Nights Part 8

Once we were so reduced that at noon I was left to a lonely _brioche_ at the _Salon_, and the men went to breakfast at the nearest cabman's eating-house, where they made the sensation of their lives, without meaning to and without finding in it any special compensation. The most respectable of the respectable architectural group of our Thursday nights was of the party and where he went the top hat and frock coat, in which I used to think he must have been born, went too. If his fas.h.i.+on-plate correctness--men wore frock coats then--made him conspicuous at our Thursday nights it can be imagined what he was sitting with his coat tails in the gutter at the cabman's table where the glazed hat and the three-caped coat of the Paris _cocher_ set the fas.h.i.+on. He had the grace to be ashamed of himself, often apologizing for his clothes and a.s.suring us that he could not help himself, which was his reason, I fancy, for accepting at an early age the professorial chair where the decorum of his hat and coat was in need of no apology.

IV

I have said we were young. It seems superfluous to add that now and then, in the suns.h.i.+ne of the perfect May day, with the call of the lilacs and the horse-chestnuts getting into our heads as well as into my copy, the _Salon_ grew stuffy beyond endurance, work became a crime, and we put up our catalogues and note-books before the closing hour and hurried anywhere just to be out-of-doors, as if our sole profession in life was to idle it away. After all, only the prig can be in Paris when May is there and not play truant sometimes.

The year Paris chose our week to show how hot it can be in May when it has a mind to, was the year I got to learn something of the Paris suburbs. The joyous expedition which ended our every day that year was so in the spirit of Harland that I should be inclined to look upon him as the tempter, had we not, with the usual amiability of the tempted, met him more than half way. Still, he excelled us all in the knack of collecting us from our work, no matter how it had scattered us or in what quarter of the town we might be, and carrying us off suddenly out of it in directions we none of us had dreamed of the minute before, just as he would collect and carry us off suddenly in London. Only, he was more resourceful in Paris because in Paris more resources were made to his hand. There are as beautiful places round London--that is, beautiful in the English way--as round Paris, but they do not invite to a holiday with the charm no sensible man can resist. The loveliness of Hampton Court and Richmond and Hampstead Heath and the River is not to be denied and yet, gay as the English playing there manage to look, the only genuine gaiety is the Bank Holiday maker's. Tradition consecrates the loveliness bordering upon Paris to the gaiety to which Gavarni and Murger are the most sympathetic guides, and none could have been more to Harland's fancy. He was very like his own favourite heroes, or I ought to say his own favourite heroes were very like him. For it is Harland who talks through his own pages with his own charming fantastic blend of philosophy and nonsense, Harland who refuses to believe in an age of prose and prudence, Harland who is determined to see the romance, the squalor, the pageantry, the humour of this jumble-show of a world, not merely at ease from the stalls, but struggling with the princ.i.p.al _role_ on the stage, or prompting from behind the scenes. When he was bent upon leading us to the same near, inside, part in the spectacle, it was extraordinary how, as if by inspiration, he always. .h.i.t upon the right expedition for the time of the year and the mood of the moment.

I remember the afternoon he said St. Cloud it seemed as inevitable that we must go there as if St. Cloud had been our one thought all day long, the evening reward promised for our day's labour; just as on the boat steaming down the Seine and in the park wandering under the trees and among the ruins, I felt that the afternoon was the one of all others predestined for our delight there. The beauty provided by St. Cloud and the mood we brought for its enjoyment met at the hour appointed from all eternity.

Artists, it is supposed, and not without reason, are trained to see beauty more clearly and therefore to feel it more acutely than other people. But my long experience has taught me that it is the lover of beauty who can dare to be flippant in the face of it, just as it is the devout who can afford to talk familiarly of holy things. Besides, artists work so hard that they have the sense to know how important it is to be foolish at the right time. That is the secret of all the delicious absurdities of what the French called the _Vie de Boheme_ until the outsider who did not understand made a tiresome _cliche_ of it. The right time for our folly we felt was the golden May evening and the right place a beautiful Paris suburb, time and place consecrated to folly by generations of artists and students. Below us, at St. Cloud, stretched the wide beautiful French landscape, with its cla.s.sical symmetry and its note of sadness, in the pure clear light of France, the Seine winding through it towards Paris; round us was the park as cla.s.sical in its lines and ma.s.ses, and with its note of sadness the stronger because of the tragic memories that haunt it; in the foreground were my companions agreeably playing the fool and posing as living statues on the broken columns: he whose solemnity of demeanour accorded with his belief that his real sphere was the pulpit, throwing out an unaccustomed leg as Mercury on one column, and on another the Architect, an apologetic Apollo in frock coat with silk hat for lyre. In my lightheartedness, and accustomed to the ways of the English, I thought them absurd but funny. A French family, however, who pa.s.sed by chance looked as if they wondered, as the French have wondered for centuries, at the sadness with which the Englishman takes his pleasures.

