London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

CHAPTER V

BROWNING AND MOSCHELES

You will look in vain now for the old brown-brick bungalow that stood, for the most part concealed by trees and shrubs, within the railings of the park-like enclosure halfway down Sloane Street, on the left-hand side, as you go from Knightsbridge. It stood there till the end of the eighties. If you walked there in the days of my early acquaintance with it, or glided through Sloane Street in a hansom, the chances were that the bungalow would still escape your glance, sheltered as it was by foliage. But from the top of any 'bus you could make it out readily, and you would wonder, as most 'bus fares did, what lucky or eccentric fellow lived within the very plain walls and had all that Cadogan enclosure as a back garden. Probably your neighbour on the 'bus top would tell you, 'bus neighbours being at all times well stocked with misinformation, that the favoured dwelling was the home of the gardener of the enclosure. But it was not. It was the home of my delightful friend, Felix Moscheles, and there you could find Robert Browning almost any Sunday afternoon when he was in London.

Felix Stone Moscheles was the son of Ignaz Moscheles, composer and pianist, whose intimate friendship with Mendelssohn is revealed in the latter's published correspondence. Felix was born in London February 8, 1833, at Number 3 Chester Place, Regent's Park, and Mendelssohn acted as his godfather at the christening in St. Pancras Church. Felix died at Tunbridge Wells, December 22, 1917. He was as kind a man as ever lived. He was an artist by profession, fond of music and musicians, as you might expect him to be; he spoke several languages fluently and with equal charm—English, French, German, Esperanto, and I know not what else—and he was passionately attached to movements for world peace. We know that nothing made for the peace of the world down to mid-1914; that while Germany had been deceiving it, the world had lulled itself to sleep with "drowsy syrups" and ecstatic daydreams. I think the awakening killed my dear old friend. That is not surprising. He was over eighty-one when the war broke out, and almost eighty-five when he died. Down to 1913, when I saw him last, I used to say that he was the youngest man of my acquaintance. He had the optimism of youth, its buoyant spirit, its gallant outlook.

When I first knew Moscheles he was only fifty-five or fifty-six, and he was passing cakes to the ladies, while his wife poured tea, and a stoutish man in a grey checked suit, and with grey moustache and chin-beard, was talking something which seemed like philosophy, and was certainly not poetry, to a mixed group in a cosy corner. It was one of the happy points about Moscheles' Sunday afternoons that if you cared to continue talking with another caller and the other caller cared to continue to listen, or to talk with you, you were not routed up to exchange commonplaces about the weather with somebody else who needed to be assured that it rained, or that the sun was shining. You could flit from group to group, and find a place where you fitted, and the host or hostess would contrive, if you were unknown, to make you known to some one without interrupting some one else's story, so that no one was left adorning the wall.

The stoutish, grey man in the grey checked suit was Robert Browning whose afternoon-tea manner was quite simple, as unaffected as that of a bank-chairman contemplating dividends or deposits. He was not in the least a posing poet. He had been a great friend of Moscheles for a long time, and the latter spoke of him as "my literary godfather." Moscheles, at this time, was preparing for publication "Felix Mendelssohn's letters to Ignaz and Charlotte Moscheles." I had something to do with persuading him to write "In Bohemia with George Du Maurier." I had been looking in his studio through a mass of autograph letters and sketches relating to his years in Paris as an art student, the "Trilby" years, and, as Du Maurier's book and the play adapted from it were the rage of the time, Felix was encouraged to write around the letters he had, and Du Maurier's early sketches, and about the characters in the romance of the hour, and to send some of the chapters to the Century Magazine, and afterward to produce the whole as a book.

Moscheles was brought up among celebrities, and was surrounded by the famous all his life. Mendelssohn, Joachim, Malibran, Lablache were, in his boyhood, family friends. He attracted distinguished persons as long as he lived. When he was thirteen the family moved from London to Leipzig, at Mendelssohn's instigation. Mendelssohn was eager that his friend, Moscheles' father, should become a professor in the Conservatoire which he was founding at Leipzig. And so the move was made, Ignaz Moscheles relinquishing his London career and its worldly advantages in order to live near his friend. Felix, who at ten had begun his education at King's College, London, had, at thirteen, to find it in Germany. But not for long; when he was seventeen, determined to become an artist, he began studying drawing and painting in Paris, at the Atelier Gleyre. Having seen something of the troubles of Germany in 1848, he was now to see the troubles of France which led to and followed the flight of Louis Philippe, and attended the coup d'état.

