No; I’m not going to be a chronicler in this chapter. It sounds a dull subject, I know, but many things happened in Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester in mellow September days that were vastly amusing and which were not reported in the papers, and it is about these I am going to tell you.

It used to be very charming to go to one of these cathedrals early each autumn, drink cider, listen to music six hours a day, walk by the river, have jolly “rags” in the hotel at night, and come home again at the end of a week or ten days. September is a tired month, I always think ... if not tired, a little languorous.... It has many days in which one wants to walk about just quietly, enjoying being alive. It would be wrong to fuss and work really hard. I suppose that in all those wonderful places in which I have spent so many happy weeks—Worcester, Lincoln, Gloucester, Hereford, Norwich—people ruminate and browse at all times. Certainly I have seen them browsing in herds in September days. I once watched the Bishop of Hereford browsing. He stood perfectly still and seemed to be contemplating and measuring and gently wondering about the growth of a healthy nasturtium.

Everybody used to migrate to these festivals. Well, not quite everybody ... but you know what I mean; just the very people you most awfully wanted to meet again and talk to and hear music with: people like Granville Bantock, Ernest Newman, Samuel Langford, John Coates, Dr McNaught, Frederic Austin, Herbert Hughes. 188London used to send thirty or forty critics, and the provinces about the same number. And from the surrounding towns would pour in county families, middle-class families anxious (poor deluded ones!) to keep abreast of the musical times (or do I mean The Musical Times?), maiden ladies still and for ever ecstatic over Mendelssohn’s poor old Elijah, fierce choir-masters with ideas on choral singing, village organists who really believed that Dr Brewer was the Last Word, immaculate young men with æsthetic fever and a decided leaning towards Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (always alluded to by them as The Dream), very “nee-ice” young ladies who when at home played the violin, and, last of all, deans (oh yes, lots of deans), minor canons, slim curates, parsons of all kinds, squires without money, squarsons.

It was hard for us musical critics to take these festivals quite as seriously as the festivals expected us to do, for it always seemed incredible to us that London or Birmingham or Glasgow should have the least desire to know how the choruses of Handel’s The Messiah were sung in a little town like Gloucester. Moreover, many of us were amused at the tragic seriousness of these age-old festivals—festivals at which, as a rule, only two new works of any importance were produced and over which old oratorios—an impossible form of art—hung like a heavy cloud. So we used to amuse ourselves in our different ways, and the ringleaders in our occasional rags were generally Granville Bantock and Ernest Newman.

Almost every detail of one of these joyous occasions lingers in my memory. Dr McNaught, the doyen of us all, an experienced critic, a witty speaker, and a most profound musician, was the not unwilling victim. Bantock or, to give him his full title, Professor Granville Bantock, M.A., had brought from Birmingham two live eels in a tank. When he bought these sturdy creatures, he must have had in his mind some jollification or other, and when 189I met him in the streets of Hereford (I think it was Hereford) during the morning of the Festival’s first day, he asked me what was the most amusing thing I could think of that could be done with two live eels.

“Eels!” exclaimed I, in amazement. “Do you mean to tell me that you really possess two live eels?”

“Yes, here in Hereford. One gets a little dull here after a couple of hours, and, after all, eels are very lively fry. They break the monotony of life.” He paused a moment. “And,” he added rather dreamily, “they swish their tails so busily. I suppose an eel’s tail is the busiest thing in the world. Come and have a look; they’re in my room at the hotel.”

And there they were in a tank: dark objects in dark water, swirling about with enormous enthusiasm.

The day passed and no amusing idea occurred to me. Bantock conducted one of his works in the cathedral that evening—a very important and solemn occasion, and when we critics had left our “copy” at the post-office for telegraphic transmission to our respective newspapers, we foregathered in the hotel.

Now Dr McNaught had gone to spend the late hours with a friend and was not expected back till nearly midnight; it became obvious, therefore, both to Bantock and myself, that the eels must, in some way, be made to surprise him on his return. We placed the slimy creatures in a washhand basin in his bedroom, poured water upon them, and gazed down upon them with knitted brows.

“It is enough,” said Bantock; “there is no need to think of anything else. Listen.”

And, truly, there was a most stealthy and uncouth sort of noise. Eels may have soft skins, but their muscles are hard and, as they careered round the basin, one heard a continuous smooth sound as of people going about some nefarious business in the dark, and now and again, 190at unexpected moments, a loud thwack would be heard as one of the fish threw his tail upon the side of the basin.

