Qfnrncll ImtteraitH SIthrarg 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE. 
 
 1691 
 
 lOSIC 
 
Cornell University Library 
 ML 60.T95M9 
 
 Music and life. 
 
 3 1924 021 795 582 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021795582 
 
MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 The Hunter, and Other Poems 
 7hb Dark Fire 
 Paris and Helen 
 In Time like Glass 
 
MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 BY 
 
 W. J. TURNER 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
TO 
 
 ELIZABETH BIBESCO 
 
I DESIRE to express my obligations to the Editoi of 
 The New Statesman, in whose columns many of these 
 essays appeared in a slightly different form. 
 
 W. J. T. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 PROGRESS IN MUSIC 
 
 IT is difficult to give a short conspectus of 
 the development of music as an art by the 
 human race, but I shall make the attempt. 
 It must be clearly imderstood, however, that 
 not only will a wealth of illustrations be left 
 out, but that the ideas presented wiU be mere 
 skeletons which the reader wiU have to clothe in 
 flesh and blood from his own imagination. Two 
 conditions are necessary in order that he may use 
 his imagination to some purpose. Firstly, an 
 acquaintance with good music ; and secondly, some 
 knowledge of musical history. It is my business 
 here to guide the reader to the way in which he 
 may attain this experience and knowledge. Before 
 attempting this guidance, it is necessary to try to 
 convince him that music is really important, and, 
 in common with the other arts, is the receptacle of 
 all that is most valuable in human Ufe. 
 Nothing is more difficult for the unmusical person 
 
viii MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 to believe than that music expresses thought. 
 The average Englishman does not know when he is 
 thinking. Thought to him means a syllogism, he 
 associates it with Euclid's Geometry, but he forgets 
 that Euchd's Geometry Is a mere logic, a mere 
 sequitur of conclusions that follow from premises ; 
 he forgets, in short, that the innumerable problems 
 and corollaries of Euclid depend upon a few axioms 
 and postulates, that, if he could not imagine a 
 " point " or a " straight line," there could be no 
 such thing as Euclid's Geometry. 
 
 It is this imagination of a point or a straight 
 line, this imagination of ideas, which is the real 
 stuff of thought. This imagination may be ex- 
 pressed in words, in form and colour, or in sound. 
 It is thus that we get the three arts of Literature, 
 the Fine Arts, and Music. Fundamentally they are 
 all deaUng with the same stuff of the imagination. 
 It is often objected by that type of mind which 
 calls itself " business-like " that "^e imaginations 
 of the artist have no reality, that they belong to a 
 dream world and not to the real everyday world. 
 
 * 
 
 Now this, Uke nearly all the business mind's thinking, 
 is superficial. Consider for a moment I The busi- 
 ness-like mind will assert confidently that two 
 and two make four ; but what does he mean by 
 fwo ? Can he take you by the hand and lead you 
 into the streets of the everyday world and show 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 you two anywhere? He can certainly show you 
 two motor buses, two horses, or two men, but he 
 was not talking about horses or men, he was talking 
 about two ; two and two, he said, made four. Well, 
 perhaps you will reply, two men and two men make 
 four men. But did you ever see two men exactly 
 aUke ? and if so, how can any pair of men added 
 to another pair of men be the same as two other 
 pairs ? The only answer to this is to say that a 
 pair of red-bearded men added to a pair of white- 
 bearded men are exactly the same as four beardless 
 men, because you are not concerned with their beards, 
 or their noses, or their eyes, or their complexions, or 
 their height, or their morals, or their brains, or their 
 characters, but with something which we may call 
 their " manness " — something, in fact, which we 
 have never seen, invisible to the eye, intangible to 
 the fingers, a pure abstraction, or, in other words, 
 a figment of the imagination. So we find that 
 when the business man talks so airily of two and 
 two making four, he is talking of something that 
 does not exist except in the Imagination. It is 
 an " Idea " which he has inherited from the scientist 
 or thinker of his race whose imagination first dis- 
 covered it, and without these inherited ideas he 
 would be quite unable to carry on his business at 
 all. How utterly abstract Dr imaginative are the 
 ideas on which we base our everyday life may 
 
X MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 be brought home even more strikingly by our asking 
 the business mind what two oranges and two men 
 make. They make four, but four what ? Not four 
 oranges, or four men, but, if you like, four objects, 
 and what we really mean by four objects is four 
 visual sensations. Thus at the bottom of this 
 everyday reality of which the business mind is so 
 proud, there is nothing more or less than a number 
 of sensations. The world of the artist also consists 
 of sensations, but instead of being merely pro- 
 miscuous and having only a commercial value, 
 they are controlled and used by him to express in 
 his work something more than the actual sensations 
 themselves. For example, we are hearing sounds 
 all day long ; if we Hve in a town the number and 
 variety of soimds which come to our ears is astonish- 
 ing, but they remain nothing but sounds. The 
 composer takes these soimd-sensations and builds 
 with them a piece of music which as a whole has a 
 meaidng quite independent of the separate sounds 
 of which it consists. 
 
 Now the faculty of listening to music is the 
 faculty of seizing and understanding that meaning. 
 But do not mistake me. It is never a meaning 
 that can be put into words. It is only a meaning 
 that exists for the imagination listening to sound, 
 and although there are types of music which may 
 suggest to the listener various concrete images 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 such as cataracts of falling water, hot summer 
 afternoons under shady trees, — ^to say nothing of 
 still more primitive types such as music Imitating 
 battles, galloping horses, bleating sheep, and the 
 actual cries of birds, — ^It may be taken as an axiom 
 that the higher the ts^pe of music the less it will 
 suggest concrete images and the more it will evoke 
 indefinable and mysterious states of mind. I say 
 Indefinable, for Just as there is a primitive imitation 
 music, there is a primitive emotional music which 
 arouses in the mind simple emotional states such 
 as anger, nervous excitement, sensuality, and fear. 
 The highest type of music does not do this : it 
 presents to the imagination some extraordinarily 
 satisfying but wholly inexpUcable and Indefinable 
 beauty. What this beauty is nobody knows. We 
 only know it is the most satisfying experience 
 in human life, and it must, we feel instinctively, 
 represent some immortal truth or higher con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 The history of music is the history of the attempt, 
 by the airangement of sounds, to gratify the senses, 
 to use and enjoy the intelligence and to attain to 
 that ecstasy which comes from the contemplation 
 of pure beauty. There is no doubt, whatsoever, 
 that ancient civilizations, Hke the Sumerian, the 
 Babylonian, and the Egyptian, had a quite highly 
 developed n^usic, but no trace of it has come down 
 
xii MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 to us, possibly because they had not Invented a 
 musical notation. Music would be a jealously pre- 
 served craft, and there would be an oral tradition 
 handed down from father to son • apart from this, 
 what composition there was would be in the nature 
 of improvisation, but improvisation of a highly 
 complex and expressive kind, not the sort of impro- 
 visation one gets from the modern church organist. 
 I have little doubt in my own mind that the 
 musicians of these dead civilizations produced 
 music worthy to rank with the works of Schumann, 
 Schubert, and Beethoven. It is customary to talk 
 of music as quite a new art, as if it were something 
 that began in Europe during the Middle Ages. A 
 certain encyclopaedia makes the following state- 
 ment : 
 
 " It was not until about the year a.d. 330, 
 when Pope Sylvester instituted a singing school at 
 Rome, that music began to assume something of 
 definite shape. Later in the same century 
 S. Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, did much 
 for its reform in the Church ; and further advance 
 was made by Gregory the Great (590-604) whose 
 system of musical scales is known as Gregorian 
 modes. About this time a primitive kind of 
 harmony began to be employed. Guido of 
 Arezzo (1000-1050) and Franco of Cologne 
 (c. 1200) between them laid the foundations of 
 music notation. Guido may fairly be called 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 the inventor of Sol-fa, being the first to employ 
 the syllables ut (now doh) re, mi, fa, sol, la ; the 
 syllable si, for the seventh scale, was not intro- 
 duced till the seventeenth century. Franco's part 
 in the advance lay mainly in the devising of 
 differently shaped notes to express different time 
 lengths. He also Invented ' rests ' and divided 
 time into ' dual ' and " triple.' Still there had 
 been, so far, no composers strictly so called. It 
 was not until the rise of the Netherlands school 
 in the fifteenth century that music as an art had 
 its real beginning. Josquin des Pr^ (1440- 
 1521) is described by some historians as ' the 
 first composer of modem music' " 
 
 This statement is superficially accurate but fun- 
 damentally false ; It gives far too much importance 
 to our modem system of notation, and it totally 
 ignores the fact that music of a highly developed 
 kind can exist, and certainly has existed, without 
 any notation in which to record it. One has only 
 to hear the ancient Italian folk-songs, collected by 
 Madame Geni Sadero, for proof that songs of an 
 extremely complex melodic character can be trans- 
 mitted orally for generations. And let no one be 
 deceived by the word " melodic " ; melody is hori- 
 zontal harmony ; it is greater than harmony, since 
 it contains it, as a circle contains a chord. Some 
 of these songs rival the best songs of our greatest 
 modem composers, and they are all far iri advance 
 
xiv MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 musically of the average song published to-day by 
 Messrs. ChappeU & Co., Boosey & Co., and other 
 music publishers. It is frankly unbeUevable that 
 the Greeks, for example, who were capable of a 
 poetic, dramatic, and plastic art which has never 
 been surpassed, had not a music of correspond- 
 ingly high development. We know for a fact that 
 they had musical instruments and that they had 
 scales or modes ; historians even tell us that " such 
 intervals as the quarter tone, the one-third tone, 
 and the three-eighths tone were in common use : 
 " They were perfectly comprehensible to the Greeks, and 
 would be so to us but for our lack of practice in listen- 
 ing to them." We know also that music played a 
 great part in their drama. In face of these facts 
 it is ridiculous to assume that the best Greek music 
 was less complex, less expressive, or in any way 
 less highly developed than the music of Wagner, 
 Scriabin, or Stravinsky. Personally I go further, 
 and believe that only the best modem music (and 
 by modem music I mean music since 1400) could 
 be put on an equaMty with the best Greek music. 
 And what is true of the Greeks may be true, with 
 certain qualifications, of other civilizations, such as 
 the Egyptian. It is even possible that the music of 
 the Greeks was richer and finer than any music we 
 have to-day. 
 I It now remains for me to say something of the 
 
INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 development of modem music since 1400. A 
 detailed account of this may be had In many books. 
 Here a warning must be given. Most histories of 
 music contain a great deal of accurate information, 
 but the criticism of composers is frequently un- 
 sound and the aesthetic opinions expressed seem 
 to me to be generally extremely superficial and 
 often prejudiced by contemporary controversies. I 
 therefore advise the reader especially to put no 
 faith in the opinions he finds expressed on the work 
 of any composer who is still aUve or who has died 
 since 1880, but to keep an open niind £tnd to judge 
 for himself. 
 
 Making a rapid survey of the past few hundred 
 years, it may be said that from 1400 to the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century the musical activity of 
 Europe can be divided into three classes : I. Church 
 music. II. Court music, or music as a recreation 
 of the aristocracy. III. Folk music. 
 
 Church music was restricted In scope through 
 clerical influence, and the rare and refreshing 
 periodic infiltrations of popular music into the 
 Church service w^e quickly stopped — ^piety being 
 restored by Papal purging. The Coimcil of Trent, 
 which sat from 1545 to 1563, recommended the 
 style of Palestrina "as the only one fitting for the 
 service of God." In England, however, where at 
 that time piety was more natural and less formal 
 b 
 
xvi MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 than it became later and where more individual 
 liberty was allowed to the composer, a great amount 
 of superb Church music was written by such com- 
 posers as Thomas Tallis, Christopher Tye, William 
 Byrd, John Dowland, Orlando Gibbons, and others. 
 The magnificent edition of Tudor Church music, 
 whose publication (under the general editorship of 
 Dr. Terry) the Carnegie Trust is assisting, will 
 preserve for the future the fine work of these men. 
 But the strangling influence of the Church, which 
 became more pompous and more careful of its 
 dignity as it lost its virtue, was ultimately fatal to 
 Church music, and since Palestrina and the EhgMsh 
 composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
 turies. Church music has not been music. Even J. S. 
 Bach's Passions and his famous Mass are not the 
 best of his music ; yet though intensely individual 
 they do represent a certain sturdy Lutheran piety, 
 and they may be granted as an exception to the 
 general statement made above. The absolute 
 spiritual deadness of the bulk of English Church 
 music during the nineteenth century must, I am 
 afraid, be taken to reflect the state of mind of 
 the church-going population of that time. Its one 
 spark of vitality is shown in Revivalist hymn music 
 which expresses (quite unknown to its exponents) 
 a low type of emotional excitement arising mainly 
 from suppressed sexual instincts. 
 
INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 It Is in Court music tliat our modem art music 
 has its origin. During tlie eigliteenth century tlie 
 higUy cultivated aristocracy of Vienna, Paris, and 
 London liad a considerable musical culture ; in 
 Vienna especially many noblemen were excellent 
 amateur musicians, and could and did take their 
 place in a string quartet with the professionals. 
 They were mainly responsible for the material 
 support of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and others, 
 and although they did not by any means fuUy 
 appreciate the greatness of these men, or always 
 behave like gentlemen, yet in their circle these 
 composers found genuine appreciation and help, 
 as may be read, for instance, in any life of Bee- 
 thoven. The private bands of musicians, together 
 with the subsidized theatre orchestras which many 
 of these Viennese noblemen supported, were the 
 foundations of ova modem orchestras, and the 
 fact that the people had nothing whatever to do 
 with the development of modern music — the oppor- 
 tunity for the necessary culture being limited to a 
 small class — explains a certain sterile intellectuality 
 which ultimately developed and has become evident 
 during the last fifty years. 
 
 It is the conscious and unconscious realization 
 of this steriUty that has been the cause of the 
 recent interest in Folk Song. During the whole 
 of the period under survey, when both Church and 
 
xviii MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Court were the sole employers of the professional 
 musician, music continued to survive among the 
 people ; but it is safe to assert that with the passing 
 of every century its vitality grew feebler. The 
 people had no professional musicians, at least none 
 of the highest order ; for although every one of 
 the great composers came from the people (a fact 
 which is really rather astonishing) their exceptional 
 gifts marked them out for early adoption into 
 aristocratic circles, and their activities were then 
 confined to the small highly cultivated musical 
 world of the capital. Since the Middle Ages the 
 widening gulf between the people and the small 
 ruling class was a source of loss to both sides. 
 The natural musical genius which every generation 
 produces had in previous ages been responsible 
 for all the folk-music of which every modem 
 nation is now so proud ; but henceforth the people 
 were impoverished by the devotion of this genius 
 to the service of a small minority who in turn 
 imposed upon it considerable restrictions. Small 
 groups of people always tend to evolve compara- 
 tively hard and fast conventions, the observance of 
 which they call "good taste." They also become 
 super-refined and hyper-intellectual. I mean by 
 these' two phrases simply that refinement and 
 intellectuality became the chief objects to be 
 pursued ; for it is impossible ever to be too refined 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 XIX 
 
 or too intellectual, provided the refinement and the 
 intdlectuality are the artistic means and not the 
 artistic goal. The composer of genius by sheer' 
 force and richness of personality may break these 
 fetters and flood the music of his time with fresh 
 life, but many musicians, who are highly gifted 
 men, and who in favourable circumstances could 
 produce much beautiful work, are unable to do this. 
 Of ability they have plenty; what they really 
 lack is vitality ; and Just as an angemic or otherwise 
 invalid person seeks an Infusion of blood from 
 some on& more vigorous^ so the modem musician 
 seeks invigoration and inspiration from the folk- 
 music of his nation. Thus it is that we have had 
 during the last fifty years the extraordinary 
 phenomenon of a nationalist movement in music, 
 coinciding with a period of somewhat barren in- 
 tellectuality. It represents the efEort of the highly 
 sophisticated professional musician to get new blood 
 into his veins. It is, however, an effort doomed 
 to failure, for the stimulus obtained is artificial and 
 temporary. In order to have a mass of fine music 
 constantly produced we must have a fine civiliza- 
 tion and a common faith and enthusiasm for hfe. 
 Luckily, we shall always have the man of genius 
 who seems to spring up, independent of all condi- 
 tions, but even he suffers to some extent with 
 the rest. 
 
XX MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Progress in music during the last hundred years, 
 like most other "progress" of which we hear, 
 has been almost entirely material. Whatever 
 music the Greeks or Egyptians had, they certainly 
 did not have that enormous paraphemaha for 
 performing music which we possess in the modem 
 orchestra ; but all these new instruments and com- 
 binations of instruments have In themselves Httle 
 significance. Like the motor bus which can take 
 you from Charing Cross to the Bank in half the 
 time that the old horse bus took, but does not — 
 because the streets are too full of motors for it to 
 be able to go any faster than a horse — so the modern 
 orchestra fails to produce a result commensurable 
 with its resources. This Is, of course, only a tem- 
 porary condition. We shall, no doubt, have a period 
 during which the mechanical resources of the 
 musician will remain stationary, while he progresses 
 in the capacity to use them; that is the sort of 
 progress we want. By the " capacity to use them " 
 I am not referring to a technical capacity. Although 
 the aural sense of the modern musician is suffi- 
 ciently developed to appreciate the exquisite use of 
 orchestral colour by such a master as Debussy, 
 yet the average modem composer cannot use 
 colour exquisitely, or indeed with any deUcacy or 
 beauty, and I believe that his aesthetic sense Is 
 definitely inferior to that of the average Greek of 
 
INTRODUCTION xxi 
 
 the age of Perides. The quite extraordinary lack 
 of discrimination in our audiences would seem to 
 support this view. Perhaps there is too much worry 
 and excitement at present in modem life for men 
 and women to have the repose which is essential 
 to any great mental or spiritual development. 
 What good art we get is due entirely to the few, 
 both as creators and audience, who attain this 
 repose, this quahty of being out of the everyday 
 world — often at what appears to the superficial 
 as a considerable sacrifice. 
 
 It now remains for me briefly to suggest what 
 aesthetic development there seems to have been in 
 music during the historical period — which I have 
 fixed roughly as from 1400 to the present day. 
 The folk-music of the Middle Ages was l3nical, 
 and though not the direct expression of emotion 
 (for nothing valuable comes from the direct expres- 
 sion of emotion), it sprang from " emotion re- 
 collected in tranquillity " plus a certain direct joy 
 in expression. The song with which the Sardinian 
 shepherd greets the morning sun rising over the 
 mountains (collected by Madame Sadero) is a good 
 -example of the wonderfully complex melodic beauty 
 of which natural untrained genius is capable. The 
 music of the sixteenth and seventeenth century 
 European composers was mainly lyrical in the same 
 way, but with a professional intellectual element 
 
xxii MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 added. This latter element became more and more 
 dominant until it culminated during the eighteenth 
 century in the German composers, of whom Ji S. 
 Bach is the chief. In spite of all that has been 
 said about Bach's genius — and no one admires his 
 music more than I do — ^it cannot be denied that 
 the intellectual, academic, or professional element 
 in music shows itself in his work to have grown 
 out of EiU proportion to its aesthetic value. If this 
 is true of Bach, who was one of our great modem 
 composers not because of his colossal technical 
 skill but because of the quality of his ideas, it is 
 even more true of hundreds of his contemporaries 
 and successors. I do not think on the other hand 
 that the comparative simpUcity of Haydn and 
 Mozart, who are the next great names we meet 
 with after Bach, was due to any lack of technique 
 or indeed to any technical change. I think it was 
 simply a fresh lyrical outburst similar to the 
 lyrical outburst in English poetry made by Blake, 
 Coleridge, and others after the highly skilled but 
 somewhat frigid virtuosity of the eighteenth-century 
 poets of whom Pope was the most prominent. 
 Certainly Mozart was Bach's intellectual equal in 
 every respect, and if he did not achieve any of the 
 prodigious contrapuntal feats of the older man, it 
 was certainly not because he couldn't. Compare, 
 moreover, the actual quality of Mozart's ideas with 
 
\ INTRODUCTION xxiii 
 
 those of ^ach, and I think the pahn must be 
 given to Mozart. Mozart's ideas, like Bach's, are 
 expressed m^odically, harmonically (if you care 
 to separate harmony and melody, though they 
 are really one), and rhythmically. Beethoven ex- 
 presses his ideas in exactly the same way as Mozart ; 
 there is no purely technical change. There is, on 
 the other hand, a less lyrical expression. This was 
 due not so much to an increase in dramatic instinct 
 — for Mozart had. as much dramatic instinct as 
 Beethoven, as may be seen in his operas — it 
 was due to a profoimder consciousness. The 
 dramatic instinct can exist at any stage of the human 
 consciousness ; it is simply a question of contrasting 
 one thing effectively with another. In fact, it 
 almost demands a certain simplification of things. 
 That is to say, a composer writing dramatically 
 begins by simplifying even if he ends by producing 
 a higher complex whole. But the mood expressed 
 by a lyric is single, and the change noticeable in 
 Beethoven's work is due to the introduction into 
 music of a larger share of human personality. 
 Thus, when we say that Beethoven's music is 
 richer than Mozart's, this is what we mean. It is 
 not necessarily more beautiful ; in my opinion, it is 
 not as beautiful ; it is, I think, less perfect, but it 
 is greater In the sense that the ugliest and most 
 imperfect man is greater than the most beautiful 
 
xxiv MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 bird. Schumann and Chopin each in his turn 
 extended the range of human personality in music — 
 Schumann, by introducing sentiment or idealized 
 emotions, Chopin by expressing a romantic languor 
 and the highly refined sensibiUty of a leisured and 
 luxurious civiHzed class. Wagner extended still 
 further the sensuous element in music, and added 
 an intellectual sensuousness — ^in the sense that the 
 ecstatic contemplation and dramatic expression 
 of the ideas of sin and cruelty might be described 
 as an intellectual sensuousness (see the Ring of the 
 Nibehtngs and Parsifal). This is an element which 
 does not exist in the music of Mozart, Beethoven, 
 Bach, or Haydn. The modem French and Russian 
 composers, of whom Debussy and Rimsky-Korsakov 
 are the most characteristic, have added enor- 
 mously to our sense of colour in music, and have 
 made novel and pleasing use of the tonal qualities 
 of different instruments and groups of instruments. 
 The Russians also have greatly stimulated our 
 rhythmic sense. Finally, we have the astonishing 
 growth of a music almost wholly intellectual, but 
 intellectual in quite a different sense from that in 
 which we can caU Bach intellectual. This type 
 of music descends through Berlioz from Liszt, and 
 is best exempMfied in the work of Richard Strauss. 
 Its chief characteristic is its psychological clever- 
 ness. Anyone could tell just from hearing Strauss' 
 
INTRODUCTION xxv 
 
 music that he was a man of great intelligence. 
 He has the comic spirit and the keen perception 
 of the intellectual for the inconsistencies, the 
 follies, the mental and physical vagaries of human 
 character, Tyl Eulenspiegel is the first master- 
 piece of wit in music. Unfortunately, Strauss is 
 not as wise or as profound as he is witty, and he is 
 deficient in poetic power, i.e. the power of creating 
 beauty. Stravinsky also belongs to this class, but 
 he is less of an intellectual and more primitive than 
 the German composer. By " more primitive " I 
 mean that he has more vitality and is less urban. 
 If Strauss has brought wit and a worldly inteUigence 
 into music, Stravinsky has introduced an element 
 of bizarre imagination which is not to be met with 
 earlier. This is especially true of Le Sucre du 
 Printemps and his opera The Nightingale. 
 
 To many people Scrlabtn, who is the last modem 
 composer I shall particularize. Is greater than 
 either Strauss or Stravinsky, but in his case it is 
 much more difficult to define what his contribution 
 to music has been. Scriabin's music had none of 
 the intellectual wit and intelligence we find in 
 Strauss and Stravinsky, but rhythmically Stravinsky 
 seems to me somewhat primitive and barbaric by 
 the side of Scriabin. The dance rhythms of Le 
 Sucre du Printemps are of course intentionally 
 physical ta character, but in such dance rhythms 
 
xxvi MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Stravinsky finds a natural expression. Scriabin 
 could never have written Le Sucre du Printemps on 
 that physical plane. The Rite of Spring' would 
 never have suggested to him the ritual dances of 
 savages with legs and arms, but a spiritual dance, 
 a Dance of Fire, a creative ecstasy of the essence 
 of the universe. The Poem of Ecstasy is, in fact, 
 Scriabin's Le Sacre du Printemps, and to my mind 
 a greater Sucre du Printemps than Stravinsky's — 
 greater because it Is the expression of a deeper 
 and wider human consciousness even if it lacks an 
 imaginative or concrete image-making element 
 which is present in Stravinsky's work. Scriabin is 
 in character much more akin to Beethoven than 
 either Strauss or Stravinsky, and his music re- 
 presents the chief advance in consciousness made 
 since Beethoven's time, although we may grant 
 that other composers have advanced music sensu- 
 ously and intellectually. 
 
 W. J. T. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 On Listening to Music . 
 
 PAGB 
 I 
 
 II. 
 
 Unadulterated Music . 
 
 7 
 
 III. 
 
 The Problem of Music . 
 
 • IS 
 
 IV. 
 
 Programme Music 
 
 22 
 
 V. 
 
 An Example of Programme Music . 
 
 . 28 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Morality of Music 
 
 ■ 34 
 
 VII. 
 
 Song-Writing .... 
 
 40 
 
 VIII. 
 
 African and Suburban Music. 
 
 . 46 
 
 IX. 
 
 SCRIABIN ..... 
 
 51 
 
 X. 
 
 Sonorous Alcohol 
 
 S6 
 
 XI. 
 
 The Royal Philharmonic Society , 
 
 63 
 
 XII. 
 
 The Promenade Concerts 
 
 68 
 
 XIII. 
 
 An Imaginary Conversation . ^ 
 
 75 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Max Reger .... 
 
 79 
 
 XV. 
 
 The London Choral Society . 
 
 85 
 
 XVI. 
 
 A Note on Opera 
 
 90 
 
 XVII. 
 
 The Technique of Opera 
 
 xxvii 
 
 98 
 
xxvm 
 
 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 XVIII. Notes on Three Operas 
 XIX. The Magic Flute . 
 XX. LOVISE . 
 XXI. The Village Rqmeo and Juliet 
 XXII. The Critic . 
 
 XXIII. CfsAR France 
 
 XXIV. A Concert at the Front , 
 XXV. Stravinsky . 
 
 XXVI. A Musical Philosophy 
 XXVII. The Barrel-Organ in the Rain 
 XXVIII. Debussy 
 XXIX. On Conducting 
 XXX. Musical Plays 
 XXXI. A Note on Hector Berlioz 
 XXXII. The Oriana Madrigal Society 
 
 XXXIII. A Note on Bach's B Minor Mass 
 
 XXXIV. On Pianists . 
 XXXV. Style in Singing 
 
 XXXVI. Jazz Music . 
 XXXVII. Plastic Music 
 XXXVIII. Church Music 
 XXXIX. Interpretation in Music 
 
MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 I 
 
 ON LISTENING TO MUSIC 
 
 IT is safe to assert that of the large number of 
 people who habitually go to concerts few get 
 anything more than an emotional impression of 
 varying intensity from the music they hear. If you 
 hear from a distance two people speaking, you may 
 get an impression of a quarrel, of anger, or of affec- 
 tion, mthout hearing any of the words thai are spoken, 
 and imless you go nearer that is all you will get. 
 This is precisely what most of us get from music — a 
 general emotional impression. But just as people 
 are not always speaking with that particular pas- 
 sionate accent which makes a direct emotional effect, 
 so music is not always thus accented ; then in both 
 cases, unless we move a little closer in, we are un- 
 affected, the conversation and the music having no 
 meaning for us. Such music, we wiU be heard to 
 say, is meaningless, or dull, or uninteresting. Of 
 course it is, for the simple reason that we are not 
 hearing what is going on. Now, only a small per- 
 
2 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 centage of any audience does really hear what is 
 going on, the rest are simply sitting with their ears 
 pricked up to catch any note of anger, love, hatred, 
 joy, gaiety, or voluptuousness that may be carried 
 to their minds. This explains why composers such 
 as Tschaikovsky, Wagner, and Scriabin have a so 
 much wider appeal than composers like Debussy, 
 Bach, or Mozart, just as it explains why a Chappell 
 or Boosey ballad is more popular than a song by 
 PurceU. Between " The Rosary " and Tschaikovsky's 
 Symphony in B minor {Pathdtique) there is no 
 essential difference to the ordinary ear. Each pro- 
 duces a direct emotional effect and, of course, it 
 matters nothing that the one is a song and the 
 other a symphony ; each of them produces an 
 emotion which can be registered on any normal 
 adult human brain just as the note of anger in a 
 distant conversation can, and it calls for no mental 
 effort to make that registration, to receive that 
 impression. People who call themselves musical in 
 the ordinary way are people who respond quickly 
 to emotional sound-impressions, but they are mostly 
 sensitive to the emotions, not to the sounds. 
 
 Now, the really musical person, or perhaps I 
 ought to say the higher, the more developed musical 
 tjrpe, is the one that is primarily sensitive to the 
 sounds and not to the emotions. To take again our 
 conversation analogy, it is the person who is most 
 vividly aware, when listening to two people talking 
 in the distance, not of the emotional colour of the 
 noise — whether it suggests anger or good temper 
 
ON LISTENING TO MUSIC 3 
 
 — but of the purely aural cadence and clang of the 
 voices, the blend and discord of tones, the curves and 
 subtleties of the rhythm. A man in whom this 
 quality of mind finds its extreme manifestation 
 would be capable of not noticing that the two people 
 were quarrelling and on the verge of coming to blows 
 in his complete sensuous absorption in the cadence 
 and discordance of their voices, jtist as Newton, 
 absorbed in working out a mathematical problem in 
 chalk on the back of a coach, did not observe that 
 the coach had begun to move, buj; automatically 
 ran after it, still conscious only of his mathematics. 
 But this really musical person is, on the other 
 hand, not the professorial t37pe ; that is, or ought 
 to be, obvious. To the professional or academic 
 musician in his purest form, music is pattern and 
 logic in sounds, and in every composition he looks 
 for the sjTitax and the grammar. You may know 
 him by his complete incapacity to distinguish be- 
 tween great and commonplace music ; aU he can see 
 is good or bad grammar, and, like the compilers of 
 many text-books in English, bad grammar seems 
 to interest him even more than good. But on the 
 whole I prefer him ; I think him less dangerous than 
 the emotional Ustener, who reaUy misses all that 
 distinguishes music from any other art. What a 
 large proportion he forms of our musical audiences 
 can be observed at the " Promenades," where the 
 audience applauds so indiscriminately as to make 
 one almost tear one's hair and foam at the mouth. 
 There can be no doubt that for the majority of a 
 
4 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 " Prom " audience it does not matter what the 
 contents of the programme are. But these crowds 
 are incurably fickle, they do not form the stable 
 public which knows good music and will always pay 
 to hear it year in and year out. It is among this 
 latter public that the really musical people are to 
 be found — ^the people who know that Gounod's Valse 
 Song from Romeo and Juliet is delightful if perfectly 
 sung, but unendurable if only passably sung. The 
 emotional hstener, however, will believe that 
 Wagner's " O Star of Eve," however sung, is 
 superior to the Gounod Valse Song. That is to say, 
 he listens not with his ear but with his heart, which — 
 it cannot be too often or too emphatically declared 
 — ^is all wrong. 
 If, however, the average person listens with his 
 
 ' heart and the academical or professional musician 
 (as a rule) with his brain, and they are both wrong, 
 in what way, it wiU be asked, is the reaUy musical 
 person supposed to listen ? I would answer — and I 
 do not know if the phrase is new — with his sensuous 
 imagination. It is at once the rarest and the 
 most arduous way in which to listen to music, and 
 perhaps I can best further explain what I mean by 
 listening with the " sensuous imagination " if I say 
 what the first requirement for such a way of listening 
 is. It is mental concentration. When I went to hear 
 The Beggar's Opera, at the Ljric Theatre, Hammer- 
 smith, the audience chewed chocolates throughout, 
 and clapped hands violently after almost every 
 
 song. Now, if you can think of diving after and 
 
ON LISTENING TO MUSIC 5 
 
 unwrapping a chocolate while Miss Sylvia Nelis is 
 singing, it is certain that you are not hearing her, 
 for if you were hearing her you wouldn't taste the 
 chocolate — ^it would have no more flavour than water. 
 Secondly, if you really appreciated fully the sensi- 
 tiveness of her phrasing and the beautiful smoothness 
 of her legato singing, it would torture your ear to 
 hear the sudden hand-clapping as she finished ; but 
 the audience for the most part is not really listening 
 at all, it is just letting the music flow over it, and it 
 finds it pleasant, quaint, and sentimental ! It has 
 little notion of the gulf that' separates Miss NeHs 
 from most of the other singers, and it wiU accept 
 the ear-oftending and exaggerated vocalization of 
 " Peachum " with the same applause as it gives 
 to a perfect "PoUy" or an almost perfect "Mac- 
 heath." 
 
 There seems to me little doubt that most of our 
 audiences go to the concert-hall or the theatre more 
 or less fuddled with food or drink. They have not 
 eaten or drunk to excess, merely to repletion ; and, 
 as every athlete knows, it is impossible to do good 
 work immediately after a hea'vy meal. People seem 
 to think that they can hsten to music in a state in 
 which no first-rate composer would dream of com- 
 posing. They believe that no work is required of 
 them ; but if it does not take quite so much mental 
 energy to Msten to a Brahms' symphony as to write 
 it, yet it takes far more than the average listener is 
 capable of. Large numbers of people sit through the 
 " Promenades " in a state of blissful stupor, digesting 
 
6 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 their dinner to the sound of music. It takes some- 
 thing like Tschaikovsky's " 1812 " Overture to make 
 much of an effect upon them. Their senses are not 
 bright and keen enough to perceive the wealth of 
 musical beauty that is in any first-rate work. No 
 one would wish to debar them from the pleasure 
 they get, but it is a very tame and primitive sensation 
 compared with the intense and passionate realization 
 of musical beauty which comes with concentration 
 and the exercise of the sensuous imagination. 
 
II 
 
 UNADULTERATED MUSIC 
 
 CHANCE sometimes brings our way a perfect 
 example of the pure musical instinct to which 
 I have referred, I have said that most people 
 who call themselves musical are really more sensi- 
 tive 'to emotional than to musical sound. I com- 
 pared them to people who, listening to a distant 
 conversation, catch and are absorbed in the emo- 
 tional note — whether of anger, affection, etc. — 
 rather than the purely aural clash, cadence, and 
 blend of the moving voices. I beheve that great 
 art has nothing whatever to do with that emotional 
 expression, that music as an art has no business 
 with the convesdng of emotions, and that it is the 
 haU-mark of bad music, as of bad art generally, that 
 it is emotional. I suggest that except for a greater 
 technical skill — which means, shortly, superior 
 brain power — the composer of Tschaikovsky's 
 Fourth, Fift^, and Sixth Symphonies would be in 
 the same class^as the composer of that well-known 
 song " The Rosary," were it not that in a few works 
 . and for a brief space in others he is musical and 
 not emotional. Frequently he has no more right 
 
8 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 to be considered a great composer than has the 
 composer of the most sobful ballad that ever made 
 a drunkard weep. 
 
 Even the greatest composers have moments of 
 emotional weakness — moments, that is to say, when 
 they are imequal to the enormously difficult task 
 of writing imaginatively, aiid then they too fall 
 back on trjdng to infect their audience with their 
 emotion by some exhibition of what is, after aU, 
 hysteria ; or they fall back on cleverness and become 
 academic and dull. The skilful composer learns 
 how to play on his audience's feelings in cold blood. 
 The bells and cannon of Tschaikovsky's " 1812 " 
 Overture are the trickery of a highly emotional 
 man who knows exactly how to excite us because 
 he knows what excites him. But Tschaikovsky is 
 a mere child in the game compared with those we 
 shall have in the future, although, perhaps, the 
 difficulty of not awakening our sense of humour 
 will increasingly preserve us. 
 
 It is, of course, comparatively easy to agree 
 with this argument while one draws one's selec- 
 tions of emotional music from such composers as 
 Tschaikovsky. It is when we are confronted with 
 such works as Cfear Franck's D Minor Symphony 
 or his Quintet, or with examples (and they can 
 easily be found) from Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven, 
 whose appeal is directly emotional and does npt 
 touch the sensuous imagination, that we are pulled 
 up. Every one can recognize the gulf that separates 
 the emotions of Tschaikovsky's symphonies from 
 
UNADULTERATED MUSIC 9 
 
 those shown in the two works of Franck I have 
 named. It is the difference between rant and 
 religion, but, immensely superior as is Franck's 
 symphony to any of Tschaikovsky's, it falls short 
 of the greatest art just because it mainly touches 
 the nerves and not the imagination. It excites 
 us while we hear it, but it gives us very little to 
 carry away except the memory of our excitement. 
 Now, this is a good test. Why do we come back 
 again and again to Mozart ? Mozart haunts us 
 because, though he is not academic, he does not 
 harrow our emotional nerves ; he is not like 
 Wagner, a man letting off rockets in an excited 
 crowd ; or Tschaikovsky, a sentimentalist crying for 
 the moon ; or Brahms, a middle-aged man remem- 
 bering his mother and his first-love ; or Franck, a 
 man shut out from heaven ; he is not a mere tube 
 through which blow his aspirations, his sentiments, 
 and his regrets in a more or less chaotic flood ; he 
 is that most m3rsterious of Nature's secrets, a great 
 creative artist, whose work, purged of all emotional 
 dross, flies straight at the imagination. 
 
 All the truly great composers have moments of 
 this power, and I confidently appeal to the judgment 
 of aU iateUigent music-lovers when I say that it is 
 the most enduring and precious quality in their 
 art. It haunts and pervades the mind, but it 
 produces no single emotional reaction. There are 
 songs of Brahms that make one go home and un- 
 tie one's early love-letters ; there are works of 
 Tschaikovsky and Wagner that make one immedi- 
 
10 MUSIC AND MFE 
 
 ately want to join a brass band ; C&ar Franck has 
 made me (although not a Catholic) go to Mass ; but I 
 never heard, and never expect to hear of Mozart 
 producing any of those strange and inartistic 
 effects. He simply quickens the musical sense and 
 is as inexplicable as Hfe. 
 
 Now, if we accept my contention that the greatest 
 art is absolutely free from the expression of any 
 emotion that can be referred to in our daily existence 
 as human beings, we are up against the fact that 
 the greater part of music fails to satisfy this con- 
 dition. I suggest not only that tMs is true, but 
 that musical criticism has hitherto made very little 
 attempt to discriminate between the superior and 
 the inferior elements in the work of composers of 
 acknowledged eminence. It is not always or even 
 often that a composer's best works are the most 
 belauded. What appeals to most men is emotional 
 force. Beethoven is considered a greater man 
 than Mendelssohn because he is a more passionate 
 man. Beethoven and Wagner were great person- 
 alities ; they had power, and they make you feel 
 their power in their nlusic ; their greatness as 
 composers as contrasted with other great men who 
 were not composers is that they were able to 
 express their individuahty in their music. This, 
 one must infer, is genius. I submit that such 
 reasoning is thoroughly superficial and misleading. 
 There may be some connexion between the dynamic 
 vitality of deeply passion&te men like Beethoven 
 and Wagner and that creative power that under- 
 
UNADULTERATED MUSIC 11 
 
 lies their musical genius ; science to-day knows 
 too little about these forces to say, but, speaking 
 by intuition and from experience, I am ready to 
 prophesy that it wiU be found that the emotional 
 ebullitions of passionate men like Beethoven and 
 Wagner — and three-fourths of their compositions are 
 such-^-are whoUy accidental and irrelevant to their 
 real genius, and that their art will live only by 
 virtue of the one-fourth (or whatever the propor- 
 tion may be), which is that unadulterated stream 
 of pure music springing up no one knows whither 
 and speaking of no one knows what— not of love, 
 death, democracy, or the struggles of husband and 
 wife around a baby.^ 
 
 I would not, for one moment, have it thought 
 that this is an " art for art's sake " argument. 
 That I consider to be an even more misleading and 
 inaccurate conception than that, given genius, great 
 -passions make great music. I have the deepest 
 conviction that great music is great because it 
 is the expression of some profound idea in the 
 universe. It is, if you like, an expression of the 
 spirit, but it is not an expression of a great man's 
 temper, or of his love for women, or for his fellow- 
 men, or of his hatred of tryanny, for these are 
 matters of another world, physical and accidental, 
 like Carlyle's dyspepsia, which produced a great 
 deal of violent emotional literature but no art. 
 
 If this is true of the creative artist, if he expresses 
 an idea and does not merely give vent to his 
 
 ' " Domestic Symphony," by R. Strauss. 
 
12 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 emotions, it is interesting to apply the theory to 
 the interpretative artist. It leads us to question, 
 at once, the right of the most famous pianists 
 and violinists to their position in the musical 
 world. And here I return to my opening sentence, 
 which said that chance has just brought our way 
 a perfect example of pure musical instinct. As I 
 sat listening for the first time to Mr. Jascha Heifetz 
 in October 1920, I heard what I had never heard 
 before — ^the perfect violinist. Let me say at once 
 that Heifetz has not got the silvery tone and the 
 almost feline grace or the tenderness of Kreisler ; 
 he has not got what Mischa Elman had once, the 
 fiery ardour we associate with youth ; he has not 
 got what Paganini had, the magnetic personality 
 of an altogether extraordinary man. But what 
 have these qualities to do with music, though 
 they are the most talked about by musical critics ? 
 Absolutely nothing ! Impeccable technique, fault- 
 less intonation, and an absolutely pure tone are 
 indispensable requirements only because thfe ab- 
 sence of any one of them interferes with, blemishes 
 the presentment of the idea, but a silver tone or a 
 golden tone gratifies the sensuous ear as a crushed 
 grape gratifies the palate ; they are qualities of 
 an altogether inferior order and are absolutely 
 irrelevant to art. Equally irrelevant and inferior 
 are tenderness, sentiment,' and ardour. These 
 quaMties are all delightful in themselves, and if a 
 violinist or a pianist cannot give us the best thing, 
 there is, of course, no reason why he should not 
 
UNADULTERATED MUSIC 13 
 
 give us something for our money. It is even 
 probable that more people will go to see him break 
 a string through excess of " fire," or weep into the 
 piano through excess of water, than wiU ever 
 assemble to hear him play pure music, unadulter- 
 ated by any admixture with his love for a red- 
 haired woman sitting in the front row of the stalls, 
 or with any of the other miscellaneous passions 
 of what is, probably, a very third-rate human 
 character. 
 
