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SET DOWN IN MALICE




                SET DOWN IN MALICE
             A BOOK OF REMINISCENCES


                        BY
                GERALD CUMBERLAND


                        ❦


   “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I
    contradict myself.”
                                Walt Whitman.


                    BRENTANO’S
                     NEW YORK
                    MDCCCCXIX




PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED EDINBURGH




UXORI HORAS AMISSAS REDDO




PREFATORY NOTE


Very many of the following pages were written in the trenches and
dug-outs of Greece and Serbia. I added a chapter or two in Port Said,
Alexandria and Marseilles. That is to say, I wrote far away from books
and without reference to documents, and I wrote to refresh a mind
dulled by the conditions of Active Service in the Near East. A few
chapters were written in London and a few in Winchester.

Here and there may be found factual inaccuracies, though if these
exist I am not aware of them. But the spirit of the book is as near
the truth as I can bring it.

                                                  Gerald Cumberland

  Winchester
    _2nd June 1918_




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                              PAGE
      I. Mr George Bernard Shaw                          11

     II. Miscellaneous                                   22
           Mrs Annie Besant—Mr Marcus Stone—Mr Lloyd
           George—Bishop Welldon—Dr Walford Davies

    III. Mr Frank Harris                                 32

     IV. Miscellaneous                                   47
           Madame Yvette Guilbert—Sir Victor Horsley—
           Mrs Pankhurst—Mr Jacob Epstein—Madame Aïno
           Ackté

      V. Mr Stanley Houghton and Mr Harold Brighouse     55

     VI. Some Writers                                    68
           Mr Arnold Bennett—Mr G. K. Chesterton—
           Mr Lascelles Abercrombie—Mr Harold Monro—
           Mr John Masefield—Mr Jerome K. Jerome—Sir
           Owen Seaman—Mr A. A. Milne

    VII. Sir Edward Elgar                                79

   VIII. Intellectual Freaks                             88

     IX. Fleet Street                                   102

      X. Mr Hall Caine                                  117

     XI. More Writers                                   128
           Rev. T. E. Brown—Mr A. R. Orage—Mr Norman
           Angell—Mr St John Ervine—Mr Charles Marriott
           —Mr Max Beerbohm—Mr Israel Zangwill—Mr
           Alphonse Courlander—Mr Ivan Heald—Mr Dixon
           Scott—Mr Barry Pain—Mr Cunninghame Graham

    XII. Musical Critics                                143

   XIII. Manchester People                              153

    XIV. Chelsea and Mr Augustus John                   166

     XV. Miscellaneous                                  175
           Mr Arthur Henderson, M.P.—Lord Derby—Miss
           Elizabeth Robins—Mr Frank Mullings—Mr Harold
           Bauer—Mr Emil Sauer—Mr Vladimir de Pachmann

    XVI. Cathedral Musical Festivals                    187

   XVII. People of the Theatre                          199
           Sir Herbert Tree—Mr Gordon Craig—Mr Henry
           Arthur Jones—Mr Temple Thurston—Miss Janet
           Achurch—Miss Horniman.

  XVIII. Berlin and Some of its People                  212

    XIX. Some Musicians                                 226
           Edvard Grieg—Sir Frederick H. Cowen—Dr Hans
           Richter—Sir Thomas Beecham—Sir Charles
           Santley—Mr Landon Ronald—Mr Frederic Austin

     XX. Two Chelsea Rags, 1914 and 1918                239

    XXI. More Musicians                                 246
           Professor Granville Bantock—Mr Frederick
           Delius—Mr Joseph Holbrooke—Dr Walford Davies
           —Dr Vaughan Williams—Dr W. G. McNaught—Mr
           Julius Harrison—Mr Rutland Boughton—Mr John
           Coates—Mr Cyril Scott

   XXII. People I would like to meet                    263

  XXIII. Night Clubs                                    273

         Index                                          283




CHAPTER I

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW


It was when I was a very young man indeed that I caught and succumbed
to my first attack of Shaw-fever. I do not remember how I caught it;
something in the Manchester air, no doubt, was responsible for my
malady, for a handful of “intellectual” Manchester people had most
daringly produced a complete Shaw play, and, though I had not
witnessed the play, I had read it, and it was with delight that I saw
_The Manchester Guardian_ saying about _You Never Can Tell_ just the
very things I had myself already thought. I found that in my suburban
circle of friends I was regarded as harbouring “advanced” ideas. Shaw,
I was told, was “dangerous.” This bucked me up enormously, and I
thereupon wrote a long essay on Ibsen’s _A Doll’s House_ and, desiring
further to astonish and bewilder my friends, got into communication
with Bernard Shaw with a view to having the essay published in
pamphlet form. When it was known in Manchester suburbia that Shaw had
written to me, a boy still at school, my friends could not decide
whether I was cleverer than they had hitherto supposed or Mr Bernard
Shaw more foolish than seemed possible.

I have never completely recovered from that first attack of
Shaw-fever; like ague, it sleeps in my bones and, from time to time,
makes its presence known by little convulsions that are disturbing
enough while they last, but which generally die pretty quickly.

It was in the middle of 1901 that I wrote to Mr Shaw about the
particular brand of socialism from which at that time I was
suffering. It must have been a very raw and crude brand, and my letter
to Bernard Shaw must have amused him considerably. Certainly his reply
was most diverting. Here it is:

  “By all means give ‘every penny you can spare to those who are
  most in need of monetary help.’ If you will be kind enough to send
  it to the Treasurer of the Fabian Society, 3 Clement’s Inn,
  London, W.C., you may depend upon its being wanted and well used.
  If you prefer relieving needy persons, I can give you the names
  and addresses of several fathers of families who can be depended
  on to absorb all your superfluous resources, however vast they may
  be. By making yourself poor for their sakes you will have the
  satisfaction of adding one more poor family to the existing mass
  of poverty and contributing your utmost to the ransom which
  perpetuates the existing social system. You will go through life
  consoled by an inexhaustible sense of moral superiority to bishops
  and other inconsistent Christians. And you will never be at a loss
  for friends. Where the carcass is there will the eagles be
  gathered.

  “A world of beggars and almsgivers—beautiful Christian ideal.

  “You are not a prig—only a damned fool. A month’s experience will
  cure you.”

But though I think this letter amusing now, I am convinced I did not
think so at the time I received it. I know not in what terms of pained
surprise and hurt vanity I replied to it, but a few days later I
received the following short note:—

  “Yes: you are an ass; and nothing will help you until you get over
  that.

  “‘A has money, B is without. If A doesn’t share with B he
  is—well, I call him a thief.’ Just what an ass would do. Pray what
  do you call B if he accepts A’s bounty?

  “I strongly recommend you to become a stockbroker. You believe
  that doing good means giving money; and you fancy yourself in the
  character of Lord Bountiful with a touch of St Francis.

  “Yes, a hopeless ass. No matter; embrace your destiny and become a
  philanthropist. It is not a bad life for people who are built that
  way.”

That, I think, most effectively closed the correspondence, as, I have
little doubt, it was intended to do.

During the next few months, having approached Messrs Greening & Co.,
the publishers, I was commissioned by them to write a book on Mr Hall
Caine for their _Eminent Writers of To-day_ series. The book being
completed and published before the end of the year, I conceived the
idea of writing another about Mr Bernard Shaw, and communicated with
the dramatist, informing him of my intention and asking him if he
would provide me with biographical details. This he consented to do,
and on 19th December 1901 wrote to me from Piccard’s Cottage,
Guildford, saying: “If you will let me know when you are coming to
London, I will make an appointment with pleasure and give you what
help I can.”

A few weeks later I went to Guildford, but I went there with a guilty
secret hidden in my breast. The secret was this. My publishers did not
care about issuing a complete book devoted to Bernard Shaw and all his
works. I gathered, much to my amazement, that they did not think him
of sufficient importance. The astounding idea was then suggested that
half my book should be concerned with Bernard Shaw and the other half
with Mr George Moore. Now, at the time of my visit to Guildford, I had
not imparted this information to Mr Shaw. I did not anticipate that he
would like the suggestion and I thought it wiser to disclose it to
him by word of mouth rather than by letter.

I came upon Mr Shaw taking photographs in the little front garden of
Piccard’s Cottage. It was a winter’s day and an inch of snow lay upon
the ground; yet he wore no overcoat. He insisted upon taking my
photograph. He took me sitting. He took me standing. And when he had
grown tired of playing with his new toy, he suggested that we should
go into the house.

There a hideous surprise awaited me. Lying upon the sofa of the study
was an open copy of the current week’s _Candid Friend_, a most
brilliant and most ruthless paper edited by Mr Frank Harris.

“There is something there,” said Shaw, nodding in the direction of the
sofa, “that should interest you, I think.”

I sat down, took up the paper and looked at the open pages. To my
horror I saw a most brutal, murderously clever full-page caricature of
Mr Hall Caine on one side, and on the other a long and most hostile
review of my stupid little book on the famous novelist.... Shaw, tall
and erect, stood looking at me a little malignantly, and, on the
instant, I was on my guard.

I read the review word by word and examined the caricature very
closely. The article was amazingly good, but, as I read it, I did so
wish it had been written about a book by somebody else. Frank Harris
himself, I think, had written the article and Frank Richardson had
drawn the caricature. I looked up at Shaw and smiled.

“Awfully good, don’t you think?” I said.

He nodded, and by his manner seemed to express approval of the way in
which I had come through the ordeal. He showed me some photographs he
had taken—not very good photographs. One, taken by his wife, I think,
showed Bernard Shaw with his arm round a female scarecrow; leaning
slightly forward, he was leering at it with narrowed eyes.

During lunch Shaw devoured a large number of vegetarian dishes and
drank water, whilst Mrs Shaw and I ate meat and drank wine. It was, I
think, the mellowing influence of a basin of raisins that loosed his
tongue and set him talking without cessation. He spoke of Karl Marx
and Granville Barker, of Mrs Annie Besant and Janet Achurch, of
Mr Sidney Webb and the Fabian Society, of Morocco and Ancoats, of
Shorthand and Wagner, of _The Manchester Guardian_ and H. G. Wells ...
in a word, of Shakespeare and the musical glasses.

I rather gathered that he had “got over” Karl Marx years ago, and I
inferred that he considered the work of this writer indispensable for
young cubs to sharpen their teeth upon, but that he was by no means
the last word in socialism. I think he thought that Bernard Shaw was
the last word. For Granville Barker he had even then a great regard,
and, speaking of him, he offered me some cider, a bottle of which
Barker had drunk some days previously; as he offered the cider he said
that Barker had “ridden over”—whence, I know not—on his bicycle and
that the cider had made him half tipsy.... The thought of Mrs Annie
Besant appeared to afford him vast amusement, but he spoke in terms of
high regard of Janet Achurch.

“But she uses her voice wrongly. It is quite the finest voice on the
stage and, perhaps because she knows it is so fine, she is always
trying experiments with it. For a Shakespeare passage, for example,
she will plan out what I may call a scheme of sound; sound that will
rise and fall with the passion and decline of the words, that will
intensify and grow dim as the mood waxes and wanes. But the scheme,
the design—for it _is_ a kind of design—is nearly always too
elaborate, too involved. It is full of detail, and the detail is apt
to become more prominent than the general outline. She will start off
most magnificently, lose herself a little, recover herself, lose
herself again, and then abruptly strike a woefully wrong note.
Perhaps her ear is wrong; perhaps excitement betrays her. But, with
all her faults—and even her faults are more interesting than other
people’s excellencies—she remains a superb actress.”

Of Mr Sidney Webb I remember nothing that he said, nor have any of the
loving words he spoke of the Fabian Society remained in my memory. He
spoke of it a great deal, both at lunch and during our subsequent
walk, but somehow or other the Fabian Society has always seemed to me
a bloodless and dull sort of institution, and while he talked about it
my thoughts wandered, and I mused rather sadly over the psychology of
this man whose moral earnestness was so much greater than my own.

But I pricked up my ears when the word “Morocco” fell from his lips,
though in the event he said very little about it. I found he had no
great belief in the value of travel as a means of education, an
expander of the mind. He himself had never travelled; places and
countries so precisely fulfilled all your expectations that, really,
what was the use of going to see them? Facts, people and ideas:
nothing else aroused his curiosity.

Of shorthand he said ... well, you don’t particularly want to know
what he said of shorthand, do you? And in _The Perfect Wagnerite_ he
has said all that it is necessary for him to say about Wagner. Last of
all comes H. G. Wells.

Now, I have not the remotest idea what Shaw thinks of Wells in these
days, yet I would give a good deal to know. But sixteen years ago the
older man had for the younger an almost reverential admiration. At the
time of my visit to Shaw one of Wells’ books was appearing serially
in, I think, _The Fortnightly Review_. Wells was busy looking into the
future, and the future that he saw seemed, in some respects, so
disagreeable yet so likely that Shaw was dismayed at the prospect.

“A great man, Wells,” said Shaw; “do you know anything about him?”

I told him the little I knew and, as we had finished lunch, I asked
Mrs Shaw’s permission to light a cigarette.

Almost immediately after, we started on our walk.

Never shall I forget that terrible walk. I believed then, as I believe
now, that Shaw was deliberately pitting his powers of endurance
against my own—the powers of endurance of a middle-aged vegetarian
against those of a young meat-eater. He walked with a long, easy
stride, swinging his arms, breathing deeply through his wide nostrils.
His pace, which never for a moment did he attempt to accommodate to
mine, was at least five miles an hour. He forgot, or he did not choose
to remember, that I had that morning travelled by the slow midnight
train from Manchester, that I had crossed London, that I had reached
Guildford by a weary Sunday train from Waterloo, and that I had just
eaten an enormous lunch. I panted and struggled half a pace behind
him. I became stupendously hot. I made unexpected and unathletic
sounds, like a man who is being smothered. Blissfully unconscious of
all this was Shaw.... I wonder?... No; blissfully conscious of all
this was Shaw.

He talked steadily the whole time, but I was suffering from an
inhibition of all my mental faculties. Yet, at the back of my mind, I
kept saying to myself: “You know, you have not yet told him that he is
to share your book with George Moore.” And each time I told myself
that, I shuddered somewhat.

It was not until we had neared Mr G. F. Watts’ house that Shaw
moderated his pace a little.

“That,” said he, in a curiously low voice—the kind of voice one uses
in churches—“that is where G. F. Watts lives.”

And he pointed to some high chimneys that overtopped a belt of trees,
and stopped and gazed. But I was in no mood of reverence and, though I
have frequently struggled to induce a feeling of rapture when gazing
upon the large canvases of Watts, I have never been able to do so. So
I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped my perspiring forehead.

“Hot?” asked Shaw grimly.

“Of course I’m hot. Aren’t you?”

“Warm. Just nicely warm.”

Presently we came to a tall tower of terra-cotta bricks which, Shaw
told me, had been erected by the villagers under the direction and at
the instigation of Watts himself. We stopped in front of this and, as
it was one of the “sights” of the district, I felt that I was expected
to say something wise or, at all events, something complimentary about
it. I could say neither.

“Which do people imagine it to be—useful or ornamental?” I asked.

“I wonder,” said he.

“For it is neither,” I ventured.

But his thoughts were otherwhere, for he began a long, technical
exposition on the art of making bricks and tiles. His talk became
art-and-crafty. I was carried back to my childhood days, my
kindergarten days. I heard the name of William Morris and I sighed
most profoundly.

Shaw won that walk by a neck. Having reached Piccard’s Cottage, he put
me in a kind of conservatory, gave me a blanket and a deck chair and
told me to go to sleep. But already I _was_ asleep....

When I awoke it was quite dark, and, feeling rather miserable, I
groped my way back to the house. There I found Mr and Mrs Shaw in the
study, she frowning at her desk, he standing on the hearthrug and
looking at her most quizzically.

“Well, how much is it?” she asked. “Four times into two hundred. The
cheque _must_ go by to-night’s post. I’ve done the sum three times,
and on each occasion I’ve got a different answer.”

“Is it two hundred pence or two hundred pounds?”

“Don’t be absurd, George. Even you know that you can’t get a furnished
house like this for two hundred pence a year.”

“Four times into two hundred—let me see—fifty. Yes, fifty. You can
safely write down fifty pounds.”

That little incident safely over, we turned to tea.

I induced Shaw to talk about his own work, and I quickly discovered
that, unlike most authors, he had no feeling of bitterness that he had
had to spend years in hard work before he won public recognition.

“A writer of originality must expect to have to wait. If a writer is
acclaimed immediately—I mean a writer on social and artistic
subjects—he may be pretty sure that he is saying things that have been
said before. He may be saying them better than anybody else;
nevertheless, they are the same things. My own success has been
gained, and is very largely maintained, by the force of my personality
and by the tradition about myself that has gradually grown up in the
mind of the public. For example, if I were to write an article and
give it to you to copy out and offer to editors in your own name, you
being the professional author, I doubt very much if a single editor
would look at it twice. A good deal, you see, _is_ in a name.”

It was when Mrs Shaw, having sipped her tea, had left the room, that I
broached the subject of my book.

“Publishers are curious people,” I remarked meditatively.

He sat silent.

“My own publishers in particular. They are now fighting shy of a book
solely about you.”

I paused and glanced at him. But he was gazing at me with eyes of a
mild malice and he was very silent.

“Yes,” I continued. “To put it bluntly, they think that a book solely
about you would not be a success. So that they propose the first half
of the book should be concerned with you and the second half with
George Moore.”

“And the title?” he asked gently.

“Why? What do you mean?”

“Well, don’t you think _The Two Mad Irishmen_ would go rather well?”

I floundered. If he was going to be witty or sarcastic, or anything
horrid of that kind, I should be nowhere at all. To cover my
confusion—and, as it chanced, to make that confusion worse—I began to
talk very rapidly.

“I know their suggestion is awfully stupid, but then publishers do
make stupid suggestions. That, I suppose, is why they are so
successful. Of course, George Moore and yourself——”

“Oh, George has worked awfully hard,” said Shaw reasonably. “I don’t
suppose there is a more conscientious artist living. He has dug out of
himself everything there was to be got. No one could have tried more.
As a worker, George is magnificent. But, really, when you suggest a
book——”

“No! No! I don’t suggest it for one moment,” I interrupted.

“Then what are we discussing?”

“Well, in the first instance, my publishers suggested——”

“Ha! ‘In the first instance!’ No; it really cannot be done. If you
wish to write the book nobody, of course, can stop you, but if you do
you must not expect me to countenance it. I shall wash my hands of the
whole business.”

And, in spite of some further conversation, that remained his
unshakable attitude.

An hour later he walked with me down to the station, I resolving all
the way that I would persuade my publisher to accept two books. Shaw
droned on about Sidney Webb and the Fabian Society.... So many people
have talked to me of Sidney Webb. I wonder why. I have heard Sidney
Webb speak; he knows all about figures and dates and money and wages,
and so on.... But of human nature he knows nothing; he knows less than
a child, for a child has at least intuition. Figures don’t go very
far, do they? Of course, by manipulation, you can make them go all the
way....

But, as I was saying, Shaw talked about Fabianism and Webbism all the
way to the station.

He was good enough to wait till the train started, and the last I saw
of him as I leant through the window was a long, lean figure standing
under a lamp. The figure wore no overcoat, but I noticed, even when a
hundred yards separated us, a pair of thick, home-knitted woollen
gloves....

       *       *       *       *       *

_P.S._—The book was never written, for my publishers could not be
persuaded to take G.B.S. at his own or my estimate.

Mr George Moore, on being approached, wrote me from Dublin, saying,
inconsequently enough, that he had never asked anybody to write about
him nor had he ever asked anybody to refrain from doing so. On the
whole, he thought it better that if A (myself) wished to write about B
(Mr George Moore), it would be an excellent arrangement, provided
that:

(1) A was an intimate friend of B’s, or

(2) A was a complete stranger to B.

I was left, most courteously, to infer that I (A), being a complete
stranger, had better remain so.

I did.

I have done.




CHAPTER II

MISCELLANEOUS

  Mrs Annie Besant—Marcus Stone—Lloyd George—Bishop
  Welldon—Dr Walford Davies


Mrs Annie Besant, like her Himalayan Mahatmas, is lofty, remote, and
difficult of access. Only once was I admitted to The Presence. What
drove me there was, first of all, curiosity, and, secondly, a feeling
of great respect for her which I had retained from boyhood. I admired
her courage, her independence, her friendship with and loyalty to
Bradlaugh; moreover, I have always held in high regard those who, from
temperamental or spiritual discord with their fellows, have kicked over
the intellectual traces and run a race of their own. Annie Besant,
whatever else she may be, is a woman of courage, of vast resource and
of indomitable will.

But alas! my hour’s interview with her did much to sap and destroy my
devotion. First of all, I must say that, previous to meeting her, I
had been for a short time an Associate of the Theosophical Society. I
was never admitted to membership of that body because I never claimed
the privilege; my associateship originated in my desire to hear Orage
lecture and in my anxiety to study some curious and not unintelligent
people at first hand. Nothing is at once more distressing and more
repellent to me than affectation, and the affectation of most members
of the Theosophical Society whom I met was really appalling. The people
were also grotesque. The men had dyspepsia and bald heads, and the
women wore djibbahs and a look of condescending benevolence. They read
Madame Blavatsky assiduously and gabbled nonsense to each other.

Mrs Besant made an appointment for me one Saturday afternoon at the
Midland Hotel, Manchester. I was shown into a private sitting-room
which, upon entering, I took to be empty. But, after a few moments had
passed, I observed a snake-like movement in a corner of the room, and a
thin, pale lady advanced languidly towards me, holding out a lifeless
hand which hung nervelessly at her wrist. I glanced at her in surprise
and noticed that she wore a djibbah, a long necklace of yellow stones,
a most insincere smile, and vegetarian boots.

“Mrs Besant will be with you shortly,” she said, scrutinising me
carefully. Having, as it appeared to me, taken a mental inventory of
my clothing, she glided to the door and, smiling at me once more,
disappeared. I took her to be a sort of bodyguard.

The entrance of Mrs Besant was brisk and businesslike. She had a firm
handshake; she looked a capable business woman—a woman accustomed to
issuing commands and having them implicitly obeyed. Of medium height,
she was plump and heavily built; her pale face, surmounted by perfectly
white hair, was of an intensely serious cast, and I saw no humour in
her eye.

Our conversation, a little halting at first, began to flow quite easily
when I mentioned her Autobiography and asked her why she had not issued
a second volume.

“You see,” I said, “it stops just at the most interesting period of
your life. You have never stated fully how you became convinced of the
truth of theosophical doctrines. I, for one, cannot understand your
position.”

“It isn’t very necessary that you should,” she observed calmly.

“Who am I, you mean, that I should presume to understand you?”

“Yes; perhaps I meant something like that. People who are intended to
understand me will understand me. The rest don’t matter. In any case,
this is not a subject that has much interest for me.”

“But, surely, if you think you have discovered the truth, you are
anxious to spread it? As a matter of fact, I know, of course, that you
are anxious on this point, or you would not lecture and write.”

“You are quite right,” she said, leaning forward a little. “I spread
the truth, but, then, the truth is not for everybody. Much of it falls
on stony ground.”

“And it will continue to do so,” I half interrupted, “until you have
proved that the alleged miracles of Madame Blavatsky are really true.
Was Madame Blavatsky a charlatan or was she not?—on the answer to that
question all modern theosophy stands or falls.”

She smiled at this attack of mine and at the violence of it.

“It _is_ proved,” she answered; “it is proved up to the hilt. I and
thousands of others are entirely satisfied.”

“And Madame Coulomb?—was she a mountebank? And were the mysteries of
Adyar frauds?”

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion about those matters. I have
my own view; you, no doubt, have yours. And now,” she added, a little
wearily, “let us have tea and talk about the weather.”

Such was the substance of our talk. I gathered the impression, right or
wrong, that Mrs Besant had brought herself to a state of mind when no
evidence, however strong, that was opposed to her beliefs would shake
her faith for a moment. She desired most fervently to believe in the
_bona fides_ of Madame Blavatsky, and believe she did. The Theosophical
Society does not—or it did not in those days—demand from its members
the acceptance of any particular doctrine; you could accept as little
or as much as you wanted and still remain one of the faithful. But
Mrs Besant went the whole hog.

Bernard Shaw once told me that, meeting Mrs Besant years after the
Bradlaugh days, he said to her, half jokingly:

“You surely don’t believe one quarter of the rubbish you write and
talk, do you?”

Her answer was to look at him coldly and turn on her heel. Which, after
all, was perhaps the wisest answer she could give.

       *       *       *       *       *

A kindly old man took me to his studio and began to talk of Dickens.
He spoke of those Victorian days as though they were the greatest that
have ever been. He knew Anthony Trollope and all his works and looked
askance at me because _Barchester Towers_ was the only Trollope book I
had read.

And then he took me to an easel and showed me his latest work—a
“pretty-pretty” picture of a girl in a garden; the sort of picture
that, according to my mood, either excites my laughter or throws me
into a fury of rage.

But Marcus Stone was very old, and his ideals, being those of
yesteryear, left me untouched. The young can never understand the old
and, as I listened to him talking of art and literature and life, I
told myself that we to-day are centuries away from the mid-Victorian
days. If he had not been so old and kindly I should have wished to say:

“Do you want to know what all you people were like fifty years
ago?—well, read _Punch_ for, say, the year 1870.”

But though my friends tell me that I am brutal, and I know I am
ill-mannered, I could not find it in my heart to speak those words.

       *       *       *       *       *

The amiable but rather weak Mr P. W. Wilson, who used to do “Lobby”
work for _The Daily News_, having declined a whisky, entered into
conversation with me at the hotel at Criccieth. He told me that till
that morning he had been staying with Mr Lloyd George, but that,
Mr Masterman, Sir Rufus Isaacs and other people of importance having
turned up, he himself had had to seek refuge in the hotel.

The occasion of the assembly of these wits was the opening of an
institute at Llanystumdwy, the little village near Criccieth, where the
Prime Minister spent his childhood days. Mr Lloyd George had given the
institute to the inhabitants of the village and was himself to open it
publicly the following day.

Mr Wilson’s amiability and his self-satisfaction at enjoying the
friendship of Mr Lloyd George rather put me out, and I felt a strong
desire to disturb his sleek smoothness.

“I hope,” said I, “that the suffragettes will not be brutally treated
to-morrow, but I am very much afraid they will.”

“Of course,” observed P. W. W., between draws at his pipe, “if they
create a disturbance here, in the very midst of Lloyd George’s
worshippers, they must expect a stiff time of it.”

“Yes, and they will get it. The organised gang of roughs from Portmadoc
who are coming here to-morrow armed with clubs will see to that. The
uneducated Welsh, their passions once aroused, are little better than
savages....” I hesitated a moment. Then, as impressively as I could,
I added: “We must prepare ourselves for dreadful sights to-morrow. I
should not be very surprised if one or two women are not torn limb from
limb. And if they are, the responsibility will, in my opinion, rest
mainly with Mr Lloyd George himself.”

P. W. Wilson took his pipe from his mouth and looked at me with some
concern.

“How do you make that out?” he asked.

“Well, hitherto he has not done very much to soothe the irritation of
meetings he has addressed which have been interrupted by suffragettes.
Lloyd George has not very much magnanimity. Moreover, in this
particular matter, he evinces but a shallow knowledge of human nature.
He would win the approval of all men of generous and chivalrous natures
if——”

I allowed my voice to die away to nothing.

Wilson, really disturbed, moved a little uneasily on his chair, rose,
scratched his head, sat down again and sighed.

“I must tell him,” said he. “I must warn him that, at the very
beginning of his speech, he must appeal to the audience to deal gently
with any interrupters.... Torn limb from limb.... You really think
that?”

I felt a little sorry to have disturbed him so much, and yet I knew
that I very much preferred an anxious, harassed Wilson to a Wilson who
was smooth and sleek.

Next morning at breakfast he was again smooth and self-satisfied.

“I have seen him,” he whispered, like a conspirator; “I have seen him.
It is arranged. Everything is all right.”

Later on that morning I was myself received by Mr Lloyd George in his
house. I went prejudiced against him and determined at all hazards not
to allow myself to be won over by that charm of manner of which I had
heard so much.

But in five minutes I had succumbed. He has a wonderful gift of
making you feel that he thinks you are the most interesting and most
intelligent person he has ever met. What he really does think, I
suppose, is that you (of course, I don’t mean you; I mean myself) are
an unmitigated bore, and while his eyes are smiling at you he is really
saying to himself: “Why doesn’t the fellow go?...” Yes, he has charm.
He does not fuss and he is not over-emphatic in his manner. And he is
a most deferential listener. He will even ask you your opinion about
matters of which he knows ten times more than yourself, and he will do
you the honour of arguing with you.

That afternoon, at the formal ceremony of “opening” the institute, my
warning concerning the suffragettes was nearly prophetic. Mr Lloyd
George, of course, did all in his power to quell the mob’s anger,
but the women were violently assaulted, their breasts beaten, their
clothes ripped from their backs, their hair torn by the roots from
their heads.... On the edge of the mêlée I saw P. W. Wilson standing
deploring it.

       *       *       *       *       *

It has always seemed to me an extraordinary thing that, in company
with Dr Walford Davies, I should have been asked some years ago to be
a guest at the annual dinner of the Church Diocesan Music Society. I
am always ready for adventure, of however hazardous a nature, so I
accepted the invitation even after I had been told that a speech was
expected from me.

Bishop Welldon, arriving late—in fact, I believe he had dined
elsewhere—plumped himself on a chair next to me, and immediately began
to dominate everything and everybody within a radius of twenty yards.
He is one of those distressing people who _will_ be jocular. And his
jocularity is rather noisy. He laughed a great deal and rubbed his
hands together. And he asked me a question and then asked me another
before I had had time to answer the first. And, really, he did talk so
awfully loudly.... I had come across him before in trams and shops and
places of that kind, and it was always the same; he invariably talked
_at_ you.... Even in the Manchester Cathedral, where Dr Kendrick Pyne
introduced me to him, he shouted at me and never allowed me to finish a
sentence.

But I perceive that I am becoming petulant, and I ought not to do so
for, as a matter of fact, the dinner was a screamingly funny affair.
I had prepared a fierce and warlike speech, a speech attacking the
Society whose food I had just eaten and whose wine was still warm in my
veins. I am, I suppose, quite the worst speaker in the world; so I had
memorised my speech and, so good I thought it that I had vastly enjoyed
doing so. But alas! when the minute drew near for me to deliver it, I
found myself in an atmosphere of such conviviality, such kindness, such
flattering attention, that I could not find it in my heart to deliver
the words I had prepared and memorised. Yet an impromptu speech of a
different tenor was impossible. I simply hadn’t the talent to do it. My
name was called and I rose to my feet.

My speech was offensive: it was meant to be. But offensive though I
knew it to be, I did not know how offensive it really was. I mentioned
the name of Wagner and, as I did so, I saw Dr Walford Davies shudder
most violently. Though I attacked the Church for her unimaginative
attitude to music, though I stamped on hymns and hymn tunes, though I
slanged the microscopic brains of many organists, though I said that
nearly all Cathedral music was to me anathema maranatha, nobody except
Bishop Welldon appeared to care in the least, and he did not care half
so much as poor, virginal Walford Davies, who, at the name of Wagner,
shuddered and put his glass aside.

Davies spoke: earnestly, like St Francis; frenziedly, like Savonarola;
passionately, like Venus ... no! no! no! ... passionately, like
St Paul. Eschew Wagner! That’s what it all came to.... “Eschew....”
Hate the sin, love the sinner, but most certainly “eschew” both. His
cheeks were very white, his lips pale. He trembled a little. Wagner, it
appeared, was one of the devils. Ab-so-lute-ly pernicious.... Have you
ever noticed how accurately you can estimate a man by his adjectives?
Dr Walford Davies used “pernicious” eleven times, “poisonous” twice,
“very-much-to-be-distrusted” once, “naughty” once (“this naughty man!”
was the phrase), “unlicensed” thrice, and “immoral” fifteen times....
I must say, _en passant_, that I am writing from memory and that my
memory for figures is atrocious; still, these adjectives, collectively
represent the impression his speech left on my mind.

After dinner (well, neither after nor before dinner) one does not
ardently desire a speech of that kind. It fell flat. A fat organist
from Bolton (or was it Bacup?) winked me a fat wink. The man on my
left—a young musical doctor from Cambridge—dug his elbow into my ribs.

And then came Bishop Welldon’s speech. He was extraordinarily clever.
He said some of the most cutting things imaginable. He was scathing.
He hurt me. Reaching for my glass, I hastily swallowed the large
brandy I had been careful to ask for beforehand. He made epigrams,
epigrams adapted most skilfully from the writings of his friend, John
Oliver Hobbes. And he spoke so well; he had presence; he had a manner;
he, like Sir Willoughby Patterne, had a leg ... and a leg that was
gaitered. Perhaps it was the gaiters that did it. One has heard a good
deal lately about the Hidden Hand, but what about the influence of the
Hidden Leg? The leg hidden under the table? The gaitered leg hidden
under the table? Most of the diners, remembering that Bishop Welldon
was indeed a bishop—though, truly, only, so to speak, an ex-bishop,
and an ex-bishop only of Calcutta, and now possessing only the powers
of a dean (whatever those powers may be!)—most of the diners, I say,
recollecting that Bishop Welldon was indeed a bishop, looked at me with
eyes of faint hostility or did not look at me at all.

I was very young, said Bishop Welldon. I was enthusiastic; I was
inexperienced; I was “artistic”; I was a jumper-at-conclusions.

When he finished and, with one of his good-natured smiles, turned and
looked at me, I was crumbling bread very rapidly, rolling the bread
into soiled little pills, putting the little pills all in a row.

Later on in the evening Bishop Welldon, a little group of jolly people
and I myself sat and smoked and drank very inferior coffee. Dr Walford
Davies did not join us. He shot little pointed darts at me from his
eyes, but (as, of course, you must have anticipated) when he and I
parted he was most studiously polite.

And, on my way to my tram, I hummed Davies’ _Hame! Hame! Hame!_ to
myself and pondered over the mystery that enables a man to write such
a wonderful, soul-searching melody and yet possess an intellect of
quality only ... well, so-so.

  Here a little child I stand,
  Heaving up my either hand ...

Do you know Walford Davies’ setting of that Grace, the setting he made
some years ago for one of the daughters of the late Canon Gorton? If
you do, if, as I do, you adore its Blake-like simplicity, its Ariel
freshness, you will not mind his hatred of Wagner. Only, it is rather
strange, don’t you think, that we outsiders who love Wagner (and I
believe, don’t you, that all intense lovers of Wagner must be rather
outsiderish?) should be able to love Walford Davies also, though he
(most unhappy!) can’t or won’t love us?

But it is being borne in upon me that for the last five minutes I have
been writing like the adorable Eve in _The Tatler_. Let me, for her
sake, begin another chapter.




CHAPTER III

FRANK HARRIS


It must have been five or six years ago that a friend came to me with
the news that Frank Harris had expressed a desire to see some of my
verse. Precisely what my friend had told Harris about me, I do not
know; something very exaggerated, perhaps; something complimentary,
doubtless; something that piqued Harris’s curiosity, it was evident. As
Harris is one of the few modern writers for whom my boyish admiration
has survived manhood, I felt subtly gratified that he should take
even a fleeting interest in me, and I sat down at once and copied out
various poems that had already appeared in _The Academy_, under Lord
Alfred Douglas’s editorship, and in _The English Review_ in the days of
Ford Madox Hueffer, and, more recently, when edited by Austin Harrison.
With my verses I sent a letter, hypocritically modest as regards
myself, honestly full of admiration as regards Harris. He replied from
his villa in Nice, sending me a long letter in which he did me the
honour to enter fully into the supposed merits and demerits of my work.
Of one poem he said that it was not sufficiently sensual, and I have
never been able quite to understand what he meant, for I had, with some
particularity, described seven naked ladies swimming in a pool, and I
had felt that my verses had obviously enough expressed my feelings.

The correspondence continued until, one day, Harris wrote to tell me
he was returning to London and to invite me to visit him there. In the
event, however, my first meeting with Harris was in Manchester, whither
he came to lecture on Shakespeare to the local dramatic society. Jack
Kahane (a great friend of mine) and I met him at the Midland Hotel upon
his arrival, and from the very first moment he intoxicated me. Whilst
he changed from his travelling clothes to evening dress he talked and
ejaculated, beseeching us to remain with him as he had had “a rotten
journey from London and felt unutterably bored.” I remember very little
of what he said except that, with some venom, he called Browning “a not
unprosperous gentleman.” He refused to eat or drink before his lecture
and, presently, we went down to the large room in the hotel where he
was to speak.

We found there a mixed assembly. Everybody in Manchester, it should
be explained, writes plays; at least, I never yet met a man in that
delectable city who does not. Moreover, they “study” them. They weigh
and compare the merits of Stanley Houghton and Ibsen, Harold Brighouse
and Strindberg, Allan Monkhouse and Bjornson, Arnold Bennett and
Hauptmann, Laurence Housman and Brieux, and so forth. They search
for “inner meanings”; the more earnest of them hunt for “messages”;
the more delicate seek to perceive Fine Shades. They are veritable
disciples of Miss Horniman—priggishly intellectual, self-consciously
superior. And, of course, the rock of their salvation is St Bernard.
Innocuous people enough, but impossible to live in the same city with.

To this assembly of earnest, pale men and spectacled women Harris was
to lecture, and I looked from them to Harris and from Harris to them
with joyful expectations. From the very first sentence he was fiery and
provocative, throwing out daring theories, anathematising all forms
of respectability, upholding with unparalleled fierceness a wonderful
ideal of chivalry and nobility and condemning, _en bloc_, the whole
human race, and particularly that portion of it seated before him.
Ladies rustled; men stirred uneasily. Then, having delivered himself
of a passage of hot eloquence, he paused. A clock ticked. He looked
defiantly at us and still paused. A fat lady in the front row, palpably
embarrassed by the long silence and, no doubt, feeling that she had
reached one of the most dramatic moments of her existence, banged her
plump hands together and ejaculated: “Bravo!” A few other ladies of
both sexes joined her, but Harris was not to be placated. Thrusting
out his chin, he began again. And this time he attacked the Mancunian
literary idol, Professor C. H. Herford, a great scholar, but a more
than suitable object for Harris’s ridicule. Herford is a man who has
not lived fully: a semi-invalid, asthmatic, bloodless and spectacled;
a man of books and rather dusty books; in effect, a professor. He
had recently reviewed Harris’s book, _The Man Shakespeare_, in _The
Manchester Guardian_, and had called it “a disgrace to British
scholarship.” Why this should have annoyed the author I cannot tell,
but Harris is at times a little unreasonable. Indeed, “annoyance” but
feebly describes the feeling that spent itself in scalding invective
and the most terrible irony. Each sentence he spoke appeared to be the
last word in bitterness; but each succeeding sentence leaped above
and beyond its predecessor, until at length the speaker had lashed
himself into a state of feeling to express which words were useless.
He stopped magnificently, and this time the room rang with applause.
It is probable that not half-a-dozen people present believed his
attack on Professor Herford was justified; indeed, it is probable that
not half-a-dozen were qualified to form any opinion of value on the
matter. Nevertheless, they applauded him with enthusiasm, and they did
so because they had been deeply stirred by eloquence that can only be
described as superb and by anger that was lava hot in its sincerity.
Briefly, the lecture was an overwhelming success.

I was soon to discover that Harris, like all the men of genius I have
met, is vain. I do not mean that he overrates his gifts: he does not;
nor that his recognition of his own genius is offensively insistent:
such is very far from being the case. I mean that he is inordinately
proud, innocently and childlikely proud, of things that are not of the
least consequence. At supper in the French Restaurant the head waiter
slipped noiselessly across to the table at which Harris, Kahane and I
were sitting. (Harris is the kind of man who acts as a magnet to all
head waiters—a high tribute to his dominating personality.) When our
orders had been given the waiter, turning to go, said: “Very good,
Mr Harris.” On the instant Harris looked up. “So you know me?” he
asked. “Yes, sir. I have had the pleasure of waiting on you in Monte
Carlo and, if I am not mistaken, in New York as well.” It is difficult
to describe the naïve pleasure Harris took in this: it stamped him at
once as a man of the world—he who, of all people, required, in our
opinion, no such stamp.

For six hours we talked—talked long after every other visitor in the
hotel had retired, and we were left alone in the Octagon Court in a
pool of dim light. Harris is the only brilliant talker I have met who
has not made me feel an abject idiot. To begin with, though he has a
pronounced strain of violence, almost of brutality, in his nature, he
is always infinitely courteous. He will listen to your (I mean my)
feeble contributions to a discussion with interest which, if feigned,
is so admirably feigned that you are completely deceived. And he can
keep this sort of thing up indefinitely. Moreover, though his mind is
agile enough, his speech is rarely quick; it is slow and deliberate,
but without hesitation, without a single word of tautology.

I cannot hope, after so long a lapse of time, to reproduce, however
faintly, the true quality of Harris’s conversation, but I remember the
substance of it most vividly. In his lecture earlier in the evening he
had mentioned Jesus Christ, and the reference to our Saviour had been
so original in its implication, yet so reverent in its manner, that I
felt he must have much that is new to say on a subject that has aroused
more discussion than any other during the last two thousand years. So I
broached it tentatively. He was aroused immediately, and skilfully drew
me out to discover if I had anything new to say. I had not. I merely
voiced what must be an age-long regret, that only one side of Christ’s
nature has been presented to us in the Gospels; that the feasting,
joyous Christ has been only faintly indicated; and that His tolerance
towards the weaknesses of the body’s passions had always been shirked
by those of the priestly craft. I thought it possible that at some
future crisis in the world’s history Christ might come again and, on
His second coming, present to the world a more complete embodiment of
all the potentialities inherent in human nature.

With much of this Harris agreed, though I soon perceived that his mind
had for long been intuitively building up, and giving true proportion
to, those elements in Christ’s nature that are only hinted at in
the Gospels. He was all for a full-blooded, passionate Jesus, for a
Jesus who had tested the body’s powers, for a Jesus who was crucified
by passion before He was crucified by Pilate. In a word, he applied
to Jesus the same intuitive method that he had already applied to
Shakespeare. The danger of this method, of course, is that one is
tempted (and it is almost impossible not to succumb to the temptation)
to project one’s own personality into that of the man one is studying.

“My next book shall be about Jesus Christ,” said Harris. “No man in
these days has written honestly about Him.”

“Shall you write as a believer?” I asked.

“Most assuredly,” he replied.

Then Harris told us some stories—stories he had written, stories he
had yet to write. I remember Austin Harrison once saying to me: “Frank
Harris is the most astounding creature! He will tell you a story
and tell it so marvellously that, when he has finished, you say to
yourself: ‘That is the most wonderful thing I have ever heard.’ And
you say to him: ‘Why, in God’s name, don’t you write that?’ Well, he
does write it, and when you read it you see that, after all, it is by
no means so wonderful a thing as you had thought it.” But this is only
half true. The story that is told is a very different thing from the
story that is written: so different, indeed, that one cannot find any
basis for comparison. In telling a story Harris is elliptical; a faint
gesture serves for a sentence; a momentary silence is an innuendo; a
lifting of the eyebrows, a look, a dropping of the voice, a slowness
in his speech—all these take the place of words. He is an exquisite
actor and he is at his best when he is sinister and menacing. One
need scarcely say that the effect of one of Harris’s stories, told in
private, with only one or two listeners, is extremely powerful, for his
personality, so quick to melt and suffuse his speech—colouring it and
vitalising it—is strong and strange and full of tropical richness....

But the actor’s gift is not rare, whereas that combination of
talents that makes a great short-story writer is met with only once
or twice in a generation. Harris’s claims to greatness in this
direction cannot justly be denied, though of late years there has
been a noticeable tendency to treat his work as though it were not
of first-rate importance. His choice of subject, the violence of his
thought, his strict honesty of mind, his open contempt for many of his
contemporaries—these have brought him enemies whose only method of
retaliation is to decry work they will not understand.

But Harris could not be happy without hostility. There is something of
the jaguar in his nature; he must, for his soul’s peace, have his teeth
in the flesh of an enemy. And, if he is not fighting an individual, he
is offending society at large. Years ago, so Harris told me, when he
was editing _The Fortnightly Review_ with such distinction, he printed
one of his own short stories in that magazine—a story that, for one
reason or another, gave great offence to a large section of readers.
Within twenty-four hours he had a hornet’s nest about his ears, and
the directors of the firm, Messrs Chapman & Hall, who published the
_Fortnightly_, met in solemn conclave to discuss what should be done
with so injudicious and reckless an editor. Needless to say, Harris
stood by his guns, and one can imagine the splendidly arrogant way
in which he would uphold his right to insert anything he chose in a
magazine edited by himself. But discussion made matters only more
critical, and Harris told me he would have been compelled to hand in
his resignation if an unforeseen event had not occurred. That event
was the entrance of George Meredith, who, at that time, was a reader
for Messrs Chapman & Hall. As soon as his eyes lit on Harris he held
out his hand, and walked quickly up to him, saying: “My warmest
congratulations! Your story in the new number is quite the finest thing
you have done—an honour to yourself and the _Fortnightly_!” That left
no further room for discussion and, needless to say, Harris retained
his editorship of the great magazine.

My first meeting with Harris was of the friendliest nature, and on his
return to London he wrote to me thanking me for something I had written
about him in _The Manchester Courier_. (I noticed with amusement that
_The Manchester Guardian_, unable, no doubt, to forgive Harris for
attacking Professor Herford, had absolutely ignored the Shakespeare
lecture, except to announce baldly that it had been given.)

Very soon after this meeting in Manchester I went to live in London,
and called on Harris in Chancery Lane. He was running a curious
illustrated weekly, entitled _Hearth and Home_, and I remember sitting
in a little back room in his office turning over the files of his
magazine and wondering what on earth he hoped to do with such a
production. It was tame; it was watery; it was feeble. I looked at him
quizzically.

“What do you think of it?” he asked.

“Well, don’t you see?...” I began hesitatingly; “don’t you see that ...
well, now, look at the _title_!”

“Title’s good enough, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes, good enough ... good enough for Fleetway House. Why not sell
it to Northcliffe? But you’ve got no Aunt Maggie’s column, and no
Beauty Hints, and no Cupid’s Corner! Oh, Harris!”

He laughed, and invited me out to lunch.

I never discovered what strange circumstances had conspired to make
him the possessor of this extraordinary production. No doubt he bought
it for nothing, with the intention of rapidly improving it and selling
it for something substantial later on. But I believe it died soon
after—perhaps urged on to its grave by some verses of mine which were
printed close to an advertisement of ladies’ ——.

On our way out of the office we were joined by a very beautiful lady
who, it soon transpired, shared my admiration for Harris’s genius. We
jumped on to a bus running at full speed and alighted, a couple of
minutes later, at Simpson’s.

Harris should write a book on cookery. Perhaps he will. Harris should
run a hotel. But he has already done so. Harris should be induced to
print all the indiscreet things he says over coffee and liqueurs....

It was a close study of Simpson’s menu that started the cookery
discussion. The Beautiful Lady and I were told what was wrong and what
was right with the menu. And then there began a discourse, profound,
full of strange knowledge and recondite wisdom, a discourse that
Balzac should have heard, that the de Goncourts would have envied.
We listened, amazed. And a waiter, having rushed to our table in the
stress of his work, stood anchored, his mouth slightly open, his whole
attention riveted on the Master from whom no gastronomic secrets were
hid. Truly, Harris was amazing!

After a considerable time his enthusiasm evaporated and we began to
eat. And then ensued a long talk, full of indiscretions, of most
enjoyable malice. Harris told us many things that, perhaps, it would
have been wiser if he had kept to himself. But, in spite of his venom,
his real hatred of certain individuals, he never for a moment permits
himself to be blinded to the quality of a man’s work.

“So-and-so is the most detestable person,” he said, speaking of a
well-known writer, “but he is one of the few real poets alive.” Again:
“X is the most generous-hearted man I have ever met; it’s a pity he
can’t learn to write.”

Mention of Richard Middleton, who had only recently died by his own
hand in Brussels, troubled him, and it was clear that he had not yet
recovered from the shock of this tragedy.

“He killed himself in a mood of sheer disgust—disgust at his lack of
success. True, he was still young, and was becoming more widely known
month by month; also, he had many friends. Nevertheless, life did not
give him what he asked and, tired of asking, he ended life. I remember
him coming to me just before he left England. He wanted to get away.
Some mood of loathing had come to him; he was fretful, yet determined.
I offered him my villa at Nice; it was empty, the caretaker would
attend to his wants and he would have ample leisure for his work. He
hesitated, stayed in London a day or two longer and then disappeared to
Brussels.... I know the poison he used, and a score of times I have
gone over in my mind the tortures he must have endured.”

Harris paled; his face twitched and, involuntarily, as it seemed,
his shoulders twisted themselves. Brooding, he was silent for a few
minutes, and then, collecting himself with a little shudder, began to
speak of other things.

A little later the Beautiful Lady departed and we were left alone.

“And now,” said Harris, “tell me about yourself. What are you doing?
Why have you left Manchester?—but there is no reason to ask that. Tell
me this—are you making enough money for yourself?”

“Well, I’ve lived in London just one week,” said I, “and my tastes are
rather expensive. Just before I left Manchester a very experienced
journalist told me I should be making a thousand pounds a year at the
end of eighteen months; another, equally experienced, declared I should
never make more than six pounds a week. I hope the second one won’t
prove correct.”

He mused for a few moments.

“You ought to make a thousand pounds a year pretty easily, I should
think,” he said at length. “Whom do you know?”

I knew nobody, and said so. He thereupon took a piece of paper from his
pocket and wrote a list of names; at the top of the list stood J. L.
Garvin; at the bottom, Lord Northcliffe.

“Northcliffe’s away,” he said, “buying forests in Newfoundland to
make paper with. However, he’ll be back in a week or two, and in the
meantime I’ll write you a letter to give to him. And now we’ll take a
taxi and see people.”

Harris gave up the whole of that day to me and, largely owing to him,
I had within the next few days more work offered to me than I could
possibly get through. From time to time, months later, good things
would come my way, and nearly always I could trace them to something
generous and fine that Harris had said of me.

It was chiefly because he was so generous with his time that I so
rarely called upon him. Often I would curb a strong desire to see him,
feeling that however embarrassing my visit might be, he would, out of a
quixotic kindness, throw up his work and come with me to talk. For this
reason I had not seen him for some little time, when, one morning, I
received a letter from him reproaching me for my absence. “Why have you
hidden yourself for so long?” he asked. “I go to the Café every night;
come, you will find me there.”

“The Café,” of course, was the Café Royal. It so chanced that, that
very afternoon, my duties took me to a symphony concert in the Queen’s
Hall; the concert over, I found myself passing the Café Royal on my way
from the Queen’s Hall to Piccadilly Circus, and turned in on the remote
chance of finding Harris.

At the end of the passage, near the windows where French papers are
displayed, I found a crowd of a dozen excited men, all talking and
gesticulating. The rest of the Café was empty, as one would expect at
that time of the day. In the middle of the small crowd was Harris, who
caught my eye almost at once. He came to me, and I saw that he was
rather agitated.

“Come and sit over here, Cumberland,” he said. “I’ve just been through
a beastly quarter of an hour.”

