Nights Part 6

I like to insist upon his simplicity because people now, who judge him by his drawings, would so much rather insist upon his perversity and his affectation. How can you reconcile that sort of thing with simplicity?

They will ask, pointing to drawings of little mocking satyrs and twisted dwarfs and grotesques and extravagant forms and leering faces and a suggestion of one can hardly say what. But it might as well be asked why the mediaeval artist delighted to carve homely, familiar scenes and incidents, and worse, in the holiest places, to lavish his ingenuity upon the demons and devils above the doors leading into his great churches; why a philosopher like Rabelais chose to express the wisest thought in the most indecent fooling; why every genius does not look out upon life and the world with the same eyes and find the same method to record what he sees. Some men can only marvel with Louis Stevenson at the wide contrast between the "prim obliterated polite face of life" and its "orgiastic foundations"; others are only reconciled to it by the humour in the contrast or by the pity invoked by its victims. What makes the genius is just the fact that he looks out upon life, that he feels, that he uses his eyes, in his own way; also, that he invents his own methods of expression. Beardsley saw the satire of life, he loved the grotesque which has so gone out of date in our matter-of-fact day that we almost forget what it means, and no doubt disease gave a morbid twist to his vision and imagination. But, above all, he was young, splendidly young: young when he began work, young when he finished work. He had the curiosity as to the world and everything in it that is the divine right of youth, and he had the gaiety, the exuberance, the flamboyancy, the fun of the youth destined to do and to triumph. Already, in his later work, are signs of the pa.s.sing of the first youthful stage of his art.

It is suggestive to contrast the conventional landscapes with the grinning little monstrosities in some of the ill.u.s.trations for the _Rape of the Lock_; the few drawings for his _Volpone_ have a dignity he had not hitherto achieved.

n.o.body can be surprised if some of the gaiety and exuberance and fun got no less into his manner towards the people whose habit is to shield their eyes with the spectacles of convention. Beardsley had a keen sense of humour that helped him to s.n.a.t.c.h all the joy there is in the old, time-honoured, youthful game of getting on the nerves of established respectability. Naturally, so Robert Ross, his friend, has said of him, "he possessed what is _called_ an artificial manner"; that is, his manner was called affected, as was his art, because it wasn't exactly like everybody else's. I have never yet come across the genius whose manner was exactly like everybody else's, and shyness, self-consciousness, counted for something in his, at least at the start. He had only to exaggerate this manner, or mannerism, to set London talking. It was the easier because rumours quickly began to go about of the darkened room in which he worked, of his turning night into day and day into night like Huysmans's hero, and of this or of that strange habit or taste, until people began to see all sorts of things in him that weren't there, just as they read all sorts of things into his drawings that he never put into them, always seeking what they were determined to find. To many there was uncanniness in the very extent of his knowledge, in his wide reading, in his mastery of more than one art, for, if he had not been an artist, he most a.s.suredly would have been a musician or a writer. Added to all this, was the abnormal notice he attracted almost at once, the diligence with which he was imitated and parodied and the rapidity with which a Beardsley type leaped into fashion.

Of course Beardsley enjoyed it. What youth of his age would not have enjoyed the excitement of such a success? It would have been morbid at his age not to enjoy it. He never seemed to me more simply himself than when he was relating his adventures and laughing at them with all the fresh, gay laughter of the boy--the wonderful boy--he was. Arthur Symons wrote of him, I have forgotten where, that he admired himself enormously. I should say that he was amused by himself enormously and was quite ready to pose and to bewilder for the sake of the amus.e.m.e.nt it brought him. He was never spoiled nor misled by either his fame or his notoriety.

It was so Beardsley's habit to consult J. that he would have asked advice, if Harland had not, for _The Yellow Book_ which went through several stages of its preliminary planning in the old Buckingham Street chambers. Among the vivid memories of our Thursday nights one is of Harland taking J. apart for long, intimate discussions in a corner of the studio, and another of Beardsley taking him off for confidences as intimate and long, and my impression in looking back, though I may be mistaken, is that each had his personal little scheme for a journal of his own before he decided to share it with the other. It was characteristic of the friendliness of both that they should have insisted upon J. figuring in the first number. As vivid in my memory is the warm spring morning when Beardsley, his face beaming with joy, called to give me an early copy of this first number, with a little inscription from him on the fly-leaf--I have just taken down the volume from the near book shelf--"To Mrs. Pennell from Aubrey Beardsley" I read, as commonplace an inscription as ever artist or author wrote, but, reading it, I see as if it were yesterday the sunlit Buckingham Street room where I used to work, William Penn curled up on my desk, and, coming in the door, the radiant youth with the gay-covered book in his hands.