Beardsley was one of the party. It was the first time he was with us in Paris, the first time, for that matter, he had ever been there. He had clutched beforehand, like the youth he was, at the pleasure the visit promised, and I remember his joy in coming to tell me of it one morning in Buckingham Street. I remember too how amazing I thought it that, when he got there, he seemed at once to know Paris in the mysterious way he knew everything.

We had not heard of his arrival until we ran across him at the _Vernissage_ in the New _Salon_. I think he had planned the dramatic effect of the chance meeting, counting upon the impression he would make as we met. I have said he was always a good deal of a dandy and I could see at what pains he had been to invent the costume he thought Paris and art demanded of him. He was in grey, a harmony carefully and quite exquisitely carried out, grey coat, grey waistcoat, grey trousers, grey Suede gloves, grey soft felt hat, grey tie which, in compliment to the French, was large and loose. An impression of this grey elegance is in the portrait of him by Blanche, painted, I think, the same year. As he came through the galleries towards us with the tripping step that was characteristic of him, a little light cane swinging in his hand, he was the most striking figure in them, dividing the stares of the staring _Vernissage_ crowd with the _clou_ of the year's New _Salon_: that portrait by Aman-Jean of his wife, with her hair parted in the middle and brought simply down over her ears, which set a mode copied before the season was over by women it disfigured, heroines who could dare the unbecoming if fas.h.i.+on decreed it. Beardsley knew he was being stared at and of course liked it, and probably would not have exchanged places with anybody there, not even with Carolus-Duran when, splendidly barbered, in gorgeous waistcoat, and with an air of casualness, the _cher maitre et president_ strolled into the restaurant at the supreme moment, carefully chosen, all the crowd there before him, their breakfast ordered, their first pangs of hunger stilled, and their attention and enthusiasm at liberty for the greeting he counted upon, and got.

It may be that this scene of the older generation's triumph and the power of officialism in art told on Beardsley's nerves, or it may be it was simply because he was still young enough to believe n.o.body had ever been young before, but certainly by evening he had worked himself up into a fine frenzy of revolt. When we had got through our foolish game of living statues, and had settled down to dinner in a little restaurant, where a parrot's greeting of "_Apres vous, madame! Apres vous, monsieur!_" had vouched for the excellence of its manners, and where we could look across the river and see for ourselves how true were the effects that Cazin used to paint and that seemed so false to those who knew nothing of French twilight, and when Beardsley had finished his first gla.s.s of very ordinary wine well watered, he let us know what he thought about _les vieux_ and their stultifying observance of worn-out laws and principles.

That started Bob Stevenson, who saw an argument and, for the sake of it, became ponderously patriarchal, h.o.a.ry with convention. In point of years, it is true, he was older than any of us, but no matter what his age according to the Family Bible he was to the end, and would have been had he lived to be a hundred, the youngest in spirit of any company into which he ever strayed or could stray. His way, however, was, as Louis Stevenson described it, "to trans-migrate" himself into the character or pose he a.s.sumed for the moment and no Heavy Father was ever heavier than he that night at St. Cloud. He spoke with the air of superior knowledge calculated to aggravate youth. With years, he a.s.sured Beardsley, men learned to value law and order in art, as in the state, at their worth; and, more and more inspired by his theme, as was his way, he grew preposterously wise and irritating, and he talked himself so successfully into every exasperating virtue of age that I could not wonder at the fierceness with which Beardsley turned upon him and denounced him roundly as conventional and academic and prejudiced and old-fas.h.i.+oned and all that to youth is most odious and that to Bob, when not playing a part, was most impossible. In harmony with his new _role_, he showed himself a miracle of forbearance under Beardsley's reproaches and sententious beyond endurance, actually called Beardsley young, his cardinal offence, for the young hate nothing so much as to be reminded of the youth for which the old envy them. Bob's almost every sentence began with the unendurable "at my age," which irritated Beardsley the more, while we roared at the farce of it in the mouth of one to whom years never made or could make a particle of difference. He wound up by the warning in soothing tones that Beardsley, in his turn burdened with years, would understand, would be able to make allowances, as all must as they grow older, or life would be an endless battle for the individual as for the race. Beardsley, luckily for himself, did not live to lose his illusions, and I fancy that to not one of us who listened to their talk did it occur that we were in danger of losing ours with age, so immortal does youth seem while it lasts.

