If there is one thing more than another that the ordinary person cannot endure, it is to hear a man from Manchester praising his own city. Somebody from Leeds may tell him how beautiful a town Leeds is, and he will not turn a hair; he will listen unruffled to a Liverpudlian discoursing on the peculiar glories of the great city on the Mersey; but if the man from Manchester wishes to be tolerated, he must never let fall a word in praise of the place that witnessed his astounding birth. Why this is so, I cannot explain. I merely record the fact.

So, for the moment, I will not praise Manchester. I will go even farther than that. I will agree with you that it rains there every day, that it is the ugliest city in Britain, that it is cocksure and conceited, that its politics are damnable, that its free trade principles are loathsome, and that its public men are aitchless and gross. I will, I say, agree to all this. You may say anything disagreeable you like about Manchester, and I shall not care. Nevertheless, if I could not live in London, Manchester is the city to which I would go. I have stayed in Athens, and Athens is a marvellous city; I know my Paris, and Paris is not without fascination; I have been to Cairo, and the bazaars of Cairo seemed to me so wonderful that I held my breath as I passed through them; I know Antwerp and some of the half-dead cities of Belgium, and in Bruges I have felt as decadent as any nasty Belgian poet. But these places are not Manchester. They are 154not so glorious as Manchester, not so vital, not so romantic, not so adventurous.... But already I have broken my word: I have begun to praise Manchester in my second paragraph. Let me begin a third.

It might be thought that the centre of Manchester’s intellectual life is the University, but this is not so. Nor is it the Cathedral, nor the big technical schools, nor yet the Gaiety Theatre. These things count, but none of them precisely radiates intellectual energy. You do not (unless you wish to be disappointed) go to the Bishop for ideas, or to the man of business for culture, nor to Miss Horniman for a wide and generous view of life. For these things, and for many other things besides, you go to The Manchester Guardian. In The Daily Mail Year Book, against the entry Manchester Guardian, you will find these words: “The best newspaper in the world.” Now, you would imagine that if The Daily Mail really believed that, The Daily Mail would strain every nerve to be as like The Manchester Guardian as possible. But Lord Northcliffe knows better than that. He knows, we all know, that the best newspaper in the world is not going to be the best seller in the world. The word “best,” when applied to a newspaper, does not signify a newspaper that shrieks louder than any other newspaper, that has the greatest number of “stunts,” that lays reputations low in the dust, that holds Cabinet Ministers in the hollow of its hand. It signifies, among other things, a paper whose editor will not sacrifice a single ideal in order to increase his circulation, who has the power of infusing his staff with his own enthusiasms, and who regards the arts as a necessary part of a decent human existence.

The Daily Mail once upon a time compelled the whole of the British Isles to start growing sweet-peas. That is one kind of power. That is the kind of power that The Manchester Guardian does not possess.

Yet, I ask you, is there a more irritating newspaper 155in the whole of Christendom than The Manchester Guardian? How many times have we not all thrown it down in disgust and vowed never to read it again, only to buy it faithfully next morning? It would sometimes appear that every crank in England is busily engaged in airing his crazy views in its correspondence columns. It would sometimes appear that the three greatest highbrows in the country had laid their heads together to write the leading article. It would sometimes appear that conscientious objectors were really the only generous, manly and heroic people left in this mad world.
      .             .             .             .             .             .             .             .     

Let me tell you a true story of a man who for years has been, and still is, on the staff of The Manchester Guardian. I tell this strange story, partly because it is strange, and partly because it illustrates so finely the kind of reverence that so many citizens of Manchester have for the best paper in the world.

Some thirty years ago a male child was born to a worthy and not unprosperous man in Manchester. Now this man had one faith, one gospel, one ambition. His faith was of the Liberal persuasion. (Why, may I ask in passing, do people refer to Jews as men and women of the Jewish “persuasion”? Can a man, indeed, be persuaded to Jewry?) But to resume. His faith, as I said, was Liberal, his gospel The Manchester Guardian, his ambition to have some close connection with that paper. Being unfitted by the nature of his own talents to join the staff, he resolved that in the fullness of time that distinction should belong to his son. So he wrote to the editor, thus:

Sir,—I have the honour to inform you that last night my wife gave birth to a son. It is my ambition that, when his intellect is ripe and his powers mature, he shall be chosen by you as a member of your staff. His education, 156his whole upbringing, shall be directed to that end. I shall report to you his progress from time to time.

I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant,
—— ——.

I have not this letter before me; indeed, I have never seen it. But I am assured it was couched in those or similar terms.