 But Mr. Heifetz can give us the best thing. 
 Technique, intonation, tone are all perfect, but 
 they only constitute a perfect medium for the 
 perfect expression of the music. With an amazing 
 (because so very, very rare) aloofness and tran- 
 quillity his musical intelligence expresses the 
 musical idea. It is plapng at the very farthest 
 possible remove from the mechanical. The fingers 
 do not play themselves, which is the fate that 
 befalls most great virtuosos ; it is a pure musical 
 intelligence playing, unmuddied by any personal 
 characteristics. Mr. Heifetz is only nineteen ; it 
 is unthinkable that he will always be able to play 
 as he does now. Inevitably his human character 
 will develop, passions and prejudices wiU be 
 awakened and intensified, and presently they will 
 affect his playing. He will become — what the 
 foolish critic wants him to be now — emotional, 
 and he will be emotional according to his character. 
 If he is a third-rate sort of person his playing will 
 become vulgar and full of cheap exaggerations and 
 
14 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 emphases ; on the other hand, he may develop 
 differently, and his playing may obtain a conscious 
 weight and dignity. But it can never be better 
 than it is now ; for such human qualities as warmth, 
 dignity, nobility, or sentiment are mere banners 
 raised above the crystal current of pure music Uke 
 the street decorations below which flows the human 
 procession. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF MUSIC 
 
 IT has been said that any attempt to expound 
 a theory that great music was not simply the 
 direct expression of great emotion " will only 
 confuse the plain man." This, I think, is extremely 
 probable, but then this " confusion," this substitu- 
 tion of a larger and more complex truth for what 
 has become a simple fallacy is all that makes Ufe 
 worth Uving for us plain men. Einstein, Bertrand 
 RusseU, Freud make havoc of the most respectable 
 and sensible ideas, and all our experience seems to 
 be nothing but a series of exploding simplicities. 
 One cannot even faU in love without discovering 
 that " things are not what they seem," and I am 
 convinced that we are stiU very far from imder- 
 standing the nature of music, and that, however 
 imperfectly I may be expressing my meaning, I 
 am, nevertheless, getting a Httle nearer the reaUty 
 than those who say, " There is no such thing as the 
 • pure music ' of, say, the Brahms violin concerto 
 that can be separated from the dignity and nobility 
 and general humanity and all the rest of it," 
 Here are the conclusions of a Geneva doctor 
 
16 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 who, " after an exhaustive examination of different 
 ' melomaniacs,' has succeeded in distinguishing five 
 varieties and two main camps. The latter he calls 
 respectively ' rationel ' and ' affectif,' according to 
 whether the pleasure caused by music is mainly an 
 intellectual or a sensuous one. Intellectual Usteners 
 may be of two kinds, ' techniciens ' or ' ideatifs,' 
 and sensuous ones are either ' sentimentaux ' or 
 ' emotifs purs.' In between the two main divisions 
 is an intermediate class, that of the ' imaginatifs.' 
 Thus the five varieties of listener are : 
 
 (i) Those whose pleasure in hearing music depends 
 on their technical knowledge of the art. 
 
 (2) Those whose pleasure depends on the thoughts 
 
 or ideas suggested by the music. 
 
 (3) Those who either consciously or unconsciously 
 
 substitute images for sounds. 
 
 (4) Those whose pleasure depends on the senti- 
 ^ ments or emotion with which they are 
 
 inspired or which they discover in the 
 music. 
 
 (5) Those who experience an emotion sui generis 
 
 and not to be compared with any other 
 psycholdgical phenomenon ; in other words 
 a purely musical emotion unable to be 
 expressed in other terms." 
 
 Now, the interesting point is not so much this 
 classification which, however, I think admirable, 
 but the fact that Dr. Odier goes on to award the 
 highest honours to the last class, maintaining that 
 though numerically the smallest they are the most 
 musical of all. Now this is really an extraordinary 
 
THE PROBLEM OF MUSIC 17 
 
 corroboration of what I have been propounding. 
 Unlike Dr. Odier, I have made no examinations 
 of those whom he amiably describes as " melo- 
 maniacs." But purely from an analysis of my own 
 experience I have come to conclusions almost 
 identical with those expressed by him. This seems 
 to me pretty conclusive proof that we are right. 
 But I have something to add to Dr. Odier's classifica- 
 tion, and it is that I believe one and the same 
 person can belong to all the five classes enumerated. 
 When I say " I believe," I ought to say " I know," 
 for it is my own experience. If I have such con- 
 fidence in declaring that the highest kind of music 
 is not the expression of emotions but something 
 sui generis, and that the highest type of listener is 
 the type belonging to class five, it is because I have 
 been a listener in every one of the five classes, and 
 have experienced as a listener of the type of class 
 five profounder and more lasting pleasure than in 
 any other way. The argument, therefore, does 
 not rest on d priori reasoning. It is based on the 
 fact of a gradual development of the power of 
 appreciation in an individual listener, and it is 
 corroborated by Dr. Odier's exhaustive examination 
 of " melomaniacs." 
 
 But how Dr. Odier arrives at his conclusion that 
 the type of class five is the highest type of musical 
 listener I do not know. The fact that I think his 
 conclusion right must not obscure my astonishment 
 that any examination of " melomaniacs " could 
 lead to any sensible conclusion whatsoever. It 
 
18 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 seems characteristic of that bogus science rampant 
 among us to call persons fond of music " melo- 
 maniacs," and it is equally characteristic of it that 
 the investigator should believe that, by judging 
 the method of listening or the taste in music of 
 numbers of persons, one could find out which is the 
 best type of listener. Such an apparent " method " 
 is transparent humbug. Obviously, there is only 
 one sound way in which Dr. Odier could have carried 
 on this investigation, and that is by reference to 
 his own experience. All that his examination of 
 persons can mean is that : (i) a majority of 
 persons examined declared that they had knowledge 
 of all five types of listening and got the deepest 
 enjoyment from class five ; or (2) that Dr. Odier 
 took certain musicians as the acknowledged greatest 
 composers, and found that all the people who 
 preferred them to other and, by assumption, inferior 
 composers, belonged to class five ; or (3) that Dr. 
 Odier belonged to tj^pe five, and those who were 
 like him he called the best type. 
 
 Of these three " methods " number one is the 
 only one which can be reasonably described as 
 anything but a mockery and a quackery, and we 
 are unable to accept it as the method employed 
 because Dr. Odier says that type five is probably 
 the smallest class of all. In any case, no one would 
 accept a majority vote upon any question of art. 
 I must confess to an extraordinary curiosity as to 
 the method of investigation employed by Dr. Odier, 
 and there is only one possible way that occurs to 
 
THE PROBLEM OF MUSIC 19 
 
 me in which he may have arrived at his conclusions. 
 He may have found that all the listeners of type five 
 had shared at one time or another the sensations of 
 the other four classes, and had come unanimously 
 to believe in the superiority of that fifth tjTpe, 
 whereas the listeners in the other four classes were 
 capable of listening only in one or perhaps in two 
 ways. If this, in fact, is how he arrived at the 
 assurance of the superiority of type five it is indeed 
 conclusive. Personally, I strongly suspect that 
 this is the truth, for I have met many people who 
 have listened in only one of the ways enumerated 
 and their judgment has always been faulty. It is 
 probable that it is best to be able to listen in all 
 five ways, and not to be at the mercy of a one-sided 
 temperament or brain ; but I have come to be con- 
 vinced of the superiority of type five simply because 
 I get more permanent, more profoimd, satisfaction 
 from it, and, what is more, a satisfaction that is 
 unique, which the other kinds of satisfaction are 
 not. Moreover, this wiU give one a principle of 
 criticism, a touchstone by which one can judge 
 the music itself ; for I find that a great deal of music 
 gives little or no pleasure to a listener of type five. 
 You can only listen to it as one of the remaining 
 four classes, for it has no existence otherwise ; it 
 is either a technical tour-de-force, programme music 
 (classes two and three) ; a sentimental and emo- 
 tional stimulus (Mendelssohn, Tschaikovsky, etc.), 
 or it is nothing. Therefore, if I appear dogmatic 
 in my criticism of music, it proceeds, at any rate, 
 
20 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 from the application of certain principles founded 
 not on abstract theory but on experience, and is 
 not merely the expression of a nebulous excitement 
 experienced in a concert-hall. Neither is it merely 
 technical as so much musical criticism is. It is 
 worth attempting to work out a canon of musical 
 criticism that shall be esthetic, since musical 
 criticism up till now has been either grammatical 
 — similar to the technical instruction given, for 
 example, by a teacher of harmony or counterpoint 
 or orchestration at a conservatorium, or it has 
 been impressionistic — ^the emotions of a soul among 
 masterpieces. Few musical critics, it is safe to 
 say, and still fewer musicians have any notion of 
 what they are talking about, for musical criticism 
 is in a far more backward state than literary criticism. 
 I maintain, as an example, that practically all 
 London's musical critics went wrong over Heifetz, 
 for the simple reason that they did not know 
 precisely how to place Heifetz. " Fiery or Frigid ? " 
 was the query at the 'head of one criticism. The 
 critics were confronted with playing that technically 
 was flawless ; yet it was neither emotional nor could 
 they honestly feel that it was mechanical, but they 
 felt it must be one or the other, for the simple reason 
 that they have all been brought up on the crude 
 popular belief that executive artists vary in quality 
 as they vary in emotional depth. They could not 
 say that Heifetz gave shallow or sentimental 
 emotional readings, for, so far as they could see, 
 he expressed no emotion whatever. But then, the 
 
THE PROBLEM OF MUSIC 21 
 
 devil of it was that never had they heard playing 
 that was less like a machine. What the deuce was 
 the matter with Heifetz ? The problem seemed 
 insoluble, so that aU gave it up, and some sought 
 refuge in mysticism — Heifetz could not grasp " the 
 subtle influence behind the mere notes " (how does 
 one do that, I wonder ?), and others decided to 
 take courage and call Heifetz " cold," although 
 this epithet applied musically can only mean dead 
 or Hfeless, which is exactly what Heifetz's playing 
 is not. The truth, of course, is simply that Heifetz 
 played with a purely musical instinct of astonish- 
 ing sensitiveness and spontaneity, and his plajdng 
 was no more " emotional " than a crocus bursting 
 into flower in a garden, and no more and no less 
 " mystical." 
 
IV 
 
 PROGRAMME MUSIC 
 
 ¥" E Festin de I'Araignee (The Feast of the Spider) , 
 / by the prominent French composer, Albert 
 
 — ^Roussel, is a work that by its clarity and 
 ingenuity must please the cultivated musician, but 
 although it frequently tickles the senses agreeably 
 and by its logical construction satisfies the brain, it 
 fails to satisfy our consciousness as a great work of 
 art should, and it must be considered a composition 
 of a minor order. It may be fruitful to inquire 
 why this is so, because Le Festin de I'Araignee, being 
 what is called " programme music," the inquiry 
 may throw light on the subject of programme music 
 generally. 
 
 I do not know when the term " prograrnme 
 music " was first used, but I should judge that it 
 was some time during the second half of the nine- 
 teenth century. However recent the expression, 
 the thing itself is not recent, for there has been 
 programme music from time immemorial — ^not, as 
 many writers would say, from the fifteenth century. 
 When primitive man first began to take pleasure in 
 rhjTthm it is very Hkely that one of the first of his 
 
PROGRAMME MUSIC 23 
 
 discoveries would be, for example, the excitement 
 produced from the suggestion of an approaching 
 horseman by a gradual crescendo of a repeated 
 rhythmic phrase produced by knocking his knuckles 
 on a piece of wood. The day when he discovered 
 how to make the horseman depart by reversing 
 the process would be a day of joy in that primitive 
 musician's life. Now, obviously, there is nothing 
 very exalted, nothing permanently satisfying to 
 the spirit about this ; nor, I would suggest, is there 
 an3rthing very satisfying or of permanent aesthetic 
 value about the modern immensely complicated 
 and highly organized version of this musical activity. 
 It is, I maintain, an unfruitful form destined to an 
 everlasting limitation, — ^like that, for example, of the 
 multiplication table, — ^and the reason is that it is 
 purely mechanistic and, therefore, capable only of 
 increasing complexity but never of aesthetic mean- 
 ing. But programme music in order to retain 
 our interest has sought to obtain some emotional 
 colouring ; it does this by the imitation of what 
 in life would arouse emotion, and it reawakens 
 that emotion by association. The primitive man 
 gets a thrill from the rhsrthmic crescendo which 
 suggests an approaching horseman because in his 
 real life an approaching horseman would mean 
 danger, or a warning of danger, or at the least 
 awaken an indefinite anxiety or excitement. That 
 is the emotional content of his primitive rhythmic 
 programme music. All modem programme music 
 gets its emotional content in some similar way. 
 
24 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Let us now take M. Roussel's Le Festin de 
 I'Araignie, based on the Souvenirs Entomologiques 
 of Henri Fabre, and examine it closely. We find, 
 to begin with, a theme on the flute against a sway- 
 ing figure for muted violins which is not directly 
 imitative of a:ny sound in the external world. It 
 therefore presents the mind with no image, but it 
 evokes an indefinable sensation. When we look 
 at the " programme " and discover that at this 
 point in the music the spider is absorbed in medita- 
 tion, we realize that the sensation we had was that 
 of a stiU, summer day, and we had already recognized 
 the affinity of the music to the opening of Debussy's 
 Prelude d I'aprh-midi d'un faune. Now, this is a 
 genuinely successful evocation of an atmosphere. 
 The theme is in V time, and it begins with a bar of 
 two dotted minims, followed by a bar of crotchets 
 and quavers, and ending in a third bar, again of 
 two dotted minims. It is not difiicult to see why 
 this should give an effect of some slight movement 
 in general tranquillity. The first bar merely estab- 
 lishes the rhythm, the third bar sustains it ; 
 nothing happens except in the middle bar, where 
 you have that slight flurry of crotchets. So, on a 
 calm day, there is a rhjrthm of life, the pulse of the 
 flowing blood, the transformation of the mounting 
 sap on whose underlying current a leaf falls or an 
 insect moves or a bird hops from one branch to 
 another. That is your little flurry of crotchets. 
 Now, this theme of M. Roussel's is exquisitely 
 right, as are the figures which he uses later to 
 
PROGRAMME MUSIC 25 
 
 illustrate the efforts of ants to remove a fallen rose- 
 leaf, and a butterfly's dance. I should say that 
 M. Roussel, when composing this theme, did so 
 from an imaginative apprehension of an outdoor 
 scene suggested by his subject, and the theme is 
 evidence of a real sensibility. No such sensibility 
 is required to invent the theme of the entrance of 
 the ants, a tripping figure in quavers and semi- 
 quavers, where you get at least eight notes to a bar 
 in f time, so that even on paper the score suggests 
 a line of black ants. This is the lower level of 
 invention, one might almost say imitation. It is 
 only a slightly more complex form of imitation 
 than Strauss's imitation of bleating sheep in Don 
 Quixote or the primitive man's imitation of a gallop- 
 ing horse. Even the theme of the swaying spider 
 suspended in meditation is also imitation, still 
 more subtle and complex. Intelligence would 
 suffice for the imitations of ants and sheep, but a 
 sensibility of a deeper kind than mental perception 
 is required to represent that swaying spider and a 
 sensibihty which involves a greater consciousness. 
 
 Unfortunately, M. Roussel's work does not continue 
 in that deeper level of consciousness ; he comes up 
 to the surface thinking of his programme and 
 constructing his music logically. This is the fatal 
 snare of all " programme " music, that the artist 
 must come up to the surface of his conscious mani- 
 pulating intellect in order to maintain the connexion 
 with his " programme," which is external. There 
 may be an imderlying programme, there probably 
 
26 MUSJC AND LIFE 
 
 is one in all absolute music, but the point is that 
 such a programme is not an affair of the conscious 
 intellect, it is not external to the artist's creative 
 consciousness, and therefore his creation is not 
 imitative but proceeds from a sensibility pro- 
 fotinder than that of the apprehending brain. 
 When Tschaikovsky wrote to Taniev, " With all you 
 say as to my Symphony (No. 4 in F Minor) having 
 a programme I am quite in agreement. But I do 
 not see why this should be a mistake. I am far 
 more afraid of the contrary : I do not wish any 
 S5miphonic work to emanate from me which has 
 nothing to express, and consists merely of a pur- 
 poseless design of rhythms and modulations," he 
 meant by a programme the expression of definite 
 emotional states in a dramatic sequence. Here, 
 what is external to the creative consciousness of 
 the artist is that framework of dramatic sequence 
 which ordains that the first movement of - the 
 sjmiphony shall express despair, the second melan- 
 choly resignation, the third bizarre fancy, and the 
 fourth reckless enjoyment. But that is not all 
 that is external ; he himself is the object of his 
 consciousness, his despair, and his suffering are 
 the content of his Symphony, so that again, in this 
 second type of " programme " music, we do not 
 meet with a profound but with a superficial sensi- 
 bility. It is a curious evidence of Tschaikovsky's 
 shallowness that he should have imagined that the 
 only alternative to dramatizing himself in music 
 (instead of, as M. Roussel does, spiders, ants, and 
 
PROGRAMME MUSIC 27 
 
 butterflies) was to write a " purposeless design of 
 rhythms and modulations " ! Tschaikovsky, really, 
 only gave an imitation of himself in music. This 
 is what aU " emotional " writers do ; that is why 
 their music is " programme " music as surely as 
 is M. Roussel's Spider-Feast or any imitation of 
 waterfalls, spinning wheels, flowing rivers, dancing 
 dolls, or steaming cruisers — all of which have 
 already appeared in music. Now, in absolute 
 music the composer does not imitate anything. It 
 is obvious that he himself as a human being to be 
 apprehended by his conscious brain is as much a 
 natural object as a trail of ants, and therefore if his 
 music is a reflection of his apparent emotional 
 gestures, it is " programme " music. If, however, 
 it sinks deeper than the external, physical, and 
 emotional world, down where all distinctions of 
 man, woman, waterfall, spider, love, hatred, joy, 
 and sorrow vanish, then it will be absolute music, 
 and it is precisely because such music goes below 
 the external divisions of things and yet is concrete 
 that it is valuable. That is what I mean when I 
 say that great music expresses some profound idea 
 in the Universe, and is not the expression of the 
 senses or of the emotions as is all " programme " 
 music. 
 
V 
 AN EXAMPLE OF PROGRAMME MUSIC 
 
 WE know when we see a work labelled 
 " Italia " or " Rumania " or " Russia " or 
 " Britannia " that we are not going to hear 
 a masterpiece ; but why is this ? If patriotism can 
 stir men to kiU one another, why cannot it produce 
 great music ? Why is it that the notion of a Sinn 
 Fein Symphony or a French Fantasia or a Tone 
 Poem on Great Britain is felt to be intrinsically 
 worthless and even slightly ridiculous, and why is 
 it that the idea of an English Overture is felt to be 
 not so worthless and less ridiculous ? 
 
 It is, I believe, because the words " Sinn Fein," 
 " France," " Great Britain " suggest political com- 
 binations or groups of men bound together in 
 opposition to other groups of men ; and I believe 
 the vice in these words lies in the artificial realities 
 they represent, lies in the barrenness inherent in the 
 phrase in opposition. These words represent no 
 fundamental reality, but a mere logical syllogism, 
 a pure product of the reason, a parallelogram of 
 forces in which one force is called Great Britain and 
 another force Grermany or France. In reality we 
 
 ■8 
 
EXAMPLE OF PROGRAMME MUSIC 29 
 
 have not these distinct forces, but a mass of men 
 whose nature is obscure, and the abstractions 
 " Great Britain," " France," etc., created Uke a 
 kind of geometry upon their geographical or spatial 
 position are too unreal to form the subject-matter 
 of music or any other art. The ideas, as ideas or 
 abstractions are real with a reality of their own, as 
 geometry is real, but, like geometry, they have been 
 created by reason. Let loose upon the world they 
 have consequences and can arouse passions, and 
 so we can get a kind of music written which will 
 express these passions ; but we instinctively feel 
 there is little virtue, Httle meaning in it. We know 
 the whole thing is a concoction of our own ; but 
 we do not feel that we ourselves are a concoction 
 of our own, nor do we feel that we have invented 
 the green fields, the hedges, the misty landscape, the 
 downs and moors and warm, huddled villages of 
 England ; and since the word " England," being 
 less used pohtically than " Great Britain," suggests 
 these realities to us, and not a political " idea " 
 of our own invention, we instinctively feel that there 
 might be a virtue in an English Overture which 
 there could not possibly be in a British Overture. 
 This explains why at aU times the artist, hke the 
 scientist, as artist or scientist, has been so careless 
 and so impatient of patriotic manifestations. Try- 
 ing to increase his grip on reaUty, he resents this 
 mock creation which inferior minds present to him, 
 and he knows they grow so impassioned about it 
 because it is, in general, the objectification of their 
 
30 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 immediate material interests. That is their reality, 
 that is the mess of pottage for which they have 
 sold their birthright. They have used their reason 
 to turn their material interests into ideas in order 
 to give a purpose to their activities. This works 
 admirably in the world of reason, which is a world 
 of extremely limited relationships ; but in the world 
 of art, which is the world of ultimate reality and 
 not a mental abstraction, its hoUowness is exposed 
 because we come to art with the whole of our nature 
 seeking to apprehend it. 
 
 Now the composer of Italia has dived below the 
 superficies of the map ; he has not expressed in 
 music the excitement produced by a too-prolonged 
 contemplation of boundaries, during which one 
 discovers that a valuable coal mine is on the other 
 fellow's side or that one's territory just misses a 
 fine and convenient harbour. It is not frontier 
 music, and the national anthem is never used. To 
 quote from the programme notes : " The first part 
 depicts the passionate and superstitious population 
 of Sicily languishing in the terrible heat of the sun 
 or in the depths of the sulphur mines, while the 
 second half presents the careless exuberance of the 
 NeapoUtan." 
 
 There were two ways in which Casella might 
 have approached this subject. The first is the 
 way of imitation, or, in other words, of programme 
 music. Just as the poet might describe a scene 
 accurately and convincingly, or a painter paint it 
 accurately and convincingly, so the composer can 
 
EXAMPLE OF PROGRAMME MUSIC 31 
 
 depict it accurately and convincingly. To do this 
 he takes the folk-tunes of the Sicilians and Nea- 
 politans and weaves them into a musical picture, 
 but what virtue there is in the picture is in the 
 folk-tunes, and what virtue there is in the com- 
 poser is in his original sensibility (which made him 
 select the right tunes) and in his technical skill ; 
 he has created nothing, but he has copied something 
 which moved him, something which will in time 
 disappear and Uve only in his copy. This is what 
 CaseUa has done ; it is not great art, because great 
 art does not consist in cop5dng reality so that we 
 may have again the sensations that the reality 
 gave us ; but it is stimulating and enjoyable as 
 the reaUty would have been stimulating and enjoy- 
 able. The other way of approaching the subject 
 is the way of the great artist who, contemplating 
 reality, gives it a meaning. If we can imagine a 
 great composer contemplating these Sicilians and 
 Neapolitans, can we imagine that he would be con- 
 tent to imitate the two scenes and call it Italia ? 
 Stirred profoundly, as he must be, he would en- 
 deavour to create some synthesis, to produce some 
 tremendous unity into which these things would 
 go, but they would be transformed. We should 
 be presented with a new creation, with a work of 
 art, in short, whose reality would be profounder 
 than the superficial musical copies of these Sicilian 
 sulphur-diggers and Neapolitan singers. On the 
 other hand, this copy of Sicily and Naples is far 
 superior to Casella's later attempts at cinema music 
 
32 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 — his musical descriptions of artillery battles and 
 Italian cruisers plunging through- the ocean. Yet 
 we were told on the concert programme that " this 
 work was composed in 1909 and belongs to Casella's 
 earlier and more conventional style, from which he 
 has entirely freed himself in his later music, where 
 he uses a more distinctly personal medium of ex- 
 pression " — as if it were necessarily a great advance 
 to have a more distinctly personal medium of 
 expression. Naturally a man's appetite changes ; 
 where he once Hked jam roU, he now abhors it 
 and wants a savoury. Casella's taste in sounds 
 has changed ; the harmonic flavour of 1909 won't 
 do in 1919 ; and every man's taste in sound has an 
 individuality that corresponds to the individuality 
 of his taste in food, it has possibly the same physical 
 basis, but this development of an individuality is 
 not equivalent to an advance. It may synchronize 
 with his decay as an artist ; in any case, music is 
 something more than a liking for particular kinds of 
 sound. It was not Keats' fondness for such words 
 as "tip-toe," " swooning," " quiet " that made 
 him a great poet, nor did Beethoven's use of the 
 chord of the dominant seventh make him a great 
 composer, and, as I have said elsewhere, everybody 
 to-day can use Debussy's whole-tone scale, but 
 nobody can write another Prelude d I'apres-midi 
 d'un faune. 
 
 There is another point that interests me. I 
 enjoyed Casella's Italia immensely. The con- 
 struction is extremely well done. The tunes of the 
 
EXAMPLE OF PROGRAMME MUSIC 33 
 
 sulphur-diggers are melancholy and moving, the 
 famous FunicuU-Funiculd of the Neapolitans ex- 
 tremely exhilarating, but I wonder if I would have 
 enjoyed it half so much if I hadn't known about 
 those sulphur-diggers under the blazing sun of 
 superstitious Sicily and if I hadn't had old asso- 
 ciations with Funiculi-Funiculd. All art depends 
 for its effect upon the mental capacity of the 
 spectator or auditor, upon the content of the con- 
 sciousness that contemplates it ; but it is a peculiar 
 weakness of programme music that it depends so 
 much for its effect on mere trivial, accidental 
 knowledge to be got out of a Baedeker. 
 
VI 
 THE MORALITY OF MUSIC 
 
 IT is a universal instinct in our race that a great 
 composer Is necessarily a great man, and we 
 mean not great in stature, great in muscle, or 
 greatly equipped in the struggle for physical or social 
 existence, but great in some quality (or group of 
 qualities) which more than any other we feel to be 
 the essence of human life as contrasted witli brute or 
 vegetable life. We have this instinct about aU great 
 artists, we feel that they represent the human spirit 
 at its highest, that they are indeed the human spirit 
 in action, and aU works of art are like the material 
 skeletons, the moulds or fossils of that activity left 
 behind in matter after the energy which formed 
 them has disappeared. Some works of art are of 
 the order of the mastodon and the great auk ; they 
 represent by-paths, side-tracks Into which the 
 spiritual energy of the universe ran quickly and 
 suddenly vanished, but there are others which are 
 in the line of true succession, they possess a strange 
 virtue of generation, a power of increase, of spiritual 
 fertilization. These are a sign to the artist that he 
 is not alone, and in their presence the spirit awakes 
 
 34 
 
THE MORALITY OF MUSIC 85 
 
 — as though it heard its own voice. If this is true, 
 what are we to think of the miiltifarious artistic 
 activity of the modem world ? More music has 
 been composed in London during the year 1920 than 
 was produced in Great Britain dming many hvm- 
 dreds of years following the landing on these shores 
 of Julius Caesar, but of that large musical output of 
 1920 what proportion was the expression of that 
 quintessential human activity, that spirit which is 
 evolving in the universe ? Not necessarily any 1 
 Just as the steam-engine, the aeroplane, and the 
 telephone, singly or in combination, with all their 
 like, can give no inkhng of the moral state of man- 
 kind, though they may teU us much of certain of 
 its intellectual developments, so the music of the 
 concert-hall, the music-hall, and the home has no 
 spiritual meaning, being as purely a product of the 
 vegetable senses and the animal emotions as the 
 steam-engine is a product of the intellect. Great 
 music — ^music that is an expression of the human 
 spirit — ^is exceedingly rare, and it is certain that very 
 httle of it has been composed during the last fifty 
 years, but, on the other hand, our sensuous and 
 intellectual activity has probably never been so 
 great. Composers like Max Reger and Richard 
 Strauss in Germany, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazounov, 
 and Stravinsky in Russia, represent an amount of 
 cerebration that does and should compare with the 
 construction of Cunard Uners, gigantic bomb- 
 dropping aero-buses, wireless telegraphy, gramo- 
 phones* and gas-masks. They represent at their 
 
36 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 best, be it admitted, a little more than that. They 
 have alert senses, including a comic sense. They are 
 sensitive to combinations of sounds, and they will, 
 every man of them, tickle oiir ears for us, but, above 
 all,, the most characteristic of them — Strauss and 
 Stravinsky — are keenly aware of human society and 
 its incongruous and ephemeral relationships. like 
 the average novelist and dramatist of to-day, the 
 superficial characteristics of an insignificant and 
 purely opporttmist society constitute their favourite 
 subject-matter. Strauss and Stravinsky, like Shaw 
 and Tchekhov, represent an imperfect escape of the 
 hirnian spirit. Something has gone wrong. They 
 have been unable even to unfold their wings, and 
 far from being able to leave the earth, Shaw cannot 
 even leave the Fabian Society, Strauss the theatre, 
 or Tchekhov the Russian provinces. When we 
 consider the immense European reputation of these 
 men we are amazed at their provinciality. All their 
 work is topical to an extent that must stagger the 
 observer who has any true sense of the unimportance 
 of the ideas and conventions current at any epoch. 
 And their work is topical because it is intellectual ; 
 it is not concerned with the human spirit, the human 
 spirit never or very rarely enters into it ; it is pro- 
 duced by the intelligence using the senses, and we 
 get from it sensations of the order of those produced 
 by food, drink, party politics, and mob excitement, 
 instead of that spiritual ecstasy which great art 
 produces. Such a composer as Debussy, who is far 
 freer from the disease of intellectualism than are 
 
THE MORALITY OF MUSIC 87 
 
 most modern composers, is felt to be equally un- 
 satisfactory in spite of possessing a musical sensi- 
 bility so exquisite as almost to cloy our senses. But 
 we cannot feed spiritually upon^ bon-bons, and 
 unfortunately that is all Debussy has to give us. As 
 for Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Dukas, Roussel, and all 
 the other French composers whose music I have 
 heard, they seem to me to be merely clever. Not so 
 clever as Strauss, not so clever as RLmsky-Korsakov, 
 not so clever as Stravinsky, and with not nearly so 
 exquisite a musical gift as Debussy. They may caJl 
 themselves artists, and they may call themselves 
 composers, but they have as little in common with 
 Beethoven as any troupe of conjurers performing 
 at the Palladium. However, their clientele is 
 wealthier and belongs to a higher grade of society. 
 Then we have another type of incomplete 
 musician — ^it is the sentimental or emotional com- 
 poser. Any man who thinks that his griefs or joys 
 are in themselves worth expressing is mistaken. 
 The first thing an emotional coinf oser has got to 
 learn is that no matter how intensely he may feel, 
 that intense feeling is not of the slightest interest 
 to anybody. When he has passed beyond all wish 
 to interest mankind in his sufferings or his joys, 
 and when in his artistic activity he is purged of all 
 individual desires, he may perceive beauty with such 
 suddenness and such intensity that he praises it as 
 Milton imagined the Cherubim and the Seraphim 
 praised the Son of God. It will be the sudden 
 flowering in consciousness of the human spirit, and 
 
38 MUSIC AND EIFE 
 
 it is this flowering of the consciousness which is 
 great art. The portrait of the artist as drawn by 
 Mr. Shaw in The Doctor's Dilemma has always seemed 
 to me painfully inadequate and fundamentally 
 wrong. Dubedat is a tjrpe that is quite common, 
 the man gifted with exceptionally keen senses and 
 a highly strung nervous organization, but that does 
 not make a great artist : it is only the physical 
 instrument for an artist. What makes the artist, 
 it cannot be too often declared, is his consciousness, 
 and the consciousness of Dubedat, far from being 
 profound, passionate, and representative of the 
 human spirit at its highest development, was, as 
 Mr. Shaw showed it, narrow, feeble, and almost 
 entirely visual — ^just as Debussy's was almost 
 entirely aural. When the great artist speaks, 
 whether in words or in music, he speaks of a world 
 that is beyond time and space and beyond all ideas 
 of good or evil, of to-day or yesterday, and he speaks 
 of that -world because it is the world in which he 
 dwells. It is of the very essence of his nature 
 that his mind does not dwell, as the minds of ordi- 
 nary men do, chiefly upon the pleasures of the body 
 or the satisfactions of social prestige. To imagine 
 that he could be mainly occupied with "such things 
 is to imagine that he is an ordinary, undeveloped 
 person who has not got beyond a very rudimentary 
 consciousness. To compare such a person with a 
 ^eat artist is like comparing to a man a dog that 
 runs about following its nose. We demand of a 
 great artist neither tricks nor the vivid expression of 
 
THE MORALITY OF MUSIC 39 
 
 our own passions, but a profounder and wider con- 
 sciousness than we possess ourselves. The values 
 here are entirely spiritual. In judging music, as in 
 judging every other art, there are no other values, 
 and there can be no other values. But we have to 
 admit that nine-tenths of the modern music we hear 
 has no more spiritual value than the silver paper 
 in which chocolates are wrapped, and its manu- 
 facturers, like the manufacturers of that silver paper, 
 wiU not be remembered to-morrow. 
 
VII 
 
 SONG-WRITING 
 
 THERE is a movement among modern 
 English composers towards setting to music 
 the words of the best contemporary poets, 
 and in so far as it shows any real appreciation of 
 poetry it is all to the good. It would be rash, 
 however, to assume so much ; but even if it only 
 means that musicians have awakened to the fact 
 that other arts besides their own exist and have 
 their standards, that it is becoming and decent to 
 pay such respect to their fellow-artists as not to 
 set to music the feeble and vapid verse of the 
 average popular baUad, it is an excellent thing. It 
 must be remembered, however, that the poet is 
 utterly indifferent whether the musician sets his 
 poems to music or not. I am not speaking of the 
 unmusical poet ; he, it may be assumed, would be 
 certain to welcome any setting of his words, for 
 to him a musical setting would be equivalent 
 merely to an " interpretation," a " reading " with 
 pianoforte, of his poem, and one reading the more 
 is so much addition to his public. The poet who 
 happens, however, to have some tmderstanding 
 
SONG-WRITING 41 
 
 of music looks at the matter in quite a different 
 light. He cannot be a believer in " interpretation." 
 For him his poem is a completed thing ; it is a 
 finished creation to which nothing can be added 
 and from which nothing can be taken away. He 
 may even resent his poem being read aloud by 
 anyone, for it means the thrusting of an additional 
 medimn between his words and the audience. I, 
 for one, am against reading aloud as a principle, 
 although I grant that an individual reading might 
 be found that in practice would not discontent me. 
 The poet uses words much as the musician uses 
 tones ; he builds up by the use of syllabic colour, 
 rhythm, consonantal discord, and vowel melody, 
 and by the association and juxtaposition of images, 
 an extraordinarily subtle and complex expression, 
 which must come direct to the reader from the 
 words, and to which any intervention of sound — 
 be the voice never so sweet it is still irrelevant 
 — ^is fatal. 
 
 Poetry is a highly concentrated art like music ; 
 it is not the versification of ideas, that is why it 
 cannot be paraphrased. There are some benighted 
 souls who will ask a poet to paraphrase a poem, 
 but unless it is mere rhyming, it is as impossible to 
 paraphrase it as it is to paraphrase a Mozart fan|;asia. 
 It is, I maintain, equally impossible to set it to 
 music. The composer who "presents a poem 
 niusically in order to interpret its meaning" has 
 mistaken his vocation. He should not be interested 
 in interpreting a poem, he should be interested in 
 
42 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 — or I w(Md rather say " driven to " — expressing 
 the feeling the poem awakened in him. Personally, 
 I can hardly understand composers writing songs 
 at all. It seems to me that if a man has the dis- 
 tinctive musical imagination which makes a com- 
 poser, he would have no patience with anybody 
 else's words ; and if he happened to be blessed with 
 the literary sense, and was stimulated by readiiig 
 Walter de la Mare, he would sit down and compose 
 a sonata, or a study, or a nocturne, or anything 
 you wiU, so long as it was pure music, unhampered 
 and unadulterated by the material intrusion of 
 another art. This, of course, presumes an unfailing 
 flow of inspiration — which has not been the posses- 
 sion of even the greatest composers. But they 
 always possess their musical sensitiveness, their fine- 
 ness of instinct, and their patiently acquired skill, 
 and there will be times when they will be interested 
 by such a technical problem as setting a poem to 
 music, and then they will write songs. But even 
 then the value of the song is entirely musical. The 
 composer can do nothing, absolutely nothing, for 
 the poet. To imagine that he can is to imagine 
 that you can interpret a sculptor's nude figure by 
 dressing it in an appropriate costume. Of course 
 this is heresy to-day, when theories of presenting 
 poems musically abound, but I am convinced that 
 it is true, and I am prepared to confess that I very 
 rarely hear, and never bother about, the words of 
 a song. I am wiUing to admit that it adds an 
 interest to the song to hear, Icnow, or read before- 
 
SONG-WRITING 43 
 
 hand the words, but it Is an hitellectual Interest 
 comparable to the interest we have in knowing that 
 Keats wrote Lamia in rhjnned couplets with an 
 occasional alexandrine. It adds nothing to the 
 poetic worth of Lamia that it was written in rhymed 
 couplets with occasional alexandrines, although it 
 would detract from its worth if the couplets did not 
 rhyme (or if the rhymes were forced) and the 
 alexandrines were clumsy. So, although the words 
 add nothing to a song, yet once the composer 
 elects to use words, if he misplaces the accent or 
 otherwise maltreats the poem, it is injurious to 
 his song. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the modem song bears a 
 strong resemblance to " programme music." It is 
 not a lyrical outpouring, a melodic rhapsody suitable" 
 to any solo instrument, to an oboe or EngUsh horn, 
 but most suitable to the voice, because the voice 
 is the most beautiful and the most expressive of 
 solo instruments. This, however, is what the best 
 songs are, and they are equally effective if one does 
 not know the language, but in translation they 
 lose, which proves that it is only the sound and not 
 the idea or meaning of the word that matters. The 
 modem song is, on the contrary, a piece of scene- 
 painting in music hke Richard Strauss's symphonic 
 poems. Now, the fact that the programme tells us 
 that Don Quixote comes across a flock of sheep 
 does not add to the musical value of Don Quixote ; 
 all it does is to make us listen to hear if we can 
 recognize the bleating, and if it sounds like bleating 
 
44 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 and not like donkeys braying, we think Don Quixote 
 is very iine. That is to say, our real musical interest 
 in Don Quixote has gone to pot. This is what has 
 happened in modem song. The musical interest has 
 gone to pot, and we are fobbed off with all sorts of 
 adventitious and often highly interesting substitutes, 
 which are often very well in their way and make 
 an entertaining mental recreation, but^thfey have 
 no more to do with music than making anagrams 
 has to do with poetry. 
 
 Now, I know a modem poet who has had a poem 
 called " India " set to music by a very promising com- 
 poser named Walter Clement, and he is very pleased 
 with it. He thinks it is a very fine song. It has a 
 bass which vividly suggests to him tigers tramping, 
 tramping, tramping through the jungle. It makes 
 him tremble when he hears it. " Ah ! " you will 
 say, " what about that song, then ? " But, wait 
 a minute ! There are no tigers tramping^ tramping, 
 tramping through the jungle in that poem! The 
 tigers are velvet-footed, still as great cats peering 
 from the comers of darkness. There is not a sound 
 in the poem except, perhaps, of the falling of leaves. 
 The composer has forgotten all about the words. 
 The poem stimulated his imagination and he wrote 
 music — ^music that does not interpret the words, but 
 that recreates what the composer imagined. Every 
 work of art must have a germ, and there is no 
 reason why the germ of a song should not be found 
 in the words of a poet, just as it may be found in 
 the going-down of the sun ; but to " interpret " 
 
SONG-WRITING 45 
 
 a poem in music, is as foolish an endeavour as to 
 interpret the launching of a battleship in music, 
 and those composers who feel drawn to such things 
 had better be engaged in launching battleships, for 
 they are certainly not creative artists. 
 
VIII 
 AFRICAN AND SUBURBAN MUSIC 
 
 THE author of the Life and Letters of Coleridge- 
 Taylor^ was a personal friend of the com- 
 poser. He had an extremely difficult task 
 which on the whole he achieved well. So gentle, 
 so amiable, so self-withdrawing and unassertive 
 was the hero that to make an exciting book about 
 him would have needed such a great effort of the 
 creative imagination as would have turned it 
 into a novel. Moreover, aU that Coleridge-Taylor 
 said and thought in the circle of his friends and 
 acquaintances, so far as is conveyed by Mr. Berwick 
 Sayers, had the atmosphere of the Polytechnic 
 and the suburban musical and Uterary society. 
 The book positively reeks of Norwood, Peckham, 
 and Croydon. We feel as one nonentity after 
 another passes through its pages as if we should 
 never get out of sight of the Crystal Palace, and we 
 never do, except when Coleridge-Taylor tells his 
 wife : " I dreamt I saw Hurlstone in heaven. I 
 was just entering. Of course we couldn't shake 
 
 '^Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Musician, His Life and Letters, 
 
 by W. C. Berwick Sayers. Cassell. 73. 6d. 
 
 46 
 
AFRICAN AND SUBURBAN MUSIC 47 
 
 hands, but we embraced each other three times. 
 You know what that means— I am going to die." 
 
