as
much as those young insistent voices in Buckingham Street could tell,
but only of things so tragic and so sombre that I am the more eager to
finish the story of our London nights with our Thursdays, in the years
when we were burdened by no more serious fighting than the endless fight
of friend with friend, of fellow worker with fellow worker, fought in
the good cause of work and play, faith and doubt, fear and hope--a
stirring fight, but one in which words are the weapons, one which can
never be won or lost, since no two can ever be found to agree when they
talk for pleasure, nor any one man forced to agree with himself for all
time.

V

NIGHTS

IN PARIS

IN PARIS

I

I still go to Paris every year in May when the _Salons_ open, but now I
go alone. The lilacs and horse-chestnuts, that J. used to reproach me
for never keeping out of the articles it was my business to write there,
still bloom in the _Champs-Elysees_ and the _Bois_, but now I am no
longer tempted to drag them into my MS. The spring nights still are
beautiful on the _Boulevards_ and _Quais_ but only ghosts walk with me
along the old familiar ways, only ghosts sit with me at table in
restaurants where once I always ate in company. Paris has lost half its
charm since the days when, as regularly as spring came round, I was one
of the little group of critics and artists and friends from London who
met in it for a week among the pictures.

It was much the same group, if smaller, that met on our Thursday nights
in London. Some of us went for work, to "do" the _Salons_ after we had
"done" the Royal Academy and the New Gallery, then the Academy's only
London rival: Bob Stevenson for the _Pall Mall_, D.S. MacColl for the
_Spectator_, Charles Whibley for the _National Observer_. J., during
several years, spared the time from more important things to fight as
critic the empty criticism of the moment, the old-fashioned criticism
that recognised no masterpiece outside of Burlington House and saw
nothing in a picture or a drawing save a story: a thankless task, for
already the old-fashioned criticism threatens to become the
new-fashioned again. I, for my part, was kept as busy as I knew how to
be, and busier, for the _Nation_ and my London papers. Others went
because they were artists and wanted to see what Paris was doing and May
was the season when Paris was doing most and was most liberal in letting
everybody see it. Beardsley and Furse se