I have deeply considered the question as to how far and how deep I should go in the matter of my experiences as an Art student. Those brief but intense visits to Paris come back to me as almost the best times that life has given me. To be young, and very ardent, and to achieve what you have most desired, and to find that it brings full measure and running over—all those privileges were mine. I may have taken my hand from the plough, and tried to “cultiver mon jardin” in other of the fields of Paradise, but if I did indeed loose my hand from its first grasp, it was to place it in another, in the hand of the best comrade, and the gayest playboy, and the faithfullest friend, that ever came to turn labour to pastime, and life into a song.

I believe that those who have been Art students themselves will sympathise with my recollections, and I trust that those who were not will tolerate them. If neither of these expectations is fulfilled, this chapter can be lightly skipped. The damage done on either side will be inconsiderable.

Drawing and riding seem to me to go farther back into my consciousness than any other of the facts of life. I cannot remember a time when I had not a pony and a pencil. I adored both about equally, and if I cannot, even now, draw a horse as I should wish to do it—a fact of which I am but too well aware—it is not for want of beginning early and trying often.

My education in Art has been somewhat spasmodic. I think I was about seventeen when a dazzling invitation came for me from a very much loved aunt who was also my godmother, to stay with her in London and to work for a term at the South Kensington School of Art. There followed three months of a most useful breaking-in for a rather headstrong and unbroken colt. I do not know what the present curriculum of South Kensington may be; I know what it was then. From a lawless life of caricaturing my brethren, my governesses, my clergy, my elders and betters generally, copying in pen and ink all the hunting pictures, from John Leech to Georgina Bowers, that old and new “Punches” had to offer, and painting such landscapes in water colours as would have induced the outraged earth to open its mouth and swallow up me and all my house, had it but seen them, I passed to a rule of iron discipline.

1. Decoration, scrolls and ornament in all moods and tenses.

2. The meticulous study in outline of casts of detached portions of the human frame, noses, ears, hands, feet; and

3. The most heart-breaking and time-wasting stippling of the same.

I well remember how, on a day that I was toiling at a large and knubbly foot, a full-rigged Mamma came sailing round the class, with a daughter in tow. The other students were occupied with scrolls and apples and the like. The Mamma shed gracious sanction as she passed. Then came my turn. I was aware of a pause, a shock of disapproval, and then the words,

“A naked foot, my dear!”

There was a tug on the tow-rope and the daughter was removed.

I imagine it must have been near the end of my three months that my detested efforts were made into a bundle and sent up to high places with a scribble on the margin of one of them, “May Miss Somerville pass for the Antique? E. Miller.”

In due course the bundle was returned. Mr. Sparkes, a majestic and terrible being, wrapped in remoteness and in a great and waving red beard, as in a mantle of flame, had placed his sign of acquiescence after the inquiry. Miss Somerville was given to understand that she was permitted to Pass for the Antique.

This, however, Miss Somerville did not do. She was (not without deep regret for all of her London sojourn that did not include the School of Art) permitted instead to pass the portals of Paddington Station, and to return to Ireland by “The Bristol Boat,” in other words, an instrument of the devil, much in vogue at that time among the Irish of the South, that took some thirty hours to paddle across the Channel, and was known to the wits of Cork as “The Steam Roller.” It was, I fancy, on board the Steam Roller that a cousin of mine, when still deep in hard-earned slumber, and still far outside “The Heads” (i.e. the entrance of Cork Harbour), was assaulted by the steward.

“Come, get up, get up!” said the steward, shaking him by the shoulder, with the licence of old acquaintance and authority.

My cousin replied with a recommendation to the steward to betake himself to a rival place of torment, where (he added) there was little the steward could learn, and much that he could teach.

“Well,” replied the steward, dispassionately, “ye’re partly right. Ye have an hour yet.”

Thus I found myself back in Carbery again, left once more to follow my own buccaneering fancy in the domain of Art, a little straightened and corrected, perhaps, in eye, and with ideas on matters Æsthetic beneficially widened. But this was due mainly to one who has ever been my patron saint in Art, that cousin who preferred reverie to Shakespeare; partly, also, to peripatetic lunches among the pictures and marvels of the South Kensington Museum; not, I say firmly, to that heavy-earned Pass for the Antique.

