[153]CHAPTER XIIIMANCHESTER PEOPLEIfthere 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[154]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 toThe Manchester Guardian. InThe Daily Mail Year Book, against the entryManchester Guardian, you will find these words: “The best newspaper in the world.” Now, you would imagine that ifThe Daily Mailreally believed that,The Daily Mailwould strain every nerve to be as likeThe Manchester Guardianas 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 Mailonce 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 thatThe Manchester Guardiandoesnotpossess.Yet, I ask you, is there a more irritating newspaper[155]in the whole of Christendom thanThe 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 ofThe Manchester Guardian. I tell this strange story, partly because itisstrange, 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 gospelThe 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,[156]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 ofThe 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 indeveloping..... . . . . . . .But not all the members ofThe Manchester Guardianstaff 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.[157]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:[158]“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 itwasnew. 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 littleoffensive——And yet how difficult it is for the stranger to understand[159]Manchester!—and difficult in spite of the fact that Manchester loves being understood.Mr J. Nicol Dunn, who, as editor ofThe Morning Postand, later, ofThe Johannesburg Star, did most brilliant work, utterly failed to understand Lancashire people when he came to editThe 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.”“Iknewhe did! Of course he would takeThe 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[160]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, tragicdénouementcame 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 ofThe Manchester Guardianstaff.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[161]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 getThe Sunday Chronicleto-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 receivedThe Evening Newsin exchange.[162]“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,[163]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.”[164]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, talkingwithis 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[165]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.
Ifthere 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[154]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 toThe Manchester Guardian. InThe Daily Mail Year Book, against the entryManchester Guardian, you will find these words: “The best newspaper in the world.” Now, you would imagine that ifThe Daily Mailreally believed that,The Daily Mailwould strain every nerve to be as likeThe Manchester Guardianas 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 Mailonce 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 thatThe Manchester Guardiandoesnotpossess.
Yet, I ask you, is there a more irritating newspaper[155]in the whole of Christendom thanThe 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 ofThe Manchester Guardian. I tell this strange story, partly because itisstrange, 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 gospelThe 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,[156]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 ofThe 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 indeveloping....
. . . . . . . .
But not all the members ofThe Manchester Guardianstaff 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.
[157]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:
[158]“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 itwasnew. 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 littleoffensive——
And yet how difficult it is for the stranger to understand[159]Manchester!—and difficult in spite of the fact that Manchester loves being understood.
Mr J. Nicol Dunn, who, as editor ofThe Morning Postand, later, ofThe Johannesburg Star, did most brilliant work, utterly failed to understand Lancashire people when he came to editThe 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.”
“Iknewhe did! Of course he would takeThe 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[160]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, tragicdénouementcame 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 ofThe Manchester Guardianstaff.
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[161]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 getThe Sunday Chronicleto-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 receivedThe Evening Newsin exchange.
[162]“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,[163]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.”
[164]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, talkingwithis 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[165]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.
[166]CHAPTER XIVCHELSEA AND AUGUSTUS JOHNThereis 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 forThe Daily Citizenwhen 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[167]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[168]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[169]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 yourSmiling 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[170]“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 likethat. 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[171]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[172]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 theyareartists, 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 maypretendto 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[173]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[174]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 theirfamilies....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 (asThe New Ageonce 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.
Thereis 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 forThe Daily Citizenwhen 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[167]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[168]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[169]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 yourSmiling 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[170]“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 likethat. 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[171]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[172]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 theyareartists, 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 maypretendto 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[173]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[174]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 theirfamilies....
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 (asThe New Ageonce 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.
[175]CHAPTER XVMISCELLANEOUSArthur Henderson, M.P.—Lord Derby—Miss Elizabeth Robins—Frank Mullings—Harold Bauer—Emil Sauer—Vladimir de PachmannI quiteforget 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 MrHenderson would be very much at home on the Manchester Exchange. I recollect most vividly that he bored me very much and[176]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 Smilesredivivus, 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[177]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.[178]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 onThe Open QuestionandThe 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,[179]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 quicklydie....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 Iamvain. 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[180]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’sall 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[181]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[182]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[183]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.[184]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[185]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 thangold....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 reallyisgoing on in the performer’s mind. It has appeared to me that the pianist has been saying: “You noticed that, didn’t you? Well,youcouldn’t do it if you spent a whole lifetime trying; yet how easilyIachieved 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[186]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.
Arthur Henderson, M.P.—Lord Derby—Miss Elizabeth Robins—Frank Mullings—Harold Bauer—Emil Sauer—Vladimir de Pachmann
I quiteforget 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 MrHenderson would be very much at home on the Manchester Exchange. I recollect most vividly that he bored me very much and[176]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 Smilesredivivus, 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[177]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.
[178]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 onThe Open QuestionandThe 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,[179]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 quicklydie....
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 Iamvain. 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[180]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’sall 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[181]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[182]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[183]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.
[184]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[185]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 thangold....
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 reallyisgoing on in the performer’s mind. It has appeared to me that the pianist has been saying: “You noticed that, didn’t you? Well,youcouldn’t do it if you spent a whole lifetime trying; yet how easilyIachieved 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[186]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.