 This atmosphere one can justly say is not present 
 in Coleridge-Taylor's best work, simply because 
 what is most characteristic in his music, what is its 
 real and undeniable virtue, is absolutely un-English, 
 and is entirely due to his negro father, supplemented 
 by his careful training at the Royal CoUege of 
 Music under Sir Charles Stanford. From his 
 negro father he got his inspiration, his lyrical gift 
 and sense of colour, and from Sir Charles Stanford 
 he got a sound technical training and the rudiments 
 of a sound taste. I lay stress on this partly because 
 in tlie Life the father is somewhat rapidly disposed 
 of to make way for the crowd of Croydon not- 
 abilities, whose influence on Hiawatha, thank God, 
 was nil — ^if we except the generous gentleman who 
 paid for the boy's musicaK training. After all, the 
 father was essential and is, in addition, easily the 
 most interesting person in the book apart from his 
 son. Ever5^hing Daniel Taylor did was excep- 
 tional, from his becoming a member of the Royal 
 CoUege of Surgeons at the age of twenty-two to 
 his infant Samuel ; from his passion for Coleridge 
 and the christening of his son after the poet to the 
 culminating " turned his face towards West Africa 
 and disappeared thitherwards suddenly" — which 
 reads like an Elizabethan exploit, an Ethiopian 
 jewel flashing in the High Street of Croydon. 
 
 Had Daniel Taylor not been a negro there is 
 no doubt his son would have succumbed to his 
 
48 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 environment, as most of our yoimg musicians do, 
 and in the regular progression from choir-boy to 
 composer have eventually arrived at producing the 
 sort of music with which we are all horribly familiar. 
 It is evident to any competent critic that such 
 lovely things as Onaway, Awake ! with their chro- 
 matic colouring, their peculiar rh3rthms and vivid 
 feeling, welled up in Coleridge-Taylor from his 
 African blood, and have no place or counterpart 
 in English music. It is the fashion to sneer at 
 Coleridge-Taylor in certain circles, and no doubt 
 he is frequently blatant, commonplace, and, at his 
 worst, reminiscent of Sankey and Moody ; never- 
 theless, there is- altogether more musical inspiration 
 in his work than in most of his English rivals. 
 Coleridge-Taylor wrote music because he couldn't 
 help it, whereas there is far too much will-power 
 about the majority of our young composers. Their 
 absolute musical barrenness, their total lack of 
 any impression to express or of anything genuine to 
 say, tricked out with infinite technical resource 
 and clever writing, makes one feel that, beside 
 some men who are continually being patted on the 
 back in the Press, Coleridge-Taylor was a heaven- 
 sent genius. And let there be no quibbling about 
 this. Coleridge-Taylor had genius ; his best works 
 thoroughly deserve their extraordinary popularity. 
 In fact, if he had only been of different intellectual 
 calibre, if he had not been timid, but fiUed with 
 a passionate belief in his own race and in its obvious 
 superiority to much in the people round him, he 
 
AFRICAN AND SUBURBAN MUSIC 49 
 
 might have been a very great man indeed. For 
 when we come to take satisfaction in liis work 
 from a national point of view we have reluctantly 
 to admit that, while his virtues were all his own, 
 his shortcomings he only shared in common with 
 the generality of English composers. If by blood 
 he was African, intellectually and in spirit he was 
 English. Nowhere do we get the sense of exalta- 
 tion, of vast and awful mystery, of spiritual tragedy 
 and silences big with impending Fate as in some of 
 Conrad's African tales. And it is just in his lack of 
 imagination, of spirituality, that Coleridge-Taylor 
 shows himself in harmony with his South London 
 environment. His philosophy is of the suburban 
 drawing-room and tea-party order ; he takes life 
 easily ; it seems a pleasant, cheerful affair, un- 
 ruffled by any dark questionings or violent passions. 
 I wish to emphasize this because it is so essentially 
 the modem English outlook and is so natural and 
 ingrained in our young composers that no one 
 could ever hope for any great achievement in music 
 while it lasted. Why our young musicians should 
 always be a so much more tame and ordinary lot 
 than our young poets and writers is inexplicable 
 to me ; but the fact remains that while our young 
 author is mostly f uU of bitter intellectual energy and 
 passion, shaking his fist at the universe from his 
 lonely room, our young musician is generally to be 
 found full of smiles, handing round tea-cakes and 
 generally Uving as if the world had said its last word 
 in the tennis-courts of Putney and the novels of 
 4 
 
50 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 G. A. Birmingham, Not long ago a man produced 
 a tone-poem on Btilwer-Lytton's Last Days of 
 Pompeii. One charitably concluded that he had 
 been attracted by the idea of doing Vesuvius in 
 music ; but even so, what a subject for a modem 
 musician ! There are, of course, exceptions like 
 Vaughan Williams, Hoist, Arnold Bax, Elgar and 
 Delius ; but it is interesting to note that the most 
 genuine and successful things have been inspired by 
 English landscape. Much delicate work, full of 
 quiet feehng and lovely detail, has been done in this 
 Une. But anjTthing on a bigger scale is less suc- 
 cessful, and when effective is not original. How 
 could it be otherwise when even in their smaller 
 work our composers are passive and quiescent 
 rather than acid and kinetic. In fact, the best 
 English composers, those most worth listening 
 to, are water-colourists. It seems that English 
 landscape, the beauty of Nature in England, is 
 still a source of real inspiration, whereas English 
 life is fatal to inspiration. And I think we have 
 the truth here. English life is almost completely 
 suburban, it has no counterpart in any country in 
 Europe, or in fact in the whole world. And the 
 atmosphere of Suburbia is paralysing. It is a 
 transient and jerry-built society for which it would 
 torment Solomon to find a meaning and about 
 w^ch he certainly could not write a Song. 
 
IX 
 SCRIABIN 
 
 SCRIABIN'S last two symphonic works have 
 now been performed frequently enough in 
 London for us to become fairly familiar with 
 them, and repetition has proved what some of us 
 thought from the first, that there is nothing obscure 
 and chaotic, in construction at any rate, in 
 Scriabin's later works. Dr. Eaglefield Hull, in his 
 monograph on the composer, has pointed out that 
 Scriabin had a passion for classical sonata form, 
 and he gives the following " plan " of Prometheus : 
 («) Exposition containing nine motives or themes, 
 pages 3-23 of the ftiU score (pages 3-22 of the 
 piano arrangement), (b) Development, beginning 
 with the opening theme on page 23, full score up 
 to page 56 (pages 22-43 piano arrangement), 
 (c) Recapitulation, second theme on page 56, full 
 score (page 43 piano arrangement), (d) Coda, 
 prestissimo, fuU score, page 73 (piano arrangement, 
 page 56). 
 
 Nothing seems to me to prove the futility of the 
 academic ideas about form more than the fact 
 that it can be shown that both the Poem of Ecstasy 
 
 5» 
 
62 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 and Prometheus are laid down on the lines of the 
 regular classical sonata. This " exposition," " de- 
 velopment," " recapitulation," and " coda " can 
 be pointed out on the score with a blue pencil, 
 but to the musician who is concentrated on hearing 
 what Scriabin has to say, this talk of sonata form 
 will appear the most utter nonsense. Naturally, 
 I do not mean that he could not recognize audibly 
 this exposition, development, etc., of thematic 
 material. It is perfectly easy to do this after one 
 has heard either work a couple of times, even 
 without ever having seen the score, but if one 
 listens to Scriabin's music in this way, it cannot 
 fail to appear meaningless, however clear. Perhaps 
 I can explain this by an analogy. The classical 
 writers, when using the sonata form (I exclude 
 Beethoven, for Beethoven sometimes writes in a 
 manner that has a certain affinity with Scriabin); 
 would create a theme which was an end in itself. 
 Take, for example, the opening theme of Mozart's 
 G Minor Symphony : six notes of a running accom- 
 paniment, and the melody soars into the air with 
 a loveliness so exquisite that to ask what it meant 
 would be as ridiculous as to ask the meaning of a 
 rose. (Note that one does not ask the meaning of a 
 rose, but one asks the meaning of a bad smell. We 
 feel the rose is its own justification.) Of course, the 
 rose has a meaning, but we do not bother about 
 that tmtil we have temporarily exhausted our 
 delight in it, and anyhow we shall jiever discover 
 what its meaning is because it is perfect. We 
 
SCRIABIN 53 
 
 have got rid of the multiplicity of the universe ; 
 we have concentrated it all into one sensation. 
 This is what Mozart has done for us in his opening 
 theme ; he has reduced the universe to an aural 
 sensation. He does this by creating melodies — as 
 some force, of which we know nothing, creates 
 roses and other flowers. He places his melodies 
 in a vase which he calls a s5miphony, and does 
 this with such art that he produces fresh sensations 
 of pure pleasure, and obtains exquisite modulations 
 — passing subtly and daringly from one tint to 
 another. It must be emphasized that here the real 
 essential achievement is the melody which has no 
 meaning but its own beauty. 
 
 Now, when we come to the work of Scriabin, we 
 find that what the composer is really attempting to do 
 is to create by the whole mass of his score, its seventy 
 pages or so, a piu:e single sensation such as earth 
 has given us in a rose and Mozart in a melody. 
 It seems to me that there can be no doubt about 
 this, for if we try to take the Poem of Ecstasy or 
 Prometheus to pieces, they become utterly meaning- 
 less. We can play the opening F sharp chord of 
 Prometheus or any of the following themes (they are 
 rather phrases than themes), but taken separately 
 they do not justify themselves. They have not 
 the completeness of a Mozart melody or of a rose. 
 They are indeed like the single petals of a rose 
 and shout their incompleteness aloud. But how 
 many people are there whose ear is sufficiently 
 developed to get one single definite impression or 
 
54 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 sensation from Prometheus as a whole ? If we can 
 imagine a Mozart Symphony which was one single 
 melody, a melody which began at the first bar 
 and was only finished at the last bar, how many 
 people are there who would be able to perceive that 
 melody ? It wotild be almost hke asking anyone 
 to get that impression which we call a rose from 
 looking at a flower a single petal of which extended 
 to the moon ; yet I feel certain that this is what 
 Scriabin is asking us to do, and it explains why 
 the Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus when first 
 performed completely mystified the bulk of the 
 audience, not only here, but in Russia. Competent 
 musical critics declared that a lot of it sounded 
 like mere noise. That it is not " mere noise " 
 nothing is more certain, but what its real merit 
 is we cannot so easily discover. It has, however, 
 this haU-mark of real genius, that it is a definite 
 creation, as a rose or a Mozart melody is a definite 
 creation ; - it is not a clever weaving together of 
 dead material, an intellectual musical basket-ware 
 such as aU the trained musical craftsmen of Europe 
 can supply. I think this much everybody whose 
 opinion is worth -having wiU admit, but for my own 
 part it is not without a certain regret that I see 
 the direction in which music seems to be moving. 
 It is a movement from pluralism to monism — 
 from the creation of a number of simple sensuous 
 beauties like roses and lilies and the melodies of 
 Mozart to the creation of states of mind. How 
 much was lost when we lost the simple, concrete, 
 
SCRIABIN 53 
 
 sensuous images of Apollo, Athene, Zeus, Juno, 
 Mercury,' Aphrodite, for the vague monistic state 
 of mind which contemplated some utterly nebulous 
 Jehovah, who could not be expressed in a single 
 image because he was all-embracing and aU-per- 
 vading ? Perhaps nothing, perhaps it was a real 
 advance, but if we admit that it marked a progress 
 to a more exalted emotional state, we must also 
 admit that we lost a number of beautiful if smaller 
 sensations. So in the evolution from the plurality 
 of melody to the harmonic monism of modern 
 music we have lost a great deal of concrete beauty. 
 
X 
 
 SONOROUS ALCOHOL 
 
 IT is thought that the French are a hard- 
 headed, illusion-shattering race — at least those 
 Frenchmen who put pen to paper and express 
 their attitude to the Universe in the national 
 equivalent of Stephens' blue-black ink. Particu- 
 larly is this so, it is imagined, when their subject is 
 one of the arts, but I have just been reading a 
 book on music,^ of which my copy is marked tenth 
 edition, that is in parts as bewilderingly fanciful 
 as any that ever came out of the United Kingdom, 
 Massachusetts or Ohio, U.S.A. M. Mauclair has 
 made what he considers a significant discovery : 
 he has noticed what has hitherto escaped observa- 
 tion, namely, that an orchestra is an electric battery, 
 and that what for nearly a hundred years we have 
 taken to be music is really electric fluid. This 
 electric fluid, it would seem, did not begin to be 
 generated until the later days of Beethoven, In 
 fact, I am not sure whether M. Mauclair considers 
 Beethoven to have generated any electric fluid or 
 not. I think, however, his position is that it is 
 
 1 La Religion de la Musique, by Camille Mauclair. 
 5fi 
 
SONOROUS ALCOHOL 57 
 
 the orchestra and not the composer that generates 
 the fluid, for he specifically exempts all combina- 
 tions of instruments and voices, all " concerts " 
 before the days of the modem sjnmphony orchestra 
 from this affinity with zinc, carbon, and sulphuric 
 acid. 
 
 " Vocal or instrumental music that comes from one 
 man or even from three or four has in no way [the 
 elemental character of an orchestra. Music only 
 really began to make itself felt in the Universe on 
 th'fe day when it appeared in an orchestral form. 
 Similarly, that electro-magnetism with which 
 certain human beings were saturated, endowing 
 them with a certain ambient power, of varying 
 extent, has only commenced its activity in the 
 Universe from the day that saw its elements 
 assembled in the galvanic battery. Without the 
 orchestra no democratic formation of art could 
 have sprung from music. Without the battery the 
 fixing of the vital fluid would never have taken 
 place outside the limits of the individuals in which 
 it presented itself as charm or force of will. The 
 orchestra and the galvanic battery have made 
 possible the distant transport of forces hitherto 
 localized." 
 
 I am afraid that if I had seen the above para- 
 graph quoted as an example of M. Mauclair's ideas 
 on music I should have lost interest in his opinions, 
 although its last sentence may arrest attention. 
 It may be true that the quality of charm in a person 
 springs from a chemical transformation of bodily 
 tissue, and that It is closely related to that electric 
 charm that is produced by the waste of metals in 
 
5^ MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 acids or by similar processes ; it may be true that 
 le fluide musical of M. Mauclair's compatriots is 
 produced by the wasting of catgut and rosin, and 
 le fluide musical of our recent enemies by the trans- 
 formation of beer into tears, but large as the element 
 of truth may be in these apparently fantastic con- 
 ceptions, they leave us, after we have admitted 
 them, very much where we were before. We are 
 not learning a great deal when we learn that : fluide 
 vital, electrique, magnetique, musical " ne sont qu'une 
 meme chose " ; we begin learning when we begin to 
 discover the differences between le fluide musical 
 and le fluide electrique, not the resemblances. In 
 short, Monsieur Mauclair suffers in this book of 
 studies from not having separated consciously his 
 two functions of poet and musical critic. His 
 imagination is constantly catching fire and pour- 
 ing forth clouds pf fantastic symbolical synthesis 
 which would be more stimulating and amusing 
 less casually expressed. Also then it might have 
 had some meaning. But these waves of brain- 
 feverishness that proceed from M. Mauclair with 
 the vague purposelessness of the electric " waves " 
 from one of his beloved batteries when one grips 
 its handles convince one of nothing, and are mere 
 irritations. Yet M. Mauclair is far from being 
 incapable of analysis, and when his intelligence 
 comes to the aid of his exceptional sensibility he is 
 often very interesting. He asks the question why 
 music has apparently developed so much later than 
 any other of the arts, and, dismissing the suggestions 
 
SONOROUS ALCOHOL 5& 
 
 that the human ear was less easily educable than 
 the senses of sight and touch, or that our modem 
 instruments demanded a scientific ingenuity beyond 
 the capacity of antiquity, he suggests that the true 
 explanation is that modem music is a collective, a 
 democratic art : 
 
 " Music has become the coUectivist art. That is 
 the true explanation of the indifference to the 
 invention of multiple instruments lasting so long. 
 The formation of an orchestra in the image of a 
 crowd only seemed desirable at the very moment 
 when the arrival of the other arts at the height of 
 individualism made the hieratic role of music no 
 longer useful. The choral has been the culminating 
 expression in language of a union of musical wills ; 
 the orchestra is directly opposed to this inasmuch 
 as it offers the means of mutually dissolving wills." 
 
 The satisfaction our ancestors got from music, 
 says M. Mauclair, was mental. Rhjrthm was a 
 sonorous geometry reinforcing the meanihg of the 
 individual word. The choral and the individual 
 hmnan song were means for the enunciation and 
 the transmission of thought, and the human voice 
 kept its prestige as the finest of instmments be- 
 cause it stood for the supreme form of the free, 
 spoken word. When, however, men began to take 
 dehght in the susceptibility of the nerves, when 
 they began to demand from the subtle vibrations 
 of certain materials a voluptuousness which was 
 its own end, when the last idea of hieratic ritual 
 had disappeared from profane music, when the 
 essential elements had sorted themselves out and 
 
60 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 had found In the other arts a means of perfect 
 enunciation without any need of vocal rhjrthm to 
 mark their significance, then, and only then, did 
 men consider perfectioning tonal delights, and 
 developing the material sources of that physical 
 sensuality which had previously been merely 
 accessory to an emotion of thought. From an 
 intellectual joy they passed to a physical passion. 
 This means, according to M. Mauclair, that music 
 has only been music during the last hundred years ; 
 before that it was a gesture arresting the attention, 
 a physical emphasis imderlining the human thought. 
 There is a great deal to be said for this theory, and 
 it fits in with the tendency of modem criticism 
 to insist on the unemotional character of music as 
 we are beginning to understand it. " After having 
 admitted into the severe geometry of primitive 
 song the ornamental imitation of natural sounds as 
 a decorative feature, we have come to make music 
 consist of the transcription of this ' decor "... 
 the natural magic of sounds invading the soul and 
 dissolving the will is the height of our present 
 musical satisfaction." M. Mauclair does not 
 develop this idea beyond declaring that orchestral 
 music is a magnetic bath in which we get a stupefying 
 pleasure from the momentary dissolution of our 
 wills, and that chamber music, on the contrary, is 
 hieratic : " la musique de chambre est notre voix 
 qui parle : I'orchestre est la nature qui lui rdpond et 
 r^touffe dans son immense murmure ot. miroite 
 le reflet de I'univers, Ulysse et les Sir^nes. . , ." 
 
SONOROUS ALCOHOL 61 
 
 All M. Maucldr's Ideas dissolve into these 
 grandiose images, but their meaning is clearer for 
 being graphic. There is little doubt that the 
 modem composer has lost control through the 
 hugeness of the orchestral resources which are at 
 his disposal, but which he does not command ; he 
 can summon spirits from the vasty deep, but their 
 cries engulf him, and as he sinks he weakly 
 struggles to pass on to his listeners the tumultuous 
 sounds that murmur around him. Our sensibility 
 has outrun our powers of selection, our will is 
 surrendered to a multitude of sensations of which 
 we caimot deny ourselves one. This is no moral 
 weakness, as the ignorant and narrow-minded will 
 rush foolishly to beKeve ; it is merely an irregular 
 development. All our human powers do not march 
 parallel in their evolution; some get ahead of 
 others, and the enormous increase in our sensibiUty 
 which has taken place, not only in musical sensibility, 
 as M. Mauclair seems to think, but on most sides 
 of our nature, and in most if not all our senses, is, 
 besides being a source of immense enrichment to our 
 life, an indispensable foundation for further artistic 
 development. The great genius, when he comes 
 along, will be master of his sensibility, though his 
 sensibility has a thousand avenues of delight to 
 every one known to his ancestors ; he wiU be master 
 of it, and of all the increased resources it gives, 
 because of the strength of his personality. It is 
 personality that synthesizes the revenue of the 
 senses, and it is only personalities inferior to their 
 
62 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 task that imagine they can get control by beggar- 
 ing their senses. Therefore, although we shall 
 certainly be faced in the future by people who will 
 denounce modem music (when they have got 
 sufficient intelligence) as " sonorous alcohol," let 
 us be ready to smile benignly, and ignore a fatuous- 
 ness which has pursued the progress of life con- 
 sistently down the ages since man's power of speech 
 became a separate faculty, developing independ- 
 ently of his power of understanding. 
 
XI 
 THE ROYAL PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY 
 
 THE Philharmonic Society has always been 
 like the British Government, it has feared 
 both to progress and not to progress. Its 
 desperate attempts to discover which way the wind 
 was blowing, and then to oppose it while it was a mere 
 breeze, but to nm frantically after it as soon as it be- 
 came an almost exhausted gale, have been a source of 
 amusement to educated musicians. I say educated 
 musicians, because musicians as a whole, until the 
 last few years (very few), have formed the most 
 ignorant and iUiterate class in the State, and these 
 musicians have comprised a great part of the Phil- 
 harmonic Society's audience (they are not aU dead 
 yet). Naturally the suburban vicar whose daughters 
 had got tired of asking, " What are the wild waves 
 sajdng ? " and the suburban teacher who hailed 
 Cowen's " The Better Land " as the greatest of songs, 
 and immediately planted it in the throats of the 
 young misses of MusweU HiU, who were learning 
 singing to the niin of a whole generation's taste, would 
 want to see the famous composer conduct at the 
 
 Philhcwmoiuc Society, and so we have Cowen as sole 
 
 •'63 
 
64 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 conductor from 1890 to 1892, and again from 1900 
 to 1906. Now, Sir Frederick Cowen gave them as 
 much good music as they could stand, and, being a 
 modest man, he was probably thirsting to declare 
 that he coioldn't conduct, that his songs were rubbish, 
 and that his Suites of fairy whisperings and babbling 
 flowers were all my eye ; but what could he do ? 
 People would buy his songs, people would listen to 
 his Suites, the Government would make him. a 
 knight. If he had said to the public, " Don't listen 
 to my songs, they're no good, but buy Hugo WoM's," 
 his audience would have thought to themselves, 
 " What a kind man ! " and if anyone ever got as fax 
 as buying Wolf's songs she would have been more 
 convinced than ever as to Sir Frederick's goodness 
 of heart. So Sir Frederick, knowing that if he had 
 written like Hugo Wolf he would have starved, and 
 knowing how much better a man he was than 
 hundreds who might have taken his place, and who 
 had never even heard of Hugo Wolf, stuck to his 
 conductorship and his royalties and his title, and 
 sighed to think English people were so siUy and so 
 tasteless. AH this time the little musical enterprise 
 there was in London was confined mainly to Sir 
 Henry Wood, who was not patronized by the swarm 
 of local musicians who made up the Philharmonic 
 audience, but had to find and get together a new 
 public — ^a public that read Meredith and Hardy and 
 Ibsen and Shaw, and studied Economics and Botti- 
 celli. Since 1906 the Philharmonic Society has been 
 gradually altering ; it has had conductors like 
 
ROYAL PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY 65 
 
 NiMsch, Mengelberg, Wood, Safonoff, and Beecham, 
 and in the season 1915-16 the names of Stravinsky, 
 Franck, Ravel, Debussy, d'Indy, Rimsky-Korsakov, 
 Bax, and Frank Bridge proved that it was really 
 alive at last. However, the ignorant old Adam is 
 far from dead, he stiU moves in the paradise of vocal 
 music with his retinue of substantial prima donnas 
 and tenors whom no higher power has yet been able 
 to eject.. And it is here that we touch the secret' of 
 the musical beggary of our country in spite of its 
 abundant native talent. The Philharmonic Society 
 presents its Gold Medal to Clara Butt for her singing 
 of "Abide with me," but gave no Gold Medal to 
 Gervase Elwes for his singing of Vaughan Williams's 
 "On Wenlock Edge." This sort of thing is an in- 
 soluble enigma to the foreign musician, and causes Mr. 
 Arnold Dolmetsch to depart for the past where there 
 were no Clara Butts, or " Better Lands " or " Lost 
 Chords," where Tosti never wept " Good-bye," 
 where Dorothy Forster's " Roses " would have been 
 nipped in the bud, and when genuine expression was 
 not drowned in noise and bathos, but the English 
 were the greatest musicians of the world. When 
 Mr. Csoil Scott attacks the " Ballad " he is attacking 
 the root evil, because it is our singers who poison the 
 nation's taste, and the mischief they do is so much 
 greater just because a song penetrates hundreds of 
 homes to every one reached by instrumental work. 
 Commercial firms can hardly be blamed for exploit- 
 ing the restless demand of an ignorant and depraved 
 public taste, any more than we can blame the manu- 
 S 
 
66 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 facturers for providing the trsishy jewellery wMch 
 is sold. But societies like the Philharmonic exist 
 to set a higher standard — a standard which is not 
 measured by size or expensiveness, but by quality. 
 The public ought to be able to look somewhere 
 for guidance. The Press, when not ignorant, is 
 hampered by timidity and by an easy indifference 
 due to the fact that few people at all realize how one's 
 tastes in music, in furniture, in morals, in intellectual 
 and physical life are all intimately connected. 
 Neither William Morris nor the Vienna Secessionists 
 could have redeemed from stupidity and vulgarity 
 the house of a woman who Hked ballad concerts, or 
 the average vocal concert in England ; and a man 
 who could sing " The Holy City " would always vote 
 wrong. Among the main obstacles to the purifica- 
 tion of taste are the Churches, with their hundredth 
 performance of Maunder's Penitence, Pardon, and 
 Peace, and their appalling local concerts, when some 
 Ragged Boys' Home gets one-and-threepence as 
 an excuse for the vestr3mtten's daughters who learn 
 singing to display their talents. There seems to be 
 something about a choir that attracts to it all the 
 dullest and most inartistic people in its neighbour- 
 hood, all the people without any musical instincts, 
 and all the people without any voices. The leading 
 soprano sets the taste for the district ; she has gener- 
 ally studied for anything from a week to ten years 
 with one of the great oratorio stars who, having 
 spent half a century singing The Messiah and Elijah 
 and a few " ballads " from one proviiicial town 
 
ROYAL PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY 67 
 
 to another, has lost all idea of what music is, and 
 has never found it necessary to acquire any musical 
 education, or, in fact, any education whatsoever. 
 Yet these singers are countenanced and engaged by 
 London and Provincial bodies of such standing as the 
 Philharmonic Society, thus setting an entirely wrong 
 level of taste throughout the country. The young 
 people whose musical taste is first formed in the 
 Church carry this taste with them into the Music- 
 hall, and the close affinity in the music of both these 
 popular institutions wiU have escaped no pene- 
 trating observer. We can safely declare that 
 England wiU never again become a great musical 
 nation until we hear real music and real musicians in 
 the Church and in the Music-haU, just as less than a 
 couple of hundred years ago you could hear CoreUi's 
 Sonatas in any London " pub." In order to attain 
 this result the Philharmonic Society has to set the 
 standard for the Provinces and Sir Oswald StoU. 
 This means a more discriminating distribution of 
 gold medals and no more announcements that a 
 certain gentleman " has graciously consented to 
 sing," but an equal enterprise and a standard as 
 high in vocal music as in instrumental. 
 
XII 
 
 THE PROMENADE CONCERTS— 
 
 WITH the best will in the world the true 
 musician cannot always feel amiably dis- 
 posed to Messrs. Chappell & Co. The 
 financing of the Promenade Concerts and the 
 Queen's Hall Orchestra in succession to Sir Edgar 
 Speyer (to whom musical London owes an incal- 
 culable debt) left one dubiously suspicious that, 
 sooner or later, just as the Bechstein piano was 
 ousted by the Chappell, so would German music, 
 or at least serious and great music, be replaced by 
 something, in the phrase of the suburban grocer, 
 " just as good, if not better." Such is the effect of 
 the wrong sort of fame — ^the fame of the Chappell 
 BaUad Concerts, to which the bulk of the English 
 middle and upper class public has flocked for years. 
 The fact that Messrs. Chappell & Co. have been 
 merely supplying a demand (although there is no 
 such thing as merely supplying a demand ; it has 
 to be tickled, and that is what the concerts are for, 
 those celebrated concerts which begin at lunch and 
 go on till dinner) does not excuse them in the eyes 
 of the idealist, who can admire some one ready to 
 
 68 "^ 
 
THE PROMENADE CONCERTS 69 
 
 lose money in educating the public, but cannot for- 
 give the mere waxing fat out of whatever low taste, 
 ignorance, sentimental immorality, and frivolous 
 brainlessness happens to be going. When Messrs. 
 ChappeU have continuously put their hands in their 
 pockets to back up something good and great, 
 then he will look up to them with respect — 
 at present, however, he scans the programmes of 
 the Promenades warily for traces of the cloven hoof, 
 and sighs to think that in a History of Modern 
 European Music the compositions issuing from the 
 plaster palace in Bond Street would have no place. 
 
 The programmes of the Promenades of the season 
 1915, which was the first under Messrs. Chappell, 
 showed (as might be expected) but slight evidence 
 of the change in proprietorship brought about by 
 the war. In fact, they seemed to constitute a sort 
 of prize-ring in which conflicting ideas got alternately 
 knocked down. We found, for example : 
 
 "Aria, Walter's Prize Song (The Mastersingers)." 
 
 One could hear Mr. de Lara chuckle as he saw that 
 even Walther had lost his German " h." Immedi- 
 ately following, however, we had : 
 
 " Siegfried's Journey {Gdtterddmmerung)." 
 
 One can reaUze the difficulty of finding an English 
 equivalent of " Siegfried " (Victorypeace's Journey 
 would have been a hkely contribution), but why 
 " Gotterdammerung " ? Was not that enough to 
 make any true Englshman stay away — or at least 
 stamp his foot and hiss at an appropriate place (as 
 
70 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Mr. Josef or Joseph Holbrooke suggested) ? In 
 another place, after printing " Good Friday Music," 
 they actually followed this with " Charfreitags- 
 zauber," which was reaUy too bad and quite up- 
 setting to stay-at-home patriots. Trying to discover 
 some principle at work led me to the hypothesis 
 that the programmes were confused purposely, so 
 that nobody could accuse the proprietors of partisan- 
 ship, while the largest possible audience might be 
 got at ; and this task-seemed to be divided between 
 several persons. There is Mrs. Rosa Newmarch, 
 for instance. I yield to none in my admiration of 
 Mrs. Newmarch's descriptive gifts, but I feel it is 
 a great pity some of the composers did not read 
 Mrs. Newmarch's notes before they wrote their 
 music — especially Russian and descriptive com- 
 posers. " All the strange visions of night have 
 vanished," writes Mrs. Newmarch in a note to a 
 novelty of Bagrinovsky's, but it is one of the most 
 reprehensible lapses on the part of any composer 
 that Bagrinovsky has quite overlooked this and 
 allowed his " strange visions of night " to degenerate 
 into common trespassers. This is where the Ger- 
 mans, painstaking as usual, score. Richard Strauss 
 is always most careful to make his sheep bleat pre- 
 cisely where Mrs. Newmarch says they do — and this 
 is not one of the least of his claims to greatness. 
 
 The next field of operations appeared to be the 
 translations of the words of Songs, Arias, Recitatives, 
 etc. It seemed a point of honour with the trans- 
 lator, or rather the selector of translations, that on 
 
THE PROMENADE CONCERTS 71 
 
 no account should the printed version be the same 
 as that actually sung. It is possible that the object 
 was to show the numerous French and Belgian 
 visitors among us that such a great literary nation 
 as ours had more than one translation of everjTthing 
 — ^which was, of course, highly patriotic and com- 
 mendable ; on the other hand, the idea may have 
 been that anyone offended by the words or the 
 literary style of the printed translation would be 
 sure to be moUified by the singer's use of other 
 words, or vice versa. 
 
 At any rate, there was no panic at work in those 
 programmes ; and evidently the fiery harangues of 
 Messrs. Holbrooke and de Lara during the early 
 part of the war did not upset the management. 
 For this they certainly deserve credit, coupled, in 
 my case, with admiration for a highly developed 
 art in the nomenclature of Wagner's Operas, though 
 to anyone unfamiliar with the peculiar composition 
 of Promenade audiences it would appear to be mere 
 caprice. The Promenaders are a very mixed lot, 
 but during the war they separated most conveniently 
 into three classes : 
 
 (i) The real music lovers, who wiU not stay away 
 if The Mastersingers is written JDie Meister- 
 singer. 
 
 (2) The people who know that Die Meistersinger 
 
 is German but do not know that The Master- 
 singers is the translation. 
 
 (3) The people who do not know German when 
 
 they see it, and think Gdtierddmmerung is^ 
 Russian. 
 
72 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Need one say more ? Any intelligent person study- 
 ing this classification would find in it the key to 
 all the printed vagaries ; but in order to make the 
 classification comprehensive and all-embracing, I 
 should mention that Class I. numbered a few 
 cranks who would have stayed away if Die Meister- 
 singer was written The Mastersingers. 
 
 Such, with a slight dilution of Wagner on Monday 
 nights, were the trifling changes in the programmes ; 
 but there was another, more disturbing, feature. 
 I don't mind having to listen to a fine artist playing 
 on a Chappell piano. No one could be more 
 anxious to see the native industry flourishing ;. I 
 certainly desire to hear a first-rate Chappell before 
 I die. But the fact that the one possible orchestral 
 haU in London (for the Albert Hall is " impossible ") 
 is in the hands of a piano-maMng and song-selling 
 firm might be a very real menace to the healthy 
 musical life of the city, and calls for the greatest 
 vigilance. It is possible that Messrs. Chappell may 
 have liu-king somewhere in their cellars an instru- 
 ment which is the especial triumph of their factory 
 and to which they Usten before writing those 
 confident advertisements which declare that 
 " Chappell pianos cannot be excelled," etc. But 
 does anybody believe this is really the case ? Does 
 one not take it for granted as necessary exaggera- 
 tion ? Are we not accustomed to it in a thousand 
 things from soap to pills ? 
 
 I often wonder what would happen if advertisers 
 were a little more realistic and a little less romantic. 
 
THE PROMENADE CONCERTS 73 
 
 Suppose Messrs. Chappell left off advertising : 
 " The finest English make, cannot be excelled for 
 their exquisite tone, responsive touch, remarkable 
 singing quality, and lasting durability ; ^ endorsed 
 and played by the greatest artists of the day." 
 Supposing, I say, instead of this we read : " Chappell 
 pianos, quite good in their way, an average Enghsh 
 make, now up to the medium-class German, hope 
 to do better if you support us ; some leading 
 professionals prefer other makes, but ours is quite 
 a sound article." I personally believe that the 
 public's appetite would be immensely whetted and 
 that sales would go up. Perhaps I am merely 
 wrong-headed, but I know that such an advertise- 
 ment would appeal to me. Certainly no one believes 
 the other rigmarole. Of course the moraUty of 
 commerce is not the morality of art, and one can 
 therefore understand people who have to do with 
 both spheres getting somewhat confused. The 
 vast numbers of inartistic — i.e. non-moral — ballads 
 published by Messrs. Chappell & Co. have evidently 
 been " passed " by the management along with the 
 advertisements, so that often it is a Httle difficult 
 to tell the songs from the advertisements ; though, 
 no doubt, it is possible. But they have the same 
 spiritual father — a sort of father one can imagine 
 saying in a Wells novel, " Oh, it's orl right — I'm orl 
 right — wot's the matter with me ? " " Nothing ! " 
 is the swift reply from a thousand suburban homes. 
 
 * This is where we surpass the Germans, in " lasting dura- 
 bility" ; their pianos are merely durable. 
 
74 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 "Nothing ! " echo Messrs. Chappell, looking at 
 their yearly balance. " Everything ! " groans the 
 true patriot, refusing to be comforted by the New 
 Queen's Hall Light Orchestra and by the improved 
 English of their recent advertisements. 
 
 Nevertheless it must be said in justice to Messrs. 
 Chappell & Co. that seven years have now passed 
 since they took control of the Promenades and the 
 Queen's Hall S3anphony Concerts and there has 
 been no lowering of the standard of music performed. 
 There has been even an improvement in the quaHty 
 of the vocalists engaged, which is a reaUy aston- 
 ishing achievement. Also Messrs. Chappell & Co. 
 have always taken criticism in good part, and 
 have never attempted to influence or boycott those 
 critics who have dared to point out their imper- 
 fections. 
 
XIII 
 AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION 
 
 DURING the first Promenade season of the 
 war it occurred suddenly to Mr. Newman 
 that it would be a good idea to have a 
 " Russian Night " ; the idea was at once put into 
 action and a vast audience resulted. The items in 
 the programme were just the usual ones that are 
 played again and again during every London season. 
 And the night was not even " Russian," it was 
 " Tschaikovsky " ; and Tschaikovsky, to vary Cui's 
 famous reference to Rubinstein, is more of a Russian 
 who composed than a Russian composer. Why a 
 Uttle Tschaikovsky should be so much less attractive 
 than a whole meal of Tschaikovsky can only be 
 explained on the aU-or-nothing principle, which 
 almost divides England into Teetotallers and 
 Drunkards. However, the idea having been so suc- 
 cessful, it w^ natural that Mr. Newman should next 
 think of a ""5rench Night." But, alas, it became 
 only too clear that it had been Tschaikovsky and 
 not Russia that drew the multitude, and as no 
 
 musical man of business has ever had the sense to 
 
 rs 
 
76 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 provide France with a Tschaikovsky, the audience 
 was medicore. 
 
 France has only had one great emotional com- 
 poser of the elemental type — the type that has a 
 universal appeal, and he was not a Frenchman ; 
 yet if he had been carefuUy " boomed " and 
 " worked " as Tschaikovsky has been, concert- 
 givers would have held in him another trump card. 
 The idea that " good wine needs no bush " is only 
 relevant to connoisseurs ; for the rest of the public 
 it is the bush that matters. Seeing that the musical 
 connoisseurs of London at any one concert will only 
 about half fill the top circle of the Queen's Hall, 
 it can be readily understood that concerts will 
 always depend financially on the Richard Wagners, 
 the Tschaikovskys, and the Richard Strausses, who 
 draw less as musicians than as wizards or freaks — 
 their only rival being the twentieth-century custom 
 of the young man taking his girl out one night a 
 week, which fills the Queen's Hall on a Saturday 
 night, be the programme good, bad, or indifferent. 
 Just as in Pasteboard Opera the competent im- 
 presario will hoodwink Scotland Yard into sending 
 a squad of police to guard his prima donna's imita- 
 tion diamonds and fill the picture press with photo- 
 graphs of the lady strung round with ropes of 
 paste pearls and dropping tears of disillusionment 
 on bunches of letters containing the false promises 
 of kings and princes, so in the world of music 
 must the enterprising management reveal to the 
 open-mouthed public BjTronic, Demoniacal, Theo- 
 
AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION 77 
 
 phistic, or merely Cacophonous details, hints, and 
 legends sufficient to excite the blase and astonish 
 the innocent, and by this means bring to his own 
 many a great composer who otherwise would 
 languish in comparative obscurity. 
 
 Having given a Russian night and a French night, 
 Mr. Newman came up to Sir Henry a day or two 
 later, looking very gloomy, and said : " We'll 
 have to have an Italian night." " What ! " said 
 Sir Henry, turning nearly purple. " Can't be 
 helped," continued Mr. Newman. " I hear that 
 the Italian Ambassador is hourly expecting the 
 announcement." " My God ! " exclaimed Sir 
 Henry, faUing into a deck chair in his garden. 
 " That means Puccini, if not Tosti — ^to think I 
 should ever come to this ! " " Well, there's no 
 way out of it," replied Mr. Newman ; " it never 
 once occurred to me, but, of course, it's simply 
 inevitable after having a Russian and a French 
 night. The ItaUan Government would complain, 
 and then Asquith would complain." " Asquith ! " 
 ejaculated Sir Henry, " Asquith ! What has he 
 composed ? I don't know him." " I mean the 
 Prime Minister." " Oh ! the politician ! " " Yes, 
 he could censor us," added Mr. Newman. Sir 
 Henry groaned, then he jumped up suddenly. 
 "And what about Serbia? Shall we have to have 
 a Serbian night and a Montenegrin night? — and 
 what about aU those Zulu chiefs or those Nigerian 
 
 fellows " " Oh, we'll stop at Italy," asserted- 
 
 Mr, Newman firmly. " Stop at Italy ! " murmured 
 
78 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Sir Henry feebly. " Isn't that where the British 
 public has stopped in spite of my twenty years' 
 work?" 
 
 But Sir Henry was too pessimistic. I went to 
 that concert out of curiosity, but the British public 
 has really been educated to some purpose — ^it did not 
 bite. A poor house listened dolefully to a lugubri- 
 ous and everlasting Fantasia on Puccini's Madame 
 Butterfly, and only a few maidens from bygone 
 ages sighed intermittently during Mascagni's 
 Intermezzo. During those dreary two hours it 
 came upon me gradually that the Futurists were 
 much-maHgned and long-suffering men. I can 
 now appreciate better what it must be to live 
 musically in the land of Leoncavallo, Mascagni, and 
 Puccini. I understood all that Marinetti and his 
 followers must have endured. 
 
XIV 
 MAX REGER 
 
 HAD it not been for the war, the death of 
 Max Reger, at the early age of forty-three, 
 would have occEisioned a great deal more 
 comment than appeared in our Press, where the 
 tendency was to dismiss him as a composer of 
 comparatively small account. Reger, however, who 
 for many years has been next to Richard Strauss, 
 the greatest living German composer, was very far 
 from being of small account. Like Strauss, Reger 
 came from Bavaria, where he was bom in 1873 ; 
 he was thus about seven years younger than either 
 Strauss or Debussy. In spite of this, the number 
 and length of his compositions are truly prodigious, 
 going well into the second hundred opus number. 
 What this means we can better judge from the 
 fact that Elgar, who is over sixty,, is still a good 
 way off his first hundred. This wealth of produc- 
 tion is characteristic, for the first and last impression 
 one gets of the man is size ; even in Germany he 
 was noted as a colossal beer-drinker. He -was, in 
 fact, a man after Mr. Chesterton's heart, about 
 
 six feet tall and very heavily buUt. The face was 
 
 79 
 
80 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 striking, being square and heavy, with a magnificent 
 brow, but at the same time mobile, sensitive, and 
 expressive ; the most remarkable feature, however, 
 was the full, over-hanging, and somewhat imperious 
 mouth. The whole man gave an impression of 
 enormous vitaUty. Reger is mostly represented as 
 being a return to Bach — " half a Bach redivivus,"^ 
 Mottl once called him ; but although it is true that 
 a great mass of his music is contrapuntal and that 
 he revels in colossal fugues, that his technical 
 capacity is astounding and a nightmare to exe- 
 cutants, for whom he has small mercy, yet he 
 is by no means a mere " half-Bach " or a mere 
 juggler of colossal intellectual power. He has 
 written over two hundred songs, never heard in 
 England, some of which, even in the opinion of 
 strong anti-Regerites, are exceedingly beautiful 
 {e.g. " Anmutiger Vertrag," " Flieder Wennlichter 
 Mondenschein," " Traum durch die Dammerung," 
 " Madchenhed," " Der Mond gluht," etc.) ; and 
 even in his stiffest works there are simple and lucid 
 beauties obvious to anyone at a first hearing. 
 
