Apropos of his chess-playing, I remember that some years ago a chess enthusiast—a bore of the vilest description—used to visit him regularly and stay to a very late hour for the purpose of playing a game. These visits soon became intolerable, and, one evening, as Bantock, irritated and petulant, sat opposite his opponent, he resolved to put an end to the nuisance.
“Excuse me a moment,” said he; “I have left my cigar-box upstairs, and I really can’t do without a smoke.”
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]He left the room, and went straight to bed and to sleep. Next time he met his visitor, they merely bowed.
Bantock used to relate this story with the greatest glee, and in the course of time the yarn grew to colossal dimensions. It became epical. One was told how his visitor was heard calling: “Bantock! Bantock! I’ve taken your Queen,” how strange noises proceeded from dark rooms, and how, next morning, his visitor, having sat up all night, was found wide awake trying the effect of certain combinations of moves on the board. When a thing is said three times, it is, of course, true, but Bantock never told exactly the same story three times. He believes, I think, that consistency is the refuge and the consolation of the dull-witted.
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Frederick Delius, a Yorkshireman, has chosen to live most of his artistic life abroad, and for this reason is not familiarly known to his countrymen, though he is a great personage in European music. A pale man, ascetic, monkish; a man with a waspish wit; a man who allows his wit to run away with him so far that he is tempted to express opinions he does not really hold.
I met him for a short hour in Liverpool, where, over food and drink snatched between a rehearsal and a concert, he showed a keen intellect and a fine strain of malice. Like most men of genius, he is curiously self-centred, and I gathered from his remarks that he is not particularly interested in any music except his own. He is (or was) greatly esteemed in Germany, and if in his own country he has not a large following, he alone is to blame.
He is a man who pursues a path of his own, indifferent to criticism, and perhaps indifferent to indifference. Decidedly a man of most distinguished intellect and a quick, eager but not responsive personality, but not a musician who marks an epoch as does Richard Strauss, [252] ]and not a man who has formed a school, as Debussy has done.
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Joseph Holbrooke, for sheer cleverness, for capacity for hard work, and for intellectual energy, has no equal among our composers. It was Newman who first spoke to me about him, and it was Newman who made me curious to meet this extraordinary genius.