And there followed the dinner--the amazing dinner as unlike the usual formal dinner of inauguration as could be. It was given in an upper room of the Hotel d'Italie in Old Compton Street and was as free of ceremony as our Thursday nights. The men were in dress suits or tweeds as they chose, the women in evening or tailor gowns according to their convenience. I have an impression that more people came than were expected and that it was all the waiters could do to serve them. I know I was much more concerned with my discomfort to find that Harland and Beardsley, for the first time in my experience, had forgotten how to talk. Everybody else was talking. I can still see the animated faces and hear the animated voices of Mrs. Harland and John Oliver Hobbes and Menie Muriel Dowie and Kenneth Grahame and George Moore and John Lane and Max Beerbohm, and all the brand-new writers prepared to shock, or to "uplift," or to pull down old altars and set up new ones, or any other of the fine things that were to make the _Yellow Book_ a force and famous. But also I can still feel the heavy, unnatural silence of the two editors from which I was the chief sufferer, to me having fallen the honour of sitting in the centre of the high table between them. J.

was away and, in his absence, I was distinguished by this mark of Beardsley's appreciation and Harland's friendliness. I was greatly flattered, but less entertained. They were both as nervous as debutantes at a first party. Shrinking from the shadow cast before by their coming speeches, neither of them had as much as a word to throw me. Nor could they concentrate their distracted thoughts upon the _menu_--plate after plate was taken away untouched, while I kept on emptying mine in self-defence, to pa.s.s the time, wondering if, in my role of the _Pall Mall's_ "greedy Autolycus," my friends would now convict me of the sin of public eating as well as what they had been pleased to pretend was my habit of "private eating," for not otherwise, they would a.s.sure me, could they account for the unfailing flamboyancy of my weekly article on cookery. Seated between the two men, in their hours of ease when they were not editors, my trouble would have been to listen to both at the same moment and to get a word in edgewise. However, when the speeches were over the strain was relaxed. The evening ended in the accustomed floods of talk;--on the way from the Hotel d'Italie; at the Bodley Head, John Lane's new premises in the Albany to which he took us all that we might see the place from which the _Yellow Book_ was to be published; round a little table with a red-and-white checked cover in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Monico, the company now reduced to Harland and Mrs.

Harland, Beardsley, Max Beerbohm and two or three others whose faces have grown dim in my memory, everybody as unwilling to break up the meeting as on Thursday nights in our Buckingham Street rooms. And with these ceremonies the _Yellow Book_ was launched into life.

I am not sure what the _Yellow Book_ means to others--to those others who buy it now in the thirteen volumes of the new edition and prize it as a strange record of a strange period, from which they feel as far removed as we felt from the Sixties. But to me, the bright yellow-bound volumes mean youth, gay, irresponsible, credulous, hopeful youth, and Thursday night at Buckingham Street in full swing. To be sure the _Yellow Book_ was never so young as it was planned to be. It did not represent only _les Jeunes_, who would have kept it all to themselves in their first mad, exuberant, reckless springtime. But they were not strong enough to stand alone, as _les Jeunes_ seldom are, or have been through the ages. It was more original in its art than in its literature. Some of the youngest writers were "discoveries" of Henley's, while some who actually were "discovered" by the _Yellow Book_ have faded out of sight. Many were men of name and fame well established.

Hamerton, almost at the end of his career, Henry James in the full splendour of his maturity, Edmund Gosse with his reputation already a.s.sured, were as welcome as the youngest of the young men and women who had never printed a line before. So identified with "this pa.s.sage of literary history"--in his words--was Henry James that he has recorded the preliminary visit of "a young friend [Harland of course], a Kensington neighbour and an ardent man of letters," with "a young friend of his own," in whom there is no mistaking Beardsley, "to bespeak my interest for a periodical about to take birth in his hands, on the most original 'lines' and with the happiest omen." But there was youth in this readiness for hero-worship--youth in this tribute to the older men whose years could not dim the brilliance nor lessen the power of their work in the eyes of the new generation--the fragrance of youth exudes from the pages of the _Yellow Book_ as I turn them over again, in places the fragrance of infancy, the young contributors so young as to seem scarcely out of their swaddling clothes. At the time the energy and zest put into it had an equal savour of youth. And altogether it gave us all a great deal to talk about, so that I see in it now a sort of link to join on Thursday nights the different groups from their opposing corners, supplying to writers and artists one subject of the same interest to both. It even opened the door to the architects, one of whom went so far as to neglect architecture and to emulate Ibsen in a play.

