A Royal Academician And His Friends

( Originally Published 1912 )

SINCE 1878 it has been my custom to make frequent trips to Europe and to England, and one of my first friends in London was George H. Boughton, the Royal Academician, whose success never spoiled him, and who remained unaffected, unpretentious, and accessible under all circumstances to those for whom he cared, even when they had dropped far behind him in achievement and distinction. I dare say that many of us have heard complaints that success is estranging, that it has little time to spare for those it outpaces, though it protests that its heart is unchanged and unalterable. It pretends to bewail the days that are gone, and wishes them back: it "dear old fellows" you, and will drop in on you some day soon at your "diggings," and when you murmur congratulations it smirks and says "nonsense," and that there are no such times as the old times. Then "Ta-ta, old chap!" and off it goes in its shining Victoria or landau, breathing a sigh of relief at the escape from further detention, and for-getting you in a flash until years hence some mischance perhaps restores you to that fickle memory. Success, we are told, likes the company of its peers in its own seventh heaven, and has its own proper apology for its choice, and it is only when it stoops to humbug that it repels.

There was nothing of that sort about Boughton. He clung to old comrades, and all he asked of them was that they should be interesting. "All that is necessary to success, socially, in London," he said axiomatically, "is that you shall be interesting." And for newer and younger acquaintances, if they prepossessed him, and had talent meriting recognition, there could not have been a more useful or a more willing service than that which he gave voluntarily in putting them on their feet.

He knew everybody in literature and in art, and everybody liked him. "I have been sitting between Browning and Leighton, and Boughton put me there. You may think I am dreaming. I thought I was. I had to pinch myself to make sure. But it's a fact," wrote a young American artist to me soon after his arrival in England with a letter of introduction to Bough-ton at his beautiful house on Campden Hill, Kensington. A simple missive of that kind to him usually opened not only his own door, but also the doors of the eminent people in his circle. Things like that one had to discover for one's self, but he was not reticent about the kindnesses done for him by others.

My own letter of introduction to him, presented in 1878, at once led to hospitalities as little expected as they were deserved, and they were continued to the end of my long friendship with him. Sprightly in figure and infectiously genial and informal, he said that after luncheon he would be disengaged and ready to go out with me. What would I like to do? Kensington was then unfamiliar to me, and I was a worshipper of Thackeray. I suggested a stroll to some of Thackeray's haunts in that suburb where he lived so long and where so much of his greatest work was written. Thackeray himself could have recognized the neighbourhood then; now he would be estranged in it, if not lost. So we spent all the afternoon in company with Thackeray's ghost and the ghosts of his characters, and saw him sauntering up High Street, a commanding figure in loosely-fitting clothes, abstracted till the voice or the touch of a friend arrested him and turned him into smiles. Miss Thackeray (Lady Ritchie) was out of town: she was then living in a small house on Young Street — "dear old street," she calls it — opposite her old home, No. 13 in her girlhood, No. 16 now, which ought to be the most celebrated house of all London, for there "Vanity Fair," "Esmond" and "Pendennis" were written, in a second-story room overlooking gardens and orchards in the rear. A later tenant was afraid that a tablet in front would attract too much attention, but one had been inserted in the rear wall, and Thackeray himself would hardly have thought it superfluous. When he took James T. Fields, the Boston publisher, to the front door of that domicile he said with mock gravity, "Down on your knees, you rogue, for here 'Vanity Fair' was penned, and I will go down with you, for I have a high opinion of that little production myself!"

Kensington Square is round the corner from Young Street, commercialized and decayed now, but then select and secluded and haunted by the figures of Esmond, Lady Castlewood, and Beatrice.

What an afternoon all this made for me, and we ended it at the Arts Club, in Hanover Square, where Whistler also was dining — an unmistakable poseur, long-limbed and nonchalant, with a drawl as sesquipedalian as that of Mark Twain.

The incident happened long afterward, but I believe it is new to print. Whistler called on another friend of mine, Albert T. Sterner, the artist, at his studio in Paris, and while they were talking Sterner's little son brought out some of his own sketches and endeavoured to induce the famous visitor to look at them.

"Yes-yes-yes." Whistler put the boy aside.

"Do you know, Sterner, I'm wet. I think I. ought to have some hot toddy."

It was or had been raining. The boy disappeared for a minute, and came back with one of his sketches in a frame. Whistler instantly received it from him, and roared, "Haw, haw ! The boy's a genius. Haw, haw! He knows the value of a frame!"

Boughton was especially fond of Lord Leighton, and Sir John Millais and had an almost boundless appreciation of them as artists and as men. Full of gratitude, he never wearied of praising Millais's service to him, and as an example he told how, when he was worried about the portrait of a little girl he was painting and repainting without getting the effect he strove for, Millais called, and, learning of his distress, scrutinized the picture.