 On the other hand, a great deal of his work is 
 sour and forbidding and of terrifying length. His 
 violin concerto (Op. loi), for instance, takes an 
 hour and two minutes to play, and would crack 
 the skulls of most of our violinists ; but in Germany 
 it is played from memory by great violinists Mke 
 Henri Marteau, and it is recorded to the eternal 
 honour of a violinist named SchmuHer that after 
 playing it for a j^eaf he succeeded in reducing the 
 
MAX REGER 81 
 
 time to fifty-eight minutes. This work was de- 
 noimced on its first performance as "a crime 
 against the violin " ; but this is an exaggeration, 
 for few men knew as well as Reger how to write 
 for the violin. I can testify to his Sonatas for 
 Violin Alone being wonderful pol5^honic creations 
 worthy of the artists who can play them. These, 
 again, are never heard here, where we still consume 
 the senseless trickery of Wieniawski and the sugar- 
 candies of Kreisler. In chamber music, Reger has 
 written a melodious and easily grasped Trio in 
 E minor and two Quartets that I know of — ^the 
 D minor quartet (Op. 74) and the E flat quartet 
 (Op. 109). The famous violinist Hans Wessely once 
 said that a well-known Berlin quartet had been 
 studying the D minor quartet for two years and 
 were not ready to play it yet, so there is some 
 excuse for the London String Quartet never doing 
 it. When played at the Dortmund festival it had 
 had sixty-four rehearsals — ^let us admire this stiff- 
 necked obstinacy ! I heard both these quartets in 
 Munich and remember being considerably impressed ; 
 though at that time I was a violent Strauss partisan 
 and used to declare in the pleasant manner of 
 students that Reger was a gigantic idiot. Of late 
 years Reger has written more orchestral work, 
 but the same characteristics are present. The 
 Piano Concerto appeared in 191 1 and took fifty-one 
 minutes to play ; it was hailed as " the most 
 unpopular composition that has appeared for years," 
 which of itself is an achievement in Germany and 
 6 
 
82 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 prejudices one in its favour. I have never heard 
 it, I am sorry to say, nor the SinfonieUa, the title 
 of which is one of Reger's jokes, for it has the full 
 four movements of a Symphony and takes forty 
 minutes to play ; it was of this work that Herr 
 Siegfried Ochs, a noted conductor, said on its 
 production in Berlin : " Give me the ludd old 
 masters — ^like Richard Strauss." 
 
 However, I heard Reger conduct in person a 
 later work for Orchestra, a Suite inspired by the 
 pictures of Arnold Bocklin ; and this was lucidity 
 itself and fuU of striking and beautiful writing, 
 showing the influence of Debussy and the modern 
 French school very strongly. This was in 1913-14, 
 when Reger was conductor of the Meiningen ducal 
 orchestra which von Biilow and Brahms made 
 famous. Always a remarkable-looking man, Reger 
 had by then got immensely stout and was unable 
 to stand up to conduct, having a colossal arm-chair 
 specially built for him. As a conductor he was 
 undemonstrative but very alert and decisive ; 
 the plajdng of the band was remarkable for pre- 
 cision and clarity. For Chorus and Orchestra 
 Reger has written two remarkably fine works : 
 Gesang der Verkldrten (Op. 71) and Die Nonnen 
 (Op. 112). Neither, as far as I am aware, has been 
 given in England. The former on its first produc- 
 tion was described as the most original and daring 
 thing in music, and from the entry of the chorus 
 so unprecedentedly complicated and harsh, not to 
 say ugly, that Strauss's "Domestic Symphony" 
 
MAX REGER 83 
 
 which followed was hailed as a great relief in the 
 >vay of beauty and simplicity. " Yet," said one 
 critic, " there is no denjring the astonishing mastery 
 and power displayed." I have no room to write of 
 Reger's organ music, which is colossal ^in quantity, 
 length, and construction, but "astonishing mastery 
 and power " is the term which most justWsums 
 up Reger's compositions. In intellectual cmstrac- 
 tion, in architectonics, he displays the most astound- 
 ing capacity ; there is nothing sentimental, feeble, 
 or merely emotional about Reger's music ; on the 
 contrary, it is mostly harsh, sober, massive, and 
 forbidding, bristling with accidentals and eternally 
 modulating. It is probable that much of it will 
 outlast far more popular work, for it is very far 
 from being mere dry academic note-spinning, 
 although he is generally more intent on building 
 up wonderful tonal fabrics than in convejdng moods 
 or sensations. That the former is capable of giving 
 the more soMd gratification few peoples wiU deny. 
 It is too much to hope that we shall hear for a 
 long time yet any of Reger's work. I happened 
 one week during the war to go into a well-known 
 music publisher's, and I was struck by the way 
 Russia dominated the place. Portraits of Russian 
 composers and portraits of Russian artists adorned 
 the walls ; all the Germans had been sent down 
 into the cellars to await Mr. Hughes's return to 
 Australia ; and there, neglected and despised, lay, 
 no doubt, a few heaps of Reger's music ousted 
 from the upper air by the brilliant mass of com- 
 
84 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 posers whose names have the good fortune to begin 
 with " Pop " or end with " oft " (in other ways an 
 unlucky conjunction). I do not grumble at this. 
 I am not anti-Russian ; I am in music pro-Russian, 
 pro-German, pro-French and even pro-EngMsh. 
 It is very amusing to listen to deluded people who 
 imagine that we can get EngHsh music by keep- 
 ing it free from foreign influence. We can either 
 assimilate foreign influence or we cannot ; if we 
 cannot, we are certainly not vigorous enough to 
 produce national music ; we should be like an 
 Englishman who, if he ate a German sausage, 
 became a German. To bar our front door to 
 strangers is only a confession of impotence. 
 
XV 
 THE LONDON CHORAL SOCIETY 
 
 EVERY now and then some hoary body which 
 one had imagined was mouldering in the 
 grave pops up its antique head and barks at 
 us. This is what the London Choral Society did at 
 the Queen's Hall on Easter Wednesday, 1921, al- 
 though perhaps one should not use the word " bark " 
 in connexion with such a body of respectable singers. 
 For six years during which the musical Hfe of 
 London has been active there has been no sign of 
 the London Choral Society, and this perhaps is not 
 surprising when one considers that choral singers 
 are not paid as orchestral players are, but in some 
 societies even pay for the privilege of being allowed 
 to sing. The concert on the 23rd of March was 
 advertised as the second of the first season since 
 the war. The programme consisted of Beethoven's 
 Mount 0/ Olives and his Mass in D, and when one 
 comes to ask oneself why such a commonplace, 
 unattractive work as The • Mount of Olives was 
 chosen, one puts one's finger on the weakness of this 
 Society. The plain truth is that the London Choral 
 Society is an anachronism and that its supporters are 
 
86 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 anachronisms — ^in particular the gentleman who 
 stood up in the dress circle during the final chorus, 
 thinking, no doubt, since it began with the word 
 7 Hallelujah," that he was listening to The Messiah. 
 One felt that The Mount of Olives would never have 
 been chosen if the performance had not taken place 
 in Holy Week, just as one felt that the audience 
 (except the critics) would never have been there if 
 the performance had not been in Holy Week. As I 
 sat and watched those ghosts of the nineteenth 
 century each clasping its soiled and tattered vocal 
 score, an indescribable pathos assailed me. Most 
 of them, no doubt, had seen the funeral of Queen 
 Victoria and were (unconsciously) only waiting for 
 their own. Meanwhile, poor pathetic remnants of a 
 period that beheved not in Beethoven but in Lent, 
 they sat listening not to the music but to the words 
 of their faith, and 'it was nothing to them that a 
 soloist belonging to a newer generation — unable to 
 believe her engagement to sing in The Mount of Olives 
 with the London Choral Society was anything but 
 a dream — ^had not turned up. The atmosphere 
 affected even the critics, one of whom was moved to 
 write : " There is some great music in it, notably in 
 the ' Gloria.' " There is, of course, no " Gloria " 
 in The Mount of Olives. Would that there was ! 
 But the atmosphere of the London Choral Society's 
 audience is so depressing, and The Mount of Olives 
 so tedious, that one would end by taking a sudden 
 loud tap on the drum for a Gloria. 
 The Mount of Olives is one of Beethoven's worst 
 
THE LONDON CHORAL SOCIETY 87 
 
 works. It was written about the same time as hjs 
 Second Symphony — ^that is to say, about 1802 — and 
 now it sounds exactly like aU the bad oratorios that 
 followed it during the nineteenth century, culminating 
 in Stainer's Crucifixion. It sounds incredible that Sir 
 John Stainer could have written a work comparable 
 to anything written by Beethoven, but it is true, 
 nevertheless. One can only explain it by saying 
 that Beethoven must have known by second sight, 
 by intuition or what you will, the sort of audience 
 he would get for his work during the hundred years 
 to follow. It would have been waste to have written 
 good music for people who were only going to use it 
 as a pretext for dragging their offspring and their 
 dependents to a pompous display of formal piety. 
 It is terrible to imagine the hundreds of thousands of 
 children who in England throughout the nineteenth 
 century were driven off to churches and to haUs to 
 be tortiured by the public exercise of a frenzied 
 rehgious bigotry which henceforth would be linked 
 insepaxably in their minds with music. This was the 
 only sort of music they ever heard, and if its context 
 was sufficient to paralyse the genius of Beethoven, 
 it is obvious that it was more than enough to crush 
 the budding musical instinct of the average child. 
 Having known in my youth a pious grandfather who 
 on Sundays locked away all the daily papers, in- 
 cluding Pick-me-up (a paper with a certain resem- 
 blance to La Vie Parisienne), a grandfather who 
 thought nothing of committing adultery but would 
 have fainted if one had played tennis on a Sunday ; 
 
88 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 a grandfather who thought "The Lost Chord" was 
 sacred music and that a Beethoven Symphony on a 
 Sunday would have sent us to the devil — ^having 
 known these things, as I say, I am filled with con- 
 tempt and loathing for the sort of audience that goes 
 to hear The Mount of Olives during Holy Week and 
 goes to hear no other music during the rest of the 
 year. 
 
 If the London Choral Society cannot obtain an 
 audience on the musical value of its perfonnances it 
 does not deserve one. If it thinks to make up for 
 poor musicianship by performances at Christmas and 
 Easter, in order to catch the rapidly diminishing 
 rump of the nineteenth century, both it and its 
 conductor, Mr. Arthur Fagge, will soon exist in a 
 still more attenuated form. At present, even the 
 name of the London Choral Society seems wrong ; 
 such is the effect of evil associations. What a 
 contrast with this sham musical religious sentiment 
 inherited from the nineteenth century is the real 
 goodness and beauty of the work of the Oriana 
 Madrigal Society and Mr. Kennedy Scott's newly 
 formed Philharmonic Choir. Here we have the real 
 spirit of the twentieth century in its musical expres- 
 sion, the spirit that animates the best of our younger 
 artists, poets, and musicians. When we heard the 
 Philharmonic Choir eleven days later, the hall 'was 
 packed with an enthusiastic audience of live people. 
 Hundreds were turned away through lack of accom- 
 modation. We were moved as it is only in the power 
 of the greatest art to move us, although we did 
 
THE LONDON CHORAL SOCIETY 89 
 
 not think the performance perfect. What was the 
 reason of this difference ? It was the same hall. It 
 was the same orchestra. The fact that it was Bach's 
 Mass instead of Beethoven's was just an accident, 
 but a different spirit animates conductor, choir, 
 orchestra, and audience. It is a spirit of faith — 
 faith in good music and a desire for perfection in its 
 performance. There is present no cant, no humbug, 
 no " religion." There may be here and there in the 
 audience a certain amount of intellectual snobbish- 
 ness, but what can we expect ? This is not a perfect 
 world. 
 
XVI 
 A NOTE ON OPERA 
 
 THE tradition that Wagner reformed opera 
 is firmly established, but exceedingly vul- 
 nerable. Suppose we ask to be shown the 
 fruit of the reform, what shall we be confronted 
 with ? Blank silence, I should imagine, from any 
 discriminating judge ; but from others a list of 
 post-Wagnerian operas, of which the best known are 
 La Boheme, Madame Butterfly, Louise, PagUacci, 
 Cavalleria Rusticana; the best, Mefistofele and 
 Hansel and Gretel, and the latest, The Boatswain's 
 Mate. Of all these operas one may say truthfully 
 that the more Wagnerian they are the worse they 
 are. There is scarcely one of them as good as 
 Rossini's Barber of Seville, or William Tell, or 
 Cherubini's Water Carrier, or Gluck's Orpheus, not 
 to bring into the comparison Weber or Mozart. 
 This may only mean that these later composers are 
 less naturally gifted than the men before Wagner ; 
 but it is strange that the decline in talent should 
 be so general, and it is stUl stranger that it should 
 reach its nadir just where the Wagnerian influence 
 is most marked, and it becomes more than strange 
 
A NOTE ON OPERA 91 
 
 when we can plot the same curve in the work of 
 one man. For example, the best of Puccini's 
 works is La BoMme, which is far less Wagnerian 
 than the much inferior operas Manon Lescaut and 
 The Girl of the Golden West. Personally, I think 
 such operas as Manon Lescaut, The Boatswain's 
 Mate, and Louise a great decline on BeUini's Sonnam- 
 bula or Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment or 
 Verdi's II Trovatore. It is not the fashion to think 
 this. For some reason or other, to make a singer 
 thimder in a heavy, melodramatic, declamatory 
 style " The soup is ready," as Charpentier does, is 
 thought far superior to vocalizing it with a trill 
 and a flourish— though, as a matter of fact, the old 
 Italian composers did not introduce soup into their 
 operas. They ignored table-laying, feeding, and 
 washing-up, just as we stiU ignore various opera- 
 tions of the toilet ; though, no doubt, some " re- 
 former " wiU come along one day and insist on 
 putting them aU in, and his followers wiU then 
 sneer at Charpentier and Miss Smyth as shallow 
 and artificial — which is a horrible prospect for 
 them. 
 
 One authority has defined Wagner's reform as 
 " getting rid of the parasitic vocal phrase and re- 
 storing drama to its proper position of superiority." 
 I accept this definition, but consider it a definition 
 of degeneration, not of reform. Let us consider the 
 first part of the definition — the " parasitic vocal 
 phrase." Now this, if it means anything, means 
 the phrase that exists for its own sake ; that is to 
 
92 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 say, the phrase that exists for its own musical value 
 and not merely as a means of telling you that the 
 soup is ready — ^information which does not interest 
 you in the least, seeing there is no prospect of your 
 getting up on to the stage and eating it. I submit, 
 with due reverence to all the pundits who are against 
 me on this point, that it is precisely the " parasitic 
 vocal phrase " — ^and not the soup — ^that you want 
 when you go to hear opera. Similarly, the notion 
 that it is a reform to restore the drama to its 
 position of superiority in opera fills me with as- 
 tonishment. To restore the drama to its position 
 of superiority over the creases in Sir George Alex- 
 ander's ^ trousers seems to me to have been a 
 legitimate aspiration of the theatre ; but to make 
 the drama predominate in the opera-house over 
 the music is equivalent to making Sir George Alex- 
 ander's trousers predominate over the drama. 
 The extraordinary dullness of The Boatswain's Mate 
 and Louise is due to their lack of musical interest, 
 just as the extraordinary attraction of Wagner's 
 operas is due entirely to the music. To this day 
 I have never properly understood what the Ring 
 cycle is about. The only readable book on the 
 subject I ever came across was Mr. Shaw's Perfect 
 Wagnerite, which was very amusing and as relevant 
 as any other. For Wagner was essentially a 
 s3Tnphonist, and his so-called operas are programme 
 
 ^ No one has such trousers nowadays, and it is a bitter com- 
 mentary on popular fame that this will probably be the last 
 time Sir George Alexander's name will appear in print. 
 
A NOTE ON OPERA 98 
 
 sjonphonies with vocal parts, the artistic successors 
 not of Fidelia, The Magic Flute, or Don Giovanni, 
 but of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony — of which he 
 was so fond. His real achievement was to enlarge 
 the bounds of orchestral expression ; opera he left 
 where he found it. He did not even invent re- 
 citative, or, what is more to the point, employ it 
 with originality. Peri's opera Euridice, composed 
 before 1600, was written entirely in recitative 
 purposely to obtain dramatic truth at the expense 
 of melody, and, later, in the seventeenth century, 
 the reformers like Scarlatti seeking higher musical 
 perfection found themselves compelled to sacrifice 
 this so-called dramatic truth. I say " so-called " 
 because no drama set to music is dramatically true 
 whether the whole drama unfolds on a pedal point, 
 undulates in a recitative, or pirouettes and loops 
 the loop in an aria. There is one way, and one 
 way only, of keeping the drama dramatically true, 
 and that is to abandon the music altogether. It 
 must be thought unfortunate that this simple 
 course has not commended itself to the majority 
 of opera composers. What has misled theoretical 
 reformers and many practical musicians is the 
 conception of opera as drama set to music. Under 
 the influence of this, as I think profound, miscon- 
 ception, the composer takes his drama from a penny 
 novelette or a six-shilling novel, and tries to make an 
 opera of it by letting the actors declaim in a re- 
 citative as near to speech as possible, so as not to 
 weaken the fragile naturalism of the story, while 
 
94 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 his musical powers are limited to weaving a back- 
 ground more or less congruous, but always super- 
 fluous. It is impossible to call such opera a musical 
 form ; it is no more a musical form than arranging 
 an appropriate background of pot-palms and flowers 
 to the speeches of Cabinet Ministers would be an art 
 form. 
 
 But if opera is not drama set to music, as the 
 followers of Wagner imagine, and if it is not a 
 method of displaying the human voice, as the early 
 nineteeftth-century Italians believed, what is it ? 
 It is, I think, a form of programme music, and its 
 value as a separate musical form is that it enables 
 the musician to express ideas as distinct from 
 sensations. Compare Strauss's tone -poem Till 
 Eulenspiel with a Brahms symphony. To enjoy 
 the former demands a knowledge of its programme 
 as it deals with ideas ; in fact, the music and the 
 programme make one composition ; but for a 
 Brahms symphony, which is purely sensuous, a 
 programme is superfluous. This explains why all 
 the best opersis are comic, with a tendency to satire 
 and fantasy — these being intellectual qualities. 
 To use opera solely as a vehicle of emotion is to 
 misuse the form, and needlessly to cramp your 
 power of expression. 
 
 And by emotion I do not mean grief or joy, or 
 pain or fear, but aural emotion. I do not think, 
 for instance, that the role of music is to express 
 lamentations for children sunk in the Lusitania. 
 Such a lament for strings by an English composer 
 
A NOTE ON OPERA 93 
 
 has been much praised, but I can find no merit in 
 it. To me it is only a quiet, unaggressive noise, 
 from which I gather that the composer felt sad, 
 and, for the moment, gentle. That is to say, it 
 merely conveys information and expresses grief just 
 as tears do, and is simply a roundabout way of the 
 composer coming on to the platform, ejaculating 
 Lusitania, with a sob, snivelling into a handkerchief, 
 and retiring. The reason it is nothing more is that 
 it has not been conceived aurally. A parallel from 
 another art may make this clearer. The Tate 
 Gallery used to be fuU of pictures conceived ethic- 
 ally or anecdotaUy and not visually. Pictures of 
 doctors sitting by bedsides, of lovers quarrelling, of 
 incredibly melancholy individuals " breaking the 
 news." These canvases were the production of 
 painters working emotionally ; they had no more 
 to do with visual consciousness than business 
 " memos " or maps ; in fact, their authors were 
 not visually conscious at all, they were simply 
 clerks who had learned to draw and paint instead 
 of to stenograph and typewrite, and their works 
 were as suitable to hang upon walls as invoices and 
 short stories. The painter is reaUy the musician 
 of the eye, and some understanding of this is 
 apparent in modem art ; but much modem music 
 is still in the problem-picture stage. 
 
 The modem development of opera ought to be a 
 development from abstract to concrete music as we 
 get everywhere else. Thus, whereas a singer in 
 past opera simply upheld a strand of the abstract 
 
96 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 musical pattern, the singer of the new opera — ^the 
 opera to correspond with the tone-poems of Strauss 
 and Debussy — ought to be a point of colour, a 
 musical idea or gesture in the conception or pro- 
 gramme. We get an approach to this ideal in 
 Stravinsky's use of the Ballet, which is practically 
 dumb opera, but it points the way to a proper 
 and really operatic use of the voice. Such an opera 
 wo^d be a logical development of the old abstract 
 Italian opera where the voice was just one instru- 
 ment the more. This does not mean that the voice 
 is not to be treated entirely differently to any other 
 instrument, for no instrument can be treated Hke 
 another. To give the voice nothing but recitative is 
 as absurd as to write melodies for the drum, yet 
 we are asked to look upon this as a reform. The 
 whole of modem opera, with its subordination of 
 music to drama, the music being a growling com- 
 mentary on the drama instead of beiijg the drama 
 itself, is a bastard production due more to Wagner's 
 theories and the incapacity of his followers than 
 to his practice. To write a genuine opera demands 
 extraordinary intellectual endowment, finding ex- 
 pression naturally by music ; this is asking some- 
 thing quite different from the purely musical en- 
 dowment of men hke Brahms and Mendelssohn. 
 In fact, it is asking so much that without faith in 
 the unlimited capacity of the human brain we might 
 as well resign ourselves to the unmusical novels 
 of Puccini, Charpentier, Miss Smyth, and the rest* 
 In the meantime do not let us say that opera has 
 
A NOTE ON OPERA 97 
 
 been reformed. It has simply ceased being a string 
 of musical nmnbers written for their own sake and 
 to show the beauty of the human voice, and become 
 a melodrama floated on a current of mostly irrele- 
 vant noise. The two essentials 6f any reforrn are 
 that the music should predominate, and that it should 
 be used to illunainate ideas and human character. 
 
XVII 
 THE TECHNIQUE OF OPERA 
 
 ANYONE interested In the technique of 
 Opera — and, frankly, very -few operas have 
 any other interest — will find considerable 
 pleasure in comparing Samson and Delilah and 
 Bizet's Fair Maid of Perth with Tristan and Isolda 
 The Fair Maid of Perth strikes one at first as very 
 old-fashioned ; tt has the set pieces, duets, quartets, 
 and arias of its old Italian models, its dramatic 
 situations are very feebly and conventionally handled 
 in the music, even when compared with the work 
 of inferior composers hke Puccini, Leoncavallo, or 
 Charpentier, and are, of course, utterly insignificant 
 by the side of Wagner's dramatic moments ; but 
 how restful and pleasing it is to listen to a composer 
 who says nothing when he has nothing to say, who 
 does not think it incumbent on him to fill up every 
 page of his score with a mass of "tonage" — ^if I 
 may coin a word for verbiage in music! The 
 Mozartian method of mierely striking a chord to 
 support any explanation in recitative necessary to 
 the story has gone the way of many other good 
 
 things. It was still used by Bizet, and by Saint- 
 s' 
 
THE TECHNIQUE OF OPERA 99 
 
 Saens in Samson and Delilah, but no man calling 
 himself " modem " — ^that is, no man handcuffed to 
 the Wagnerian school — would think of stooping to 
 such siny)licity. It is as much a rule of thumb with 
 him not to do this as it was with his predecessors 
 to do it, and it is indeed characteristic of second- 
 hand minds that they should think the mere sub- 
 stitution of one formula for another to be progress. 
 It is, of course, the intellectual craving for unity 
 or " form " which has driven creative musicians Hke 
 Wagner to weave a continuous musical whole from 
 the first to the last bar of their score, but the more 
 successful they are the more necessarily the work 
 takes on the natiure of a sjmiphonic poem with an 
 explanatory (iramatic background. This I maintain 
 is what Tristan and Isolda mainly is, and therefore. 
 Incidentally, most productions are on the wrong 
 lines, inasmuch as the drama is brought too far 
 Into the foreground, and the " too sohd " flesh and 
 too apparent actions of its protagonists (in the 
 setting of the first scene, above all) get in the way 
 of the music and of the whole imaginative effect. 
 We should not see the action or actors too plainly. 
 Colour, atmosphere, and scenery should be used to 
 support the music and put the drama into such a 
 perspective as to give the whole opera the unity 
 of magic or a legend. In most productions the 
 drama is so in the foreground that the music at 
 times even sounds Uke padding, so slow is the action 
 and so long-winded some of the personages, King 
 Mark in particular. Tristan and Isolda is frequently 
 
100 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 considered to be the most perfect in form of all 
 operas, but it has no real unity since from a musical 
 point of view the drama is a disintegrating and 
 distorting factor. The music cannot take its natiural 
 shape, it cannot be built up along its own hues of 
 growth, the operation of its own architectonic laws 
 is thwarted by the necessities of the plot. Conse- 
 quently, even if we relegate the action to the back- 
 ground, we are bound to find the music shapeless, 
 with great masses of padding, while, on the other 
 hand, if we concentrate on the drama (which is 
 the normal way) the music is frequently superfluous 
 and tedious. The dilemma which confronts the 
 operatic composer is, shall the music be a background 
 to the story or the story a backgroimd to the music ? 
 Wagner's solution was the former in theory, and he 
 wove his leading motives into a sort of dim tapestry 
 hung behind the actors of the drama, with the result 
 that we get long stretches of dull drama enlivened 
 by Uttle flashes'in the tapestry ; and at the critical 
 moments when the action wakes up, the musical 
 figures woven in the tapestry suddenly stand out in 
 a blaze of colour, completely take the stage, and 
 shoulder the actors off the scene. This sudden 
 self-assertion of the music, which forms the only 
 live and valuable part of Wagner's operas, is alone 
 fatal to their artistic unity,, and it is actually quite 
 as justifiable just to drop into the theatre to hear 
 the third act of Tristan as it was to drop in to Lucia 
 di Lammermoor merely to hear Melba sing the mad 
 scene. 
 
THE TECHNIQUE OF OPERA 101 
 
 The Fair Maid of Perth is written from the 
 opposite point of view, that the story is merely an 
 excuse for the music, smd the proof that this, though 
 not the only alternative, is a better and more fruitful 
 theory can be found in the fact that no one but 
 Wagner has ever succeeded in writing a tolerable 
 opera with the other theory, and that as operas 
 (and apart from occasional moments of extra- 
 ordinary genius) even Wagner's musical prose-poems 
 are less interesting and enjoyable on the stage than 
 Samson and Delilah — the work of a man of no 
 genius, but of talent and taste. Wagner and his 
 followers have sacrificed the musical opportunities 
 offered by set pieces, trios, quartets, arias, ballets, 
 and choruses, and have gained nothing thereby 
 but a realism which is purely illusory. Nothing is 
 more certain than that musicians wiU not continue 
 to consent to being crippled in this way. Bizet's 
 Fair Maid of Perth, with all its weaknesses, is worth 
 a dozen of Madame Butterfly or Louise. It is, to 
 begin with, sincere and spontaneous, and if its lyric 
 quality is occasionally very feeble and sickly, it is 
 also now and then, as in the Intermezzo and the 
 Ballet, delightful — and it is lyricism above all 
 which needs bringing back to opera. Some critics 
 seem to think there are plenty of English composers 
 as good as Bizet, I am certain there are English 
 composers as good as and better than Charpentier ; 
 but if they begin to write operas, it is to be hoped 
 that they wiU model their work on Mozart, Bizet, 
 and Rimsky-Korsakov, not on Wagner. This 
 
102 MUSIC AND MFE 
 
 question of form Is all-important. The duet, the 
 trio, the quartet, the aria, the chorus, and the ballet 
 are the accumulated musical resources evolved by 
 centuries of effort. The modem composer should 
 not throw them all away because one musician of 
 great genius happened as a rule to be incapable of 
 using them, since they did not suit his sensation- 
 loving, unintellectual, non-operatic mind. The 
 only sort of unity that is possible or desirable in 
 opera is the unity of the imderlying idea and of 
 the musical style. To endeavour to produce a 
 melodic recitative closely imitating the inflexions 
 of human speech is the most horrible quackery that 
 ever imposed itself on a gullible world. There is 
 more operatic quality in Petroushka than in Tristan 
 and Isolda, and Stravinsky can be derived back from 
 Mozart, where you will find the same power of de- 
 tachment, the same sense of character in melody 
 and harmony, the same intellectuality. These 
 qualities are the very essence of opera, and a further 
 proof of this contention can be found in the f^ct 
 that of aU .Wagner's works the only one that for 
 its full enjoyment and appreciation needs to be 
 performed on the stage, and not merely played and 
 sung in the concert haU, is Die Meister singer. Die 
 Meistersinger is the only opera Wagner ever wrote. 
 
XVIII 
 NOTES ON THREE OPERAS 
 
 IT is doubtful whether many operas wiU long 
 survive being sung in English. There is a 
 fatuity in sounds as well as in words, though 
 we are for the most part less sensitive to the former ; 
 but the combination of the two is, I should think, 
 irresistible. However, the happy publishers of 
 men hke Puccini need not be unduly terrified, as it 
 is only possible to hear, on an average, one word in 
 five, and so a desirable obscurity still envelops the 
 meaning of many operatic creations. When this 
 obscurity lifts, the result is distinctly depressing ; 
 though it has sometimes a comic side, if you are in 
 a mood to see it. When Othello was sung in Italian 
 it might have taken a sensitive ear to teU how 
 insincere and superficial was the Hymn of Hate 
 which closes the second act, and is sung by Othello 
 and lago kneeling ; but its first performance in 
 English will reveal at once that element of unsound- 
 ness and hollow swagger which Verdi never qmte 
 grew out of. Othello also suffers from the fact that 
 the plot makes great demands on our credulity, 
 Shakespeare himself is guilty of one atrocity which 
 
104 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 mars the last act of the opera when Desdemona, 
 having been snaothered, comes to life again, and 
 then is so inconsiderate as to die without apparent 
 reason. Then anybody but a hopeless fool would 
 have seen through the sort of lago we get on the 
 stage in a second — and we must remember that 
 Othello is supposed to be a successful general, 
 that is to say, a hard-headed man able to outwit 
 his enemies. Mr. Frederick Austin has been 
 praised for playing an uncommonly unexaggerated 
 lago, but this only shows how bad our operatic 
 traditions are, for Mr. Austin's lago is still a 
 thousand times too obviously cunning and diabolical. 
 The lagos of this world do not go about with " be- 
 hold this scheming devil " written in every gesture 
 and expression ! Is it done for fear the family 
 circle, inexperienced in villains, may mistake lago 
 for the hero's best friend ? One feels ultimately, 
 however, that Verdi conceived his lago on these 
 grotesque hues, and that therefore the drama is 
 hopeless, and we had better resign ourselves to 
 being amused instead of being moved : only we 
 cannot dismiss Othello as we can, for instance, 
 dismiss The Girl of the Golden West, because Verdi 
 was capable now and then of real intense music, 
 and in the last act of Othello he reaches it, to our 
 extreme pleasure. We are then able to look back 
 more tolerantly and recognize the unusual force 
 and vigour often shown by Verdi in the previous 
 three acts. 
 
 The Girl of the Golden West is a good entertain- 
 
NOTES ON THREE OPERAS 105 
 
 ment, which is more than I can say for Puccini's 
 other operas. It ougnt to have been a great suc- 
 cess. Musically it is beyond the pale : it has no 
 feeling or imagination, nothing but the shallowest 
 artifice, the most transparent trickery. Yet if 
 trickery, it is not the most offensive trickery. 
 Puccini does not besmirch everybody and every- 
 thing with treacle, and though it is as easy to be 
 sloppy in music as in words, and Minnie's Bible- 
 class gives him a great opportunity, he never 
 descends to the depths of The Professor's Love 
 Story. What is so striking is the complete absence 
 of sincerity in the music. It is all gesture, with a 
 hand on the heart and an eye on the box-office. 
 There is a note on the programme by Puccini's 
 publishers repeating the old tag that the music is 
 a " continuous commentary on the action." This 
 orchestral commentary habit has become the worst 
 feature in modem opera. It has degenerated into 
 a mere formula to save original thinking, and its 
 main use now seems to be to palm off long stretches 
 of dullness by continually whisking before your 
 ears one or two of what the composer thinks to 
 be his best tunes. The first two acts of Louise 
 offer one of the worst examples of this trick, but I 
 also defy anyone to tell me the meaning of the 
 orchestral commentary in the first act of The Girl 
 of the Golden West during the dialogue between the 
 Sheriff and Minnie. The orchestra would be just 
 as well employed in shuffling their chairs about. 
 The play is an amusing melodrama well performed. 
 
106 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 The Sheriff well-acted is a delightful creation — 
 the sort of thing Dickens might have done if he had 
 written cowboy tales. Then there is the cowboy 
 who reads aloud a letter from home : " Your poor 
 old grandmother is no more — ^Whisky 1 " And the 
 heroine who sits on a barrel full of gold at the end 
 of the first act and murmurs, " Oh, Hell 1 " as the 
 curtain falls. All this is quite charming, and no 
 doubt there is more of it if we could hear it. The 
 hbretto makes no large demands on our simplicity. 
 All the material for a plain, poignant tale is there, 
 and a composer of genius could make it real and 
 intensely moving. But these Italian composers 
 have no heart and no imagination ; they simply 
 thump their chests and are full of gesticulations. 
 Moussorgsky's Boris Godounov is a striking 
 contrast. Transparent sincerity and emotional 
 force combine to make this a magnificent, stimu- 
 lating work, though I never expect to hear these 
 choruses sung with the verve and violence I should 
 Uke. In the scene of- the Revolt, Moussorgsky 
 soars utterly beyond Verdi, Puccini, Charpentier, 
 and all other gesticulators." It is an opera that 
 makes us feel how much more we English have in 
 common with the Russian people than with any 
 other nation in Europe 
 
XIX 
 
 THE MAGIC FLUTE 
 
 AS a manifestation of pure genius The Magic 
 Flute would be liard to beat. It is the joy of 
 all musicians and the despair of all com- 
 posers. From the first note of the overture to the 
 final fall of the curtain there is not a dull moment, 
 not an miinspired bar. It is a haven of delight in 
 which one Uves, withdrawn from care and depression, 
 for a few hours. To produce this exquisite master- 
 piece with excellence at any time is a genuine public 
 benefit which, judging from the crowded houses it 
 often draws, is realized by many. The Magic Flute is 
 classic in the sense that it has that serene and magical 
 beauty of perfection marred by no strain of technique 
 imable to cope with vision, of disordered imagination, 
 of unequal senses and faculties discordantly yoked. 
 It has the effortless ease, the limpid spontaneity, the 
 serene and heavenly beauty of a Greek temple under 
 a blue Attic sky. There Is shade in that temple 
 as well as the transparent sunshine In which it is 
 bathed, but the shade is luminous j and it is beauti- 
 ful as grief is beautiful, as death is beautiful in that 
 wonderfully proportioned way of vision we have 
 
 107 
 
108 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 learned to call Greek. Somewhere in it a note of 
 sadness is touched, how or where is imperceptible, 
 but the result is serene and perfect, as is that figure 
 of Death which is sculptured on a column of the 
 Temple of Diana in the British Museum, a figure so 
 lovely that it brings tears to the eyes of the beholder. 
 The libretto has been the butt of many wits. But 
 I Uke it. A " tissue of absurdities " has no repulsion 
 for me. I do not want a reason for every exit, nor 
 do I mind the terrible but anaemic serpent dying ' 
 and the hero swooning at the sight of three lovely 
 ladies so that they can sing a trio undisturbed. 
 What is irritating to me is a logic that draws atten- 
 tion to itself and then breaks down, or a chromo- 
 Uthographic Italian love-tale like Cavalleria Rusticana 
 or Pagliacci, in which hearts are torn to tatters with 
 shrieks of calico. The Hbretto of The Magic Flute 
 is not unreasonable, it is simply beyond reason. 
 What could be more preposterous than Papageno, 
 the bird-catcher ; yet his every note and action is 
 a delight. Love, adventure, humour, danger, trial, 
 religion, success, and joy are combined in a wholly 
 inconsequent manner, but stiU they are combined. 
 It has passages of whimsicality, seriousness, and 
 sense ; and, though incredible and perhaps intoler- 
 able without the music, yet it gave Mozart enough 
 to put his whole soul into it and lift it to a work 
 of art of the most lofty and imperishable beauty. 
 
XX 
 
 LOUISE 
 
 ONE of the things which make me almost 
 Ic^e heart is the immense popularity of 
 Louise. Louise at Covent Garden, in French, 
 with a pantomime transformation scene of the 
 dawn in Paris at the foot of Montmartre, had a 
 certain atmosphere of strangeness and suspected 
 naughtiness which one would expect to attract a 
 large class ; but Louise in English, and without 
 the transformation scene, surely it would be un- 
 pardonable if that should go down ! However, 
 down it goes, while immeasurably superior works 
 such as Otello and The Seraglio have been failures, 
 both in London and in the provinces. The reason 
 did not lie in the production, for Otello was one of 
 the finest productions Sir Thomas Beecham had 
 given us ; the ensemble was superb, every part 
 was well cast, and the setting was a genuine artistic 
 effort. The Seraglio was also a beautiful produc- 
 tion. The setting of Louise, on the other hand, 
 was just a piece of hack-work by a few carpenters 
 and scene-painters, though there was no fault to 
 
 find with the cast. Apart from the story there is 
 
 109 
 
110 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 only one other element to be reckoned with — and 
 it is one that many opera-goers seem habitually 
 to leave out of account — ^namely, the music. 
 
 In opera, to my mind, the music is the thing. 
 This may be an old-fashioned idea, hke the idea 
 that poetry must be Judged as poetry and not 
 accepted as mystical and marvellous because it tells 
 us some such fat platitude as that the earth is 
 round, or makes some unintelligible statement such 
 as " I am the cosine of the angle of God." Now 
 the music of Louise is bosh, it is absolute bunkum ; 
 that is a fair and unexaggerated statement. I 
 would ask anyone who cannot believe this to go 
 to a performance and close his eyes and listen 
 intently to the music, and ask himself honestly, 
 does it ever mean anything, does it ever delight, 
 or heighten or quicken any emotion whatsoever ? 
 Of comse, one cannot expect the non-musician to 
 perceive the mass of threadbare Wagnerian cUchis, 
 the utter lack of any note personal to Charpentier, 
 but the complete absence of musical " ear " in the 
 composer can surely be felt. There is absolutely 
 nothing^for, the musician. One hears every note 
 coming half an hour ahead and wishes despairingly 
 that something would go wrong and stop it. The 
 harmonies not only belong to the old, soiled stock- 
 in-trade of two dead generations, but are dished 
 out mechanically, empty of all feeling. Further, 
 there is not a tune from beginning to end. Some 
 people will say, " Oh, but Charpentier was not 
 trying to write tunes, he was following Wagner- 
 
LOUISE 111 
 
 and writing a logical music-drama." Now, this 
 is a fallacy. Wagner's operas are stuffed with 
 magnificent tunes, and Wagner's best work was 
 done when he forgot all about his theories and let 
 his drama stand still while he poured out a flood 
 of sensuous music in a mood of lyrical exaltation. 
 There are huge chimks of dullness in Wagnejr's 
 operas, while his melodic recitative seems as if it 
 would go on for ever, but we forgive these because 
 of the lyrical bits — and remember Wagner had got 
 so much stanaina that sometimes, as in Tristan and 
 Isolda, the lyrical bit lasts throughout a whole act. 
 But the music of Louise is one vast chunk of diill- 
 ness, so that one prays that somebody, preferably 
 a large tenor, may fall through the drum or into 
 the tuba. 
 
 I have racked my brains to discover the reason 
 of the popularity of Louise, and I have come to 
 the conclusion that the attraction is the-tale, which 
 is the pleasing story of a girl flying frona her home 
 to her lover. The theme in itself is nothing \ every- 
 thing depends on how Charpentier, who wrote Ids 
 own libretto, looks at it j and unfortunately he 
 regards it without passion, without the fantastic 
 and bitter hate which we are awaiting some genius 
 to express in music, and even without tenderness. 
 In short, Louise is the musical counterpart of such 
 books as The Christian. The music fluctuates 
 between dullness and insincere melodrama ; that 
 is why I called it bunkum. 
 
 I am convinced from observation that the music 
 
112 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 plays quite a secondary part in the appreciation 
 of the majority of our opera audiences. Even 
 people who are genuine music-lovers, and in the 
 habit of listening to absolute music, seem to forget 
 all about it when they go to the opera. They are 
 looking for a tale or a moral. Well, there may be 
 something in Louise for the moralist, the social 
 worker, and the parent of adolescents. There 
 may be people who don't know that girls should 
 have lovers. But to the people who want to hear 
 music, I say emphatically, stop away ; and if you 
 d(J go, and find you Uke it, put on sackcloth and 
 ashes and Usten to Beethoven and Brahms and 
 Debussy and Rimsky-Korsakov and Wagner and 
 Delius and Arthur Sullivan and " The Girl I left 
 Behind Me," and sing tunes to yourself every 
 morning in your bath until you get to feel what 
 is wrong with Louise, imtil half an hour of that 
 miserable tootling, which modem instruction in 
 harmony and orchestration would enable Lord 
 Curzon or Lord Northchffe to write, drives you 
 crazy ; for then, and then only, will you be a man 
 who hears, and not a mere receptacle of stray 
 sounds. 
 
