War Letters of a Public-School Boy Part 5

JANUARY, 1912

_January 1._--Went with Mother to first night of _Nightbirds_ at the Lyric. Workman and Constance Driver excellent; Farkoa also very good.

_January 2-5._--Busy making switchboard at home. At the engineering workshop I am starting on a steel rod; cutting with hack saw, cutting 5/16 standard Whitworth thread; grooving it.

All this on a Drummond 3-1/2-inch lathe.

_January 6._--Heard of 4 v. 20 a.h. acc.u.mulator for 10s. 6d. I must buy it. Splendid acc. it is. Finished switchboard; all correct; polished up meters and instruments. [Here is diagram of connections.]

Evening.--At _Tales of Hoffmann_, Opera House, with Mother. Good performance. First and third acts excellent; second ("Barcarolle"

act) poor. Orchestra superb. Felice Lyne, Pollock, Victoria Fer--artistes of great promise. Renaud a master.

_January 7._--Wrote Economic Electric for new dynamo. Received letter from "Humber" recommending motor bike. I will probably buy one later on, or a "Triumph."

_January 10._--Took my old acc.u.mulator to electrician. To my great pleasure he said there was nothing wrong, only wanted filling and charging.

_January 11._--Tried my acc. on the train, running through switchboard; a great success. Engine runs very well. All switchboard connections absolutely correct; the reading when running: volts 3.5 to 4.25, amps. 1 to 2.5.

_January 12._--To Ba.s.sett Lowke's and bought wagon; yellow colour, red lettering; splendid model.

_January 13._--At matinee _Orpheus in the Underground_, at His Majesty's. Exceedingly good show. Courtice Pounds, L. Mackinder and Lottie Venn--all first rate; good voices and not afraid to use them.

_January 15._--To Hippodrome. The feature two amazingly clever Chimpanzees. Leo Fall's _Eternal Waltz_ a pretty operetta.

_January 16._--Final golf match between Dad and myself. Dad wins match and rubber by 1 up.

_January 17._--Got back my P.O. bank book. Total now 6 3s.

Discovered slight leakage at joint between the cylinder and combustion head of the gas engine, owing to wearing away of asbestos washer, so causing a very small but appreciable diminution of compression. Made a temporary stopping with vaseline.

Evening.--Dad and I to _Tales of Hoffmann_, at the Opera House.

This time a magnificent performance.

_January 19._--Dynamo arrived. A beautiful machine.

_January 20._--Went with Dad to International football match, England _v._ Wales, at Twickenham. Score--England, 8 points; Wales, _nil_. A splendid game. Wales beaten chiefly owing to their very poor three-quarters. Little to choose between the packs.

_January 31._--Having re-started music with a good teacher, a pupil of Professor Hambourg, I have practised very hard on the piano these last few days.

In his enthusiasm for engineering he devoured books like "Engineering Wonders of the World," "How it Works," "How it is Made," "Engineering of To-day," "Mechanical Inventions of To-day"; also books on wireless telegraphy and aviation. A great lover of books, he liked on off-days to visit London bookshops and rummage their shelves. Very proud he was of his purchases during these excursions. From time to time he would have a run round the museums and picture galleries of London or take a trip to Hampton Court--Wolsey's palace and William III's home--a spot dear to him for its links with history and for the beauty of its surroundings. He was always enthralled at the British Museum by the Rosetta Stone--that key by means of which Champollion unlocked for the modern world the long-hidden secret of Egypt's ancient civilisation.

A subject which he pursued keenly for a couple of years--from fifteen to seventeen--and which held him in fascinated wonder, was Astronomy, a branch of knowledge that happens to be strongly represented among my books. Often on starry nights he would be a watcher of the heavens.

Many a night from yonder ivied cas.e.m.e.nt, Ere he went to rest, Did he look on great Orion, sloping Slowly to the west.

Many a night he saw the Pleiads, rising Thro' the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fireflies, tangled In a silver braid.

