CHAPTER I.

Musical

Criticisms

SHERRATT & HUGHES

Publishers to the Victoria University of Manchester

Manchester: 27 St. Ann Street

London: 65 Long Acre

[Illustration: AGED 26.]

MUSICAL CRITICISMS

BY

ARTHUR JOHNSTONE

WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR BY

HENRY REECE AND OLIVER ELTON

MANCHESTER

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

1905

To Dr. Hans Richter

in Memory of his Friend and Admirer

Arthur Johnstone

FOREWORD.

The Editors desire to express their thanks to the Proprietors of the

_Manchester Guardian_ for their permission to reprint the articles

contained in this volume.

They also wish to acknowledge the assistance they have received in

compiling the memoir from the family of the late Mr. Arthur Johnstone

and from his friends, and they are more particularly indebted to

Professor Sidney Vantyn for the long correspondence he placed at their

disposal.

The letters quoted were for the most part written to Mr. Oliver Elton.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

=Memoir= i.

=Chapter I.--Bach=

The Genius of Bach 1

Mass in B minor ("Hohe Messe") 3

The "St. Matthew Passion" 5

A minor Concerto for two Violins 8

=Chapter II.--Beethoven=

Symphony No. 5 (C minor) 11

Symphony No. 6 ("Pastoral") 13

Symphony No. 7 14

Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica") 16

Symphony No. 2 18

"Missa Solennis" 20

"Fidelio" 21

=Chapter III.--Berlioz=

"Symphonie Fantastique" 24

"La Damnation de Faust" 27

The Centenary Celebrations 29

=Chapter IV.--Liszt=

"Faust" Symphony 33

Pianoforte Concerto in E flat 36

=Chapter V.--Wagner=

Overture, "Faust in solitude" 39

The "Ring" at Covent Garden (1903) 41

The Bayreuth Festival 51

"Parsifal" 53

The "Ring" at Bayreuth (1904) 56

=Chapter VI.--Tchaïkovsky=

Symphony No. 5 and other works 63

Symphony No. 4 67

Overture, "Romeo and Juliet" 69

Symphony No. 5 71

Symphony No. 6 ("Pathétique") 75

=Chapter VII.--Sir Edward Elgar=

"King Olaf" 78

The "Enigma" Variations 81

Overture, "Cockaigne" 85

The "Dream of Gerontius," Birmingham Festival 89

" " Düsseldorf 92

" " Preliminary Article 95

" " Hallé Concerts, Manchester 98

"The Apostles," Birmingham Festival 104

" Preliminary Article 108

" Hallé Concerts, Manchester 111

Overture, "In the South" 116

The "Coronation Ode" 117

=Chapter VIII.--Richard Strauss=

"Don Quixote," Rhenish Musical Festival at Düsseldorf 119

"Don Juan," Preliminary Article 122

" Hallé Concerts 124

"Till Eulenspiegel" 126

"Sehnsucht" 128

Strauss's conducting of Liszt's "Faust" Symphony,

Lower Rhine Musical Festival, Düsseldorf 129

"Tod und Verklärung" 131

"Also sprach Zarathustra" 133

"Ein Heldenleben," Liverpool Orchestral Society 136

Quartet in C minor, for Piano and Strings 139

=Chapter IX.--Chamber Music=

Dvoràk. Quintet in A Major 142

" Quartet, Op. 96 143

Beethoven. Razoumoffsky Quartet (No. 3) 145

Bach. Concerto in D minor for two Violins 146

Beethoven. Quartet in B flat major 147

Tchaïkovsky. Quartet in D major 148

" Trio in A minor, Op. 50 148

César Franck. Quintet in F minor 151

=Chapter X.--Piano Playing=

Reisenauer 153

Moszkowski 155

Busoni 157

" 159

Borwick 161

Siloti 163

Rosenthal 165

Paderewski 166

Godowsky 169

Lamond 171

=Chapter XI.--Violin Playing=

Ysaye 174

Ysaye and Busoni 176

Kubelik 178

Kreisler 180

=Chapter XII.--Music in the Nineteenth Century=

Extract from a review of Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland's

"English Music during the 19th Century" 182

Centenary Article: "Music in England during the 19th

Century" 189

=Chapter XIII.--Hans Richter= 201

=Chapter XIV.--Nietzsche=

Nietzsche and Wagner 211

Nietzsche in English 222

Note.--The performances noticed were all given at Manchester, except

where otherwise stated.

PORTRAITS.

Aged 26 _Frontispiece_

Aged 20 face p. 10

Aged 26 face p. 30

MEMOIR.

ARTHUR GIFFARD WHITESIDE JOHNSTONE was born December 3rd, 1861, the

fourth son of the Rev. Edward Johnstone and Frances Mills. His father

was then taking the duty at Colton in Staffordshire, but in the

following year accepted the living of Warehorne in Kent; this he

resigned in 1866 and went to live at St. Leonards. Mr. Johnstone died in

1870, and the direction of Arthur's education fell entirely upon his

mother. Mrs. Johnstone gave her life to good works and to the care of

her children, one of whom was an invalid. Arthur looked on her as a

saint, and the thought held up his belief in humanity during the

somewhat long struggle when his powers and aims were uncertain, and when

he had to observe excessive dulness, dreariness, and meanness at close

quarters. He was also beholden to her for the gift that was at last to

determine his career. She was a good musician, and it was from her that

Johnstone inherited his fine taste and received his first instruction in

music. Later he studied under Mr. W. Custard, a local organist. The

atmosphere of his home was religious--extreme Anglican approaching to

Roman Catholic. Johnstone, though he became by reaction anti-clerical,

continued to appreciate the value of religion, chiefly through art and

music, as his letters and criticisms show. But his bent was secular as

well as artistic; a high Anglican school and a high Anglican college

were therefore not a pasture in which he could thrive. His spirit was

foreign to theirs. It says much for his strength of mind, that these

institutions left him able to admire certain forms of Christian art.

In 1874 he went to Radley and remained there four years, doing neither

well nor ill, stifled rather in the ecclesiastical atmosphere of the

school, caring little for games, and out of sympathy with the public

school spirit. He therefore lived his own life, learnt to protect

himself by ingenious tact and reserve, and read irregularly what he

liked. Though not specially built for athletics he was by no means

lacking in bodily arts and dexterities. When quite young he was a first

rate billiard-player, a good skater, and at lawn tennis well above the

average. His chief accomplishment was an odd one which never left him.

During these early years he made a constant pastime of conjuring, and

devoted to it much of his leisure and some of his business hours. He

even gave elaborate entertainments in public, from the age of fourteen.

On one occasion when he was only seventeen he was able to apply his

skill to a really practical use. He was going by train to give a

performance and happened to enter a compartment where there was a gang

of card sharpers. They drew him into playing "Nap" with them; soon he

began losing and knew that he was being cheated. They were using the

ordinary conjuror's cards with plain white backs, of which he had a

supply in his pocket. He soon found an opportunity of replacing their

pack with one of his own, won back his losses with schoolboy

satisfaction, and changed carriages at the first stopping-place, leaving

the experts to solve the mystery for themselves. His self-possession in

public and private, the mature and slightly initiate air that became

less marked as he grew older, were probably due to these performances.

They served in his real education. The intellectual side of what is

usually common showman's art attracted him. The psychology of the

conjuror's victim, amused and angry, straining all his wits on the wrong

point; the festal atmosphere, or _Stimmung_, of inattentive youth and

good temper necessary for success, the real poverty of intricate

mechanical appliance compared with skill and patter--of these things he

would talk in youth with an Edgar-Poe-like elaboration and solemnity, no

doubt as well as any man in England. The best of these exhibitions was

when Johnstone was professing to explain to a few friends a trick of his

own doing. There came first, in long and well-cut sentences, a kind of

metaphysic of conjuring; an account of those principles of delusion that

were inapplicable in the present instance; exposure of the vulgar and

obvious methods, which seemed to the crowd the same as those subtler

ones which merely satisfied the conscience of the artist; and lastly, on

the verge of the "explanation," a long parenthesis or a touch of

coldness and abstraction, not to be interrupted, which ended, if at all,

not in any explanation whatever, but in a last performance of the trick.

Johnstone made a point of seeking acquaintance with the chief professors

of manual illusion who visited England. He well knew, of course, the

methods of signalling to counterfeit clairvoyance; and in one case, that

of "Little Louie," whose show at the Westminster Aquarium was the best

public marvel of the sort, he was convinced that the performers only

eked out by signalling and other tricks the failures of some genuinely

supernormal power of the "telepathic" kind which they themselves did

not fully understand. We say thus much about legerdemain, as it was long

our friend's quaint and picturesque substitute for the less original

forms of young men's amusement. It gave a good deal of pleasure to other

people, and he needed amusement, for his life was not to be easy.

Johnstone left Radley at the end of the summer term 1878, and for the

next two years worked under Messrs. Wren and Gurney for the Indian Civil

Service, the limit of entrance then being nineteen years. It must be

admitted that he made no serious attempt to succeed, and that here, as

at Oxford later, the prospect of an examination proved to be the reverse

of an incentive to work. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that he

failed, for though he would have found a great interest in the natives

(and extended his _répertoire_ of tricks) he would have been repelled by

the average Anglo-Indian; besides, his abilities did not lie in the

direction of legal and political administration. In October, 1880,

Johnstone came up to Keble College, Oxford, and he quickly had a small

circle round him. Among his friends were R. A. Farrar, son of the

well-known Dean, and G. H. Fowler, the biologist, of his own College;

Winter, of St. John's, the best musician among undergraduates; his

biographers; and, later, Prof. York Powell, who instantly detected his

ability and force of nature. Amongst the dons of Keble, Johnstone cared

for two. One was the Warden, the Rev. E. S. Talbot, now Bishop of

Southwark, who behaved with tact, and encouraged as far as he might a

mind of no pattern type, which would not bring the College any

regulation honours; the other was the Rev. J. R. Illingworth, the best

writer of the school, and since known as a philosophical preacher.

Ascetic, but thoroughly humane, Mr. Illingworth attracted Johnstone by

his honesty and fineness of temper. But these clergymen, after all,

dwelt in their own world, not in his. Until he met York Powell,

Johnstone had found no older man from whom he could learn without

cautions and reservations, and who struck him as a master-mind and a

perfectly free spirit. The two men signally valued each other's

conversation; they had many delicate qualities in common--the kind of

delicacy only found in Bohemians of experience who have kept their

perceptions at the finest edge. Powell materially helped Johnstone more

than once by letting persons of consequence know what he thought of his

younger friend. Even in Powell's record there was hardly any friendship

more completely unruffled.

In youth, as an undergraduate, Johnstone was sallow, but healthy, rather

lean and light, with a large and well-moulded musician's head, like

Beethoven's or, still more, Rubinstein's, in the outline of the

overhanging brow. It is easy to recall that earnest face, that

delightful smile always characteristic of him, and, above all, the

fascination of his playing on the piano. His voice was clear and carried

well, with a sharp metallic ring when he was indignant, but was usually

pitched low, as if unwilling to be overheard. His manner was formed and

his talk was from the first what it remained: forcible, emphatic, and

undoubtedly over-superlative at times, cut into quaintly elaborate but

perfectly built sentences, which came so naturally to him that we have

heard him discharge one of them the moment after opening his eyes in the

morning. They can best be illustrated by his more familiar style in his

writings and letters; the latter, indeed, give a fairly exact reflex of

his talk. A _flâneur_ of the best kind, he observed closely and

curiously; in spite of long spells of apparent idleness, the alert

quality of his mind never showed the faintest trace of slackness. He

described vividly and accurately; and he had a remarkable gift for

explaining any subject or point of view unfamiliar to his listeners,

careful that the slightest detail should not escape them. And, in turn,

he would quickly catch up and develop the ideas of his friends however

vaguely suggested or insufficiently thought out. Johnstone professed

Radical principles and was a member of the Russell Club, where the

advanced Liberals met for papers and debates; but his Radicalism was

social rather than political, and after the foreign experiences of his

later years his opinions tended in the direction of strong government

and Imperialism. At this time it amused him to be rather eccentric in

dress, though he afterward became trim and fairly modish. In 1882 the

intellectual undergraduate was capable of wearing a wide-brimmed,

light-brown, hard hat, descending over the ears and eyes and long hair

penthouse fashion. He had one of these "built for me, ground plan and

projection" on a special scale. He also had a tie which could be folded

into twenty-five different aspects or patterns, some of them striking;

it was a mosaic of squares, and the harvest of a long search;

twenty-five neckties in one. His collars were ultra-Byronic. Otherwise

he was not markedly strange in attire; though the real incongruity was

between these freaks of dress, and the keen intent grey gleam of his

eyes, and the look of held-in vehemence and sensibility.

To what did this sensibility tend, what did it crave for? Not chiefly

for definite learning, or book-knowledge, or for abstract philosophical

truth. Johnstone's nature and gifts did not set towards scholarship

(except afterwards to musical scholarship) or to pure speculation. He

wanted, no doubt, to write, but he never cared to practise style as a

mere handicraft; "let us have," he would say, "something with blood in

it." He did not ask for religious solutions or consolations. Since

nearly all he printed was on musical subjects, only his letters and our

memories can give the impression of what he wanted. It was a

sufficiently rare ambition among the Oxford young men of our time,

though often enough professed. He wanted art and beauty. This desire, of

course, in others often was a cant; there were scholars and

verse-makers--more or less of the "æsthetic" type--sentimental and hard

at bottom like most such persons, who cultivated beauty, and have

usually come to nothing except prosperity. Johnstone was of another race

to these; they never heard of him; he did not care for the main chance;

he was in profound earnest. Few young men looked at life with so

definite an aspiration to get the grace, enjoyment, and beauty out of

it, and so definite a conviction that not much of these things is

attainable. To such spirits, pre-appointed to suffer and wait, society

seems at first an irrational welter, out of which, as by a miracle,

emerge enchanting islets of grace, and wit, and cheer. The desire to

find beauty in things or persons, and the desire to find soul and

humanity, are the unalloyed, intense, and usually disappointed passions

of elect youth claiming its rights. It is the second of them that saves

a young man from the conceit and exclusive folly that may beset the

first. Johnstone's tastes, his reading, loves and friendships were

guided by these two passions, and by a third which took off from the

strain of them, and was equally imperious--the wish to study the world

and to be entertained reasonably. Classes did not exist for him, except

that he often felt he was more likely to be able to foregather with and

help men and women who were at a discount in the world. With such

warring elements and a spirit so hard to satisfy, it was no wonder that

his earlier years seemed planless, and in part were so. The instinct for

travel and odd experience lasted long. No one but his near friends had

much knowledge of this complex but essentially single nature. To them

there seemed to be more than a seed of nobility and fair example in such

a youth, so externally disappointing to parents, and guardians, and

shepherds of colleges. Out of it was gradually wrought a character full

of fire and aspiration, fundamentally austere and uncompromising in

loyalty and in artistic conscience, but masked under a certain

reticence. But this is to forestall by several years.