"Hum!, said Millais, "I know that girl; it's her mouth you've got wrong: give me a bit of pencil. This is the way her mouth goes," and as he said the words, he drew on a piece of paper the correct lines. "That's the only thing wrong with it. Put that right, and you won't have any more trouble with it."

Millais, said Boughton, was exactly like a doctor in his manner, and most soothing. The great thing about him which always impressed you was his clean mind and his sense of healthfulness. He was always like a healthy English squire who had lived all his life out of doors.

For some twenty years, while he was president of the Royal Academy, Leighton gave a series of dinners to all the members, in batches of twenty or so, arranged according to seniority, going thus through the forty members and the thirty associates; and to these would always be added a good admixture of those coming men who were as yet not within the restricted circle of the Royal Academy. Many a young aspirant saw a strong hint in one (and often many) of those coveted invitations of what was in the "lap of the Fates" for him, and in the very near future, probably.

The dinners were always merry ones, for Leighton was a lover of a good jest or story, and his splendid laugh was as musical as his nature. After the artistic dinner would come the coffee in the Persian court, beside the patter of the marble fountain. And afterward the guests would troop up the wide, picture-lined staircase to the vast, overflowing study, with the artist's work on show — complete and incomplete pictures, and all the most elaborate sketches and studies for every part of the work done or in hand. Besides these studies on canvas and paper would be some others in wax or clay, not only for his sculptures and bronzes, but for groups in his large and important pictures as well. Many of these little figurines would suggest by their classic grace those from Tanagra.

"Now, boys" - Leighton generally called his associates "boys" — "suggestions, criticisms, praises, and condemnations are earnestly invited and gratefully received," and there was no let or hindrance to any sound or sincere expression of any one's feelings as to the works before them.

He had one of the great, open minds that would take advice as freely as it was offered, Boughton told me.

"I mind me of a rather typical instance of this which tells against myself a bit. It was the year that he exhibited his 'Rescue of Andromeda.' On the line and next neighbour to it I found, on the members' varnishing and 'touching-up days,' a picture of my own, I forget which one. Leighton was up on a staging, working for some hours in perfect silence, which I did not seek to interrupt. After a time he descended from his altitude, and taking me back a few steps by a willing arm, demanded a searching criticism.

" 'If you see anything to suggest, now is the time, my boy, to out with it, or else forever after hold thy peace.'

"'Well, I do see one small but important matter that I will mention, as you invite remarks.'

"'Good! And that is----'

"'Well, it's the insufficient-looking little "bolt from the blue" that seems to cause such agony to the stricken monster of the deep.'

"'Not devilish enough?'

"'Not much more fatal than a big paint brush handle.'

"Leighton laughed, and asked, 'Have you any idea of what such a "bolt," or shaft, or arrow, should be?'

"'Not at this very moment,' I urged, 'but----'

"At that he handed me his splendid palette and brushes and said, 'Now, my son, look out for my return in half an hour, and during that time you have carte blanche to create some lethal weapon that would be likely to annoy, if not to slay, the monster — no fire-works, you know!'

"I mounted the president's scaffold, his palette and brushes in hand and tried hard to conjure up some deadly and worthy arrow of destruction. I need not say that this honour thrust upon me was soon observed by some of the older members, and taken to be some weird joke of mine.

"Come down from there! Send for Leighton at once, somebody!'

"They must have thought me suddenly gone mad, as I only said, 'Go away ! I have leave to finish this splendid work.'

"They wanted to throw me out, and might have done so but for the return of Leighton, who calmed their fears by assuring them that it was all right. I was evolving a heaven-sent arrow to stagger the monster. The laugh on me came when I was obliged to own that I had done nothing to the picture except to stare idly at it. Then their fears were appeased and they departed."

I never knew two men more alike than were Boughton and George du Maurier. I do not refer to their personal appearance - in that they differed — but to their simplicity of character and their detestation of vanity and pretence. Both of them were unobtrusive and. inconspicuous and completely free from ostentation in dress and manner. Both viewed life comprehensively and with humorous leniency, and both. irradiated a sympathetic warmth which at once unsealed confidences and penetrated the barriers of one's reserves. Intelligence awoke and tingled, and one's humanity glowed in conversation with them, though their speech was that of the least pedantic and least formal of men, and not above a flip of slang when slang could trap an elusive meaning. A word sums them up — they were both natural to the core, and that is a much rarer quality than it appears to be at the moment, or until we search for instances of it in an apish and subservient age, which opposes and discredits and maligns truth and simplicity as it approves and encourages artificiality and convention.

Like Du Maurier, Boughton had a very fine and discriminating appreciation of literature. He had about as many authors as artists among his friends, and had he chosen to abandon one profession for the other his pen could have supported him. He described Holland as well as it has ever been described and some of his experiments in fiction reached a psychological depth below the surface of lambent pleasantry. One of his stories — "A Bar Sinister" — has not been dislodged from my memory by any of the later adhesions of a quarter of a century, and it holds there through its in-effaceable vividity and originality.

