MISCELLANEOUS
Arthur Henderson, M.P.—Lord Derby—Miss Elizabeth Robins—Frank
Mullings—Harold Bauer—Emil Sauer—Vladimir de Pachmann
I quite forget what particular concatenation of circumstances brought
me into personal touch with Mr Arthur Henderson, M.P., but I rather
think that when I waited for him at Waterloo Station I was acting
the part of messenger-boy. Perhaps I delivered a letter or telegram
to him, or I may have given him a verbal message. All I remember is,
that something very important had happened, and it was necessary
that Mr Arthur Henderson should be apprised of this happening at the
earliest possible moment. So I volunteered to meet him at Waterloo.
We walked across the station together, and I was depressingly aware of
a rather bulky form with a Manchester kind of face. He spoke heavily
and uttered commonplaces that fell dead on his very lips. I could feel
his self-importance radiating from him, and I gathered that I was
supposed to be in the presence of a very exceptional person indeed. But
I did not feel that he was exceptional. There has never been a moment
since I reached manhood that I haven’t known that my intellect is of
finer texture than that of the five thousand who elbow each other on
the Manchester Exchange, and it seemed to me that night at Waterloo
Station that Mr Henderson would be very much at home on the Manchester
Exchange. I recollect most vividly that he bored me very much and
that, offering him some plausible excuse, I parted from him before we
had crossed the river, and darted away to more congenial people.
A few weeks previous to this encounter I had heard Mr Henderson give
an “address” in a Nonconformist chapel. An “address,” I am given to
understand, is a kind of homely sermon in which the speaker talks to
his audience in a friendly and distinctly unbending manner. He seeks to
improve them, to lead them to higher and better things: in a word, to
make them more like himself.... I have not the faintest recollection of
what drove me inside this Nonconformist chapel, but I cannot conceive
I went there of my own free will. I suppose that someone paid me to go
there. But my mind retains a very clear picture of a pulpit containing
a man with a face so like other faces that, sometimes, when I examine
it, it seems to belong to Mr Jackson of Messrs Jackson & Lemon, the
famous auctioneers of Boodlestown, and at other times it is owned
by Mr Brownjonesrobinson who, I need scarcely point out, is known
everywhere.... Really, I have no intention of being violently rude.
This question of faces is important. A face should express a soul. No
great man whose portrait I have seen possessed a commonplace face.
The address was heavy, obvious and dull. I was taken back twenty years
to my boyhood when stern parents compelled me to go to a Wesleyan
chapel one hundred and three times a year (twice every Sunday and once
on Christmas Day); on most of those hundred and three occasions I used
to hear exhortations to be “good,” not, so to speak, for the love of
the thing, but because being “good” paid. Mr Arthur Henderson, Samuel
Smiles _redivivus_, proved that it paid. He didn’t say: “Look at me!”
but, all the same, we did look at him. The spectacle to most of his
congregation was, I suppose, encouraging; me, it didn’t excite. I can
well believe that, as I stepped out of the building, I said to myself:
“No, Gerald. We will remain as we are. The penalties of virtue are much
too heavy for us to pay.”
* * * * *
One Saturday evening I journeyed to Liverpool with twenty or thirty
other newspaper men to dine with Lord Derby. Pressmen are accustomed to
this kind of entertainment from public men, and their host generally
contrives to be exceptionally agreeable. It would be putting it very
crudely to state that these dinners are intended as a bribe: let me
therefore say that they serve the purpose of smoothing the way for
the dissemination of some propaganda or other. To the best of my
recollection, Lord Derby had no other purpose in view than the laudable
and kindly intention of making the journalists of Manchester and
Liverpool better acquainted with one another.
After dinner, various ladies and gentlemen from the neighbouring music
halls provided us with an excellent entertainment, and I can now see
Lord Derby smilingly and courteously receiving these artists and
making them feel that they, like ourselves, were honoured guests, and
not merely paid mimes. He seemed to me then, as he has always seemed
to me, our dearly loved, bluff but unfailingly courteous national
John Bull. He is, I think, the most British man with whom I have ever
spoken—honest, brave, resourceful, self-sacrificing, fond of good
company and good cheer, hail-fellow-well-met yet a trifle reserved and
not a little cautious, blunt but considerate of others’ feelings. Some
of us collected signatures on the backs of our menus, but when Lord
Derby had written his name on the top of mine I left it there alone,
not caring to see other names mingling with his: perhaps feeling that
no other name of those present was worthy to stand beneath his name.
He spoke to us, but his speech had nothing in it save welcome.
