I presented my “story” to him and tried to make him talk about it, but he looked glum and stared stonily into the empty fire-grate.
“Really,” he began, at length, “I can’t think of anything to say. Can you? If you can think of something very clever, put it in your article and say I said it. Yes, do say I said it. But, of course, it must be very clever.”
And he lapsed into a long, depressed silence. I was very glad when a friend of his popped his head into the [142] ]room and shouted: “What about that game of bridge?” I rose hastily and escaped.
. . . . . . . .
It would be difficult to find a more picturesque figure than R. B. Cunninghame Graham. I always picture him sitting on a bare-backed Mexican steed, his shirt open at the throat, a long whip in one hand, a lasso in the other, his eyes, like Blake’s tiger, burning bright, his boots fantastically spurred, his hat flapping in the wind, and his steed galloping ventre à terre. In South and Central America, no doubt, he does run wild, but in London of late years he has always been most respectable. And yet even West End respectability cannot kill his picturesqueness. He has a shining mind, and everything he says is youthful and spirited.
Most of his literary enthusiasms are for the younger—the youngest—generation, but as his mind is essentially uncritical and impulsive, his judgments are not very trustworthy. I remember his praising unreservedly a young alleged poet who in recent years has made himself known by his scholarship and impudence, and, as far as I could gather, it was chiefly his impudence that had attracted Cunninghame Graham.
[143]
]CHAPTER XII
MUSICAL CRITICS
Not until quite recently has musical criticism been taken seriously either by the London or provincial Press. In the old days of the sixties, when Wagner came to London (I am writing many miles away from books, but surely it was in the sixties that Wagner visited us?), there was not a single open-minded musical critic on the British Press. J. W. Davison, the very powerful Times critic, was not only a fool, but, what is much more dangerous, he was a learned fool. He treated Wagner shamefully, and he did more than his share to bring our country into musical disrepute among the cultured men of other nations. Joseph Bennett, of The Daily Telegraph, was a fluent writer who contrived to say less in a full column than a man like Ernest Newman or R. A. Streatfeild or Samuel Langford can say in a couple of lines. He footled gaily for many years, wielded enormous power, and did nothing whatever to advance the cause of music in England.
As a commercial asset, Joseph Bennett must have been invaluable to the proprietors of The Daily Telegraph. For, like Davison, he had great influence. People read him. Even in my own time, when an important new work was produced, we used to question each other: “What does Old Joe say?” And, most unfortunately, it mattered a great deal what Old Joe did say, though anyone who knew much about music was very well aware that nine times out of ten Bennett would be wrong. If he damned a work—well, that work was damned. No [144] ]musical critic to-day wields such power as his, though there are at least a score of writers on music who have ten times his gifts. His present successor, for example, Mr Robin Legge, is incomparably a finer musician, a much more open-minded man, and a student of infinitely more culture, than Bennett. Yet his influence, I imagine, is not so great as that of his predecessor. One cannot say that Bennett stooped to his public, for Bennett could not stoop; if he had stooped, he would have disappeared altogether. No: he was the public: the people: the common people. He had the point of view of the man in the back street.
But to-day things are changed. The musical critic is no longer primarily a raconteur, a gossiper, a chatterer. As a rule, he is a man of culture, of experience, of solid musical attainments. He earns little—anything from one hundred and fifty pounds to five hundred pounds a year, though, no doubt, in very rare instances, he may be paid more than the latter figure. Musical criticism, therefore, is not a profession that seduces the ambitious man, for the ambitious man of materialistic views may more easily earn three times what the Press has to offer him by selling imitation jewellery or doing anything else that money-making people do. When E. A. Baughan, now dramatic critic of The Daily News, was editing The Musical Standard more than twenty years ago, he wrote me a very earnest letter beseeching me not to become a musical critic on account of the payment being so meagre. “If you have a desk, stick to it; if you are a commercial traveller, remain a commercial traveller” was his advice in essence. But I would rather be a musical critic on one hundred and fifty pounds a year than a stockbroker earning fifteen hundred pounds. I love money, but I love music and journalism more, and the three years I spent in Manchester with an income of three hundred pounds were full of happiness, brimful of great days when I [145] ]felt my mind growing and my spirit taking unto itself wings.