When Mary Anderson first came to London we went to see her in the Lady of Lyons, and never shall I forget her first entrance on the stage. This was rendered the more impressive by an old lady with white hair making an entrance just before Mary Anderson, and Cecil, who was with us, pretending to think she was Mary Anderson, and saying with polite resignation that she was a little less young than he had expected. When Mary Anderson did appear, her beauty took our breath away; she was dressed in an Empire gown with her hair done in a pinnacle, and she looked like a picture of the Empress Josephine: radiant with youth, and the kind of beauty that is beyond and above discussion; eyes like stars, classic arms, a nobly modelled face, and matchless grace of carriage. Next year we all went in a box to see her in Pygmalion and Galatea, a play that I was never tired of reproducing afterwards on my toy theatre.
As I grew older, I remember going to one or two grown-up parties in London. One was at Grosvenor House, a garden party, with, I think, a bazaar going on. There was a red-coated band playing in the garden, and my cousin, Betty Ponsonby, who was there, asked me to go and ask the band to play a valse called “Jeunesse Dorée.” I did so, spoke to the bandmaster, and walked to the other end of the lawn. To my surprise I saw the whole band following me right across the lawn, and taking up a new position at the place I had gone to. Whether they thought I had meant they could not be heard where they were, I don’t know, but I was considerably embarrassed; so, I think, was my cousin, Betty.
Another party I remember was at Stafford House. My mother was playing the violin in an amateur ladies’ string-band, conducted by Lady Folkestone. My cousin, Bessie Bulteel, had to accompany Madame Neruda in a violin solo and pianoforte duet. The Princess of Wales and the three little princesses were sitting in the front row on red velvet chairs. The Princess of Wales in her orders and jewels seemed to me, and I am sure to all the grown-up people as well, like the queen of a fairy-tale who had strayed by chance into the world of mortals; she was different and more graceful than anyone else there.
There is one kind of beauty which sends grown-up people into raptures, but which children are quite blind to; but there is another and rarer order of beauty which, while it amazes the grown-up and makes the old cry, binds children with a spell. It is an order of beauty in which the grace of every movement, the radiance of the smile, and the sure promise of lasting youth in the cut of the face make you forget all other attributes, however perfect.
Of such a kind was the grace and beauty of the Princess of Wales. She was as lovely then as Queen Alexandra.
I was taken by my father in my black velvet suit. I was sitting on a chair somewhere at the end of a row, and couldn’t see very well. One of the little princesses smiled at me and beckoned to me, so I boldly walked up and sat next to them, and the Princess of Wales then took me on her knee, greatly to the surprise of my mother when she walked on to the platform with the band. The audience was splendid and crowded with jewelled beauties, and I remember one of the grown-ups asking another: “Which do you admire most, Lady Clarendon or Lady Dudley?”
Another party I remember was an afternoon party at Sir Frederic Leighton’s house, with music. Every year he gave this party, and every year the same people were invited. The music was performed by the greatest artists: Joachim, Madame Neruda, Piatti the violoncellist, and the best pianists of the day, in a large Moorish room full of flowers. It was the most intimate of concerts. The audience, which was quite small, used to sit in groups round the pianoforte, and only in the more leisurely London of the ’eighties could you have had such an exquisite performance and so naturally cultivated, so unaffectedly musical an audience. The Leighton party looked like a Du Maurier illustration.
When we were in London my father would sometimes come back on Saturday afternoons with a present for one of us, not a toy, but something much more rare and fascinating—a snuff-box that opened with a trick, or a bit of china. These were kept for us by Chérie in a cupboard till we should be older. One day he took out of a vitrine a tiny doll’s cup of dark blue Sèvres which belonged to a large service and gave it me, and I have got it now. But the present I enjoyed more than any I have ever received in my life, except, perhaps, the fifty-shilling train, was one day when we were walking down a path at Membland, he said: “This is your path; I give it to you and the gate at the end.” It was the inclusion of the little iron gate at the end which made that present poignantly perfect.
There was no end to my father’s generosity. His gifts were on a large scale and reached far and wide. He used to collect Breguet watches; but he did not keep them; he gave them away to people who he thought would like one. He had a contempt for half measures, and liked people to do the big thing on a large scale. “So-and-so,” he used to say, “has behaved well.” That meant had been big and free-handed, and above small and mean considerations. He liked the best: the old masters, a Turner landscape, a Velasquez, a Watteau; good furniture, good china, good verse, and good acting; Shakespeare, which he knew by heart, so if you went with him to a play such as Hamlet, he could have prompted the players; Schiller, Juvenal, Pope, and Dryden and Byron; the acting of the Comédie française, and Ellen Terry’s diction and pathos. Tennyson was spoilt for him by the mere existence of the “May Queen”; but when he saw a good modern thing, he admired it. He said that Mrs. Patrick Campbell in her performance of Mrs. Ebbsmith, which we went to the first night of, was a real Erscheinung, and when all the pictures of Watts were exhibited together at Burlington House he thought that massed performance was that of a great man. He was no admirer of Burne-Jones, but the four pictures of the “Briar Rose” struck him as great pictures.
He was quite uninsular, and understood the minds and the ways of foreigners. He talked foreign languages not only easily, but naturally, without effort or affectation, and native turns of expression delighted him, such as a German saying, “Lieber Herr Oberkellner,” or, as I remember, a Frenchman saying after a performance of a melodrama at a Casino where the climax was rather tamely executed, “Ce coup de pistolet était un peu mince.” And once I won his unqualified praise by putting at the end of a letter, which I had written to my Italian master at Florence, and which I had had to send via the city in order to have a money order enclosed with it, “Abbi la gentilezza di mandarmi un biglettino.” This use of a diminutive went straight to my father’s heart. Nothing amused him more than instances of John Bullishness; for instance, a young man who once said to him at Contrexéville: “I hate abroad.”