of a lovely bright morning to take a drive, said to be the most charming in England, along the south coast of the Isle as far as 'Black Gang Chine,' where we alighted at the inn. Jamie flew off like a sea-fowl, his sketch-book in hand, and when I finally found him, he was seated on the red sandy beach, down, down, down, where it was with difficulty Willie and I followed him. He was attempting the sketch of the waterfall and cavern up the side of the precipice; he came back later, glowing with the exercise of climbing, with sketch-book in hand, and laughing at being 'Jacky last,' as we were all assembled for our drive back."
James did not return with Mrs. Whistler. It was feared his health would not stand another Russian winter. He stayed with the Hadens at 62 Sloane Street, and studied with a clergyman who had one other pupil. It was then that Boxall, commissioned by Major Whistler, painted his portrait, "when he was fourteen years old," Mrs. Thynne, his niece, says.
Mr. Alan S. Cole, C.B., recalls that "Whistler, as early as 1849, was staying with the Hadens in Sloane Street, and went to one or two children's parties given by the old Dilkes. To these also went my elder sisters and Miss Thackeray and so met Jimmy. Seymour Haden was our family doctor—with whose family ours was intimate—very much on account of the early relations between my father, his brothers, and Seymour Haden, dating from schooldays at Christ's Hospital."
Major Whistler, through the summer of 1848, continued his work, though cholera raged. In November he was attacked. He recovered, but his health was shaken; he overtaxed his strength, and on April 9, 1849, he died: the immediate cause heart trouble, which his son inherited. He had been employed or consulted also in the building of the iron roof of the Riding House at St. Petersburg and the iron bridge over the Neva, in the improvement of the Dvina at Archangel, and the fortifications, the arsenal, and the docks at Cronstadt. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington, with three of his sons, and a monument was erected to his memory by his fellow officers in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn.
The Emperor suggested, Whistler told us, that the boys should be educated in the school for Court pages. But Mrs. Whistler determined to take them home, and the Emperor sent her in his State barge to the Baltic. She went to the Hadens, where she found James grown tall and strong. In London they forgot for a moment their sorrow in their visit to the Royal Academy (1849), in Trafalgar Square, where Boxall's portrait of James was exhibited. A short visit to Preston followed, the two boys carried off by "kind Aunt Alicia" to Edinburgh and Glasgow, and then they met in Liverpool. Economy made Mrs. Whistler hesitate between steamer and sailing-packet, but, by the advice of George Whistler, she took the steamer America, July 29, 1849, for New York, where they arrived on August 9, at once going by boat to Stonington.
CHAPTER III: SCHOOLDAYS IN POMFRET.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN FORTY-NINE TO EIGHTEEN FIFTY-ONE.
"The boys were brought up like little princes until their father's death, which changed everything," Miss Emma W. Palmer writes us. Major Whistler's salary was large, so were his expenses; we have never heard there was a pension. He left his family comparatively poor—fifteen hundred dollars a year.
Mrs. Whistler would have preferred to stay at Stonington, but for her two sons' sake she went to Pomfret, Connecticut, where there was a good school, Christ Church Hall. The principal was Rev. Dr. Roswell Park, a West Point engineer before he became parson and school teacher. At Pomfret Mrs. Whistler made herself a home. She could only afford part of an old farmhouse, and she felt keenly the discomfort for her boys. Yet she kept up the old discipline. On Christmas Day she wrote to her mother that they had been busy all morning bringing in wood and listing draughty doors, though she allowed them to lighten their task by hanging up evergreens and to sweeten it with "Stuart's Candy." After a snowstorm, they had, like other boys, to shovel paths, and all the while they had to study. "Jimmie was still an excitable spirit with little perseverance," she wrote; however, she would not faint but labour, and "I urged them on daily, and could see already their exertions to overcome habits of indolence." The Bible was read and the two boys were made to recite a verse every morning before breakfast. Miss Palmer, their schoolmate, during the winter of 1850, remembers that Mrs. Whistler "was very strict with them," and describes Whistler at this period as "tall and slight, with a pensive, delicate face, shaded by soft brown curls, one lock of which fell over his forehead. … He had a somewhat foreign appearance and manner, which, aided by his natural abilities, made him very charming even at that age. … He was one of the sweetest, loveliest boys I ever met, and was a great favourite."
The deepest impression he left at Pomfret was as a draughtsman. He made caricatures and illustrations to the books he read, portraits of his friends, and landscapes. Many of his sketches have been preserved. The late Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, also one of his schoolmates, describes him as "a man as fascinating as he was great, with a charm which from the very beginning everyone who knew him recognised." Whistler told us that he used to walk to school with her, carrying her books and basket, and she wrote us:
"He was very attentive and kind; full of fun in those days. The master of the school—Rev. Dr. Roswell Park—was one of the stiffest and most precise of clergymen, and dressed the part. One day Whistler came to school with a high, stiff collar and a tie precisely copied from Dr. Park's. Of course, the schoolroom was full of suppressed laughter. The reverend gentleman was very angry, but he could hardly take open notice of an offence of that sort. So he bottled up his wrath, but when Jimmy—as we used to call him in those schooldays—gave him some trifling cause of offence, the Rev. Dr. went for him with a ferrule. The school was in two divisions—the girls sitting on one side of the large hall, and the boys on the other. Jimmy, pursued by the Dr. and the ferrule, went round back of the girls' row, and threw himself down on the floor, and the Dr. followed him and whacked him, more, I think, to Jimmy's amusement than to his discomfort."
Mrs. Moulton had further recollections of the maps he drew, which "were at once the pride and the envy of all the rest of us—they were so perfect, so delicate, so exquisitely dainty in workmanship."
The work done at Pomfret by Whistler which we have seen does not strike us as remarkable. It has its historic importance, but shows no greater evidence of genius than the early work of any great artist.
CHAPTER IV: WEST POINT.
THE YEARS EIGHTEEN FIFTY-ONE TO EIGHTEEN FIFTY-FOUR.
Though Whistler's mother was proud of his drawing, she did not see in art a career for him. She thought he had inherited a profession more distinguished. Many Whistlers and McNeills had been soldiers. West Point had made of them men—Americans. West Point must do the same for him. Through the influence of George Whistler with Daniel Webster, he was appointed cadet At Large by President Fillmore, and on July 1, 1851, after two years at Pomfret school, within ten days of his seventeenth birthday, he entered the United States Military Academy, West Point, where Colonel Robert E. Lee was Commandant. Whistler was not made for the army any more than Giotto for Tuscan pastures, or Corot for a Paris bonnet shop. It was inevitable that he should fail. Yet his three years at West Point were an experience he would not have missed.
BIBI LALOUETTE
ETCHING.