The adventure of other afternoons worked out so surprisingly in Harland's vein that he might have invented it for his books or we might have borrowed it from them. The encounter with a peac.o.c.k at a _cafe_ in the _Bois_, to which he swept us off at the end of the hottest of those hot May days, was one of many that he afterwards made use of. Had he not, I might hesitate to recall it, knowing as I do that its wit must be lost upon the younger generation of to-day who face life and work with a severity, a solemnity, that alarms me. Their inability to take themselves with gaiety is what makes the young men of the Twentieth Century so hopelessly different from the young men of the Eighteen-Nineties. Their high moral ideal and concern with social problems would not permit them to see anything to laugh at in the experiment of feeding a peac.o.c.k on cake steeped in absinthe, but it struck us, in our deplorable frivolity, as humorous at the time, our consciences the less disturbed because the bird was led into temptation in the manner of one to whom it was no new thing to yield. Harland, when he wrote the story with the mock seriousness he was master of, suggested that the crime was in its having been committed by an irreproachable British author, the sober father of a family. More momentous to us, accessories to the crime, was the fact that the cake stuck, a conspicuous lump, in the peac.o.c.k's conspicuous throat. For what seemed hours we waited in tense agitation, torn between our desire to make sure the lump would disappear and our fears of discovery before it did. But the peac.o.c.k was a gentleman in his cups and reeled away to swallow the lump and, I hope, to sleep off his debauch, in some more secluded spot where, if he were discovered, we should not be suspected.

There was another afternoon I wonder Harland did not make use of which, had I been in a pedantic mood, I might have taken as an object-lesson in the art and occupation of shocking the _bourgeois_. We had been tempted and had yielded as unreservedly as the peac.o.c.k, with the difference that our temptation took the form of the suns.h.i.+ne and the convenience of the train service at St. Lazare. No sane person with such suns.h.i.+ne out-of-doors could stay shut up in the _Salon_ and a train was ready at St. Lazare, whenever we chose to catch it, to carry us off to Versailles. We were on our way at once after our midday breakfast.

Versailles was too beautiful on that beautiful day to ask anything of us except to live in the beauty, to make it ours for the moment; too beautiful to spare us time for bothering about those who had been there before us; too beautiful to allow the guide-book's fine print and maps and diagrams to blind our eyes to the one essential fact that the sun was s.h.i.+ning, that the trees were in the greenest growth of their May-time, that the flowers were radiant with the fulfilment of spring and the promise of summer. As a place full of history we must have known it, had we never heard its name. History stared at us from the grey palace walls, history waylaid us in the formal alleys, lurked in the formal waters, haunted the formal gardens, overshadowed all the leafy pleasant places. There is no getting very far from history at Versailles no matter how hard one may try to. But we had no intention to let the dead past blot out the new life rekindling--to give its chill to the young spring day and its sadness to the foolish young people out for a holiday--to wither the fresh beauty that makes it good just to be alive, just to have eyes to see and freedom to use them.

I can write this now, but I would not have dared to say it then. Not only I, but every one of us, would have been as ashamed to be caught indulging in sentiment, or "bleating," as the _National Observer_. The chances are we were talking as much nonsense as could be talked to the minute, for there was nothing we liked to talk better, nothing that served us so well to disguise the emotion we thought out of place in the world in which so obviously the self-respecting man's business was to fight. But if I had not felt the beauty it would not now, so many years after, remain as my most vivid impression of the day.

We had Versailles to ourselves at first. We were alone in the park, alone in the alleys and avenues, alone in the gardens,--and the palace and its paintings could not tempt us in out of the suns.h.i.+ne. But such good luck naturally did not last and while we were loitering near the great fountain we saw a party of women with the eager, hara.s.sed, conscientious look that marks the personally-conducted school-ma'am on tour, bearing briskly down upon us, each with a red book in one hand, a pencil in the other, all engrossed in the personally-conducted school-ma'am's holiday task of checking off the sight disposed of, pigeon-holing the last guide-book fact verified. Their methodical progress was an offence to us in the mood we were in, would be an offence on a May day to the right-minded in any mood. I admit they could have turned upon us and asked what we were, anyway, but tourists as, after a fas.h.i.+on, no doubt we were. But they could not have accused us of the horrible conscientiousness, the deadly determination to see the correct things and to think the correct thoughts about them that dulls the personally-conducted to the world's real beauty and its meaning--the same tendency of the mult.i.tude to follow like sheep the accepted leader and never venture to explore fresh fields for themselves, that drove Hugo to writing his _Hernani_, and Gautier to wearing his red waistcoat, and all the other Romanticists to their favourite pastime of shocking the _bourgeois_. Versailles was so wonderful on the face of it that we resented the presence of people who needed a book to tell them so and to explain why; and we made our protest against the _bourgeois_ in our own fas.h.i.+on or, to be exact, in Furse's fas.h.i.+on. He was then blessedly young, fresh from the schools and not yet sobered by Academic honours, though already a youthful member of the New English Art Club, from whom an att.i.tude of general defiance was required. He raged and raved in his big booming voice, declared that tourists ought to be wiped off the face of the earth, that the women were a hideous blot on the landscape, that the guide-books were disgracefully out of tone, that it was unbearable and he wasn't going to bear it, and by his sudden satisfied smile I saw he had found out how not to. As the school-ma'ams came within earshot:

"It's beastly hot," he boomed to us, "what do you say to a swim?"