[Illustration: AGED 20.]

Johnstone had entered Oxford at a time of great intellectual ferment.

Looking back we can now see that it was during the years about 1880 that

the revolutionary flood ran highest. The authority of Darwin and Huxley

was unquestioned by many of the younger generation and all-embracing.

The vague Christianity and sentimental optimism of Tennyson was held in

little esteem beside the wider tolerance, the subtle analysis, the

ceaseless curiosity of Browning. Above all "the Bard," as Swinburne was

admiringly called, was the poet of the young men. Another very important

factor in the mental development of our generation--and for Johnstone,

perhaps, the strongest of all--was supplied by the French literature of

the century, from the Romantic School onwards. It is no wonder,

therefore, that the reaction from the High Church influences and

surroundings of his youth was severe and complete, and that his highly

æsthetic nature demanded the fullest artistic and intellectual freedom.

The so-called "æsthetic movement," as we have before implied, left him

untouched. He would have nothing to do with the attempt to symbolise and

revive a civilisation that had utterly passed away, nor with the

deliberate neglect of the modern world, and its most intense and living

art--Music. Johnstone had not much mediæval sense, and was sparing in

his appreciation of Rossetti, to whom he became unjust. What he liked

best was "Jenny," though he was rightly critical on the unsound streaks

in its rhetoric. It was first brought home to him, as to others of his

group, by the skilful and dramatic reading, in a singular clanging

voice, of his chief Keble friend, C. W. Pettit: a young man of high and

melancholy character who was found drowned, probably by accident, in the

Upper River, near Oxford, in the spring of 1882. A memorial stone with

Pettit's initials marks the place, in an unfrequented reach of the

stream, and the inscription, if not effaced, is now a mystery except to

some few who remember him.

"Jenny" also struck upon what may be mentioned now as the deepest chord

in Johnstone's sympathies; it is heard sounding in the letters, quoted

below, that review the stories of Ruth, Fantine, and Tess of the

D'Urbervilles. His attitude in this matter was free from conventional

ethics, and was, therefore, essentially Christian; and the relations of

society to technically errant women, who have lapsed even once by

accident, preoccupied him bitterly, and that in no theoretical or

sequestered way. In his own gipsy experience, he witnessed at least one

instance where the issue only just escaped disaster. He was haunted by

the story, as De Quincey was by that of his lost companion in Oxford

Street. The girl whom Johnstone, though generally hard up, managed to

befriend in his secret, chivalrous and effectual fashion, finally

married some one decent and respectable. Concealing the place and

circumstance, he afterwards cast the incident of the "Fantine of

Shotover" (we also conceal, of course, the name of the village) into a

kind of prose sketch or _poème_, which he finished when he was about

twenty-six, re-wrote twice, and thought of printing. It is unfortunately

not now to be traced. Its musical, exalted prose, if inexperienced in

form, gave genuine promise in that kind of composition; but he never to

our knowledge, pursued the vein, and the prose in which he became expert

was, apart from his letters, purely critical and expository. Still,

enough has been said to show the force and unusual bent of Johnstone's

human sympathies. It is clear that a young man's truth of instinct and

strength of head are never more hardly taxed than when he is confronted

with a concrete story of this kind. He may become foolish in opposite

ways, especially if he is also an artist and has strength of

temperament. He may be personally entangled through his sympathies, and

make ill worse. He may be superior, and spoil everything by clumsy

missionary benevolence, hard of hand. It is something if he can get

behind the ordinary, blind, damnatory formulæ of society. This however,

is not so difficult to a free mind. What is harder is to do it, and yet

to see the facts without mere theorising, without the cumber of

rhetorical and literary sentiment that obscures them. A Scotch-descended

brain is useful at this point. In our memory Johnstone rose to the

occasion thus presented, and acted and judged with balance. But we are

more concerned now with the road by which he arrived at his force of

sympathy. Æstheticism of the rootless academic kind had, it is evident,

no hold upon him; he was too angry to be precious; but his motive power

at bottom was that of the artist, as it was surely not that of the

radical theorist or philanthropic organiser; although it was, if we use

accurate language, by no means less human than theirs. What was at work

was his sense of beauty; of physical beauty, first of all, or of grace,

in the victimised person, as the sign and vesture of an originally sound

and simple, or gay and innocently festal nature; beauty inbred, and then

marred by some rough contact, and then marred more by social punishment,

and seldom retrieved, even in part--as in the particular instance it

chanced to be retrieved--by any fortunate and final escape. All this

revolts the deepest of human feelings, which distinguishes us from most

of the beasts, namely the æsthetic feeling, which at this point happens

to coincide closely with the religious. A certain depth and rarity were

thus super-added to the plain good feeling and kindliness of the man;

and we can draw these facts from the jealous hiding-place of the past

without undue violence to the shyness in which he wrapped them, as they

show his personal and special path of approach to the human tragedy, and

may even come to the notice of, and serve for the encouragement of

similar minds at a corresponding stage of discontent. We may now go back

to his early youth, when he was halfway through Oxford, and when some of

these ideas were germinating into necessarily crude expression, which

none the less has its interest. In a letter of 1881, he writes:--

"How can we escape from Swinburne? Does not modern society drive one to

his school, at least the sort of society that I am _supposed_ to have

been brought up in, whose moral atmosphere is a sort of perpetual

afternoon tea, where all the men are pale young curates and the women

district visitors, their excitements vulgar ritualistic tea-pot

tempests, the doctrinal significance of birettas, purificators.... Their

minds ever on the alert to quash the smallest expression of any delight

in natural beauty--'beauty is only skin-deep,' the damnedest lie that

was ever formulated (compare Browning's Paracelsus). I wish with Gautier

that I had been born in the days of the Roman Empire, when asceticism

was almost unknown and what there was of it entirely specialised, before

ever such an astounding classification as the World, the Flesh, and the

Devil had been made, or every natural beauty writhed, like the divine

feminine torso, in the accused grip of fashion." These are the

outpourings of a very young man only twenty. It may fairly be said that

Johnstone was always far more of an ascetic, personally, than he ever

admitted, and the articles on Bach and Sir Edward Elgar abundantly prove

the religious habit of mind induced by the training and associations of

his early years. A year later his views have become better balanced, as

shown by the following extract from a letter on the same subject.

"I read most of the _Apologia_ a month or two back. As you say, Newman

stands quite alone in his sincerity and spiritual power, the only

orthodox thinker who is not an instance of self-deception resulting from

reiterated untruth. All the purest and most beautiful aspects of the old

faith seem to group round him. But the lights are almost out on the

stage where he poses so magnificently, a rough crowd is spoiling all the

scenic illusion, and garish sunbeams are coming in through the roof.

"I was moved to tears the day before yesterday by the appearance in this

place [Tunbridge Wells] of a pretty face.

"There she was, a radiant and triumphant vindication of human nature

among the myriad libels on the human form.

"I love the wonderful human body. How utterly the most beautiful of

imaginable things in its strange dualism; perfect form expressed with

infinite subtlety in two mutually supplemental phases. The one--tall,

lithe-limbed, and athletic, with its shifting net-work of muscles

beneath the clear brown skin, boldly chiselled features and short crisp

hair--emblem of strength and swiftness and godlike protection, buoyant

and fearless; the other--a harmony of exquisite curves, white and

sensitive, and crowned with rippling hair, fulfilled of tender life and

wondrous grace--living type of fruitfulness. To say that either deviated

from the abstract perfection of form is merely to say the very idea of

sex is such a deviation; and is there not a certain divine

suggestiveness in this very fact? Their union is perfect Beauty--veils

of the great human Sacrament. And all this is faded clean out of modern

life. The belief in the body is dead. I believe some of us live and die

never knowing the likeness of the human form, just as some of us do

without ever seeing the sunrise.

"The 'pale Galilean' has banished Beauty; and only here and there,

disguised almost beyond recognition, has it ventured with infinite

apology to return.... Yet let us not be all unthankful to the pale

Galilean and his lessons of suffering; there are too many of us who see

in their own instincts the very impress of impossibility to be

satisfied, who have to reflect with some bitterness, not '_il faut

mourir_,' but '_il faut vivre_' and gather up our scraps and skulk

along, hoping, perhaps, some day for a lowly place in some court in the

House of Life, if it be only that of a scullion. And then at what a

frightful cost have those lessons become part of the world's

inheritance! Surely it cannot have been for nothing."

* * * * *

Obviously, in all this outburst, if its literary and intellectual

origins are not hard to trace, there was no pose whatever; it was a mood

that Johnstone honestly and passionately lived through, or rather it

remained as a background to his nature. He was far from happy at this

period. He had many friends and varied interests, but he felt that life

was being wasted; in fact he had not "found himself," nor was he to do

so until his visit to Germany. No doubt Keble was not the college for

one of his temperament, and the English system of teaching the classics

made them, for him, dead languages indeed; but had their oral use been

encouraged (the practice of the late Professor Blackie) it is possible

that he might have taken a real interest in them. With one of his

friends he would speak constantly in Latin.

During the next few years Johnstone was mainly engaged in scholastic

work, and the necessity of earning his own living prevented him from

taking his degree. In a letter of September 1885, he regrets that he

"had to live much in continuous utter rebellion against outward

circumstances. In the morning is much strife and crying; in the evening,

comfort of the pot. The Day of Rest brings loneliness in

crowds--'stalled oxen and hatred.' _Ca finira._"

In the spring of 1887 he inherited a small legacy, which set him free,

for a time, from the drudgery of teaching, and enabled him to carry out

his long-deferred wish for a course of serious musical study at a

foreign conservatorium. At this period he knew absolutely no German, and

had only a fair knowledge of French, and was quite unconscious of

possessing the natural gift for modern languages, which he was

afterwards to turn to good account at the Edinburgh Academy and

elsewhere. In August he went to Kreuznach to acquire the elements of

German before proceeding to the Cologne Conservatorium, where he had

determined to study. The family where he stayed could speak no English

and but little French, so he was forced from the outset to express

himself in a strange tongue and make shift to understand it. Early in

October he entered the Conservatorium as a student, and engaged himself

to take the year's course. His chief friend was M. Sidney Vantyn, now

Professor of the Piano at the Liège Conservatoire, and then in his last

year of study. They met in the class of Professor Eibenschütz, one of

the most severe masters there, who made no allowance for Johnstone's

previous amateur training, and was rather harsh and discouraging. He

knew no English and Johnstone's German was still elementary, so Vantyn,

who knew English thoroughly, acted as interpreter between them. In his

recollections of those days M. Vantyn writes:--

"It was certainly evident that he had never had a musical training

before his arrival in Cologne. Johnstone's fingers were stiff and he had

to begin almost at the very beginning. And this he had the courage to

do. At that time I was one of the advanced pupils, I offered to help,

and for some months we practised together every day, more especially

with a view to developing the fingers. In April, 1888, he showed me a

sketch of a _Valse de Concert_. This composition was what one would have

expected from Johnstone--bright, original, thorough. At my request he

completed the _Valse_ which I played shortly afterwards at a concert,

where it met with a decided success. A little later it was sold to a

music publisher at Liège. He soon left Herr Eibenschütz for Dr.

Klauwell, with whom he studied the piano and harmony." Among the other

professors at the Conservatorium were Humperdinck, afterwards famous as

the composer of _Hansel und Gretel_, and Gustav Jensen, the brother of

the better-known song writer.

At length, Johnstone was living in a world which brought out his best

qualities and stimulated his keenest interests. But he now realised that

he had come ten years too late for the attainment of any eminence,

either as executant or composer, and contented himself with considerably

extending his general knowledge of music. Nor did he ever confine his

attention to music alone; but he endeavoured to see as much as possible

of German methods of work, especially as regards the teaching of

languages. In reading the Cologne verdict on Johnstone's early training

it must be remembered that in his youth the piano was not well taught in

England, where the principles and importance of a good technique were

alike unknown. Of course, the principal and all his masters liked him

personally, but naturally their chief interest lay with young pupils who

promised to make a name in the musical world. The year's course at the

Conservatorium ended in July, and about this time he writes:--

"As regards intentions, I am quite resolved now (and quite contented) to

become a modern language teacher for life. During this year I have

obtained some insight into the musical profession, with the conclusion

that for all but the very few of quite the first rank it is a wretched

life. So I am after all going to take my degree, and shall reside next

term as a member of Balliol.... I could get a living by music now, but

that would be to sink into a drudgery yet worse than anything I have yet

had to do. I _will_ not teach beginners. Besides, I can make a much

better living in another profession."

Johnstone returned to England at the end of August, 1888, in wonderful

spirits and in better health than he had ever before enjoyed, bursting

with ideas and enthusiasm for everything German. It was Gulliver's

homecoming after the voyage to the Houyhnhnms, and his friends had to

listen to criticism of a similar kind. There is no doubt that this year

brought real maturity to Johnstone. He gained a confidence in himself

and a grip on life, which even when the prospect seemed most hopeless

prevented him from ever again falling into his old moods of despondency.

In October he returned to Oxford. Some years back he had taken his name

off the books of Keble and migrated to New Inn Hall. The Hall had lately

been absorbed by Balliol, and so in the end Johnstone became a member

of the College which should have sheltered him from the beginning. In

Balliol he was tolerably well at home, though now senior to the men

around him. He forgathered with Farmer, who had just left Harrow for

Balliol and with the Master's support arranged a concert in the Hall

every Sunday evening. Once he gave a conjuring show, by Farmer's

request. Jowett shrilled in cherubic mirth, sent for Johnstone, listened

to his conversation, which flowed more easily than that of most of

Jowett's undergraduate visitors and was of another stamp; and continued

to treat him with politeness. Johnstone, whose classics had somewhat

rusted during his stay in Germany, read with Mr. St. George Stock, the

philosophical writer, then and since a well-known private teacher in

Oxford. In December he passed the necessary schools and took his degree;

his last experience of the old, disquieting city was pleasant, if

brief--a period of _recueillement_ before embarking upon the new career

which he had chosen.

In the March following, 1889, he received an offer to go as tutor to the

young son of Prince Abamélek in Podolia, a province of Southern Russia.

The following account of his journey is interesting:--

"I left Berlin on Thursday morning at 8.30; the stage through Galicia,

Oswiecim, Cracow, Lemberg, Podwoloczyska was a bad twenty-four hours.