His letters were like his talk, unreserved and spontaneous. I quote only two of them, the longest referring to an article 'about him which had appeared in a popular magazine :

9 Calverly Park, Tunbridge Wells, July 23, 1900.

MY DEAR RIDEING:

I was away from London when your very kind note came to West House, and the scorched soles of my weary feet have had so little rest since that the "happy moments" have not been mine to reply until this peaceful Sunday down here.

It is very interesting, and most flattering to me, that you like the interview so much that you desire further reminiscences and experiences. The article seems to have "caught on" over here, judging by the dozens of press notices that the enterprising clipping bureau has showered upon me. Of course there is a lot more of the same sort of material stowed away in the carefully dusted "pigeon-holes" of my memory. I could have swamped that smiling interviewer with streams of memories vastly pleasant to me but as to the wary and easily bored public, I and he was not so certain. He was of legal mind and profession, that young man, with a tendency to extract the "evidences" of things, and to let the literary qualities go hang. And what he did not trim off his editor did, and made matters of "Gradgrind" fact outstand in all their bare nakedness. The little personal incidents, which he, the interviewer, extracted from me were given by me as showing the little "tides" in my career, which, taken just as they happened instead of some other way, carried me on the way I wanted to go, instead of landing me in some backwater of stagnation. . . . But as the thing seems to please, I suppose its way is better than my way.

Your proposal is "so sudden," as the old maidens say, that I am blushing with confusion. Like the maidens, I am not unprepared for the proposal, as I have been writing a good deal "off and on" (all sorts of stuff) lately; but not any reminiscences. And as I so often delight in my memories of the good people - loved by the world — that it has been my good fortune to know or even meet, I think that some more "memories" might interest the world outside my own little back "pigeon-holes." I saw enough of Dante Rossetti, for instance, to give a charming side of his character not enough dwelt upon by his biographers. Also of Lord Leighton — one of the most splendid fellows I ever met, and whose equal I never expect to see again. And his great quality as a man was supreme personal charm. I never thought to criticize his art, or Rossetti's, or Millais's or Browning's, but just to dwell on the rare qualities of character and curious incidents that reveal such men.

So, my dear Rideing, you may expect to hear more of this matter from me at an early date. Just now I am resting a bit.

Yours ever,

G. H. BOUGHTON.

9 Calverly Park, Tunbridge Wells, August 26, 1900.

MY DEAR RIDEING:

I am afraid I have already exhausted my memories (such as are not too personal and private) of Millais and Browning for the benefit of that inter-viewer. The few other memories of Millais are much on the same line (of his ever-ready kindness). There are many bits of gossip such as are given in two already published biographies. But I don't wish to repeat used-up matter. My other memories, many too personal, are connected with the inner life of the Royal Academy — so "inner" that they are not only "tiled," but quite uninteresting to the average youth. So too of Leigh-ton. Outside the Academy walls he was the soul of kindness — but one anecdote would serve as a type of the rest. What took place in his own house is also too sacred (and too remote) for the average reader.

So much for England. Paris I gave as to my master there in the --.

American memories touched a new field, and a name (in Gifford) that has to be reckoned with, one day.

My Durand experience (there was only one) I also gave to the —. Page I never met. Voilà!

Many salutations to you all the same.

Yours ever sincerely,

G. H. BOUGHTON.

Although Boughton was English by birth, and never entirely outgrew the rugged dialect of his native Midlands, his youth in New York had half-Americanized him, and he was often claimed as an American artist. Some of the best of his work depicted scenes in American history, especially those of the Dutch period and that of the first settlement of New England. The gray-green, sandy and low-cliffed coast of Massachusetts, and the ascetic solemnity of Pilgrim and Puritan, sad-faced, heavily hatted, and heavily cloaked, found in him an interpreter as true and as subtle as Hawthorne himself, and he was no less successful in the portrayal of the more humorous and substantial types of New Amsterdam, immitigably Dutch in their transplantation. I think that, though admired by the public, he was appraised higher and more accurately by his fellow painters.

The last time I saw him he was summering at Petersfield and I at Selborne, and I drove part of the way home with him through the pretty region of Gilbert White. He was less animated than usual. Ordinarily he was blithe and jaunty, with a disposition to see the funny side of things in discourse. Now I noted that he was subdued, and he spoke of the ailment which very soon afterward became fatal. To visualize him the reader should think of a rather plain man of medium height and girth, with a round head and a nutty complexion, and merry, inviting eyes of quick observation; leisurely in manner, but full of sensibility; a man of the world, but not a man of fashion, who might have been passed in the street without recognition as a man of distinction. He was indefatigable in social life, but deferred little to its conventions. I suppose there were functions at which he must have donned a top hat and a Prince Albert coat, but even in the zenith of the London season I never met him in the daytime when he was not wearing a bowler and a jacket suit of cheviot or tweed.