* * * * *
When I see, as I frequently do, the newspapers and reviews praising
the works of Mrs Humphry Ward and describing her as the greatest of
living British female writers, I rub my eyes in astonishment and wonder
why Miss Elizabeth Robins is overlooked. Mrs Humphry Ward can, it
is true, tell a story: she knows well much of the behind-the-scenes
life of modern politics: moreover, she is a woman of the world with a
highly cultivated mind and a varied experience of life. But if ever
there was a woman without genius, without, indeed, the true literary
gift, she is that woman. She cannot fire the imagination, quicken the
pulse, or stir the heart. She plays with puppets and never reveals
life. Miss Robins, on the contrary, strikes deep into life—cleaves it
asunder, disrupts it, opens it out to our gaze. She has the gift of
tragedy.... When I think concentratedly of Mrs Humphry Ward’s books, I
remember atmospheres, social environments, a few incidents, and I see
dimly about half-a-dozen pictures. But when my mind dwells on _The Open
Question_ and _The Magnetic North_, I see and hear and touch live men
and women.
I know nothing of Miss Elizabeth Robins’ private affairs, but if my
intuition guides me rightly, she has had a tragic life and her life
is still and always will be tragic. Her temperament is not dissimilar
to Charlotte Brontë’s, that great little woman whose sense of the
ridiculous was so great but whose power of expressing it was so small.
Miss Robins, as you all know, entered the ranks of the militant
suffragettes, and it was at a meeting of the W.S.P.U. that I met her
and heard her speak. In the real sense, she has no gift of speech. When
she has to address an audience, she prepares her words beforehand,
memorises them, and then delivers them with the lucidity, the passion
and the eloquence of a great actress. I think I have heard all the
best-known women speakers from Lady Henry Somerset up to Mrs Pankhurst,
but though my admiration of Mrs Pankhurst’s brave and proud gifts
scarcely knows a limit, I consider that Miss Robins surpasses her in
her power of sweeping an audience along with her and in her great gift
of quickening the spirit and urging it upwards to the heights of an
enthusiasm that does not quickly die....
Perhaps in reading this book you have not gathered the impression
that I am afflicted by a devastating bashfulness that, always at the
wrong moments, robs me of speech and makes me appear an imbecile.
Nevertheless that affliction is mine. The more I like and reverence
people, the more bereft of speech I become in their presence. It is so
when I am with Orage, though we have been intimate enough for him to
address me in letters as “My dear Gerald”; it is so with Frank Harris
(but perhaps you think I ought not to “reverence” him—yet his genius
compels me to); and it is so with Ernest Newman and Granville Bantock.
And when Miss Elizabeth Robins’ hand met mine in a firm clasp and she
spoke some words of greeting, I had not a word to say. Like an ashamed
schoolboy, I walked, speechless and fuming, from the room and kicked
myself in the passage outside.... I know this shyness has its origin
in vanity, but then I _am_ vain. But I am a fool to allow my vanity to
gain the upper hand of my speech.
* * * * *
Frank Mullings!... Well, I have more than once said that singers bore
me, but if a man is bored by Mullings, he is worse than a fool. One
always has a special kind of affection for men whom one has known in
obscurity and of whom one’s prophecies of great things has come true.
Mullings has, indeed, travelled far since those jolly days when we used
to meet in Sydney Grew’s little flat in Birmingham and make music
with Grieg, Bantock and Wolf for company. A great “lad,” as we say in
Lancashire: a great fat boy without affectation, without jealousy,
without even the pride that all great artists should possess: a
generous, simple-hearted man who is capable of travelling a couple of
hundred miles to sing, without fee, the songs of Bantock, just because
he loved those songs and wanted others to love them.
He was always untidy, short-sighted, and either very depressed or very
jolly. His moods were thorough, and they infected you. In Birmingham,
in days when only a few, and those few powerless to help, were aware
of his astonishing gifts, he was serene and happy. I remember him,
Sydney Grew and myself sitting on the floor of Grew’s very narrow
drawing-room, our backs to the wall, and talking of our future. I was
the oldest of the three, and for that reason spoke with simulated
wisdom.
“Only one of us is marked down for real success, and you, Mullings, are
the man,” I said. “You have the successful temperament. Sydney here
will do valuable work, but he hasn’t the gifts that shine and blind. As
for me, I shall make the most of my small but, I really think, engaging
talent and swank about in a little circle of appreciators.”
Mullings laughed.
“Do you really think I shall?” he asked. “Have another whisky,
Cumberland, and go on talking; you give me confidence. And confidence
is half the battle, isn’t it?”
“So they say. But haven’t you confidence already?”
“Well, it ebbs and it flows.”
