arthur henderson, m.p.—lord derby—miss elizabeth robins—frank mullings—harold bauer—emil sauer—vladimir de pachmann
i quite forget what particular concatenation of circumstances brought me into personal touch with mr arthur henderson, m.p., but i rather think that when i waited for him at waterloo station i was acting the part of messenger-boy. perhaps i delivered a letter or telegram to him, or i may have given him a verbal message. all i remember is, that something very important had happened, and it was necessary that mr arthur henderson should be apprised of this happening at the earliest possible moment. so i volunteered to meet him at waterloo.
we walked across the station together, and i was depressingly aware of a rather bulky form with a manchester kind of face. he spoke heavily and uttered commonplaces that fell dead on his very lips. i could feel his self-importance radiating from him, and i gathered that i was supposed to be in the presence of a very exceptional person indeed. but i did not feel that he was exceptional. there has never been a moment since i reached manhood that i haven’t known that my intellect is of finer texture than that of the five thousand who elbow each other on the manchester exchange, and it seemed to me that night at waterloo station that mr henderson would be very much at home on the manchester exchange. i recollect most vividly that he bored me very much and 176that, offering him some plausible excuse, i parted from him before we had crossed the river, and darted away to more congenial people.
a few weeks previous to this encounter i had heard mr henderson give an “address” in a nonconformist chapel. an “address,” i am given to understand, is a kind of homely sermon in which the speaker talks to his audience in a friendly and distinctly unbending manner. he seeks to improve them, to lead them to higher and better things: in a word, to make them more like himself.... i have not the faintest recollection of what drove me inside this nonconformist chapel, but i cannot conceive i went there of my own free will. i suppose that someone paid me to go there. but my mind retains a very clear picture of a pulpit containing a man with a face so like other faces that, sometimes, when i examine it, it seems to belong to mr jackson of messrs jackson & lemon, the famous auctioneers of boodlestown, and at other times it is owned by mr brownjonesrobinson who, i need scarcely point out, is known everywhere.... really, i have no intention of being violently rude. this question of faces is important. a face should express a soul. no great man whose portrait i have seen possessed a commonplace face.
the address was heavy, obvious and dull. i was taken back twenty years to my boyhood when stern parents compelled me to go to a wesleyan chapel one hundred and three times a year (twice every sunday and once on christmas day); on most of those hundred and three occasions i used to hear exhortations to be “good,” not, so to speak, for the love of the thing, but because being “good” paid. mr arthur henderson, samuel smiles redivivus, proved that it paid. he didn’t say: “look at me!” but, all the same, we did look at him. the spectacle to most of his congregation was, i suppose, encouraging; me, it didn’t excite. i can well believe 177that, as i stepped out of the building, i said to myself: “no, gerald. we will remain as we are. the penalties of virtue are much too heavy for us to pay.”
. . . . . . . .
one saturday evening i journeyed to liverpool with twenty or thirty other newspaper men to dine with lord derby. pressmen are accustomed to this kind of entertainment from public men, and their host generally contrives to be exceptionally agreeable. it would be putting it very crudely to state that these dinners are intended as a bribe: let me therefore say that they serve the purpose of smoothing the way for the dissemination of some propaganda or other. to the best of my recollection, lord derby had no other purpose in view than the laudable and kindly intention of making the journalists of manchester and liverpool better acquainted with one another.
after dinner, various ladies and gentlemen from the neighbouring music halls provided us with an excellent entertainment, and i can now see lord derby smilingly and courteously receiving these artists and making them feel that they, like ourselves, were honoured guests, and not merely paid mimes. he seemed to me then, as he has always seemed to me, our dearly loved, bluff but unfailingly courteous national john bull. he is, i think, the most british man with whom i have ever spoken—honest, brave, resourceful, self-sacrificing, fond of good company and good cheer, hail-fellow-well-met yet a trifle reserved and not a little cautious, blunt but considerate of others’ feelings. some of us collected signatures on the backs of our menus, but when lord derby had written his name on the top of mine i left it there alone, not caring to see other names mingling with his: perhaps feeling that no other name of those present was worthy to stand beneath his name.
178he spoke to us, but his speech had nothing in it save welcome.