XXI 
 THE VILLAGE ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 A WELL-KNOWN critic, writing of the first 
 real production by Sir Thomas Beecham at 
 Covent Gardgn of Mr. Delius's Village Romeo 
 and Juliet, remarked : " The whole opera is on the 
 shoulders of the two lovers. The librettist has made 
 it impossible for them to be dramatic, but the 
 singers did all that was possible." In other words, 
 then, they did nothing ? Would that it had been 
 so I The opinion I have quoted is more or less the 
 opinion one most frequently hears on the subject of 
 Mr. Delius's opera, but it seems to me to spring from 
 a very Umited conception of the possibilities of the 
 operatic form. Is it not curious that a critic, having 
 observed that a librettist had made it impossible for 
 his characters to be " dramatic," should nevertheless 
 praise the singers for an attempt to fly in the face of 
 the author's intentions, an attempt which he says 
 is doomed to failure, for it is " impossible " ? 
 Obviously, by " impossible " he can only mean 
 impossible without turning the author's libretto into 
 something different, and for this he is prepared to 
 praise the singers, since he evidently considers the 
 8 
 
114 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 author to be absolutely wrong in not wanting his 
 work to be " dramatic." So we see that our critic 
 has a preconceived idea of what a librettist should 
 do, and the fact that Mr. DeHus deliberately chose a 
 hbretto that was not what-^n the opinion of our 
 critic — a libretto ought to be/|*ves him no food for 
 reflection. He simply thinks that Mr. Delius does 
 not know what he is about. 
 
 One might accept such a conclusion in the case of 
 a young and inexperienced composer, but even then 
 it would be rash. With Mr. Delius it is more thau 
 rash. When a mature composer chooses a libretto, 
 he chooses it (unless he is suffering from softening 
 of the brain) because it appeals to his genius, because 
 it offers4cope to his own especial and peculiar gifts. 
 He does not want a libretto that would sdtisfy Mr. 
 William Archer as " weU^constructed," or Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw as " sensible," or the Bishop of Lon- 
 don as " moral," or Lord Northcliffe as " popular." 
 He will take a libretto that is none of these things, a 
 libretto that flies in the face of all the supposed rules 
 as to what a libretto ought to be, provided only that 
 it appeals to his musical imagination and gives him a 
 chance to do what he wants to do. Therefore, it is, 
 I contend, absolute folly to criticize a hbretto before 
 a composer has worked on it, for it is hke criticizing 
 an architect from a pile of bricks before the house is 
 built. An opera is not a libretto set to music ; the 
 libretto bears rather the same relation to the com- 
 pleted opera that words do to a poem. The words 
 in themselves may appear to be good words or they 
 
THE VILLAGE ROMEO AND JULIET 116 
 
 may appear to be bad words, they may be euphoni- 
 ous or ugly ; but we can form no idea from them 
 alone whether the poem will be good or bad, or even 
 very definitely what the poem will be like. 
 
 Of course, I am far from saying that the composer 
 can give to a hbretto any twist he pleases or that he 
 can easily find an3H;hing like his ideal libretto. What 
 I am saying is that the right way to criticize the 
 libretto of an opera is to point out where it frustrated 
 the composer's efforts, where it failed to give him a 
 raison d'etre for the effect he wanted, where, in short, 
 it did not bear the strain which he put upon it. To 
 criticize it for being something the composer, obvi- 
 ously, never wanted it to be, something he had 
 deliberately avoided, is quite irrelevant and foolish ; 
 but it is the criticism one most commonly hears of 
 a Hbretto for the simple reason that critics seem 
 to have only one ideal, and that is the " dramatic " 
 libretto. 
 
 The Village Romeo and Juliet is a romantic love- 
 story from the German of Gottfried KeUer. There 
 are two romantic farmers who encroach on a dead 
 man's land. There is an enigmatic, sorrowful, 
 menacing figure called The Black Fiddler. There 
 are two children who grow up to be lovers. There is 
 a coimtry fair at a small town in the mountains. 
 There is Paradise Valley. Although the opera has 
 only three acts, there are seven scenes. It has a 
 strange, dreamy quality which is no doubt partly 
 what appealed to Mr. Delius, for it has certainly 
 stimulated him to write some of his finest music. 
 
116 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 The lovers are strangely passive. This is to my 
 mind a beautiftil characteristic. They pass through 
 the scenes of the opera like the children of a dream. 
 It is the love of mediaeval times rather than love as 
 operatic composers know it — ^that love which, Uke a 
 malady of the flesh, took hold of the patient so that 
 he forgot aU the duties of this Ufe and went his way 
 with eyes that saw nothing of the world around him. 
 How ridiculous it is to complain that this story is not 
 dramatic ! One might as weU complain of Bur- 
 gundy for not sparkling. The fact is, our operatic 
 public has got so used to fat tenors brandishing card- 
 board swords, and to daggers, poison, and revolvers, 
 and to abductions, seductions, and desertions, that 
 they do not know what tO make of such a .strange, 
 inert, flowerless passion as that of SaM and Vrenchen. 
 Unfortunately, the Hbretto owes more to Mr. Delius 
 than it does to its author, who has failed to give us 
 the feeling that the tragedy of the lovers was inevit- 
 able. The music convinces us while we are in the 
 theatre, but what we can hear of the text rather 
 disillusions us, for it does not reaUy belong to the 
 same world. It is not, in fact, a story that satisfies 
 the imagination ; there is a touch of early nineteenth 
 century romantic falsity about it. It will just bear 
 the interpretation Mr. Delius gives it, and that is, 
 unfortunately, aU a composer can expect to find 
 unless he is his own librettist. Biit it would be 
 difficult to overpraise the music. The reticence and 
 briefness of the love-passages between Sali and 
 Vrenchen are extraordinarily refreshing, and in 
 
THE VILLAGE ROMEO AND JULIET 117 
 
 sensitiveness of outline and in harmonic colouring 
 the music of modem Italian opera with its crude and 
 blatant emotionalism will not bear comparison with 
 it. The Village Romeo and Juliet may not become 
 a very popular work, but it is an opera that will 
 wear better than three-fourths of the operas that 
 are popular to-day, although it will always depend 
 more than most on the way it is produced. 
 
XXII 
 THE CRITIC 
 
 PERHAPS the highest praise one can give 
 Sir Charles Stanford's opera is to say that 
 the one Irishman has added to the wit of the 
 other ; that is, that the opera makes an even more 
 enjoyable evening's entertainment than the play 
 itself. The libretto, which has been arranged by 
 Mr. L. Cairns James and the composer, follows 
 Sheridan's text literally, and is more important than 
 the music to the resulting opera. But the music 
 is adequate, and in parts charming, both musically 
 and in its appropriateness to the spirit of the text. 
 One of the chief examples of both intrinsic musical 
 merit and subtle appreciation of the words is the 
 really delightful piece of recitative sung by Tilburina 
 on her first entrance — ^that inimitable catalogue 
 of the flowers which greet the rising sun. Sir 
 Charles Stanford has struck exactly the right note 
 in this, and I fancy the most ardent Sheridan 
 enthusiast would be obUged to admit that the 
 piquancy of Tilburina's monologue had been con- 
 siderably enhanced. In fact, in my opinion, the 
 tragedy rehearsed goes very much better as an opera 
 
THElCRlTtC lis 
 
 -A 
 
 rehearsed, if only because the modem opera to which 
 the public is accustomed— the opera of Puccini, 
 Gounod, Verdi, and others — is even more nonsen- 
 sical and idiotic than the average, modem drama. 
 Indeed, there is no need to confine these epithets 
 to Puccini, Verdi, and Gounod, as we had an ex- 
 cellent example of operatic absurdity given us on 
 the night of the first performance of The Critic 
 in Debussy's L'Enfant Prodigue, wMch is as con- 
 ventional and ridiculous and tediously uninteresting 
 as the most devoted lover of Italian opera could 
 wish. The musician can detect in the orchestral 
 writing some characteristics of the Debussy to be ; 
 nevertheless, no one could dream that the man 
 who wrote L'Enfant Prodigue at twenty-two would 
 write PelUas et Melisande at forty; and PelUas et 
 Melisande is still far ahead of the pubhc taste 
 in opera, while MaeterMnck has long been quite 
 popular. Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Christopher 
 Hatton, for instance, are much funnier operaticaUy 
 than they wotdd be dramatically, and Sir Charles 
 Stanford has ever37where shown his ability to rise 
 to his opportunities. Very little of his effect is got 
 by actual musical quotations, the resources of 
 which are very Hmited, as nine out of every ten 
 persons in the audience will never notice them ; 
 he relies chiefly on imitation of the usual operatic 
 methods. Little, if any, exaggeration is needed, 
 and the satire is got more through the ensemble 
 than by the music itself.- There is nothing, for 
 instance, musically Uke Moussorgsky's delineation 
 
120 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 of Jthe rich and the poor Jew, where the actual 
 musical phrases themselves convey an impression 
 of the two men as vividly as any words or pencil 
 could do. One of the best things is the chorus of 
 Leicester and the garrison of Tilbury Fort, " We 
 are — aU resolved — ^to conquer, or be free," where 
 by merely following the well-established Italian 
 model of an operatic chorus a supremely comic 
 effect is achieved. Another fine thing is the ensuing 
 prayer to Mars. The whole of this section is a 
 delicious satire on " last-ditchers," and mere 
 patriotic sound and fury, but I am doubtful how 
 a popular audience would take it, though its success 
 on the first night was immense. 
 
 The duet between Whiskerandos and Tilburina, 
 and the latter's mad scene in white satin are alto- 
 gether admirable. It is to be regretted that in the 
 adaptation of the play as a libretto, the first scene 
 of The Critic, including Sir Fretful Plagiary, has 
 been cut out ; because the opera is none too long, 
 and, apart from this omission, we have in it the 
 whole virtue of Sheridan's play, and it would have 
 been safe to assert that had we got our National 
 Repertory Theatre, it would be as opera that most 
 of us would wish to see The Critic. 
 
XXIII 
 CESAR FRANCK 
 
 FRANCK, once my favourite composer, died 
 in 1890; and Ambroise Thomas, the Director 
 of the Paris Conservatoire, straightway took 
 to his bed to avoid having to go to the fimeral 
 of a colleague who was such a nonentity. For 
 Franck was a nonentity ; he had been organist at 
 St. Clothilde for thirty-two years, he gave lessons 
 from eight in the morning till nine at night, he had 
 written music that no one ever seemed to want to 
 hear, and he had been made in his old age Chevalier 
 of the Legion d'Honneur for his painstaking and 
 meritorious punctuality as Professor of the Organ 
 at the Paris Conservatoire. He was married and 
 had children ; he was a good Catholic and a pro- 
 digious worker, who had to rise every morning at 
 five in order to find a couple of hours free for com- 
 position. In fact, he was the very model of what 
 a good bourgeois should be, but never ,is. One 
 blemish only could be discovered in the pure 
 respectability of the man — ^he was a Catholic, but 
 a Catholic whom rumour compared to Fra Angelico 
 
122 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 and Pascal. As a composer Franck simply did not 
 exist, the world knew him not ; and when his friends 
 obtained a performance of his Symphony on 
 February 17, 18-89, Gounod was heard to pro- 
 nounce in a loud, authoritative voice at its conclu- 
 sion : " C'est I'affirmation de Vimpuissance poussee 
 jusqu'au dogme," and the public let it rest at that. 
 As for Franck, on those rare occasions when his 
 works were performed, he followed the music in 
 his thought, withdrawn into an inner world of his 
 imagination, and he never seemed to be aware 
 either of the coldnegs of the public or of the faults 
 and shortcomings of the players which were gener- 
 ally conspicuous. Accustomed to" the fussiness of 
 most coniposers over the renderings of their master- 
 pieces, some wiU find this not only extraordinary, 
 but incredible. 
 
 There is only one book on Cesar Franck in 
 English, aiid that is the translation of his life- by 
 d'Indy ; but d'Indy is a man with a bee in his 
 bonnet, and is more intent on trpng to prove 
 the religious orthodoxy of the Master than ~ on 
 revealing his baffling personality. How baffling it 
 is I shall now try to show. D. G. Mason, the 
 American critic, describes Franck as "a devout 
 mystic, an obscure and saintly man." " In the 
 presence of this devout mystic the sounds of cities 
 and peoples fade away and we are alone with 
 the soul and God." Saint-Sa6ns describes his 
 work as " musique cathedralesque." Arthur Coquard 
 
CtSAR FRANCK 123 
 
 Compares him with Fra Angelico, and refers to 
 his " celestial melodies, his harmonic originality." 
 Others compare him to Shakespeare, Bach, Maeter- 
 linck, Amiel, and a mediaeval monk. Some swear 
 to his orthodoxy, others to his partiality to R«nan. 
 There is miiversal testimony to his powerful intellect 
 and equal testimony to his touching naiveU. One 
 French writer says : " II avail une intelligence ouverte 
 d tout, un besoin de nouveauU et d' investigation que 
 Hen ne pouvait satisfaire, neanmoins il etait par 
 caractere un homme d'un autre age." He was an 
 infant prodigy who composed aU his great music 
 after he was fifty, and there is the genuine anecdote 
 told by his son, who, on being disturbed one even- 
 ing by constant bursts of laughter from his father 
 while he was reading, asked him what the book was 
 that entertained him so much ; to which Franck 
 replied : " It's Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I 
 find it very amusing." 
 
 Now when we come to his music we find, 
 instead of the simple saint, the genial bourgeois 
 husband, the sympathetic friend and teacher — 
 the " Pater Seraphicus " of his pupils — a passion- 
 ate violence, an almost blasphemous audacity, a 
 sort of titanic defiance of God and Ufe, and 
 an agony of soul the like of which has never 
 before been expressed in literature, music, or art. 
 Nothing is more remarkable, nothing is more 
 intriguing, nothing is more startling in aU the 
 biographies of men than the abysmal gloom, the 
 
124 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 truly soul-rending despair expressed in the music 
 of this man whose life was one long smiling devotion 
 to a daily rovmd of humdrum duties. The truth is 
 that Franck was one of the most astounding person- 
 alities^n the history of the world ; he was heroic 
 and epic, and beside him even the strong-wiUed 
 Wagner seems like a puling child. UnMke Wagner, 
 he abused no one, had no contempt for the world 
 which ignored him, but was tolerant, broad-minded, 
 S3nnpathetic, and could stand absolutely alone. 
 The thoughts that lurked within that wonderful 
 head — ^that head of which Jacques Chevalier writes : 
 " Voyez ce masque formidable ramassSe dans sa vision 
 intirieure, vision douloureuse car die contracte les 
 sourcils et la bouche mais vision colossale — alors vous 
 direz qu'ily a I'infini dans ce crdne " — did not permit 
 a man to be troubled as to whether his fellow-men 
 thought his music good or bad. He stood alpove 
 such petty considerations. In the regions in which 
 he breathed there were other things to trouble a 
 man's sqjil, and he has spoken of those things in 
 the most passionate accents in which it has yet 
 been given to any man to speak. No one has ever 
 conceived such idiosyncratic themes ; they are 
 mostly short phrases of Indescribable character, 
 but they are Uke nothing else in music. There is 
 something superhmnan and supernatural about 
 them. In fact, there is an intensity, an exaltation 
 in his music that is hardly of this world. Franck 
 has been rightly declared one of the three great 
 
CfiSAR FRANCK 125 
 
 founders of modem France ; but the revolution 
 he accomplished in French music was a spiritual 
 one. After Franck, men could no longer breathe 
 in the atmosphere of Gounod, Ambroise Thomas, 
 DeUbes, and the rest of the chiffon-and-sugar school ; 
 nevertheless, he remains an isolated phenomenon, 
 he is not in the line of present-day development — 
 except in harmony, where he was an innovator. 
 The most characteristic modem French composers, 
 such as Debussy and Ravel, owe practically nothing 
 to him ; and the reason is that modem music is 
 becoming more and more sensuous and concrete, 
 more and more susceptible to colour, attitude, and 
 what we may call atmosphere, and is greatly 
 inspired by nature, from the Water Wagtails of 
 C57ril Scott to the floating clouds, the falling rain, 
 the wind-dimmed pools reflected in the beautiful 
 mirror-music of Debussy. Franck had none of this 
 susceptibility ; he was passionate and intense, but 
 not sensuous ; in this respect he resembles Carlyle, 
 Ibsen, and Bach, and differs from Keats and Wagner. 
 It is in the painter El Greco, however, that we find 
 his closest affinity. One cannot imagine El Greco 
 taking any interest in nature ; he seems wholly 
 oblivious to it, and a dry consuming fire of the will 
 seems to bum in his pictures, just as it bums in 
 Franck's music. This is no doubt the reason why 
 Franck has been called mediaeval and is what 
 distinguishes him from Beethoven, whom he much 
 resembles in moral passion and intrinsic ardour, 
 
126 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 but with the difference that Beethoven had a 
 pagan joy in beauty and a Hvely feeling for 
 nature. Franck will never become popular; he is 
 for the few whose spiritual ardour surpasses any 
 capacity for sensuous enjoyment and whose so- 
 journ on this earth must therefore inevitably be 
 tortured and full of bitter unrest. 
 
XXIV 
 A CONCERT AT THE FRONT 
 
 IN a small town in France, a few miles behind 
 the front line, turning out of the square past 
 the military policeman with a rifle slung across 
 his shoulder, who regulates the traffic with the 
 calm precision of a London constable, you will 
 find, a few hundred yards down a narrow paved 
 road, the most important building for many miles 
 around. It is a large, ramshackle contrivance 
 knocked together by Tommies from odds and ends 
 of timber and pieces of fibrous roofing. Dark, 
 patchedi and almost flapping like a hideous scare- 
 crow in the wind, it will hold about eight hundred 
 men, and is called, with the Army's mordant 
 humour, " The Pavilion." 
 
 One would have expected the British or Australian 
 soldier to have borrowed one of the commoner 
 music-hall names and called it The Empire or The 
 Palace, but he happened to hit upon " Pavilion " and 
 so set the passer-by thinking of Arthurian legends, 
 of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, of the silk-tasselled 
 pavilions of Saladin, while confronting him with a 
 
 127 
 
128 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 real war pavilion as fantastic and extraordinary 
 as that of any romance. A few yards up the 
 road is a large white board with the Inscription 
 in black: — 
 
 " Forward of this point Is the Ever-ready Gas Zone. 
 Box respirators must always be carried," 
 
 and almost opposite, protruding from an uneasy- 
 looking house, is a roughly scrawled sign-board 
 under the name Veuve Marie Colbert, which mutters 
 pathetically into the street, " Eggs, postcards, and 
 chips." Day and night the gims are rumbling, 
 sometimes broken and absent-mindedly, sometimes 
 in a determined roar; and the sky will often be 
 dotted with the bursts of " Archies," scattering 
 round passing Boche machines ; but no matter 
 what the strafing or what the situation, at a certain 
 hour soldiers will troop in from all around and fill 
 the Pavilion to its uttermost. 
 
 The price of admission is one franc for officers 
 and sergeants and fifty centimes for other ranks. 
 Entering, you find four rows reserved for officers 
 and the rest of the buUding crammed with "other 
 ranks " ; you will even see heads sticking through the 
 doors when there is no more room for bodies. Sitting 
 down, you face a stage with real footlights, and 
 behind you is a cinema lantern, both being supplied 
 from a d5mamo in an adjoining sea of mud. In 
 front of the stage, squeezed as closely together as 
 possible, is a military band. You feel an intense 
 joy of anticipation tinging through the building. 
 
A CONCERT AT THE FRONT 129 
 
 The faces of the bandsmen and the audience are 
 aglow with pleasure when a thick-set man stands 
 up, puts his comet to his mouth, and the evening 
 begins with a rousing march. The band plays 
 fairly well, but with such enormous gusto as to 
 obliterate all defects and paralyse with a crushing 
 offensive all criticism in the audience. The show 
 is very similar in scheme to that given by pierrot 
 troupes at seaside towns in the summers before 
 the war, only incomprehensibly better. But 
 perhaps its superiority lies in the stupendous 
 verve with which everything is done. Again and 
 again and again the performers triumph over their 
 material. They are nine soldiers in the permanent 
 r61es of one pianist, two girls, and six men, and 
 they always open with some chorus, generally from 
 an old London musical comedy. Then follow two 
 ragtime duets, one sentimental song with Ughts 
 lowered — ^generally about parting from some girl ; 
 then a comic song, as a rule curiously antique, 
 such as " I want to sing in Opera " ; then a recita- 
 tion or dramatic scene of their own concoction — 
 most excellently done this, as a rule ; then a roster 
 of verses ad lib. to a sort of comic chorus such as 
 " The Night that the Old Cow died," or " When we 
 sat upon the Baby on the Shore." This is the 
 item where aU the gibes at quartermaster-sergeants 
 and men in "cushy" jobs and innumerable jokes 
 are got off, typical couplets being : 
 
 And the Australians stood at attention. 
 As an officer passed by. 
 
130 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Solemn Chorus : The night that the old cow died. 
 
 And an anti-aircraft gun 
 Got its first shot on a Hun 
 
 The night that, etc. 
 
 The two jokes that brought down the house 
 when I was last there were the remark of one of 
 the girls, extraordinarily well made-up, who comes 
 in simpering, and flashing an engagement ring, 
 and says, " I'm engaged to a soldier." " Oh, 
 what is he ? " " He's an officer in the Y.M.C.A." ; 
 and the reply of a jovial captain who comes jauntily 
 on to the stage, and meeting a depressed subaltern, 
 slaps him on the back, with " Hullo ! old man, 
 where are you now ? " " I'm attached to the 
 R.F.C. Where are you ? " " Oh, I'm attached to 
 the base." 
 
 The most popular item on each occasion was the 
 ragtime duet, really excellently sung, which was 
 always clapped, whistled, and cheered to the echo. 
 This should be comforting to those who maintain, 
 Uke myself, that the natural uncultivated taste in 
 music is better than the large commercial product 
 which the public is induced to consume — for there 
 is no doubt whatever that most ragtimes, with 
 their s3mcopation, vivid rhj^hms, and frequently 
 attractive modulations, are the best music that 
 many people hear, and far superior to what singers 
 of ragtime would probably refer to as " high-class 
 songs," meaning the sort of unmusical twaddle 
 you may see advertised any Saturday in the Daily 
 Telegraph. 
 
A CONCERT AT THE FRONT 181 
 
 The life of the Army is, however, not conducive 
 to subtlety. Excitement and sentiment are the 
 two poles on which these entertainments hang 
 successfully. Wagner and the composer of " If 
 you were the only Boy in the World " are the tj^es 
 of musicians who could always be sure of a British 
 soldier's welcome. The bands seem to play in a 
 continuous switchback between /the "1812" Over- 
 ture and " The Rosary " — ^that is to say, there is 
 always either a tremendous row or something "to 
 cry over." Even so the commonplace, stupid 
 scoring of the music that mostly gets played by 
 brass bands is far beneath the level of the audience, 
 which is quick to appreciate anything simple and 
 striking. 
 
XXV 
 
 STRAVINSKY 
 
 STRAVINSKY is the young man's god, and 
 it must be granted that in music the yoyng 
 men have generally been right in their 
 judgment. To-day, however, things are changed 
 considerably, the pubMc runs after anything that 
 can claim to be weird and novel, and as soon as 
 anything weirder and more novel can be found 
 the less weird is precipitately abandoned. It is a 
 disastrous atmosphere for the real artist, who is 
 apt unconsciously, if he have originality, to force 
 the pace, to overstrain his powers instead of letting 
 them develop naturally. I feel that something of 
 this sort has happened to Stravinsky, whose music 
 I have always admired. The Nightingale is, un- 
 doubtedly, a fine conception. It is the nearest 
 approach to what I have always conceived the 
 operatic form to be that we have ever had ; it is 
 far more of a true opera than any of the long-winded 
 musical melodramas of Richard Wagner. The 
 Nightingale is a highly fantastic, imaginative work ; 
 we never have that sense of discomfort from the 
 
 discrepancy between the real and the represented 
 
 132 
 
STRAVINSKY 133. 
 
 which haunts all the operas of Wagner and the 
 Wagnerians, and this is because Stravinsky has 
 understood the peculiar scope of the theatre for an 
 imaginative reality that has nothing to do with this 
 world as it appears in ordinary life. Compare the 
 chant of the Fisherman in the woodland grove by 
 the sea, with which The Nightingale begins and 
 closes, with one of the most beautiful effects Wagner 
 ever got — ^the piping of the Shepherd in the third 
 act of Tristan — and you will notice first of all that 
 the sea in Wagner's opera is the sea of the coast of 
 Brittany ; you can in imagination hear its breakers 
 rolling on the coast at the foot of Tristan's castle 
 and, presently, the vessel which bears Isolde will 
 come in sight. But the sea by that grove where 
 the Fisherman sings is no sea that ever was on 
 earth, nor do you know if its breakers roll, or if 
 it be transparent and solid as glass. Again, the 
 piping of the Shepherd, sad and haunting though 
 it be, is yet warm and human, and suggestive of all 
 the warm breathing things of earth, of the Shepherd's 
 human longing and of the Shepherd's mate ; but 
 the Fisherman's song is abstract, void, remote. 
 We are in a world Hke the worlds of the astronomers, 
 those worlds that rotate beyond our vision in a 
 space which we conceive in our minds, intangible, 
 yet vivid with a reality as startling as that of Euclid. 
 Now this is something new in music, and it is in 
 this direction that music is going to develop im- 
 measurably. Certainly the future for Opera lies 
 in its suitability as a medium for this kind of 
 
134 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 imagination, although we have to face the fact that 
 far more people are emotionally sympathetic than 
 imaginative, and that therefore the emotional 
 operas will always probably have the stronger 
 appeal. 
 
 Now, it must be said on the other hand that 
 Stravinsky has not advanced anj^thing Mke so far 
 in the mastery of the expression of his ideas as 
 Wagner. This fact is generally concealed from 
 most people by the novelty of his ideas ; but to me 
 Stravinsky technically is a babe by the side of 
 Wagner, in spite of the fooUsh adulation of his 
 followers, who are largely people incapable of much 
 discrimination and who are always talking of Stra- 
 vinsky's marvellous technique, when the truth is 
 that Stravinsky's technique, far from being mar- 
 vellous — which Wagner's was — ^is painfully in- 
 adequate to his really remarkable ideas. To any- 
 one with a little imagination it is distressing to listen 
 to parts of The Nightingale, and hear again and again 
 the music fail to get the effect that was in the 
 composer's mind. In Ustening to Parsifal, on the 
 contrary, it is quite the opposite. I have little 
 innate sympathy with Wagner's music. I hardly 
 ever want to hear it ; often I go unwillingly ; but 
 always when I do go I am confounded, swept 
 away, and completely overwhelmed by that colossal 
 genius for expression — and expression, often, of the 
 most tawdry rubbish. So impressed am I by 
 Wagner's genius that when it comes to judging 
 Parsifal I am torn by conflicting opinions. Like 
 
STRAVINSKY 135 
 
 the average audience I am deeply moved, speU- 
 bound ; but an instinct struggles within me that 
 there is something wrong, that this music is at the 
 opposite pole to the truly spiritual ; it is too silky, 
 too rich, and that even Amfortas' pain is a luxury 
 to the flesh. Whatever its defects, however, it is 
 never insincere, and that ultimately is the source 
 of its strength. 
 
 It is a matter of extreme grief to the more fan- 
 tastic of Stravinsky's Paris admirers that his ballets 
 L'Oiseau de Feu and Peiroushka should have had 
 such popular success in London. They therefore 
 pretend to despise these works, and talk impressively 
 in mysterious phrases of his more recent " Three 
 Pieces for Clarinet" — ^pieces in which Stravinsky 
 has managed to avoid expressing anjd;hing at all 
 with wonderful skill. We have it, however, on the 
 authority of M. Ansermet — ^the well-known Geneva 
 conductor who has lectured on Stravinsky's music — 
 that there is no essential difference between the 
 Stravinsky of those earlier works and the later 
 Stravinsky. M. Ansermet is quite right, and he is 
 also sound when he claims that Stravinsky's music 
 is to be heard and judged from a purely musical 
 point of view. Unfortunately, no one yet knows 
 what a " purely musical point of view " is. Can 
 we Hsten to the Tannhduser Overture from a purely 
 musical point of view ? We may begin by deter- 
 mining to hear it as pure music. We will allow 
 a certain pmrely musical charm to the " figures " 
 in which the strings weave the attractions of the 
 
186 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Venusberg, but most men will find that they cannot 
 sit through the Tannhduser Overture without getting 
 excited. Is this state produced purely by the action 
 of the music on one's physical sense, of by the idea 
 of conflict got from the programme and represented 
 musically ? I think it is got by a mixture of both, 
 for it must be remembered that when this overture 
 was first heard and its meaning was unfamiliar, 
 it was thought to be a disgusting noise. I feel that 
 the people who thought this were right. To me it 
 is a disgusting noise, and the fact that it has made 
 me so excited that I grip the arms of my seat while 
 listening to it does not make it any the less dis- 
 gusting as noise. But if we are to accept this 
 demand of certain musicians that we shall judge all 
 music purely as noise (which is about what M. 
 Ansermet means by his " purely musical point of 
 view ") Stravinsky will not fare very weU, for as 
 noise much of his music is frankly unendurable. 
 There is, for example, less that is gratifying to the 
 ear in his Cats' Cradle Songs than there is in the 
 Tannhduser Overture. The modem composer who 
 would come off best judging his music purely as 
 noise would be Debussy — all of whose noises were 
 delicious. I am not so sure that Brahms would 
 not be his most serious competitor, for Brahms, 
 who is often regarded as an austere, intellectual 
 composer, was to my mind one of the most sensuous 
 of all. At its best his music gratifies the ear far 
 more than Beethoven's. It does this by a com- 
 bination of harmonic and melodic lusciousness, and 
 
STRAVINSKY 137 
 
 it is also noticeable that his rhythmic effects are 
 sensuously gratifying and not exciting. His fond- 
 ness for s3nicopation, which is the most sensuous 
 element in rhythm, is an obvious mark of this 
 quality. Brahms is also short-winded, and never 
 produces that nervous exhilaration that comes from 
 rhj^thmic virtuosity — of which Beethoven is such 
 a master. This rhythmic virtuosity is one of the 
 surest ways of producing excitement. The Dancing 
 Dervishes can produce a high state of spiritual 
 exaltation by its means at wiU, and it is curious that 
 those two composers who command this rhythmic 
 virtuosity to the highest degree. Bach and Beethoven, 
 should have always been recognized as the most 
 spiritual and exalted. 
 
 Are we then to beMeve that moral grandeur is 
 nothing but rhythmic virtuosity ? Certainly not. 
 Stravinsky possesses a rhythmic virtuosity that is 
 truly remarkable. It is associated, no doubt, in Le 
 Sucre du Pnntemps with a spiritualistic ritual that 
 has some affinity with that of the Dancing Dervishes. 
 Here we have the ritual dance conceived in its 
 primitive religious function, but great as was my 
 admiration for Le Sucre du Printemps (I say " was," 
 for I have not heard or seen the music for years), 
 I do not think anyone would claim for it that it 
 struck that note of self -forgetful passion so character- 
 istic of Bach and Beethoven. Therefore, although 
 we can say that rhythmic virtuosity is invariably 
 stimulating, we have to acknowledge that it varies 
 in expression. My contention is that it is the 
 
 V 
 
138 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 expression, not the stimulation, that is important. 
 This is what I mean when I decry "emotional 
 music." " Emotional " music is rich in stimula- 
 tion but poor in expression, just as a dog-fight or 
 a boxing-match is. You have only to compare the 
 overture to Tannhduser with the Meistersinger 
 Quintet or the Preislied to find how very much more 
 expressive the Meistersinger music is. The great- 
 ness of Mozart, a composer whom everybody agrees 
 to be perfect — sans peur et sans reproche — consists 
 in his attaining such extraordinary expressiveness 
 with so little sense-stimulation. It is because 
 Stravinsky seems to be either consciously or un- 
 consciously striving after expressiveness rather than 
 " emotionalism " that I have felt that in opera he 
 relates back to Mozart. But of course he is more 
 " literary " than Mozart was, and he is an intellec- 
 tual moving in a society which is more widely 
 sophisticated than was the environment of Mozart. 
 There are also times when Stravinsky is a pure cari- 
 caturist, a rather cynical Dickens, and, like nearly 
 all modem artists, he is much too consciously 
 clever. I cannot help feeUng that it is unfortunate 
 for Stravinsky that he has become so cosmopolitan ; 
 he seems to be withering in too closely confined 
 and artificial an atmosphere. The soldier of his 
 Tale of the Soldier is the sort of figure that is in- 
 telligible only to a highly sophisticated people. 
 The average soldier would rightly not recognize 
 himself in that intellectual abstraction, that fan- 
 tastic figure of a caricaturing imagination. It may 
 
STRAVINSKY 139 
 
 be objected that the imagination always cari- 
 catures, and in the sense that the creative imagina- 
 tion throws a strange light upon all objects, this is 
 true ; but it may be such a light as leaves them mere 
 shallow silhouettes making fantastic and meaning- 
 less gestures, or it may be a light that, while not 
 taking anj/thing away from them as men and women, 
 shows us an unsuspected background and gives 
 them an added significance. It seems to me that 
 on the whole Stravinsky fails to enrich us in this 
 way. He amuses us, he entertains us, he is en- 
 larging the means of expression in music, and he 
 is intellectually interesting, but, though perhaps 
 imaginative and not merely fanciful, he is not pro- 
 foimdly expressive. I doubt if he will ever meet 
 here with that frenzied enthusiasm with which he 
 is acclaimed in Paris. We can be tmsted with our 
 heads if not with our hearts, while our Latin friends 
 are only too apt to get drunk on their own in- 
 telligence. 
 
XXVI 
 A MUSICAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 A POET'S ideas on poetry are always in- 
 teresting, and although the ideas of a 
 musician on music have not necessarily 
 an equal attractiveness, since he has to express 
 himself in a medium unrelated to his own, yet they 
 must always have some value. In Mr. Cyril Scott's 
 book^ there is an amount of sound sense which 
 is not alone due to his first-hand acquaintance 
 with his subject. Mr. Scott thinks, and if some 
 of his conclusions are to me thoroughly repulsive 
 they are at least his own ideas, not platitudes or 
 fashionable jargon, which is what most general 
 writing on music usually amounts to. 
 
 Mr. Scott beUeves in Romanticism as opposed to 
 Classicism and Futurism, and, accepting his defini- 
 tion, it is not difficult to agree with him. The 
 difference between a Romanticist and a Futurist 
 he neatly puts as the difference between one who 
 desires newness in all directions and one who 
 desires it in only one direction ; the former gives 
 
 ' The Philosophy of Modernism {in its connexion with Music). 
 
 Kegan Paul, is, 6d. net. 
 
 140 
 
A MUSICAL PHILOSOPHY 141 
 
 us a new beauty, but the latter merely a deformity. 
 That is to say, the Romantic artist will create a 
 new type of beauty as the Madonna of da Vinci 
 and the old women of Rembrandt were new, while 
 the Futurist wiU give us a Madonna in triangles, 
 which is new only in its angularity. Wagner, 
 for example, he says, invented new structure, new 
 harmonies, new polyphony, and new melody ; he 
 was novel in all directions, whereas the novelty of 
 the musical Futurists is whoUy harmonic, and they 
 have discarded all other factors ; therefore their 
 work, not being consistently novel, is merely de- 
 formed. Mr. Scott elsewhere compares a Clasacist 
 (and I believe this comparison has been used before) 
 to a man who starts a walking tour determined to 
 keep entirely to the roads ; a Futurist to a man who 
 determines to keep entirely off the roads ; while the 
 Romanticist is the man who follows or leaves the 
 roads as he thinks fit. 
 
 These definitions are lacking in subtlety and 
 ignore many ideas associated with the words Classic 
 and Romantic, but they are clear arid serve Mr. 
 Scott's argument effectively. There is the same 
 logical narrowness in Mr. Scott's chapter on 
 Originality as a sense. The original mind, says Mr. 
 Scott, feels discomfort when repetition is present, 
 and this is what distinguishes him from the con- 
 ventional mind which feels discomfort when repeti- 
 tion is absent ; yet Mr. Scott is conscious of the 
 inadequacy of this explanation of the original mind 
 when he asks : " How is it that a music-lover can 
 
142 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 listen with enjoyment many times to the Prelude 
 to Tristan and Isolda, and yet only once, and 
 without enjo3nnent, to a composition by one of 
 Wagner's imitators ? " As a matter of fact, absence 
 of repetition is just as capable of causing tedium 
 as repetition, and originality seems rather to be a 
 manner of perception, of individuaUty of sensation, 
 conveyed by the artist by a thousand indirect 
 means, of which repetition itself may be one : as 
 organic, in a word, Hke a flower, and not logical 
 and mechanical as is the conception of repetition. 
 Mr. Scott goes on to remark that Max Reger's 
 imitation of profound work " glamoured " the 
 German public into beheving he was a Master, 
 whereas, according to Mr. Scott's argument, this 
 imitation should merely have produced boredom. 
 My personal opinion is that Reger's work was 
 highly individual ; his pianoforte sketcjies, for 
 instance, Aus meinem Tagebuch, are reminiscent 
 of nobody, least of all Bach. Those works where 
 the resemblance to Bach is as great as the resem- 
 blance of Charpentier's operas to Wagner's resemble 
 Bach in the sense that their workmanship is so 
 masterly that it might be mistaken for Bach's, 
 whereas nobody could possibly imagine any of 
 Charpentier's compositions to be by Wagner, unless 
 a Wagner who had lost all his technical mastery 
 and all his brilliant ideas. 
 
 It is only on the intellectual side that Reger 
 resembled Bach, and on this point of intellectualism 
 Mr. Scott makes the curious statement that there 
 
A MUSICAL PHILOSOPHY 143 
 
 is as much intellect to Wagner or Strauss as to 
 Beethoven — curious, because I should have thought 
 there was considerably more if, under intellectual 
 we range the technical and constructive as distinct 
 from the expressive. The superiority of Beethoven 
 to Wagner has always been, to me, the greater depth 
 and range of his personality. On the other hand, Mr. 
 Scott clearly sees that the reason why many older 
 composers fail to hold us is because, as he admirably 
 puts it, they do not " afford sufficient material to 
 occupy the mind." Mr. Scott's opinions on key- 
 signature, rhythms, and form are becoming those 
 of aU intelligent musicians, but his chapter on the 
 law of recurrence bristles with debatable points. 
 I agree in the main with his strictures on musical 
 criticism, and I will pass to his last chapter and its 
 appendix entitled " The Hidden Aspects of Music." 
 Mr. Scott makes an apparently innocent start by 
 asking. Can music have a moral effect ? He thinks 
 it can. But though every lover of music knows 
 that moral effect is produced directly by sounds 
 combined by the brain of the musician, as it is 
 by words and as it equally is by btiildings in brick 
 and stone and by faces of men and women, Mr. 
 Scott sees a difficulty. " How," he says, " is the 
 moral effect engendered when there are no sug- 
 gestionistic tpords to call it into being ? " (the italics 
 are mine). This is, to me, a most amazing sentence, 
 enough to make me really doubt whether Mr. Scott 
 was conscious of its implications. But that he has 
 wandered far from reality is shown in his next 
 
144 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 sentence, which reads : "To answer this we must 
 resort to the occult doctrines . . . the only means 
 of helping us out of our difficulty. Now," Mr. Scott 
 continues, " occult lore holds that man is not 
 merely his physical body, but that interpenetrating 
 that body are other subtler bodies, notably sensa- 
 tion-body, emotion-body, mental-body, intuition- 
 body . . . and it is essential to add that these 
 bodies are perceptible to the trained psychic though 
 imperceptible to the ordinary man, the reason 
 being that only the psychic has awakened the 
 latent faculties of two glands in the brain, known 
 as the pineal gland and the pituitary body." To 
 this dull end does Mr. Scott's hard reasoning bring 
 him ! It is, indeed, well known that all men 
 peculiarly susceptible to logic finish their days in 
 the toils of some plausible, sense-prpof system. 
 Man has an earthly body ; why not an astral 
 body or even a jam-tart body ? Why not ? Can 
 anybody say why not ? Logic cannot deny their 
 possibility. The twentieth-century man who has 
 reaMzed that anjTthing is possible is truly in a 
 pitiable plight. Before the pineal gland and the 
 pituitary body he is undone. The only thing which 
 could save him is ordinary gumption ; and gumption 
 in the twentieth century is not to be had. My 
 heart bleeds for the poor defenceless Chestertonian 
 " man in the street " confronted with these two 
 psychic scoundrels, the pineal gland and the pituit- 
 ary body. How they will rob him of his money 
 and his common sense, and leave him wrapped in 
 
A MUSICAL PHILOSOPHY 145 
 
 black cloths embroidered with stars, muttering 
 incantations and attending lectures at the Society 
 of the Seven Great Girls of the Giddy East, so 
 surrounded with auras that he cannot see his way 
 out into the light of day! Mr. Scott proceeds to 
 say that music has a very marked effect on this 
 emotion-body, alias astral vehicle, which Mr. Scott 
 sajre is composed of a very rare form of matter. 
 Mr. Scott does not give us the name of this substance 
 or its specific gravity ; he tells us that it is dense 
 and that it vibrates, altering its patterns as sand 
 does on a plate rubbed by a vioHn-bow. Perhaps 
 it is sand ; anyhow, Mr. Scott, who has apparently 
 seen it vibrate arid form patterns, gives no rates of 
 vibrations or diagrams of patterns, though he says : 
 " I am not writing this book to uphold this or 
 that conception of the universe, but to maintain 
 that which I know to be true." Perhaps the reason 
 for leaving us so in the dark may be found fiulher 
 on, where Mr. Scott writes : " Hardly ever in the 
 history of the planet has the astral plane been in 
 the state it now is." With the astral plane in such 
 a state it is doubtless difficult to give exact descrip- 
 tions of astral bodies, but, says Mr. Scott, " each 
 of these planes (emotional, mental, intuitioiial) 
 possesses its own distinctive species of music . . . 
 the creative artist who can attune his mind to the 
 highest of these planes (high in the sense of rapidity 
 of vibration and not in the sense of spacial altitude) 
 will succeed in producing the most elevated music." 
 Here we have something definite^ Great music, 
 
146 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 according to Mr. Scott, is all a matter of rajridity 
 of vibration ; but has Mr. Scott forgotten that 
 when the rate of vibration exceeds a certain figure, 
 sound is imperceptible to human ears, so 4:hat the 
 greatest music would be inaudible ? That there 
 is something in this I, afflicted by much hearing 
 of Mr. Scott's contemporaries, will admit ; but the 
 logic of my experience would not satisfy Mr. Scott, 
 who at this point definitely forsakes sanity and says : 
 " Here again we are compelled to bring the psychic 
 to our assistance, for it must be noted that every 
 musical composition produces a thought-and-colour 
 form in astral space, and according to that form and 
 colour is to be gauged the spiritual value of the 
 composition. If the preponderating colours be 
 lilac, violet, blue, pink, yellow, and apple-green, 
 combined with a form of lofty structure and vast- 
 ness, then the work is one of intrinsic spiritual 
 value . . . this method of gauging the spiritual 
 value of art is only possible to him who has awakened 
 the latent faculties of the pineal gland and pituitary 
 body." " What can we glean from all this ? " 
 naively asks Mr. Scott. What, indeed ! Turning 
 to the Appendix for further enlightenment, we 
 find Mr. Scott refusing to admit the association of 
 colours with letters or tones from people who are 
 not clairvoyants, as such people, not having gone 
 through the necessary occult training, have imagina- 
 tions far more active than their pineal glands. 
 " Doctors have not hit upon the fact known to 
 occultists (who have other scientific modes of 
 
A MUSICAL PHILOSOPHY 147 
 
 discovering things), that the pineal gland is the 
 organ of psychic perception." It is sad to see a 
 man of Mr, Scott's gifts led completely astray by so 
 transparent a ruffian as the pineal gland. But there 
 is comfort in finding that, according to Mr. Scott, 
 Scriabin, some of whose works I intensely admire, 
 has a different table of colour tones from the psychic 
 one, and this, in Mr. Scott's words, " leads one 
 to inquire . . . whether he was a reliable psychic or 
 merely an imaginative artist." Well, well ! After 
 that I give Mr. Scott up as lost. 
 
