One evening—he and I used to pass his free evenings together—we went to a tavern called the "Tobacco Pipe," one of those places which a London innkeeper would not fail to denominate "Ye olde...." The whole of the Round Table used to meet there once a month in a nice smoky back-room. It was a large room, which from its dimensions seemed lower than it really was. It was panelled in old dark oak, and on the ceiling heavy black joists were visible. The tables, which no table-cloth adorned, were made of old oak, as were the chairs and the rest of the furniture. Old fashioned oil lamps fixed on the joists succeeded in giving the whole locality a kind of pleasant homeliness, although these oil lamps were lit by electricity. I was told that this room was several hundred years old, and that the new modern house had been built around it. That room was in great demand by all sorts of societies, and it was not possible for it to be hired by one body oftener than for one evening a month, because decisions in any trade or profession had to be taken at "The Tobacco Pipe" if fashion was to be satisfied.
That day the programme of the Round Table was to find some means of defence against the growing invasion of amateurs in the theatrical and especially the musical profession. All the people I knew were there and, of course, many more.
Poor Hammer, who was the senior of the company, made the first speech. He began all right, talking of art for art's sake, but soon lost the subject and, before anybody knew how it had happened, was explaining the fundamental difference between mediæval and modern counterpoint. By unanimous consent he was deprived of the power of going on with his speech, and, greatly astonished, sat down.
The Herr Graf said, that being himself a sort of an amateur he was defending their cause. He quite understood that hopeless cases should be prevented from producing their work in public, but such rule could not be applied to all. Had not Wagner been called an amateur? The only way out was the creation of a special tribunal for such disputes.
An elderly gentleman who stammered told the assembly that if Wagner had been suppressed it would not have been a shame. He was hissed into silence, and Mr. Bischoff declared that such words were Anti-German, that to attack Wagnerism was to attack Germanism, that Wagner's object had been the freeing of opera from its traditional and conventional Franco-Italian forms, and his one law: dramatic fitness.
Thereupon another speaker arose. He was a medical man by profession, and his name was Doctor Bernheim. He declared that the subject of Germanism was quite out of place, and that the right way of tackling the question had been indicated by Mr. Hammer.
Immediately the old man got up, bowed in an awkward way and offered his snuff box to the Doctor, who went on: Certainly, there were two different classes of artists. There was art for art's sake, music which had only that one aim of being beautiful, and in this he included art for technique's sake. The other class was art for the expression of an idea, in his opinion the higher form of art, though he admitted that his opinion mattered very little. Only these two classes of artists counted at all, and it was the public's, not the artist's, duty to decide who could be ranged in the one or the other category, and who was not to be counted in either of them. The struggle against amateurs had to be fought not by the institution of a tribunal, but by the production of work either so skilled or so highly inspired that no amateur could compete.
Doctor Bernheim seemed to have won the day when Mr. Doblana chose to take part in the discussion. In his opinion the Doctor had made a mistake by including art for technique's sake into art for art's sake. Technique could be taught, and learning alone had nothing common with art. He, Doblana, knew composers for the brain and composers for the heart; only the latter were artists by the grace of God, the only ones he admitted. The public could not decide who deserved this qualification. But the one fact, that a composer was capable of inventing new melodies, real melodies, would entitle him to being called an artist.
I did not like Doblana's view of the question, yet I would have given anything to spare him the answer.