It appeared that a well-known and very distinguished _littérateur_ had
quarrelled with him in the Café.... Blows had been exchanged....

We talked of money—an ever-absorbing topic both to Harris and to me. He
told me his books had brought him practically nothing. For _The Bomb_,
if I remember correctly, he received fifty pounds—certainly not more
than one hundred pounds.

“If I had been compelled to live by what my books have brought
me,” he said, “I should have starved. Yet it is not long ago that
Arnold Bennett assured me that I should be able to earn five thousand
pounds a year if I gave my whole time to fiction. But Bennett is
wrong. My books, ever since _Elder Conklin_ was published, have been
enthusiastically praised, but they have not had large sales. Most
authors must find book-writing the most unremunerative work in the
world. I put an enormous amount of labour into _The Bomb_, as I do
into all my books, and the labour was not made any the less from the
fact that much of the earliest part of the book is autobiographical.
In my young manhood I worked as a labourer, deep under water, at the
foundations of Brooklyn Bridge; it is all described in my book.”

Though I went to the Café Royal at frequent intervals after that I very
rarely saw Harris there. He had abandoned _Hearth and Home_, or it had
abandoned him, and he was now throwing away his brilliant gifts on
_Modern Society_. I was elected an honorary member of the Cabaret Club,
run by Madame Strindberg, the widow of the great Swedish writer, and I
used to look in there occasionally in the early hours of the morning,
expecting to run across Harris, who, I heard, also visited that exotic,
underground and rather riotous place. But I never chanced to see him,
and two or three months must have passed without my hearing of him.

In March, 1914, I went to Athens for a holiday. Something brave and
wonderful in that city, some ancient Bacchic madness, some fierce
exaltation of soul took hold of me, and I remember sitting down one
night, after a visit to fever-stricken Eleusis, to write to Harris,
feeling the necessity of expressing myself to one who would understand.
The reader may be amused that I should think Harris akin to ancient
Greece, but if the reader is amused he does not know Harris. Only A. R.
Orage is more Greek in spirit than he is. In reply Harris wrote at
great length, full of the fervour of a young student. He told me that
in his young manhood he had spent a year of study in that wonderful
city, and urged me to visit him on my return to England.

But I was destined not to see him again. Very soon after my return
to England he got into trouble with reference to something libellous
that he had published in _Modern Society_. He was kept in prison, if
I remember rightly, for about a month. I sought permission to visit
him there, but was refused, and I was staying in Oxford when he was
released.

Soon after the war broke out he wrote me the following letter from
Paris:—

                              23, Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Paris,
                                        _29th Aug. ’14_.

  My dear Cumberland,—I’m just back from the frontier.... This war
  of nations is going to test every man as by fire before it’s
  over. It will be long in spite of Mr Kipps and Bernard Shaw. The
  Russian masses will hardly come decisively into action (they
  have scarcely any railways and no good roads) till next May or
  June, and long before then, or rather in a couple of months from
  now, the French will be pressed back to within twenty miles of
  besieged Paris, when I hope the English forces on the flank will
  stop the German advance. Then will begin the slow process of
  driving the Germans home, which will be quickened by the Russian
  weight behind Cossack pricks. Fancy one _man_ having the power to
  set 400 millions of men fighting for their lives. And then they
  talk of man as a rational animal!!

  Don’t say you like what I wrote in _The Daily Sketch_; all my
  best things were carefully cut out and filled up with drivel,
  till my cheeks burned.

  Your sketch of me is very kindly; the fault you find in me is not
  a fault. Jesus, Shakespeare, Napoleon—all the greatest men have
  known their own value and insisted on it—perhaps because they
  have all _come to their own and their own received them not_.
  When you have done great work you feel it is not yours, but given
  to you; you are only a reed shaken in the wind; you can judge
  it as if it had nothing to do with you. Moreover, you see that
  this failure to recognise greatness is the capital sin of all
  time, the sin against the Holy Ghost which He said could never be
  forgiven. Modesty is the fig-leaf of mediocrity—don’t let us talk
  of it. Remember how Whistler scourged it.

  I’m writing now on _Natural Religion_—my best thing yet: I’ve
  done more than Nietzsche: don’t think I’m bragging. I am the
  Reconciler; though my cocked nose and keen eyes may make you
  think me a combatant. Twenty years hence, Cumberland, if your
  eyes keep their promise, you’ll think differently of me. I
  remember as a young man getting Wagner to praise himself and
  saying to myself that no man was ever so conceited as the little
  hawk-faced fellow with the ploughshare chin. Did he not say that
  the step from Bach to Beethoven was not so great as that from
  Beethoven to Wagner! And yet for these fifteen years past I have
  agreed with him and find nothing conceited in the declaration.
  Only weak men are hurt by another man’s conceit; are we not gods
  also to be spoken of with reverence?

    To see the world in a grain of sand
      And Heaven in a wild flower,
    To hold Infinity in your hand
      And Eternity in an hour.

  The question for you is, have I quickened you? Encouraged you to
  be a brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity? Did virtue
  come out of me? or discouragement? Now at nearly sixty I am about
  to rebuild my life: my own people have stoned and imprisoned and
  exiled me. Well—the world’s wide. In October I shall be in New
  York, ready for another round with Fate. Meanwhile, all luck to
  you and all good will from your friend,

                                                  Frank Harris.

  Remember this word of Joubert: there is no such sure sign of
  mediocrity as constant moderation in praise. Ha! Ha! Ha! Yours
  ever,
                                                  F. H.

There is not in this letter a single word to indicate that he was not,
heart and soul, in sympathy with the Allied Cause. Late in September,
1914, I was myself in Paris, having visited Amiens and the Marne. I
took the earliest opportunity of calling upon Harris, but discovered
that he had left his rooms a few days earlier, leaving no indication
of his next resting-place. On calling upon the American Consul I
discovered that my friend had already sailed for the States.

Subsequently he wrote bitterly about England in an American paper. I
never had an opportunity of reading his articles, but I read various
extracts from them in British newspapers, and was astounded both by
the views they contained and by the manner in which those views were
expressed.

Years ago Ruskin wrote Rossetti a curious letter: he said he could
regard no man as friend who did not value his (Ruskin’s) gifts as
highly as he (Ruskin) did. Harris, no doubt, adopted the same kind of
attitude towards England. England refused to accept him at his own
estimate and, at length, in fierce disgust, Harris turned his back on a
country which he deemed unworthy of him.




CHAPTER IV

MISCELLANEOUS

  Madame Yvette Guilbert—Sir Victor Horsley—Mrs Pankhurst—Jacob
  Epstein—Madame Aïno Ackté


Yvette Guilbert!... Yvette Guilbert! I suppose that only a writer
who really can write can say anything useful or dignified about this
most wonderful woman.... And yet I must try. Do you remember that
extraordinary breath-catching passage in _Villette_ where Charlotte
Brontë describes the acting of Vashti—Vashti who was Rachel—Vashti who
went to London when Charlotte loved Héger?... That, I always think,
was a great event. Little Currer Bell, with her most modest mind and
her most proud heart, sitting, so breathlessly, on one side of the
footlights, and Rachel walking from the wings, beyond the footlights,
and, like an empress, speaking, thinking like an empress, and, like a
veritable woman, loving and hating.... Do you remember that passage? If
you do, perhaps you will think, as I do, that, after all, only women
can write of women. Did not Jane Austen create Elizabeth Bennet? And
who was it who wrote the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_? And even, after
all, Aphra Behn ... well, _she_ knew something about women, didn’t she?

So that I feel only a woman can write at all convincingly of Yvette
Guilbert. I must just gossip and prattle a little while.

I must have heard Yvette Guilbert a score of times. The first occasion
was in the Midland Hall, Manchester, eight or ten years ago, when
she sang to an audience of about two hundred frigid people who,
apparently, knew as much French as I know of the language of the Serbs,
and as much about Art as the pencil with which I write knows about the
thoughts it records. Ernest Newman was there and, that night, wrote
an article for _The Manchester Guardian_ that must have more than
compensated Guilbert for the smallness of the audience. For she loves
praise, even the praise she gives herself, as the following letter
addressed to myself will testify:

  Je reçois votre aimable lettre et votre _admirable article_!! Je
  ne peux pas vous dire toute _la joie_ que je ressens en lisant
  que vous comprenez _si bien_ mes efforts! Je n’ai jamais _su être
  hypocrite_ et j’ai toujours manqué de diplomatie dans la vie à
  cause de cela; aussi, je n’hésite pas à vous dire que je _crois_
  sincèrement mériter vos bonnes paroles parce que je passe _ma
  vie entière_ à _me dévouer_ à mon art sans jamais de vacances.
  Mon amour pour le travail et la Beauté et tout ce qui est _pure_
  en art est tout le “mateur” de mes forces intellectuelles. Merci
  d’avoir deviné ce que le public ne voit pas toujours. Mes mains
  dans les vôtres.

                                                  Yvette Guilbert.

Guilbert has no singing voice, and yet she sings. Her singing voice
is small ... ever so small. Yet clear, distinct, expressive and, in
the lowest register, most deep and thrilling. How little mere “voice”
matters! Only consider. Here, on one hand, we have Madame Clara Butt
with, I suppose, one of the most wonderful organs that this world,
or any other world, has ever listened to. But would you walk five
miles to hear her sing? I wouldn’t. You, I hope and believe, wouldn’t
either. Would you walk five miles to hear Blanche Marchesi sing—Blanche
Marchesi, whose voice, as mere voice, is like a hundred other voices?
Of course you would. Voice matters little. It is the temperament, the
intellect, behind the voice that counts. And the eternal struggle
that Yvette Guilbert has had to undergo has been the struggle to make
her comparatively small voice express the wonderful things of her
imagination.

A gesture. A look. An inflection. Two paces on the platform. A little
cry ... a little cry of dismay. A superb and beautiful signal that
tells us the Mother of God is big with a Child. A tiny silence. A
moment of jauntiness. Something arch and irresistible. Something tragic
that makes you clench your fists....

One day Yvette Guilbert wrote to ask me to call on her. I did not go.
One feels so foolish in the presence of genius. One’s vanity is hurt.
One is afraid of being found out.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the early days of the war I visited Sir Victor Horsley several times
at his home. I was interested in shell shock, in the influence that
the horror of war has on certain types of human nature, and he was
good enough to supply me with a great deal of information. Quiet and
undemonstrative, he used always to stand, or move slowly up and down
the room; in the long talks we had together, I do not remember his
sitting down once.

I don’t think I ever met a man more careful to express his exact
meaning; he appeared to have a horror of exaggeration and he qualified
nearly every statement he made. In discussing scientific subjects such
scrupulous carefulness is, of course, not only wise but necessary, and
when, later on, I wrote a newspaper article on the effect that the
strain and horror of war have on the human brain, Sir Victor showed
himself very anxious that, in quoting his views, I should do so in
language that could not possibly be interpreted in two different senses.

He told me what my own experience in France and Salonica in 1915–1917
confirmed later on, that it is frequently the neurotic, the artistic,
the excitable man who most quickly adapts himself to, and is least
disturbed by, the incredible cruelties of warfare, whilst the
phlegmatic type of man is more liable to be broken by those cruelties.
Sir Victor Horsley suggested that this was, in some measure, due to
the fact that the neurotic man has, in imagination, tasted the terror
of war before he has actually experienced it; that he has, as it were,
prepared his mind for the shock it is to receive. The unimaginative man
cannot do this, so that when his turn comes to go to the trenches and
witness stark horrors, his nervous system reacts most violently.

Sir Victor spoke a good deal to me about the evil influence of drink,
and continually regretted that rum was served out to our soldiers. On
this subject, of course, though I disagreed with him profoundly, I did
not attempt to argue, though I pointed out that Napoleon had won many
of his campaigns by almost drugging his men with spirits. To this he
made no reply, though he shook his head gravely and seemed to ponder
a little.

My last interview with him was in his long, bare dining-room, where, as
we stood before the fire, he described to me in a low, serious voice
two or three war cases of mental trouble (functional, of course, not
organic), and I could see that the war was, so to speak, closing in
around him and enveloping him with its violent appeals, its tragic
interests.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs Pankhurst I met only once, but the impression she has left on my
mind is that of a most vivid personality. I saw her in many ridiculous
situations that would have made almost any other person look positively
foolish; but Mrs Pankhurst’s sense of personal dignity is so strong,
her personality is so imperious, and, above all, she possesses so much
humour and good sense, that it is impossible to imagine any situation,
however grotesque, that would render her ridiculous.

My interview with her was at the close of a day during which she had
worked incessantly. She was tired, and her face was lined and rather
dim. An hour earlier I had seen her in Oxford Street, Manchester,
seated in an open, horseless carriage, a dozen enthusiastic girls
pulling at the shafts, a few ribald boys following and shouting small
obscenities. I admired the perfect way she carried off the trying
situation. She sat perfectly calmly, as though nothing in the least
unusual were happening, as though, indeed, it were her daily custom,
and the daily custom of all women, to be dragged through the public
streets by a band of young ladies.

We sat under a lamp at a large table. The things we discussed are now
of no consequence, for the need for their discussion no longer exists.
I can only give my impression of her.

She struck me as being unutterably weary, weary bodily and perhaps
mentally. Her personality suggested a body and a spirit being driven
by an implacable will, a will that had no mercy for herself or for
others, a will that no power could break. I could not help wondering,
as I looked at her, whether she had not her moments of doubt, of
self-distrust. She must have had, for all men and women have. But those
moments would be few and short. Though she spoke to me very quietly,
without a gesture, with one rather tightly clenched hand on the table,
I felt the sheer _power_ of her, the power that a quenchless spirit
always gives to its owner.

Fanatic? Well, yes, if to be indifferent to the opinion of other people
and to be absolutely sure of yourself is to be fanatical. Certainly,
she was strange and grim and relentless. And yet one could not doubt
her tenderness, her deep sympathy, her devotion to humanity. Yes, a
strange woman, but perhaps not so very strange. The qualities I saw in
her are common qualities; the difference between her and others was
simply that she possessed those qualities in an unusual degree.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jacob Epstein, after flouting the artistic conventions for at least ten
years, is being taken to the heart of the public. The impossible is
happening, and it is happening because of the war. The war has forced
reality upon us; it has made us love beauty rather than prettiness,
truth rather than make-believe, the soul of things rather than their
appearances.

Epstein, I think, could never be said to be in revolt against any of
the artistic tendencies of the time. He simply did not follow those
tendencies or permit them to influence him. But three or four years
ago, when I first met him, he had the appearance, the manner, and even
the thoughts of one who is in revolt.

I remember discussing with him some very curious and, indeed, rather
alarming designs of his which were being exhibited at a little gallery
whose name I have forgotten. The designs were openly and widely
described as “indecent”; to me they were not indecent: they were merely
meaningless. I could see no idea behind them.

“They are not designs,” said Epstein, a little petulantly, I thought.

“Then what _are_ they?” I asked. “What do _you_ call them?”

“I am not aware that I call them anything.”

“But what do they _mean_?”

He smiled curiously and (we were sitting in the Café Royal) lit a
cigarette.

“Ah! That is for you to find out. Surely you don’t expect an artist to
explain himself?”

Of course he was perfectly right, and I was more than foolish to ask
him these questions. But I flogged at it.

“Now, your busts! Especially that wonderful head of Augustus John’s
son!—beautiful, marvellous! But those extraordinary red drawings.”

“I cannot explain them,” said he, “but I would certainly like you to
understand them, for it seems to me that you are not unintelligent.”

He gave me a quick, sly look, and we began to talk of John. I am afraid
that Epstein must have qualified his opinion of my intelligence, for
he asserted, in contradiction to what I was saying, that John was on
the wrong tack, and we failed to come to any agreement about this most
wonderful of living painters.

Like most artists, Epstein is pronouncedly inarticulate. He is, I
suppose, as much a mystery to himself as he is to others. But his work
is, of course, a hundred times more interesting than himself.

I used to see him often, but we rarely did more than acknowledge
each other’s existence, and when I saw him the other week in khaki,
sitting in the Café Royal, it was clear to me that, though he said he
remembered me, he had only a vague recollection of my personality and
had completely forgotten my name.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have often thought it strange that while singers like Madame Patti
and Madame Tetrazzini should conquer the world—and by the world I
mean every section of the musical public, vulgar and fastidious
alike—another and, to my mind, a very much finer artiste, Madame Ackté,
should be regarded with delight only by those whose musical experience
is wide and whose minds have been tutored by comprehensive study.
Personality, after all, is almost everything in Art, and Madame Ackté
has a personality that dwarfs into insignificance nearly all singers
who are her equal in technical attainments and in musical subtlety.

Her great part is Salomé, in Richard Strauss’s opera of that name. With
the wonderful intuition of a healthy, robust mind she has divined all
the perverted wickedness of that most tortured woman. Her acting is
among the finest things of our day.

No one could guess, in talking to this quiet, almost demure woman,
that she has in her such fires of passion, such powers of portraying
devastating wickedness. She has charm, graciousness, simplicity. Like
Yvette Guilbert, she has worked hard almost every day of her life. Her
talk is all of music and acting. She seems most unmodern. Her ingenuous
love of praise is delightful, and if you notice the little subtleties
in her singing and acting that most people do not notice, she is your
friend for ever.




CHAPTER V

STANLEY HOUGHTON AND HAROLD BRIGHOUSE


But perhaps you have forgotten who Stanley Houghton was? Well, not so
long before the Great War he was famous, both in England and America,
as the author of _Hindle Wakes_, he was universally alluded to as
a charming personality, and he promised to become one of the most
prosperous playwrights in England. Then, while still young and not
yet accustomed to his fame, he died in Italy. Thereupon some thousand
newspaper-writers recorded his death and wrote about him some of the
most lamentable nonsense it has ever been my misfortune to read.

Let me tell you all about it.

I was introduced to Stanley Houghton in Manchester by Jack Kahane—the
latter a most brilliant and engaging personality who knew everybody:
or, rather, everybody knew him.

“This,” said Kahane, indicating Houghton, “is one of Miss Horniman’s
pets. She is doing a play of his this week at the Gaiety. Now, let me
see, Stanley, what is the name of your little play?”

Houghton laughed deprecatingly.

“Oh, I saw it last night,” said I, “and jolly good it was. But I’ve
seen another play of yours besides _The Younger Generation_; it was
founded on a story by Guy de Maupassant. That, also, was tremendously
amusing.”

He frowned, and I understood from the way that he looked over my head
that I had displeased him. For a moment he was silent, then:

“I’ve just been reading some of your verses in _The English Review_,”
said he; “quite nice, quite nice.”

So then I examined him closely and saw a tall, fair youth, with plenty
of straw-coloured hair, a prominent, rather crooked nose, and a manner
of painful self-consciousness. I believe that, from that moment, we
distrusted each other most heartily. We parted a few minutes later
and I think Houghton must have shared my suspicion and regret that we
should often have to meet after that date. Kahane was and is (though
he has been in France these three years and I in Macedonia) my most
intimate friend, and had lately “taken up” Houghton, and whenever
Kahane did a thing he did it pretty thoroughly. And friends of a friend
are bound to tumble across each other continually.

Later in the day I protested to Kahane.

“What on earth has induced you to take up this man Houghton?” I asked.

“He amuses me,” said Jack. “And, really, you know, one or two of his
little things are quite promising. When he bores me I rag him. And then
he loses his temper. _Il m’amuse_, and that’s all I require from him.”

Shortly after I was elected a member of a funny little coterie in
Manchester, called the Swan Club. Kahane had founded it. There were
twelve of us altogether: Kahane; Stanley Houghton; Harold Brighouse
(whose play, _Hobson’s Choice_, is making “big money” in London at
the moment of writing); Charles Abercrombie (now a Lt.-Colonel and a
C.B.); Walter Mudie, the best of good fellows; Ernest Marriott, artist;
W. Price-Heywood, accountant and leader-writer; myself and a few
hangers-on of the Arts. We used to meet for lunch at a shabby little
restaurant in Peter Street, Manchester, opposite the Theatre Royal,
and we did our utmost to induce each other to talk about ourselves.

In this little coterie Houghton was a veritable whale among the
minnows. He was also a fish out of water. From the very first his
success spoiled him. He would take himself ponderously. Brighouse
worshipped success, so he worshipped Houghton. The rest of us, if we
worshipped anything at all, worshipped genius, and as Kahane was the
only one among us who had a touch of that divine quality, we rather
tended to worship him. But Kahane frittered away his gifts; he made a
lot of money by dint of working about an hour a day and by the sheer
force of his personality. For the rest he played and played hard. He
talked; he ragged; he listened to music and saw plays; he fell in love;
he indulged harmless vices; and he wrote two wonderful plays, full of
faults, but streaked with originality, with fire and with colour. In
effect, he could beat both Houghton and Brighouse at their own game,
and they knew it. But, at that time, playwriting with Kahane was only
a game; with the other two it was deadly earnest.

Houghton and Brighouse were something (and, I gathered, something not
very brilliant) in the city. Quite what that something was I do not
know, though I remember seeking out Brighouse once in a dark warehouse
smelling of damp cloth. Every afternoon Houghton and Brighouse would
close their ledgers, or petty-cash books, or whatever it was they did
close, and rush off home—Brighouse to catch, perhaps, his six-five P.M.
train to Eccles, and Houghton to jump gymnastically (he played hockey,
I believe) on to a passing tram bound for Alexandra Park. After a
hurried meal, out with the MSS., the notebooks, the typescript and to
work! And how hard they _did_ work!

I remember Brighouse telling me some years ago that he had written more
than thirty plays, but I cannot conceive that anybody but himself has
read them all. Brighouse slogged, and he beat so long at the door of
success that at last it opened to him. Houghton also slogged, but in a
dandified way. He was clever, he was cute, and he played his cards well.

       *       *       *       *       *

Houghton was, not without full justice, called the leader of the
Manchester School of dramatists. He was hard; he was unimaginative; he
was unromantic. But he was extraordinarily apt, and he had a neat and
tidy brain. Close must have been that union of souls that bound his
soul to the soul of Miss Horniman. Miss Horniman never (well, hardly
ever) produced a romantic play, and Stanley Houghton never wrote one.
He was out to “make good,” and Miss Horniman helped him to go one
better.

I need scarcely say that Houghton was, so far as his plays were
concerned, an industrious man of business. When the real artist has
finished a work, he ceases to take interest in it; but, with Houghton,
when a play was completed his interest in it immediately intensified.
He sent his plays everywhere: to the provinces, to London, to America,
to agents. As soon as a play came back, “returned with thanks,” out it
went again by the next post. And he pulled strings—oh! ever so gently,
but he pulled them.

Though quite a few of his plays had been produced in the north,
and though he had written some clever dramatic criticism for _The
Manchester Guardian_, he was unknown in London till the Stage Society
produced _Hindle Wakes_. Then Fame came to him and knocked him off
his feet. It is impossible to imagine a man more conscious of his
success. His consciousness of it made him, on occasion, tongue-tied.
In conversation he could be ready, and his repartee was frequently
brilliant, but during the years I knew him his attitude always
suggested that he anticipated and feared attack. I saw him once at
the bar of the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, in the midst of a group
of friends. I was not of their company, but I noticed that he stood
silent, erect and strained, his head a little thrown back, his face
set. Then, and on many other occasions, it seemed to me that he longed
to break down the feeling of awkwardness—to throw off the obsession of
self-consciousness—that overcame him.

But I must confess that I rarely saw him in company in which there
were not two or three who were hostile to him; therefore I saw him but
seldom at his best. Not infrequently, there was a “dead set” against
him, and if the banter were edged with malice (as it not infrequently
was) he withered like a lily under the grip of a frost. The truth
is, he was not modest and he could not feign modesty. His vanity was
neither charming nor aggressive; it was cold and distant, without
geniality, without humour. Genius is one of the wombs of vanity, but
Houghton had no genius; there was not a trace of magic in him; he was
merely extraordinarily clever, closely observant and possessed of an
instinctive sense of form and of literary values.

       *       *       *       *       *

There came a day when it entered my head to interview him for _The
Manchester Courier_, a paper for which I wrote musical criticism. He
accepted my proposal with alacrity, invited me to the Winter Garden of
the Midland Hotel, and provided me with coffee, liqueurs and cigars.

He began by telling me that this was the first time he had been
interviewed for the Press.

“An uncomfortable half-hour awaits you, then,” said I, and, on the
instant, he began to fidget.

I noticed that he was dressed for the occasion; he looked prosperous
and literary and there hung about him just a suspicion of
cosmopolitanism. Not only sartorially was he prepared; his mind was in
tune to the occasion and the right pose was donned. That is to say, he
was determined not to appear conceited or self-satisfied; but he did
not succeed. He made light of his success in a heavy, emphatic way. He
praised _Hindle Wakes_ with faint damns, and suggested that this play
would soon cease its successful run in London. He was careful not to
evince any pleasure in his success, any natural buoyancy of spirit,
any momentary delight. In a word, he was dull, tactless and insincere.
There was nothing boyish or charming or graceful in his words; he had
on all his heavy armour and it banged and clanged as he moved.

When the interview was over he invited me to his father’s house for the
evening meal. I went. I went out of curiosity. He did not amuse me, but
most certainly he did interest me.

When we had finished our meal he took me to his study. Near the window
was a typewriter; in the typewriter was a sheet of paper half covered
with script. There were very few erasures.

“I always compose straight on to the machine,” said Houghton.

“Ah yes,” said I, “and so did J. M. Synge. It has always seemed to me
remarkable that Synge should do that; in your own case, of course, it
is not quite so remarkable.”

“It is a comedy for Cyril Maude” (I think he said Cyril Maude). “He
wired to me the other day to go up to London to see him. Yes; he wanted
a comedy, and he wanted me to write it. That was about a fortnight ago.
Well, the thing’s nearly finished; in another week it will be on its
way to London. Rather quick work, don’t you think?”

“Quite. But all that you have told me I know already, and, really, you
must know that I know. You see, Brighouse comes to the Swan Club day
by day, drinks his beer—you know, the conventionally British pint he
_will_ have in a pewter mug——”

“Yes; Harold is very British,” interrupted Houghton.

“Isn’t he? Well, as I was saying, Brighouse drinks his beer, fixes his
eyes on his plate, and then spasmodically tells us all the news about
you. He told us, for example, about Cyril Maude giving you a hundred
(or was it a thousand?) guineas for the sight of a new comedy; he told
us about _The Daily Mail_ wanting articles from you at some colossal
figure; he told us about the host of people who send you wires every
day; he told us about——”

Houghton stirred uneasily, but he looked intensely gratified.

“He told us about everything,” I added, after a slight pause. “What
you tell him he tells us. But why don’t you come and tell us yourself,
Houghton? We never see you at the Swan Club nowadays. It must not be
said of you that you desert old friends, that success has made you
careless of those you once liked.”

He darted a glance at me and decided, as was indeed the case, that I
was attempting to be ironical.

“The truth is,” said he, “that the company I find at the Swan Club
is not always very congenial. One or two new men have been lately
introduced——”

He looked away from me meaningly.

“Quite,” said I, unperturbed; “oh, quite.”

“And,” he continued, “I am kept very busy with one thing and another.
It is true that I have given up my business and now intend devoting all
my energy to literary work, but just at the present moment I am kept at
it from dawn to dusk.”

Silence fell upon us, a rather oppressive silence, I think, for I
remember hunting about in my mind for something to say. I noticed a
copy of _The Playboy of the Western World_ on the little table before
us.

“Still reading Synge?” I asked.

“Yes; still reading Synge,” he replied. Then, after a pause: “A great
man, Synge.”

“An interesting man, a curious man,” said I, “but great? Only G. H.
Mair, Willie Yeats and high school girls think Synge great, Houghton.”

“Is that so?” asked he languidly.

I invited him to have a cigarette, but he refused. In truth, we were
both very uncomfortable and, by the subtle understanding and inverted
sympathy that hearty dislike engenders, we rose simultaneously to our
feet, rather hurriedly left the room, and soon found ourselves in the
hall downstairs. He opened the front door and we stood for a moment,
looking around us.

Next day my interview with Houghton appeared in _The Manchester
Courier_, with a portrait of the young dramatist. I do not remember a
word of that article, but I am quite sure it was insincere, without
distinction, and full of inanities; indeed, I would bet at least ten
drachmæ that there occur in it such expressions as “inherent modesty,”
“charming personality,” “interesting outlook on life,” and so on. A
journalist (must I say it?) is like a barrister: he is fee’d to say
what is required to be said. At all events, the interview pleased
Houghton, for he sent me a copy of _Hindle Wakes_ with a jocular
inscription on its title-page.

       *       *       *       *       *

The friendship between Brighouse and Houghton increased in intensity,
and when Arnold Bennett publicly referred to Brighouse in terms of no
small admiration Houghton decided that his eager disciple could be
received into the inner sanctum of his coldly fraternal breast. And
Brighouse, grateful to Bennett, loudly proclaimed that _Milestones_ was
“the greatest play since Congreve.”

“But why Congreve, Brighouse?” I asked. “Surely you mean H. J. Byron?”

But no! He said he meant Congreve.

“I do not,” I said, considerably perturbed, “I do not like to think,
Brighouse, that you have stained your virgin mind with Congreve.”

“I’ve looked at him,” said he icily. “He wrote comedies. _Milestones_
is a comedy.”

Now, I was used to Brighouse for, from the age of eleven to thirteen I
had been at the same school with him, and I remembered how enormously
sensitive and how self-contained and how stubborn he was. I also
remembered that Rabelaisianism, or Congrevism, or, indeed, any ism that
denoted the real philosophic vulgarity of the human mind, or any jolly
indecent wit, was repellent to him.

“There are, I suppose, expurgated editions of Congreve, Brighouse. I
imagine you as a collector of expurgated editions.”

But he buried his nose in his pint of beer and refused further converse.

Now, such are the influences that one man may have upon another, it
came about that the more successful Houghton became, the harder worked
Brighouse. Said Brighouse to himself, I imagine: “If Stanley can do all
this, why not I?” So he worked desperately, sloggingly, overwhelmingly.
Yet, in spite of all his hard work, he kept a most watchful and jealous
eye on his contemporaries, and I remember meeting him at one of Miss
Horniman’s orgies at the Gaiety Theatre when a new play of Galsworthy’s
was given. It was a beautiful play (Galsworthy has not written many
beautiful plays), but I regret to say I do not remember its name. At
the end of the first act Brighouse was disgustingly “superior,” and
at the end of the second he was contemptuous. So I sought a quarrel
with him. There are, I think, few emotions so devastating, and so
difficult to control, as the anger that surges upon one when one
hears a beautiful work of art, noble, subtle and full of humanity,
treated with contempt by a man whose vanity has blinded the eyes of
his soul. But I do not remember making any attempt to control my anger
at Brighouse; rather did I nurse and nourish it, and, when the proper
time came, I poured it upon him with generosity. Harold—or “Brig,” as
we used to call him—is too much a man of the world not to know how to
deal with an excitable man in a temper, and I remember coming away from
our quarrel feeling rather foolish and having a disturbing admiration
for Brighouse’s dignity. After this little episode, we were always very
polite to each other, and, later on, when we met in London, our meeting
was not without some cordiality.

Since these days Brighouse has scored a big success with _Hobson’s
Choice_. He will score other successes. He will die reputed and rich.
He will live, some day, in a West End flat and have a cottage in the
country from which he will issue at regular intervals and take long
walks in muddy lanes. I believe he will sedulously cultivate the
friendship of those who may be of service to him, and he will drink his
pint of beer every day of his life. He will be praised twice a year by
Sir William Robertson Nicoll. Yes, he will be praised twice a year by
Sir William Robertson Nicoll. And when Sir William dies, Mr St John
Adcock will take up the cry. And, when the war is over, our successful
young dramatist will go to America, where the money comes from.... I
should like to see Harold in America.

       *       *       *       *       *

There came a day when a new one-act play by Houghton was given at
the Manchester Gaiety—a play I subsequently saw at a London music
hall, its fit home; but I remember neither the play’s title nor its
plot. I recollect, however, that three or four men and women met in
the corridor of a London hotel and talked or suggested risky things.
Rather stupid, I thought it, and it certainly never occurred to me
that it was immoral or nasty; it was merely a dramatic experiment that
did not quite come off. But the dramatic critic of _The Manchester
Guardian_—either Mr A. N. Monkhouse or Mr C. E. Montague (I think
the former)—“went for” it tooth and nail on the score of its alleged
immorality. The criticism was scathing: it made a wound and then poured
acid into the wound. Houghton must have felt the criticism sorely,
but when I met him next day he pluckily treated it as a matter of no
consequence whatever.

“A reasonable man cannot expect always to be understood,” said he, “and
I suppose _The Manchester Guardian_, which has always been very good to
me in the past, has a right to scold me if it thinks fit.”

“A _scolding_, Houghton? Why, you were thrashed.”

“Well, I s’pose I was. But I can stand it.”

Vain men are invariably supersensitive, and for that reason I think
Houghton felt every word and act of hostility; but he never showed
weakness under opposition, and he could hit back when he thought it
worth while.

I once witnessed a physical assault upon him after a rather rowdy
dinner, when we all took to ragging each other. There was no excuse
for the assault, except what excuse may be found in bitter feeling
and enmity, but Houghton received the blow without a word, and we who
witnessed it neither expostulated with his assailant nor expressed
sympathy with his victim. Houghton paled and his large eyes gleamed,
and I have no doubt that on a subsequent occasion he settled the matter
with the man who was responsible for his humiliation.

Only a very few men really understood Houghton, and those were men who,
like Walter Mudie, had known him intimately in boyhood. Mudie swore
by him and would hear no word against him. But there was something
forbidding in Houghton’s nature—a barricade of reserve that he himself
had not wilfully erected, but which had been placed there by Nature. It
was impossible for people who met him casually a few times to form a
high opinion either of his intellect or of his personality. I remember
Captain James E. Agate, a most original and brilliant colleague of
Houghton’s on _The Manchester Guardian_, once saying to a group of
people: “Don’t you make any mistake about Houghton. He’s not such a
fool as he appears.” But it is a very incomplete man who requires such
a double-edged defence as that.

Though the contrary has often been stated, Houghton did not, I believe,
take much interest in anybody’s work except his own. He patronised a
young bank clerk, Charles Forrest, who had written a promising little
play that was subsequently, by Houghton’s recommendation, I believe,
given in Manchester and Liverpool; but when he came in contact with
work that was, in many respects, superior to his own, he was airily
superior and supercilious. He once asked to see a blank-verse play of
my own that was given at the Manchester Gaiety, but as I was aware
that he knew as much of blank verse as I do of conic sections—which
is nothing at all—I refrained from passing on my MS. to him. In other
men’s work he looked for faults; in his own he found perfection.

       *       *       *       *       *

I need scarcely say that when I went to London I did not seek out
Houghton, who had settled down in the Metropolis some months before me.
But we met in the Strand, he wearing a fur-lined overcoat and looking a
trifle like H. B. Irving, and I carrying a load of review books under
my arm. We looked at each other; we hesitated; we stopped. Stanley
was a trifle languid and, after a few inconsequent remarks, he began
telling me the history of his fur overcoat. He had, he said, bought it
for five pounds or seven pounds, or some such ridiculously low price,
and he had bought it second-hand.

And (Fate wills these things) whenever I hear the name Stanley Houghton
I think of that rather tall, rather aristocratic, figure in the
Strand wearing its second-hand fur-lined overcoat and talking, with
embarrassment, about nothing in particular, standing first on one foot
and then on the other.

It is, of course, impossible to predict with certainty what further
successes Houghton would have achieved had he lived, but there can be
little doubt that his sharp and lively talents would have produced
plays even more noticeable than _Hindle Wakes_. A little more
experience of life would probably have shown him the futility and the
destructive effects of his intellectual snobbery. He was raw and crude,
and success did not mellow or enlarge him.




CHAPTER VI

SOME WRITERS

  Arnold Bennett—G. K. Chesterton—Lascelles Abercrombie—Harold
  Monro—John Masefield—Jerome K. Jerome—Sir Owen Seaman—A. A. Milne


Of all the famous writers I have met, I have found Arnold Bennett the
most surprising. I do not know what kind of man I expected to see
when it was arranged that I should meet him, but I certainly had not
anticipated beholding the curiously, wrongly dressed figure that, one
spring afternoon some few years ago, walked up the steps leading from
the floor of Queen’s Hall to the foyer of the gallery. I was there by
appointment. I was a friend of a friend of his—Havergal Brian, a young
fire-eating genius from the Potteries, and Brian had planned this
curious meeting. It was during the interval of an afternoon concert of
a Richard Strauss Festival, and Ackté was singing.

Bennett was rather short, thin, hollow-eyed, prominent-toothed. He wore
a white waistcoat and a billycock hat very much awry, and he had a
manner of complete self-assurance. I cannot say that I was unimpressed.
We were introduced, and he looked at me drowsily, indifferently,
insultingly indifferently. He did not speak and I, nervous, and a
little bewildered by the colour of his socks, which I at that moment
noticed for the first time, blundered into some futility.

“I don’t see why,” said Bennett, in response.

I didn’t either, so far as that went. Desperately uncomfortable, I
looked round for Brian, and saw him standing fifteen yards or so away,
grinning malignantly.

So I plunged into a new topic—with even more disastrous results.

“I notice,” said I, “that you continue writing for _The New Age_ in
spite of their violent attacks on you.”

“Yes,” he answered laconically, and he looked dizzily over my left
shoulder.

Then and there I decided that I would not speak again until he had
spoken. I had not sought the interview any more than he had. Presently:

“I have been working very hard lately,” I heard. I turned quickly
to him; he had spoken into space. I showed a polite interest and he
thawed a little. He told me something of the number of words and hours
he wrote a day, of the work he had planned for the next two years,
of the regularity of his methods, of his disbelief in the value of
“inspiration.” I seemed to have heard it all before about Anthony
Trollope. He was not exactly loquacious, but he communicated a great
deal in spite of a rather unpleasant impediment in his speech....

Soon our interview was over, for we heard the orchestra tuning up, and
we left each other with just a word of farewell and without a sigh of
regret.

His conversational powers never, I believe, reach the point of
eloquence. I remember G. H. Mair giving me an amusing description
of a breakfast he gave to Arnold Bennett and Stanley Houghton in
his lodgings in Manchester. Bennett and Houghton had not previously
met, and the latter was young and inexperienced enough to nurse the
expectation that the personality of the famous writer would be as
impressive as his work, and impressive in the same way. It is true that
very extraordinary circumstances would be necessary to make breakfast
in Manchester free from dullness, but Houghton no doubt thought that
his meeting with Bennett _was_ an extraordinary circumstance. In the
event, however, he was disillusioned.

They went in to breakfast, and Bennett sat moody and silent, crumbling
a piece of bread. It chanced that on being admitted to the house
Bennett had caught sight of a cabman carrying a particularly large
trunk downstairs, and he began to question Mair closely about the
incident, Mair explaining that a fellow-lodger was removing that
morning and taking all his luggage with him.

“Yes, yes,” said Bennett, a little impatiently, “but why should he have
such a large trunk? It was enormous. I don’t think I have ever seen so
large a trunk before. It was at least twice the usual size.”

He took a mouthful of bacon and spent a minute in mastication. Having
swallowed:

“Absurdly large,” he said challengingly. “I can’t think why anyone
should wish to own it. Besides, it’s not right to ask any man to carry
such an enormous weight. That’s how strangulated hernia is caused. Yes,
strangulated hernia.”

The topic did not prove fruitful, and I can imagine Houghton cudgelling
his brains to discover what strangulated hernia really was, and Mair
saying something witty about it. But with his second cup of coffee and
his marmalade and toast Bennett once more talked of the cabman, the
impossible trunk, and the cabman’s hypothetical hernia.

“Of course,” he remarked meditatively, “the man must have _some_ reason
for owning such an incredibly large trunk, but I confess I can’t guess
the reason. And, in any case, it is bound to be a selfish one. Now,
strangulated hernia——”

And that was all that issued during a whole hour from one of the
cleverest brains in England.

That Arnold Bennett is almost painfully conscious of his own
cleverness there is no manner of doubt. He is stupendously aware of
the figure he cuts in contemporary literature. He is for ever standing
outside himself and enjoying the spectacle of his own greatness, and he
whispers ten times a day: “Oh, what a great boy am I!” I was once shown
a series of privately printed booklets written by Bennett—booklets that
he sent to his intimates at Christmas time. They consisted of extracts
from his diary—a diary that, one feels, would never have been written
if the de Goncourts had not lived. One self-conscious extract lingers
in the mind; the spirit of it, though not the words (and perhaps not
the facts) is embodied in the following:—“It is 3 A.M. I have been
working fourteen hours at a stretch. In these fourteen hours I have
written ten thousand words. My book is finished—finished in excitement,
in exaltation. Surely not even Balzac went one better than this!”

A great writer: no doubt, a very great writer: but you might gaze at
him across a railway carriage for hours at a time and never suspect it.

       *       *       *       *       *

But if Arnold Bennett is the least picturesque and literary of figures,
G. K. Chesterton is the most picturesque and literary. His mere bulk
is impressive. On one occasion I saw him emerge from Shoe Lane, hurry
into the middle of Fleet Street, and abruptly come to a standstill
in the centre of the traffic. He stood there for some time, wrapped
in thought, while buses, taxis and lorries eddied about him in a
whirlpool and while drivers exercised to the full their gentle art of
expostulation. Having come to the end of his meditations he held up his
hand, turned round, cleared a passage through the horses and vehicles
and returned up Shoe Lane. It was just as though he had deliberately
chosen the middle of Fleet Street as the most fruitful place for
thought. Nobody else in London could have done it with his air of
absolute unconsciousness, of absent-mindedness. And not even the most
stalwart policeman, vested with full authority, could have dammed up
London’s stream of traffic more effectively.

The more one sees of Chesterton the more difficult it is to discover
when he is asleep and when he is awake. He may be talking to you most
vivaciously one moment, and the next he will have disappeared: his body
will be there, of course, but his mind, his soul, the living spirit
within him, will have sunk out of sight.

One Friday afternoon I went to _The Daily Herald_ office to call on
a friend. As I entered the building a taxi stopped at the door and I
found G. K. C. by my side.

“I have half-an-hour for my article,” said he, rather breathlessly.
“Wait here till I come back.”

The first sentence was addressed to himself, the second to the
taxi-driver, but as we were by now in the office the driver heard
nothing. Chesterton called for a back file of _The Daily Herald_, sat
down, lit a cigar and began to read some of his old articles. I watched
him. Presently, he smiled. Then he laughed. Then he leaned back in his
chair and roared. “Good—oh, damned good!” exclaimed he. He turned to
another article and frowned a little, but a third pleased him better.
After a while he pushed the papers from him and sat a while in thought.
“And as in uffish thought he” sat, he wrote his article, rapidly,
calmly, drowsily. Save that his hand moved, he might have been asleep.
Nothing disturbed him—neither the noise of the office nor the faint
throb of his taxi-cab rapidly ticking off twopences in the street
below.... He finished his article and rolled dreamily away.

His brother Cecil has the same gift of detachment. He can write
anywhere and under any conditions. I have seen him order a mixed grill
at the Gambrinus in Regent Street, begin an article before his food
was served, and continue writing for an hour while the dishes were
placed before him and allowed to go stone cold. Like most men in Fleet
Street who do a tremendous amount of work, he has always plenty of time
for play, and I do not remember ever to have come across him when he
was not ready and willing to spend a half-hour in chat in one of the
thousand and one little caravanserai that lurk so handily in the Strand
and Fleet Street.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of poets of the younger generation I have met only three—Lascelles
Abercrombie, Harold Monro, and John Masefield. Abercrombie I remember
as a lean, spectacled man, who used to come to Manchester occasionally
to hear music and, I think, to converse intellectually with Miss
Horniman. Of music he had a sane and temperate appreciation, but
was too prone to condemn modern work, of which, by the way, he knew
nothing and which by temperament he was incapable of understanding. He
struck me as cold and daring—cold, daring and a little calculating. He
appeared unexpectedly one day at my house, stayed for lunch, talked all
afternoon, and went away in the evening, leaving me a little bewildered
by the things he had refrained from saying. Really, we had nothing
in common. My personality could not touch his genius at any point,
and the things he wished to discuss—the technicalities of his craft,
philosophy, æsthetics and so on—have no interest for me. If I had not
studied his work and admired it whole-heartedly, I should have come
to the conclusion that he had written poetry through sheer cleverness
and brightness of brain. No man was less of a poet in appearance and
conversation. He professed at all times a huge liking for beer, but I
never saw him drink more than a modest pint, and his pose of “muscular
poet” (a school founded and fed by Hilaire Belloc) deceived few.

       *       *       *       *       *

Harold Monro I used to see occasionally in the Café Royal, and I
met him a few times at the Crab Tree Club. I remember going with
him, early one morning in June, 1914, after sitting up all night, to
the Turkish baths in Jermyn Street. We swam a little in a tank and
were then conducted to a cubicle, where I wished to talk, but Monro
was heavy with sleep and soon began to breathe stertorously. A few
days later he received me rather heavily at his office at The Poetry
Bookshop, read some of my verses, and told me quite frankly that he
did not consider me much of a poet. A sound, solid man, Monro, and he
has written at least one poem—_Trees_—as delicate and as beautiful as
anything done in our time.

       *       *       *       *       *

But neither Monro nor Abercrombie, greatly gifted and earnest in their
work though they be, fulfils one’s conception of a poetic personality.
There is no mystery about them, no glamour; they do not arouse wonder
or surprise. John Masefield, on the other hand, has an invincible
picturesqueness—a picturesqueness that stamps him at once as different
from his fellows. He is tall, straight and blue-eyed, with a complexion
as clear as a child’s. His eyes are amazingly shy, almost furtive. His
manner is shy, almost furtive. He speaks to you as though he suspected
you of hostility, as though you had the power to injure him and were
on the point of using that power. You feel his sensitiveness and you
admire the dignity that is at once its outcome and its protection.

There are many legends about Masefield; he is the kind of figure that
gives rise to legends. And, as he is curiously reticent about his early
life, some of the most extravagant of these legends have persisted and
have, for many people, become true. But the bare facts of his life are
interesting enough. As a young man he grew sick of life, of the kind
of life he was living, and went to sea as a sailor before the mast. He
had neither money nor friends; or, if he had, he relinquished both.
The necessity to earn a living drove him into many adventures, and I
am told that for a time he was pot-boy in a New York drink-den. Here
his work must have been utterly distasteful, but the observing eye and
the impressionable brain of the poet were at work the whole time, and
one can see clearly in some of Masefield’s long narrative poems many
evidences of those bitter New York days. How Masefield came to London
and settled in Bloomsbury, becoming the friend of J. M. Synge, I do not
know. For six months he was in Manchester, editing the column entitled
Miscellany in _The Manchester Guardian_, and writing occasional
theatrical notices. I have been told by several of his colleagues
on that paper that Masefield’s reserve was invulnerable; he quickly
secured the respect of his fellow-workers, but not one of them became
intimate with him. He lived in dingy lodgings, he worked hard and, at
the end of six months, withdrew to London on the plea that he found it
impossible to do literary work at night.

But if the circumstances of Masefield’s life are little known, his
spiritual history is more than indicated in his work. Here one sees
a stricken soul; a nature wounded and a little poisoned; a nervous
system agitated and apprehensive. His mind is cast in a tragic mould
and his soul takes delight in the contemplation of physical violence.
His personality, as I have said, is furtive. He shrinks. His intimate
friends may have heard him laugh. I have not.

It must be nearly six years since I visited him at his house in Well
Walk, Hampstead. It was a miserably cold afternoon in February,
and though it was not yet twilight the blinds of the drawing-room
were drawn and the lights already lit. Masefield’s conversation was
intolerably cautious, intolerably shy. In a rather academic way he
deplored the lack of literary critics in England; the art of criticism
was dead; the essay was moribund. He expanded this theme perfunctorily,
walking up and down the room slowly and never looking me in the eyes
once. It was only when, at length, he had sat down—not opposite me,
but with the side of his face towards me—that, very occasionally, his
eyes would seek mine with a rapid dart and turn away instantly, and at
such moments it seemed as though he almost winced. Such shrinking, such
excessive timidity, whilst arousing my curiosity, also made me feel no
little discomfort, and I was glad when a spirit kettle was brought in,
with cups and saucers, and Masefield began to make tea.

This making of tea, a most solemn business, reminded me of _Cranford_.
The poet walked to a corner of the room, took therefrom a long
narrow box divided into a number of compartments and proceeded, most
delicately, to measure out and mix two or three different kinds of tea.
The teapot was next heated, the blended tea thrown in, and boiling
water immediately poured on it. And then the tea was timed, Masefield
holding his watch in his hand and pouring out the fluid into the cups
at the psychological second.... He ought, I think, to have taken a
little silver key from his waistcoat pocket and locked up the tea-box.
He ought to have taken his knitting from a work-box. He ought to have
asked me if I had yet spoken to the new curate. But he did none of
these things....

Though for an hour he continued talking, he said nothing—at least,
he said nothing I have remembered. The extraordinary thing about him
was that, in spite of his timidity, his seeming apprehensiveness, he
left on my mind a deep impression of adventure—not of a man who sought
physical, but spiritual, risks. I think he is a poet who cannot refrain
from exacerbating his own soul, who must at all costs place his mind in
danger and escape only at the last moment. I believe he is intensely
morbid, delighting to brood over dark things, seeing no humour in life,
but full of a baffled chivalry, a nobility thwarted at every turn.

       *       *       *       *       *

A man of a very different type is Jerome K. Jerome, whom I met at the
National Liberal Club and elsewhere in the early days of the war.
Like all humorists, he is an inveterate sentimentalist; his belief
in human nature is as wide-eyed and innocent as that of a child. He
is an untidy, prosperous, middle-aged man—very kindly, but a little
intolerant. His mental attitude is that of a man sitting a little apart
from life, alternately amused and saddened by the things he sees. In
the drawing-room of his flat at Chelsea he seemed a little out of
place; he did not harmonise with his surroundings. But in the Club he
was easy, natural, at home. More than twenty years ago I heard him
lecture in Manchester; the Jerome of to-day is the Jerome of those
far-off years, a little mellower perhaps, a little quieter, a little
more sentimental, but essentially the same in appearance, in manner and
in his attitude towards life.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have met other humorists, but of a type very different from that
represented by Jerome. Sir Owen Seaman I met at a little dinner given
by the Critics’ Circle at Gatti’s to a colleague of ours who was on
the point of leaving for the Front, and who, alas! is now no more. Sir
Owen was made both by nature and training for a squarson—that useful
but fast-dying gentleman who combines the duties and responsibilities
of squire and parson. His personality, rather beefy and John Bullish,
confirms one’s expectations. He made an excellent chairman at this
particular dinner.

       *       *       *       *       *

His very brilliant assistant, A. A. Milne, I once interviewed for a now
defunct Labour paper. I was invited to the office of _Punch_, and met a
tall, slim, yellow-haired and blue-eyed youth, who was so inordinately
shy that, after half-an-hour’s perfunctory conversation, I discovered
that I had not sufficient material for a paragraph, whereas I had
orders to make a column article of the interview. I knew instinctively
that Milne must find, as I do, a good deal in W. S. Gilbert’s writings
that is in deplorable taste, and I did my utmost to induce him to say
something very rude about Sullivan’s collaborator. But he would not
“bite.” He nodded and smiled at, and appeared to agree with, all the
savage things I said of Gilbert, but he would say very little—and
certainly not enough for my purpose—on his own account. I tried other
subjects, but without success; finally, I got up in despair, thanked
him for the time he had given me and prepared to depart.