It was during the Atelier Gleyre period that he met George du Maurier and had the amusing experiences he described afterwards in the book to which I have alluded. From Paris he went to Antwerp, where he studied under Van Lorino at De Keyser's Academy, and where he had as fellow students Laurens Alma-Tadema, Maris, and Heyermans. I don't know when he returned to London to settle down, but when he did so he began a career that was to be rich in friendships, helpful to all, and productive in portraiture.

As a portrait painter he was at his best, I think. As long ago as 1862, in his studio at Cadogan Gardens, he painted a portrait of Mazzini which, after Mazzini's death, he offered to present to Italy. But official Italy at that time was not desiring portraits of Mazzini and the offer was declined. Now, after the painter's death, the portrait goes to a museum at Milan. In 1882, Moscheles visited America, accompanying his friends Henry Irving and Ellen Terry on their first journey over the Atlantic. He painted Grover Cleveland, during the week when Cleveland was first elected to the Presidency, and talked with him of the subjects which absorbed the artist,—International Arbitration and Universal Peace. His portrait of Browning went to the Armour Institute, Chicago. Other portraits of his which were quite remarkable, which linger in the memory, were of his mother, Charlotte Moscheles, Rubinstein, H. M. Stanley, Gounod, Sarasate, Tom Mann, Israels, Stepniak, George Jacob Holyoake (at the age of eighty); he made beautiful water colours of Venice, of Spain, of Sicily, of Cairo, of Tunis, of Algerian subjects; and later was quite fascinated by his scheme of painting a series of "Pictures with a Purpose."

But the "Pictures with a Purpose" did not, I think, attract persons less purposeful than the painter. They were socialistic pictures, reforming, philanthropic, propagandist, as if the painter were preaching by paint and canvas. I think his oral preaching was preferred.

I have mentioned the old brown-brick bungalow where Moscheles lived in Cadogan Gardens, where I first knew him, and first saw Robert Browning. Moscheles had lived there for I know not how many years, but when his lease expired, in the early nineties, the bungalow expired too. The march of "improvement" was coming down Sloane Street, and the bungalow was doomed. It disappeared from the gaze of surrounding and jealous neighbours who might have keys to the gardens but could not live in those pleasant demesnes. In the Elm Park Road, near the borders of Chelsea and Fulham, Moscheles found a house with an unusually large garden. He transformed the house and built a studio which he connected with it, and there one went to so many melodious evenings and artistic afternoons that through the years of recollection I seem to behold him hospitably dispensing tea and bread and butter, attended by swarms of musicians who were, or were to become, famous; by poets and painters who had found, or still were seeking, celebrity; by dreamers who were going to free Russia; or zealous gentlemen, like Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, who were not only labouring for the Hague Conferences but for the Parliament of Man.

It was there that Mark Hambourg first played when he came to London. I remember the occasion well enough, but not the music, for I cannot forget that phenomenally ugly youngster. He was then only a boy. But the music rippled and thundered from his fingers, while that amazing head with its torrential hair cast shivering shadows over the magical keyboard. The unprepossessing youth was then unknown. He became known soon enough and he ran quickly to the fame that waits upon pianists of remarkable gifts.

Moscheles was a citizen of the world, which he regarded as his native country, so it was natural enough that he should take a lively interest in Esperanto in the days when people thought it a fad, and he became, as he remained, President of the London Esperanto Club. He was constantly corresponding with congenial folk in remote countries with the object of spreading the merits of Esperanto as an auxiliary language for international intercourse. "Even now," he said a generation ago, "I can go anywhere with it, and by its aid find somebody who will make me feel at home." He was a tireless propagandist. I would venture to say that he loved "propaganding" more than art. At any rate he could seldom avoid diluting his painting with propaganda in the contented Victorian era when little wars were fought every six months and trouble looked for between whiles. How easy it seemed in those days, when most of us were credulous, to achieve Liberty by lecturing!

