A beastly city was Berlin. And yet not all of Berlin was beastly. But the artistic, the musical, part of it was “low, very low,” as Chawnley Montague said, on an historic occasion, of the slums of Sierra Leone.
But Karl Klindworth had nothing of beastliness in him. In writing about Klindworth I shall, I am convinced, feel rather old, and you, when reading about him, will, I greatly fear, also feel rather old. You see Klindworth belongs so awfully to the past. Yet he was a very great man in his day, and there must be still in London many people who knew him in those silly, savage days when stupid people (and they were brutally stupid) thought of Wagner what brutally stupid people think to-day of Richard Strauss.
Klindworth was not only a disciple of Wagner’s but he was also one of Wagner’s prophets: a forerunner. A great pianist, also: a great conductor: a great man. Frederick Dawson, one of the most generous-hearted of men, took me to Klindworth’s, and said some jolly, flattering things about me to the great musician. Klindworth was very old, about eighty years, and, when he [217] ]spoke, it was like listening to the voice of a man who had just got beyond the grave and was not unhappy there.
I egged him on to speak of Wagner.
“What can I say?” he mused. “Nothing. Wagner was from God.”
His large eyes, two great ponds of colour in a face not white but stained with ivory, smouldered and suddenly burst into flame. His hands, always trembling a little, now shook rather violently. I could not help feeling, as I gazed upon this old man, that Wagner lived in him as strongly as he lives in the mighty scores of Die Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde.
We sat silent. Frau Klindworth, an Englishwoman speaking English most charmingly with a foreign accent, folded her hands and gave a little sigh. Dawson shot me a significant look which meant: “Keep quiet; if you do, he will begin to talk.”
And for a little while he did. Without a gesture, without a movement, Klindworth, looking with unfocussed eyes into space, began to talk. (He spoke in English, for he knew that I knew very little German.)
“No one,” said he, “who was a gentleman, I mean no one who had ordinary feelings of chivalry, could meet Wagner without feeling that he was in the presence of one of the Kings of our world. Certain people, both in England and Germany, have written stupid things of him; they have pointed fingers at his faults, banged their fists upon his sins. I hate those people. Faults and sins? Who has not faults? Who has not committed sins? You English have a word ‘uncanny.’ Or is it you Scottish people? Wagner was uncanny. He dived into things. Yes, he dived. And every time he lost his body in the blue sea, he brought back a pearl. A pearl? No: pearls have no mystery. He brought back, each time, a hitherto undiscovered gem.... ‘Gem’! [218] ]What silly sounds you have in English.... Jem.... Djem!”
His old mind, outworn and very weary, appeared to cease its functioning. He sat with no sign of life in him. It was as though a clock had stopped, as though a light had gone out. And then, without any apparent cause, he came to life again.