“But,” said Milne, eyeing me, a little distrustfully, “I must see a
copy of your article before it is printed.”

“Why, certainly,” said I, and that evening posted it to him, expecting
to see it back with perhaps one or two minor alterations.

But when my poor article arrived back (really, I thought it an
excellent piece of work) I could scarcely recognise it, so heavily
was it scored out, so numerous were the alterations. And Milne’s
accompanying letter was scathing. I remember one or two sentences.
“I cannot tell you how thankful I am,” he wrote, “that I insisted on
seeing your article before it was printed. It does not represent my
views in the least; your talent for misrepresentation is remarkably
resourceful.”

When the article was finally passed for publication at least
seventy-five per cent. of it was from Milne’s pen. He wrote one or two
other stabbing sentences to me, from which it appeared that, however
numerous his virtues may be, he is unable to suffer fools gladly.




CHAPTER VII

SIR EDWARD ELGAR


The weaknesses that seem to be inseparable from genius—and, most
particularly, from artistic genius—are precisely those one would
not expect to discover associated with greatness of mind. It would
appear that few men are so great as their work, or, if they are, their
greatness is spasmodic and evanescent. Works of genius, it is sometimes
stated, are created in moods of exaltation, when the spirit is in
turmoil, when the mind is lit and the nerves are tense. In some cases
it may be so. It was so, I believe, in the case of Wagner, who had
long spells, measured by years, of unproductiveness, when his creative
powers lay fallow; and it was so in the case of Hugo Wolf, Beethoven,
Shelley, Poe, Berlioz and many other men whose names spring to the
mind. But it certainly was not so with Balzac and Dickens, any more
than it is to-day with Arnold Bennett.

There is in Sir Edward Elgar’s work a strange contradiction: great
depth of understanding combined with a curious fastidiousness of style
that is almost finicking. Many aspects of life appeal to his sympathies
and to his imagination, but an innate and exaggerated delicacy, an
almost feminine shrinking, is noticeable in even his strongest and most
outspoken work.... It is this delicacy, this shrinking, that to the
casual acquaintance is at once his most conspicuous and most teasing
characteristic.

My first meeting with Elgar was ten years ago, when, being commissioned
to interview him for a monthly musical magazine, I called on him at the
Midland Hotel, Manchester, where he was staying for a night. On my way
to his room I met him in the corridor, where he carefully explained
that he had made it a strict rule never to be interviewed for the Press
and that under no circumstances could that rule be broken. His firm
words were spoken with hesitation, and it was quite obvious to me that
he was feeling more than a trifle nervous. I have little doubt that
this nervousness was due to the fact that in an hour’s time he was to
conduct a concert at the Free Trade Hall. However, he was kind enough
to loiter for some minutes and talk, but he took care, when I left him,
to remind me that nothing of what he had said to me must appear in
print.

I, of course, obeyed him, but, in place of an interview, I wrote an
impressionistic sketch of the man as I had seen him during my few
minutes’ conversation at the Midland Hotel. Of this impressionistic
sketch I remember nothing except that, in describing his general
bearing and manner, I used the word “aristocratic.” At this word Elgar
rose like a fat trout eager to swallow a floating fly. It confirmed
his own hopes. And I who had perceived this quality so speedily, so
unerringly, and who had proclaimed it to the world, was worthy of
reward. Yes; he would consent to be interviewed. The ban should be
lifted; for once the rule should be broken. A letter came inviting
me to Plas Gwyn, Hereford—a letter written by his wife and full of
charming compliments about my article.

So to Hereford I went and talked music and chemistry. It was Christmas
week, and within ten minutes of my arrival Lady Elgar was giving me hot
dishes, wine and her views on the political situation. The country was
in the throes of a General Election, and while I ate and drank I heard
how the Empire was, as Dr Kendrick Pyne used to say, “rushing headlong
to the bow-wows.” Lady Elgar did not seem to wish to know to what
particular party (if any) I belonged, but I quickly discovered that to
confess myself a Radical would be to arouse feelings of hostility in
her bosom. Radicals were the Unspeakable People. There was not one, I
gathered, in Hereford. They appeared to infest Lancashire, and some had
been heard of in Wales. Also, there were people called Nonconformists.
Many persons were Radicals, many Nonconformists; but some were both.
The Radicals had won several seats. What was the country coming to?
Where was the country going?

Where, indeed? I did not allow Lady Elgar’s rather violent political
prejudices to interfere with my appetite, and she appeared to be
perfectly satisfied with an occasional sudden lift of my eyebrows,
and such ejaculations as: “Oh, quite! Quite!” “Most assuredly!” and
“Incredible!” If she thought about me at all—and I am persuaded she did
not—she must have believed me also to be a Tory. After all, had not I
called her husband “aristocratic,” and is that the sort of word used by
a Radical save in contempt?

After lunch Elgar took me a quick walk along the river-bank. For the
first half-hour I found him rather reserved and non-committal, and I
soon recognised that if I were to succeed in obtaining his views on
any matter of interest I must rigidly abstain from direct questions.
But when he did commit himself to any opinion, he did so in the
manner of one who is sure of his own ground and cannot consider, even
temporarily, any change in the attitude he has already assumed.

I found his views on musical critics amusing, but before proceeding to
set them down I must make some reference to his relations with Ernest
Newman. Newman, it is generally agreed, is unquestionably the most
brilliant, the fairest-minded and the most courageous writer on music
in England. His power is very great, and he has done more to educate
public opinion on musical matters in England than any other man. For
some little period previous to the time of which I am writing he and
Elgar had been close friends, and their friendship was all the stronger
because it rested on the attraction of opposites. Elgar was an ardent
Catholic, a Conservative; Newman was an uncompromising free-thinker and
a Radical. Elgar was a pet of society, a man careful and even snobbish
in his choice of his friends, whilst Newman cared nothing for society
and would be friendly with any man who interested or amused him.

Up to the time Elgar composed _The Apostles_ he had no more
whole-hearted admirer than Newman, but this work was to sever their
friendship and, for a time, to bring bitterness where before there
had been esteem and even affection. Newman was invited by a New York
paper—I think _The Musical Courier_—to write at considerable length
on _The Apostles_. As his opinion of this work was, on the whole,
unfavourable, he may possibly have hesitated to consider an invitation
the acceptance of which would lead to his giving pain to a friend. But
probably Newman thought, as most inflexibly honest men would think,
that, on a matter of public concern, silence would be cowardly. In the
event, he wrote his article and sent it to America, also forwarding
a copy to Elgar himself, telling him that, though it went against
his feelings of friendship to condemn the work, he thought it a
matter of duty to speak what was in his mind. That letter and that
article severed their friendship, and the severance lasted for some
considerable time.

My visit to Elgar took place during his estrangement from Newman, and
when I mentioned the subject of musical criticism to him it was, I
imagine, with the hope that the name of the famous critic would crop
up. It did.

“The worst of musical criticism in this country,” said Elgar, “is that
there is so much of it and so little that is serviceable. Most of those
who are skilled musicians either have not the gift of criticism or
they cannot express their ideas in writing, and most of those who can
write are deplorably deficient in their knowledge of music. For myself
I never read criticism of my own work; it simply does not interest me.
When I have composed or published a work, my interest in it wanes and
dies; it belongs to the public. What the professional critics think of
it does not concern me in the least.”

Though I knew that Elgar had on previous occasions given expression to
similar views, his statement amazed me. So I pressed him a little.

“But suppose,” I urged, “a new work of yours were so universally
condemned by the critics that performances of it ceased to take place.
Would you not then read their criticisms in order to discover if there
was not some truth in their statements?”

“It is possible, but I do not think I should. But your supposition is
an inconceivable one: there is never universal agreement among musical
critics. I think you will notice that many of them are, from the
æsthetic point of view, absolutely devoid of principle; I mean, they
are victims of their own temperaments. They, as the schoolgirl says,
‘know what they like.’ The music they condemn is either the music that
does not appeal to their particular kind of nervous system or it is
the music they do not understand. They have no standard, no norm, no
historical sense, no——”

He stammered a little and waved a vague arm in the air.

“There are exceptions, of course,” I ventured. “Newman, for example.”

“No; Ernest Newman is not altogether an exception. He is an unbeliever,
and therefore cannot understand religious music—music that is at once
reverential, mystical and devout.”

“‘Devout’?” whispered I to myself. Aloud I said:

“A man’s reason, I think, may reject a religion, though his emotional
nature may be susceptible to its slightest appeal. Besides, Newman has
a most profound admiration for your _The Dream of Gerontius_.”

Elgar was silent for a few minutes. Then, with an air of detachment and
with great inconsequence, he said:

“Baughan, of _The Daily News_, cannot hum a melody correctly in tune.
He looks at music from the point of view of a man of letters. So does
Newman, fine musician though he is. Newman advocates programme music.
Now, I do not say that programme music should not be written, for I
have composed programme music myself. But I do maintain that it is a
lower form of art than absolute music. Newman, I believe, refuses to
acknowledge that either kind is necessarily higher or lower than the
other. He has, as I have said, the literary man’s point of view about
music. So have many musical critics.”

“And so,” I interpolated, “if one has to accept what you say as
correct, have many composers, and composers also who are not
specifically literary. And, after what you have said, I find that
strange. Take the case of Richard Strauss, all of whose later symphonic
poems have a programme, a literary basis. Do you, for that reason,
declare that Strauss regards music from the literary man’s point of
view—Strauss who, of all living musicians, is the greatest?”

He paused for a few moments, and it seemed to me that our pace
quickened as we left the bank of the river and made for a pathway
across a meadow. But he would not take up the argument; stammering a
little, he said:

“Richard Strauss is a very great man—a fine fellow.”

But as that was not the point under discussion, I felt that either his
mind was wandering or that he could think of no reply to my objection.

A little later, on our way home, we discussed the younger generation of
composers, and I found him very appreciative of the work done by his
juniors. He particularly mentioned Havergal Brian, a composer who has
more than justified what Elgar prophesied of him, though perhaps not in
the manner Elgar anticipated.

Apropos of something or other, Elgar said, I think quite needlessly and
a little vainly:

“You must not, as many people appear to do, imagine that I am a
musician and nothing else. I am many things; I find time for many
things. Do not picture me always bending over manuscript paper and
writing down notes; months pass at frequent intervals when I write
nothing at all. At present I am making a study of chemistry.”

I think I was expected to look surprised, or to give vent to an
exclamation of surprise, but I did neither, for I also had made a study
of chemistry, and it seemed to me the kind of work that any man of
inquiring mind might take up. I did not for one moment imagine that I
was living in the first half of the nineteenth century when practically
all British musicians were musicians and nothing else and not always
even musicians.

When we had returned to the house we sat before a large fire and,
under the soothing influence of warmth and semi-darkness, stopped all
argument. In the evening Lady Elgar accompanied me to the station, and
all the way from Hereford to Manchester I turned over in my mind the
strange problem that was presented to me by the fact that, though I was
a passionate, almost fanatical lover of Elgar’s music, the creator of
that music attracted me not at all. I saw in his mind a daintiness that
was irritating, a refinement that was distressingly self-conscious.

Some years later Sir Edward Elgar moved to London, and when I saw him
in his new home he tried to prove to me that living in London was
cheaper than living in the country.

His attitude towards me on this occasion was peculiarly strange. I
represented a Labour paper, but Elgar did not know that I was at the
same time writing leading articles for a London Conservative daily.
He treated me with the most careful kindness, a kindness so careful,
indeed, that it might be called patronising. It soon became quite clear
to me that he imagined I myself came from the labouring classes, but
I cannot boast that honour, and as he, the aristocrat, was in contact
with me, the plebeian, it was his manifest duty and his undoubted
pleasure to help me along the upward path. I was advised to read
Shakespeare.

“Shakespeare,” said he, “frees the mind. You, as a journalist, will
find him useful in so far as a close study of his works will purify
your style and enlarge your vocabulary.”

“Which of the plays would you advise me to read?” asked I, with
simulated innocence and playing up to him with eyes and voice.

The astounding man considered a minute and then mentioned half-a-dozen
plays, the titles of which I carefully wrote down in my pocket-book.

“And Ruskin,” he added as an afterthought. “Oh, yes, and Cardinal
Newman. Newman’s style is perhaps the purest style of any man who wrote
in the nineteenth century.”

“I do not think so,” said I, thoroughly roused and forgetting to play
my part. “The _Apologia_ is slipshod. My own style, faulty though it
may be, is more correct, more lucid, even more distinguished than
Cardinal Newman’s.”

He turned away, either angry or amused.

“It is true,” said I, with warmth. “Anyone who has tried for years,
as I have done, to master the art of writing, and who examines the
_Apologia_ carefully will perceive at once that it is shamefully
badly written. For two generations it has been the fashion to praise
Newman’s style, but those who have done so have never read him in a
critical spirit. I would infinitely prefer to have written a racy book
like—well, like _Moll Flanders_, where the English is beautifully clean
and strong, than the sloppy _Apologia_.”

“_Moll Flanders_,” he said questioningly; “_Moll Flanders_? I do not
know the book.”

“It is all about a whore,” said I brutally, “written by one Defoe.”

And that, of course, put an end to our conversation. I rose to leave.

The impression left on my mind by my two visits to Elgar is definite
enough, but I am willing to believe that it does not represent the
man as he truly is. He is abnormally sensitive, abnormally observant,
abnormally intuitive. Like almost all men, he is open to flattery,
but the flattery must be applied by means of hints, praise half
veiled, innuendo. If you gush he will freeze; if you praise directly,
he will wince. His mind is essentially narrow, for he shrinks from
the phenomena in life that hurt him and he will not force himself to
understand alien things. His intellect is continually rejecting the
very matters that, in order to gain largeness, tolerance and a full
view of life, it should understand and accept. Yet, within its narrow
confines, his brain functions most rapidly and with a clear light.

I have been told by members of the various orchestras he has conducted
that when interpreting a work like _The Dream of Gerontius_ his face is
wet with tears.

He has a proper sense of his own dignity, and it is doubtful if he
exaggerates the importance of his own powers. Many years ago, as I
have related, I employed the word “aristocrat” in describing him, and
to-day I feel that that word must stand. He has all the strength of the
aristocrat and many of the aristocrat’s weaknesses.




CHAPTER VIII

INTELLECTUAL FREAKS


In the most tragic and most trying moments of life it is well to turn
aside from one’s sorrows and refresh one’s mind and strengthen one’s
soul by gazing upon the follies of others. Those others gaze on ours.

In my spiritual adventures I have met many amazingly freakish people.
Ten years ago the Theosophical Society overflowed with them. They were
cultured without being educated, credulous but without faith, bookish
but without learning, argumentative but without logic. The women,
serene and grave, swam about in drawing-rooms, or they would stand
in long, attitudinising ecstasies, their skimpy necks emerging from
strange gowns, their bodies as shoulderless as hock bottles. The men
paddled about in the same rooms, but I found them less amusing than the
women.

“You were a horse in your last incarnation,” said a fuzzy-haired
giantess to me one evening, two minutes after we had been introduced.

“Oh, how disappointing!” I exclaimed. “I had always imagined myself
an owl. I often dream I was an owl. I fly about, you know, or sit on
branches with my eyes shut.”

“No; a horse!” shouted the giantess, with much asperity. “I’m not
arguing with you. I’m merely telling you. And I don’t think you were a
very nice horse either.”

“No? Did I bite people?”

“Yes; you bit and kicked. And you did other disagreeable things
besides. Now, _I_ was a swan.”

I evinced a polite but not enthusiastic interest.

“You would make an imposing swan,” I observed.

“Yes. I used to glide about on ponds, like this.”

She proceeded to “glide” round and round the corner of the room in
which we were sitting. She arched her neck, raised her ponderous legs
laboriously and moved about like a pantechnicon. Her face assumed a
disagreeable expression and I thought of a rather good line in one of
my own poems:

  And swans sulked largely on the yellow mere.

“And how much of your previous incarnation do you remember?” I asked,
when she had finished sulking largely in the yellow drawing-room.

“Oh, quite a lot. It comes back to me in flashes. I was very lonely—oh,
_so_ lonely.”

She gave me a quick look, and I began to talk of William J. Locke, who,
a few days previously, had published a new book. Resenting my change
of subject, she left me and, a few minutes later, as I was eating a
watercress sandwich, I heard her saying to a yellow-haired male:

“You were a horse in your last incarnation.”

I met this lady on other occasions, and always she was occupied in
telling men that they had been horses and she a swan—an oh-so-lonely
swan.

“Why,” said I to my hostess one day, “don’t Madame X.’s friends look
after her? See—she is arching her neck over there in the corner, and I
am perfectly certain she has told the man with her that he has been,
is, or is going to be a horse.”

For a moment my hostess looked concerned.

“Look after her? What do you mean?”

“Well, she is obviously insane.”

“On the contrary, she is the most subtle exponent we have of Madame
Blavatsky’s _Secret Doctrine_. Eccentric, perhaps, but as lucid a
brain as Mr G. R. S. Mead’s or as Colonel Olcott’s. You should get her
to describe your aura. She is excellent, too, in Plato. She doesn’t
understand a word of Greek, but she gets at his meaning intuitively.
There is something cosmic about her. _You_ know what I mean.”

“Oh, quite, quite.” (But what _did_ she mean?)

“Cosmic consciousness is a most enthralling subject,” continued my
hostess, digging the hockey-stick she always carried with her well into
the hearthrug. “Walt Whitman had it, you know.”

“Badly?” I inquired.

She appeared puzzled.

“I don’t quite know what you mean by ‘badly.’ He could identify himself
with anything—the wind, a stone, a jelly-fish, an arm-chair, a ...
a ... oh, everything! They were he and he was they. He _thought_
cosmically. Fourth dimension, you know. Edward Carpenter and all that.”

I rather admired this way she had of talking—a little like the Duke in
G. K. Chesterton’s _Magic_.

“Oh, do go on!” I urged her.

“What I always say is,” she continued, “why stop at a fourth dimension?
Someone has written a book on the fourth dimension, and some day
perhaps I shall write one on the fifth.”

“A book? A real book? Do you mean to say you could write a book? How
clever! How romantic!”

“Well, I have thought about it. One is influenced. One has influences.
The consciousness of the ultimate truth of things, the truth that
suffuses all things, the cosmic nature of—well, the cosmos. Do you see?
Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_.”

“Yes; Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_ does help, doesn’t it?”

“Did I say Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_? I really meant Shelley’s _Revolt
of Islam_. The fourth dimension is played out. It’s done with. It was
true so far as it went, but how far did it go?”

“Only a very little way,” I answered.

“Yes, but Nietzsche goes much farther. Have you read Nietzsche? No?
I haven’t, either. But I have heard Orage talk about him. Nietzsche
says we can all do what we want. We must dare things. We must be blond
beasts. Mary Wollstonecraft and her set, you know. Godwin and those
people.”

She waved her hockey-stick recklessly in the air and marched
inconsequently away. Nearly all the Theosophists I met were like
that—inconsequent, bent on writing books they never did write, talkers
of divine flapdoodle, inanely clever, cleverly inane. Dear freaks I
used to meet in days gone by!—where are you now?—where are you now?

       *       *       *       *       *

A freak who ultimately lost all reason and was confined in a private
asylum used to sit at the same desk that I did when, many years ago,
I was a shipping clerk in Manchester. This man, whose name was not,
but should have been, Bundle, had considerable private means, but
some obscure need of his nature drove him to discipline himself by
working eight hours a day for three pounds a week. The three pounds
was nothing to him, but the eight hours a day meant everything. He was
a conscientious worker, but I think I have already indicated that his
intelligence was not robust. He had no delusion; he merely possessed a
misdirected sense of duty.

One day he left us, and a few months later I met him in Market Street.
He looked prosperous, smart and intensely happy.

“Are you busy?” he asked. “No? Well, come with me.”

He slipped his arm in mine, led me into Mosley Street, and stopped in
front of the large, dismal office of the Calico Printers’ Association.

“That,” said he, “is mine. Now, come into Albert Square.”

When we had arrived there he pointed to the Town Hall.

“That also is mine. The Lord Mayor gave it to me with a golden key.
Here is the golden key.”

Producing an ordinary latchkey from his pocket, he carefully held it in
the palm of his hand for my inspection.

“It is,” he announced, “studded with diamonds. But you can’t see the
diamonds. Crafty Lord Mayor! You don’t catch him napping. He’s hidden
them deep in the gold....”

I enjoyed this poor fellow’s company more than I did that of a very old
woman to whom I was introduced in a pauper asylum. She was sitting on a
low stool and, pointing at her head with her skinny forefinger, “It’s
pot! It’s pot!” she said.

But even she provided me with more exhilaration than do the tens (or
perhaps hundreds) of thousands of real freaks who, I imagine, inhabit
every part of the globe. I allude to the vast throng of people who
arise at eight or thereabouts, go to the City every morning, work all
day and return home at dusk; who perform this routine every day, and
every day of every year; who do it all their lives; who do it without
resentment, without anger, without even a momentary impulse to break
away from their surroundings. Such people amaze and stagger one. To
them life is not an adventure; indeed, I don’t know what they consider
it. They marry and, in their tepid, uxorious way, love. But love to
them is not a mystery, or an adventure, and its consummation is not a
sacrament. They do not travel; they do not want to travel. They do not
even hate anybody.

All these people are freaks of the wildest description; yet they
imagine themselves to be the backbone of the Empire. Perhaps they
are. Perhaps every nation requires a torpid mass of people to act as a
steadying influence.

In the suburbs of Manchester these people abound. I know a man still
in his twenties who keeps hens for what he calls “a hobby.” Among his
hens he finds all the excitement his soul needs. The sheds in which
they live form the boundaries of his imagination. I should esteem this
man if he kicked against his destiny; but he loved it, until the Army
conscripted him. God save the world from those who keep hens!

I know a man who has been to Douglas eighteen times in succession
for his fortnight’s holiday in the summer. Douglas is his heaven;
Manchester and Douglas are his universe. No place so beautiful as
Douglas; no place so familiar; no place so satisfying. After all,
Douglas is always Douglas. Moreover, Douglas is always miraculously
“there.” God save the world from men who go to Douglas eighteen times!

I know a man who hates his wife and still lives with her. He is
respectable, soulless, saving, a punctual and regular churchgoer, a
hard bargain-driver. He walks with his eyes on the ground. He has
always lived in the same suburb. He will always live in the same
suburb. God save the world from men who always live in the same suburb!

I know a man ...

But this is getting very monotonous. Besides, why should I
particularise any more freaks when all of them, perhaps, are as
familiar to you as they are to me?

       *       *       *       *       *

Then there is the literary freak; not the _poseur_, not the man who
wishes to be thought “cultured” and intellectual, but the scholarly man
who, during an industrious life, has amassed a vast amount of literary
knowledge, but whose appreciation of literature is lukewarm and without
zest. Very, very rarely is the great writer a scholar. Dr Johnson was
a scholar, but, divine and adorable creature though he was, he was not
a great writer. None of the great Victorians had true scholarship, and
very few even of the Elizabethans. And to-day? Well, one may consider
Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett
and G. K. Chesterton as great writers; if you do not concede me all
these names, you must either deny that we have any great writers at all
(which is absurd) or produce me the names of six who are greater than
those I have named (and the latter you cannot do). Have any of these
anything approaching scholarship?

And yet in our universities are scores of men who are regarded as
possessing greater literary gifts than those who actually produce
literature. These learned, owlish creatures pose pontifically. Whenever
a new book comes out they read an old one! The present generation, they
say, is without genius. But they have always said it. They said it
when Dickens, Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë were writing. I have no
doubt they said it in Shakespeare’s time. The present generation teems
with genius, but our “scholarly” mandarins know it not. How barren is
that knowledge which lies heavy in a man’s mind and does not fertilise
there. When one considers the matter, how essentially dull and stupid
and brainless is the man devoid of ideas!

One of these bald-pated freaks is well known to me. He moves heavily
about in a quadrangle. He delivers lectures. He has written books. He
passes judgment. He annotates. He writes an occasional review. Funny
little freak! Great little freak, who knows so much and understands
so little.... When England wakes (and I do not believe that even yet,
after nearly four years of war, England is really awake) such men will
pass through life unregarded and neglected; they will sit at home in a
back room, and their relatives and friends will love and pity them,
as one loves and pities a poor fellow whose temperament has made him a
wastrel, or as one pities a man who has to be nursed.

       *       *       *       *       *

  =People of the Play:= _A handful of literary freaks_.

  =Scene:= _A drawing-room in Tooting, or Acton, or Highgate, or
    Ealing, or any funny old place where the middle classes live_.

  =Time:= 8 P.M. _on (generally) Thursday_.

  Mrs ARNOLD. Now that Miss Vera Potting, M.A., has finished
    reading her most interesting paper on Mr John Masefield, the
    subject is open for discussion. Perhaps you, Mr Mather-Johnstone,
    will give us a few thoughts—yes, a few thoughts. (_She smiles
    wanly and gazes round the room._) A _most_ interesting paper _I_
    call it.

  Rev. MATHER-JOHNSTONE, M.A. Miss Potting’s most interesting paper
    is—well, most interesting. I must confess I have read nothing
    of—er—Mr Masefield’s. I prefer the older poets—Cowper, Bowles’
    Sonnets, and the beautifully named Felicia Hemans. Fe-lic-i-a!
    To what sweet thoughts does not that name give rise! But it has
    been a revelation to me to learn that a popular poet (and Miss
    Potting has assured us that Mr Masefield _is_ popular) should so
    freely indulge in language that, to say the least, is violent,
    and I am glad to say that such language is not to be found in the
    improving stanzas of Eliza Cook.

  Mr S. WANLEY. I have read some verses of Mr Masefield’s in a
    very—well—advanced paper called, if my memory does not deceive
    me, _The English Review_. I did not like those verses. I did
    not approve of them. They were bathed in an atmosphere of
    discontent—modern discontent. Now, what have people to be
    discontented about? Nothing; nothing at all, if they live
    rightly. (_He stops, having nothing further to say. For the same
    reason, he proceeds._) Nevertheless, I thank Miss Potting, M.A.,
    very much for her most interesting paper. There is one question
    I should like to ask her: is this Mr Masefield read by the right
    people?

  Miss VERA POTTING, M.A. Oh no! Oh dear, no! Most certainly not!
    Still, it is incontestable that he _is_ read.

  Mr S. WANLEY. Thank you so much. I felt that he could not be read
    by the right people.

  Miss GRACELEY (_rather nervously_). I feel that I can say I know
    my Lord Lytton, my Edna Lyall, my Charlotte M. Yonge and my
    Tennyson. I have always remained content with them, and after
    what Miss Vera Potting, M.A., has said about Mr Masefield in her
    most interesting paper, I shall _remain_ content with them.

  Mr S. WANLEY. Hear, hear. I always seem to agree with you, Miss
    Graceley.

  Mrs ARNOLD (_archly_). What is the saying?—great minds always
    jump alike?

  Rev. MATHER-JOHNSTONE (_sotto voce_). _Jump?_

  Mr PORTEOUS (_with most distinguished amiability_). I really
    think that this most interesting paper that Miss Vera
    Potting, M.A., has read to us should be published. It is
    so—well, so improving, so elevating, so——

  Miss VERA POTTING, M.A. (_who has already fruitlessly sent the
    essay to every magazine in the country_). Oh, Mr Porteous! How
    can you? Really, I couldn’t think of such a thing.

  Rev. MATHER-JOHNSTONE, M.A. (_who, being not altogether free
    from jealousy, thinks this is really going a bit too far_).
    But perhaps we do not all quite approve of women writers—I mean
    ladies who write for the wide, rough public.

  Mrs ARNOLD. True! True!... But then, what about Felicia Hemans?

  Rev. MATHER-JOHNSTONE, M.A. Mrs Hemans was Mrs Hemans. Miss Vera
    Potting, M.A., is, and I hope will always remain, Miss Vera
    Potting, M.A.

  Mr PORTEOUS. Oh, don’t say that! What I mean is——

    (_This sort of thing goes on for an hour when, very secretly
      and as though she were on some nefarious errand, Mrs ARNOLD
      disappears from the room. She presently reappears with a maid,
      who carries a tray of coffee and sandwiches. The dreadful
      Mr Masefield is then forgotten._]

You think the above sketch is exaggerated? Ah! well, perhaps you have
never lived in Highgate, or in the suburbs of Manchester, Birmingham,
Sheffield or Leeds. I could set down some appalling conversations that
I have heard in suburban “literary” circles. There is a place called
Eccles, where, one evening——

       *       *       *       *       *

In London Bohemia there are many freakish people, but, for the most
part, they are altogether charming and refreshing. Quite a number of
them have what I am told is, in the Police Courts, termed “no visible
means of subsistence,” but they appear to “carry on” with imperturbable
good humour and borrow money cheerfully and as frequently as their
circle of acquaintances (which is usually very large) will permit.

Frequenters of the Café Royal in pre-war days will recognise the
following types:—

Picture to yourself a Polish Jew, young, yellow-skinned, black-haired;
he has luminous eyes, sensuous lips and damp hands, and he dresses
well, but in an extravagant style. He is a megalomaniac, and he has
all the megalomaniac’s consuming anxiety to discover precisely in what
way other people react to his personality. One night my bitterest enemy
brought him to the table at which I was sitting, introduced us to each
other, and walked away.

“I am told you are a journalist,” my new acquaintance began. “I myself
write poems. I have a theory about poetry, and my theory is this: All
poetry should be subjective.”

“Why?”

“Never mind why. I am telling you about my theory. All poetry should be
subjective; as a matter of fact, all the best poetry is. To myself I am
the most interesting phenomenon in the world. To yourself, you are. Is
it not so?”

“Yes; you have guessed right first time.”

“Well, I have in this dispatch case eight hundred and seventy-three
poems about myself, telling the world almost all there is to know about
the most interesting phenomenon it contains.”

He took from his case a great pile of MS. and turned the leaves over in
his hands.

“Here,” said he, “is a blank-verse poem entitled _How I felt at
8.45 A.M. on June 8, 1909, having partaken of Breakfast_. Would you
like to read it?”

I assured him I should, though I fully expected it would contain
unmistakable signs of mental disturbance. But it did not. It was
quite respectably written verse, much better than at least half
of Wordsworth’s; it was logical, it had ideas, it showed some
introspective power, and it revealed a mind above the ordinary.

I told him all this.

“Then you don’t think I’m a genius? Some people do.”

“You see, I’m not a very good judge of men—particularly men of genius.
You may be a genius; on the other hand, you may not.”

“But what exactly do you think of me?”

“I have already told you.”

“Yes, but not with sufficient particularity. Now, put away from you all
feeling of nervousness and try to imagine that I have just left you and
that a friend of yours has come in and taken my place. You are alone
together. You would, of course, immediately tell him that you had met
me. You would say: ‘He is a very strange man, eccentric....’ and so on.
You would describe my appearance, my personality, my verses. You, being
a writer, would analyse me to shreds. Now, that is what I want you to
do now. I want you to say all the bad things with the good. And I shall
listen, greedily.”

“But, really!” I protested. “Really, I can’t do what you ask.”

Disappointed and vexed, he sat biting his underlip.

“All right,” he said at length, “we’ll strike a bargain. After you have
analysed me I, in return, will analyse you.”

“You have quite the most unhealthy mind with which I have ever come in
contact.”

“You really believe that?” he asked, delighted. “Do go on.”

“Oh, but I’m sorry I began. This kind of thing is dangerous.”

“Yes, I know. But I like danger—mental danger especially.”

“But drink would be better for you. Even drugs. You are asking me to
help to throw you off your mental balance.”

“I know. I know. But you won’t refuse?”

“To show you that I will I am leaving you now in this café. I am going.
Good-night.”

But he met me many times after that, and always pursued me with
ardour. In the end he gained his desire and, having done so, had no
further use for me.

I call him The Man Who Collects Opinions of Himself. He is still in
London. And he is not yet insane.

Then there was the lady—since, alas! dead—who used always to appear
in public in a kind of purple shroud, her face and fingers chalked.
She rather stupidly called herself Cheerio Death, and was one of the
jolliest girls I have ever met. She longed and ached for notoriety and
for new sensations: she feasted on them and they nourished and fattened
her. Only very brave or reckless men dared be seen with her in public,
for, though her behaviour was scrupulously correct, her appearance
created either veiled ridicule or consternation wherever she went. Yet
she never lacked companions.

“Hullo, Gerald!” she used to say to me; “sit down near me. You are so
nice and chubby. I like to have you near me. How am I looking?”

“More beautiful than ever.”

“Oh, you _are_ sweet. Isn’t he sweet, Frank?” she would say to one of
her companions. “Order him some champagne. I’m thirsty.”

And, really, Cheerio Death was very beautiful in a ghastly and terrible
way. By degrees, all the reputable restaurants were closed to her,
and in the late autumn of 1913 she disappeared, to die of consumption
in Soho. Poor girl! Perhaps in Paris, where they love the _outré_ and
the shocking, she would have secured the full, hectic success that in
London was denied her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Are freaks always conscious of their freakishness? I do not think
they are. Not even the man who wilfully cultivates his oddities until
they have become swollen excrescences hanging bulbous-like on his
personality is aware how vastly different, how unreasonably different
he is from his fellows. He is more than reconciled to himself; he
loves himself; he is what other people would be if only they could.
Vanity continually lulls and soothes and rots him. The nature that
craves to be noticed will go to almost any lengths to secure that
notice.

It has always appeared curious to me that the ambition to become
famous should very generally be regarded as a worthy passion in a
man of genius. It is but natural that a man of genius should desire
his work to reach as many people as possible, but whether or not he
should be known as the author of that work seems to me a matter of no
importance whatever. But to the man himself it is all-important. He has
an instinctive feeling that if, in the public eye, he is separated from
his work, savour will go from what he has created. He and his work must
be closely identified.

This desire to be widely known, to be talked about everywhere, is in
the man of genius accepted as natural, but it is this very desire that,
in many cases, makes a freak of the ordinary man. Obscurity to him is
death.




CHAPTER IX

FLEET STREET


I don’t know why, but for many years there has been (and I am told
there still is) a kind of silent conspiracy to keep out of Fleet Street
as many aspirants to journalism as possible. They are discouraged by
extravagant stories of the fierce competition that reigns there, by
tragic yarns of men of great gifts who walk about The Street in rags. I
myself was discouraged in this way and I found myself, on the verge of
middle age, still hesitating in Manchester. It is true, I did not enter
journalism until I was in my thirties, and I did not know the ropes.
I did not know London either. Also, I was married and had children to
educate and could not afford to take risks and make of life the grand
adventure I have, in my heart, always known it to be.

So I hung on in Manchester, writing musical criticism for _The
Manchester Courier_ and contributing occasional articles and verses to
_The Academy_, _The Contemporary Review_, _The Cornhill_, _The English
Review_, _The Musical Times_, and many other magazines, and there is
scarcely a London daily of repute for which at one time or another
I did not write. But still I could find no opening in Fleet Street.
The truth is, there is no regular means of finding openings in Fleet
Street. If an editor is in want of a dramatic critic, a musical critic,
a leader writer, or a descriptive reporter, he never advertises for
one. He always knows someone who knows somebody else who is just the
man for the job.

So one day I said to myself: “I will go to London at all costs. I will
take a room in Bloomsbury and risk it.” By a happy accident I received,
a few days later, a note from Rutland Boughton, the well-known
composer, telling me that he was relinquishing his post as musical
critic of _The Daily Citizen_, that ill-fated paper so courageously
edited by Frank Dilnot. Boughton suggested I should apply for the
vacancy. I did apply. I wrote to Dilnot and received no answer. I
chafed a fortnight and then telegraphed, prepaying a reply. “No vacancy
at present” was the message I received. So I took the next train to
London and bearded Dilnot in his den. “Yes, I’ll take you,” he said,
“if you’ll come for two pounds a week. But, if you’re the real stuff,
you’ll receive much more.” As I knew that I was, indeed, the real
stuff, “I’ll come,” said I. “When can I start?”

I went back to Manchester and saw W. A. Ackland, the managing editor of
_The Manchester Courier_ and the kindest of men, expecting to receive
from him a cold douche. But no! To my amazement, he encouraged me most
heartily, and kept me on his staff, bidding me write a weekly article
for him from London. This I did till the outbreak of the war, writing a
lot of material also for his London letter.

During my first year in London I made six hundred and forty pounds. And
I spent it. I spent it in eager examination of, and participation in,
the many activities that the life of a great metropolis affords. Very
soon—within six months—I found myself in the happy position of being
able to refuse work that was offered me, for I did not wish to work all
my waking hours. I wanted to play. I did play. I made many friendships.
I talked a great deal, played the piano two or three hours a day,
caroused, ragged in Chelsea, and lived every hour of my life.

It may be thought that six hundred and forty pounds per annum is no
great sum. Nor is it. But does a doctor, a barrister, a solicitor,
or any other professional man earn so much, without capital or
influence, during his first year in London? Or in his second? Or
third? Money-making in Fleet Street up to about seven hundred and fifty
pounds a year is the easiest thing in the world for a man who has any
talent at all for writing, especially if that talent be combined with
versatility. The journalist is rarely intellectual; as a rule, he is
merely ready and glib. I am ready and glib myself.

So I am not among those who feel inclined to discourage him who hankers
after Fleet Street. No matter if you live in the waste regions of
Sutherland, if you have proved yourself by inducing a number of editors
of repute to take your stuff, go in and win! Really, it is very easy.

       *       *       *       *       *

The men of Fleet Street are the best fellows in the world. Roughly,
they may be divided into two classes: those who “go steady,” with
their eye always on the main chance, with every faculty strained to
enable them to “get on” in the world; and those happy-go-lucky people
who make money easily and spend it recklessly, so excited by life that
they cannot pause to contemplate life, so happy in their labour and
in their play that they cannot conceive a day may come when work will
be irksome and playing a half-forgotten dream. There are, of course,
other divisions into which journalists may be separated. There is,
for example, the devoted band of brilliant young men who work for
Orage in _The New Age_—a paper that cannot, I am sure, pay high rates.
(What those rates are I do not know, for I could never induce Orage to
print a single thing I wrote for him.) Then there are the hangers-on
of journalism: people who review books in the time spared from their
labours as university professors, struggling barristers, parish priests
and so on. Many of these people, led by vanity or some other concealed
motive, offer to work without payment.

The men who “go steady” are the editors, the leader-writers, the news
editors, the literary editors, etc. For the most part they are men who
have to keep late hours and clear heads, for important news may reach
the office at midnight and instant decisions regarding the policy that
the paper has to assume in regard to that news have to be made. A great
political speech may be made in Edinburgh; a startling murder trial may
close in Liverpool; a famous man may die in Paris; a strike may break
out in the Potteries: in short, anything may happen. What attitude is
the paper going to take up? What precise shade of opinion is going to
be expressed about that political speech? What is to be said about the
degree of justice that the workers in the Potteries can claim for their
action? These matters have to be decided instantly, for they have to be
written about instantly, and perhaps you who read the leading article
next morning rarely stop to consider the conditions—the incredibly
difficult conditions—under which it has been written. For this kind
of work real, genuine ability is required: a very wide and accurate
knowledge of affairs, rapidity of thought, a fluent and eloquent pen
and a mind so sensitive that it can, without effort, reflect to a
nicety the precise policy of the paper upon whose work it is engaged.

There is a story, and I think the story is true, of a new and
inexperienced reporter who was given a trial on the staff of a very
famous “halfpenny” paper. He was not a success, for he bungled
everything that was given him to do, and he had not an idea in his head
concerning the invention and manufacture of stunts. So he was tried as
a book-reviewer, and again failed miserably. They made a sub-editor of
him, and once more he was slow and inaccurate. Said the news editor
to the editor-in-chief: “I’m afraid I shall have to get rid of Jones;
he’s tried almost everything and failed.” “Oh! has he?” returned the
editor-in-chief. “Well, put him on to writing leaders.”

But even the halfpenny Press has, in recent years, come to regard its
leader columns as one of the most important parts of its papers. Of
this kind of work I have had little experience. A position as writer of
“leaderettes” was offered me on _The Globe_, but I was not a success,
for I was at the same time writing a great deal of stuff for _The Daily
Citizen_, and, as both papers were equally violent in antagonistic
political and social fields, I soon found myself writing solidly and
regularly against my own convictions. It is true that a journalist,
like a barrister, is generally but a hireling paid to express certain
views, but there are few men so intellectually backboneless and
ethically flabby that they can, day after day, say both yes and no to
the various problems that face them.

       *       *       *       *       *

I suppose there are few professions in which one learns more about
the seamy side of human nature than one does in journalism. The one
appalling vice of eminent men is vanity. Musicians, actors, authors,
politicians—even judges and preachers—appear to be so constituted that
they cannot live and be happy without publicity. From what source, do
you think, originate those chatty little paragraphs concerning famous
men and women that you find in every evening newspaper and in many
weeklies? They originate from the fountain-head. If the novelist does
not himself send the paragraph to the paper, his publisher does; if
the actor has not written that “snappy” par., he has given his manager
the material for it. At one time I wrote a weekly column of theatrical
gossip for a well-known daily, and I can, without exaggeration, say
that most of our famous actors and actresses did my work for me. I used
scissors and paste, corrected their grammatical errors (and mistakes in
spelling!), coloured the whole with my personality—and there the column
was ready for the printer! Sometimes I would receive letters from
notorious mimes expostulating with me because I had not mentioned their
names for a month or two. Others wrote and thanked me for praising
them. One lady whom I have never seen, either on the stage or off,
sent me a silver pencil-case, with a letter containing the material for
a very personal sketch. I put the pencil in my pocket and the sketch in
the newspaper. Quite recently I was shown an article signed by a famous
lady, containing a bogus account of how she had received a strange
proposal of marriage. The article had been invented and written by an
acquaintance of mine, but the signature was the lady’s.

But more egregious than the vanity of actors is the vanity of
fashionable preachers. To them notoriety is the very breath of their
nostrils. They have no “agents,” so they are compelled to advertise
themselves without camouflage. And they do it shamelessly. I will not
mention names, but at least half the fashionable preachers in London,
no matter what their denomination, are guilty of constant and most
resourceful self-advertisement. A little, a very little, jesuitical
reasoning is sufficient to satisfy their consciences that this is
done, not out of vanity, but from a desire to bring a still larger
congregation to the fount of wisdom itself.... They are the fount of
wisdom.

On only two occasions have I approached an author with a request for
an interview and been refused. But I have taken care never to approach
such men as Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy and a few others who regard
their profession with too much respect to lend themselves to a practice
which, at its best, is undignified, and which, at its worst, is a
method of mean self-glorification.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of “ghosting” I have done a little and seen much. I know well a
very prosperous musical composer of talent who has paid me to write
many articles that he has signed with his own name. You call me an
accomplice? But then it was nothing to me what he did with my articles
when I had written them. Believe me, the practice is very common.
The man who signs the articles furnishes the ideas: the ghost merely
expresses them.

The same musical composer was commissioned a few years ago to write an
orchestral work for an important musical festival. We will call him
Birket. Either Birket was too busy to write the work or he felt he had
not the ability to do it; whatever the reason, he went to a friend
of mine—a man of far superior gifts to his more famous colleague—and
offered him a certain sum to do the work for him. My friend—Foster
will do for his name—consented, and the work was duly performed at the
festival, conducted by Birket, and I attended in my capacity as musical
critic.

How eminent men who are not writers do itch to see themselves in print!
It is not enough that their speeches are reported, their paintings and
musical compositions criticised, their sentences recorded by every
daily newspaper, their acting, singing and what not lauded to the
skies: they must themselves write: or, if they cannot write, it must
appear to the public that they have written. Why? Just vanity. That
word “vanity” will explain nine-tenths of the seemingly inexplicable
things in the conduct of most of our public men. A man accepts a
knighthood because, as a rule, he is vain; he refuses it for the same
reason; he advertises that he has refused it because he is vain; and,
because he is vain, he refuses to advertise that he has refused it.

       *       *       *       *       *

A great deal has been written about the romance of Fleet Street.
But romance is in a man’s mind and heart, and it is true that many
romantically minded men go to Fleet Street. Fleet Street gives us a
sense of importance, a sense of too much importance. We like to feel
that we are powerful, but only a mere handful of men in The Street
have power that is worth while. What we of the rank and file write is
soon forgotten, for newspaper readers are, for the most part, people
who devour print greedily, neither masticating nor assimilating the
things they devour. Newspapers confuse the mind and bring it to a
state of drugged apathy. Did you ever meet a really voracious reader
of newspapers who possessed the gift of sifting and weighing evidence,
or one who had an accurate memory, or one who could think clearly and
logically, or one who was not bewildered and befogged by mere words?

But even if we men in Fleet Street have no real power, we have what
is much the same thing: we have the illusion of power. We come into
close contact with people much more important than ourselves, and some
of these people fawn on us, for we are the necessary intermediaries
between themselves and the public.

But romance? Why is Fleet Street romantic? Well, as I have already
said, it is because so many journalists themselves are romantic....
But I wonder if that really _is_ the reason, and as I wonder I begin
to think that though it is true one meets adventurous, talented and
original people by the score in newspaper offices, yet, after all, it
is not they who make journalism seem full of savour, of rich delight,
of unexpectedness and excitement, of high romance. No; it is writing
itself that is romantic: mere words and the colour and music of words;
the smell of printers’ ink; the wet feel of a paper fresh from the
press; the sounds of telephone bells and of machinery; the joy of
expressing oneself; the lovely, great joy of signing one’s name to
an article and knowing that in twenty-four hours it will have been
read or glanced at by perhaps half-a-million people.... But it seems
to me as I write that I am utterly failing to communicate to you
who read the romantic nature of journalism. To you it is, perhaps,
merely a slipshod profession, a profession in which there is something
sordid and vulgar and as unromantic as Monday morning. To me a man
who writes with distinction is the most interesting creature in the
world: I cannot know too much about him; I can never tire of his
talk. Actors bore me. So do politicians, lawyers, men of science,
those who are professionally religious, doctors, musicians. But
writers and financiers—especially Jewish financiers—are to me full of
subtlety; their souls are elusive, and their minds are cunning past all
reckoning. It is frequently said that the art of writing is possessed
by most people. The art of writing correctly may be, but the “correct”
writer is frequently not a writer at all, for he cannot compel people
to read him. A writer without readers is not a writer; he is simply a
man who murmurs to himself very laboriously. But the writer who can
claim thousands of readers—I mean even such writers as Mr Charles
Garvice and the lady who invented _The Rosary_—are in essentials more
highly endowed with the true writer’s gifts than many mandarins who
live cloistered in Oxford and Cambridge. And I say this in spite of
the fact that I have never been able to read more than ten consecutive
pages of any book of Mr Garvice’s that I have picked up, and that _The
Rosary_ seems to me a story of such amazing flapdoodleism that——

       *       *       *       *       *

Arnold Bennett says somewhere that living in the theatrical world is
like living a story out of _The Arabian Nights_. To me Fleet Street
is more amazing than the bazaars of Cairo, more mysterious than the
hermaphroditic Sphinx. And perhaps one of the most amazing things about
Fleet Street is the easy way in which many men earn money.

Some years ago I was on the staff of a paper where I had for a
colleague a dark blue-eyed young man who was our crime specialist.
He had just come from the provinces, and had not even a rudimentary
notion of how to write. He knew he couldn’t write; he boasted of it.
And he cared nothing for newspapers or books or anything even remotely
connected with literature. But he had an amazing talent for sniffing
out crime. I remember a great jewel robbery which he got wind of
half-a-day before anyone else, and, in a way known only to himself, he
obtained full particulars of the affair, writing a half-column “story”
before any other paper in the kingdom even knew there was a story to
write. He entertained me vastly, and I used to go with him sometimes
at night when he called at Scotland Yard for news. Scotland Yard never
gives away news unless it is in its own interest to do so. But I am
very much inclined to believe that it was somewhere in Scotland Yard
that he obtained his most valuable information. We would walk down wide
corridors there together, sit ten minutes in a waiting-room, interview
an official who invariably said: “Nothing doing to-night,” and come
away. But that was quite enough for my friend. “I must go to Poplar
straight away,” he would say, as we came away; or perhaps: “I can just
catch the last train to Guildford”; or “There is nothing at all in the
rumour of that murder in Battersea.” I used to look at him in amazement
and exclaim: “But how do you _know_?” “Ah!” he would reply; “they say
that walls have ears. But much more frequently they have tongues.”

This man was paid three pounds a week by our editor. Three times out
of four he was ahead of every other paper in his news, and I was not
in the least surprised when one day, after he had been in London only
two months, he came to me and said: “Next week I am leaving you. I am
going to _The Morning Trumpet_; they’re giving me five hundred pounds a
year.” Five months later he was getting a thousand pounds a year from a
paper that never hesitates to pay handsomely for “stunts.”

I caught fire from my friend’s enthusiasm, and late one night, just
when I had finished a long notice of a new play, I overheard the night
editor regretting to one of the sub-editors that news of a particularly
horrible murder in Stepney had just reached the office when all the
reporters were out on duty. “Let me go!” I urged. “But you are in
evening dress,” he objected. “Never mind; send me off.” And ten minutes
later I was being rushed in a taxi-cab at full speed to Stepney. I
found the scene of the murder—a mean little house in a mean little
street. Outside the house was a crowd of eager loafers, a score of
reporters, and as many policemen, who, refusing to be bribed, kept us
all in the street without news. However, such was my enthusiasm that I
alone of all the reporters got into the house and into the cellar where
the wretched woman had been butchered to death three hours earlier. I
drew a hasty plan of the underground floor, interviewed a sister of the
murdered woman, obtained full particulars, and then jumped into the
taxi-cab to return to the office. Within an hour of leaving my desk I
was back again, and in another twenty minutes I had ready as vivid and
thrilling a “story” as ever I hope to write. Knowing that the paper
was on the point of going to press, I did not, as I ought to have
done, hand my copy to one of the sub-editors, but took it straight to
the machines. Whilst I was waiting for a proof, I was summoned to my
editor’s room. He was frowning, and he looked very much perturbed.

“By the merest chance, Cumberland,” he said, sternly, “I have been the
means of saving the paper from heavy penalties for contempt of court.”
He paused and bit his lip. “I suppose you think your murder story a
most brilliant piece of work.”

“Well, I certainly was under that impression, sir,” I began, “but it
would seem——”

“_Seem!_” he thundered. “You’ve got the facts, it’s true, but then all
my reporters have to get the facts. The gross blunder you’ve made is,
first of all, in saying that the suspected man has spent practically
all his life in prison—contempt of court of the vilest description.
Secondly, you’ve said——” He enumerated no fewer than five blunders I
had made. “But, worst of all,” he concluded, “you took it upon yourself
to give your copy direct to the printers after midnight, thus breaking
the strictest rule of this office.”

It was true. In my exciting enthusiasm I had forgotten this Persian
rule.

“Fortunately, I came in just in time to stop your stuff. You’d better,
I think, confine yourself exclusively to your dramatic criticism.”

