e startlingly
original than Beardsley's inscriptions, but to me full of meaning and
memories. I cannot look at it without seeing myself fluttering from one
to another of the old Buckingham Street rooms, heavy with the smell of
smoke and powder, thunderous not only with the knocking--naturally I
quote the Ibsen phrase everybody was quoting in the Nineties--but the
banging, the battering, the bombarding of the younger generation at the
Victorian door against which it was desperate work to make any
impression at all.

VIII

In my less responsible intervals it amused me to find the painters
running their own shop, or their own little counter, quite apart from
the illustrators, and carrying on all by themselves their own special
campaign against that obdurate Victorian door. Their campaign, as they
ran it, required less talk than most, for they were chiefly men of the
New English Art Club--the men who gave the shows where Felix Buhot smelt
the powder--the men who were considered apostles of defiance when the
inner group held their once-famous exhibition as "London
Impressionists"--the men about whom the critics for a while did nothing
save talk--but men who had the reputation of talking so little
themselves that, when a man came up for election in their Club, his
talent for silence was said to be as important a consideration with them
as his talent for art. Not that the silence of any one of them could
rival Phil May's in eloquence--they never learned to say nothing with
his charm. Often the poverty of their conversation had the effect of
being involuntary, as if they might have had plenty to say had they
known how to say it. More than one struggled to rid himself of his
talent with at least an air of success.

The big booming voice of Charles W. Furse was frequently heard, but in
it a suspicion of an Academic note unfamiliar in our midst, so that,
young as he was, combative, enthusiastic, "a good fellow" as they say in
England, still in his Whistler and rebel period, his friends predicted
for him the Presidency of the Royal Academy. The first time I ever saw
him was the year he was showing at the New English two large upright,
full-length portraits of women, highly reminiscent of Whistler, and, on
press day, was being turned out of the gallery by the critics who, in
revolutionizing criticism, were fighting against the old-fashioned
Victorian idea of press views with the artists busy log-rolling and an
elaborate lunch,