My next term of serious apprenticeship did not occur for four or five years, and was spent in DÜsseldorf. One of my cousins (now my brother-in-law), Egerton Coghill, was studying painting there, and advised my doing the same. It was there, therefore, that I made my first dash into drawing from life, under the guidance of M. Gabriel Nicolet, then himself a student, now a well-known and successful portrait-painter. In the following spring I was there again, for singing lessons as well as for painting. This time I had Herr Carl Sohn for my professor, a delightful painter, who helped me much, but on the whole I think that I learnt more of music than of anything else while I was in DÜsseldorf, and had I learnt nothing of either, I can at least look back to the concerts at the Ton Halle, and praise Heaven for the remembrance of their super-excellence. Twice a week came the concerts; it was very much the thing to go to them, and I have not often enjoyed music more than I have at those Ton Halle nights, sitting with the good friends whom Providence had considerately sent to DÜsseldorf to be kind to me, in an atmosphere of rank German tobacco, listening to the best of orchestras, and enjoying every note they played, while I covered my programme with caricatures (as, also, was very much the thing to do).

My friends and I joined one of the big Gesang Vereins, and a very good two months ended in three ecstatic days of singing alto in the Rheinische Musik Fest, which, by great good luck, took place that May in DÜsseldorf.

The AbbÉ Liszt was one of the glories of the occasion. I saw him roving through the gardens of the Ton Halle, with an ignored train of admirers at his heels; an old lion, with a silver mane, and a dark, untamed eye.

I do not regret those two springs in DÜsseldorf, but still less do I regret the change of counsels that resulted in my going to Paris in the following year. “When the true gods come, the half-gods go,” and, apart from other considerations, the DÜsseldorf School of Art only admitted male students, and ignored, with true German chivalry, the other half of creation.

Of old, we are told, Freedom sat on the heights, well above the snow line, no doubt, and, even in 1884, she was disposed to turn a freezing eye and a cold shoulder on any young woman who had the temerity to climb in her direction. My cousin, who had been painting in DÜsseldorf, had moved on to Paris, and his reports of the studios there, as compared with the possibilities of work in DÜsseldorf, settled the question for me. But the point was not carried without friction.

“Paris!”

They all said this at the tops of their voices. It does not specially matter now who they were; there are always people to say this kind of thing.

They said that Paris was the Scarlet Woman embodied; they also said,

“The IDEA of letting a GIRL go to Paris!”

This they said incessantly in capital letters, and in “capital letters” (they were renowned for writing “capital letters”), and my mother was frightened.

So a compromise was effected, and I went to Paris with a bodyguard, consisting of my mother, my eldest brother, a female cousin, and with us another girl, the friend with whom I had worked in DÜsseldorf. We went to a pension in the Avenue de Villiers, which, I should imagine and hope, exists no more.

As I think of its gloomy and hideous salons, its atmosphere of garlic and bad cigars, its system of ventilation, which consisted of heated draughts that travelled from one stifling room to another, seeking an open window and finding none; when I remember the thread-like passages, dark as in a coal mine, the clusters of tiny bedrooms, as thick as cells in a wasp’s nest; the endless yet inadequate meals, I recognise, with long overdue gratitude, the devotion of the bodyguard. For me and my fellow-student nothing of this signified. For us was the larger air, the engrossing toil of the studio. It absorbed us from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. But the wheels of the bodyguard drave heavily, and they had a poor time of it.

So poor indeed was it, that, after three weeks of conscientious sight-seeing and no afternoon tea (“Le Fife o’clock” not having then reached the shores of France), my mother decided it were better to leave me alone, sitting upon the very knee of the Scarlet Woman, than to endure the Avenue de Villiers any longer, and to fly back to what she was wont to describe to her offspring, if restive, as “your-own-good-home-and-what-more-do-you-want.” (In this connection, I remember an argument I once had with her, in which, being young and merely theoretically affaired with the matter, I furiously asserted my preference, even—as the fight warmed—my adoration, for the practice of cremation, and my unalterable resolve to be thus disposed of. My mother, who would rise to any argument, no less furiously combated the suggestion, and finally clinched the matter by saying, “Cremation! Nonsense! I can tell you, my fine friend, you shall just be popped into your own good family vault!”)