Just at the frontier the snow was immensely deep, standing in a wall on

each side of the train. It was like being let into Russia through the

works of a great snow fortification. The worst mistake I made was in

bringing no victuals with me. I noticed at the frontier examination that

my portmanteau was the only one not half full of food. The restaurants

at the large junctions are excellent, being all under the management of

Tartars, a race possessing the genius of cookery, but if you have to

wait as I did, more than twenty-four hours at an out-of-the-way country

station, you may find nothing obtainable but tea. Travelling in Russia

is in any case tiring; the distances are interminable, and every journey

has to be regarded as a sort of pilgrimage. On coming from Osipoffka

here, we had to leave about ten in the evening to meet the desired

train.

"The start was rather amusing, for we were a considerable caravan with

children, servants, horses and dogs. All night we drove across the

Steppe, accompanied by several mounted men with torches, which they

lighted when the way was bad.

"I had an outside place and was somewhat dazed and curried by the wind

and dust by the time we got to the station. Railway travelling is

interesting if you have got the courage not to go first class. The

carriages are on the American plan, with an opening down the middle.

Instead of dapper bagmen you find long-coated and long-haired Jews,

besides soldiers and students in curious costumes, while whole families,

travelling together, produce the effect of an emigrant convoy. Everyone

undresses with complete _sang-froid_.

"The family always come for the summer to this estate. It lies in a

well-wooded district of Podolia, some hundred miles further north than

the region to which I first went. The house is very large, and the

garden magnificent. It is skirted by a river and there are primitive

boats and an excellent bathing place. They have also a steam-launch of

English manufacture, which is shortly to be got afloat.

"The neighbourhood is a paradise of Gipsies. The river throws out arms

and endless windings, and the ground between is much broken and covered

with undergrowth. Here the Gipsies encamp. One sees them in the evening

bathing with their horses, and thus I had an opportunity of observing a

thing, the peculiar and suggestive appropriateness of which is remarked

on by Darwin in his 'Voyage of the Beagle,' namely, a naked man on a

naked horse. This is the true centaur; they become one thing. I am now

convinced that the Gipsies are the most physically beautiful of all

races. In England they are abject beggars, but here rather more

well-to-do than the average of the population; for they are not like the

peasants, more than half-starved by ecclesiastical regulation, and

obviously, in a country in such a stage as Russia is at present, they

have a better time. There are plenty of immense regions where they can

trap and fish quite unmolested, and the climate favours their mode of

life--doubly, I should imagine, the winter giving a short account of

defective constitutions. I suppose they are thieves, but to the casual

observer they are entirely admirable. Troops of splendid little brown

children go about in the evening singing or shrieking with shrill

laughter. Their music, by the way, is valued in Russia. There are

several troops who get large sums for attending various festivities.

"It has gradually been borne in upon me that the climate of this region

is almost ideal. The sky is deep blue and far off, yet the heat is never

really oppressive, on account of a constant breeze which brings balsam

from the woods. For the landscape a finer contrast could scarcely be

found to the Southern Steppe, which is like the burnt and scraped

bottom of a pot. It has a character of its own, of course. From the fact

of being usually able to see to the level horizon in all directions, it

reminds one of the sea, while in summer the heated and quivering air

which rises from the ground produces marvellous atmospheric effects; but

there is always a wind, skin-drying and far from healthy. Here, on the

other hand, we are well watered and surrounded by deep and lordly

forest, and the aspect of the whole country is _riant_.

"I have not yet seen much of the _kirchliches Wesen_. The priest at

Osipoffka, I gathered, is a man who has to get in a mass as often as he

is sober enough. The Abaméleks do not receive him, and never go to

Church while there. In any case, I do not think the Princess is

particularly _dévote_. She is of Polish descent, and her family having

given up Western Catholicism, have never become, I suppose, enthusiastic

as Russian orthodox.

"Of the children the boy is much the most interesting. The eldest girl,

though not without promise of beauty, is at present in a somewhat gaping

and lumbering stage. The younger one is much smaller, though only a

little younger than her sister, also of better intelligence, if worse

temper. She laughs with a curious _abandon_ and is full of

_câlineries_, and is two totally different persons when pleased and

bored.

"Master Paul has not the faintest resemblance that I can trace to either

of them. He is an exceptionally round-limbed and well-made child, with

low forehead and hair like dead-black fur showing a dead-white skin

between, tending to stand up though perfectly soft, and always with a

backward sweep, as though he had lately stood facing a high wind; beady

brown eyes, clear brown colour, delicate little nose and chin and a

mouth like a cherry, make up a face which is no false promise of his

vivacity of temperament. It changes in the hundredth part of a second

from bubbling laughter to a sort of Last Judgment seriousness.

"He wags his little _tête de Polichinelle_ over his victuals, and

converses with them in several languages. Sometimes his mother

interrupts him and asks if he knows what he is saying, when he swears

that he hasn't spoken for a quarter of an hour. _Pauvre petit bijou_ she

calls him."

In the autumn of 1889 his engagement as tutor ended, and he spent the

winter in Odessa to study the language. He put himself, as usual, under

conditions where it was impossible to speak any other language; entered

a Russian family; prepared his questions in Russian when he shopped;

and addressed in Russian the official who delayed his necessary papers

until he had silently put down a bribe of two roubles, and who then

shook him warmly by the hand. He was full of tales; he told of the

English journalist, so aggressively and deliberately English that he

would not uncover before the Tsar's portrait in a hairdresser's shop; of

the Prince Abamélek, who was always talking of taking him out shooting,

but never did so; of the Princess, who feared that her little Paul was

"trop jeune encore pour profiter de son esprit eminemment cultivé"; of

the social tyranny of Russian orthodoxy, which drove free-thinking

persons of quality in the country to church and sacrament at all the

Christian festivals; and, finally, of his shortness of funds which

forced him to find his way home in humble style.

As an English liberal, Johnstone was naturally a welcome guest in the

society of the Reform party; and on his return to England he was to meet

Stepniak at the house of their common friend, York Powell, and to enroll

himself among the Friends of Russian Freedom. But he was more in

sympathy with the members of the Reform movement than with their

objects. While in Russia, such connections secured him a mild

surveillance on the part of the officials, and he had a little

difficulty in obtaining the necessary passport to leave the country; but

these vexations did not prevent him from holding that a paternal

government was required in Russia, and that his countrymen as a whole

were to blame for their harsh judgment of a civilisation merely because

it ran counter to their own political ideals. The late Bishop Creighton

arrived at precisely the same conclusion after his visit to Russia to

attend the Coronation in 1896.

[Illustration: AGED 26.]

On his way home he spent some months in Buda-Pesth, Vienna, and the

Tyrol, and made his first visit to Bayreuth and the Passion Play at

Oberammergau.

Shortly after his return to England Johnstone accepted a mastership in

Modern Languages at the Edinburgh Academy, where his elder brother had

been a classical master for some years. He came into residence in

September, 1890, and Edinburgh was his home until he left that city for

Manchester, in January, 1896. On the whole he was happy there; for

though teaching foreign languages to boys is rather a thankless task, he

was cheered from time to time by the successes of his pupils in

examinations elsewhere, mainly those for entrance to Woolwich and

Sandhurst. He could even confess, after a long summer holiday on the

Continent, that "he was again thoroughly penetrated with the atmosphere

of gray old long-faced Sawbath-keeping Edinburgh." After all, Johnstone,

though he considered himself an Englishman, was, as may be gathered from

his name, Scotch on his father's side; his mother, too, had a strain of

Scotch blood. So perhaps that quiet self-contained manner and all that

it implied came to him from north of the Tweed.

About this time, he was penetrated with the excellent purpose of

training his bodily nerve. He knew that he could never be noticeably

muscular, or anything more than wiry, with his light frame and high

tension. But he would say, "we ought to be able to see a man fall from a

high scaffolding on to the pavement, just before our feet, battered, and

to do whatever is necessary without turning a hair." Accordingly, though

himself most sensitive to pain and to the sight of it, he fraternised

with the young doctors and surgeons whom he met, accompanied them to

operations, watched the worst things, and even gave his help, which was

more than once invited owing to his deftness and neatness of handling.

In this way he got over any shrinking of the nerves. In Edinburgh he

also managed to find some amusement. He was a foreigner in his

adaptiveness to restaurant life, and found a quiet French café to his

taste, where he took his visitors. The odd stratification of Edinburgh

society into the various aristocracies of the country, University,

professions and commerce, and its broad Scotch democratic feeling,

entertained him. He was in one emergency summoned as French interpreter

in the police court, and was pleased at having given satisfaction to

himself and the magistrate, as the case was a somewhat delicate one and

demanded nicety of expression. York Powell, writing to a friend in June,

1893, spoke of Johnstone as

"a fine fellow, very interesting; a musician doomed for the sins of

others (for he is not a great sinner) to be a dominie in Edinboro',

where he is consoled by an old Frenchman who can talk and

understand; and they have, with one or two more, a little French

club. Each pays sixpence a night for expenses, and you have simple

refreshments and sound conversation."

Above all, his musical opportunities were good and varied, and he took

the fullest advantage of them. Music in Edinburgh had, for many years,

maintained a high standard. The orchestral concerts were second only to

those conducted by Hallé and Richter; the latter brought his own band

occasionally, and every solo player of eminence came there from time to

time. He found many congenial friends, and was a frequent guest at the

houses of Mrs. Sellar, the widow of the Professor of Humanity at

Edinburgh, and Dr. Berry Hart, the famous surgeon, where musical

amateurs met constantly; and he was a member of the "Rhyme and Reason

Club," where literary and artistic questions were discussed.

His most noteworthy contribution to the Club was a paper on the

"Relation of Music to the Words in Songs," which he afterwards read at

the Manchester College of Music, and which well merits a summary here

(and some extracts). It shows how his mind was steadily working in the

direction of musical criticism. Its origin was a statement made in a

paper on Tennyson's songs, that poetry, if it be true poetry, is

self-sufficient, and the addition of music to it, however fine the music

may be in itself, is an intrusion and a disturbance for the true lover

of poetry.

The first part of his paper is concerned with an examination into the

nature of music and its place among the arts. He goes on to deplore the

divorce between music and the songs of modern English poets, none of

which are capable of being sung, and traces this divergence back to the

days when Puritanism banished music from church and village green.

Burns, he adds, wrote genuine songs; but he is the only song-writer

since the days of Elizabeth, and worthy of being ranked with Heine. He

concludes by claiming for music "that it is not an inferior art, a mere

hand-maid to poetry, but a direct revelation of the principle of beauty

and on a footing of honourable equality with poetry. The songs of all

the really great lyrical poets are obviously and radiantly singable, and

meant to be sung, and in their authors' lifetime they were sung. So far

then from the finest lyrical poetry being impaired by association with

music, it is only the maimed poetry of decadence that does not admit of

such association, one unfailing mark of a lyric of the highest order

being that it rises to the true singing quality." In the following

passage Johnstone sets forth the ideal at which the composer of songs

should aim:--

"The great German song composers, such as Schubert, Schumann, Franz and

Brahms, working in profound sympathy with the 'Volkslied,' have arrived

at a conception of the song infinitely richer, more refined, and more

genial than is to be found elsewhere. With Franz and Schumann we find

that, in the best cases, the music positively furnishes a sort of

literary criticism on the text, with such exquisite exactness does the

composer appreciate the text and supply the appropriate musical

counterpart.

"We often hear of the music being _wedded_ to the words of a song, and

it is very curious to find so wonderfully neat and perfect a metaphor

being used by people who are far from suspecting its perfection. This is

in fact, precisely what takes place when a good song is composed--the

music is _wedded_ to the verse, though the expression is often used by

those who think that the music has nothing to do but to express again,

more forcibly perhaps, whatever feeling is expressed by the verse, who

think, in other words, that the music is enslaved, not wedded, to the

poetry.

"But music is not restricted to the expression of the feeling of certain

verses or of any other feeling or feelings. The poetry and the music

have each their independent character and their measure of independent

beauty, and this independent beauty and character is in no sense

destroyed by the union. The music has far more to do than merely express

again or emphasise whatever feeling is expressed by the verse. It may

accompany the verse, adorn the verse, brighten the verse, show up the

character of the verse in a new light, and, in turn, be much improved

by the association; but on the other hand, if destitute of independent

beauty, the music can never become beautiful by being _wedded_ to

something.

"It will now have become clear, what according to the view of music that

I have endeavoured to explain, is the task of a song composer. He has

far more to do than to express again in tones the feeling of the song.

He has to furnish a composition that, in the first place, has life; and,

in the domain of art, to have life is to have beauty.

"Secondly, it must have no incompatibility of temperament with the text,

but must be such as can once for all be wedded to the text with happy

results.

"It is needless to say that a composer who takes this view, or has a

subconscious appreciation of the facts on which this view is based, will

not, if he cares for his text, be satisfied with the first outworn

rubbish that comes to hand, by way of musical setting. He will regret

whatever is totally wanting in naturalness and freshness.

"He will not, like the composer of drawing-room ballads, capture some

wretched cadence, threadbare with much use, and trick it out, dragging

up the melody into long high notes, crowing and shouting as though he

had discovered America, whereas all he has really discovered is an old

shoe lying by the roadside that once, perhaps, belonged to a prince, but

after being stolen by the valet was given to a beggar, and so through a

succession of beggars, the last of whom left it by the side of the high

road."

Johnstone's interest in music was becoming more and more intense. In the

intervals of his school work he composed a Gavotte which had a quaint

origin. He was one day in a music publisher's shop in Edinburgh, when he

saw a gavotte on the counter which had won a prize of £5 or £10 offered

by the firm for the best composition in gavotte form submitted to them.

"And is this your prize gavotte?" said Johnstone, "Well, if I couldn't

compose a better gavotte than that in the time it takes to write it down

I should think _even_ worse of myself than I do." "Why then," said the

representative of the firm, "go home and compose your gavotte, we will

publish it if we take it and give you the same money as this

prize-winner got." Johnstone went home and composed it, and the firm

carried out their promise.

His few compositions were nearly always actually produced and completed

under some sudden pressure from outside. Left to himself, his critical

impulse was always stronger than his productive; he became dissatisfied

and dropped the thing he was working at. His friend, the well-known

singer, Fritz Hedmondt, having obtained from him a promise to arrange a

certain song, let matters drop until the concert date was fixed and the

programmes printed with the song announced "arranged by Mr. Arthur

Johnstone." He then forwarded the programme to Johnstone with the

observation that, of course, the thing had to be done. And it was done,

in twenty-four hours, and was a beautiful and original bit of

harmonization. He also set several songs, which, like the gavotte, met

with the approval of Prof. F. Niecks, and were the main subjects of a

fairly regular correspondence with Vantyn. In one of these letters he

gives an appreciation of the pianoforte piece he most admired.

"About Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques I can only say this: For a long

time past I have privately held the opinion that the work is on the

whole, the finest composition for pianoforte solo in existence. This

will no doubt seem to you exaggerated, but such is my feeling about it.

The extraordinary wealth of imaginative beauty in those variations I

believe to be quite without parallel. Just think of that last variation

before the finale. There is nothing else in music which bears even the

faintest resemblance to it."

