

"'No,' she replied; 'I am just going to buy my trousseau.'

"'A little late for that, is it not?' I asked.

"'No,' she answered, 'for I am only going to buy a tooth-brush and a new sponge, as one ought to have new ones when one marries.'

"However, there never was a more successful marriage. They adored each other, and lived most happily together, and when she died he was broken-hearted indeed. He never recovered from the loss."

* * * * *

When Frederick Keppel, the American print expert, first called upon the artist at the Tite Street studio, the famous portrait of Sarasate, "black on black," stood at the end of the long corridor that he used to form a vista for proper perspective of his work. Laying his hand on Keppel's shoulder, he said:

"Now, isn't it beautiful?"

"It certainly is," was the reply.

"No," said he; "but isn't it _beautiful_?"

"It is indeed," said Keppel.

This was too mild a form of agreement. Whistler raised his voice to a scream:

"D---n it, man!" he piped. "Isn't it BEAUTIFUL?"

Adopting the emphasis and the exclamation, Mr. Keppel shouted:

"D----n it, it is!"

This was satisfactory.

* * * * *

The proof-sheets of _The Gentle Art_, Whistler version, had just arrived as Mr. Keppel called. "Read them aloud," he commanded, "so I can hear how it sounds."

Mr. Keppel started in, but his elocution was not satisfactory.

"Stop!" Whistler cried. "You are murdering it! Let me read it to you!"

He read about two hours to his own keen delight, but was finally interrupted by a servant announcing, "Lady ----."

"Where is she?" asked the artist.

"In her carriage at the door."

He went on reading until Mr. Keppel suggested that he had forgotten the lady.

"Oh," he said, carelessly, "let her wait! I'm mobbed with these people."

After another quarter-hour he condescended to go down and greet her shivering ladyship.

* * * * *

A little later during this visit a foreign artist called and was pleasantly received. Admiring a small painting, the visitor said:

"Now, that is one of your good ones."

"Don't look at it, dear boy," replied Whistler, airily; "it's not finished."

"Finished!" said the visitor. "Why, it's the most carefully finished picture of yours I've seen."

"Don't look at it," insisted Whistler. "You are doing an injustice to yourself, you are doing an injustice to the picture, and you're doing an injustice to me!"

Then, theatrically:

"Stop! I'll finish it now." With that he picked a very small brush, anointed, its delicate point with paint, and touched the picture in one spot with a speck of pigment.

"Now it's finished!" he exclaimed. "Now you may look at it."

Forgetting his umbrella, the foreign gentleman called at the studio the next day to get it. Whistler was out, but the visitor was much moved to find the "finishing touch" had been carefully wiped off!

* * * * *

Mr. Keppel's personal relations with Whistler ended when, by an idle chance, he sent a copy of _The University of the State of New York Bulletin, Bibliography, No. I, a Guide to the Study of James Abbott McNeill Whistler_, compiled by Walter Greenwood Forsyth and Joseph Le Roy Harrison, to Joseph Pennell, and another to Ernest Brown, in London. Mr. Keppel, arriving in London the day of Mrs. Whistler's funeral, sent a note of condolence, and, receiving a mourning envelope sealed with a black butterfly, opened it expecting a grateful acknowledgment. Instead, it was a fierce, rasping denunciation for the distribution of the pamphlet--a mere catalogue so far as it went.

"I must not let the occasion of your being in town pass," he wrote, "without acknowledging the gratuitous zeal with which you have done your best to further the circulation of one of the most malignant innuendos, in the way of scurrilous half-assertions, it has been my fate hitherto to meet. Mr. Brown very properly sent on to me the pamphlet you had promptly posted to him. Mr. Pennell, also, I find, you had carefully supplied with a copy--and I have no doubt that, with the untiring energy of the 'busy' one, you have smartly placed the pretty work in the hands of many another before this."

* * * * *

Mr. Keppel replied in kind, but Whistler never wrote him directly again. Some business letter of the former requiring a reply, he summoned the house-porter, who wrote under dictation, beginning his crude epistle thus: "Sir:--Mr. Whistler, who is present, orders me to write as follows." Roiled by this beyond measure, Mr. Keppel resorted to verse to relieve his feelings, after which Whistler twice sent verbal messages through friends that if he ever saw him again he would kill him!

* * * * *

John M. Cauldwell, the United States Commissioner for the Department of Art at the Paris Exposition of 1900, sent a circular letter to American artists in the city announcing his arrival and making appointments to discuss the hanging of their work. Whistler received one, asking him to call at "precisely four-thirty" on the afternoon of the following Thursday.

