Musical
Criticisms

Sherratt & Hughes
Publishers to the Victoria University of Manchester
Manchester: 27 St. Ann Street
London: 65 Long Acre

Aged 26.

[FOREWORD.]

The Editors desire to express their thanks to the Proprietors of the Manchester Guardian for their permission to reprint the articles contained in this volume.

They also wish to acknowledge the assistance they have received in compiling the memoir from the family of the late Mr. Arthur Johnstone and from his friends, and they are more particularly indebted to Professor Sidney Vantyn for the long correspondence he placed at their disposal.

The letters quoted were for the most part written to Mr. Oliver Elton.

[CONTENTS.]

Note.—The performances noticed were all given at Manchester, except where otherwise stated.

PORTRAITS.

[MEMOIR.]

Arthur Giffard Whiteside Johnstone was born December 3rd, 1861, the fourth son of the Rev. Edward Johnstone and Frances Mills. His father was then taking the duty at Colton in Staffordshire, but in the following year accepted the living of Warehorne in Kent; this he resigned in 1866 and went to live at St. Leonards. Mr. Johnstone died in 1870, and the direction of Arthur's education fell entirely upon his mother. Mrs. Johnstone gave her life to good works and to the care of her children, one of whom was an invalid. Arthur looked on her as a saint, and the thought held up his belief in humanity during the somewhat long struggle when his powers and aims were uncertain, and when he had to observe excessive dulness, dreariness, and meanness at close quarters. He was also beholden to her for the gift that was at last to determine his career. She was a good musician, and it was from her that Johnstone inherited his fine taste and received his first instruction in music. Later he studied under Mr. W. Custard, a local organist. The atmosphere of his home was religious—extreme Anglican approaching to Roman Catholic. Johnstone, though he became by reaction anti-clerical, continued to appreciate the value of religion, chiefly through art and music, as his letters and criticisms show. But his bent was secular as well as artistic; a high Anglican school and a high Anglican college were therefore not a pasture in which he could thrive. His spirit was foreign to theirs. It says much for his strength of mind, that these institutions left him able to admire certain forms of Christian art.

In 1874 he went to Radley and remained there four years, doing neither well nor ill, stifled rather in the ecclesiastical atmosphere of the school, caring little for games, and out of sympathy with the public school spirit. He therefore lived his own life, learnt to protect himself by ingenious tact and reserve, and read irregularly what he liked. Though not specially built for athletics he was by no means lacking in bodily arts and dexterities. When quite young he was a first rate billiard-player, a good skater, and at lawn tennis well above the average. His chief accomplishment was an odd one which never left him. During these early years he made a constant pastime of conjuring, and devoted to it much of his leisure and some of his business hours. He even gave elaborate entertainments in public, from the age of fourteen. On one occasion when he was only seventeen he was able to apply his skill to a really practical use. He was going by train to give a performance and happened to enter a compartment where there was a gang of card sharpers. They drew him into playing "Nap" with them; soon he began losing and knew that he was being cheated. They were using the ordinary conjuror's cards with plain white backs, of which he had a supply in his pocket. He soon found an opportunity of replacing their pack with one of his own, won back his losses with schoolboy satisfaction, and changed carriages at the first stopping-place, leaving the experts to solve the mystery for themselves. His self-possession in public and private, the mature and slightly initiate air that became less marked as he grew older, were probably due to these performances. They served in his real education. The intellectual side of what is usually common showman's art attracted him. The psychology of the conjuror's victim, amused and angry, straining all his wits on the wrong point; the festal atmosphere, or Stimmung, of inattentive youth and good temper necessary for success, the real poverty of intricate mechanical appliance compared with skill and patter—of these things he would talk in youth with an Edgar-Poe-like elaboration and solemnity, no doubt as well as any man in England. The best of these exhibitions was when Johnstone was professing to explain to a few friends a trick of his own doing. There came first, in long and well-cut sentences, a kind of metaphysic of conjuring; an account of those principles of delusion that were inapplicable in the present instance; exposure of the vulgar and obvious methods, which seemed to the crowd the same as those subtler ones which merely satisfied the conscience of the artist; and lastly, on the verge of the "explanation," a long parenthesis or a touch of coldness and abstraction, not to be interrupted, which ended, if at all, not in any explanation whatever, but in a last performance of the trick. Johnstone made a point of seeking acquaintance with the chief professors of manual illusion who visited England. He well knew, of course, the methods of signalling to counterfeit clairvoyance; and in one case, that of "Little Louie," whose show at the Westminster Aquarium was the best public marvel of the sort, he was convinced that the performers only eked out by signalling and other tricks the failures of some genuinely supernormal power of the "telepathic" kind which they themselves did not fully understand. We say thus much about legerdemain, as it was long our friend's quaint and picturesque substitute for the less original forms of young men's amusement. It gave a good deal of pleasure to other people, and he needed amusement, for his life was not to be easy.

Johnstone left Radley at the end of the summer term 1878, and for the next two years worked under Messrs. Wren and Gurney for the Indian Civil Service, the limit of entrance then being nineteen years. It must be admitted that he made no serious attempt to succeed, and that here, as at Oxford later, the prospect of an examination proved to be the reverse of an incentive to work. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that he failed, for though he would have found a great interest in the natives (and extended his répertoire of tricks) he would have been repelled by the average Anglo-Indian; besides, his abilities did not lie in the direction of legal and political administration. In October, 1880, Johnstone came up to Keble College, Oxford, and he quickly had a small circle round him. Among his friends were R. A. Farrar, son of the well-known Dean, and G. H. Fowler, the biologist, of his own College; Winter, of St. John's, the best musician among undergraduates; his biographers; and, later, Prof. York Powell, who instantly detected his ability and force of nature. Amongst the dons of Keble, Johnstone cared for two. One was the Warden, the Rev. E. S. Talbot, now Bishop of Southwark, who behaved with tact, and encouraged as far as he might a mind of no pattern type, which would not bring the College any regulation honours; the other was the Rev. J. R. Illingworth, the best writer of the school, and since known as a philosophical preacher. Ascetic, but thoroughly humane, Mr. Illingworth attracted Johnstone by his honesty and fineness of temper. But these clergymen, after all, dwelt in their own world, not in his. Until he met York Powell, Johnstone had found no older man from whom he could learn without cautions and reservations, and who struck him as a master-mind and a perfectly free spirit. The two men signally valued each other's conversation; they had many delicate qualities in common—the kind of delicacy only found in Bohemians of experience who have kept their perceptions at the finest edge. Powell materially helped Johnstone more than once by letting persons of consequence know what he thought of his younger friend. Even in Powell's record there was hardly any friendship more completely unruffled.

In youth, as an undergraduate, Johnstone was sallow, but healthy, rather lean and light, with a large and well-moulded musician's head, like Beethoven's or, still more, Rubinstein's, in the outline of the overhanging brow. It is easy to recall that earnest face, that delightful smile always characteristic of him, and, above all, the fascination of his playing on the piano. His voice was clear and carried well, with a sharp metallic ring when he was indignant, but was usually pitched low, as if unwilling to be overheard. His manner was formed and his talk was from the first what it remained: forcible, emphatic, and undoubtedly over-superlative at times, cut into quaintly elaborate but perfectly built sentences, which came so naturally to him that we have heard him discharge one of them the moment after opening his eyes in the morning. They can best be illustrated by his more familiar style in his writings and letters; the latter, indeed, give a fairly exact reflex of his talk. A flâneur of the best kind, he observed closely and curiously; in spite of long spells of apparent idleness, the alert quality of his mind never showed the faintest trace of slackness. He described vividly and accurately; and he had a remarkable gift for explaining any subject or point of view unfamiliar to his listeners, careful that the slightest detail should not escape them. And, in turn, he would quickly catch up and develop the ideas of his friends however vaguely suggested or insufficiently thought out. Johnstone professed Radical principles and was a member of the Russell Club, where the advanced Liberals met for papers and debates; but his Radicalism was social rather than political, and after the foreign experiences of his later years his opinions tended in the direction of strong government and Imperialism. At this time it amused him to be rather eccentric in dress, though he afterward became trim and fairly modish. In 1882 the intellectual undergraduate was capable of wearing a wide-brimmed, light-brown, hard hat, descending over the ears and eyes and long hair penthouse fashion. He had one of these "built for me, ground plan and projection" on a special scale. He also had a tie which could be folded into twenty-five different aspects or patterns, some of them striking; it was a mosaic of squares, and the harvest of a long search; twenty-five neckties in one. His collars were ultra-Byronic. Otherwise he was not markedly strange in attire; though the real incongruity was between these freaks of dress, and the keen intent grey gleam of his eyes, and the look of held-in vehemence and sensibility.

To what did this sensibility tend, what did it crave for? Not chiefly for definite learning, or book-knowledge, or for abstract philosophical truth. Johnstone's nature and gifts did not set towards scholarship (except afterwards to musical scholarship) or to pure speculation. He wanted, no doubt, to write, but he never cared to practise style as a mere handicraft; "let us have," he would say, "something with blood in it." He did not ask for religious solutions or consolations. Since nearly all he printed was on musical subjects, only his letters and our memories can give the impression of what he wanted. It was a sufficiently rare ambition among the Oxford young men of our time, though often enough professed. He wanted art and beauty. This desire, of course, in others often was a cant; there were scholars and verse-makers—more or less of the "æsthetic" type—sentimental and hard at bottom like most such persons, who cultivated beauty, and have usually come to nothing except prosperity. Johnstone was of another race to these; they never heard of him; he did not care for the main chance; he was in profound earnest. Few young men looked at life with so definite an aspiration to get the grace, enjoyment, and beauty out of it, and so definite a conviction that not much of these things is attainable. To such spirits, pre-appointed to suffer and wait, society seems at first an irrational welter, out of which, as by a miracle, emerge enchanting islets of grace, and wit, and cheer. The desire to find beauty in things or persons, and the desire to find soul and humanity, are the unalloyed, intense, and usually disappointed passions of elect youth claiming its rights. It is the second of them that saves a young man from the conceit and exclusive folly that may beset the first. Johnstone's tastes, his reading, loves and friendships were guided by these two passions, and by a third which took off from the strain of them, and was equally imperious—the wish to study the world and to be entertained reasonably. Classes did not exist for him, except that he often felt he was more likely to be able to foregather with and help men and women who were at a discount in the world. With such warring elements and a spirit so hard to satisfy, it was no wonder that his earlier years seemed planless, and in part were so. The instinct for travel and odd experience lasted long. No one but his near friends had much knowledge of this complex but essentially single nature. To them there seemed to be more than a seed of nobility and fair example in such a youth, so externally disappointing to parents, and guardians, and shepherds of colleges. Out of it was gradually wrought a character full of fire and aspiration, fundamentally austere and uncompromising in loyalty and in artistic conscience, but masked under a certain reticence. But this is to forestall by several years.

Aged 20.

Johnstone had entered Oxford at a time of great intellectual ferment. Looking back we can now see that it was during the years about 1880 that the revolutionary flood ran highest. The authority of Darwin and Huxley was unquestioned by many of the younger generation and all-embracing. The vague Christianity and sentimental optimism of Tennyson was held in little esteem beside the wider tolerance, the subtle analysis, the ceaseless curiosity of Browning. Above all "the Bard," as Swinburne was admiringly called, was the poet of the young men. Another very important factor in the mental development of our generation—and for Johnstone, perhaps, the strongest of all—was supplied by the French literature of the century, from the Romantic School onwards. It is no wonder, therefore, that the reaction from the High Church influences and surroundings of his youth was severe and complete, and that his highly æsthetic nature demanded the fullest artistic and intellectual freedom. The so-called "æsthetic movement," as we have before implied, left him untouched. He would have nothing to do with the attempt to symbolise and revive a civilisation that had utterly passed away, nor with the deliberate neglect of the modern world, and its most intense and living art—Music. Johnstone had not much mediæval sense, and was sparing in his appreciation of Rossetti, to whom he became unjust. What he liked best was "Jenny," though he was rightly critical on the unsound streaks in its rhetoric. It was first brought home to him, as to others of his group, by the skilful and dramatic reading, in a singular clanging voice, of his chief Keble friend, C. W. Pettit: a young man of high and melancholy character who was found drowned, probably by accident, in the Upper River, near Oxford, in the spring of 1882. A memorial stone with Pettit's initials marks the place, in an unfrequented reach of the stream, and the inscription, if not effaced, is now a mystery except to some few who remember him.

"Jenny" also struck upon what may be mentioned now as the deepest chord in Johnstone's sympathies; it is heard sounding in the letters, quoted below, that review the stories of Ruth, Fantine, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. His attitude in this matter was free from conventional ethics, and was, therefore, essentially Christian; and the relations of society to technically errant women, who have lapsed even once by accident, preoccupied him bitterly, and that in no theoretical or sequestered way. In his own gipsy experience, he witnessed at least one instance where the issue only just escaped disaster. He was haunted by the story, as De Quincey was by that of his lost companion in Oxford Street. The girl whom Johnstone, though generally hard up, managed to befriend in his secret, chivalrous and effectual fashion, finally married some one decent and respectable. Concealing the place and circumstance, he afterwards cast the incident of the "Fantine of Shotover" (we also conceal, of course, the name of the village) into a kind of prose sketch or poème, which he finished when he was about twenty-six, re-wrote twice, and thought of printing. It is unfortunately not now to be traced. Its musical, exalted prose, if inexperienced in form, gave genuine promise in that kind of composition; but he never to our knowledge, pursued the vein, and the prose in which he became expert was, apart from his letters, purely critical and expository. Still, enough has been said to show the force and unusual bent of Johnstone's human sympathies. It is clear that a young man's truth of instinct and strength of head are never more hardly taxed than when he is confronted with a concrete story of this kind. He may become foolish in opposite ways, especially if he is also an artist and has strength of temperament. He may be personally entangled through his sympathies, and make ill worse. He may be superior, and spoil everything by clumsy missionary benevolence, hard of hand. It is something if he can get behind the ordinary, blind, damnatory formulæ of society. This however, is not so difficult to a free mind. What is harder is to do it, and yet to see the facts without mere theorising, without the cumber of rhetorical and literary sentiment that obscures them. A Scotch-descended brain is useful at this point. In our memory Johnstone rose to the occasion thus presented, and acted and judged with balance. But we are more concerned now with the road by which he arrived at his force of sympathy. Æstheticism of the rootless academic kind had, it is evident, no hold upon him; he was too angry to be precious; but his motive power at bottom was that of the artist, as it was surely not that of the radical theorist or philanthropic organiser; although it was, if we use accurate language, by no means less human than theirs. What was at work was his sense of beauty; of physical beauty, first of all, or of grace, in the victimised person, as the sign and vesture of an originally sound and simple, or gay and innocently festal nature; beauty inbred, and then marred by some rough contact, and then marred more by social punishment, and seldom retrieved, even in part—as in the particular instance it chanced to be retrieved—by any fortunate and final escape. All this revolts the deepest of human feelings, which distinguishes us from most of the beasts, namely the æsthetic feeling, which at this point happens to coincide closely with the religious. A certain depth and rarity were thus super-added to the plain good feeling and kindliness of the man; and we can draw these facts from the jealous hiding-place of the past without undue violence to the shyness in which he wrapped them, as they show his personal and special path of approach to the human tragedy, and may even come to the notice of, and serve for the encouragement of similar minds at a corresponding stage of discontent. We may now go back to his early youth, when he was halfway through Oxford, and when some of these ideas were germinating into necessarily crude expression, which none the less has its interest. In a letter of 1881, he writes:—

"How can we escape from Swinburne? Does not modern society drive one to his school, at least the sort of society that I am supposed to have been brought up in, whose moral atmosphere is a sort of perpetual afternoon tea, where all the men are pale young curates and the women district visitors, their excitements vulgar ritualistic tea-pot tempests, the doctrinal significance of birettas, purificators.... Their minds ever on the alert to quash the smallest expression of any delight in natural beauty—'beauty is only skin-deep,' the damnedest lie that was ever formulated (compare Browning's Paracelsus). I wish with Gautier that I had been born in the days of the Roman Empire, when asceticism was almost unknown and what there was of it entirely specialised, before ever such an astounding classification as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil had been made, or every natural beauty writhed, like the divine feminine torso, in the accused grip of fashion." These are the outpourings of a very young man only twenty. It may fairly be said that Johnstone was always far more of an ascetic, personally, than he ever admitted, and the articles on Bach and Sir Edward Elgar abundantly prove the religious habit of mind induced by the training and associations of his early years. A year later his views have become better balanced, as shown by the following extract from a letter on the same subject.

"I read most of the Apologia a month or two back. As you say, Newman stands quite alone in his sincerity and spiritual power, the only orthodox thinker who is not an instance of self-deception resulting from reiterated untruth. All the purest and most beautiful aspects of the old faith seem to group round him. But the lights are almost out on the stage where he poses so magnificently, a rough crowd is spoiling all the scenic illusion, and garish sunbeams are coming in through the roof.

"I was moved to tears the day before yesterday by the appearance in this place [Tunbridge Wells] of a pretty face.

"There she was, a radiant and triumphant vindication of human nature among the myriad libels on the human form.

"I love the wonderful human body. How utterly the most beautiful of imaginable things in its strange dualism; perfect form expressed with infinite subtlety in two mutually supplemental phases. The one—tall, lithe-limbed, and athletic, with its shifting net-work of muscles beneath the clear brown skin, boldly chiselled features and short crisp hair—emblem of strength and swiftness and godlike protection, buoyant and fearless; the other—a harmony of exquisite curves, white and sensitive, and crowned with rippling hair, fulfilled of tender life and wondrous grace—living type of fruitfulness. To say that either deviated from the abstract perfection of form is merely to say the very idea of sex is such a deviation; and is there not a certain divine suggestiveness in this very fact? Their union is perfect Beauty—veils of the great human Sacrament. And all this is faded clean out of modern life. The belief in the body is dead. I believe some of us live and die never knowing the likeness of the human form, just as some of us do without ever seeing the sunrise.

"The 'pale Galilean' has banished Beauty; and only here and there, disguised almost beyond recognition, has it ventured with infinite apology to return.... Yet let us not be all unthankful to the pale Galilean and his lessons of suffering; there are too many of us who see in their own instincts the very impress of impossibility to be satisfied, who have to reflect with some bitterness, not 'il faut mourir,' but 'il faut vivre' and gather up our scraps and skulk along, hoping, perhaps, some day for a lowly place in some court in the House of Life, if it be only that of a scullion. And then at what a frightful cost have those lessons become part of the world's inheritance! Surely it cannot have been for nothing."

Obviously, in all this outburst, if its literary and intellectual origins are not hard to trace, there was no pose whatever; it was a mood that Johnstone honestly and passionately lived through, or rather it remained as a background to his nature. He was far from happy at this period. He had many friends and varied interests, but he felt that life was being wasted; in fact he had not "found himself," nor was he to do so until his visit to Germany. No doubt Keble was not the college for one of his temperament, and the English system of teaching the classics made them, for him, dead languages indeed; but had their oral use been encouraged (the practice of the late Professor Blackie) it is possible that he might have taken a real interest in them. With one of his friends he would speak constantly in Latin.

During the next few years Johnstone was mainly engaged in scholastic work, and the necessity of earning his own living prevented him from taking his degree. In a letter of September 1885, he regrets that he "had to live much in continuous utter rebellion against outward circumstances. In the morning is much strife and crying; in the evening, comfort of the pot. The Day of Rest brings loneliness in crowds—'stalled oxen and hatred.' Ca finira."

In the spring of 1887 he inherited a small legacy, which set him free, for a time, from the drudgery of teaching, and enabled him to carry out his long-deferred wish for a course of serious musical study at a foreign conservatorium. At this period he knew absolutely no German, and had only a fair knowledge of French, and was quite unconscious of possessing the natural gift for modern languages, which he was afterwards to turn to good account at the Edinburgh Academy and elsewhere. In August he went to Kreuznach to acquire the elements of German before proceeding to the Cologne Conservatorium, where he had determined to study. The family where he stayed could speak no English and but little French, so he was forced from the outset to express himself in a strange tongue and make shift to understand it. Early in October he entered the Conservatorium as a student, and engaged himself to take the year's course. His chief friend was M. Sidney Vantyn, now Professor of the Piano at the Liège Conservatoire, and then in his last year of study. They met in the class of Professor Eibenschütz, one of the most severe masters there, who made no allowance for Johnstone's previous amateur training, and was rather harsh and discouraging. He knew no English and Johnstone's German was still elementary, so Vantyn, who knew English thoroughly, acted as interpreter between them. In his recollections of those days M. Vantyn writes:—

"It was certainly evident that he had never had a musical training before his arrival in Cologne. Johnstone's fingers were stiff and he had to begin almost at the very beginning. And this he had the courage to do. At that time I was one of the advanced pupils, I offered to help, and for some months we practised together every day, more especially with a view to developing the fingers. In April, 1888, he showed me a sketch of a Valse de Concert. This composition was what one would have expected from Johnstone—bright, original, thorough. At my request he completed the Valse which I played shortly afterwards at a concert, where it met with a decided success. A little later it was sold to a music publisher at Liège. He soon left Herr Eibenschütz for Dr. Klauwell, with whom he studied the piano and harmony." Among the other professors at the Conservatorium were Humperdinck, afterwards famous as the composer of Hansel und Gretel, and Gustav Jensen, the brother of the better-known song writer.

At length, Johnstone was living in a world which brought out his best qualities and stimulated his keenest interests. But he now realised that he had come ten years too late for the attainment of any eminence, either as executant or composer, and contented himself with considerably extending his general knowledge of music. Nor did he ever confine his attention to music alone; but he endeavoured to see as much as possible of German methods of work, especially as regards the teaching of languages. In reading the Cologne verdict on Johnstone's early training it must be remembered that in his youth the piano was not well taught in England, where the principles and importance of a good technique were alike unknown. Of course, the principal and all his masters liked him personally, but naturally their chief interest lay with young pupils who promised to make a name in the musical world. The year's course at the Conservatorium ended in July, and about this time he writes:—

"As regards intentions, I am quite resolved now (and quite contented) to become a modern language teacher for life. During this year I have obtained some insight into the musical profession, with the conclusion that for all but the very few of quite the first rank it is a wretched life. So I am after all going to take my degree, and shall reside next term as a member of Balliol.... I could get a living by music now, but that would be to sink into a drudgery yet worse than anything I have yet had to do. I will not teach beginners. Besides, I can make a much better living in another profession."

Johnstone returned to England at the end of August, 1888, in wonderful spirits and in better health than he had ever before enjoyed, bursting with ideas and enthusiasm for everything German. It was Gulliver's homecoming after the voyage to the Houyhnhnms, and his friends had to listen to criticism of a similar kind. There is no doubt that this year brought real maturity to Johnstone. He gained a confidence in himself and a grip on life, which even when the prospect seemed most hopeless prevented him from ever again falling into his old moods of despondency. In October he returned to Oxford. Some years back he had taken his name off the books of Keble and migrated to New Inn Hall. The Hall had lately been absorbed by Balliol, and so in the end Johnstone became a member of the College which should have sheltered him from the beginning. In Balliol he was tolerably well at home, though now senior to the men around him. He forgathered with Farmer, who had just left Harrow for Balliol and with the Master's support arranged a concert in the Hall every Sunday evening. Once he gave a conjuring show, by Farmer's request. Jowett shrilled in cherubic mirth, sent for Johnstone, listened to his conversation, which flowed more easily than that of most of Jowett's undergraduate visitors and was of another stamp; and continued to treat him with politeness. Johnstone, whose classics had somewhat rusted during his stay in Germany, read with Mr. St. George Stock, the philosophical writer, then and since a well-known private teacher in Oxford. In December he passed the necessary schools and took his degree; his last experience of the old, disquieting city was pleasant, if brief—a period of recueillement before embarking upon the new career which he had chosen.

In the March following, 1889, he received an offer to go as tutor to the young son of Prince Abamélek in Podolia, a province of Southern Russia. The following account of his journey is interesting:—

"I left Berlin on Thursday morning at 8.30; the stage through Galicia, Oswiecim, Cracow, Lemberg, Podwoloczyska was a bad twenty-four hours. Just at the frontier the snow was immensely deep, standing in a wall on each side of the train. It was like being let into Russia through the works of a great snow fortification. The worst mistake I made was in bringing no victuals with me. I noticed at the frontier examination that my portmanteau was the only one not half full of food. The restaurants at the large junctions are excellent, being all under the management of Tartars, a race possessing the genius of cookery, but if you have to wait as I did, more than twenty-four hours at an out-of-the-way country station, you may find nothing obtainable but tea. Travelling in Russia is in any case tiring; the distances are interminable, and every journey has to be regarded as a sort of pilgrimage. On coming from Osipoffka here, we had to leave about ten in the evening to meet the desired train.

"The start was rather amusing, for we were a considerable caravan with children, servants, horses and dogs. All night we drove across the Steppe, accompanied by several mounted men with torches, which they lighted when the way was bad.

"I had an outside place and was somewhat dazed and curried by the wind and dust by the time we got to the station. Railway travelling is interesting if you have got the courage not to go first class. The carriages are on the American plan, with an opening down the middle. Instead of dapper bagmen you find long-coated and long-haired Jews, besides soldiers and students in curious costumes, while whole families, travelling together, produce the effect of an emigrant convoy. Everyone undresses with complete sang-froid.

"The family always come for the summer to this estate. It lies in a well-wooded district of Podolia, some hundred miles further north than the region to which I first went. The house is very large, and the garden magnificent. It is skirted by a river and there are primitive boats and an excellent bathing place. They have also a steam-launch of English manufacture, which is shortly to be got afloat.