The last thing I foresaw for the _Yellow Book_ was a speedy end or, for the matter of that, any end at all, so overflowing was it with the spirit of youth and energy, war and enthusiasm. But the end came surprisingly soon. To remind me, were I in danger of forgetting, another book stands on our shelves close to the First Volume of the _Yellow Book_:--the First Volume of the _Savoy_, on its fly-leaf again Beardsley's inscription simple as himself, "Mrs. Pennell, with kindest regards from Aubrey Beardsley," and only a little less than two years between the dates of the two. And the beginning of the _Savoy_ meant the end of the _Yellow Book_, whose life was short after Beardsley left it.

Why he left it has nothing to do with the story of our Thursday nights, when no obstacle, great or small, would have been put in its way by us who held youth and energy, war and enthusiasm above most things in demand and honour. But I question if the time has come for the full telling of the story, wherever or with whom the blame may lie. That an objection was raised to Beardsley's presence in the _Yellow Book_, though without Beardsley there would have been no _Yellow Book_, is known and has been told in print, the reason being that Victorian sham prudery and respectability had not been totally wiped out for all the hard fighting of the Fighting Nineties. Beardsley was not slain, he was not defeated, at once he reappeared on the battle-field with the _Savoy_, Arthur Symons his fellow editor. But by now the enemy never yet conquered on this earth held him in deadly grip, and the fight he had to fight sent him from London to Bournemouth, to Saint-Germain, to Dieppe, to Mentone in search of health. He was the youngest of that old Thursday night crowd and he was the first to go, and the _Savoy_ went with him, and before he had gone our Thursday nights were already but a landmark in memory, so quickly does the flame of youth burn out.

VII

By another of our happy chances Phil May came as a.s.siduously on our Thursday nights as Beardsley, and they were two of the artists, though their art was as the poles apart, who had most influence on the black-and-white of the Nineties--it will be seen from this that I refrain from saying what I think of J. and his influence, but it is considered almost as indiscreet, almost as bad form, to admit the excellence or importance of one's husband's work as to pretend to any in one's own.

If no drawings could have been less like Beardsley's than Phil May's neither could two men have been more utterly unlike. Some friends of Beardsley's believe that he was happiest where there was most noise, most people, most show, which, however, was not my impression. But when there was the noise of people about him, he might be relied upon to contribute his share and to take part in whatever show was going. I question if Phil May was happy at all unless in the midst of many people and much noise, whether at home or abroad, but to their noise, anyway, he had not the least desire to add. Beardsley was fond of talk, always had something to say, was always eager to say it. All Phil May asked was not to be expected to say anything, to be allowed to smile amiably his dissent or approval. Had the rest of our company been of his mind in the matter, it would not have been so much easier for us to start the talk at once than to stop it at a reasonable hour, our Thursday nights would not have been so deafening with talk that I do not yet understand why the other tenants in the house did not unite in an indignant protest to the landlord.

It was not laziness that kept him silent. He had not a touch of laziness in his composition. His drawings look so simple that people thought they were dashed off at odd moments. But over them he took the infinite pains and time considered by the wise to be the true secret of genius. It may be he expressed himself so well in lines he had no use for words. The one indisputable fact is that he would do anything to escape talking. I recall a night--not a Thursday night though he finished it in our rooms--when he had been invited to lecture to a Woman's Club at the Society of Arts. He appeared on the platform with a formidable-looking MS. in his hand, but he put it down at once and spent his appointed hour in making drawings on big sheets of paper arranged for an occasional ill.u.s.tration. He had more to say than I ever heard him say anywhere, when we got back to Buckingham Street. The MS. was all right, he a.s.sured us, a capital lecture written for him by a friend, but it began "Far be it from me" something or other, he didn't wait to see what, for, as far as he got, it did not sound like him, did it? and we could honestly agree that it did not.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Drawing by Himself PHIL MAY IN CAP AND BELLS]

He could talk. I must not give the idea that he could not. I know some of his friends who do not share or accept unqualified my memory of him as a silent man. But he talked most and best when he had but a single companion, and nothing could persuade me that he was not always relieved, when the chance came, to let others do the talking for him.

