‘Yes, father,’ Berkeley answered with a smile. ‘How do you think it runs now?’ and he hummed over a few lines of his own words, set with a quaint lilt to his own inimitable and irresistible music:—
And though in unanimous chorus
We mourn that from ages before us
No single enaliosaurus
To-day should survive,
Yet joyfully may we bethink us,
With the earliest mammal to link us,
We still have the ornithorhyncus
Extant and alive!
‘How do you think the score does for that, father, eh? Catching air rather, isn’t it?’
‘Not a better air in the whole piece, Artie; but, my boy, who do you think will ever understand the meaning of the words. The gods themselves won’t know what you’re driving at.’
‘But I’m going to strike out a new line, Daddie dear. I’m not going to play to the gallery; I mean to play to the stalls and boxes.’
‘Was there ever such a born aristocrat as this young parson is!’ cried the old man, lifting up both his hands with a playful gesture of mock-deprecation. ‘He’s hopeless! He’s terrible! He’s incorrigible! Why, you unworthy son of a respectable Paddington shoemaker, if even the intelligent British artizans in the gallery don’t understand you, how the dickens do you suppose the oiled and curled Assyrian bulls in the stalls and boxes will have a glimmering idea of what you’re driving at? The supposition’s an insult to the popular intelligence—in other words, to me, sir, your Progenitor.’
Berkeley laughed. ‘I don’t know about that, father,’ he said, holding up the page of manuscript music at arm’s length admiringly before him; ‘but I do know one thing: this comic opera of mine is going to be a triumphant success.’
‘So I’ve thought ever since you began it, Artie. You see, my boy, there’s a great many points in its favour. In the first place you can write your own libretto, or whatever you call it; and you know I’ve always held that though that Wagner man was wrong in practice—a most inflated thunder-bomb, his Lohengrin—yet he was right in theory, right in theory, Artie; every composer ought to be his own poet. Well, then, again, you’ve got a certain peculiar vein of humour of your own, a kind of delicate semi-serious burlesque turn about you that’s quite original, both in writing and in composing; you’re a humourist in verse and a humourist in music, that’s the long and the short of it. Now, you’ve hit upon a fresh lode of dramatic ore in this opera of yours, and if my judgment goes for anything, it’ll bring the house down the first evening. I’m a bit of a critic, Artie; by hook or by crook, you know, paper or money, I’ve heard every good opera, comic or serious, that’s been given in London these last thirty years, and I flatter myself I know something by this time about operatic criticism.’
‘You’re wrong about Wagner, father,’ said Arthur, still glancing with paternal partiality at his sheet of manuscript: ‘Lohengrin’s a very fine work, a grand work, I assure you. I won’t let you run it down. But, barring that, I think you’re pretty nearly right in your main judgment. I’m not modest, and it strikes me somehow that I’ve invented a genre. That’s about what it comes to.’
‘If you’d confine yourself to your native tongue, Mr. Parson, your ignorant old father might have some chance of agreeing or disagreeing with you; but as he doesn’t even know what the thingumbob you say you’ve invented may happen to be, he can’t profitably continue the discussion of that subject. However, my only fear is that you may perhaps be writing above the heads of the audience. Not in the music, Artie; they can’t fail to catch that; it rings in one’s head like the song of a hedge warbler—tirree, tirree, lu-lu-lu, la-la, tirree, tu-whit, tu-whoo, tra-la-la—but in the words and the action. I’m half afraid that’ll be over their heads, even in the gallery. What do you think you’ll finally call it?’