This was the finishing touch! I had imagined men might come and
go--but that poor Shave would go on for ever. I discovered on
inquiring later that the sudden death was due to suicide after
depression resulting from some misunderstanding which I did not
inquire into, which must have affected his brain.
I belonged to the club shortly after Swinburne had resigned his
membership, and the following story was repeated to me. It seems that
he had spent an evening in the club; and he was about to leave when,
selecting what he thought was his hat from amongst the many, he felt
he had inadvertently mistaken another for his own. Replacing it, he
tried again. Several times he repeated the process of trying on in
hopes of finding the right hat, but all in vain. Growing excited, he
began to try on indiscriminately, without success; then, finding he
had lost his hat, he lost his head, and dashed the offending hats to
the ground in turn. At last, after a grand _finale_ of destruction, he
strode hatless from the club, leaving devastation behind him.
Whistler once came searching for _his_ opera hat. I was comfortably
ensconced, and did not assist him. Finally, roused by his persistent
search, I got up to help, and found to my chagrin that I had been
sitting on the hat, and that, in so doing, I had ruined the springs
and rendered it useless. He put it on, nevertheless, and although the
effect was "amazing" (his favourite expression), Jimmy accepted my
apologies most good-humouredly and philosophically.
One of the occasions of note at the club was an annual fish dinner
held at the "Old Ship," Greenwich, but when that custom ceased the
dinner took place at the club itself. It was at one of these
festivities that Edmund Yates, who had been very bitter against me
previously in his paper, made, I remember, a very kindly allusion to
myself. I had caricatured him, as he thought, with intent to hurt his
feelings; and he had publicly--and very unjustly--accused me of
artistic snobbery. He had said that I was in the habit of caricaturing
only those who were socially unimportant, and flattering noble lords;
but at this dinner I was sitting almost opposite him, and when he rose
to reply to a toast, he endeavoured to propitiate me by referring to
himself as "portly, but not quite so portly as the artist of _Vanity
Fair_ had depicted him." This I understood to be a tentative offering
of the olive branch. Later, when in prison for libel, he wrote his
reminiscences, in which he alluded in a more than friendly manner to
some drawings I had done for him in earlier days to illustrate
lectures that he delivered in America on Dickens and Thackeray.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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