if there is one thing more than another that the ordinary person cannot endure, it is to hear a man from manchester praising his own city. somebody from leeds may tell him how beautiful a town leeds is, and he will not turn a hair; he will listen unruffled to a liverpudlian discoursing on the peculiar glories of the great city on the mersey; but if the man from manchester wishes to be tolerated, he must never let fall a word in praise of the place that witnessed his astounding birth. why this is so, i cannot explain. i merely record the fact.
so, for the moment, i will not praise manchester. i will go even farther than that. i will agree with you that it rains there every day, that it is the ugliest city in britain, that it is cocksure and conceited, that its politics are damnable, that its free trade principles are loathsome, and that its public men are aitchless and gross. i will, i say, agree to all this. you may say anything disagreeable you like about manchester, and i shall not care. nevertheless, if i could not live in london, manchester is the city to which i would go. i have stayed in athens, and athens is a marvellous city; i know my paris, and paris is not without fascination; i have been to cairo, and the bazaars of cairo seemed to me so wonderful that i held my breath as i passed through them; i know antwerp and some of the half-dead cities of belgium, and in bruges i have felt as decadent as any nasty belgian poet. but these places are not manchester. they are 154not so glorious as manchester, not so vital, not so romantic, not so adventurous.... but already i have broken my word: i have begun to praise manchester in my second paragraph. let me begin a third.
it might be thought that the centre of manchester’s intellectual life is the university, but this is not so. nor is it the cathedral, nor the big technical schools, nor yet the gaiety theatre. these things count, but none of them precisely radiates intellectual energy. you do not (unless you wish to be disappointed) go to the bishop for ideas, or to the man of business for culture, nor to miss horniman for a wide and generous view of life. for these things, and for many other things besides, you go to the manchester guardian. in the daily mail year book, against the entry manchester guardian, you will find these words: “the best newspaper in the world.” now, you would imagine that if the daily mail really believed that, the daily mail would strain every nerve to be as like the manchester guardian as possible. but lord northcliffe knows better than that. he knows, we all know, that the best newspaper in the world is not going to be the best seller in the world. the word “best,” when applied to a newspaper, does not signify a newspaper that shrieks louder than any other newspaper, that has the greatest number of “stunts,” that lays reputations low in the dust, that holds cabinet ministers in the hollow of its hand. it signifies, among other things, a paper whose editor will not sacrifice a single ideal in order to increase his circulation, who has the power of infusing his staff with his own enthusiasms, and who regards the arts as a necessary part of a decent human existence.
the daily mail once upon a time compelled the whole of the british isles to start growing sweet-peas. that is one kind of power. that is the kind of power that the manchester guardian does not possess.
yet, i ask you, is there a more irritating newspaper 155in the whole of christendom than the manchester guardian? how many times have we not all thrown it down in disgust and vowed never to read it again, only to buy it faithfully next morning? it would sometimes appear that every crank in england is busily engaged in airing his crazy views in its correspondence columns. it would sometimes appear that the three greatest highbrows in the country had laid their heads together to write the leading article. it would sometimes appear that conscientious objectors were really the only generous, manly and heroic people left in this mad world.
. . . . . . . .
let me tell you a true story of a man who for years has been, and still is, on the staff of the manchester guardian. i tell this strange story, partly because it is strange, and partly because it illustrates so finely the kind of reverence that so many citizens of manchester have for the best paper in the world.
some thirty years ago a male child was born to a worthy and not unprosperous man in manchester. now this man had one faith, one gospel, one ambition. his faith was of the liberal persuasion. (why, may i ask in passing, do people refer to jews as men and women of the jewish “persuasion”? can a man, indeed, be persuaded to jewry?) but to resume. his faith, as i said, was liberal, his gospel the manchester guardian, his ambition to have some close connection with that paper. being unfitted by the nature of his own talents to join the staff, he resolved that in the fullness of time that distinction should belong to his son. so he wrote to the editor, thus:
sir,—i have the honour to inform you that last night my wife gave birth to a son. it is my ambition that, when his intellect is ripe and his powers mature, he shall be chosen by you as a member of your staff. his education, 156his whole upbringing, shall be directed to that end. i shall report to you his progress from time to time.
i have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant,
—— ——.
i have not this letter before me; indeed, i have never seen it. but i am assured it was couched in those or similar terms.
years passed. harry—we will call him harry—survived the perils of babyhood and was sent to a school for the sons of gentlemen, and the editor was duly apprised of the fact. harry studied hard, for his ambition was even that of his father. harry took scholarships, harry had a private tutor, and, eventually, harry went to the ’varsity. in the meantime, reports passed at regular intervals from harry’s father to the editor of the manchester guardian, who now, as nurses say, began to sit up and take notice. he desired to meet harry. he did meet him. harry took an honours degree, came back to manchester, and was duly installed among the blessed, where he still is. harry’s dream, harry’s father’s dream, is fulfilled. but are those reports, i wonder, still being written. as, for example:
sir,—i have the honour to inform you that my son, harold, contemplates marriage. it has always appeared to me that the married state is peculiarly useful in developing....