Every summer he spent several weeks on the continent, and it was on one

of these visits that he first made the acquaintance of Nietzsche's

philosophy, which was then hardly known in England though beginning to

be talked of in Scotland under the influence of Dr. Tille of Glasgow.

In December, 1903, he writes to Miss Sellar:--

"The author of _Schopenhauer als Erzicher_ is Friedrich Nietzsche. I

suppose you will no more agree with the point of view than with

Sudermann's; for, in fact, the point of view of the two writers is

practically identical, but I do not think you can fail to recognise the

extraordinary originality and force, and, above all, the magnificent

honesty of Nietzsche.

"Have you not noticed that most serious-minded and well-intentioned

people in our day go about with a revised table of the virtues, saying

'truth' when they mean a certain group of optimistic delusions; saying

'courage' for readiness in accepting and energy in reiterating such

delusions, and persistency in closing the eyes to all those facts of

life which do not harmonise with them.

"So far as my experience goes, the only people in our day who say and

admit the truth to the best of their lights are the disciples of

Schopenhauer--Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, Sudermann, Nietzsche.

"No doubt you will regard this statement with my 'personal equation'

looming large. I mean you will consider there is no more in it than that

these are the teachers with whom I happen to agree. But I shall be

surprised if you do not admit Nietzsche's honesty and the

extraordinarily searching and luminous character of his thought."

If Johnstone had been put through the mangle of the Honour School called

"Greats," it might have left him superciliously deaf to Nietzsche. As it

was, being without philosophic training, but deeply sensitive to any

new, articulate and daring voice, as well as perfectly at home in

German, he found in Nietzsche a liberating and refreshing power. And

then his personal experiences disposed him to accept the main thesis of

Nietzsche's philosophy that mankind, owing to the teachings of

Christianity, had sacrificed the future of the race to over-much care

for the weaker brethren. At the same time he kept his head, and signed

no vow of submission to Nietzsche. The review of Tille's translation,

well bears partial reprinting in this volume for its keen intelligence

and also as a quite early sketch of the Nietzschian system in the

English press. It was one of the first articles written by Johnstone for

the _Manchester Guardian_, and makes us regret, unwisely no doubt, that

his mind was to be absorbed more and more in music.

Yet, in spite of that absorption, he was as deeply interested as ever in

literature and the drama, when dealing with the most serious issues and

problems of life. The purely technical and executive side of these arts

appealed less to him, and so, to take one instance, he soon outgrew his

early enthusiasm for Swinburne, wondered "whether he ever actually gets

there," and was even too severe in revulsion. Intentional obscurity

irritated him. Mallarmé and his school he would not attempt to

understand. His suspicions indeed were well founded, for at the last

Mallarmé in his lecture on "La Musique et les Lettres" had arrived at

forecasting a new future for music when the sound and rhythm of words

would replace the more clumsy and material tones of instruments.

Browning and Meredith repelled him by their style, though they attracted

him by their subjects and method of treatment. Some of his letters on

literature can be quoted here, as this side of his gifts is little

represented in reviews. It will be seen that he talks less of the style

and form, than of the temper and insight of the three great romancers,

Meredith, Hugo, and Hardy. He is still intent, as they are, on the

special kind of subject, "man's inhumanity to women," which we have seen

absorbing him. Meredith was not widely read in Oxford in the early

eighties by the younger men, though he had always had a small and

impassioned public there since 1870. In our time he was rarely quoted.

He was too strong for tender youth; and any "scholar" or worshipper of

pure form or arbiter of elegancies could preach on Meredith's harshness

and quaintness, and wish that he were more considerately feeble.

Johnstone's tone when at twenty-five, in 1886, he writes of Meredith is

decisive enough, though his words would now be taken as a repetition of

the obvious.

"Rhoda Fleming," he writes, "left me with increased wonder that its

author has not a more generally recognised position. He is the only

living English prose-writer with a real mind-kingdom of his own. The

story moves like fate--as inevitably, as cruelly (the white sacrifice!),

but just misses being dramatic. Why does he not write a play? He could;

perhaps something better than has been done for centuries."

A year earlier he had written:--"When you say Hugo is 'so false' you

must mean not quite practical. Mrs. Gaskell's 'Ruth' is 'false' if you

like, as well as irrelevant. Its real tendency is the reverse of the

authoress' ostensible purpose. The woman becomes a partner in a union

perfectly unpolluted and humane, but unauthorised, and even this is made

inevitable. The Quaker element then turns it into tragedy, and the

climax is effected by a person who is a sufficiently remarkable instance

of a figure created by an apostle of mild propriety. He would have upset

the whole scheme of the Redemption by making the good Jesus sin the sin

of hate. This worthy, but rather Pharisaical Methodist--this large-boned

man of substance who makes responses louder than anyone else--this

nameless monster, whose foul-mouthed brawling on discovery of the

woman's history while under him as a governess, is made the insult in

answer to which her protector produces the _plea_ (which is the purpose

of the book); who, perhaps, takes his place as the best type in fiction

of the most hateful character that the varying conditions of climate and

creed ever yet conspired to produce on this, God's flowery earth--comes

duly in for his share in the comprehensive wash-brush at the finish. By

the simple expedient of turning his hair from black to white he is

qualified for service at the heroine's peaceful tomb, where he joins in

dropping the charitable tear.

"The beautiful touches in this work are the seal of its futility,

arising as they do from the character of Ruth--an impossible incarnation

of all the virtues and graces--a sort of virgin mother, at last in fact

a crowned saint; and I cannot believe in her story, perhaps from being

too young. It may be that the remembrance of Ruth and other such works,

while reading Fantine, misled me; that the escape from the high-pew and

hassock flavour of Methodism to Hugo's 'prophetic soul of the wide

world' blinded. Yet, when a work like 'Les Misérables,' with the

prodigious activity of its dramatic impulse, takes in its sweep the

story of Fantine, something may surely be expected, if ever a writer is

to be adequate on such a subject, and, I cannot but think, rightly. The

'eternal Priestess of Humanity blasted for the Sins of the

People'--Fantine is just the thought dramatised.

"Essentially hopeless and inexorable, surpassing the limit of horror

permissible in art.... And still the nameless agonies of the martyr's

death are forgotten for the angel-benediction at her grave. And is it

nothing to have achieved that this benediction should have been

possible after such a life?...

"Yes, 'Les Misérables,' notwithstanding incidental impossibilities,

albeit ever in extremes, looms in my mind as incomparably the greatest

thing in fiction with which I am acquainted, and the longer ago it gets

since I read it and the more I read, the stronger this impression grows.

It seemed to me that the touches of truth in this 'false' work were

quite fearful in their power; such, for instance, of that gang of

convicts being jolted by in the van, 'their heads knocking together.' He

produces the physical effects of actual presence at what he describes.

Of course, it violates every possible canon from the 'Unities'

downwards; in fact, it might almost be made the basis of a new law of

multiplicities."

Some years later, in 1892, he wrote his impression on reading Hardy's

masterpiece: "I have just finished 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles.' You may

have noticed a passage in Vol. I. running thus (chap. xvi.):--'Long

thatched sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted

with vivid green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts rubbed

to a glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows and calves of

bygone years, _now passed to an oblivion almost inconceivable in its

profundity_.'

"If a man speaks so of _cattle_ how must he feel towards his human

brothers and sisters! How strong must be in him that profoundest of

poetic passions, the '_carent quia vate sacro_' feeling! For, no doubt,

sometimes in these quiet country places a heart of such gold as Tess's

throbs away in complete obscurity its allotted number of pulses. Our

temper has altered from the time when this emotion was dismissed with a

'Let not ambition mock their useful toil,' etc., and Hardy has fully

realised the appalling paths of such tragedies in humble life. 'This

time,' he seems to have said, 'this time no mincing and no hedging. Let

the disdainful smilers and those others who shift all responsibilities

on to Providence look to themselves.'

"There are passages of infinite pathos in this story: the 'too-late'

meeting of Tess with Angel Clare in the sea-side lodging, and the

terrific scene immediately after, when Angel is gone and she is left to

sob out her distraction; where Tess says to Angel, 'Why didn't you stay

and love me when I was sixteen with my little sisters and

brothers?':--the long letter she writes about a year after Angel has

left her, and where she practises the ballads that he had liked best,

while working in the field, 'the tears running down her cheeks all the

while at the thought that, perhaps, he would not after all come to hear

her, and the silly words of the songs resounding in painful mockery of

the aching heart of the singer.' And, earlier, the baptising by Tess of

her own infant, and--perhaps lying nearest of all to the fountain of

tears--those glimpses of her early innocence. 'Tess's pride would not

allow her to turn her head again to learn what her father's meaning was,

if he had any, and thus she moved on with the whole body to the

enclosure where there was to be dancing on the green' ... when one knows

against what fate the poor girl is going! But is it not all just a

little too cruel? To represent such adorable goodness, and sweetness,

and faithfulness as being rewarded with the actual _gibbet_--is not this

a little hard, even on Providence? The unsparingly tragic ending is not

the only thing, nor even the main thing that distinguishes this from

other stories dealing with the same sort of subject.

"In George Eliot's Hetty we evidently have to do with a character quite

other than Tess's. The imputation of depravity attached to the fact that

Hetty, when scarcely more than a child, looked long in the glass and

thought how fine it would be to be a lady--this seems to me an

exceedingly miserable evidence of the somewhat crude vice of character

by which, notwithstanding George Eliot's immense genius, her sympathy

with the simple-hearted was, in certain cases, marred or destroyed. But

Hetty's character must be taken as it is revealed in action and

intention, and she abandons her infant, whereas the soul of Tess goes

out in an agony of endeavour to preserve hers, and, long after its

death, she exposes herself to ridicule by tending its outcast's grave.

In Hetty's dreams and schemes, again no thought of her parents and

people or hope of bettering their lot has place, while Tess at the

darkest moment of her _via dolorosa_--at Stonehenge, just before God

finally forsakes her--thinks of her sister 'Liza-Lu, and secures a

protector for those she is leaving behind.

"Scott is, of course, without a trace of George Eliot's defect, and

always treats Effie Deans like a gentleman. By certain touches, too, he

indicates how deep is his concern for her, such as that crowd of

blackguards and urchins about the court-house, for whose holiday Effie

was so nearly murdered. But besides the fact that Scott has no true

grasp of feminine character, he makes Jeanie his heroine and never

really undertakes to tell Effie's story. And George Eliot, after

disposing of Hetty in a hurry, actually offers to interest us in the

love affairs of that preaching woman! In Fantine there are details

perhaps more intolerable to hear than this story of Hardy's, but the

general effect is less strong. For partly we distrust Hugo's rhetoric,

and besides, we are beguiled and consoled at the end, however

unreasonably, by his 'fortunately God knows where to look for graves,'

while in 'Tess' the concluding incidents come with a thunderbolt

inevitableness, and at the end nothing stands between us and the hideous

ignominy, the entire forgetfulness, the utter nakedness. But though her

life has become forfeit, perhaps that ignominy of the actual gibbet

might have been spared. In any case, there is nothing to be said at the

end of such a tale but--

"Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,

* * * * *

And maiden virture rudely strumpeted!"

Yet let us not find fault, for terrible as it is to find a man who,

discarding the tradition that it is the office of poets to soothe and

amuse their fellow-prisoners with pretty fables and tales of the

governor's beneficence--a man who rejects this almost universal

tradition and appals his hearers with an account of malignant

treacheries committed by that governor--yet I sympathise with the

temper that does this, and believe that it has its roots in a genuine

and manly feeling, the feeling that I tried to suggest at the beginning.

"Hardy is a strong example of that curious, inverted Manichæism so

characteristic of our time--a sort of mediæval horror of the grossness

of matter, balanced by a most unmediæval sense of the utter madness of

insulting and despising matter, seeing that the tyranny of it is

absolute.

"He is perhaps the first Briton to write as a true man of the people on

such a subject, that is to say, to take it quite seriously. His story is

told with such passion that almost every particle of doctrinaire

affectation or easy pattern work is consumed and refined away, and he

has created in Tess the most inexpressibly pathetic figure that I know

of in literature."

About Zola he writes in a letter of July, 1893:--

"Perhaps you have read 'Le Rêve.' It and 'La Debâcle' are the only two

of Zola's longer novels that could be recommended to a lady, and even

the latter with some misgiving. I cannot say that I think 'Le Rêve' one

of Zola's best works. I am far from sure that the French critic who

said: 'Nous préférons Monsieur Zola à quatre pattes' was not in the

right. Nevertheless, there are passages in it stamped by Zola's unique

greatness. With regard to its defects, I would rather say nothing at

present, except one--the end strikes me as absurd, _franchement mauvais

et du placage litteraire_--a recrudescence of something that we have

left far behind, something dead that should have been left to bury its

dead. All the same there are, I think, truly great things in the book."

Of Marie Bashkirtseff, September, 1891, he writes:--

"Concerning Marie Bashkirtseff, she seems to me to have had nearly every

gift except two, namely imagination and heart. Above all, a sort of

critical intuition, which prevented her from ever resting satisfied in

anything second-rate. She was a typical little Russian, small of

stature, dark of tint; in temperament sensitive, romantic, versatile;

unlike the northern Russians, who are prevalently tall and fair and have

a certain contempt for the unpractical. Nearly the whole Russian harvest

of folk-songs and cognate treasure comes from the south, from Cossacks

and little Russians, the true Muscovite being almost a songless bird.

Marie must have had in a high degree the incomparable grace and

distinction of her countrywomen, with that wonderful animation and

'fever of life' which makes the atmosphere of Russian society the

warmest and brightest in the world. As to your statement that 'some of

her failings, like her love of luxury and her desire to be attended to

at all costs, are pure vanity and wormwood,' I have always stuck up for

this barbaric element, and believe that largely on it depends the

prodigious formative power of a _free feminine influence_--that thing of

such rarity as to be almost non-existent in our puritanical society. I

know a man at half a glance who has ever been under it."

Referring to his correspondent's remarks that Russians seem to look at

religious questions like intelligent children, he writes:--

"Did you ever hear of the Soo-ré-ye-vites, the sect of which Leo Tolstoi

is a member?

"Soorayeff was a peasant ignorant of reading and writing. He had read in

church 'God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in

spirit and in truth,' and by pure sympathy and unaided intelligence he

jumped to the conclusion that Jesus Christ meant what He said. Think of

the prodigious freshness of nature and the promise that this shows.

"There are the five hundred sects of Great Britain all accepting the

same fundamental absurdities, and yet this simple man, never having

heard of criticism, is enabled to penetrate the viewless veil, woven by

the years and the churches over the face of the Son of Man, so as to

understand that Christ actually meant that God was a Spirit.