"The neighbourhood is a paradise of Gipsies. The river throws out arms and endless windings, and the ground between is much broken and covered with undergrowth. Here the Gipsies encamp. One sees them in the evening bathing with their horses, and thus I had an opportunity of observing a thing, the peculiar and suggestive appropriateness of which is remarked on by Darwin in his 'Voyage of the Beagle,' namely, a naked man on a naked horse. This is the true centaur; they become one thing. I am now convinced that the Gipsies are the most physically beautiful of all races. In England they are abject beggars, but here rather more well-to-do than the average of the population; for they are not like the peasants, more than half-starved by ecclesiastical regulation, and obviously, in a country in such a stage as Russia is at present, they have a better time. There are plenty of immense regions where they can trap and fish quite unmolested, and the climate favours their mode of life—doubly, I should imagine, the winter giving a short account of defective constitutions. I suppose they are thieves, but to the casual observer they are entirely admirable. Troops of splendid little brown children go about in the evening singing or shrieking with shrill laughter. Their music, by the way, is valued in Russia. There are several troops who get large sums for attending various festivities.

"It has gradually been borne in upon me that the climate of this region is almost ideal. The sky is deep blue and far off, yet the heat is never really oppressive, on account of a constant breeze which brings balsam from the woods. For the landscape a finer contrast could scarcely be found to the Southern Steppe, which is like the burnt and scraped bottom of a pot. It has a character of its own, of course. From the fact of being usually able to see to the level horizon in all directions, it reminds one of the sea, while in summer the heated and quivering air which rises from the ground produces marvellous atmospheric effects; but there is always a wind, skin-drying and far from healthy. Here, on the other hand, we are well watered and surrounded by deep and lordly forest, and the aspect of the whole country is riant.

"I have not yet seen much of the kirchliches Wesen. The priest at Osipoffka, I gathered, is a man who has to get in a mass as often as he is sober enough. The Abaméleks do not receive him, and never go to Church while there. In any case, I do not think the Princess is particularly dévote. She is of Polish descent, and her family having given up Western Catholicism, have never become, I suppose, enthusiastic as Russian orthodox.

"Of the children the boy is much the most interesting. The eldest girl, though not without promise of beauty, is at present in a somewhat gaping and lumbering stage. The younger one is much smaller, though only a little younger than her sister, also of better intelligence, if worse temper. She laughs with a curious abandon and is full of câlineries, and is two totally different persons when pleased and bored.

"Master Paul has not the faintest resemblance that I can trace to either of them. He is an exceptionally round-limbed and well-made child, with low forehead and hair like dead-black fur showing a dead-white skin between, tending to stand up though perfectly soft, and always with a backward sweep, as though he had lately stood facing a high wind; beady brown eyes, clear brown colour, delicate little nose and chin and a mouth like a cherry, make up a face which is no false promise of his vivacity of temperament. It changes in the hundredth part of a second from bubbling laughter to a sort of Last Judgment seriousness.

"He wags his little tête de Polichinelle over his victuals, and converses with them in several languages. Sometimes his mother interrupts him and asks if he knows what he is saying, when he swears that he hasn't spoken for a quarter of an hour. Pauvre petit bijou she calls him."

In the autumn of 1889 his engagement as tutor ended, and he spent the winter in Odessa to study the language. He put himself, as usual, under conditions where it was impossible to speak any other language; entered a Russian family; prepared his questions in Russian when he shopped; and addressed in Russian the official who delayed his necessary papers until he had silently put down a bribe of two roubles, and who then shook him warmly by the hand. He was full of tales; he told of the English journalist, so aggressively and deliberately English that he would not uncover before the Tsar's portrait in a hairdresser's shop; of the Prince Abamélek, who was always talking of taking him out shooting, but never did so; of the Princess, who feared that her little Paul was "trop jeune encore pour profiter de son esprit eminemment cultivé"; of the social tyranny of Russian orthodoxy, which drove free-thinking persons of quality in the country to church and sacrament at all the Christian festivals; and, finally, of his shortness of funds which forced him to find his way home in humble style.

As an English liberal, Johnstone was naturally a welcome guest in the society of the Reform party; and on his return to England he was to meet Stepniak at the house of their common friend, York Powell, and to enroll himself among the Friends of Russian Freedom. But he was more in sympathy with the members of the Reform movement than with their objects. While in Russia, such connections secured him a mild surveillance on the part of the officials, and he had a little difficulty in obtaining the necessary passport to leave the country; but these vexations did not prevent him from holding that a paternal government was required in Russia, and that his countrymen as a whole were to blame for their harsh judgment of a civilisation merely because it ran counter to their own political ideals. The late Bishop Creighton arrived at precisely the same conclusion after his visit to Russia to attend the Coronation in 1896.

Aged 26.

On his way home he spent some months in Buda-Pesth, Vienna, and the Tyrol, and made his first visit to Bayreuth and the Passion Play at Oberammergau.

Shortly after his return to England Johnstone accepted a mastership in Modern Languages at the Edinburgh Academy, where his elder brother had been a classical master for some years. He came into residence in September, 1890, and Edinburgh was his home until he left that city for Manchester, in January, 1896. On the whole he was happy there; for though teaching foreign languages to boys is rather a thankless task, he was cheered from time to time by the successes of his pupils in examinations elsewhere, mainly those for entrance to Woolwich and Sandhurst. He could even confess, after a long summer holiday on the Continent, that "he was again thoroughly penetrated with the atmosphere of gray old long-faced Sawbath-keeping Edinburgh." After all, Johnstone, though he considered himself an Englishman, was, as may be gathered from his name, Scotch on his father's side; his mother, too, had a strain of Scotch blood. So perhaps that quiet self-contained manner and all that it implied came to him from north of the Tweed.

About this time, he was penetrated with the excellent purpose of training his bodily nerve. He knew that he could never be noticeably muscular, or anything more than wiry, with his light frame and high tension. But he would say, "we ought to be able to see a man fall from a high scaffolding on to the pavement, just before our feet, battered, and to do whatever is necessary without turning a hair." Accordingly, though himself most sensitive to pain and to the sight of it, he fraternised with the young doctors and surgeons whom he met, accompanied them to operations, watched the worst things, and even gave his help, which was more than once invited owing to his deftness and neatness of handling. In this way he got over any shrinking of the nerves. In Edinburgh he also managed to find some amusement. He was a foreigner in his adaptiveness to restaurant life, and found a quiet French café to his taste, where he took his visitors. The odd stratification of Edinburgh society into the various aristocracies of the country, University, professions and commerce, and its broad Scotch democratic feeling, entertained him. He was in one emergency summoned as French interpreter in the police court, and was pleased at having given satisfaction to himself and the magistrate, as the case was a somewhat delicate one and demanded nicety of expression. York Powell, writing to a friend in June, 1893, spoke of Johnstone as

"a fine fellow, very interesting; a musician doomed for the sins of others (for he is not a great sinner) to be a dominie in Edinboro', where he is consoled by an old Frenchman who can talk and understand; and they have, with one or two more, a little French club. Each pays sixpence a night for expenses, and you have simple refreshments and sound conversation."

Above all, his musical opportunities were good and varied, and he took the fullest advantage of them. Music in Edinburgh had, for many years, maintained a high standard. The orchestral concerts were second only to those conducted by Hallé and Richter; the latter brought his own band occasionally, and every solo player of eminence came there from time to time. He found many congenial friends, and was a frequent guest at the houses of Mrs. Sellar, the widow of the Professor of Humanity at Edinburgh, and Dr. Berry Hart, the famous surgeon, where musical amateurs met constantly; and he was a member of the "Rhyme and Reason Club," where literary and artistic questions were discussed.

His most noteworthy contribution to the Club was a paper on the "Relation of Music to the Words in Songs," which he afterwards read at the Manchester College of Music, and which well merits a summary here (and some extracts). It shows how his mind was steadily working in the direction of musical criticism. Its origin was a statement made in a paper on Tennyson's songs, that poetry, if it be true poetry, is self-sufficient, and the addition of music to it, however fine the music may be in itself, is an intrusion and a disturbance for the true lover of poetry.

The first part of his paper is concerned with an examination into the nature of music and its place among the arts. He goes on to deplore the divorce between music and the songs of modern English poets, none of which are capable of being sung, and traces this divergence back to the days when Puritanism banished music from church and village green. Burns, he adds, wrote genuine songs; but he is the only song-writer since the days of Elizabeth, and worthy of being ranked with Heine. He concludes by claiming for music "that it is not an inferior art, a mere hand-maid to poetry, but a direct revelation of the principle of beauty and on a footing of honourable equality with poetry. The songs of all the really great lyrical poets are obviously and radiantly singable, and meant to be sung, and in their authors' lifetime they were sung. So far then from the finest lyrical poetry being impaired by association with music, it is only the maimed poetry of decadence that does not admit of such association, one unfailing mark of a lyric of the highest order being that it rises to the true singing quality." In the following passage Johnstone sets forth the ideal at which the composer of songs should aim:—

"The great German song composers, such as Schubert, Schumann, Franz and Brahms, working in profound sympathy with the 'Volkslied,' have arrived at a conception of the song infinitely richer, more refined, and more genial than is to be found elsewhere. With Franz and Schumann we find that, in the best cases, the music positively furnishes a sort of literary criticism on the text, with such exquisite exactness does the composer appreciate the text and supply the appropriate musical counterpart.

"We often hear of the music being wedded to the words of a song, and it is very curious to find so wonderfully neat and perfect a metaphor being used by people who are far from suspecting its perfection. This is in fact, precisely what takes place when a good song is composed—the music is wedded to the verse, though the expression is often used by those who think that the music has nothing to do but to express again, more forcibly perhaps, whatever feeling is expressed by the verse, who think, in other words, that the music is enslaved, not wedded, to the poetry.

"But music is not restricted to the expression of the feeling of certain verses or of any other feeling or feelings. The poetry and the music have each their independent character and their measure of independent beauty, and this independent beauty and character is in no sense destroyed by the union. The music has far more to do than merely express again or emphasise whatever feeling is expressed by the verse. It may accompany the verse, adorn the verse, brighten the verse, show up the character of the verse in a new light, and, in turn, be much improved by the association; but on the other hand, if destitute of independent beauty, the music can never become beautiful by being wedded to something.

"It will now have become clear, what according to the view of music that I have endeavoured to explain, is the task of a song composer. He has far more to do than to express again in tones the feeling of the song. He has to furnish a composition that, in the first place, has life; and, in the domain of art, to have life is to have beauty.

"Secondly, it must have no incompatibility of temperament with the text, but must be such as can once for all be wedded to the text with happy results.

"It is needless to say that a composer who takes this view, or has a subconscious appreciation of the facts on which this view is based, will not, if he cares for his text, be satisfied with the first outworn rubbish that comes to hand, by way of musical setting. He will regret whatever is totally wanting in naturalness and freshness.

"He will not, like the composer of drawing-room ballads, capture some wretched cadence, threadbare with much use, and trick it out, dragging up the melody into long high notes, crowing and shouting as though he had discovered America, whereas all he has really discovered is an old shoe lying by the roadside that once, perhaps, belonged to a prince, but after being stolen by the valet was given to a beggar, and so through a succession of beggars, the last of whom left it by the side of the high road."

Johnstone's interest in music was becoming more and more intense. In the intervals of his school work he composed a Gavotte which had a quaint origin. He was one day in a music publisher's shop in Edinburgh, when he saw a gavotte on the counter which had won a prize of £5 or £10 offered by the firm for the best composition in gavotte form submitted to them. "And is this your prize gavotte?" said Johnstone, "Well, if I couldn't compose a better gavotte than that in the time it takes to write it down I should think even worse of myself than I do." "Why then," said the representative of the firm, "go home and compose your gavotte, we will publish it if we take it and give you the same money as this prize-winner got." Johnstone went home and composed it, and the firm carried out their promise.

His few compositions were nearly always actually produced and completed under some sudden pressure from outside. Left to himself, his critical impulse was always stronger than his productive; he became dissatisfied and dropped the thing he was working at. His friend, the well-known singer, Fritz Hedmondt, having obtained from him a promise to arrange a certain song, let matters drop until the concert date was fixed and the programmes printed with the song announced "arranged by Mr. Arthur Johnstone." He then forwarded the programme to Johnstone with the observation that, of course, the thing had to be done. And it was done, in twenty-four hours, and was a beautiful and original bit of harmonization. He also set several songs, which, like the gavotte, met with the approval of Prof. F. Niecks, and were the main subjects of a fairly regular correspondence with Vantyn. In one of these letters he gives an appreciation of the pianoforte piece he most admired.

"About Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques I can only say this: For a long time past I have privately held the opinion that the work is on the whole, the finest composition for pianoforte solo in existence. This will no doubt seem to you exaggerated, but such is my feeling about it. The extraordinary wealth of imaginative beauty in those variations I believe to be quite without parallel. Just think of that last variation before the finale. There is nothing else in music which bears even the faintest resemblance to it."

Every summer he spent several weeks on the continent, and it was on one of these visits that he first made the acquaintance of Nietzsche's philosophy, which was then hardly known in England though beginning to be talked of in Scotland under the influence of Dr. Tille of Glasgow.

In December, 1903, he writes to Miss Sellar:—

"The author of Schopenhauer als Erzicher is Friedrich Nietzsche. I suppose you will no more agree with the point of view than with Sudermann's; for, in fact, the point of view of the two writers is practically identical, but I do not think you can fail to recognise the extraordinary originality and force, and, above all, the magnificent honesty of Nietzsche.

"Have you not noticed that most serious-minded and well-intentioned people in our day go about with a revised table of the virtues, saying 'truth' when they mean a certain group of optimistic delusions; saying 'courage' for readiness in accepting and energy in reiterating such delusions, and persistency in closing the eyes to all those facts of life which do not harmonise with them.

"So far as my experience goes, the only people in our day who say and admit the truth to the best of their lights are the disciples of Schopenhauer—Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, Sudermann, Nietzsche.

"No doubt you will regard this statement with my 'personal equation' looming large. I mean you will consider there is no more in it than that these are the teachers with whom I happen to agree. But I shall be surprised if you do not admit Nietzsche's honesty and the extraordinarily searching and luminous character of his thought."

If Johnstone had been put through the mangle of the Honour School called "Greats," it might have left him superciliously deaf to Nietzsche. As it was, being without philosophic training, but deeply sensitive to any new, articulate and daring voice, as well as perfectly at home in German, he found in Nietzsche a liberating and refreshing power. And then his personal experiences disposed him to accept the main thesis of Nietzsche's philosophy that mankind, owing to the teachings of Christianity, had sacrificed the future of the race to over-much care for the weaker brethren. At the same time he kept his head, and signed no vow of submission to Nietzsche. The review of Tille's translation, well bears partial reprinting in this volume for its keen intelligence and also as a quite early sketch of the Nietzschian system in the English press. It was one of the first articles written by Johnstone for the Manchester Guardian, and makes us regret, unwisely no doubt, that his mind was to be absorbed more and more in music.

Yet, in spite of that absorption, he was as deeply interested as ever in literature and the drama, when dealing with the most serious issues and problems of life. The purely technical and executive side of these arts appealed less to him, and so, to take one instance, he soon outgrew his early enthusiasm for Swinburne, wondered "whether he ever actually gets there," and was even too severe in revulsion. Intentional obscurity irritated him. Mallarmé and his school he would not attempt to understand. His suspicions indeed were well founded, for at the last Mallarmé in his lecture on "La Musique et les Lettres" had arrived at forecasting a new future for music when the sound and rhythm of words would replace the more clumsy and material tones of instruments.

Browning and Meredith repelled him by their style, though they attracted him by their subjects and method of treatment. Some of his letters on literature can be quoted here, as this side of his gifts is little represented in reviews. It will be seen that he talks less of the style and form, than of the temper and insight of the three great romancers, Meredith, Hugo, and Hardy. He is still intent, as they are, on the special kind of subject, "man's inhumanity to women," which we have seen absorbing him. Meredith was not widely read in Oxford in the early eighties by the younger men, though he had always had a small and impassioned public there since 1870. In our time he was rarely quoted. He was too strong for tender youth; and any "scholar" or worshipper of pure form or arbiter of elegancies could preach on Meredith's harshness and quaintness, and wish that he were more considerately feeble. Johnstone's tone when at twenty-five, in 1886, he writes of Meredith is decisive enough, though his words would now be taken as a repetition of the obvious.

"Rhoda Fleming," he writes, "left me with increased wonder that its author has not a more generally recognised position. He is the only living English prose-writer with a real mind-kingdom of his own. The story moves like fate—as inevitably, as cruelly (the white sacrifice!), but just misses being dramatic. Why does he not write a play? He could; perhaps something better than has been done for centuries."

A year earlier he had written:—"When you say Hugo is 'so false' you must mean not quite practical. Mrs. Gaskell's 'Ruth' is 'false' if you like, as well as irrelevant. Its real tendency is the reverse of the authoress' ostensible purpose. The woman becomes a partner in a union perfectly unpolluted and humane, but unauthorised, and even this is made inevitable. The Quaker element then turns it into tragedy, and the climax is effected by a person who is a sufficiently remarkable instance of a figure created by an apostle of mild propriety. He would have upset the whole scheme of the Redemption by making the good Jesus sin the sin of hate. This worthy, but rather Pharisaical Methodist—this large-boned man of substance who makes responses louder than anyone else—this nameless monster, whose foul-mouthed brawling on discovery of the woman's history while under him as a governess, is made the insult in answer to which her protector produces the plea (which is the purpose of the book); who, perhaps, takes his place as the best type in fiction of the most hateful character that the varying conditions of climate and creed ever yet conspired to produce on this, God's flowery earth—comes duly in for his share in the comprehensive wash-brush at the finish. By the simple expedient of turning his hair from black to white he is qualified for service at the heroine's peaceful tomb, where he joins in dropping the charitable tear.

"The beautiful touches in this work are the seal of its futility, arising as they do from the character of Ruth—an impossible incarnation of all the virtues and graces—a sort of virgin mother, at last in fact a crowned saint; and I cannot believe in her story, perhaps from being too young. It may be that the remembrance of Ruth and other such works, while reading Fantine, misled me; that the escape from the high-pew and hassock flavour of Methodism to Hugo's 'prophetic soul of the wide world' blinded. Yet, when a work like 'Les Misérables,' with the prodigious activity of its dramatic impulse, takes in its sweep the story of Fantine, something may surely be expected, if ever a writer is to be adequate on such a subject, and, I cannot but think, rightly. The 'eternal Priestess of Humanity blasted for the Sins of the People'—Fantine is just the thought dramatised.

"Essentially hopeless and inexorable, surpassing the limit of horror permissible in art.... And still the nameless agonies of the martyr's death are forgotten for the angel-benediction at her grave. And is it nothing to have achieved that this benediction should have been possible after such a life?...

"Yes, 'Les Misérables,' notwithstanding incidental impossibilities, albeit ever in extremes, looms in my mind as incomparably the greatest thing in fiction with which I am acquainted, and the longer ago it gets since I read it and the more I read, the stronger this impression grows. It seemed to me that the touches of truth in this 'false' work were quite fearful in their power; such, for instance, of that gang of convicts being jolted by in the van, 'their heads knocking together.' He produces the physical effects of actual presence at what he describes. Of course, it violates every possible canon from the 'Unities' downwards; in fact, it might almost be made the basis of a new law of multiplicities."

Some years later, in 1892, he wrote his impression on reading Hardy's masterpiece: "I have just finished 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles.' You may have noticed a passage in Vol. I. running thus (chap. xvi.):—'Long thatched sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted with vivid green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts rubbed to a glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows and calves of bygone years, now passed to an oblivion almost inconceivable in its profundity.'

"If a man speaks so of cattle how must he feel towards his human brothers and sisters! How strong must be in him that profoundest of poetic passions, the 'carent quia vate sacro' feeling! For, no doubt, sometimes in these quiet country places a heart of such gold as Tess's throbs away in complete obscurity its allotted number of pulses. Our temper has altered from the time when this emotion was dismissed with a 'Let not ambition mock their useful toil,' etc., and Hardy has fully realised the appalling paths of such tragedies in humble life. 'This time,' he seems to have said, 'this time no mincing and no hedging. Let the disdainful smilers and those others who shift all responsibilities on to Providence look to themselves.'

"There are passages of infinite pathos in this story: the 'too-late' meeting of Tess with Angel Clare in the sea-side lodging, and the terrific scene immediately after, when Angel is gone and she is left to sob out her distraction; where Tess says to Angel, 'Why didn't you stay and love me when I was sixteen with my little sisters and brothers?':—the long letter she writes about a year after Angel has left her, and where she practises the ballads that he had liked best, while working in the field, 'the tears running down her cheeks all the while at the thought that, perhaps, he would not after all come to hear her, and the silly words of the songs resounding in painful mockery of the aching heart of the singer.' And, earlier, the baptising by Tess of her own infant, and—perhaps lying nearest of all to the fountain of tears—those glimpses of her early innocence. 'Tess's pride would not allow her to turn her head again to learn what her father's meaning was, if he had any, and thus she moved on with the whole body to the enclosure where there was to be dancing on the green' ... when one knows against what fate the poor girl is going! But is it not all just a little too cruel? To represent such adorable goodness, and sweetness, and faithfulness as being rewarded with the actual gibbet—is not this a little hard, even on Providence? The unsparingly tragic ending is not the only thing, nor even the main thing that distinguishes this from other stories dealing with the same sort of subject.

"In George Eliot's Hetty we evidently have to do with a character quite other than Tess's. The imputation of depravity attached to the fact that Hetty, when scarcely more than a child, looked long in the glass and thought how fine it would be to be a lady—this seems to me an exceedingly miserable evidence of the somewhat crude vice of character by which, notwithstanding George Eliot's immense genius, her sympathy with the simple-hearted was, in certain cases, marred or destroyed. But Hetty's character must be taken as it is revealed in action and intention, and she abandons her infant, whereas the soul of Tess goes out in an agony of endeavour to preserve hers, and, long after its death, she exposes herself to ridicule by tending its outcast's grave. In Hetty's dreams and schemes, again no thought of her parents and people or hope of bettering their lot has place, while Tess at the darkest moment of her via dolorosa—at Stonehenge, just before God finally forsakes her—thinks of her sister 'Liza-Lu, and secures a protector for those she is leaving behind.

"Scott is, of course, without a trace of George Eliot's defect, and always treats Effie Deans like a gentleman. By certain touches, too, he indicates how deep is his concern for her, such as that crowd of blackguards and urchins about the court-house, for whose holiday Effie was so nearly murdered. But besides the fact that Scott has no true grasp of feminine character, he makes Jeanie his heroine and never really undertakes to tell Effie's story. And George Eliot, after disposing of Hetty in a hurry, actually offers to interest us in the love affairs of that preaching woman! In Fantine there are details perhaps more intolerable to hear than this story of Hardy's, but the general effect is less strong. For partly we distrust Hugo's rhetoric, and besides, we are beguiled and consoled at the end, however unreasonably, by his 'fortunately God knows where to look for graves,' while in 'Tess' the concluding incidents come with a thunderbolt inevitableness, and at the end nothing stands between us and the hideous ignominy, the entire forgetfulness, the utter nakedness. But though her life has become forfeit, perhaps that ignominy of the actual gibbet might have been spared. In any case, there is nothing to be said at the end of such a tale but—

"Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,
* * * * * * *
And maiden virture rudely strumpeted!"

Yet let us not find fault, for terrible as it is to find a man who, discarding the tradition that it is the office of poets to soothe and amuse their fellow-prisoners with pretty fables and tales of the governor's beneficence—a man who rejects this almost universal tradition and appals his hearers with an account of malignant treacheries committed by that governor—yet I sympathise with the temper that does this, and believe that it has its roots in a genuine and manly feeling, the feeling that I tried to suggest at the beginning.

"Hardy is a strong example of that curious, inverted Manichæism so characteristic of our time—a sort of mediæval horror of the grossness of matter, balanced by a most unmediæval sense of the utter madness of insulting and despising matter, seeing that the tyranny of it is absolute.

"He is perhaps the first Briton to write as a true man of the people on such a subject, that is to say, to take it quite seriously. His story is told with such passion that almost every particle of doctrinaire affectation or easy pattern work is consumed and refined away, and he has created in Tess the most inexpressibly pathetic figure that I know of in literature."

About Zola he writes in a letter of July, 1893:—

"Perhaps you have read 'Le Rêve.' It and 'La Debâcle' are the only two of Zola's longer novels that could be recommended to a lady, and even the latter with some misgiving. I cannot say that I think 'Le Rêve' one of Zola's best works. I am far from sure that the French critic who said: 'Nous préférons Monsieur Zola à quatre pattes' was not in the right. Nevertheless, there are passages in it stamped by Zola's unique greatness. With regard to its defects, I would rather say nothing at present, except one—the end strikes me as absurd, franchement mauvais et du placage litteraire—a recrudescence of something that we have left far behind, something dead that should have been left to bury its dead. All the same there are, I think, truly great things in the book."

Of Marie Bashkirtseff, September, 1891, he writes:—

"Concerning Marie Bashkirtseff, she seems to me to have had nearly every gift except two, namely imagination and heart. Above all, a sort of critical intuition, which prevented her from ever resting satisfied in anything second-rate. She was a typical little Russian, small of stature, dark of tint; in temperament sensitive, romantic, versatile; unlike the northern Russians, who are prevalently tall and fair and have a certain contempt for the unpractical. Nearly the whole Russian harvest of folk-songs and cognate treasure comes from the south, from Cossacks and little Russians, the true Muscovite being almost a songless bird. Marie must have had in a high degree the incomparable grace and distinction of her countrywomen, with that wonderful animation and 'fever of life' which makes the atmosphere of Russian society the warmest and brightest in the world. As to your statement that 'some of her failings, like her love of luxury and her desire to be attended to at all costs, are pure vanity and wormwood,' I have always stuck up for this barbaric element, and believe that largely on it depends the prodigious formative power of a free feminine influence—that thing of such rarity as to be almost non-existent in our puritanical society. I know a man at half a glance who has ever been under it."