"I congratulate you," he replied. "Personally, I never have been able and never shall be able to be anywhere at precisely four-thirty."

* * * * *

"_Parbleu!_ This is a nice get-up to come and see me in, to be sure!" was his greeting to a newspaper writer who called to tap him on art, clad in a brown jacket, blue trousers, and decked with a red necktie. "I must request you to leave this place instantly! These scribblers, rag-smudges, _incroyable_! Why, it is perfectly preposterous! Did you ever hear such dissonance? His tie is in G major, and I am painting this symphony in E minor. I will have to start it again. Take that roaring tie of yours off, you miserable wretch! Remove it instantly!"

The visitor removed the "roar." "Thank goodness!" said Whistler. "My sight is perfectly deaf!"

"I am so sorry, Mr. Whistler," apologized the scribe.

"Whistler, sir? Whistler? That's not my name!" he cried, in a highly wrought voice.

"I beg your pardon?"

"That is not my name. I say, you don't seem to know your own language. W-h is pronounced Wh-h-h--Wh-h-histler. Bah!"

* * * * *

Max Beerbohm, the caricaturist, was rather clumsy with the Gallic tongue. Whistler used to term it "Max Beerbohm's Limburger French."

The carefully cultivated and insistently displayed white lock played a part in many amusing incidents. Sir Coutts Lindsay's butler whispered to him excitedly one evening: "There's a gent downstairs says he's come to dinner, wot's forgot his necktie and stuck a feather in his 'air."

Another evening, at the theater, an usher said obligingly: "Beg pardon, sir, but there's a white feather in your hair, just on top."

* * * * *

Raging characteristically once when in Paris, he earned this rebuke from Degas, the matchless draughtsman: "Whistler, you talk as if you were a man without talent."

* * * * *

Some one gave Henry Irving a Whistler etching for a Christmas gift. "Of course I was delighted," he said, "for I was a great admirer of the artist as well as a personal friend of the man, but when I started to hang the etching I was puzzled. I couldn't for the life of me tell which was the top and which the bottom. Finally, after reversing the picture half a dozen times and finding it looked equally well either way up, I decided to try an experiment.

"I invited Whistler to dine with me and seated him opposite his picture. During dinner he glanced at it from time to time; between the soup and the fish he put up his eyeglass and squinted at it; between the roast and the dessert he got up and walked over to take a closer view of it; finally, by the time we reached the coffee, he had discovered what the trouble was.

"'Why, Henry,' he said, reproachfully, 'you've hung my etching upside down.'

"'Indeed!' I said. 'Well, my friend, it's taken you an hour to discover it!'" "The man in possession" furnishes an amusing incident in the artist's career.

When the creditors at last landed a bailiff in the painter's Chelsea mansion, he tried to wear his hat in the drawing-room and smoke and spit all over the house. But Whistler, in his own airy way, soon settled that. He went out into the hall, and, selecting a stick from his collection of canes, he daintily knocked the man's hat off. The bailiff was so surprised that he forgot to be angry, and in a day or two he had been trained to wait at table. But though he was now in possession and a favored household servant, he could not obtain his money. So he declared that if he was not paid he would have to put bills up outside the house announcing a sale. And sure enough, a few days after great posters were stuck up all over the front of the house announcing so many tables and so many chairs and so much old Nankin China for sale on a given day. Whistler enjoyed the joke hugely, and hastened to send out invitations to all his friends to a luncheon-party, adding as a postscript: "You will know the house by the bills of sale stuck up outside." And the bailiff proved an admirable butler and the party one of the merriest ever known.

As the guests were rising from the table a lady observed to the host:

"Your servants seem to be extremely attentive, Mr. Whistler, and anxious to please you."

"Oh, yes," replied he; "I assure you they wouldn't leave me!"

But the bailiff stayed on, and the day of sale approached; so Whistler, having been educated at West Point, determined to practise strategy. Some one had told him that a mixture of snuff and beer had the property of sending people off to sleep. So he bought a big parcel of snuff and put the greater part of it into a gigantic tankard of beer, which he sent out to the bailiff in the garden. It was a very hot summer afternoon, and the man eagerly welcomed his refreshment. Whistler was in his studio painting and soon forgot all about him. In the evening he said to his servant, "Where's the man?" The servant replied: "I don't know, sir. I suppose he must have gone away."