Partly through his zeal for Esperanto and partly through his passion for a "Free Russia", he was particularly keen to meet Stepniak. I had known the latter for some years, having as long ago as 1885 or 1886 written an article about him for the New York Tribune. The meeting with Moscheles was brought about one night at a "Smoke Talk" in my home in Cheyne Walk, and from that moment the two men became fast friends, remaining so until Stepniak's tragic death. Whether Stepniak had or had not killed an official in Russia I don't know, and I do not care much. If he had killed him I dare say the man deserved it, for, of all the plundering and oppressive gangs of officialdom, the Russians of that era had about the worst; they robbed like desperados and they ruled their land with lies, torture, and corruption. In a country capable of producing the "Revolution" of 1917 and the later Bolshevism, anything was possible in the mid-eighties,—anything except the shadow of freedom. The tall dark Russian with the thin beard and the thin squeaky voice was a striking contrast to Moscheles, who was grey, and rather short than tall, and whose quiet geniality was the bloom on a trustful, generous character that invited confidence. Stepniak used to say that he never became quite accustomed to the liberty of English life. The opposite character of Russian habits had bitten too deeply into him. I remember that when he first came to London he would look around furtively when in the street, and if we stopped at a corner to talk he would ask: "Will the police allow this? In Russia they would not after dark." If he had lived to see London during the Great War he might have felt much more at home.

No one was ever bored at the Moscheles' afternoons. How could one be bored when host and hostess gave no thought to themselves but all their thought to their guests? Even the Swami I met there did not depress my spirits as many Swamis have done. I forget his name. I have met regiments of them in one country and another. Mostly they blazed, not with humility but importance. He, I say, had a worldly air, as if he were an Anglican bishop. He had also a sense of humour which was not entirely subdued as he listened to an American lady expounding the doctrine of "Votes for Women." "Madame," said he, "may I ask a question?"

The lady looked assent.

"Your husband: does he share these views?"

"Not yet," she replied.

"Ah," said the Swami. And there were gusts of laughter.

"I may add," said the lady, "that I am not yet married."

Then the laughter came in shrieks, and the Swami smiled. But this, of course, was a generation before the suffragettes were brandishing hatchets like the Redmen, and burning churches and slashing paintings like the Huns.

But I have alluded to Browning, and have done so because whenever I think of Moscheles, I always think of him in association with Browning. Their friendship was very intimate, and that is one fact which shows the kind of man Moscheles was. After that glimpse and how-d'ye-do-good-bye at the old brown-brick bungalow which the Earl of Cadogan was so glad to destroy when the chance arrived to do so, it had been arranged by Moscheles and the poet that we should meet again with another friend of the three at a little lunch of four. But fate, or, to be precise, politics, which may be another name for fate, decided otherwise, and I had to go far afield to chronicle the results. Never again did that little company come together unless it were at Browning's open grave, on the midday of the dying year. The reaper Death had mown quickly.

When the scene shifted to Westminster Abbey, I waited at the cloister doors till I could pass to a seat in the Poets' Corner. While waiting at the door, I heard from the pressing throng behind me the voice of an Irish writer whom I had known and had lost from sight five years before. While looking for the familiar face that belonged to the delicious brogue, there came the sound of a great key turning an ancient lock, and then the door swung open. "Come," said another friend, and we went in, getting separated before we had gone far, but taking seats near the draped grave.

Browning's son was chief mourner. The poet had died in his son's home, the Palazzo Rezzonico, in Venice. And now, this day at Westminster was the last day of 1889. The great bell of the Abbey began tolling; its deep notes floated down from its tower as they sought lodgment in the hearts of the assembling throng, and with every stroke some face appeared that all England, or the world, knew well. After thirty years I can recall many of the faces that the grey light of the dull day, softened by the colouring of the Abbey windows, fell upon. There were tiers of people. Even the openings in the triforium revealed them, and by the great western doors they were packed, though they could catch but glimpses of the chancel, and most of them not that. Huxley's was the first face I saw. I had first seen it in the same place, almost on the same spot, years before, at Darwin's funeral. Max Muller and George Meredith were near him now. One thought that England sent her celebrated living men that day to meet the famous multitudes whose bodies have been laid away beneath the Abbey pavement for centuries upon centuries. There were Lord Wolseley and the Lord Chief Justice, Lord (then Professor) Bryce, Frederic Harrison, Holman Hunt, Henry Irving, Sidney Colvin, Whistler and Poynter and Alma-Tadema and Sir John Lubbock (afterwards Lord Avebury).