professor granville bantock—frederick delius—joseph holbrooke—dr walford davies—dr vaughan williams—dr w. g. m‘naught—julius harrison—rutland boughton—john coates—cyril scott
at the present moment there are only two names that are of vital importance in british creative music—sir edward elgar and granville bantock. no two men could be in more violent contrast: elgar, conservative, soured with the aristocratic point of view, super-refined, deeply religious; bantock, democratic, rabelaisian, free-thinking, gorgeously human.
of the two, bantock is the more original, the deeper thinker, the more broadly sympathetic.
it must be about ten years ago that, staying a week-end with ernest newman, i was taken by my host one evening to bantock’s house in moseley. i remember bantock’s bulky form rising from the table at which he was scoring the first part of his setting of omar khayyám, and i recollect that, as soon as we had shaken hands, he took from his pocket an enormous cigar-case of many compartments that shut in upon themselves concertina-fashion. from another pocket he produced a huge match-box containing matches almost as large as the chips of wood commonly used for lighting fires. having carefully selected a cigar for me, he struck a match that, spluttering like a firework, calmed down into a huge blaze. he gazed upon me very solemnly and rather critically all the time i was lighting up, but his face relaxed into a 247smile when, having plunged my cigar into the middle of the flame, i left it there for many seconds and did not withdraw it until the cigar itself had momentarily flamed and until it glowed like a miniature furnace.
i was destined to smoke very many of bantock’s cigars, and i hope that when the war is over i shall smoke many more; but i never lit a cigar he handed me without noticing that he invariably observed me very closely and a trifle anxiously, as though afraid i should fail in some detail of the holy rite. i do not think i ever did fail, for he never met me without offering me a cheroot, which he certainly would never have done if i had omitted any necessary observance of the lighting ceremonial.
that first evening we talked a good deal—at least, newman and a few other friends did; but bantock, never a very loquacious man, committed himself to nothing save a few generalities. by no means a cautious man in his mode of life, he is nevertheless cautious in his choice of friends, and no man can freeze more quickly than he when uncongenial company is thrust upon him. there were several strangers in our little circle, and bantock was content for the most part to sit back in his easy-chair and listen.
the following night we met again at the midland institute, birmingham, where ernest newman was giving one of his witty and brilliant lectures. bantock insisted upon my sitting on the platform, though for what reason i do not know, unless it was to satisfy his impish instinct for putting shy and self-conscious people into prominent positions. at that time he and newman were the closest of friends, and as newman and i were on very friendly terms, bantock was disposed to regard me very favourably; at all events, before we parted that evening, he showed me clearly enough that he did not actually dislike me, for he invited me to visit him for a week-end whenever i saw my way clear to do so. from that time onward 248i met him frequently in his own house, in manchester, london, wrexham, gloucester, liverpool, birmingham and elsewhere.
soon it became a regular practice of mine to run over from manchester to liverpool every alternate saturday to attend the afternoon rehearsal and the evening concert of the philharmonic society, the orchestra of which bantock conducted. these were very pleasant meetings, for a party of us used to stay at the london and north western hotel and we would sit until the small hours of sunday morning talking music, returning to our respective homes on sunday afternoon. at these times bantock was at his best, and bantock’s best makes the finest company in the world. in his presence one always feels warm and deeply comfortable, and yet very much alive; he made a glow; he reconciled one to oneself. i would not call him a brilliant, or even a good, talker, but i can with truth call him a very wise one; and in argument he is unassailable.
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though i used frequently to go to liverpool to hear bantock conduct, i did not do so because i regarded him as a great artist with the baton. of his ability in this direction, there is no doubt; but that he is an interpretative genius no qualified critic would assert. no: it was the personality of the man himself, and the new, modern works he used to include in his programmes that drew me to liverpool. bantock, at that period, was almost passionately modern. i remember with amusement how pettish he used sometimes to pretend to be when, perhaps in deference to public opinion (but perhaps he was overruled by a committee?), he felt compelled to include a beethoven symphony in one of his concerts.
on one occasion i met him at lime street station, liverpool, when he emerged from the train carrying a bundle of loose scores under his arm.