. . . . . . . .
when i see, as i frequently do, the newspapers and reviews praising the works of mrs humphry ward and describing her as the greatest of living british female writers, i rub my eyes in astonishment and wonder why miss elizabeth robins is overlooked. mrs humphry ward can, it is true, tell a story: she knows well much of the behind-the-scenes life of modern politics: moreover, she is a woman of the world with a highly cultivated mind and a varied experience of life. but if ever there was a woman without genius, without, indeed, the true literary gift, she is that woman. she cannot fire the imagination, quicken the pulse, or stir the heart. she plays with puppets and never reveals life. miss robins, on the contrary, strikes deep into life—cleaves it asunder, disrupts it, opens it out to our gaze. she has the gift of tragedy.... when i think concentratedly of mrs humphry ward’s books, i remember atmospheres, social environments, a few incidents, and i see dimly about half-a-dozen pictures. but when my mind dwells on the open question and the magnetic north, i see and hear and touch live men and women.
i know nothing of miss elizabeth robins’ private affairs, but if my intuition guides me rightly, she has had a tragic life and her life is still and always will be tragic. her temperament is not dissimilar to charlotte brontë’s, that great little woman whose sense of the ridiculous was so great but whose power of expressing it was so small.
miss robins, as you all know, entered the ranks of the militant suffragettes, and it was at a meeting of the w.s.p.u. that i met her and heard her speak. in the real sense, she has no gift of speech. when she has to address an audience, she prepares her words beforehand, memorises them, and then delivers them with the lucidity, 179the passion and the eloquence of a great actress. i think i have heard all the best-known women speakers from lady henry somerset up to mrs pankhurst, but though my admiration of mrs pankhurst’s brave and proud gifts scarcely knows a limit, i consider that miss robins surpasses her in her power of sweeping an audience along with her and in her great gift of quickening the spirit and urging it upwards to the heights of an enthusiasm that does not quickly die....
perhaps in reading this book you have not gathered the impression that i am afflicted by a devastating bashfulness that, always at the wrong moments, robs me of speech and makes me appear an imbecile. nevertheless that affliction is mine. the more i like and reverence people, the more bereft of speech i become in their presence. it is so when i am with orage, though we have been intimate enough for him to address me in letters as “my dear gerald”; it is so with frank harris (but perhaps you think i ought not to “reverence” him—yet his genius compels me to); and it is so with ernest newman and granville bantock. and when miss elizabeth robins’ hand met mine in a firm clasp and she spoke some words of greeting, i had not a word to say. like an ashamed schoolboy, i walked, speechless and fuming, from the room and kicked myself in the passage outside.... i know this shyness has its origin in vanity, but then i am vain. but i am a fool to allow my vanity to gain the upper hand of my speech.
. . . . . . . .
frank mullings!... well, i have more than once said that singers bore me, but if a man is bored by mullings, he is worse than a fool. one always has a special kind of affection for men whom one has known in obscurity and of whom one’s prophecies of great things has come true. mullings has, indeed, travelled far since those jolly days when we used to meet in sydney grew’s little flat in 180birmingham and make music with grieg, bantock and wolf for company. a great “lad,” as we say in lancashire: a great fat boy without affectation, without jealousy, without even the pride that all great artists should possess: a generous, simple-hearted man who is capable of travelling a couple of hundred miles to sing, without fee, the songs of bantock, just because he loved those songs and wanted others to love them.
he was always untidy, short-sighted, and either very depressed or very jolly. his moods were thorough, and they infected you. in birmingham, in days when only a few, and those few powerless to help, were aware of his astonishing gifts, he was serene and happy. i remember him, sydney grew and myself sitting on the floor of grew’s very narrow drawing-room, our backs to the wall, and talking of our future. i was the oldest of the three, and for that reason spoke with simulated wisdom.
“only one of us is marked down for real success, and you, mullings, are the man,” i said. “you have the successful temperament. sydney here will do valuable work, but he hasn’t the gifts that shine and blind. as for me, i shall make the most of my small but, i really think, engaging talent and swank about in a little circle of appreciators.”
mullings laughed.
“do you really think i shall?” he asked. “have another whisky, cumberland, and go on talking; you give me confidence. and confidence is half the battle, isn’t it?”
“so they say. but haven’t you confidence already?”
“well, it ebbs and it flows.”