Nevertheless, he offered me, two days later, ten pounds a week to give
up my dramatic criticism and general articles (for which I was at that
time getting only five pounds) and devote myself to reporting—an offer
which I refused, as the work would have exhausted all my time.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was at about this time that the idea occurred to me that a certain
monthly magazine for which I had been writing regularly might, if
asked, pay me at a higher rate than that which, till then, they had
been giving me. So I dressed myself very carefully (clothes _do_ help,
don’t they?) and drove up to the office in a smart hansom.

“I have called about my articles,” I began, rather brusquely, to the
editor, a scholarly man who knew far more about Elizabethan literature
than he did about human nature. “I have found just lately that I am so
busy that I have resolved to give up some of my work. Your magazine is
one of those with which I am anxious to retain my connection, partly
because my relationship with you has always been so pleasant.”

And I stopped. It is not everyone who knows the right place at which
to stop in conversations of this kind. “My relationship with you has
always been so pleasant” was, most indubitably, the right place.

He tried to force me into further talk by remaining silent himself. A
clock ticked: a clock always does tick on these occasions. He coughed.
I looked steadily towards the window. For a full minute there must have
been silence: to me it seemed an hour; to him I have no doubt it seemed
eternity.

“I think, Mr Cumberland, we shall be able to come to a satisfactory
arrangement,” he said, when eternity had passed. “What do you say to
such-and-such an amount?”

And he staggered me by mentioning a sum exactly treble the amount I had
been receiving for the last two years.

As I walked into the Strand, I felt a mean and disagreeable
bargain-driver, but after I had lunched at Simpson’s, I said to myself:
“What a fool you were not to go to see him twelve months ago!”

But though many people equally as obscure as myself earn a thousand
pounds a year by their pens, you must not imagine that all the men who
are famous writers do likewise. By no means always does it happen that
a man combines literary genius and the power of earning money, and
there are many men rightly honoured in our own day whose earnings do
not involve them in the payment of income tax. The faculty of making
money, no matter whether it is made out of the sale of pills or poems,
tripe or tragedies, is innate. No man by taking thought can add a
thousand pounds a year to his income, for money is not made by thought
but by intuition.

I know a man in Chelsea who earns fifteen hundred pounds a year by
writing what, in my schoolboy days, we called (and perhaps they are
still called) “bloods.” He knocks off a cool five thousand words a
day every day for three weeks, and then takes a week’s holiday—boys’
“bloods,” servant-girls’ novelettes, children’s fairy tales and
newspaper serials. He is a cheerful, energetic man, whose hobbies are
bull-dogs and Shakespeare, and he has five different pen-names. For
the matter of that, I use three different pseudonyms, my reason for
doing this being that the editor of _The Spectator_, say, might not
accept my work if he knew I was writing at the same time for _The
English Review_ (I have written for both publications), and I am
doubtful if _The Morning Post_ would have printed a single word of
mine if the editor had been aware that I was having a thousand words a
day printed in _The Daily Citizen_. Some editors like what they call
“versatility of thought,” others (I think rightly) distrust it.

But I can very well believe that this gossip about money appears to you
very sordid. Well, so it is. My final paragraph shall not be permitted
to mention, or even hint at, hard cash.

       *       *       *       *       *

Once again I return to my statement that Fleet Street is romantic
because many of the people in it are romantic. But what is a romantic
person? Alas! I cannot define one. Perhaps a romantic person is he
whose soul is mysterious and elusive and whose mind is perturbed and
exalted by a poetic vision of life. He must care little for the things
that Mr Samuel Smiles and the “get on or get out” school value so
much.... No. That will not do at all, for a great many men and women
who have cared a great deal for money and worldly power were romantic.
Nero, for example, and Cleopatra, and Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth,
and Lord Verulam——

But though a romantic man may be difficult to define, he is very easy
to recognise. Ivan Heald was incorrigibly romantic. But perhaps the
most romantically minded man I met in Fleet Street was the journalist
who went with me to Athens in the very early spring of 1914. He had
no right in Fleet Street, for he was essentially a man who preferred
to do things rather than write about them. But half the men in London
journalism have drifted there not so much because they have a natural
aptitude for the work but because they are born adventurers, and the
great adventure of Fleet Street is bound to cross the path of most
roving men one day or another.

Years ago there lived in London a man who wrote books and magazine
stories under the name of Julian Croskey. He had been in the Civil
Service in Shanghai, had helped to finance and organise a rebellion,
and had been turned out of China, whence he came to England to write.
In 1901 I began a correspondence with Croskey, who, in the meantime,
had gone to Canada and was living alone on a river island. Though we
corresponded for years, we never met, and after a time his letters
began to show signs of megalomania. But there was such genius in his
letters, such brooding energy, such hate of life, and, at times, such
an uncanny suggestion of terrific power, that I treasured every word
he wrote to me, and, when his letters ceased, something vital and
something almost necessary to me passed out of my life. I do not like
to believe that he ceased writing to me because I no longer interested
him. I hope he still lives. I hope he will read this book. Some day his
letters must be published, for they constitute a problem in psychology
at once fascinating, mysterious and demonic. And this man whom I never
met remains to me the most romantic of all men I have met in the spirit.




CHAPTER X

HALL CAINE


My acquaintance with Hall Caine began in a semi-professional way.
Whilst still a schoolboy, I was commissioned by _Tit-Bits_ to write
a three-column interview with him. I wrote to the novelist for an
interview. Perhaps the rawness of my letter aroused the suspicion that
I was too young to write adequately about him even in a paper of the
standing of _Tit-Bits_; at all events he refused the interview, but
very kindly said that, if I was contemplating a visit to the Isle of
Man, he would be pleased if I would call on and lunch with him as an
unprofessional visitor. At that time, being young and ardent, I was
a young and ardent admirer of his, and I believe I told him so in my
letter that requested the interview.

If I went to him as an admirer I came away from that first visit to
Greeba Castle a worshipper. In those days he was (but he still is!)
an astounding personality. He came into the room quietly and, having
shaken hands and sat down by my side, said: “An exquisite day for your
walk from St John’s.” So impressively was this spoken, and there was
such a fire in his eyes as he said it, such a weight of meaning in his
manner, that I felt as though something secret and wonderful had been
revealed to me. I wanted to say: “How true!” What I did say was: “Yes;
isn’t it?” He asked me a few questions about myself and then spoke
about general matters. He probably said quite trivial, kindly things,
but at the time they were uttered, and for a little while afterwards,
they seemed rich and full of wisdom.

After lunch he showed me the MSS. of some of his books. I remember the
MS. of _The Bondman_. It was written in a small, curiously artistic
handwriting on half sheets of notepaper, which had been pasted on to
much larger sheets handsomely bound. I handled the book as reverently
as the young ladies of early days caressed the pages of the great
Martin Tupper. There were many “blots” in the MS.—many alterations,
excisions and additions, and it was clear, even from a cursory
examination, that Mr Hall Caine was a hard and conscientious worker.
Upon this and other books he left me to browse for an hour whilst he
went to receive other callers—all of them strangers to him—who were
just arriving.

Some of those visitors, as I discovered later, were a rather
extraordinary crew: men and women from Lancashire and Yorkshire: I
mean _absolutely_ from Lancashire and Yorkshire: men and women who had
made a little money and who had unbounded respect for people who had
made a little more: men and women who were sound and good, but not
quite educated and who were either like fish out of water, gasping and
floundering spasmodically, or positively frightfully at their ease. I
recollect a tall and handsome lady who prodded everything with a green
parasol, and two men who, not too furtively, made elaborate efforts to
estimate the amount of the author’s income.

We had tea on a terrace in the grounds and in the evening I was driven
back to St John’s, all the other callers returning to Douglas.

The impression left by Mr Hall Caine’s personality on my mind by that
and many subsequent visits was overwhelming. He was vivid, alive, and
full of smouldering fires; short and vehement; his eyes were large and
bright; his voice beautiful and capable of a thousand inflections—an
actor’s voice; his temperament also an actor’s; his point of view an
actor’s. But he never did act; invariably he was tragically (and, I
must add, sometimes pathetically) sincere. He had humour, but he could
not laugh at himself. His dress was eccentric; he wore a flapping hat,
breeches and a jacket made of thick, everlasting, hand-made cloth. A
big tie bulged and billowed somewhere about his neck. He told me on one
occasion that chars-à-bancs full of trippers from Douglas continually
passed along the Douglas-Peel road and that when the trippers caught a
sight of him they would sometimes hail him with cries of derision and
shouts of laughter.

“At those moments,” he said, “I am always most dignified. I raise my
hat to them and bow and their laughter immediately ceases.”

That I could well believe, for there is something commanding in his
personality, something well calculated to quell insolence.

A desultory correspondence and a few casual visits followed during the
next three or four years, and when I was in my very early twenties I
persuaded Messrs Greening & Company to invite me to write a book on
Hall Caine for a popular series (_English Writers of To-day_, it was
called) they were at that time issuing. Mr Caine, upon being approached
by me, put no hindrance in my way, but, on the contrary, consented to
give me some assistance in the way of providing me with information
and a few letters received by him from eminent men. I spent several
week-ends at Greeba Castle and found in Mrs Caine, always charming and
ideally gifted with tact, a delightful hostess. My book was quickly
written. It was a feeble, bombastic and ridiculous performance. A
friend of mine (I thought he was an enemy) called it “a prolonged
diarrhœa of the emotions.” In this book Hall Caine took a very kindly
interest, and he provided me with autograph letters written by Ruskin,
Blackmore, T. E. Brown and Gladstone to insert in my book. But I was,
of course, the sole author of the work, and Mr Caine had nothing to
do with it save to put me right on matters of fact and to tone down
some of my exuberant and sentimental praise. The silly volume, because
of its subject, attracted a good deal of attention, both in this
country and in America, though it was not published in the States.
_The Philadelphia Daily Eagle_, for example, on the day the book was
published, printed a eulogistic cablegram review of it from London.
But, for the most part, my monograph was mercilessly slated. Hall
Caine, in addition, was abused for consenting to be the subject of it,
and I was abused for having chosen him for my subject. One paper headed
its review “Raising Caine.”

The truth is, at this time (1901) Mr Hall Caine, though extraordinarily
popular with the public, was not much liked by a certain section of the
Press. His success was envied by some, perhaps; his recognition of his
own worth was fiercely and almost universally resented; and his almost
unconscious habit of advertising himself—though he did not indulge this
habit more than most popular novelists—could not be tolerated. Mr Caine
used frequently to deplore his only too palpable unpopularity with the
Press, and once or twice he asked me to explain it. His own theory was
that he had a few powerful enemies who took advantage of every occasion
to disseminate lies about him, but who these enemies were he never
stated. As a matter of fact, he occasionally said injudicious things
to reporters which, in cold print, appeared not only self-satisfied
but vainglorious. A long and very well written article by Mr Robert
H. Sherard, in (I believe) _The Daily Telegraph_ caused him a good deal
of anxiety.

Not often does one find a man of Hall Caine’s very special gifts
endowed with the abilities of a financier. He is as quick and as clever
at driving a bargain as a Lancashire or Yorkshire mill-owner. There
have always been and, I suppose, always will be a large percentage
of writers who are constitutionally incapable of looking after their
own affairs; they can produce, but they cannot sell. Mr Hall Caine
does not belong to these. He, more than any man, contributed to the
breakdown of the three-volume novel system. It was he who helped to
formulate the Canadian Copyright Laws. With the assistance of Major
Pond (who in these days remembers the great Major Pond?) he made
tens of thousands of dollars by lecturing to the Americans. He had
the acumen and the courage to issue one of his longest novels in two
volumes at two shillings net each. He was the first eminent novelist
to make a practice of publishing his works in the middle of the
August holidays—the supposed “dead” season in the publishing world.
He has bought farms in the Isle of Man and made them pay. He has had
commercial interests in seaside boarding-houses and has shown a bold
but wise enterprise in many of his investments. In other words he has,
to his honour, continually exhibited abilities that not one artist in a
hundred possesses.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have rarely seen Hall Caine in a light-hearted mood, but I have been
with him in more than one hour of black depression.

Vividly do I remember spending a few days at Greeba Castle shortly
after the time when the publication of a story of his, that was running
serially in a ladies’ paper, was suddenly and dramatically stopped
by the editor of that paper on the score of its alleged immorality.
The story was about to be produced in book form and, of course, the
editor’s action had provided a fine advertisement; this fact, however,
did not appear to console the novelist in the least. The most sensitive
of men, he was crushed by this very public charge of writing immoral
literature.

For myself, when he told me all the circumstances, I merely laughed. He
glanced at me sideways.

“You are amused?” he asked. “I wonder why.”

“Because you are allowing yourself to be made miserable by a most
trivial event.”

“You call it trivial that the whole world should think me a man of
immoral mind?”

“The whole world? Why, the world doesn’t trouble itself about the
matter in the least. Only one man accuses you of immoral writings; that
man is the editor of the paper. What on earth does his opinion matter
to you?”

“But his opinion will be widely read and will be widely believed.”

“Will be believed, you should have added, by people who allow another
man to form their opinions for them. What do _they_ matter?”

He sighed.

“But they _do_ matter,” said he, rather forlornly. “I hate to think of
people out there”—he waved a vague arm in the direction of the kitchen
garden—“thinking evil thoughts and saying evil things of me.”

“‘They say. What do they say? Let them say,’” I quoted.

We paced up and down the terrace, his eyes fixed on the ground. At
length:

“I wonder what you would think of the chapter in question,” he said
musingly. “You have read the story as far as it has been printed. Well,
I will give you the final chapters to read.”

We went to his room and he handed me a few pages of printed copy. I
read them.

“Well?” inquired he, when I had finished.

“It is passionate, it is sexual,” said I, “but to call it immoral is to
call black white.”

“You really believe that?” he asked, a little anxiously.

“I do. I assure you I do.”

But the black cloud of self-distrust and misery would not be
dissipated, and that night, after dinner, we sat over a slow fire,
though it was early in August, and talked long and rather sadly of
Rossetti, of T. E. Brown and of things that had been said by Peel
fishermen.

       *       *       *       *       *

Another occasion, when I was with the novelist on a day of some
anxiety, is equally clear in my memory. I may say at this point that
Hall Caine was invariably in a condition of some mental strain a few
days before and after the publication of one of his stories. He was a
little apprehensive of the reviewers, and he was always afraid lest the
public should not remain faithful to him. In this connection I remember
him saying to me once: “I can imagine no fate more tragic than for a
novelist at middle age, when he believes his powers to be at their
highest, to lose his hold upon his public.”

He would, I think, deny that he cares what the reviewers may say;
nevertheless, my experience of him tells me that he does care. In his
early life as a novelist he was, perhaps, overpraised; certainly he
but very rarely felt the lash of the critic’s whip. So that when the
critics began to condemn the work of the man they had once praised, he
was not disciplined to bear their condemnation philosophically. Every
taunt wounded him, every thrust went home, every sneer was a stab.

But on the occasion about which I am now writing he was not depressed
so much in anticipation of what the reviewers might say as on account
of the competition of another novel which had been issued a few days
previous to the date fixed for the publication of a new book of his
own. That novel was Lucas Malet’s _The History of Sir Richard Calmady_,
published, if my memory does not betray me, by Messrs Methuen.

The first question he asked me one morning before breakfast was:

“Have you read _Sir Richard Calmady_?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Well?” exclaimed he, a little impatiently, “well, what do you think of
it?”

“An amazingly clever performance, but very horrible.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” he cried eagerly. “Horrible! Ghastly! And yet, they
tell me, people are reading it.”

“Partly for that reason, no doubt.”

“But the public, the people, the great reading public—surely they will
not respond to the appeal of a book of that nature?”

“The public, you must remember, has many hearts; it may well give one
to Sir Richard Calmady.”

“But _my_ public?”

“Yes; even your public.”

He brooded a little.

“I am told that Lucas Malet’s publishers believe in the book,” he said,
after a longish pause, “and are prepared to spend a small fortune in
pushing it. And that, of course, means that it will interfere with, and
perhaps seriously injure, the sales of my own story. But it seems to me
that the public—the _real_ public—will never read a novel that has for
its chief attraction a man with no legs.”

I suggested that he should postpone the publication of his book until
the rage for _Sir Richard Calmady_ had died down. But no! This would
not suit him. He must catch the real holiday season at its full tide.
August was the best month in the year, and the first week the best week
in the month, and the fifth day the best day of the week.

Hall Caine always shows great perspicacity in selecting the date of
publication for his books; he will never allow it to synchronise with
any other big event. Moreover, his book must be born to an expectant
world; it must be well advertised beforehand. Unlike other writers,
he does not work hard at a book, finish it and then hand it over to a
publisher to deal with more or less as he thinks fit. In a sense, he is
his own publisher, and as a rule he interests himself in the sale of
a new work of his own, in its distribution, its printing and binding,
etc., as much as the actual publisher himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

It used to be a popular belief—but Arnold Bennett has done much to
kill it—that an author laughs and cries with the creatures of his
imagination, that he lives and dreams with them, and that when his book
is finished, and the time comes for him to part from them, he does so
with pain that is little short of anguish. So far as most authors are
concerned, this is exactly opposite to the real facts. Before an author
is half-way through his novel he is heartily sick of his characters;
his beautiful heroine is an unmitigated nuisance and his hero an
incredible bore. He is only too thankful to reach the end of the last
chapter and leave his puppets for ever.

But this is not so with Hall Caine. His novels, as you know, do not
err on the side of brevity, and though it is possible you may tire
of his heroine, you may be absolutely certain that her creator never
does. To this novelist the creatures of his imagination are, in one
sense, more real than the material beings around him. He is wholly
dominated by his imagination. His brain is peopled by creatures of his
own fancy. His emotions are engaged on behalf of people who do not
exist. His consciousness is confined to the little world he has created
for himself and he is saturated with and submerged by fancies that his
imagination has bred.

I shall never forget coming across him early one morning in the little
shaded footway that winds among trees in the castle grounds to the main
drive. His eyes were dim, and he had not perfect control of his voice.

“I have been finishing my book,” he said, referring to _The Eternal
City_, “and I wept as I wrote.”

I have been with him on several occasions when he has been finishing
his books, and I have always found him in alternating moods of
exhaustion and emotional excitement. Whatever else may be charged
against him, it cannot with truth be said that he does not put his
whole soul into his work.

       *       *       *       *       *

As a man he is the most loyal of friends and the most loyal of enemies.
He can hate bitterly. I have heard him eloquent in his hate. I have
heard him hate W. T. Stead and Frank Harris, and nothing could have
exceeded his bitterness. But he does not nurse his hatred, and he is a
man quick to forgive.

I cannot close this chapter without a word concerning his generosity.
By “generosity” I do not mean only that he is free with money, but
that he will give his time, the work of his brain, his advice and even
himself for any good cause and for any man in need. To struggling
authors he is the very soul of generosity. He struggled himself. Born
on a coal barge in Runcorn, largely self-educated, having experienced
the anxiety of straitened means and hope deferred, he has known
intimately the hardships of life, and will do all in his power to
shield others from them. On several occasions I have met people—mostly
young men—who have come to him for help and advice in beginning a
literary career. He is never extravagant in his praise of their work,
but if he finds merit in it he is always warmly encouraging. Years
before I met him face to face, when I was a boy of fourteen, I sent
him a long poem I had written in the Spenserian stanza, and the first
letters I received from him were careful and most helpful criticisms
of this juvenile literary effort. I had written to him as an entire
stranger and without any introduction whatever. In my youth and
egotism I had taken his replies as a matter of course; it was only
later that I recognised the most kindly spirit that prompted a busy and
often harassed man to give his time and energy to a boy whose work can
have had very little to recommend it.




CHAPTER XI

MORE WRITERS

  Rev. T. E. Brown—A. R. Orage—Norman Angell—St John Ervine—Charles
  Marriott—Max Beerbohm—Israel Zangwill—Alphonse Courlander—Ivan
  Heald—Dixon Scott—Barry Pain—Cunninghame Graham


I wonder how many readers turn nowadays to the poetical works of Thomas
Edward Brown, the Manx poet. Not a great number, I think. Indeed, I
doubt if he ever had a large audience, though he had the power of
exciting almost unlimited enthusiasm in the breasts of those whom he
did attract. He was praised whole-heartedly by George Eliot, George
Meredith, W. E. Henley and other famous writers, and the publication of
his Letters a year or two after his death made a great stir.

In my boyhood’s days I was one of Brown’s most devoted disciples. He
had a charming trick of infusing scholarship with the real “stuff” of
humanity, that appealed to me irresistibly, and I liked the honest
sensuality of his _Roman Women_ and the pathos of such poems as _Aber
Stations_ and _Epistola ad Dakyns_. Perhaps I could not read his poems
now, for, truth to tell, they “gush” almost indecently. However, he
remains the most distinguished literary figure that the little Isle of
Man has produced, and two or three of his lyrics will persist far into
the future.

I met him at Greeba Castle, Mr Hall Caine’s Manx residence, when I was
still a schoolboy. It was just a few months before Brown’s death, and a
rather sad incident marked his visit to Hall Caine.

We were at lunch when he arrived: a rather solemn lunch: a lunch at
which the guests were ill assorted. A ponderous scholar from Scotland
insisted upon discussing the authorship of Homer—a subject about which
our host evidently knew little and cared less. In the middle of a
rather painful silence, Brown was ushered into the dining-room; he
was carrying a little book of Laurence Binyon’s that had just been
published. His burly figure, his genial face, his ready tongue soon
lifted us out of the atmosphere of black boredom that had settled upon
us. In five minutes he had disposed of the Scottish scholar, had drunk
a whisky and soda, and had combated Hall Caine’s opinion that Binyon
“had entirely missed the point” in one of the poems he (Binyon) had
written.

All afternoon we talked. Brown had come all the way from Ramsey (some
twenty-four miles, four of which had to be walked) to spend a few hours
with his friend, and, as he was a man greedy of enjoyment, not a single
moment was wasted. It soon appeared that Brown was a great admirer of
Hall Caine’s—it should be mentioned that Mr Caine had not then written
_The Prodigal Son_ or _The Eternal City_—and the novelist basked in the
tactful praise that was bestowed upon him.

As we were talking, a servant came with the news that eleven Americans
had arrived and had been shown into the library. Hall Caine left the
room to give them tea. An hour later, he came back, exhausted but not
displeased.

“One of the penalties of fame,” he said, with a sigh.

“But you are not the only one who suffers from your own fame,” observed
Brown. “I am constantly besieged by American journalists, who come
to me for private information about yourself. A very persistent lady
from New York came only the other day and wished to know if you were
educated.”

Hall Caine laughed.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“Well, I asked her what she meant by ‘education,’ and she replied: ‘Is
he at all like Matthew Arnold?’”

Towards evening, Brown departed.

Next morning, a note arrived from him, evidently written immediately on
his return home the previous evening. The note expressed the writer’s
regret that he had been unable to visit Greeba Castle that day; he had
fully intended coming, but had been prevented at the last moment. This
letter disturbed Hall Caine enormously.

“His mind is going,” he said; “I have noticed several other signs
of vanishing memory, if not of something worse, during the last few
months.”

There was, indeed, I have always thought, a streak of morbid
eccentricity in Brown’s intellectual make-up. A careful reader of his
letters will notice many moods of fierce exaltation engendered by
wholly inadequate and inexplicable causes. His sudden death was perhaps
a blessing in disguise.

       *       *       *       *       *

There are in London two or three men, not known to the general public,
whose influence on modern thought is most profound and most disturbing.
Of these men A. R. Orage, the editor of _The New Age_, is quite the
most distinguished. What circulation his paper enjoys, I do not know;
it cannot be large; probably it is not more than two or three thousand;
perhaps it is not even so much as that. But the men and women who read
it are men and women who count—people who welcome daring and original
thought, who hold important positions in the civic, social, political
and artistic worlds, and who eagerly disseminate the seeds of thought
they pick up from the study of _The New Age_. Tens of thousands of
people have been influenced by this paper who have never even heard its
name. It does not educate the masses directly: it reaches them through
the medium of its few but exceedingly able readers.

_The New Age_ is professedly a Socialist organ, but the promulgation
of socialistic doctrines is only a part of its policy and work. Its
literary, artistic and musical criticism is the sanest, the bravest
and the most brilliant that can be read in England. It reverences
neither power nor reputation; it is subtle and unsparing; and, if it
is sometimes cruel, it is cruel with a purpose. All sleek money-makers
in Art have reason to fear Orage, for his rapier wit may at any moment
glance and slide between their ribs and release the hot air that is at
once the inspiration and the material of all their works.

Orage has more than a touch of genius. It was Baudelaire (wasn’t it?)
who said that genius was the power to look upon the world with the eyes
of a child. Well, Orage has the all-seeing, non-rejecting eyes of a
child. He has also the eternal spirit of youth. One cannot imagine him
growing old. Perhaps his most interesting characteristic is his power
of attracting and holding friends; he is the most hero-worshipped of
men. Having once given his friendship, however, he exacts the utmost
loyalty; treachery is the one sin that can never be forgiven.

I knew Orage years ago, when he was still in Leeds teaching the young
idea how to shoot. He was then a prominent member of the Theosophical
Society and lectured a good deal—and rather dangerously, I think—on
Nietzsche. His gospel, always preached with his tongue in his cheek,
that every man and woman should do precisely what he or she desires,
acted like heady wine on the gasping and enthusiastic young ladies
who used to sit in rows worshipping him. They wanted to do all kinds
of terrible things, and as Orage, backed by “that great German,”
Nietzsche, had sanctioned their most secret desires, they were resolved
to begin at once their career of licence. They used to “stay behind”
when the lectures were over, and question Orage with their lips and
invite him with their eyes, and it used to be most amusing and a little
pathetic to listen to the gay and half-veiled insults with which Orage
at once thwarted and bewildered his silly devotees.

He had in those days a wonderful gift of talking a most divine
nonsense—a spurious wisdom that ran closely along the border-line of
rank absurdity. The “cosmic consciousness” of Walt Whitman was a great
theme of his, and Orage, in his subtle, devilishly clever way, would
lead his listeners on to the very threshold of occult knowledge—and
leave them there, wide-eyed and wonder-struck.

I have never known an editor more jealous of the reputation of his
paper than Orage is of _The New Age_. No consideration of friendship
would induce him to print a dull article, however sound, and when one
of his contributors becomes sententious, or slack, or banal—out he
goes, neck and crop. Among the contributors to _The New Age_ I remember
writers as different in mental calibre as John Davidson and Edward
Carpenter, Frank Harris and Cecil Chesterton, Arnold Bennett and Janet
Achurch. These and scores of equally distinguished people have written
for Orage. Why? For money? Well, scarcely; _The New Age’s_ rates of pay
must be very modest. For what, then? They have written because in _The
New Age_ they can tell the unadulterated truth and because they are
proud to see their work in that paper.

       *       *       *       *       *

To many people Norman Angell is a rather sinister figure, and the
people who attack him most violently to-day are precisely those who
praised him most when he wrote his first book. He has been overpraised
and spoilt. His intellectual attainments are not greatly above the
average, and his thinking is not always honest. In the early days of
the war it used to be amusing to see him working among his spectacled
and yellow-skinned assistants; he was small but magisterial, and he
was always tucking sheets of foolscap into long envelopes and looking
very important as he did so. I really believe that in those days of
August, 1914, he had a vague idea that he and his helpers could stop
the war at any moment they chose. Certainly, he was very cross with the
war. Europe was behaving in her old, mad way without having previously
consulted him.

“But it will soon be over,” he assured me. “You see——”

He stopped and waved his hand vaguely in the direction of a typewriter,
smothered in documents.

“Quite,” said I uncomprehendingly. “You mean——?”

“Yes; that’s it. Exhaustion. It can’t go on for ever. It must stop some
time.”

A smile that came from nowhere straggled into his face. I felt vaguely
discomfited.

“You see, we are hard at it,” he said, and, as he spoke, be indicated
a pale, ill-shaven youth who was wandering aimlessly about the office,
his hands full of papers.

A queer little chap, Angell. Very much in earnest, of course, very sure
of himself, very pushing, very “idealistic.”

       *       *       *       *       *

St John Ervine is a writer who already counts for much but who, a few
years hence, will count for a good deal more. He is by way of being a
protégé of Bernard Shaw, and earnest young Fabians have already learned
to reverence him.

We worked together on _The Daily Citizen_, he being dramatic critic.
He was not enormously popular with the rest of the staff, for he was
very “high-brow”; his face was smooth, sleek and superior, and he had
a habit of being friendly with a man one day and scarcely recognising
him the next. My own relations with him were of the most disagreeable.
A play of his was given at the Court Theatre, and I was sent to
criticise it. I did criticise it: the play was ugly, clever and sordid.

“But,” protested Ervine, pale with vexation, the next time he met me,
“but you have entirely misunderstood my play. You can’t have stayed
till the end.”

“It was very painful for me, Ervine,” said I, “but I really did stick
it out to the finish. Why do you young fellows write so depressingly?
You look happy enough, Ervine——”

“The close of my play is the part that matters. Bernard Shaw said
so....”

We parted: he, with a look of successful hauteur; I, broken and crushed.

A week or so later I met him at one of Herbert Hughes’s jolly Sunday
evenings in Chelsea.

“You know Gerald Cumberland, of course,” said someone who was
introducing him to people.

He drew himself up with great dignity and stared at me through his
pince-nez.

“I think,” said he, “yes, I believe we _have_ met before somewhere.
Where was it, Mr ... er ... Cumberland?”

Shortly after, he left _The Daily Citizen_, and I was given the
position which he had occupied with so much conscious distinction. I
somehow think that when the war is over and we meet, he will not know
me. Ervine is very much like that.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fifteen years is a long time in the literary world, and Charles
Marriott’s _The Column_, which threw everybody into fever-heat
somewhere about 1902, is, I suppose, forgotten. It was a “first” novel.
Uncritical Ouida loved it; W. E. Henley unbent and wrote a Meredithian
letter to its author; W. L. Courtney seized some of his short stories
for _The Fortnightly Review_; and I suppose (though I really don’t
know this) _The Spectator_ wrote five lines of disapproval. It was a
brilliant book; fresh, original, provocative. It promised a lot: it
promised too much; the author has since written many distinguished
books, but none of them is as good as _The Column_ said they would be.

Marriott was living at Lamorna, a tiny cove in Cornwall, when I first
knew him. He was tall, lantern-jawed and spectacled. He was interested
in everything, but it appeared to me even then that he was a little
inhuman. He lacked vulgarity; rude things repelled him enormously,
unnaturally; he had no literary delight—or else his delight was too
literary: I don’t know—in coarseness. Fastidious to the finger-tips,
he would rather go without dinner than split an infinitive. Since
those days Marriott has gone on refining himself until there is very
little Marriott left. Even the longest and the thickest pencil may be
sharpened too frequently.

Many years after I met him at an exhibition of pictures in Bond Street.
He was then almost old, tired, preoccupied. He is quite the last man
to be a journalist; his art criticism is wonderfully fine, but a life
standing on the polished floors of galleries between Bond Street and
Leicester Square is soul-corroding and heart-breaking. Marriott’s mind
no longer darts and leaps. It moves gently, very gently.

       *       *       *       *       *

Max Beerbohm is not so witty in conversation as one might expect. On
the spur of the moment he has little verbal readiness; his mind is
purely literary. He bears no resemblance to his late brother, Sir
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, one of the cleverest conversationalists I have
ever met.

A short, mild and debonair figure received me one May afternoon in
a house which, if not in Cavendish Square, was somewhere in its
neighbourhood. In my later schoolboy days Max was very much cultivated
by those of the younger generation who liked to think themselves
enormously in the swim. We used to “collect” Max Beerbohm’s—not his
caricatures, for they were far and away beyond our means; but his
articles. I remember a rather startling article of his in _The Yellow
Book_ which I had bound in lizard-skin, and a friend of mine had all
Max’s _Saturday Review_ articles beautifully typewritten on thick
yellow paper and bound in scarlet cardboard. Max was precious, Max was
deliciously impertinent, Max was too frightfully clever for words.

When I called upon him four or five years ago I had, I need scarcely
say, long outgrown my early infatuation, for he had begun to “date,”
and was safely in his niche among the men of the nineties. But
half-an-hour’s talk with him revived some of the old fascination. He
had “atmosphere”; his personality created an environment; he brought
a flavour of far-off days. We talked quite pleasantly of his art, but
he said nothing that has stuck in my memory, and my questions seemed
to amuse rather than interest him. His small dapper figure gave one
the impression of a schoolboy who had grown a little tired, who had
prematurely developed his talents, and who had just fallen short of
winning a big prize.

He led the way to the front door, shook me by the hand, looked at me
meditatively for a moment, smiled faintly, and ... vanished.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of Israel Zangwill I can give only an impression. I see him now as I
saw him one hot afternoon at his rooms in the Temple. A dark man, a
spare man, a man very much in earnest and anxious to be just. He was
perspiring slightly, I remember, and he bent forward a little so as
to hear and understand every word I said. I had a request to make:
a favour to ask. He listened patiently, gave me a cup of tea, and
stirred his own. For a little he ruminated. Then he turned to me and
lifted his eyebrows—lifted his eyebrows rather high. I repeated my
request, giving further details. I was a little confused. He studied my
confusion, not cruelly, but in the way that a trained observer studies
everything that comes under his notice. Then: “Ye-es,” he said; “I see.
I see.” And then there was a minute’s silence.

“I will do what you want,” he remarked, at length. “I will do it
willingly—most willingly.”

And he did. Our little business entailed some subsequent
correspondence, and some work on Zangwill’s part. The work was done
promptly; his letters answered mine by return of post. He gained
nothing by his work, whereas the paper I represented gained a great
deal.

       *       *       *       *       *

Alphonse Courlander was one of the many young and promising writers
whom the war has killed. He was one of the most hard-working
journalists in Fleet Street, and if he was not precisely brilliant, he
had unusual gifts and used them to good purpose. I could never read his
novels, but I understand they met with a certain success, and people
whose opinion I respect have spoken highly of them.

He represented _The Daily Express_ in Paris at the time the war broke
out. He was the most conscientious of men, and he grappled with the
extra work that grew up with the war with a fierce and fanatical
energy. He overworked himself, and the horror of the war appears
to have got on his nerves. He disappeared from Paris and was found
wandering alone in London, neurasthenic, beaten, purposeless. A week or
two later he died.

Courlander was a good example of a not unusual type of man one
frequently meets in Fleet Street—a type that, in the end, is bound
to meet either failure or tragedy. He was too highly strung for the
rigours of the game: too sensitive; too ambitious for his weak frame.
The type either takes to drink or wears itself out long before middle
age. Courlander was an abstemious man; perhaps if he had “let himself
go” occasionally, he would have stood the strain of his work better.
When I saw him, he was always busy, always up to date, always writing
or going to write a novel in his spare time. He had very little
inventive faculty and used to worry over his plots and worry his
friends over them. “Plots! ... as if plots matter if you have anything
to say!” I used to urge. And then he would look at me, mystified.

“But, Cumberland, what can you know about it? You have never written a
novel.”

“Oh, but I have,” I would reply, “but no one will publish them.”

“Ah! that’s the reason.”

And he really believed that that _was_ the reason.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ivan Heald was a colleague of Courlander—a colleague any man in Fleet
Street would have been glad to possess. Heald was original, and he
created a record in so far as he was the first and, so far as I know,
the only man to be employed by a British daily paper to write a “funny
story” each day. He made a wide reputation, a reputation that, no
doubt, pleased him, but he had no real ambition. People who “got on”
rather amused him—that is to say, if their success was won at the
expense of experience of life. I never met a man more full of zest for
life, a man more eager for experience, a man who retained his youth so
successfully. He was vivid, careless, tolerant and, in spite of every
appearance to the contrary, essentially serious-minded. It was the
simple pleasures of life that attracted him.

He had no scholarship, but his mind was well ordered, and his
appreciation of natural and artistic beauty was of the keenest.

I remember that when we were holidaying together at Oxford he would
become almost angry with me because I could not immediately perceive
the beauty of certain lines—the outlines of trees, the curve of a
table-napkin, the pattern made by the ropes of a tent, and so on.

“You should get Eddie or Norman Morrow to go a walk with you,” he said.
“_They_ would make you see things.”

He loved folk-songs, Irish peasants, the plays of Synge, the Russian
Ballet, the Thames, the homely comfort of a country inn. His feeling
for family life was strong, and Friday evenings at the Healds’, where
one met his mother and sisters, as clever if not so vivid as he
himself, were one of the great recurring pleasures of many men’s lives.

He was wounded in Gallipoli, nursed back to health, transferred to the
R.F.C., and died (in all probability, for the exact manner of his death
is not certainly known) in the air. A death he would have desired. But
Ivan Heald should not have died, and sometimes I am tempted to think
that he still lives, that something in him still lives—something that
was rich and strange and beautiful. The other day I came across one of
the little notes he used to scribble to me. It is written from Ireland,
and because it is so like him I give it here:

  Dear Gerald,—If only I had the nice stiff paper and the delicate
  pen nib, I would try to write a letter to you like the ones you
  send me. There came a thrill yesterday. As I sat in my little
  parlour toying with my last month’s _Ulster Guardian_, there
  leapt out of the page your poem, _Fashioned of Dreams You Are_
  [reprinted from a magazine]. It was as though the sea between us
  had suddenly shrunk to a couple of glasses of whisky. I shall
  never pass a Poet’s Corner again without looking for you. There
  are poets here, too. An old-age pensioner describing a wonderful
  fish he had seen told me that it was “a gay and antic fish, fresh
  and smart and soople.” I shall leave for home to-morrow evening
  and see you on Sunday night, and if there is one bottle of red
  wine left in the world, you and I will surely drag it out of the
  dust. How the bottles must wonder under their cobwebs at this
  strange turn of fate—that the Master Butler may either transform
  them into sparkling phrases and beautiful thoughts through rare
  fellows like us, or send them to dreary death in the paunch of
  fools like ——
                                                    Ivan.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dixon Scott used to throw me into little ecstasies by his reviews in
_The Manchester Guardian_, and I often used to wonder if I should
meet him. Our paths crossed for a brief minute not long before we
left England—he to meet his death in France, and I to sit and wait in
Serbia. It was at the end of one of my evenings in the Café Royal,
where one used to sip absinthe, smoke a cigar, and listen to Orage.
It was “Time, gentlemen, please”: 12-30 A.M.: in Army parlance, 0030
hours. We were all very merry as we crowded into Regent Street, and I
heard a voice behind me say: “Dixon Scott.”

I turned round immediately.

“Are you Dixon Scott?” I asked a man—a man who looked as unlike my
preconceived picture of him as possible.

“Yes, and someone has just told me you are Gerald Cumberland.”

“How awfully jolly,” said I, “for now I have the opportunity of telling
you how much I admire your wonderful genius.”

“Tophole!” said he. “I love praise, don’t you?”

“Ra-_ther_!” said I.

And then I fought for a taxi and saw Scott no more.

       *       *       *       *       *

Barry Pain, like the gentleman who used to be known as Adrian Ross,
leads a double intellectual life. He earns his bread by writing
humorous literature; he is the king of modern jesters; but secretly
(and perhaps in shame) he studies philosophy and metaphysics and is
known to have written a big two-volume work dealing with the furtive
processes of the human mind. He is a scholar, but Fate has made of him
a manufacturer of jokes. While his tougher intellectual faculties are
wrestling with the basic problems of the universe—the whence, whither
and why of things—his observing eye is noting the little discrepancies
of life, the jolly frailties of human nature, the absurdities of our
everyday existence.

He revealed little of his capacity for humour when he entertained me to
whisky and soda at his club. I found a big, bearded and rather fleshy
man rolling about in a very easy chair. I had been sent to interview
him by one of those very pushing newspapers that, in the Silly Season
especially, run absurd “stories.” I have not the slightest recollection
of the particular story that took me to Barry Pain, but I am perfectly
certain that it was preposterous, and I am perfectly certain that
my news editor—he was Stanley Bishop, of blessed memory—expected me
to bring back to the office several gems of humour tempted from the
brain and stolen from the lips of the famous writer. But Pain was coy.
Perhaps he does not believe in giving away jokes for which coin of the
realm is usually paid.

I presented my “story” to him and tried to make him talk about it, but
he looked glum and stared stonily into the empty fire-grate.

“Really,” he began, at length, “I can’t think of anything to say. Can
you? If you can think of something very clever, put it in your article
and say I said it. Yes, do say I said it. But, of course, it must be
very clever.”

And he lapsed into a long, depressed silence. I was very glad when a
friend of his popped his head into the room and shouted: “What about
that game of bridge?” I rose hastily and escaped.

       *       *       *       *       *

It would be difficult to find a more picturesque figure than R. B.
Cunninghame Graham. I always picture him sitting on a bare-backed
Mexican steed, his shirt open at the throat, a long whip in one hand,
a lasso in the other, his eyes, like Blake’s tiger, burning bright,
his boots fantastically spurred, his hat flapping in the wind, and
his steed galloping _ventre à terre_. In South and Central America,
no doubt, he does run wild, but in London of late years he has always
been most respectable. And yet even West End respectability cannot kill
his picturesqueness. He has a shining mind, and everything he says is
youthful and spirited.

Most of his literary enthusiasms are for the younger—the
youngest—generation, but as his mind is essentially uncritical and
impulsive, his judgments are not very trustworthy. I remember his
praising unreservedly a young alleged poet who in recent years has made
himself known by his scholarship and impudence, and, as far as I could
gather, it was chiefly his impudence that had attracted Cunninghame
Graham.




CHAPTER XII

MUSICAL CRITICS


Not until quite recently has musical criticism been taken seriously
either by the London or provincial Press. In the old days of the
sixties, when Wagner came to London (I am writing many miles away from
books, but surely it was in the sixties that Wagner visited us?), there
was not a single open-minded musical critic on the British Press. J. W.
Davison, the very powerful _Times_ critic, was not only a fool, but,
what is much more dangerous, he was a learned fool. He treated Wagner
shamefully, and he did more than his share to bring our country into
musical disrepute among the cultured men of other nations. Joseph
Bennett, of _The Daily Telegraph_, was a fluent writer who contrived
to say less in a full column than a man like Ernest Newman or R. A.
Streatfeild or Samuel Langford can say in a couple of lines. He footled
gaily for many years, wielded enormous power, and did nothing whatever
to advance the cause of music in England.

As a commercial asset, Joseph Bennett must have been invaluable to the
proprietors of _The Daily Telegraph_. For, like Davison, he had great
influence. People read him. Even in my own time, when an important
new work was produced, we used to question each other: “What does
Old Joe say?” And, most unfortunately, it mattered a great deal what
Old Joe did say, though anyone who knew much about music was very
well aware that nine times out of ten Bennett would be wrong. If he
damned a work—well, that work _was_ damned. No musical critic to-day
wields such power as his, though there are at least a score of writers
on music who have ten times his gifts. His present successor, for
example, Mr Robin Legge, is incomparably a finer musician, a much
more open-minded man, and a student of infinitely more culture, than
Bennett. Yet his influence, I imagine, is not so great as that of his
predecessor. One cannot say that Bennett stooped to his public, for
Bennett could not stoop; if he _had_ stooped, he would have disappeared
altogether. No: he _was_ the public: the people: the common people. He
had the point of view of the man in the back street.

But to-day things are changed. The musical critic is no longer
primarily a raconteur, a gossiper, a chatterer. As a rule, he is a
man of culture, of experience, of solid musical attainments. He earns
little—anything from one hundred and fifty pounds to five hundred
pounds a year, though, no doubt, in very rare instances, he may be
paid more than the latter figure. Musical criticism, therefore, is not
a profession that seduces the ambitious man, for the ambitious man of
materialistic views may more easily earn three times what the Press
has to offer him by selling imitation jewellery or doing anything else
that money-making people do. When E. A. Baughan, now dramatic critic
of _The Daily News_, was editing _The Musical Standard_ more than
twenty years ago, he wrote me a very earnest letter beseeching me not
to become a musical critic on account of the payment being so meagre.
“If you have a desk, stick to it; if you are a commercial traveller,
remain a commercial traveller” was his advice in essence. But I would
rather be a musical critic on one hundred and fifty pounds a year than
a stockbroker earning fifteen hundred pounds. I love money, but I love
music and journalism more, and the three years I spent in Manchester
with an income of three hundred pounds were full of happiness, brimful
of great days when I felt my mind growing and my spirit taking unto
itself wings.

E. A. Baughan is not, I think, a musician in the true sense of the
word, nor does he claim to be, but I imagine that, being musical and
having the itch for writing, he took the first journalistic work that
offered itself. That work was the editing of _The Musical Standard_.
Subsequently he went to _The Morning Leader_ as musical critic, and
then to _The Daily News_ as dramatic critic. He is sane, level-headed,
honest, but not conspicuously brilliant. His musical work, judged by a
high standard, was poor. He had not sufficient knowledge to guide him
to a right judgment when faced by a new problem. Hugo Wolf was such a
problem, and if ever Baughan reads now what he wrote about Hugo Wolf
some fifteen years ago, he must, I imagine, tingle with shame to the
tips of his toes.

As a dramatic critic he has secured an honourable and enviable
position. I used to meet him very frequently at first nights, and
always thought him a trifle _blasé_ and almost wholly devoid of
imagination, subtlety and true artistic feeling. He has not the
artist’s attitude towards life, and he would probably bring an action
for slander against you if you said he had.

       *       *       *       *       *

I was never introduced to C. L. Graves, the musical critic of _The
Spectator_ and the well-known humorous writer, but on one occasion I
sat next to him at a very important concert, and in conversation found
him an extremely courteous but rather baffled man. His knowledge of
music is that of the cultured amateur. His mind but grudgingly admits
“advanced” work, and I, as a modern, regret that an intellect so
charming, so gracious, so able, should be even occasionally occupied in
passing judgment on work that has its being entirely outside his mental
horizon. But I doubt very much if _The Spectator_ has any influence on
the musical life of London, though I imagine that Dr Brewer, Mr T. H.
Noble, Sir Hubert Parry, Sir Charles V. Stanford and Sir Alexander
Mackenzie read Mr Graves with regularity and approval.

       *       *       *       *       *

But the man whom all of us who write about music honour most of all
is Ernest Newman, of _The Birmingham Daily Post_. Here we have a
first-rate intellect functioning with absolute sureness and with
almost fierce rapidity. As a scholar, no man is better equipped; as
a writer, he ranks with the highest; for fearlessness and inflexible
intellectual honesty, he has no equal. His books on Wagner and Hugo
Wolf and the volume entitled _Musical Studies_ are head and shoulders
above any volumes of musical criticism ever published in our language.
But though his knowledge of music is encyclopædic, music is but one
of many subjects upon which he is an authority. Under another name
he has published a volume on philosophy which, on its appearance,
created something like a sensation; unfortunately, this book ceased to
be procurable within a few weeks of its publication. Poetry, French
and German literature, sociology and psychology are but a few of the
subjects upon which he is as well qualified to write as he is on music.

Why does he hide himself in Birmingham? Well, if you are a musical
critic in London, it is impossible to do any solid work. All day and
almost every day you are at concerts and operas, and you are sadly in
danger of becoming a mere reporter. Newman’s post in Birmingham leaves
him some leisure in which to write more important work.

I never think of Newman without wondering if ever he will be given the
chance to achieve the work that is nearest his heart. That work is a
full and complete history of music. For this task he is intellectually
well equipped, but the labour in which it would involve him calls for
years of leisure. Time and again he has planned work—notably, a book
on Montaigne—which, for lack of leisure, he has been compelled to
abandon. He was made for finer things than newspaper work, and though
he has made an indelible impression on musical thought in this and
other countries, his life will be largely wasted if the latter half of
it has to be spent in writing daily criticism and occasional articles.

Newman’s psychology is peculiarly complex. Though there is a vein of
cruelty in him, he is yet sensitive to the suffering of other people. I
was with him on one occasion when Bantock told him that a certain enemy
of his (Newman’s) had just died. The effect of this news on Newman was
to me most unexpected. He started a little. “Good God!” he said; “poor,
poor devil.” And for the rest of the evening he sat gloomy and silent.
The thought of death is intolerable to him. His repulsion from it is as
much physical as nervous. Though, on occasion, a stern and relentless
critic, he reacts morbidly to criticism of himself. He is highly
strung, imaginative, rationalistic; he believes little and trusts not
at all, loves intensely and hates bitterly. Vain he is, also, and he
clings almost despairingly to what remains of his youth.

It is some few years since I saw Newman in close intimacy, but when
he was on the staff of _The Manchester Guardian_ and, later on, when
he removed to Birmingham, I was at his house very frequently, and a
very small circle of friends used to pass long evenings in delicious
fooling. In those days Newman could throw off twenty-five years of
his age and become a high-spirited and impish boy. I remember one
night when, a _macabre_ mood or, rather, a mood of extravagantly high
spirits having descended upon us, one of our company, a lady, simulated
sudden illness and death. We dressed her in a shroud, placed pennies
on her eyes and candles at her head and feet. But in the middle of
this foolery, Newman disappeared, and when it was all over and he had
returned, he was in a sombre mood. It was not because we had trifled
with a terrible fact in life that he was disturbed and distrait, but
because we had unwittingly cut into his shrinking mind and hurt it by
reminding him of something he would fain forget. Insanity repelled him
in the same violent manner, and all who knew him intimately when he
was writing his book on Hugo Wolf will remember that Wolf’s warped and
poisoned psychology obsessed and dominated him.

But often Newman would spend an evening in playing modern songs to
us—Bantock’s _Ferishtah’s Fancies_, Wolf’s _Mörike Lieder_, and so on.
I can see him now as, his clever, rather saturnine face abundantly
alive, he described Richard Strauss’s _Ein Heldenleben_, telling us how
the music of the harps stained the texture of the music in a magical
way, like one flinging wine on some secretly coloured fabric. Those
evenings are to me among the most valued of my life. I remember how my
wife and I used to walk home under a long avenue of trees very late in
the spring nights, the gummy smell of buds in our nostrils, Newman’s
voice still in our ears, and our minds fermenting deliciously with a
kind of happiness we had not experienced before.

Those days are gone for ever: days of a recovered youth; evenings that
were romantic just because they were evenings; nights when, in silence,
one dreamed long and long, the body sunk deep in unconsciousness, the
soul ranging and mounting and, in the morning, returning to its home
subtly changed and infinitely refreshed.... Newman opened for me a
world which, but for him, I do not think I ever should have beheld;
nor, indeed, should I ever have been aware of that world’s existence.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have written of Samuel Langford elsewhere in this book, and I have
little to add here. He succeeded Newman on _The Manchester Guardian_,
and I recall the curiosity with which many of us read his first
articles, fearing that anything he might write must of necessity fall
so far below Newman’s high standard as to be unreadable. We were soon
reassured. Langford and Newman have little in common, and there is no
basis upon which one can compare them. And, at first, Langford had to
feel his way, to master his _métier_, to acquire some of his literary
technique....

