. . . . . . . .
[191]
]But not all our time was spent in this uproarious way. There were long hours of talk, great talk from Langford of The Manchester Guardian, a man of mature years whom to meet is a privilege and whom to know intimately is a blessing; witty, rather cruel, but vastly entertaining talk from Newman; pungent talk from Bantock; and general gossip from all kinds of people.
I do remember so regretfully—regretfully, because I do not think a like occasion can happen again—an afternoon that Langford and I spent sitting at a little rustic table under a just yellowing grove of poplars. Langford’s mind is spacious, most richly stored. Nothing can happen that does not at once and without effort fit into his philosophy of life, and though his talk is profound it is so greatly human that, in listening to him, one feels completely at rest. He accepts everything.... I daresay you have noticed that many people have tried to describe the effect Walt Whitman’s personality has had on them, and you will have observed how they have all failed. It is an impossible task.... And I feel that in writing about Langford it is impossible to convey to you what he stands for to his friends. I recollect Captain J. E. Agate once saying to me: “I never come away from speaking to Langford without feeling what an empty fool I am.” Yes, that is true; yet, at the same time, you feel reconciled to your own empty folly; besides, you know well enough that if you were a fool Langford would not talk to you; he would just ask you to have a drink and then he would fumble clumsily in his waistcoat pocket to find you a cigarette.
Langford will never be “successful” in the worldly sense. Perhaps he looks with suspicion on success; certainly he has never attempted to achieve it. I imagine that his nature is very like that of Æ, and if what everyone says of Æ is true, one cannot conceive that anything finer could be said of anyone than that he resembles the great Irish poet.
[192]
]It was these refreshing talks with various people that did something to mitigate the severity of the atmosphere of conventionality, of “respectability” in its worst sense, that made it rather difficult to breathe freely in these cathedral cities. Everyone wore new clothes; men perspired in kid gloves; girls carried prayer-books and copies of Elijah; deans were dapper; ostlers were clean and profoundly polite; and, wherever you went, you heard people saying that they had seen Lord Bertie and Lady Jane, and had you noticed that the dear Bishop had looked a little tired last evening? There was, too, about these festivals an air as of a society function. Music, an unwilling handmaid of charity, was “indulged” in. One did not have music every day, for that would have been frivolous; but one had it in great lumps every twelve months, and had it, not because one cannot live fully and vividly without art, but because it made a good excuse for a social “occasion.” The music itself was excused—for in the minds of these people it required an excuse—by the fact that the entire festival was organised for charity, that vice which causes so many sins.
I myself came into rather violent conflict with the Norfolk and Norwich Musical Festival authorities on a question of artistic morality. Ten or eleven years ago they offered a prize of twenty-five guineas for a poem, and another prize of fifty guineas for the best musical setting of the poem. I entered the former competition and secured the prize. My “poem” was in blank verse and lyrics, its subject Cleopatra, and it contained the following passage:
Iris. And when with regal, arrogant step she passed
Across the portico, her white breasts gleamed;
Her neck seemed conscious of its loveliness;
Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted with