Chapter XVII: Social Hours

The recollection of many pleasant hours spent at the Lambs Club recalls other social gatherings which have lightened my life as a man of letters. Of society, strictly so called, I have known but little. A few occasional excursions into the higher realms have come to me accidentally, and my experiences of such more formal gatherings were never of a kind to tempt me to strive with any earnest ambition for those more dignified joys which must, I presume, be highly prized by those who seek them.

The drift of modern life has, indeed, broken down many of the barriers of an earlier time, and the dividing line between Bohemia and Society, properly so called, is now often effaced by ambition on the one side or by curiosity on the other.

Here, however, I shall only speak of those more intimate gatherings where artists of various callings were wont to meet, and the first in my recollection are those associated with the pleasant Sunday evenings at the house of Dr. Westland Marston, whose simple hospitality drew many interesting folk to his table.

It was there I first met the beautiful Adelaide Neilson, whose picturesque and romantic career would vie in interest, if it could ever be recorded, with that of Lady Hamilton herself. Certainly her changing fortunes were no less sudden in their contrast, for, although she came of humble origin, she was at the time when I first knew her widely worshipped as a beauty and as an actress.

Dr. Westland Marston himself had, like Rossetti, though not in an equal degree, the power of inspiring and encouraging younger men, whom he loved to draw about him. While I was still at school I had already read his play of _The Patrician’s Daughter_, a play chiefly interesting from a literary point of view by reason of its endeavour to treat a purely modern theme through the medium of blank verse. Some of his shorter poems were also known to me, and as he was the first man of any rank in literature with whom I had become personally acquainted, I was glad of the opportunity which those Sunday evenings afforded me to know him better.

No man had ever a more real delight in literature or a clearer or more delicate perception of its finer qualities. I think it was Joseph Knight who first introduced me to him, and in the years when I was making my first efforts in journalism it was a constant delight to me to find that I was a welcome visitor at his house.

He had been impressed, as Knight told me, by a review I had written in the _Globe_ of the poems of Joachim Miller, and I remember the warm words of encouragement with which he greeted me on my first visit to his house.

It was there I met Mrs. Lynn-Linton, whose articles in the _Saturday Review_ on “The Girl of the Period” were at the time attracting a considerable amount of attention. Afterwards I got to know her well, and learnt to discover in her earnest, enthusiastic nature qualities that struck much deeper than the superficial satire which she had exercised in this series of papers exploiting the foibles of her sex.

Another house where artists and men of letters were warmly welcomed was that of Dr. Schlesinger, who was for many years the valued English correspondent of the _Cologne Gazette_. Dr. Max Schlesinger, in virtue of very considerable gifts both as a politician and as a man of letters, and even more perhaps by qualities of personal character that made him widely trusted, occupied an exceptional position in the world of journalism in London. His known discretion as a publicist won for him the confidence of the most eminent of our statesmen, but the associations of this kind which belonged to his life as a journalist, never led him to desert or to neglect that purely artistic environment to which by inclination and culture he naturally belonged.

Nothing could have been more simple, more entirely unostentatious than the hospitality offered on those pleasant weekly evenings in Dr. Schlesinger’s house. It was, I think, a valued rendezvous to all who considered themselves welcome, for it was Dr. Schlesinger’s privilege, partly due perhaps to the exceptional position he occupied, that he was able to make his house a delightful meeting-place for the leaders of thought in many departments, and for the most prominent artists of every nationality.

It was there I first met Mr. G. H. Boughton, then a young and struggling painter, who, if not American by birth, was at any rate American by long association, and who afterwards achieved in England a deservedly high place among his comrades. Mr. and Mrs. Boughton, before they built their house upon Campden Hill, had begun to be known as accepted hosts by a large body of artistic society, and in later days the big studio at Campden Hill became the scene of many joyous entertainments, which occasionally took the form of fancy dress. Mr. Boughton, whatever may be the final verdict on his own artistic achievement, was a man of fine taste and delicate perception, both in the region of art and in the wider field of literature. It was there I first met Robert Browning, a constant guest at the Boughtons’ dinners, which, with the larger parties they sometimes entertained, became for many years an accepted meeting-place for nearly all who were interested in art.

A little later, when the Grosvenor Gallery was established, the Sunday afternoon parties, so graciously presided over by Lady Lindsay, quickly established themselves as a social feature of the time. A part of the mission which Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay had accepted was the establishment of a closer link between the professors of the plastic arts and the representatives of cultivated society; and certainly, while these afternoons endured, they served their purpose admirably well, and proved the means, to those who attended them, of forming many new and valued friendships. I remember one of those pleasant assemblies being suddenly and very sadly interrupted by the arrival of Montague Corry, afterwards Lord Rowton, who was the bearer of the appalling announcement of the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke.

Of later hosts and hostesses who have especially distinguished themselves by the cultivation of the more artistic aspect of society it would be possible to speak with fuller appreciation, if it were not that they are still amongst us and still discharging those graceful duties of hospitality. Sir George and Lady Lewis, while they still occupied their beautiful cottage at Walton, made us all welcome, and the days I have spent there in company with Burne-Jones remain among the sweetest memories of that earlier time. Nor less delightful are the recollections which gather about those memorable Tuesday evenings which for many years have been enjoyed by the friends of Sir Lawrence and Lady Tadema.

The instinct of hospitality belongs to many kindly hosts; the genius of hospitality is rare, but it would be conceded, I think, by all--who for so many years have been welcomed, first to Townsend House overlooking Regent’s Park, and in later days to that larger and more spacious studio which stands in the Grove End Road--to Sir Lawrence and Lady Tadema. The last Tuesday evening we spent in Townsend House comes back vividly to me now. I think all of us who were there were a little moved at the thought that there should be even a temporary break in the continuity of these weekly gatherings; some of us, perhaps, were also a little afraid lest the new order of things in that larger house towards which our hosts were flitting should be robbed of some of the intimacy we had so long enjoyed.