. . . . . . . .
but not all the members of the manchester guardian staff are ’varsity men: for which, indeed, one may be thankful. the men of letters whom they admire most—bernard shaw, h. g. wells, joseph conrad and arnold bennett—never even dimly espied the towers and spires of oxford and cambridge. but the paper has the manner of oxford, though not oxford’s intellectual outlook.
157for myself, i have never been on the staff of this paper, though i have written scores of articles for its commercial pages. some of the most distinguished intellects in the country write for it regularly—allan monkhouse, whose play, mary broome, has not been and scarcely can be sufficiently praised; c. e. montague, now in the army; professor c. h. herford, whose scholarship is in excess of his human feeling; samuel langford, whom i have dealt with elsewhere in this book; j. e. agate, whose fastidious style is a pure delight. indeed, nearly every man who can write and who has something definitely new to say will find the columns of this paper open to him.
. . . . . . . .
the drawback to social life in manchester is that there is no central meeting-place where kindred spirits can foregather. it is true, there is the arts club, but when you have said the arts club is there, you have said all that it is necessary to say about the arts club. it is true, also, that if you stroll into the american bar of the midland hotel at almost any hour of the day, you are pretty sure to meet someone amusing; but you really can’t make music, or rehearse plays, or play the fool (at least, not to any great extent) in an american bar. the consequence of this lack of a good democratic club is that all kinds of little coteries are formed, and it is about one of these little coteries that i wish to tell you.
of course, manchester is not london. you know that. in london, if you don’t like one play, you can go to another. if the music that sir henry j. wood gives you is not to your taste, you can go to hear mr landon ronald, or (if truly desperate) join the philharmonic society. but in manchester this is not so. you have either to like the music or do without it. well, some years ago we didn’t like it, and jack kahane, talking to me one day in a mood of disgust, casually remarked:
158“i’m going to kick richter out of manchester. we’ve had enough of him.”
with kahane, to think is to act, and within a week he had formed the manchester musical society and begun a press campaign against the famous old conductor. this society was kahane’s new toy, and he played with it to some purpose. we talked a great deal, gave innumerable concerts, hired lecturers, wrote articles, and held enormously thrilling committee meetings. our programmes consisted almost exclusively of new and very “modern” music, just the kind of music that the guarantors of the hallé concerts society detested. we were all for the new spirit in music, and some of us in our enthusiasm liked new music just because it was new. in three months richter began to totter on his throne and, later on, he resigned his post, and now sir thomas beecham most fitly reigns in his stead.
this little society was extremely typical of manchester. it was typical because it was enthusiastic, because every member of it worked hard for no monetary reward, and because it had a definite object in view and achieved that object. above all, it was young; the spirit of it was young. i have never found in london a band of young men and women putting their noses to the grindstone for months on end with the sole object of achieving an artistic ideal. people in london exploit art, but they do not work at art for art’s sake. manchester is england’s musical metropolis. elgar said so ten years ago; beecham echoed his words the other day. i claim for manchester also that the level of culture is much higher than it is in london. in proportion to its size manchester has during the last fifty years given to england more writers, musicians, politicians, actors, business men, reformers and social workers of distinction than any other city.... but all this, i think, is a little offensive——
and yet how difficult it is for the stranger to understand 159manchester!—and difficult in spite of the fact that manchester loves being understood.
mr j. nicol dunn, who, as editor of the morning post and, later, of the johannesburg star, did most brilliant work, utterly failed to understand lancashire people when he came to edit the manchester courier. i think he regarded them as a peculiar race of savages. “a wealthy lancashire manufacturer,” he said to me once, “will ask you to dinner and will order a bumper of champagne. but if you ask him for a half-guinea subscription for a political society, he will give you a curt refusal. what is to be done with such folk?” dunn thought us hard and unimaginative, incapable of seeing in what direction lay our best interests, and utterly childish in our notions of political economy.
