I had graduated in a good school for entertaining at Boston and New York, where the hostess takes care that each of her guests before they leave shall have been introduced to the persons most worth meeting. If Oliver Wendell Holmes was in the room at Boston or the American Cambridge, every guest was presented to him. At a large literary at-home in New York you were sure to have been introduced to a Mark Twain, or a Howells, or a Stockton before you left. Americans make a point of having a guest of honour at an at-home, and I tried to keep this up as a feature of our at-homes at Addison Mansions.
It was some time before we were able to start our Bohemian at-homes in London, because when we arrived we had hardly a single acquaintance in Bohemia, except Gleeson White, and his author, artist and actor friends, like ours, were all in America. Like ourselves, he had been three years absent from England.
The hundreds of English and American authors, artists and actors who knew us at 32, Addison Mansions will recollect chiefly a very narrow hall hung with autographed portraits of celebrities, a room whose woodwork and draperies suggested one of the old Mameluke houses at Cairo, a room whose walls were covered with Japanese curios, and two other rooms, one of which was lined to the height of several feet from the ground with ingeniously-fitted-in book-cases, and the other was a bedroom in disguise. These and a ten by seven telephone room, likewise lined with book-shelves, which only had enough chairs for a tête-à-tête, formed the suite in which we held the weekly receptions in the American style at which so many people, now famous, used to meet every Friday night, regaled only with cigarettes, whiskeys-and-sodas, claret cup, bottled ale and sandwiches.
There must have been some attractions about them when actors like the Grossmiths, and authors like Anthony Hope, and half-a-dozen R.A.s used to find their way out to these wilds of West Kensington Friday after Friday towards midnight. Perhaps it was that we never had any entertainment when we could help it, and friends were able to make our flat a rendezvous where they could be secure of having conversations uninterrupted by music, and to which they could bring a stranger whom they wished to introduce into Bohemia.
Occasionally a stranger so introduced, who happened to be a famous reciter, felt constrained, as a matter of returning hospitality, to insist on reciting for us. But in the main, as a large number of our guests were performers, they were glad that no performances were allowed, for if they had had to listen to other people, they would have felt bound, as a matter of professional etiquette, to perform themselves. If there are performances and you are a performer, it is a reproach not to be asked to perform.
It was Kernahan who first took us to the Idler Teas.
With Sir Walter Besant I had been in correspondence before I left England, and on my return he wrote asking me to join the Authors’ Club, with which my name was so intimately associated for many years. But I did not meet so many Bohemians there as I did at the Idler Teas and the dinners of the Vagabonds Club, of which I became a member because the circle of brilliant young authors whom Jerome and Barr had enlisted for the Idler Magazine were many of them “Vagabonds.”
At the Idlers and Vagabonds I met most of the rising authors, and when the American rush to London commenced, I took many distinguished Americans to the Idler Teas, and to the receptions of people whom we met there. In this way we soon had a very large acquaintance in Bohemia, eager to meet our American friends, when we commenced our at-homes on a modest scale to give our literary acquaintances from the opposite sides of the Atlantic the opportunity of meeting each other.
I met many authors as well as actors at the Garrick and the Savage—in addition to the authors I met at the Authors’ Club and the Savile, and as I was at that time a member of the Arts, and the Hogarth, a very lively place, I met a great many artists. Of black-and-white artists, at any rate, who patronised the latter, I soon knew quite a number—Phil May, Bernard Partridge, Dudley Hardy, Reginald Cleaver, Ralph Cleaver, Hal Hurst, Melton Prior, Seppings Wright, Holland Tringham, Paxton, James Greig, John Gülich, Louis Baumer, F. H. Townsend, Fred Pegram, Chantrey Corbould, Frank Richards, Bernard Gribble, Will Rothenstein, Aubrey Beardsley, Willson, Starr Wood and Linley Samborne.
At the same time we saw a good deal of such well-known painters as David Murray, R.A.; Solomon J. Solomon, R.A.; Arthur Hacker, R.A.; J. J. Shannon, R.A.; Walter Crane; Llewellyn, the P.R.I.; Sir James Linton, P.R.I.; G. A. Storey, A.R.A.; Sir Alfred East, R.A.; R. W. Allan; J. H. Lorimer, R.S.A.; J. Lavery; Herbert Schmalz; Hugh de Trafford Glazebrook; Yeend King; William Yeames, R.A., who married my cousin, Annie Wynfield; and Alfred Parsons, A.R.A.