“oh, he’s all right,” said sydney grew. “don’t worry about mullings. but what do you mean when you say that i shall do valuable work?”
“you’re an artist, and you’ve got personality and 181ideas. haven’t you often reproached me on the score that you meet me for an hour and, a month later, see all that you have told me in two or three articles that in the meantime i have written for the papers?”
“well, you do pick my brains, gerald. you know you do.”
“simply because they are worth picking. and if i didn’t, they would be lost to the world. why don’t you yourself write? you must write more and talk less.”
he took my advice, and began a career that promised much until the war interrupted it.
in the meantime, mullings has “arrived” and i am longing to meet him again, for i know very well he will be still fat and jolly, that he will still allow me to play accompaniments for him on any old piano that is handy, and that we shall talk excitedly of bantock and julius harrison, of the manchester musical society and phyllis lett, of “colonel” anderton and ernest newman, and of everything and everybody that made those far-off days so full of interest and so sweet to remember.
. . . . . . . .
harold bauer set out to conquer the world, and has done nothing more than arouse the interest of one or two countries. yet he is a great pianist. but i am told that his personality stands between him and the real thing in the way of success. i have sat next to critics at his recitals who have squirmed in their stalls as he played.
“what is the matter?” i have asked.
“i don’t quite know. but don’t you feel it yourself?”
“feel what?”
“something. i don’t quite know what. something indefinable. his playing is too greasy. did you ever hear brahms played like that before?”
“no. i wish i had. i think his brahms wonderfully fine.”
certainly, his temperament is not magnetic like the 182personality of paderewski, of kubelik, of yvette guilbert, and the public is a connoisseur of temperaments. i think i have elsewhere observed in this book that the public collects temperaments just as a few people collect china or autographs. perhaps bauer is not exotic or orchidaceous enough. he is too “straight,” too downright.
“what are they like, these manchester people?” bauer asked me one afternoon before he was to play in england’s musical metropolis.
“well, they’re ‘difficult,’ i think. they know something about music here. you are not in london now, you know. you have reached the centre of things.”
“seriously?”
“quite. i mean it. these people really do know. you see, for the last fifty years they have had nothing but the best. they have a tradition and stick to it.”
“the clara schumann tradition? joachim and brahms and hallé and all that?”
“no, no! that is on its last legs, on its knees even. the tradition, i admit, is hard to define, but it’s there all the same. if you get a couple of encores here, you may well consider that a success.”
“funny thing, the public,” he muttered. “you never know where you have it. but, of course, there is no such entity as ‘the public.’ there are thousands of publics and they are all different.”
. . . . . . . .
emil sauer has a glittering style and had, fifteen years ago, a technique that no word but rapacious accurately describes. the piano recital he gave in manchester nearly two decades ago was the first recital i ever attended, though i was a lad in my late teens; the occasion then seemed, and still seems, most romantic. it is true that, on the nursery piano at home, one of my elder brothers used to give recitals with me as sole auditor, and that 183i used to return the compliment the following evening, but though we took these affairs very seriously and even wrote lengthy criticisms of each other’s playing, our performances were not of a high order. but one evening, defying parental authority and risking paternal anger, we slipped unseen from home and went to hear sauer.
i think we must both have been much younger than our years—certainly we were much younger than the average educated boy of eighteen or nineteen to-day—and we were in a very high state of nervous excitement as we sat in the gallery of the free trade hall waiting for the great man’s appearance. his slim and, as it seemed at the time, spirit-like figure passed across the platform to the piano, and two hours of pure trance-like joy began for at least a couple of his listeners. my brother and i knew all there was to know about the great pianists of the past, and often we had tried to imagine what their playing was like; but neither he nor i had conceived that anything could be so gorgeous as what we now heard. for once, realisation was many more times finer than anticipation. only one thing disturbed my complete happiness—and that was the notion that the pianist might possibly be disappointed with the amount of applause he was receiving, though, of a truth, he was receiving a great deal of applause. so i clapped my hands and stamped my feet as hard and as long as possible. the appassionata sonata almost frenzied me and a liszt rhapsody was like heady wine.
but all beautiful things come to a close, and towards ten o’clock my brother and i found ourselves on the wet pavement outside, feeling very exalted but at the same time uncertain whether we had done our utmost to make sauer’s welcome all that we thought it should have been.