249“let me carry your books for you,” said i.
he selected the least bulky and lightest of the scores he was carrying, and handed it to me.
“you are always a good chap, cumberland,” he remarked. “do take this; it’s the heaviest of the lot: beethoven’s fifth symphony. so very heavy.” he sighed. “and so dry that merely to carry it makes me thirsty. how many times have you heard it?”
but he was poking a cigar into my mouth, and i could not answer until it was well alight.
“at least fifty or sixty. oh, more than that! eight times, say, every year for the last fifteen years—one hundred and twenty.”
“yes, always a good chap, and so very patient,” he murmured to himself. “do you know, cumberland, i had to work—yes, to work—at that symphony in the train. and i define work as doing something that gives you no pleasure. talking about work, i must post these before i forget.”
he took from his pocket a number of post cards all addressed to ernest newman. these post cards appeared to amuse him immensely, and he handed them to me with a smile. there were about a dozen of them, and each bore an anagram of the word “work”—krow, wrok, rowk, rwko, etc.
“he’ll receive these by the first post in the morning,” bantock explained, “and if they don’t succeed in making him jump out of bed and finish his analysis of my omar khayyám for breitkopf and härtel, nothing will.”
point was added to the jest by the fact that newman has always been a particularly hard, and generally very heavily pressed worker.
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in his early manhood bantock travelled a good deal in the east, not so much by choice, but because circumstances drove him thither. yet i often feel that the 250east is his natural home. whether or not he has any close acquaintance with eastern languages, i do not know, but he certainly likes his friends to think he has, and many of the letters he has sent me contain quotations and odd words written in what i take to be persian and chinese characters. i should not, however, be in the least surprised to learn that these are “faked,” for bantock loves nothing so much as gently pulling the legs of his friends.
he has not, however, the foresight of eastern people. his enthusiasms drive him into extremes and into monetary extravagances. when he lived at broadmeadow, with its extensive wooded grounds, outside birmingham, he had a mania for bulbs, and i remember his showing me a stable the floor of which was covered with crocus, daffodil, jonquil and narcissus bulbs.
“but,” protested i, “these ought to have been planted months ago.”
“i know, i know,” he said sadly. “but the gardener is so busy. still, there they are.”
his philosophic outlook has been largely directed by eastern philosophy. he admires cunning and takes a beautiful and childlike delight in believing that he possesses that quality in abundance. but in reality, he cannot deceive. even his card tricks are amateurish, and his chess-playing is only just good.
apropos of his chess-playing, i remember that some years ago a chess enthusiast—a bore of the vilest description—used to visit him regularly and stay to a very late hour for the purpose of playing a game. these visits soon became intolerable, and, one evening, as bantock, irritated and petulant, sat opposite his opponent, he resolved to put an end to the nuisance.
“excuse me a moment,” said he; “i have left my cigar-box upstairs, and i really can’t do without a smoke.”
251he left the room, and went straight to bed and to sleep. next time he met his visitor, they merely bowed.
bantock used to relate this story with the greatest glee, and in the course of time the yarn grew to colossal dimensions. it became epical. one was told how his visitor was heard calling: “bantock! bantock! i’ve taken your queen,” how strange noises proceeded from dark rooms, and how, next morning, his visitor, having sat up all night, was found wide awake trying the effect of certain combinations of moves on the board. when a thing is said three times, it is, of course, true, but bantock never told exactly the same story three times. he believes, i think, that consistency is the refuge and the consolation of the dull-witted.
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frederick delius, a yorkshireman, has chosen to live most of his artistic life abroad, and for this reason is not familiarly known to his countrymen, though he is a great personage in european music. a pale man, ascetic, monkish; a man with a waspish wit; a man who allows his wit to run away with him so far that he is tempted to express opinions he does not really hold.
i met him for a short hour in liverpool, where, over food and drink snatched between a rehearsal and a concert, he showed a keen intellect and a fine strain of malice. like most men of genius, he is curiously self-centred, and i gathered from his remarks that he is not particularly interested in any music except his own. he is (or was) greatly esteemed in germany, and if in his own country he has not a large following, he alone is to blame.
he is a man who pursues a path of his own, indifferent to criticism, and perhaps indifferent to indifference. decidedly a man of most distinguished intellect and a quick, eager but not responsive personality, but not a musician who marks an epoch as does richard strauss, 252and not a man who has formed a school, as debussy has done.
