and curiously irritated by, the presence of other people." I also feel drawn to a man who talks of organists having as much imagination as the vox humana stop. On theatrical people he is unconvincing: one hears something about Beerbohm Tree's memory, Henry Arthur Jones's self-importance, Temple Thurston's sensitiveness, Gerald Cumberland's slavish devotion to Janet Achurch, and Miss Horniman's detestation of Romance and Mancunian hardness, but there are no brilliant thumb-nail sketches of actors and actresses whom we have learnt to love or hate. On the other hand, I did not realise before how much music is regarded in Berlin as a trade. "A musician does not go to Berlin to get money: he goes to get a reputation.' Unless you were known in Berlin, you were everywhere considered a second-rate kind of person, a mere talented outsider. Few artists have gone to sing or play in Berlin except for the purpose of obtaining favourable Press Notices. It may cost a couple of hundred pounds, but it is counted money well spent, well invested. The story of the concert-agent who required £325 to provide hall, printing, advertisements, invitations, preliminary paragraphs, audience, critics' articles, and so on is probably like most of the rest of the book, pure or impure fabrication, but is delightful. After much that is irrelevant about Grieg, whom he calls "Griegkin," Richter, "the great disciplinarian ”, the "polished, emotional " Landon Ronald, and other musicians, he picks out two names as of vital importance in British creative music-Sir Edward Elgar and Granville Bantock: Elgar, "conservative, soured with the aristocratic point of view, super-refined, deeply religious; Bantock, democratic, Rabelaisian, free-thinking, gorgeously human." Of the two it is obvious that he prefers the latter. Among the people whom Mr Cumberland would like to meet (a quite neat idea, well worked out), W. B. Yeats is given pride of place on account of his "lack-lust "nature: He wants to satisfy himself as to what precisely is wanting in this lily-fingered, effeminate poet. These are not exactly his words. The versatility of Hilaire Belloc also attracts him: " Even now, on the borderland of middle age, I cannot pick up a new book of Belloc's without a little thrill: he is so clean, so bravely prejudiced, so courageous. He is a lover of wine and beer, of literature, of the Sussex Downs, of the great small things of life: a mystic, a man of affairs, a poet. What, indeed, is he not that is fine and noble and free?" It is when he writes like this that all our prejudice against Gerald Cumberland suddenly vanishes: the only true criticism, said some one, is that which appreciates it seems as if this man might have been a true critic, but has misunderstood or ignored this axiom, and so queered his pitch. On the other hand, there are times when it is necessary for the critic to speak plainly, and no one is so well fitted to say what we all feel about D. H. Lawrence as Cumberland. Lawrence is one of the men he would like to meet for reasons which he does not state: but he does realise that here was a genius who in Sons and Lovers and The White Peacock (which Mr Cumberland, in his perversity, calls The Red Peacock) gave the world something entirely new. He could so easily have been the leading novelist of the day: instead, he allowed himself to be overwhelmed by the passion of sex, and then ran away out of the ugly chaos we call life: there was no riband of silver in his case it was just sheer funk.. we feel the same sort of sense of loss that we felt when Richard Middleton and John Davidson killed themselves. These things are not done. For some rather obscure reason there is a good deal of talk about night clubs in this book, but as it all leads up to an exceedingly cunning suggestion about their reconstruction much dull description may be forgiven. I, for one, am quite willing to subscribe to Mr Cumberland's establishment if it comes up to his vision: “A night club is never for the old. There should be no card-playing. Dancing one would have, of course, and music of the best. And wine, and many pretty women, and a perfume of roses . . and above all, a big room set apart for the hour that comes after dawn. At dawn we would all go into another room, a room coloured green, with narcissi and jonquils and hyacinths on the tables: a room with open windows : a room with fruit spread invitingly: a room where one could still be gay and in which one need not feel sordid and spiritually jaded and spiritually unclean." Set Down in Malice is altogether a most curious book. It certainly satisfies a craving that we all feel to know something about our more famous contemporaries, but I cannot, for the life of me, think why he should search for something nasty to say about most of them. It is as false a method as that of the headmaster's testimonial to his assistants when he wants to get rid of them to be fulsome in eulogy iscertainly no worse, except that it is commoner, than to be blatant in one's rudeness. Mr Cumberland has certainly met some most interesting people, but it is doubtful whether any of them will ever speak to him again he seems to have wantonly infringed one of : the severest unwritten laws of society: he has broken the confidence which was not asked. In his endeavour to achieve perfect honesty he has tried to evade another natural law which cannot lightly be broken, that of compromise, and has succeeded in giving us a false and quite dishonest portrait. He is like popular caricaturists who emphasise Lord Northcliffe's hair and G. K. Chesterton's embonpoint. Even Lytton Strachey did not stop at Manning's "Hat." No. Gerald Cumberland's book ought to have been worth a place on one's permanent bookshelf, but isn't. In a year it will be as dead as this week's Bystander. I VIII THE HUMOUR OF "SAKI" Reginald Reginald in Russia The Chronicles of Clovis T was in the Christmas vacation of 1905 that I was presented with a copy of Reginald by a fellow undergraduate. There are some debts that one can never repay in full; it is perhaps something that we never forget the friend who introduces us to an author who ultimately becomes a favourite: I shall feel that I have, in some degree, repaid him in this case if I can entice any reader of this chapter who may have missed Munro's work to love it as I do, for he who brings before our notice what exactly suits our temperament is a private benefactor of a very high order. "Saki's" humour-let it be admitted at once-is not for all tastes. There may be some who look upon such playing upon phrases as "There are occasions when Reginald is caviare to the Colonel," or "We live in a series of rushes-like the infant Moses "--as unworthy. These are they who refuse to laugh at the nimble-witted Nelson Keys, and prefer to reserve their merriment for an abstruse Shakespearean pun about points and gaskins.' 66 66 |