re none of us seeing sights, being
far too busy doing the work we were in Venice to do; and no matter what
Ruskin and Baedeker taught, "the boys" gave the date which overshadowed
for us every other in Venetian history. Nothing that had happened in
Venice before or after counted, though "the boys" themselves were in
their turn a good deal overshadowed by Whistler, who had been there with
them for a while.

It was extraordinary how the Whistler tradition had developed and
strengthened in the little more than four years since he had left
Venice. I had never met him then, though J. had a few months before in
London. I hardly hoped ever to meet him; I certainly could not expect
that the day would come when he would be our friend, with us constantly,
letting us learn far more about him and far more intimately than from
all the talk at a _cafe_ table of those who already knew him, accepted
him as a master, and loved him as a man. But had my knowledge of him
come solely from those months in Venice I should still have realized the
power of his personality and the force of his influence. He seemed to
pervade the place, to colour the atmosphere. He had stayed in Venice
only about a year. In the early Eighties little had been written of him
except in contempt or ridicule. But to the artist he had become as
essentially a part of Venice, his work as inseparable from its
associations, as the Venetian painters like Carpaccio and Tintoretto who
had lived and worked there all their lives and about whom a voluminous
literature had grown up, culminating in the big and little volumes by
Ruskin upon which the public crowding to Venice based their artistic
creed. During those old nights I heard far more of the few little inches
of Whistler's etchings and of Whistler's pastels than of the great
expanse of Tintoretto's _Paradise_ or of Carpaccio's decorations in the
little church of _San Giorgio degli Schiavoni_. The fact made and has
left the greater impression because the winter in Rome had not worn off,
for me, the novelty of artists' talk or quite accustomed me to their
point of view, to their surprising independence in not accepting the
current and easy doctrine that everything old is sacred, everything
modern insignificant. Because a painter happened to paint a couple of
hundred years or more ago did not place him above their criticism;
because he happened to paint to-day was apt to make him more
interesting to them.

At the _Orientale_