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joseph holbrooke, for sheer cleverness, for capacity for hard work, and for intellectual energy, has no equal among our composers. it was newman who first spoke to me about him, and it was newman who made me curious to meet this extraordinary genius.
holbrooke’s weakness—but i do not consider it a weakness—is his pugnacity. he has fought the critics times without number and, in many cases, with excellent results for british music, though holbrooke must know much better than i do that in fighting for his colleagues he has incidentally injured himself. a chastised critic is the last person in the world likely to write a fair and unbiassed article on a new work produced by the hand that chastised him. but not only the critics have felt the lash of holbrooke’s scorn: conductors, musical institutions, some very prosperous so-called composers, committees, publishers and, indeed, almost every kind of man who has power in the musical world, have felt his sting.
but if he is clever and witty in his writing, he is much cleverer and wittier in his talk. i do not suppose i shall ever forget one sunday i spent with him, for by midday he had reduced my mind to chaos and my body to limpness by his consuming energy. when he was not playing, he was talking, and he did both as though the day were the last he was going to spend on earth, so eager and convulsive was his speech, so vehement his playing.
perhaps his most remarkable quality is his power of concentration. i remember his telling me that when he was yachting with lord howard de walden in the mediterranean, he was engaged on the composition of dylan, an opera containing some of the most gorgeous and weirdly uncanny music that has been written in our 253generation. at this opera he worked, not in hours of inspiration (for, like arnold bennett, he does not believe in inspiration), but when he had nothing more exciting or more necessary to do. for example, he would begin work in the morning, cheerfully and without regret lay down his pen at lunch-time, return to his music immediately lunch was finished, and unhesitatingly recommence writing at the point at which he had left off. interruptions that arouse the anger of the ordinary creative artist do not disturb him in the least. he can work just as composedly and as fluently when a heated argument is being conducted in the room as he can in a room that is absolutely quiet. music, indeed, flows from him, and if moods come to him which render his brain numb and his soul barren, i doubt if they last more than a day or two.
of the truly vast quantity of music he has written, i, to my regret, know only a portion, and that belongs chiefly to his very early period, when he was under the influence of edgar allan poe. poe is his spiritual affinity, and holbrooke’s setting of annabel lee—a work which i can play backwards from memory—is more beautiful and haunting than the beautiful and haunting poem itself.
i have called holbrooke pugnacious and, some years ago, much to his amusement and, i think, gratification, i called him the stormy petrel of music. but what makes him stormy? what are the defects in our musical life that he so persistently attacks? first of all, he hates incompetence, especially official incompetence, and the incompetence that makes vast sums of money. he hates commercialism in art, and by that phrase i mean the various enterprises that exploit art for the sole purpose of making money. he hates publishers who issue trash; he hates critics who write rubbish. he hates the obscurity in which so many of his gifted colleagues live, and he hates the love of the british public for foreign music inferior to that which is being written at home. and i believe 254he hates the system that presents editors of newspapers with free concert tickets for the use of their critics.
but, in dwelling at such length on holbrooke’s combativeness, i feel i am giving a rather one-sided view of his true character. for he is not all hate. indeed, it is true to state that no composer has written more in appreciation of men who may be considered his rivals. he is anxious and quick to study the work of men of the younger generation, and whenever any of that work appeals to him he either performs it in public or writes to the papers about it.
i have heard him called perverse, unreliable, injudicious, and many other disagreeable things. he may be. but holbrooke is not an angel. he is simply a composer of genius working under conditions that tend to thwart and paralyse genius.