With the departure of my people, May Goodhall and I also shook off as much of the dust of the Avenue de Villiers as was possible, and moved to another pension, nearly vis-À-vis the Studio. This latter was an offshoot of the well-known Atelier Colarossi. It had been started in the Rue Washington (Avenue des Champs ElysÉes) in order to secure English and American clients, as well as those French jeunes filles bien ÉlevÉes to whose parents the studios of the Quartier Latin did not commend themselves. Its tone was distinctly amateur; we were all “trÈs bien ÉlevÉes’ and “trÈs gentilles,” and in recognition of this, a sort of professional chaperon had been provided, a small, cross female, who made up the fire, posed the models, and fought with les ÉlÈves over the poses, and hatred for whom created a bond of union among all who came within her orbit. One of the French girls, Mlle. La C——, fair, smart, good-looking, bestowed upon me some degree of favour. The class was wont to do a weekly composition for correction by M. Dagnan-Bouveret, who was one of the professors; the subjects he selected were usually Scriptural, and Mlle. La C—— was accustomed to appeal to me for information. She was, I remember, quite at sea about La fille de JephtÉ, and explained that the Bible was a book not convenable pour les jeunes filles, whereas the Lives of the Saints were most interesting, and full of a thousand delicious little horrors. Without approaching Martin’s Sunday School erudition, I presently found myself established as the exponent of the composition. I recollect one week, when the subject was “The Maries at the Sepulchre,” an obsequious German came to inquire “if eet was in ze morning zat ze holy Laties did co to ze tomb? Or did zose Laties, perhaps, co in ze efening?”

Mlle. la C——’s home chanced to be the house next but one to the Studio, and the Rue Washington was a street of a decorum appropriate to its name. None the less, a bonne came daily at 12 o’clock to escort her home for dÉjeuner. There came a day when the bonne failed of her mission, and on my return at one o’clock, I found my young friend (who was as old as she would ever, probably, admit to being) faint with hunger, and very angry, but too much afraid of the wrath of her family to return alone.

One wonders whether, even in provincial France, Freedom still denies herself to this extent.

In the following spring I went again to Paris, and this time, my friend May Goodhall being unfortunately unable to come with me, a very delightful American, and her friend, German by up-bringing, but of old French noble descent, allowed me to join their mÉnage. Its duties were divided according to our capacities. Marion A—— was housekeeper, “Ponce,” by virtue of her German training, was cook, and to me was allotted the humble rÔle of scullion. We had rooms in a tall and filthy old house in the Rue Madame, one of those sinister and dark and narrow streets that one finds in the Rive Gauche, that seem as if they must harbour all variety of horrors, known and unknown, and are composed of houses whose incredible discomforts would break the spirit of any creature less inveterate in optimism than an Art student. For Marion and Ponce and I had decided to abandon the Rue Washington, and to go to what was known there as “le Colarossi lÀ-bas,” the real, serious, professional studio (as opposed to its refined astral body, “prÈs l’Étoile”), and we now felt ourselves Art students indeed.

I don’t know how young women manage now, but in those days I and my fellows were usually given—like the Prodigal Son—a portion, a sum of money, which was to last for as long or as short a time as we pleased, but we knew that when it ended there would be no husks to fall back upon; nothing but one long note on the horn, “Home!”, and home we should have to go. (I once ran it to so fine a point that I could buy no food between Paris and London, and when I arrived at my uncle’s house in London, it was my long-suffering uncle who paid the cabman.)

Therefore, for the keen ones, the most stringent and profound economies were the rule. Never did I reveal to my father and mother more than the most carefully selected details of that house in the Rue Madame. I paid seven francs per week for my bedroom and service, and though this may not seem excessive, I am inclined now to think that the accommodation was dear at the money. My room, au cinquiÈme, had a tiled floor, but this was of less consequence, as its size permitted of most of the affairs of life being conducted from a central and stationary position on the bed. Thence, I could shut the door, poke the fire, cook my breakfast, and open the window, a conventional rite, quite disconnected with the question of fresh air. The outlook was into a central shaft, full of darkness and windows, remarkable for the variety and pungency of its atmosphere, and for the fact that at no hour of the day or night did it cease to reverberate with the thunderous gabble of pianos, the acrid screeches of the violin—(to which latter I contributed a not unworthy share)—and, worst of all, the solfeggi of the embryo vocalist.

The service (comprised, it may be remembered, in the daily franc) consisted in the occasional offices of a male housemaid, whose professional visits could only be traced by the diminution of our hoarded supplies of English cigarettes. Yet he was not all evil. He reminded me of my own people at home in his readiness to perform any task that was not part of his duties, and a small coin would generally evoke hot water. Marion A——, who had retained, even in the Rue Madame, a domestic standard to which I never aspired, would, at intervals, offer LÉon her opinion of him and his methods. The housemaid, with one of Ponce’s cigarettes in the corner of his mouth, and one of mine behind his ear, would accept it in the best spirit possible, and once went so far as to assure her, with a charming smile, that he had now been so much and so very often scolded that he really did not mind it in the least.