And he took off his coat, he took off his waistcoat, he took off his necktie, he unb.u.t.toned his collar,--but already the school-ma'ams had scuttled away, the more daring glancing back once or twice as they went, their dismay tempered by curiosity.

Furse was pleased as a child over his success, vowed he was ready for all the tourists impudent enough to think they had a right to share Versailles with us, and, when a group of Germans talked their guttural way towards us, he had us all down on our knees, before we knew it, nibbling at the gra.s.s like so many Nebuchadnezzars escaped from Charenton--an amazing sight that brought the chorus of "Colossals" to an abrupt stop, and sent the Germans flying.

It may be objected that we were behaving in a fas.h.i.+on that children would be sent to bed without any supper for, that it was worse than childish to take pleasure in shocking innocent tourists much better behaved than ourselves. But there wasn't any pleasure in it. If we set out to shock them, it was to get rid of them, that was all we wanted, and it made me see that the succession of young rebels who have loved to _epater le bourgeois_ never wanted anything more either--except the self-conscious young rebels who play at rebellion because they fancy it the surest and quickest way "to arrive."

It is less easy to say why a beautiful day at Versailles should have sent us back to Paris singing American songs--or to give credit, if credit is due, it was the rest of the party who returned to the music of their own voices; I, who to my sorrow cannot as much as turn a tune, never am so imprudent as to raise my voice in song and so add my discord to any singing in public or in private. Had they been heard above the noise of the train, the explanation of those who saw us when we got to St. Lazare probably would have been that we were a company of n.i.g.g.e.r minstrels. By accident, or sheer inattention, when we climbed upstairs on the double-decked suburban train, we chose the car just behind the locomotive and memory has not cleaned away the black that covered our faces when we climbed down again.

It was all very foolish--and no less foolish were the afternoons in the depths of Fontainebleau or the sunlit green thickets of Saint-Germain--no less foolish any of those afternoons in the forest or the park to which a long drive by train, or tram, had carried us. And I am prepared to admit the folly to-day as I sit at my elderly desk and look out to the London sky, grey and drear as if the spring had gone with my youth. But if I never again can be so foolish, at least I am thankful that once I could, that once long ago I was young in Paris, "the enchanted city with its charming smile for youth,"--that once I believed in folly and, in so believing, had learned more of the true philosophy of life than the most industrious student can ever dig out of his books.

V

The afternoon at Versailles was the rare exception. We were too keen about our work, or too dependent on it, to play truant often, however gay the suns.h.i.+ne and convenient the trains. Nor was it any great hards.h.i.+p not to, especially after we had broken loose once or twice so successfully as to make sure we had not forgotten how. If we did stay in the _Salon_ until we were turned out, the last to leave, Paris was neither so dull nor so ugly at night that we need sigh for the suburbs.

It was an amus.e.m.e.nt simply to drink our coffee in front of a _cafe_, to go on with the talk that must have had a beginning sometime somewhere, but that never got anywhere near an end, and to watch the life of the Paris streets.

I had got my initiation into _cafe_ life that first year in Italy and had finished my education by cycle on French roads, where every evening taught me the difference between the country where there is a _cafe_ to pa.s.s an hour in over a gla.s.s of coffee after dinner, and England where choice in the small town then lay between immediate bed or the intolerable gloom of the Coffee Room. It is the real democrat like the Frenchman or the Italian who knows how to take his ease in a _cafe_; the Englishman, who hasn't an inkling of what the democracy he boasts of means, fights shy of it. He does not mind making use of it when he is away from home, but he is likely to be thanking his stars all the time that in his part of the world nothing so promiscuous is possible. I tried to point out its advantages once to an English University man.

"Aoh!" he said, "you know at Oxford we had our wines and we weren't bothered by people."

But it is just the people part of it that is amusing, the more so if the background is the Street of a French or an Italian town.