But such fears, if they existed, were quickly dispelled when we were once more welcomed to the new abode. The change belonged only to the building; our host and hostess have remained unalterable in the loyalty of their friendship.

It was at the house now occupied by Sir Alma Tadema that at one time I used to dine with the French painter, James Tissot, a man whose varied moods of changing ambition and alternating ideals leave him almost without a parallel among the painters of the time. Tissot was one of the first contributors to the exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery, his talent at the time being almost entirely preoccupied by a modish type of modern feminine beauty.

In those earlier exhibitions he found such lighter essays of his hung in close juxtaposition with the widely different work of Burne-Jones, and dining with him at about this time I could see that his mind was deeply exercised by the impression the English painter had made upon him.

“Mon ami,” he confided to me, “je vois qu’il y a quelque chose à faire, là.”

And accordingly, before the next year’s exhibition had come round he had ventured his experiment in the region of what he thought to be ideal art. But the leap was too long for so brief a period of preparation, and I remember that his friend Heilbuth, who was present at the dinner of that second year, made sad havoc with the painter’s schemes by ridiculing the little card upon which Tissot had set forth his symbolical intentions. He treated the written description of the pictures as though it were a menu of the feast that awaited us, crying out each course from the beginning: “Potage une dame avec un serpent, qui signifie----” But at this point the incensed Tissot snatched the paper from his hand, and amid a roar of laughter, in which perhaps the painter did not very heartily join, we went in to dinner.

But that sudden ambition, though it was not capable of immediate fulfilment, implied a deeper strain in Tissot’s nature which was destined to find expression at a later day. Shortly afterwards he left England, and it was many years before I saw him again, hard at work in his studio in Paris upon the completion of a series of designs in illustration of the Life of Christ. Those designs exhibited an extraordinary persistence in the interpretation of local truth, for he had made a long sojourn in the Holy Land in order to fit himself for the task, and they showed besides an occasional intensity of feeling that lay dormant and unsuspected in the man as I knew him first. What was the real kernel of such a nature it is hard to say. The man himself, although in those earlier days he displayed little but the evident ambition to make his art remunerative, nevertheless, by occasional glimpses, betrayed the elements of a deeper purpose underlying the life that was preoccupying him at the moment.

A strange figure, a strange individuality, yielding by turns to impulses the lightest and the most devout, but always, however he might be engaged, proving himself the possessor of an extraordinary industry and a remarkable talent!

I have already alluded to the suppers in the Beefsteak Room as among the notable social reunions of the time. But there is one of those Lyceum suppers a little more formal than the rest which I feel disposed to recall, because it gave evidence of quite an unsuspected power on the part of Henry Irving of suddenly replying as a speaker to an unexpected attack.

The occasion was the 100th performance of the _Merchant of Venice_, in 1879, and I think it was the first time that the stage of a great London theatre had been employed as the arena of a large and splendid entertainment. Since that time we have enjoyed such feasts under the hospitable auspices of Mr. Tree at His Majesty’s--once, as I recall, on the occasion of the 100th night of _Julius Cæsar_, and again on a corresponding occasion to celebrate the successful run of _Ulysses_.

On the evening to which I now refer, the task of proposing Irving’s health was entrusted to Lord Houghton, who, it was thought, would hardly choose that particular occasion to exhibit the cynical temper he was known to possess. But Lord Houghton, as I afterwards found reason to know, was not disposed to be governed by conventional restrictions, and he devoted nearly the whole of his speech to a considered depreciation of Irving’s conception of Shylock, enlarging, in terms, that seemed to us who sat there, almost designedly bitter, upon what he considered the undeserved dignity that the actor had granted to the character.

It must have been that Irving was taken by surprise, and although his habit was always to speak from preparation, and often indeed to read what he had prepared, he proved himself, on this occasion, a master of good-humoured impromptu, twitting Lord Houghton, in a spirit of genial banter, with being a slave to the old-fashioned idea that Shylock was a comic villain, and promising on some future occasion to try and more amply satisfy his lordship’s ideal by representing Shylock as a Houndsditch Jew with three hats upon his head and a bag of lemons in his hands. The actor’s success, acknowledged by all who were present, was due, I think, mainly to the fact that, although taken off his guard by this unexpected provocation, there was not a trace of ill-humour in his reply.

There was one other occasion when Irving was the host at a small supper-party given at the Continental Hotel, when he showed an equal power of retaining his self-possession in circumstances the most trying and the most unexpected.

The honoured guest of the evening--entertained upon his return from a foreign campaign--was a brilliant and gifted journalist, now no more, and chief among those whom he had specially desired Irving to invite to meet him was a distinguished statesman still living, though by deliberate choice he no longer takes an active part in public affairs. The guest for whom the entertainment was given arrived late, and when he appeared it was evident to those of us who knew him that he had dined, not wisely, but too well. On a sudden, and in response to the most harmless raillery on the part of the statesman to whom I have referred, he rose and retorted with the most bitter and, if I may say so, the most vulgar abuse; and while we all sat appalled by the outrage he was committing, he turned and appealed to Irving to justify his extraordinary outburst. It was then that Irving’s tact showed itself. Quietly and slowly he replied, “All I have to say, my dear friend, is, that first upon the list of those whom you specially desired I should invite to meet you this evening, stood the name of Lord----.” And then, as though to prove to us that he too could exhibit an equal measure of self-possession, the man so wantonly attacked, without a word of resentment or rebuke, quietly filled his glass and invited us to drink just one toast to say how glad we were to see our old friend returned once more from his travels abroad.