The fire was now burning brightly, and I recalled my memories one by one till the three months we had spent in the studio became visible.

The first week my drawing was no worse than Lewis's; indeed, it was rather better, but the second week he had outstripped me, and whatever talent I had, the long hours in the studio wore it away rapidly, and one day, horrified at the black thing in front of me, I laid down my pencil: saying to myself, I will never take up pencil or brush again, and slunk away out of the studio home to the Galerie Feydeau to the room above the umbrella shop, to my bed, my armoire à glace, my half-dozen chairs; and on that bed under its green curtains I lay all night weeping, saying to myself: My life is ended and done. There is no hope for me. All I wanted was Art, and Art has been taken from me. Je suis fichu, fichu, bien fichu, I repeated, and the steps of the occasional passer-by echoed mournfully under the glass roofing.

The Galerie Feydeau had never seemed a cheerful place to live in; it was now as hateful to me as a prison, and Lewis was my gaoler. He went away every morning at eight o'clock, and I met him at breakfast in the little restaurant at the end of the Galerie Feydeau. After breakfast he returned to the studio, and I was free to wander about the streets or to sit in my room reading Shelley. He came home about five, and we went for a walk, and he told me what was happening in the studio. Everything that happened seemed to be for his greater honour and glory. He had won the medal and the hundred francs that Julian offered every month for the best drawing—an innovation this was to attract custom—and a little spree had to be given to commemorate his triumph. He organised the spree very well; of course it was my money that paid for it; and the best part of the studio came to the Galerie Feydeau one evening, and we sang and smoked and drank punch and played the piano. Lewis played the violin, and Julian, drawing his chair up to mine, told me that in ten years hence Lewis would be hors concours in the Salon, and living in a great hotel in the Champs Élysées painting pictures at thirty thousand francs apiece. Les grandes tartines we used to call the pictures that went to the Salon, or les grandes machines: I am forgetting my studio slang. Julian had a difficult part to play. If he were to depreciate Lewis's talent I might throw up the sponge and go away; he thought it safer to assure me that my sacrifices were not made in vain; but man is such a selfish and jealous animal that it had begun to seem to me I would prefer a great failure for Lewis to a great success. Not a great failure, I said to myself; for if he fail I shall never get rid of him. There will be no escape from the Galerie Feydeau for me, so I must hope for his success. He will leave me when he begins to make money. When will that be? and the cruel thought crossed my mind that he was laughing at me all the while, looking upon me as the springboard wherefrom he would jump into a great Salon success. It seemed to me that I could see us both in the years ahead—myself humble and obscure, he great and glorious, looking down upon me somewhat kindly, as the lion looks upon the mouse that has gnawed the cords that bound him. I think I was as unhappy in the Galerie Feydeau as I had been in Oscott College. I seemed to have lost everybody in the world except the one person I wished to lose, Lewis. I was a stranger in the studio, where I went seldom, for every one there knew of my failure; even the models I feared to invite to my rooms lest they should tell tales afterwards. At last the thought came of my sister's school friend, and at her home I met people who knew nothing of Julian and L'École des Beaux-Arts, and at a public dinner I was introduced to John O'Leary and his Parisian circle, and all these people were interested in me on account of my father. One can always pick one's way into Society, and three months later I was moving in American and English Society about the Place Wagram and the Boulevard Malesherbes, returning home in the early morning, awaking Lewis frequently to describe the party to him, awaking him one morning to tell him that a lady whose boots I was buttoning in the vestibule had leaned over me and whispered that I could go to the very top button ... if I liked. A very pretty answer it had seemed to Lewis, and it was clear that he was affected by it, though he resisted for a long time my efforts to persuade him to allow me to introduce him to my friends. I had intended only an outing, an exhibition of my cousin, after which he was to return to his kennel. But I had interrupted his life, and fatally; invitations came to him from every side; he accepted them all, and we started to learn the Boston before the armoire à glace. He learnt it quicker than I did, and when he returned from Barbizon, whither he had gone to meet the wife of an American millionaire, I told him I could live no longer in the Galerie Feydeau and was going away to Boulogne to meet some people whom I had met at Madame Ratazzi's, into whose circle I had happily not introduced him, and wishing to take him down a peg I mentioned that I had acted with her in La Dame aux Camélias. He flew into a violent rage. I was going away with swagger friends to enjoy myself, careless whether he ate or starved. He was right from this point of view. I was breaking my promise to him. But is there anybody who would be able to say he would not have broken his in the same circumstances? None! It was at once a shameful and a natural act; he was my friend; it was shameful, it was horrible, but there are shameful and horrible things in other lives beside mine. His presence had become unendurable. But why excuse myself further? Let the facts speak for themselves and let me be judged by them. They have already been published in The Confessions of a Young Man, but I wonder now if I told in that book enough of the surprise that I experienced on finding him still in the appartement in the Galerie Feydeau when I returned from Boulogne? He should have moved out of my rooms after the quarrel, but instead of that he had converted the sitting-room into a workshop, and his designs for lace curtains occupied one entire wall. He'll go tomorrow, of course, I said, but he did not go on the morrow or the day after, and at the end of the week he was still there, and annoying me by whistling as he worked on his design. At last, unable to bear it any longer, I opened the door of my bedroom and begged him to cease, and it is to this day a marvel to me how he restrained himself from strangling me. He looked as if he were going to rush at me, and on the threshold of my room indulged in the most fearful vituperation and abuse, to which I felt it would be wiser not to attempt an answer, for his arms were long and his fists were heavy; he was always talking about striking out, and it is foolish to engage in a combat when one knows one is going to get the worst of it, so I just let him shout on until he retired to his lace curtains, and I resolved to give notice.