Referring to his correspondent's remarks that Russians seem to look at religious questions like intelligent children, he writes:—

"Did you ever hear of the Soo-ré-ye-vites, the sect of which Leo Tolstoi is a member?

"Soorayeff was a peasant ignorant of reading and writing. He had read in church 'God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth,' and by pure sympathy and unaided intelligence he jumped to the conclusion that Jesus Christ meant what He said. Think of the prodigious freshness of nature and the promise that this shows.

"There are the five hundred sects of Great Britain all accepting the same fundamental absurdities, and yet this simple man, never having heard of criticism, is enabled to penetrate the viewless veil, woven by the years and the churches over the face of the Son of Man, so as to understand that Christ actually meant that God was a Spirit.

"Suppose a missionary went among a savage tribe and tried to teach them what Justice is; told them he himself was a son of Justice, and that Justice was made manifest in him; lastly, that Justice is a spirit. Suppose he came back after an absence and found the people teaching that Justice was three persons and burning alive those who did not accept this view!"

In England, unless it were in London, Johnstone seldom felt at home; in Scotland, still less. He liked to wander from one easy variegated foreign city to another, where good music and good plays are quickly accessible, and British convention is a mere figure in the comic papers. He valued his friends in Edinburgh, but the place displeased him. He would sit on Arthur's seat and hate the modern Athens steaming there below him. Its curious old mossy layers of culture, professional and academic, could hardly satisfy him, and he quickly got through the moss to the stone. The ferment of the young "Celtic" writers and painters seemed to come to little. He did not inure himself to the occasionally inconsiderate manners of the Lowland Scotch, nor could he bring himself to repay them steadily in kind. Some of the officials with whom he dealt appeared to have been born, where they would die, in Gath. He would hardly agree with, but he could understand the unqualified remark of his old French associate, "Il n'y a pas d'amour dans ce pays." Probably he was unjust to Edinburgh; but though his forbears were partly Scotch, he was not, like Stevenson, born Scotch, and he never really saw the native character from within. Teaching may not have been the best introduction to it. He taught well, having the right sort of delivery and insistent method. But it is disgusting to an artist to teach anything for bread, except, perhaps, his own craft. The hard work, the pull on the nerves and patience, can scarcely have strengthened Johnstone's health.

Indeed, wherever he lived he had a touch of the exile. He dwelt really in some region not of this earth at all, where the masters of music sit in their Valhalla, where the hard waste matter that makes up most of our life is eliminated, while the essence of its pain and pleasure is distilled through art and presented in sublime purity of form. The saint has his vision of personal goodness, the philosopher his of systematic truth, the reformer his of a new society. The artist—for the term must be extended to those who perceive as well as those who produce—has his ideal vision, which varies in form with his special art. It follows that the valuable part of actual life, to such a temper, is made up of such stray hours of vivid experience and intelligence as, taken together, give some notion of that other world. We had written "moments" instead of "hours," but the former word would be misleading, with the false suggestion of fleeting passive sensation, for which Walter Pater, or rather those who misinterpret him, must answer. Every experience, in truth, whether moral, sensuous, or intellectual, that is, of real worth, contributes to the artist's dream. Johnstone posed so little and lived by this principle so naturally and unwittingly that he could not be called a doctrinairè. But few men save up their vital impressions about everything so carefully, engraving them patiently on the memory, and dismissing the vast mass of experience that tells us nothing. Hence Johnstone was never quite naturalised in any abode, though he managed to be sociable and festive when the chances came. In Edinburgh, however, for the reasons given, he stayed over long, and we may regret that he was not sooner freed from teaching school.

Practically, there was some compensation for so late an escape. The teacher's attitude, as of one clearly laying down the law, remained in much of his press work, and to its advantage. The public as a whole, though it must not be told so, is like a large, impatient, grumbling, half-ignorant class of schoolboys. Reviewing is therefore educational work. Not that the dominie-tone is wanted; for that is the worst of faults, even in school-teaching! But the teacher does not take his class into the secret of his own doubts, hesitations, or revulsions; he gives his results, he gives what he thinks the truth. Or, if a figure from another calling be preferred, the critic operates, beneficently if often without anæsthetics. Further, there was something to be said for the late specialisation of Johnstone's ruling talent. His nature was rich; his articles have the style of a man who has lived, as well as one who knows his trade. No youth, though ever so clever, could have made them. He treats music as a means by which all the emotions, whether large and solemn, or light and happy, or sombre, or perverse, are transformed, often out of recognition, into their counterparts in sound; so that the kinds of joy and pain given by music, like those given by high drama but in a rarer measure, are stripped of any stinging personal reference, while unweakened in force. The hearer is thus mysteriously shown, as Rossetti says, the "road he came," and yet has no more, for the time, to do with himself, save in so far as he is one of a thousand men to whom the music interprets their experience, widely and deeply. Therefore, to understand music, a man must have suffered. Johnstone had met and weathered some of the suffering which an intense nature, even under conditions easier than his, must absolutely meet with on this earth, and must either give in to and go under, or must get over and appropriate—there is no choice! He chose the latter way, being strong enough, and so became a better musical critic.

Besides, his bent for music was growing more marked during the last years in Edinburgh. It was clear to his friends what his profession ought to be, and his chance of adopting it came at the end of 1895. The musical critic of the Manchester Guardian, Mr. Fremantle, died; and it was hard to find a successor who would stamp his own mark and make the critical judgments of the paper a power, in the musical capital in the North of England. Johnstone had already written for the Manchester Guardian articles of sundry kinds; a review of the translation of Nietzsche, part of which is reprinted in this book, and a notice on Tolstoi; as well as on musical matters. York Powell was foremost in commending his friend to the editor as a man of worth and high special talent. An offer was sent to Johnstone, which he weighed with even more than his usual deliberation. He felt the break with his friends in Scotland, and he had misgivings, being a slow writer and not fond of his pen, as to his power to work under journalistic conditions. As even his letters show, he composed carefully and was a master of exact expression; thus he felt some anxiety at having to work under the pressure of a time limit, and that too at a late hour. He therefore sent, without in any way jumping at the offer as an escape from usherdom, a dignified reply that gave an impression of his quality. It was not easy for his friends to make him decide with the necessary haste. In the end he accepted the proposal, much to their relief, and came to Manchester in January, 1896. There he stayed for the rest of his life.

In Manchester, Johnstone's existence and outlook were quite altered. He had not to wait until the daily chare was over before he could turn to music, which now took up his force and time for the working part of the year. He had taught well, but others could have done that. Now, for nine years, he gave himself to the work for which he was built, and which few could do so well. Certainly no one did it in quite his way. The union of temperament, knowledge, style, gave him an accent of his own. His lore and his sensibility always grew and enriched each other. He did not wholly limit himself to music, and before passing to this his chief occupation, we may note his activity elsewhere. It was too much to hope he would have any great distracting interest. Music is enough and more for one man. But he spared some time for literature. He had a swift preference even as a boy for all that was fresh, vehement, and strange in modern drama and fiction. He was not at all like the complacent, young, up-to-date college tutor, who reads the latest exotic writers, but remains unaltered. Johnstone, if he liked a play or story at all, was seized and shaken; a kind of enthusiasm which is a better preface to a true judgment than any amount of accomplished and balanced coldness, or the pseudo-"judicial" frame of mind. He was not so fond of poetry, or so sure in his perception of it, caring too little for purely verbal in contrast with accompanied or wordless music. We have reprinted above, however, a part of his lecture on the scientific frontier between the two arts. He found time also, when the press of the season was over, for some byplay as a reviewer. He wrote in commanding style about books on conjuring, on billiards, and on cooking. He used to say that cooking was his real gift. To go to a certain café and quote Mr. Johnstone's name, was to ensure a respectful and an even terrified service; and the well-drilled waiter would commend a particular sauce-bottle as that which his distinguished customer had used. But he remembered, with more pleasure than banquets, having slept on shelves with the Cretan rebels in the mountains, and sharing and digesting their extremely dried fish. He also wrote on weighty matters outside music; the chief of these were English and German plays. The companies that travelled from the Fatherland to the Germanic city of the British Empire, and acted in the Schiller-Anstalt, often played pieces involving actual dialect. Johnstone's familiarity with German, as well as his natural sympathy with writers like Hauptmann (and Sudermann in a less degree), marked him out as the right reviewer. Plays, like concerts, have to be noticed in hot haste on the very evening; or, at best, if given on Saturday, by the following evening; for so much expedition is the minotaur-public of a daily paper supposed to stipulate. The work done on such terms is not always the worst in substance, though only long wont can give the kind of finish or varnish that is desired. The same remark applies to musical reviewing; but Johnstone's distrust of himself was needless. The result was more in accordance with the expectation of his friends than with his own. Many of his articles were written at great speed, and as one of his colleagues said, if it had been possible for him to wait till he felt he could do justice to the subject, most of them would never have been written at all.

Before passing to his main labours as a journalist, we may here quote, in illustration, part of the notice that he wrote on the Johannisfeuer of Sudermann. Our reprints in this book deal almost wholly with music, and, as we have said, he thought of music as a comment, at several removes and after strange distillations, on life and experience. But the drama, which is a copy of life, not indeed a direct one, but subject to the laws of theatrical art, also engrossed him, especially when it was at once modern in form and homely and passionate in theme.

The Bavarian peasants and their girls still jump through the dying embers of their bonfires on the eve of St. John:—

"For the truth is Mr. Parson, a remnant of heathenism stirs in the blood of us all. It has persisted through all the centuries since ancient Germanic times, and, once a year, it blazes up with the fire of St. John's Eve. For that night the spooks of ancient heathenism are unchained. Witches ride on broomsticks, instead of being beaten with them, and pass through the air, with mocking laughter, on their way to the Blocksberg. The Wild Hunt scours over the forest and wilder desires over our hearts—all that is most frenzied and most utterly doomed to nonfulfilment. No matter what the order may be that for the time being reigns in the world, for one single heart's desire to be realised, and to give us something to live on, a thousand others must go to ruin, not only for the ever unattainable, but others, allowed to escape from a hand that held them too carelessly. Yes, those bonfires which blaze up—do you know what they are? They are the spectres of our heart's desires, the red-winged birds of paradise that we might have kept by us for life but allowed to escape, the spooks of the old order, of the heathenism that is in us. However satisfied we may be in the light of day and beneath the reign of law and order, this is St. John's Eve in the night sacred to Midsummer Madness. I drink to your ancient heathen fires. Let them blaze high! Will no one clink glasses with me?"—(Act. iii., sc. 3.)

"So the title 'Johannisfeuer,' with its double meaning, literal and symbolical, must be rendered into English—according as we wish to lay stress on the former or the latter—'The Bonfires of St. John's Eve' or 'Midsummer Madness.' On seeing the remarkably fine performance of this play the non-German spectator, impressed with the general worthlessness of German drama since the Augustan age (that is, the age of Goethe and Schiller), might well wonder how it is possible for a German writer to produce such a thing—a play, simple and unpretentious in design, yet fraught through and through with poetic beauty; a play written with northern sharpness of characteristic and, at the same time, with Italian warmth, eloquence, and keenness of sympathy with the moods of nature; a play distinctly Ibsenesque in structure and largely also in style, yet, for all its sombre colouring, not haggard and aghast, like nearly all the products of the Scandinavian's demonic spirit. The scene is in a farm in East Prussia, in a neighbourhood with a mixed population of Germans, Poles, and Lithuanians. The name of the farmer's family is Vogelreuther. Marikke, a Lithuanian gipsy girl, is a foster-child in their house, having been picked up along with her mother and carried home by Mr. and Mrs. Vogelreuther in their sledge during the famine winter of 1867. In the house she is known as Heimchen (the Cricket) and in the neighbourhood as the 'famine child.' In the farm-house lives a young man named George, an orphan nephew of Vogelreuther, indebted to the famine for his upbringing. In the opening of the play George has made a good start in life, having been apprenticed to an architect in Königsberg and done well. He is betrothed to the farmer's daughter Gertrude, but some years before there had been a love affair between him and Heimchen, who had repulsed him hastily, not because she did not care for him, but because she did not believe in the honesty of his intentions. While busying herself with preparations for her foster-sister's coming marriage, Heimchen discovers a manuscript book belonging to George and containing verses and a diary. She cannot resist the temptation to read, and she thus discovers that George had loved her deeply and seriously, despite the difference in their standing. Heimchen's mother—a besotted and thievish old woman—haunts the neighbourhood, and has been recognised by her daughter. Heimchen has been told that her mother is dead, but knows better. Meetings with the terrible old woman re-awaken the gipsy instincts in Heimchen. George loves her still at heart, and circumstances draw the two together. The crisis is reached on the night of St. John's eve, when after an evening in which the whole neighbourhood, lit up with bonfires, is given over to punch drinking, dancing, and excitement. George is requested by the unsuspecting farmer to escort Heimchen to the railway station, she having a night train to catch to Königsberg. The ending is intensely Ibsenesque in style. George, on the very day fixed for his wedding with Gertrude, is ready to fly with Heimchen, but, mindful of the immense obligations binding them both to the farmer's family, he insists that there shall be at least an explanation. Heimchen, instinctively grasping the difference between a man's and a woman's love, foresees the regrets that would result from the overthrow of George's plans. She changes her attitude and forbids him to speak to the farmer. The St. John fires are burnt out. The midsummer madness is over. It is now for her to return to duty and dulness and the burden of a starved heart. For life she must remain satisfied with her one night of bliss on St. John's eve. So she stands alone and watches the departure of George's and Gertrude's wedding procession.

"The great scene of the play, in which Heimchen and George are left alone together, is managed with wonderful stagecraft. Till the last moment they seem to be adhering to 'good resolutions,' but a series of incidents, all absolutely natural, occur to distract attention and cause delay, till they hear the whistle of the train and know that it is too late. The bonfires, the punch-drinking, and, above all, George's speech, from which the quotation at the head of these notes is taken, have fired their blood, and Heimchen is unstrung by the painful meeting with her disreputable mother earlier in the day, when she had been obliged to buy back things that her mother had pilfered. At last she throws herself on her knees before George and says, 'Du! Küss' mich nicht! Ich will dich küssen. Ich will alles auf mich nehmen. Meine Mutter stiehlt. Ich stehl' auch'—and the curtain falls."

To return to the date of Johnstone's arrival at the Guardian office in Manchester, where he was made welcome. He found friends upon the staff, and kept them in spite of his want of sympathy with some of the political views of the paper. On politics he never wrote, except when recording matters of fact on his mission to the Greco-Turkish war. But, not to speak of living persons, he was brought for some years into close contact with one of the best-equipped and finest-tempered journalists of our time. William Thomas Arnold, the son of Thomas, and nephew of Matthew Arnold, was one of the two or three men, senior to himself, in his personal circle, for whom Johnstone had a profound regard both as a man and as a master-craftsman. This regard was well-deserved. An authoritative scholar in the history of the early Roman Empire, a critic who cast original light on Keats and some of the Jacobean poets, at home in Dryden, in the French literature both of the great century and the romantic age, abreast also of criticism in both countries, and a sound vigorous judge of acting and the drama, Arnold made time to share the daily burdens and aid in sustaining the high uncompromising standards of a newspaper whose many foes have never questioned its consistent and iron courage during the last ten years. Arnold often stood to Johnstone in the capacity of actual editorial chief for the evening. It is hateful to be edited, even to the change of a comma, except where errors of fact or risks of libel are in question. Political contributions are another thing; a common line—the "view of the paper"—must be adhered to, and self-sacrifice in detail, within large limits, is simply necessary. That is warfare; you may resign your commission, but, if you do not, must accept instructions. But in art and letters! The mutual respect of the two men may be measured by the freedom that was left to Johnstone, and by the spirit in which he, rightly the most sensitive of men in such concerns and naturally irritable, took the occasional blue-pencillings. His other colleagues also held Johnstone in regard, in spite of the vehemence with which he went his own way. Sometimes he would come in from the concert, like an instrument whose strings are still quivering at full pitch, and this is not the mood for rapid committee work at night. There might be one great explanation from time to time which cleared the air. It was seen that he was thinking of his subject, and not of his own vanity, and that he was immensely, indignantly, and delightfully wrapped up in that subject. On the whole it was a good training for him, and few strong men, beginning at the age of thirty-four, would have shown themselves, despite occasional rubs, so reasonably adaptive. It may also be said that few newspapers would have stood so well by a writer who, whenever he felt it his duty to do so, would promptly perturb the musical hive, careless whether drone or hornet minded. Mr. John Morley, who ought to know, has expressed some doubt as to whether journalism tends to special elevation of character. There are cases where the doubt does not arise. When the critic, on artistic, and therefore on public, grounds, and with due store of knowledge, raises a fury by his condemnations, and when the editor, who has to think of his paper and its standing, supports the critic, believing him likely to be right, that is a good evening's work. The scope therefore granted to Johnstone as a journalist by his editor was a proof of sagacity, for he became a power in the musical community, not only of Manchester but of the larger region the Manchester Guardian reaches. No doubt, though he was allowed as free a hand in expressing his opinions as any other of his craft, and a much freer one than the majority, he sometimes wearied of the necessary restrictions of a journalist's position and their deadening effect upon the mind. An outburst, expressive of a deep and recurring mood, occurs in a letter of January, 1902, written on his return to Manchester, and describing a day he had spent in London with York Powell.

"There is now no one in this neighbourhood with whom I can converse. I find myself permanently in the journalistic attitude, regarding it as luck if I can say two per cent. of what I think about anything; so the meeting with Powell was an oasis at the end of some very sandy months."

This complaint was laid not against the paper he served, but against the sparseness of the kind of society he liked best. To understand it some curious features of life in Manchester must be recalled. He used at times to come to a small society of friends, which lasted for eight or nine years, and met during the business year at about monthly intervals, at the members' dwellings, for free conversation. He is remembered as having there discoursed on Tolstoy's conceptions of art with his usual energy and elaboration. The stringent mad-logic of the great art-hater had once attracted, but at last disgusted him, and he saw that even Tolstoy's famed novels, with their show of godlike equity, really held the seed of his later prejudices against science, art, and sexual love. But such occasions when he could talk freely seemed to grow rarer. The fault lay somewhat, no doubt, in his own radical solitariness of mind, but also in the surrounding conditions.

Huge Manchester, almost a metropolis, is full of force, full of mental as well as commercial stir; it is not, no, it is not! a social city. If it ever learns how to amuse itself, it will really be that; it will be a metropolis. The reasons of the defect are partly physical. It has an air, a rainfall, a climate, and an aspect, that do not make for good spirits. The suburbs lie far apart in a ring round the business crater, which becomes dark and most unfestal after ten o'clock at night, and which those who cannot drive think twice of crossing. Also there is an unfused mixture of races and classes. Apart from Greeks and Armenians, who stand apart from one another and from other nations, there are the German and other Jews on one side, and the Germans who are not Jews markedly on another side. There are the big Lancashire money-makers, of the soil; the shopkeepers and the vast clerkly multitude; the professional classes, or castes; and the hand-workers, rough, but in essential breeding and wits perhaps the soundest of all. For social purposes many of these elements do not count. It is the Germans, the Jews, and the professional classes, with many of the intelligent business men in a large way, who probably civilise Manchester, in the stricter sense of the term. It is as civilised an English city as can be found in England outside London, if the press, the libraries, the university, the theatres, and the music, be all weighed together. But its bent hardly lies towards society, in the sense of ringing, collective, intellectually disinterested talk, or towards gaiety of the more bearable kind. There is ample dining, dancing, and official entertainment, but those are not enough for salvation. The vast number of philanthropic, educational, religious, and political agencies, which fill playtime with labour for the good of mankind or party, entitle the city to be called great and progressive, but they do not precisely make it blithe. They inspire respect, and no one who has not lived there many years can realise their number or the strenuous, positive, character of the place; the southern nature seems soft and vague in comparison. But the free talk of the real capitals, and their resources for witty amusement, imply a large leisured class, an element of flâneurs in the population, which is hardly possible in a big North-English city. There is personal isolation in a curious measure—a want of rallying points for talk. The atoms repel each other and fly apart. Men go home to their families or rooms and stop there. If they go out, it is often for some "meeting" of an earnest description, not to amuse themselves; or, if they wish to do this, they go to music, which is a somewhat solitary pleasure. Talk, for the satisfaction of talking, is less common. There are exceptions; but this is the impression given by long residence in Manchester. The Germans, with their club and singing and cheerfulness, have done their best for their adopted city. But it was hard for a cosmopolitan person like Arthur Johnstone, at once deeply bent on art and beauty of all kinds, and also demanding some kind of cheerful foreign life in the intervals of work, to find his account quickly in his new abode, and the opinion of it we have recorded above is largely his own.

For some time, therefore, he felt that Manchester was admirable rather than refreshing. It had found for him the work of his life; he soon became a force in his own calling; he had friends, new as well as old, in the place; and he liked it better, as time passed, and as he managed to find some of the intelligent festiveness that he wanted. Gradually he touched several quite different circles, chiefly doubtless the musical, but others also, journalistic, academic, and professional. Except with a few, Johnstone made his way somewhat slowly in society. He could be outspoken, uncompromising, and even explosive (though he never attacked unless he thought there was provocation). These characteristics and his daring line as a critic, both in talk and print, caused him to be under-estimated by some otherwise intelligent persons. He might have said, with Saint-Simon, that he was not "un sujet académique." He disliked dons as a class; at Oxford and elsewhere they made him, of course wrongly, restive. He had not been through their mill, and they did not always care for or see his curious and original play of mind. Their committee-trained caution of phrase was alarmed by his emphasis and heavy-shotted superlatives, which merely amused his friends. There were, of course, those among them who liked him well. In some houses he had, apart from his musical gifts, a certain name for being "clever and spiky." The latter epithet was only partially true, for he was simple-hearted and good-natured the moment that the occasion arose. "His sympathy," writes Madame de Navarro (Miss Mary Anderson), "never failed, and his unaffected love and enthusiasm for the good, the true, and the beautiful, could always be counted upon." All who had eyes saw this in Johnstone, but all had not eyes. He was interested, absorbed, whelmed in his subject, and thought instinctively more about ideas and purposes than about persons, so that he sometimes ignored persons and therefore dissatisfied them. He also said, what is true, that of the provinces, as compared with the capital, "the favourite sin is cowardice." This, and any semblance of snobbery, he openly despised. He liked to have power and weight—and was right in liking it—in order to carry out certain musical reforms. But he dismissed at once anyone who, as he put it, "may be very well-informed, yet clearly cares nothing at all for things in themselves, but simply and solely to be a person of consideration." So, except as a musical critic, his measure, for good reasons, was not invariably taken. He knew this fact, and felt it with some keenness, but not from the side of disappointed conceit. He thought it was his lot in life not to be able to talk freely and acceptably save to a very few persons. He was sorry, but convinced that thus he was built. The old Oxford sense of solitariness—and Oxford leaves dregs in the cup for these her sensitive children—does not easily let go its victim. The happiness and success of the latter years, however, were to leave him markedly easier, mellower, and more communicative. He was, indeed, fully entering on his own when he was cut down. But a larger and more various experience than ever yet, both of thought and travel, was to be his lot within the last eight years of his short life.

In April, 1897, Johnstone made his appearance in a new capacity. The dispute between Greece and Turkey over the treatment of the Christians in Crete had reached an acute stage and war was expected to break out at any moment. The Manchester Guardian, more than any other English newspaper, had championed the Greek cause. Naturally the proprietors wished to secure the best and fullest accounts of the operations and to have them despatched in advance of other papers. Mr. J. B. Atkins was chosen to accompany the army in the field, and Johnstone's knowledge of modern languages and acquaintance with Eastern Europe marked him out as a valuable colleague. He was posted at Athens to receive reports from the front, to arrange all the details connected with their transmission, and to review the progress of the war, work which he carried through very successfully. His gift of tongues, which once caused him to be congratulated in Germany on "speaking English so well," enabled him soon to get a working knowledge of modern Greek; he was fortunate too in finding a Greek gentleman, who, grateful for the attitude of the Manchester Guardian, acted as his interpreter and showed him about the city. The same friend was on intimate terms with the Royal family, and introduced Johnstone to the King and the Duke of Sparta. At the close of his stay at Athens, he hesitatingly asked if there was any return he could make for the various kindnesses he had received, when this friend of royalty named so modest a fee that Johnstone was staggered; "it was the pourboire of a head-waiter," he said afterwards when describing the incident, adding that he had never realised what true democracy meant until then. Among his associates there was the correspondent of a Viennese paper who had somehow incurred the dislike and suspicion of the war-party, but, as Johnstone thought, unjustly. At last his life was openly threatened; there was no hope for him unless he managed to leave the country at once, and even then there was a fair chance that he might never reach the ship alive. Johnstone, being on good terms with the patriotic party, pleaded for his life and undertook to get him away; he cycled behind him for the four miles from Athens to the Piræus, and when they reached the harbour kept the mob off until he was safely on board an Austrian Lloyd steamer. The ride was an exciting one, for it was expected that an attempt would be made to shoot the obnoxious correspondent on the way down to the port; some shots were actually fired, but went wide of the mark. When the war was nearing the end Johnstone's services were not so necessary at Athens, and he went to join Mr. Atkins in camp; but he saw no fighting, for the day after his arrival peace was declared. His colleague returned to England, and Johnstone spent some weeks in Crete to investigate the stories of those atrocities which had been the immediate cause of the war. He went sac au dos like J. K. Huysmans in 1870, but unlike him, roughed it with good humour and looked upon hardships of this kind as a helpful and valuable experience. A year later when congratulating a friend, who was somewhat habit-ridden, on his marriage, he wrote, "The problem of changing one's habits is emphatically one of those to be solved 'ambulando.' The forms of ambulation best adapted to the purpose are serving on a campaign, doing time 'with,' and getting married;" admitting, however, that the last, though less drastic, was more permanent in its effect.