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dr walford davies!... well, what can i say about dr walford davies except that he represents all the things in which i have no deep faith?—asceticism, fine-fingeredism, religiosity, “mutual improvement,” narrowness of intellect, physical coldness. i love some of his songs—simple things of exquisite tenderness, but it would be futile to regard him as anything more than a cultured gentleman with considerable musical gifts.
on two or three occasions i have been thrown into his company, but i have never been able to decide whether he is ignorant of my existence or whether he dislikes me so intensely that he cannot bring himself to recognise my existence.
he is terribly in earnest—in earnest about brahms and perhaps about frau schumann also. he wrinkles his forehead about brahms and poises a white hand in the air.... please do not imagine that i do not love brahms: i adore him. but brahms was not god. he was not even a god. whereas wagner.... it was 255in 1911, i think, that i heard dr walford davies preaching about brahms. now, if you preach about brahms, you are eternally lost, for you exclude both wagner and hugo wolf.
how exasperating it must be to possess a temperament that can accept only part of what is admirable! it seems to me that walford davies distrusts his intellect: in estimating the worth of music, he seems to say, intellectual standards, artistic standards, are of no value. to him the only sure test is temperamental affinity. and he wishes all temperaments to conform to his own limitations.
i have seen dr davies near temple gardens with choir-boys hanging on his arm, with choir-boys prancing before him and following faithfully behind him. a shepherd with his sheep! i am sure he exerts upon them what is known as a “good influence.” but in matters of art how bad that good influence may be! did ever a worshipper of wagner walk the rooms of the y.m.c.a.?
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i have a very bad memory for the names of public-houses and hotels (though i love these places dearly), and i regret that i am unable to recall the name of that very attractive hotel in birmingham where, early one evening, dr vaughan williams, travel-stained and brown with the sun, walked into the lounge and began a conversation with me. he had walked an incredible distance, and though, physically, he was very tired, his mind was most alert, and we fell to talking about music. he told me that he had studied with ravel, and when he told me this i reviewed in my mind in rapid succession all vaughan williams’ compositions i could remember, trying to detect in any of them traces of ravel’s influence. but i was unsuccessful. to me he, with his essential british downrightness, his love of space, his freedom from all mannerisms and tricks of style, seemed ravel’s very antithesis.
256like myself, he had come to birmingham to listen to music, and the following evening, after we had heard a long choral work of bantock’s, we had what might have developed into a very hot argument. with him was dr cyril rootham, a very charming and cultivated musician, and both these composers were amazed and amused when, having asked my opinion of bantock’s work, i became dithyrambic in its praise.
“but i thought you were modern?” asked williams.
“i am anything you please,” said i; “when i hear richard strauss i am modern, and when i listen to bach i am prehistoric. but why do you ask?”
“moody and sankey,” murmured rootham.
williams laughed.
“good! damned good!” he exclaimed, turning to his companion. “you’ve got it. hasn’t he, cumberland?”
“got what?”
“it. him. bantock, i mean. now, don’t you think—concede us this one little point—don’t you think that this thirty-two-part choral work of bantock’s is just moody and sankey over again? glorified, of course: gilt-edged, tooled, diamond-studded, bound in lizard-skin, if you like: but still moody and still sankey.”
i clutched the sleeve of a passing waiter and ordered a double whisky.
“one can only drink,” said i. “and when people disagree so fundamentally as we do, whisky is the only tipple that makes one forget.”
but, either late that night or late the following night, we found music in which we could both take keen pleasure. herbert hughes played us some of his songs, and i remember samuel langford, breathing rather heavily behind me, becoming more and more enthusiastic as the night wore on. williams, to whom also the songs were new, took a vivid interest in them.
“i like your herbert hughes,” said langford.
257“my herbert hughes?”
“well, you do rather monopolise him. and i don’t wonder. he’s what one calls the ... the ...”
“the goods?”
langford laughed in his beard and his eyes disappeared.
the last glimpse i had of vaughan williams was two or three years later, outside hughes’ studio in chelsea. we stood for a minute in the darkened street.