He can't stay after quarter-day.

But the quarter was a long way off, and every day I met him in the Passage des Panoramas among my friends, flowing away in a new ulster past the jet ornaments and the fans; a splendid fellow he certainly was with his broken nose and his grand eyes, and the ulster suited him so well that I began to regret a quarrel which prevented me from asking him questions about it. He came and went as he pleased, passing me on the staircase and in the rooms, his splendid indifference compelling the conclusion that however lacking in character a reconciliation would prove me to be, I could no longer forego one, and after many hesitations I called after him and begged that he would allow bygones to be bygones. I think that he said this was impossible; he must have been counting on my weakness; however this may be, he played with me very prettily, forcing me to plead, practically to ask his forgiveness, and when we were friends again he related that he was looking out for a studio, and in the effusion of reconciliation I very foolishly asked him to tell me if he should happen upon an appartement that he thought would suit me, for live another quarter in the Galerie Feydeau I couldn't. He promised that he would not fail to keep his eyes open, and a few days after he mentioned that he had seen a charming appartement in the Rue de la Tour des Dames—the very thing that would suit me. As there was not nearly enough furniture in the Galerie Feydeau to fill it, he entered into negotiations with an upholsterer, and dazzled me with a scheme of decoration which would cost very little to carry out, and which would give me as pretty an appartement as any in Paris. He was kind enough to relieve me of all the details of un déménagement, and what could I do in return but invite him to stay with me until he had painted a picture?

We had a friend at that time who painted little naked women very badly and sold them very well, and it occurred to Lewis that if Faléro could sell his pictures there was no reason why he should not, so he borrowed a hundred francs from me to hire a model, and painted a nymph; but though better drawn than Faléro's nymphs, she went the round, from picture-dealer to picture-dealer, never finding a purchaser, which did not matter much, for Lewis began at this time to please a rich widow who lived in Rue Jean Goujon. She was not, however, very generous, refusing always de le mettre dans ses meubles, and he continued to live with me, wearing my hats and neckties, borrowing small sums of money, and what was still more annoying, beginning to cultivate a taste for literature, daring even to seek literary advice and help from Bernard de Lopez, a Parisian despite his name—Parisian in this much, that he had written a hundred French plays, all in collaboration with the great men of letters of his time, including Dumas, Banville, and Gautier.

I had picked him up in the Hôtel de Russie very soon after my arrival in Paris. He dined there every Monday, an old habit (the origin of this habit he never told me, or I have forgotten)—a strange habit, it seemed, for anything less literary than the Hôtel de Russie ... for the matter of that anything less literary than Bernard de Lopez's appearance it is impossible to imagine: two piggy little eyes set on either side of a large, well-shaped nose; two little stunted legs that toddled quickly forward to meet me, and two little warm, fat hands that often held mine too long for comfort. So small a man never had before so large a head, a great bald head with a ring of hair round it, and his chin was difficult to discover under his moustaches; roll after roll of flesh descended into his bosom, and, by God! I can still see in my thoughts his little brown eyes watching me just like a pig, suspiciously, though why he should have been suspicious of me I cannot say, unless, indeed, he suspected that I doubted the existence of the plays he said he had written in collaboration, a thing which I frequently did, unjustly, for he was telling the truth. He had collaborated with Gautier, Dumas, and Banville, and having assured myself of this by the brochures, I began to think that he could not have been always so trite and commonplace.

Men decline like the day, and he was in the evening of his life when I met him, garrulous about the days gone by, and in the Café Madrid, whither I invited him to come with me after dinner at the Hôtel de Russie, he told me that Scribe had always said he would like to rewrite La Dame Blanche. Rewrite a piece that has been acted a thousand times, Lopez would gurgle, and then he told me about la scène à faire. The morning he had brought Dumas the manuscript of Le Fils de la Nuit he had said to him: Nous aurons des larmes. He used to speak about a writer called Saint-George, whose rooms were always heavily scented, and scent gave the little man des maux de tête. There was another man whose name I cannot recall, with whom he had written many plays, and who had an engagement book like a doctor or a dentist, qui ne l'empêche pas d'avoir beaucoup d'esprit. It pleases me to recall Lopez's very words: they bring back the 'seventies to me, and my own thoughts of the 'seventies and the intellectual atmosphere in which these men lived, going about their business with comedies and plays in their heads—an appointment at ten to consider the first act of a vaudeville; after breakfast another appointment, perhaps at the other end of Paris, to discover a plot for a drama; a talk about an opera in the café at five, and perhaps somebody would call in the evening—no—not in the evening, for they wrote on into the night, tumbling into bed at three or four in the morning.