Of the stay in Crete he always spoke as the best holiday of his life. He was struck with the beauty both of the lowlands and the hills, and predicted the day when the isle would be one of the great resorts of Europe. The mountaineers redeemed for him the modern Greek race, which his experience in Athens had led him to scorn utterly. He thought that the citizen and official class were shifty and mendacious, and his epithets were Juvenalian in vigour. The hillmen were of another race, in body and spirit, and he loved sharing their hardy life. It is right to add that he exempted the ordinary Greek soldier on the mainland from the condemnation which he reserved for the officers. Some considerable time he spent on the water, chartering a small steamer in order to coast up near the seat of war. Before making his way homeward he went to Constantinople, and the surface view, at any rate, of the Turk pleased him well. He returned home in unusually buoyant health and wearing a moustache, having fallen under the spell of Eastern prejudice against the clean-shaved.

At the beginning of the musical season in October, 1898, a considerable storm was raised in Manchester by the action of the guarantors of the Hallé concerts, who had offered the post of conductor to Dr. Richter, instead of renewing Dr. Cowen's appointment. It fell to Johnstone to write the two leading articles on the subject which appeared in the Manchester Guardian of October 4th and 17th. His clear and judicial summing up of the case left no room for questioning the right of the guarantors to act as they had done, while his special knowledge of Dr. Richter's immense services to musical art enabled him to write with authority on the great chance now open for Manchester's acceptance. In short, the point at issue lay between sentimental considerations and the good of the community, and Johnstone very naturally declared for the latter. Our reference to this controversy is intentionally brief, but its importance at the time was considerable. Johnstone was now recognised as a leader of musical opinion in Manchester, a position and influence which became greatly extended in the years that followed.

There is no doubt as to the kind of power that he exerted. He did not touch the actual administration of music in Manchester, in the College of Music, or the Hallé concerts, or elsewhere. He did not directly advise, therefore, in the choice of programmes, players, or singers. But he went to every performance of the slightest note, whether popular or not, and wrote about it incisively and heedfully, always preferring to praise and interpret, but hitting very hard when he thought it imperative to do so. He went to the prize exhibitions of the college pupils, and reviewed them (omitting names) with a sympathetic ear for promise. He lectured, often very well, at Mr. Rowley's Sunday gatherings in Ancoats, and also in the History Theatre of Owens College. As a lecturer, it may be observed, he suffered at times from having too much to say and failing to compress it perfectly. But he held an audience of unprofessional hearers with his sharply-cut and pungent style; and, in one respect he was a fortunately un-English lecturer, for his power of graphic gesture was quite noteworthy. These, however, were casual activities; presswork took almost all his strength. He did a vast amount of musical reviewing, and his room was stacked with the publications that he simply found it useless to criticise. But the notices of actual singing and playing were his main labour, as well as the pioneer articles on unknown or imperfectly appreciated works. These were of high value, and contain some of his best writing, being done at fuller leisure. As to the quality of his published utterances we may say no more; the articles we have saved for this book must speak for themselves. But, without doubt, his judgment was looked for, and welcomed or feared. He made it less easy for bad performers to come again. He was generous, preferring even a slight excess, to oncoming and unrecognised talent, or to remote and exotic kinds of talent which made the fashionable multitude impatient. He became the worthy and articulate voice of musical opinion in and beyond one of the English capitals of the art.

We could hardly illustrate the kind of power that Johnstone exerted better than by quoting what Canon Gorton writes concerning his connection with the Morecambe musical festival:—

"Our festival was born in 1891. From the first it was organised entirely apart from any pecuniary object; it brought us some delightful music, as we set our own test pieces, and its aim was essentially educational. Our special correspondent from the Manchester Guardian did not arrive on the scene until 1899. We had grown accustomed to unstinted praise, the judges exhausted the adjectives in the language in describing the excellence of the singing, composers told us that they had never heard their part-songs so perfectly rendered. We thought we were perfect. Then came a bomb from the critic (April 27th, 1899). He was not in touch with us or cognisant with our aim, nor did he allow for our limitations. Much of the music seemed to him unworthy; the competitive or sporting element annoyed him; he saw rocks ahead, rocks on which others had been wrecked. He wrote: 'The array of talent is no doubt imposing, but far too much of the music is of an inferior stamp. It should not be forgotten that the end and aim of such festivals is to foster a taste for music. But the taste for inferior music needs no fostering. If, therefore, the organisers of these festivals prescribe second-rate works for the competitions, they simply destroy the raison d'être of these competitions. It is music as an art—not music as a sport or trade—that requires fostering. There is a danger that such concerts may degenerate into a vulgar pot-hunting business, and one would like to see everything done, both as regards the music prescribed and the conduct of the proceedings of the festival itself, to guard against that danger.' I do not claim to know much about music, but I recognise good English when I see it. I saw that 'our special correspondent' was a master of his craft. I replied at once in the Manchester Guardian rejecting his interpretation of our motives, and still more the motives which brought choirs to our Festival. I said that 'no chastening was joyous' and urged that the critic should have patience, that we were then walking and that some day we would run, and expressed a hope that he might be there to see. I afterwards called upon him at the Reform Club, and this commenced a friendship, the memory of which I shall always hold as a matter of pride. He henceforth became for us 'the critic.' We not only awaited his arrival, but in choice of music Mr. Howson (the choir-master) even applied an additional test: 'This will test the choir, but will it also satisfy Mr. Arthur Johnstone's taste?' The choir were conscious ever of his presence. The judges were in the box giving their awards, but 'Mr. Johnstone is in the grand circle, what does he think?' I heard him once appeal to his wife; 'Am I not always open to conviction?' With his first article in view, and with the knowledge of what subsequently he did for us, I could but allow that he made good his claim, for he became the most stalwart defender of our Morecambe musical festival—'a movement,' he wrote in 1903 'that is one of the most genuine and hopeful things in the musical England of to-day.' Again he complained that 'little or nothing has been done by the teachers of music in Manchester to encourage the musical revival that for a good many years had been going on in the North of England, and more particularly in Lancashire.' Later, he wrote a remarkable article in reply to the strictures of Mr. J. Spencer Curwen. Mr. Curwen had questioned whether our festivals help choral music in the long run, and proceeded to comfort us by saying that 'we were entering upon a dangerous path. The more success you have, the nearer you will approach to the state of things which exists in Wales.' To this belated warning Mr. Johnstone replied (October 5th, 1903): 'The peculiar evils enumerated by Mr. Spencer Curwen as being fostered by competitions were observed a good many years ago by those who are organising meetings in North Lancashire. Indeed, one may say the observation of these evils was the point of departure in Lancashire, and we are, therefore, a little tired of these strictures on the choirs got up to learn certain pieces, dispersing immediately afterwards; on fragmentary performances, and the rest of the black things on Mr. Curwen's list. It is evident that Mr. Curwen is entirely without knowledge of the best Lancashire choirs formed by the influence of competition in their own neighbourhood. These choirs have as strong a principle of cohesion as any in the world. Their repertory is exceedingly wide. Their organisers show immense enterprise in unearthing the treasures of the old English and Italian madrigal writers and of the finest modern part-song writers. Let Mr. Curwen go to Morecambe next spring; his ideas on the subject of musical competition will be pretty thoroughly revolutionised.' Yes, Mr. Johnstone was open to conviction, sought nothing less than the truth, was at infinite pains to obtain it—O si sic omnes. But the debt we owe to him was not merely because he was a critic keen to discern the good, not merely because he proved a fearless champion. He became a friend always ready to discuss methods of development, and to place his exact and wide knowledge at our disposal, and after we had formed our plans it was a great gain to Mr. Howson and myself to test their wisdom by his opinion. He spoke frequently of the capacity for conducting which the festival revealed, and inveighed against the star system, whether among vocalists, instrumentalists, or conductors—and of these last he had in his mind's eye several whom he maintained we ought to rely upon. It does not fall to me to speak of him as a friend, as a delightful companion, as a courteous gentleman—one whom I married and one whom, alas! I buried in the prime of his powers."

Johnstone took the position he had thus made with increasing seriousness, and worked during the Manchester musical season harder than ever. In the summer he went abroad, but not entirely for rest. He greatly expanded his knowledge, and also his musical reputation and that of his paper, by his visit to festivals at Bayreuth, at Oberammergau, at Düsseldorf, and at Vienna. Forced to choose, we have hardly been able, within these limits, to quote from the contributions he sent home. The last of his foreign journeys was unlike all the others, which had been taken alone. The words quoted above from the letter of January, 1902, were no longer to be true, though the desired companionship came late. A solitary life in lodgings, and the absence of domestic ties to one of his affectionate and home-loving nature (which lay behind his gipsy habits) could not be compensated even by hosts of friends; but brighter days were in store. In June, 1902, he became engaged to Miss Lucy Morris, a Manchester lady who had won considerable distinction at Cambridge; and henceforward the most human of interests gave fresh inspiration to his life and work.

Their marriage took place two years later, on June 28th, 1904, quietly at Morecambe. The friend of both, Canon Gorton, married them, and another friend, Mr. Howson, undertook the musical part of the ceremony, which was performed by the Morecambe Madrigal Society and the church choir. There never was a wedding with better music, and for once the hackneyed description, "the service was fully choral," might have been used with a real meaning. The honeymoon was spent on the Riffel Alp: afterwards the travellers attended the Bayreuth festival, returning to Manchester at the end of August, where they went to live at Tarnhelm (named after the magic helmet of the "Ring") in Victoria Park. A few more months of happiness remained to Johnstone. On Thursday, December 8th, he was taken seriously ill, but though in considerable pain he attended a concert in the evening, and wrote a notice of the performance. The next morning his condition was worse, and on Saturday he was operated upon for appendicitis. But relief came too late, and on Friday, December 16th, his sufferings ended. He had just completed his forty-third year: he was in the plenitude of his intellectual powers, and had entered upon the happiest and most useful period of his life.

This cruel and sudden ending to Johnstone's career, at a moment when he had reason to be reconciled to life and to forgive circumstance, when he was wider in his critical sympathies and more thoroughly master of his means of expression than ever before, and when his public influence was strong, stirred the musical society of north-western England. North and South are two different nations—neighbours that often carefully ignore and misunderstand each other. This appears to be specially the case in musical criticism. The London press said much too little. But the word "provincial" has no application to the musical energies of Manchester. It is like one of the great German towns, Munich or Frankfurt, being wholly independent of the capital, of which it is not a colony. The mark made by Johnstone in this region was attested in a measure that he would never have foreseen. The Manchester Guardian, besides giving an honourable obituary notice to its critic, received far more letters in his honour, expressing sorrow at his early death and admiration of his character, than it found space to print, although the most salient of them filled its columns. They were written with knowledge, not by laymen, but by persons with whom Johnstone had worked and had dealt faithfully, sometimes stringently. The remark of Canon Gorton, "I began my friendship with a quarrel," might be echoed more than once. Johnstone's clean, hard literary thrust, or punch, free from noisy hammering violence, was a not infrequent introduction to his acquaintance. It was given with a will, but in a spirit thoroughly, and to third parties amusingly, impersonal. The letters as a whole give a clear notion of the intelligent professional view concerning him; of his honesty, catholicity, and knowledge. He had been everywhere, he counted, and when he had gone he was missed.

One of Johnstone's brothers in the craft, Mr. Ernest Newman, after referring to a dispute which had led to their friendship, spoke of him as "the best and strongest Englishman of our time in this line." Dr. Adolph Brodsky, after praising in especial Johnstone's accounts of pianoforte performances, singled out his services in breaking down the popular prejudice in England against Bach. Others wrote of his musical erudition and his "laudable desire to prevent anything in the form of charlatanism from finding a place in the musical assemblies of Manchester." Canon Gorton, who, as we quoted above, wrote with gratitude of the high stimulus given by Johnstone to those local efforts which save music from being unduly centralised in the bigger cities, and his pertinent remarks upon the rarity and value of great musical critics claim quotation, as they bring home the public sense of loss in Johnstone's death.

"He held a high view of his office, and would make a sacrifice of self rather than a sacrifice of truth. It is difficult to calculate the extent of your loss. Musicians succeed musicians; they being dead may yet speak. But the critic's words are ephemeral; they remain in the files of the newspapers. For musicians there are schools; but what school is there for critics? In music we need guides, men with a wide horizon, a general culture, men unfettered by musical faction, with definite ideals, with command of the English tongue, of courage and of true instinct. Such an one, I take it, was Mr. Arthur Johnstone. Who will fill his place?"

Upon this precise statement of the case we could not try to improve. We can only add some words upon the nature of the man apart from his profession. In an estimate of Johnstone's character the foremost place must be assigned to his love of truth in all things; this virtue was the touchstone he applied to his friends and to all artistic work. M. Vantyn happily quotes, as the most appropriate motto for him, Locke's words, "To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world and the seed-plot of all other virtues," adding by way of comment, "In everything, in all intercourse, upon all occasions, under all circumstances, whether in enjoyment, in work, in serious intercourse, he was a gentleman in the strictest sense of the word." Next we may place his wonderful sympathy with the oppressed in every class. Even where there was much that roused his anger in the sinner, as in the case of Oscar Wilde, he was indignant at the merciless treatment he received, and pleaded for a minor punishment. Where his sympathy could have free play he was tender in the extreme, he would take infinite personal trouble, and give all that his modest means permitted. He was fond of animals, he disliked the idea of killing them in "sport," and was glad that most of his intimate friends shared his view. But he was not unreasonable on this point; and, to take the real test question, he was not absolutely opposed to vivisection under stringent conditions. For all his early talk of the "joy of life" he was more anxious to secure it for others than for himself. He was tolerant under his armour, and would rebuke pointless severity by saying, "Well, well, there is something wrong with almost everybody;" but he did not extend this indulgence to the cruel and pedantic. His youthful rebelliousness, apartness, and questioning of society did not all vanish, but were taken up and transformed into a more flexible temper; for they had never been the mere plant of nihilism and vanity, that a selfish nature manures in its barren private garden. Some of his friends valued, above all, his total lack of the small inquisitiveness, which he resented more than anything in others. He was deep in his work or in the minor preparations for the day, and did not trouble much about his friends' affairs. But when anything was doing, he emerged at once. When one of his old companions was in suspense over illness at home, and yet could do nothing but wait, Johnstone planned for him and personally conducted an elaborate series of distractions and amusements covering about four hours—not an easy thing to do in Manchester—each of them appearing to be improvised as it came. The trouble over, he relapsed into thought and went his ways. There were many such incidents. A picturesque and noble character of this kind, with its traits of quaintness, claims thus much record, and the more so that reticence made it less easy to discover. To the public the journalist is such a mere spectral hand and pen, writing by lamplight, without a face or form behind it, as we hear of in a certain class of old ghost-stories. Johnstone had become more than this to many of his readers. But they could not know him as a man. It is well, therefore, to lift so much of his privacy as may enable them partially to do so. He went through the world scornful of its common valuations, appraising for himself, watching with a certain isolation, and always preferring (if he must choose) liberty to happiness, and rightful pride to obvious advantage. But he was all the more human for that.

We may here say something about his piano playing. Johnstone, of course, never professed to be more than an amateur. He was quite aware that the difference in executive skill between the professional and the best amateur is almost as great in music as in billiards; and that, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold's saying, "Technique is three-fourths of musical performance." As to the remaining fourth his playing stood on a very high level. Even in undergraduate days the charm of his rendering was considerable, always carefully thought out and individual. If he had never heard a piece performed, his insight was remarkable, lighting instinctively upon what one realised was the best way of playing it. His touch was very delicate; he never forced the tone out of a piano, and always avoided anything that might be called hard hitting. He liked best playing something in the style of a Rubinstein barcarolle, where the music should speak through a veil of sound. But his strength really lay in a fine sense of rhythm, a rare gift even among great pianists. Whatever piece he attempted he took at the proper pace, even if occasionally a note might be missed or a passage blurred, rather than give a false idea of it by playing too slowly; what was altogether beyond his powers he left alone. On his return from the Cologne Conservatoire his actual execution was at its best, the fingers strong and lissom; and, being at the top of his physical health, his playing was full of almost exuberant vitality. A weak circulation was always a trial, and it was his habit to warm his fingers at a fire, when possible, before sitting down to the piano. It was perhaps a small talent, but singularly dainty and cultivated, for which our memory of twenty-five years is profoundly grateful.

We might expect that the qualities he aimed at in his own playing would be those that most attracted him in the great pianists of his period. Of course he admired at their full value those transcendent players, Rubinstein, Sophie Menter, Paderewski, Rosenthal; but there are also artists equally unapproachable in their own delicate way, such as Pachmann, Godowsky, Reisenauer, Siloti, and it was from them he received the greatest personal pleasure.

As critic his first object was to explain the qualities and scope of the music (in Pater's words, "to disengage its virtue"); to show, if a classic, why it had attained its position, if modern, why it should command serious attention. He never assumed too much musical knowledge on the part of his readers, avoiding the use of technical expressions, still more of stereotyped phrases. Bad work and slovenly performance he could chastise unsparingly, but he never wrote harshly when he recognised genuine effort, and he was very generous in his praise of young performers, and often attended minor concerts at some inconvenience to encourage rising artists. His style was clear and precise, rather expository in tone; coloured when the occasion demanded, and occasionally enriched with allusions to other arts. Thus the elaborate tracery of Gothic architecture exhibited in Strasburg Cathedral (a favourite figure) is employed to illustrate Bach and contrasted with the formal classicism of earlier composers, and the Palladian style of Handel; Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius" is compared to some "jewelled ciboire of the Middle Ages;" a pianist's playing of arabesque passages reminds him of the "arrogance and costly unreason of fine jewellery." His discernment of any new work of permanent value was quick and unerring; we may instance his early estimate of Elgar and indeed of Strauss too (for his position then was uncertain) as having been in advance of general musical opinion, though unquestioned at the present day. Tchaïkovsky's Pathetic Symphony was a more obvious discovery; here he showed his critical power rather in quenching the popular enthusiasm (which he had at first assisted in creating) for this work when the public seemed to have lost all sense of proportion, by reminding his readers that after all "Tchaïkovsky and Dvoràk are inspired barbarians and must not be put on the same level with Beethoven and Schumann." Mention too should be made of his appreciation of Liszt, whose services to music are too frequently ignored—the creator of the modern pianoforte technique, the brilliant and original composer, and the generous friend of Wagner.

In their choice of the articles of which this volume is composed the editors have given special prominence to those on the works of Sir Edward Elgar and Herr Richard Strauss, the two composers of our time who, as Johnstone considered, would bear the largest share in influencing the cause of musical development. Many of the articles were written on the first production of important works, and, in Elgar's case, further impressions are given of later performances of the same work. Those on the great acknowledged masters, if they cannot add much more to our stock of actual knowledge, are interesting as confessions of a sound musical faith. It is also true that the sum of potential energy in the works of these great masters is infinite; in this sense, that they strike a new flash out of every fresh and apprehensive mind. They can beget generations of critics, each with another thing to say. Such criticism is not a mere absorptive or passive process; it is re-creation: it puts into fresh terms, by the art of words, some of the impressions that have been built up of sound without language; or it tells those who have felt the same thing what they did not clearly know or remember that they had felt. The power to explain music is rarer than competence in judging books. It may be thought that amongst Englishmen of our generation Arthur Johnstone had as large a share as any of this re-creative genius.

Musical
Criticisms

[CHAPTER I.]
——
BACH.

The Genius of Bach.

November 27, 1901.

In the minds of those who have specially at heart the welfare and progress of musical art in this country nothing at the present time looms larger than the church music of Bach. To acquiesce in the prevalent indifference of the public to that music we feel to be impossible. If Shakespeare is nothing but a bore, there seems to be an end of imaginative literature; and similarly, in music, any person whom Bach entirely fails to interest had better give up all pretence to being musical. For Bach is not one of the composers, like Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaïkovsky, Dvoràk, or Richard Strauss, whom it is allowable to like or dislike. Bach is the musical Bible—the foundation of the faith. Historically considered, both Bach and Handel are artists of the Reformation and the Renaissance. But if we fix attention on their essential musical personalities, we find a certain broad difference between the two great eighteenth century composers, which is fairly well suggested by calling Bach a Gothic and Handel a Renaissance artist. Bach's "Passion according to St. Matthew" stands to Handel's "Messiah" in something like the same kind of contrast that Strasburg Cathedral presents to St. Peter's in Rome. On the other hand, in its course of development music has been quite different from architecture and the graphic and plastic arts, and modern music owes quite a hundred times more to Bach than it does to Handel. Bach represents by far the greatest stimulating influence that has ever existed in the musical world. His stupendous industry, resulting in a body of first-rate work that may be reckoned among the greatest wonders of the world (it is not possible for a modern to know it all); his awe-inspiring union of very great talent with very great character; the completeness of his human nature and the absolute purity of his life and art—these things unite to make of Bach's personality something truly august, something that administers a quietus to the ordinary critical, fault-finding spirit. Glancing over the huge library of his collected works and knowing the glories that a few of them contain, one is fain to say, "There were giants in the earth in those days." Yet "giant" is scarcely the word. For the astounding sinew and sturdiness of the man were quite secondary in the composition of his character to that quality, in virtue of which he worked on throughout a long life as though in perpetual consciousness of something higher than ordinary human judgment; not waiting for full appreciation, which did not come till about a century after his death (very much as in Shakespeare's case), but perfectly realising the great ethical ideal of Marcus Aurelius—the good man producing good works, just as the vine produces grapes. No greater praise can be bestowed on Handel than to say that in his very best moments he is almost worthy of Bach, as, for example, in the choral section "The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all," or in the tenor of the recitative "He looked for some to have pity on Him, but there was no man; neither found He any to comfort Him."

Bach's Mass in B minor.

November 29, 1901.

Under Dr. Richter's irresistible generalship the most arduous task ever yet undertaken by the Hallé Choir was yesterday carried through to a brilliantly successful issue. Bach's great Mass illustrates his tendency to throw all the weightier eloquence of a sacred composition into the chorus, a solo or duet being treated as a delicate interlude, some florid obbligato for violin, oboe, or "corno di caccia"—the eighteenth century name for the ordinary orchestral horn—being intertwined with the melodic line in the manner of Gothic tracery. The Mass is in six main divisions—the Kyrie, with three sub-sections; the Gloria and the Credo, each in eight; the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei, each in two sub-sections. The two choruses of the Kyrie—the former a wailing supplication, the latter a mystical counterpart washed clean of earthly passion—were sufficient to show that the choir had a most thorough grasp of their parts, all the difficult and complex chromatic harmonies coming out with admirable clearness and correctness. The first chorus of the Gloria, with its joyous vivace movement, breaks into a style much more generally "understanded of the people." Here the choir were on thoroughly firm ground. The ring of the voices was magnificent, and the superbly effective contrast at the words "Et in terra pax" was perfectly given. The first occasion on which we noticed any serious defect in the choral singing was in the burst of jubilant melody at the opening of the "Et resurrexit." The jar was only momentary and was doubtless the result of an over-vehement attack. It can scarcely be questioned that the most marvellous chorus in the whole work is the Sanctus, which expresses in six-part harmony the mystical rapture of celestial beings set free from all care, pain, and strife. The effect of those persistent three-quaver groups in their garlanded similar motion is like nothing else in this world. They create a harmony of unparalleled richness, filling the ear with a feast of ravishing sound. The contrast with such choruses as Handel's "Hallelujah" and "Worthy is the Lamb" is extremely striking. Handel was always of the Church Militant. He was always strenuous, affirming the faith as it were with a note of triumph over its enemies. Such a rose of Paradise as this Sanctus of Bach's is quite remote from all that Handel could do. For an earthly choir, however, with lungs and vocal chords liable to weariness, all this infinitely ornate and elaborate passage-work is very trying, notwithstanding the absolute suavity of the musical expression, and in the ensuing "Hosanna" there were occasional signs of exhaustion. But the choir recovered their breath during the two succeeding solos, and gave a magnificent performance of the concluding "Dona nobis pacem."

"St. Matthew Passion."

January 25th, 1900.

It is possible to regard the "St. Matthew Passion" of Sebastian Bach as the greatest work of sacred musical art in existence, and thus as greater than Handel's "Messiah"; while at the same time thoroughly acquiescing in the greater popularity of the "Messiah." Handel was a mighty artist and a most lordly person; but he was a man of the world and a Court composer, and his religion, though perfectly genuine, was external and official in character. Bach, too, was a mighty artist, but he was not a man of the world. He was a devout and pious man and a man of the people, and his religion was inward and personal. Again, Handel was cosmopolitan, whereas Bach was thoroughly German. Not that Bach was wanting in knowledge of Italian and other foreign music. He was a perfectly comprehensive encyclopædia of the musical knowledge that existed in his time. But the basis of his character was too homely, simple and loyal to be modified by foreign influence. Thus while Handel became musically an Italian, Bach remained thoroughly German. All these circumstances suggest reasons for the much wider popularity of Handel's music by comparison with Bach's. The general public like the clear and definite outline, the structural simplicity, that they find in the Italian and quasi-antique style of Handel, while they are bewildered by the subtlety, the complexity, the varied imaginative play, and the rejection of set forms that they find in Bach. It must be remembered that the average man of the world to a great extent determines the tone of the general public; one may be thankful that there exists any work of sacred musical art so splendid as "Messiah," which is to a great extent intelligible to the average man of the world, and one may rest satisfied that, for the present at any rate, the "Messiah" should be performed often, the Passion music seldom.