“Oh, _he’s_ all right,” said Sydney Grew. “Don’t worry about Mullings.
But what do you mean when you say that I shall do valuable work?”
“You’re an artist, and you’ve got personality and ideas. Haven’t you
often reproached me on the score that you meet me for an hour and, a
month later, see all that you have told me in two or three articles
that in the meantime I have written for the papers?”
“Well, you do pick my brains, Gerald. You know you do.”
“Simply because they are worth picking. And if I didn’t, they would be
lost to the world. Why don’t you yourself write? You must write more
and talk less.”
He took my advice, and began a career that promised much until the war
interrupted it.
In the meantime, Mullings has “arrived” and I am longing to meet him
again, for I know very well he will be still fat and jolly, that he
will still allow me to play accompaniments for him on any old piano
that is handy, and that we shall talk excitedly of Bantock and Julius
Harrison, of the Manchester Musical Society and Phyllis Lett, of
“Colonel” Anderton and Ernest Newman, and of everything and everybody
that made those far-off days so full of interest and so sweet to
remember.
* * * * *
Harold Bauer set out to conquer the world, and has done nothing more
than arouse the interest of one or two countries. Yet he is a great
pianist. But I am told that his personality stands between him and the
real thing in the way of success. I have sat next to critics at his
recitals who have squirmed in their stalls as he played.
“What is the matter?” I have asked.
“I don’t quite know. But don’t you feel it yourself?”
“Feel what?”
“Something. I don’t quite know what. Something indefinable. His playing
is too greasy. Did you ever hear Brahms played like that before?”
“No. I wish I had. I think his Brahms wonderfully fine.”
Certainly, his temperament is not magnetic like the personality
of Paderewski, of Kubelik, of Yvette Guilbert, and the public is a
connoisseur of temperaments. I think I have elsewhere observed in this
book that the public collects temperaments just as a few people collect
china or autographs. Perhaps Bauer is not exotic or orchidaceous
enough. He is too “straight,” too downright.
“What are they like, these Manchester people?” Bauer asked me one
afternoon before he was to play in England’s musical metropolis.
“Well, they’re ‘difficult,’ I think. They know something about music
here. You are not in London now, you know. You have reached the centre
of things.”
“Seriously?”
“Quite. I mean it. These people really do know. You see, for the last
fifty years they have had nothing but the best. They have a tradition
and stick to it.”
“The Clara Schumann tradition? Joachim and Brahms and Hallé and all
that?”
“No, no! That is on its last legs, on its knees even. The tradition,
I admit, is hard to define, but it’s there all the same. If you get a
couple of encores here, you may well consider that a success.”
“Funny thing, the public,” he muttered. “You never know where you have
it. But, of course, there is no such entity as ‘the public.’ There are
thousands of publics and they are all different.”
* * * * *
Emil Sauer has a glittering style and had, fifteen years ago, a
technique that no word but rapacious accurately describes. The piano
recital he gave in Manchester nearly two decades ago was the first
recital I ever attended, though I was a lad in my late teens; the
occasion then seemed, and still seems, most romantic. It is true
that, on the nursery piano at home, one of my elder brothers used to
give recitals with me as sole auditor, and that I used to return the
compliment the following evening, but though we took these affairs very
seriously and even wrote lengthy criticisms of each other’s playing,
our performances were not of a high order. But one evening, defying
parental authority and risking paternal anger, we slipped unseen from
home and went to hear Sauer.
I think we must both have been much younger than our years—certainly
we were much younger than the average educated boy of eighteen or
nineteen to-day—and we were in a very high state of nervous excitement
as we sat in the gallery of the Free Trade Hall waiting for the great
man’s appearance. His slim and, as it seemed at the time, spirit-like
figure passed across the platform to the piano, and two hours of pure
trance-like joy began for at least a couple of his listeners. My
brother and I knew all there was to know about the great pianists of
the past, and often we had tried to imagine what their playing was
like; but neither he nor I had conceived that anything could be so
gorgeous as what we now heard. For once, realisation was many more
times finer than anticipation. Only one thing disturbed my complete
happiness—and that was the notion that the pianist might possibly be
disappointed with the amount of applause he was receiving, though, of a
truth, he was receiving a great deal of applause. So I clapped my hands
and stamped my feet as hard and as long as possible. The Appassionata
Sonata almost frenzied me and a Liszt Rhapsody was like heady wine.
But all beautiful things come to a close, and towards ten o’clock my
brother and I found ourselves on the wet pavement outside, feeling very
exalted but at the same time uncertain whether we had done our utmost
to make Sauer’s welcome all that we thought it should have been.