Our respective newspaper offices were situated near each other, and on
our way from the Free Trade Hall he used often to persuade me to drink
with him before we began our work. “We shall do each other good,” he
would say. And his short, ungainly figure, with its thick neck carrying
a nobly-shaped head, would make its way to the bar where, placing a
pile of music on the counter, he would turn to me and talk, both of
us forgetting to order our drinks, and neither of us caring for the
lateness of the hour.... Next morning, he would frequently come round
to my house immediately after breakfast, look in at the window of my
study, and wave a newspaper in the air. I was always deep in work, for
at that time I reviewed eight or ten books every week, but I remember
no occasion on which I did not welcome him most gladly. And sometimes
I would spend an afternoon in his great garden, worshipping flowers,
and watch him as, with fumbling hands, he turned the face of a blossom
to the sky and looked at it with I know not what thoughts. I know
nothing of horticulture, but Langford knows everything, and often he
would talk, more to himself than to me, about the deep mysteries of his
science. And, saying farewell at the little gate, he would sometimes
crush into my arms a large sheaf of coloured leaves and flowers, wave
an awkward hand, and shamble back to his low-built, picturesque house
set deep in blooms. Though twenty years my senior, neither he nor I
felt the long spell of years lying between us. And sometimes I am
tempted to go back to Manchester to renew a friendship for the loss of
which all the great happiness that London has brought me has, it seems
at times, been but inadequate compensation.

       *       *       *       *       *

During my three years as musical critic on _The Manchester Courier_ I
had some curious experiences, and to me the most curious of them all
was the persistent manner in which attempts were made by people in
Berlin to enlist my sympathies on behalf of an extremely able musician,
Oskar Fried. It almost seemed to me that a secret society existed in
Germany for the sole purpose of getting Oskar Fried a job in England.
Letters written in English came to me from total strangers, informing
me at great length and with stupid tautology that Fried was the one
hope of musical Young Germany. He had Ideals; he was a Leader; he had
the Prophetic Vision; he was the man who was going to promote and lead
a new Romantic Movement. “Very good,” said I to myself, “but what on
earth has all this to do with me?”

I was not long in finding out. A young Englishman resident in Berlin,
and obviously deeply saturated with the German spirit, wrote to me to
say that, in his opinion, Fried was the only man in Europe to fill the
post that Dr Richter had vacated as conductor of the Hallé Concerts
Society in Manchester. The letter arrived at a time when various
musicians were being, as it were, “tried” as conductors of the Hallé
Concerts, and my unknown correspondent was anxious that Fried should be
invited to conduct one or two concerts. To this letter I sent a polite
but non-committal reply. I knew Oskar Fried’s name just as I knew the
names of a dozen pushing German conductors; but I knew no more. My
persistent correspondent, to whom I will give the name of Purvis, wrote
again, sending me a typewritten copy of a book he had written on his
friend. It was a highfalutin document of idolatry. Fried was his idol,
and Purvis gushed and gushed and gushed again. But the whole thing was
done with truly Germanic thoroughness. I felt that I was being “got
at,” and though I resented it, I was greatly amused. I led him on. I
was anxious to see this gushing disciple, this seeming advertising
agent, this, as it appeared to me, wholly Germanised Englishman. So I
replied to him a second time, and one evening he called upon me. He
was a boy of twenty-one with a beard, a manner that was intended to be
ingratiating but was intolerably insolent, and a self-assurance truly
Napoleonic. He tickled me hugely and, as I have more than a grain of
malice in me, I opened out to him, flattered him heavily, and talked
music with him. But, though he loved the flattery, he was level-headed
enough to stick to his point—that I should do all in my power to secure
for Oskar Fried the Hallé conductorship. And he ended the interview
with the astonishing announcement that Fried had already been engaged
by the Hallé Concerts Society to conduct two of their concerts.

By what devious and subterranean ways this was achieved, I do not know,
but I have no doubt that scores of influential Germans in Manchester
were approached in a similar way to what I was.

Oskar Fried, with his idolatrous lackey, came uninvited to my house.
They arrived at ten and left at six. I found Fried a very remarkable
man—magnetic, of forceful personality, but with the manners and point
of view of a gutter-snipe. He asked me point-blank what I could do for
him.

“In what way?” I asked him, through Purvis, our interpreter.

“It is obvious in what way,” returned Purvis, without passing on the
question to Fried.

“Well,” said I, “I have already written about Fried in the papers.
And, really, I have no influence. I am not very popular with the Hallé
Concerts Society people, and if I were to begin to recommend Fried....
But, in any case, I have not yet heard your friend conduct. It is
impossible for me to recommend a man of whose talents I know nothing
save by hearsay. You see that, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” said Purvis. “You are a musical critic in
Manchester, whilst I am a musical critic in Berlin, and I tell you that
Fried is the man you want here. Surely that is enough? You must take it
from me. _I_ say it.”

I smiled and, glancing at Fried, watched his thin, eager face, with its
peering eyes which looked inquiringly first at Purvis and then at me.

Purvis came next day and the day after that, and I began to wonder
in precisely what relation he stood to Fried. When together, they
seemed to be just business friends, and it occurred to me that the
long typewritten _Life of Fried_ that Purvis had written was merely
a gigantic piece of bluff. Finally, I decided to cut both men adrift
altogether, and the next time Purvis called I was out.

When I heard Fried conduct, I at once recognised his great powers: he
had undoubted genius. But he was never invited to become the permanent
conductor of the Hallé Concerts Society. Perchance his table manners
were adversely reported upon by Dr Brodsky, or Mr Gustave Behrens, or
the discreet and reserved Mr Forsyth.




CHAPTER XIII

MANCHESTER PEOPLE


If there is one thing more than another that the ordinary person cannot
endure, it is to hear a man from Manchester praising his own city.
Somebody from Leeds may tell him how beautiful a town Leeds is, and
he will not turn a hair; he will listen unruffled to a Liverpudlian
discoursing on the peculiar glories of the great city on the Mersey;
but if the man from Manchester wishes to be tolerated, he must never
let fall a word in praise of the place that witnessed his astounding
birth. Why this is so, I cannot explain. I merely record the fact.

So, for the moment, I will not praise Manchester. I will go even
farther than that. I will agree with you that it rains there every
day, that it is the ugliest city in Britain, that it is cocksure
and conceited, that its politics are damnable, that its free trade
principles are loathsome, and that its public men are aitchless
and gross. I will, I say, agree to all this. You may say anything
disagreeable you like about Manchester, and I shall not care.
Nevertheless, if I could not live in London, Manchester is the city to
which I would go. I have stayed in Athens, and Athens is a marvellous
city; I know my Paris, and Paris is not without fascination; I have
been to Cairo, and the bazaars of Cairo seemed to me so wonderful that
I held my breath as I passed through them; I know Antwerp and some of
the half-dead cities of Belgium, and in Bruges I have felt as decadent
as any nasty Belgian poet. But these places are not Manchester. They
are not so glorious as Manchester, not so vital, not so romantic, not
so adventurous.... But already I have broken my word: I have begun to
praise Manchester in my second paragraph. Let me begin a third.

It might be thought that the centre of Manchester’s intellectual life
is the University, but this is not so. Nor is it the Cathedral, nor
the big technical schools, nor yet the Gaiety Theatre. These things
count, but none of them precisely radiates intellectual energy. You do
not (unless you wish to be disappointed) go to the Bishop for ideas,
or to the man of business for culture, nor to Miss Horniman for a wide
and generous view of life. For these things, and for many other things
besides, you go to _The Manchester Guardian_. In _The Daily Mail Year
Book_, against the entry _Manchester Guardian_, you will find these
words: “The best newspaper in the world.” Now, you would imagine that
if _The Daily Mail_ really believed that, _The Daily Mail_ would strain
every nerve to be as like _The Manchester Guardian_ as possible. But
Lord Northcliffe knows better than that. He knows, we all know, that
the best newspaper in the world is not going to be the best seller
in the world. The word “best,” when applied to a newspaper, does not
signify a newspaper that shrieks louder than any other newspaper, that
has the greatest number of “stunts,” that lays reputations low in
the dust, that holds Cabinet Ministers in the hollow of its hand. It
signifies, among other things, a paper whose editor will not sacrifice
a single ideal in order to increase his circulation, who has the power
of infusing his staff with his own enthusiasms, and who regards the
arts as a necessary part of a decent human existence.

_The Daily Mail_ once upon a time compelled the whole of the British
Isles to start growing sweet-peas. That is one kind of power. That is
the kind of power that _The Manchester Guardian_ does _not_ possess.

Yet, I ask you, is there a more irritating newspaper in the whole of
Christendom than _The Manchester Guardian_? How many times have we
not all thrown it down in disgust and vowed never to read it again,
only to buy it faithfully next morning? It would sometimes appear that
every crank in England is busily engaged in airing his crazy views in
its correspondence columns. It would sometimes appear that the three
greatest highbrows in the country had laid their heads together to
write the leading article. It would sometimes appear that conscientious
objectors were really the only generous, manly and heroic people left
in this mad world.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let me tell you a true story of a man who for years has been, and
still is, on the staff of _The Manchester Guardian_. I tell this
strange story, partly because it _is_ strange, and partly because it
illustrates so finely the kind of reverence that so many citizens of
Manchester have for the best paper in the world.

Some thirty years ago a male child was born to a worthy and not
unprosperous man in Manchester. Now this man had one faith, one
gospel, one ambition. His faith was of the Liberal persuasion. (Why,
may I ask in passing, do people refer to Jews as men and women of the
Jewish “persuasion”? Can a man, indeed, be persuaded to Jewry?) But to
resume. His faith, as I said, was Liberal, his gospel _The Manchester
Guardian_, his ambition to have some close connection with that paper.
Being unfitted by the nature of his own talents to join the staff, he
resolved that in the fullness of time that distinction should belong to
his son. So he wrote to the editor, thus:

  Sir,—I have the honour to inform you that last night my wife
  gave birth to a son. It is my ambition that, when his intellect
  is ripe and his powers mature, he shall be chosen by you as a
  member of your staff. His education, his whole upbringing, shall
  be directed to that end. I shall report to you his progress from
  time to time.

  I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant,

                                                  —— ——.

I have not this letter before me; indeed, I have never seen it. But I
am assured it was couched in those or similar terms.

Years passed. Harry—we will call him Harry—survived the perils of
babyhood and was sent to a school for the sons of gentlemen, and the
editor was duly apprised of the fact. Harry studied hard, for his
ambition was even that of his father. Harry took scholarships, Harry
had a private tutor, and, eventually, Harry went to the ’varsity. In
the meantime, reports passed at regular intervals from Harry’s father
to the editor of _The Manchester Guardian_, who now, as nurses say,
began to sit up and take notice. He desired to meet Harry. He did meet
him. Harry took an honours degree, came back to Manchester, and was
duly installed among the blessed, where he still is. Harry’s dream,
Harry’s father’s dream, is fulfilled. But are those reports, I wonder,
still being written. As, for example:

  Sir,—I have the honour to inform you that my son, Harold,
  contemplates marriage. It has always appeared to me that the
  married state is peculiarly useful in developing....

       *       *       *       *       *

But not all the members of _The Manchester Guardian_ staff are ’varsity
men: for which, indeed, one may be thankful. The men of letters whom
they admire most—Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad and Arnold
Bennett—never even dimly espied the towers and spires of Oxford and
Cambridge. But the paper has the manner of Oxford, though not Oxford’s
intellectual outlook.

For myself, I have never been on the staff of this paper, though I have
written scores of articles for its commercial pages. Some of the most
distinguished intellects in the country write for it regularly—Allan
Monkhouse, whose play, _Mary Broome_, has not been and scarcely can be
sufficiently praised; C. E. Montague, now in the Army; Professor C. H.
Herford, whose scholarship is in excess of his human feeling; Samuel
Langford, whom I have dealt with elsewhere in this book; J. E. Agate,
whose fastidious style is a pure delight. Indeed, nearly every man who
can write and who has something definitely new to say will find the
columns of this paper open to him.

       *       *       *       *       *

The drawback to social life in Manchester is that there is no central
meeting-place where kindred spirits can foregather. It is true, there is
the Arts Club, but when you have said the Arts Club is there, you have
said all that it is necessary to say about the Arts Club. It is true,
also, that if you stroll into the American bar of the Midland Hotel
at almost any hour of the day, you are pretty sure to meet someone
amusing; but you really can’t make music, or rehearse plays, or play
the fool (at least, not to any great extent) in an American bar. The
consequence of this lack of a good democratic club is that all kinds
of little coteries are formed, and it is about one of these little
coteries that I wish to tell you.

Of course, Manchester is not London. You know that. In London, if you
don’t like one play, you can go to another. If the music that Sir Henry
J. Wood gives you is not to your taste, you can go to hear Mr Landon
Ronald, or (if truly desperate) join the Philharmonic Society. But in
Manchester this is not so. You have either to like the music or do
without it. Well, some years ago we didn’t like it, and Jack Kahane,
talking to me one day in a mood of disgust, casually remarked:

“I’m going to kick Richter out of Manchester. We’ve had enough of him.”

With Kahane, to think is to act, and within a week he had formed the
Manchester Musical Society and begun a Press campaign against the
famous old conductor. This Society was Kahane’s new toy, and he played
with it to some purpose. We talked a great deal, gave innumerable
concerts, hired lecturers, wrote articles, and held enormously
thrilling committee meetings. Our programmes consisted almost
exclusively of new and very “modern” music, just the kind of music that
the guarantors of the Hallé Concerts Society detested. We were all
for the new spirit in music, and some of us in our enthusiasm liked
new music just because it _was_ new. In three months Richter began to
totter on his throne and, later on, he resigned his post, and now Sir
Thomas Beecham most fitly reigns in his stead.

This little Society was extremely typical of Manchester. It was typical
because it was enthusiastic, because every member of it worked hard
for no monetary reward, and because it had a definite object in view
and achieved that object. Above all, it was young; the spirit of it
was young. I have never found in London a band of young men and women
putting their noses to the grindstone for months on end with the sole
object of achieving an artistic ideal. People in London exploit art,
but they do not work at art for art’s sake. Manchester is England’s
musical metropolis. Elgar said so ten years ago; Beecham echoed his
words the other day. I claim for Manchester also that the level of
culture is much higher than it is in London. In proportion to its
size Manchester has during the last fifty years given to England more
writers, musicians, politicians, actors, business men, reformers and
social workers of distinction than any other city.... But all this, I
think, is a little offensive——

And yet how difficult it is for the stranger to understand
Manchester!—and difficult in spite of the fact that Manchester loves
being understood.

Mr J. Nicol Dunn, who, as editor of _The Morning Post_ and, later,
of _The Johannesburg Star_, did most brilliant work, utterly failed
to understand Lancashire people when he came to edit _The Manchester
Courier_. I think he regarded them as a peculiar race of savages. “A
wealthy Lancashire manufacturer,” he said to me once, “will ask you to
dinner and will order a bumper of champagne. But if you ask him for a
half-guinea subscription for a political society, he will give you a
curt refusal. What is to be done with such folk?” Dunn thought us hard
and unimaginative, incapable of seeing in what direction lay our best
interests, and utterly childish in our notions of political economy.

“Cumberland,” he said, unexpectedly, one evening, “is your father a
Conservative?”

“He is,” said I.

“What paper does he take?”

“_The Manchester Guardian._”

“I _knew_ he did! Of course he would take _The Manchester Guardian_!
Good Lord! To what a strange set of people have I come!”

And he grunted and went on with his work.

My native town is young and strenuous and guileless. Its vanity is the
vanity of the clever youngster who loves “showing off” in his exuberant
way. So young and guileless is it that it is the easiest thing in
the world to deceive it. How easy it is to deceive Manchester is
illustrated by the case of Captain Schlagintweit, the German consul for
some years in that city.

Schlagintweit was an enormous German whose mission in life it was to
induce Manchester to believe that Germany was our bosom friend, that
Germany’s first thought was to help Great Britain, and that the two
peoples were so closely akin in their spiritual aims that a quarrel
between them, even a temporary misunderstanding, was utterly and for
ever impossible. As I have said, he was enormous: a great man with a
fair round belly: a man who talked a lot and ate a lot, and who, when
he talked even with a solitary companion, spoke as though he were
addressing a huge audience. He “bounded” beautifully and with so much
aplomb and zest that it seemed right he should bound and do nothing
else.

I met him everywhere—in the Press Club, at concerts, at the Schiller
Anstalt, in restaurants; and nine times out of ten he was in the
company either of a journalist, a member of the City Council, or a
Member of Parliament. I never knew any man who worked so hard for his
country as he did. He distilled sweet poison into our ears and we
believed him every time.

I must confess I felt rather flattered by the way in which he
constantly sought my company. I thought for a long time that he
loved me for my own sweet sake, and it was not until the, for him,
tragic _dénouement_ came that I realised that it was because I was a
journalist, and for that reason alone, he dined and wined me and talked
discreetly of Germany’s heartache for Great Britain. As I very rarely
wrote on international politics, I do not think his evil counsel had
any appreciable effect on my work, but it is impossible to imagine that
his overflowing bonhomie, his cleverness, his subtle scheming did not
greatly influence the thought of Manchester. He was made much of by
more than one member of _The Manchester Guardian_ staff.

His daughter came to sing at a concert I organised, and it was after
this concert that he so overwhelmed me with flattery that I looked at
him in amazement. I said to myself: “You are a humbug.” But on looking
at him again, I said: “No; you’re not a humbug: you’re a fool.” A third
scrutiny, however, left me in doubt, and I said: “I’m damned if I know
what you are.” Certainly I never suspected he was first cousin to a
spy, that he was paid handsomely by his Government for his propaganda
work in Manchester, and that he secretly despised and hated us.

Shortly after war broke out, many things were discovered about
Schlagintweit that had hitherto been unknown, and he was led,
handcuffed, to Knutsford gaol, but not before he had broken through the
five-mile radius to which, as a German, he was confined, and not before
he had motored through a far-off district where tens of thousands of
our soldiers were encamped.

I do not believe London would have been deceived by him, and I am sure
that Ecclefechan wouldn’t. Yet Manchester was.

Manchester is young, ingenuous, trusting, guileless.

       *       *       *       *       *

Have you ever noticed (but you must have done!) that the self-made
man—and half the prosperous men in Manchester are self-made—will
frequently part with a ten-pound note much more readily than he will
with a few pence? The economical habits of his youth still cling to and
dominate him, and he counts the halfpence and is careless of the pounds.

One Saturday night in the summer, I was taking a walk with a friend in
the country ten or twelve miles from Manchester. Our talk was of County
cricket, in which my companion—a most magnificent person, with ships
sailing on half the oceans of the world—was greatly interested. For
three days Lancashire had been playing Yorkshire a very close match,
and we knew that by now the game would be over.

“We sha’n’t know the result till we get _The Sunday Chronicle_
to-morrow,” said X. regretfully.

But, five minutes later, we met, most miraculously, a newsboy with a
bundle of papers under his arm.

X. took a penny from his pocket, handed it to the boy, and received
_The Evening News_ in exchange.

“Very sorry, sir,” said the boy, “but I’ve got no change. I’ve got no
halfpennies.”

X. turned to me.

“Oh, I’ve no change either,” said I, amused.

With an exclamation of annoyance, X. handed the paper back to the boy
and pocketed his penny.

After we had proceeded a few paces:

“Lancashire has won by two wickets,” he said. “I saw it in the corner
in the Stop Press news.”

Now, X. had great riches.

An incredible story, isn’t it? But it is true, and it gives you the
self-made Manchester man—at least, one side of him—in a nutshell.

       *       *       *       *       *

It used to be a great delight to me to see Dr J. Kendrick Pyne walking
near the Cathedral or in Albert Square, for he used to suggest to me
a bygone age and a remote place. His short, thick-set figure used to
move with the utmost precision, unhurried, unperturbed. His plump,
clean-shaven face, his well-shaped head, surmounted by a new silk hat
of old-fashioned shape, his gold-rimmed spectacles with the peering
eyes behind them, his inevitable umbrella, and his correct dress—all
these conspired to make a figure of great dignity, a figure that always
seemed to carry about with it the atmosphere of the Cathedral whose
organ he played for so many smooth years. There hung about him the
tradition of the famous Dr Wesley.

In character and disposition also he belonged to a different era. He
never underestimated the importance of the position he held in the city
as Cathedral organist, City organist, and Professor at the Manchester
Royal College of Music, and wherever he went and in the execution of
whatever work to which he set his mind, his word was law. A very fine
type of Englishman. He would brook no interference from Bishop or
Dean, and his combative, upright spirit fought unceasingly to uphold
the dignity of his art.

His childlike vanity was most alluring, and I used to love him for it
and respect him for the way he clung to his belief in himself.

One day he took me to the town hall to look once more at the wonderful
series of frescoes that Ford Madox Brown painted in the great hall.
When he came to the fresco picturing the Duke of Bridgewater at the
ceremonial “opening” of the Bridgewater Canal, he pointed to the
features of the Duke, and inquired:

“Whom do you think he resembles?”

There was just a note of anxiety in his voice as though he were afraid
I should not be able to answer his question. For the life of me I could
not think of anyone who resembled Madox Brown’s Duke, and I stood
silent. Pyne then turned his face full upon me, and again inquired,
somewhat imperiously:

“Whom do you think he resembles?”

“Why,” exclaimed I, guessing wildly, “it is a portrait of you!”

“Yes,” said he, with naïve satisfaction, “it is. I sat to Madox Brown
for the great Duke. The portrait is immortal.”

But whether the portrait was immortal because Kendrick Pyne had sat for
it, or Madox Brown had painted it, I did not gather.

On another occasion he again used the word “immortal,” but this time it
was in reference to one of his own works.

“You know,” said he, apropos of something I have forgotten, “I should
have made a name as a writer if I had gone in for literature, but I
felt that music had stronger claims upon me. My organ-playing will not,
so to speak, live, because the art of the executant necessarily dies
with him. But my Mass in A flat is, in itself, enough to keep my name
immortal.”

There was such innocent satisfaction in his tone, such a bland look
upon his face, that he seemed to me like a delicious grown-up child.

But have not all men of genius this superb confidence in themselves? I
am convinced they have. Could they possibly “carry on” without it? But
only a few men of genius have the courage, or the artlessness, to speak
what is really in their hearts.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of the “characters” of Manchester, a man who loves being a
character, is Mr Charles Rowley, who for an unconscionable number
of years has been doing splendid educational and recreative work
in Ancoats, a congeries of slums, a district of appalling poverty.
Here, in the Islington Hall, on most Sunday afternoons, one can hear
first-rate chamber music and, as a rule, a lecture delivered by some
local or London celebrity. I myself have heard Bernard Shaw and Hilaire
Belloc lecture there and, after the lectures, I have gone to the clean
little cottage where Mr Rowley occasionally entertains a few chosen
friends to tea and talk.

I do not know if Mr Rowley is a Manchester man, but he is of a type
that I have found only in that city. He is combative and energetic;
he is a little red flame of enthusiasm. Though, no doubt, interested
in and pleased with himself, he is equally interested in local public
affairs and equally pleased with the people for whom he works. His
broad and pungent humour is just the kind of humour the so-called
lower classes understand, and his energy of mind and readiness of wit
are remarkable. I have seen him on several occasions talking to—or,
perhaps, talking _with_ is what I really mean—a huge audience in order
to keep them in good humour until the arrival of the lecturer of the
afternoon. He bandies jokes with anybody who cares to shout to him, and
he has the true democrat’s gift—he never by a look, a word or a gesture
implies that he is in any way superior to the meanest member of his
audience. These rough people love him, admire him and laugh at him.
And, of course, he is able to laugh at himself. Perhaps, all things
considered, he is the most human man I have met, and I like to think
that in him the spirit of Manchester is embodied. I do not mean you to
infer that I think the spirit of Manchester is the finest spirit in the
world, but I do believe that it is a spirit that might well be emulated
by many other towns.

What is that spirit? Well, Manchester has a sincere and very proper
respect for success, and particularly for success that has been won
in the face of great difficulties. Manchester loves education and
knowledge, not only because these things are useful in achieving
success, but also for their own sake. Manchester is public-spirited,
proud of its traditions, loyal to its principles. It is cultured—not in
the super-refined, lily-fingered sense, but in the sense that it loves
literature, music, art. It is enthusiastic about these things; it works
hard to come by them and treasures them when they are obtained.

One could, of course, say many disagreeable and true things about
Manchester, but as these have been said frequently by other people, I
refrain from repeating what is already known.




CHAPTER XIV

CHELSEA AND AUGUSTUS JOHN


There is a prevalent opinion that Chelsea is the British counterpart of
the Quartier Latin, but the resemblance each bears to the other is only
superficial. The Quartier Latin and respectability are poles asunder;
its population does not only never think of respectability, but it does
not know what it is. Parisian Bohemians have no use for it. They do not
condemn it, for it may suit others; for themselves, it is as useless as
yesterday’s dinner.

Chelsea is not in revolt against morals or anything else; for the
most part, it is quiet, law-abiding and hard-working. Very little is
demanded of new-comers; in order to obtain entrance to that magic land,
you must be a “good fellow,” you must have personality and a real love
of the arts, and you must be a democrat through and through. One thing
is never forgiven—a reference, however remote, to your own success. You
may be as successful as you like without creating the slightest envy,
but you must not thrust your success down other people’s throats.

My own introduction to Chelsea was rather of a wholesale kind; indeed,
it would be truer to say that Chelsea was introduced to me. One evening
Ivan Heald and I finished a rather strenuous day’s work at the same
time. I had just finished my daily column of chat for _The Daily
Citizen_ when the telephone rang. “Is that you, Gerald? ... Yes, Ivan
speaking.... Finished? ... Cheshire Cheese? Right-o! It’s now thirteen
minutes past seven; we’ll meet at sixteen minutes past.” So while he
ran down Shoe Lane, I ran up Bouverie Street and we met at the door
of that caravanserai where, sooner or later, one comes across all the
bright spirits of Fleet Street and every American sightseer who sets
his foot on our shores. We feasted and, replete, adjourned to the bar
for gossip. But there was no one there to gossip with and, presently,
Ivan said:

“Come to my flat and play Irish songs.”

“But your piano’s such a poor one. Much better come to my place and
listen to Wagner.”

So we jumped into a taxi and were soon racing through Sloane Square
for Chelsea Bridge on the way to my flat in Prince of Wales’s Road,
opposite Battersea Park. At the Bridge Heald tapped the window, and,
the taxi having stopped, he jumped out on to the pathway and promptly
closed the door upon me inside.

“And now,” said Ivan, “do you know what you are going to do?”

“Whatever you tell me, I suppose. What is it?”

“You’re going home in this cab to prepare your wife for a lot of
visitors. Tell her there will be ten or maybe twenty. We sha’n’t want
any food; we’ll bring that with us. All we shall want is coffee. Ask
her if she’ll make gallons of coffee, Gerald. For the women, you know.
There’ll be whisky for us, won’t there?” he added rather wistfully.
“Now trot along. I sha’n’t be a quarter of an hour behind you.”

“But, Ivan——”

“But me not a single but,” he said, grinning, and turned away.

Half-an-hour later a taxi-cab full of strangers carrying parcels
arrived at my flat. Heald was not with them. In answer to their ring,
my wife and I went to open the door to welcome them.

“Come right in,” we said. And then they told us who they were and we
told them who we were. A couple of minutes later another taxi full of
strangers arrived. Still no Ivan Heald. It was now about ten o’clock,
and during the following hour Chelsea people still kept arriving,
some in cabs, some on foot. It appeared that Heald had routed up half
the people he knew in Chelsea and told them that he had found someone
“new,” that we were just “it,” and that the sooner we all got to know
each other the better.

This “surprise party”—so dear to Americans—turned out a complete
success, though half the people had to sit on the floor. Norman Morrow,
away in a corner behind a pile of books, sang Irish songs, Herbert
Hughes played the piano in his brilliant way, and Harry Low and Eddie
Morrow, with two clever girl-models, acted plays that they invented on
the spur of the moment. Heald came in late, armed with loaves, butter,
cakes and fruit. Not until dawn (the month was June) did we separate.
I was to meet these delightful people many, many times later, but so
casual yet intimate was our relationship that I never heard—or, if I
heard, I soon forgot—the surnames of a few of them. We called each
other by our Christian names or by nicknames.

Perhaps of all the Chelsea people Augustus John is the most
interesting. We became acquainted at the Six Bells, the famous King’s
Road hostelry, and he took me to his studio near at hand. It was a big
barn-like place with a ridiculous little stove that burned fussily
somewhere near the entrance and from which you never felt any heat
unless, absent-mindedly, you sat on the stove itself. The studio was
crowded with work of all kinds, the most conspicuous canvas being
a huge crayon drawing of a group of gipsies. Augustus John planted
me in a chair in front of this, seated himself on another chair and
stared—not at the picture, but—at me! Now, I had been told that John
does not suffer fools gladly, and I suspected from his inquisitorial
glance that he was waiting to see if I was of the detested brood.
Sooner or later I should have to speak, and I groped despairingly in
my mind for something sensible yet not obvious to say about his bold,
vivid and arresting picture. Through sheer apprehensiveness I found
nothing, so, after gazing at the canvas for a few minutes, I rose and
passed on to the next picture. John’s large, luminous eyes followed me.

“You don’t like it,” he said, softly but decisively.

“Oh yes, I do,” I answered, “or, rather—what I mean is that ‘like’ is
not the right word. It attracts me and repels me at the same time. It
makes me curious—curious about the gipsies themselves, but more curious
still about the man who has drawn them. But you didn’t make it for
anyone to ‘like,’ did you?”

“No; I don’t suppose I thought of anyone at all. There the thing is, to
be taken or left, to be accepted by the onlooker or rejected.”

“Quite. But to me it is not a passive kind of picture at all. It
thrusts itself on to you very violently, I think, and it rather demands
to be ‘taken,’ as you put it. It is not like your _Smiling Woman_,
for instance, who mysteriously glides into one’s mind, wheedling her
way as she goes. Your gipsies assault the mind. Your picture is quite
contemptuous of opinion.”

He appeared to be satisfied, for he smiled; if I had proved myself a
fool, it was clear I was not the kind of fool he detested.

We met often after that. I would see him two or three times a week in
the Six Bells. He used to drink beer, and he would talk in his slow
way, or listen to me, nodding occasionally and saying just a word now
and again. But John is the least loquacious of men. His presence makes
you feel comfortable, not only because his personality is tolerant
and roomy, but because you know that if you are boring him he will
not think twice about edging away to the billiard-room or telling you
abruptly that he must be “off.” Like so many very hard workers, he
appears to be an accomplished loafer. I have never seen him at work; I
don’t know anybody who has. I have never heard anybody say: “John can’t
come to-night because he’s busy.” I expect that when the fever is on
him, he keeps at his easel night and day.

But perhaps you are wondering what Augustus John looks like? Have
you seen Epstein’s bust of him? Wonderfully good, of course;
extraordinarily good; but it is rather solemn—heavy, I mean. John is
not ponderous, and he does not wear the air of a prophet, and I have
never seen him look precisely like _that_. His hair is long.... Of
course, most of you will feel disposed to sneer at that; so should
I if it were anybody but John.... But he carries it off splendidly.
You know, even Liszt (at all events in his photographs) looked
frightfully conscious of his locks, but though John’s hair makes him
conspicuous, he does not appear conscious of his conspicuousness. He is
tall, deliberate in his movements, deep-voiced, very self-contained.
His shortish beard is red, and he has large eyes that, in some
extraordinary way, seem separate from his face; I mean, they belie it.
His features are so composed that one might think them expressionless;
but his eyes are brooding and deep and quiet. He has not the noisy,
fussy little eyes of the “trained observer,” the man who notices
everything and remembers nothing; he notices only what is essential to
him, the things that are necessary for him to notice.... Of course, I
haven’t described him in the least; I might have known I could not when
I began to try.... But it seems to me that the essential thing about
Augustus John is the quiet, lazy exterior which, in some peculiar way,
contrives to suggest hidden fires and volcanic energies. A Celt, of
course, and the mystery of the Celt hangs about him.

I think John loves few things so much as simply sitting back in a chair
and looking at people: ruminating upon them, as it were; chewing the
cud of his thoughts. I remember his coming to my flat on one occasion
at one o’clock in the morning when he knew there was a party there.
His eyes were very bright and he came in rather eagerly, and rather
eagerly also he sat and watched us, sipping cold coffee as he did so
and occasionally raising his voice into a half-shout when something
happened that amused him. But though he sat until nearly all our guests
had departed, he scarcely spoke at all.

And yet another evening I remember very vividly, an evening at Herbert
Hughes’s studio where, by candle-light, we used to have music every
Sunday evening and where, in the half darkness at the far end of that
long room, one could, if one wished, just sit and look on and perhaps
talk a little to one’s neighbour. There John sat in the dark, like a
Velasquez painting, his limbs thrown carelessly about, his head turned
gently towards a sparkling Irish girl who seemed to be teasing him.

It is only now, when I have set myself to write about him, that I
realise how little, after all, I know about Augustus John, though I
have met him so often. He reveals himself most generously in his work,
though even there he keeps back more than he discloses. But I think
that even to his closest friends he reveals very little, and that
perhaps is why so many legendary stories about him are afloat. He has
the mystery of Leonardo. One feels that his personality hides a great
and important secret, but one feels also that that secret will remain
hidden for ever. Sombre he is, sombre yet vital, sombre and full of
humour.

       *       *       *       *       *

Allusion to the impression that Augustus John gives of habitually
loafing reminds me that this characteristic is typical of Chelsea. They
are the most casual people in the world, and it is their casualness
that the worker-by-rote cannot understand. I know a score of studios
where one could walk in at any time of the day and be welcomed or, if
not welcomed, treated with most disarming frankness. If the owner of
the studio were busy on some work that had to be finished, he would
say: “There’s a drink there on the table and a smoke. Do what you like
but, for God’s sake, don’t talk!” Or: “Go round to the Bells, Old
Thing. I like you very much and all that sort of nonsense, but even you
can be a bit of a nuisance at ten in the morning. It’s like drinking
Benedictine before breakfast.” But receptions such as this latter are
very rare, and most artists—because they _are_ artists, I suppose—are
ready enough to throw down their work and play for half-an-hour.

I always think of Norman and Edwin Morrow as typical artists. Norman,
who died almost in harness a short time ago, was absolutely disdainful
of success, or perhaps it would be truer to say that he was disdainful
of the means by which success is usually won. I imagine him looking
upon certain successful men and their work and saying to himself: “Only
the distinguished nowadays are unknown.” But he would say this with his
tongue in his cheek, laughing at himself, and knowing that the dictum
is only half true. He liked admiration—what artist does not?—but people
who liked things of his that he himself did not approve of made him
“tired.”

Of course, those people who worship success—or, at all events, admire
it—are very difficult to bring to the belief that many artists are
almost indifferent to it. “Artists may _pretend_ to care nothing for
success, especially those who have failed to achieve it,” they say,
“but surely it is a case of sour grapes?” No man except a fool, it is
true, is wholly indifferent to money, but the type of artist of whom I
am now writing is tremendously casual about it. If money comes his way,
as it has in John’s case, well and good; if not, it can very well be
done without. The artist lives almost entirely for the moment, for the
moment is the only thing of which he is certain. Yesterday has gone and
has melted into yesterday’s Seven Thousand Years; to-morrow is not yet
here and may never arrive; therefore, _carpe diem_.

Norman Morrow had the kind of subtlety and refinement that one finds
in the work of Henry James. I very rarely came away from his studio
without feeling that I had given myself “away,” that he had seen
through all my insincerities, that he was aware of the precise motives
of my acts even when I was not aware of them myself. But, being a swift
analyst of his own emotions and a constant diver after the real motive
in himself, he was tolerant of others and very slow to condemn.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is incorrect to assume, as many people do, that there is in Chelsea
anything of the atmosphere of Henri Murger’s Bohemia. Nowadays, in
London artistic and literary circles, only the idle and incompetent
starve. Murger’s young artists, moreover, are absurdly self-conscious
and flabby and childish. Chelsea men and women are keen-witted,
level-headed, and experienced people of the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

All the faddists, of course, go to live at Letchworth, but there are
in Chelsea a few groups of young “intellectuals” who are good enough
to supply comic relief in the “between” days when one is bored. One
Saturday evening, having been to the Chelsea Palace of Varieties and
feeling restless and disinclined for bed, I remembered that I had a
standing invitation to go to a certain studio where, I was told, I
should be welcomed whenever I cared to go. I went and discovered a
handful of young men sitting round the fire and directing the affairs
of the Empire.

The little group of intellectuals (all from Cambridge—or was it
Oxford?) hailed me and fell to talking about politics, socialism,
Fabianism, Sidney Webbism, and so forth. All very bright and clever,
and all very promising, but the wonderful conceit of it all! Some of
them were men with brilliant university honours, but they had not even
the wisdom, the sense of proportion, of children. They idolised Bernard
Shaw and spoke of H. G. Wells in terms of contempt. They really thought
that the destinies of our Empire were directed by the universities, and
their priggish little minds were eager to “control” the poor, to direct
their work, even to fix the size of their families....

I sat silent, wondering if these men represented the best—or even the
average—that our universities produced in immediately pre-war days. I
looked at their long, white fingers, their longish hair, their long
noses, and I listened to their drawl which was not quite a drawl, and
I thought that their conversation was, what Keats would have called
it, “a little noiseless noise.” They had brains, of course; they were
smartish and “clever.” But what are brains without experience and what
is cleverness without judgment? These men, I felt, would never gain
experience, for they saw in life only what they wished to see, denying
the rest. Life to them was a vast disorder which Oxford and Cambridge,
as represented by them, was about to put right. I imagine Mrs Sidney
Webb and Mr Beatrice Webb (as _The New Age_ once so happily called
them) walking over from Grosvenor Road to Chelsea and smiling blandly,
and with huge satisfaction, at their ridiculous disciples.

I have described these people because, though they do not represent
Chelsea, they are to be met with there in considerable numbers. They
have flats and studios full of knick-knacks, flats in which you will
find art curtains, studios in which there is ascetic severity and where
one has triscuits for breakfast.




CHAPTER XV

MISCELLANEOUS

  Arthur Henderson, M.P.—Lord Derby—Miss Elizabeth Robins—Frank
  Mullings—Harold Bauer—Emil Sauer—Vladimir de Pachmann


I quite forget what particular concatenation of circumstances brought
me into personal touch with Mr Arthur Henderson, M.P., but I rather
think that when I waited for him at Waterloo Station I was acting
the part of messenger-boy. Perhaps I delivered a letter or telegram
to him, or I may have given him a verbal message. All I remember is,
that something very important had happened, and it was necessary
that Mr Arthur Henderson should be apprised of this happening at the
earliest possible moment. So I volunteered to meet him at Waterloo.

We walked across the station together, and I was depressingly aware of
a rather bulky form with a Manchester kind of face. He spoke heavily
and uttered commonplaces that fell dead on his very lips. I could feel
his self-importance radiating from him, and I gathered that I was
supposed to be in the presence of a very exceptional person indeed. But
I did not feel that he was exceptional. There has never been a moment
since I reached manhood that I haven’t known that my intellect is of
finer texture than that of the five thousand who elbow each other on
the Manchester Exchange, and it seemed to me that night at Waterloo
Station that Mr Henderson would be very much at home on the Manchester
Exchange. I recollect most vividly that he bored me very much and
that, offering him some plausible excuse, I parted from him before we
had crossed the river, and darted away to more congenial people.

A few weeks previous to this encounter I had heard Mr Henderson give
an “address” in a Nonconformist chapel. An “address,” I am given to
understand, is a kind of homely sermon in which the speaker talks to
his audience in a friendly and distinctly unbending manner. He seeks to
improve them, to lead them to higher and better things: in a word, to
make them more like himself.... I have not the faintest recollection of
what drove me inside this Nonconformist chapel, but I cannot conceive
I went there of my own free will. I suppose that someone paid me to go
there. But my mind retains a very clear picture of a pulpit containing
a man with a face so like other faces that, sometimes, when I examine
it, it seems to belong to Mr Jackson of Messrs Jackson & Lemon, the
famous auctioneers of Boodlestown, and at other times it is owned
by Mr Brownjonesrobinson who, I need scarcely point out, is known
everywhere.... Really, I have no intention of being violently rude.
This question of faces is important. A face should express a soul. No
great man whose portrait I have seen possessed a commonplace face.

The address was heavy, obvious and dull. I was taken back twenty years
to my boyhood when stern parents compelled me to go to a Wesleyan
chapel one hundred and three times a year (twice every Sunday and once
on Christmas Day); on most of those hundred and three occasions I used
to hear exhortations to be “good,” not, so to speak, for the love of
the thing, but because being “good” paid. Mr Arthur Henderson, Samuel
Smiles _redivivus_, proved that it paid. He didn’t say: “Look at me!”
but, all the same, we did look at him. The spectacle to most of his
congregation was, I suppose, encouraging; me, it didn’t excite. I can
well believe that, as I stepped out of the building, I said to myself:
“No, Gerald. We will remain as we are. The penalties of virtue are much
too heavy for us to pay.”

       *       *       *       *       *

One Saturday evening I journeyed to Liverpool with twenty or thirty
other newspaper men to dine with Lord Derby. Pressmen are accustomed to
this kind of entertainment from public men, and their host generally
contrives to be exceptionally agreeable. It would be putting it very
crudely to state that these dinners are intended as a bribe: let me
therefore say that they serve the purpose of smoothing the way for
the dissemination of some propaganda or other. To the best of my
recollection, Lord Derby had no other purpose in view than the laudable
and kindly intention of making the journalists of Manchester and
Liverpool better acquainted with one another.

After dinner, various ladies and gentlemen from the neighbouring music
halls provided us with an excellent entertainment, and I can now see
Lord Derby smilingly and courteously receiving these artists and
making them feel that they, like ourselves, were honoured guests, and
not merely paid mimes. He seemed to me then, as he has always seemed
to me, our dearly loved, bluff but unfailingly courteous national
John Bull. He is, I think, the most British man with whom I have ever
spoken—honest, brave, resourceful, self-sacrificing, fond of good
company and good cheer, hail-fellow-well-met yet a trifle reserved and
not a little cautious, blunt but considerate of others’ feelings. Some
of us collected signatures on the backs of our menus, but when Lord
Derby had written his name on the top of mine I left it there alone,
not caring to see other names mingling with his: perhaps feeling that
no other name of those present was worthy to stand beneath his name.

He spoke to us, but his speech had nothing in it save welcome.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I see, as I frequently do, the newspapers and reviews praising
the works of Mrs Humphry Ward and describing her as the greatest of
living British female writers, I rub my eyes in astonishment and wonder
why Miss Elizabeth Robins is overlooked. Mrs Humphry Ward can, it
is true, tell a story: she knows well much of the behind-the-scenes
life of modern politics: moreover, she is a woman of the world with a
highly cultivated mind and a varied experience of life. But if ever
there was a woman without genius, without, indeed, the true literary
gift, she is that woman. She cannot fire the imagination, quicken the
pulse, or stir the heart. She plays with puppets and never reveals
life. Miss Robins, on the contrary, strikes deep into life—cleaves it
asunder, disrupts it, opens it out to our gaze. She has the gift of
tragedy.... When I think concentratedly of Mrs Humphry Ward’s books, I
remember atmospheres, social environments, a few incidents, and I see
dimly about half-a-dozen pictures. But when my mind dwells on _The Open
Question_ and _The Magnetic North_, I see and hear and touch live men
and women.

I know nothing of Miss Elizabeth Robins’ private affairs, but if my
intuition guides me rightly, she has had a tragic life and her life
is still and always will be tragic. Her temperament is not dissimilar
to Charlotte Brontë’s, that great little woman whose sense of the
ridiculous was so great but whose power of expressing it was so small.

Miss Robins, as you all know, entered the ranks of the militant
suffragettes, and it was at a meeting of the W.S.P.U. that I met her
and heard her speak. In the real sense, she has no gift of speech. When
she has to address an audience, she prepares her words beforehand,
memorises them, and then delivers them with the lucidity, the passion
and the eloquence of a great actress. I think I have heard all the
best-known women speakers from Lady Henry Somerset up to Mrs Pankhurst,
but though my admiration of Mrs Pankhurst’s brave and proud gifts
scarcely knows a limit, I consider that Miss Robins surpasses her in
her power of sweeping an audience along with her and in her great gift
of quickening the spirit and urging it upwards to the heights of an
enthusiasm that does not quickly die....

Perhaps in reading this book you have not gathered the impression
that I am afflicted by a devastating bashfulness that, always at the
wrong moments, robs me of speech and makes me appear an imbecile.
Nevertheless that affliction is mine. The more I like and reverence
people, the more bereft of speech I become in their presence. It is so
when I am with Orage, though we have been intimate enough for him to
address me in letters as “My dear Gerald”; it is so with Frank Harris
(but perhaps you think I ought not to “reverence” him—yet his genius
compels me to); and it is so with Ernest Newman and Granville Bantock.
And when Miss Elizabeth Robins’ hand met mine in a firm clasp and she
spoke some words of greeting, I had not a word to say. Like an ashamed
schoolboy, I walked, speechless and fuming, from the room and kicked
myself in the passage outside.... I know this shyness has its origin
in vanity, but then I _am_ vain. But I am a fool to allow my vanity to
gain the upper hand of my speech.

       *       *       *       *       *

Frank Mullings!... Well, I have more than once said that singers bore
me, but if a man is bored by Mullings, he is worse than a fool. One
always has a special kind of affection for men whom one has known in
obscurity and of whom one’s prophecies of great things has come true.
Mullings has, indeed, travelled far since those jolly days when we used
to meet in Sydney Grew’s little flat in Birmingham and make music
with Grieg, Bantock and Wolf for company. A great “lad,” as we say in
Lancashire: a great fat boy without affectation, without jealousy,
without even the pride that all great artists should possess: a
generous, simple-hearted man who is capable of travelling a couple of
hundred miles to sing, without fee, the songs of Bantock, just because
he loved those songs and wanted others to love them.

He was always untidy, short-sighted, and either very depressed or very
jolly. His moods were thorough, and they infected you. In Birmingham,
in days when only a few, and those few powerless to help, were aware
of his astonishing gifts, he was serene and happy. I remember him,
Sydney Grew and myself sitting on the floor of Grew’s very narrow
drawing-room, our backs to the wall, and talking of our future. I was
the oldest of the three, and for that reason spoke with simulated
wisdom.

“Only one of us is marked down for real success, and you, Mullings, are
the man,” I said. “You have the successful temperament. Sydney here
will do valuable work, but he hasn’t the gifts that shine and blind. As
for me, I shall make the most of my small but, I really think, engaging
talent and swank about in a little circle of appreciators.”

Mullings laughed.

“Do you really think I shall?” he asked. “Have another whisky,
Cumberland, and go on talking; you give me confidence. And confidence
is half the battle, isn’t it?”

“So they say. But haven’t you confidence already?”

“Well, it ebbs and it flows.”

“Oh, _he’s_ all right,” said Sydney Grew. “Don’t worry about Mullings.
But what do you mean when you say that I shall do valuable work?”

“You’re an artist, and you’ve got personality and ideas. Haven’t you
often reproached me on the score that you meet me for an hour and, a
month later, see all that you have told me in two or three articles
that in the meantime I have written for the papers?”

“Well, you do pick my brains, Gerald. You know you do.”

“Simply because they are worth picking. And if I didn’t, they would be
lost to the world. Why don’t you yourself write? You must write more
and talk less.”

He took my advice, and began a career that promised much until the war
interrupted it.

In the meantime, Mullings has “arrived” and I am longing to meet him
again, for I know very well he will be still fat and jolly, that he
will still allow me to play accompaniments for him on any old piano
that is handy, and that we shall talk excitedly of Bantock and Julius
Harrison, of the Manchester Musical Society and Phyllis Lett, of
“Colonel” Anderton and Ernest Newman, and of everything and everybody
that made those far-off days so full of interest and so sweet to
remember.

       *       *       *       *       *

Harold Bauer set out to conquer the world, and has done nothing more
than arouse the interest of one or two countries. Yet he is a great
pianist. But I am told that his personality stands between him and the
real thing in the way of success. I have sat next to critics at his
recitals who have squirmed in their stalls as he played.

“What is the matter?” I have asked.

“I don’t quite know. But don’t you feel it yourself?”

“Feel what?”

“Something. I don’t quite know what. Something indefinable. His playing
is too greasy. Did you ever hear Brahms played like that before?”

“No. I wish I had. I think his Brahms wonderfully fine.”

Certainly, his temperament is not magnetic like the personality
of Paderewski, of Kubelik, of Yvette Guilbert, and the public is a
connoisseur of temperaments. I think I have elsewhere observed in this
book that the public collects temperaments just as a few people collect
china or autographs. Perhaps Bauer is not exotic or orchidaceous
enough. He is too “straight,” too downright.

“What are they like, these Manchester people?” Bauer asked me one
afternoon before he was to play in England’s musical metropolis.

“Well, they’re ‘difficult,’ I think. They know something about music
here. You are not in London now, you know. You have reached the centre
of things.”

“Seriously?”

“Quite. I mean it. These people really do know. You see, for the last
fifty years they have had nothing but the best. They have a tradition
and stick to it.”

“The Clara Schumann tradition? Joachim and Brahms and Hallé and all
that?”

“No, no! That is on its last legs, on its knees even. The tradition,
I admit, is hard to define, but it’s there all the same. If you get a
couple of encores here, you may well consider that a success.”

“Funny thing, the public,” he muttered. “You never know where you have
it. But, of course, there is no such entity as ‘the public.’ There are
thousands of publics and they are all different.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Emil Sauer has a glittering style and had, fifteen years ago, a
technique that no word but rapacious accurately describes. The piano
recital he gave in Manchester nearly two decades ago was the first
recital I ever attended, though I was a lad in my late teens; the
occasion then seemed, and still seems, most romantic. It is true
that, on the nursery piano at home, one of my elder brothers used to
give recitals with me as sole auditor, and that I used to return the
compliment the following evening, but though we took these affairs very
seriously and even wrote lengthy criticisms of each other’s playing,
our performances were not of a high order. But one evening, defying
parental authority and risking paternal anger, we slipped unseen from
home and went to hear Sauer.

I think we must both have been much younger than our years—certainly
we were much younger than the average educated boy of eighteen or
nineteen to-day—and we were in a very high state of nervous excitement
as we sat in the gallery of the Free Trade Hall waiting for the great
man’s appearance. His slim and, as it seemed at the time, spirit-like
figure passed across the platform to the piano, and two hours of pure
trance-like joy began for at least a couple of his listeners. My
brother and I knew all there was to know about the great pianists of
the past, and often we had tried to imagine what their playing was
like; but neither he nor I had conceived that anything could be so
gorgeous as what we now heard. For once, realisation was many more
times finer than anticipation. Only one thing disturbed my complete
happiness—and that was the notion that the pianist might possibly be
disappointed with the amount of applause he was receiving, though, of a
truth, he was receiving a great deal of applause. So I clapped my hands
and stamped my feet as hard and as long as possible. The Appassionata
Sonata almost frenzied me and a Liszt Rhapsody was like heady wine.

But all beautiful things come to a close, and towards ten o’clock my
brother and I found ourselves on the wet pavement outside, feeling very
exalted but at the same time uncertain whether we had done our utmost
to make Sauer’s welcome all that we thought it should have been.

“Let’s wait for him outside the platform entrance and cheer him when he
comes out,” suggested my brother.

Very strange must that two-voiced cheer have sounded to Sauer as, in
the dark side street, he stepped quickly into his cab, which began
immediately to move away. As our voices died, he opened the window and
leaned out, holding out to us his long-fingered hand. Running eagerly
to him, we clasped his hand in turn and, amazed, listened to the few
words of thanks he shouted to us.