XXVII 
 THE BARREL-ORGAN IN THE RAIN 
 
 IT is not always in concert-halls that one has 
 the most delightful musical experiences — ^hardly 
 ever, some would even say ; but I do not go so 
 far as that. None the less, everyone who has any 
 instinct for music will remember chance occasions 
 when some song or instrumental air, heard almost 
 accidentally, at some friend's house or — ^in some 
 countries happier in this respect than our own — ^in 
 the street has made a vivid impression that remains 
 in the memory long after we have completely 
 forgotten the recitals of an Elena Gerhardt, a 
 Paderewski or a Kreisler. 
 
 I remember when a small boy that by some freak 
 of fortune Paderewski came to my native town for 
 the first time ; my mother, wishing me to hear the 
 famous pianist, procured me one seat at what 
 appeared to me — and for our part of the world 
 actually was — ^an enormous price. Ai any rate, I 
 went alone, considerably affected by a consciousness 
 that in being there at all I was rather going the pace. 
 My seat was very near to the great man, and I 
 
 remember how his hands trembled and how ner- 
 
 143 
 
THE BARREL-ORGAN IN THE RAIN 149 
 
 vously he clasped his knees. I also remember being 
 more excited by his face than by his playing. He 
 played first of all something by Bach — very likely a 
 prelude and fugue — and then a Beethoven sonata ; 
 the rest of his programme I have forgotten. I do 
 not think I was in the least moved by the music, but 
 I returned home in a state of great excitement, and 
 with a feehng that the concert was an event in my 
 Hfe that ought in some way to be celebrated, and 
 that the presence of such a great man in our town 
 must be brought to the notice of the inmates of the 
 house who should not be allowed to pass away into 
 sleep that night as if nothing out of the ordinary had 
 occurred. Accordingly, I crept round to the back 
 of the house and rummaged about in a shed until I 
 had found — what is unknown in this country — an 
 old kerosene tin. Taking a stick, I then marched 
 into the house, beating the kerosene tin for all I was 
 worth. 
 
 Now, musically, this event meant nothing, or very 
 little, to me. I had been often far more touched 
 by the very same music I had heard that night, 
 played by amateurs ; and although this experience 
 of the contrast in the pleasure got from amateurs 
 and from professionals is liot true of orchestral 
 concerts it is especially true of singers ; for I do not 
 remember ever hearing a professional singer before 
 I was twenty who gave me any pleasure at all. I 
 beUeve this is a common experience. It is due partly 
 to the fact that in Anglo-Saxon (and to a lesser 
 degree one might almost include German) countries 
 
150 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 professional singers have no feeling for music what- 
 ever. They are simply the possessors of voices that 
 have a marketable value, and they hire out their 
 voices to concert-givers and to music publishers who 
 need them to display their wares. They painfully 
 acquire the minimum of technical musical know- 
 ledge necessary to enable them to sing an average 
 ballad, or to take part in the half-dozen oratorios 
 that are the staple musical diet of large masses of the 
 population. They meet the average church organist 
 on the common ground of complete insensibility 
 and almost complete, ignorance. They are far more 
 illiterate than the ordinary dock-labourer, and their 
 vanity has to be encountered to be believed. These 
 wretches — I could name a lot of them if the law of 
 libel permitted one such an artistic luxury — ^are 
 even to this day, in spite of the great improvement 
 that has taken place in England during the last ten 
 or fifteen years, going up and down London, the 
 provinces and the suburbs singing and spoiling the 
 taste of the people. Their mainstay and sheet 
 anchor is human sentimentality — ^the sentimentality 
 of people who have had no opportunity to learn to 
 appreciate finer qualities, but who, if left alone, 
 would perhaps get out of the trough of sloppy 
 emotionalism in which the modem urban population 
 wallows. 
 
 For years, whatever singing I heard worth the 
 hearing was from amateurs, and from them I heard, 
 before I was eighteen, nearly all Schubert's songs 
 and a great number of other German lieder, which. 
 
THE BARREL-ORGAN IN THE RAIN 151 
 
 until I went to (Germany, I had never heard from the 
 concert platform at all. One of my most pleasurable 
 recollections is that of going suddenly into a drawing- 
 room where some one was singing Schubert's " Wohin." 
 It was one of those exquisite moments when we 
 are by some happy combination of physical and 
 spiritual health extraordinarily alive, and for both 
 singer and listener the music, though familiar, had a 
 beauty which they had never felt so intensely before. I 
 have never heard " Wohin " sung since, either in public 
 or by an amateur, but it is one of those melodies that 
 I can always recall at will. The singing of amateurs 
 is, as a whole, on a far higher level than professional 
 singing, and in speaking of amateurs I am thinking 
 of musical amateurs, not of the people who go to 
 ballad concerts and buy the last song about roses to 
 take home and strum upon the piano, although I 
 should imagine that their interpretation by their own 
 fireside had merits unknown to, and beyond the 
 capacity of, the professional singer to whom the 
 song was dedicated. 
 
 In Latin countries, however, the art of singing has 
 never been lost by the people. I believe that of all 
 European countries Spain is the most wonderful in 
 this respect, but I have never been there, and 
 English musicians as a whole know very Uttle about 
 the academic music of Spain and practically nothing 
 about the popular music. As for ancient Spanish 
 music, I do not think I am far wrong in saying that 
 it is absolutely unknown — ^which is hardly surpris- 
 ing when we consider that 70 per cent, of the works 
 
152 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 of our greatest and most famous English composer, 
 Purcell, are unknown to musicians. His Fairy 
 Queen, for instance, which was given at Cambridge 
 in 1920, had not been performed since 1693. There 
 are four volumes of his harpsichord works edited 
 by Mr. William Barclay Squire — ^never played in 
 public except by Mrs. Gordon Woodhouse — and I 
 forget how many volumes the Purcell Society has 
 published, all of which, however, appear to be 
 totally ignored by the professional musicians who 
 give concerts. However, that is by the way, and 
 only illustrative of how immeasurably more im- 
 portant the amateur in music is than the concert- 
 giving artist who is so much more in the limelight. 
 In Italy, of course, you may still hear plenty of 
 good singing, even in the streets, and I dare say it 
 would be possible to hear to-day, in parts of the 
 country, many of those wonderful old Italian folk- 
 songs which Madame Geni Sadero has spent her life 
 collecting. Although I once walked through a large 
 part of Central Italy it was never my good fortune 
 to come across any old folk-songs, but I must confess 
 that they were not the object of my tour. I do 
 remember, however, going into an old wine-cellar 
 with walls about fifteen feet thick in a small town in 
 a little frequented part of the country and suddenly 
 hearing, to my amazement, a gramophone burst 
 forth into the waltz from The Merry Widow. The 
 gramophone rang the death-kneU of folk-song wher- 
 ever it penetrated. There are musical critics — even 
 good ones — ^who have a kindly word for the gramo- 
 
THE BARREL-ORGAN EST THE RAIN 153 
 
 phone ; \ know I shall join them one of these days 
 but at pf^ent I have nothing for it but execration. 
 It was, i^wever, in Italy that I received the most 
 poignant musical impression of my Ufe. A friend 
 and I had arrived one day at Como, which we had 
 never seen before. It was a most miserable day : 
 one of those only too frequent days among the 
 Italian lakes when the rain pours down as if it had 
 set in for months. In utter wretchedness we walked 
 along the comparatively deserted streets looking for 
 a suitable restaurant, when suddenly, turning a 
 comer, we heard a barrel-organ grinding out 
 Lohengrin's Narration. It is a curiously beautiful 
 melody, but at that moment, pouring out into the 
 empty town among hills and buildings almost 
 blotted from our sight with the steady, down- 
 streaming rain, it was simply marvellous. If 
 Richard Wagner had been there to hear it he would 
 have wept. For it had become part of the earth ; 
 it was in some wholly inexplicable sense real — ^real 
 with that reality that all good creative art has but 
 which we cannot always feel, and that certainly we 
 do not feel once at a hundred concerts. 
 
XXVIII 
 DEBUSSY 
 
 CLAUDE ACHILLE DEBUSSY was bom 
 in 1862. He was, at his. death, still in the 
 early fifties, and a year or two older than 
 Richard Strauss, who shared with him for many 
 years a notoriety greater than any musician has 
 enjoyed since Wagner. He was undoubtedly 
 France's greatest living composer, though many 
 good judges see in Maurice Ravel, a man ten years 
 his junior, possibilities greater than any achieve- 
 ments of Debussy ; but that is, literally, music 
 of the future. Considering work actually done, 
 Debussy has the stronger claim, and this apart 
 from the question of originality, which has mainly 
 an historical interest — ^for all composers of genius 
 are equally original, but their originality is not 
 equally obvious. 
 
 Debussy had undoubtedly musical genius of the 
 very first class. L'Aprds-midi d'un faune is the 
 work of a man who had, to the highest degree, the 
 basic quality without which no man can be a great 
 composer, that which makes a man a composer 
 rather than a poet or a painter or a dramatist or a 
 
DEBUSSY 155 
 
 philosopher, qtiite independently of his intellectual 
 power and moral character. I can only crudely 
 describe that quality by sa3dng that the man in 
 whom it exists gazes upon, understands, and com- 
 municates with the external world through sound. 
 It is local in so far as it undoubtedly results from 
 the structure of his brain, and being the most local 
 it is the least, though it is the only indispensable, 
 factor in the equipment of a great musician. No 
 great musician, no second-rate musician, no musician 
 worth listening to. at all, has been without it in 
 varying degrees. Wagner had it to as high a pitch 
 as any man known to us ; it is what makes his music 
 so electric, so overwhelming in its sensuous excite- 
 ment ; but it could not make Wagner the greatest 
 of aU composers, and it could not even put Debussy 
 among the great ; it left him with Chopin, whom 
 he much resembles, not at aU in his music, but in 
 type. What was it, then, that Debussy, like 
 Chopin, lacked, and Wagner had ? It was, I think 
 there can be little doubt, intellectual power and 
 character. Debussy gives us in his music winds, 
 skies, water, and airy spaces, but never man ; the 
 human element is entirely lacking. He does not 
 even give us the emotions aroused by these natural 
 things as Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner do ; he 
 merely gives us the sense of them. Not that I would 
 belittle such a remarkable achievement. I would 
 merely point to the distinction, and then draw 
 attention to the fact that he wrote only one opera, 
 and that did not deal with human beings at all. 
 
156 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 but with Maeterlinckian sense-impressions labelled 
 with human names. If one concedes that the 
 fimction of art is to reveal the soul of man, it must 
 be admitted that Debussy's is a singularly one- 
 sided, incomplete, and inadequate revelation by 
 the side of Wagner's, and this deficiency in humanity 
 is what I mean when I say that Debussy lacked 
 character. That he was Wagner's inferior in 
 intellectual power hardly needs proving. It would, 
 however, be wrong to say that Debussy was weak 
 in construction ; L'Apris-midi d'un faune, and, on 
 a smaller scale, many of his pianoforte works, are 
 perfect in form, their outUnes firm and inevitable. 
 But it was a mastery of scanty material ; there was 
 none of that almost superhuman ease with which 
 Wagner handled and shaped such swarms of ideas 
 as would have reduced a lesser man to incoher- 
 ence. The intellectual power of Die Meistersinger 
 will be a source of joy when all interest in Wagner's 
 operas is dead ; it is his most enduring quality, 
 and there is nothing like it in Debussy. Finally, 
 we come to the deficiency which Debussy shared 
 with Wagner, and which excludes both from the 
 company of Bach and Beethoven ; perhaps it is best 
 summed up in the word love. Whatever we mean 
 when we say that man is a spirit, the word stands 
 for something as real, as unmistakable as a tree or 
 a stone. The spirit glimmers faintly here and there 
 in Wagner ; it is not perceptible in Debussy, who 
 might be not a man, but a metal harp with silver 
 strings set in a lifeless plain and played on by the 
 
DEBUSSY 157 
 
 winds. The sea blown on to the shore makes 
 music as beautiful as Debussy's ; it, as old Fitz- 
 gerald once said, has no soul, and it is the grandeur, 
 the subHmity of the soul that makes the music 
 of Beethoven and Bach so immeasurably greater 
 than the music of Wagner and Debussy. There are 
 many people, chiefly among professional musicians, 
 who dislike and do not understand this judgment 
 by spiritual values. They do not analyse the music 
 they hear except harmonically — and harmonic 
 originaUty is the passport to their favour. In 
 discussing Debussy they argue continually as to 
 whether he got his harmonic system, whole-tone 
 scale, etc., from Rimsky-Korsakov, from Siam, 
 from hearing bells, listening to birds, or hanging 
 bits of metal on trees. But surely it is obvious 
 that all creative artists get their inspiratio^ from 
 innumerable sources. Musicians express them- 
 selves through their ears, and their ears are 
 forever acquiring material. Original ears, that 
 is to say, ears sensitive to sound-combinations 
 previous ears were deaf to, pick up original material : 
 the material was always there, but no one before 
 noticed it. L'Apres-^nidi , d'un faune has been 
 written over twenty years, but no one has ever 
 succeeded in writing anything equal to it, though 
 nearly every musician can now hear that sort of 
 harmony without having to get Debussy played to 
 him. The reason why so much attention is paid 
 to this point of harmonic originality is because it 
 appears to offer an easy path to fame. The great 
 
158 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 man is great, and, being unique, is original ; the 
 budding composer who is not a great man thinks 
 he can stumble across some new system which will 
 make him great, forgetting that the new Mes abund- 
 antly around, him all the time, that all there ever 
 will be in harmony is here now, but that he can only 
 discover what is in him to discover — ^which in most 
 cases is nothing. More than any composer who has 
 ever lived, Debussy suggests the landscape-painter, 
 and water-colours rather than oils. Nowhere else 
 in music do you get such a sense of sky and air and 
 cloud and water ; one feels he is a musician who 
 would, above aU others, have delighted' Pater. 
 There is a purity of outline, a clarity of colour, a 
 melodic distinction that reminds one of the gracious 
 beauty of Pico della Mirandola, and with a sudden 
 realization of his nationality one understands that 
 he upholds the grand Latin tradition with its 
 marvellous sense ol' the concrete. Debussy is an 
 artist like Verocchio, DonateUo, and Cellini. There 
 is no mysticism in his PeUdas and MSUsande, 
 only extreme subtlety of sense. His rh5d;hms are 
 extraordinarily delicate, supple, and wavering ; the 
 rhjrthms of most German composers seem coarse 
 by comparison. It is ungracious and miserable to 
 dwell on what a man has not given us who has left 
 such a wealth of rare beauty behind. A man who 
 can create such intangible loveliness as the first 
 Arabesque for pianoforte will not come often into 
 this world. 
 
XXIX 
 ON CONDUCTING 
 
 MANY people mistake stick-waving for 
 conducting. I did for a great number of 
 years ; and I well remember as a child 
 that there stood on a table in our drawing-room in 
 its open case a sumptuous baton which some society 
 had presented to my father. This magnificent 
 stick was of ebony, with a handle of ivory, embossed 
 and inlaid with translucent stones, and with a gold 
 band, on which was engraved a laudatory inscrip- 
 tion. I could not understand why my father never 
 used it, and one day when he happened to be in 
 the room I said to him : " Father, why don't you 
 use that marvellous and glittering " — I was fond 
 of long words when I was ten — " baton ? " " That ! " 
 he exclaimed, " I'd rather use a handkerchief ! " 
 This brusque reply gave me indescribable pain, and 
 for years I brooded in secret over the affair, wondering 
 what could be wrong with that baton that seemed 
 to me so lovely ; until in the end it faded out of 
 my mind and I no longer even noticed it lying on 
 the table when I went into the drawing-room. 
 This, then, was the first lesson I learned about 
 
 S59 
 
160 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 conducting — that the loveliness of the baton does 
 not count. The next stage was to learn that the 
 gracefulness or energy with which the stick is waved 
 also does not count. It was many, very many, years 
 before I learned this. Most adults who are fond of 
 music and go frequently to orchestral concerts judge 
 a conductor entirely by his face or, shall I say, 
 personality, and by the way he waves his stick. 
 Of the two the former is the more reUable. Now, 
 the beating of time with a stick by a man perched 
 on a box in front of an orchestra is nothing. It may 
 make things a Httle easier occasionally for the weaker 
 members, but if a quartet, septet, and octet can play 
 without a conductor to beat time, then an orchestra 
 of seventy or one hundred can — for there are not 
 seventy or a hundred different parts in such an 
 orchestra, but only about fourteen or fifteen. The 
 conductor is there because the orchestra is, or should 
 be, playing his conception of the music ; he is there 
 at the performance to remind them of the fact, 
 and by his gestures occasionally, if necessary, to 
 recall points which he has explained at rehearsal. 
 I remember hearing at Munich an American conduct 
 the Konzert-Vereinigung Orchestra in Dvorak's 
 Fifth (New World) Symphony. He stood in front 
 of the orchestra on a high platform, he beat time 
 regularly through every movement, but as regards 
 having any influence on the playing of the work 
 he might as well not have been there, for he simply 
 did not affect their playing any more than if he had 
 been in the back row of the hall beating time with 
 
ON CONDUCTING 161 
 
 his foot. Many professional conductors who think 
 they are conducting are merely beating time to the 
 orchestra's playing, fluctuating in energy and pre- 
 cision of stick-waving exactly as the orchestra 
 varies its playing as it was last taught. 
 
 Von Billow's famous mot, tha:t there are two classes 
 of conductors, the one with the score in his head 
 and the other with his head ia the score, is witty 
 and true, but does not go to the root of the matter. 
 Many indifferent conductors are capable of the 
 feat of memory necessary to conduct without a 
 score. The fact that a man can memorize a score 
 easily tells us nothing of his capacity as a conductor ; 
 he may, in iaxA, be hopelessly bad. There is another 
 qualification of a technical nature which was once 
 — ^in the days when orchestral players were less 
 efl&cient, less educated, and with less goodwill 
 towards strange cbnductors than now — even ;nore 
 important than it is to-day, and that is a knowledge 
 of the compass and nature of all the instruments 
 in the orchestra. This knowledge, Vhich is abso- 
 lutely essential to the composer, is of less importance 
 to the conductor, for to-day most of the players in 
 a first-class orchestra are virtuosos, with whom it is 
 rather a matter of pride that no composer could 
 write anything in their compass that they couldn't 
 play; so that composers, too, are less likely to 
 have the experience Tschaikovsky had with one of 
 his Suites when Taniev wrote to him that the flutes 
 objected to pla37ing triplets for twenty-two bars 
 without a break, and the soloist said it was bad 
 
162 MUSIC AND MFE 
 
 for his lips to play a certain sequence of notes, so 
 he wanted to play another sequence. Tschaikovsky, 
 technically one of the best equipped of composers, 
 replied : 
 
 " (the flutes) could easily manage to play 
 such, a passage for 220 bars. It would be 
 very innocent to imagine that this must be 
 done in one breath. They can breathe every 
 time, I play the flute a little myself, and am 
 certain of it. (As for the oboist) I like the idea 
 that the high notes are ruination to Herr Z.'s 
 lips ! ! I It is a thousand pities these precious 
 Hps, from which Frau Z. has stolen so many 
 kisses, should be spoilt for ever by E in alt. 
 But this wiU not hinder me from injuring 
 these sacred lips by writing high notes — 
 notes, moreover, that every oboist can easily 
 play, even without a French mouthpiece." 
 
 The more technical kno^^ledge a conductor has 
 the better, but it is not mere technical knowledge 
 any more than it is memory or capacity to wave a 
 stick gracefully to the required rhj^thm that makes 
 a great conductor. The vital matter is conception, 
 which includes the conductor's imaginative under- 
 standing of the work he is to interpret and his power 
 of making that conception clear and of inspiring his 
 players and getting his ideas rendered adequately 
 by the orchestra. AH this is done at rehearsal, 
 and when the performance actually comes, a con- 
 ductor who knows his business has only to look at 
 his men. No frantic and incessant stick-wagging 
 for him ; he can fold his arms and just nod, and the 
 
ON CONDUCTING 168 
 
 orchestra will glow Into a mighty crescendo that 
 will make aU hearts tremble. He does not give 
 every clarionet, 'ceUo, or horn entry his beat, he 
 does not flap his elbows violently to each awe- 
 inspiring thud of the drum, he does not try to 
 accentuate tnmipet-blasts with his fists, he does 
 not scrape the ground in an effort to lift the violins 
 to soar into the empjTrean. None of these meaning- 
 less and futile antics is for him ; for bars he may lay 
 down his stick and smile or look significantly at 
 his players as the mass of sound waxes and wanes 
 about him. He is restrained in his movements, 
 and therefore each gesture that he does make is 
 so much the more significant. This virtue of 
 restraint is essential ; for no conductor can hope 
 to stimulate his players at a vital moment when he 
 has been continuously nagging, whipping, and 
 poking at them from the very first bar — ^yet how 
 many of our best-known conductors have contracted 
 this vice of constant gesticulation, with the natural 
 result that their stick-waving becomes a separate 
 show, an " extra " of which the orchestra takes not 
 the slightest notice I 
 
 Most conductors are temperamentally limited in 
 their sympathies and understanding, and can only 
 conduct the music of one or two composers well. 
 Sir Henry Wood, for example, often conducts 
 Wagner effectively and accompanies a concerto 
 better than almost anyone ; but although he is too 
 good a musician and too experienced a conductor 
 not to be able to give his audience an idea of 
 
164 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Beethoven, yet it is safe to say that no one who 
 has only heard Beethoven conducted by Sir Henry 
 Wood has ever really heard Beethoven at all. Both 
 Sir Henry Wood and Mr. Landon Ronald can do 
 sufficient justice to Wagner and Tschaikovsky, but 
 if one of our young composers wrote a work really 
 English in spirit — as English, for instance, as Edward 
 Thomas's poems — ^then they might be both utterly 
 lost, and it is possible that Mr. Adrian Boult would 
 give us a far superior rendering. 
 
 Finally, most of the best-known conductors 
 conduct the same works far too often. I should 
 imagine that Sir Henry Wood is utterly sick of the 
 sound of Tschaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, and of 
 Beethoven's Third and Fifth, and of the bulk of 
 Wagner. Both orchestra and conductor cannot 
 help getting so stale and bored that it becomes an 
 outrage on the dead composers to go on playing 
 their works. I sometimes think that the London 
 Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonic Society, 
 and the Queen's HaU Orchestra should taboo all 
 Wagner's, Beethoven's, and Tschaikovsky's works 
 for two years. It would be an immense relief to 
 all musical London. Let us hear Albeniz, Mahler, 
 Bruckner, Bela Bartok, Elgar, Scriabin, Strauss, 
 Ravel, d'Indy, Glazounov, Smetana, Rimsky- 
 Korsakov, Dehus, Hoist, Vaughan Williams, and 
 as many young English composers as possible. 
 Two years without Wagner, Beethoven, and Tschai- 
 kovsky, and conducting in England might be found 
 to have improved fifty per cent. I 
 
XXX 
 
 MUSICAL PLAYS 
 
 THE other night I went to see something 
 that was described in my morning paper as 
 "a musical play." To me "a musical 
 play " sotmds dehghtful until just after I have 
 been to one ; then I. realize that a musical play 
 is what you get when a composer who cannot write 
 music is introduced to a dramatist who cannot 
 write a play, and collaborating with him and finding 
 the results hopeless,, buys jokes frbm the stage 
 doorkeeper, bits of business from the carpenters 
 and scene-shifters, rummages in second-hand music 
 shops for old songs to crib from, and when the 
 mixture has been sufficiently rehearsed by a popular 
 comedian without a memory and a charming young 
 lady without a voice, advertises the result as " a 
 new musical play." The critics of the dailies are 
 at their wits' end to know what to say about these 
 protean monsters who retain the same body under 
 a multitude of faces, and the editors are in an 
 even worse plight, for they never know whether 
 to send their music critic, their prize bulldog expert, 
 or their police-court reporter — except of those 
 
 i6s 
 
166 MUSIC AND HFE 
 
 happy Journals where one man combines In his own 
 person these important oflBces. 
 
 And yet these musical plays are popular, al- 
 though it is true that they are popular not because, 
 but in spite, of their music and their ideas. If 
 It were not for the frequently charming dresses, 
 the pretty, and occasionally fascinating, girls, and 
 the fact that they make a bright and cheerful 
 place to go to in an evening, they would not remain 
 popular long. The want of enterprise and ideas in 
 theatrical managers would appear less than human 
 if we did not constantly remind ourselves of the 
 timidity and feebleness of imagination which seem 
 to seize everyone who depends to any large degree 
 on pubUc opinion. It is notorious among critics 
 and people accustomed to observing carefully the 
 concert and theatre-going public, that those who 
 cater for the public's amusement are among the least 
 reMable judges of what is likely to succeed. When 
 any one of them strikes a success with some overdue 
 idea, aU the others immediately start imitating 
 it ad nauseam. The poor thing is led out of every 
 theatrical stable, each day getting more bony and 
 emaciated ; it is put into harness again and again, 
 never new harness, only the old set continually 
 reversed, and positively driven to death, until it 
 absolutely won't " go " any further. One has 
 only to go round the theatres and halls to find 
 everywhere the same jokes, the same songs, and 
 the same settings — ^the very tunes have, all the same 
 flavour, are cast in the same idiom. For twelve 
 
MUSICAL PLAYS 167 
 
 months one will be greeted everywhere with the 
 tag, " Wait and see," and without " Winston " 
 most of our great comedians would become extinct. 
 " Everybody's doing it," says one of those imported 
 rag-times, and it is the truth, for either everybody 
 is doing it or it isn't being done at all. 
 
 This is one of the reasons why our young com- 
 posers, who ought to be writing musical plays in 
 collaboration with some of our young, witty, and 
 imaginative writers, are wasting their time writing 
 orchestral sketches for performance once a year 
 at the Promenades. They get no chance. No 
 theatrical manager has the imagination to com- 
 mission from them a musical play, pay them a 
 lump sum down, give them a free hand, and pro- 
 duce it when completed, with the same care and 
 lavishness as he expended before the war on the 
 productions of the Vienna school — Lehar, Oscar 
 Strauss, and Leo Fall. And, unless so commissioned, 
 they will never be produced, because the struggle 
 for a living is too severe, and the time and hard 
 labour necessary for librettist and composer to 
 turn out a really first-class work is tremendous 
 and far more than most people can be made to 
 reaUze. The theatrical managers find it easier 
 and safer to dish up the same thing under a different 
 name again and again, and they have a few hacks 
 who, not being artists, can turn out an inexhaust- 
 ible supply of their cut-and-dried product at a 
 moment's notice. At present it is as though ' 
 Gilbert and Sullivan had never hved. Instead of 
 
168 MUSIC AND BIFB 
 
 being the beginning of a national style of musical 
 play whose development we might all have beeh 
 enjoying to-day, together with the revenue brought 
 into the country from royalties abroad,, supporting 
 a flourishing school of British musicians, their 
 work has no sequel but this stuff without beauty, 
 without ideas, without humour, which we take 
 because it is gilded over for us by a handful of 
 pretty girls. 
 
 I must confess I can see no remedy while 
 those who produce musical plays and revues are 
 doing far too good business to bother about 
 new paths. When the reaction comes, there wiU 
 be a slump, and competition may force enter- 
 prise ; though, in hard fact, the survivors in this 
 particular sphere generally sxurvive because of 
 their superior financial resources, not because of 
 their superior enterprise. It is cold comfort trust- 
 ing to mere competition to improve matters. The 
 men who control the money have rarely the in- 
 telligence and taste to lavish it in the right direction, 
 and their disasters frighten the smaller men. Also, 
 as Mr. James Glover has pointed out, our seriously 
 trained musicians have looked down upon this 
 work. I must confess I cannot understand why 
 — ^whether because they fail to appreciate its 
 possibilities or whether because the sense oi humour 
 fails to survive the atmosphere of the Royal Col- 
 lege and the Royal Academy of Music, I do not 
 know. I am sure, however, that our young com- 
 posers would be far better occupied in finding a 
 
MUSICAIj plays 169 
 
 humorous, imaginative librettist among our young 
 writers, and breaking new ground in musical plays, 
 than in writing long and dreary S3niiphonic Poems, 
 Scherzos, and Suites, which are nothing but watery 
 imitations of Strauss, Debussy, and Dvorak, or in 
 brooding over the problem of how they can impart 
 new Mfe to the now extinct Wagnerian music- 
 drama. 
 
XXXI 
 
 A NOTE ON HECTOR BERLIOZ 
 
 FOR years it has been difficult, living as we do 
 in the midst of a torrent of novelties in 
 literature and music, to find a temporary 
 silence in which we might recoUect the existence of 
 forgotten masterpieces. In a fairly recent book Mr. 
 Remain RoUand wrote a short but enthusiastic 
 article on Berlioz, and there has been noticeable in 
 musical circles an Increasing tendency to a more 
 generous estimate of one of France's greatest com- 
 posers. I do not wish to say an3d;hing at the 
 moment about BerHoz's music, except that it has 
 always been underrated and that he was one of the 
 greatest of pioneers, having more right than any 
 other man to be considered the founder of modem 
 orchestral music. There is unanimous agreement 
 that he was the first to understand and develop the 
 special technique of orchestration, and that the 
 Russian mastery in this branch is due directly to his 
 influence, yet there is nothing like the same reaJization 
 of the fact that he was a fountain of the purest 
 melody and that he has written music of the most 
 exquisite delicacy and tenderness. 
 
A NOTE ON HECTOR BERLIOZ 171 
 
 But what I wish particularly to draw attention to 
 is his wonderful autobiography, covering the years 
 1803 to 1863. It was translated from the French 
 and published by Macmillan in 1884, and although it 
 is famous, I suspect that few of the younger genera- 
 tion have read it. This is a pity, because the man 
 was as remarkable as his music. As a critic 
 Schumann may have been more level-headed, and 
 Wagner had more of a gift for elaborate theorizing, 
 but Berlioz has a brilliance that is difficult to parallel 
 outside of Heine. It is therefore strange to find him 
 confessing : 
 
 " When I talk of laziness it only applies to the 
 writing of prose. I have often sat up aU night over 
 my scores, and have spent eight hours at a time 
 labouring at instrumentation, without once chang- 
 ing my position ; but it is an effort to me to write 
 prose, and about the tenth line or so I get up, walk 
 about the room, look out into the street, take up a 
 book, and strive by any means to overcome the 
 weariness and fatigue which instantly overpower 
 me. 
 
 No doubt this was only part of the truth, for 
 BerUoz is thoroughly vinreliable, writing just as the 
 mood takes him, and subject to the most extra- 
 ordinary outbreaks of prejudices and dislikes. But 
 what vivacity I What wit I What a rushing, over- 
 whelming spate of la,nguage he has at command ! 
 How vividly he can depict a scene I What a power 
 of irony and invective I There is nothing quite like 
 this autobiography in all Uterature. It deserves 
 
172 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 immortality, for it is as entertaining as Boswell's 
 Johnson, if in a different way, Wagner's My Life 
 is to my naind one of the most fascinating of books ; 
 but Wagner, though not more egdstical than Berlioz, 
 could never have begun his autobiography thus : 
 
 " I was bom on the nth December 1803, at La 
 Cote St. Andre, a very small town in France, situated 
 in the department of the Is6re, between Vienne, 
 Grenoble, and Lyons. During the months which 
 preceded my birth, my mother never dreamt, as 
 Virgil's did, that she was about to bring forth a 
 branch of laurel. However painful to my amour 
 propre this confession may be, I ought to add that 
 neither did she imagine, Uke Olympias, the mother 
 of Alexander, that she bore within her a fiery brand. 
 Strange, I admit, but true." 
 
 No, this ironical touch is not to be found in Wagner, 
 who, if there had ever been any legend of this sort 
 about himself, would have solemnly recorded it. 
 One of the special charms of Berlioz is that even the 
 most ordinary things that befall him blaze with 
 colour and passion. When he first takes Communion 
 he describes it Hke this : 
 
 " Kneeling in the midst of a multitude of white- 
 robed maidens, I was rudely awakened by the priest 
 summoning me to take precedence of aU those fair 
 yoimg girls, and go up to the altar first. Blushing 
 at this act of discourtesy, I went up to receive the 
 sacrament. As I did so the choir burst forth into 
 the Eucharistic hymn. At the sound of those fresh 
 young voices I was overwhelmed with a sudden 
 rush of mystic passionate emotion. A new world 
 
A NOTE ON HECTOR BERtIOZ 178 
 
 of heaven of which I had heard so much ; and, 
 strange proof of the power of true expression and the 
 magical influence of real feeling, I found out ten years 
 afterwards that the melody so ingeniously married 
 to sacred words and introduced into a religious 
 ceremony was Nina's song, Quand U bieft-aime 
 reuiendra ! This was my first musical experience, 
 and in this manner I became religious — my weekly 
 confession to the director of my conscience was, 
 ' My father, I have done nothing,' to which the worthy 
 man always replied, ' Go on, my child, as you have 
 begun,' and so I did for several years." 
 
 His father wished Berlioz to become a doctor, and 
 this is his description of his first visit to the dis- 
 secting-room : 
 
 "When I entered that fearful human charnel- 
 house. Uttered with fragments of limbs, and saw the 
 ghastly faces and cloven heads, the bloody cesspool 
 in which we stood, with its reeking atmosphere, the 
 swarms of sparrows fighting for scraps, and the rats 
 in the comers gnawing bleeding vertebra, such a 
 feeling of horror possessed me that I leapt out of the 
 window, and fled home as though Death and aU his 
 hideous crew were at my heels. It was twenty-four 
 hours before I recovered from the shock of this first 
 impression, utterly refusing to hear the words 
 anatomy, dissection, or medicine, and firmly re- 
 solved to die rather than enter the career which had 
 been forced upon me." 
 
 No one but Berlioz has ever seen a dissecting- 
 room hke that, and did Shakespeare ever affect any- 
 one else hke this ? He is writing of the first per- 
 formance of Hamlet, in France, at the Od^on : 
 
174 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 " This sudden and unexpected revelation of 
 Shakespeare overwhehned me. The lightning-flash 
 of his genius revealed the whole heaven of art to me. 
 I recognized the meaning of real grandeur, real 
 beauty, and real dramatic truth, and I also realized 
 the absurdity of the ideas circulated by Voltaire, in 
 France, about Shakespeare. But the shock was too 
 great, and it was a long while before I recovered 
 Sfrom it. I became possessed by an intense, over- 
 powering sense of sadness. I could not sleep, I lost 
 my spirits, my favourite studies became distasteful 
 to me, and I spent my tinje wandering aimlessly 
 about Paris and its environs. During that long 
 period of suffering I can only recall four occasions on 
 which I slept, and then it was the heavy deafh-Uke 
 sleep produced by complete physical exhaustion. 
 These were one night on some sheaves in a field near 
 ViUe-juif ; one day in a meadow in the neighbourhood 
 of Sceaux ; once on the snow on the banks of the 
 frozen Seine, near Neuilly ; and, lastly, on a table in 
 the Caf^ du Cardinal at the comer of the Boulevard 
 des ItaUens and the Rue Richelieu, where I slept for 
 five hours, to the terror of the garfons, who thought 
 I was dead and were afraid to come near me." 
 
 When Romeo and Juliet was announced, he describes 
 how he was so f earfvil the free list might be suspended 
 that, although he had a pass, he rushed off and 
 bought a stall : 
 
 " From that moment my fate was sealed. After 
 the harrowing sufferings, the tearful love, the bitter 
 irony, the black meditations, the heart-rending 
 sorrows, the madness, the tears, mourning, catas- 
 trophes, and malign fortune of Hamlet — ^the dark 
 clouds and icy winds of Denmark — ^the change was 
 
A NOTE ON HECTOR BERLIOZ 176 
 
 too great to the hot sunshine and balmy nights of 
 Italy — ^to the love, quick as thought, burning as lava, 
 imperious, irresistible, iUimitably pure and beautiful 
 as the smile of an angel ; the raging revenge, heart- 
 breaking embraces, and desperate struggles between 
 love and death. And so, at the end of the third act, 
 scarcely able to breathe, stifled with a feeling as 
 though an iron hand held my heart in its grip, I cried 
 out, ' I am lost 1 ' " 
 
 It is impossible in a small space to give an37thing 
 like an adequate idea of the wealth of humour and 
 criticism in Berlioz's two Volumes of autobiography 
 or to convey the effect of this extraordinary man who 
 was a whirlwind of tempestuous emotion, and whose 
 usual attitude to life is summed up in his exclama- 
 tion : " Destruction I Fire and thunder ! Blood 
 and tears I My brain shrivels at the thought of such 
 horrors." The nobility of his character (and his 
 sense of the dramatic) is shown by the pathetic 
 accoimt of the ss^nphony dreamed and wilfuUy 
 forgotten for fear of taking the bread out of the 
 mouth of his dying wife. There is one more quota- 
 tion, however, that I cannot omit. It is after the 
 death of his second wife : 
 
 " I am in my sixty-first year ; I have neither 
 hopes, nor illusions, nor great thoughts left. My 
 son is nearly always absent ; I am sohtary. My 
 contempt for the foUy and meanness of men, my 
 hatred of their detestable ferocity, are at their 
 height, and I say hoiurly : ' When death wills.' 
 Why does it delay ? " 
 
XXXII 
 THE ORIANA MADRIGAL SOCIETY 
 
 IF any foreign musician of my acquaintance 
 were to come to London for the first time I 
 would naturally wish to take him to the best 
 we had to offer. It would not be Covent Garden, 
 assuredly, not even were it under the control of 
 Sir Thomas Beecham and we were being regaled 
 with Russian Opera and Ballet. One can hear 
 Riissian Opera in other places besides London, and 
 we stiU await a Granville Barker in opera production 
 to lift our performances above or even up to the 
 continental level. Neither would it be to the Royal 
 Philharmonic Society, nor to hear the London 
 Sjonphony Orchestra, nor to the Queen's Hall 
 Orchestra. I would not try to dazzle him with 
 any of our conductors, although we have two or 
 three who are excellent. Nor have we any String 
 Quartet which could possibly excite one who would, 
 as a matter of course, have heard the fa,mous Capet 
 Quartet of Paris, now, alas I no more, through the 
 loss of the Brothers Casadesus, fighting for France 
 at the front. No, I would renounce all these, and 
 
 take him to a concert of the Oriana Madrigal 
 
 176 
 
THE ORIANA MADRIGAL SOCIETY 177 
 
 Society, confident of giving him a musical experi- 
 ence not to be surpassed outside of England or in it. 
 I confess to always looking forward to their concerts 
 with a violent impatience. The Orijana Society is 
 like a queen jealous of her favours, bestowing them 
 on us with reluctance and making her devoted 
 admirers wait long intervals for her reappearance, 
 as though she feared they were not quite worthy 
 of her. And they are not, they could not be. 
 If musical London knew an3d;hing at all. Bond 
 Street, on the occasion of an Oriana concert, 
 would be one surging mass of people grimly de- 
 termined to get into that ^olian Hall for lov& or 
 money. 
 