A long line of Christian aspiration and endeavour culminates in the "St. Matthew Passion" music. The Good Friday service, or mystery, of the Passion dates back to mediæval times. Musical settings of it are quite innumerable. They fall into three main groups, according to style. The earliest are in the "Plain-song" of the mediæval church. At the period of Luther's Reformation the plain song gave way to the chorale style. Finally, there are many settings in the oratorio style. Of these Bach himself certainly wrote four, and probably five. By universal consent the "St. Matthew Passion" is the finest of Bach's settings. The main outlines of the scheme were fixed by tradition. Bach had the assistance of a poet named Picander in arranging his text, but it was by Bach's own judgment that all important points were settled. He divided the story into two parts. The first comprises the conspiracy of the High Priest and Scribes, the anointing of Christ, the institution of the Lord's supper, the prayer on the Mount of Olives and the betrayal of Judas, and ends with the flight of the disciples. In the second part are set forth the hearing before Caiaphas, Peter's denial, the judgment of Pilate, the death of Judas, the progress to Golgotha, the Crucifixion, Death and Burial of Christ. Between the two parts there is a broad contrast, a certain solemn stillness prevailing in the first and a passionate stir in the second. Fifteen chorales are heard in the course of the work, each forming a meditation upon the foregoing incident in the story. The chorus is double, and there is immense power in the manner in which the two main masses of sound are used, both to emphasise all that has poetic value and to express the many elements composing the mighty picture. Most of the solos are supported by the first choir. The utterances of Christ are given by a bass voice with string quartet accompaniment. The bass voice is in accordance with tradition. Most of the other recitatives have an obbligato accompaniment, in which a motif bearing figurative reference to some prominent image in the text is worked out. The obbligato is in most, though not in all, cases assigned to a wind instrument, so as to contrast still further with the music accompanying the words of Christ. The longest solo part is that of the Narrator, who sings tenor. In the course of a long and masterly discussion Dr. Spitta, the great biographer of Bach, contends that the "St. Matthew Passion" is not, strictly speaking, either dramatic music or oratorio music. One passage in the discussion may here be quoted:—"Consider the passage where the Jewish people, prompted by the High Priests and Elders, demand the release of Barabbas. The Evangelist makes them reply to Pilate's question with the single word 'Barabbas.' The situation is, no doubt, full of emotion, and an oratorio writer might have let the tension of the moment discharge itself in a chorus. But it would necessarily have been embodied in a form in which the chorus could have its full value as a musical factor, in a broadly worked-out composition with a text of somewhat greater extent. The dramatic composer would have given it the utmost brevity, since it stands midway in the critical development of an event. He would have to consider the progress of the action as well as the expression of feeling. A sudden roar of the excited populace—thronging tumultuously about the governor—a sudden roar and brief turmoil of voices would be the effect best suited to his purpose. Bach, composing a devotional Passion, makes the whole choir groan out the name 'Barabbas' once only, on the chord of the minor seventh approached by a false close."

Dr. Spitta's point is that Bach's music interprets the feeling of devout Christians, neither subordinating the purport of the text to a musical poem, like a conventional oratorio composer, nor entering into the point of view of the actor, like any other kind of dramatic composer. Dr. Spitta's arguments on this point are quite convincing; and we do not follow his practice of calling the work a "mystery" instead of an oratorio, only because the former word would not be generally intelligible, and because, in this country, we call any work of sacred art for voices and instruments an oratorio, if it is not a Mass, and if it is on too grand a scale to be called a cantata.

Minor Concerto.

March 14, 1902.

Anyone who knows his interpretation of Bach's A minor Concerto can scarcely help associating Dr. Brodsky with that work very much as one associates Joachim with Beethoven's, and Sarasate with Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. There is no other work that gives us so much of Bach's musical individuality within the scope of a clear, simple, and widely intelligible scheme. Bach made no music for the theatre, the casino, or the fashionable ballroom. He seems to have written almost exclusively for the church and for innocent, paternally safeguarded merry-making. He was a good old patriarch who composed either to praise God or to help the young people enjoy themselves—for if anyone imagines that Bach's gigues, gavottes, sarabandes, and so forth were not meant for actual dancing he is greatly mistaken. In such works as the Concertos one may still trace the twofold impulse clearly enough, though all is idealised, structurally elaborated, and otherwise adapted to a purely artistic purpose. For in the first movement of the A minor Concerto—Dr. Brodsky's special piece—we have something that brings the spirit into the proper atmosphere. Bach takes us, as it were, to church, composing our minds, as we go, with strong and able talk about subjects appropriate to the religious season and the service that we are to attend. The second movement is the service, and the Finale is the afternoon walk or dance; Bach would probably have approved of Sunday dancing. Dr. Brodsky is unsurpassable in the andante, where the powerful, composed, and majestic rhythm of the bass finds a poetic and delicately fanciful commentary in the solo part. Here one perceives the difference between Bach's and Beethoven's religious standpoint, between the ages of faith and of strife, between the ancien régime and the revolutionary period. For Bach the ancient faith is enough, while in the spirit of Beethoven there ferment, fume and rage the ideas of the French Revolution. The Hellmesberger cadenza played by Dr. Brodsky in the Finale is perhaps the best-written excursus of its kind in existence. It passes in review the thematic material of the entire work, with unfailing felicity of touch, and good judgment as to the amount of development; and the extremely rich and florid figuration is all so neatly spun out of elements contained in the body of the work, that it seems to have grown where we find it hanging, and has no suggestion of anything alien about it.

[CHAPTER II.]
——
BEETHOVEN.

C Minor Symphony, No. 5.

October 22, 1897.

The opening of the first movement forms the subject of a celebrated passage in Wagner's pamphlet on conducting, where he complains of the manner in which the pauses on E flat and D used to be scamped, and of many other defects which were usual in the performances of forty years ago. He represents Beethoven rising from his grave and apostrophising the conductor with a harangue that begins: "Hold thou my fermate [pauses] long and terribly." Wagner was a most exacting critic, but we venture to think that he would have been fairly satisfied with last night's rendering of the first movement. The contrast of the masculine and feminine elements which are inherent in the first and second subjects respectively was presented with all possible effect; the pauses were as long and terrible as Wagner could have desired, and were sustained with a perfectly equable tone-delivery; the beautiful unaccompanied phrase for oboe—which on the recurrence of the passage takes the place of the fermata, or pause, at the twenty-first measure—was given with all possible force of expression; and many other individual beauties of the rendering might be cited. The second movement is less taxing for the performers than the rest of the work; it was given in a manner well in keeping with the spirit of the symphony, which is like some vast work of sculpture in bronze, such as the gates of the Baptistery at Florence. Just such plastic force in the moulding of mighty tone-elements and just such nobility of the imagination did Beethoven possess as enabled Ghiberti to mould those wonderful gates, concerning which Michelangelo said that they were worthy to be the gates of Paradise. The scherzo, too, was an artistic triumph for the orchestra. Not a point was missed in that wonderful and uncanny tone-picture. A dance of demons it has been called; but it must be remembered that many great artists have treated grotesque and grisly subjects with an ineffably beautiful touch, such as we see, for example, in Alfred Rethel's marvellous drawing "Death the Friend." Not that the scherzo in Beethoven's C minor symphony breathes the spirit of that drawing, which is restful and serene, while the scherzo is full of weird mockery. The only point of the comparison is that in both works we find a grotesque subject ennobled and beautified by a great artistic imagination. Strange that the C minor symphony should often have been quoted as an irregular and anarchical composition. Sir George Grove has pointed out in his well-known analysis that the entire work conforms most strictly to structural principles, and that its chief irregularities are the linking together of the scherzo and finale and the reprise of the scherzo shortly before the concluding presto.

The Sixth Symphony.

February 24, 1899.

In dealing with this symphony, the conductor had occasion to show qualities different from those that have been called forth by the preceding works of the present Beethoven series. The third and fifth symphonies are of a strongly exciting character, the second is also distinctly exciting, at any rate in the finale, the fourth is a kind of mildly celestial or seraphic utterance, and the first does not truly represent the mature master in any of his moods. In previous performances of the series it was the successful rendering of some exciting element in the music, or the interpretation of a sublime emotion, upon which the conductor seemed to lay a kind of stress. Yesterday the case was quite different. The Pastoral Symphony is not exciting, or sublime, or mysterious, those qualities being alien to the genius of pastoral music or poetry. It is an expression of the emotion stirred by simple and homely delights; and for its interpretation it requires, in addition to the technical equipment, only a certain fresh and healthy energy. Even the religious note near the end is of a simple idyllic character. Once more the interpretation was, in our view, very admirable. The conductor seemed fully to grasp the poetic import of each section, and, under his guidance, the orchestra fully conveyed the breezy delights of the opening movement, the soothing murmur of the brook, the boisterous mirth of the ensuing allegro, the contrasting note of the storm, and the final hymn of thanksgiving. It has been said that Beethoven's music has an ethical bearing; and, as many persons have great difficulty in understanding how any music can have an ethical bearing, it may be worth while to suggest that the Pastoral Symphony, following the tremendous emotions of the preceding symphonies, teaches precisely the same lesson as the opening of Goethe's "Faustus and Helena," where the sylphs, typifying simple, untroubled natural influences, are busied about the person of the sleeping "Faust," pitying the "unhappy man whether good or wicked," and seeking to soothe his tormented spirit. According to the view of Goethe and Beethoven there is no other healing for the unhappy man's tormented spirit but in the simple, untroubled influences of nature. Such, in addition to its musical beauties, is the ethical lesson of the Pastoral Symphony.

The Seventh Symphony.

March 3, 1899.

One quality differentiating Beethoven's Seventh Symphony from the rest of the nine is well expressed by Sir George Grove in his famous book ("Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies") when he calls it the most rhythmical of them all. Beyond question the rhythm is on the whole more strongly marked in the seventh than in any of the others. The slow movement is not called a march; yet it has a far more definite tramping rhythm than the movement that is called a march in the Heroic Symphony. In the finale the rhythmical emphasis attains a degree of reckless violence that has never been surpassed by any composer except Tchaïkovsky. A scherzo is always strongly rhythmical; but in the scherzo of this symphony one finds a kind of frenzied rushing, whirling movement that is rare in Beethoven's works. Another differentiating quality of the symphony is grotesque expression, which is strong in the vivace, stronger in the scherzo, and goes all lengths in the finale. As with the later works of many other great artists, it is hard to divine the poetic intention of this symphony. One perceives a marvellous design, for the most part grotesque in character; one perceives the work of a gigantic imagination, smelting the stubborn tone-masses as in a furnace and moulding them to its purposes with a kind of superhuman plastic force. But what the mighty design illustrates is not, at present, obvious. The grotesqueness of the first, third, and last movements is all the more striking from the character of the slow movement, which is absolutely remote from the grotesque. The quality of the expression in that slow movement eludes all classification. It is not exactly a funeral march, and not exactly a dirge, though it is undoubtedly mournful in character. A kind of unearthly rhythmical chant one might imagine it to be, accompanying some mysterious function among the gods of the dead. There is perhaps no slow movement left by Beethoven the beauty of which is more penetrating or more imposing. After a fine and spirited rendering of the introduction and vivace, the slow movement—inscribed "allegretto" in the score, though the composer afterwards expressed a desire that the indication should be changed to "andante quasi allegretto"—was played with fine expression, though perhaps a trifle too quickly. The scherzo was entirely admirable. At the opening of the finale the rushing semiquavers in the violin part were, for some reason, not quite clear, though later in the movement, when the music had become more complex, the same figure sounded clear enough. On the whole, the rendering of the symphony well maintained the success that had previously attended the series.

"Eroica" Symphony.

February 1, 1900.

The fact that the leading theme in the first movement of the "Eroica" Symphony is taken note for note from Mozart's youthful operetta, "Bastien et Bastienne," is of no great importance. If an operetta contained something that could thus be caught up into the seventh heaven of art, its existence was thereby justified very much better than the existence of most other operettas. The notion of bringing a charge of plagiarism against Beethoven in reference to this theme is absurd beyond expression. There is, after all, nothing in the theme but a certain rhythmical arrangement of the common chord so simple that it might well have occurred to two composers independently. Whether it occurred independently to Beethoven or whether he heard Mozart's operetta at the Elector's Theatre in Bonn while he was a boy and unconsciously reproduced the theme, as is conjectured by Sir George Grove, is of no importance. With Mozart the theme is little more than a piece of chance passage-work. It leads to nothing; whereas with Beethoven it leads to developments of extraordinary richness and significance, forming the most important element in a tone-picture that greatly surpasses in passionate and incisive eloquence, in fulness of matter, varied interest, and plastic force anything that previously existed in the world of music. It would be hard to mention any other of Beethoven's themes from which results quite so tremendous have been obtained. It is repeated between thirty and forty times in the course of the movement, reappearing under an endless variety of forms, assigned to all sorts of different instruments, changing in key, in tone-colouring, in loudness or softness of utterance, producing an infinite variety of effects in the harmony, combining in all sorts of unexpected ways with other themes, and on every reappearance taking on new value, bringing fresh revelation. To such great uses may an operetta tune come at last, if it happen to be laid hold of by a Beethoven with an imagination like a mighty smelting furnace, and a hand that can model like a great sculptor in bronze. In Dr. Richter's interpretation of the "Eroica," the most striking point is his treatment of the contrast between those musical elements symbolising phases of virile energy and the strains of consolation and reconciliation. Of the latter element a characteristic example is the heavenly duet for oboe and 'cello that occurs just after the terrific outburst of rage and defiance in the "working-out" section of the first movement. It is a crisis of beauty and grandeur to which, so far as we know, no other conductor can now do justice. But here, and throughout the mighty first movement, we were reminded that Dr. Richter's pre-eminence is really more unquestionable in Beethoven than in any other music. His Wagner renderings are approached by others, but his Beethoven renderings are not even approached. To the noble and solemn strains of the Funeral March again complete justice was done; and the same may be said of the scherzo—a movement full of radiant mirth and containing in the trio the most beautiful horn music ever written—and of the finale in variation form.

Symphony No. 2 in D.

January 15, 1904.

According to Mr. Felix Weingartner, the advance from Beethoven's No. 2 to his No. 3 Symphony is so great as to be without parallel in the history of art, and this we regard as sound doctrine. The No. 3—the "Eroica"—represents not merely a contribution of unparalleled brilliancy to the symphonic music of the period, but an immense enlargement of its previously known possibilities. Such a work naturally dwarfs all that has gone before in its own kind; but it is very desirable to avoid the mistake of certain commentators who, perceiving a great gulf between No. 2 and No. 3, declare the former to be an immature work, not thoroughly characteristic of Beethoven, but exhibiting him as a mere disciple of Haydn and Mozart. While listening yesterday to the wonderfully animated and expressive rendering one could scarcely fail to be struck by the fact that it is all intensely Beethovenish; that it goes beyond Mozart, quite as distinctly and persistently as Mozart in his superb G minor Symphony goes beyond Haydn. We need a revision of the current view in regard to these early Beethoven Symphonies. Only the first is immature. No. 2 is stamped with the true Beethoven individuality on every page, and is comparable with Mozart's G minor in the richness of its organisation and the potency of its charm. The enormous difference between No. 2 and No. 3 is not to be correctly indicated by calling the former immature. It is a difference that separates the Beethoven Symphonies from No. 2 to the end into two well-defined groups. As was long ago observed, the odd-number Symphonies, beginning with 3, are cast more or less in the heroic mould, while the intervening even-number Symphonies are much milder in character—creations of halcyon periods in which the composer would seem to have been storing up energy for the titanic labours of 3, 5, 7, and 9. Bearing this in mind, we have no difficulty in assigning No. 2 to its proper place. It is to be grouped along with 4, 6, and 8, and it may thus be called the first of the "halcyon" Symphonies. Besides the general character of the music there is one very special reason for not accepting the view of No. 2 as an immature work. In the second subject of the Larghetto, we have a very beautiful and original musical idea, so thoroughly recognised by the composer as one of his best and most characteristic that he returned to it many years later when composing his last and greatest slow movement. Compare pp. 29 and 363 of Sir George Grove's "Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies," noticing in particular that the key-relation of the syncopated theme to the general scheme of the movement is the same in the two cases.

"Missa Solennis."

February 1, 1901.

Until yesterday Beethoven's "Missa Solennis" had not been heard at these concerts, but it is not surprising that performances of such a work should be few and far between. It is, beyond question, the most austere of all musical works—a product of Beethoven's quite inexorable mood. At the period when it was written the composer had become a sort of suffering Prometheus. Even apart from his deafness, it is wonderful that Beethoven's persistent ill-fortune, his isolated and unhappy life, should not have discouraged him and checked the flow of his creative energy. But that the mightiest of his compositions should have been produced when he was stone-deaf—that is surely one of the most perfectly amazing among well-authenticated facts! So far as we know, there never was any other case in which deafness failed to cut a person off altogether from the world of music. With Beethoven it only brought a gradual change of style. As the charm that music has for the ear faded away he became more and more absorbed, aloof, austere, and spiritual. The warm human feeling of his middle-period compositions gave way to a style of such unearthly grandeur and sublimity as are oppressive to ordinary mortals. Of that unearthly grandeur there is no more typical example than the "Missa Solennis." Not only in regard to the composition but even in regard to a performance the ordinary language of criticism is at fault. Who ever heard a "satisfactory" performance of the "Missa Solennis"? A spirit of sacrifice is demanded of the performers; for the music is written from beginning to end with an utter want of consideration for the weaknesses and limitations of the human voice. Of course that would be intolerable in an ordinary composer. Handel's combination of German structural solidity with Italian courtesy, sense of style, and delight in rich vocal rhetoric is the ideal thing. By comparison with the reasonable and tactful Handel, Beethoven is a kind of monster, from the singer's point of view, but a monster of such genius that his terrible requirements must occasionally be met.

The quartet was best in the astonishing "Dona nobis pacem" section, where the composer seems to represent humanity as endeavouring to take the Kingdom of Heaven by violence, protesting against all the oppression that is done under the sun, and sending up to the throne of God so instant a clamour for the gift of peace as may be heard amid the very din of strife. For that prayer for peace sounds against the sullen rolling of drums and menacing clangour of trumpets, the voices having now a mighty unanimity, now the wail of this or that forlorn victim. One looks in vain through the temple of musical art for anything to match that tremendous conception marking the final phase of the "Missa Solennis."

"Fidelio."

October 28, 1904.

A most strange and unclassifiable chamber in the palace of musical art is reserved for Beethoven's "Fidelio." A sort of despair is likely to come over one who attempts to state how Beethoven stands in relation to dramatic music. If one says that he was not a great dramatic composer, there arise the questions—Did he not make the Symphony a hundred times more dramatic than it ever was before? Did he not make music in association with Goethe's "Egmont" that seems to belong for evermore to that drama? Did he not individualise Leonora in music as well as Mozart had individualised the much less exalted characters of Donna Anna and Zerlina? Did he not achieve in his "Third Leonora" something that no one has ever equalled or can ever hope to equal in the domain of the dramatic overture? In fact he did all those things, and several more that can be cited in apparent refutation of the statement that he was not a great dramatic composer. And yet it is certain that he never composed dramatic music as one to the manner born—not with the unfailing adequateness to the theme of Gluck, the felicitous profusion of Mozart, the glowing picturesqueness of Weber. No; in the mighty river of Beethoven the symphonist's invention shrinks to a trickle in his one opera. The water is incomparably limpid, and blossoms of the rarest beauty and fragrance grow on the banks of the stream; but every page is stamped, as it were, with the admission that writing operas was not Beethoven's strong point: and beyond question he acted wisely in writing only one. How mighty is the change when he takes the symbols of his one musical drama and uses them for a monumental purpose, in the great "Leonora" Overture! Beethoven is Shakespearean in the range of his mind and in his attitude towards life, which he always approaches on the purely human side, and without the preoccupations of the Court, the camp, the cloister, the academic grove, or the church. But he is not Shakespearean in his medium of expression, which is hard and unyielding—a kind of musical bronze or granite. Yet "Fidelio"—despite its jejune story, which suggests that Beethoven, having objected to Mozart's "Don Giovanni" as scandalous, felt it his duty to compose an opera on a subject that should be "strictly proper," and despite its thin vein of invention—inevitably retains its hold on the musical world. To call the success of it a succès d'estime would be a misuse of words. It focuses a certain range of poetic ideas that nothing else of its kind touches, and stands—with its Wordsworthian simplicity and moral goodness—among other operas like a Sister Clare amid a group of fine ladies.

[CHAPTER III.]
——
BERLIOZ.

"Symphonie Fantastique."

November 1, 1901.

The "Symphonie Fantastique" offers a more complete picture of the composer's musical personality than any other single work. As a specimen of youthful precocity it also stands alone. It was written at the age of twenty-six, when the composer was still a student at the Conservatoire, being persistently snubbed by a group of dons, who all—with the possible exception of Cherubini, the Principal—were utterly his inferiors in every kind of musical power, knowledge, and skill. The experience of Berlioz at the Conservatoire of Paris was very similar to Verdi's at a like institution in Milan; but the marks of genius in work of the student period were far more distinct in Berlioz's than in Verdi's case. We have said that, as a work of precocious genius, the "Symphonie Fantastique" stands alone. No doubt other composers, such as Mozart and Schubert, had shown genius of a higher order at an even earlier age. But the "Symphonie Fantastique," as the work of a 'prentice-hand showing absolute mastery of the greatest and most complex resources, has no parallel. The great fact that has always to be remembered in regard to Berlioz is that he devoted himself with all the energy of an enormous and highly original talent to one particular task in music. That task was the winning of new material for the musical medium, and what Berlioz accomplished in the world of tone was very like what Christopher Columbus accomplished in the world of land and sea. Berlioz too opened up a new hemisphere, and he did his work much more thoroughly than the great navigator. This mighty achievement secures for Berlioz a permanent place of the first importance in the musical hierarchy. But to be deterred by respect for his genius from admitting his faults is not the best way of using his magnificent legacy. Those faults are none the less monstrous for being inseparable from his individuality, and a thoroughly enlightened modern musician would probably find it very difficult to define the attitude of his mind towards the works of Berlioz's art. In a sense, everything in the best of those works, among which the symphony played yesterday is unquestionably to be reckoned, is justified. When one finds an artist dealing with certain subjects as though to the manner born, and with enormous power and resource, one must not condemn him because those subjects are unpleasant or even horrible in the extreme. Such condemnation is not living and letting live. Artistic power is associated with qualities of the highest and rarest that human nature produces, and it is always justified. The favourite subjects of Berlioz may well prove a stumbling-block. "Orgy" very nearly became in his hands a musical form. In at least three different works of his—"Symphonie Fantastique," "Harold in Italy," and "The Damnation of Faust"—we find a movement called by some such name, and, his appetite for horrors not being satisfied with the "Witches' Sabbath" in the first of those three works, he gives us another movement representing a procession to the guillotine of a young man condemned for murdering his sweetheart. In close association with this love of the lurid, spectral, and ghastly is the bitterly ironical spirit which conceived an "Amen" chorus in mock ecclesiastical style to be sung over a dead rat, the guying of the composer's own love-theme with a jig-like variation on a specially ugly instrument (the E flat clarinet) introduced into the orchestra for that purpose, and the use of the stern and majestic Plain Song theme of the "Dies Iræ" as a cantus firmus, to which the mocking laughter of witches (rushing past through the air in a huge weltering broomstick cavalcade) makes a kind of fantastic counterpoint. It is well to bear in mind that the same talent gave us such miraculous gossamer fancies as the "Queen Mab" Scherzo and the chorus of Sylphs and that most tenderly beautiful and vividly conceived idyll "L'Enfance du Christ."

For the "Symphonie Fantastique" the orchestra had to be considerably enlarged. In addition to all the usual instruments the score requires an E flat clarinet, two bells (G and C), a second harp, an extra kettledrum, and a second bass tuba. Everything had been rehearsed with infinite care, and in all five movements the rendering was a display of virtuosity such as only a very rare combination of favourable circumstances would allow one to hear. No other composer displays a very powerful and skilful orchestra to quite such immense advantage. As Mr. Edward Dannreuther has finely and truly remarked—"With Berlioz the equation between a particular phrase and a particular instrument is invariably perfect." His violently wilful character manifests itself in the harmony. His fancies devour one another, like dragons of the prime, instead of progressing and developing in an orderly manner. But the marvellous beauty of the tone-colouring and aptness of the passage-work never fail. The parts of the symphony most thoroughly enjoyed by the audience were, no doubt, the second movement in waltz rhythm (where the most wonderful use is made of the two harps and the wood-wind) and the march in the fourth movement, where the part symbolising the emotions of the mob rather than of the victim is very brilliant and telling, with suggestions of that Hungarian March which the composer afterwards made his own.

"Faust."

March 7, 1902.

