One of the principal figures in literary society, and one of my most valued friends, is M. H. Spielmann, the great art critic who discovered and bought the lost Velasquez a year or two ago. Spielmann was for seventeen years editor of the Magazine of Art, and is an authority on Punch and its contributors, as well as on painting and sculpture. He is the author of several standard works, and has been juror in the Fine Arts’ section of innumerable exhibitions. He is also a keen politician on the Conservative side, though he is the brother-in-law of the Rt. Hon. Herbert Samuel, and is an admirable speaker. But you always feel that it is not his accomplishments which count in Spielmann, though he has so many; it is himself—his shining character, his almost feminine gentleness and considerateness, combined with unusual firmness and principle. There are few men in London who could be so ill spared as Spielmann.
THE JAPANESE ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS.
(From the Painting by Yoshio Markino.)
CHAPTER XXV
FRIENDS WHO NEVER CAME TO ADDISON MANSIONS
I ought to say something here of the interesting people I have known, who never happened to come to Addison Mansions, for one reason or another.
Distance prevented the great Dr. Boyd of St. Andrews—the famous A.K.H.B., of whom I saw a good deal in the long summer I spent at St. Andrews—from coming. Dr. Boyd possessed the most crushing powers of repartee of any person I ever met. One day, when he was walking with me along the street at St. Andrews, which leads down to the links, some one presented an American publisher, a partner in a famous firm, to him.
“I am very glad to meet you, Dr. Boyd,” said the publisher. “I enjoyed your Scenes from Clerical Life so much.”
“I did not write that book, sir,” said the terrible Doctor. “I wrote The Recreations of a Country Parson—and you ought to know it, because your firm stole them both.”
I once unconsciously helped him in using this talent, which happened in this wise. Dr. Boyd was a reformer as drastic as John Knox. The great humanising movement in the Scottish Church, which made its services and music so much more beautiful and its attitude so much less angular, was largely his work, for he was not only one of the most eloquent of the notable ministers who worked for it, but he had any amount of backbone. An old ultra-Protestant lady, having perceived this, paid an evangelist a thousand a year to go about Scotland preaching against him. One Sunday he was at St. Andrews, on the public space where the inhabitants used to practice archery, preaching against Dr. Boyd. His preaching was all “limehousing,” an appeal to the coarsest prejudice, most banal abuse and derision. It was so ludicrous that I took most of it down in longhand, in the intervals when he paused for applause, as he did whenever he imagined that he was scoring. It so happened that I was having afternoon-tea with Dr. Boyd, and that he was preaching in his own church that evening. I began to sympathise with him in being made the subject of such a persecution.