 After hearing the Plain Song, " Unto Us a Child 
 is Bom," and Sweehnck's sixteenth-century motet, 
 Hodie Christus natus est, adequately rendered, one 
 is ready to weep tears of joy. Each time I hear 
 the Oriana Society it is like making a new discovery. 
 Their programmes are a delight just to read over 
 to oneself, including as they always do old English 
 church and secular music of rare and unforgettable 
 beauty. If by any chance an5^hing mediocre 
 ever creeps in, it is rendered with such perfection 
 of tone, such beautiful articulation, such crispness, 
 and at the same time, when necessary, with such 
 a flowing legato that it has you entranced. To 
 simply hear the choir hold a final chord is alone 
 worth going many, many miles. As for things like 
 Martin Shaw's arrangement of the thirteenth- 
 century words and tune, Angelus ad Virginem, 
 
 12 
 
178 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 and the motet Magnum nomen Domini, arranged 
 by M. Prsetorius (sixteenth century), both sung by 
 the choir (unaccompanied, of course) in Latin, 
 exquisitely enunciated, words simply fail to de- 
 scribe their effect. I can only repeat that I 
 could weep tears of joy for such perfect and holy 
 beauty. The honorary conductor, Mr. C. H. 
 Kennedy Scott, is equally at home in the fine 
 modem EngHsh work of men Hke Vaughan Williams, 
 Balfour Gardiner, Gustav Hoist, W. G. Whittaker, 
 and others who, in their part songs and choral 
 work generally, are continuing the old national 
 tradition and doing much the most vital and 
 fructifying work in music in England to-day. The 
 Oriana Society and these composers much more 
 truly represent English music than any of our 
 orchestras or large societies, and it is real music, 
 not sham Teutonicism, sweepings from the concert- 
 halls of Gerttiany, pseudo Strauss, bogus Wagner, 
 petrified Brahms, or pale reflections of Debussy and 
 Ravel which, together with our drawing-room 
 ballads, are thought by many foreigners, with the 
 assistance, it must be confessed, of influential 
 concert-givers here, to constitute England's con- 
 tribution to music. Well might we despair if it 
 were so ! But let the foreign musician pay a visit 
 to one of the Oriana Society's concerts to learn 
 that there is something that we may rightly and 
 proudly call English music. But above all, our 
 own people should support this Society by becom- 
 ing subscribers. It would not be easy to find a 
 
THE ORIANA MADRIGAL SOCIETY 179 
 
 more effective way of assisting young composers 
 and promoting a National Scliool of Music wortliy 
 of comparison with our national literature, and 
 equally powerful in the work of regenerating our 
 social Ufe. 
 
XXXIII 
 A NOTE ON THE B MINOR MASS 
 
 THE B minor Mass is officially regarded as 
 Bach's masterpiece. When I say "officially" 
 I mean it is so regarded by Church musicians, 
 writers of programme notes, academic professors, 
 and aU the amateurs who have never heard it. 
 Personally, I can only say that there are many works 
 by Bach which give me greater pleasure. If I had 
 to choose between the Forty-Eight Preludes and 
 Fugues and the B minor Mass I should plump for 
 the former, and there are many others of Bach's 
 compositions which I should be loth to lose for the 
 B minor Mass — although I would certainly give 
 up both the St. Matthew and the St. John Passion 
 for the Mass. A work on so gigantic a scale as the 
 B minor Mass must always impress us by its mere 
 proportions. In Bach's ceise the difficulty of ap- 
 preciating the music at its true value is complicated 
 by Bach's astounding virtuosity. Take, for example, 
 the opening Kyrie. It begins with a chorus in 
 five parts, continues with a duet between soprano 
 and alto, and concludes with another chorus in 
 
 ilo 
 
A NOTE ON THE B MINOR MASS 181 
 
 four parts. Now, when the Kyrie begins it is most 
 impressive, the mere volume of the voices moving 
 in a steady and remorseless cotmterpoint, together 
 with the orchestra, and the underlying organ 
 continuo produces an effect of massive power which 
 is most exhilarating. But, intrinsically, its aesthetic 
 value is about on the same level as the aesthetic 
 value of the sight of a company of the Guards 
 marching past the colours with an almost absolute 
 regularity and rhjrthmic perfection. After the first 
 thrill of excitement has passed we find ourselves 
 beginmng to wait for something to happen. We sit 
 patiently through the Ky^ie and get well into the 
 Gloria and then a gradual conviction of monotony 
 can no longer be resisted. Yes, already Bach's 
 B minor Mass, "the crowning achievement of 
 Bach's genius as a creative musician," begins to 
 grow monotonous. It is still impressive, and no 
 doubt to an academic musician, with the score in 
 his hands and his soul long ago defunct, this charge 
 of monotony would appear incredible, but then his 
 interest is almost entirely if not absolutely technical. 
 It is a source of everlasting amazement to him to 
 contemplate Bach's prodigious skill and fertility of 
 invention. But what do I care for Bach's prodigious 
 skill ? Even such virtuosity as Bach's is valueless 
 unless it expresses some ulterior beauty or, to put 
 it more succinctly, unless it is as expressive as it 
 is accomplished. The value of the actual musical 
 material of most of the Kyrie and Gloria seems to 
 me to be slight, and what pleasure we get is 
 
182 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 derived from the consummate skill with which it 
 is handled. 
 
 Dr. Terry, In his excellent edition of Forkel's 
 Bach, says (relative to the fifty-three Cantatas 
 composed from 1736-1744) : " There are few 
 phenomena in the record of art more extraordinary 
 than this unflagging cataract of inspiration in which 
 masterpiece followed masterpiece with the mono- 
 tonous periodicity of a Sunday sermon." In my 
 enthusiasm for Bach I swallowed this statement 
 when I first met it, but if Dr. Terry will excuse 
 the expression, it is arrant nonsense. Creative 
 genius does not work in this way. Masterpieces 
 are not produced with the monotonous periodicity 
 of a Sunday sermon. In fact, if we stop to think 
 we shall understand that this " monotonous 
 periodicity " weis exactly what was wrong with 
 a great deal of Bach's music. Bach, through a 
 combination of natural ability and quite imparalleled 
 concentration on his art, had arrived at the point 
 of being able to sit down at any minute of any day 
 and compose what had all the superficial appearance 
 of being a masterpiece. It is possible that even 
 Bach himself did not know which was a master- 
 piece and which Wcis not, and it is abundantly clear 
 to me that in all his large-sized works there are 
 huge chunks of stuff to which inspiration is the 
 last word that one could apply. The dunderheaded 
 professional musicians can hardly be expected to 
 know the difference between Bach and Bach. To 
 them he is the Protestant Pope of music and, like 
 
A NOTE ON THE B MINOR MASS 188 
 
 the other Pope, infallible. But I say that the 
 pretty trumpet work in the four-part chorus of the 
 Gloria, for example, is a proof that Bach was being 
 consciously clever and brightening up his stuff, and 
 that he was not at that moment writing with the 
 spontaneity of those really creative moments which 
 are popularly called inspired. Wlien, however, we 
 get to the fmal chorus of the Gloria in five parts 
 something happens. Those who have any instinct 
 for music can feel the change at once. They can 
 also feel that the opening five-part chorus of the 
 Credo which follows might have been written by 
 Mr. Frank Bridge. 
 
 Just let us think for one moment that the words 
 of this chorus begin with the tremendous statement 
 Credo in unum Deum, and be staggered that they 
 seem to have meant no more to J. S. Bach than 
 they would mean to the average organ-grinder. 
 The music shows no sign of Bach's imagination 
 having been fired at all ; the old Leipzig Cantor 
 simply took up his pen and reeled off this chorus 
 as any master craftsman might polish off a ticklish 
 job in the course of a day's work. 
 
 But the Credo does not remain long at this level. 
 It contains some magnificent choruses, including 
 the subhme Crucifixus and the dehghtful bass Aria 
 with ohoi d'amore obbligati. Then the opening chorus 
 of the Sanctus is another movement which could 
 not be praised too highly. Although it is absolute 
 blasphemy to say so, I feel I should like the organ 
 part cut out altogether in any performance with a 
 
184 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 large modem orchestra, but this is because I detest 
 the conjunction of the organ with the modem 
 orchestra. The organ will not blend with the 
 orchestra until we get mechanical homs, trumpets, 
 and tubes — ^in fact an entire keyboard orchestra. 
 
XXXIV 
 ON PIANISTS 
 
 THE commonest of all virtuosos is the 
 efficient pianist, and nothing more tedious 
 can well be imagined than a recital by one 
 of these efficient pianistSj some of whom can play 
 simultaneously two Chopin studies with intricate 
 variations of their own, as I once heard a wonderful 
 bald-headed German do in Munich. This man had 
 a European reputation, and was so marvellous that 
 there were only three people in the haU. He had 
 gone bald wondering why it was that another 
 pianist who could play only one Chopin study at a 
 time could keep on giving recitals in town after town, 
 and always to full haUs, often with people stand- 
 ing wherever it was possible to squeeze them in. 
 Pianists like this bald-headed German are generally 
 intolerable to listen to because of their hard tone 
 and their general mental inflexibility. Their 
 technique has often been acquired painfully, and 
 they seem determined to communicate some of 
 the pain to their auditors. They push their way 
 over a composition hke a steam-roller across a 
 
 metal road, and one listens in angujish for the final 
 
 185 
 
186 MtJSiC AND LIFE 
 
 terrifying crunch which signals that the piece has 
 been demoUshed. 
 
 In a different class from these human pianolas 
 are the piano-punchers, men whom a pacific Pro- 
 vidence has not allowed to become pugilists. These 
 are often jovial and exuberant fellows of varying 
 merit. It is generally possible to Hsten to even 
 the worst of them with some pleasure, while the 
 best of them can be magnificent. I imagine that 
 Rubinstein was a pianist of this tj^e, and certainly 
 his namesake Mr. Arthur Rubinstein is. A recital 
 by Mr. Arthur Rubinstein could never be dull — ^he is 
 far too full of vitality — and although it would be 
 impossible to say that his technique was greater 
 than Mr. Joseph Hofman's (it is probably not nearly 
 so great) yet he is far more exciting to Usten to, 
 because he is more emotional. The piano-puncher, 
 emotional at his best, often has considerable re- 
 finement, and can sometimes play, with great delicacy 
 and tenderness. What he generally lacks is the 
 exquisite sensibility of the more sensuous pianist, 
 the sort of pianist who is naturally drawn to play 
 Debussy and Ravel, who gets an extraordinary 
 gratification from pure tone and from a gradation 
 and blending of tone, and from what one might call 
 the " colour " of harmony. This exquisite sensi- 
 bihty is quite different again (being much more 
 carnal) from the romantic sensibility of those young 
 ladies of the mid- Victorian novel who swoon from 
 extreme deUcacy. Theirs was an exquisiteness of 
 sentiment rather than of sense, and together with 
 
ON PIANISTS 187 
 
 a very considerable physical gift of sensuous per- 
 ception, it is found very highly developed in the 
 playing of Vladimir de Pachmann, who when plajdng 
 often chatters like a heroine in a novel by Fanny 
 Bumey. 
 
 There is finally that class of pianists remarkable 
 for their intellectual power, of which the chief is 
 undoubtedly Busoni. A friend once described 
 Busoni's playing to me as leaving him with the 
 impression of having been in a " cast-iron cathedral, 
 adorned with frescoes of infernal flames, where 
 Busoni performed ironic rites on a Chappell piano," 
 and I feel inwardly convinced that this description 
 is far from being a mere picturesque exaggeration. 
 Extraordinary as Busoni's intellectual power is, I 
 do not find his plajnng satisfactory. I should not 
 mind its being unemotional, but it is not unemo- 
 tional — ^it is strongly emotional in a very unusual 
 way, suggesting a mind twisted and warped and 
 passion expressing itself in an icy coldness and 
 a cold-blooded devQry towards natural human 
 desires. So I feel that Busoni's intellectuality is 
 not a [valuable intellectuality, but a cranky in- 
 tellectuality. There are many pianists who stimu- 
 late and delight us at a first hearing, but there are 
 very few who wear well, and the perfect pianist 
 is not to be found. There is one curious feature in 
 the public attitude towards virtuosos, and it is that 
 once a man has been recognized as a great pianist 
 he is expected to remain a great pianist for the rest 
 of his life. But I am inclined to think that few of 
 
188 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 them remain first-rate for any length of time : 
 they generally become very good copies of an 
 Old Master. 
 
 These classifications I have made are extremely 
 rough, and permit of an infinite number of individual 
 combinations, each with a flavour and a personality 
 all its own. 
 
XXXV 
 
 STYLE IN SINGING 
 
 NOT so very many years before the war, 
 if one stayed in any of the smaller German 
 towns, one's eyes were continually affronted 
 by the shocking lack of taste in dress shown by 
 the majority of German women. It was not that 
 the matrons were more matronly, the dowagers 
 more dowageresque, and the frumps more frequent 
 and " frumpier " than anywhere else in the world : 
 it was that even the young girl, the Backfisch, was 
 a sight hideous beyond belief, with flat shoes, 
 worsted stockings, and a skirt Uke a potato sack. 
 There seemed to be a complete lack of any sense of 
 style. The Germans appeared to have no eyes, and 
 to their dull sense women were as Uke one another 
 as sheep — ^which, indeed, they were very Uke, 
 
 But Uttle by Uttle all that changed. Vienna — 
 which has been the greatest civiUzing influence in 
 Europe for many centuries — ^taught German men 
 and women to use their eyes, and the refinement 
 in dress and manners that took place throughout 
 Germany during the ten years before the war was 
 
 astonishing. In Munich one saw shopping in the 
 
 189 
 
190 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 streets numbers of beautiful and elegant women on 
 whom it was a delight to look, and in Vienna, at the 
 innumerable recitals in their fine new triple concert- 
 hall, the elegance and exquisite beauty of the women 
 was on a level with the music — ^that is to say it sur- 
 passed anything one could see or hear in London. 
 
 But where Germany stood during the greater part 
 of the nineteenth century in respect of dress, we in 
 England stand to-day in respect of singing. We have 
 absolutely no perception, no sense of refinement 
 or style in this matter whatsoever. In our taste 
 for singing we are (and I am including London) a 
 nation of frumps — dowdy beyond aU description. 
 The reason is largely that the average Londoner 
 never hears any good singing. It is safe to say that 
 probably his sole experience of professional singers 
 is at the Chappell or Boosey or Enoch Ballad 
 Concerts. Now the standard of singing at the 
 average Ballad Concert represents the standard 
 of Weldon's Paper Patterns in dress. But is 
 it useful, practical stuff — ^better, perhaps, than 
 nothing ? Some, not I, may think so, but certainly 
 it has no beauty, no distinction whatever. The 
 singing that is heard in an average suburban drawjng- 
 room is on a still lower level. It is really amazing 
 that the yotmg English girl, who reaUy shows con- 
 siderable taste in her shoes, her stockings, her 
 gloves, and all the details of her dress, shoidd play 
 and sing in the most slap-dash, careless^ and dowdy 
 way songs that are shapeless^^ tasteless, and of the 
 cheapest shoddy. 
 
STYLE IN SINGING 191 
 
 Somebody once said to me, what does it matter 
 wliat a girl looks like, so long as she has' a good 
 heart. I replied that I couldn't have every girl's 
 heart, but I could see every girl's dress. So there 
 are people without any musical ear who like a 
 song because it has a good sentiment : 
 
 "Wait for me, dear, if you pass the way 
 Of the sunset fields when the hour is late, 
 There, in the hush of the d3ring day. 
 Dearest, wait 1 " 
 
 Many a man will approve of this exhortation to wait. 
 It is, he feels, a piece of advice badly wanted ; most 
 of the waiting in his experience has been done 
 by him, but his approval of the moral should not 
 Influence his judgment of the song. A song is 
 not meant to be a method of giving advice, or of 
 inculcating sound sentiments : it is like an opera- 
 cloak or a fan, a work of art designed to be beautiful 
 in itself. The ear, hke the eye, has to be cultivated 
 to appreciate this beauty, and Heaven knows that 
 in London it gets little chance, since most of the well- 
 known English concert-singers have less taste and less 
 aesthetic sense than the average suburban dressmaker. 
 There is only one way of cultivating the ear, 
 and that is by hearing really good singers. We 
 had in London, at the Lsnric Theatre, Hanmiersmith, 
 an opportunity to hear in The Beggar's Opera a 
 singer who was a real stylist — I mean Miss Sylvia 
 Nelis, who took the part of Polly Peachum, The 
 singing at this delightful show was on a superior 
 level *11 through, particixlarly so in the case of Mr. 
 
192 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Frederick Ranalow, but it reached a high-water 
 mark of distinction in Miss Sylvia Nelis. Those 
 who have not heard Miss Nelis, or hearing her have 
 not particularly marked her, should take the next 
 opportunity that comes, and listen intently to that 
 exquisite phrasing and clean vocalization. Once 
 they have done so, and have realized the wonderful 
 beauty of real singing, they will, I hope, not be 
 able to endure again the crude, blatant vulgarity 
 of the average well-known sopranp. The unmusical 
 person is sure to expect something startling or 
 hair-raising in Miss Nelis's singing, and will at 
 first possibly be disappointed. But remember that 
 style is a matter of perfection in detail. The best- 
 dressed woman, like the best singer, is not the 
 " loudest." 
 
 It was the one solid merit of the Grand Opera 
 season at Covent Garden that it gave London an 
 opportunity of hearing really first-rate singing. 
 Whatever might be said about the general pro- 
 duction of the operas> however severely one might 
 have been moved on occasion to criticize the musical 
 quality of certain favourite works, the standard of 
 singing remained immeasurably superior to an57thing 
 to be heard in London or the provinces throughout 
 the rest of the year. It has been my experience 
 that good singing is the last thing that the really 
 musical amateur learns to appreciate, and how he 
 is ever to learn to appreciate it when he gets no 
 chance of hearing it in England to-day, I am unable 
 to imagine. 
 
XXXVI 
 JAZZ MUSIC 
 
 I MUST confess to a liking for jazz music when 
 it is good, and it was unfortunate that Sir 
 Hugh Allen, the new head of the Royal 
 College of Music, when making his onslaught on 
 the popular taste for " beastly tunes," was not a 
 little more specific in his denimciation, for it is 
 futile to declaim vaguely against all popular music. 
 I suspect that most of our best musicians are not 
 very famihar with the songs of the theatre and the 
 music-hall or with the waltzes, one-steps, and fox- 
 trots of the dancing-clubs and restaurants ; but 
 they are making a great mistake if they imagine 
 that this music is all bad or " beastly." No one 
 can deny that the tunes of the average musical 
 comedy are, as a rule, without beauty or distinction ; 
 but they are extremely academic. They are 
 modelled on tunes that have attracted in the past, 
 and they have a certain smoothness and lack of 
 character that betokens the training of the schools. 
 The absence of crudeness, clumsiness, or originality 
 could not be more marked if their composers were 
 pupils of the Royal College or the Royal Academy 
 13 
 
194 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 of Music. One would almost imagine that Sir 
 Hugh Allen believed that an academic musical 
 training and a familiarity with the best music of 
 the world's greatest composers must inevitably 
 give a man good taste and enable him to write 
 good tunes ! How many of Sir Hugh AUen's 
 students can write a beautiful tune ? The Royal 
 College of Music is lucky if it possesses one. But 
 what is to be done while we are waiting for that 
 one, and is he to provide aU the music-hall singers 
 and all the revues and musical comedies with their 
 music ? The fact is, that there is a large com- 
 mercial demand for music, and the numerous 
 schools and colleges of music in the country have 
 been busy for a long time meeting that demand. 
 There is no commercial demand for genius because 
 genius cannot be supplied with the certain regularity 
 of the A.R.C.M. or A.R.A.M. or the morning's 
 milk. But there is no reason why the quality of 
 the commercial product should not be continually 
 improved, and this is, no doubt, what Sir Hugh 
 AUen was really aiming at. This improvement is 
 dependent upon the existence of some faculty 
 called " taste," but I must confess to being wholly 
 sceptical as to the power of scholastic training to 
 impart " taste." It has not been my experience 
 that men or women acquire " taste " by mere 
 association with good music. It seems to me as 
 unscientific and as untrue as to think that if I 
 develop my biceps by Sandow exercises my children 
 will inherit them. Every one can perhaps develop 
 
JAZZ MUSIC 195 
 
 to a certain limited extent a faculty that he has 
 already got, but I suspect that even this is an 
 erroneous idea, and that the process of develop- 
 ment is not under our control at all. However, 
 be that as it may, experience shows us many an 
 accomplished musician, accustomed since child- 
 hood to the best music, whose " taste " or judgment 
 is no better than that of the first wild baboon 
 one might catch in the Congo. Does this seem an 
 exaggeration ? I am certain it is not so. I believe 
 that the more plausible and more probable a 
 theory or an argument is, the less likely it is to be 
 true. The paradoxes of Mr. Chesterton are nothing 
 to the paradoxes of reality, and one of the commonest 
 of paradoxes is the trained musician who can 
 discern, the beastliness of the tunes he never hears 
 — ^the tunes of the rag-time comedian and the 
 gramophone dance-record, but is completely taken 
 in by vulgar and banal tunes elaborately disguised 
 for a large orchestra. Speech may have been 
 given us to conceal our thought, but brains or 
 technique are certainly acquired by the modem 
 musician to conceal his spiritual beggary. 
 
 What our academic teachers are really asking 
 for from the composers of popular music is more 
 skill. They are so accustomed to hearing poverty 
 of thought and crudity of feeling well masked by 
 the adroit manipulation of technical devices, that 
 they are horrified when they come up against 
 vulgarity and " beastliness " in all its nakedness. 
 
 Composers, like men and women, can be taught 
 
1&6 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 good manners, but nobody surely pretends that 
 their 'essential nature is thereby changed. The 
 same variety of individual character remains 
 underneath ; all that has been done is to push 
 that individual character out of sight for the mutual 
 convenience of society. However excellent this 
 may be in daily life it is fatal in art. The music- 
 hall songs and rag-times may very well be beastly, 
 sentimental, and vulgar, but in so far aS they 
 express the life of the people and not their drawing- 
 room behaviour they are far more valuable and far 
 less vulgar than the carefully trained, colourless 
 insipidity of the composer produced by the Royal 
 College or the Royal Academy of Music who has 
 been so remorselessly dosed with Bach, Beethoven, 
 Brahms, Wagner, and Tschaikovsky, and so combed 
 and flat-ironed that he has no more individuality 
 than any other of the starched shirt-fronts produced 
 by his musical laundry. What do these students 
 feel ? What do they think ? Does anyone ever 
 hear anything of them in after life ? Would they 
 ever know whether they were Hstening to Brahms 
 or Beethoven except by sheer exercise of memory ? 
 Have they any passion for music ? Have they any 
 blood in their veins at all ? Their works seem to 
 deny them aU the attributes of Hfe. Better far Mr. 
 Jack Jones's " Tipperary " or the El Rdiquario 
 one-step and many a rag-time than Mr, Frank 
 Bridge's Lament for the " Lusitania," Mr. Cyril 
 Jenkins's Magic Cauldron, or Mr. Percy Grainger's 
 Suite In a Nutshell — that huge and elaborate 
 
JAZZ MUSIC 197 
 
 orchestration of a pennyworth of high spirits 
 which ence exhausted nearly a hundred musicians 
 and irearly as many machines at a Sjnnphony 
 concert conducted by Sir Henry Wood at the 
 Queen's Hall. 
 
XXXVII 
 
 PLASTIC MUSIC 
 
 OF the disciplinary value of Mr. Jacques 
 Dalcroze's system of Eurhythmies there can 
 be no doubt. It should form a part of the 
 curriculum of every school, both for boys and girls, 
 although to my mind its chief virtue is not that on 
 which Monsieur Dalcroze and his supporters are 
 accustomed 'to lay the greatest stress. I once had 
 the pleasure of attending a demonstration at the 
 Lyceum Theatre, when a very large audience was 
 held fascinated for a whole morning by the really 
 beautiful and striking plastic music — to coin what 
 seems to me the most suitable expression — exhibited 
 by Monsieur Dalcroze's pupils. 
 
 By Eurhs^thmics Its founder means rhjTthmlc 
 movement, ear-training, and improvisation — a 
 training in all of which his school provides; but 
 what is original in Monsieur Dalcroze's scheme — 
 original I mean in modem times — ^is the expression 
 of certain basic elements of music in movement or, 
 to put it more concretely, the introduction of the 
 body into musical training, which in modern times 
 has become purely intellectual — apart from deep- 
 
 fg8 
 
PLASTIC MUSIC 199 
 
 breathing, vocal exercises, and the quick-fingeredness 
 of instrumental virtuosos. These latter, however, 
 lead merely to what might almost be considered as 
 ph57sical deformity, since they only develop a few 
 muscles, such as the muscles of the chest and arms, 
 produdng tenors and sopranos who are genuine 
 monsters, and pianists who could fell an ox with 
 their right arm, snap a ship's-biscuit with their 
 fingers, but scarcely totter a hundred yards. 
 
 The foundation of Monsieur Dalcroze's method is 
 the expression of musical rhythm in movement, and 
 although he deprecates the application of the term 
 " Rhjrthmic G3nTinastics " to his system because it 
 suggests physical drill rather than intellectual driU, 
 yet the peculiar value of Eurhythmies lies in its 
 physical reaUzation of intellectual drill with a con- 
 sequent harmony of body and mind that approaches 
 an ancient ideal. What is wrong with modem 
 gymnastics, and athletics in general, is that the body 
 is treated as a sort of Caliban, to be trained to the 
 utmost power of speed and strength and directed by 
 a separate, governing intelligence or Ariel, which itself 
 needs no training but is supernatural, " bom, not 
 made." As a consequence, we find that from many 
 athletes the neglected Ariel has flown altogether, 
 leaving poor Caliban huge, mighty, and incapable — 
 his phght only the more pitiablejor his strength. It 
 is very likely that if we took two equally matched 
 " rugger " or " soccer " teams and could re-train 
 them from childhood, giving the one a three or five 
 years' course of Dalcroze's Eurhythmies taken out 
 
200 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 of their physical training hours, that this team 
 would simply " smother " the team brought up on 
 the ordinary athletic training. I emphasize this 
 point because it seems to me that the virtue of 
 Monsieur Dalcroze's Eurhj^thmics Mes in danger of 
 being overlooked by people who, owing to some un- 
 fortunate idiosjmcrasy, are indifferent to music and 
 imagine that Eurhythmies is merely a novel method 
 of teaching music. As a matter of fact, music really 
 begins where Eurhythmies ends, for Eurhj^thmics 
 is concerned only with some of the intellectual 
 foundations of music. It would be possible to 
 become the ablest graduate of the Dalcroze School 
 of Eurhythmies without having any fine power of 
 perception as regards music. A first-class Eurhylh- 
 micist is as Hkely to be unable to discriminate good 
 music from bad, to teU the difference between 
 Sullivan and Hermann DarewsM or between Wagner 
 and Charpentier, as any professor of harmony who 
 has ever lived. But he or she would have a physical 
 grace and an adroitness and power of body and mind 
 in the exercise of music or of any physical or intel- 
 lectual task that would be far superior to that of 
 the average music-student or athlete. " We teach 
 music, not dancing," exclaimed Monsieur Dalcroze 
 from the stage of the Lyceum Theatre, and Monsieur 
 Dalcroze is right in emphasizing the xiistinction, 
 since it is the intellectual training which his 
 system gives that is valuable, but it is valuable 
 mainly because, and unique only because, it is 
 plastic, not abstract, like mathematics, or like 
 
\ PLASTIC MUSIC - 201 
 
 harmony and musical theory as it is ordinarily 
 taught. 
 
 But when we have pretty well agreed that 
 Eurhythmies is as valuable a training as its sup- 
 porters claim it to be, and much the best method 
 of combining intellectual and physical training yet 
 evolved, there remains a question whether it is not 
 possible to carry intellectual discipline too far. I 
 am not sure, but that, even from a purely musical 
 point of view, students trained a Httle too thoroughly 
 in Eurhythmies might not lose in the apprehension 
 of rhythmic subtlety. We do not altogether know 
 the effect of discipline on the human brain. Cer- 
 tainly its apparent effect is to clarify the under- 
 standing, but does it really do this, or does it merely 
 prevent the brain from looking sideways, as it were ? 
 Does it merely put bhnkers on the horse so that 
 there seems no alternative to the route straight ahead 
 of him, although in reality there are thousands ? 
 I strongly feel that mental discipline, Uke every 
 other sort of discipline, can be overdone, and that 
 what it does is to set Up in the brain a network of 
 tramway lines, on which the consciousness travels 
 up and down like a car, doomed never to leave the 
 track and unable to explore the cross-paths and 
 byways that exist, and are being extended faster 
 than new lines are being built. It is a fact that we 
 can govern our perceptions to see and hear what we 
 have been trained to expect with such completeness 
 of concentration that we become bUnd and deaf by a 
 process of selection that has become unconsciously 
 
202 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 automatic. That Is why all great artists shrink in 
 horror from the theories and systems in which 
 smaller men so willingly 'enmesh themselves. But 
 even from the point of view of the audience — 
 who, to listen appreciatively, must themselves be 
 artists of a kind — ^these systems are dangerous in 
 excess, for they blunt the perceptions. My advice 
 to parents and to all who are interested in 
 Eurhythmies is, that they should be moderate. 
 Let a child have not too long a course of Eurhyth- 
 mies and^then forget all about Eurh3^hmics for the 
 rest of his life. This advice is not new, but it needs 
 to be repeated at the advent of every fresh theory of 
 education. 
 
X X X V n I 
 
 CHURCH MUSIC 
 
 I WAS once presented by the author with a 
 copy of a book dealing with Church music, 
 which I know to be a very thorny subject,^ 
 and let me say before proceeding further that the 
 publisher had not done his duty by this book, for 
 it was printed on such paper that I threw it into 
 the waste-paper basket three times, each time having 
 to fish it out after remembering that it was a gift 
 and that I had no right to be dissatisfied. Having 
 read it, however, I found myself tolerating the 
 inferior paper in the hope that the low price will 
 ensure it a large circulation, particularly among 
 parsons and habitual chxirch-goers, I must frankly 
 declare that Mr. Duncan- Jones knows a great deal 
 more about Church music than I do, for I can only 
 speak as one for whom music is more important 
 than the Church. Nevertheless, I claim to be neither 
 a barbarian nor a rationalist, and I should like to 
 put the musical point of view of one who in his time 
 
 '^Chwch Music, by A. S. Duncan- Jones, M.A., Perpetual 
 Curate o£ St. Atary the Virgin, Primrose Hill. Robert Scott. 
 33. 6d. net. 
 
 303 
 
204 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 has been a choir-boy, and has also attended the 
 services of a great number of churche^ of all de- 
 nominations — ^Including the Baptist Chapel, the 
 Jewish Synagogue, and the Roman Catholic Church 
 in England and abroad. In the first place, not 
 every musician will, I think, agree with Mr. Duncan- 
 Jones that there is Church as distinct from secular 
 music. That there is an historical distinction every- 
 body knows, but that there is a fundamental 
 musical difference few would to-day admit, and this 
 becomes clearer the moment we substitute the word 
 " religious " for " church." To the musician, Bach's 
 Passions, his masses, his cantatas, sonatas, motets 
 and preludes and fugues are music, neither 
 " religious " nor " secular," and whether written 
 for performance in church or concert-hall they are 
 good or bad, great or mediocre for the same reasons. 
 To teU a musician that his feeUngs on hearing the 
 St. Matthew Passion in a cathedral would differ 
 from his feelings on hearing it in the <3ueen's HaU, 
 would be merely telling him that his feelings on 
 hearing it would depend on whether he had a com- 
 fortable or uncomfortable seat, or was feeling ill 
 or well, or happy or depressed, or had or had not paid 
 for adniission. Obviously, all circumstances affect 
 one's feehngs, and not least of aU the " circum- 
 stance " of the church, but the nature of the music 
 is unchangeable ; it is grave or gay, noble or mean, 
 spiritual or sensual, exdted or emotional, according 
 to its nature and the spirit of its author. Now, 
 in the concert-hall, we get the whole spirit of 
 
CHURCH MUSIC 205 
 
 man. Let us remember the magnificent words 
 of Blake : 
 
 " The pride of the peacock Is the glory of God. 
 The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. 
 The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. - 
 The nakedness of woman is the work of God." 
 
 My complaint against Church music is that its 
 authors insist — ^under guidance from the Chiirch — 
 on giving us only part of the work of God, and that 
 often a very inferior part, while pretending to give 
 us aU, or all that matters. There are musical 
 historians who tell us that prior to the Papal decree 
 of 1322 by Pope John XXII Church music was " like 
 rag-time gone mad," because composers used folk- 
 tunes and combined them with chants. I must 
 confess that the idea of such procedure does not 
 shock me, although the actual results might very 
 weU have done so. The return to plain-song may 
 weU have been what everybody claims, a real 
 reform, but I am aU against the idea that there is a 
 special criterion for Church music. There is only 
 one criterion, good music remains good music and 
 bad remains bad, and the Church will always pull 
 its reformers back into the abyss of bad music while 
 it permits its members to ask, Is this appropriate ? 
 instead of: Is this good enough? Here we put 
 our finger on the inherent diflficulty of the Church's 
 position. It is almost imposable for the Church 
 not to give an impression of hj^pocrisy, fop its 
 emphasis is on its pretmsions rather than its per- 
 formances. The Royal Philharmonic Society is 
 
206 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 supposed to provide the best music and the best 
 artists. Its only pretensions are to call itself 
 " Royal " and to put out its bust of Beethoven at 
 each concert. It has a committee composed of 
 eminent musicians, who are supposed to be able 
 to discriminate between good and bad music. 
 Well, to a certain extent they can so discriminate, 
 but they do not claim infallibility even with regard 
 to good and bad music, and if Beethoven's bust 
 could blush it would have blushed often at the music 
 it has had to hear. 
 
 The Church, however, does not merely know 
 infallibly the difference between good and bad 
 music (witness the Papal decrees), it knows the 
 difference between Good and Bad. It is obvious 
 that the brain of any one parson is an inadequate 
 receptacle for such knowledge, and he consequently 
 breaks down at all sorts of points, and the point 
 where he breaks down most audibly is music. The 
 music in the average church is truly a fearful thing, 
 but the adoption of plain-song, though it will 
 preserve the congregation from many horrors which 
 they probably prefer, wiU not ensure beautiful 
 music. Even Mr. Duncan- Jones, ardent as is his 
 advocacy of plain-song, admits that the parish 
 church " must be allowed a certain latitude " in 
 its interpretation of it, and he warns the parson 
 against the purist who wiU be sm:e to tell him his 
 performance is an outrage. Here, it seems to me, 
 Mr. Dimcan- Jones lets in again the very devU he 
 set out to exorcise. Plain-song has itself been many 
 
CHURCH MUSIC 207 
 
 times " reformed " in the history of the Church, and 
 if we adopt it to-day to get rid of the vulgarity and 
 emotionahsm of the ordinary Church music but 
 allow our parish church to make it a " vehicle of 
 self-expression," it will very quickly have to be 
 reformed once more. In short, plain-song is no 
 panacea that will suddenly produce good music 
 in our parish churches. The only way Church 
 music can be improved is by a steady education in 
 public taste, and in this it does not differ from other 
 music. Luckily, there are a number of people, 
 and among them is Mr. Duncan- Jones, who are 
 steadily educating the public. If every parson in 
 England could be made to buy this book and made 
 to understand it, there would be at least one thing 
 good in every church in England ; and, to return to 
 Blake, who knew more about our spiritual life than 
 any man of the last thousand years," goodness can 
 only exist in minute particulars "^-which is why 
 the Church, which has to be good in everything, 
 is such a practical failiure in spite of all its noble 
 ideals. 
 
XXXIX 
 INTERPRETATION IN MUSIC 
 
 I WENT to a recent recital by Fritz Kreisler 
 naturally curious to know what I should think 
 of his playing after an interval of eight years, 
 and still more curious to compare his playing 
 >*ith that of Jascha Heifetz, whom I had heard 
 only a few months before. I do not know what 
 continental and American critics think of the 
 relative merits of these two violinists, but here in 
 England Kreisler seems to be accepted unanimously 
 as a great violinist, while Heifetz has been for the 
 most part damned as a mere virtuoso. Obviously, 
 musicians and musical critics have some ideal 
 standard to which they refer the performances of 
 artists, and it may be interesting to try to find out 
 what this ideal is and whether it is sound criticism 
 to apply it. To begin with, it must be noticed that 
 there is no analogy in any other art to the executant 
 in music. No, there is one, there is the reciter of 
 poetry — ^hardly a comforting comparison for the 
 musician ! 
 
 There are also, in Drama, the actors, but can we 
 consider Drama as an art ? Has not some great 
 
 203 
 
INTERPRETATION IN MUSIC 209 
 
 critical contemporary said that Shakespeare was 
 " no artist " ? Meaning, I suppose, that he was a 
 damned poet who stuck bits of Ids poems into other 
 people's bad plays instead of putting them into 
 anthologies as the modems do. However, we 
 cannot discuss here whether Drama is an art or 
 not. I shaU only say that in theatrical matters I 
 side mainly with Mr. Gordon Craig and that what 
 I am going to say about the musical executant 
 applies also to the dramatic executant or actor. 
 Now, the ideal, current during the last fifty or sixty 
 years among " cultured " people both as to reciting 
 poetry and to playing music, has been the ideal 
 of "interpretation." The virtuosos of voice and 
 instrument have been judged according as they 
 fulfilled two requirements, the first being whoUy 
 technical and the second being wholly in the nature 
 of expounding or interpreting the work played. 
 So we get the stereotyped formul^ of criticism. 
 " Miss Blank's technique is good, but she has not 
 yet grasped the mystical nature of Franck's Pre- 
 lude, Choral, and Fugue." Now this criticism has 
 a meaning, it serves in a rough-and-ready way to 
 convey the fact that there is something wrong with 
 Miss Blank's playing, ■ and, no doubt, if musical 
 critics were paid five thousand a year, with a pension 
 at fifty, and given adequate time to think, they could 
 aU tell us much more than that about Miss Blank's 
 playingj and lead us very much closer to the heart 
 of this mystery of Ian intelligent female who, after 
 seven years in a first-rate conservatorium and five 
 14 
 
210 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 years' Individual study under distinguished pianists, 
 still plays in such a way as to convey to an eminent 
 critic the impression that she misses the whole 
 point of the Franck Prelude, Choral, and Fugue 
 whilst playing it with the greatest facility. Un- 
 fortunate female (and male) products of Leipzig, 
 London, and Paris ! Twelve years of unremitting 
 toU of mind and fingers under the best masters the 
 world produces, and at the end of it all merely the 
 capacity to break the strings of a ChappeU piano ! 
 Why were you not taught how to grasp the mystical 
 nature of C6sax Franck's very small output of 
 pianoforte music ? What is the good of aU those 
 professors and assistant-professors if the first 
 musical critic who hears your performance after 
 aU those years of study declares it to be pointless — 
 a mere digitalion ? 
 
 But now another and much more serious question 
 must be asked. How did the critic grasp the 
 mystical nature of Franck's Prelude, Choral, and 
 Fugue, and what does he mean by it ? Let us 
 assume that the critic cannot play any musical 
 instrument and cannot read the notes (for this will 
 simplify the argument), we must then conclude 
 that he has heard it played so many times that he 
 understands it. It must also be admitted that 
 there is such a gift as musical intuition ; the musical 
 critic, like the poet, is bom not made, and there are 
 people who have a power of immediately grasping 
 the musical contents of a new work even at a single 
 imperfect performance that is staggering to many a 
 
INTERPRETATION IN MUSIC 211 
 
 highly trained academic musician. Now, this gift 
 is closely related to the creative gift of the great 
 composer — it springs from a similar Unusual musical 
 sensibility; but what makes the one creative and 
 the other merely re-creative — as, for example, the 
 reader of Shakespeare has to re-create the poetry 
 of Shakespeare (for Shakespeare means nothing to 
 an idiot, little to the readers of John Bull, and 
 not much to our average Civil Servant) — cannot be 
 examined here. It is enough to be reminded that 
 every great worlcof art requires for its fuU apprecia- 
 tion a sensibility as great as its creator's. What 
 was the matter with Miss Blank was that her 
 sensibility was not even as great as the musical 
 critic's. He felt that her plashing was not sensitive, 
 and so he said she missed the mysticism of the 
 music — ^trying by the use of the word mysticism to 
 suggest the kind of sensitiveness he missed. And 
 here we come to the crux of the whole matter. 
 Some have maintained that the " ear," by which 
 they mean the brain listening to sound, is the sole 
 judge of music ; others think that the " heart," by 
 which they mean the man as father, brother, lover, 
 son, and sojourner in this world, is the sole judge of 
 music ; but there are those who believe that the 
 music men think they make is really the music of 
 the spheres, that something eternal and universal 
 expresses itself in music, and unless they hear that 
 they are not satisfied. He who has once heard the 
 song of the Syrens will never again be satisfied with 
 the summer songs of the washerwomen at Margate 1 
 
212 MUSIC AND LIFE 
 
 Nor will he be satisfied with an emotional perfonn- 
 anceof Tschaikovsky's Pathetic S37mphony that may 
 make all the fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers, and 
 sons in the concert-hall weep. 
 
 There is no " music of the spheres " here 1 On 
 the other hand, he cannot accept the brain listening 
 to sound as a complete statement of the truth. 
 Man is obviously more than a mere instrument 
 listening to sound. What is to give the sounds 
 their value ? What is to make one set of sounds 
 preferable to another ? We have discarded the 
 emotional reference, and so once more we are thrown 
 back on some universal significance which these 
 sounds must have and for which our instinct 
 searches. When the music has that significance 
 or that beauty (for the beauty is the significance) 
 we are satisfied— but only then. 
 
 The critic has got to be dogmatic in this matter. 
 He can only in the last resort declare this is 
 beautiful or this is not beautiful, and he has slowly 
 to win the confidence and the understanding of his 
 readers so that when he uses the word " beautiful " 
 they fathom the full richness of its meaning. 
 
 It follows from this argument that there is only 
 one perfect way in which any piece of music can be 
 played. Music— -any music — ^is only played per- 
 fectly if it comes to us absolutely pure and imiversal, 
 unadulterated by time or place. It may be that 
 what we think is universal is not ; our perfection 
 may be imperfect but our imperfection is certainly 
 still less perfect, and we cannot rest Content with 
 
INTERPRETATION IN MUSIC 218 
 
 that. But this is what we are doing when we 
 demand of the performer " interpretation." " In- 
 terpretation " invariably means obtruding the 
 personal character of the performer into the per- 
 formance. So we get all sorts of readings of famous 
 compositions : the sentimental reading, the erotic 
 reading, the " all damned nonsense " reading, the 
 pugnacious reading, the intellectual reading, the 
 " young noiss " reading, the old cynic reading, and, 
 coimnonest of all, the " mixed " reading — ^pro- 
 duced by serious people who go to aU the recitals of 
 celebrated virtuosos and mark their scores. 
 