"Suppose a missionary went among a savage tribe and tried to teach them

what Justice is; told them he himself was a son of Justice, and that

Justice was made manifest in him; lastly, that Justice is a spirit.

Suppose he came back after an absence and found the people teaching that

Justice was three persons and burning alive those who did not accept

this view!"

In England, unless it were in London, Johnstone seldom felt at home; in

Scotland, still less. He liked to wander from one easy variegated

foreign city to another, where good music and good plays are quickly

accessible, and British convention is a mere figure in the comic papers.

He valued his friends in Edinburgh, but the place displeased him. He

would sit on Arthur's seat and hate the modern Athens steaming there

below him. Its curious old mossy layers of culture, professional and

academic, could hardly satisfy him, and he quickly got through the moss

to the stone. The ferment of the young "Celtic" writers and painters

seemed to come to little. He did not inure himself to the occasionally

inconsiderate manners of the Lowland Scotch, nor could he bring himself

to repay them steadily in kind. Some of the officials with whom he dealt

appeared to have been born, where they would die, in Gath. He would

hardly agree with, but he could understand the unqualified remark of his

old French associate, "Il n'y a pas d'amour dans ce pays." Probably he

was unjust to Edinburgh; but though his forbears were partly Scotch, he

was not, like Stevenson, born Scotch, and he never really saw the native

character from within. Teaching may not have been the best introduction

to it. He taught well, having the right sort of delivery and insistent

method. But it is disgusting to an artist to teach anything for bread,

except, perhaps, his own craft. The hard work, the pull on the nerves

and patience, can scarcely have strengthened Johnstone's health.

Indeed, wherever he lived he had a touch of the exile. He dwelt really

in some region not of this earth at all, where the masters of music sit

in their Valhalla, where the hard waste matter that makes up most of our

life is eliminated, while the essence of its pain and pleasure is

distilled through art and presented in sublime purity of form. The saint

has his vision of personal goodness, the philosopher his of systematic

truth, the reformer his of a new society. The artist--for the term must

be extended to those who perceive as well as those who produce--has his

ideal vision, which varies in form with his special art. It follows that

the valuable part of actual life, to such a temper, is made up of such

stray hours of vivid experience and intelligence as, taken together,

give some notion of that other world. We had written "moments" instead

of "hours," but the former word would be misleading, with the false

suggestion of fleeting passive sensation, for which Walter Pater, or

rather those who misinterpret him, must answer. Every experience, in

truth, whether moral, sensuous, or intellectual, that is, of real worth,

contributes to the artist's dream. Johnstone posed so little and lived

by this principle so naturally and unwittingly that he could not be

called a doctrinairè. But few men save up their vital impressions about

everything so carefully, engraving them patiently on the memory, and

dismissing the vast mass of experience that tells us nothing. Hence

Johnstone was never quite naturalised in any abode, though he managed to

be sociable and festive when the chances came. In Edinburgh, however,

for the reasons given, he stayed over long, and we may regret that he

was not sooner freed from teaching school.

Practically, there was some compensation for so late an escape. The

teacher's attitude, as of one clearly laying down the law, remained in

much of his press work, and to its advantage. The public as a whole,

though it must not be told so, is like a large, impatient, grumbling,

half-ignorant class of schoolboys. Reviewing is therefore educational

work. Not that the dominie-tone is wanted; for that is the worst of

faults, even in school-teaching! But the teacher does not take his class

into the secret of his own doubts, hesitations, or revulsions; he gives

his results, he gives what he thinks the truth. Or, if a figure from

another calling be preferred, the critic _operates_, beneficently if

often without anæsthetics. Further, there was something to be said for

the late specialisation of Johnstone's ruling talent. His nature was

rich; his articles have the style of a man who has lived, as well as one

who knows his trade. No youth, though ever so clever, could have made

them. He treats music as a means by which all the emotions, whether

large and solemn, or light and happy, or sombre, or perverse, are

transformed, often out of recognition, into their counterparts in sound;

so that the kinds of joy and pain given by music, like those given by

high drama but in a rarer measure, are stripped of any stinging personal

reference, while unweakened in force. The hearer is thus mysteriously

shown, as Rossetti says, the "road he came," and yet has no more, for

the time, to do with himself, save in so far as he is one of a thousand

men to whom the music interprets their experience, widely and deeply.

Therefore, to understand music, a man must have suffered. Johnstone had

met and weathered some of the suffering which an intense nature, even

under conditions easier than his, must absolutely meet with on this

earth, and must either give in to and go under, or must get over and

appropriate--there is no choice! He chose the latter way, being strong

enough, and so became a better musical critic.

Besides, his bent for music was growing more marked during the last

years in Edinburgh. It was clear to his friends what his profession

ought to be, and his chance of adopting it came at the end of 1895. The

musical critic of the _Manchester Guardian_, Mr. Fremantle, died; and it

was hard to find a successor who would stamp his own mark and make the

critical judgments of the paper a power, in the musical capital in the

North of England. Johnstone had already written for the _Manchester

Guardian_ articles of sundry kinds; a review of the translation of

Nietzsche, part of which is reprinted in this book, and a notice on

Tolstoi; as well as on musical matters. York Powell was foremost in

commending his friend to the editor as a man of worth and high special

talent. An offer was sent to Johnstone, which he weighed with even more

than his usual deliberation. He felt the break with his friends in

Scotland, and he had misgivings, being a slow writer and not fond of his

pen, as to his power to work under journalistic conditions. As even his

letters show, he composed carefully and was a master of exact

expression; thus he felt some anxiety at having to work under the

pressure of a time limit, and that too at a late hour. He therefore

sent, without in any way jumping at the offer as an escape from

usherdom, a dignified reply that gave an impression of his quality. It

was not easy for his friends to make him decide with the necessary

haste. In the end he accepted the proposal, much to their relief, and

came to Manchester in January, 1896. There he stayed for the rest of his

life.

In Manchester, Johnstone's existence and outlook were quite altered. He

had not to wait until the daily chare was over before he could turn to

music, which now took up his force and time for the working part of the

year. He had taught well, but others could have done that. Now, for nine

years, he gave himself to the work for which he was built, and which few

could do so well. Certainly no one did it in quite his way. The union of

temperament, knowledge, style, gave him an accent of his own. His lore

and his sensibility always grew and enriched each other. He did not

wholly limit himself to music, and before passing to this his chief

occupation, we may note his activity elsewhere. It was too much to hope

he would have any great distracting interest. Music is enough and more

for one man. But he spared some time for literature. He had a swift

preference even as a boy for all that was fresh, vehement, and strange

in modern drama and fiction. He was not at all like the complacent,

young, up-to-date college tutor, who reads the latest exotic writers,

but remains unaltered. Johnstone, if he liked a play or story at all,

was seized and shaken; a kind of enthusiasm which is a better preface to

a true judgment than any amount of accomplished and balanced coldness,

or the pseudo-"judicial" frame of mind. He was not so fond of poetry, or

so sure in his perception of it, caring too little for purely verbal in

contrast with accompanied or wordless music. We have reprinted above,

however, a part of his lecture on the scientific frontier between the

two arts. He found time also, when the press of the season was over, for

some byplay as a reviewer. He wrote in commanding style about books on

conjuring, on billiards, and on cooking. He used to say that cooking was

his real gift. To go to a certain café and quote Mr. Johnstone's name,

was to ensure a respectful and an even terrified service; and the

well-drilled waiter would commend a particular sauce-bottle as that

which his distinguished customer had used. But he remembered, with more

pleasure than banquets, having slept on shelves with the Cretan rebels

in the mountains, and sharing and digesting their extremely dried fish.

He also wrote on weighty matters outside music; the chief of these were

English and German plays. The companies that travelled from the

Fatherland to the Germanic city of the British Empire, and acted in the

Schiller-Anstalt, often played pieces involving actual dialect.

Johnstone's familiarity with German, as well as his natural sympathy

with writers like Hauptmann (and Sudermann in a less degree), marked him

out as the right reviewer. Plays, like concerts, have to be noticed in

hot haste on the very evening; or, at best, if given on Saturday, by the

following evening; for so much expedition is the minotaur-public of a

daily paper supposed to stipulate. The work done on such terms is not

always the worst in substance, though only long wont can give the kind

of finish or varnish that is desired. The same remark applies to musical

reviewing; but Johnstone's distrust of himself was needless. The result

was more in accordance with the expectation of his friends than with his

own. Many of his articles were written at great speed, and as one of his

colleagues said, if it had been possible for him to wait till he felt he

could do justice to the subject, most of them would never have been

written at all.

Before passing to his main labours as a journalist, we may here quote,

in illustration, part of the notice that he wrote on the _Johannisfeuer_

of Sudermann. Our reprints in this book deal almost wholly with music,

and, as we have said, he thought of music as a comment, at several

removes and after strange distillations, on life and experience. But the

drama, which is a copy of life, not indeed a direct one, but subject to

the laws of theatrical art, also engrossed him, especially when it was

at once modern in form and homely and passionate in theme.

The Bavarian peasants and their girls still jump through the dying

embers of their bonfires on the eve of St. John:--

_"For the truth is Mr. Parson, a remnant of heathenism stirs in the

blood of us all. It has persisted through all the centuries since

ancient Germanic times, and, once a year, it blazes up with the

fire of St. John's Eve. For that night the spooks of ancient

heathenism are unchained. Witches ride on broomsticks, instead of

being beaten with them, and pass through the air, with mocking

laughter, on their way to the Blocksberg. The Wild Hunt scours over

the forest and wilder desires over our hearts--all that is most

frenzied and most utterly doomed to nonfulfilment. No matter what

the order may be that for the time being reigns in the world, for

one single heart's desire to be realised, and to give us something

to live on, a thousand others must go to ruin, not only for the

ever unattainable, but others, allowed to escape from a hand that

held them too carelessly. Yes, those bonfires which blaze up--do

you know what they are? They are the spectres of our heart's

desires, the red-winged birds of paradise that we might have kept

by us for life but allowed to escape, the spooks of the old order,

of the heathenism that is in us. However satisfied we may be in the

light of day and beneath the reign of law and order, this is St.

John's Eve in the night sacred to Midsummer Madness. I drink to

your ancient heathen fires. Let them blaze high! Will no one clink

glasses with me?"--(Act. iii., sc. 3.)_

"So the title 'Johannisfeuer,' with its double meaning, literal and

symbolical, must be rendered into English--according as we wish to lay

stress on the former or the latter--'The Bonfires of St. John's Eve' or

'Midsummer Madness.' On seeing the remarkably fine performance of this

play the non-German spectator, impressed with the general worthlessness

of German drama since the Augustan age (that is, the age of Goethe and

Schiller), might well wonder how it is possible for a German writer to

produce such a thing--a play, simple and unpretentious in design, yet

fraught through and through with poetic beauty; a play written with

northern sharpness of characteristic and, at the same time, with Italian

warmth, eloquence, and keenness of sympathy with the moods of nature; a

play distinctly Ibsenesque in structure and largely also in style, yet,

for all its sombre colouring, not haggard and aghast, like nearly all

the products of the Scandinavian's demonic spirit. The scene is in a

farm in East Prussia, in a neighbourhood with a mixed population of

Germans, Poles, and Lithuanians. The name of the farmer's family is

Vogelreuther. Marikke, a Lithuanian gipsy girl, is a foster-child in

their house, having been picked up along with her mother and carried

home by Mr. and Mrs. Vogelreuther in their sledge during the famine

winter of 1867. In the house she is known as Heimchen (the Cricket) and

in the neighbourhood as the 'famine child.' In the farm-house lives a

young man named George, an orphan nephew of Vogelreuther, indebted to

the famine for his upbringing. In the opening of the play George has

made a good start in life, having been apprenticed to an architect in

Königsberg and done well. He is betrothed to the farmer's daughter

Gertrude, but some years before there had been a love affair between him

and Heimchen, who had repulsed him hastily, not because she did not care

for him, but because she did not believe in the honesty of his

intentions. While busying herself with preparations for her

foster-sister's coming marriage, Heimchen discovers a manuscript book

belonging to George and containing verses and a diary. She cannot resist

the temptation to read, and she thus discovers that George had loved her

deeply and seriously, despite the difference in their standing.

Heimchen's mother--a besotted and thievish old woman--haunts the

neighbourhood, and has been recognised by her daughter. Heimchen has

been told that her mother is dead, but knows better. Meetings with the

terrible old woman re-awaken the gipsy instincts in Heimchen. George

loves her still at heart, and circumstances draw the two together. The

crisis is reached on the night of St. John's eve, when after an evening

in which the whole neighbourhood, lit up with bonfires, is given over to

punch drinking, dancing, and excitement. George is requested by the

unsuspecting farmer to escort Heimchen to the railway station, she

having a night train to catch to Königsberg. The ending is intensely

Ibsenesque in style. George, on the very day fixed for his wedding with

Gertrude, is ready to fly with Heimchen, but, mindful of the immense

obligations binding them both to the farmer's family, he insists that

there shall be at least an explanation. Heimchen, instinctively grasping

the difference between a man's and a woman's love, foresees the regrets

that would result from the overthrow of George's plans. She changes her

attitude and forbids him to speak to the farmer. The St. John fires are

burnt out. The midsummer madness is over. It is now for her to return to

duty and dulness and the burden of a starved heart. For life she must

remain satisfied with her one night of bliss on St. John's eve. So she

stands alone and watches the departure of George's and Gertrude's

wedding procession.

"The great scene of the play, in which Heimchen and George are left

alone together, is managed with wonderful stagecraft. Till the last

moment they seem to be adhering to 'good resolutions,' but a series of

incidents, all absolutely natural, occur to distract attention and cause

delay, till they hear the whistle of the train and know that it is too

late. The bonfires, the punch-drinking, and, above all, George's speech,

from which the quotation at the head of these notes is taken, have fired

their blood, and Heimchen is unstrung by the painful meeting with her

disreputable mother earlier in the day, when she had been obliged to buy

back things that her mother had pilfered. At last she throws herself on

her knees before George and says, 'Du! Küss' mich nicht! Ich will dich

küssen. Ich will alles auf mich nehmen. Meine Mutter stiehlt. Ich stehl'

auch'--and the curtain falls."

