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.