 How music is to be played so as to have that 
 universality, that freedom from time or place, that 
 rare and' final beauty, neither I nor any man knows, 
 but we know that quality when we hear it. I think 
 Heifetz has it as no one else I have heard has had it. 
 I do not know what it depends on, but I think our 
 estimates of character are based on much too 
 shallow foundations to be surprised at finding a boy 
 of nineteen, of no particular intellectual gifts, possess- 
 ing it ; and a mature man of about fifty, of great 
 culture and intelligence and of fine and genial 
 nature, without it. Kreisler is, undoubtedly, a great 
 violinist, for in him reason, sentiment, sensuousness, 
 intelligence, vitality, and refinement are har- 
 moniously blended. His playing is "interpreta- 
 tion " at its very best. To hear him is to hear 
 music transmitted through the medium of a fine, 
 fully developed human personahty. To hear 
 Heifetz is to hear the song of the Syrens. 
 
PRINTED BV 
 
 UORSISON AND GIBB LTD. 
 
 BDINBUKGH 
 
A SELECTION FROM 
 
 Messrs. Methuen's 
 
 P UBLICATION S 
 
 This Catalogue contains only a selection of the more important books 
 published by Messrs. Methuen. A complete catalogue of theu- publications 
 may be obtained on application. 
 
 Bam (F. VI.)— 
 A Digit of the Moon ; A Hindoo Love 
 Story. The Descent of the Sun: A 
 Cycle of Birth. A Heifer of the Dawn. 
 In the Great God's Hair. A Draught 
 OF the Blub. An Essence of the Dusk. 
 An Incarnation of the Snow. A Mine 
 OF Faults. The Ashes of a God. 
 Bubbles of the Foam. A Svrup of the 
 Bees. The Livery of Eve. The Sub- 
 stance of a Drea;k. All Fcap. ivo. 5J. 
 rut. An Echo of the Spheres. Wide 
 Demy. i2s, 6d. net. 
 
 BaJier (C. B. GoIUns). CROME. Illus- 
 trated. Quarto. £'S' S*- **ei. 
 
 Balfour (Sir Qraham). THE LIFE OF 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Ft/- 
 ieenth Edition. In one Volume. Cr, ivo. 
 Buckram, is. 6d. net. 
 
 BeUoc(H.)- 
 Paris, 8j. 6d. net. Hills and the Sea, 6s. 
 net. On Nothing and Kindred Subjects, 
 6s. 7t€t. On Everything, 6s. net. On Some- 
 thing, 6s. net. FiRiiT and Last, 6s. net. 
 This and That and the Other, 6s. net. 
 Marie Antoinette, i8j. net. The Pyre- 
 nees, iQS. 6d, net, 
 
 Blackmore (S. FoweU). LAWN TENNIS 
 UP-TO-DATE. Illustrated. Demy 8w. 
 I2J. 6d. net. 
 
 Campbell (Norman R.). WHAT IS 
 SCIENCE t Cr. ivo. ss. net. 
 
 Chandler (Arthnr), D.D., late Lord Bishop of 
 Bloemfontein — 
 Ara Cceli : An Essay in Mystical Theology, 
 SS. net. Faith and Experience, sj. net. 
 The Cult of the Passing Moment, ss, 
 net. The English Church and Reunion, 
 SS. net. ScALA MuNDi, 4f, 6d, net. 
 
 Chesterton (G. K.)— 
 The Ballad of the White Horse. 
 All Things Considered. Tremendous 
 Trifles. Alarms and Discursions. A 
 Miscellany of Men. The Uses of 
 Diversity. All Fcap. Bzio. 6s. net. 
 Wine, Water, and Song. Fcap. Bzio, 
 IS. 6d. net, 
 
 Clutton-Brock(A.). WHATIS THE KING- 
 DOM OF HEAVEN? Fifth Edition, 
 Fca^. Bvo 5J. net, 
 
 ESSAYS ON ART. Second Edition, Fcap, 
 8zr0. 5J. Ttet. 
 
 ESSAYS ON BOOKS. Third Edition. 
 Fcap. 8017. 6s. net. 
 
 MORE ESSAYS ON BOOKS. Fca^, ivo, 
 6s. net. 
 
 Cole (G. D. H.). SOCIAL THEORY. 
 
 Second Edition^ revised. Cr, Zvo, 6s. net. 
 Conrad (Joseph). THE MIRROR OF 
 
 THE SEA : Memories and Impressions. 
 
 Fourth Edition. Fcap. %vo. 6s. net. 
 
 Drever (James). THE PSYCHOLOGY 
 OF EVERYDAY LIFE. Cr. Szjo. 6s. net. 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INDUSTRY. 
 Cr. Svo. 5s, net, 
 
 Einstein (A.). RELATIVITY : THE 
 SPECIAL AND THE GENERAL 
 THEORY. Translated by Robert W. 
 Lawson. Sixth Edition. Cr. iso. ss. 
 net. 
 
 Other Books on the Einstein Theory. 
 
 SPACE— TIME— MATTER. By Hermann 
 
 Wevl. Demy ivo. aij. net. 
 EINSTEIN THE SEARCHER : His Work 
 
 explained in Dialogues with Einstein. 
 
 By Alexander Moszkowski. Demy Bvo. 
 
 12s. 6d. net, 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE THEORY 
 
 OF RELATIVITY. By Lyndon Bolton. 
 
 Cr, 8vo, se, net. 
 RELATIVITY AND GRAVITATION. By 
 
 various Writers. Edited by J. Malcolm 
 
 Bird. Cr. Bvo. ^s,6d. net, 
 RELATIVITY AND THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 By Dr. Harry Schmidt. Cr. ivo. ss. 
 
 net. 
 
 Fyleman (Rose). FAIRIES AND CHIM- 
 NEYS. Fcap. Sao. Ninth Edition. 
 2S, 6d, net, 
 
 THE FAIRY GREEN. Fourth Edition, 
 Fcap, Zvo, 3f. 6d. net. 
 
 THE FAIRY FLUTE. Fca^, Sot. 3s, 6d, 
 net, 
 
 Gibblns (H. de B.). INDUSTRY IN 
 ENGLAND: HISTORICAL OUT- 
 LINES. With Maps and Plans. Tenth 
 Edition, Demy Bvo, X2S, 6d, net, 
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL HISTORY OF 
 ENGLAND. With 5 Maps and a Plan. 
 Twenty-seventh Edition, Cr. Bvo. 5J 
 
 Gibbon (Ednard). THE DECLINE AND 
 FALL OF THE ROMAN 1EMPIRE. 
 Edited, with Notes, Appendices, and Maps, 
 by J. B. Bury, Seven Volumes. Demy ^o. 
 Illustrated. Each 12s, 6d. net. Also in 
 Seven Volumes. Unillustrated. Cr, Bvo, 
 Each IS. 6d, net. 
 
Messrs. Methuen's Publications 
 
 Oloser (T. R.)— 
 
 The Conflict of Religions in the Easlv 
 Roman Empire, los. 6d. nii. Poets and 
 Puritans, ioj. 6rf. net. From Pericles 
 to Philip, i<u. 6d. tut. Virgil, xas. 6d. 
 net. The Christian Tradition and its 
 Verification (The Angus Lecture for 19x2), 
 6s. net. 
 
 arahanie (Kenneth). THE WIND IN 
 THE WILLOWS. Eleventh Edition. Cr. 
 %vo. IS. 6d. net. 
 
 HaU (H. R.). THE ANCIENT HISTORY 
 OF THE NEAR EAST FROM THE 
 EARLIEST TIMES TO THE BATTLE 
 OF SALAMIS. Illustrated. Fifth Edi- 
 tion. Detny %vo. izis. net. 
 
 Hanthorne (Nathaniel). THE SCARLET 
 LETTER. With 31 Illustrations in Colour 
 by Hugh Thomson, tf^ide Royal ivo. 
 31J. dd. net. 
 
 Herbert (A. P.). THE WHEREFORE 
 AND THE WHY : New Rhymes for Old 
 Children. Illustrated by George MoRRpw. 
 Fcap. \to. ZS' 6d. net. 
 
 LIGHT ARTICLES ONLY. Illustrated by 
 George Morrow. Cr. ivo. 6s. net. 
 
 BoldBWorth (W. B.). A HISTORY OF 
 ENGLISH LAW. Vols. /., //., ///. 
 Bach Second Edition, Demy 3vo. Each 
 iSf. net. 
 
 Inge (W. R.). CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM. 
 (The Bampton Lectures of i8gg.) Fifth 
 Edition. Cr. Zvo. js. 6d. net. 
 
 JenkB (K.). AN OUTLINE OF ENG- 
 LISH LOCAL GOVERNMENT. Fourth 
 Edition. Revised by R. C. K. Ehsor. Cr. 
 Zvo. 5s. net. 
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH 
 LAW: From the Earliest Times to 
 the End of the Year igii. Second 
 Edition, revised. Demy ivo. 12s. 6d. net. 
 
 Julian (Lady) of Nornlch. REVELA- 
 TIONS OF DIVINE LOVE. Edited by 
 Grace Warrack. Seventh Edition. Cr. 
 Bvo. 5s. net. 
 
 KeatB (John). POEMS. Edited, with Intro- 
 duction and Notes, by K. de Selincourt. 
 Witli a Frontispiece in Photogravure. 
 Fourth Edition. Demy Swtf. laj. 6d. net. 
 
 Kldd (Benjamin). THE SCIENCE OF 
 POWER. Ninth Edition. Crown 8»». 
 ^s. 6d, net. 
 
 SOCIAL EVOLUTION. Demy Sou. %s. 6d. 
 net. 
 
 A PHILOSOPHER WITH NATURE. 
 Cr. Bvo. 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 KlpUng (Bndyard). BARRACK-ROOM 
 BALLADS. 2zsth Thousand. Cr. Sno. 
 Buckram, 7J. 6d. net. Also Fcap, Bvo. 
 Cloth, 6s. net; leather j 'js. 6d. net. 
 Also a Service Edition. Two Volumes, 
 Squarefcai>, Bvo. Each gj. net^ 
 
 THE SEVEN SEAS. 157'A Thousand, 
 Cr. Bvo. Buckram, ys. 6d. net. Also Fca^, 
 Bvo. Clpth, 6s. net; leather, 7s. 6d. net. 
 Also a Service Edition. Two Volumes, 
 Sqtiarefaap, Bvo. Each 31. net. 
 
 Kipling (Rudyard)— ci>«/2«»«i;. 
 
 THE FIVE NATIONS. 126/A Thousand, 
 Cr, Bvo, Buckram, js, 6d. net. Also Fcap. 
 Bvo. Cloth, 6s. net; leather, 7s. 6d. net. 
 Also a Service Edition. Two Volumes, 
 Square fcap. Bvo, Each y, net, 
 
 DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES. 102W 
 Thousand. Cr. Bvo. Buckram, 7s. 6d. net. 
 Also Fcap, Bvo, Cloth, 6s, net; leather, 
 •JS, 6d, net, ^ 
 
 Also a Service Edition. Two Volumes 
 Square fcap. Bvo. Each 3J. net. 
 
 THE YEARS BETWEEN, gsth Thou- 
 sand. Cr, Bvo. Buckram, 7J. 6d, net. 
 Fcap, Sao, Blue cloth, 6s, net; Limp 
 lamiskin,7S, 6d, net. 
 
 Also a Service Edition. Two Volumes, 
 Squarefcap, Bvo, Each r^, net, 
 
 HYMN BEFORE ACTION. Illuminated. 
 Fcap. 4to, IS. 6d, net. 
 
 RECESSIONAL. Illuminated. Fcap. 4&. 
 IS, 6d, net. 
 
 TWENTY POEMS FROM RUDYARD 
 KIPLING. 360th Thousand. Fcap. Svo. 
 IS. net. 
 
 SELECTED POEMS. Cr. Bvo. 5s. net. 
 
 Knox (E. V. &.). ('E-voe' of Punch.) 
 PARODIES REGAINED. Illustrated by 
 George Morrow. Fcap. Bvo. 6s. net. 
 
 Lamb (Charles and Mary).' THE COM- 
 PLETE WORKS. Edited by E. V. Lucas. 
 A New and Revised Edition in Six Volumes, 
 With Frontispieces. Fcap, Bvo. Each 6s. net. 
 The volumes are : — 
 
 I. Miscellaneous Prose, ii. Elia and 
 the Last Essay of Elia. iil Books 
 FOR Children, iv. Plays and Poems. 
 V. and VL Letters. 
 
 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. With an Intro- 
 duction by E. V. Lucas, and 28 Illustrations 
 by A. Garth Jones. Fcap, Bvo, 5s, net. 
 
 Lankester (Sir Ray). SCIENCE FROM^ 
 AN EASY CHAIR. Illustrated. Thirteenth 
 Edition. Cr. Bvo. 7s. 6d. net, 
 
 SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR 
 Second Series. Illustrated. Third Edition. 
 Cr. Bvo. 7s. 6d. net, 
 
 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST. 
 Illustrated. Third Edition. Cr. 8to. 
 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 SECRETS OF EARTH AND SEA. Cr, 
 Bvo, Bs, 6d, net. 
 
 Lodge (Sir Oliver). MAN AND THE 
 UNIVERSE : A Study of the Influence 
 OF the Advance in Scientific Know- 
 ledge upon our Understanding of 
 Christianity. Ninth Edition, Crown Bvo, 
 ys. 6d, net, , 
 
 THE SURVIVAL OF MAN : A Study in 
 Unrecognised Human Faculty. Seventh 
 Edition, Cr. Bvo. 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 MODERN PROBLEMS. Cr. Bvo. 7s. 6d. 
 net. 
 
 RAYMOND ; or Life and Death. Illus- 
 trated. Twelfth Edition. Demy Bvo. 15J. 
 net. 
 
Messrs. Methuen's Publications 
 
 Lnoai (E. V.)— 
 Thb Life op Chables Lamb, z vols., iif. 
 tuf, A Wanderer in Holland, lor. 6d. net. 
 A Wanderer in London, lof. 6^. n«/. 
 London Revisited, icu. 6</. m/. A Wan- 
 derer IN Paris, nas. 6d, net and 6s, net, A 
 Wanderer in Florence, i<». 6d. net. 
 A Wanderer in Venice, ioi. &£ »</. The 
 Open Road: A Little Book for Wayfarers, 
 6s, 6d. net and us. net. The Friendly 
 Town : A Little Book for the Urbane, 6s. 
 net. Fireside and Sdnshihb, 6s, net. 
 Character and Comedy, 6s. net. The 
 Gentlest Art: A Choice of Letters by 
 Entertaining Hands, 6s, 6d. net. The 
 Second Post, 6s. net. Her Infinite 
 Variety : A Feminine Portrait Gallery, 6s. 
 net. Good Company : A Rally of Men, 6s. 
 net. One Day and Another, 6s. net. 
 Old Lamps for New, 6s. net. Loiterer's 
 Harvest, dr. net. Clodd and Silver, 6s. 
 net, A BoswELL op Baghdad, and other 
 Essays, 6s, net. 'Twixt Eagle and 
 Dove, 6s. net. The Phantom Journal, 
 and other £^ays and Diversions, 6s. 
 net. Specially Selected : A Choice of 
 Essays. 7^. 6d. net. The British School : 
 An ^ecdotal Guide to the British Painters 
 and Paintings in the National Gallery, 6s. net. 
 Roving East and Roving West : Notes 
 gathered in India, Japan, and America. 
 is, net. Urbanities. Illustrated by G. L. 
 Stamfa, 7j. 6d, net, Vermeer. 
 
 ■.(*.). AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN 
 VERSE. With Introduction by Robert 
 Lynd. Third Edition, Fcap. 8»o. 6s. net. 
 Thin paper, leather, fs. 6d, net. 
 
 HoDongaU (William). AN INTRODUC- 
 TION TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY. 
 Sixteenth Edition. Cr. ivo, is. 6d, net, 
 
 BODY AND MIND: A History and a 
 Defence op Animism. Fifth Edition, 
 Demy %vo, 12s, 6d. net, 
 
 MaolTer (B. H.). THE ELEMENTS OF 
 SOCIAL SCIENCE. Cr. Sao, 6s, net, 
 
 Maeterlinck (Hanrice)-; 
 
 The Blue Bird : A Fairy Flay in Six Acts, 
 6;. net. Mary Magdalene; A Play in 
 Three Acts, sj. net. Death, 3^. 6d. net. 
 Our Eternity, 6s, net. The Unknown 
 Guest, 6s, net. Poems, sj. net. The 
 Wrack op the Storm, 6s, net. The 
 Miracle of St. Anthony : A Play in One 
 Act, J!. 6d. net. The Burgomaster of 
 Stilemondb : A Pla^ in Three Acts, ^s. 
 net. The Betrothal ; or. The Blue Bird 
 Chooses, 6s. net. Mountain Paths, 6s. 
 net. The Story op Tyltyl, au. net, 
 
 mine (A. A.). The Day's Play. The 
 Holiday Round. Once a Week. All 
 Cr,ivo. 'is,6d,net. Not that it Matters. 
 Fcap, ivo. 6s, net. If I May. Fcap, Svo. 
 6s. net, Thb Svnnv Side. Fcap, Sm. 
 6s, net. 
 
 Ozenham (Jolui>— 
 
 Bees in Amber ; A Little Book of Thought- 
 ful Verse. All's Well : A Collection of 
 War Poems. The King's High Way. The 
 Vision Splendid. The Fiery Cross. 
 High Altars : The Record of a Visit to 
 the Battlefields of France and Flanders. 
 Hearts Courageous. All Clear! 
 All Small Pott S»o. Paper, is. 3d. net; 
 cloth hoards, zs, net. Winds of the 
 Dawn. Gentlemen — The King, as, net. 
 
 Petile (W. H. Flinders). A HISTORY 
 OF EGYPT. Illustrated. Six Volumes, 
 Cr, Svo. Each gs. net. 
 
 Vol. I. From the 1st to the XVIth 
 Dynasty. Ninth Edition. (lof . 6d. net.) 
 
 Vol. II. The XVIIth and XVIIIth 
 Dynasties. Sixth Edition. 
 
 Vol. III. XIXth to XXXth Dynasties. 
 Second Edition, 
 
 Vol. IV. Egypt under the Ptolemaic 
 Dynasty, J. P. Mahaffy. Second Edition. 
 
 Vol. V. Egypt under Roman Rule. J. G. 
 Milne. Second Edition. 
 
 Vol. VI. Egypt in the Middle Ages. 
 Stanley Lane Poole. Second Edition. 
 
 SYRIA AND EGYPT, FROM THE TELL 
 EL AMARNA LETTERS. Cr, ivo, 
 Ss, net, 
 
 EGYPTIAN TALES. Translated from the 
 Papyri. First Series, ivth to xiith Dynasty. 
 Illustrated. Third Edition. Cr. iao, 
 SS. net. 
 
 EGYPTIAN TALES. Translated from the 
 Papyri. Second Series, xviiith to xixth 
 Dynasty, illustrated. Second Edition. 
 Cr, Bvo, ss. net. 
 
 Pollard (A. F.). A SHORT HISTORY 
 OF THE GREAT WAR. With 19 Maps. 
 Second Edition, Cr, ivo, ros. 6d. net. 
 
 PoUltt (Arthur W.). THE ENJOYMENT 
 OF MUSIC. Cr. ivo. ss. net. 
 
 Price (L. L.). A SHORT HISTORY OF 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY IN ENGLAND 
 FROM ADAM SMITH TO ARNOLD 
 TOYNBEE. Tenth Edition. Cr, ivo, 
 ss. net. 
 
 Held (G. Archdall). THE LAWS OF 
 HEREDITY. Second Edition. Demy ivo. 
 £1 IS. net. 
 
 Robertson (C. Grant). SELECT STAT- 
 UTES, CASES, AND DOCUMENTS, 
 i66i>-i832. Third Edition, Demy ioo, 
 15s. net. 
 
 Belons (Edmund)— 
 Tommy Smith's Animals, jr. 6d. net. 
 Tommy Smith's Other Animals, 3s, 6d. 
 net, "Tommy Smith at the Zoo, 2s, gd, 
 •Tommy Smith again at the Zoo, is. gd. 
 Jack's Insects, 3*. 6d, Jack's Other 
 Insects, 3s, 6d, 
 
 Shelley (Percy Bysihe). POEMS. With 
 an Introduction by A. Clutton-Brock and 
 Notes by C. D. LococK. 7Vv« Volumes. 
 Demy ivo, £1 is, net. 
 
4 
 
 Messrs. Methuen's Publications 
 
 Smith (Adam). THE WEALTH OF 
 
 NATIONS. Edited by Edwin Cannan. 
 
 Tvio Volumes. Second Edition. Demy 
 
 Bvo. £z. tos. net. 
 Smith (S. C. Kaines). LOOKING AT 
 
 PICTURES. Illustrated. Fcap. Szio. 
 
 6s. net. 
 Stevenson (R. L.). THE LETTERS OF 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Edited 
 
 by Sir Sidney Colvin. A New Re- 
 
 arrar^ed Edition in four volumes. Fourth 
 
 Edition. Fcap. Zvo. Each 6s. net. 
 Bnrtees (R. B.>- 
 
 Handley Cross, 7j. 6d. net, Mr. 
 
 Sponge's Sporting Tour, yj. 6d. net. 
 
 Ask Mamma: or. The Ricbest Commoner 
 
 in England, js. 6d. net. Jorrocks's 
 
 Jaunts and Jollities, 6s. net. Mr. 
 
 Facey Romford's Hounds, yj. 6d. net. 
 
 Hawbuck Grange ; or. The Sporting 
 
 Adventures of Thomas Scott, Esq., 6s. 
 
 net. Plain or Ringlets! 7;. 6d. net. 
 
 Hillingdoh Hall, 7;. 6d. net. 
 TUdon (W. T.). THE ART OF LAWN 
 
 TENNIS. Illustrated. Third Edition. 
 
 Cr. Zvo. 6s. net. 
 TlleBton(Ilary W.). DAILY STRENGTH 
 
 FOR DAILY NEEDS. Twenty-seventh 
 
 Edition. Medium i6mo. 3*. 6d. net. 
 Townshend (R. B.). INSPIRED GOLF. 
 
 Fcap. ivo. iS. 6d. net. 
 Turner (W. J.). MUSIC AND LIFE. 
 
 Crown Zvo. js. 6d. net. 
 
 Underhlll (Evelyn). MYSTICISM. A 
 Study in the Nature and Development of 
 Man's Spiritual Consciousness. Eighth 
 Edition. Demy Zvo. 15^. net. 
 
 Yardon (Harry). HOW TO PLAY GOLF. 
 Illustrated. Fourteenth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 
 SS. 6d. net. 
 
 Waterhouse (Elizabeth). A LITTLE 
 BOOK OF LIFE AND DEATH. 
 Twenty-first Edition. Small Pott Zvo. 
 Clotht 2S. 6d, net. 
 
 Wells (J.). A SHORT HISTORY OF 
 ROME.^ Seventeenth Edition. With 3 
 Maps. Cr. Zvo. 6s. 
 
 Wilde (Oscar). THE WORKS OF OSCAR 
 WILDE. Fcap. Zvo. Each 6s. 6d. net. 
 
 I. Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and 
 the Portrait of Mr. W. H. ii. The 
 Duchess of Padua, in. Poems, iv. 
 Lady Windermere's Fan. v. A Woman 
 of No Importance, vi. An Ideal Hus- 
 band. VII. The Importance of Being 
 Earnest, viii. A House of Pome- 
 granates. IX. Intentions, x. De Pro. 
 fundis and Prison Letters, xi. Essays. 
 xiL Salom^j a Florentine Tragedy, 
 and La Saihte Courtisane. xiii. A 
 Critic in Pall Mall. xiv. Selected 
 Prose of Oscar Wilde, xv. Art and 
 Decoration. 
 
 A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES. Illus- 
 trated. Cr. Lto, aif. net. 
 
 Yeats (W. B.). A BOOK OF IRISH 
 VERSE. Fourth Edition. Cr.Zvo. 7s.net. 
 
 'Part II. — A Selection of Series 
 Ancient Cities 
 
 General Editor, Sir B. C. A. WINDLE 
 Cr. Svo. 6s. net each ■volume 
 With Illustrations by E. H. New, and other Artists 
 Bristol. Canterbury. Chester. Dub- I Edinburgh. Lincoln. Shrewsbury. 
 
 The Antiquary's Books 
 
 Demy Svo. los. 6d. net each volume 
 With Numerous Illustrations 
 
 Ancient Painted Glass in England. 
 Archeology and False Antiquities. 
 The Bells of England. The Brasses 
 OF England. The Castles and Walled 
 Towns of England. Celtic Art in 
 Pagan and Christian Times. Church- 
 wardens' Accounts. The Domesday 
 Inquest. English Church Furniture. 
 English Costume. English Monastic 
 Life. English Seals. Folk-Lore as 
 AN Historical Science. The Gilds and 
 Companies of London. The Hermits 
 AND Anchorites of England. The 
 
 Manor and Manorial Records. The 
 Mediaeval Hospitals of England. 
 Old English Instruments of Music. 
 Old English Libraries. Old Service 
 Books of the English Church. Parish 
 Life in Mediaeval England. The 
 Parish Registers of England. Re- 
 mains OF THE Prehistoric Age in Eng- 
 land. The Roman Era in Britain. 
 Romano-British Buildings and Earth- 
 works. The Royal Forests of Eng- 
 land. The Schools of Medieval Eng- 
 land. Shrines of British Saints. 
 
Messrs. Methuen's Publications 
 
 The Arden Shakespeare 
 
 General Editor, R, H. CASE 
 
 Demy Svo, 6s. net each volume 
 
 An edition of Shakespeare in Single Plays ; each edited with a full Introduction, 
 Textual Notes, and a Commentary at the foot of the page. 
 
 Classics of Art 
 
 Edited by Dr. J. H. W. LAING 
 Witk numerous Illustrations, Wide Royal Svo 
 
 The Art of the Gbebks, i$s. net. The 
 Art of the Romans, i6f. net. Chardin, 
 xss. net. DoNATELLO, i6s. net. George 
 RoMNEY, x5f. net. Ghirlandaio, 15J. net. 
 Lawrence, 25^. net. Michelangelo, 15J, 
 
 net. Raphael, 15J. net. Rembrandt's 
 Etchings, 31J. 6d. net. Rembrandt's 
 Paintings, 425. net. Tintoretto, i6j. net. 
 Titian, 16s. net. Turner's Sketches and 
 Drawings, iss. net. Velazquez, isj. net. 
 
 The ' Complete ' Series 
 
 Demy Svo 
 
 Fully Illustrated. 
 
 The Gomfletb Airman, i&r. net. The 
 Complete Amateur Boxer, ioj. &f. net. 
 The Complete Association Foot- 
 baller, %as. 6d. net. The Complete 
 Athletic Trainer, zos. 6d. net. The 
 Complete Billiard Flayer, xss. 6d. 
 net. The Complete Cook, ios. td. net. 
 The Complete Cricketer, zos. 6d. net. 
 The Complete Foxhunter, z6s. net. 
 The Complete Golfer, 12;. 6d. net. 
 The Complete Hockey-Player, zos. td. 
 net. 'The Complete Horseman, 12;. bd. 
 
 net. The Complete Jojitsdan. Cr.Zvo. ss. 
 net. The Complete Lawn Tennis Flayer, 
 I2J. 6d. net. The Complete Motorist, 
 zos. 6d. net. The Complete Mountain- 
 eer, z6s. net. The Complete Oarsman, 
 151. net. The Complete Photographer, 
 iSJ. net. The Complete Rugby Foot- 
 baller, on the New Zealand System, 
 Z2S. 6d. net. The Complete Shot, z6s. 
 net. The Complete Swimmer, zos. 6d. 
 net. The Complete Yachtsman, zSs. 
 net. 
 
 The Connoissear's Library 
 
 Witi numerous Illustrations. Wide Royal Svo. zjj. net each volume 
 
 English Coloured Books. Etchings. 
 European Enamels. Fine Books. 
 Glass. Goldsmiths' and Silversmiths' 
 Work. Illuminated Manuscripts. 
 
 Ivories. Jewellery. Mezzotints. 
 Miniatures. Porcelain. Seals. 
 
 Wood Sculpture. 
 
 Handbooks of Theology 
 
 Demy Svo 
 
 The Doctrine of the Incarnation, is*. 
 net. A History op Early Christian 
 Doctrine, z6s. net. Introduction to 
 the History of Religion, 12J. 6d. net. 
 An Introduction to the History of 
 
 THE Creeds, 12s. 6d. net. The Philosophy 
 of Rjsligion in England and America, 
 I2J. 6d. net. The XXXIX Articles of 
 THE Church of England, 15;. net. 
 
 Health Series 
 
 Fcap. Svo. 2s, 6d, net 
 
 The Baby. The Care of the Body. The 
 Care of the Teeth. The Eyes of our 
 Children. Health for the Middle- 
 Agbd. The Health of a Woman. The 
 
 HEiU.TH OF THB SKIN. HOW TO LiVB 
 
 Long. The Prevention of the Common 
 Cold. Staying the Plague. Throat 
 AND Ear Troubles. Tuberculosis. The 
 Health of the Child, xs. net. 
 
Messrs. Methuen's Publications 
 The Library of Devotion 
 
 Handy Editions of the great Devotional Books, well edited. 
 
 With Introductions and (where necessary) Notes 
 
 Small Pott iaio, cloth^ 3;, net a^d y. 6d^ net 
 
 Little Books on Art 
 
 With many Illustrations. Demy l6mo~ ^s. net each volume 
 
 Each volume consists of about 200 pages, and contains from 30 to 40 Illustrations, 
 including a Frontispiece in Photogravure 
 
 Albrecht DUrbr. The Arts of Japan. Boucher. Holbein, Illuminated 
 
 Bookplates. Botticelli. Burns- Jones. Manuscripts. Jewellery. John Hop?- 
 
 Cellinl Christian Symbolism. Christ ner. Sif Joshua Reynolds. Millet. 
 
 IN Art. Claude. Constable. Corot. Miniatures. OurLady in Art. Raphael. 
 
 Early Englis^i Water-Colour. Ena- Rodin. Turner. Vandyck. Velazquez. 
 
 MELS. Frederic Leighton. George Watts. 
 RoMNEY. Greek Art. Grbuze and 
 
 The Little Guides 
 
 With many Illustrations by E. H. New and other artists, and from photographs 
 
 Small Pott ivo. ^s. net, y. net, and 6;. net 
 
 Guides to the English and Welsh Counties, and some well-known districts 
 
 The main features of these Guides are (i) a handy and charming form j (2) 
 illustrations from photographs and by well-known artists ; (3) good plans and 
 maps ; (4) an adequate but compact presentation of everything that is interesting 
 in the natural features, history, archaeology, and architecture of the town or 
 district treated. 
 
 The Little Quarto Shakespeare 
 
 Edited by W. J. CRAIG. With Introductions and Notes 
 
 Pott i6mo. 40 Volwnes. Leather, price is. gd. net each volume 
 Cloth, IS. 6d, 
 
 Plays 
 
 Fcap. 8vo, 3s. 6d. net 
 
 Milestones. Arnold Bennett and Edward 
 Knoblock. Ninth Edition. 
 
 Ideal Husband, AnT Oscar Wilde. Acting 
 Edition. 
 
 Kismet. Edward Knoblock. Fourth Edi- 
 tion. 
 
 The Great Adventure Arnold Bennett. 
 Fifth Edition. 
 
 Typhoon. A Play in Four Acts. Melchior 
 
 Lengyel. English Version by Laurence 
 
 Irving. Second Edition. 
 Ware Cask, The. George Pleydell. 
 General Post. J. E. Harold Terry. Second 
 
 Edition. 
 The Honeymoon. Arnold Bennett. Third 
 
 Edition. 
 
Messrs. Methuen's Publications 
 
 All Aboot Flying, 3s. nei. 
 AHD Dont's, 2f. edXiwt. The Golfing 
 SwiHGi as, 6d, net. Quick Cuts to Good 
 Golf, is, 6d. nei. Inspired Golf, as. 6d. 
 
 Sports Series 
 
 Illustrated, Fcap, 8»tf 
 Golf Do's 
 
 net. How TO Swim, as. net. Lawn 
 Tennis, 31. net. Skating, 3s. net. Cross- 
 country Skmng, sj. net. Wkestlihg, 
 as. net. Hockey, 4^. net. 
 
 The Westminster GommentarieB 
 
 General Editor, WALTER LOCK 
 Den^ 8vo 
 
 The Acts of the Apostles, t6s. net. 
 Amos, 9s. 6d. net. I. Corinthians, 8i. 
 6d. Tiet. KxODUS, 15^. net. Ezekiel, \ 
 I2J. 6d. net. Genesis, ids. net. Hebrews, 
 is. 6rf. net. Isaiah, i6j. net. Jeremiah, 
 
 161. net. Job, 81. 6d. net. The Pastoral 
 Epistles, 8;. 6d. net. The Philifpians, 
 is. 6d. net. St. James, Ss. 6d, net. St, 
 Matthew, 15*. net. 
 
 Methnen's Two-Shilling Library 
 
 Cheap Editions of many Popular Books 
 
 Part III. — A Selection of Works of Fiction 
 
 Bennett (Ainold)— 
 
 Clayhanger, Ss. net. Hilda Lesswavs, 
 is. 6d. net. These Twain. The Card. 
 The Regent ; A Five Towns Story of 
 Adventure in London. The Price of 
 Love. Buried Alive. A Man from the 
 North. The Matador of the Five 
 Towns. Whom God hath Joined. A 
 Great Man: A Frolic. Alt is. 6d. net. 
 
 Birmingham (George A.)— 
 Spanish Gold. The Search Party. 
 Lalage's Lovers. The Bad Times. Up, 
 the Rebels. All "js. 6d. net. Inishebnv, 
 8j. 6d. net. The Lost Lawyer, 7J. &^. net. 
 
 Burroughs (Edgar Rice)— 
 Tarzan of the Apes, ts. net. The . 
 Return of Tarzan, ds. net. The Beasts i 
 OF Tarzan, 6s. net. The Son of Tarzan, '•■ 
 6s. net. Jungle Tales of Tarzan, 6s. 
 net. Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, 
 6s. net. Tarzan the Untamed, m. 6d. net. 
 A Princess of Mars, 6s. net. The Gods 
 OF Mars, 6s. net. The Warlord of 
 Mars, 6s. net. Thdvia, Maid of Maiis, 
 6s. net. Tarzan the Terrible, as. 6d. net. 
 The Man without a Soul. 6s. net. 
 
 Oonrad (Joieph), A Set of Six, ^s. 6d. net. 
 Victory: An Island Tale. Or. Sao. ge. 
 net. The Secret Agent : A Simple Tale. 
 Cr. Svth gs. net. Under Western Eves. 
 Cr. 8w. 9^. net. Chance. Cr. Zvo. gs. net. 
 
 OorelU (Ularle)- 
 
 A Romance of Two Worlds, 71. 6d. net. 
 Vendetta : or. The Story of One For- 
 .gotten, 8j. net. Thelma : A Norwegian 
 Princess, 8j. 6d. net. Ardath : The Story 
 of a Dead Self, js. 6d. net. The Soul of 
 L11.ITH, 7* . 6d. net. Wormwood : A Drama 
 of Paris, is. net, Barabbas : A Dream of 
 the World's Tragedy, is. net. The Sorrows 
 OF Satan, js. 6d. net. The Master- 
 Christian, is. 6d. net. Temporal Power ; 
 A Study in Supremacy, 6s. net. God's 
 Good Man : A Simple Love Story, is. 6d. 
 net. Holy Orders : The Tragedy of a 
 Quiet Life, is. 6d. net. The KtiGHTV Atom, 
 7^. 6d. net. Boy : A Sketch, -/s, 6d, net. 
 Cameos, 6s. net. The Life Everlasting, 
 is. 6d. net. The Love of Long Ago, and 
 Other Stories, is. 6d. «et. Innocent, 
 •js. 6d. net. The Secret Power : A 
 Romance of the Time, 7^. 6d, net. 
 
 Hichens (Robert)— 
 
 Tongues of Conscience, is. 6d. net. 
 Telix : Three Years in a Life, is. 6d. net. 
 The Woman with the Fan; is. 6d net. 
 Byeways, 7s. 6d. net. The Garden of 
 Allah, is. 6d. net. The Call of the 
 Blood, 8j. 6d. net. Barbary Sheep, 6s. 
 net. The Dweller on the Threshold, 
 Ut, 6d. net. The Way of Ambition, 7*. 
 6d, net. In the Wilderness, js. 6d. net. 
 
Messrs. Methuen's Publications 
 
 Hope (Anthony)— 
 
 A Changs of Ais. A Man or Mark. 
 The Chronicles of Codnt Antonio. 
 Simon Dale. The King's Mirror. 
 Quisant6. The Dolly Dialogues. 
 Tales of Two People. A Servant of 
 THE Public. Mrs. Maxon Protests. 
 A Young Man's Year. Beaumaroy 
 Home from the Wars. All 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 Jacobs (W. W.)— 
 
 Many Cargoes, sj. net. Sea Urchins, 
 5J. nei and 3J. 6d. net. A Master of 
 Craft, 51. net. Light Freights, 51. net. 
 The Skipper's Wooing, ji. net. At Sun- 
 wicH Port, jj. net. Dialstonk Lane, 
 %S. net. Odd Craft, sj. net. The Lady 
 of the Barge, sj. net. Salthaven, Sj- 
 net. Sailors' Knots, s*- «''• Short 
 Cruises, 6j. net. 
 London (Jack). WHITE FANG. Ninth 
 Edition. Cr. Svo. js. 6d. net. 
 
 Lnoas (E. V.)- 
 
 Listenbr's Lure : An Oblique Narration, 
 6s. net. Over Bemerton's: An Easy- 
 - going CliTomcle, 6j. net. Mr. Inglesidb, 
 6s. net. London Lavender, 6s. nei. 
 Landmarks, is. 6d. net. The Vermilion 
 Box, js. 6d. net. Vbrena in the Midst, 
 is. 6d. net. Rose and Rose, 7J. 6d. net. 
 
 HcKenna (Stephen)— 
 SoNiA : Between Two Worlds, 81. net. 
 Ninety-Six Hours' Leave, is. 6d. net. 
 The Sixth Sense, 6s. net. Midas & Son, 
 Sj. net. 
 
 Halet (Lucas)— 
 The History of Sir Richard Calmadv : 
 A Romance. loi. net. The Carissima. 
 The Gatelbss Barrier. Dbadham 
 Hard. All js. 6d. net. The Wages of 
 Sin. 8j. net. 
 
 Mason (&. E. W.). CLEMENTINA. 
 Illustrated. Ninth Edition. Cr. Svo. js. 
 6d. net, 
 
 Hazwell(W. B.)- 
 ViviEN. The Guarded Flame. Odd 
 Lengths. Hill Rise. The Rest Curb. 
 All 7 J. 6d. net. 
 
 Oxenham (John)— 
 Profit and Loss. The Song op Hya- 
 cinth, and Other Stories. The Coil of 
 Carne. The Quest of the Golden Rose. 
 Mary All-Alone. Broken Shackles. 
 "1914." AU^s. 6d. net. 
 
 Parker (aUbert)— 
 
 PlERRS AND HIS PEOPLE. MrS. FaLCHION. 
 
 ' The Translation of a Savage. When 
 Valmond came to Pontiac : Tlie Story of 
 a Lost N apoleon. An Adventurer of the 
 North : The Last Adventures of ' Pretty 
 Pierre.' The Sbats of the Mighty. The 
 Battle of the Strong : A Romance 
 of Two Kingdoms. The Pomp of the 
 Lavilettes. Northern Lights. All 
 JS. 6d. net. 
 
 Phlllpotts (Eden)- 
 
 Childrbn of the Mist. The River. 
 Demster's Daughter. The Human Boy 
 AND THE War. All js. 6d. net. 
 
 Ridge (W. Pett>- 
 
 A Son of the State, 7j. 6d. net. The 
 Remington Sentence, 7J. 6d. net. 
 Madame Prince, 7J, 6a. net. Top Speed, 
 7j. 6d. net. Special Performances, 6j. 
 net. The Bustling Hours, 7J. 6d. net. 
 Banhertons Agency, 7J. 6d. net. Well- 
 to-do Arthur, 7j. 6d. nei. 
 
 Rohmer (Sax)— 
 
 The Devil Doctor. Tales of Secret 
 Egypt. The Orchard of Tears. Thb 
 Golden Scorpion. All js. 6d. net. 
 
 S«lnnerton (F.). SHOPS AND HOUSES. 
 
 Third Edition. Cr. iva. js. 6d. net. 
 SEPTEMBER. Third Edition. Cr. 8w. 
 
 7J. 6d. nei. 
 THE HAPPY FAMILY. Second Edition. 
 
 •JS. 6d. net. 
 ON THE STAIRCASE. Third Edition. ' 
 
 ■JS. 6d. net. 
 COQUETTE. Cr. ivo. 7J. 6d. nei. 
 
 Wells (H. G.). BEALBY. Fourth Edition. 
 Cr. Svo. JS. 6d. net. 
 
 WlUlamson (G. N. and &. H.)— 
 The Lightning Conductor : The Strange 
 Adventures of a Motor Car. Lady Betty 
 across the Water. Lord Loveland 
 discovers America. The Guests of 
 Hercules. It Happened in Egypt. A 
 Soldier of the Legion. The Shop 
 Girl. The Lightning Conductress. 
 Secret History. The Love Pirate. 
 All Js. 6d. net. Crucifix Corner. 6s. 
 net. 
 
 Methuen's Two-Shilling Novels 
 
 Cheap Editions of many of the most Popular Novels of the day 
 
 Write for Complete List 
 
 Fcap. 8i/» 
 
*• r r 
 
 - I p ir t 
 
 
 I Ji« 'i» i 
 
 .<< ) A\