Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (659 page)

Mr. K — was exceedingly nice and sympathetic, and he remarked that in his day my uncle Oliver Madox Brown had had the reputation of being the laziest boy at that establishment, whilst I had amply carried on that splendid tradition.

That was the last of my school-days, but nearly fifteen years later I met in the Strand a man who was an officer in the Burmese Civil Service. At school he had been my particular chum. And he told me that he had been so shocked by Mr. P—’s throwing the inkpot at me that, without telling anybody about it, he had gone straight to the headmaster and had reported the whole matter. The headmaster had taken Mr. P — to task to such effect that the poor man resigned from the school and shortly afterwards died in Alsace-Lorraine. Apparently the offence of my having written a book was only a pretext for getting rid of me from the school. Mr. P — , it appears, had reported that my powers of invective were so considerable that I must gravely menace the authority of any master. And yet, from that day to this and never before, can I remember having addressed a cutting speech to any living soul except once to a German waiter in the refreshment-room of Frankfort Hauptbahnhof.

Thus music or the enthusiasm for music put an end to my lay education in these islands, and I entered upon a course more distinctly musical. Having received instruction from more or less sound musicians, and a certain amount of encouragement from musicians more or less eminent, I attempted the entrance examination of one of the British royal institutions for education in music. I acquitted myself reasonably well or even exceedingly well as far as the theory of music was concerned, but this institution has, or perhaps it was only that it had, a rule that seemed to me inscrutable in its stupidity. Every pupil must take what is called a second study — the study of some instrument or other. I had a nodding acquaintance with practically every instrument of the orchestra except the drums, which I could never begin to tackle. The principal of the institution in question set it down to my dismay that my second study must be the piano. Now I could not play the piano; I dislike the piano, which seems to me to be the most soulless of the instruments, and, in any case, to acquire mastery of the piano, or indeed of any other instrument, requires many hours of practising a day which would interfere, as it seemed to me, rather seriously with the deep study that I hoped to make of the theory of music. I accordingly asked to be allowed to interview the principal — an awful being who kept himself splendidly remote. Having succeeded with a great deal of difficulty in penetrating into his room, I discovered a silent gentleman who listened to my remarks without any appearance of paying attention to them. But when I had finished and was waiting in nervous silence, he suddenly overwhelmed me with a torrent of excited language. What it amounted to was that, during his lifetime my father had domineered over that institution and that, if I thought I was going to keep up the tradition I was exceedingly mistaken. On the contrary, the professors were determined to give me a hot time of it, or — as Sir C — D — put it — to treat me with the utmost rigour of the rules.

This gave me food for several days of reflection. I had to consider that Sir C — D — was in private life an unemotional English gentleman — frigid and rather meticulous in the matter of good form. Musical emotion had worked such a person up to a pitch of passion as egregious as was manifested in all his features; musical passion had worked me up to such a pitch of emotion as to let me insult in the most outrageous manner a harmless person like Mr. P — , whom I really liked. There must then be something so unbalancing in a musical career as to leave me very little opening, I being, at any rate in my own conception, a person singularly shy and wanting in the faculty which is called “push.” I had to remember, too, that my best friends — the young men and women with whom personally I got on in the extreme of geniality — became invariably frigid and monosyllabic as soon as I mentioned my musical ambitions. There was about these people on such occasions an air of reserve, an air almost of deafness; whereas when they spoke of their own ambitions they became animated, gay, enthusiastic. This might be evidence that all musicians were hopelessly self-centred, or it might be evidence that my music was no good at all. I dare say both were true. Whether it were both or either it seemed to me that here was no career for a person craving the sympathy of enthusiasm and the contagious encouragement of applause. Possibly had I lived in Germany it would have been different, for in Germany there is musical life, a musical atmosphere. In the German establishments for musical education there is none of this deafness, there is none of this reserve, there is none of this self-centred abstraction. There is a busy, there is a contagious life, and student keeps watch on student with an extreme anxiety which may be evidence of no more than a determination to know what the other fellow is doing and to go one better.