“cumberland,” he said, unexpectedly, one evening, “is your father a conservative?”
“he is,” said i.
“what paper does he take?”
“the manchester guardian.”
“i knew he did! of course he would take the manchester guardian! good lord! to what a strange set of people have i come!”
and he grunted and went on with his work.
my native town is young and strenuous and guileless. its vanity is the vanity of the clever youngster who loves “showing off” in his exuberant way. so young and guileless is it that it is the easiest thing in the world to deceive it. how easy it is to deceive manchester is illustrated by the case of captain schlagintweit, the german consul for some years in that city.
schlagintweit was an enormous german whose mission in life it was to induce manchester to believe that germany was our bosom friend, that germany’s first thought was to help great britain, and that the two peoples were so closely akin in their spiritual aims that a quarrel between 160them, even a temporary misunderstanding, was utterly and for ever impossible. as i have said, he was enormous: a great man with a fair round belly: a man who talked a lot and ate a lot, and who, when he talked even with a solitary companion, spoke as though he were addressing a huge audience. he “bounded” beautifully and with so much aplomb and zest that it seemed right he should bound and do nothing else.
i met him everywhere—in the press club, at concerts, at the schiller anstalt, in restaurants; and nine times out of ten he was in the company either of a journalist, a member of the city council, or a member of parliament. i never knew any man who worked so hard for his country as he did. he distilled sweet poison into our ears and we believed him every time.
i must confess i felt rather flattered by the way in which he constantly sought my company. i thought for a long time that he loved me for my own sweet sake, and it was not until the, for him, tragic dénouement came that i realised that it was because i was a journalist, and for that reason alone, he dined and wined me and talked discreetly of germany’s heartache for great britain. as i very rarely wrote on international politics, i do not think his evil counsel had any appreciable effect on my work, but it is impossible to imagine that his overflowing bonhomie, his cleverness, his subtle scheming did not greatly influence the thought of manchester. he was made much of by more than one member of the manchester guardian staff.
his daughter came to sing at a concert i organised, and it was after this concert that he so overwhelmed me with flattery that i looked at him in amazement. i said to myself: “you are a humbug.” but on looking at him again, i said: “no; you’re not a humbug: you’re a fool.” a third scrutiny, however, left me in doubt, and i said: “i’m damned if i know what you are.” certainly i never 161suspected he was first cousin to a spy, that he was paid handsomely by his government for his propaganda work in manchester, and that he secretly despised and hated us.
shortly after war broke out, many things were discovered about schlagintweit that had hitherto been unknown, and he was led, handcuffed, to knutsford gaol, but not before he had broken through the five-mile radius to which, as a german, he was confined, and not before he had motored through a far-off district where tens of thousands of our soldiers were encamped.
i do not believe london would have been deceived by him, and i am sure that ecclefechan wouldn’t. yet manchester was.
manchester is young, ingenuous, trusting, guileless.
. . . . . . . .
have you ever noticed (but you must have done!) that the self-made man—and half the prosperous men in manchester are self-made—will frequently part with a ten-pound note much more readily than he will with a few pence? the economical habits of his youth still cling to and dominate him, and he counts the halfpence and is careless of the pounds.
one saturday night in the summer, i was taking a walk with a friend in the country ten or twelve miles from manchester. our talk was of county cricket, in which my companion—a most magnificent person, with ships sailing on half the oceans of the world—was greatly interested. for three days lancashire had been playing yorkshire a very close match, and we knew that by now the game would be over.
“we sha’n’t know the result till we get the sunday chronicle to-morrow,” said x. regretfully.
but, five minutes later, we met, most miraculously, a newsboy with a bundle of papers under his arm.
x. took a penny from his pocket, handed it to the boy, and received the evening news in exchange.
162“very sorry, sir,” said the boy, “but i’ve got no change. i’ve got no halfpennies.”
x. turned to me.
“oh, i’ve no change either,” said i, amused.
with an exclamation of annoyance, x. handed the paper back to the boy and pocketed his penny.
after we had proceeded a few paces:
“lancashire has won by two wickets,” he said. “i saw it in the corner in the stop press news.”
now, x. had great riches.
an incredible story, isn’t it? but it is true, and it gives you the self-made manchester man—at least, one side of him—in a nutshell.