I do not know what the attraction was that made everybody like him, not merely the riffraff and the loafers who hung about his studio and waylaid him in the street for what they could get out of him, but all sorts of people who asked for nothing save his company--I could never define the attraction to myself. It was not his looks. Even before his last years, when he was the image of J.J. Shannon's portrait of him, his appearance was not prepossessing. He dressed well according to his ideals. Beardsley was not more of a dandy; but Beardsley was the dandy of Piccadilly or the Boulevards, Phil May was the dandy of the race-course. He brought with him that inevitable, indescribable look that the companionship of horses gives and that in those days broke out largely in short, wide-spreading covert coats and big pearl b.u.t.tons. I have always been grateful to the man who enlivens the monotony of dress by a special fashion of his own, provided it belongs to him. The horsy costume did belong to May, for he rode and hunted and was a good deal with horses, but it was borrowed by some of his admirers until it degenerated into almost as great an affectation as the artist's velvet jacket and long hair, or the high stock and baggy corduroys of the Latin Quarter imported into Chelsea. When the Beggarstaff Brothers, as Pryde and Nicholson called themselves in those old days, would wander casually into our rooms at the end of six or eight feet of poster that they had brought to show J. and that needed a great deal of manipulation to bring in at all, they looked as if the stable, not the studio, was their workshop. And one young genius of an ill.u.s.trator, who could not afford to ride, and who I do not believe had ever been on a horse in his life, could not mount the bus in his near suburb without putting on riding breeches. But Phil May's dress was as essentially his as his silence.

Neither his looks nor his silence, however original and personal, could have been the cause of the charm he undeniably possessed. I think he was one of the people whom one feels are nice instinctively, without any reason. He was sympathetic and responsive, serious when the occasion called for it, foolish when folly was in order. It wasn't only in his drawings that he was ready to wear the cap and bells. I know an artist, one of whose cherished memories of Phil May is of the Christmas Eve when they both rang Lord Leighton's door-bell and ran away and back to Phil May's studio on the other side of the road, and Phil May was as pleased as if it had been a masterpiece for _Punch_. He was naturally kind,--amiable perhaps because it was the simplest thing to be. In his own house his amiability forced him to break his silence, but his remarks then, as far as I heard them, were usually confined to the monotonous offer "Have a cigar!" "Have a whiskey-and-soda!" or "Have a drawing!" if anyone happened to express admiration for his work. Had we accepted this last offer every time it was made to us, we would have a fine collection of Phil May's, while, as it is, we do not own as much as a single sketch given to us by him. Visitors who did not share our scruples have found their steady attendance at his Sunday nights one of the best investments they ever made.

Away from his own house, on our Thursday nights, relieved of the necessity to offer anything, this being now our business, his conversation was more limited than in his own place. My memory of him is of an ugly, delightful, smiling, silent man, sitting astride a chair, his arms resting on the back, a big cigar in his mouth, and around him a band of devoted admirers as fully prepared and equipped to do the talking for him as he was to let them do it. He held his court as royally among ill.u.s.trators as Henley among his Young Men, and if n.o.body contributed so little to the talk as Phil May, around n.o.body else, except Henley, did so much of the talk centre.

In my recollections of Phil May astride his chair on Thursday nights, Hartrick and Sullivan are never very long absent. n.o.body knew better than they the beauty of his work--to hear them talk about his line was to be convinced that the supreme interest in life was the expressive quality of a line made with pen in black ink on a piece of white paper.

The appearance of _The_ _Parson and the Painter_ was one of the events of the Nineties--though it was not boomed into notoriety as were the performances of some other ill.u.s.trators of the period as ingenious as Barnum in the art of advertis.e.m.e.nt--and there was not an artist who did not hail May as a master. But Hartrick and Sullivan went further. They were not only such good artists themselves that they could appreciate genius in others, they were young enough not to be afraid of their enthusiasms. They gave the effect of being with May, with whom they often arrived and stayed until the deplorably early hour of the morning at which he started for home, in order that they might watch over him, and, indeed, he needed watching. He was not readier in offering than in giving anything he was asked for, which was one reason why there was always a procession of waiters and actors and jockeys out of work at his front door--why his pockets were always empty. They even discovered the same genius in May's talk as in his drawing, though the mystery was when they heard the talk. To this day they will quote Phil May while I wonder how it is that while for me Henley's talk has not lost its thunder, nor Bob Stevenson's its brilliant flashes of imbecility, nor Harland's its whimsical twist, nor Beardsley's its fresh gaiety, nothing of Phil May's remains save the familiar refrain "Have a cigar!" "Have a whiskey-and-soda!" "Have a drawing!"

Obsessed by my old-fashioned notion as hostess that people could not enjoy themselves unless they were kept moving, persisting in my vain efforts to break up the groups into which the company invariably fell, again and again I would lure Hartrick and Sullivan away from Phil May.