In England, at any rate in the musical world, as in the world of all the other arts, a general change seems gradually to have come over the atmosphere in the last quarter of a century. Jealousies amongst executants, amongst composers, have diminished; and along with them have diminished the enthusiasm and the partisanships of the public. In the ‘fifties and ‘sixties there was an extraordinary outcry against the Pre-Raphaelite movement, in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties there was an outcry almost more extraordinary against what was called the Music of the Future. As I have said elsewhere, Charles Dickens attempted to get the authorities to imprison the Pre-Raphaelite painters because he considered that their works were blasphemous. And he was backed by a whole, great body of public opinion. In the ‘seventies and ‘eighties there were cries for the imprisonment alike of the critics who upheld and the artistes who performed the Music of the Future. The compositions of Wagner were denounced as being atheistic, sexually immoral, and tending to further socialism and the throwing of bombs. Wagnerites were threatened with assassination, and assaults between critics of the rival schools were things not unknown in the foyer of the opera. I really believe that my father, as the chief exponent of Wagner in these islands, did go in some personal danger. Extraordinary pressures were brought to bear upon the more prominent critics of the day, the pressure coming, as a rule, from the exponents of the school of Italian opera. Thus, at the openings of the opera seasons packing-cases of large dimensions and considerable in number would arrive at the house of the ferocious critic of the chief newspaper of England. They would contain singular assortments of comestibles and of objects of art. Thus I remember half-a-dozen hams, the special product of some north Italian town, six cases of Rhine wine, which were no doubt intended to propitiate the malignant Teuton; a reproduction of the Medici Venus in marble, painted with phosphoric paint so that it gleamed blue and ghostly in the twilight; a case of Bohemian glass and several strings of Italian sausages. And these packing cases, containing no outward sign of their senders, would have to be unpacked and then once more repacked, leaving the servants with fingers damaged by nails and passages littered with straw. Inside would be found the cards of Italian
prime donne
, tenors or basses, newly arrived in London, and sending servile homage to the illustrious critic of the “Giornale Times.” On one occasion a letter containing bank-notes for £50 arrived from a
prima donna
with a pathetic note begging the critic to absent himself from her first night. Praise from a Wagnerite she considered to be impossible, but she was ready to pay for silence. I do not know whether this letter inspired my father with the idea of writing to the next suppliant that he was ready to accept her present — it was the case of Bohemian glass — but that in that case he would never write a word about her singing. He meant the letter, of course, as a somewhat clumsy joke, but the lady — she was not, however, an Italian — possessing a sense of humour, at once accepted the offer. This put my father rather in a quandary, for Mme. H — was one of the greatest exponents of emotional tragic music that there had ever been, and the occasion on which she was to appear was the first performance in England of one of the great operas of the world. I do not exactly know whether my father went through any conscientious troubles — I presume he did, for he was a man of a singular moral niceness. At any rate he wrote an enthusiastic notice of the opera and an enthusiastic and deserved notice of the impersonatrix of Carmen. And since the Bohemian glass — or the poor remains of the breakages of a quarter of a century — still decorate my sideboard, I presume that he accepted the present. I do not really see what else he could have done.

Pressure of other sorts was also not unknown. Thus, there was an opera produced by a foreign baron who was a distinguished figure in the diplomatic service, and who was very well looked on at Court. In the middle of the performance my father received a command to go into the royal box, where a royal personage informed him that in his august opinion the work was one of genius. My father replied that he was sorry to differ from so distinguished a connoisseur — but that in his opinion the music was absolute rubbish
— Lauter Klatsch.

The reply was undiplomatic and upon the whole regrettable, but my father had been irritated by the fact that a good deal of Court pressure had already been brought to bear upon him. I believe that there were diplomatic reasons for desiring to flatter the composer of the opera, who was attached to a foreign embassy — the embassy of the nation with whom for the moment the diplomatic relations of Great Britain were somewhat strained. So that without doubt His Royal Highness was as patriotically in the right as my father was in a musical sense. Eventually, the notice of the opera was written by another hand. The performance of this particular opera remains in my mind because during one of its scenes, which represented the frozen circle of Hell, the cotton wool, which figured as snow on the stage, caught fire and began to burn. An incipient panic took place among the audience, but the orchestra, under a firm composer whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, continued to play, and the flames were extinguished by one of the singers using his cloak. But I still remember being in the back of the box and seeing in the foreground, silhouetted against the lights of the stage, the figures of my father and of some one else — I think it was William Rossetti — standing up and shouting down into the stalls: “Sit down, brutes! Sit down, cowards!”