Some nights we went to the _Cafe de la Paix_ on the _Rive Droite_; other nights, to the _Cafe d'Harcourt_ on the _Rive Gauche_; and occasionally to the _Cafe de la Regence_ where many artists went, especially foreign artists, and more especially Scandinavians. I seem to retain a vision of Thaulow, a blond giant more than fitting in the corner of the little raised enclosure in the front of the _cafe_. My one other recollection is of a story I heard there, though of the painter who told it I can recall only that he was a Belgian. If I recall the story so well, it must be because it struck me at the time as characteristic and in memory became forever after a.s.sociated with the little open s.p.a.ce I was looking over to as I listened, amused and interested, while the flower women pushed past their barrows piled high with the big round bunches of budding lilies-of-the-valley you see nowhere save in Paris. It is impossible for me to think of the _cafe_ without thinking of the little _Place_, nor of the little _Place_ without at once hearing again the artist's voice lingering joyfully over the adventures of his youth.

The story was one of a kind I had often listened to at the _n.a.z.ionale_ in Rome and the _Orientale_ in Venice--a story of student days--a story of two young painters coming to Paris in their first ripe enthusiasm, with devotion to squander upon the masters, upon none more lavishly than upon Jules Breton, which explains what ages ago it was and how young they must have been. They were at the _Salon_, standing in silent wors.h.i.+p before Breton's peasant woman with a scythe against a garish sunset, when they heard behind them an adoring voice saying the things they were thinking to one they knew must be the _cher maitre_ himself, and they felt if they could once shake his hand life could hold no higher happiness. The wors.h.i.+p of the young is pleasant to the old.

Breton let them shake his hand and, more, he kept them at his side until his visit to the _Salon_ was finished, and then sent them away walking on air. They were leaving the next day. In the morning they went to the _Rue de Rivoli_ to buy toys to take home to their little brothers and sisters, and one selected a dog and the other a mill, and when wound up the dog played the drum and cymbals and the mill turned its wheel and, children themselves, they were ravished and would not have the toys wrapped up but carried them back in their arms to the hotel, stopping in the _Avenue de l'Opera_ to wind up the mill and see the wheel go round again. And as they stood enchanted, the mill wheel turning and turning, who should come towards them but the _cher Maitre_. It was too late to run, too late to hide the mill with its turning wheel and the dog with its foolish drum. They longed to sink through the ground in their mortification--they, the serious students of yesterday, to be caught to-day playing like silly children in the open street. But how ineffable is the condescension of the great! The master joined them.

"_Tiens_," he said, "and the wheel, it goes round? But it works beautifully. Let us wind it up again!"

Cannot you see the little comedy,--the fine old prophet with the red ribbon in his b.u.t.ton-hole, the two trembling, adoring students, the toy with its revolving wheel, all in the gay sunlight of the _Avenue de l'Opera_, and not a pa.s.ser-by troubling to look because it was Paris where men are not ashamed to be themselves. The two painters preserved this impression of the kindness of the master long after they ceased to wors.h.i.+p at the shrine of the peasant with her scythe posed against the sunset.

One duty the Boulevards of the Left Bank imposed upon us in the Nineties was the search for Verlaine and Bibi-la-Puree, and many another poet for all time and celebrity for the day, in the _cafes_ where they waited to be found and I do not doubt were deeply disappointed if n.o.body came to find them. The fame of these great men, who were easily accessible when the _cafe_ they went to happened to be known, had crossed to London with so much else London was labelling _fin-de-siecle_. To have met them, to be able to speak of them in intimate terms, to be authorities on the special vice of each, was the ambition of the yearning young decadents on the British side of the Channel, who imagined in the intimacy a proof of their own emanc.i.p.ation from it would have been hard to say what, their own genius for revolution if it was not clear what reason they had to revolt. We, who cultivated a withering scorn for decadence and the affectation of it, were moved by nothing more serious or ambitious than youth's natural desire to see and to know everything that is going on, and we could not have been very ardent in our search, for I never remember once, on the nights we devoted to the hunt, tracking these lions to their lair. However, at least one of our party had better luck when he started on the hunt without us. According to a rumour at the time, the respectable British author, sober father of a family, who fed the peac.o.c.k on cake steeped in absinthe, was once seen in broad daylight with the _Reine de Golconde_ on his arm, walking down the _Boul' Mich'_ at the head of a band of poets.