“let’s wait for him outside the platform entrance and cheer him when he comes out,” suggested my brother.
184very strange must that two-voiced cheer have sounded to sauer as, in the dark side street, he stepped quickly into his cab, which began immediately to move away. as our voices died, he opened the window and leaned out, holding out to us his long-fingered hand. running eagerly to him, we clasped his hand in turn and, amazed, listened to the few words of thanks he shouted to us.
for long after that, sauer was one of our major gods, and we followed his triumphs both in england and on the continent with the utmost interest and excitement. when we boasted to our friends that we had shaken hands with the great pianist, they evinced little interest in the matter. “why, that’s nothing!” exclaimed a philistine; “last saturday afternoon i touched the sleeve of jim valentine’s coat!” now, jim valentine was a great rugger player.
. . . . . . . .
perhaps the most exquisite and the most fragile thing in the world at present is the chopin playing of vladimir de pachmann. for more than a quarter of a century writers have been attempting to reproduce his coloured music in coloured words: they have all failed. de pachmann is an exotic, a hothouse plant. not a hothouse plant among many other plants, but a plant living luxuriously and solitarily and with exaggerated self-consciousness in its own hothouse.
in thinking of him, one feels that he belongs to the very last minute of civilisation’s progress. all the civilisations of the past have come and gone and returned; they have worked age-long with tireless industry; mankind has struggled upwards and rushed precipitately downwards through thousands of years; cities have been sacked and countries ravaged; babylon, nineveh, athens and rome have bloomed flauntingly and wilted most tragically: and the most exquisite thing that has been produced by all this suffering, all this unimaginable labour, is the 185chopin playing of de pachmann. the world has toiled for thousands of years and has at last given us this thing more delicate than lace, more brittle than porcelain, more shining than gold....
there is the rather painful question of this pianist’s eccentricities. one can discuss them publicly for de pachmann himself continually thrusts them on the public. you know to what i refer: the running commentary of words, gestures, nods, smiles and leers which he almost invariably passes not only on the music he plays, but also on his manner of playing it. i refuse to believe that this most extraordinary behaviour is mere affectation: it seems to me a direct and irrepressible expression of the man’s very soul. it is not ridiculous, because it is so serious and so natural. nevertheless, it is entirely ineffective. it does not help in the least. rather does it mar. to see the performer winking slyly at you when he has, as it were, “pulled off” a particularly delicate nuance does not give that nuance a more subtle flavour: it merely distracts the attention and sets one conjecturing what really is going on in the performer’s mind. it has appeared to me that the pianist has been saying: “you noticed that, didn’t you? well, you couldn’t do it if you spent a whole lifetime trying; yet how easily i achieved it!”
the large, smooth face, with its loose mouth and dizzied eyes, is the face of a magician out of a story book. it is not a real face. it has only one of the attributes of power—egotism. egotism has furrowed every line on that countenance; it dilates the eyes. egotism runs through the sensitive fingers. i have stood by his side and wilfully shut my ears on the music and fastened my eyes on his face; but i learned nothing. i do not know if his mind dwells aloof from all emotion, his intellect functioning automatically—as would seem to be the case; or if, experienced and cynical, he has the power of pouring the very essence of his spirit into sound, laughing at himself 186and us as he does so—but laughing more at us than at himself, for we are deceived whilst he is not.
it is strange that so exotic a personality should have a firm and unrelaxing hold on the public. he is not caviare to the general. villiers de l’isle adam is worshipped by the few; walter pater cannot have more than a thousand sincere disciples, but de pachmann is adored by millions. “millions” is no exaggeration. people are taken out of themselves whilst he plays. you remember, don’t you? the paderewski craze in america fifteen years ago, when the platform was stormed and taken by assault night after night by society ladies. i witnessed pretty much the same kind of thing at a de pachmann recital in a lancashire town; but the latter pianist was stormed, not by society ladies, but by unemotional bank clerks, stockbrokers, merchants, working men and women. at the end of the concert, they flowed on to the platform in hundreds, and surrounded the pianist whilst he played encore after encore, smiling vacantly the while and enjoying himself immensely, pausing between each piece only to motion his ring of worshippers a little farther from the piano.
an enigmatic creature, this; a creature who will never give up his secret; perhaps, even, a creature who is not aware that he possesses a secret.
