Langford laughed in his beard and his eyes disappeared.
The last glimpse I had of Vaughan Williams was two or three years later, outside Hughes’ studio in Chelsea. We stood for a minute in the darkened street.
“Going to see Hughes?” I asked.
But he was busy with preparations for enlisting, and a few weeks later he, Hughes and myself and nearly all our Chelsea circle were swept into the army.
In June or July, 1917, I missed Vaughan Williams at Summerhill, near Salonica, by a day. But perhaps when the war is finished...?
. . . . . . . .
Dr W. G. McNaught, though a musician of the older school, is one of the youngest, most up-to-date and most powerful of our musical scholars. By one means or another, the influence of his personality is felt in every town and village in the British Isles. He is the editor of the best of our musical papers, a faultless and ubiquitous adjudicator at our great musical festivals, a witty and most reliable writer, a profound scholar, and a man of such natural geniality and spontaneity that he is liked by everyone. As a rule, I detest men who are liked on all hands, but I could never detest Dr McNaught even if he were to detest me and tell me so.
I do not remember when I first met him, and I do not think I have any special anecdotes to relate about him. But, in thinking of him now, and reviewing our friendly acquaintanceship of eight or ten years, I recall that I have never been able to persuade him to take me seriously. He has printed all the articles I have sent him, but he has always laughed indulgently at both them and me. I cannot help wondering why. Perhaps his exasperatingly [258] ]clever son has betrayed the secrets I have entrusted to him: the facts that my piano-playing is amateurish, my scholarship nil, and my ear fatally defective. And I think I once showed McNaught, jun., some of my compositions. One should never show (but of course I mean “show off”) one’s compositions when one cannot compose.
. . . . . . . .
Unless you are something of a musician yourself, you will probably never have heard the name of Julius Harrison, for though he has fame of a kind, and of the best kind, he is scarcely known to the man in the street. Just as Rossetti is primarily a poet for poets, so is Julius Harrison a musician for musicians. Only one word describes him: distinguished. Very distinguished he is, with the refinement and sensitiveness of a poet, the intuition of a novelist, and the waywardness of all men who allow themselves to be governed by impulse.