“going to see hughes?” i asked.
but he was busy with preparations for enlisting, and a few weeks later he, hughes and myself and nearly all our chelsea circle were swept into the army.
in june or july, 1917, i missed vaughan williams at summerhill, near salonica, by a day. but perhaps when the war is finished...?
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dr w. g. mcnaught, though a musician of the older school, is one of the youngest, most up-to-date and most powerful of our musical scholars. by one means or another, the influence of his personality is felt in every town and village in the british isles. he is the editor of the best of our musical papers, a faultless and ubiquitous adjudicator at our great musical festivals, a witty and most reliable writer, a profound scholar, and a man of such natural geniality and spontaneity that he is liked by everyone. as a rule, i detest men who are liked on all hands, but i could never detest dr mcnaught even if he were to detest me and tell me so.
i do not remember when i first met him, and i do not think i have any special anecdotes to relate about him. but, in thinking of him now, and reviewing our friendly acquaintanceship of eight or ten years, i recall that i have never been able to persuade him to take me seriously. he has printed all the articles i have sent him, but he has always laughed indulgently at both them and me. i cannot help wondering why. perhaps his exasperatingly 258clever son has betrayed the secrets i have entrusted to him: the facts that my piano-playing is amateurish, my scholarship nil, and my ear fatally defective. and i think i once showed mcnaught, jun., some of my compositions. one should never show (but of course i mean “show off”) one’s compositions when one cannot compose.
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unless you are something of a musician yourself, you will probably never have heard the name of julius harrison, for though he has fame of a kind, and of the best kind, he is scarcely known to the man in the street. just as rossetti is primarily a poet for poets, so is julius harrison a musician for musicians. only one word describes him: distinguished. very distinguished he is, with the refinement and sensitiveness of a poet, the intuition of a novelist, and the waywardness of all men who allow themselves to be governed by impulse.
when i first met him he was little more than a brilliant boy full of rich promise. he lived at stourport, where i used to go occasionally and pass a few days with him on the river. i knew of nothing against him save that he was an organist, and i feared that he might be tempted to remain an organist and build up a teaching “practice,” just as a doctor builds up a practice. but i was mistaken. he ventured on london, suffered obscurity for a year or two, worked like a fiery little devil, and at length threw up the hack-work that kept him alive. then he emerged, very engaging and very likeable, into the real musical world of london. sir thomas beecham gave him tristan und isolde and other operas to conduct, the london philharmonic society invited him to interpret to it one of his own works, and concerts devoted entirely to his compositions were given in several provincial towns. in five years he will be recognised as the greatest conductor england has yet given us; in ten years he will have a european reputation as a composer.
259what is he like? he is mercurial, passionate, loyal, snobbish, charming, outspoken, very open to his friends.
“i am snobbish, gerald; we have agreed about that, so you won’t quarrel with me, will you?” he has asked several times.
“apropos?” i have answered.
“well, i really can’t stick your pal, so-and-so. an out-and-out bounder.”
“yes, julius. but he bounds so beautifully. besides, he has real talent.”
“but you’ll never ask me to meet him, will you?”
“when i’m rich, julius, i shall have two flats—one where you and your friends can come, and another where my bounderish friends may foregather. but i’m afraid i shall be oftener at the flat you visit than at the other. you are a beast—what makes you so snobbish? and why do you continue to like me, who am not ‘quite’ a gentleman in your eyes?”
“oh, but you are, gerald. well, perhaps you’re not. only in your case it doesn’t seem to matter. you are so full of affectations—jolly little affectations, i admit, but still....”
i don’t think anything will break our friendship, for julius is good and generous enough to allow me to say the rudest things in the world to him. he only laughs. for my part, i can forgive him anything, for he admires my poems. and i suppose he will always forgive me much for i admire without stint his genius as a conductor and his genius as a composer. i think that at heart he will always remain a boy, a boy full of passionate dignity, of untarnished ideals, of frequent impulses.