Verlaine I did meet, but it was in London, where admiring, or philanthropic, young Englishmen brought him one winter to lecture and the subject as announced was "Contemporary French Poetry," and through all these years I have managed to preserve the small sheet of announcement with Arthur Symons's name and "kind regards" written below, a personal little doc.u.ment, for it was Symons who got up the show, and he and Herbert P. Horne who sold the tickets. Instead of lecturing, Verlaine read his verses to the scanty audience, all of whom knew each other, in the dim light of Barnard's Inn Hall, and the music of their rhythm was in his voice so that I was not conscious of the satyr-like repulsiveness of his face and head so long as he was reading. When he was not reading, the repulsiveness was to me overpowering and I shrank from his very presence. Nor was the shrinking less when I talked with him the night after his lecture, at a dinner where my place was next to his. He was like a loathsome animal with his decadent face, his yellow skin, and his little b.e.s.t.i.a.l eyes lighting up obscenely as he told me of the two women who would fight for the money in his pockets when he got back to Paris. Beyond this I have no recollection of his talk. The prospect before him apparently absorbed his interest, was the only good he had got out of his visit to London. The beauty of his own beautiful poems, I felt in disgust, should have made such vicious sordidness impossible. It revolted me that a man so degraded and hideous physically could write the verse I had loved ever since his _Romances sans Paroles_ first fell into my hands, or, writing it, could be content to remain what he was. To be sure, the genius is rare whom it is not a disappointment to meet, and the hero-wors.h.i.+pper may be thankful when his great man is guilty of nothing worse than the famous writer in Tchekhof's play--so famous as to have his name daily in the papers and his photograph in shop windows--whose crime was to condescend to fish and to be pleased when he caught something.

VI

The Nineties would not let us off from another entertainment as characteristic--as _fin-de-siecle_, the Englishman under the impression that he knew his Paris would have cla.s.sified it--nor did we want to be let off, though it lured us indoors.

The big theatres had no attraction: to sit out a long play in a hot playhouse was not our idea of what spring nights were made for. Neither had the "h.e.l.ls" and "Heavens," the fatuous, vulgar, indecent performances with catchpenny names, run for the foreigner who went to Paris so that he might for the rest of his life throw up hands of horror and say what an immoral place it was.

Once or twice we tried the out-door _Cafe-Chantant_, and we heard Paulus in the days when all Paris went to hear him, and Yvette Guilbert when she was still slim and wore the V-shaped bodice and the long black gloves, as you may see her in Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs.

Once or twice we tried the big stuffy music-halls, also adapted to supply the travelling student of morals with the specimens he was in search of, but not dropping all local character in the effort. We seemed to owe it to the memory of Manet to go to the _Folies-Bergere_ which cannot be forgotten so long as his extraordinary painting of the barmaid in the ugly fas.h.i.+ons of the late Seventies is saved to the world. That natural desire of youth just to see and to know, that had carried us up and down the _Boulevards_ of the _Rive Gauche_ in pursuit of its poets, sent us to the _Casino de Paris_ and the _Moulin Rouge_. But a first visit did not inspire us with a desire for a second, though I would not have missed the _Casino_ if only for the imperishable memory of the most solemn of our critics dancing there with a patroness of the house and looking about as cheerful as a martyr at the stake, nor the _Moulin_ _Rouge_ for another memory as imperishable of the most socially pretentious leaving his partner, after his dance, with the "thanks awfully" of the provincial ball-room. I thought both dull places which nothing save their reputation could have recommended, even to those determined young decadents in London who were no prouder of their friends.h.i.+p with Bibi and Verlaine than of their freedom of the French music-halls, and who wrote of them with a pretence of profound knowledge calculated to _epater le bourgeois_ at home, referring by name with easy familiarity to the dancers in the _Quadrille Naturaliste_, as celebrated in its way as Bibi in his, and explaining solemnly the _chahut_ and the _grand ecart_ and _le port d'armes_ and every evolution in that unpleasant dance. How it brought it all back to me the other day when I found in _The Gypsy_--the direct but belated offspring of _The Savoy_--a poem to _Nini-patte-en-l'air_. And does anybody now know or care who Nini-patte-en-l'air was? Or who _La Goulue_ and the rest? Would anybody now go a step to see the _Quadrille_ were any graceless acrobats left to dance it? These things belonged to the lightest of light fas.h.i.+ons that pa.s.sed with the Nineties, and the _Moulin Rouge_ itself could burn down to the ground a few months ago and hardly a voice be heard in lament or reminiscence. Upon such rapidly s.h.i.+fting sands did the young would-be revolutionaries of London build their House of Decadence.

The entertainment worth the exchange of the pure May night for a smoke-laden, stuffy interior was in none of these places. Where we looked for it--and found it--was in the little _cafe_ or _cabaret_--the _cabaret artistique_ as it was then known in Paris--with a flair for the genius the world is so long in discovering, where the young poet read his verses, the young musician interpreted his music, the young artist showed his work in any manner the chance was given him to, to say nothing of the posters he sometimes designed for it and decorated Paris with: theatre and performance and advertis.e.m.e.nt impossible in any other town or any other atmosphere. London is too clumsy. Berlin is too ponderous, New York has not the right material home-grown, and the spirit of the original dies in the self-conscious imitation. Even in Paris a Baedeker star is its death-blow, the private guide's attention spells immediate ruin, nor can it survive more legitimate honours at home when they come. Like most good things it has its times and its seasons, and it was in the Nineties it gave forth its finest blossoms.