The next morning Whistler got up very late and went out into the garden, where he was astonished to see the bailiff sitting in precisely the same position as the day before. The empty tankard was on the table beside him and his pipe had fallen from his hand upon the grass. "Hello, my sleeping beauty!" said Whistler. "Have you been there all night?" But the man made no answer, and all the painter's efforts to rouse him were unavailing. Late in the afternoon, however, he awoke in the most natural way in the world, exclaiming that it was dreadfully hot weather and that he must have been asleep over an hour. Whistler's strategy had been even more successful than he anticipated; the bailiff had slept through the entire day appointed for the sale of the painter's household effects, and was induced to go away in a very bewildered state of mind and with a small payment on account in his pocket.

* * * * *

Lady de Grey went once to the Tite Street studio for luncheon and chided Whistler for his extravagance in having two man servants to wait on the table, when he was always complaining of being hard up.

"Hush!" whispered Whistler. "One of them is the man in possession, and he has consented to act as footman for the day; but he asks me to please settle up as soon as possible, because he too has a man in possession at his own place and wants to get clear of him."

* * * * *

Once at a garden party the rapt hostess rushed up to the artist and exclaimed:

"Oh, Mr. Whistler! Do help me out! I have just bought a magnificent Turner, but Lord----says it isn't genuine, merely a clever imitation. Now I want you to look at it, and if you say it is genuine, as I know you will, I shall be perfectly satisfied."

"My dear lady," replied Whistler, "you expect a good deal of me. The distinction between a real Turner and an imitation Turner is so extremely subtle."

* * * * *

A flippant reply to the secretary of a London club where Whistler's account was past due produced this retort--and the money was paid:

"DEAR MR. WHISTLER:--It is not a Nocturne in Purple or a Symphony in Blue and Gray we are after, but an Arrangement in Gold and Silver."

* * * * *

At an exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts there was a portrait in subdued colors by Whistler, "The Little Lady of Soho." Before this picture Secretary Harrison S. Morris stood one day. "It is beautiful," he observed, "and it reminds me of a story about Whistler--not a very appropriate or poetical one, perhaps. But here it is, anyhow. Whistler one summer day took a walk through the Downs with three or four young men. They stopped at an ale-house and called for beer. Tankards were set before them and they drank. Then Whistler said to the host:

"'My man, would you like to sell a great deal more beer than you do?'

"'Aye, sir, I would that!'

"'Then don't sell so much froth!'"

* * * * *

When a French magazine located his birthplace in Baltimore, and the error traveled far, Whistler took no pains to correct it. "My dear cousin Kate," he said to Mrs. Livermore, "if any one likes to think I was born in Baltimore, why should I deny it? It is of no consequence to me."

* * * * *

A chance American introduced himself by saying: "You know, Mr. Whistler, we were born at Lowell, and at very much the same time. You are sixty-seven and I am sixty-eight."

"Very charming," he replied. "And so you are sixty-eight and were born at Lowell. Most interesting, no doubt, and as you please! But I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell and I refuse to be sixty-seven!"

* * * * *

"Don't be afraid," said Whistler to Howard Paul, who recoiled from the presence of a huge dog because he did not like the look in the animal's eyes. "Look at his tail--how it wags. When a dog wags his tail he's in good humor."

"That may be," replied Paul, "but observe the wild glitter in his eye! I don't know which end to believe."

* * * * *

Comyns Carr met a foreign painter who had been known to breakfast with Whistler at Chelsea and asked him if he had seen him lately.

"Ah no, not now so much," was the reply. "He ask me a little while ago to breakfast, and I go. My cab-fare two shilling, 'arf crown. I arrive. Very nice. Goldfish in bowl. Very pretty. But breakfast! One egg, one toast, no more! Ah, no! My cab-fare back, two shilling, 'arf crown. For me no more!"

* * * * *

A.G. Plowden, the London police magistrate, attended a private view at Grosvenor Gallery. The first person he met was Whistler. He took Plowden, very amiably, to his full-length portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell, where, after sufficiently expressing his admiration, Plowden asked if there were any other pictures he ought to see.

"Other pictures!" cried Whistler, in a tone of horror. "Other pictures! There are no other pictures! You are through!"

* * * * *

Dining at a Paris restaurant in his early days, Mr. Whistler noted the struggle an elderly Englishman was having to make himself understood. He politely volunteered to interpret.