For long after that, Sauer was one of our major gods, and we followed
his triumphs both in England and on the Continent with the utmost
interest and excitement. When we boasted to our friends that we had
shaken hands with the great pianist, they evinced little interest
in the matter. “Why, that’s nothing!” exclaimed a Philistine; “last
Saturday afternoon I touched the sleeve of Jim Valentine’s coat!” Now,
Jim Valentine was a great rugger player.

       *       *       *       *       *

Perhaps the most exquisite and the most fragile thing in the world at
present is the Chopin playing of Vladimir de Pachmann. For more than
a quarter of a century writers have been attempting to reproduce his
coloured music in coloured words: they have all failed. De Pachmann
is an exotic, a hothouse plant. Not a hothouse plant among many
other plants, but a plant living luxuriously and solitarily and with
exaggerated self-consciousness in its own hothouse.

In thinking of him, one feels that he belongs to the very last minute
of civilisation’s progress. All the civilisations of the past have
come and gone and returned; they have worked age-long with tireless
industry; mankind has struggled upwards and rushed precipitately
downwards through thousands of years; cities have been sacked and
countries ravaged; Babylon, Nineveh, Athens and Rome have bloomed
flauntingly and wilted most tragically: and the most exquisite thing
that has been produced by all this suffering, all this unimaginable
labour, is the Chopin playing of de Pachmann. The world has toiled for
thousands of years and has at last given us this thing more delicate
than lace, more brittle than porcelain, more shining than gold....

There is the rather painful question of this pianist’s eccentricities.
One can discuss them publicly for de Pachmann himself continually
thrusts them on the public. You know to what I refer: the running
commentary of words, gestures, nods, smiles and leers which he
almost invariably passes not only on the music he plays, but also
on his manner of playing it. I refuse to believe that this most
extraordinary behaviour is mere affectation: it seems to me a direct
and irrepressible expression of the man’s very soul. It is not
ridiculous, because it is so serious and so natural. Nevertheless, it
is entirely ineffective. It does not help in the least. Rather does it
mar. To see the performer winking slyly at you when he has, as it were,
“pulled off” a particularly delicate nuance does not give that nuance
a more subtle flavour: it merely distracts the attention and sets one
conjecturing what really _is_ going on in the performer’s mind. It has
appeared to me that the pianist has been saying: “You noticed that,
didn’t you? Well, _you_ couldn’t do it if you spent a whole lifetime
trying; yet how easily _I_ achieved it!”

The large, smooth face, with its loose mouth and dizzied eyes, is the
face of a magician out of a story book. It is not a real face. It has
only one of the attributes of power—egotism. Egotism has furrowed every
line on that countenance; it dilates the eyes. Egotism runs through the
sensitive fingers. I have stood by his side and wilfully shut my ears
on the music and fastened my eyes on his face; but I learned nothing.
I do not know if his mind dwells aloof from all emotion, his intellect
functioning automatically—as would seem to be the case; or if,
experienced and cynical, he has the power of pouring the very essence
of his spirit into sound, laughing at himself and us as he does so—but
laughing more at us than at himself, for we are deceived whilst he is
not.

It is strange that so exotic a personality should have a firm and
unrelaxing hold on the public. He is not caviare to the general.
Villiers de l’Isle Adam is worshipped by the few; Walter Pater cannot
have more than a thousand sincere disciples, but de Pachmann is adored
by millions. “Millions” is no exaggeration. People are taken out of
themselves whilst he plays. You remember, don’t you? the Paderewski
craze in America fifteen years ago, when the platform was stormed and
taken by assault night after night by society ladies. I witnessed
pretty much the same kind of thing at a de Pachmann recital in a
Lancashire town; but the latter pianist was stormed, not by society
ladies, but by unemotional bank clerks, stockbrokers, merchants,
working men and women. At the end of the concert, they flowed on to
the platform in hundreds, and surrounded the pianist whilst he played
encore after encore, smiling vacantly the while and enjoying himself
immensely, pausing between each piece only to motion his ring of
worshippers a little farther from the piano.

An enigmatic creature, this; a creature who will never give up his
secret; perhaps, even, a creature who is not aware that he possesses a
secret.




CHAPTER XVI

CATHEDRAL MUSICAL FESTIVALS


No; I’m not going to be a chronicler in this chapter. It sounds a dull
subject, I know, but many things happened in Gloucester, Hereford and
Worcester in mellow September days that were vastly amusing and which
were not reported in the papers, and it is about these I am going to
tell you.

It used to be very charming to go to one of these cathedrals early
each autumn, drink cider, listen to music six hours a day, walk by
the river, have jolly “rags” in the hotel at night, and come home
again at the end of a week or ten days. September is a tired month,
I always think ... if not tired, a little languorous.... It has many
days in which one wants to walk about just quietly, enjoying being
alive. It would be wrong to fuss and work really hard. I suppose that
in all those wonderful places in which I have spent so many happy
weeks—Worcester, Lincoln, Gloucester, Hereford, Norwich—people ruminate
and browse at all times. Certainly I have seen them browsing in herds
in September days. I once watched the Bishop of Hereford browsing. He
stood perfectly still and seemed to be contemplating and measuring and
gently wondering about the growth of a healthy nasturtium.

Everybody used to migrate to these festivals. Well, not quite everybody
... but you know what I mean; just the very people you most awfully
wanted to meet again and talk to and hear music with: people like
Granville Bantock, Ernest Newman, Samuel Langford, John Coates,
Dr McNaught, Frederic Austin, Herbert Hughes. London used to send
thirty or forty critics, and the provinces about the same number. And
from the surrounding towns would pour in county families, middle-class
families anxious (poor deluded ones!) to keep abreast of the musical
times (or do I mean _The Musical Times_?), maiden ladies still and
for ever ecstatic over Mendelssohn’s poor old _Elijah_, fierce
choir-masters with ideas on choral singing, village organists who
really believed that Dr Brewer was the Last Word, immaculate young men
with æsthetic fever and a decided leaning towards Elgar’s _The Dream of
Gerontius_ (always alluded to by them as _The Dream_), very “nee-ice”
young ladies who when at home played the violin, and, last of all,
deans (oh yes, lots of deans), minor canons, slim curates, parsons of
all kinds, squires without money, squarsons.

It was hard for us musical critics to take these festivals quite as
seriously as the festivals expected us to do, for it always seemed
incredible to us that London or Birmingham or Glasgow should have the
least desire to know how the choruses of Handel’s _The Messiah_ were
sung in a little town like Gloucester. Moreover, many of us were amused
at the tragic seriousness of these age-old festivals—festivals at
which, as a rule, only two new works of any importance were produced
and over which old oratorios—an impossible form of art—hung like a
heavy cloud. So we used to amuse ourselves in our different ways, and
the ringleaders in our occasional rags were generally Granville Bantock
and Ernest Newman.

Almost every detail of one of these joyous occasions lingers in my
memory. Dr McNaught, the doyen of us all, an experienced critic, a
witty speaker, and a most profound musician, was the not unwilling
victim. Bantock or, to give him his full title, Professor Granville
Bantock, M.A., had brought from Birmingham two live eels in a tank.
When he bought these sturdy creatures, he must have had in his mind
some jollification or other, and when I met him in the streets of
Hereford (I think it was Hereford) during the morning of the Festival’s
first day, he asked me what was the most amusing thing I could think of
that could be done with two live eels.

“Eels!” exclaimed I, in amazement. “Do you mean to tell me that you
really possess two live eels?”

“Yes, here in Hereford. One gets a little dull here after a couple
of hours, and, after all, eels are very lively fry. They break the
monotony of life.” He paused a moment. “And,” he added rather dreamily,
“they swish their tails so busily. I suppose an eel’s tail is the
busiest thing in the world. Come and have a look; they’re in my room at
the hotel.”

And there they were in a tank: dark objects in dark water, swirling
about with enormous enthusiasm.

The day passed and no amusing idea occurred to me. Bantock conducted
one of his works in the cathedral that evening—a very important and
solemn occasion, and when we critics had left our “copy” at the
post-office for telegraphic transmission to our respective newspapers,
we foregathered in the hotel.

Now Dr McNaught had gone to spend the late hours with a friend and was
not expected back till nearly midnight; it became obvious, therefore,
both to Bantock and myself, that the eels must, in some way, be made to
surprise him on his return. We placed the slimy creatures in a washhand
basin in his bedroom, poured water upon them, and gazed down upon them
with knitted brows.

“It is enough,” said Bantock; “there is no need to think of anything
else. Listen.”

And, truly, there was a most stealthy and uncouth sort of noise. Eels
may have soft skins, but their muscles are hard and, as they careered
round the basin, one heard a continuous smooth sound as of people
going about some nefarious business in the dark, and now and again,
at unexpected moments, a loud thwack would be heard as one of the fish
threw his tail upon the side of the basin.

Newman and Frederic Austin and one or two others collaborated in
preparing our scheme. A female figure was made, carefully placed on the
middle of Dr McNaught’s pillow, and gently covered to the neck with the
bedclothes.

These elaborate arrangements for Dr McNaught’s entertainment were only
just completed when the doctor himself returned. We waited in dark
corners of the corridor for the result.

After an interval of a few minutes, a bell rang and a chambermaid
appeared.

“There is some mistake, I think,” said Dr McNaught genially. “Either
this room is a bedroom, a larder, or an aquarium; it would be most good
of you if you would decide as soon as possible which it really is.”

The chambermaid entered the bedroom and we could just hear her quiet
voice as, a moment later, she half whispered:

“But, sir, the room is already occupied. There is a lady in your bed.”

Of course, the psychological moment had arrived, and we strolled
casually into the bedroom to become witnesses of Dr McNaught’s
embarrassment. The jape was continued. McNaught was taken to the
smoke-room, solemnly tried by judge and jury for having murdered
a woman and concealed her body (it was at the time of the Crippen
affair), and sentenced to death. Newman brought a hatchet from the
cellar and, not long before dawn, the mock sentence was carried out
with elaborate pantomime....

“Very childish—just like schoolboys!” I hear a reader (not you, of
course) say, rather contemptuously. Yes, it was like schoolboys, and
substitute “-like” for “-ish” in “childish” and I agree with you most
heartily.

       *       *       *       *       *

But not all our time was spent in this uproarious way. There were long
hours of talk, great talk from Langford of _The Manchester Guardian_,
a man of mature years whom to meet is a privilege and whom to know
intimately is a blessing; witty, rather cruel, but vastly entertaining
talk from Newman; pungent talk from Bantock; and general gossip from
all kinds of people.

I do remember so regretfully—regretfully, because I do not think a
like occasion can happen again—an afternoon that Langford and I spent
sitting at a little rustic table under a just yellowing grove of
poplars. Langford’s mind is spacious, most richly stored. Nothing can
happen that does not at once and without effort fit into his philosophy
of life, and though his talk is profound it is so greatly human
that, in listening to him, one feels completely at rest. He accepts
everything.... I daresay you have noticed that many people have tried
to describe the effect Walt Whitman’s personality has had on them, and
you will have observed how they have all failed. It is an impossible
task.... And I feel that in writing about Langford it is impossible to
convey to you what he stands for to his friends. I recollect Captain
J. E. Agate once saying to me: “I never come away from speaking to
Langford without feeling what an empty fool I am.” Yes, that is true;
yet, at the same time, you feel reconciled to your own empty folly;
besides, you know well enough that if you were a fool Langford would
not talk to you; he would just ask you to have a drink and then he
would fumble clumsily in his waistcoat pocket to find you a cigarette.

Langford will never be “successful” in the worldly sense. Perhaps he
looks with suspicion on success; certainly he has never attempted to
achieve it. I imagine that his nature is very like that of Æ, and if
what everyone says of Æ is true, one cannot conceive that anything
finer could be said of anyone than that he resembles the great Irish
poet.

It was these refreshing talks with various people that did something
to mitigate the severity of the atmosphere of conventionality, of
“respectability” in its worst sense, that made it rather difficult to
breathe freely in these cathedral cities. Everyone wore new clothes;
men perspired in kid gloves; girls carried prayer-books and copies
of _Elijah_; deans were dapper; ostlers were clean and profoundly
polite; and, wherever you went, you heard people saying that they had
seen Lord Bertie and Lady Jane, and had you noticed that the dear
Bishop had looked a little tired last evening? There was, too, about
these festivals an air as of a society function. Music, an unwilling
handmaid of charity, was “indulged” in. One did not have music every
day, for that would have been frivolous; but one had it in great lumps
every twelve months, and had it, not because one cannot live fully and
vividly without art, but because it made a good excuse for a social
“occasion.” The music itself was excused—for in the minds of these
people it required an excuse—by the fact that the entire festival was
organised for charity, that vice which causes so many sins.

I myself came into rather violent conflict with the Norfolk and Norwich
Musical Festival authorities on a question of artistic morality. Ten
or eleven years ago they offered a prize of twenty-five guineas for a
poem, and another prize of fifty guineas for the best musical setting
of the poem. I entered the former competition and secured the prize.
My “poem” was in blank verse and lyrics, its subject Cleopatra, and it
contained the following passage:

  _Iris._ And when with regal, arrogant step she passed
          Across the portico, her white breasts gleamed;
          Her neck seemed conscious of its loveliness;
          Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted with
          The expectancy of proud assault; she was
          As one who lives for a last carnival
          Of love, in which she may be stabbed and torn
          By large excess of passion.

  _Charmion._                          Oh! Our Queen
          Has wine for blood; her tears are heavy drops
          Of water stolen from some brackish sea
          Or murderous waves; her heart now leaps with life
          And now lies sleeping like a coilèd snake.
          But in to-night’s cold moon she burns and glows;
          Her heart is housing many a mad desire,
          And she is sick for Antony.

  _Iris._                              The day
          Has gone, and soon they’ll drink the heady wine
          That sparkles in each other’s eyes. Once more
          Venus and Bacchus meet, and all the world
          Stands still to watch the bliss of living gods.

There was a little more to the same effect, and when I wrote the stuff
I thought it very fine and still think it rather pretty. But a section
of the musical Press attacked it violently, and for a couple of months
I was quite a notorious person. I gathered from the articles and
letters that appeared that my dramatic poem was not likely to engender
music that would carry on the tradition of Mendelssohn’s _Elijah_.
That had been my object in writing it. I was sick of that tradition. I
wished to help to break it.

One day, while the little storm was still raging, I received a letter
from Sir Henry J. Wood, who was to conduct the Festival at Norwich
at which my work was to be given. (Mr Julius Harrison, who has since
become prominent as one of Sir Thomas Beecham’s assistant conductors,
had gained the prize for the musical setting of my poem.) In his letter
Sir Henry wrote: “Very much against my will, I am writing to ask you
on behalf of the Committee of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival if
it is possible for you to make any alternative version of the ‘two
objectionable lines’ (I fail to find them myself) in your libretto,
_Cleopatra_.... From my point of view, the whole thing is absurd and
ridiculous.”

I could not find the objectionable lines. I showed the poem to a most
maiden aunt and watched her as she read it, hoping to tell by her
sudden blush when her eyes had reached the evil place. She did not
blush; she simply read the thing and said: “Oh, Gerald, how nice! I do
think you have such pretty thoughts.” So did I.

A few days later Mr Julius Harrison came to my aid. The committee, it
appeared, objected to “her white breasts gleamed” and also to:

  Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted with
  The expectancy of proud assault....

I changed those lines, and the work in due course was performed at
Norwich, and in Queen’s Hall, London. Later on, when my little poem was
sung in Southport in its original form, with Mr Havergal Brian’s music
(for he also had honoured me), Mr Landon Ronald conducting, the members
of the audience did not leave their seats when the “objectionable”
lines occurred; rather did they seem to lean forward a little and
listen more intently.

I have mentioned this incident, not because in itself it is important,
but because it so beautifully illustrates the point of view of our
Cathedral Festivals. Their “secular” concerts are echoes of the
concerts given in the Cathedral. They hate (or else they are afraid
of?) every emotion that is not a religious emotion. They think that God
made our souls and the devil our bodies. They may be right; if they
are, it is clear the devil is not lacking in consideration.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is no doubt that our most ecstatic moments at the Cathedral
Festivals were supplied by Wagner’s _Parsifal_, which Mr J. F.
Runciman, in his little book on this composer, describes as “this
disastrous and evil opera.” Only excerpts from it, of course, were
given; all “objectionable lines” were cut out. If _Parsifal_ is to
be given on the platform at all—and, in view of the fact that we
seldom have it on the stage, why not?—then it had better be given on a
platform that has been erected in a spacious and beautiful cathedral.
I remember those white voices floating down from a place out of sight
near the roof, away above the clerestory. I always used to try to
obtain a seat near some dimly stained window so that it might for
me blot out the rather bewildered or consciously “rapt” faces of my
fellow-creatures, for, in listening to noble music, I invariably feel
much greater than, and curiously irritated by the presence of, other
people.

And it used to be so fine to come forth from the Cathedral at noon,
step into that mellow September English sunshine which I have not seen
for nearly three years, and walk by the river ... walk perhaps a mile
or so and come back to the hotel to eat cool meats and cool salads and
drink cool wine. It was at these times I used to sigh and long for
Bayreuth and wonder if I should ever see the grave of Wagner in the
garden of Villa Wahnfried in that little Bavarian town.

It was at Gloucester, I think, that one year I was pursued by a certain
hard-working, but not very talented, composer who, having gained a
most extensive “popular” public for his work, was now anxious to win
the suffrage of more cultivated people. Most unhappily for me, he took
it into his head that my musical criticism had some influence in the
north, and though he was quite wrong in this assumption, I was never
able to convince him of his error. Wherever I went, lo! he was there
with me. And always under his arm was a musical score, a score of his
own composition. Something new, he assured me; something really quite
modern. Would I look at it? I did. It was feeble, paltry and bombastic,
but I did not like to tell him so. But when he pressed me for an
opinion I said, what was near enough to the truth, that it was a great
advance on his previous work. This seemed to please him, and he took
to inviting me out to lunch. If ever I went into the hotel smoke-room
for a quiet pipe, I would invariably notice a vague but self-important
figure in the doorway, and presently would hear the unmistakable pop
that a champagne bottle so deliciously makes when it is opened. A
bubbling glass would be placed at my side.

“Now, Richard Strauss in his _Ein Heldenleben_ ...” his voice would
begin. And he would proceed to tell me all about _Ein Heldenleben_ and
its beauties. To bewilder him, I used to assert that _Carmen_ seemed to
me a much finer work than Strauss’s _Elektra_, and, because he was very
ignorant and because he had not the slightest appreciation of Strauss,
he used to look at me rather pitifully, and would eventually confess
that he too liked Bizet more than he liked Strauss and that, indeed, it
appeared to him that Arthur Sullivan....

One day, when we were alone, he asked me if I would write a series of
articles on his works. It was my turn to be bewildered.

“A series?” I asked, utterly stunned.

“Yes,” answered he, “a series. First of all, there are my part-songs.
Then there are my instrumental pieces. Last of all, my Cantatas.” He
pronounced cantatas with a capital C. “Just a short series: three
articles in all.”

I hesitated, but he looked at me most pleadingly. I tried a little
sarcasm, but that made him more pertinacious than ever. So then I
flatly refused, and kept on refusing, and did not stop refusing.

“Well, then,” said he at length, “will you put in writing and sign what
you said to me the other day about my new work? You will remember that
you said it was the best thing I had ever done, that it was original,
full of vigour, astonishingly fresh, subtle in harmony....”

“Oh, really,” I protested, “did I say all that?”

“Yes, indeed, you did.”

And then I became very, very rude indeed, and, after that, whenever we
met, we used to bow to each other most politely and say never a word.

This kind of man, and there is quite a handful of them, haunts the
more important Festivals, but it must be very rarely that one of them
obtains what he desires.

       *       *       *       *       *

Can you recall the most curious and most unlikely sight you have
ever witnessed? Most of us, even in the course of a few years of a
very ordinary existence, witness many strange things, but of all the
strange things I have stumbled across nothing has been so wayward, so
_outré_, so fundamentally silly, as the forty organists I saw sitting
in one room at Worcester. One can imagine two, or even three, organists
sitting talking together, but forty, and fifteen of the forty Cathedral
organists, seems incredible.

Now, you have only to be fond of modern music to feel instinctively
that a man who is an organist and nothing else is sitting on the wrong
side of the fence. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he is helping
to hold things back; he hates the rapid progress which music is making,
and he has as much imagination as the _vox humana_ stop.

Well, the forty organists were sitting and talking and smoking, and as
I looked at them and at their mild, but worried, faces, it seemed to me
and my companion that, in the interests of art, morality and ordinary
decency, some protest should be made. And we decided that we were just
the people to make it. We could have forgiven them if they had met
together to discuss some professional question—_e.g._ how to get their
salaries raised, how to get the better of their respective vicars,
or how they could expand their minds so as to be able to appreciate
Debussy or Ravel or even Max Reger. But they were gathered together
merely because they liked it, just for the sake of enjoying each
other’s society. Monstrous absurdity! Could they not see how ridiculous
they were? Forty organists in one room!—why, there ought not to be
forty organists in the whole world.

Fortunately the room was on the ground floor and the hour late. My
companion and I stepped outside the hotel, waited till the street was
quiet, and then rapped a series of three tattoos upon the window-pane
to secure silence within. We then sang in two parts, I in a high
falsetto and my friend in a lugubrious bass, the “Baal” Chorus from
_Elijah_. “Baal, we cry to thee! Baal, we cry to thee!”

We had not proceeded very far in this beautiful music—intended by the
dear, delicious Mendelssohn for a shout of savagery, but really a quite
charming cradle song—when a cry of delighted laughter came from the
room, and two or three of the organists, hatless and earnest, rushed
out into the street.

“Come inside!” they said; “come and join us. You belong to _us_!”

Too utterly flabbergasted at this invitation to make any reply, we
turned and fled, rushed back to our hotel, and ordered whisky-and-sodas.

The great musician to whom we told the story next day said:

“Well, once more, you see, the biters were bit.”

But my friend and I did not think so.




CHAPTER XVII

PEOPLE OF THE THEATRE

  Sir Herbert Tree—Gordon Craig—Henry Arthur Jones—Temple
  Thurston—Miss Janet Achurch—Miss Horniman


Sir Herbert Tree never met a stranger without trying to impress him. He
always succeeded. He would take the utmost pains about it: go to any
lengths: use his last resource.... I am not now, of course, dealing
with him as an actor. We all have our varying opinions of him as an
actor. Some think he could; some think he couldn’t.... But I am writing
of him at the present moment as a man. A showman, if you like. As a
man, as a man who “showed off” either as a wit, a mimic, a man of the
world, a superman, or what not, he was supreme.

I met him in his private office at His Majesty’s in the middle of the
run of _Joseph and his Brethren_. He had invited me there in order to
dictate an article to me, but, as he told me over the ’phone, he hadn’t
the remotest notion what the subject of the article was going to be.
Could I help him with any ideas? His article was for a Labour paper.
Did I know anything about Labour? If I didn’t, did I know anybody who
did?

In speaking to me over the ’phone, he appeared so anxious that I began
to rack my brains for a subject. In the recesses of my meagre intellect
I found the remnants of two or three subjects, and at nine o’clock that
evening I presented myself at His Majesty’s Theatre with them on the
tip of my tongue.

His room was empty as I entered it. Opposite the door was a fireplace
and above the fireplace a mirror; on the left of the door as you
entered it was Sir Herbert’s large desk. By the side of this, seated on
a low chair, I waited. I had not to wait long, for presently I heard a
soft, rather pulpy kind of sound coming down the passage and, a moment
later, Sir Herbert entered, wearing a long white beard and the garments
of a gentleman of the East. The play was still in the first act, and he
had that minute come off the stage.

“Got a subject?” he asked, shaking hands. “So have I. The Influence of
the Stage on the Masses! What do you think of it? Very trite, I know,
but there are a few important things I want to say. Sit here, will you?
Here you are—ink and paper.”

And, sitting down, he began immediately to dictate the article. He
got along swimmingly, and about a third of the article must have been
down on paper when I heard a squeaky voice outside the door. It was
the call-boy. Sir Herbert rose, stroked his beard, adjusted his gown,
and walked outside; as he did these things he continued dictating, his
voice stopping in the middle of a rather involved sentence when he was
out in the passage.

After five or six minutes, I heard the same soft, pulpy sound
approaching and, while yet outside the door, he began dictating at
the precise point where he had left off, rounding off the sentence
most beautifully. It was a remarkable feat of memory. After a very
short period, we heard the high-pitched voice a second time, and
once more he moved dreamily away, still dictating. Again he stopped,
purposely as it seemed to me, in the middle of a sentence, and again,
when he reappeared, he spoke the waiting word. Marvellous! He gave me
a cautious, inquiring look, as if to discover if I had noticed his
cleverness. I smiled back reassuringly. In a few minutes the article
was finished.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Exactly the thing. _The Daily Citizen_ readers will be delighted. But
what an extraordinary memory you have!”

“Ah! You noticed that?” he said, seemingly well pleased.

He began to talk of _Joseph and his Brethren_ and, in the middle of our
conversation, Mr Temple Thurston, looking rather nervous, was shown in.
I knew that, at that time, Thurston was writing for Tree a play on the
subject of the Wandering Jew, and as I guessed they had business to
transact, I withdrew as quickly as possible.

I saw Sir Herbert on another occasion, but whether it was soon before,
or soon after, the incident I have just related I cannot recollect.

He was conducting a rehearsal on the stage of His Majesty’s, and I
stood in the wings, watching him. He had recently produced a play
called, I think, _The Island_, by a Spanish or a Brazilian writer. It
was a dead failure and was withdrawn after three or four nights. It was
to talk of this play that I had come, and as he advanced to the wings I
noticed that he looked rather worried.

“What _was_ wrong with the play?” he asked. “All you critics have
tried to tell me, but I’m blessed if I can understand what you are all
talking about.”

“To me the fault of the play was quite obvious. The author had got hold
of a good idea and the drama had several fine situations; but, whereas
the idea was poetical and mysterious and the situations tense and
dramatic, the author or the translator had employed the most stilted
kind of dialogue, and language as commonplace as that which I am now
using. The play should have been translated or rewritten by a poet.”

“Ah! It’s very strange you should say that, for I myself had felt
strongly disposed to ask John Masefield to prepare the thing for the
stage. I wish I had done; but, of course, it’s too late now. But a
manager can never tell beforehand what play will be a success and what
won’t.”

“Pardon me. That is often said, but I don’t believe it’s true. Some
people really _do_ know what the public wants. Arnold Bennett, for
example, and Hall Caine, not to mention others. Do _they_ ever make
mistakes? Has Arnold Bennett ever been guilty of a failure?”

“No, perhaps not. But I can’t engage Bennett as a reader. Even if he
would consent to do the work, I should not be able to afford his fee.”

“Yes, I know. But my contention is that there are people who can and do
gauge to a nicety the taste of the public.” And I mentioned the names
of two critics who had, on many occasions, foretold most accurately the
exact length of time new pieces would run.

Tree was called back to the rehearsal, and he glided away for a few
moments, fluttering a handful of loose papers as he went. He soon
returned, and this time he was cheerfulness itself.

“It’s going very well,” he said, referring to the rehearsal. “It’s only
a stop-gap, of course, but it’ll make a little money. I must write to
those critics you mentioned,” he added musingly; “or perhaps it would
be better if I seemed to run across them accidentally?”

But whether or not he did run across either of the critics
accidentally, I do not know, for the war broke out soon after and
disrupted everything.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was when I was staying in Guilford Street, Bloomsbury, six or seven
years ago, in a house opposite the Foundlings’ Hospital, that, one
morning, Gordon Craig came into the room. He was, I think, in search of
Ernest Marriott, a most ingenious and original artist, who at that time
and for long after was doing some sort of work for Craig. Marriott and
I were staying at the same boarding-house.

When Craig’s bulky form filled the doorway I recognised at once, from
Marriott’s description of him, who he was, and I introduced myself to
him, telling him Marriott was out.

“Yes, I know he is,” said Craig; “but I have often wanted to look at
one of these fine old houses.”

And he walked round and round the room, with his eyes on the cornice,
telling me all sorts of things, which I have long forgotten, that I had
never heard before. He seemed to have made a special study of English
architecture of the early nineteenth century, and whilst he was in the
house talked of nothing else, though I tried to lure him into gossip of
the theatre.

He gave me the impression of a large, white man with hair which, if not
entirely grey, was very fair. He had, I remember, hands much plumper
than one would expect an artist to possess; his face also was rather
plump. He seemed to fill the large room and radiate vitality. He left
as suddenly and as inconsequently as he had come.

“How like he is to Miss Ellen Terry!” remarked my landlord, not knowing
the identity of his visitor.

“Yes,” said I, “now you mention it, I notice the extraordinary
resemblance. But, after all, the resemblance is not so remarkable, for
you see, he is her son.”

       *       *       *       *       *

On one occasion I was sent to interview Mr Henry Arthur Jones. Over
the telephone I made an appointment with him for the morrow, and when
I arrived at his house I found rather elaborate preparations had been
made for the occasion. Mr H. A. Jones was standing in the middle of the
drawing-room with outstretched hand, on a table near the open window
(it was July, I think) was a tray with what one calls tea-things, a
lady shorthand typist (specially engaged for the occasion) was waiting
with notebook and pencil, and a maid was carrying into the room a
teapot, and cress sandwiches.

The presence of the lady typist embarrassed me. She took down in
shorthand my questions and Mr Jones’ replies. Thinking it would be
foolish to waste any time on preliminary politenesses, I plunged
straight into the middle of my subject. The lady typist sipped her tea
in the awkward little pauses that came from time to time. It was not
an interview; it was a kind of official statement. It was like the
proceedings at a police court. I felt I should be held responsible to a
higher authority for every word I spoke.

However, at the end of an hour a good deal of excellent matter had
been taken down, probably enough for a two-column article. But my news
editor did not want a two-column article. He wanted a scrappy little
paragraph or, at most, two scrappy little paragraphs. Now, in view of
the fact that Mr Jones had gone to the trouble and expense of getting a
shorthand typist specially from town, and, more particularly, in view
of the fact that it was perfectly clear that he had not contemplated
the possibility of an interview with him being used merely and solely
for a snappy little paragraph, I felt it incumbent upon me to tell him
just how matters stood. But how could I? Could you have told him? Well,
_I_ couldn’t, though I tried and tried hard.

When the interview was over, he arranged that the shorthand typist
should return to her office, type out her shorthand, and send the
result to me in Fleet Street early that evening. In due course, ten
foolscap sheets of valuable and most interesting matter came along, and
I handed it in to the night-editor just as it stood.

Next morning, only two snippety paragraphs appeared in the paper, and I
have often thought since that Mr H. A. Jones must have felt disgusted
with the paper, a little more disgusted with himself, but most of all
disgusted with me. After all, it was not entirely my fault, was it?...
I mean, he should not have taken himself _quite_ so importantly, should
he?

I retain a very clear impression of his personality. He was short,
rather dapper, and very deliberate. He always thought briefly before
he answered a question, but when he did answer it he did so without
hesitation, going straight into the middle of the matter. He struck me,
as he sat on a rather low chair opposite the window, as essentially
earnest, essentially honest-minded, essentially clear-headed. His
manner was a little important. He may be said to have “pronounced”
things rather than to have spoken them. He was formally courteous. I do
not think one could justly say that he has the “artistic” temperament,
and I imagine he possesses no particularly acute perception of beauty.
There is no emotional enthusiasm about him; he has no unreliable
“moods”; he does not think or feel one thing to-day and another
to-morrow. By no means typically a man of this generation, and yet not
a man who has outlived his own time. It appeared to me that he had
little intuition; his very considerable knowledge of human nature is
probably based on close observation and most careful deduction.

When we parted he gave me copies of two of his plays.

He was a man of considerable personal charm and no little intellectual
weight: a man both kindly and stern: a man who could at all times be
trusted to see the humour of things and who, on occasion, could be
cruel to be kind.

       *       *       *       *       *

Not so very long before the war, my journalistic duties took me to the
first night of Mr Temple Thurston’s _The Greatest Wish in the World_,
a rather weak but quite innocuous play given by Mr Bourchier. If the
play “succeeded,” the audience assuredly didn’t. When the curtain went
down on the last act, there was a good deal of applause, chiefly from
the gallery, and we who were seated in the stalls waited a moment to
discover what the verdict of the house was going to be.

Now, every close observer of theatre audiences knows well enough that
among the many different kinds of applause there is one kind that is
very sinister: it is a kind difficult to describe, but unmistakable
enough when heard: to the uninterested listener it sounds sincere
and hearty, but if you listen carefully you will catch, beneath the
heartiness, a derisive note—something viciously eager in the shouts,
something malicious in the whistles. There was this sinister sound, a
kind of ground-bass, in the applause that followed the last fall of
the curtain at the first production of Mr Temple Thurston’s play. The
mimes had walked on and bowed their acknowledgments when, suddenly,
there arose loud cries of “Author! Author!” Well did I know what those
cries meant, and I told myself that the play had failed pitifully. I
was edging my way out of the stalls when, to my amazement, I saw the
curtain rise once more and disclose the nervous figure of Mr Temple
Thurston. Instantly there went up from a section of the audience
hisses and boos and cries of half-angry disappointment. Mr Thurston
shrank and winced as though he had been struck in the face, and his
exit was confused and awkward. It was as wanton an act of cruelty as
I have ever witnessed: deliberate, heartless, stupid. This is not the
place to discuss the propriety or otherwise of an audience insulting a
writer who has failed to please it, but it is certain that in no other
profession, in no other walk of life, do such savage traditions prevail
as in the enticing and intoxicating world of the theatre.

Not long after this incident I was received by Mr Temple Thurston at
his flat. I found him writing, and almost at once he began to talk most
intimately about himself.

“Never again,” said he, apropos of the episode I have just related,
“shall I ‘take a call.’ I cannot even now think of those awful few
moments on the stage without a shudder. It is distressing enough for an
author to fail—distressing: not only because of his own disappointment,
but chiefly because of the disappointment he brings to the actors who
have done their best for his play—without having his failure hurled
in his face, so to speak. But though I shall never again take a call,
I shall continue writing plays. I have never yet written a really
successful play, and no work of mine has had a longer run than sixty
performances. I have had many chances, of course, but I shall have
more.”

He then told me of his early attempts to win fame. Like many other
successful writers, he began in Fleet Street. The work there did not
suit him, and he soon abandoned it. He married early, lived with his
wife in a couple of rooms in Chancery Lane, and for a little time
picked up a living as best he could. The story of his first wife’s
extraordinary success with _John Chilcote, M.P._, is common knowledge.
That success preceded his own by two or three years, but he had not
long to wait before his own work found and pleased the public.

I saw Thurston on two or three other occasions, and found him a man
avid of enjoyment, frank, a little bitter, combative, kindly, strong,
sensitive, independent. He has a nature at once contradictory and
baffling.

       *       *       *       *       *

Twenty years must have passed since Miss Janet Achurch gave her
astounding performance in Manchester of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s
_Antony and Cleopatra_. It was a performance so remarkable, so
electrifying, that the old Queen’s Theatre in Quay Street became, for
a time, the centre of theatrical interest for the whole of England.
What London critic nowadays goes to Manchester, or anywhere else more
than five miles from home, to witness a Shakespeare play? Yet they all
went to see Miss Achurch. I remember a cheeky and brilliant article
by Bernard Shaw in _The Saturday Review_ on Miss Achurch, another by
Clement Scott in _The Daily Telegraph_, a third by William Archer in (I
think) _The World_.

For myself, I saw the play seventeen times, and though I have seen
many other actresses interpret Cleopatra, I have not known one whose
performance could rank with the gorgeous presentation by Miss Achurch.

All my visits to the Queen’s were surreptitious, for I was brought up
in a family that not only hated the theatre as an evil place but feared
it also. Though I was but a boy I had a certain amount of freedom, for
I was studying medicine at the Victoria University, and many afternoons
that should have been spent in dissecting human feet and eyes were
passed in the gallery of Flanagan’s theatre.

I suppose I must have been in love with Miss Achurch, though the kind
of feeling that a boy sometimes has for a great emotional actress is
more akin to worship than love. I longed to approach my divinity, but
feared to do so. I wrote about her in local papers, and I remember a
curious weekly called _Northern Finance_ which, for some dark reason
or other, printed, among its news of stocks and shares, a crude,
bubbling article of mine on Miss Achurch. I sent all my articles to her
and, with the colossal impudence of youth, and driven by a schoolboy
curiosity, asked for an interview.

She wrote to me. Reader, are you young enough to remember how you felt
when you first saw Miss Ellen Terry? Can you recall your adoration,
your devotion?... Those days of young worship, how fine they are!
Novelists always laugh at calf love because they cannot write about
it and make it as beautiful as it really is. Like many other things
that are human, calf love is absurd and beautiful, noble and silly,
profound and superficial. But, unlike so many things that are human,
there is nothing about it that is mean and selfish, nothing that is not
proud and good.

Yes, she wrote to me and invited me to visit her. She was kind and
gracious.... Amused? Oh, I have no doubt she was amused, but she never
betrayed it.

I used to hang about the stage door in the dark to watch her go into
the theatre or come out of it. I scraped up an acquaintance with
several members of the orchestra, for I thought I saw in them a kind of
magic borrowed from her. Her hotel was a castle.

Those of my readers who never saw Miss Achurch in what theatrical
writers call her “palmy” days can have only a very faint conception of
her genius. She became ill: her beauty faded. Only rarely did one see
her on the stage.

Years later I saw her in Ibsen’s _Ghosts_ and, again much later, in a
small part in Masefield’s adaptation of Wiers-Jennsen’s _The Witch_.
She was wonderful in both plays, but the grandeur had departed, the
glory almost gone.

It is most sadly true that actors live only in their own generation.
Janet Achurch ought to have lived for ever. She will not be forgotten
while we who saw her live; but we cannot communicate to others the
genius we witnessed and worshipped.

       *       *       *       *       *

Miss Horniman is one of the many people I have never met. “Then why
write about her?” you ask. I really don’t know, except that I want to.
She was (and, for all I know to the contrary, still is) something of a
personality in Manchester, and she was so for a considerable period,
she producing quite a few plays at the Gaiety Theatre that were well
worth seeing.

But she was ridiculously overpraised. She was petted and spoiled
by _The Manchester Guardian_, the Victoria University gave her an
honorary Master of Art’s degree, many literary and dramatic societies
went down on their knees to her and implored her to come and speak to
them, and she was regarded by the entire community as a woman of daring
originality, great wisdom and vast experience. She could do nothing
wrong. No play she produced, no matter how sour and Mancunian, was ever
condemned by the local Press. Miss Horniman had given it, therefore it
was “the right stuff.” She knew about it all: _she knew_: SHE KNEW.
Many Manchester dramatic critics were themselves writing plays, and
Miss Horniman smiled upon them. She smiled upon Stanley Houghton,
Harold Brighouse, Allan Monkhouse, all critics of _The Manchester
Guardian_. She would have smiled upon the plays of J. E. Agate and
C. E. Montague if they had written any. She was our benefactress, and
we used to sit and watch her in her embroidered gown as she rather
self-consciously queened it in a box at her own theatre.

Yet, after all, she had a rather depressing effect upon the city.
She gave no new play that was perfectly beautiful. She appeared to
detest romance and had little understanding of blank verse. Starting
her public life as a patron of Bernard Shaw, she declined upon Shaw’s
fevered disciples. She spoke in public very frequently, and always said
the same things. She had all the enthusiasm of a clever business woman.
Wishing very much to make money (so she told us), she understood all
the arts of self-advertisement. But, really, Manchester was not the
place for her; it was sufficiently hard and provincial before she came——

But perhaps I am allowing myself to run away with myself in writing
down all these disagreeable things. Yet I believe them to be true, and
they must stand. Her plays gave me several enjoyable evenings which,
but for her, I should never have had, and I can never be too grateful
to her for restoring to the Gaiety Theatre the drink licence that the
Watch Committee had taken away some years before she came. That act,
at all events, did in some degree help to make the Manchester plays a
little less like Manchester plays.




CHAPTER XVIII

BERLIN AND SOME OF ITS PEOPLE


One winter, about ten years ago, I went to Berlin in the company of
Mr Frederick Dawson, the famous English pianist, who had planned to
give two recitals there. We stayed at the Fürstenhof, a luxurious and
enervating hotel where we had a suite of rooms facing the front. In the
large drawing-room that Karl Klindworth had engaged for Dawson was a
good piano.

Now, music in Berlin is just a trade. Everyone plays or sings and
everybody teaches somebody or other to play and sing. Unless you are
an artist of colossal merit (and sometimes even if you are), you will
find it practically impossible to persuade anybody to listen to you if
you are not prepared to “square” the critics. In the season, twenty,
thirty, forty concerts are given nightly, and by far the greater number
of them are given to empty stalls. That does not matter: no artist of
any European experience expects anything else. A musician does not go
to Berlin to get money: he goes to get a reputation. Berlin’s cachet
is (or, most decidedly, I should say _was_) absolutely indispensable
for any pianist, violinist or singer who wishes to make a permanent
and wide reputation. Before the war, Mr Snooks could play as hard and
as fiercely and as long in London as he liked, but unless he was known
in Berlin, and unless it was known that he was known in Berlin, he
was everywhere considered but as a second-rate kind of person, a mere
talented outsider. So that it is quite within the facts to say that
few artists have gone to sing or play in Berlin except for the purpose
of obtaining Press notices, favourable Press notices, Press notices
that glow with praise and reek of backstairs influence. An American,
a French or a Danish artist will go to Berlin with a few years’
savings, give a short series of recitals, cut his Press notices from
the papers, go back to his native land, and then advertise freely—his
advertisements, of course, consisting of judicious excerpts (not always
very literally translated) from his Berlin notices. This visit to
Berlin, with the hire of a concert hall, etc., may cost a couple of
hundred pounds, but it is counted money well spent, well invested.

Frederick Dawson had already paid several visits to Berlin and Vienna,
and was so well known in both cities that his appearance in either
always attracted large and enthusiastic audiences; but, apart from
Dawson himself, d’Albert and Lamond, no other British artist or
semi-British artist had, I imagine, the power to do so.

I was introduced to many critics and many artists. The critic was
almost invariably a Herr Doktor and the Herr Doktor was almost
invariably a Herr Professor: they all had degrees and they all taught.
They were overworked, “doing” five or six concerts a night and
receiving very little pay. They would dash about from one concert hall
to another in taxi-cabs, jot down a few notes, and look down their
noses; when they wished to leave a particular hall, they would look
round furtively, gather their coat-tails together, and sidle slimly or
roll fatly to the door.

Some of these gentlemen, I heard, were very shady in their dealings
with young and inexperienced artists. They plied a trade of gentle
blackmail, kid-gloved blackmail, of course, but the kid gloves
contained the claws of a hungry eagle. The following describes one of
their pretty little customs.

Hearing of the arrival in Berlin of a singer or pianist whose agent had
been advertising the fact that his client would shortly give a series
of three recitals, the critic would call upon him, express interest
in his work, and ask to have the pleasure of hearing the artist sing
or play. The artist, flattered and already sure of one good “notice”
at least, would immediately accede; having done his best or worst,
something like the following conversation would take place:—

=Critic.= Quite good. But that A-minor study of Chopin’s is, of course,
rather hackneyed; you are not, I presume, including it in any of your
programmes?

=Artist= (_rather taken aback_). I must confess I had intended doing
so. But if you think....

=Critic.= I do. Most decidedly I do. There are in Berlin at least ten
thousand people who play it; why should you be the ten thousand and
first? Debussy, now. Why not Debussy? Or even Busoni. Busoni can write,
you know.

=Artist= (_eagerly_). Yes, yes; I’m playing some Debussy: _Les Poissons
d’Or_ and _Clair de Lune_.

=Critic.= _Clair de Lune_ is a little _vieux jeu_, don’t you think?
However, play it. Play it now, I mean.

The artist, half angry, but tremulously anxious to please, does as he
is told.

=Critic.= Oh yes; you have talent. I think, yes, I rather think I shall
be able to praise you in my paper. However, we shall see. But there
is something, just a little of something, lacking in your style. Your
rhythm is not sufficiently fluid. It should, if I may say so, _sway_
more. And your use of _tempo rubato_.... Well, now, I could show you.
You see, I have heard Debussy himself play that, and I know pre-cise-ly
how it should go.

=Artist= (_absolutely staggered_). Oh ... er ... yes. Quite.

=Critic= (_having allowed time for his remarks to sink in_). Now what
would you say if I were to suggest that I give you a few lessons—say
a couple. I would charge you a guinea and a half each: lessons of
half-an-hour, you know.

=Artist= (_looking wildly round_). If you were to suggest such a
thing—of course, you haven’t done so yet—but if you _were_ to suggest
it....

=Critic= (_with most un-German suavity_). Of course, when I said
“lessons,” I used entirely the wrong word. What I meant was hints and
suggestions. Mere indications. A passing on of a tradition—passing it
on, you understand, from Debussy to yourself. Not everyone, I need
scarcely say, has heard Debussy play. If you were to play Debussy as
I know he should be played, you would be one of the first to do so in
Berlin, and I in my paper should record the fact.

=Artist.= I see. Yes, I do see. I think that perhaps you are right. You
believe I could—I am rather at a loss for a word—you believe I could,
shall we say “absorb,” the tradition in a couple of lessons?

=Critic.= I don’t see why you shouldn’t, though, of course, I may
decide—I mean, we may agree—that a third lesson is necessary. Shall we
have our first lesson now?

=Artist= (_now quite at his ease, slyly_). Lesson? You mean my first
“hint,” “suggestion,” “indication.” Right-o.... Let’s get along with it.

They are friends: they understand each other. Within twenty-four hours
three guineas pass from the pocket of the artist to the pocket of the
critic, and, in due time, half-a-dozen lines of praise, golden-guinea
praise, appear in the critic’s paper.

After all, how simple, how friendly, how altogether right and jovial!

You may think the artist a fool to pay so much for so little, but,
really, you are quite wrong. It isn’t “so little.” It is a good deal.
Those half-dozen lines, in the old pre-war days, would help to secure
valuable engagements not only in New York, Boston, Philadelphia,
Chicago, and the scores of large towns that lie in between, but also
in London, Manchester, Bradford, Leeds; in Paris, Lyons, Rouen,
Marseilles, Bordeaux, Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp. But not in Germany.
Germany knows better. Not in Mannheim, Cologne, Hanover, Dresden. The
secrets of Berlin were known in all the cities and towns of Germany
some years before the war, and the playful little habits of the critics
of that most wonderful city were looked at askance ... were looked at
askance ... were looked at askance _and imitated_. And the imitators
had for their secret motto: _Honi soit._

       *       *       *       *       *

A beastly city was Berlin. And yet not all of Berlin was beastly. But
the artistic, the musical, part of it was “low, very low,” as Chawnley
Montague said, on an historic occasion, of the slums of Sierra Leone.

But Karl Klindworth had nothing of beastliness in him. In writing about
Klindworth I shall, I am convinced, feel rather old, and you, when
reading about him, will, I greatly fear, also feel rather old. You see
Klindworth belongs so awfully to the past. Yet he was a very great man
in his day, and there must be still in London many people who knew him
in those silly, savage days when stupid people (and they were brutally
stupid) thought of Wagner what brutally stupid people think to-day of
Richard Strauss.

Klindworth was not only a disciple of Wagner’s but he was also
one of Wagner’s prophets: a forerunner. A great pianist, also: a
great conductor: a great man. Frederick Dawson, one of the most
generous-hearted of men, took me to Klindworth’s, and said some jolly,
flattering things about me to the great musician. Klindworth was very
old, about eighty years, and, when he spoke, it was like listening
to the voice of a man who had just got beyond the grave and was not
unhappy there.

I egged him on to speak of Wagner.

“What can I say?” he mused. “Nothing. Wagner was from God.”

His large eyes, two great ponds of colour in a face not white but
stained with ivory, smouldered and suddenly burst into flame. His
hands, always trembling a little, now shook rather violently. I could
not help feeling, as I gazed upon this old man, that Wagner lived in
him as strongly as he lives in the mighty scores of _Die Meistersinger_
and _Tristan und Isolde_.

We sat silent. Frau Klindworth, an Englishwoman speaking English most
charmingly with a foreign accent, folded her hands and gave a little
sigh. Dawson shot me a significant look which meant: “Keep quiet; if
you do, he will begin to talk.”

And for a little while he did. Without a gesture, without a movement,
Klindworth, looking with unfocussed eyes into space, began to talk. (He
spoke in English, for he knew that I knew very little German.)

“No one,” said he, “who was a gentleman, I mean no one who had ordinary
feelings of chivalry, could meet Wagner without feeling that he was
in the presence of one of the Kings of our world. Certain people,
both in England and Germany, have written stupid things of him; they
have pointed fingers at his faults, banged their fists upon his sins.
I hate those people. Faults and sins? Who has not faults? Who has
not committed sins? You English have a word ‘uncanny.’ Or is it you
Scottish people? Wagner was uncanny. He dived into things. Yes, he
dived. And every time he lost his body in the blue sea, he brought back
a pearl. A pearl? No: pearls have no mystery. He brought back, each
time, a hitherto undiscovered gem.... ‘Gem’! What silly sounds you
have in English.... Jem.... Djem!”

His old mind, outworn and very weary, appeared to cease its
functioning. He sat with no sign of life in him. It was as though a
clock had stopped, as though a light had gone out. And then, without
any apparent cause, he came to life again.

“Let us go to the piano,” he said, rising.

So we left the little room in which we were sitting and moved to the
large music-room at the far end of which was a grand piano. Frau
Klindworth, Dawson and I sat in the semi-darkness near the door;
Klindworth’s tall but rather shrunken figure moved down the room to
the little light that hung above the keyboard. He played some almost
unknown pieces of Liszt, interpreting them in a style at once noble and
half-ruined. The excitement of playing seemed to increase rather than
add strength to his physical weakness, and many wrong notes were struck.

It was very pathetic to see this old man trying to revive the fires
within him, trying and failing; and I felt that if, by some miraculous
effort, he had succeeded, if the ashes of long-spent fires had indeed
broken into hot flame, his frail body would have been consumed.

He gave me his photograph and wrote on the back some message, and
when I left him I thought I should never see him again. But, a few
days later, I saw him in the front row of one of Frederick Dawson’s
recitals, and I occasionally heard from him a deep-noted “Bravo!” as
Dawson electrified us with one of his stupendous performances.

Klindworth lingered on for some years later and, when I was in
Macedonia last year, I saw in some newspaper a few lines recording
his death. In the seventies he was a great figure in London, and
Wagner-worshippers of those days worshipped Klindworth also, not only
for his genius, but also for his loyalty, his noble-mindedness, his
devotion to his art.

       *       *       *       *       *

Out of curiosity on the last day of my stay in Berlin, I went to
a famous concert agent’s office, ostensibly to make some business
inquiries, but, in reality, to have a look at the underworld of art;
for the business side of all art has almost invariably an underworld of
its own in which there is much irony and in which dwells a spirit of
strangely sardonic humour.

The office was crowded with artists, most of them prosperous, all of
them of recognised position. Though they were clients of the agent—that
is to say, people able and eager to engage his services and pay
handsomely for them—they were kept waiting an unconscionable time, as
though they had come to beg favours. As, indeed, they had. For Herr
Otto Zuggstein always made it perfectly clear by his manner that the
favour was his to confer, the honour yours to accept. He had a hot,
eager brain, cunning hands and hairy wrists.