It has been stated that most of Paul's vacations were spent in Wales, but in 1913 he went farther afield, accompanying his mother, his brother and myself on a tour in Germany. He was enraptured with this, his first visit to the Continent. On our outward journey we halted at Brussels, in those days a bright and happy city with nothing in its cheerful, prosperous air to suggest that in less than a year there would descend upon it the baleful shadow of the Great War. Much in the old Germany appealed powerfully to our son, and even of the new Germany, with its energy and its zeal for learning, he was something of an admirer. But he hated in modern Germany its brazen materialism and boastful arrogance. He attributed the change in the spirit of the German people to the hardness of their Prussian taskmasters, whose yoke was submissively borne because of the glamour of the military victories achieved since 1866, and the rapid growth in wealth that had followed the attainment of German unity. He read and spoke German and was familiar with the literature and history of the country. Two great Germans, Goethe and Wagner, he intensely admired. It so happened that we were at Frankfort on the centenary of Goethe's death. Paul visited the Goethe house and spent a couple of hours examining its souvenirs with loving interest. He liked to see the places and the houses a.s.sociated with the names or lives of great men. On our homeward journey down the Rhine he left us at Bonn to visit the house where Beethoven was born, joining-us subsequently at Cologne.

This holiday in the Rhineland and the Black Forest brought deep enjoyment to him. His enthusiasm at his first sight of the Rhine was unrestrained, and the morning after our arrival he plunged into its waters for a swim. Professor Cramb, writing of the love of Germans for the Rhine, quotes a letter from Treitschke, in which that fire-eating historian said on the eve of his leaving Bonn: "To-morrow I shall see the Rhine for the last time. The memory of that n.o.ble river will keep my heart pure and save me from sad or evil thoughts throughout all the days of my life." Paul in a marginal note writes: "Wonderful attraction of the Rhine. I have felt it myself, though not a German."

He got on excellently with the German people. One Sunday afternoon, doing the famous walk from Triberg to Hornberg, he had a long and friendly talk with a German reservist in the latter's native tongue, about the relations of Germany and England. Both agreed that war between the two nations would be madness, and both dismissed it as to the last degree improbable, but the German said significantly that he feared the Crown Prince was a menace to peace.

In the spring of the following year (1914) Paul spent Easter week with me in Paris. Never had I seen the French capital more beautiful or happier-seeming than in that bright and joyous springtime. Who could have dreamt then that war was only three months distant? Paris was a revelation to Paul. He crowded a lot of sight-seeing into half a dozen busy days. All that was n.o.ble or beautiful in Art as in Nature appealed instinctively to him. I can see him now at the Louvre gazing rapt from various angles at that glorious piece of statuary the Venus of Milo. His knowledge of history made his visit to the glittering palace of Louis XIV at Versailles an undiluted pleasure. Fascinated by the genius of Napoleon, he spent a long time at the Invalides gazing down on the sarcophagus within which the conqueror of Europe sleeps his last sleep.

Later in the year he and two other Dulwich boys arranged to spend three weeks of the summer vacation in the house of a professor at Rouen. They were to have left London on the second week in August.

This hopeful project was frustrated by the rude shock of war.

CHAPTER VIII

MUSIC

_Music is a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that._

CARLYLE.

Paul began the study of music at an early age. He had natural apt.i.tude for it and an unerring ear. As a little boy he used to sing with much expression in a sweet, clear voice. He received great a.s.sistance from his mother in his musical studies. After he had turned fifteen, music became one of his main interests. Indeed, if we except football, it was his master pa.s.sion, and, unlike football, it could be pursued throughout the year. Whenever his scholastic studies and his athletic activities permitted, he would spend his leisure at the piano. With characteristic thoroughness he studied the lives as well as the works of the great composers. During the Grand Opera season he was a frequent visitor to Covent Garden Theatre and the performances of the _Nibelungen Ring_ were for him a fountain of pure delight. He was also a regular attendant with his mother at the Queen's Hall and Albert Hall concerts. Ballad singing did not appeal to him in the same degree as operatic and orchestral music. Thanks to instinctive gifts and a.s.siduous practice he became a scholarly and an accomplished musician.

A brilliant pianist, his playing was marked by power and pa.s.sion, and the colour and glow of an intense and sensitive personality. He could memorise the most intricate composition, and would play for hours without a note. Music was almost a religion with him: he found in it solace, joy, inspiration.

Above all other musicians, he reverenced Beethoven and Wagner. For Beethoven's music, with its spiritualised emotion and divine harmonies, his admiration knew no bounds. Of the famous symphonies he a.s.signed first place to that in C minor, No. 5, which he thought stood alone in the art of musical expression, peerless and unapproachable, a unique emanation from the soul and mind of man. "It holds us in its grasp," wrote Wagner of this composition, "as one of the rarer conceptions of the master, in which Pa.s.sion, aroused by Pain as its original ground-tone, raises itself upward on the stepping-stone of conciliation and exaltation to an outburst of Joy conscious of Victory." Paul loved to play the Fifth Symphony as well as to hear it performed by an orchestral band. When playing it he seemed to lose touch with earth and to be transported to celestial heights. In his marginalia he compares the methods of expression of Shakespeare with those of Beethoven. That able critic, the late Professor Dowden, in some penetrating observations on Shakespeare's works, wrote:

In the earliest plays the idea is at times hardly sufficient to fill out the language; in the middle plays there seems a perfect balance and equality between the thought and its expression; in the latest plays this balance is disturbed by the preponderance, or excess, of ideas over the means of giving them utterance.

