But soon we got on to his own subject—singing—and here again we were at cross-purposes. Singers who to me seem supreme artists he had either not heard of or had not heard.
“There is only one British singer to-day who carries on the old tradition,” said he; “I mean Madame Kirkby Lunn. She has technique, style, personality. The others, compared with her, are nowhere.”
Some general talk followed, and I soon discovered, beyond the possibility of doubt, that, like all great Victorians who have had their day, he was living in the past—in that particular past whose artistic spirit is embodied in the Albert Memorial, in the musical criticism of J. W. Davidson, in the pianoforte playing of Arabella Godard, in the poetry of Lord Tennyson, in the pictures of Lord Leighton, in the prose of Ruskin.
What had Santley to say to me, or I to him? Nothing, and less than nothing. We were from different worlds, different planets, for half-a-century divided us. In years, he was nearer to the Elizabethan age than I ... and yet how much farther away was he?
. . . . . . . .
Perhaps Mr Landon Ronald will not be angry with me if I call him the most accomplished of British musicians. He would have every right to be angry if I said he was accomplished and nothing else.... How far back that word “accomplished” takes us, doesn’t it? Twenty years, at least. For aught I know to the contrary, it may still be employed in Putney. I observe that Chambers defines “accomplishment” as an “ornamental acquirement,” and, in my boyhood, that was precisely what it [235] ]meant. Young ladies “acquired” the art of playing the piano, the art of painting, the art of recitation. Their skill in any art was not the result of developing a talent that was already there, but it was the result of a pertinacity that should have been spent on other things. But one no longer uses “accomplished” in that precise sense.
Landon Ronald has more than a streak of genius in his nature, and his cleverness is so abnormal as to be almost absurd. His genius and his cleverness are evident even in a few minutes’ conversation. He radiates cleverness, and he is so splendidly alive that as soon as he enters a room you feel that something quick and electric has been added to your environment.
When I first met him—ten years ago, was it?—his one ambition was to be recognised throughout Europe as a great conductor. He was acknowledged as such in England, of course, and a visit to Rome had fired both the Italian public and critics with enthusiasm. But London and Rome are not Europe, whilst in those days Berlin most distinctly was. He was most charmingly frank about himself, full of enthusiasm for himself, full of delight in all life’s adventures.
“Of course, I know my songs aren’t real songs,” he said. “I can write tunes and I’m a musician, and I’m just clever enough to be cleverer than most people at that sort of work. But you must not imagine I take my compositions seriously. I think they’re rather nice—‘nice’ is the word, isn’t it?—and I enjoy inventing them—and ‘inventing’ is also the word, don’t you think? Besides, they make money; they help to boil the pot for me while I go on with my more serious work—that is to say, conducting.”
Havergal Brian was in the room—we were in that fulsome and blowzy town, Blackpool—and he remarked, as so many extraordinarily able composers have from [236] ]time to time remarked, that he found it impossible to write music that the public really liked.