* * * * *

To return to the date of Johnstone's arrival at the _Guardian_ office in

Manchester, where he was made welcome. He found friends upon the staff,

and kept them in spite of his want of sympathy with some of the

political views of the paper. On politics he never wrote, except when

recording matters of fact on his mission to the Greco-Turkish war. But,

not to speak of living persons, he was brought for some years into close

contact with one of the best-equipped and finest-tempered journalists

of our time. William Thomas Arnold, the son of Thomas, and nephew of

Matthew Arnold, was one of the two or three men, senior to himself, in

his personal circle, for whom Johnstone had a profound regard both as a

man and as a master-craftsman. This regard was well-deserved. An

authoritative scholar in the history of the early Roman Empire, a critic

who cast original light on Keats and some of the Jacobean poets, at home

in Dryden, in the French literature both of the great century and the

romantic age, abreast also of criticism in both countries, and a sound

vigorous judge of acting and the drama, Arnold made time to share the

daily burdens and aid in sustaining the high uncompromising standards of

a newspaper whose many foes have never questioned its consistent and

iron courage during the last ten years. Arnold often stood to Johnstone

in the capacity of actual editorial chief for the evening. It is hateful

to be edited, even to the change of a comma, except where errors of fact

or risks of libel are in question. Political contributions are another

thing; a common line--the "view of the paper"--must be adhered to, and

self-sacrifice in detail, within large limits, is simply necessary. That

is warfare; you may resign your commission, but, if you do not, must

accept instructions. But in art and letters! The mutual respect of the

two men may be measured by the freedom that was left to Johnstone, and

by the spirit in which he, rightly the most sensitive of men in such

concerns and naturally irritable, took the occasional blue-pencillings.

His other colleagues also held Johnstone in regard, in spite of the

vehemence with which he went his own way. Sometimes he would come in

from the concert, like an instrument whose strings are still quivering

at full pitch, and this is not the mood for rapid committee work at

night. There might be one great explanation from time to time which

cleared the air. It was seen that he was thinking of his subject, and

not of his own vanity, and that he was immensely, indignantly, and

delightfully wrapped up in that subject. On the whole it was a good

training for him, and few strong men, beginning at the age of

thirty-four, would have shown themselves, despite occasional rubs, so

reasonably adaptive. It may also be said that few newspapers would have

stood so well by a writer who, whenever he felt it his duty to do so,

would promptly perturb the musical hive, careless whether drone or

hornet minded. Mr. John Morley, who ought to know, has expressed some

doubt as to whether journalism tends to special elevation of character.

There are cases where the doubt does not arise. When the critic, on

artistic, and therefore on public, grounds, and with due store of

knowledge, raises a fury by his condemnations, and when the editor, who

has to think of his paper and its standing, supports the critic,

believing him likely to be right, that is a good evening's work. The

scope therefore granted to Johnstone as a journalist by his editor was a

proof of sagacity, for he became a power in the musical community, not

only of Manchester but of the larger region the _Manchester Guardian_

reaches. No doubt, though he was allowed as free a hand in expressing

his opinions as any other of his craft, and a much freer one than the

majority, he sometimes wearied of the necessary restrictions of a

journalist's position and their deadening effect upon the mind. An

outburst, expressive of a deep and recurring mood, occurs in a letter of

January, 1902, written on his return to Manchester, and describing a day

he had spent in London with York Powell.

"There is now no one in this neighbourhood with whom I can _converse_. I

find myself permanently in the journalistic attitude, regarding it as

luck if I can say two per cent. of what I think about anything; so the

meeting with Powell was an oasis at the end of some very sandy months."

This complaint was laid not against the paper he served, but against the

sparseness of the kind of society he liked best. To understand it some

curious features of life in Manchester must be recalled. He used at

times to come to a small society of friends, which lasted for eight or

nine years, and met during the business year at about monthly intervals,

at the members' dwellings, for free conversation. He is remembered as

having there discoursed on Tolstoy's conceptions of art with his usual

energy and elaboration. The stringent mad-logic of the great art-hater

had once attracted, but at last disgusted him, and he saw that even

Tolstoy's famed novels, with their show of godlike equity, really held

the seed of his later prejudices against science, art, and sexual love.

But such occasions when he could talk freely seemed to grow rarer. The

fault lay somewhat, no doubt, in his own radical solitariness of mind,

but also in the surrounding conditions.

Huge Manchester, almost a metropolis, is full of force, full of mental

as well as commercial stir; it is not, no, it is not! a _social_ city.

If it ever learns how to amuse itself, it will really be that; it will

be a metropolis. The reasons of the defect are partly physical. It has

an air, a rainfall, a climate, and an aspect, that do not make for good

spirits. The suburbs lie far apart in a ring round the business crater,

which becomes dark and most unfestal after ten o'clock at night, and

which those who cannot drive think twice of crossing. Also there is an

unfused mixture of races and classes. Apart from Greeks and Armenians,

who stand apart from one another and from other nations, there are the

German and other Jews on one side, and the Germans who are not Jews

markedly on another side. There are the big Lancashire money-makers, of

the soil; the shopkeepers and the vast clerkly multitude; the

professional classes, or castes; and the hand-workers, rough, but in

essential breeding and wits perhaps the soundest of all. For social

purposes many of these elements do not count. It is the Germans, the

Jews, and the professional classes, with many of the intelligent

business men in a large way, who probably civilise Manchester, in the

stricter sense of the term. It is as civilised an English city as can be

found in England outside London, if the press, the libraries, the

university, the theatres, and the music, be all weighed together. But

its bent hardly lies towards society, in the sense of ringing,

collective, intellectually disinterested talk, or towards gaiety of the

more bearable kind. There is ample dining, dancing, and official

entertainment, but those are not enough for salvation. The vast number

of philanthropic, educational, religious, and political agencies, which

fill playtime with labour for the good of mankind or party, entitle the

city to be called great and progressive, but they do not precisely make

it blithe. They inspire respect, and no one who has not lived there many

years can realise their number or the strenuous, positive, character of

the place; the southern nature seems soft and vague in comparison. But

the free talk of the real capitals, and their resources for witty

amusement, imply a large leisured class, an element of _flâneurs_ in the

population, which is hardly possible in a big North-English city. There

is personal isolation in a curious measure--a want of rallying points

for talk. The atoms repel each other and fly apart. Men go home to their

families or rooms and stop there. If they go out, it is often for some

"meeting" of an earnest description, not to amuse themselves; or, if

they wish to do this, they go to music, which is a somewhat solitary

pleasure. Talk, for the satisfaction of talking, is less common. There

are exceptions; but this is the impression given by long residence in

Manchester. The Germans, with their club and singing and cheerfulness,

have done their best for their adopted city. But it was hard for a

cosmopolitan person like Arthur Johnstone, at once deeply bent on art

and beauty of all kinds, and also demanding some kind of cheerful

foreign life in the intervals of work, to find his account quickly in

his new abode, and the opinion of it we have recorded above is largely

his own.

For some time, therefore, he felt that Manchester was admirable rather

than refreshing. It had found for him the work of his life; he soon

became a force in his own calling; he had friends, new as well as old,

in the place; and he liked it better, as time passed, and as he managed

to find some of the intelligent festiveness that he wanted. Gradually he

touched several quite different circles, chiefly doubtless the musical,

but others also, journalistic, academic, and professional. Except with a

few, Johnstone made his way somewhat slowly in society. He could be

outspoken, uncompromising, and even explosive (though he never attacked

unless he thought there was provocation). These characteristics and his

daring line as a critic, both in talk and print, caused him to be

under-estimated by some otherwise intelligent persons. He might have

said, with Saint-Simon, that he was not "un sujet académique." He

disliked dons as a class; at Oxford and elsewhere they made him, of

course wrongly, restive. He had not been through their mill, and they

did not always care for or see his curious and original play of mind.

Their committee-trained caution of phrase was alarmed by his emphasis

and heavy-shotted superlatives, which merely amused his friends. There

were, of course, those among them who liked him well. In some houses he

had, apart from his musical gifts, a certain name for being "clever and

spiky." The latter epithet was only partially true, for he was

simple-hearted and good-natured the moment that the occasion arose. "His

sympathy," writes Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary Anderson), "never failed,

and his unaffected love and enthusiasm for the good, the true, and the

beautiful, could always be counted upon." All who had eyes saw this in

Johnstone, but all had not eyes. He was interested, absorbed, whelmed in

his subject, and thought instinctively more about ideas and purposes

than about persons, so that he sometimes ignored persons and therefore

dissatisfied them. He also said, what is true, that of the provinces, as

compared with the capital, "the favourite sin is cowardice." This, and

any semblance of snobbery, he openly despised. He liked to have power

and weight--and was right in liking it--in order to carry out certain

musical reforms. But he dismissed at once anyone who, as he put it, "may

be very well-informed, yet clearly cares nothing at all for things in

themselves, but simply and solely to be a person of consideration." So,

except as a musical critic, his measure, for good reasons, was not

invariably taken. He knew this fact, and felt it with some keenness, but

not from the side of disappointed conceit. He thought it was his lot in

life not to be able to talk freely and acceptably save to a very few

persons. He was sorry, but convinced that thus he was built. The old

Oxford sense of solitariness--and Oxford leaves dregs in the cup for

these her sensitive children--does not easily let go its victim. The

happiness and success of the latter years, however, were to leave him

markedly easier, mellower, and more communicative. He was, indeed, fully

entering on his own when he was cut down. But a larger and more various

experience than ever yet, both of thought and travel, was to be his lot

within the last eight years of his short life.

In April, 1897, Johnstone made his appearance in a new capacity. The

dispute between Greece and Turkey over the treatment of the Christians

in Crete had reached an acute stage and war was expected to break out at

any moment. The _Manchester Guardian_, more than any other English

newspaper, had championed the Greek cause. Naturally the proprietors

wished to secure the best and fullest accounts of the operations and to

have them despatched in advance of other papers. Mr. J. B. Atkins was

chosen to accompany the army in the field, and Johnstone's knowledge of

modern languages and acquaintance with Eastern Europe marked him out as

a valuable colleague. He was posted at Athens to receive reports from

the front, to arrange all the details connected with their transmission,

and to review the progress of the war, work which he carried through

very successfully. His gift of tongues, which once caused him to be

congratulated in Germany on "speaking English so well," enabled him soon

to get a working knowledge of modern Greek; he was fortunate too in

finding a Greek gentleman, who, grateful for the attitude of the

_Manchester Guardian_, acted as his interpreter and showed him about the

city. The same friend was on intimate terms with the Royal family, and

introduced Johnstone to the King and the Duke of Sparta. At the close of

his stay at Athens, he hesitatingly asked if there was any return he

could make for the various kindnesses he had received, when this friend

of royalty named so modest a fee that Johnstone was staggered; "it was

the pourboire of a head-waiter," he said afterwards when describing the

incident, adding that he had never realised what true democracy meant

until then. Among his associates there was the correspondent of a

Viennese paper who had somehow incurred the dislike and suspicion of the

war-party, but, as Johnstone thought, unjustly. At last his life was

openly threatened; there was no hope for him unless he managed to leave

the country at once, and even then there was a fair chance that he might

never reach the ship alive. Johnstone, being on good terms with the

patriotic party, pleaded for his life and undertook to get him away; he

cycled behind him for the four miles from Athens to the Piræus, and when

they reached the harbour kept the mob off until he was safely on board

an Austrian Lloyd steamer. The ride was an exciting one, for it was

expected that an attempt would be made to shoot the obnoxious

correspondent on the way down to the port; some shots were actually

fired, but went wide of the mark. When the war was nearing the end

Johnstone's services were not so necessary at Athens, and he went to

join Mr. Atkins in camp; but he saw no fighting, for the day after his

arrival peace was declared. His colleague returned to England, and

Johnstone spent some weeks in Crete to investigate the stories of those

atrocities which had been the immediate cause of the war. He went _sac

au dos_ like J. K. Huysmans in 1870, but unlike him, roughed it with

good humour and looked upon hardships of this kind as a helpful and

valuable experience. A year later when congratulating a friend, who was

somewhat habit-ridden, on his marriage, he wrote, "The problem of

changing one's habits is emphatically one of those to be solved

'_ambulando_.' The forms of ambulation best adapted to the purpose are

serving on a campaign, doing time 'with,' and getting married;"

admitting, however, that the last, though less drastic, was more

permanent in its effect.

Of the stay in Crete he always spoke as the best holiday of his life. He

was struck with the beauty both of the lowlands and the hills, and

predicted the day when the isle would be one of the great resorts of

Europe. The mountaineers redeemed for him the modern Greek race, which

his experience in Athens had led him to scorn utterly. He thought that

the citizen and official class were shifty and mendacious, and his

epithets were Juvenalian in vigour. The hillmen were of another race, in

body and spirit, and he loved sharing their hardy life. It is right to

add that he exempted the ordinary Greek soldier on the mainland from the

condemnation which he reserved for the officers. Some considerable time

he spent on the water, chartering a small steamer in order to coast up

near the seat of war. Before making his way homeward he went to

Constantinople, and the surface view, at any rate, of the Turk pleased

him well. He returned home in unusually buoyant health and wearing a

moustache, having fallen under the spell of Eastern prejudice against

the clean-shaved.

At the beginning of the musical season in October, 1898, a considerable

storm was raised in Manchester by the action of the guarantors of the

Hallé concerts, who had offered the post of conductor to Dr. Richter,

instead of renewing Dr. Cowen's appointment. It fell to Johnstone to

write the two leading articles on the subject which appeared in the

_Manchester Guardian_ of October 4th and 17th. His clear and judicial

summing up of the case left no room for questioning the right of the

guarantors to act as they had done, while his special knowledge of Dr.

Richter's immense services to musical art enabled him to write with

authority on the great chance now open for Manchester's acceptance. In

short, the point at issue lay between sentimental considerations and the

good of the community, and Johnstone very naturally declared for the

latter. Our reference to this controversy is intentionally brief, but

its importance at the time was considerable. Johnstone was now

recognised as a leader of musical opinion in Manchester, a position and

influence which became greatly extended in the years that followed.

There is no doubt as to the kind of power that he exerted. He did not

touch the actual administration of music in Manchester, in the College

of Music, or the Hallé concerts, or elsewhere. He did not directly

advise, therefore, in the choice of programmes, players, or singers. But

he went to every performance of the slightest note, whether popular or

not, and wrote about it incisively and heedfully, always preferring to

praise and interpret, but hitting very hard when he thought it

imperative to do so. He went to the prize exhibitions of the college

pupils, and reviewed them (omitting names) with a sympathetic ear for

promise. He lectured, often very well, at Mr. Rowley's Sunday gatherings

in Ancoats, and also in the History Theatre of Owens College. As a

lecturer, it may be observed, he suffered at times from having too much

to say and failing to compress it perfectly. But he held an audience of

unprofessional hearers with his sharply-cut and pungent style; and, in

one respect he was a fortunately un-English lecturer, for his power of

graphic gesture was quite noteworthy. These, however, were casual

activities; presswork took almost all his strength. He did a vast amount

of musical reviewing, and his room was stacked with the publications

that he simply found it useless to criticise. But the notices of actual

singing and playing were his main labour, as well as the pioneer

articles on unknown or imperfectly appreciated works. These were of high

value, and contain some of his best writing, being done at fuller

leisure. As to the quality of his published utterances we may say no

more; the articles we have saved for this book must speak for

themselves. But, without doubt, his judgment was looked for, and

welcomed or feared. He made it less easy for bad performers to come

again. He was generous, preferring even a slight excess, to oncoming and

unrecognised talent, or to remote and exotic kinds of talent which made

the fashionable multitude impatient. He became the worthy and articulate

voice of musical opinion in and beyond one of the English capitals of

the art.