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of all unhappy artists the most unhappy are those who are impelled by temperament to mingle social propaganda with their artistic work. rutland boughton has the soul 260of the artist-preacher. he has persuaded me to many things: he almost persuaded me to “try” vegetarianism, and i remember one morning very well when, sitting on the end of my bed, he pointed a finger at me and enumerated all the evils that infallibly follow on the immoderate drinking of whisky.
i regret this tendency in him: it does not strengthen his art, and it exhausts a good deal of his energy and time. a practical mystic, a man of intense and sometimes difficult moods, a man so honest himself that he is incapable of suspecting dishonesty in others, a man who is always poor, for he loves his art better than riches: he is all these things. now, a man who endures poverty as cheerfully as he may, who is continually bashing his head against the brick-wall indifference of others, and who at the same time is extraordinarily sensitive, may seek happiness, but, if he does, it will always elude him. boughton, of course, would deny this. i can hear him saying: “but of course i’m happy!” at times, rutland, you are happy. you are happy when you are immersed in a new composition, when you are playing beethoven (do you remember that evening when, on a poorish piano, you played so bravely a couple of sonatas for edward carpenter and me?), when you are lecturing, when you have made a convert. but when you believe, as you do, that the world is awry, has always been awry, and shows every sign of continuing indefinitely to be awry, how can you, with your ardour for rightness, for justice, for goodness, be happy?
for years boughton has done very special festival work at glastonbury where, when the war has spent itself, i hope to go for a week’s music, for at glastonbury strange things are being done—things that are destined, perhaps, to divert in some measure the stream of our native music.
in the early days of august, 1914, boughton burst into my flat. i was still in civilian clothes and was 261reading ernest dowson to discover how he stood the war atmosphere: i thought he stood it very well.
“what, gerald!” boughton exclaimed; “not enlisted yet?”
“my dear chap,” i protested, “i am old and married and have a family. besides, i don’t like killing people: i’ve tried it. and i strongly object to being killed.”
“oh, you can help without killing people. there’s the a.s.c., for example.”
“a.s.c.? what’s that?”
“i’m going to enlist as a cook. come along with me.”
but i told him that i was reading dowson, that i was presently going to read a volume of æ, and after that i had the fullest intention of strangling debussy on the piano.
so he went away to enlist as a cook. i heard, however, that when he was told that, in addition to his duties as an army cook, he might be called upon to slaughter animals, he came away sad and dejected, and, i think, turned his mind to other things.
where he is now, i do not know. the war has blotted most of us out, and few men know whether their best friends are at the other end of the world or fighting in the trenches in the very next sector on their right or left.
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i have said somewhere that singers do not interest me. nor do they. but john coates is something more than a singer—superb artist, generous friend, unflagging enthusiast, maker of reputations. he is at once a grown-up boy full of high spirits and a profound mystic. there are many men who have seen him on the stage in some light opera who have never guessed that his buoyant spirits are the outcome of a soul that is content with its own destiny. to me, his interpretation of elgar’s gerontius is one of the great things of modern times—as great as ackté’s salome, as great as kreisler’s 262violin-playing, as wonderful as the genius of augustus john. “honest john coates!” is his title: i have heard him so described many times in london and the provinces. a man you can trust with anything: a very fine and noble gentleman, humble yet proud.
his reverence for elgar is extraordinary. i have been told that, on one occasion, after being in the company of the distinguished composer for an hour or so, he joined a few friends who were sitting in another room.
“i have just been talking to the greatest man living,” said he, with deep impressiveness and in the manner of one who has been in the presence of someone holy.
i love such hero-worship. the man who can feel as coates does about elgar is himself noble and not far removed from greatness.
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cyril scott possesses a mind of such exquisite refinement that it can react only to the most delicate of appeals. he is perhaps a little exotic, like his swaying and deliciously scented lotus flower. many years ago i was introduced to his music, and in pre-war days i very rarely let a week go by without playing something of his. on only one occasion was i thrown into his company, and even then i was not aware of the identity of the somewhat excited and, to me, extraordinarily interesting man who sat restlessly in his chair and spoke a little vehemently. he struck me as a man easily carried away by his ideals, carried away into a world where logic is useless and facts are worse than dust.