We knew it was a pleasure to be s.n.a.t.c.hed this year, for next who could say where it might be, and we set out to s.n.a.t.c.h it with the same diligence we had devoted one spring to eating dinners and another to playing in the suburbs, though we could make no pretence in a week to exhaust it.

Night after night we dined, we drank our coffee at the nearest _cafe_, we scrambled to the top of the big omnibus with the three white horses, now as dead as the performance it was taking us to, we journeyed across Paris to see or to hear the work of the young genius on the threshold of fame or oblivion. And if in an access of conscientiousness we had felt the need--as we never did--of a reason for our eagerness, we might have had it in the way our evening's entertainment invariably turned out to be the legitimate sequel of our day's work. For there wasn't a _cabaret_ of them all that did not reflect somehow the things we had been busy studying and wrangling over ever since our arrival in Paris, the merit they shared in common being their pre-occupation with the art and literature of the day to which they belonged. The tiresome performance known as a _Revue_, which is all the vogue just now in the London music-halls, undertakes to do something of the same kind: to be, that is, a reflection of the events and interests and popular excitements of the day. But the wide gulf between the music-hall _Revue_ and the old _Cabaret_ performance is that art and literature could not, by hook or by crook, be dragged into the average Englishman's scheme of life.

If one night the end of the journey was the _Treteau de Tabarin_--the hot and uncomfortable little room rigged up as a theatre, with hard rough wooden benches for the audience, and vague lights, and bare and dingy stage where men and women whose names I have forgotten read and recited and sang the _chansons rosses_ that "all Paris" flocked there to hear--it was to have the argument from which we had freshly come continued and settled by one of the inspired young poets. For my chief remembrance is of the irreverent youth who summed up our daily dispute over Rodin's great melodramatic Balzac, with frowning brows and goitrous throat, wrapped in shapeless dressing-gown, that stood that spring in the centre of the sculpture court at the New _Salon_, and the summing up was in verse only a Frenchman could write, the satire the more bitter because the wit was so fine.

A second night when we climbed the lumbering omnibus, we were bound for the _Chat Noir_. It had already moved from its first primitive quarters but had not yet degenerated into a regular show place, advertised in Paris and taken by Salis on tour through the provinces. Here, our justification was to find that everything, from the sign of the Black Cat, then hanging at the door and now hanging, a national possession, in the Carnavalet Museum, and the cat-decorations in the _cafe_ and the drawings and paintings on the wall, to the performance in the big room upstairs, was by the men over whose work we had been arguing all day at the _Salon_ and buying in the reproductions at the bookstalls and bookshops on the way back.

To see that performance upstairs we had each to pay five francs at the door, and we paid them as willingly as if they did not represent breakfast and dinner for the next day, and so many other people paid them with equal willingness that the room was crowded, though the show was of a kind that the same public in any town except Paris would have paid twice that sum to stay away from. Imagine Poe attracting customers for a New York saloon-keeper by reciting his poems! Imagine Keene or Beardsley making the fortunes of a London public-house by decorating its walls and showing his pictures on a screen! Or imagine the public of to-day, debauched by the "movies" and the music-hall "sketch," knowing that there is such a thing as poetry or art to listen to and look at!

But Salis,--the great Salis, inventor, proprietor, director of the _Chat Noir_, dealt only in poetry and art and music, and this is sufficient to give him a place in the history of the period, even if he were the mere exploiter filling his pockets by pilfering other people's brains that he was accused of being by his enemies. He crowded his _cafe_ by letting poets whom n.o.body had heard of and whose destiny--some of them, Maurice Donnay for one--as staid Academicians n.o.body could have foreseen, try their verses for the first time in public; by giving the same splendid opportunity to musicians as obscure then, whatever heights at least two--Charpentier and Debussy--were afterwards to reach; and by allowing the artist, while the poet was the interpreter in beautiful words and the musician in beautiful sound, to show his wonderful little dramas in black-and-white, the _Ombres Chinoises_ that were the crowning glory of the night's performance. From days in the _Salons_, from the ill.u.s.trated papers and magazines and books we filled our bags with to take back to London, we could not measure the full powers of men like Willette and Caran d'Ache and Riviere and Louis Morin until we had seen also _The Prodigal Son_, _The March of the Stars_, and all the stories they told in those dramatic silhouettes--those marvellous little black figures, cut in tin, only a few inches high, moving across a white s.p.a.ce small in due proportion, but so designed and posed and grouped by the artist as to give the swing and the movement and the pa.s.sing of great armies until one could almost fancy one heard the drums beat and the trumpets call, or to suggest the grandeur and solemnity of the desert, the vastness of the sky, the mystery of the night. They have been imitated. Only a few months ago I saw an imitation in a London music-hall, with all that late inventions in photography and electric light could do for it. But no touch of genius was in the little figures and the elaboration was no more than clever stagecraft. The simplicity of the _Chat Noir_ was gone, and gone the gaiety of the performers, and the pretence of gaiety is sadder than tragedy. Salis knew how to catch his poet, his musician, his artist, young,--that is where he scored.