On the other hand, it is not to be imagined that acts of kindness and good-fellowship were rare under this seething mass of passions and of jealousies. Thus at one of the Three Choir Festivals, my father, having had the misfortune to sprain his ankle, was unable to be present in the cathedral. His notice was written for him by the critic of the paper which was most violently opposed to views at all Wagnerian — a gentleman whom till that moment my father regarded as his bitterest personal enemy. This critic happened to be staying in the same hotel, and having heard of the accident volunteered to write the notice out of sheer good feeling. This gentleman, an extreme
bon vivant
and a man of an excellent and versatile talent, has since told me that he gave himself particular trouble to imitate my father’s slightly cumbrous Germanic English and his extreme modernist views. This service was afterwards repaid by my father in the following circumstances. It was again one of the Three Choir Festivals — at Worcester, I think, and we were stopping at Malvern — my father and Mr. S — going in every day to the cathedral city. Mr. S —— was either staying with us or in an adjoining house, and on one Wednesday evening, his appetite being sharpened by an unduly protracted performance of “The Messiah,” Mr. S — partook so freely of the pleasures of the table that he omitted altogether to write his notice. This fact he remembered just before the closing of the small local telegraph office, and although Mr. S — was by no means in a condition to write his notice, he was yet sufficiently mellow with wine to be lachrymose and overwhelmed at the idea of losing his post. We rushed off at once to the telegraph office and did what we could to induce the officials to keep the wires open whilst the notice was being written. But all inducements failed. My father hit upon a stratagem at the last moment. At that date it was a rule of the Post Office that if the beginning of a long message were handed in before eight o’clock the office must be kept open until its conclusion as long as there was no break in the handing in of slips. My father therefore commanded me to telegraph anything that I liked to the newspaper office as long as I kept it up whilst he was writing the notice of “The Messiah.” And the only thing that came into my head at the moment was the Church Service. The newspaper was therefore astonished to receive a long telegram beginning:
When the wicked man turneth away from the sin that he has committed
and continuing through the
Te Deum
and the
Nunc Dimittis,
till suddenly it arrived at “The Three Choirs Festival. Worcester, Wednesday, July 27th,
1887.”
Nowadays the acts of kindliness no doubt remain a feature of the musical world, but I think the enthusiasms as well as the ferocities have diminished altogether. Composers like Strauss and Debussy steal upon us as it were in the night. Both Strauss and Debussy must be nearly as incomprehensible to good Wagnerites as were the works of Wagner to enthusiastic followers of Rossini and the early Verdi. Yet there are no outcries; there is no clamouring for the instant imprisonment of Strauss or the critic of the — . Nor is this want of enthusiasm limited to England. A little time ago I was present at the first performance in Paris of Strauss’s
Also sprach Zarathustra.
The hall was filled with “All Paris” — all Paris polite, indifferent,
blageur,
anxious to be present at anything that was new, foreign and exotic. There was a respectable amount of applause, there was some yawning decently concealed. In the middle of it the old gentleman who had taken me to the performance got up suddenly and made for the door. He had, as I heard, some altercation with the attendants, for there was a rule that the doors could not be opened whilst the music played. I followed him to the door and found my friend — the late General du T — , one of the veterans of the war of 1870 — explaining to the attendant that he felt himself gravely indisposed and that he must positively be allowed to go away. We were at last permitted to go out. Outside, the general said that Strauss’s music really had made him positively ill. And it had made him still more ill to have it received with’ applause. He wanted to know what had happened to France — what had happened to Paris, to that Paris which in the ‘seventies had resisted by force of arms the production of
Tannhäuser
at the Opéra. The music appeared to him horrible, unbearable, and yet no one had protested.