Of the wonderful 'seventies Lopez was le dernier rejeton; and talking about Le Fils de la Nuit, the first play that had ever run two hundred nights, we strolled back to his lodging in the Place Pigalle—a large room on the second floor overlooking the Place with a cabinet de toilette. And as time went on I learnt some facts about him. He had been married, and received from his wife the few thousand francs a year on which he lived, and the Empire bed with chairs and a toilet-table to match must have come from her; he would not have thought of buying them, and still less the two portraits by Angelica Kauffmann on either side of the fireplace. A man who had outlived his day! a superficial phrase, for none can say when a man has outlived his day. He had not outlived his when the managers ceased to produce his plays, for he drew my attention to literature, and it is pleasant to me to remember the day that I hurried down to Galignani's to buy a play, for one evening while we talked in the Café Madrid it had occurred to me that with a little arrangement Lewis and Alice would supply me with the subject of a comedy. But never having read a play I did not know how one looked upon paper. Congreve, Wycherley, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh (Leigh Hunt's edition) were my first dramatic authors, and my first comedy, in imitation of these writers, was composed and written and copied out and read to Bernard de Lopez within six weeks of its inception. His criticism of it was, I thought at first we were going to have a very strong play, a man that marries his mistress to his friend, and I understood at once that the subject had been frittered away in endless dialogue after the manner of my exemplars, and it was as likely as not in the hope of getting all this dialogue acted that I returned to England, remaining there some time, writing a long comedy which Lopez did not like. Drama was abandoned for poetry, and Lopez encouraged me to tell him of my poems, advising me as we ascended the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette or the Rue des Martyrs to choose subjects that would astonish the British public by their originality—for instance, if instead of inditing a sonnet to my mistress's eyebrows I were to tell the passion of a toad for a rose.

Not that, of course not that, but poems on violent subjects.

A young man's love for a beautiful corpse, I interjected.

He introduced French poetry to me, and through him I read a great deal that I might not have heard of, and wrote a great deal that I might never have written; and it was to him that I brought my first copy of my first book, Flowers of Passion, together with an article that had appeared in The World, entitled, A Bestial Bard. The article began: The author of these poems should be whipped at the cart's tail, while the book is being burnt in the market-place by the common hangman. It filled the greater part of a column, and the note struck by Edmund Yates was taken up by other critics, and, much impressed by the violence of their language, Lopez said: They seem to have exhausted the vocabulary of abuse upon you, and he began to sound me regarding the possibility of an English and a French author writing a play together for the English stage. Martin Luther seemed to us a character that would suit Irving, then at the height of his fame.

But shall we present both sides of the question impartially like Goethe? Or shall we write as ardent Protestants?



Mon cher monsieur, ce n'est pas pour vous contrarier, mais 'd'où suintent d'étranges pleurs' est un vers de sept; suintent n'a que deux syllabes.

C'est ma mauvaise prononciation flamande, Lewis said, and he bundled up his papers, adding: You have come to talk Martin Luther, so I'll leave you.

But what right does he come interrupting you?

He only came to show me a sonnet.

But what the devil does he want to write sonnets for? Isn't it enough that he should paint bad pictures?

He merely came to inquire out the prosody of a certain line, Lopez answered, and he tried to calm me.

No, there's no use, Lopez. I can't fix my thoughts. Perhaps after dinner. What do you say to the Rat Mort?

He raised no objection to the Rat Mort, but the moment we entered the café he rushed up to a dishevelled and wild-eyed fellow. I thought I had lost him. Let me introduce you, he said, to Villiers de l'Isle Adam. Lewis was forgotten in the excitement of dining with a real man of letters, in the pleasure of confiding to Villiers the scene that I had come to talk to Lopez about.

It is to Martin Luther himself, I said, whom she has never seen, that she confesses in a wood her love of Martin Luther.

I must introduce you to Mallarmé, said Villiers, and he wrote a note on the edge of the table. You'll find him at home on Tuesday evenings.

Mallarmé spoke to me of Manet, and he must have spoken to Manet about me, for one night in the Nouvelle Athènes Manet asked me if the conversation distracted my attention from my proofs. Come and see me in my studio in the Rue d'Amsterdam. And not very many evenings later Mendès was introduced to me between one and two in the morning. He asked me to the Rue Mansard, where he lived with Mademoiselle Holmès, whereupon, before I had time to realise the fact, I was launched on Parisian literary and artistic society, and six months afterwards Manet said to me, There is no Frenchman in England who occupies the position you do in Paris. Perhaps there isn't, I answered mechanically, my thoughts turning to Lewis, who was certainly going down in the world. I should have done better to have left him in the Mont Rouge to get his living as a workman, for he'll never be able to scrape together any sort of living as a painter, and my spirits rose mountains high against him. An old man from the sea, I said, whom I cannot shake off.

But the courage to fling him into the street was lacking, and I continued to bear with him day after day, hoping that he would leave me of his own accord. He was well enough in Julian's studio or in the Beaux-Arts or in English and American society, but he would seem shallow and superficial in the Nouvelle Athènes, and I always avoided taking him there; but one night he asked me to tell him where I was dining, and I had to tell him at the Nouvelle Athènes. He pleaded to be allowed to accompany me, and I will admit to some vanity on my part; or was it curiosity that prompted me to introduce him to Degas, who very graciously invited us to sit at his table and talked to us of his art, addressing himself as often to Lewis as he did to me. He opened his whole mind to us, beguiled by Lewis's excellent listening, until the waiter brought him a dish of almonds and raisins. Then a lull came, and Lewis said, leaning across the table:

I think, Monsieur Degas, you will agree with me that, more than any other artist among us, Jules Lefebre sums up all the qualities that an artist should possess.