After underlining this pa.s.sage Paul made the comment: "An extraordinary coincidence occurs to me in that the same thing happens with Beethoven, the greatest of the absolute musicians. Anyone must see that in the last symphony (No. 9 in D minor) he seems often at a loss how to put his feelings into shape (or sound), as though musical style up to his time could not express the intensity of his ideas.

Hence in this symphony there is a distinct lack of balance--a defect which is absent from the works of his middle period (_e.g._, Symphony No. 5 or No. 7)."

Another Beethoven work that he loved was the Third Symphony in E Flat, with its epic opening; the mournful beauty of its funeral march, now sad, calm, solemn like a moonless, starless night, now s.h.i.+ning with gleams of hope and faith; its crisp and lively scherzo; and the triumphant finale, a veritable ecstasy of divine joy. My son as an historical scholar found a peculiar attraction in this symphony by reason of its a.s.sociation with Napoleon Buonaparte, for it was inspired by Beethoven's belief--formed in those days when the soldier of the Revolution was regarded as the liberator of peoples and the enemy only of the old feudal order--that Napoleon was marked out by destiny to realise Plato's ideal of government. One recalls how the act of Napoleon in proclaiming himself Emperor shattered this illusion; how Beethoven erased the fallen hero's name from the t.i.tle-page of his score, withheld the "Eroica" for a time, and then gave it to the world in 1805 as "An Heroic Symphony composed in memory of a great man." When Beethoven heard of Napoleon's death at St.

Helena, he said he had already composed his funeral ode 17 years before. Of this _marche funebre_ M. Ballaique wrote: "It owes its incomparable grandeur to the beauty of the melodic idea and also to a peculiarity of rhythm. At the first half of each bar there is a halt, a pause, which seems to punctuate each station, each painful slip or descent on the way to the ill.u.s.trious tomb."

Of Wagner, Paul was a whole-hearted wors.h.i.+pper. He was familiar with the myths, legends and folk-poems from which Wagner drew his themes, and he exulted in the master's superb treatment of them. Never, he thought, had music and ideas been more felicitously blended than by Wagner, whatever the theme--the storm-tost soul of "the Flying Dutchman," to whom redemption came at last through loyalty and compa.s.sion; the conflict between sensuality and love fought out in the arena of Tannhauser's mind; the cosmic glories of the Ring with the resplendent figures of Siegfried and Brunhilde; the self-dedication of Parsifal, the Sir Percival of our Arthurian legends, whom "The sweet vision of the Holy Grail drew from all vain-glories, rivalries and earthly heats." Into the glowing music of Wagner my son read lessons in renunciation, the sordidness of the l.u.s.t for gold, the sublimity of pure human love, the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. The occasional voluptuousness of the music was so trans.m.u.ted in the alembic of his temperament that for him the sensual element was eliminated. An incident ill.u.s.trative of his devotion to Wagner is worth recording. In the summer of 1913, during our holiday tour in Germany, we had for part of the time our headquarters at a.s.smannshausen, a smiling village sheltering snugly at the foot of vine-clad hills on the right bank of the Rhine. That great river is at its best at a.s.smannshausen; the broad current here flows swiftly over a stony bed. Day and night one's ears are filled with the music of the rus.h.i.+ng waters hastening impetuously to the distant sea as though eager to lose themselves in its infinite embrace. One evening the guests at the hotel arranged a concert, and to our surprise--for we knew how diffident he was--Paul, evidently moved by the _genius loci_, volunteered to take part in it. When the time came he advanced to the piano through the crowded room and, with an elbow resting on the instrument, astonished the audience by a few explanatory words. He said he was going to play the "Ride of the Valkyries," and explained what Wagner meant to convey by that wild, stormy music. Then seating himself at the instrument, he proceeded to play the "Ride" from memory. His execution had a verve whose charm was irresistible. It was a lovely summer night. Through the open windows of the concert-room one caught glimpses of the moonlight quivering on the waters of the swift-flowing Rhine. Nothing could be heard save the river's melodious roar softened by distance, and this enchanting music interpreted by one who was saturated with its spirit, both sounds blending harmoniously like the double pipe of an ancient Greek flute player. All of us felt the spell of the scene and the occasion.