“Let’s wait for him outside the platform entrance and cheer him when he
comes out,” suggested my brother.
Very strange must that two-voiced cheer have sounded to Sauer as, in
the dark side street, he stepped quickly into his cab, which began
immediately to move away. As our voices died, he opened the window and
leaned out, holding out to us his long-fingered hand. Running eagerly
to him, we clasped his hand in turn and, amazed, listened to the few
words of thanks he shouted to us.
For long after that, Sauer was one of our major gods, and we followed
his triumphs both in England and on the Continent with the utmost
interest and excitement. When we boasted to our friends that we had
shaken hands with the great pianist, they evinced little interest
in the matter. “Why, that’s nothing!” exclaimed a Philistine; “last
Saturday afternoon I touched the sleeve of Jim Valentine’s coat!” Now,
Jim Valentine was a great rugger player.
* * * * *
Perhaps the most exquisite and the most fragile thing in the world at
present is the Chopin playing of Vladimir de Pachmann. For more than
a quarter of a century writers have been attempting to reproduce his
coloured music in coloured words: they have all failed. De Pachmann
is an exotic, a hothouse plant. Not a hothouse plant among many
other plants, but a plant living luxuriously and solitarily and with
exaggerated self-consciousness in its own hothouse.
In thinking of him, one feels that he belongs to the very last minute
of civilisation’s progress. All the civilisations of the past have
come and gone and returned; they have worked age-long with tireless
industry; mankind has struggled upwards and rushed precipitately
downwards through thousands of years; cities have been sacked and
countries ravaged; Babylon, Nineveh, Athens and Rome have bloomed
flauntingly and wilted most tragically: and the most exquisite thing
that has been produced by all this suffering, all this unimaginable
labour, is the Chopin playing of de Pachmann. The world has toiled for
thousands of years and has at last given us this thing more delicate
than lace, more brittle than porcelain, more shining than gold....
There is the rather painful question of this pianist’s eccentricities.
One can discuss them publicly for de Pachmann himself continually
thrusts them on the public. You know to what I refer: the running
commentary of words, gestures, nods, smiles and leers which he
almost invariably passes not only on the music he plays, but also
on his manner of playing it. I refuse to believe that this most
extraordinary behaviour is mere affectation: it seems to me a direct
and irrepressible expression of the man’s very soul. It is not
ridiculous, because it is so serious and so natural. Nevertheless, it
is entirely ineffective. It does not help in the least. Rather does it
mar. To see the performer winking slyly at you when he has, as it were,
“pulled off” a particularly delicate nuance does not give that nuance
a more subtle flavour: it merely distracts the attention and sets one
conjecturing what really _is_ going on in the performer’s mind. It has
appeared to me that the pianist has been saying: “You noticed that,
didn’t you? Well, _you_ couldn’t do it if you spent a whole lifetime
trying; yet how easily _I_ achieved it!”
The large, smooth face, with its loose mouth and dizzied eyes, is the
face of a magician out of a story book. It is not a real face. It has
only one of the attributes of power—egotism. Egotism has furrowed every
line on that countenance; it dilates the eyes. Egotism runs through the
sensitive fingers. I have stood by his side and wilfully shut my ears
on the music and fastened my eyes on his face; but I learned nothing.
I do not know if his mind dwells aloof from all emotion, his intellect
functioning automatically—as would seem to be the case; or if,
experienced and cynical, he has the power of pouring the very essence
of his spirit into sound, laughing at himself and us as he does so—but
laughing more at us than at himself, for we are deceived whilst he is
not.
It is strange that so exotic a personality should have a firm and
unrelaxing hold on the public. He is not caviare to the general.
Villiers de l’Isle Adam is worshipped by the few; Walter Pater cannot
have more than a thousand sincere disciples, but de Pachmann is adored
by millions. “Millions” is no exaggeration. People are taken out of
themselves whilst he plays. You remember, don’t you? the Paderewski
craze in America fifteen years ago, when the platform was stormed and
taken by assault night after night by society ladies. I witnessed
pretty much the same kind of thing at a de Pachmann recital in a
Lancashire town; but the latter pianist was stormed, not by society
ladies, but by unemotional bank clerks, stockbrokers, merchants,
working men and women. At the end of the concert, they flowed on to
the platform in hundreds, and surrounded the pianist whilst he played
encore after encore, smiling vacantly the while and enjoying himself
immensely, pausing between each piece only to motion his ring of
worshippers a little farther from the piano.
An enigmatic creature, this; a creature who will never give up his
secret; perhaps, even, a creature who is not aware that he possesses a
secret.