“And Ruskin,” he added as an afterthought. “Oh, yes, and Cardinal Newman. Newman’s style is perhaps the purest style of any man who wrote in the nineteenth century.”
“I do not think so,” said I, thoroughly roused and forgetting to play my part. “The Apologia is slipshod. My own style, faulty though it may be, is more correct, more lucid, even more distinguished than Cardinal Newman’s.”
He turned away, either angry or amused.
“It is true,” said I, with warmth. “Anyone who has tried for years, as I have done, to master the art of writing, and who examines the Apologia carefully will perceive at once that it is shamefully badly written. For two generations it has been the fashion to praise Newman’s style, but those who have done so have never read him in a critical [87] ]spirit. I would infinitely prefer to have written a racy book like—well, like Moll Flanders, where the English is beautifully clean and strong, than the sloppy Apologia.”
“Moll Flanders,” he said questioningly; “Moll Flanders? I do not know the book.”
“It is all about a whore,” said I brutally, “written by one Defoe.”
And that, of course, put an end to our conversation. I rose to leave.
The impression left on my mind by my two visits to Elgar is definite enough, but I am willing to believe that it does not represent the man as he truly is. He is abnormally sensitive, abnormally observant, abnormally intuitive. Like almost all men, he is open to flattery, but the flattery must be applied by means of hints, praise half veiled, innuendo. If you gush he will freeze; if you praise directly, he will wince. His mind is essentially narrow, for he shrinks from the phenomena in life that hurt him and he will not force himself to understand alien things. His intellect is continually rejecting the very matters that, in order to gain largeness, tolerance and a full view of life, it should understand and accept. Yet, within its narrow confines, his brain functions most rapidly and with a clear light.
I have been told by members of the various orchestras he has conducted that when interpreting a work like The Dream of Gerontius his face is wet with tears.
He has a proper sense of his own dignity, and it is doubtful if he exaggerates the importance of his own powers. Many years ago, as I have related, I employed the word “aristocrat” in describing him, and to-day I feel that that word must stand. He has all the strength of the aristocrat and many of the aristocrat’s weaknesses.