But it was no use. What they all wanted was to talk not only about their shop but their own particular counter in it, and no sooner was my back turned than there they were in the same groups again, Hartrick and Sullivan watching over Phil May, supported by Raven Hill and Edgar Wilson, both then deeply involved in youth's game of shocking the _bourgeois_ by showing on the pages of _Pick-Me-Up_ how the matter of ill.u.s.tration was ordered in France, and presently starting a magazine of their own to show it the better, and to do their share as ardent rebels in the big fight of the Nineties. On my shelves, close by the first number of _The Yellow Book_ and of the _Savoy_ is the first volume of _The b.u.t.terfly_ and on its fly-leaf is the inscription: "To Elizabeth Robins Pennell with L. Raven Hill's kind regards," no more startlingly original than Beardsley's inscriptions, but to me full of meaning and memories. I cannot look at it without seeing myself fluttering from one to another of the old Buckingham Street rooms, heavy with the smell of smoke and powder, thunderous not only with the knocking--naturally I quote the Ibsen phrase everybody was quoting in the Nineties--but the banging, the battering, the bombarding of the younger generation at the Victorian door against which it was desperate work to make any impression at all.

VIII

In my less responsible intervals it amused me to find the painters running their own shop, or their own little counter, quite apart from the ill.u.s.trators, and carrying on all by themselves their own special campaign against that obdurate Victorian door. Their campaign, as they ran it, required less talk than most, for they were chiefly men of the New English Art Club--the men who gave the shows where Felix Buhot smelt the powder--the men who were considered apostles of defiance when the inner group held their once-famous exhibition as "London Impressionists"--the men about whom the critics for a while did nothing save talk--but men who had the reputation of talking so little themselves that, when a man came up for election in their Club, his talent for silence was said to be as important a consideration with them as his talent for art. Not that the silence of any one of them could rival Phil May's in eloquence--they never learned to say nothing with his charm. Often the poverty of their conversation had the effect of being involuntary, as if they might have had plenty to say had they known how to say it. More than one struggled to rid himself of his talent with at least an air of success.

The big booming voice of Charles W. Furse was frequently heard, but in it a suspicion of an Academic note unfamiliar in our midst, so that, young as he was, combative, enthusiastic, "a good fellow" as they say in England, still in his Whistler and rebel period, his friends predicted for him the Presidency of the Royal Academy. The first time I ever saw him was the year he was showing at the New English two large upright, full-length portraits of women, highly reminiscent of Whistler, and, on press day, was being turned out of the gallery by the critics who, in revolutionizing criticism, were fighting against the old-fashioned Victorian idea of press views with the artists busy log-rolling and an elaborate lunch, or at least whiskey and cigars behind a screen. The New English men compromised by staying away, but they clung to the lunch, a feast chiefly for their commissionaire and their salesman and the grey-haired critic, a survival, who could not reconcile himself to change and whom I heard once, in another gallery, p.r.o.nounce the show admirable, "perfect really, your show, but for one thing missing--a decanter and cigars on the table." Furse, who had not heard the critic's cry for reform and could not understand his banishment, lingered in the pa.s.sage, b.u.t.ton-holing everybody who came out, trying to pick up a hint as to what we were all going to say about him. He considered himself a red-hot rebel and the prophetic picture of him scaling Academic heights annoyed him extremely, though he so soon became an a.s.sociate of the Academy that I think, had he lived, time would have proved the prophets right.

Walter Sickert's voice, too, was frequently heard at the beginning of a Thursday night, but his promise of brilliancy never struck me as leading anywhere in particular, my personal impression being that with his talk, as with his art, the fulfilment scarcely justified the promise.

D.S. MacColl, young arch-rebel at the time little as the formal official of to-day suggests it, his bombarding of the Victorian door directed chiefly from the sober columns of the _Spectator_, and later of the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, was always well armed with words for the Thursday night battle, conscientious in distributing his blows and shaping them in strict deference to his sense of style, just a touch of the preacher perhaps in his voice and in his fight for art and freedom, as he was the first to acknowledge; more than once I have heard him explain apologetically that his right place was the pulpit for which he had been designed.

Arthur Tomson, one of the best friends in the world, was a spirited revolutionary who went to the length of founding and editing a paper of his own to promote revolution--the _Art Weekly_, which, not being able to afford ill.u.s.trations, conducted its warfare solely by its articles, and strong, fearless, knock-you-down articles they were since we all wrote for the paper while it lasted. It did not last long, however, but shared the fate of most revolutionary sheets with more brains than capital. Arthur Tomson himself, out of print, was a quiet, if staunch fighter, another of the old Thursday night group who knew that his years on this earth were to be short. He was not the gayer for it as Harland and Beardsley were, but the sadder, it may be because he foresaw the end long before it came, and he was given to the melancholy that found expression in so many of his paintings.

Wilson Steer, Tonks, Professor Brown pa.s.sed, and no more, across the stage of our Thursday nights, all three, as I remember them, scrupulous in upholding the reputation for silence of their Club. Conder flitted in and out of our rooms, always agreeable but not the man to lift up his voice in a crowd.