Everyone listened tense and silent until the descending chromatic pa.s.sage at the end when the "Valkyries" vanish into s.p.a.ce, the echo of their laughter dies away, and the "Ride" ends in a sound like the fluttering of wings in the distance. When Paul rose from the piano the pent-up feelings of the audience found expression in enthusiastic applause.

In the spring of 1913, just after he had turned 17, he wrote the following appreciation of Wagner for the _Llanelly Star_:

The 22nd of May, 1913, marks the centenary of an event of supreme importance in the annals of music. To-day just one hundred years ago was born at Leipzig Richard Wagner, king of the music-drama, who towers above all other operatic composers like some lofty mountain rising from the midst of a dull and featureless plain.

Such a colossal revolution as was effected by Wagner in Art can hardly find a parallel in any walk of life. What, in brief, was the scope of Wagner's reforms? To answer this question it is necessary to glance at the state in which the opera stood in pre-Wagner days. From the days of Scarlatti the opera had consisted of a number of semi-detached solos, duets or choruses to which tunes were set. These pieces were joined up by any jumble of notes sung by the characters on the stage, usually with no artistic meaning whatsoever, known as the recitative. In a word, the opera was a mere ballad concert. The recitative was so utterly foolish and meaningless, as a rule, that men like Beethoven and Weber, when they composed music-dramas, abolished it altogether, and composed what is known as "Singspiel"--that is, a number of ballads connected simply by spoken words. (The well-known Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are really Singspiels in a lesser form.) Thus it is obvious that the meaning of the opera--that is, a drama whose significance is made more clear by the aid of music suitable to the situation in hand--had been entirely lost sight of.

In the average French or Italian opera, or in the singspiels, all that matters is a number of songs, ballads or arias--call them what you will--entirely disconnected and quite destructive to the continuity that must be the essence of every drama. This continuity is an absolute necessity to every spoken play; imagine the effect if Shakespeare or Ibsen had written little pieces of rhyming verse joined up by any jumble of nonsensical prose!

Neglect of this fact led every opera composer before Wagner astray. We can imagine a pre-Wagner composer telling his librettist, "Now, mind you arrange that in certain parts the words will allow me to put in arias or choruses." In short, the situation was summed up in Wagner's famous phrase, "The means of expression (music) has been made the end, while the end of expression (the drama) has been made the means." Now this state of affairs is clearly wrong. If there is no dramatic idea kept as end to work to, then what is the use of writing opera at all? Why not be content with song-cycles or ballads, or lieder like Brahms's and Schumann's?

There are no divisions into aria and recitative in Wagner's operas, but dramatic continuity is retained by the voices of the characters singing music the succession of whose notes is determined by the emotional requirements of the moment.

Meanwhile, the orchestra forms a sort of musical background by giving forth music which exactly suits the dramatic situation.

The orchestra, in a word, as Wagner himself said of _Tristan und Isolde_, forms an emotional tide on which the voice floats like a boat on the waters. The essential relevance of the music to the dramatic situation is obtained, as a rule, by means of what are known as "leading motives." These form the basis of all Wagner's reforms. A leading motive is simply a musical phrase suggestive of a dramatic idea. Wagner's motives are marvellous in their descriptive and soul-stirring power. They seem to indicate not only the pith, but the utmost depths of the heart of the ideas which they represent. It is this that makes Wagner so very like Shakespeare. All can appreciate him, yet he is above all criticism, universal in his appeal.

Who but Wagner could make us feel the awful tragedy of Siegfried's death, the calm of the primeval elements, the pompous yet somewhat venerable character of the Mastersingers, the agony of Tristan's delirium, the superb majesty of Valhalla, or the free, n.o.ble nature of Parsifal? Even when Wagner uses motives comparatively little, writing rather "freely," as in _Tristan und Isolde_, he always has the power of imprinting an idea with the utmost clearness upon our souls. He will sometimes make a slight change in a motive, or make a development of it, that gives us an entirely different psychological impression of the idea represented by the motive, as indicating some new aspect of it in which the motives are all dovetailed together into a compact whole that is simply marvellous. If one considers the "Ring,"

that gigantic web of motives, and at the same time, in the words of that able critic, Mr. Ernest Newman, "beyond all comparison the biggest thing ever conceived by the mind of a musician,"

colossal yet logical, gigantic yet compact, the power of the Bayreuth master will become even still more evident.