[128]CHAPTER XIMORE WRITERSRev. 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 GrahamI wonderhow 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 hisRoman Womenand the pathos of such poems asAber StationsandEpistola 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.[129]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 writtenThe Prodigal SonorThe 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.[130]“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 ofThe 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 ofThe 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.[131]The New Ageis 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[132]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 ofThe 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 toThe New AgeI 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’srates of pay must be very modest. For what, then? They have written because inThe New Agethey 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[133]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. “Yousee——”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 onThe 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[134]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 saidso....”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 wehavemet before somewhere. Where was it, Mr ... er ... Cumberland?”Shortly after, he leftThe 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’sThe 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 forThe Fortnightly Review; and I suppose (though I really don’t know this)The Spectatorwrote five lines of disapproval. It was a brilliant book; fresh,[135]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 asThe Columnsaid 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[136]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 inThe Yellow Bookwhich I had bound in lizard-skin, and a friend of mine had all Max’sSaturday Reviewarticles 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[137]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 representedThe Daily Expressin 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[138]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 thatwasthe 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[139]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. “Theywould 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’sUlster 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[140]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 foolslike ——Ivan.. . . . . . . .Dixon Scott used to throw me into little ecstasies by his reviews inThe 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”: 12-30A.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[141]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[142]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 gallopingventre 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.
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 wonderhow 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 hisRoman Womenand the pathos of such poems asAber StationsandEpistola 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.
[129]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 writtenThe Prodigal SonorThe 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.
[130]“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 ofThe 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 ofThe 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.
[131]The New Ageis 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[132]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 ofThe 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 toThe New AgeI 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’srates of pay must be very modest. For what, then? They have written because inThe New Agethey 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[133]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. “Yousee——”
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 onThe 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[134]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 saidso....”
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 wehavemet before somewhere. Where was it, Mr ... er ... Cumberland?”
Shortly after, he leftThe 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’sThe 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 forThe Fortnightly Review; and I suppose (though I really don’t know this)The Spectatorwrote five lines of disapproval. It was a brilliant book; fresh,[135]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 asThe Columnsaid 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[136]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 inThe Yellow Bookwhich I had bound in lizard-skin, and a friend of mine had all Max’sSaturday Reviewarticles 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[137]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 representedThe Daily Expressin 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[138]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 thatwasthe 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[139]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. “Theywould 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’sUlster 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[140]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 foolslike ——Ivan.
. . . . . . . .
Dixon Scott used to throw me into little ecstasies by his reviews inThe 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”: 12-30A.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[141]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[142]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 gallopingventre 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.
[143]CHAPTER XIIMUSICAL CRITICSNotuntil 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 powerfulTimescritic, 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, ofThe 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 ofThe 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 workwasdamned. No[144]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 hehadstooped, he would have disappeared altogether. No: hewasthe 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 ofThe Daily News, was editingThe Musical Standardmore 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[145]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 ofThe Musical Standard. Subsequently he went toThe Morning Leaderas musical critic, and then toThe Daily Newsas 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 trifleblaséand 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 ofThe Spectatorand 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 ifThe Spectatorhas any influence on the musical life of London, though I[146]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, ofThe 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 entitledMusical Studiesare 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. Underanother 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[147]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 ofThe Manchester Guardianand, 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, amacabremood 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[148]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’sFerishtah’s Fancies, Wolf’sMörike Lieder, and so on. I can see him now as, his clever, rather saturnine face abundantly alive, he described Richard Strauss’sEin 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 onThe Manchester Guardian, and I recall the curiosity with which many of us read his first articles, fearing that[149]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 hismétier, to acquire some of his literarytechnique....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[150]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 onThe Manchester CourierI 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[151]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[152]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.Isay 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 typewrittenLife of Friedthat 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.
Notuntil 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 powerfulTimescritic, 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, ofThe 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 ofThe 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 workwasdamned. No[144]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 hehadstooped, he would have disappeared altogether. No: hewasthe 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 ofThe Daily News, was editingThe Musical Standardmore 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[145]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 ofThe Musical Standard. Subsequently he went toThe Morning Leaderas musical critic, and then toThe Daily Newsas 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 trifleblaséand 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 ofThe Spectatorand 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 ifThe Spectatorhas any influence on the musical life of London, though I[146]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, ofThe 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 entitledMusical Studiesare 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. Underanother 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[147]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 ofThe Manchester Guardianand, 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, amacabremood 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[148]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’sFerishtah’s Fancies, Wolf’sMörike Lieder, and so on. I can see him now as, his clever, rather saturnine face abundantly alive, he described Richard Strauss’sEin 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 onThe Manchester Guardian, and I recall the curiosity with which many of us read his first articles, fearing that[149]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 hismétier, to acquire some of his literarytechnique....
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[150]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 onThe Manchester CourierI 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[151]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[152]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.Isay 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 typewrittenLife of Friedthat 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.