Occasionally, a visitor from abroad appeared--Felix Buhot every Thursday that one winter, or, more rarely Paul Renouard, in London for the _Graphic_, his appearance an event for the ill.u.s.trators who already reverenced him as a veteran. Or else it was a representative, a publisher, of _les Jeunes_ over there, bringing fresh stimulus, fresh incentive, especially if his coming meant fresh orders and fresh opportunity to say what had to be said freely and without restraint.

Once it was Jules Roque from Paris, of the _Courrier Francais_ in which he published the drawings of Louis Legrand and Forain and other artists accepted as models by the young men of our Thursday nights who believed in themselves the more defiantly when asked to figure in such good company. Once it was Meier Graefe from Berlin, big, handsome, enterprising, not yet enc.u.mbered with Post-Impressionism and its outshoots, seeking American and British contributors to the German _Pan_, a magazine as big and enterprising as himself if not always as handsome, and the younger generation of London had the comfort of knowing that if the Victorian door in England held firm, the door of Europe had opened to them.

Occasionally one of the older, the very much older generation came in to make us feel the younger for his presence--none more imposing than Sandys, most distinguished in his old age, wearing the white waistcoat that was the life-long symbol of his dandyism, full of Pre-Raphaelite reminiscences, and reminiscences of the Italian Primitives could not have seemed more remote. J. sometimes met Holman Hunt in other haunts--at dinners of the Society of Ill.u.s.trators and elsewhere--and reported him to me as a talker who could, in the quant.i.ty and aggressiveness of his talk, have given points to Henley and Henley's Young Men, so I regret that he never was with us to talk over Pre-Raphaelite days with Sandys. The only other possible representative of Pre-Raphaelitism who came was Walter Crane, if so he can be called, for the tradition fell lightly on his shoulders, was a mere re-echo in his work; the only one of Sandys's contemporaries was Whistler, and their meeting of which J. and I have written in another place, does not belong to the story of our Thursday nights, for they were a thing of the past when Whistler returned from Paris, where he had gone to live almost as they began.

Nor did Sandys often appear on Thursdays. He seemed to prefer the evenings when we were alone, to my surprise, for the homage he received when he did come on Thursday must have been pleasant. Drawings of his hung prominently in our rooms, J. then haunting the salesrooms for the originals of the Sixties as industriously as the barrows and shops for their reproductions. And to the man who prefers fame to reach him during his lifetime, surely it should have been an agreeable experience to sit, or to be enthroned as it were, in so friendly an atmosphere, with some of his own finest work on the wall behind him for background, and surrounded by a worshipping group asking nothing better than to be allowed to sit at his feet and listen to his every word--which was a sacrifice for his worshippers in Buckingham Street who rejoiced in the sound of their own voices as did most of the company. But the Nineties are not more wonderful and stimulating to the young men of to-day who look back to them so admiringly, than the Sixties were to us whom they kept up into the small hours of many a Friday morning, inexhaustible as a subject of our talk, and Sandys, standing for the Sixties and all we found in them so admirable, could command any sacrifice. The respect for the Sixties was an article of faith, a dogma of dogmas in the Nineties.

If the now younger generation write articles and books about the Nineties--those amazing doc.u.ments in which I scarcely recognise an age I thought I knew by heart--we were still more zealous in writing books about the Sixties. And we collected the drawings and publications of the Sixties. When J. and I now allowed ourselves an afternoon out, it was to wander from Holywell Street to Mile End Road, from Piccadilly to Holborn, searching the booksellers' barrows and shops for the unsightly, gaudy, badly-bound volumes that contained the ill.u.s.trations of the Sixties--ill.u.s.trations ranked amongst the finest ever made. Our bookshelves that are still filled with them represent one of the most animated phases of the Nineties. And we looked upon the "men of the Sixties" as masters, among them giving to Sandys a leading place.

If he was not any longer doing the work for which we took off our hat to him, he certainly looked the leader--tall, handsome, dignified, just enough of a stoop in his shoulders to become his age, his dress irreproachable, the white waistcoat immaculate, pale yellow hair parted in the middle and beautifully brushed, beard not patriarchal exactly but eminently correct and well cared for, manners princely. It was clear that he liked the role of master and his voice was in keeping with the part. But he was a master who presided at his best over a small audience, and, no doubt knowing it, he avoided our Thursdays.