Colarossi, the proprietor of the studios, was a wily and good-natured old Italian, who had been a model, and having saved money, had somehow acquired a nest of tumble-down studios in the Rue de la Grande ChaumiÈre. He then bribed, with the promise of brilliant pupils, some rising artists to act as his “Professeurs,” and secured, with the promise of brilliant professors, a satisfactory crowd of rising pupils, and by various arts he had succeeded in keeping both promises sufficiently to make his venture a success. The studio in which I worked was at the top of the building, and was reached by a very precarious, external wooden staircase; the men-students were on the ground-floor beneath us. “Le Colarossi lÀ-bas” was indisputably serious. The models were well managed, as might be expected, when no trick of the trade could hope to pass undetected by “Le Patron”; the students were there to work, and to do good work at that, and the women’s and men’s studios were all crowded with “les sÉrieux.” Raphael Collin, gloomy, pale, pock-marked, and clever, and Gustave Courtois—“Le beau Gustave”—tall and swaggering, with a forked red beard, and a furious moustache like two emphatic accents (both grave and acute), were our professors. They were both first-rate men, and were respected as much as they were feared. They went their rounds with—as it were—scythe blades on their chariot wheels, and flaming swords in their hands. It was nerve-shaking to hear the cheerful and incessant noises of “les hommes en bas” cease in an instant, as though they had all been turned to stone, and to know that the Terror that walked in the noonday was upon them. Extraordinary how that silence, and that awful time of waiting for the step on our stair, opened the eyes; everything was wrong, and it was now too late to make it right. And then, the professor’s tour of slaughter over, and the study, that was “pas assez bien construit,” looking with its savage corrections, as if someone had been striking matches on it, how feebly one tottered to the old concierge for the three sous’ worth of black coffee that was to pull one together, and enable the same office to be performed for the humiliated drawing. It may, however, be remembered to “le beau Gustave” that one ÉlÈve was spared from the fire and sword to which he was wont to put the Studio. This was a small and ancient widow who arrived one Monday morning, announcing that she was eighty-two, but none the less had decided to become an artist. It was soon pathetically obvious that she would require a further eighty-two years, at least, to carry out her intention. Courtois came, regarded with stupefaction the sheet of brown paper on which she had described, in pink chalk, hieroglyphs whose purport were known only to herself, faltered “Continuez, Madame,” and hurried on. Despite this encouragement, the old lady apparently abandoned her high resolve, for on Saturday she departed, and the Studio knew her no more.

When I think of Colarossi’s, I can now recall only foreigners; many Germans, a Czech, who sang, beautifully, enchanting Volksliede of the Balkans, and whose accompaniments I used to play on a piano that properly required two performers, one to sit on the music stool and put the notes down, the other to sit on the floor and push them up again; they all stuck. There were Swiss, and Russians, and Finlandaises; there was a Hungarian Jewess, a disgusting being, almost brutish in her manners and customs, yet brilliant in her work; an oily little Marseillaise, Parthians and Medes and Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia (with a stress upon the first syllable), unclean, uncivilised, determined, with but one object in life, to extract the last sou of value from their abonnements (and, incidentally, also to extract from any unguarded receptacle such colours, charcoal, punaises, etc., as they were in need of, uninfluenced by any consideration save that of detection.)

The standard of accomplishment was very high. The Marseillaise, who looked like a rag-picker, did extraordinarily good work; so, as I have said, did the Jewess, whose appearance suggested an itinerant barrow and fried potatoes. (Delicious French fried potatoes! I used to buy five sous’ worth off a brazier at the corner of the Place S. Sulpice, and carry them back to the mÉnage wrapped in a piece of La Patrie, until Ponce, who adored animals, was told very officiously that they were fried in the fat of lost dogs, and forbade further dealings with the murderer.)

Colarossi’s never took “a day off.” Weekdays, Sundays, and holy days, the studios were open, and there were ÉlÈves at work. Impossible to imagine what has become of them, all those strange, half-sophisticated savages, diligently polishing their single weapon, to which all else had been sacrificed.

Yet when I look back to the Studio, to its profound engrossment in its intention, its single-hearted sacrifice of everything in life to the one Vision, its gorgeous contempt for appearances and conventions, I find myself thinking how good it would be to be five and twenty, and storming up that rickety staircase again, with a paint-box in one hand, and a Carton as big as the Gates of Gaza in the other.

DANS LA RIVE GAUCHE.