as the spring--now the original wood block
and now the colour print, one year the draughtsman's Holbein-inspired
portrait and another the poster that excited us into collecting Cheret
and Toulouse-Lautrec at a feverish rate and facing afterwards, as best
we could, the problem of what in the world to do with a collection that
nothing smaller than a railroad station or the hoardings could
accommodate.

And the Sculpture court was not the accustomed chill waste, dreary as
the yard crowded with marble tombstones. If nobody else had been in
it--and many were--Rodin was there to heat the atmosphere, his name
kindling a flame of criticism long before his work was reached. Beyond
his name he was barely known in London, where I remember then seeing no
work of his except his bust of Henley, who, during a visit to Paris, I
believe his only one, had sat to Rodin and then, ever after, with the
splendid enthusiasm he lavished on his friends, had preached Rodin. But
in Paris at the New _Salon_ there was always plenty of the work to
explain why the name was such a firebrand--disturbing, exciting,
faction-making--as I look back, culminating in the melodramatic Balzac
that would have kept us in hot debate for all eternity had there not
been innumerable things to interest us as much and more.

The critic has simply to take his task as we took ours and not another
occupation in life can prove so brimming over with excitement. In the
early Nineties I had not a doubt that it could always be taken like
that. I would not have believed the most accredited prophet who
prophesied that we would outlive our interest in the New _Salon_. And
yet, a year came when, of the old group, only D.S. MacColl and I met in
the _Champ-de-Mars_ and he, with boredom in his face and voice, assured
me he had found nothing in it from end to end except a silk panel
decorated by Conder, and so helped to kill any belief I still cherished
in the emotion that does not wear itself out with time.

However, this melancholy meeting was not until the Nineties were nearing
their end, and up till then our days were an orgy of art criticism and
excitement in it. In Paris, as in Rome, as in Venice, as in London,
only night set me free for the pleasure that was apart from work. As a
rule, none of us dared at the _Salons_ to interrupt our work there even
to make a function of the midday breakfast, as we did of lunch at the
Academy, the days in Paris being so remarkably short for