. . . . . . . .
it used to be a great delight to me to see dr j. kendrick pyne walking near the cathedral or in albert square, for he used to suggest to me a bygone age and a remote place. his short, thick-set figure used to move with the utmost precision, unhurried, unperturbed. his plump, clean-shaven face, his well-shaped head, surmounted by a new silk hat of old-fashioned shape, his gold-rimmed spectacles with the peering eyes behind them, his inevitable umbrella, and his correct dress—all these conspired to make a figure of great dignity, a figure that always seemed to carry about with it the atmosphere of the cathedral whose organ he played for so many smooth years. there hung about him the tradition of the famous dr wesley.
in character and disposition also he belonged to a different era. he never underestimated the importance of the position he held in the city as cathedral organist, city organist, and professor at the manchester royal college of music, and wherever he went and in the execution of whatever work to which he set his mind, his word was law. a very fine type of englishman. he would brook no interference from bishop or dean, 163and his combative, upright spirit fought unceasingly to uphold the dignity of his art.
his childlike vanity was most alluring, and i used to love him for it and respect him for the way he clung to his belief in himself.
one day he took me to the town hall to look once more at the wonderful series of frescoes that ford madox brown painted in the great hall. when he came to the fresco picturing the duke of bridgewater at the ceremonial “opening” of the bridgewater canal, he pointed to the features of the duke, and inquired:
“whom do you think he resembles?”
there was just a note of anxiety in his voice as though he were afraid i should not be able to answer his question. for the life of me i could not think of anyone who resembled madox brown’s duke, and i stood silent. pyne then turned his face full upon me, and again inquired, somewhat imperiously:
“whom do you think he resembles?”
“why,” exclaimed i, guessing wildly, “it is a portrait of you!”
“yes,” said he, with naïve satisfaction, “it is. i sat to madox brown for the great duke. the portrait is immortal.”
but whether the portrait was immortal because kendrick pyne had sat for it, or madox brown had painted it, i did not gather.
on another occasion he again used the word “immortal,” but this time it was in reference to one of his own works.
“you know,” said he, apropos of something i have forgotten, “i should have made a name as a writer if i had gone in for literature, but i felt that music had stronger claims upon me. my organ-playing will not, so to speak, live, because the art of the executant necessarily dies with him. but my mass in a flat is, in itself, enough to keep my name immortal.”
164there was such innocent satisfaction in his tone, such a bland look upon his face, that he seemed to me like a delicious grown-up child.
but have not all men of genius this superb confidence in themselves? i am convinced they have. could they possibly “carry on” without it? but only a few men of genius have the courage, or the artlessness, to speak what is really in their hearts.
. . . . . . . .
one of the “characters” of manchester, a man who loves being a character, is mr charles rowley, who for an unconscionable number of years has been doing splendid educational and recreative work in ancoats, a congeries of slums, a district of appalling poverty. here, in the islington hall, on most sunday afternoons, one can hear first-rate chamber music and, as a rule, a lecture delivered by some local or london celebrity. i myself have heard bernard shaw and hilaire belloc lecture there and, after the lectures, i have gone to the clean little cottage where mr rowley occasionally entertains a few chosen friends to tea and talk.
i do not know if mr rowley is a manchester man, but he is of a type that i have found only in that city. he is combative and energetic; he is a little red flame of enthusiasm. though, no doubt, interested in and pleased with himself, he is equally interested in local public affairs and equally pleased with the people for whom he works. his broad and pungent humour is just the kind of humour the so-called lower classes understand, and his energy of mind and readiness of wit are remarkable. i have seen him on several occasions talking to—or, perhaps, talking with is what i really mean—a huge audience in order to keep them in good humour until the arrival of the lecturer of the afternoon. he bandies jokes with anybody who cares to shout to him, and he has the true democrat’s gift—he never by a look, a word or a gesture implies that 165he is in any way superior to the meanest member of his audience. these rough people love him, admire him and laugh at him. and, of course, he is able to laugh at himself. perhaps, all things considered, he is the most human man i have met, and i like to think that in him the spirit of manchester is embodied. i do not mean you to infer that i think the spirit of manchester is the finest spirit in the world, but i do believe that it is a spirit that might well be emulated by many other towns.
what is that spirit? well, manchester has a sincere and very proper respect for success, and particularly for success that has been won in the face of great difficulties. manchester loves education and knowledge, not only because these things are useful in achieving success, but also for their own sake. manchester is public-spirited, proud of its traditions, loyal to its principles. it is cultured—not in the super-refined, lily-fingered sense, but in the sense that it loves literature, music, art. it is enthusiastic about these things; it works hard to come by them and treasures them when they are obtained.
one could, of course, say many disagreeable and true things about manchester, but as these have been said frequently by other people, i refrain from repeating what is already known.