And his work, his object in life? Well, he was the connecting-link
between the artist and the public, just as a publisher is the
connecting-link between authors and those who read. Otto Zuggstein
“published” pianists, singers, violinists. He engaged concert halls
for them, sold their tickets and collected the money, printed their
programmes, distributed tickets to the Press, advertised their
recitals, and so on. There are, of course, many such men, men engaged
honourably in an honourable profession, in all the big cities of
Europe; but Zuggstein was steeped in dishonour. It was freely said
of him that he had all the powerful music critics of Berlin in the
hollow of his hand. Instead of working for their respective editors
they really worked for him. He could command a long and enthusiastic
“notice” about almost any artist in almost any paper; he could also
secure the publication of the most damning criticisms. If you were
a really great artist desiring to “succeed” in Berlin and he, or his
friends, considered it against his own and his friends’ interest for
you to succeed, he could and would prevent you doing so.

He occasionally emerged from the inner room in which he sat, moved
among us for a minute or so, exchanging handshakes, smiles and other
insincerities, and, singling out a man or a woman with special business
claims upon him, returned with his companion to his private office. As
he disappeared, some of those who waited smiled significantly at each
other.

Zuggstein, as one used to write three or four years ago, “intrigued”
me. He was such an efficient rogue: a rogue working, as it appeared,
most openly, most flagrantly, but in reality working with an abundance
of prepared camouflage.

I waited most patiently and, in the course of time, when he again
issued from his private sanctum, he queried me with his right eyebrow,
beckoned me almost imperceptibly with his left elbow and, preceding me,
made a gangway to his room. I followed him with an air, recognising, as
I did so, that I was in for a bit of an adventure, and resolved to lie
like poor Beelzebub himself.

“Good-morning,” said he in English when the door was closed upon us.
“Will you take a chair and also a cigar?” Mysteriously, he produced a
box from the region of his knees and looked hard at me. “And a whisky?”
he added, with a smile. “I never drink myself,” he apologised, “but you
English!”

I accepted all three invitations.

“I have come,” said I, when I had lit my cigar and savoured it, “I have
come to see you about half-a-dozen recitals, piano recitals, that a
Norwegian friend of mine wishes to give here in Berlin next January.”

“To whom,” asked he—and a little chill descended upon him as he asked
the question—“to whom have I the honour of speaking?”

I smiled deprecatingly, and produced from my card-case a card bearing
the name “Gerald Cumberland.”

“I am staying at the Fürstenhof. Room 4001.”

Disarmed, but still cautious, he wrote the number of my room on the
pasteboard.

“I am, I think it is obvious, from England. This is my first visit to
your great city. I am interested in art, in music.” I used a careless,
all-embracing gesture. “And my Norwegian friend, Mr Sigurd Falk,
knowing that I was about to set out for Berlin, asked me to try to
arrange certain matters with you. He got your name from a compatriot of
his.”

By this time he had poured out, and I had drunk most of, the whisky. A
peculiar thing happened: whilst it was I who drank the whisky, it was
he who became genial—more than genial: almost friendly.

“What,” he inquired, “does your friend wish to do in Berlin?”

“Play the piano and make a little money.”

He grunted sympathetically, if a man may ever be said to grunt
sympathetically.

“Money is difficult to make in Berlin,” he said, looking at me keenly,
“but I will do my best for him. Six recitals, you say?”

“Six. And at this, our first interview, I wished to have just a rough
estimate of what those six recitals are likely to cost.”

“Why, it all depends.... Another whisky?... No?... It all depends.
Depends on all kinds of things. What hall do you want? I ought,
perhaps, to tell you, first of all, what hall you can _have_: you see,
you come rather late, very late, in the day. It is now November, and
your friend wishes to play in January. All the halls are usually booked
months in advance.”

We went into particulars of halls, dates, etc. And then he began to
scribble figures on a sheet of paper.

“Press?” he queried.

“I _beg_ your pardon?”

“You would, I mean your friend would, I imagine, like a favourable
Press?”

“Why, yes.”

“Audience?”

“Do you mean _any_ kind of audience?”

“I am afraid they will be mostly women, though, of course, I can get
you a certain number of male students. But the audience, I can promise
you, will be well disposed. Three or four encores at least.”

“Yes, then, both Press _and_ audience.”

He scribbled a little more.

“An inclusive estimate?” he asked.

“Please. You mean by inclusive...?”

“Everything,” he said impressively; “the hall, the printing, the
advertisements, a few invitations, the preliminary paragraphs, the
audience, the critics’ articles. And not only the critics’ notices, but
the presence of the critics themselves,” he added.

He worked hard for five minutes, looked up data in books, and at length
very gently pushed over to me, across the shining top of the table,
a properly written out estimate for the recitals my imaginary friend
intended to give. The total amount, as represented by English money,
was £325.

“Thank you so much,” said I; “I will call to see you to-morrow perhaps.
But I must first of all get an estimate from Herr Dorn.”

“Who is Herr Dorn?” he asked, in surprise.

I did not know: his name had slid into my mind that very moment, and I
was not quite sure whether, in the whole world, there was such a name.
Then, greatly daring, I greatly lied.

“He is a cousin of Sigurd Falk,” said I.

As I left, he gave me another cigar, shook my hand most warmly, and
looked me in the eyes very keenly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Every night Dawson and I used to go either to the opera or to some
concert, and, when the music was finished, which was generally very
late, we would perhaps go to some supper-party or other.

I have a good appetite myself, but really some of the German ladies’
gastronomic feats were superb. I remember myself one night sitting
fascinated and awestruck as I saw a Wagner-heroine type of woman,
full-breasted, high-browed and majestic, eat plateful after plateful of
oysters, until I began to wonder how it was so many oysters came to be
in Berlin at one and the same time.

       *       *       *       *       *

Elena Gerhardt, in those days, was large, white and serene. She was a
little bitter, perhaps, and certainly greatly disappointed. I met her
in Manchester shortly after my return to England, and found her mind
insipid, her soul tepid.

       *       *       *       *       *

Egon Petri had phlegm almost British: a real slogger: most uninspired:
the possessor of faultless technique: the possessor of a brain that
retained everything but expounded nothing. He had business ability and
pushed ahead all the time: pushed ahead all the time, but never arrived
anywhere. Never will arrive anywhere in particular, except at his own
well-cleaned doorstep, where the polished knocker will respond to his
carefully gloved hand.

       *       *       *       *       *

Richard Strauss I also met in Manchester at about the same time. I have
always maintained that, in at least one case out of three, it is unwise
to judge a man by his face.

But I must for a moment digress. This question of faces is most
interesting. Every man, of course, makes his own face: even the most
ugly of us will concede that much, for, if we are, and know we are,
ugly, we always console ourselves with the thought: “Yes, but it is a
special kind of ugliness. There is strength in my ugliness. There is
character; there is soul. My ugliness is original. There is no ugliness
_quite_ like my ugliness.” For, so long as we are different from other
people, that is all that matters. Now, in making our faces—a process
that is always continuous from the time we are born to the moment of
death—some of us are full of anxiety to make, not a face, but a mask.
Our faces do not express our souls: they hide them. The consequence
of this is that you will sometimes, though not often, meet a man with
a mean, insignificant face who is, in reality, the possessor of a
first-rate brain. But it is difficult to repress some facial hint of
intellect; try how one may, one can do little to modify the shape of
one’s brow or give the eye a sodden and unintelligent look.

Richard Strauss has disguised himself. At close quarters one sees at
once that his head is both shapely and well poised: one notices the
exceptionally high forehead, the firm rounded lips, the determined
chin. “A financier,” you say to yourself; “at all events, if not a
financier, a man of affairs, a man accustomed to deal with and order
facts. Certainly not a dreamer—not a poet or a musician or an artist of
any kind.”

He exhibits no emotion. Self-restrained, he speaks little but very much
to the point. Even in moments of great success, he is reserved and
businesslike. You can never take him unawares. He is guarded, on the
alert, watchful. “All mind but no heart,” you say; at least, you say
that if you are a careless observer.

His tastes are of the simplest and though, for a composer, he has
amassed a large amount of money, he is absurdly economical. He
rather likes abuse, and when a critic makes a fool of himself he is
inordinately amused. The spectacle of human vanity and human folly
excites him. His handshake is firm, his regard direct.

His piano-playing is beautifully neat and polished, but he is not a
virtuoso on the instrument.




CHAPTER XIX

SOME MUSICIANS

  Edvard Grieg—Sir Frederick H. Cowen—Dr Hans Richter—Sir Thomas
  Beecham—Sir Charles Santley—Landon Ronald—Frederic Austin


Very many years have passed since, one cold winter’s afternoon, I met
Edvard Grieg on Adolph Brodsky’s doorstep. A little figure buried,
very deeply buried, in an overcoat at least six inches thick, came
down the damp street, paused a minute at the gate, and then, rather
hesitatingly, walked up the pathway. He saluted me as he reached the
door and we waited together until my summons to those within was
answered.

I found him very homely, completely without affectation, childlike, and
a little melancholy. He was at that time in indifferent health, and
it was at once made evident to me that both Grieg himself and those
around him—especially Mrs Brodsky—were very anxious that he should
be restored to complete fitness. He said nothing in the least degree
noteworthy, but when he did speak he had such a gentle air, a manner so
ingratiating and simple, that one found his conversation most unusually
pleasant.

Ernest Newman once called Grieg “Griegkin,” a most admirable name for
this quite first-rate of third-rate composers. His music is diminutive.
He could not think largely. He loved country dances, country scenes,
the rhythm of homely life, the bounded horizon. Even so extended a
work as his Pianoforte Concerto is a series of miniatures. And Grieg
the man was precisely like Grieg the artist. He was Griegkin in his
appearance, his manner, his way of speaking: a little man: a gracious
little man. His attitude towards his host and hostess was that of an
affectionate child. Such dear simplicity is, I think, in the artist
found only among men of northern races.

Some years later, in an intimate little circle, I was to hear his
widow sing and play many of her husband’s songs. She was the feminine
counterpart of himself—spirited, a little sad, simple yet wise, frank,
and an artist through and through.

       *       *       *       *       *

A great deal of comedy is lost to the world through lack of historians.
It is almost impossible to conceive that Sir F. H. Cowen should ever
have been in serious competition with Hans Richter: impossible to
conceive that half the musical inhabitants of a large city should have
been ranged fiercely on Sir Frederick’s side, and the other half ranged
on the side of Richter: impossible to conceive that both Cowen and
Richter were candidates for the same post. Yet so it was.

Sir Charles Hallé, who had founded and conducted for about
half-a-century the famous orchestral concerts in Manchester still known
by his name, died and left no successor. Literally, there was no one
to appoint in his place, no one quite good enough. Month after month
went by, a good many distinguished and semi-distinguished musicians
came to Manchester and conducted an odd concert or two, but it was very
widely felt that no British musician would do. Sir Frederick Cowen,
always an earnest and accomplished composer, came for a season or two
and did some admirable work, but Cowen was not Hallé. Then the German
element in Manchester discovered that Richter would come, if invited.
The salary was large, the work not heavy, the climate awful, the people
devoted, the position unusually powerful. All things considered, it
was one of the few really good vacant musical posts in Europe.

All this is ancient history now, and I will record only briefly that
ultimately Sir Frederick Cowen was, in effect, told (what, no doubt, he
already knew) that Richter was the better man and that he (Cowen) must
go. But before this decision was made a most severe fight was waged in
the city. Cowen conducted, and thousands of partisans came and cheered
him to the echo. Richter conducted, and thousands of partisans came and
cheered him to the echo. People wrote to the newspapers. Leader writers
solemnly summed up the situation from day to day. Protests were made,
meetings were organised and held, votes of confidence were passed.
London caught the infection, and passed its opinion, its opinions....

Sir F. H. Cowen (he was “Mr” then) received me in his rooms at the
Manchester Grand Hotel. It was impossible not to like him, for, if
he had no great positive qualities that seized upon you at once, he
had a good many negative ones. He had no “side,” no self-importance,
no eccentricities. He had neither long hair nor a foreign accent. He
did not use a cigarette-holder. He did not loll when he sat down, or
posture when he stood up. And he had not just discovered a new composer
of Dutch extraction.... These are small things, you say. But are
they?...

I remember looking at him and wondering if he really _had_ written _The
Better Land_. It seemed so unlikely. Faultlessly dressed, immaculately
groomed, how _could_ he have written _The Better Land_—that luteous
land that is so sloppy, so thickly covered with untidy debris?

He would not talk of the musical situation in Manchester, and I could
see that he was very sensitive about his uncomfortable position.

“If I am wanted, I shall stay,” was all he would give me.

“And are you going to write about me in the paper?” asked he, at the
end of our interview; “how interesting that will be!” And he smiled
with gentle satire.

“I shall make it as interesting as I can,” I assured him, “but, you
see, you have said so little.”

“Does that matter?” he returned. “I have always heard that you
gentlemen of the Press can at least—shall we say embroider?”

“But may I?” I asked.

“How can I prevent you? Do tell me how I can, and I will.”

“Well, you can insist upon seeing the article before it appears in
print.”

“Oh, ‘insist’ is not a nice word, is it? But if you would be kind
enough to send me the article before your Editor has it....”

       *       *       *       *       *

Hans Richter was an autocrat, a tyrant. During the years he conducted
in Manchester, he did much splendid work, but it may well be questioned
if, on the whole, his influence was beneficial to Manchester citizens.
He was so tremendously German! So tremendously German indeed, that he
refused to recognise that there was any other than Teutonic music in
the world. His intellect had stopped at Wagner. At middle age his mind
had suddenly become set, and he looked with contempt at all Italian and
French music, refusing also to see any merit in most of the very fine
music that, during the last twenty years, has been written by British
composers.

He irked the younger and more turbulent spirits in Manchester, and we
were constantly attacking him in the Press. But with no effect. Richter
was like that. He ignored attacks. He was arrogant and spoiled and
bad-tempered.

“Why don’t you occasionally give us some French music at your
concerts?” he was asked.

“French music?” he roared; “there _is_ no French music.”

And, certainly, whenever he tried to play even Berlioz one could see
that he did not regard his work as music. And he conducted Debussy, so
to speak, with his fists. And as for Dukas...!

Young British musicians used to send him their compositions to read,
but the parcels would come back, weeks later, unread and unopened.
His mind never inquired. His intellect lay indolent and half-asleep
on a bed of spiritual down. And the thousands of musical Germans in
Manchester treated him so like a god that in course of time he came to
believe he was a god. His manners were execrable. On one occasion, he
bore down upon me in a corridor at the back of the platform in the Free
Trade Hall. I stood on one side to allow him to pass, but Richter was
very wide and the corridor very narrow. Breathing heavily, he kept his
place in the middle of the passage.... I felt the impact of a mountain
of fat and heard a snort as he brushed past me.

Everyone was afraid of him. Even famous musicians trembled in his
presence. I remember dining with one of the most eminent of living
pianists at a restaurant where, at a table close at hand, Richter also
was dining. The previous evening Richter had conducted at a concert at
which the pianist had played, and the great conductor had praised my
friend in enthusiastic terms; moreover, they had met before on several
occasions.

“I’ll go and have a word with the Old Man, if you’ll excuse me,” said
my friend.

I watched him go. Smiling a little, ingratiatingly, he bowed to
Richter, and then bent slightly over the table at which the famous
musician was dining alone. Richter took not the slightest notice. My
friend, embarrassed, waited a minute or so, and I saw him speaking.
But the diner continued dining. Again my friend spoke, and at
length Richter looked up and barked three times. Hastily the pianist
retreated, and when he had rejoined me I noticed that he was a little
pale and breathless.

“The old pig!” he exclaimed.

“Why, what happened?”

“Didn’t you see? First of all, he wouldn’t take the slightest notice of
me or even acknowledge my existence. I spoke to him in English three
times before he would answer, and then, like the mannerless brute he
is, he replied in German.”

“What did he say?”

“How do I know? I don’t speak his rotten language. But it sounded like:
‘Zuzu westeben hab! Zuzu westeben hab! Zuzu westeben hab!’ I only know
that he was very angry. He was eating slabs of liver sausage. And he
spoke right down in his chest.”

He was, indeed, unapproachable.

Of course, he was a marvellous conductor, a conductor of genius; but
long before he left Manchester his powers had begun to fail.

For two or three years I made a practice of attending his rehearsals.
Nothing will persuade me that in the whole world there is a more
depressing spot than the Manchester Free Trade Hall on a winter’s
morning. I used to sit shivering with my overcoat collar buttoned
up. Richter always wore a round black-silk cap, which made him look
like a Greek priest. He would walk ponderously to the conductor’s
desk, seize his baton, rattle it against the desk, and begin without
a moment’s loss of time. Perhaps it was an innocent work like Weber’s
_Der Freischütz_ Overture. This would proceed swimmingly enough for
a minute or so, when suddenly one would hear a bark and the music
would stop. One could not say that Richter spoke or shouted: he merely
made a disagreeable noise. Then, in English most broken, in English
utterly smashed, he would correct the mistake that had been made, and
recommence conducting without loss of a second.

He had no “secret.” Great conductors never do have “secrets.” Only
charlatans “mesmerise” their orchestras. Simply, he knew his job, he
was a great economiser of time, and he was a stern disciplinarian.

He could lose his temper easily. He hated those of us who were
privileged to attend his rehearsals. He declared, quite unwarrantably,
that we talked and disturbed him. But he never appeared to be in the
least disturbed by the handful of weary women who, with long brushes,
swept the seats and the floor of the hall, raising whirlpools of dust
fantastically here and there, and banging doors in beautiful disregard
of the Venusberg music and in protest against the exquisite Allegretto
from the Seventh Symphony.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sir Thomas Beecham (he was then plain “Mr”) brought a tin of tobacco to
the restaurant, placed it on the table, and proceeded to fill his pipe.
He was not communicative. He simply sat back in his chair, smoking
quietly, and behaving precisely as though he were alone, though, as
a matter of fact, there were four or five people in his company. He
was not shy: he was simply indifferent to us. If you spoke to him, he
merely said “no” or “yes” and looked bored. He _was_ bored.

And so he sat for ten minutes; then, with a little sigh, he rose and
departed from among us, without a word, without a look. He just melted
away and never returned.

       *       *       *       *       *

I rather dreaded meeting Sir Charles Santley, and when I rang at his
door-bell, I remember devoutly wishing that in a moment I should
hear that he was out, or that he had changed his mind and no longer
desired to see me. I dreaded meeting him because I realised that,
temperamentally, we were opposed. I had read his reminiscences
and disliked him intensely for the things he had said of Rossetti.
Instinctively, I drew away from his robust, tough-fibred mind.

But he was in, and in half-a-minute I was talking to an old, but still
vigorous, gentleman whose one desire appeared to be to put me at my
ease. I do not think I ever met a man so honest, so blunt. I felt that
his mind was direct and his judgment decisive, but I found him lacking
in subtlety, unable to respond to the mystical in art, and wholly
deficient in true imaginative qualities. He was Victorian.

Now, I don’t suppose any of us who are living to-day (and when I say
“living” I mean anyone whose mind is still developing—most people, say,
under the age of forty-five) will be able to understand the point of
view of the Victorian musician. It appears to me monstrous that anyone
should still love Mendelssohn and hate Wagner, that anyone should sing
J. L. Hatton in preference to Hugo Wolf, that anyone should still
delight in Donizetti and Bellini. Those Victorian days were days when
the singer wished that his own notions of the limitations of the human
voice should control the free development of music. They loved _bel
canto_ and nothing else; they averred, indeed, that there was nothing
else to love. They were admirable musicians from the technical point of
view, and they had honest hearts and by no means feeble intellects. But
they could never be brought to believe that music was a reflection of
life, that there were in the human heart a thousand shades of feeling
that not even Handel had expressed, that sound is capable of a million
subtleties, that the ear of man is an organ that is, so to speak, only
in its infancy.

It was a little pathetic, I thought, when speaking to Santley, that
this very great singer had been living for at least thirty years
entirely untouched by many of the finest compositions that had been
written in that period.

And he declared, quite frankly, that “modern” music had no interest
for him. When I mentioned Richard Strauss, he smiled. At the name of
Debussy, he looked bewildered, and about Max Reger, Scriabin, Granville
Bantock, Sibelius and Delius, he had not a word to say.

But soon we got on to his own subject—singing—and here again we were at
cross-purposes. Singers who to me seem supreme artists he had either
not heard of or had not heard.

“There is only one British singer to-day who carries on the old
tradition,” said he; “I mean Madame Kirkby Lunn. She has technique,
style, personality. The others, compared with her, are nowhere.”

Some general talk followed, and I soon discovered, beyond the
possibility of doubt, that, like all great Victorians who have had
their day, he was living in the past—in that particular past whose
artistic spirit is embodied in the Albert Memorial, in the musical
criticism of J. W. Davidson, in the pianoforte playing of Arabella
Godard, in the poetry of Lord Tennyson, in the pictures of Lord
Leighton, in the prose of Ruskin.

What had Santley to say to me, or I to him? Nothing, and less than
nothing. We were from different worlds, different planets, for
half-a-century divided us. In years, he was nearer to the Elizabethan
age than I ... and yet how much farther away was he?

       *       *       *       *       *

Perhaps Mr Landon Ronald will not be angry with me if I call him the
most accomplished of British musicians. He would have every right to be
angry if I said he was accomplished and nothing else.... How far back
that word “accomplished” takes us, doesn’t it? Twenty years, at least.
For aught I know to the contrary, it may still be employed in Putney.
I observe that Chambers defines “accomplishment” as an “ornamental
acquirement,” and, in my boyhood, that was precisely what it meant.
Young ladies “acquired” the art of playing the piano, the art of
painting, the art of recitation. Their skill in any art was not the
result of developing a talent that was already there, but it was the
result of a pertinacity that should have been spent on other things.
But one no longer uses “accomplished” in that precise sense.

Landon Ronald has more than a streak of genius in his nature, and his
cleverness is so abnormal as to be almost absurd. His genius and his
cleverness are evident even in a few minutes’ conversation. He radiates
cleverness, and he is so splendidly alive that as soon as he enters a
room you feel that something quick and electric has been added to your
environment.

When I first met him—ten years ago, was it?—his one ambition was to be
recognised throughout Europe as a great conductor. He was acknowledged
as such in England, of course, and a visit to Rome had fired both the
Italian public and critics with enthusiasm. But London and Rome are not
Europe, whilst in those days Berlin most distinctly was. He was most
charmingly frank about himself, full of enthusiasm for himself, full of
delight in all life’s adventures.

“Of course, I know my songs aren’t _real_ songs,” he said. “I can write
tunes and I’m a musician, and I’m just clever enough to be cleverer
than most people at that sort of work. But you must not imagine I take
my compositions seriously. I think they’re rather nice—‘nice’ _is_ the
word, isn’t it?—and I enjoy inventing them—and ‘inventing’ is also the
word, don’t you think? Besides, they make money; they help to boil the
pot for me while I go on with my more serious work—that is to say,
conducting.”

Havergal Brian was in the room—we were in that fulsome and blowzy town,
Blackpool—and he remarked, as so many extraordinarily able composers
have from time to time remarked, that he found it impossible to write
music that the public really liked.

“Nearly all my stuff,” said he, “is on a big scale for the orchestra. I
am always trying to do something new—something out of the common rut.”

“Ah, but then,” exclaimed Ronald, quite sincerely, “you are a composer,
and I am not.”

Brian was appeased, and I looked at Ronald with admiration for his
tact. But he went even a little farther.

“I sometimes feel rather a pig,” he continued, “making money by my
trifles when so many men with much greater gifts can only rarely get
their work performed and still more rarely get it published. You told
us just now,” said he, turning to Brian, “that you would like to make
money by your compositions. Who wouldn’t? Well, it would be foolish of
me to advise you to try to write more simply, with less originality,
and on a smaller scale. It would be foolish, because you simply
couldn’t do it. No; you must work out your own salvation: it is only a
matter of waiting: success will come.”

A month or two later, we met at Southport, I in the meantime having
written an article on Ronald for a musical magazine. With this article
he professed himself charmed. He was as jolly about it as a schoolboy,
and expressed surprise that I could honestly say such nice things about
him.

“It _is_ good to be praised,” said he, laughing; “I could live on
praise for ever.” And then, lighting a cigarette, he added: “Perhaps
the reason why I like it so much is that I feel I really deserve it.”

It was my turn to laugh.

“But I do feel that!” he protested; “if I didn’t, I should hate you or
anyone else to say such frightfully kind things about me and my work.”

A month or two later he wrote me a long letter full of enthusiasm
for some work of mine he had seen somewhere, and when I saw him the
following week in London I protested against his undiluted praise.

“I believe you think I am a bit of a humbug,” said he.

“I’m afraid I do,” I replied. (For, really, I think almost all subtle
and clever artists are bits of humbugs.)

“Very good, then!” exclaimed he, ridiculously hurt.

“What I mean is, that if you like anyone, your judgment is immediately
prejudiced in their favour.”

“So you think I like you?”

“I am sure of it.”

“Well, you’re quite right. But, really and truly, you mustn’t call
me, or even think me, the slightest bit of a humbug. You can call
me impulsive, superficial, or anything horrid of that kind ... but
insincere! Why, sincerity is the only real virtue I’ve got.”

And I believe he believed himself. But who is sincere?—at least, who is
sincere except at the moment? Are not all of us who are artists swayed
hither and thither, from hour to hour, by the emotion of the moment? Do
we not say one thing now, and an hour later mean exactly the opposite?
Are we not driven by our enthusiasms to false positions, and do not
glib, untrue words spring to our lips because the moment’s mood forces
them there?

I have not met Landon Ronald for four years, but the other day I heard
him conduct, and I recognised in his interpretations the supreme
qualities I have so often observed before. He himself is like his
work—polished, highly strung, emotional, fluid, intense. His mind works
with lightning-like quickness; he knows what you are going to say just
a second before you have said it. And over his personality hangs the
glamour that we call genius.

       *       *       *       *       *

Many well-known singers have I met, but very few of them inspire me to
burst into song. They are a dull, vain crew. Among the few most notable
exceptions is Frederic Austin, a man with a temperament so refined,
with a nature so retiring, that it is a constant source of wonder to me
that he should be where he now is—in the front rank of vocalists.

Years ago Ernest Newman said to me:

“Frederic Austin has become a fine singer through sheer brain-work. He
always had temperament, but his voice was never in the least remarkable
until by ingenious training, by constant thought, and by the most
arduous labour he developed it until it became an organ of sufficient
strength and richness to enable him to interpret anything that appeals
to him.”

He is, I think, the only eminent singer in this country who is a
distinguished composer. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about him
is that you might very easily pass days in his company without guessing
that he is a famous singer, for his personality suggests qualities that
famous singers seldom possess. He is _distingué_, austere, and devoted
to his art.




CHAPTER XX

TWO CHELSEA “RAGS,” 1914 AND 1918


1914

It used to begin as a rumour, a faint stirring and excitement in King’s
Road, Chelsea. The artist on the top floor of Joubert Studios—an artist
who had a private income and a gently nursed hypochondria—received
a parcel from home: a couple of cooked chickens, perhaps, a tongue,
cakes, crystallised fruits, three bottles of wine and so on. The lady
who occupied the studio below, and the musical critic who lived in the
third studio from the top, were duly apprised of the fact, and Norman
and Eddie Morrow were called in from near by for a consultation.

“Clearly,” the lady remarked, “a rag is indicated. A rag must always
have a beginning, and this undoubtedly is a most excellent beginning.
Ring up Susie, somebody, and fetch Hearn over and Ivan and let the
Cumberlands know; and, oh! Hughes, dear little Herbert, lend me your
pots and pans and things. And, Warlow, just run round everywhere and
tell all the people you meet. Don’t forget John, and I think that Deane
would like that girl with fuzzy hair. We’ll begin at seven. No, we
won’t: we’ll begin now.”

And Warlow, nursing his hypochondria and being very biddable, sighed
and moved away, saying beseechingly as he went:

“You _will_ leave me a wing, won’t you? I’ve had no breakfast yet.”

But neither had the rest, and by the time Warlow, suffering in a
resigned and patient kind of way from paleness and breathlessness,
returned, one of the chickens had vanished, and the long table with its
litter of paper, cardboard, pencils and paint, was now littered also
with plates and knives and forks and breadcrumbs. The rag had begun.

The month was May, a true May with a warm wind, a warmer sun, and
fluttering green leaves. The little party—the nucleus of the much
larger party that was to meet there in the evening—drifted downstairs
to Hughes’s studio where there was a grand piano and a portable
harmonium which appeared to belong to no one in particular. Hughes,
looking a little ruefully at the MS. upon which he was engaged, put it
away on a shelf, opened his wide windows and began to play. Harry Lowe,
with his magnificent but untrained voice, appeared dramatically in the
doorway and sang:

   _Largo    {For he’s a Scotsman, a bonny Scotsman,
  grandioso_ {       His feyther and his mither,
             {       His sister and his brither—
  (_Forte_)   They are _all_ Scotch, from the land of Roderick Dhu;
  (_Vivace_)  And the whitewash brush in the middle of his kilt
  (_Piano_)          Is all Sco-otch too.

This went to a great tune devised, invented, composed and arranged
by Hughes and Lowe. The great air, heard with its cunning chatter of
an accompaniment from the piano, put everyone in the right mood, and
Norman Morrow, whose head was always full of ideas, began to prepare
“stunts” for the evening, whilst Warlow, having nothing better to do,
attired himself as an Italian Count, sat at the open window, and smiled
sadly at all the girls whose attention he could attract in the street
below.

Norman’s idea was a revue—a revue of Any Old Thing: Mona Lisa, the
sale of beautiful slaves, the Salome Dance by six-foot-two Harry Lowe,
the Innocent Wench who took the Wrong Turning, etc., etc. He wanted
to prepare the groundwork for the evening’s performance; the details
could be filled in on the spur of the moment. But, in the afternoon
rehearsal, several scenes, exciting the actors, were studied carefully
to the most minute particular. Kitty, in the meantime, was upstairs
preparing food, her dainty hands fluttering over salads and sandwiches.
At six, jolly, lovable little Susie rushed from her work, revitalised
everybody, and sang in her funny little voice, holding a cigarette in
one hand and a saucepan in the other.

But before the Rag Proper began, many charming idiocies were enacted.
Warlow and Eddie Morrow walked to Sloane Square (it is conceivable
that they called at the Six Bells on the way) for the sole purpose of
riding back again in a taxi-cab, Warlow in a great Russian overcoat
smothered in fur, Eddie a little unkempt and looking as though he had
just stepped out of one of J. M. Synge’s plays. Harry Lowe telephoned
a number of telegrams to a far-off post office where it was supposed
there was a lady who owned his heart and sold postage stamps. Norman
Morrow sat in a corner daubing pieces of brown paper with yellow paint
and chuckling inconsequently to himself. All three studios, one above
the other, appeared to be in glorious disorder, but, as a matter of
fact, nearly every brain was busy with preparations, and by seven
o’clock everything was ready for the great rag....

I cannot re-create the scene for you. I do not know quite how it is,
but the gaiety, the light-heartedness of that most jolly evening
ooze from my heart as I write. I am not sufficient of an artist to
sweep from my heart all the sad, irrecoverable things that my heart
remembers. Especially, I cannot forget Ivan Heald, who now lies dead.
(A year later he was to say to me, in that same studio: “This is a real
good-bye, Gerald. It is not possible that both of us will survive
this.”... And, of course, it is he who has gone. One feels mean in
surviving, in enjoying the savour of life, when one’s best friends have
departed.) ...

The artistic Irishman is a perfect actor, an inimitable mimic, and the
two Morrows surpassed everyone. If ever you have seen Eddie Morrow, it
will appear to you inconceivable that he could ever make a good Mona
Lisa. Yet his Mona Lisa was perfect. He smiled so mysteriously, so
faintly, so imaginatively, that Walter Pater, had he seen him, would
have rewritten that swooning chapter which contains so much of art’s
opiate.... I remember Edith Heald who, unexpectedly to me, revealed
consummate art as a nigger-boy, her eyes rolling in rapt wonderment.
I remember Hearn’s eyeglasses, and the smiling eyes behind them, and
the little scurry of words that occasionally came from his lips when
something magical touched his spirit. And I can hear Herbert Hughes’
contented voice saying: “Well, this is rather splendid, don’t you know.”

Hughes was awfully good to me on these occasions, for he would allow me
to improvise the music for the dumb charades, though as an extempore
player—and, indeed, as a player of any kind—he is worlds above me.
And I used to love to invent Eastern Dances à la Bantock to fit the
gyrations of Harry Lowe, or Debussy chords for anything shadowy and
sentimental, or chromatic melodies—prolonged and melting things in the
“O Star of Eve” manner—for luscious love scenes, or fat, bulgy discords
when some real tomfoolery was afoot.

You must imagine everybody gay and, occasionally, just a little
riotous; in remembrance, it seems to me very beautiful because so happy
and childlike. And you must imagine everybody very friendly, even to
complete strangers. There was a carnival atmosphere. Clever people were
there with their brains burning bright. There were wit, music, wine,
pretty women, courtesy, infinite good-will.

Perhaps, towards midnight, we would seek change in quietness, and,
lying on rugs spread on the waxed floor, would listen to Norman
singing, unaccompanied, an Irish Rebel song, and something a little
hard would come into Irish Susie’s eyes for a moment or two, and I
remember with regret how, some months after war had broken out, I said
after Norman had been singing that it was no longer pleasant to me to
hear Rebel songs. Regret? Yes; for when I said that I was a prig and
was imagining myself as something of a soldier-hero. If only Norman
were alive now to sing whatsoever songs he liked!

Well, the evening lapsed into night and the night into morn, and again
we became boisterous and new ideas were put into shape and little
tragedies were given in the burlesque manner. The resourcefulness of
the mimes! The devilishly clever satire! The good spirits that never
failed!...

       *       *       *       *       *

It is no use. I cannot describe for you one of those great nights, for
the mood will not come. And one of the reasons why I cannot recapture
the spirit of a Chelsea Rag as it was in the old days, is because
whilst I am writing I have in my mind a picture of a very different
kind.

       *       *       *       *       *


1918

Early in 1918 I was in London for a brief period after an absence from
England of more than two years spent in France, Egypt, Greece and
Serbia. My health was broken, my spirits were low. The Chelsea people
were dispersed; only Hearn, with his lame foot, was left of the men,
but several of the women were to be found. Herbert Hughes, by some
miracle, was on leave, and he turned up unexpectedly one night at my
flat. We talked quietly, laughed a little, had some music, and fell
into silence.

“Those great days!” said I, apropos of nothing.

“Yes. Nothing like them will come again. But all of us who remain alive
and are still in England must meet. What about next Sunday? We’ll meet
at Madame’s.”

And so it was arranged. Next Sunday there were seven of us to make
merry, whereas in former days there were forty or fifty. But we seven
were together once more: we who, as it were, had been saved—saved
perhaps only temporarily.

It is a long studio in which we sit, but screens enclose a piano, the
fireplace, a few rugs and chairs, and a table. Madame is tall and quiet
and distinguished; her light soprano voice conveys an impression of
wistfulness, and her personality, full of charm and a sadness that does
not conceal her courage, diffuses itself throughout the room. We have
met together for a rag, but no one evinces the least desire to indulge
in any violent jollity.

Hughes goes to the piano, for a piano always draws him as a magnet
draws steel, and sometimes, half-consciously, he feels the pull of
one before he has seen it. He goes to the piano and, perking his
nose at an angle of about forty degrees with the horizontal, plays
French songs very quietly, whilst we sit gazing into the heart of
the fire, each with his own thoughts, and probably each with the
same thoughts—thoughts of Harry Lowe in Greece, of Gordon Warlow in
Mesopotamia, of those who lie dead, though but two years before they
were more alive than we ourselves, of those who have gone to France and
never returned....

And Madame, moving with our thoughts, gently rises and joins Hughes and
begins, her hands clasped on her breast, to sing with most alluring
grace things by Hahn, Debussy and Duparc. The music lulls us into a
very luxury of sadness, into a mood in which grief loses its edge and
sorrow its poignancy. To me, who have heard no music for two years,
her singing is mercilessly beautiful, so beautiful, indeed, that my
breathing becomes uneven and my eyes wet. And once again I feel that
spinal shiver which, as a little boy, I used to experience when I heard
an anthem by Gounod or just caught the sound of a military band as it
marched down another road.... I never used to run from the house to see
the band, for even in those early days I had an intuitive knowledge
that beauty is mystery, and that to probe mysteries is to mar, if not
altogether to kill, beauty.... And to-night, when Madame comes to the
end of each song, I do not speak, I scarcely breathe, so fearful am I
that the spell may be broken. But something of the spell lasts even
when she ceases singing altogether and, looking at my wife, I know
that she feels it too—that, indeed, all in our little company are more
quietly happy, more reconciled to all the brutality and ugliness over
the sea, than we have been for a long age.

We talk in quiet tones about the past, the present and the future, each
contributing something to the common stock of conversation. Madame
brings us tea and cakes, and we listen to the dim rumour of traffic in
King’s Road. And then, not very late, moved by a common impulse, we
rise to leave, and talking softly as we go, make our way outside where,
as we did in that spot three years ago, we say farewell, wondering as
we do so what Fate has in store for each of us and whether for one or
more of us this is the end of our life in Chelsea—a life in which we
have worked hard and played hard, enjoying both work and play, and in
which we have been carelessly unmindful of the danger lying in wait for
our country.




CHAPTER XXI

SOME MORE MUSICIANS

  Professor Granville Bantock—Frederick Delius—Joseph
  Holbrooke—Dr Walford Davies—Dr Vaughan Williams—Dr W. G.
  M‘Naught—Julius Harrison—Rutland Boughton—John Coates—Cyril Scott


At the present moment there are only two names that are of
vital importance in British creative music—Sir Edward Elgar and
Granville Bantock. No two men could be in more violent contrast:
Elgar, conservative, soured with the aristocratic point of view,
super-refined, deeply religious; Bantock, democratic, Rabelaisian,
free-thinking, gorgeously human.

Of the two, Bantock is the more original, the deeper thinker, the more
broadly sympathetic.

It must be about ten years ago that, staying a week-end with Ernest
Newman, I was taken by my host one evening to Bantock’s house in
Moseley. I remember Bantock’s bulky form rising from the table at
which he was scoring the first part of his setting of _Omar Khayyám_,
and I recollect that, as soon as we had shaken hands, he took from
his pocket an enormous cigar-case of many compartments that shut in
upon themselves concertina-fashion. From another pocket he produced a
huge match-box containing matches almost as large as the chips of wood
commonly used for lighting fires. Having carefully selected a cigar for
me, he struck a match that, spluttering like a firework, calmed down
into a huge blaze. He gazed upon me very solemnly and rather critically
all the time I was lighting up, but his face relaxed into a smile
when, having plunged my cigar into the middle of the flame, I left it
there for many seconds and did not withdraw it until the cigar itself
had momentarily flamed and until it glowed like a miniature furnace.

I was destined to smoke very many of Bantock’s cigars, and I hope that
when the war is over I shall smoke many more; but I never lit a cigar
he handed me without noticing that he invariably observed me very
closely and a trifle anxiously, as though afraid I should fail in some
detail of the holy rite. I do not think I ever did fail, for he never
met me without offering me a cheroot, which he certainly would never
have done if I had omitted any necessary observance of the lighting
ceremonial.

That first evening we talked a good deal—at least, Newman and a few
other friends did; but Bantock, never a very loquacious man, committed
himself to nothing save a few generalities. By no means a cautious
man in his mode of life, he is nevertheless cautious in his choice of
friends, and no man can freeze more quickly than he when uncongenial
company is thrust upon him. There were several strangers in our little
circle, and Bantock was content for the most part to sit back in his
easy-chair and listen.

The following night we met again at the Midland Institute, Birmingham,
where Ernest Newman was giving one of his witty and brilliant lectures.
Bantock insisted upon my sitting on the platform, though for what
reason I do not know, unless it was to satisfy his impish instinct for
putting shy and self-conscious people into prominent positions. At
that time he and Newman were the closest of friends, and as Newman and
I were on very friendly terms, Bantock was disposed to regard me very
favourably; at all events, before we parted that evening, he showed me
clearly enough that he did not actually dislike me, for he invited me
to visit him for a week-end whenever I saw my way clear to do so. From
that time onward I met him frequently in his own house, in Manchester,
London, Wrexham, Gloucester, Liverpool, Birmingham and elsewhere.

Soon it became a regular practice of mine to run over from Manchester
to Liverpool every alternate Saturday to attend the afternoon rehearsal
and the evening concert of the Philharmonic Society, the orchestra of
which Bantock conducted. These were very pleasant meetings, for a party
of us used to stay at the London and North Western Hotel and we would
sit until the small hours of Sunday morning talking music, returning to
our respective homes on Sunday afternoon. At these times Bantock was at
his best, and Bantock’s best makes the finest company in the world. In
his presence one always feels warm and deeply comfortable, and yet very
much alive; he made a glow; he reconciled one to oneself. I would not
call him a brilliant, or even a good, talker, but I can with truth call
him a very wise one; and in argument he is unassailable.

       *       *       *       *       *

Though I used frequently to go to Liverpool to hear Bantock conduct, I
did not do so because I regarded him as a great artist with the baton.
Of his ability in this direction, there is no doubt; but that he is an
interpretative genius no qualified critic would assert. No: it was the
personality of the man himself, and the new, modern works he used to
include in his programmes that drew me to Liverpool. Bantock, at that
period, was almost passionately modern. I remember with amusement how
pettish he used sometimes to pretend to be when, perhaps in deference
to public opinion (but perhaps he was overruled by a Committee?), he
felt compelled to include a Beethoven symphony in one of his concerts.

On one occasion I met him at Lime Street Station, Liverpool, when he
emerged from the train carrying a bundle of loose scores under his arm.

“Let me carry your books for you,” said I.

He selected the least bulky and lightest of the scores he was carrying,
and handed it to me.

“You are always a good chap, Cumberland,” he remarked. “Do take
this; it’s the heaviest of the lot: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. So
very heavy.” He sighed. “And so dry that merely to carry it makes me
thirsty. How many times have you heard it?”

But he was poking a cigar into my mouth, and I could not answer until
it was well alight.

“At least fifty or sixty. Oh, more than that! Eight times, say, every
year for the last fifteen years—one hundred and twenty.”

“Yes, always a good chap, and so very patient,” he murmured to himself.
“Do you know, Cumberland, I had to work—yes, to _work_—at that Symphony
in the train. And I define work as doing something that gives you no
pleasure. Talking about work, I must post these before I forget.”

He took from his pocket a number of post cards all addressed to Ernest
Newman. These post cards appeared to amuse him immensely, and he handed
them to me with a smile. There were about a dozen of them, and each
bore an anagram of the word “work”—KROW, WROK, ROWK, RWKO, etc.

“He’ll receive these by the first post in the morning,” Bantock
explained, “and if they don’t succeed in making him jump out of bed
and finish his analysis of my _Omar Khayyám_ for Breitkopf and Härtel,
nothing will.”

Point was added to the jest by the fact that Newman has always been a
particularly hard, and generally very heavily pressed worker.

       *       *       *       *       *

In his early manhood Bantock travelled a good deal in the East, not
so much by choice, but because circumstances drove him thither. Yet I
often feel that the East is his natural home. Whether or not he has
any close acquaintance with Eastern languages, I do not know, but he
certainly likes his friends to think he has, and many of the letters
he has sent me contain quotations and odd words written in what I take
to be Persian and Chinese characters. I should not, however, be in the
least surprised to learn that these are “faked,” for Bantock loves
nothing so much as gently pulling the legs of his friends.

He has not, however, the foresight of Eastern people. His enthusiasms
drive him into extremes and into monetary extravagances. When he lived
at Broadmeadow, with its extensive wooded grounds, outside Birmingham,
he had a mania for bulbs, and I remember his showing me a stable the
floor of which was covered with crocus, daffodil, jonquil and narcissus
bulbs.

“But,” protested I, “these ought to have been planted months ago.”

“I know, I know,” he said sadly. “But the gardener is so busy. Still,
there they are.”

His philosophic outlook has been largely directed by Eastern
philosophy. He admires cunning and takes a beautiful and childlike
delight in believing that he possesses that quality in abundance. But
in reality, he cannot deceive. Even his card tricks are amateurish, and
his chess-playing is only just good.

Apropos of his chess-playing, I remember that some years ago a chess
enthusiast—a bore of the vilest description—used to visit him regularly
and stay to a very late hour for the purpose of playing a game. These
visits soon became intolerable, and, one evening, as Bantock, irritated
and petulant, sat opposite his opponent, he resolved to put an end to
the nuisance.

“Excuse me a moment,” said he; “I have left my cigar-box upstairs, and
I really can’t do without a smoke.”

He left the room, and went straight to bed and to sleep. Next time he
met his visitor, they merely bowed.

Bantock used to relate this story with the greatest glee, and in the
course of time the yarn grew to colossal dimensions. It became epical.
One was told how his visitor was heard calling: “Bantock! Bantock! I’ve
taken your Queen,” how strange noises proceeded from dark rooms, and
how, next morning, his visitor, having sat up all night, was found wide
awake trying the effect of certain combinations of moves on the board.
When a thing is said three times, it is, of course, true, but Bantock
never told exactly the same story three times. He believes, I think,
that consistency is the refuge and the consolation of the dull-witted.

       *       *       *       *       *

Frederick Delius, a Yorkshireman, has chosen to live most of his
artistic life abroad, and for this reason is not familiarly known to
his countrymen, though he is a great personage in European music. A
pale man, ascetic, monkish; a man with a waspish wit; a man who allows
his wit to run away with him so far that he is tempted to express
opinions he does not really hold.

I met him for a short hour in Liverpool, where, over food and
drink snatched between a rehearsal and a concert, he showed a keen
intellect and a fine strain of malice. Like most men of genius, he is
curiously self-centred, and I gathered from his remarks that he is not
particularly interested in any music except his own. He is (or was)
greatly esteemed in Germany, and if in his own country he has not a
large following, he alone is to blame.

He is a man who pursues a path of his own, indifferent to criticism,
and perhaps indifferent to indifference. Decidedly a man of most
distinguished intellect and a quick, eager but not responsive
personality, but not a musician who marks an epoch as does Richard
Strauss, and not a man who has formed a school, as Debussy has done.

       *       *       *       *       *

Joseph Holbrooke, for sheer cleverness, for capacity for hard work,
and for intellectual energy, has no equal among our composers. It was
Newman who first spoke to me about him, and it was Newman who made me
curious to meet this extraordinary genius.

Holbrooke’s weakness—but I do not consider it a weakness—is his
pugnacity. He has fought the critics times without number and, in many
cases, with excellent results for British music, though Holbrooke must
know much better than I do that in fighting for his colleagues he has
incidentally injured himself. A chastised critic is the last person in
the world likely to write a fair and unbiassed article on a new work
produced by the hand that chastised him. But not only the critics have
felt the lash of Holbrooke’s scorn: conductors, musical institutions,
some very prosperous so-called composers, committees, publishers and,
indeed, almost every kind of man who has power in the musical world,
have felt his sting.

But if he is clever and witty in his writing, he is much cleverer and
wittier in his talk. I do not suppose I shall ever forget one Sunday I
spent with him, for by midday he had reduced my mind to chaos and my
body to limpness by his consuming energy. When he was not playing, he
was talking, and he did both as though the day were the last he was
going to spend on earth, so eager and convulsive was his speech, so
vehement his playing.

Perhaps his most remarkable quality is his power of concentration. I
remember his telling me that when he was yachting with Lord Howard
de Walden in the Mediterranean, he was engaged on the composition of
_Dylan_, an opera containing some of the most gorgeous and weirdly
uncanny music that has been written in our generation. At this opera
he worked, not in hours of inspiration (for, like Arnold Bennett, he
does not believe in inspiration), but when he had nothing more exciting
or more necessary to do. For example, he would begin work in the
morning, cheerfully and without regret lay down his pen at lunch-time,
return to his music immediately lunch was finished, and unhesitatingly
recommence writing at the point at which he had left off. Interruptions
that arouse the anger of the ordinary creative artist do not disturb
him in the least. He can work just as composedly and as fluently when a
heated argument is being conducted in the room as he can in a room that
is absolutely quiet. Music, indeed, flows from him, and if moods come
to him which render his brain numb and his soul barren, I doubt if they
last more than a day or two.

Of the truly vast quantity of music he has written, I, to my regret,
know only a portion, and that belongs chiefly to his very early
period, when he was under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is his
spiritual affinity, and Holbrooke’s setting of _Annabel Lee_—a work
which I can play backwards from memory—is more beautiful and haunting
than the beautiful and haunting poem itself.

I have called Holbrooke pugnacious and, some years ago, much to his
amusement and, I think, gratification, I called him the stormy petrel
of music. But what makes him stormy? What are the defects in our
musical life that he so persistently attacks? First of all, he hates
incompetence, especially official incompetence, and the incompetence
that makes vast sums of money. He hates commercialism in art, and by
that phrase I mean the various enterprises that exploit art for the
sole purpose of making money. He hates publishers who issue trash;
he hates critics who write rubbish. He hates the obscurity in which
so many of his gifted colleagues live, and he hates the love of the
British public for foreign music inferior to that which is being
written at home. And I believe he hates the system that presents
editors of newspapers with free concert tickets for the use of their
critics.

But, in dwelling at such length on Holbrooke’s combativeness, I feel
I am giving a rather one-sided view of his true character. For he is
not all hate. Indeed, it is true to state that no composer has written
more in appreciation of men who may be considered his rivals. He is
anxious and quick to study the work of men of the younger generation,
and whenever any of that work appeals to him he either performs it in
public or writes to the papers about it.

I have heard him called perverse, unreliable, injudicious, and many
other disagreeable things. He may be. But Holbrooke is not an angel. He
is simply a composer of genius working under conditions that tend to
thwart and paralyse genius.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dr Walford Davies!... Well, what can I say about Dr Walford Davies
except that he represents all the things in which I have no deep
faith?—asceticism, fine-fingeredism, religiosity, “mutual improvement,”
narrowness of intellect, physical coldness. I love some of his
songs—simple things of exquisite tenderness, but it would be futile to
regard him as anything more than a cultured gentleman with considerable
musical gifts.

On two or three occasions I have been thrown into his company, but I
have never been able to decide whether he is ignorant of my existence
or whether he dislikes me so intensely that he cannot bring himself to
recognise my existence.

He is terribly in earnest—in earnest about Brahms and perhaps about
Frau Schumann also. He wrinkles his forehead about Brahms and poises
a white hand in the air.... Please do not imagine that I do not love
Brahms: I adore him. But Brahms was not God. He was not even a god.
Whereas Wagner.... It was in 1911, I think, that I heard Dr Walford
Davies preaching about Brahms. Now, if you preach about Brahms, you are
eternally lost, for you exclude both Wagner and Hugo Wolf.

How exasperating it must be to possess a temperament that can accept
only part of what is admirable! It seems to me that Walford Davies
distrusts his intellect: in estimating the worth of music, he seems to
say, intellectual standards, artistic standards, are of no value. To
him the only sure test is temperamental affinity. And he wishes all
temperaments to conform to his own limitations.

I have seen Dr Davies near Temple Gardens with choir-boys hanging on
his arm, with choir-boys prancing before him and following faithfully
behind him. A shepherd with his sheep! I am sure he exerts upon them
what is known as a “good influence.” But in matters of art how bad that
good influence may be! Did ever a worshipper of Wagner walk the rooms
of the Y.M.C.A.?