My heart misgave me, and Degas's laughter did not console me, nor his words whispered in my ear as he left:

Votre ami est très fort.... Il m'a fait monter l'échelle comme personne. And a few days afterwards in the Rue Pigalle he said:

Comment va votre ami? Ah! celui-là est d'une force.

Mais, cher ami, le pauvre garçon n'a jamais su se dégager—

Pas du tout; il est très fort.

Son esprit n'a jamais su dépasser certaines bornes ... la Rue Bonaparte.

But no explanation pleased Degas as much as his own: Il m'a tiré les vers du nez ... et comme personne. I resisted this explanation till, feeling that I was beginning to show myself in a stupid light, I accepted it outwardly, though convinced inly that Lewis had been guilty of the unpardonable sin—lack of comprehension. He must go and at once, and as soon as I returned home I begged him to leave me. At the end of the month, when my mother sends me my money, he answered, and my heart sank at the thought of having him with me so long. I think I must have answered, For God's sake go! and a few days afterwards the concierge mentioned to my great surprise that Monsieur Hawkins had left, and had paid her the few francs he owed her. A good trait on his part, I thought, and my heart softened toward him suddenly, and continued soft until a lady told me that Monsieur Hawkins had been to see her and had borrowed a hundred francs from her.



We sat looking at each other, the lady thinking no doubt that I should not have told Lewis I was her lover, and myself thinking that I had at length caught Lewis in deliberate blackmail; and, going round to the studio in which he had settled himself, I said, before looking round the walls to admire the sketches:

I have just come from Miss ——, and she tells me you borrowed a hundred francs from her.

If I did, you borrowed from Alice Howard, my mistress, he answered.

I had forgotten, and sat dumbfounded. But why had I borrowed this money? I never wanted for money. Perhaps to put Alice to the test, or to get back some of my own, for she had borrowed often from me, and finding her in affluent circumstances.... She asked me some days after to repay her, and I gave her the money that was in my pockets—a hundred francs; the other hundred I forgot all about till one evening at Alphonsine's I saw her rise up from her place and walk toward me, a vindictive look round her mouth and eyes.

Have you come, she said, to pay me the money that you owe me?

To admit that I had borrowed money from Alice at Alphonsine's was impossible; lies happen very seldom in my life, but they have happened, and this was an occasion when a lie was necessary. But I lied badly from lack of habit, and Lewis had heard from the women there that I had not stood up to Alice; and now to pass off the matter on which I had come to speak to him, I asked him how I should have answered Alice.

You should have answered her ironically: Toi, tu m'as prêté de l'argent? Où ça? Quand tu venais me trouver à l'hôtel de toutes les Russies et que tu pleurais pour un déjeuner? Quand tu n'avais pas deux mètres d'indienne à te coller sur les fesses? Non, mais vrai: y avait-il une maquerelle rue de Provence qui voulait de ta peau? Tu dis que tu m'as prêté de l'argent? C'est-il quand ton tôlier te reprenait ta clé tous les matins, ou quand tu demandais aux michés cinquante centimes pour aller aux chiottes?

Splendid! I cried.

Faut pas se laisser marcher sur le pied, dis. Je ne lui aurais par parlé autrement.

You have l'esprit prime-sautier, but any wit I have is l'esprit de l'escalier ... et de la dernière marche.

Je ne lui aurais pas parlé autrement.

Patter always excites my admiration; we get back to origins—to the monkey. And looking round the studio the number of sketches that I saw everywhere in oil and water-colour put the thought into my mind that Lewis must have discovered a patron and was living as comfortably as he had ever done with me. So all my sacrifices were in vain, I said to myself, and aloud to him: You are doing a great deal of work. I have discovered a patron, he answered, and he told me of an old man living in a barred house in a distant suburb who never opened his door except to a certain ring—an old man in gold-rimmed spectacles who would buy any drawing that Lewis brought him at a price: thirty francs for a flower in a vase, for an apple, a pear, for a street corner, for a head sketched in ten minutes. He is your banker? I said. Yes; it's just like cashing a cheque. And I left the studio hoping that the old man who looked at Lewis's drawings through gold-rimmed spectacles would live for many a year. His death would certainly bring back Lewis to me asking for fifty, for a hundred francs; and if I could not lend him so much he would ask for twenty, and if I could not manage twenty he would ask for ten, and if I could not manage ten he would ask for five, perhaps coming down to the price of his omnibus home. But the old man continued in the flesh, and weeks and months passed away without my seeing or hearing from Lewis. Years must have gone by before we met at Barbizon, whither he had gone intent upon investing all his savings on a Salon picture.