Newman and Frederic Austin and one or two others collaborated in preparing our scheme. A female figure was made, carefully placed on the middle of Dr McNaught’s pillow, and gently covered to the neck with the bedclothes.

These elaborate arrangements for Dr McNaught’s entertainment were only just completed when the doctor himself returned. We waited in dark corners of the corridor for the result.

After an interval of a few minutes, a bell rang and a chambermaid appeared.

“There is some mistake, I think,” said Dr McNaught genially. “Either this room is a bedroom, a larder, or an aquarium; it would be most good of you if you would decide as soon as possible which it really is.”

The chambermaid entered the bedroom and we could just hear her quiet voice as, a moment later, she half whispered:

“But, sir, the room is already occupied. There is a lady in your bed.”

Of course, the psychological moment had arrived, and we strolled casually into the bedroom to become witnesses of Dr McNaught’s embarrassment. The jape was continued. McNaught was taken to the smoke-room, solemnly tried by judge and jury for having murdered a woman and concealed her body (it was at the time of the Crippen affair), and sentenced to death. Newman brought a hatchet from the cellar and, not long before dawn, the mock sentence was carried out with elaborate pantomime....

“Very childish—just like schoolboys!” I hear a reader (not you, of course) say, rather contemptuously. Yes, it was like schoolboys, and substitute “-like” for “-ish” in “childish” and I agree with you most heartily.
      .             .             .             .             .             .             .             .     

191But not all our time was spent in this uproarious way. There were long hours of talk, great talk from Langford of The Manchester Guardian, a man of mature years whom to meet is a privilege and whom to know intimately is a blessing; witty, rather cruel, but vastly entertaining talk from Newman; pungent talk from Bantock; and general gossip from all kinds of people.

I do remember so regretfully—regretfully, because I do not think a like occasion can happen again—an afternoon that Langford and I spent sitting at a little rustic table under a just yellowing grove of poplars. Langford’s mind is spacious, most richly stored. Nothing can happen that does not at once and without effort fit into his philosophy of life, and though his talk is profound it is so greatly human that, in listening to him, one feels completely at rest. He accepts everything.... I daresay you have noticed that many people have tried to describe the effect Walt Whitman’s personality has had on them, and you will have observed how they have all failed. It is an impossible task.... And I feel that in writing about Langford it is impossible to convey to you what he stands for to his friends. I recollect Captain J. E. Agate once saying to me: “I never come away from speaking to Langford without feeling what an empty fool I am.” Yes, that is true; yet, at the same time, you feel reconciled to your own empty folly; besides, you know well enough that if you were a fool Langford would not talk to you; he would just ask you to have a drink and then he would fumble clumsily in his waistcoat pocket to find you a cigarette.

Langford will never be “successful” in the worldly sense. Perhaps he looks with suspicion on success; certainly he has never attempted to achieve it. I imagine that his nature is very like that of Æ, and if what everyone says of Æ is true, one cannot conceive that anything finer could be said of anyone than that he resembles the great Irish poet.

192It was these refreshing talks with various people that did something to mitigate the severity of the atmosphere of conventionality, of “respectability” in its worst sense, that made it rather difficult to breathe freely in these cathedral cities. Everyone wore new clothes; men perspired in kid gloves; girls carried prayer-books and copies of Elijah; deans were dapper; ostlers were clean and profoundly polite; and, wherever you went, you heard people saying that they had seen Lord Bertie and Lady Jane, and had you noticed that the dear Bishop had looked a little tired last evening? There was, too, about these festivals an air as of a society function. Music, an unwilling handmaid of charity, was “indulged” in. One did not have music every day, for that would have been frivolous; but one had it in great lumps every twelve months, and had it, not because one cannot live fully and vividly without art, but because it made a good excuse for a social “occasion.” The music itself was excused—for in the minds of these people it required an excuse—by the fact that the entire festival was organised for charity, that vice which causes so many sins.

I myself came into rather violent conflict with the Norfolk and Norwich Musical Festival authorities on a question of artistic morality. Ten or eleven years ago they offered a prize of twenty-five guineas for a poem, and another prize of fifty guineas for the best musical setting of the poem. I entered the former competition and secured the prize. My “poem” was in blank verse and lyrics, its subject Cleopatra, and it contained the following passage:
Iris. And when with regal, arrogant step she passed
Across the portico, her white breasts gleamed;
Her neck seemed conscious of its loveliness;
Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted with
The expectancy of proud assault; she was
As one who lives for a last carnival
193Of love, in which she may be stabbed and torn
By large excess of passion.
Charmion.Oh! Our Queen
Has wine for blood; her tears are heavy drops
Of water ............