We could hardly illustrate the kind of power that Johnstone exerted

better than by quoting what Canon Gorton writes concerning his

connection with the Morecambe musical festival:--

"Our festival was born in 1891. From the first it was organised entirely

apart from any pecuniary object; it brought us some delightful music, as

we set our own test pieces, and its aim was essentially educational. Our

special correspondent from the _Manchester Guardian_ did not arrive on

the scene until 1899. We had grown accustomed to unstinted praise, the

judges exhausted the adjectives in the language in describing the

excellence of the singing, composers told us that they had never heard

their part-songs so perfectly rendered. We thought we were perfect. Then

came a bomb from the critic (April 27th, 1899). He was not in touch with

us or cognisant with our aim, nor did he allow for our limitations. Much

of the music seemed to him unworthy; the competitive or sporting element

annoyed him; he saw rocks ahead, rocks on which others had been wrecked.

He wrote: 'The array of talent is no doubt imposing, but far too much of

the music is of an inferior stamp. It should not be forgotten that the

end and aim of such festivals is to foster a taste for music. But the

taste for inferior music needs no fostering. If, therefore, the

organisers of these festivals prescribe second-rate works for the

competitions, they simply destroy the _raison d'être_ of these

competitions. It is music as an art--not music as a sport or trade--that

requires fostering. There is a danger that such concerts may degenerate

into a vulgar pot-hunting business, and one would like to see everything

done, both as regards the music prescribed and the conduct of the

proceedings of the festival itself, to guard against that danger.' I do

not claim to know much about music, but I recognise good English when I

see it. I saw that 'our special correspondent' was a master of his

craft. I replied at once in the _Manchester Guardian_ rejecting his

interpretation of our motives, and still more the motives which brought

choirs to our Festival. I said that 'no chastening was joyous' and urged

that the critic should have patience, that we were then walking and that

some day we would run, and expressed a hope that he might be there to

see. I afterwards called upon him at the Reform Club, and this commenced

a friendship, the memory of which I shall always hold as a matter of

pride. He henceforth became for us 'the critic.' We not only awaited

his arrival, but in choice of music Mr. Howson (the choir-master) even

applied an additional test: 'This will test the choir, but will it also

satisfy Mr. Arthur Johnstone's taste?' The choir were conscious ever of

his presence. The judges were in the box giving their awards, but 'Mr.

Johnstone is in the grand circle, what does he think?' I heard him once

appeal to his wife; 'Am I not always open to conviction?' With his first

article in view, and with the knowledge of what subsequently he did for

us, I could but allow that he made good his claim, for he became the

most stalwart defender of our Morecambe musical festival--'a movement,'

he wrote in 1903 'that is one of the most genuine and hopeful things in

the musical England of to-day.' Again he complained that 'little or

nothing has been done by the teachers of music in Manchester to

encourage the musical revival that for a good many years had been going

on in the North of England, and more particularly in Lancashire.' Later,

he wrote a remarkable article in reply to the strictures of Mr. J.

Spencer Curwen. Mr. Curwen had questioned whether our festivals help

choral music in the long run, and proceeded to comfort us by saying that

'we were entering upon a dangerous path. The more success you have, the

nearer you will approach to the state of things which exists in Wales.'

To this belated warning Mr. Johnstone replied (October 5th, 1903): 'The

peculiar evils enumerated by Mr. Spencer Curwen as being fostered by

competitions were observed a good many years ago by those who are

organising meetings in North Lancashire. Indeed, one may say the

observation of these evils was the point of departure in Lancashire, and

we are, therefore, a little tired of these strictures on the choirs got

up to learn certain pieces, dispersing immediately afterwards; on

fragmentary performances, and the rest of the black things on Mr.

Curwen's list. It is evident that Mr. Curwen is entirely without

knowledge of the best Lancashire choirs formed by the influence of

competition in their own neighbourhood. These choirs have as strong a

principle of cohesion as any in the world. Their repertory is

exceedingly wide. Their organisers show immense enterprise in unearthing

the treasures of the old English and Italian madrigal writers and of the

finest modern part-song writers. Let Mr. Curwen go to Morecambe next

spring; his ideas on the subject of musical competition will be pretty

thoroughly revolutionised.' Yes, Mr. Johnstone was open to conviction,

sought nothing less than the truth, was at infinite pains to obtain

it--_O si sic omnes_. But the debt we owe to him was not merely because

he was a critic keen to discern the good, not merely because he proved a

fearless champion. He became a friend always ready to discuss methods of

development, and to place his exact and wide knowledge at our disposal,

and after we had formed our plans it was a great gain to Mr. Howson and

myself to test their wisdom by his opinion. He spoke frequently of the

capacity for conducting which the festival revealed, and inveighed

against the star system, whether among vocalists, instrumentalists, or

conductors--and of these last he had in his mind's eye several whom he

maintained we ought to rely upon. It does not fall to me to speak of him

as a friend, as a delightful companion, as a courteous gentleman--one

whom I married and one whom, alas! I buried in the prime of his powers."

Johnstone took the position he had thus made with increasing

seriousness, and worked during the Manchester musical season harder than

ever. In the summer he went abroad, but not entirely for rest. He

greatly expanded his knowledge, and also his musical reputation and that

of his paper, by his visit to festivals at Bayreuth, at Oberammergau,

at Düsseldorf, and at Vienna. Forced to choose, we have hardly been

able, within these limits, to quote from the contributions he sent home.

The last of his foreign journeys was unlike all the others, which had

been taken alone. The words quoted above from the letter of January,

1902, were no longer to be true, though the desired companionship came

late. A solitary life in lodgings, and the absence of domestic ties to

one of his affectionate and home-loving nature (which lay behind his

gipsy habits) could not be compensated even by hosts of friends; but

brighter days were in store. In June, 1902, he became engaged to Miss

Lucy Morris, a Manchester lady who had won considerable distinction at

Cambridge; and henceforward the most human of interests gave fresh

inspiration to his life and work.

Their marriage took place two years later, on June 28th, 1904, quietly

at Morecambe. The friend of both, Canon Gorton, married them, and

another friend, Mr. Howson, undertook the musical part of the ceremony,

which was performed by the Morecambe Madrigal Society and the church

choir. There never was a wedding with better music, and for once the

hackneyed description, "the service was fully choral," might have been

used with a real meaning. The honeymoon was spent on the Riffel Alp:

afterwards the travellers attended the Bayreuth festival, returning to

Manchester at the end of August, where they went to live at Tarnhelm

(named after the magic helmet of the "Ring") in Victoria Park. A few

more months of happiness remained to Johnstone. On Thursday, December

8th, he was taken seriously ill, but though in considerable pain he

attended a concert in the evening, and wrote a notice of the

performance. The next morning his condition was worse, and on Saturday

he was operated upon for appendicitis. But relief came too late, and on

Friday, December 16th, his sufferings ended. He had just completed his

forty-third year: he was in the plenitude of his intellectual powers,

and had entered upon the happiest and most useful period of his life.

This cruel and sudden ending to Johnstone's career, at a moment when he

had reason to be reconciled to life and to forgive circumstance, when he

was wider in his critical sympathies and more thoroughly master of his

means of expression than ever before, and when his public influence was

strong, stirred the musical society of north-western England. North and

South are two different nations--neighbours that often carefully ignore

and misunderstand each other. This appears to be specially the case in

musical criticism. The London press said much too little. But the word

"provincial" has no application to the musical energies of Manchester.

It is like one of the great German towns, Munich or Frankfurt, being

wholly independent of the capital, of which it is not a colony. The mark

made by Johnstone in this region was attested in a measure that he would

never have foreseen. The _Manchester Guardian_, besides giving an

honourable obituary notice to its critic, received far more letters in

his honour, expressing sorrow at his early death and admiration of his

character, than it found space to print, although the most salient of

them filled its columns. They were written with knowledge, not by

laymen, but by persons with whom Johnstone had worked and had dealt

faithfully, sometimes stringently. The remark of Canon Gorton, "I began

my friendship with a quarrel," might be echoed more than once.

Johnstone's clean, hard literary thrust, or _punch_, free from noisy

hammering violence, was a not infrequent introduction to his

acquaintance. It was given with a will, but in a spirit thoroughly, and

to third parties amusingly, impersonal. The letters as a whole give a

clear notion of the intelligent professional view concerning him; of

his honesty, catholicity, and knowledge. He had been everywhere, he

counted, and when he had gone he was missed.

One of Johnstone's brothers in the craft, Mr. Ernest Newman, after

referring to a dispute which had led to their friendship, spoke of him

as "the best and strongest Englishman of our time in this line." Dr.

Adolph Brodsky, after praising in especial Johnstone's accounts of

pianoforte performances, singled out his services in breaking down the

popular prejudice in England against Bach. Others wrote of his musical

erudition and his "laudable desire to prevent anything in the form of

charlatanism from finding a place in the musical assemblies of

Manchester." Canon Gorton, who, as we quoted above, wrote with gratitude

of the high stimulus given by Johnstone to those local efforts which

save music from being unduly centralised in the bigger cities, and his

pertinent remarks upon the rarity and value of great musical critics

claim quotation, as they bring home the public sense of loss in

Johnstone's death.

"He held a high view of his office, and would make a sacrifice of self

rather than a sacrifice of truth. It is difficult to calculate the

extent of your loss. Musicians succeed musicians; they being dead may

yet speak. But the critic's words are ephemeral; they remain in the

files of the newspapers. For musicians there are schools; but what

school is there for critics? In music we need guides, men with a wide

horizon, a general culture, men unfettered by musical faction, with

definite ideals, with command of the English tongue, of courage and of

true instinct. Such an one, I take it, was Mr. Arthur Johnstone. Who

will fill his place?"

Upon this precise statement of the case we could not try to improve. We

can only add some words upon the nature of the man apart from his

profession. In an estimate of Johnstone's character the foremost place

must be assigned to his love of truth in all things; this virtue was the

touchstone he applied to his friends and to all artistic work. M. Vantyn

happily quotes, as the most appropriate motto for him, Locke's words,

"To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human

perfection in this world and the seed-plot of all other virtues," adding

by way of comment, "In everything, in all intercourse, upon all

occasions, under all circumstances, whether in enjoyment, in work, in

serious intercourse, he was a gentleman in the strictest sense of the

word." Next we may place his wonderful sympathy with the oppressed in

every class. Even where there was much that roused his anger in the

sinner, as in the case of Oscar Wilde, he was indignant at the merciless

treatment he received, and pleaded for a minor punishment. Where his

sympathy could have free play he was tender in the extreme, he would

take infinite personal trouble, and give all that his modest means

permitted. He was fond of animals, he disliked the idea of killing them

in "sport," and was glad that most of his intimate friends shared his

view. But he was not unreasonable on this point; and, to take the real

test question, he was not absolutely opposed to vivisection under

stringent conditions. For all his early talk of the "joy of life" he was

more anxious to secure it for others than for himself. He was tolerant

under his armour, and would rebuke pointless severity by saying, "Well,

well, there is something wrong with almost everybody;" but he did not

extend this indulgence to the cruel and pedantic. His youthful

rebelliousness, apartness, and questioning of society did not all

vanish, but were taken up and transformed into a more flexible temper;

for they had never been the mere plant of nihilism and vanity, that a

selfish nature manures in its barren private garden. Some of his friends

valued, above all, his total lack of the small inquisitiveness, which he

resented more than anything in others. He was deep in his work or in

the minor preparations for the day, and did not trouble much about his

friends' affairs. But when anything was doing, he emerged at once. When

one of his old companions was in suspense over illness at home, and yet

could do nothing but wait, Johnstone planned for him and personally

conducted an elaborate series of distractions and amusements covering

about four hours--not an easy thing to do in Manchester--each of them

appearing to be improvised as it came. The trouble over, he relapsed

into thought and went his ways. There were many such incidents. A

picturesque and noble character of this kind, with its traits of

quaintness, claims thus much record, and the more so that reticence made

it less easy to discover. To the public the journalist is such a mere

spectral hand and pen, writing by lamplight, without a face or form

behind it, as we hear of in a certain class of old ghost-stories.

Johnstone had become more than this to many of his readers. But they

could not know him as a man. It is well, therefore, to lift so much of

his privacy as may enable them partially to do so. He went through the

world scornful of its common valuations, appraising for himself,

watching with a certain isolation, and always preferring (if he must

choose) liberty to happiness, and rightful pride to obvious advantage.

But he was all the more human for that.

We may here say something about his piano playing. Johnstone, of course,

never professed to be more than an amateur. He was quite aware that the

difference in executive skill between the professional and the best

amateur is almost as great in music as in billiards; and that, to

paraphrase Matthew Arnold's saying, "Technique is three-fourths of

musical performance." As to the remaining fourth his playing stood on a

very high level. Even in undergraduate days the charm of his rendering

was considerable, always carefully thought out and individual. If he had

never heard a piece performed, his insight was remarkable, lighting

instinctively upon what one realised was the best way of playing it. His

touch was very delicate; he never forced the tone out of a piano, and

always avoided anything that might be called hard hitting. He liked best

playing something in the style of a Rubinstein barcarolle, where the

music should speak through a veil of sound. But his strength really lay

in a fine sense of rhythm, a rare gift even among great pianists.

Whatever piece he attempted he took at the proper pace, even if

occasionally a note might be missed or a passage blurred, rather than

give a false idea of it by playing too slowly; what was altogether

beyond his powers he left alone. On his return from the Cologne

Conservatoire his actual execution was at its best, the fingers strong

and lissom; and, being at the top of his physical health, his playing

was full of almost exuberant vitality. A weak circulation was always a

trial, and it was his habit to warm his fingers at a fire, when

possible, before sitting down to the piano. It was perhaps a small

talent, but singularly dainty and cultivated, for which our memory of

twenty-five years is profoundly grateful.

We might expect that the qualities he aimed at in his own playing would

be those that most attracted him in the great pianists of his period. Of

course he admired at their full value those transcendent players,

Rubinstein, Sophie Menter, Paderewski, Rosenthal; but there are also

artists equally unapproachable in their own delicate way, such as

Pachmann, Godowsky, Reisenauer, Siloti, and it was from them he received

the greatest personal pleasure.