An old graveyard full of the lush of June had taken his fancy, and after many sketches he was still certain that he had hit on a good subject for a picture. A critic pointed out that two children looking at a gravestone would balance the composition; another said that a yellow cat coming from the cottages along the wall would complete it. Both were right; all that now remained for Lewis to do was to paint the picture. But he lacked touch, and his picture would have remained very tinny if Stott of Oldham had not arrived at Barbizon suddenly.

You mustn't rub the paint like that. See here; and taking the brush from Lewis's hand he mixed a tone and drew the brush slowly from right to left. Almost at once the paint began to look less like tin, and Lewis said, I think I understand, and he was able to imitate Scott sufficiently well to produce a picture which Bouguereau said would attract attention in the Salon if the title were changed to Les Deux Orphelins.

L'Amour renaît de ses Cendres is not a title that will appeal to the general public.

Lewis tried to explain that what he meant was that the love of the parents is born again in their children; but he allowed Bouguereau's good sense to prevail, and the picture drew from Albert Wolf an enthusiastic notice of nearly half a column in the Figaro, after which it became the fashion to go to the Salon to see Les Deux Orphelins and Monsieur Hawkins, un jeune peintre anglais de beaucoup de talent, for Lewis could not separate himself from his picture, and every day he grew bolder, receiving his friends in front of it and explaining to them, and to all and sundry, the second title, L'Amour renaît de ses Cendres. His conduct was not very dignified, but he had been waiting so long for recognition of his talent that he could not restrain himself. He sold Les Orphelins for ten thousand francs, and next year the Salon was filled with imitations of it, and there was a moment when it seemed that Julian's prophesy was about to come true. The hotel in the Champs Élysées was being sought for when Lewis's first patron, the old man to whom he had sold his sketches for twenty-five or thirty francs apiece, died suddenly; and for nearly two years Welden Hawkinses were being knocked down at the Hôtel de Vente for fifty and a hundred francs apiece.

Fifteen hundred or two thousand pictures thrown upon the market was no doubt a misfortune, I said as I stirred the fire, but if Lewis had been a man of healthy talent he would have painted other pictures. But his talent was the talent of un détraqué, and a recollection of a naked man looking at a naked woman through a mask was remembered. The hereditary taint was always there, I said, and I began to turn over in my mind all that Lewis had told me about his father. My father left mamma some three or four years after their marriage. I think I was twenty before I ever saw him. I was given an address of a lodging-house in St James's, and found my father in a small back room, sitting on a bed playing the flute. Oh, is that you, Lewis? Just a moment. Lewis had heard from his mother many stories of his father's eccentricities, and he had an opportunity of verifying these in St James's Street, for when the elder Hawkins laid aside his flute and engaged in perfunctory conversation with his son he allowed a fly to crawl over his face. Every moment Lewis expected his father to brush the insect away. It had been round one eye several times, and had descended the nose, and was about to go up the eye once again when Lewis, who could contain himself no longer, cried out:

Father, that fly!

Pray don't disturb it, I like the sensation.

My thoughts passed from Lewis to Jim, and I sat for a long time asking myself if Jim would have succeeded better than Lewis if he had gone to Paris in the 'fifties. He had more talent than Lewis, but his talent seemed still less capable of cultivation. There is a lot of talent in Ireland, but whether any of it is capable of cultivation is a question one can ponder for days, and my thoughts breaking away suddenly I remembered how, soon after my return from Ireland when I had settled in Cecil Street in the Strand, and was trying to make my living by writing for the papers, the desire to see Jim again in the old studio in Prince's Gardens had come upon me, and I had gone away one night in a cab to Kensington; but the appearance of the footman who opened the door surprised me, and I asked myself if Jim had sold some pictures, or had let the house. He had sold the house, and any letters that came from him were sent to Arthur's Club, where I could obtain news of him. The porter told me that any letter would be forwarded, but I wanted to see Jim that very night, and addressing myself to the secretary of the club, who happened to be passing through the hall at that moment, I begged of him to authorise the porter to give me Mr Browne's address, which he did: and I went away in a cab certain that the end of the drive would bring me face to face with my old boon companion. The cab turned out of Baker Street and we were soon in Park Road driving between Regent's Park and a high wall with doors let into it. Before one of these the hansom stopped and I saw a two-storeyed house standing in the midst of a square plot. A maid-servant took me up a paved pathway, mentioning that Mr Browne was on the drawing-room floor, and I found him waiting expectant in his smock, a palette and a sheaf of brushes in his left hand, the thumb of his right hand in his leather belt.

My dear Jim, I've been to Prince's Gardens.

We've sold the house and Pinkie and Ada have gone to live with friends and relations.

There was a feeling in the room that nobody had called to see him for many a month, and I noticed that a good deal of colour had died out of the thick locks of flaxen hair and that his throat was wrinkled.

And all your pictures, Jim?

Your mother was kind enough to hang them up in Alfred Place when we left Prince's Gardens, and when she left the house at the end of her lease the pictures were taken away.

And you didn't make any inquiries?

Well, you see, I haven't room for many canvases.

The moment had come when I must show some interest in his pictures, and turning from the one on the easel I picked one out of the rows, hoping that the design might inspire a few words of praise.

You must have painted a dozen or twenty times upon it. I don't know how you can work over such a surface, a thick coagulated scum. Why don't you scrape? Manet always scrapes before painting, and he never loses the freshness; his paint is like cream after twenty repaintings.