It is possible that I was the more impressed by the beauty of the show because it was not of that side of the _Chat Noir_ I had heard most. Its British admirers or critics, when they got back to London, had far more to say of it as a haunt of vice, if not as decadents to parade their wide and experienced knowledge of Paris, then as students who had gone there very likely to gather further confirmation of the popular British belief in Paris as the headquarters of vice and frivolity. To this day the hero or heroine of the British novel who is led astray is apt to cross the Channel for the purpose. It was a delicate matter to accomplish this in the Nineties when the novelist happened to be a woman, for even the "New Woman" cry, if it armed her with her own front-door key, could not draw all the bolts and bars of convention for her. I can remember the plight of the highly correct Englishwoman, upon whom British fiction depended for its respectability, who wanted to send her young hero from the English provinces to the _Chat Noir_ in the course of a rake's progress, and who avoided facing the contamination herself by s.h.i.+fting to her husband the task of collecting the necessary local colour on the spot. She did well, for had she gone she could not have been so scandalized as the young Briton in her book was obliged to be for the sake of the story. Those who had eyes and ears for it could see and hear all the license they wanted, those who had eyes and ears for the beauty could rest content with that, and as far as my impression of the place goes, Salis, if he allowed license at the _Chat Noir_, refused to put up with either the affectation or the advertis.e.m.e.nt of it. I cannot forget the night when a young American woman took her cigarette case from her pocket and lit a cigarette. It would not have seemed a desperate deed in proper England where every other woman had begun to smoke in public, probably more in public than in private, for with many smoking was part of the "New Woman" crusade--"I never liked smoking," an ardent leader in the cause told me once, "but I smoked until we won the right to." France, or Salis, however, still drew a rigid line that refused women the same right in France, and with the American's first whiff he was bidding her good-night and politely, but firmly, showing her the door.

A third night, and I do not know that it was not the most amusing, the end of our journey was Bruant's _Cabaret du Mirliton_, in the remote _Boulevard Rochechouart_. I daresay there was not one of us who did not own a copy of Bruant's _Dans la Rue_, but we had bought it less because of his verses--some of us had not read a line of them--than because of Steinlen's ill.u.s.trations, and I can still hear Harland upbraiding us for our literary indifference and urging it as a duty that we should not only read Bruant's songs, but go at once to hear him sing them. Harland had the provoking talent of looking as if his stories were the last thing he was bothering about, as if he was too busy enjoying the spectacle of life to think of work, when he was really working as hard as the hardest-working of us all. And as it was not very long after that his _Mademoiselle Miss_ appeared, I have an idea that he hurried us off to Bruant's not solely to improve our literary taste, but quite as much to collect incidents for that gay little tale.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Poster by Toulouse-Lautrec ARISTIDE BRUANT OF THE CABARET DU MIRLITON]

Bruant ran the _Mirliton_ on the principle that the less easily pleasure is come by, the more it will be prized. There was no walking in as at the ordinary _cafe_, no paying for admission as upstairs at the _Chat Noir_. Instead, it amused him to keep people who wanted to get in standing outside his door while he examined them through a little grille, an amus.e.m.e.nt which, in our case, he prolonged until I was sure he did not like our looks and would send us away, and that the reason was the responsibility he laid upon us all for the frock coat and top hat which the Architect could never manage to keep out of sight, skulk as he might in the background. But, of course, Bruant had no intention of sending us away and he kept up his little farce only to the point where our disappointment was on the verge of turning into impatience. It simply meant that he did not hold to the hail-fellow-well-met free-and-easiness which was the pose of Salis at the _Chat Noir_, but, at the _Mirliton_, was all for ceremony and dramatic effect. At the psychological moment he opened the door himself, a splendid creature, half brigand, half Breton peasant, in brown corduroy jacket and knee-breeches, high boots, red silk handkerchief tied loosely round his neck, big wide-brimmed hat on the back of his head, the pa.s.sing pose of a poet who, I am told, rejoiced to give it up for a costume fitted to the more congenial pastime of raising potatoes. To have seen Toulouse-Lautrec's poster of him and his _Cabaret_ was to recognize him at a glance.