With Kahane, to think is to act, and within a week he had formed the Manchester Musical Society and begun a Press campaign against the famous old conductor. This Society was Kahane’s new toy, and he played with it to some purpose. We talked a great deal, gave innumerable concerts, hired lecturers, wrote articles, and held enormously thrilling committee meetings. Our programmes consisted almost exclusively of new and very “modern” music, just the kind of music that the guarantors of the Hallé Concerts Society detested. We were all for the new spirit in music, and some of us in our enthusiasm liked new music just because it was new. In three months Richter began to totter on his throne and, later on, he resigned his post, and now Sir Thomas Beecham most fitly reigns in his stead.
This little Society was extremely typical of Manchester. It was typical because it was enthusiastic, because every member of it worked hard for no monetary reward, and because it had a definite object in view and achieved that object. Above all, it was young; the spirit of it was young. I have never found in London a band of young men and women putting their noses to the grindstone for months on end with the sole object of achieving an artistic ideal. People in London exploit art, but they do not work at art for art’s sake. Manchester is England’s musical metropolis. Elgar said so ten years ago; Beecham echoed his words the other day. I claim for Manchester also that the level of culture is much higher than it is in London. In proportion to its size Manchester has during the last fifty years given to England more writers, musicians, politicians, actors, business men, reformers and social workers of distinction than any other city.... But all this, I think, is a little offensive——
And yet how difficult it is for the stranger to understand [159] ]Manchester!—and difficult in spite of the fact that Manchester loves being understood.
Mr J. Nicol Dunn, who, as editor of The Morning Post and, later, of The Johannesburg Star, did most brilliant work, utterly failed to understand Lancashire people when he came to edit The Manchester Courier. I think he regarded them as a peculiar race of savages. “A wealthy Lancashire manufacturer,” he said to me once, “will ask you to dinner and will order a bumper of champagne. But if you ask him for a half-guinea subscription for a political society, he will give you a curt refusal. What is to be done with such folk?” Dunn thought us hard and unimaginative, incapable of seeing in what direction lay our best interests, and utterly childish in our notions of political economy.
“Cumberland,” he said, unexpectedly, one evening, “is your father a Conservative?”
“He is,” said I.
“What paper does he take?”
“The Manchester Guardian.”
“I knew he did! Of course he would take The Manchester Guardian! Good Lord! To what a strange set of people have I come!”
And he grunted and went on with his work.