Jim did not know anything about Manet, nor did he care to hear about Monet, Sisley, Renoir, the Nouvelle Athènes and its litterati. He knew nothing of Banville's versification and had not read Goncourt's novels, so I told him that Catulle had thought well of my French sonnet, for having written a drama on the subject of Luther it was necessary to write a French dedicatory sonnet, and I recited it to Jim to revenge myself upon him for his having told me that he knew French as well as English.

My landlady's daughter, he said, pointing to a small portrait on the wall, and some time afterwards a young girl was heard singing on the stairs. There she is. Shall I ask her in?

I begged of him to do so, and a somewhat pretty girl with round eyes and a vivacious voice, came into the room and chattered with us; but her interest in the fact that Jim was my cousin was a little high-pitched, and it was obvious that she took no interest in his pictures, or indeed in any pictures; and it was a relief when she turned to Jim to ask him if he was staying to dinner.

Let us go out together and dine somewhere, I said.

Yes, ask him out to dinner. It will do him good. He hasn't been beyond the garden for weeks.

Yes, Jim; we will go up town and dine together.

I have no money.

But father will lend you any money you want. It will go down in the ... you can settle with father when you like.

She left the room and Jim spoke of the people in whose house he was lodging, a dancing master and his wife, and he gave me a mildly sarcastic account of Mrs —— coming up to see him in the morning to tell him that he might have the use of the parlour for ten shillings extra; my ears retain his voice still saying something about coals and gas not being included, and what tickled his fancy was the way the old lady used to linger about the drawing-room trying to draw the conversation on to his sisters, where was Miss Ada living now, and was Miss Pinkie still living with Lord Shaftesbury? He continued talking, moving the canvases about, and I was willing to appreciate the designs if he would only say that he would come out to dinner. At last he said:

You see, I haven't been to my tailor's for a long time, and my wardrobe is in a ragged and stained condition. I dare say they'll be able to find some cold beef or cold mutton or a sausage or two in the larder. You don't mind?

Of course I did not mind. It was for a talk about old times that I had come, and after the cold meats we returned to the drawing-room. Jim showed me all his latest designs and we discussed them together, mingling our memories of the women we had known. The names of Alice Harford, Annie Temple, and Mademoiselle d'Anka came into the conversation; I told him about Alice Howard, hoping he would ask me if she were as big as Alice Harford, and then, determined to rouse him, I said the great love affair of my life was a small, thin woman. Still he did not answer.

If a woman be sensual—



Painting always, I said.

A perplexed look came into her face which I attributed to the fact that she did not know whether the pictures were works of art or nothing at all, and I asked myself suddenly what Jim's death might have been, for a man so individual as Jim should die an individual death. But my imagination did not succeed in conjuring up any worthy death for him. Perhaps Turgenev might have failed too, though indeed Jim's death is very like a Turgenev death, only a little more wonderful. Nature often invents better than we, better even than Turgenev, who would have seen that Jim must be killed by a lion; but even Turgenev could not have seen how this could be managed without sending him out to Africa to hunt lions, which would be an invention only one degree more stupid than the supposition that the keeper had left one of the lion's cages open in the Zoological Gardens, and that the animal had escaped and climbed over the wall of Park Road, killing Jim, after tearing a hole through a large canvas of Cain Shielding his Wife from Wild Beasts, behind which the painter had hidden himself. Turgenev would not have thought of a snow lion, but Nature did, and one day when the snow was lying several feet deep round the house, she inspired Jim to make good his theory that a lion always lies with one paw tucked under him, never with the fore-paws stretched out like Landseer's lions in Trafalgar Square. He had always been saying that this was so, but his landlord and landlady did not wish him to start sculpture in the house. But now there was snow at the very door, and he began to pile it up, and when all the snow in the garden was exhausted the neighbours sent their snow in wheelbarrows and he continued to pile up hundredweight upon hundredweight until his lion assumed almost Egyptian proportions, rising above the surrounding walls, attracting the eyes of the hansom-cabmen who drew up their horses to admire and to suggest that the lion should be sent to the British Museum. Perhaps the Governor might have a refrigerator built for him, was a remark, which caused some amusement to the dancing master, his wife and daughter, and to Jim. But it was not thought worth while writing to the Governor of the Museum on the subject. The suggestion, Why don't you 'ave him photographed? coming next day from the top of an omnibus seemed more practical, and the maid-servant was asked to run round to the photographer, and the evening was spent counting the number of copies that would be required; each neighbour who had sent his snow must get one, and before bedtime it was noticed that the brightness of the stars predicted a fine day. But during the night clouds gathered, and in the morning the garden was enveloped in a white mist. A messenger came from the photographer to say he could do nothing that day, and the following day he failed to keep his appointment, and in a drizzle of rain Jim set to work to patch up his melting masterpiece. The next day the photographer arrived and got what he hoped would prove a very good impression; but everybody wanted a half-plate; and Jim worked on among the wet snow, Florence begging of him to put on an overcoat and a stronger pair of boots. But he tramped about in shoes, and next day he was crouching over the fire, and when the doctor heard the story of the lion he threw up his hands.