"Sir," said the person addressed, "I assure you, sir, I can give my order without assistance!"

"Can you indeed?" quoth Whistler, airily. "I fancied the contrary just now, when I heard you desire the waiter to bring you a pair of stairs."

* * * * *

Dining, and dining well, at George H. Boughton's house in London, Whistler was obliged to leave the table and go up-stairs to indite a note. In a few moments a great noise revealed the fact that he had fallen down the flight.

"Who is your architect?" he asked, when picked up.

The host told him Norman Shaw.

"I might have known it," said Whistler. "The d----d teetotaler!"

* * * * *

A young artist had brought Whistler to view his maiden effort. The two stood before the canvas for some moments in silence. Finally the junior asked, timidly:

"Don't you think this painting of mine is a--er--a tolerable picture, sir?"

Whistler's eyes twinkled.

"What is your opinion of a tolerable egg?" he asked.

* * * * *

"Irish girls have the most beautiful hands," he once wrote, "with long, slender fingers and delightful articulations. American girls' hands come next; they are a little narrow and thin. The hands of the English girls are red and coarse. The German hand is broad and flat; the Spanish hand is full of big veins. I always use Irish models for the hands, and I think Irish eyes are also the most beautiful."

An American artist studying in Paris, like many others, was too poor to have a perfect wardrobe. Strolling on the Boulevard, he heard a call and, turning, saw Whistler hastening toward him, waving his long black cane.

Rather flattered, he said, "So you recognized me from behind, did you, master?"

"Yes," said Whistler, with a wicked laugh; "I spied you through a hole in your coat."

* * * * *

"Do you think genius is hereditary?" asked an admiring lady one day.

"I can't tell you, madam," Whistler replied. "Heaven has granted me no offspring."

* * * * *

Whistler once took Horne, his framer, to look at one of his paintings at the exhibition.

"Well, Horne," he asked, "what do you think of it?"

"Think of it?" he cried, enthusiastically. "Why, sir, it's perfect--perfect. Mr. ---- has got one just like it."

"What!" said the puzzled Whistler. "A picture like this?"

"Oh," said Horne, "I wasn't talking about the picture; I was talking about the frame."

* * * * *

"Well, Mr. Whistler, how are you getting on?" said an undesirable acquaintance in a Paris restaurant.

"I'm not," said Whistler, emptying his glass. "I'm getting off."

* * * * *

Miss Pamela Smith, a designer in black and white, while a crude draughtsman, had a fine imagination. Whistler was asked to look over some of her work. After careful examination he said:

"She can't draw."

Another look and a gruff "She can't paint" followed.

A third look and a long thought wound up with, "But she doesn't need to."

* * * * *

A lady who rejoiced in "temperament" once said gushingly to Whistler:

"It is wonderful what a difference there is between people."

"Yes," he replied. "There is a great deal of difference between matches, too, if you will only look closely enough, but they all make about the same blaze."

* * * * *

A certain gentleman whose portrait Whistler had painted failed to appreciate the work, and finally remarked, "After all, Mr. Whistler, you can't call that a great work of art."

"Perhaps not," replied the painter, "but then you can't call yourself a great work of nature!"

* * * * *

The artist and a friend strolled along the Thames Embankment one wonderfully starry night. Whistler was in a discontented mood and found fault with everything. The houses were ugly, the river not what it might have been, the lights hard and glaring. The friend pointed out several things that appealed to him as beautiful, but the master would not give in.

"No," he said, "nature is only sometimes beautiful--only sometimes--very, very seldom indeed; and to-night she is, as so often, positively ugly."

"But the stars! Surely they are fine to-night," urged the other.

Whistler looked up at the sky.

"Yes," he drawled, "they're not bad, perhaps, but, my dear fellow, there's too many of them."

A sitter asked him how it was possible to paint in the growing dusk, as he often did. The reply was:

"As the light fades and the shadows deepen, all the petty and exacting details vanish; everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are, in great, strong masses; the buttons are lost, but the garment remains; the garment is lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter's imagination."

* * * * *

Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema, of the classic brush, loved yellow, a color which Whistler had annexed unto himself. Sir Laurence in employing the color in his decorations did not consider himself a plagiarist. He had not seen Whistler's. This defense led to a war of words. Whistler broke out:

"Sly Alma! His Romano-Dutch St. John's wooden eye has never looked upon them, and the fine jaundice of his flesh is none of the jaundice of my yellows. To-de-ma-boom-de-ay!"

* * * * *