No more original or more enigmatic figure than Hector Berlioz was produced during the nineteenth century by the world of art—a word that may here be understood in its widest acceptation, and thus as including architectural, musical, graphic, plastic, and literary art. In one of the earliest critiques on his "Faust," which was first performed at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1846, the opinion was expressed that he ought to have been a chemist, not a musician—a remark that gives extraordinary point to a piece of advice that Berlioz once gave to artists in general: "Always collect the stones that are thrown at you; they may help to build your monument." The remark that Berlioz ought to have been a chemist, originally intended as a sneer, is a perfect case in point. He was a chemist, and it is his chief glory to have been that in the world of music. He tested, analysed, combined anew, and prodigiously enriched those elements of tone which are the material of the musical artist. Of course he was far more than chemist. He was also explorer, but always in search of material for his essentially chemical experiments in tone. One can scarcely wonder that "Faust" was a failure at first. Amongst the happy-go-lucky patchwork of the book is much evidence of that coarse and satirical vein which was so strong in the composer. How could the public be expected to approve of an opera on the subject of Faust that had no love-song or truly lyrical utterance of any kind for the tenor hero, but, on the other hand, had a song about a flea and a rat's requiem, ending with an "Amen" chorus in mock ecclesiastical style, to say nothing of a scene in Pandemonium and an orgie infernale? Berlioz was a sort of a belated mediæval. The very title, "Damnation de Faust," is mediæval. Shakespeare and the other poets of Renaissance and later times recognise the fate of a soul as a matter sub judice till the end of the world. But Berlioz had no more scruple than Dante in anticipating the Last Judgment. Mediæval, too, is the coarseness of the scene in Auerbach's cellar; and the chanson gothique, about the King of Thule, sounds as if it had come to the composer as a reminiscence from some previous state of existence, so marvellous is the power of the quaint and weird melody to transport the spirit back to a musty and hierarchic world with walled towns and narrow streets, with terrorism and torture-chambers, with crusades and knight-errantry, with impossible heights of holiness and unimaginable depths of diabolism. But not to any of the defects or qualities rooted in the composer's mediævalism must we look for the popularity which the work acquired in this country some thirty-four years after the original production in Paris and has retained ever since. What the general public enjoys is the superb peasants' chorus near the beginning, the arrangement of the Rácoczy March, which is the finest piece of military music in existence, the chorus and dance of sylphs, Margaret's Romance, and Mephistopheles' Serenade. Perhaps, too, a good many of them take a sort of unregenerate pleasure in the rat and flea songs, while at heart disapproving of such things, and of course they like the ballad of the King of Thule, because no one who is musical at all can entirely fail to perceive the charm of that wonderful melody. It appeals to plenty of listeners who have no idea that there is anything Gothic or mediæval about it.

The Centenary Celebrations.

December 10, 1903.

Berlioz was the Columbus of music; he discovered the New World. By his theory and practice of orchestration he so greatly enlarged and enriched the resources of tone that all contemporary and subsequent composers capable of understanding his message experienced an immense exhilaration—a sense that new and hitherto undreamed-of possibilities were opening out before them. The starting-point of his momentous voyages was the idea of what is called "programme music." Like Wagner, he perceived that after Beethoven symphonic music could do no more on the old lines, but that music might learn to characterise much more sharply than it had ever done before. His prodigious reform, enlargement, and enrichment of orchestration was entirely carried out under the influence of the desire for stronger and finer characterisation, for a more varied and interesting play of emotion and graphic suggestion. A good many musicians and music-lovers at the present day, recognising the enormous merit of Berlioz's achievement in orchestration, yet consider that, like Moses, he was not allowed to enter the promised land to which he had led his people; or, more literally, that Berlioz was not able to make really good use of his own discoveries, the importance of which is to be recognised in the music of Wagner, Dvoràk, Tchaïkovsky, and others who learned from Berlioz, rather than in his own music. While admitting that later men, such as those mentioned, have used the Berlioz instrument to a more spiritual kind of purpose or with greater epic and dramatic significance, the open-minded music-lover can scarcely deny that the compositions of Berlioz, considered as absolute works of art, include a majestic array of masterpieces. Such things as the "Te Deum" and "Messe des Morts" bear, in their unparalleled vastness of conception, the stamp of an imagination comparable only to Michel Angelo's. They are mighty fragments of larger works never carried out—impossible to be carried out. The best-known work by Berlioz—and the most perfect, on the whole, of the extended works—is the "Faust," which must not be judged as an operatic version of Goethe's "Faust," but rather as a musical setting of the "Faust" story in the racy and drastic manner of the mediæval puppet plays, Goethe's drama being only used in so far as it affords suggestions for scenes of the well-salted and drastic animation that Berlioz loved. Berlioz was a typical French Romantic. His music is absolutely wanting in the ethical element that is so strong in Bach and Beethoven. But he had a powerful and truly poetic sense of the wonderful, the beautiful, the weird, and the characteristic. Over and over again in his "Faust" he achieves typical excellence. That rapture of spring which is one of the great, imperishable poetic themes has nowhere in music been better rendered than in the first pages of "Faust" (orchestra and tenor voice), and the ensuing peasant choruses are by far the best musical expression of that "sunburnt mirth" which outside the world of art is only possible under a southern sky. The Rácoczy March as orchestrated by Berlioz is not only the finest piece of military music in the world but is an immeasureably long way ahead of the next best piece. The energy, gaiety, and tumultuous eloquence of the final section (altogether Berlioz's own, of course), give us the musical symbol of "La Gloire"—that important conception which has played a part in history for three centuries. The scene on the banks of the Elbe is woven of moonbeams and gossamer fancies that no other composer could have handled. The rhythm of the Mephisto serenade is too good for this world. Here the composer succeeds in expressing the diabolical without any direct suggestion of malice—simply by creating the rhythm and accent of laughter too monstrously whole-hearted and full-blooded for a mere man. Another miracle is the "Chanson Gothique" (about the King of Thule), which is, as it were, the distilled essence of all mediæval romances about lovesick maidens looking forth from their casements. In the latter part the composer falls a victim to his evil genius—the macabre,—and the terrible squint of the madman is perceptible in the "Ride to the Abyss" and the howling and gibbering of demons, which entirely lack the significance of the demons in "Gerontius," and simply show us the composer indulging his taste for the grotesque horrors of the old miracle plays. The latter part of the composition should not be taken too seriously. Even in the early part there is one example of the composer's peculiar fondness for guying the offices of religion. But this, too, should be lightly passed over and forgiven in consideration of the feast that the work as a whole offers to the imagination and the bracing salt wind of the composer's manly and affirmative genius.

[CHAPTER IV.]
——
LISZT.

"Faust" Symphony.

November 21, 1902.

The melancholy fact has to be recorded that the "Faust" Symphony fell flat on its first performance in Manchester. There seems to be something in our national temperament which makes it peculiarly difficult for us to penetrate the secret of Liszt and learn to understand his tone-language. In musical society on the Continent "not to like Liszt" is regarded as a fixed characteristic of the Englishman, and those few Englishmen who have learned to like Liszt remember the gradual process by which their ears were opened, like the learning of a foreign language after one is grown up. Some composers have a manner of utterance that may be picked up half unconsciously; but for Britons, at any rate, Liszt's is not of that kind. Patience, persistent study, reflection, observation, comparison, besides an ear of some subtlety, are necessary for the understanding of it, and we have not the habit of taking music seriously (except in the abstract) or of giving it our whole attention. So a thing like the "Faust" Symphony goes over our heads as if it were a poem in some foreign language of which we only apprehend the rhythm. It is a pity, for to those few who understand the poem is very great and splendid. Like some ghostly Ancient Mariner, the spirit of the master holds us "with his glittering eye," and speaks as one who is full of matter and wisdom and is a master of life. His story is that old one about Faust and Gretchen—not the Berlioz version ending with the Damnation of Faust, but the original Goethe version which deals with the working out of Faust's salvation (the difference between the two being really quite considerable),—and in the telling of this story he conveys lessons to the heart that are much too delicate for words. A good many composers have made "Faust" music of one kind or another. Spohr and Schumann, Berlioz and Boïto, Wagner and Liszt, all paid their tribute to the inexhaustible interest of the theme, besides Gounod—most superficial and consequently best known of them all. Even in Gounod, however, there is a little genuine "Faust" music—a very little. It is to be found in the first few bars of the overture, in the Mephistopheles Serenade, and, perhaps one might add, in the song about the King of Thule, though Berlioz did that much better. Wagner's "Faust" Overture is quite a great composition, and it is nearest akin to Liszt's Symphony. But it is much too one-sided to vie in interest with Liszt's tremendous composition, which seems to grasp the whole subject and tear the very heart out of it, with a kind of imaginative power suggesting Victor Hugo's, though the touch is more true. He begins with the solitary Faust in his study, plunged in gloomy meditation, every phase of which the music expounds (to him who listens closely enough)—intellectual pride, reduced to impotence in the endeavour to solve the "riddle of the painful earth"; the tranquillising of the spirit by mystical influences seeming to emanate from a higher world; then the reawakening of pain in the consciousness that had been hushed and charmed. Here the music, passing up the chord with each note preceded by the semitone above, sounds like a series of broken sighs. And presently we encounter something quite new. A plaintive theme on the clarinet, answered by a single viola, symbolises the vision of feminine companionship. Hope reawakens, and the strength of Faust's nature asserts itself in the splendid E major theme for full orchestra, destined to play the leading part throughout the work. The movement is long, thoughtful, and no less apt in invention than rich and glowing in tone-colour. In the second movement, headed "Gretchen," we encounter quite a different atmosphere. It is a worthy counterpart to the Gretchen episode in Goethe's poem—no doubt the best picture of a girl, from the man's point of view, that exists in literature. Inexpressibly beautiful is the contrast between the fancy-free and the loving Gretchen. There is nothing in all music more rich and rapturous than the ensuing love-scene, which reminds one of the point in the first act of "Die Walküre" where the doors swing open and reveals to the enchanted gaze of the lovers the spring landscape bathed in moonlight. But Liszt is here more to the point than Wagner. Then comes Mephisto with his diabolical dance, turning everything into derision, till a light shines down from heaven, where the soul of Margaret appears among the angels, and the "spirit that denies," with his mask torn off, shrinks away, trembling and baffled. Here the "chorus mysticus" gives utterance to the crowning idea of the "Faust" drama—"The woman-soul draweth us upward and on." Such a work as the "Faust" Symphony departs from the classical model inasmuch as it is unified altogether by dramatic and characteristic and not at all by architectural principles. It may also be regarded as three character-sketches, which, with the help of some cross-reference, together tell a story. Any person well versed in modern music, on hearing this composition for the first time, cannot but be astonished at the number of ideas, afterwards used by other composers, that it contains. The most glaring case is the transformation music just before the entry of the "chorus mysticus," which has been conveyed bodily by Wagner, with only quite unimportant changes, into the third act of "Die Walküre," after the words—"So streif' ich dir die Gottheit ab." But dozens of other ideas in Wagner's "Tristan" and "Siegfried" and Strauss's "Till Eulenspiegel" one here finds in embryo.

Pianoforte Concerto in E Flat.

November 13, 1903.

The attitude of the musical public in this country towards Liszt is at the present day the most unsatisfactory and anomalous feature of the musical situation. It is not possible to name any individual who has done more than Liszt towards creating all that is best in the modern musical world. He created the pianoforte technique without which the later works of Beethoven could never have been performed, he inaugurated a new era of symphonic music by his invention of the Symphonic Poem, and he was the first to understand and interpret Wagner. But we persist in making our historic and traditional mistake. We do not appreciate the continuity of musical art, and we do not value the stimulating and school-forming influences. It is the same now as a hundred and fifty years ago, when we preferred Handel, who never influenced any other composer to good purpose, and who essentially represented the end of a development, to Bach, who is the greatest and most fruitful formative influence of any musical age, and who has powerfully influenced all subsequent composers of genius, except two or three of the Latin races. In the early nineteenth century we made precisely the same mistake in regard to Mendelssohn and Schumann; now we are making it once more by preferring Tchaïkovsky to Strauss. But worse still is our mistake of refusing to listen to Liszt, without whom neither Tchaïkovsky nor Strauss could have existed as musical personages. Once more yesterday the superb Liszt Concerto in E flat was played and received with a kind of tolerance. Very fine playing, the audience seemed to think; but what a pity the composition was not something worth hearing! Yet it is quite the most brilliant and entertaining of Concertos. No person genuinely fond of music was ever known to approach it with an unprejudiced mind and not like it, and—what is more remarkable—the effect of the music on all those who study it with a view to playing it is so great that it invariably overcomes the ancient and deeply-rooted prejudice. But, for the general public, it is not a more notorious fact that Handel's "Messiah" is a great and admirable work than that the original compositions of Liszt are horrible. Consequently, when a work by Liszt is played they do not listen, but resign themselves to be bored; and so even a work like the E flat Concerto, which is quite popular in character and free from anything tormented or obscure, besides being the most brilliant pianoforte Concerto in existence, falls on listless ears and provokes only the half-hearted applause intended exclusively for the soloist.

[CHAPTER V.]
——
WAGNER.

"Faust in Solitude."

February 15, 1900.

Musical biography teaches that a hard struggle, not only for recognition but for existence, is the normal experience of a great composer. A few great players and singers make fortunes, but great composers never, and most of them have had to endure stress of poverty to the end of their lives. Yet it may be doubted whether any other great composer ever sounded the depths of human misery, as Wagner did during that first visit to Paris, undertaken in the hope of making his fortune at the Grand Opera. It is generally supposed that genius is conscious of its own powers and works on with serene confidence in the future. But, unfortunately, there is also such a thing as conceit—that is, the illusory consciousness of powers that do not exist; and a man of genius who, without private means, had thrown up his employment and taken himself and his wife on a long journey to a foreign country in order to win recognition in "la ville Lumière" must, in the course of three fruitless years, have felt something worse than misgiving. That Wagner did so feel is a matter not of speculation but of history. He has described how, when meditating the subject of the "Flying Dutchman," he sent for a pianoforte to see whether, after the mean drudgery and abject misery of those years, "he was still a musician." Wagner was not an ordinary man. Everything about him was on a grander scale—his folly and rashness no less than his talent. Though more sensitive than others to the most trifling discomfort, he showed, under an accumulation of miseries that would simply have crushed almost anyone else, a stupendous energy and reaction. He had failed to get his "Rienzi" performed in Paris. For three years he had continued his fruitless endeavours to obtain a hearing at the opera; and a crisis of frightful despondency ensued, when, to ruin and beggary and the sense of having made a fool of himself, was added an attack of a painful skin disease which tormented him at intervals all his life. Now it was precisely at that crisis that he wrote the "Faust" Overture—his masterpiece in the strict sense of the term; that is, the first work of his mastership or mature power. Thus, instead of being crushed, Wagner is suddenly found drawing upon the reserve force of his genius to produce a work that stands very nearly on a level with Beethoven's third "Leonora" Overture. For the Faust Overture is a tone-picture of the utmost energy, nobility, and beauty, utterly defying comparison with any other except Beethoven, and attaining to a kind of demonic eloquence that Wagner himself never found again, till quite late in life, during the "Ring of the Nibelung" period.

The "Nibelung" Dramas.

May 11, 1903.

Whatever may have happened in former years, it was scarcely possible to leave the theatre after the "Götterdämmerung" performance on Saturday with any disposition to satirise the management for the failure of the stage effects in the final scene. In the course of the week Wagner's greatest work had been presented with considerably brighter intelligence and more adequate resource than ever before in this country, and it was piteous that there should be a slight humiliation at the end. It may be doubted, indeed, whether the "Ring" in its entirety has ever been better done, for the amazing excellence of the orchestral performance was to some considerable extent matched by the singers, and the dramatic realisation of the composer's intentions was good everywhere except in certain parts of the prologue, and showed positive genius at certain points in each of the main dramas forming the trilogy. The general impression was thus one of a great task nobly carried out, and the concluding fizzle, however tiresome and distressing to the stage managers, could but seem a trifling matter to any appreciative spectator. It is a terrible business, that finale of "Götterdämmerung." Conceived in a mood of frenzied protest, it bears a peculiar stamp of extravagance and violence. It shows Wagner as an Anarchist of the Bakounine type, undertaking, as it were, to "grasp this sorry scheme of things entire" and "shatter it to bits" on the off-chance that Nature might afterwards "remould it nearer to the heart's desire." A lifetime of noble endeavour and great achievement, with scarcely any response from the world but the crackling of thorns under a pot, had produced in Wagner such bitterness of spirit as little men are saved from by their natural limitations, and it is that bitterness of spirit which finds expression in the smashing and burning and drowning of the "Götterdämmerung" finale. Heroes and demigods, renouncing a hopeless conflict with the ugliness and meanness of the world, involve heaven and earth in one red ruin. Such is the significance of a tableau not worth a tithe of the time, trouble, and expense devoted to it.

By engaging Dr. Richter for the 1903 production the Covent Garden authorities made it clear that this time the nonsense of star performers who make cuts for their own convenience and sacrifice the composer's intentions to a performer's conceit would not be tolerated; and at the same time they gave the public the only possible guarantee for adequate rehearsal. For that privilege London has had to wait twenty-seven years since the original production in Bayreuth, though "Die Walküre" and "Siegfried" were long ago taken up into the ordinary Covent Garden repertory. There can be little doubt that "Rhinegold" is in all important respects the most difficult part of the "Ring" to make effective. Epic rather than dramatic in character, it presents to the actor an unfamiliar kind of task. He finds himself representing some creature that is scarcely individualised at all, and taking part in the interplay of elemental forces rather than of human passions. This goes far towards accounting for the fact that last week the "Rhinegold" performance fell very far below the level of all the rest. The representative of Alberic in the first scene seemed to take very little interest in the love-making with the Rhine maidens. He had apparently adopted the guide-book view of the dwarf as a creature merely of greed and hate, and had overlooked the "fruitful impulse"—to borrow Mr. Bernard Shaw's expression—which drives Alberic towards the Rhine maidens; for his acting was quite feeble and pointless, nor was it possible for him to carry out the stage directions that require Alberic to climb over the rock-work and rush after the Rhine maidens with the "nimbleness of a Cobold," the rock-work being much too insecure and the Rhine maidens too restricted in their movements. In that first scene the rise of the curtain reveals something like the glazed side of a huge aquarium tank, and it was apparently to the general effect of the picture as first displayed that all the attention of the scenic artists had been given. Nibelheim, with the clanking sounds of the Nibelungs at their smiths' work, was fairly well rendered, but here again Alberic's part was ineffectively done, and there was far too much fairy-tale prettiness and variety in the aspect of his crowd of slaves. At Bayreuth these victims of sweating and improper labour conditions are represented with horrifying truth as a huddled crowd of little earth-men, driven hither and thither by the cursing and lashing of their master, and, instead of being to some slight extent adorned and differentiated, uniformly grimy and abject. Stage prettiness was never more out of place than in the Covent Garden presentation of the scene. The setting was best in the final scene, where the Gods march over the rainbow bridge into Valhalla. In the rainbow there was a curious predominance of "greenery-yallery" tints to the exclusion of the primary colours, but it took its place well enough in a fairly effective stage picture with a prehistoric building on the heights to the left. Here the only point of inferiority to the Bayreuth presentation was in the meteorological background. After the magnificent orchestrated thunderstorm the sky is supposed to clear and the Gods to enter their new abode amid the glow of a most radiant sunset. But the secrets of atmospheric effect and cloud pageantry seem to remain for the present exclusively in the hands of Bayreuth and Munich, and these things, though they belong to the framework rather than the essential drama, seem to have loomed large in Wagner's imagination when he conceived the "Ring," and so to have a certain importance.

II.

In strong contrast with the embarrassment and falling back on the mere picturesque of the "Rhinegold" presentation was the rendering of "Die Walküre" on Wednesday. A dramatic interpretation of Wagner at all comparable to the musical interpretation which we derive from the Liszt-Bülow-Richter tradition is not for the present, or for some time to come, to be expected. But, making allowance for the difference in standard between the musical and scenic arts, which is simply a phenomenon of our time, one may well be thankful for such a rendering of the music's proper scenic background and framework as was given at Covent Garden on all but the first of the four evenings in the production of the present year. In the opening act of "Die Walküre" the setting was adequate, and a strikingly well-balanced performance was given by Mr. Van Dyck (Siegmund), Mr. Klöpfer (Hunding), and Mme. Bolska (Sieglinda). At the end of the only scene in which the three figure together Sieglinda, dismissed by her husband, stands at the door of the bedroom; Siegmund, who has told his story, sits on the further side of the stage, the central place being occupied by the beetle-browed Hunding. It is a moment big with fate in Wagner's peculiar manner. Nothing certain is known or decided, but glances full of inquiry and rapturous or sinister surmise pass between the three, whose variously coloured kinds of suspense the music interprets. Here the ensemble was truly admirable, the stress and peculiar atmosphere of that moment big with fate being successfully caught. Throughout the act Mr. Van Dyck's suppleness and resource were finely exemplified, the sombre figure of Mr. Klöpfer's Hunding contrasting effectively, while Mme. Bolska did much by intelligent acting and good singing to compensate for a certain lack of personal adaptation to the part.

The majestic Wotan of Mr. Van Rooy was much in evidence throughout the rest of the drama. A rare loftiness of conception stamps nearly all that Mr. Van Rooy does. On the other hand, he is somewhat wanting in suppleness, here and there, sacrificing the ensemble to some extent to his own rigorous and ultra-heroic impersonation. This is particularly noticeable in softer scenes, such as the leave-taking with Brynhild. Only in scenes where Wotan is wrathful or oppressed by the "too vast orb of his fate" does Mr. Van Rooy succeed completely. His finest moment is in the muster of the Valkyries, where those terrible warrior maidens hold converse in music as wild and tumultuous as goes up from some great parliament of birds, till Wotan stamps with his foot, and the whole covey of them rush for their horses and go wheeling and galloping away into the clouds.

To the Brynhild of Miss Ternina it is not easy to do justice. No doubt a specialist in voice-training might have some objection to raise against the manner in which this or that note was produced, and as to her impersonation in the earlier scenes, where Brynhild brandishes her spear and sings "Ho-yo-to-ho," the doubt might be raised whether it is rugged enough. But on the whole this artist seems to present a case of almost providential adaptation to the task of impersonating Wagner's greatest heroine. From whatever point of view her impersonation be regarded, it seems better than one could reasonably expect. A most richly endowed and harmonious personality is the basis of it. Fully matching Mr. Van Rooy in breadth and dignity of conception, she greatly surpasses her distinguished colleague in tact and cleverness, whether the matter in hand be the management of draperies, the humouring of a horse, or any such secondary matter upon which the proper development of a stage picture may depend. Vocally, too, Miss Ternina is fully equal to the tremendous task, and her Brynhild is thus a truly wonderful revelation of Wagner's art at its best. For Brynhild is beyond all question Wagner's finest individual creation. In a series of matchless scenes he shows us the development of the warrior-maid into a perfect woman, every phase of that development being touched with a kind of demonic power that makes it impossible for anyone altogether to miss the point. In the second act of "Walküre" Brynhild comes forth on to the crags in her shining armour, with helm and shield and corselet of steel. In the leave-taking with her obdurate father, who, against his better judgment, has given way to the counsels of Fricka—that Mrs. Grundy of Valhalla,—the insignia of her Valkyriehood begin to fall off, in anticipation of the humanising process that is to be completed when Siegfried, in the ensuing drama, removes the steel corselet for the bridal feast. Before our eyes, therefore, and step by step Brynhild is transformed, making the heroic life visible and rhythmic for us at every moment. She is the vessel into which Wagner has poured the very finest vintage of his genius. No blackguardly characteristics of the Uebermensch, such as develop so very freely in the Siegfried of "Götterdämmerung," are allowed to deform the figure and melody of the superb heroine, who to the end glows with intense and untainted life. Adequately to render such a conception—adequately both for our eyes and ears—is no small achievement, and it is Miss Ternina's achievement which well deserves to be reckoned, along with Dr. Richter's orchestral interpretation, among the glories of the present production.

III.

"Siegfried is a revelation of sensuous life in its natural and joyous fulness. No historical dress obscures his form, nor are his movements obstructed by any force external to himself. The error and confusion arising from the wild play of passion rage around him and involve him in destruction. But till that destruction is compassed nothing in Siegfried's environment can arrest his own impulse. Not even in presence of death does he allow himself to be swayed by any other influence than the restless stream of life flowing within himself. Fear, envy, and vindictiveness are alike alien to his nature, and so, too, is any desire for love arising from reflection. His every movement is determined by the direct flow of vital force swelling the veins and muscles of his body to rapturous fulfilment of their functions."

Such, according to his creator, is that central hero of the "Nibelung" dramas whom critics still for the most part hopelessly misunderstand, though the best of the actors who have to represent him seem long ago to have mastered his secret. It is a familiar fact that the cultivated instinct of a good actor will often go right where all current criticism goes wrong, and no figure of the world's drama, ancient or modern, exhibits the point in a more remarkable manner than Siegfried. To any actor, indeed, with the necessary personal and vocal endowment the part may well make a strong appeal. It is devoid of all subtlety, simply requiring him to know his words and his notes and not to allow the native hue of his resolution to be sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Mr. Kraus, the Siegfried of the Covent Garden performances, did well in most essential respects.

But much more remarkable than any particular impersonation was the catching of the proper tone and atmosphere in nearly every important scene of the three main dramas. The glowing forge in the depths of the primeval forest at the opening of "Siegfried," the play of the sunlight through the moving branches that so terrifies the dwarf accustomed to a subterranean environment, the highly realistic smith's work—all these accessories in the picture of the godlike youth were well done, and the peculiar early morning exhilaration of that first act was quite successfully realised. So, too, were the fairy-tale terrors of the dragon's cave and the leafy splendours of the glade in which Siegfried holds converse with the birds. Where there is room for improvement in the Covent Garden staging of these dramas is, above all, in the meteorological background of "Rhinegold" and "Götterdämmerung"; secondly, in the "Ride of the Valkyries," which has not hitherto been done in a sufficiently spirited manner anywhere but in Paris; thirdly, in the final scene of conflagration and ruin. At present the final scene is much too elaborately done. All that smashing and falling of timber is a mistake. A chaotic design painted on a sheet of canvas can be let down at the right moment with better effect to the eyes of the spectators, in addition to the immense advantage of producing no noise or dust, costing little, and being completely under control.[1] The present method of rendering the scene is too costly, too noisy, and too dangerous. The Valhalla building should be recognisably the same as in the final scene of "Rhinegold."