He was also a master given to small gossip. We heard from him less of art, its aims and ideals, its mediums and methods, than of the sayings and doings of the Pre-Raphaelites who were his friends and contemporaries. The name of "Gabriel" was ever in his mouth. It was Rossetti whom he most loved--or love is not the word, less of affection revealed in his memories than a sense of injury, as if it had somehow been the fault of "Gabriel" and the others that he had not come off as well as they, though of all "Gabriel" had been most active in seeing him through the tight places he so successfully got himself into. This, no doubt, was the reason Rossetti felt ent.i.tled to a little laugh now and then over Sandys's difficulties. Sandys was a man who needed to be seen through tight places until the end, as we had occasion to know by the urgent note he sent us on a Sat.u.r.day night, more than once, from the _Cafe Royal_, his favourite haunt in his later years, where a variety of unavoidable accidents, with a curious faculty for repeating themselves, would keep him prisoner until his friends came to his relief.

He was full of anecdote, which was quite in the order of things, the Sixties having supplied anecdote for a whole library of books and magazines. Could I tell Sandys's stories with Sandys's voice I should be tempted to repeat them yet once again, though many were told us also by Whistler, and these J. and I have recorded in the Life. Whistler told them better, with more truth because with more gaiety and joy in their absurdity. And yet, the solemnity of Sandys added a personal flavour, gave them a character n.o.body else could give. I have not forgotten how he turned into a parable the tale of the cross-eyed maid in the Morris Shop in Red Lion Square, whose eyes were knocked straight by a shock the company of Morris, Marshall, and Faulkner administered deliberately, and then were knocked crooked again by a shock they had not provided for or against. And, as Sandys recalled them, the strange beasts in "Gabriel's" house and garden might have been let loose from out of the Apocalypse. But Sandys's voice has been stilled forever and the anecdotes have been published oftener, I do believe, than any others in the world's rich store of _cliches_. The great of his day had all the Boswells they wanted--a retinue of admirers and cuffs ready--at their head William Michael Rossetti to pour out book after book about his brother, to leave little untold about the group that revolved round "Gabriel." Even the third generation, with Ford Madox Hueffer to lead, has taken up the task. The anecdotes have grown familiar, but it is something to have heard them from the men who were their heroes.

IX

Well--our Thursdays were pleasant, an inspiration while they lasted, and for a time I thought they must last as long as we did. But nothing pleasant endures forever, the bravest inspiration flickers and dies almost before we realize its flaring. The stern duty of Friday morning always haunted me in antic.i.p.ation, for I have never been able to take lightly the work I do with so much difficulty, and Friday morning itself often brought even J. up with a sharp turn to face the fact that man was born into the world to labour in the sweat of his brow, and not simply to talk all night until no work was left in him.

That may have been one reason for our giving up so agreeable a custom.

Another perhaps came from the discovery that the freedom of our Thursday nights was sometimes abused. A certain type of Englishman would travel a mile and more for anything he did not have to pay for, even if it was for nothing more substantial than a cigarette, a sandwich, a whiskey-and-soda. There were evenings when, looking round the packed dining-room, it would occur to me that I did not recognise half the people in it. Friends introduced friends and they introduced other friends until, in bewilderment, I asked myself if our Thursday night was ours or somebody else's. And I fancied a tendency to treat it as if it were somebody else's,--to take an ell when we meant to give no more than an inch, and J. was as little inclined as I to furnish a new proof of the wise old proverb. One day a would-be wit who was regular in his attendance and his talk, and who should have known better, asked J., "Are you still running your Thursday Club?" and so helped to precipitate the end. We were not running a Club for anybody, and if the fame of our Thursday night filled our rooms with people who behaved as if we were, the sooner we got rid of them the better.

Besides, as the weeks and the months and the years went on, many who had come and talked and fought our Thursday night through ceased to come altogether. Where I failed in breaking up the groups Time, with its cruel thoroughness, succeeded and began to scatter them far and wide.

Death stilled voices that had been loudest. The _National Observer_ pa.s.sed out of Henley's hands and Henley himself into the Valley of the Shadow. Bob Stevenson said his last good-night to us. Beardsley, Harland, Arthur Tomson, George Steevens, Phil May, Furse, Iwan-Muller--one after another of our old friends, one after another of those old masters of talk set out on the journey into the Great Silence.

It is hard to believe they have gone. I remember how, when they were with us and the talk was at its maddest and somebody would suddenly take breath long enough to look out of our windows, whose curtains were never drawn upon the one spectacle we could offer--the river with the boats trailing their lights down its shadowy reaches, and the Embankment with the lights of the hansoms flying to and fro, and the bridges with the procession of lights from the omnibuses and cabs and the trails of burning cloud from the trains--Henley would say, "How it lives, how it throbs with life out there!" and I would think to myself, "And how it lives, how it throbs with life in here!"--with a life too intense, it seemed, ever to wear itself out. And yet now only two or three of the old friends of the old Thursday nights are left to look down with us upon the river where it flows below our windows--upon the moving lights of London's great traffic, upon London's great life and great beauty, and great movement without end.