How a man of his age could be foolish enough to risk his life for such nonsense! And you tell me he always goes out without an overcoat? I'll call tomorrow and give him oxygen if required.

The thaw continued during the night, and Jim and his lion dissolved together. My first friend, I muttered, the springboard from whence I jumped into life and Art. And going to my Monet, I asked myself if Jim would have been able to discern better than AE the beauty of the evanescent willows rising out of and vanishing into the mist. He was a clever man, and knew a great deal more than anybody gave him credit for knowing. He talked nonsense about his own genius, but he knew he was talking nonsense, and his nonsense helped him to disguise his failure from himself for a moment. He should have been born in Venice about the year 1680; his talent would have come to fruition in those years, and Van Dyck would have painted his portrait. Just then the servant opened the door to ask me if I were at home to Mr Hugh Lane.



And a moment after there came into the room a tall, thin young man, talking so fast that I gathered with difficulty that there must be a great many pictures in Irish country houses which he would like to exhibit in Dublin.

If anybody cares for pictures, I contrived to interject, and he sat twisting and untwisting his legs, linking and unlinking his hands, his talk beginning to bore me a little, for I could not detect any aestheticism in him, only a nervous desire to run a show. Your brother, I said, called here a few days ago to prepare me for your visit. He said that you were going to revive Irish painting. I came here to revive the Irish language; it existed once upon a time, but Irish painting—

Lane interrupted me, admitting that the men who had painted in Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century were merely reflections of Sir Joshua and Romney.

But your brother—

Without noticing my interruption he continued telling me that, for the last fortnight, he had been travelling through Ireland, visiting all the country houses, and had obtained promises from many people to lend their pictures.

Now, your name among the list of patrons at the exhibition—But why are you giving yourself all this trouble? What is your object?

Well, you see, I am Lady Gregory's nephew, and must be doing something for Ireland.

Striking a blow, I said.

A bewildered look, quickly repressed, however, revealed to me that he did not understand my remark. You don't speak with a brogue. Your brother said you didn't. How is that?

He produced his little hysterical laugh, and without stopping to explain why it was that he had no brogue, looked round the room in search of pictures worth borrowing, and having decided upon two, a portrait of Rachel by Couture and a small Constable, he said he hoped I would try to influence Sir Thornley Stoker in his favour; he would like to print Sir Thornley's name among the patrons of the forthcoming exhibition, an exhibition designed for the advancement of Art In Ireland. I gave Lane my promise that he should be invited to the palace, our nickname for Sir Thornley's house, so full was it of beautiful things. But Sir Thornley could not be persuaded, and my affection for him was strained to the uttermost by his persistent speaking of Lane as a London picture-dealer who had come to Ireland to see what he could pick up.

Or perhaps he's on the lookout for a post in the Museum.



But what has that got to do with Lane?

Lane is Lady Gregory's nephew.

You have told me that before; you have said that before.

Of course, if you interrupt me. I was going to tell you that Lady Gregory told me herself that the family had thought of all kinds of professions suitable for Hugh, but his heart was not in any of them, and they were beginning to feel a little anxious, when one day, as they were sitting down to lunch—

Was there a duck for luncheon?

No. He caught sight of the fold of Lady Gregory's dress, a tailor-made from Paris; it is always a pleasure to a woman to hear her gown admired; but there was a seriousness in Hugh's appreciation of the hang of the skirt, and a studied regard in his eyes which caused her a moment's perplexity, and when they rose from table he stood watching her as she crossed the room. Of course, the skirt fitted rather nicely, but.... In the same afternoon she had occasion to go to her bedroom, and to her surprise found her wardrobe open and Hugh trying on her skirts before the glass. Hugh! Doesn't it seem to you, Aunt Augusta, that this skirt is a little too full? During the evening he spoke of some premises in Conduit Street; but tailoring was only a passing thought, and the next thing they heard of Hugh was that he had gone into Colnaghi's shop to learn the business of picture-dealing.

Nature is always unexpected, Thornley, bounding about like a monkey, and it may be that Lane sprang from tailor-mades right into Salvator Rosa, and up again to Giorgione and Titian. But if I had to choose Lane as the hero of a novel or play, I should proceed more regularly, a transition would be necessary, a little shop in St James's, down some court long ago swept away by an enterprising builder. In my novel there certainly would be a little shop with a window full of old fans and bits of silver, just the kind of shop that you would hang about every afternoon when you came back from the hospital, and I should place Lane in a little den out of which he would come to show you some paste—old paste. I have it, Thornley; cameos and old paste would be the steps whereby Lane mounted from tailor-mades to Salvator Rosa and then on to—whom did I say, Thornley?

Giorgione, the old doctor muttered, laughing in his beard. Two years is long enough. I was five years walking the hospitals.

It was long enough for Lane. When he left Colnaghi's shop and took a lodging in Bury Street, he was able to buy and sell pictures so successfully that in two years he had put together, I think he told me, ten thousand pounds.

Yet you say he is not a dealer; and the old doctor continued to growl by the fireside.

