Indeed, by the end of the summer they had sunk into such depths of demoralization that they felt they must really have a change; and decided on giving up the studio in the Place St. Anatole des Arts, and leaving Paris for good; and going to settle for the winter in Düsseldorf, which is a very pleasant place for English painters who do not wish to overwork themselves—as the Laird well knew, having spent a year there.
It ended in Taffy’s going to Antwerp for the Kermesse, to paint the Flemish drunkard of our time just as he really is; and the Laird’s going to Spain, so that he might study toreadors from the life.
I may as well state here that the Laird’s toreador pictures, which had had quite a vogue in Scotland as long as he had been content to paint them in the Place St. Anatole des Arts, quite ceased to please (or sell) after he had been to Seville and Madrid; so he took to painting Roman cardinals and Neapolitan pifferari from the depths of his consciousness—and was so successful that he made up his mind he would never spoil his market by going to Italy!
So he went and painted his cardinals and his pifferari in Algiers; and Taffy joined him there, and painted Algerian Jews—just as they really are (and didn’t sell them); and then they spent a year in Munich, and then a year in Düsseldorf, and a winter in Cairo, and so on.
And all this time Taffy, who took everything au grand sérieux—especially the claims and obligations of friendship—corresponded regularly with Little Billee, who wrote him long and amusing letters back again, and had plenty to say about his life in London—which was a series of triumphs, artistic and social—and you would have thought from his letters, modest though they were, that no happier young man, or more elate, was to be found anywhere in the world.
It was a good time in England, just then, for young artists of promise; a time of evolution, revolution, change, and development—of the founding of new schools and the crumbling away of old ones—a keen struggle for existence—a surviving of the fit—a preparation, let us hope, for the ultimate survival of the fittest.
And among the many glories of this particular period two names stand out very conspicuously—for the immediate and (so far) lasting fame their bearers achieved, and the wide influence they exerted, and continue to exert still.
The world will not easily forget Frederic Walker and William Bagot, those two singularly gifted boys, whom it soon became the fashion to bracket together, to compare and to contrast, as one compares and contrasts Thackeray and Dickens, Carlyle and Macaulay, Tennyson and Browning—a futile though pleasant practice, of which the temptations seem irresistible!
Yet why compare the lily and the rose?
These two young masters had the genius and the luck to be the progenitors of much of the best artwork that has been done in England during the last thirty years, in oils, in watercolor, in black and white.
They were both essentially English and of their own time; both absolutely original, receiving their impressions straight from nature itself; uninfluenced by any school, ancient or modern, they founded schools instead of following any, and each was a law unto himself, and a lawgiver unto many others.
Both were equally great in whatever they attempted—landscape, figures, birds, beasts, or fishes. Who does not remember the fishmonger’s shop by F. Walker, or W. Bagot’s little piebald piglings, and their venerable black mother, and their immense, fat, wallowing pink papa? An ineffable charm of poetry and refinement, of pathos and sympathy and delicate humor combined, an incomparable ease and grace and felicity of workmanship belong to each; and yet in their work are they not as wide apart as the poles; each complete in himself and yet a complement to the other?
And, oddly enough, they were both singularly alike in aspect—both small and slight, though beautifully made, with tiny hands and feet; always arrayed as the lilies of the field, for all they toiled and spun so arduously; both had regularly featured faces of a noble cast and most winning character; both had the best and simplest manners in the world, and a way of getting themselves much and quickly and permanently liked. …
Que la terre leur soit légère!
And who can say that the fame of one is greater than the other’s!
Their pinnacles are twin, I venture to believe—of just an equal height and width and thickness, like their bodies in this life; but unlike their frail bodies in one respect: no taller pinnacles are to be seen, methinks, in all the garden of the deathless dead painters of our time, and none more built to last!
But it is not with the art of Little Billee, nor with his fame as a painter, that we are chiefly concerned in this unpretending little tale, except in so far as they have some bearing on his character and his fate.
“I should like to know the detailed history of the Englishman’s first love, and how he lost his innocence!”
“Ask him!”
“Ask him yourself!”
Thus Papelard and Bouchardy, on the morning of Little Billee’s first appearance at Carrel’s studio, in the Rue des Potirons St. Michel.
And that is the question the present scribe is doing his little best to answer.
A good-looking, famous, well-bred, and well-dressed youth finds that London Society opens its doors very readily; he hasn’t long to knock; and it would be difficult to find a youth more fortunately situated, handsomer,