It is not only the dead we have lost. Time has made other changes as sad as any wrought by Death. The young have grown old,--have thrown off youth's "proud livery" for the sombre garment of age. The years have turned the rebel of yesterday into the Royal Academician of to-day. The inspired young prophet who protested week by week against mediocrity in paint, settled down to keeping the mediocre paintings against which his protests were loudest. He who thundered against the degeneracy of journalism accepted the patronage of the t.i.tled promoter of the half-penny press. Architects carried their respectability to the professional chair it adorns, and ill.u.s.trators rested in the comfortable berths provided by _Punch_. Friendships cooled, and friends who never missed a Thursday look the other way when they meet us in the street.

Close to me, as I write, is a bookcase on whose shelves Henley and Henley's Young Men--Marriott Watson, George Steevens, Charles Whibley, Leonard Whibley, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Morrison, G.S.

Street--jostle each other in the big and little volumes that were to create the world anew. The small green-bound Henleys stand in a row.

_Salome_, _The Rape of the Lock_, _Volpone_, with Beardsley's ill.u.s.trations, are flanked by the more pretentious performances of the Kelmscott Press and the Vale Press and the other Presses aspiring with much advertis.e.m.e.nt to do what the Constables of Edinburgh did so much better as a matter of course, and, as a reminder of this truth, the _Montaigne_ of the _Tudor Series_ is there and the _Apuleius_ and the _Heliodorus_, each with its inscription. And the little slim volume, neatly bound by Zaehnsdorf, called _Allahakbarries_--now a prize for the collector I am told--immortalizes one recreation at least of Henley's Young Men. For it is Barrie's report of the Cricket Team largely made up of these Young Men, of whom he was Captain and who used to play at Shere on the never-to-be-forgotten summer days when beautiful Graham Tomson and I were graciously invited as Patronesses, and little Madge Henley--her death shortly afterwards proving Henley's own death blow--figured as "Captain's Girl" and the _National Observer_ office as "Practice Ground." And if Henley did not drag himself down with us to the pretty Surrey village, he seemed to preside over us all, so much so that when J. and I had the little book bound and added the photographs Harold Frederic--"Photographer" in the report--made of the Team, we included one of Henley, and altogether the tiny volume is as eloquent a doc.u.ment of the Nineties and of Henley and Henley's Young Men as we have, and I wonder what the collector of those snares for the American now catalogued by the bookseller as "a.s.sociation Books" would not give to own it. And close by our _Allahakbarries_, Henry Harland's _Mademoiselle Miss_ meets in the old friendly companionship Steevens's _Land of the Dollar_ and Graham Tomson's _Poems_ and Bob Stevenson's _Velasquez_ and Harold Frederic's _Return of the O'Mahoney_ and Bernard Shaw's _Cashel Byron's Profession_ in its rare paper cover, and George Moore's _Strike_ at _Arlingford_, and Marriott Watson's _Diogenes of London_, and--but of what use to go through the list, the long catalogue, to the end? Ghosts greet me from those shelves, ghosts from the old Thursdays, from the radiant days when youth was merging into middle age--surely the best period in one's existence--days into which the breath of life never can be breathed again. We could not revive the old nights if we would. I suppose n.o.body now reads Zola, but we read him in the Nineties and I have always been haunted by his description in _L'Oeuvre_ of the last reunion of the friends who, in their eager youth, had meant to conquer Paris and who used to meet to plan their campaign over a dinner as meagre as their income and gay as their hopes. But when, after years during which money and fame had been heaped up by more than one and disappointment and despair lavished in equal measure upon others, they ventured to dine together again, and the dinner was good and well served as it never had been of old, it turned to dust and ashes in their mouths--a funeral feast. Dust and ashes would be our fare were we so foolish as again to open our doors on the Thursday night consecrated to youth and its battles long ago.

X

If we have had no more Thursday nights, it does not follow that we have had no other nights. The habit of years is not so easily broken, and our habit was, and is, at night to gather people about us and to talk. Only, after the Nineties, or rather before the end of the Nineties, we never settled again with weekly regularity upon one special night out of the seven for the purpose--on the contrary, we took, and we now take, our nights as they came and come.

They have not been, for that, the less interesting and amusing, not less loud with the sound of battle, not less fragrant with the smell of smoke. It was just after our Thursday nights, for instance, that we began what I might call our Whistler nights, and a more stimulating talker than Whistler never talked, a more stimulating fighter never fought. I do not mean in the impossible way meant by those whose judgment of him rests solely on _The Gentle Art_. They think he fought for no other end than to make enemies when, really, he enjoyed far more the good give-and-take argument that preserved to him his friends, provided those friends fought fair and did not play the coward, or the toady, to escape the combat.