Never have the musical splendours of the "Ring" been revealed to British audiences as in the past three weeks. The windy and cloudy eloquence of the "Walküre" music and the heroic pathos of Brynhild's leave-taking have long been pretty thoroughly appreciated, but not so the songs of the forge in "Siegfried," where Wagner throws an almost fabulous kind of energy into the picture of the typical young man singing at his work, summing up all that is finest in that enthusiasm of labour which is perhaps the best part of our inheritance from the nineteenth century. These songs were, in the recent production, allowed to develop without cuts or distortion. The brawny rhythm, the iron clangour, the fizz and tumult of the instrumentation—all these things came out as never before at a performance in this country. So, too, with the long love duet of Siegfried and Brynhild and the ravishing trio of the Rhine Maidens in the last act of "Götterdämmerung." But, apart from such dazzling moments, the performances were in their completeness and sustained excellence an extraordinary revelation of the composer's power in the use of musical symbolism. Just before the rise of the curtain on the first act of "Siegfried" one hears that whine or snarl of the Nibelung dwarf, entering on the minor ninth along with the hammering theme. It sounds merely comical and trivial. But just as a personal fault, first observed as something funny, may in the experience of life or study of history be found developing into a source of appalling mischief, so, as these dramas progress, do we find the symbol of Nibelung hatred developing from a comical snarl into those monstrous and multitudinous yells that rend the welkin and dismay the soul amid the gathering horror of the "Götterdämmerung" tragedy. Persons who are in the habit of chattering about the Leitmotiv as though it were a nostrum might with advantage take note of a few such points. The symbols of Nibelung hatred are not more effective nor anywise better done than the other symbols in the "Ring," but they are shorter and more peculiarly orchestrated, and so easier to follow.

As to Dr. Richter's interpretation of these gigantic scores perhaps enough has been said. The modern executive musician can approach no greater task than that in the performance of which the foundation of Dr. Richter's reputation was laid when the work was heard for the first time twenty-seven years ago in the composer's presence, and we have been fortunate in hearing his authoritative rendering once more. If Wotan had understood his business anything like as well as Dr. Richter, Valhalla would never have come to grief.

The Bayreuth Festival.

July 23, 1904.

Apart from the Wagner Theatre and the undertakings connected therewith, Bayreuth is a decayed "Residenzstadt," with an "Old Castle" of the fifteenth century, a "New Castle" of the eighteenth, and other not very carefully preserved relics of the Court which Franconian Margraves long kept here. Of country residences and "pleasaunces" too, designed in the over-fantastic manner of the South German potentate, there is more than one in the neighbourhood, and no doubt such things help to create an atmosphere that is favourable to artistic enjoyment. The smoke of modern industrial enterprise is not unknown here, but in the fulfilment of the part of its destiny which is connected with Wagnerian drama Bayreuth is aided by the leafy dells and dingles and the stately avenues of the Hofgarten, if not by the fantastic waterworks of the "Eremitage."

The Festival, which stands as a concrete symbol of Wagner's artistic mission, is just now at the zenith of its prosperity. It is twenty-eight years since the theatre was opened and twenty-one since Wagner's death, and the only thing which Bayreuth now fears is American piracy. One kind of calumny after another has been silenced, and in years past the institution seems to have done nothing but gain in solidity and dignity. It has formed an international public with a somewhat higher average of intelligence than is to be found anywhere else; and if there are certain weak and wrong-headed elements in the internal organisation, they are not so bad as to ruin the combined result of the brilliant and exceptional talent with which nearly every department—musical, dramatic, scenic, architectural, mechanical, and administrative—is worked. One might make a long list of the points in which the Wagner Theatre is somewhat better than any other of the kind. For example, the situation and approaches are more agreeable, the exits and entrances are more convenient, the ventilation is much more satisfactory, the acoustic is much finer, the distractions during the performance are fewer in consequence of specially good arrangements, structural and other, and by reason of the early start and long intervals the audience is less fatigued; the stage machinery works better, and the discipline behind the scenes is more thorough. The orchestra, besides being more advantageously placed, is larger, and has a higher average of executive ability. Apart, therefore, from the special Wagnerian enthusiasm, there is much to attract persons who take any kind of interest in musical drama, and as a matter of fact the audience commonly includes dozens of well-known musicians from different parts of the world whose own tendencies are anything but Wagnerian.

"Parsifal."

July 24, 1904.

On the second day of this festival "Parsifal" was given for the 122nd time in Bayreuth, where, since the original production in 1882, it has formed the principal feature of every festival except that of 1896. Any attempt to describe impressions of the performance has to be preceded by a shaking of oneself free from that hypnotic influence which Wagner's art in its latest phase exercises. The curtain falls on the first act, the lights are turned up, and one emerges quickly into the light of day to find oneself once more in the midst of a chattering but well-behaved international crowd that wanders about the open sandy space girdled with plantations on either side of the theatre. It is not quite the same experience as a child's on awakening from an importunate dream, because the feeling that it was not one's own dream but another's is peculiarly strong, together with a sense of utter astonishment that it should be possible for the consciousness of an adult person to be ravished away into the dream-world of another. Then comes further reflection and the inevitable question how it is done. Is it primarily by means of the music, which passes through the chambers of consciousness like the fumes of an anæsthetic, or does the peculiar potency lie in the dramatic symbols, for the elaboration of which the subtlest essences of a hundred arts seem to have been brought together? All the objections to "Parsifal" would seem to resolve themselves ultimately into distrust of something that is so dreamlike, and dreamlike in a manner so inexpressibly soft and luxurious. It is all rhythmic with the slow, musically ordered movements of the Grail's knights, who are so holy as to feel sin like a bodily pain; it is solemn with hieratic pageantry, and rich with the lustre of costly stuffs and the glitter of ecclesiastical embroideries and jewels. In the first and last acts it has the atmosphere of a Christian sanctuary, and the second act, passing in Klingsor's garden, seems to represent the pleasures of sin as imagined by the most innocent of mediæval monks. All this the orthodox moralist regards with some distrust as tending to create a distaste for hard work and cold water. But let him remember the mischief done by the Puritans in the seventeenth century, and be careful how he lays about him with the iconoclastic hammer. Whatever else "Parsifal" may be, it is certainly the most marvellous theatrical show in the world, and, as the ultimate achievement of a man who for a lifetime had been considerably in advance of any other person in knowledge of theatrical art, it deserves to be treated with a measure of respect.

What Bayreuth accomplishes at a "Parsifal" performance, in the smooth and harmonious working of infinitely complex scenic resources, is without parallel, and the almost miraculous stage management was last week at its best. The slow transformations of the first and last acts were carried out in faultless correspondence with the musical suggestions. The sudden collapse of Klingsor's garden into ruin and desolation was also perfectly done, and in all the elaborate evolutions of the knights' retainers and scholars there was never the semblance of a false move. A specially admirable feature was the fine co-ordination of the dangerously complicated musical scheme in the latter part of the first act, where the conductor has to keep together a body of singers and players who are spaced out at four different levels—the orchestra below the stage, the knights seated at the love-feast or manœuvring about on the stage, the older scholars on the first gallery of the dome, and the younger scholars at the top. All the multifarious choir-singing of boys and men was beautifully done; the only mistakes were made by Amfortas and Titurel. The conductor was Dr. Muck, of Berlin, whose tempi seem to have been considered too slow by some of the habitués, though his interpretation was admitted to be in all other respects above reproach.

"The Ring."

July 28, 1904.

This year's festival includes two complete presentations of the "Ring" tetralogy, of which the first began on Monday. It seems to be generally admitted here that the performance of the Prologue ("Rheingold") given on that day was the best that has yet been achieved. Dr. Richter was at the helm for the first time this year, and the generalship that has been one great factor in Bayreuth's reputation ever since the opening of the Wagner Theatre in 1876 soon became perceptible in the plastic force of the orchestral rendering and the consummate knowledge with which everything was disposed in such a manner as to give each performer the best possible chance of doing justice to himself and his part. Moreover, "Rheingold" is, of all the Wagnerian dramas, the one best adapted to display the art of Bayreuth advantageously. The staging is of the most extraordinary kind. All the action takes place up in the clouds, down in the waters, or where the forges resound in the fiery caverns of Nibelheim, and not one of the characters is a plain human being. Gods, goddesses, giants, dwarfs, and water nymphs make up the dramatis personæ, and the whole drama is more completely outside the range of ordinary operatic art than any other musical and dramatic work. It is therefore natural that Bayreuth, which alone among theatres devoted to musical drama is not hampered by the operatic traditions, should establish pre-eminence in the staging and dramatic presentation of "Rheingold." There is no part for a prima donna or leading tenor, and everything depends on a kind of extraordinary character-acting created by Wagner, along with those richly animated figures from Norse mythology which so effectively represent the natural forces and psychic impulses of his greatest and most characteristic poem. The most important person is Loge, the tricksy Fire God, who is far from sure that he did wisely in joining the firm of Wotan and Company.

In the great revival of the "Ring" here in 1896 the impersonation of Loge by the late Vogel of Munich was a brilliant feature. Vogel was at the time recognised as the best Loge, and his mantle has now fallen on Dr. Otto Briesemeister, who, with a much less effective costume than his predecessor's, dances very cleverly through his long and important part. But among the stage performers it was Mr. Hans Breuer, the representative of the dwarf Mime, to whom the principal honours of Monday's performance fell. Already in 1896 Mr. Breuer was the Bayreuth Mime, and he seems to have been steadily improving his presentation ever since. It is now beyond all expression brilliant. Mime (or Mimmy, as the name has been well Anglicised) is perhaps the best invented of Wagner's purely grotesque figures—better individualised than his master, the sinister Alberich, representing gold as a world-power, for whom Mimmy is compelled to do smith's work. From beginning to end the part presents unfamiliar problems to the actor, for never before was the attempt made to give a musical vehicle to such whining and cringing and snarling. But those problems have all now been solved by Mr. Breuer in a manner suggesting finality. He has penetrated to the very marrow of the composer's conception, and he gives us a figure that glows with imaginative power at every moment. Almost equally good in its very different way is the mighty elemental brutality of Mr. Johannes Elmblad's Fafner—another case of an actor completely identified with the particular part,—and the second giant (Mr. Hans Keller) fairly matched his colleague and Messrs. Breuer and Briesemeister in expressive pantomimic interpretation of the music. The enchanting "Rhine Daughter" trio of the first and last scenes was beautifully rendered, the swimming manœuvre of the former scene being done probably better than ever before. Besides doing justice to the drama as an allegorical picture of life in the light of certain nineteenth-century ideas, the performance was a specially good revelation of its amusing and naïvely entertaining qualities. Regarding the show simply as an enacted fairy-tale, one could not but call it a mighty good one, and that aspect of the matter was almost certainly never before brought out so well.

"The Ring."

July 30, 1904.

Too much ridicule has been expended on those who, in the days when the works of Wagner were new to the world, declared them impossible of performance. After witnessing one complete series of the dramas forming the programme of this year's festival I am profoundly impressed by the newness of the art that has been worked out, mainly in this place, under stress of Wagner's peculiar requirements. The stage manager and the singing actor, no less than the orchestral player and the conductor, have been compelled to acquire a new technique. It is even possible to state approximately the order in which the special kinds of technique required by Wagner were developed. Of course the instrumental came first, for without it there could have been no attempt to bring the new art before the world. Here the most important influence, in addition to the composer's own, was that of Liszt, Bülow, and Richter—the original stalwarts of the Wagnerian school. Next arose a new race of dramatic singers, of whom Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Niemann, and Materna were early examples; and the key to the enigma of the music was found. But Wagner's art is complex. Including, as it does, all the elements of the tragedy, which Aristotle describes as having music for one of its parts, together with modern scenic presentation, it is indeed somewhat more complex than any other known art, and that is why it has taken so long to master the technique of it. To the civilised world of no more than twenty-five years ago it was still inconceivable that both the drama and the music in one work could be important. A play with a little incidental music was a familiar thing, and so was an opera with a conventional dramatic framework having as its only purpose the advantageous display of musical embroideries. But a dramatic work with music as an integral part lay outside the range of all that was then believed to be possible, and long after the new race of dramatic singers had arisen the peculiar problems of mise-en-scène and stage management which Wagnerian drama presents were left quite unsolved. However, no such battle had to be fought over the stage presentation as had been fought over the music. There was the Bayreuth theatre, with plenty of time and, latterly, plenty of money to work out the scenic and mechanical problems; and very slowly they were worked out. The improvement since 1896, when I last saw the "Ring" here, is enormous, and from the mighty trilogy as now presented that old sense of awkward, cumbrous, and unmanageable material has to a great extent disappeared—not, indeed, to the same extent in all the four parts (prologue and three-fold drama). The change and improvement is most startling in "Rheingold," which, with all its mythological and thaumaturgical paraphernalia, used to be thought peculiarly clumsy and full of bad quarters of an hour, despite the genius that scintillated here and there. Now that the staging has been perfected, it no longer embarrasses the performers or distracts the spectator's attention, and one has unimpeded enjoyment of the story, with all its rich imaginative play and its Aristophanic quality, as it is interpreted by a group of actors and actresses who have thoroughly mastered their peculiar business. "Rheingold" one now perceives to be a comedy big with tragedy. Notwithstanding the undertow of forces making for monstrous mischief, it is as thoroughpaced an Aristophanic comedy as anything having Norse instead of Hellenic characters and imagery could be. The scene in which the different uses of gold are explained by Loge, with exquisitely humorous interpolated comments by Fricka (the Mrs. Grundy of Valhalla) and others, is worth the attention of any philosopher; and yet that and other passages of similar merit used to pass unnoticed. Together with the mention in my former message of Messrs. Briesemeister's, Breuer's, and Elmblad's achievements as Loge, Mimmy, and Fafner respectively, there should have been some reference to the Fricka of Mme. Reuss-Belce, who was simply perfect in the scene where that dignified lady sidles up to Loge to inquire whether the gold cannot also be used to make nice ornaments for ladies.

In regard to "Walküre" and "Siegfried," which have long been in the repertory of London, Paris, and other capitals, the superiority of Bayreuth is very much less certain—that is to say, of Bayreuth as represented by this year's performances. There was serious weakness in two out of the three great protagonists, Wotan and Brünnhilde, and for that weakness no degree of skill in the presentation of the finely fantastic and ever-shifting backgrounds could compensate, nor even the superb orchestral interpretation. The Siegfried of Mr. Ernst Kraus was, however, on the whole a very striking performance, as it was at Covent Garden in 1903. It was best in Acts i. and ii. of "Siegfried"—the forging of the sword and the slaying of the dragon, preceded and followed by the wonderful forest rêverie,—and it was least good in the "Götterdämmerung" scene, where the hero tells the story of his youth to his hunting companions. Here a certain lack of resource in purely lyrical expression was a serious defect. But on the whole Mr. Kraus would seem to be the best Siegfried of the present day—best, at any rate, of those who can be induced to enact the part without mutilation.

No excellence in the staging and general interpretation could obviate or appreciably soften the unsatisfactoriness of "Götterdämmerung." The final drama of the "Ring" series remains a terrible monster among the dramatic works of mankind, with a dreary first and second act, in which little seems to occur besides the heaping up of gloomy storm-clouds. The fierce animation of the retainers' muster in the Hall of the Gibichungs produced on Thursday the utmost effect of which it is capable; but the atmosphere of these scenes in which the tragedy of the curse resting on the Ring is worked out remained, as before, almost intolerable; and, despite the ravishing Rhine-daughter music in the third act, the romantic beauty of the "Erzählung" (story of Siegfried's youth), and the monumental grandeur of the funeral scenes, the last day of the trilogy left one with the old sense of oppression. As most persons are aware, the whole "Ring" drama began in the composer's mind with "Siegfried's Death"—that part which is now called "Götterdämmerung,"—and the other three parts were written to lead up to it. Nevertheless the original nucleus remains the monstrous product of a disordered imagination, while the three parts, conceived as something secondary, form a series of masterpieces. Books, we know, have their fates, and the fate of this one is not the least curious. The experience of this year, while tending to show that the supposed defects of "Rheingold," "Walküre," and "Siegfried" almost entirely vanish in a rendering that is harmonious on all sides, leaves one with a greatly increased sense of the final drama's inherent unsatisfactoriness.

[CHAPTER VI.]
——
TCHAÏKOVSKY.

Symphony No. 5 and other Works.

January 21, 1898.

The experiment of devoting an entire miscellaneous concert to the works of one composer is nearly always hazardous. We doubt whether any other composer besides Wagner has ever withstood such a test quite satisfactorily. It was, of course, inevitable that the unparalleled wave of popularity upon which Tchaïkovsky's "Pathetic" symphony has been carried over the country during the past two years should have had the result of bringing other works by the same composer to the fore. That result is in no way to be regretted. Tchaïkovsky is a thoroughly interesting composer. His power and originality can scarcely now be disputed, and, whatever may be the verdict upon his art arrived at by those competent to judge when the excitement of novelty shall have passed off, one fact seems already to be quite clear, namely, that he was a great master of the orchestra. Listening to Tchaïkovsky's music for a whole evening and comparing the new with former impressions may have revealed more defects and limitations than merits; but the experience confirms, to our mind, the view that the Russian composer must be allowed to take rank along with Berlioz and Wagner as a consummate and original master of the orchestra, regarded as a medium of expression. He grasps the modern orchestra as if it were one instrument. He sweeps over it like a mighty virtuoso with unerring touch. He knows the suggestions and potencies that lie in the timbre of each pipe, string, and membrane, just as a man knows the articulations of his native language. To any musical strain that is in his mind he gives outward form with absolute success. In short, he has consummate ability to express himself in music, and such ability is so rare that it is sufficient alone to make a composer very famous. There remain, of course, certain questions about the self thus expressed, and not till we reach those questions do the defects and limitations of Tchaïkovsky's art come into view. The great prevalence of melancholy moods in Tchaïkovsky's music is a matter of common observation. When he desires to shake off his habitually gloomy and brooding state, how does he set about it? Just as one would expect with such a disposition—by frenzied excitement, by the blare and glare of military pageant or by an orgiastic dance. His lighter music is bizarre or sardonic when it is not merely intoxicating. The enormous predominance of the rhythmical interest over every other kind of interest, such as that of melody or harmony, in Tchaïkovsky's music, can scarcely have escaped notice; and rhythm is the lowest element in music; it is the element representing animal impulse, as shown by its preponderance in every kind of religious music (Palestrina, for example). The music of Tchaïkovsky rocks, tramps, jigs, whirls, and flies far more than it sings; and when it does sing it is either profoundly melancholy, bitterly sardonic, or merely bizarre. The composer has absolutely no serenity in his disposition, no love of nature or of innocence, no naïveté, no calmness or coolness, no healthy activity, no religion, though much picturesque patriotism, and very little intellectuality—only just enough for the purpose of expression. Such is the disposition revealed in the art of Tchaïkovsky. Like Rubens, the painter, he cares for nothing but exuberant animalism—for Rubens' Madonnas and other quasi-religious pictures are all just as much studies of exuberant animalism as his Venuses and his boar-hunts. Tchaïkovsky, too, loves hunting; though his more special tastes are for fighting and military display, and for dancing. Such a character could not be otherwise than profoundly melancholy in the absence of strong excitement. At the same time, he was—again like Rubens—an artist of enormous power, and his creations have their value. The fifth symphony, which was given yesterday, affords a most interesting comparison with the sixth and last. Such a nature as, according to our view, Tchaïkovsky has revealed in his art would never be thoroughly dignified except in great grief or in some situation bringing his patriotism to the fore. This, we believe—added to the more complete maturity of the art,—is the explanation of that greatness which has been generally recognised as distinguishing the "Pathetic" symphony among the composer's works. Alone among the larger works of the composer it has dignity. The feeling that it embodies is tremendously deep and sincere. It is an utterance of a strong semi-primitive nature with robust appetite, but also with an immense capacity for feeling—personal feeling, and family, tribal or patriotic feeling. In the symphony given yesterday, on the other hand, we have a feast of gorgeous tone-colour, orchestral figures of astonishing scope and ingenuity, here and there motifs that are poignantly expressive, vastness of design, superhuman energy; but the dignity of the work is marred by the perpetual intervention of riotous and frenzied rhythms. The other orchestral works given were all of minor importance. Perhaps the best was the "Romeo and Juliet" overture, dealing with a subject certain sides of which were naturally congenial to the composer's temperament. He seized on these sides with unerring self-knowledge and made an eloquent musical picture out of them. "The Variations on a Rococo Theme" and "Pezzo Capriccioso" are two ingenious and bizarre pieces, both very cleverly scored, which enabled Mr. Carl Fuchs to display his admirable mastery of the violoncello as a solo instrument. They were both very finely played, and, especially the latter, aroused considerable enthusiasm. As far as the interpretation was concerned the symphony, too, must be unreservedly commended. There was only one work in the entire concert which, to our mind, bears the stamp of perfection—namely, the little song "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt," which is worthy to rank with the best lyrics by Schumann, and indeed shows the spirit of that composer in one of his moods—that which produced "Ich grolle nicht"—very strongly. All the songs were interesting. In fact, the lyrical power of Tchaïkovsky is so striking that it may be placed side by side with his mastery of the orchestra among those qualities which make him a great composer. All that has been said with more especial reference to the orchestral works applies with equal truth to the songs; they are either melancholy, like the first, third, and last given at yesterday's concert, or sardonic, like "Don Juan's Serenade." Brightness, happiness, confidence, resignation, reverence, sense of mystery are qualities as alien to the composer's nature as simple joviality or innocent badinage.

Symphony in F Minor.

November 25, 1898.

The fourth symphony of Tchaïkovsky, which formed the principal orchestral work at yesterday's concert, is full of life and zest, affording an interesting glimpse of those powers which were destined to produce the "Pathetic" symphony. Composed some fifteen years earlier than the "Pathetic," the fourth symphony represents the composer in a very different mood, though with nearly the same technical powers. It is perhaps natural that the earlier work should be more cheerful; but, considering that the composer was thirty-eight years of age when he produced that earlier work, the music sounds curiously youthful. The difference between the style of the symphony given yesterday and the "Pathetic" is almost entirely of a kind that eludes analysis. It can only be stated broadly that in the "Pathetic" there is a depth and energy of feeling to be found in none but truly great works of art; also that there is mature style, appearing especially in the marvellous tact with which so much rich, highly coloured, and dangerous material is disposed. On the other hand, the earlier symphony, while strongly akin to the "Pathetic" in rhythmic and melodic invention, figuration, instrumentation, and device in general, is not only wanting in the tact of the mature artist, but shows the composer not under the influence of any strong feeling, and simply revelling in his powers of gorgeous orchestration, ingenious thematic work, and marshalling of tone masses with a view to picturesque effect. Tchaïkovsky is nearly always martial in one part or another of an orchestral work. In the great symphony the first movement has a ferocious section suggesting actual slaughter, while the greater part of the third movement is an elaborate military pageant. The work given yesterday leads off with martial strains, which recur several times in the first movement and again in the last. The first movement also exemplifies the composer's practice of bringing in a good deal of development immediately after the statement of a theme, instead of waiting for the development section. Though every musical element is telling, the movement is too prolix. In the andantino it soon becomes apparent that the composer's mind is running on his national folk-melody, the second theme especially having a very strong flavour of Russian national music. The movement is short and very charming. Next one passes from song to dance, the scherzo being a kind of Cossack dance orchestrated in the most piquant style, the strings playing pizzicato throughout. Here again the composer is irresistible. The music is ballet-music, not worthy of a symphony, but it is so exhilarating that there has to be a "truce with grimace." And the finale? On a former occasion we have declared our view that none of Tchaïkovsky's music except his last symphony has dignity, but probably in no other quasi-serious work has he committed himself to such an astounding piece of rodomontade as is here used to conclude the symphony. The music enters like a voluble showman, beating a drum at the head of a procession, and assuring the crowd that never in this world has anything been seen quite so wonderful as that particular show. The show then proceeds, seeming to be concerned with national exploits which are all illustrated by the comments of the same voluble showman. A meritorious rendering was given of this amusing and in some respects instructive work. Many of the wind-instrument passages are very trying for the performers, especially in the case of the bass trombone, which in the last movement sometimes has to play as fast as the flute; but the players struggled manfully with these difficulties and did justice to the score.

"Romeo and Juliet" Overture.

December 14, 1900.

The case of Tchaïkovsky, with his one great Symphony overtopping by such immeasurable heights all his other compositions of whatever kind, is isolated. One is almost compelled to think of everything else in the light of the one great work. Here is something that dimly foreshadows the stupendous battle-picture in the first movement. There we note some faint suggestion of that power to represent a heart full of the most awful foreboding, amid scenes of gaiety and gallantry, which gives its peculiar character to the celebrated 5—4 movement; and there are foretastes of the bustle and excitement rendered on a gigantic scale in the scherzo, of the triumphal note in the March, of the final despairing wail. But all else is faint and fragmentary by comparison with the great symphony. The "Romeo and Juliet" overture, played yesterday, is probably Tchaïkovsky's best early composition, and it is certainly that which suggests the great last symphony in the most unmistakable manner. The poetic basis of the tone-picture is to a considerable extent the same in both. A warning prologue leads to the scenes of violence and bloodshed. Then follows a romantic love-story with a tragic ending. Everything in the overture is extremely well done—the fighting music is graphic and the love music is deeply fraught with feeling,—but it is not a bit Shakespearean in spirit. The peculiar neuralgic pathos which haunts nearly all Tchaïkovsky's works takes us into a fevered and unnatural atmosphere very unlike Shakespeare's; and the fighting is gory and realistic in the haggard manner of Verestchagin. As with Berlioz's treatment of "Faust," one must not seek for any sort of fidelity to the spirit of the original. It is better to rest satisfied with the striking and eloquent picture, founded on external features of a well-known poem but belonging essentially to the composer's own dream-world. The overture was splendidly played yesterday. Dr. Richter's interpretation most fully revealed the beauty of the introduction, where the composer had succeeded in finding a note of pathos unlike his usual narrow and egotistic or merely tormented vein. Specially remarkable was the fine precision of the percussion instruments in the sections representing the strife of the Montagues and Capulets; but it is scarcely necessary to mention details, for the whole tone-picture was superbly presented.

Symphony in E Minor.

March 8, 1901.