       *       *       *       *       *

I have a very bad memory for the names of public-houses and hotels
(though I love these places dearly), and I regret that I am unable to
recall the name of that very attractive hotel in Birmingham where,
early one evening, Dr Vaughan Williams, travel-stained and brown with
the sun, walked into the lounge and began a conversation with me. He
had walked an incredible distance, and though, physically, he was
very tired, his mind was most alert, and we fell to talking about
music. He told me that he had studied with Ravel, and when he told me
this I reviewed in my mind in rapid succession all Vaughan Williams’
compositions I could remember, trying to detect in any of them traces
of Ravel’s influence. But I was unsuccessful. To me he, with his
essential British downrightness, his love of space, his freedom from
all mannerisms and tricks of style, seemed Ravel’s very antithesis.

Like myself, he had come to Birmingham to listen to music, and the
following evening, after we had heard a long choral work of Bantock’s,
we had what might have developed into a very hot argument. With him was
Dr Cyril Rootham, a very charming and cultivated musician, and both
these composers were amazed and amused when, having asked my opinion of
Bantock’s work, I became dithyrambic in its praise.

“But I thought you were modern?” asked Williams.

“I am anything you please,” said I; “when I hear Richard Strauss I am
modern, and when I listen to Bach I am prehistoric. But why do you ask?”

“Moody and Sankey,” murmured Rootham.

Williams laughed.

“Good! damned good!” he exclaimed, turning to his companion. “You’ve
got it. Hasn’t he, Cumberland?”

“Got what?”

“It. Him. Bantock, I mean. Now, don’t you think—concede us this one
little point—don’t you think that this thirty-two-part choral work of
Bantock’s is just Moody and Sankey over again? Glorified, of course:
gilt-edged, tooled, diamond-studded, bound in lizard-skin, if you like:
but still Moody and still Sankey.”

I clutched the sleeve of a passing waiter and ordered a double whisky.

“One can only drink,” said I. “And when people disagree so
fundamentally as we do, whisky is the only tipple that makes one
forget.”

But, either late that night or late the following night, we found music
in which we could both take keen pleasure. Herbert Hughes played us
some of his songs, and I remember Samuel Langford, breathing rather
heavily behind me, becoming more and more enthusiastic as the night
wore on. Williams, to whom also the songs were new, took a vivid
interest in them.

“I like your Herbert Hughes,” said Langford.

“_My_ Herbert Hughes?”

“Well, you do rather monopolise him. And I don’t wonder. He’s what one
calls the ... the ...”

“The goods?”

Langford laughed in his beard and his eyes disappeared.

The last glimpse I had of Vaughan Williams was two or three years
later, outside Hughes’ studio in Chelsea. We stood for a minute in the
darkened street.

“Going to see Hughes?” I asked.

But he was busy with preparations for enlisting, and a few weeks later
he, Hughes and myself and nearly all our Chelsea circle were swept into
the army.

In June or July, 1917, I missed Vaughan Williams at Summerhill, near
Salonica, by a day. But perhaps when the war is finished...?

       *       *       *       *       *

Dr W. G. McNaught, though a musician of the older school, is one of the
youngest, most up-to-date and most powerful of our musical scholars. By
one means or another, the influence of his personality is felt in every
town and village in the British Isles. He is the editor of the best
of our musical papers, a faultless and ubiquitous adjudicator at our
great musical festivals, a witty and most reliable writer, a profound
scholar, and a man of such natural geniality and spontaneity that he is
liked by everyone. As a rule, I detest men who are liked on all hands,
but I could never detest Dr McNaught even if he were to detest me and
tell me so.

I do not remember when I first met him, and I do not think I have any
special anecdotes to relate about him. But, in thinking of him now, and
reviewing our friendly acquaintanceship of eight or ten years, I recall
that I have never been able to persuade him to take me seriously.
He has printed all the articles I have sent him, but he has always
laughed indulgently at both them and me. I cannot help wondering why.
Perhaps his exasperatingly clever son has betrayed the secrets I
have entrusted to him: the facts that my piano-playing is amateurish,
my scholarship nil, and my ear fatally defective. And I think I once
showed McNaught, jun., some of my compositions. One should never show
(but of course I mean “show off”) one’s compositions when one cannot
compose.

       *       *       *       *       *

Unless you are something of a musician yourself, you will probably
never have heard the name of Julius Harrison, for though he has fame
of a kind, and of the best kind, he is scarcely known to the man in
the street. Just as Rossetti is primarily a poet for poets, so is
Julius Harrison a musician for musicians. Only one word describes
him: distinguished. Very distinguished he is, with the refinement
and sensitiveness of a poet, the intuition of a novelist, and the
waywardness of all men who allow themselves to be governed by impulse.

When I first met him he was little more than a brilliant boy full of
rich promise. He lived at Stourport, where I used to go occasionally
and pass a few days with him on the river. I knew of nothing against
him save that he was an organist, and I feared that he might be tempted
to remain an organist and build up a teaching “practice,” just as a
doctor builds up a practice. But I was mistaken. He ventured on London,
suffered obscurity for a year or two, worked like a fiery little devil,
and at length threw up the hack-work that kept him alive. Then he
emerged, very engaging and very likeable, into the real musical world
of London. Sir Thomas Beecham gave him _Tristan und Isolde_ and other
operas to conduct, the London Philharmonic Society invited him to
interpret to it one of his own works, and concerts devoted entirely to
his compositions were given in several provincial towns. In five years
he will be recognised as the greatest conductor England has yet given
us; in ten years he will have a European reputation as a composer.

What is he like? He is mercurial, passionate, loyal, snobbish,
charming, outspoken, very open to his friends.

“I _am_ snobbish, Gerald; we have agreed about that, so you won’t
quarrel with me, will you?” he has asked several times.

“Apropos?” I have answered.

“Well, I really can’t stick your pal, So-and-so. An out-and-out
bounder.”

“Yes, Julius. But he bounds so beautifully. Besides, he has real
talent.”

“But you’ll never ask me to meet him, will you?”

“When I’m rich, Julius, I shall have two flats—one where you and
your friends can come, and another where my bounderish friends may
foregather. But I’m afraid I shall be oftener at the flat you visit
than at the other. You _are_ a beast—what makes you so snobbish? And
why do you continue to like me, who am not ‘quite’ a gentleman in your
eyes?”

“Oh, but you are, Gerald. Well, perhaps you’re not. Only in your case
it doesn’t seem to matter. You are so full of affectations—jolly little
affectations, I admit, but still....”

I don’t think anything will break our friendship, for Julius is good
and generous enough to allow me to say the rudest things in the world
to him. He only laughs. For my part, I can forgive him anything, for
he admires my poems. And I suppose he will always forgive me much for
I admire without stint his genius as a conductor and his genius as a
composer. I think that at heart he will always remain a boy, a boy full
of passionate dignity, of untarnished ideals, of frequent impulses.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of all unhappy artists the most unhappy are those who are impelled
by temperament to mingle social propaganda with their artistic work.
Rutland Boughton has the soul of the artist-preacher. He has persuaded
me to many things: he almost persuaded me to “try” vegetarianism, and
I remember one morning very well when, sitting on the end of my bed,
he pointed a finger at me and enumerated all the evils that infallibly
follow on the immoderate drinking of whisky.

I regret this tendency in him: it does not strengthen his art, and it
exhausts a good deal of his energy and time. A practical mystic, a
man of intense and sometimes difficult moods, a man so honest himself
that he is incapable of suspecting dishonesty in others, a man who is
always poor, for he loves his art better than riches: he is all these
things. Now, a man who endures poverty as cheerfully as he may, who
is continually bashing his head against the brick-wall indifference
of others, and who at the same time is extraordinarily sensitive, may
seek happiness, but, if he does, it will always elude him. Boughton,
of course, would deny this. I can hear him saying: “But of course I’m
happy!” At times, Rutland, you are happy. You are happy when you are
immersed in a new composition, when you are playing Beethoven (do you
remember that evening when, on a poorish piano, you played so bravely
a couple of sonatas for Edward Carpenter and me?), when you are
lecturing, when you have made a convert. But when you believe, as you
do, that the world is awry, has always been awry, and shows every sign
of continuing indefinitely to be awry, how can you, with your ardour
for rightness, for justice, for goodness, be happy?

For years Boughton has done very special Festival work at Glastonbury
where, when the war has spent itself, I hope to go for a week’s music,
for at Glastonbury strange things are being done—things that are
destined, perhaps, to divert in some measure the stream of our native
music.

In the early days of August, 1914, Boughton burst into my flat. I was
still in civilian clothes and was reading Ernest Dowson to discover
how he stood the war atmosphere: I thought he stood it very well.

“What, Gerald!” Boughton exclaimed; “not enlisted yet?”

“My _dear_ chap,” I protested, “I am old and married and have a family.
Besides, I don’t like killing people: I’ve tried it. And I strongly
object to being killed.”

“Oh, you can help without killing people. There’s the A.S.C., for
example.”

“A.S.C.? What’s that?”

“I’m going to enlist as a cook. Come along with me.”

But I told him that I was reading Dowson, that I was presently going
to read a volume of Æ, and after that I had the fullest intention of
strangling Debussy on the piano.

So he went away to enlist as a cook. I heard, however, that when he
was told that, in addition to his duties as an army cook, he might be
called upon to slaughter animals, he came away sad and dejected, and, I
think, turned his mind to other things.

Where he is now, I do not know. The war has blotted most of us out,
and few men know whether their best friends are at the other end of
the world or fighting in the trenches in the very next sector on their
right or left.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have said somewhere that singers do not interest me. Nor do they. But
John Coates is something more than a singer—superb artist, generous
friend, unflagging enthusiast, maker of reputations. He is at once a
grown-up boy full of high spirits and a profound mystic. There are
many men who have seen him on the stage in some light opera who have
never guessed that his buoyant spirits are the outcome of a soul that
is content with its own destiny. To me, his interpretation of Elgar’s
_Gerontius_ is one of the great things of modern times—as great as
Ackté’s _Salome_, as great as Kreisler’s violin-playing, as wonderful
as the genius of Augustus John. “Honest John Coates!” is his title: I
have heard him so described many times in London and the provinces.
A man you can trust with anything: a very fine and noble gentleman,
humble yet proud.

His reverence for Elgar is extraordinary. I have been told that, on one
occasion, after being in the company of the distinguished composer for
an hour or so, he joined a few friends who were sitting in another room.

“I have just been talking to the greatest man living,” said he, with
deep impressiveness and in the manner of one who has been in the
presence of someone holy.

I love such hero-worship. The man who can feel as Coates does about
Elgar is himself noble and not far removed from greatness.

       *       *       *       *       *

Cyril Scott possesses a mind of such exquisite refinement that it can
react only to the most delicate of appeals. He is perhaps a little
exotic, like his swaying and deliciously scented _Lotus Flower_. Many
years ago I was introduced to his music, and in pre-war days I very
rarely let a week go by without playing something of his. On only one
occasion was I thrown into his company, and even then I was not aware
of the identity of the somewhat excited and, to me, extraordinarily
interesting man who sat restlessly in his chair and spoke a little
vehemently. He struck me as a man easily carried away by his ideals,
carried away into a world where logic is useless and facts are worse
than dust.




CHAPTER XXII

PEOPLE I WOULD LIKE TO MEET


I suppose that even the most outrageously sincere of men are to some
extent _poseurs_, if not to themselves, then to other people. The
artistic temperament must either attitudinise or die. Posturing is the
most delicate, the most dangerous, of all the arts. To pose before
others is risky, but to pose before oneself is most hazardous, for no
one in the world is so easy to deceive, and so ready to be deceived,
as oneself, and to be deluded by a fancy picture that one has drawn
and painted in hectic moments is to appear to the world as a fantastic
clown.

Deluded thus, it appears to me, is W. B. Yeats. He is, of course, a
fine though not a great poet: no reasonable man can question that. And
there are lines and verses of his that have become woven into the very
texture of my mind. Moreover, I recognise that it is futile to quarrel
with a man because he is not other than he is. Yet I do quarrel with
him. I remember a photograph of Yeats, a photograph I have not seen
for ten or twelve years, wherein he appears conscious of nothing in
the world but himself, conscious of nothing but his hair, his eyes,
his hands—especially his hands. His fingers are so long that one is
surprised that, his palm resting on his knee, they do not reach to
the floor. It is, I concede, a human weakness for a man whom Nature
has gifted (or do I mean cursed?) with the appearance of a poet, to
play up to Nature and help her by delicate titivations. But to do this
successfully, one must have an overwhelming personality—a personality
like that of Shelley, of Byron, of Swinburne. It is a simple matter to
look like a poet, but to impose that look on mankind is given to few.
It is not given to W. B. Yeats.

How is it, I wonder, that one rather admires Æ for believing in the
objective existence of strange gods and spirits, and yet despises Yeats
for sharing this belief? It is, I think, because one feels that Æ has a
solid, even massive, intellect controlling his fantasy, whereas Yeats’
intellect is not distinguished either by subtlety or massiveness. Yeats
believes what he wishes to believe; Æ believes only what he must. Yeats
has an incurable aching for the picturesque, and whilst he believes
that he is “helped” by the supernatural, I think that this help is
derived from his own imaginings, if indeed the question of “help” comes
in at all.

Why, then, should I wish to meet this man whom, it is clear, I regard
as self-deluded and for whom my respect is mingled with a feeling
that is not very far removed from dislike? Really, I do not know. His
attitude of mind is not uncommon, and I have met many men and women his
equal in intellectual force. I think that perhaps I wish to study at
first hand a mind that is so exquisite in its refinement, so sensitive
in its moods, so invariably right in its choice of words. From all the
tens of thousands of words that exist, how difficult it is to select
the one word that is inevitable! And how slender and fragile a man’s
work becomes when his mind must perforce invariably pounce upon the
one only word! The great writers were not so fastidious. Scott, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Balzac and a hundred others: take, if you wish, any
half-dozen words from almost any page of their writings and substitute
six others, and what will be lost thereby? Scott and Byron and Balzac,
and even Shelley and Keats, have, I think, not more than a hundred or
so pages that could not with safety be tampered with in this manner.

There is something lily-fingered and, to me, something disagreeable
and effeminate in a writer who, at all times and seasons, searches
and burrows for the _mot juste_. I am curious about such writers,
curious though I know instinctively that they love letters more than
they love life. To me such men are incomprehensible, and in them,
somewhere, something is wrong. Men who do not feel lust for life have
thin necks, or shallow pates, or neurasthenia.... Perhaps, after all, I
am something of a student of nerve trouble, and wish to meet Yeats in
order to satisfy myself what precisely is lacking in him.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is a popular fallacy that versatility is invariably accompanied by
shallowness, whereas, of course, almost all men of great genius have
been peculiarly and even marvellously versatile. For me, versatility
has most powerful attraction. The man with only one talent is as
uninteresting as the man with no talent at all. Perhaps Hilaire Belloc
has retained his hold on me because he is continually surprising me.
He has done so many different and opposed things so admirably, that it
seems impossible he should strike out in yet another line; but I know
very well that before twelve months have gone he will have turned his
amazing powers in still another direction, and will accomplish his task
better than any other living man can do it.

Nearly twenty years have gone since early one spring I walked alone
across Devon from Ilfracombe to Exeter and from Exeter to Land’s End.
Now, I went alone simply because Belloc had walked alone across much of
France and Italy, and the spirit of imitation was then, as it is now,
very strong within me. I had just read his glorious _Path to Rome_,
and I carried a copy of the first edition in my haversack, reading
it by the wayside and forgetting my loneliness (for I was many times
pathetically lonely) in Belloc’s most excellent company. I pondered
over the nature of this man for many hours, envying him, and thinking
that a man with such great and diverse gifts must be reckoned among the
happiest people alive. I remember that during the weeks I walked in
Devon and Cornwall I copied him as far as I could in the most minute
particular, and at Clovelly, one golden evening as I stood talking with
some tall, Spanish-looking fishermen, I suddenly made up my mind that
I would write to him. I do not know what I wrote, but a couple of days
later a reply came from him telling me that my letter had given him
more pleasure than any of the enthusiastic reviews in the papers. This
letter I pasted in my copy of _The Path to Rome_, and in 1915 a friend
begged me to allow him to take it with him to France. He had a copy of
his own, but he wished to take mine. That friend (our worship of Belloc
was one of the many things we had in common) now lies dead, and I like
to think that his comrades buried my precious book with him.

My imitation of, and devotion to, Belloc led me into several amusing
scrapes, and I recollect arriving ruefully at Helston one wet afternoon
and seeking shelter at an inn called, I think, The Angel. Having
arranged to proceed to Penzance by train early in the evening, I went
to bed whilst they dried my clothes. Whilst in bed, I recalled that
Belloc had often praised Beaune and that I had never tasted it. So I
ordered a bottle, drank it at about 4 P.M.—and promptly went to sleep
for twelve hours!

Even now, on the borderland of middle age, I cannot pick up a new
book of Belloc’s without a little thrill: he is so clean, so bravely
prejudiced, so courageous. He is a lover of wine and beer, of
literature, of the Sussex downs, of the great small things of life: a
mystic, a man of affairs, a poet. What, indeed, is he not that is fine
and noble and free?

       *       *       *       *       *

In the musical world one is accustomed to infant prodigies; very
rarely do they develop their powers. But in the literary world infant
prodigies are rare, and at the moment I can recall among writers of
the past the boy Chatterton and that not quite so remarkable but,
nevertheless, very distinguished youth, Oliver Madox Brown. In our own
days we have had two or three men of letters whose first work, written
in their late teens or early twenties, promised more, I think, than
their later books have fulfilled. I am thinking more particularly of
Edwin Pugh and William Romaine Paterson, the latter of whom usually
writes under the pseudonym of “Benjamin Swift.”

Many of us must remember Benjamin Swift’s _Nancy Noon_, a strange novel
that jerked the literary world into excitement two decades ago. The
writer of it was but a boy, and though a few critics declared that he
“derived” from Meredith, it was almost universally acknowledged that,
for sheer originality both in style and in its general outlook upon
the world, the novel was head and shoulders above any contemporary
literature. So we all kept a close watch upon Benjamin Swift, reading
each fresh work (and there were many fresh works, for the new-comer
was very productive) with an eager anticipation which, alas! was
foiled again and again. I remember six or eight of his books, each lit
with genius, but all a little crude and violent and not one of them
indicating that the writer’s mind was becoming more mature. It was a
vigorous, eruptive mind with which one was in contact, but it was also
a mind in such incessant turmoil that one searched in vain in each of
its products for that “point of rest” which Coventry Patmore maintains
is a _sine qua non_ of all fine works of art.

In some way that I forget Benjamin Swift and I got into correspondence,
and I still possess a bundle of his letters, mostly about his work.
I remember that in one of my letters I ventured to indicate what I
thought were some of his faults: I called in question his knowledge of
music, I expressed disapproval of his violence, and I told him I feared
that he was in danger of settling down to being a mere “eccentric”
writer. My letter, as might have been expected, produced no effect,
and though I have not read his latest works (in dug-outs and trenches
one reads everything that comes to hand, but Benjamin Swift has to be
sought), I am given to understand that they are in many ways like his
first efforts—_outré_, violent, eruptive, yet distinguished and glowing
here and there with a genius that is always hectic.

Years ago, Swift invited me to call on him whenever I should happen
to be in town, and though I should very much like to meet him, I have
never accepted his invitation. One is like that. One shrinks from
satisfying one’s curiosity. I picture Benjamin Swift as bearing a
resemblance to Strindberg, but in my mind’s eye his lips are thinner
and straighter than Strindberg’s, and his eyes are more vehement.

What is it, I wonder, that prevents this writer from ranking among the
great? His intellect is wide and deep enough, his literary talent is
very considerable, and his experience of life has been exceptionally
varied. There is a twist in his genius, a maggot in his brain. He sees
life grotesquely; some of the people he creates are like the men and
women one meets in nightmares.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sometimes I amuse myself by inventing conversations between people
opposed in temperament—_e.g._ Sir Owen Seaman and Mr Hall Caine,
Mr John Galsworthy and “Marmaduke,” Little Tich and Lord Morley, and
I often wish a brain much brighter than my own (Mr Max Beerbohm’s,
for example) would occupy its idle hours in writing a book of such
conversations. I commend the idea to Mr E. V. Lucas, also, and to
Messrs A. A. Milne and Bernard Shaw (only Shaw’s fun is apt to be so
distressingly emphatic and double-fisted).

Among the dead, I make Sir Richard Burton meet and talk with Herbert
Spencer, and I always call this conversation _The Man and the Mummy_.
It is strange, but we have not, so far as I am aware, any record of
Burton’s rich and provocative conversation, though I have been assured
by men who knew him well that his talk was the best they had heard.
Sir Richard Burton is one of the men whom I most wish to meet, and
perhaps when my happy sojourn on this planet comes to a close, I shall
be allowed to serve him in some humble capacity. To me he has always
seemed to belong to Elizabethan times, and I think that he must often
have cursed at Fate for placing him in the middle of a century that
could not fully understand or appreciate him.

In our own days we have many young men of a spirit akin to that of
Burton, though not one of them may possess a tithe of his genius
or of his colossal intellect. I refer, of course, to our numerous
soldier-poets—gallant young men of thought and action, of quick and
generous sympathy, of noble aspiration. Most of you who read what I
am now writing must know at least one man belonging to this type,
for there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them—men who, but for
the war, would probably never have written a line of poetry, but
whose souls have been stirred and whose hearts have been fired by the
grandest emotion that can urge mankind to self-sacrifice: I mean the
never-dying emotion of patriotism—that emotion at which the sexless
sneer, which the “cosmopolitan” regards with amusement, and for which
men of imagination and grit gladly die.

One soldier of this type I knew intimately, and I would gladly know
many of those others who have thrilled us with their poems. Let me
describe my friend to you. He is no longer young: his precise age is
thirty-five: but he was among those who, early in August, 1914, after
first putting his small affairs in order, enlisted in Lord Kitchener’s
Army. He made no fuss about it, and told none but his most intimate
friends what he had done. I met him a few months after he had joined
up; he was then a Corporal, and seemed to me the happiest man I had
met for many a day. He told me that he had begun to write “seriously,”
for hitherto his scribbling had been of a cursory and trivial nature.
But he showed me none of his work, and it was not until he had been
in France some little time that his verses began to appear in one or
two reviews. Having been granted a commission, he quickly rose to the
rank of Captain. He was mentioned in dispatches twice and, having led
a particularly successful bombing raid on the enemy’s trenches, was
awarded the Military Cross.

There is, I know, nothing very unusual in this bare record as I have
set it down; the unusual, indeed extraordinary, nature of this case is
that before the war my friend had been a reserved, unadventurous but
very capable bank clerk, quite undistinguished and apparently without
ambition. But hidden fires must from his youth have been smouldering
in his heart, and it required the war’s disturbance and excitement to
blow these ashes into flame, and the war’s opportunity was needed to
disclose of what fine material he was made. I flatter myself that I
had always known his nature was fine and distinguished, for though he
was a bank clerk one would never have guessed it from his conversation
and demeanour. I also know that, generations ago, his forbears played
a by-no-means ignoble part in our country’s history, and for that
reason alone I felt that, though concealed, there were imagination and
aspiration abiding in his soul.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of my friends, Anna Wickham, knows D. H. Lawrence very well, and
one day I asked her if she would arrange for me to meet him at her
house. But she brushed aside the suggestion with the few words that she
was not particularly interested in Lawrence and that my time might be
wasted if spent with him. Such a suggestion amazed, and still amazes
me, and I cannot but think that Anna Wickham had never troubled to read
any of D. H. Lawrence’s writings, for it often happens among literary
people that close friends do not look at each other’s work.

To me D. H. Lawrence is perhaps the most peculiarly original English
writer living. In his poems he is so egoistic as almost to seem like
an egomaniac, and in two or three of his novels he is obsessed and
overwhelmed by the passion of sex. Yet in _Sons and Lovers_, and in
that wonderful first book of his called, I think, _The Red Peacock_, he
gets clean away from himself, and is as objective as all great creative
artists are and should be. Every writer must, of course, portray life
in terms of himself, but only small men continually thrust themselves
and themselves only on to an embarrassed public. But Lawrence has an
insatiable curiosity about himself, and it seems at times as though he
is not anxious to discover or uncover life, but to penetrate to the
deeps of his own nature and shout out at the top of his voice what he
has found there. In such egoism, there is, of course, strength as well
as weakness, and the very fault, so grave and so calamitous, that bars
him from achieving great work is, nevertheless, an attraction to those
who are much intrigued by psychology.

There are, are there not? two kinds of imaginative literature: the
kind we read without more than a passing thought for the man or woman
who has written it; and the kind we read primarily because we are
enormously interested in the personality and temperament of the man
or woman from whom that literature comes. In removing himself to
Italy instead of throwing himself heart and soul into the ugly but
extraordinary life that these years are giving us, D. H. Lawrence is,
I believe, evading his destiny and is thereby weakening the gifts and
tampering with the intellect of a man whose name should stand near the
head of all contemporary writers.

If Mr Lawrence should by chance read these pages, he will acquit me
of impertinence if he remembers that he has taken the public into his
confidence, and that he must expect the public to make some comment
upon what he, uninvited, has told us.




CHAPTER XXIII

NIGHT CLUBS


After what I have written you may find it difficult, if not altogether
impossible, to regard me as a guileless youth. Yet I ask you so
to regard me. For, if I be not guileless, how can one explain the
whole-hearted enjoyment I used to derive from my occasional visits
to the Crab Tree Club in Soho, and the Cabaret Club in Heddon Street
during the twelve months before the war?

I had been a considerable time in London before it occurred to me that
there was any other way of spending the night except in bed. Evenings,
of course, were spent either at home, the theatre, the Café Royal,
a concert hall, a music hall, or at friends’ flats and studios, and
though it is true that sometimes friends induced you to stay, or you
induced friends to stay, until dawn, yet these long hours were never
deliberately planned beforehand.

But I had the Café Royal habit, and the Café Royal, in a sort of way,
used to be an ante-chamber to various night clubs. At midnight, or
shortly after, when I left the Café with my friends, I used to find
that, instead of proceeding to their respective homes, they went to
one place or another where you made revelry and talked nonsense and,
perchance, drank what proved at eight o’clock next morning to have been
a little more than was good for you.

“Come with us to the Crab Tree,” said two or three friends on one of
these occasions.

And go I did. It was my very first visit to a night club, and I
expected to find I know not what scenes of dissipation and naughtiness.
I imagined that I should meet women even more strange than some of the
strange women of the Café Royal, that I should behold dresses so daring
that they could no longer be called dresses at all, that the music
would be ravishing, the conversation sparkling, the men distinguished,
the food delicate beyond words, the wine of a perfect bouquet. Instead,
after walking up a flight of stairs, I found a large bare room with
five men in it, one of them being the bar-tender who, behind rows of
bottles of whisky and stout, was polishing glasses. Of the other men,
three were members who had just arrived, and the fourth was the pianist
who, later on, was to play rag-time for the dancers.

I stood for a moment on the threshold of this empty room, feeling
rather exasperated that I had come hither.

“It’s all right,” said one of my friends, a little pugnacious Scotsman
with a nose and chin like Wagner’s; “wait a bit. Things will soon
brighten up.”

So we stepped to the bar and engaged the pianist in conversation.
He was something of a scholar and had made a study of rag-time from
the historical point of view. He played me two or three examples of
rag-time which he declared occurred in Bach, and I accepted his word,
though I looked at him incredulously.

The note of that night was youth. There was no hectic excitement, no
Bacchic frenzy: everybody was jolly glad to be alive. Somebody has
defined happiness as conscious pleasure. If that definition holds good,
then I was happy that night, for I remember saying to myself: “I am
coming here again.” I loved the feeling of life the place gave me; the
exhilaration of it seemed to pierce into my marrow. I did not want to
talk to anybody. I merely wanted to sit back and watch everything: the
furtive smiles of half-shy women who, happy in the arms of those they
loved, were afraid to reveal too much of their happiness; the most
delicate ankles of a slim girl I knew, but whose name (was it Kitty
or Mimi?) I only half remembered; the kaleidoscope of colour on the
platform where the dancers were. The women were like flowers—orchids
suddenly endowed with movement.... I compared the scene with the
spectacle afforded me by Murray’s Club a few nights previously, when
Ivan Heald and I were taken there for an hour or two. Some ladies at
Murray’s had had green hair, but only a poet like Baudelaire can wear
green hair with success. But at Murray’s the people were all old. Young
girls of twenty were old. Everybody was old except the aged, and they
pranced and frisked to prove their unconquerable youth.... But at this
jolly Crab Tree youth was in the air, in the music, in the laughter.

And, feeling a little intoxicated with happiness, I allowed a gentle
melancholy to steal over me, as one sometimes does in certain moods. I
thought of Paris, for this scene reminded me of Paris: I was full of
longing for Paris, and I remembered how in the spring of 1912 I used to
sit in an attic in the Quartier Latin wondering and wondering. By that
curious power that the mind, when a little excited, seems to possess—I
mean the power of transferring one from a scene where one is happy to a
scene where one would be still happier—I saw myself aimlessly strolling
beneath the plane-trees on the banks of the Seine. I took out a pencil
and wrote:

  PARIS DAYS

  These days, the bright days and white days,
  These nights of blue between the days,
  These streets a-glimmer in the haze:
  These are for you, but you come not these ways:
  Paris is empty in the light days.

  These songs, the glad songs and sad songs,
  This amber wine between the songs,
  This scented laughter from dim throngs:
  These are for you, Paris to you belongs:
  Paris is mournful with her mad songs.

  These breezes, the high breezes and dry breezes,
  These stillnesses between the breezes,
  These purple clouds the sunset seizes:
  These are for you, but underneath the trees is
  Paris a-sighing with her shy breezes.

  These days, these breezes and these nights,
  These streets, this wine, these songs, these sighs;
  Paris with all her myriad lights,
  Paris so careless yet so wise:
  All in the black sea would I spew
  If I could win an hour of you.

These verses (though you would hardly think so) cost me infinite
trouble, and when I had finished them I looked up from my scrawl and
saw that the room was half-empty.

“Is it so late then?” I asked a man sitting next to me. I saw it was
Aleister Crowley, and he looked at me rather balefully.

“No: so early. Six o’clock, to be precise.”

And he turned his back on me and gazed at a wall on which no pictures
hung.

So I picked up my straw hat and tried to find my Scots friend. He was
sitting behind the piano, talking very earnestly to a man I did not
know.

“Oh, Nicol Bain,” said I, “I _am_ so hungry.”

The streets were strewn with sunshine, and Bain took off his hat and
looked long and long at the blue sky.

“How damned fine to be alive!” he exclaimed.

“How long have you been alive?” I asked.

“Only since I came to London.”

“I was alive for three years in Manchester, but during all those years
I sat at a desk pretending to be a clerk, I was dead, quite dead. So,
you see, we really _are_ young. You are about five, and I am nearly
seven.”

He steered me into a restaurant which appeared to cater specially for
night-birds, and Bain ate bacon and eggs, whilst I feasted on a dish of
strawberries, brown bread and coffee.

“I would,” said I, “much prefer to have bacon and eggs, but
strawberries seem to be more in the picture, don’t you think? I am sure
I am behaving very nobly to fit into the picture at the expense of my
yearning inside.... And now, where can we get a bath?”

       *       *       *       *       *

After that first visit I went frequently to the Crab Tree Club. There
I met many poets and journalists and artists, and there, one night, a
poet—a great strapping fellow, all bone and sinew and muscle—loudly
challenged me to fight him. He is a man of some genius, well known both
here and in America. The exact cause of his quarrel with me I have
forgotten, but it appeared that, unwittingly, I had done him some real
injury—or he thought I had. He spoke heatedly to me and I replied still
more heatedly. Suddenly, he rose, faced me menacingly, and shouted:

“All right, then. Come and fight it out. Come and fight it out
downstairs.”

He looked at me with loathing.

I must have paled, I think, for I know that his terrific anger was like
an onslaught. But I realised that I must accept his challenge. I hated
the thought of what was before me, and hoped it would soon be over.

“Very good. We’ll go downstairs.”

I felt a hand tighten approvingly on my arm and, looking round, saw
Ivan Heald. He came with me.

“Slog him, Gerald,” he said earnestly.

But I felt most unheroic, and I know that as I made my way to the door
I was trembling a little.

The whole room was interested now, and I realised that we were going to
have spectators. And then the unexpected happened. The Club Secretary
and a few committee men rushed between us, dragging my sudden enemy
away. I was glad to be separated, for I was afraid of him.... Is it
possible that he was afraid of me?

       *       *       *       *       *

Augustus John used to come sometimes, and I remember chatting with
P. G. Konody about Byzantine architecture, about which I think I
know something. But one did not go to the Crab Tree for serious
conversation. It was the diversion of excitement we all sought....

I think that for some weeks in the spring of 1914 I felt like a
character in a rather second-rate novel. Literally, I was intoxicated
with life. And so full of vitality did I feel that I scarcely found
time for sleep. I remember walking with my wife from Soho to Battersea
Park in the early hours of a June or July morning after being up all
night. Several friends accompanied us, and though we ought to have
felt extremely jaded, we were as fresh as paint at our seven o’clock
breakfast of cherries and coffee and honey. I tried to feel like
George Meredith as I ate, for I had read somewhere that he frequently
breakfasted on honey and coffee and fruit.... The imitative instincts
that we little artists have! How strange it is! We can never be
ourselves for long. We are always imagining ourselves to be someone
else more distinguished, or more interesting. We are always insatiably
curious about the feelings and thoughts of others. Pale imitators we
are. And when we snatch at our personalities, how feeble they seem ...
how feeble they are.

       *       *       *       *       *

One frightfully busy week an invitation came to us from Madame
Strindberg to sup with her at the Sign of the Golden Calf, popularly
known as The Cabaret. We did not particularly want to go, but I had
been deeply interested in August Strindberg ever since I had read Max
Nordau’s _Degeneration_ (that, I think, is not the title, but you know
the book I mean) and I had wished to learn more about this strange
vitriolic personality, and since Strindberg himself was dead, Madame
Strindberg seemed to be the best person to whom to go for information.

The Cabaret was in a large cellar at the end of Heddon Street, and the
narrow way was blocked up with taxis as our own cab sped round the
corner from Regent Street. The place was nearly full, and a Frenchman
with a little waxed moustache was singing _Two Eyes of Grey_, with
his eyes glued to the ceiling in a stupidly sentimental manner, and I
recollect that our first impulse was to turn and flee. One hears such
songs, I am told, in Bolton and Oldham, and, I dare say, in the London
suburbs, but that Madame Strindberg should come all the way from Sweden
and bring a man all the way from France to sing the latest inanity was
incredible. But my eye caught some fantastically carved figures that
leered and leaned from the great, thick posts supporting the roof.
These painted creatures were attractive and promising and futuristic,
and:

“At all events, we’ll drink a bottle of champagne before we go,” said
I, as a waiter drew us to a table and announced that supper was about
to be served. “For champagne always helps,” I added.

And, really, for an hour or two I required a little artificial stimulus
in order to survive the dullness of the musical programme.

“Whoever the people are who run this place,” I said to a pale, elderly
man who sat opposite to me, “they are extraordinarily stupid. They get
Frank Harris to lecture one evening and give us inane music the next.
One doesn’t come to a night club to be flapdoodled.”

“Flap——?” he queried.

“Flapdoodled. Yes. I mean these people who sing and recite like
a Penny Reading. They do these things in Higher Wycombe and
Bluzzerby-on-Stream. They should not be done here.”

The pale man did not understand. He coughed behind a very white hand
and delicately selected a nut.

       *       *       *       *       *

And then Madame Strindberg approached our table. She had been pointed
out to me half-an-hour previously and I had noted a pale little woman
who appeared to examine her guests rather nervously. She looked cold
and careworn. She was very silent, and her black clothing and white
face struck a sombre note in all the moving light and colour of the
large, warm room.

She came to the table and introduced herself to us, sitting down and
placing a nervous little hand in mine. I soon discovered she had no
conversation, for, try how she might, she could not say anything that
mattered in the least. She chattered a little, made a few exclamations,
and then sat silent. To me she seemed full of negations, denials.
Personality she had, I daresay, but it did not arouse my interest
in the least, and after I had paid her a few insincere compliments
concerning the Club, I also sat silent. After a while, she was taken
away to another table by some friends.

On subsequent occasions I saw her, but I do not remember that I had
further communication with her except when I was made an honorary
member of the Club, when I wrote to her a short note of thanks. She was
no key to Strindberg: at all events, no key I could use.

       *       *       *       *       *

Later on that night, the room roused itself from its semi-lethargy, and
golden confetti and balls of coloured paper were thrown about by ladies
and gentlemen who, not knowing each other, desired an acquaintanceship.
The balls of paper unrolled themselves into long ribbons which,
catching on to projections from the supporting pillars, hung in long
loops and festoons which, thickening, soon began to resemble a gigantic
spider’s web. Silly musical toys were given us, and men and women—but
especially women—made silly noises on them and giggled, or else
shrieked uproariously.... Except for the supper, which was excellent,
the evening was not a success, and I do not suppose I should have gone
there again if I had not been in search of Frank Harris, or if Jack
Kahane had not insisted upon my accompanying him.

       *       *       *       *       *

I made a fairly extensive examination of London night clubs during
the ensuing few months. One, near Blackfriars, admitted me to full
membership on the payment of the sum of one shilling, and I used to go
there—why, I know not—and throw darts at a board and drink beer. If I
did not throw darts, I found I was deemed eccentric. So I threw darts.

Murray’s was beyond my means, and I found the people there untalented
and plethoric. They ate too much. And another club devoted to “the”
profession was full of trifling women and jaunty men. Actresses are
dear children, but at night they become tiresome. And actors always
want me to praise them. They always pretended to be quite familiar with
my name, and invariably invited me to “have one.” Quite nice people,
though, I assure you.

       *       *       *       *       *

A night club is never for the old. Grey-haired people should always be
at home after midnight. And there should be no card-playing. Dancing
one would have of course, and music of the finest. And wine, and many
pretty women, and a certain quietness, and invisible waiters, and
a perfume of roses.... As I write, I ask myself: “Why should I not
establish a night-club different from all the others?” It would be
so easy to be different; it would be so difficult for me not to be
different.... One wants space, of course: I hate being crushed against
very full-bosomed ladies.... Oh, and above all, I would have a big room
set apart for the hour that comes after dawn. Empty bottles, spilt
wine, stale tobacco-smoke, cigarette ends, all kinds of untidiness: how
horrible these are in the sun of a May or June morning! Yes, we would
all go at dawn into another room, a room coloured green, with narcissi,
and jonquils and hyacinths on the tables: a room with open windows:
a room with fruit spread invitingly: a room where one could still be
gay and in which one need not feel sordid and spiritually jaded and
spiritually unclean.... If you have the right mental outlook, you will
never feel spiritually unclean after a night of riot, but all our
London night clubs in pre-war days seemed to conspire together to make
enjoyment unhealthy, gaiety a matter for after-regret, and exaltation a
little disgraceful.... If someone will lend me a lot of money (or give
it me—why shouldn’t he?) I will found a night club that will knock all
the others into a cocked hat....




INDEX


  A

  Abercrombie, Charles, 56
  Abercrombie, Lascelles, 73–74
  Achurch, Janet, 15, 132, 207–209
  Ackland, W. A., 103
  Ackté, Aïno, 53, 68, 261
  Adcock, St John, 64
  Æ, 191, 261, 264
  Agate, J. E., 66, 157, 191, 210
  Angell, Norman, 132
  Archer, William, 208
  Arnold, Matthew, 130
  Austen, Jane, 47
  Austin, Frederic, 187, 190, 238


  B

  Bach, J. S., 45, 256
  Bain, Nicol, 276–277
  Balzac, H. de, 71, 79, 264–265
  Bantock, Granville, 148, 179–180, 181, 187, 188–191, 234, 242,
      246–251, 256
  Barker, Granville, 15
  Baudelaire, 275
  Bauer, Harold, 181–182
  Baughan, E. A., 144–145
  Beecham, Thomas, 158, 193, 232, 258
  Beerbohm, Max, 135–136, 268
  Beethoven, L. van, 45, 79, 249
  Behn, Aphra, 47
  Behrens, Gustave, 152
  Bellini, 233
  Belloc, Hilaire, 73, 265
  Bennett, Arnold, 33, 43, 62, 68–71, 79, 94, 110, 125, 132, 156,
      202, 253
  Bennett, Joseph, 143
  Berlioz, H., 79, 230
  Besant, Annie, 15, 22–25
  Binyon, L., 129
  Bishop, Stanley, 141
  Bizet, 196
  Bjornson, B., 33
  Blackmore, R. D., 119
  Blavatsky, Madame, 23–24, 89
  Boughton, Rutland, 103, 259–261
  Bourchier, Arthur, 205
  Bradlaugh, Charles, 22
  Brahms, J., 181–182, 254–255
  Brewer, Herbert, 188
  Brian, Havergal, 68, 85, 194, 235–236
  Brieux, E., 33
  Brighouse, Harold, 33, 55–67, 210
  Brodsky, A., 152, 226
  Brontë, Charlotte, 47, 94, 178
  Brown, F. Madox, 163
  Brown, Oliver Madox, 267
  Brown, T. E., 119, 123, 128–130
  Browning, Robert, 33
  Burton, Richard, 269
  Busoni, F., 214
  Butt, Clara, 48
  Byron, H. J., 62
  Byron, Lord, 264


  C

  Caine, Hall, 13, 14, 117–127, 128–130, 202, 268
  Carpenter, Edward, 90, 132, 260
  Chatterton, 267
  Chesterton, Cecil, 72, 132
  Chesterton, G. K., 71–73, 90, 94
  Chopin, F., 185
  Cleopatra, 115
  Coates, John, 187, 261–262
  Congreve, 62–63
  Conrad, J., 94, 156
  Coulomb, Madame, 24
  Courlander, A., 137–138
  Courtney, W. L., 134
  Cowen, F. H., 227–229
  Craig, Gordon, 202–203
  Croskey, Julian, 116
  Crowley, Aleister, 276


  D

  Davidson, J., 132, 234
  Davies, Walford, 28–31, 254–255
  Davison, J. W., 143
  Dawson, Frederick, 212–213, 216, 218, 223
  Debussy, Claude, 197, 214, 215, 230, 234, 242, 244, 252, 261
  Defoe, D., 87
  De Goncourt _frères_, 40
  De l’Isle Adam, Villiers, 186
  Delius, F., 234, 251–252
  De Maupassant, Guy, 55
  De Pachmann, Vladimir, 184–186
  Derby, Lord, 177
  De Walden, Lord Howard, 252
  Dickens, C., 79, 94
  Dilnot, F., 103
  Donizetti, 233
  Douglas, Lord Alfred, 32
  Dowson, E., 261
  Dukas, P., 230
  Dunn, J. Nicol, 159
  Duparc, 244


  E

  Elgar, Edward, 79–87, 188, 246, 261–262
  Eliot, George, 128
  Epstein, J., 52–53, 170
  Ervine, St John, 133
  “Eve” of _The Tatler_, 31


  F

  Forrest, Charles, 66
  Fried, Oskar, 150–152


  G

  Galsworthy, J., 63, 107, 268
  Garvice, C., 110
  Garvin, J. L., 41
  George, Lloyd, 26–28
  Gerhardt, Elena, 223
  Gilbert, W. S., 78
  Gladstone, W. E., 120
  Godard, Arabella, 234
  Gorton, Canon, 31
  Gounod, C., 245
  Graham, R. B. Cunninghame, 142
  Graves, C. L., 145
  Grieg, E., 180, 226–227
  Grew, Sydney, 179–181
  Guilbert, Yvette, 47–49, 54, 182


  H

  Hahn, Reynaldo, 244
  Hallé, Charles, 182, 227
  Handel, G. F., 188, 233
  Hardy, T., 94, 107
  Harris, Frank, 14, 32–46, 126, 132, 179, 279, 281
  Harrison, Austin, 32, 37
  Harrison, Julius, 181, 193, 194, 258–259
  Hauptmann, 33
  Hatton, J. L., 233
  Heald, Edith, 242
  Heald, Ivan, 115, 138–139, 166–168, 241, 275, 277
  Hemans, F., 95, 97
  Henderson, Arthur, 175–176
  Henley, W. E., 128, 134
  Herford, C. H., 34, 38, 157
  Hobbes, John Oliver, 30
  Holbrooke, J., 252–254
  Horniman, A., 33, 55, 58, 63, 73, 154, 209–211
  Horsley, Victor, 49–50
  Houghton, Stanley, 33, 55–67, 69, 210
  Housman, Laurence, 33
  Hueffer, F. M., 32
  Hughes, Herbert, 134, 168, 171, 187


  I

  Ibsen, H., 11, 33, 209
  Irving, H. B., 66


  J

  James, Henry, 173
  Jerome, J. K., 77–78
  Joachim, 182
  John, Augustus, 52–53, 168–171, 239, 278
  Jones, Henry Arthur, 203–205
  Joubert, 46


  K

  Kahane, Jack, 33–35, 55–57, 157–158, 281
  Keats, J., 174, 264
  Klindworth, Karl, 212, 216–219
  Konody, P. G., 278
  Kreisler, F., 261
  Kubelik, 182


  L

  Langford, S., 143, 148–150, 157, 187, 191, 256
  Lawrence, D. H., 270–272
  Leighton, Lord, 234
  Leonardo da Vinci, 171
  Lett, Phyllis, 181
  Liszt, F., 170, 218
  “Little Tich,” 268
  Locke, W. J., 89
  Lowe, Harry, 168, 240–242, 244
  Lucas, E. V., 268
  Lunn, Kirkby, 234
  Lyall, E., 96
  Lytton, Bulwer, 96


  M

  McNaught, W. G., 187–190, 257–258
  Mair, G. H., 62, 69, 70
  Malet, Lucas, 123
  _Manchester Guardian_, 11, 34, 38, 48, 58, 65–66, 75, 154–160,
      191, 209–210
  Marchesi, Blanche, 48
  “Marmaduke,” 268
  Marriott, Charles, 134–135
  Marriott, Ernest, 56, 202–203
  Marx, Karl, 15
  Masefield, John, 73–76, 95–97, 201, 209
  Maude, Cyril, 60
  Mead, G. R. S., 90
  Mendelssohn, F., 198, 233
  Meredith, George, 38, 128, 267, 268
  Middleton, Richard, 40
  Milne, A. A., 77, 268
  Monkhouse, Allan, 33, 65, 157, 210
  Monro, Harold, 73–74
  Montague, C. E., 63, 157, 210
  Moore, George, 13, 17, 20–21
  Morley, Lord, 268
  Morris, William, 18
  Morrow, Edwin, 139, 168, 172, 239, 241–242
  Morrow, Norman, 139, 168, 172–173, 239–243
  Mudie, W. H., 56, 65
  Mullings, Frank, 179–181
  Murger, H., 173


  N

  Napoleon, 44, 50
  Newman, Ernest, 48, 81–84, 143, 148, 179, 181, 187–188, 190,
      226, 234, 246–247, 249, 252
  Newman, J. H., 86
  Nicoll, W. R., 64
  Nietzsche, F., 45, 91, 131
  Nordau, Max, 279
  Northcliffe, Lord, 39, 41–44, 154


  O

  Olcott, Colonel, 90
  Orage, A. R., 22, 43, 91, 104, 130–132, 179
  Ouida, 134


  P

  Paderewski, I., 182–186
  Pain, Barry, 140
  Pankhurst, Emmeline, 50–51, 179
  Pater, Walter, 186, 242
  Paterson, W. R., 267–268
  Patmore, Coventry, 267
  Patti, Adelina, 53
  Petri, Egon, 223
  Plato, 90
  Poe, E. A., 79, 253
  Pond, Major, 120
  Price-Heywood, W. P., 56, 80
  Pugh, Edwin, 267
  _Punch_, 25, 77
  Pyne, Kendrick, 28, 162–164


  R

  Ravel, 197, 255
  Reger, Max, 197, 234
  Richardson, Frank, 14
  Richter, Hans, 150, 158, 227–228, 229–232
  Robins, Elizabeth, 178–179
  Ronald, Landon, 157, 194, 234–237
  Rootham, Cyril, 256
  Ross, Adrian, 140
  Rossetti, D. G., 46, 223, 258
  Rowley, Charles, 164
  Runciman, J. F., 194
  Ruskin, John, 46, 86, 119, 234


  S

  Santley, Charles, 232–234
  Sauer, Emil, 182–184
  Schlagintweit, Capt., 159–161
  Schumann, Clara, 182, 254
  Scott, Clement, 208
  Scott, Cyril, 262
  Scott, Dixon, 140
  Scott, Walter, 264
  Scriabin, 234
  Seaman, Owen, 77, 268
  Shakespeare, Wm., 15, 33, 36, 44, 86, 94, 115, 207
  Shaw, G. B., 11–21, 44, 94, 133, 156, 174, 208, 210, 269
  Shelley, P. B., 79, 91, 264
  Sherard, R. H., 120
  Sibelius, 234
  Smiles, Samuel, 115, 176
  Somerset, Lady Henry, 179
  Spencer, Herbert, 269
  Stead, W. T., 120
  Stone, Marcus, 25
  Strauss, Richard, 53, 68, 84, 148, 196, 216, 223–225, 234,
      251, 256
  Streatfeild, R. A., 143
  Strindberg, August, 33, 268, 279
  Strindberg, Madame, 43, 278–280
  Sullivan, A. S., 78, 196
  “Swift, Benjamin,” 267–268
  Swinburne, A. C., 264
  Synge, J. M., 60–62, 75, 241


  T

  Tennyson, A., 90
  Terry, Ellen, 203, 208
  Tetrazzini, 53
  Thackeray, Wm., 94, 234
  Thurston, Temple, 201, 205–207
  Tree, Beerbohm, 135, 199–202
  Trollope, Anthony, 25–69
  Tupper, Martin, 118


  V

  Valentine, Jim, 185
  Velasquez, 171
  Verulam, Lord, 115


  W

  Wagner, Richard, 15–16, 29, 45, 143, 167, 195, 216, 217, 229,
      233, 254–255, 274
  Ward, Humphry, Mrs, 178
  Warlow, Gordon, 239–241, 244
  Watts, G. F., 17–18
  Webb, Beatrice, 174
  Webb, Sidney, 15–16, 21, 174
  Weber, 231
  Welldon, Bishop, 28–31
  Wells, H. G., (“Mr Kipps”), 15, 16–17, 44, 94, 154, 174
  Wesley, S. S., 162
  Whistler, J. M., 45
  Whitman, Walt, 90, 132, 191
  Wickham, Anna, 270–271
  Wiers-Jennsen, 209
  Williams, Vaughan, 255–257
  Wilson, P. W., 25–28
  Wolf, Hugo, 79, 145, 148, 180, 233
  Wollstonecraft, Mary, 91
  Wood, Henry J., 157, 193


  Y

  Yeats, W. B., 62, 263–265
  Yonge, C. M., 96


  Z

  Zangwill, Israel, 136–137




Transcriber’s Note


A small number of clear typographic errors have been corrected, along
with a handful of punctuation clarifications.