As critic his first object was to explain the qualities and scope of the

music (in Pater's words, "to disengage its virtue"); to show, if a

classic, why it had attained its position, if modern, why it should

command serious attention. He never assumed too much musical knowledge

on the part of his readers, avoiding the use of technical expressions,

still more of stereotyped phrases. Bad work and slovenly performance he

could chastise unsparingly, but he never wrote harshly when he

recognised genuine effort, and he was very generous in his praise of

young performers, and often attended minor concerts at some

inconvenience to encourage rising artists. His style was clear and

precise, rather expository in tone; coloured when the occasion demanded,

and occasionally enriched with allusions to other arts. Thus the

elaborate tracery of Gothic architecture exhibited in Strasburg

Cathedral (a favourite figure) is employed to illustrate Bach and

contrasted with the formal classicism of earlier composers, and the

Palladian style of Handel; Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius" is compared to

some "jewelled _ciboire_ of the Middle Ages;" a pianist's playing of

arabesque passages reminds him of the "arrogance and costly unreason of

fine jewellery." His discernment of any new work of permanent value was

quick and unerring; we may instance his early estimate of Elgar and

indeed of Strauss too (for his position then was uncertain) as having

been in advance of general musical opinion, though unquestioned at the

present day. Tchaïkovsky's Pathetic Symphony was a more obvious

discovery; here he showed his critical power rather in quenching the

popular enthusiasm (which he had at first assisted in creating) for this

work when the public seemed to have lost all sense of proportion, by

reminding his readers that after all "Tchaïkovsky and Dvoràk are

inspired barbarians and must not be put on the same level with Beethoven

and Schumann." Mention too should be made of his appreciation of Liszt,

whose services to music are too frequently ignored--the creator of the

modern pianoforte technique, the brilliant and original composer, and

the generous friend of Wagner.

In their choice of the articles of which this volume is composed the

editors have given special prominence to those on the works of Sir

Edward Elgar and Herr Richard Strauss, the two composers of our time

who, as Johnstone considered, would bear the largest share in

influencing the cause of musical development. Many of the articles were

written on the first production of important works, and, in Elgar's

case, further impressions are given of later performances of the same

work. Those on the great acknowledged masters, if they cannot add much

more to our stock of actual knowledge, are interesting as confessions

of a sound musical faith. It is also true that the sum of potential

energy in the works of these great masters is infinite; in this sense,

that they strike a new flash out of every fresh and apprehensive mind.

They can beget generations of critics, each with another thing to say.

Such criticism is not a mere absorptive or passive process; it is

re-creation: it puts into fresh terms, by the art of words, some of the

impressions that have been built up of sound without language; or it

tells those who have felt the same thing what they did not clearly know

or remember that they had felt. The power to explain music is rarer than

competence in judging books. It may be thought that amongst Englishmen

of our generation Arthur Johnstone had as large a share as any of this

re-creative genius.

Musical Criticisms

CHAPTER I.

BACH.

[Sidenote: =The Genius of Bach.=

_November 27, 1901._]

In the minds of those who have specially at heart the welfare and

progress of musical art in this country nothing at the present time

looms larger than the church music of Bach. To acquiesce in the

prevalent indifference of the public to that music we feel to be

impossible. If Shakespeare is nothing but a bore, there seems to be an

end of imaginative literature; and similarly, in music, any person whom

Bach entirely fails to interest had better give up all pretence to being

musical. For Bach is not one of the composers, like Berlioz, Liszt,

Tchaïkovsky, Dvoràk, or Richard Strauss, whom it is allowable to like or

dislike. Bach is the musical Bible--the foundation of the faith.

Historically considered, both Bach and Handel are artists of the

Reformation and the Renaissance. But if we fix attention on their

essential musical personalities, we find a certain broad difference

between the two great eighteenth century composers, which is fairly well

suggested by calling Bach a Gothic and Handel a Renaissance artist.

Bach's "Passion according to St. Matthew" stands to Handel's "Messiah"

in something like the same kind of contrast that Strasburg Cathedral

presents to St. Peter's in Rome. On the other hand, in its course of

development music has been quite different from architecture and the

graphic and plastic arts, and modern music owes quite a hundred times

more to Bach than it does to Handel. Bach represents by far the greatest

stimulating influence that has ever existed in the musical world. His

stupendous industry, resulting in a body of first-rate work that may be

reckoned among the greatest wonders of the world (it is not possible for

a modern to know it all); his awe-inspiring union of very great talent

with very great character; the completeness of his human nature and the

absolute purity of his life and art--these things unite to make of

Bach's personality something truly august, something that administers a

quietus to the ordinary critical, fault-finding spirit. Glancing over

the huge library of his collected works and knowing the glories that a

few of them contain, one is fain to say, "There were giants in the earth

in those days." Yet "giant" is scarcely the word. For the astounding

sinew and sturdiness of the man were quite secondary in the composition

of his character to that quality, in virtue of which he worked on

throughout a long life as though in perpetual consciousness of something

higher than ordinary human judgment; not waiting for full appreciation,

which did not come till about a century after his death (very much as in

Shakespeare's case), but perfectly realising the great ethical ideal of

Marcus Aurelius--the good man producing good works, just as the vine

produces grapes. No greater praise can be bestowed on Handel than to

say that in his very best moments he is almost worthy of Bach, as, for

example, in the choral section "The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity

of us all," or in the tenor of the recitative "He looked for some to

have pity on Him, but there was no man; neither found He any to comfort

Him."

[Sidenote: =Bach's Mass in B minor.=

_November 29, 1901._]

Under Dr. Richter's irresistible generalship the most arduous task ever

yet undertaken by the Hallé Choir was yesterday carried through to a

brilliantly successful issue. Bach's great Mass illustrates his tendency

to throw all the weightier eloquence of a sacred composition into the

chorus, a solo or duet being treated as a delicate interlude, some

florid _obbligato_ for violin, oboe, or "corno di caccia"--the

eighteenth century name for the ordinary orchestral horn--being

intertwined with the melodic line in the manner of Gothic tracery. The

Mass is in six main divisions--the Kyrie, with three sub-sections; the

Gloria and the Credo, each in eight; the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus

Dei, each in two sub-sections. The two choruses of the Kyrie--the former

a wailing supplication, the latter a mystical counterpart washed clean

of earthly passion--were sufficient to show that the choir had a most

thorough grasp of their parts, all the difficult and complex chromatic

harmonies coming out with admirable clearness and correctness. The first

chorus of the Gloria, with its joyous _vivace_ movement, breaks into a

style much more generally "understanded of the people." Here the choir

were on thoroughly firm ground. The ring of the voices was magnificent,

and the superbly effective contrast at the words "Et in terra pax" was

perfectly given. The first occasion on which we noticed any serious

defect in the choral singing was in the burst of jubilant melody at the

opening of the "Et resurrexit." The jar was only momentary and was

doubtless the result of an over-vehement attack. It can scarcely be

questioned that the most marvellous chorus in the whole work is the

Sanctus, which expresses in six-part harmony the mystical rapture of

celestial beings set free from all care, pain, and strife. The effect of

those persistent three-quaver groups in their garlanded similar motion

is like nothing else in this world. They create a harmony of

unparalleled richness, filling the ear with a feast of ravishing sound.

The contrast with such choruses as Handel's "Hallelujah" and "Worthy is

the Lamb" is extremely striking. Handel was always of the Church

Militant. He was always strenuous, affirming the faith as it were with a

note of triumph over its enemies. Such a rose of Paradise as this

Sanctus of Bach's is quite remote from all that Handel could do. For an

earthly choir, however, with lungs and vocal chords liable to weariness,

all this infinitely ornate and elaborate passage-work is very trying,

notwithstanding the absolute suavity of the musical expression, and in

the ensuing "Hosanna" there were occasional signs of exhaustion. But the

choir recovered their breath during the two succeeding solos, and gave a

magnificent performance of the concluding "Dona nobis pacem."

[Sidenote: ="St. Matthew Passion."=

_January 25th, 1900._]

It is possible to regard the "St. Matthew Passion" of Sebastian Bach as

the greatest work of sacred musical art in existence, and thus as

greater than Handel's "Messiah"; while at the same time thoroughly

acquiescing in the greater popularity of the "Messiah." Handel was a

mighty artist and a most lordly person; but he was a man of the world

and a Court composer, and his religion, though perfectly genuine, was

external and official in character. Bach, too, was a mighty artist, but

he was not a man of the world. He was a devout and pious man and a man

of the people, and his religion was inward and personal. Again, Handel

was cosmopolitan, whereas Bach was thoroughly German. Not that Bach was

wanting in knowledge of Italian and other foreign music. He was a

perfectly comprehensive encyclopædia of the musical knowledge that

existed in his time. But the basis of his character was too homely,

simple and loyal to be modified by foreign influence. Thus while Handel

became musically an Italian, Bach remained thoroughly German. All these

circumstances suggest reasons for the much wider popularity of Handel's

music by comparison with Bach's. The general public like the clear and

definite outline, the structural simplicity, that they find in the

Italian and quasi-antique style of Handel, while they are bewildered by

the subtlety, the complexity, the varied imaginative play, and the

rejection of set forms that they find in Bach. It must be remembered

that the average man of the world to a great extent determines the tone

of the general public; one may be thankful that there exists any work

of sacred musical art so splendid as "Messiah," which is to a great

extent intelligible to the average man of the world, and one may rest

satisfied that, for the present at any rate, the "Messiah" should be

performed often, the Passion music seldom.

A long line of Christian aspiration and endeavour culminates in the "St.

Matthew Passion" music. The Good Friday service, or mystery, of the

Passion dates back to mediæval times. Musical settings of it are quite

innumerable. They fall into three main groups, according to style. The

earliest are in the "Plain-song" of the mediæval church. At the period

of Luther's Reformation the plain song gave way to the chorale style.

Finally, there are many settings in the oratorio style. Of these Bach

himself certainly wrote four, and probably five. By universal consent

the "St. Matthew Passion" is the finest of Bach's settings. The main

outlines of the scheme were fixed by tradition. Bach had the assistance

of a poet named Picander in arranging his text, but it was by Bach's own

judgment that all important points were settled. He divided the story

into two parts. The first comprises the conspiracy of the High Priest

and Scribes, the anointing of Christ, the institution of the Lord's

supper, the prayer on the Mount of Olives and the betrayal of Judas, and

ends with the flight of the disciples. In the second part are set forth

the hearing before Caiaphas, Peter's denial, the judgment of Pilate, the

death of Judas, the progress to Golgotha, the Crucifixion, Death and

Burial of Christ. Between the two parts there is a broad contrast, a

certain solemn stillness prevailing in the first and a passionate stir

in the second. Fifteen chorales are heard in the course of the work,

each forming a meditation upon the foregoing incident in the story. The

chorus is double, and there is immense power in the manner in which the

two main masses of sound are used, both to emphasise all that has poetic

value and to express the many elements composing the mighty picture.

Most of the solos are supported by the first choir. The utterances of

Christ are given by a bass voice with string quartet accompaniment. The

bass voice is in accordance with tradition. Most of the other

recitatives have an _obbligato_ accompaniment, in which a _motif_

bearing figurative reference to some prominent image in the text is

worked out. The _obbligato_ is in most, though not in all, cases

assigned to a wind instrument, so as to contrast still further with the

music accompanying the words of Christ. The longest solo part is that of

the Narrator, who sings tenor. In the course of a long and masterly

discussion Dr. Spitta, the great biographer of Bach, contends that the

"St. Matthew Passion" is not, strictly speaking, either dramatic music

or oratorio music. One passage in the discussion may here be

quoted:--"Consider the passage where the Jewish people, prompted by the

High Priests and Elders, demand the release of Barabbas. The Evangelist

makes them reply to Pilate's question with the single word 'Barabbas.'

The situation is, no doubt, full of emotion, and an oratorio writer

might have let the tension of the moment discharge itself in a chorus.

But it would necessarily have been embodied in a form in which the

chorus could have its full value as a musical factor, in a broadly

worked-out composition with a text of somewhat greater extent. The

dramatic composer would have given it the utmost brevity, since it

stands midway in the critical development of an event. He would have to

consider the progress of the action as well as the expression of

feeling. A sudden roar of the excited populace--thronging tumultuously

about the governor--a sudden roar and brief turmoil of voices would be

the effect best suited to his purpose. Bach, composing a devotional

Passion, makes the whole choir groan out the name 'Barabbas' once only,

on the chord of the minor seventh approached by a false close."

Dr. Spitta's point is that Bach's music interprets the feeling of devout

Christians, neither subordinating the purport of the text to a musical

poem, like a conventional oratorio composer, nor entering into the point

of view of the actor, like any other kind of dramatic composer. Dr.

Spitta's arguments on this point are quite convincing; and we do not

follow his practice of calling the work a "mystery" instead of an

oratorio, only because the former word would not be generally

intelligible, and because, in this country, we call any work of sacred

art for voices and instruments an oratorio, if it is not a Mass, and if

it is on too grand a scale to be called a cantata.

[Sidenote: =A Minor Concerto.=

_March 14, 1902._]

Anyone who knows his interpretation of Bach's A minor Concerto can

scarcely help associating Dr. Brodsky with that work very much as one

associates Joachim with Beethoven's, and Sarasate with Mendelssohn's

Violin Concerto. There is no other work that gives us so much of Bach's

musical individuality within the scope of a clear, simple, and widely

intelligible scheme. Bach made no music for the theatre, the casino, or

the fashionable ballroom. He seems to have written almost exclusively

for the church and for innocent, paternally safeguarded merry-making. He

was a good old patriarch who composed either to praise God or to help

the young people enjoy themselves--for if anyone imagines that Bach's

gigues, gavottes, sarabandes, and so forth were not meant for actual

dancing he is greatly mistaken. In such works as the Concertos one may

still trace the twofold impulse clearly enough, though all is idealised,

structurally elaborated, and otherwise adapted to a purely artistic

purpose. For in the first movement of the A minor Concerto--Dr.

Brodsky's special piece--we have something that brings the spirit into

the proper atmosphere. Bach takes us, as it were, to church, composing

our minds, as we go, with strong and able talk about subjects

appropriate to the religious season and the service that we are to

attend. The second movement is the service, and the Finale is the

afternoon walk or dance; Bach would probably have approved of Sunday

dancing. Dr. Brodsky is unsurpassable in the andante, where the

powerful, composed, and majestic rhythm of the bass finds a poetic and

delicately fanciful commentary in the solo part. Here one perceives the

difference between Bach's and Beethoven's religious standpoint, between

the ages of faith and of strife, between the _ancien régime_ and the

revolutionary period. For Bach the ancient faith is enough, while in the

spirit of Beethoven there ferment, fume and rage the ideas of the

French Revolution. The Hellmesberger cadenza played by Dr. Brodsky in

the Finale is perhaps the best-written excursus of its kind in

existence. It passes in review the thematic material of the entire work,

with unfailing felicity of touch, and good judgment as to the amount of

development; and the extremely rich and florid figuration is all so

neatly spun out of elements contained in the body of the work, that it

seems to have grown where we find it hanging, and has no suggestion of

anything alien about it.