There is a great diversity of opinion as to the merits of Tchaïkovsky's fifth Symphony. More than one London critic has expressed the view that it is equal to the much-better known sixth and last. Mr. Jacques declares in yesterday's programme that, though No. 6—the "Pathétique"—appeals more strongly to the emotions, No. 5 is constructively the finer work. On the other hand, we have the opinion of the Russian critic Berezovsky—quoted together with the same writer's detailed account of the work in a recent English book on Tchaïkovsky—that No. 5 is the weakest of all the Symphonies. There is something rather depressing in such extreme divergence of opinion. It proves one of two things;—either Tchaïkovsky is not one of the sane composers whose works stand in a certain clear relation to the musical needs of human nature; or else, for all our greatly increased musical culture, we are no quicker than were the men of Beethoven's day in our perceptions; and, in the absence of perception, we are even more tied down than were our predecessors by pedantic notions. The reception of the great "Symphonic Pathétique" in this country disposes of the former alternative. No other instrumental work ever aroused so great a wave of genuine public interest, and even persons who are no great admirers of Tchaïkovsky ought, if they care for the musical life of this country, to take an interest in him, on account of the astonishingly sudden and powerful grip that he took of the public imagination. It is not to externals—such as instrumentation, counterpoint, form, and so forth—that we must look for the explanation. Glazounoff orchestrates no less brilliantly than Tchaïkovsky and has probably a greater mastery of scholastic device, and the same is true of Saint-Saëns. Yet neither of those masters ever did or could stir anything in the least like the interest that Tchaïkovsky stirs. We believe the secret of Tchaïkovsky lies first in his sincerity, his being in earnest, his intentness, his search after the true symbol of his idea or feeling, his rejection of mere fabricated music. In listening to Glazounoff one perceives the trotting out of device. "Note how cleverly," the composer seems to say, "how cleverly I introduce this theme in augmentation." Whereas Tchaïkovsky is always intent on his idea, and, when he uses device, it is with the air of a man deeply in earnest and grasping at a resource of expression. Thus the centre of gravity is with Glazounoff as often as not in the device, with Tchaïkovsky always in the message, and with that dim sub-consciousness of the musical soul we perceive the one to be a cultivated trifler, the other a man with something important to say. That is the first and chief point. Next comes Tchaïkovsky's gift of rhythm—the quality in music for which the general public of the present day cares most. When a person of rudimentary musical notions says that he likes a good tune, it will nearly always be found that what he likes is the rhythm, and that the melody can be freely changed without his perceiving it. The same taste exists in the higher stages of cultivation. A hundred times commoner than a real sense of melodic beauty is the love of a powerful rhythm that carries the listener off his feet. Now Tchaïkovsky does that for the listener much more often than any other composer. He first captivates by something in which his gift of rhythm plays a leading part, and, having captivated, he does not disappoint us by saying empty things. Further points are his astonishingly rich harmony, which is never twisted and inconsequent, like so much of Berlioz's harmony, but always develops logically and clearly his vastness of design; his warmth of colouring, and his picturesque force. Needless to say, that to explain sudden and signal success with the general public there must always be a mention of weak points. Among Tchaïkovsky's weak points that which has gained him most popularity is his persistent habit of presenting his ideas in a sort of balanced and antithetical manner. He does not expect too much intelligence in the listener. First he says a thing, then he says it again an octave lower down or higher up and with different instrumentation; next he repeats a tag of what has just been said, and repeats that once or twice, and so forth. And the thing is not done artificially; such procedure evidently came natural to him. By the time he has finished, something of the idea has been conveyed into the dullest mind; and all this is done along with the extremely modern harmony and with instrumentation so dashing, brilliant, and varied that only a dreadfully analytical person takes note of the thematic iteration. It is a remarkable point that while all the other symphonies are full of Slavonic folk-melodies, the thematic invention in the "Pathetic" is all original—every scrap of it. There is not a folk-tune from beginning to end. One has only to think of the first theme of the first quick movement to perceive how thoroughly the composer was worked up. The originality of it is absolute. One may go over all the orchestral composers from Haydn to Wagner and Brahms, asking oneself whether that theme could be by any one of them. Obviously it could not be the work of anyone else except Tchaïkovsky. On hearing that theme for the first time the listener pricks up his ears. "Here is a man with something to say," he thinks. Now there is nothing of that kind in No. 5. The thematic material has been obtained in an easy-going manner—mostly by borrowing. And the superiority of the great No. 6 is just as remarkable in the richness and spontaneity of development as in originality of thematic invention. In other respects the case against Mr. Jacques's view is much stronger. There is not the ghost of an indication in No. 5 of the power which produced that overwhelming battle-picture in the first movement of the "Pathetic," or of the completely new kind of eloquence introduced into the world of music in the third movement—the Scherzo-March—of the "Pathetic," or of the unparalleled poignancy of expression in the Finale. The fifth is a fine picturesque work, chiefly interesting for the glimpse that it gives us of those exercises by which the genius destined to produce No. 6 strengthened itself. We hear many of the same orchestral effects, such as the frequent use of divided lower strings and the prominence of bassoon parts. The figuration in the Valse, and again in the Finale, also affords a faint premonition of the marvels that enthral us in the latter work. But, before any comparison of the two is really possible at all, one must knock off the last movement of the "Pathetic" and take it as ending with the March, as the composer originally intended it to end.

"Pathetic" Symphony.

November 22, 1901.

"Eighth time at these concerts," says last night's programme, in reference to the great Tchaïkovsky Symphony, which is only eight years old. The performances in London are to be numbered by dozens, and whenever genuine orchestral concerts are given in this country the swan-song of the late Russian master has probably been heard more often than any other symphonic work. Let us not be in too great a hurry to protest against this state of things. The enormous audience of yesterday evening—much the largest of the present season so far—suggests that the public have not lost interest in the Symphony. Nor do we dissent from the views of the public in this respect. There is astounding potency in the charm of the work and in the appeal that it makes to the imagination. For some time past we have been preoccupied with the notion that it forms a sort of pendant to Dvoràk's "New World" Symphony. Dvoràk has caught in his music the breezy, hopeful, democratic, optimistic, and free-thinking spirit of American life, with its upper side of furious go-ahead civilisation, and its under side of primitive humanity (Negroes and Red Indians) in which energy of feeling is out of all proportion to intellectual faculty. Dvoràk's slow movement is undoubtedly a hymn of such primitive humanity, with an undercurrent of meditation on the prairie by night, in which the movements of sap and the germination of seeds within the bosom of inexhaustibly fertile nature become, as it were, audible. It is something like the poetry that Walt Whitman would have written had he been a much better poet. In an analogous manner Tchaïkovsky has caught up and fixed in his "Symphonie Pathétique" the soul of modern Russia. Just as the American Symphony is breezy, democratic, optimistic, and free-thinking, so the Russian is languorous and oppressed, aristocratic, pessimistic, and hierarchic. The absence of any slow movement, except the dirge at the end, is intensely characteristic. The composer has no hymn of thanksgiving or serenely contemplative interlude to give us, but only something with the perfumed and artificial atmosphere of the ballroom, as a relief from the ardours and terrors of his military and patriotic passages. Both in his first and third movements he reminds us that the Russian, for all his profound religiosity and mysticism, for all his abundance of talent and exquisite courtesy under normal conditions, lives in a cruel country and has it in him to be more cruel than any other modern white man. The dirge at the end we believe to be the most powerful expression of tragic emotion that exists in the entire range of music. Such a work will bear a good many performances, especially in a place where there is a Richter to interpret it. Of course neither the "New World" nor the Muscovite Symphony is for a moment to be compared with Beethoven. Fellows like Dvoràk and Tchaïkovsky, belonging to the fringe of civilisation, have something of the savage about them, whereas Beethoven inherited the central European culture and expressed in music the emotions of a completely civilised character. The part of the nineteenth century subsequent to the death of Wagner will probably be remembered for the avènement of the semi-savage in music. But, be it remembered, music is an art of expression, and all thoroughly and richly expressive music is good music, no matter what the informing emotion or underlying idea.

[CHAPTER VII.]
——
ELGAR.

"King Olaf."

December 2, 1898.

Mr. Edward Elgar seems to owe his fame almost entirely to those autumn festivals which are so important a feature of musical life in this country. An organist, with a turn for serious composition, occupying a post in some city where one of those festivals is periodically held, is favourably placed with a view to getting a hearing for the productions of his musical genius; and Mr. Elgar was, and so far as we know is still, organist at St. George's Roman Catholic Church in Worcester. His career as a festival composer dates from 1890, in which year his overture "Froissart" was produced at the Worcester Festival. Three years later a choral work—"The Black Knight"—was brought to a hearing in the same city, apparently with advantageous results to Mr. Elgar's reputation, for since that time he has devoted much of his energy to composition. The cantata performed yesterday evening for the first time in Manchester seems to have been the fourth of Mr. Elgar's important choral works. When first performed at the Hanley Festival two years ago it attracted much attention, and was hailed by many writers for the press as a work for the Leeds Festival—generally considered the most important event of the kind in the country. The work composed for Leeds and produced there last October was called "Caractacus." It is in general style similar to "King Olaf," while naturally representing a later stage in the composer's development. In both works one notes the same dramatic instinct, the same unconventional treatment, the same faculty of genuine thematic invention, and the same unmistakeable gift for orchestration. As this composer gains in experience it does not seem, as with many others, that his inventive powers become exhausted, but that, on the contrary, they ripen and develop. "Caractacus" is obviously a finer work in every way than "King Olaf." Now, all these facts make Mr. Elgar a very interesting person. The qualities enumerated above—gift for thematic invention, ingenious and telling orchestration, unconventional treatment, and so forth—are extremely rare and valuable. It is quite possible for a composer to have a long and successful career without possessing any one of them, and it is therefore very natural that a composer who does possess them should be hailed with enthusiasm. But, unfortunately, they are not the only qualities necessary to a composer of extended choral works, and Mr. Elgar, who rises so far above mere feeble conventionalities in his actual music, is not free from the common but most mischievous delusion that almost anything will suffice by way of "verses for music." He throws away the resources of his remarkable art upon a text that is in places unfit for any kind of musical treatment, and is, on the whole, hopelessly rambling, incoherent, and tiresome. One becomes interested in a dramatic episode where a bride seems on the point of murdering her bridegroom with a dagger that gleams in the moonlight. But the narrative wanders away to other subjects; a fresh heroine, with quite different affairs and interests, occupies attention, and one hears nothing more of the lady with the dagger. No doubt, the title "Scenes from" the Saga of King Olaf seems to justify such procedure, but it does not prevent the interest from flagging or the general impression left by the work from being fragmentary and incoherent. The best of the music is at the beginning, where there is an extremely fine chorus, "The Challenge of Thor," containing various musical elements all truly expressive and fraught with the same primitive and racy vigour. The more important of the elements in question are the Hammer music, the Iceberg music, the Thunder and Lightning music, and the strains which carry the defiance of Christianity by the old Norse religion. The most effective, too, of the solos is the long tenor recitative following the great chorus. At the words "listening to the wild winds wailing" a highly original and interesting strain begins to be heard in the accompaniment. But the promise of these fine things is not well carried out in the latter part of the work. Everywhere the difficulties are very formidable, and in a good many cases they were too much for the chorus, who, except in "The Challenge of Thor," did not sing in a very free or expressive manner. Nor did they always take their leads with precision; but, in a complex work abounding in accompaniment figures with such puzzling cross-rhythms, these defects were excusable. The cantata did not seem to make any great impression on the audience; but we should expect to find, if ever Mr. Elgar were so fortunate as to obtain a really good subject and a good book, and especially a subject and book thoroughly adapted to his remarkable dramatic powers, that he would produce something of lasting value.

The "Enigma Variations."

February 9, 1900.

The style of composition called "Variations" is a striking example of a primitive form that has proved imperishable. Sir Hubert Parry has pointed out that the fundamental idea of variations in instrumental music is co-ordinate with the canto fermo and counterpoint of the early choral composers. Each system resulted from an attempt at giving form and unity to a composition by repeating a theme over and over again, each time in some new aspect, or with fresh ornamentation; though the effect obtained by winding ingenious counterpoint for other voices about an unchanging canto fermo is, of course, very different from the tricking out of the melody itself. In choral music the canto fermo system almost died out when maturer principles of structure were discovered; but variation-form has never fallen into disuse at any period since its invention. It has been used by all the great masters, and by many of them as a vehicle for great and splendid ideas. General progress from the mechanical to the imaginative marks the successive stages through which the form has passed. One great reason for its vitality is that it admits of treatment in every possible style. Variations may be melodic, or contrapuntal, or harmonic. A superficial composer can make them by simply worrying his theme, a profound composer by developing the musical ideas that are in it. Bach's were mainly contrapuntal, Mozart's mainly melodic—one may even say melismatic—and Beethoven made variations of every kind, in his later works obtaining results of undreamed-of grandeur from the form. But the later Beethoven has never really been followed by any mortal in the austere and wonderful path that he struck out for himself, though Brahms and others have obtained a few hints from him. The originator of modern romantic variations was Schumann, whose "Etudes Symphoniques" revealed a fresh source of life in the form, that has proved less austerely inaccessible than Beethoven's; Brahms, Tchaïkovsky, and many others having obviously derived inspiration from it. Mr. Elgar stands in a peculiar relation to the modern masters of variation-form. He seems to be much preoccupied with the curious idea of musical portraiture, which, again, owes its existence to Schumann. The miniature of Chopin occurring in Schumann's "Carnaval" was the first, and perhaps remains to this day the best, example in its kind, and the sketch of Mendelssohn forming No. 24 of the same composer's "Album for the Young" is also a recognisable piece of musical portraiture. Mr. Elgar has carried out the idea in an extended scale in these variations. His theme, which he calls "enigma," has no eccentricity. It is a rather march-like strain in regular form, having three sections, the last of which is a repetition of the first, with fresh harmony and instrumentation. There are nominally fourteen variations;—including the finale, actually thirteen, for No. 10, described as intermezzo, is not a variation. Each of the variations, and the intermezzo, bears initials, or a nickname, which are commonly assumed to represent the composer's friends. Why any such thing should be assumed we do not know. It is both possible and allowable to portray persons who are not one's friends, and some of Mr. Elgar's portraits seem to us extremely severe and satirical. One of the early numbers, in particular, gives a vivid impression of a very unsympathetic personality, garrulous, querulous, trivial, meanly egotistic, and rather ape-like. The composer does well to let the identity of the original remain shrouded in mystery. The variations are grouped according to the usual principles of contrast, and they are all extremely effective. However much the composer may call his theme an enigma—Berlioz called his variation-theme in an early symphony idée fixe—one can scarcely escape the impression that it represents the temperament of the artist, through which he sees his subjects; for that, and nothing else, is what forms the connecting link between any series of portraits by the same hand. Wonderful ingenuity is shown in varying the relation in which the theme stands to the musical picture. During the first part of the work, down to the end of the sixth variation, the attitude of the audience seemed rather reserved. But a change began to be noticeable at the seventh variation, called "Troyte," an impetuous presto movement that shows a hitherto unsuspected kind of energy. Nor did the attention flag at all during the noble and serene harmonies of the ensuing Allegretto. The richly-organised "Nimrod," forming No. 9, leads to the dainty and tripping "Dorabella" Intermezzo, which has no connection with the theme. The eleventh variation, headed "G.R.S.," is another demonstration of abundant vigour, and the following "B. G. N." has for leading feature a fine lyrical melody for 'cello. No. 13 obviously has reference to someone on a sea voyage, the "prosperous voyage" theme from Mendelssohn's "Meeresstille" overture being heard amid delicate suggestions of distant sea sound. In the very extended finale there is some powerful polyphonic writing, and the movement ends with a repetition of the theme in augmentation, forcibly declaimed by the heavy brass to the accompaniment of the full orchestra. The audience seemed rather astonished that a work by a British composer should have had other than a petrifying effect upon them. They applauded with the energy that the composer's imaginative power and masterly handling of the orchestra deserve. Dr. Richter signalled to Mr. Elgar, who was seated among the audience, and he thereupon mounted the stage and received an enthusiastic greeting from the public. The striking success of this composition reminds us of the following passage occurring at the end of an article by Sir Hubert Parry written some years ago:—"It is even possible that, after all its long history, the variation still affords one of the most favourable opportunities for the exercise of their genius by composers of the future."

"Cockaigne."

October 25,
1901.

Dr. Elgar's more recent compositions seem to require nearly as much talking about as Wagner's. But, be it observed, that is not the composer's fault, but is the result of the primitive stage at which not only the bulk of our musical public but many of our "leading musicians" still find themselves, as regards understanding the poetic import of a musical work. On two occasions in recent years a work full of slaughter and frenzy, of barbarous revelry and sensuality, of glittering and blaring pageantry, and ending with annihilation—a work the powerful appeal of which lies precisely in the fact that it is the most powerful existing expression in music of everything most un-Christian and anti-Catholic—has been performed without public protest in a British Cathedral. We here refer, of course, to the "Symphonie Pathétique." Dr. Elgar is another composer whose music means something; but what chance is there for us to understand him? One quails before the task of discussing in a concert notice all the questions to which such a work as the "Cockaigne" overture gives rise. First let us state, without stopping to give reasons, that we think it worth hearing and worth studying. If any previously existing overture is to be mentioned in order to indicate the type to which "Cockaigne" belongs, it must obviously be "Meistersinger." The humorous element is somewhat more prominent than in "Meistersinger," and the general tone and colouring of the two works are utterly dissimilar. But that the composer of "Cockaigne" had "Meistersinger" in mind is rendered practically certain by one particular point—the use of a Londoner theme and of the same theme in diminution for the youthful Londoner, in exact analogy with Wagner's symbols for the Meistersingers and the apprentices. Again the opening bustle, giving way to a love-scene, suggests "Meistersinger," and so does the polyphonic elaboration of the middle part. But there is a great difference between following Wagner's procedure and borrowing his musical ideas. To some slight extent in the E flat section, and more particularly in the harmony thereof, we find the Wagner flavour. For the rest, while the procedure seems at any rate to be based on Wagner's, we find the materials used and the character of the artistic result achieved to be entirely different from Wagner's. There are seven musical elements in "Cockaigne," the significance of which may be roughly indicated as follows:—(1) Bustle of the streets; (2) a virile personal note; (3) companionship and interchange of ideas between two sweethearts; (4) pert children playing their pranks; (5) military band episode; (6) impressions on passing from the street into a church; (7) new phases of street-bustle music. Musical symbols of very considerable plastic force are invented for these things, and are woven into a powerful and entertaining tone-picture with that mastery of the orchestra which no one can now refuse to recognise in Dr. Elgar. He always works with definite lines, and does not seem to care much for those atmospheric effects in which certain moderns, such as Richard Strauss, are so strong. The music has a far wider range of ideas and emotions than would be possible in a poem occupying the same time in delivery. It gives us impressions of London by day and by night, impressions that are partly realistic and partly antiquarian, following the flight of the imagination with absolute freedom, forming a sort of musical parallel to Henley's "London Voluntaries."

And lo! the wizard hour
Whose shining silent sorcery hath such power!
Still, still the streets, between their carcanets
Of linking gold, are avenues of sleep.
But see how gable ends and parapets
In gradual beauty and significance
Emerge! And did you hear
That little twitter-and-cheep,
Breaking inordinately loud and clear
On this still spectral exquisite atmosphere?
'Tis a first nest at matins! And behold
A rakehell cat—how furtive and acold!
A spent witch homing from some infamous dance—
Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade
Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade!

And if this is effective, does not a certain sonnet of Wordsworth's exist to prove that an aspect of London may furnish a magnificent poetic inspiration? It should be remembered that there is originality in emotion as well as in ideas and in devices; and this is where we find Dr. Elgar strong—perhaps stronger than any other British composer. Besides the technical ability to express himself in music, he has originality of emotion. He takes us into regions where music never took us before. As to his use of Wagner's procedure, that was also Beethoven's procedure in some of his finest works. In fact, it is the procedure of everyone for whom music is a language, such as it has tended more and more to become ever since Beethoven's time. The history of music in the nineteenth century is the history of something growing constantly more articulate.

No doubt some persons would like to ask—Should we have known all this, or any of it, about the significance of the "Cockaigne" music had there been no programmes? The answer is, Probably not. But the beauty of an artistic design illustrating a certain subject may often be perceived when one cannot make out what the subject is. In such a case the subject is not "all nonsense." It is the stimulating cause of the beautiful design, and it is very natural for those who find the design beautiful to like to know what it is all about. It is a mistake to think that a definite play of the imagination has nothing to do with musical composition. It has very much to do with it. The kind of music with no underlying play of fancy is only too familiar.

The name "Cockaigne" occurs in some form in old English, French, Italian, and Spanish literature, meaning "the land of delights." The fancied connection with "Cockney" is of much later date. Henry S. Leigh's "Carols of Cockayne" (1869) shows the recognition of the word in the sense of "Cockneydom." There is said to be a connection between "Cockney" and the French "coquin," and if that is so the appropriation of "Cockaigne" as correlative of "Cockney" is justified by community of origin, all these words being derived from the stem of coquere (to cook). No doubt "coquin" originally meant "cook's boy" or "loafer in a cook-shop," and "Cockney" at first meant something of the same sort. At the same time there hangs about the word "Cockaigne" a certain proverbial suggestiveness, derived from the time when it was used in the sense of "land of delights," the etymology being forgotten. It thus has a peculiar appropriateness as the title of Dr. Elgar's genial and largely humoristic tone-picture.

"The Dream of Gerontius,"

Birmingham Festival.

October 3, 1900

"The Dream of Gerontius," Cardinal Newman called his poem, with exquisite modesty. How that poem may stand in the estimation of those who share Cardinal Newman's point of view in regard to religious matters is perhaps an important question, but not one with which musical, or any artistic, criticism is concerned. For nothing is more certain about art than that it is subservient to a person's view of life. Artistic or æsthetic criticism must be humble, and must abstain from trespassing on the ground of faith and morals. Indirectly, indeed, æsthetics may have a bearing on these more serious subjects. For is it not written of religious doctrines, "By their fruits ye shall know them"?—and nothing else is in so complete a sense a "fruit" of a religion as a work of art arising therefrom. Nevertheless, the function of æsthetics is not to commend or blame a view of life, but rather to enquire with what eloquence, with what sincerity, with what measure of convincing power the artist expounds his ideas and communicates his feelings, whatever those ideas and feelings may be. With these reflections I find it necessary to premise my notes on Edward Elgar's new work. The reflections are rather solemn, but the new work is very solemn. It is deeply and intensely religious; it is totally unconventional, and must be discussed in an unconventional manner. First, then, let me state a point of difference from all that I have experienced in listening to other oratorios and sacred cantatas, and, I may say, all other musical works with words made by one person and music by another. The point is that this music, on the whole, is apt to bring home to the listener the greatness of the poem. The composer has not merely chosen from the poem such material as suited him. He has expounded the poem musically, and to the task of expounding it he has brought what may be described without inflation as the resources of modern music. We shall doubtless hear of plagiarism from "Parsifal," and there is indeed much in the work that could not have been there but for "Parsifal." But it is not allowable for a modern composer of religious music to be ignorant of "Parsifal." One might as well write for orchestra in ignorance of the Berlioz orchestration as write any serious music in ignorance of the Wagnerian symbolism. Edward Elgar does nothing so affected as to ignore the development which, for good or for evil, the language of music underwent at the hands of Wagner. His orchestral prelude, however, reverts to an earlier Wagnerian type. It gives a forecast of the whole story in such wise that at the end of it the imagination has to be carried back. We have the last agony of the sick man, his death, and passage to the unseen. The symbols, though employed in the Wagnerian manner, are, nevertheless, thoroughly original, taking us into an atmosphere and a world absolutely remote from all that is Wagnerian. When the voice of Gerontius (assigned to a tenor solo) enters we are carried back to the death-bed—to the prayers of Gerontius and his companions. A series of choruses with intervening and accompanying passages for the solo voice is devoted to the King of Terrors. Here the music touches the various notes in the gamut of feeling, from the agony of terrors to serene confidence. After the parting of Gerontius, with the words "Novissima hora est," a new voice enters, that of the Priest (baritone), chanting "Proficiscere, anima Christiana." Among the supplications for the departed is a chant three times repeated, each of the two parts ending with a choral "Amen" that bears a tender echo of the mediæval "Cantus fictus." An extended section of chorus and semi-chorus bring the first part of the cantata to a peaceful and prayerful ending.

In the second part the soul of Gerontius is winging its way towards the celestial regions, holding colloquy with an angel. There is a Dantesque passage in which a chorus of demons is overheard by the pair—the soul and the angel. Gerontius is encouraged by the angel. Echoes of earthly voices, praying for the departed soul, are borne up from the earth, and in the end the soul of Gerontius is affectionately delivered over to Purgatory by the angel, there to wait suffering indeed, but in resignation and in the assurance of salvation.

Naturally the prevalent poetic note in such a work is the mystical exaltation, now of the contrite sinner, now of the aspiring saint. The chief climax is reached, not at the end, but in the hymn of the Angels, "Praise to the Holiest in the Height," recurring before the departure to Purgatory. But the whole work sings "Praise to the Holiest in the Height and in the Depth." A powerfully contrasting note is heard in the death-agony of Gerontius and, above all, in the chorus of demons occurring in the second part. Here a comparison with Berlioz is simply inevitable—for Edward Elgar's dramatic power admits of comparison with the great masters. His demons are much more terrible than those of Berlioz, who was a materialist in the profound sense—not, that is, in virtue of more or less shifting beliefs, but of unalterable temperament. Infinitely remote from that of Berlioz is the temperament revealed in Edward Elgar's music, which, like parts of the poem, fairly merits the epithet "Dantesque."

"Gerontius,"

Lower Rhine Festival,

Düsseldorf.