He is a collector who weeds out his collection. Let us call him a weeder; and let us never speak of the lavatory but of the cloak-room or the toilet-room. And let us avoid the word lodger, for he is extinct, or, like the phoenix, he has risen from his ashes and become a paying-guest. Petticoat-bodice is taboo; and bodice—even bodice—one of the beautifullest words in the language, has yielded to the detestable corsage; and the journalist speaks of a woman as petite, thinking that petite suggests refinement. Naked is a word that nobody of taste would think of using—unclothed or undraped; no reasonable man or woman would object to meeting this sentence in a novel: I would give all my worldly wealth to see Venus walk undraped from her bath; the novelist might even write: I would give all my worldly wealth to see Elizabeth Hawkins walk undraped from her bath; but if he were to write: I would give all my worldly wealth to see Elizabeth Hawkins walk naked from her bath, he would be dubbed a very gross writer by the newspapers, though it is difficult to say how morality gains by the substitution of unclothed or undraped for naked, and easy to see that literature dies in these substitutions. Who would ever think of asking a lady for the bill-of-fare? Even in the second-class restaurants the word bill-of-fare has been dropped, we read now the menu. So you see, Lane is quite in the fashion when he calls himself a collector. If you would only meet him you would be converted, not to euphuisms, but to Lane. He has got such pretty ways. When you ask him if he is going to sell a picture he will say: Don't talk to me about selling; I can't bear to part with my pictures. One of these days I shall have a house and shall want pictures; and immediately the conversation will slide away, and you'll find yourself listening to a long tale of a collection of pictures which he intends to present at cost price to some provincial gallery. He is all for Art, and you, who have been talking Art and buying beautiful things all your life, now repudiate the one man who comes to Ireland to revive the art of painting.

It never existed in Ireland.

Never mind. It will be revived all the same.



There's no use talking any more. I've spent a very pleasant evening. Good night, Thornley, good night.

Well, you'll see, were his last words, and he was very sarcastic when it became known that Lane had bought a large Lancret from Sir Algernon Coote at the close of the exhibition, and whenever I went in to smoke a cigar with him he referred to this deal with extraordinary bitterness. I could not see what ground of complaint he had against Lane. Sir Algernon Coote, I often said, was glad to get seven or eight hundred, perhaps a thousand for his picture. What concern is it of yours the price the picture fetches afterwards? He growled in his armchair, averring that Lane had no right to ask Sir Algernon Coote to lend him a picture and then to buy it from him. A most extraordinary proposition, I said. If nobody is to make a profit, there can be no buying or selling. Yourself made a profit upon your sale of Wedgwood.

Sir Thornley did not think that this was quite the same thing, and I said, Pooh, pooh.

We had just begun to forget Lane when we heard that he had run across a Tiepolo at Ostend, and had picked up another picture in Antwerp, and for these pictures and Sir Algernon Coote's Lancret he had been paid seventeen thousand pounds by Durand Ruel. He had not taken it all out in cash; Lane's genius lies in swopping. It is a bold man that dares to swop with Durand Ruel, but Lane dares everything, and he got Manet's portrait of Mademoiselle Gonzales probably cheaper than a private buyer could have gotten it, on the plea that it was going into a permanent exhibition. It came over with a number of Impressionist pictures, lent by different people—Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Berthe Morisot—all the Impressionist school.

And for what object? Sir Thornley cried.

To found a Gallery of Modern Art. Again I set myself to explain Lane to Sir Thornley, without arriving at any results whatever. He would not, or he could not, understand that though it is Lane's instinct to make money it is also his instinct to spend the money that he makes upon Art. Nobody that I have ever met, Thornley, desires Art as purely as Lane. I have known many people who make money out of Art, but it is generally spent on motor-cars, women, cooks, and valets. But Lane spends hardly anything upon himself. His whole life is absorbed in Art, and he would not be able to gratify his passion if he did not make money. Why will you not be reconciled to him? Why will you not accept him for what he is? I said again and again. But he remained grumpy, doggedly refusing to become a member of the committee, consenting, however, to visit the exhibition, not being able to resist my descriptions of the portrait of Mademoiselle Gonzales, the Itinerant Musician, and the other pictures.

A wonderful exhibition it was, organised by Lane, who rushed about Dublin from one end to the other, begging of everybody to come to his exhibition, gathering up the ladies into groups, giving them all something to do, telling one that she must collect subscriptions to buy a certain picture, another one that she must play the piano for him; another would oblige him by playing, or trying to play, it did not matter which, a violin solo, the Kreutzer Sonata, or anything else she liked. He discovered a young gentleman who sang comic songs very well; for the sake of Art he was asked to sing. Anybody who could write at all was asked to write letters to the papers. Everybody in Dublin was swept into the exhibition, and as soon as the receipts began to decline Lane was again devising some new method whereby they might be revived. So far I had resisted him, and he came one evening to ask me to write an article.

No, ten thousand times no.

Lane laughed, and suggested a lecture.

I am the only one in Dublin who knew Manet, Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Pissarro—I knew them all at the Nouvelle Athènes. Lane, you tempt me.

When will you be able to give the lecture?

A terror came upon me, and I stuttered, When? One has to speak for an hour, an hour and ten minutes, an hour and fifteen minutes. That would make two fortnightly articles at the very least. Oh, Lane!

I'll begin to advertise the lecture tomorrow. You'll have four days to prepare it.

Four days!

And Lane, who is always in a hurry, bade me good night abruptly.