Years passed. Harry—we will call him Harry—survived the perils of babyhood and was sent to a school for the sons of gentlemen, and the editor was duly apprised of the fact. Harry studied hard, for his ambition was even that of his father. Harry took scholarships, Harry had a private tutor, and, eventually, Harry went to the ’varsity. In the meantime, reports passed at regular intervals from Harry’s father to the editor of The Manchester Guardian, who now, as nurses say, began to sit up and take notice. He desired to meet Harry. He did meet him. Harry took an honours degree, came back to Manchester, and was duly installed among the blessed, where he still is. Harry’s dream, Harry’s father’s dream, is fulfilled. But are those reports, I wonder, still being written. As, for example:

Sir,—I have the honour to inform you that my son, Harold, contemplates marriage. It has always appeared to me that the married state is peculiarly useful in developing....
      .             .             .             .             .             .             .             .     

But not all the members of The Manchester Guardian staff are ’varsity men: for which, indeed, one may be thankful. The men of letters whom they admire most—Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad and Arnold Bennett—never even dimly espied the towers and spires of Oxford and Cambridge. But the paper has the manner of Oxford, though not Oxford’s intellectual outlook.

157For myself, I have never been on the staff of this paper, though I have written scores of articles for its commercial pages. Some of the most distinguished intellects in the country write for it regularly—Allan Monkhouse, whose play, Mary Broome, has not been and scarcely can be sufficiently praised; C. E. Montague, now in the Army; Professor C. H. Herford, whose scholarship is in excess of his human feeling; Samuel Langford, whom I have dealt with elsewhere in this book; J. E. Agate, whose fastidious style is a pure delight. Indeed, nearly every man who can write and who has something definitely new to say will find the columns of this paper open to him.
      .             .             .             .             .             .             .             .     

The drawback to social life in Manchester is that there is no central meeting-place where kindred spirits can foregather. It is true, there is the Arts Club, but when you have said the Arts Club is there, you have said all that it is necessary to say about the Arts Club. It is true, also, that if you stroll into the American bar of the Midland Hotel at almost any hour of the day, you are pretty sure to meet someone amusing; but you really can’t make music, or rehearse plays, or play the fool (at least, not to any great extent) in an American bar. The consequence of this lack of a good democratic club is that all kinds of little coteries are formed, and it is about one of these little coteries that I wish to tell you.

Of course, Manchester is not London. You know that. In London, if you don’t like one play, you can go to another. If the music that Sir Henry J. Wood gives you is not to your taste, you can go to hear Mr Landon Ronald, or (if truly desperate) join the Philharmonic Society. But in Manchester this is not so. You have either to like the music or do without it. Well, some years ago we didn’t like it, and Jack Kahane, talking to me one day in a mood of disgust, casually remarked:

158“I’m going to kick Richter out of Manchester. We’ve had enough of him.”

With Kahane, to think is to act, and within a week he had formed the Manchester Musical Society and begun a Press campaign against the famous old conductor. This Society was Kahane’s new toy, and he played with it to some purpose. We talked a great deal, gave innumerable concerts, hired lecturers, wrote articles, and held enormously thrilling committee meetings. Our programmes consisted almost exclusively of new and very “modern” music, just the kind of music that the guarantors of the Hallé Concerts Society detested. We were all for the new spirit in music, and some of us in our enthusiasm liked new music just because it was new. In three months Richter began to totter on his throne and, later on, he resigned his post, and now Sir Thomas Beecham most fitly reigns in his stead.

This little Society was extremely typical of Manchester. It was typical because it was enthusiastic, because every member of it worked hard for no monetary reward, and because it had a definite object in view and achieved that object. Above all, it was young; the spirit of it was young. I have never found in London a band of young men and women putting their noses to the grindstone for months on end with the sole object of achieving an artistic ideal. People in London exploit art, but they do not work at art for art’s sake. Manchester is England’s musical metropolis. Elgar said so ten years ago; Beecham echoed his words the other day. I claim for Manchester also that the level of culture is much higher than it is in London. In proportion to its size Manchester has during the last fifty years given to England more writers, musicians, politicians, actors, business men, reformers and social workers of distinction than any other city.... But all this, I think, is a little offensive——

And yet how difficult it is for the stranger to understand 159Manchester!—and difficult in spite of the fact that Manchester loves being understood.

Mr J. Nicol Dunn, who, as editor of The Morning Post and, later, of The Johannesburg Star, did most brilliant work, utterly failed to understand Lancashire people when he came to edit The Manchester Courier. I think he regarded them as a peculiar race of savages. “A wealthy Lancashire manufacturer,” he said to me once, “will ask you to dinner and will order a bumper of champagne. But if you ask him for a half-guinea subscription for a political society, he will give you a curt refusal. What is to be done with such folk?” Dunn thought us hard and unimaginative, incapable of seeing in what direction lay our best interests, and utterly childish in our notions of political economy.

“Cumberland,” he said, unexpectedly, one evening, “is your father a Conservative?”

“He is,” ............