IliKlllY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY Of 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 The recent election of Sir Hubert 
 Parry to the Eoyal Yacht Squadron has 
 naturally caused a great explosion of 
 nautical and aquatic ardour at the Royal 
 College of Music. Sir Charles Stanford 
 i — who has for several years been A 7 ice- 
 i Commodore of the Round Pond Model 
 | Yacht Club — has purchased a fine 14-in. 
 submarine fitted with a periscope, 
 gyroscope and bonzoline ball-bearings. 
 Sir Walter Parratt has had sliding 
 seats fitted to the organ in the con- 
 cert-hall; Sir Frederick Bridge has 
 had the conductor's room at the 
 Albert Hall fitted up like a captain's 
 cabin ; a tromba-marina has been added 
 to the College orchestra ; and sea-kale 
 is now included in the vegetables 
 reared in the sumptuous College 
 kitchen-garden. 
 
 MAY and MAY Music and 
 
 ? "?™ AM "? A ° Music Literature 
 
fit** 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2008 with funding from 
 
 Microsoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/collegeaddressesOOparrrich 
 
COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 DELIVERED TO PUPILS 
 OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF MUSIC 
 
 BY 
 
 Sir C. HUBERT H. PARRY, Bart. 
 
 Mus. Doc. 
 
 DIRECTOR, 1895- 191 8 
 
 EDITED WITH 
 
 A RECOLLECTION OF THE AUTHOR 
 
 BY 
 
 H. C. COLLES 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1920 
 
MUSIC LIB* 
 
 COPYRIGHT 
 
Ps4 
 
 MUSIC 
 LIBRARY 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Hubert Parry : A Recollection . . . i 
 
 Addresses : Current Events — 
 
 Sir George Grove, 1894 .... 39 
 Johannes Brahms, 1897 .... 44 
 
 A Quarter of a Century (the 25TH Anni- 
 versary of the Founding of the R.C.M.) 49 
 King Edward VII. (Founder of the R.C.M.) 57 
 A Loyal Rival, the R.A.M. . . .68 
 
 Education for Life — 
 
 The Beauty of Order .... 83 
 
 Routine and Understanding . . -93 
 
 Enjoyments 1 13 
 
 Appreciation — True and False . . .121 
 
 Traditions and Conventions . . 1 35 
 
 Character — 
 
 I. Its Formation 147 
 
 II. Its Influence 1 57 
 
 The Windows of Life 169 
 
 The English Attitude towards Art . . 185 
 
 Aspirations . . . . • • .196 
 v 
 
 714 
 
vi COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 War— 
 
 PAGE 
 
 J 9H 215 
 
 Comrades and the Enemy . . . .230 
 
 The Individual in War .... 243 
 The College in Peace and War. . .256 
 At the Last — 
 
 Order and Disorder ..... 273 
 Youth and Age . . . . . .288 
 
 Portrait — Aboard " The Wanderer " . To face page 1 
 
ABOARD "THE WANDERER." 
 
 To face page I, 
 
HUBERT PARRY 
 
 A RECOLLECTION 
 
HUBERT PARRY 
 
 " There is nothing so tiresome as preaching." 
 The words with which Sir Hubert Parry began 
 one of those addresses, which opened every 
 term's work at the Royal College of Music 
 during the twenty-four years of his director- 
 ship, may fitly stand at the head of a volume 
 having at first sight something of the appear- 
 ance of a book of lay sermons. 
 
 That appearance would have horrified him, 
 for in condemning the tiresomeness of preach- 
 ing he was sympathising as much with the 
 preacher as with the congregation. He was 
 never wholly happy about these addresses. 
 Though there was the compensation of meeting 
 again a large number of young people, the 
 majority already his devoted friends and the 
 newcomers among them shortly to become so, 
 and of seeing them returning zestfully to the 
 study of the art he loved most, it was always an 
 
4 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 effort to begin. He felt the effort to be worth 
 while, because there were certain ideas in 
 which his whole life was so rooted that they 
 had to be said, and as the years passed he 
 spent more and more time on the careful 
 preparation of the address with which he 
 would bring the enthusiasms and energies of 
 his students into focus. He was not anxious 
 to arouse their enthusiasms or their energies. 
 He always assumed them to be there, as 
 indeed they were, brimming over and eagerly 
 meeting his own. But the business of a 
 Director was to direct, and that was what 
 these addresses were designed to do. 
 
 I can see him striding into the hall on the 
 first morning of the College term, a carnation 
 from Highnam in his buttonhole, a slip of 
 paper on which a few notes were scribbled in 
 his left hand, and his right hand free to grasp 
 that of any boy or girl who greeted him in its 
 enveloping grip. Sometimes the right hand 
 was used to deliver to some unsuspecting 
 youth that smack on the back which was his 
 favourite token of recognition, and which has 
 made many of us still associate a sharp pain 
 between the shoulder-blades with the glow of 
 the Directors presence. 
 
A COLLEGE GATHERING 5 
 
 Boys and girls were alike included in his 
 ample smile, and then he would get on to the 
 platform, tramp about a little, and jerk out a 
 few remarks hurriedly and sometimes in- 
 audibly. Something like this about preaching, 
 or the hope that we had all got over the effects 
 of our Christmas dinners, or his trouble at 
 having to repeat what he had said before, but 
 most often his pleasure at the sight of the good 
 spirits which were a reflection of his own, 
 were his favourite gambits. Their purpose 
 was to get over a moment which was irksome 
 to himself, and which he imagined must be 
 irksome to his boys and girls, the moment of 
 addressing the mind to seriousness. 
 
 The picture has a place among the " things 
 that are worth remembering," which he told 
 us to " pile up," insisting that to do so was 
 " the way to make the spirit of a place like the 
 College strong." Other people cannot share 
 the memory, but they can share his mind, and 
 that is the purpose of this volume. For the 
 addresses were not mainly about music, though 
 naturally their subject-matter was illustrated 
 largely by references to the work of pupils and 
 of professors at the R.C.M. 
 
 Their purpose was to build up the treasury 
 
6 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 of the mind, to suggest ideas for work and 
 comradeship, to inculcate the true aim of 
 education, in its widest sense, and to point out 
 the things which in his own favourite phrase 
 " make a fine thing of life." With certain 
 changes of illustration many of these addresses 
 might have been delivered equally well at the 
 Royal College of Science next door, or in the 
 Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, or at a working- 
 men's college, and in almost every one of them 
 there is some word which must be helpful to 
 all concerned in whatever way with the educa- 
 tion of themselves or of others. 
 
 That is to claim a wide audience, but it is 
 the conviction that such an audience will value 
 them which is the first defence for having 
 adopted the principle of selection in preparing 
 these addresses for publication in book form. 
 The first instinct of those who can remember 
 how, when and where they were spoken is to 
 ask for a complete record of them, to form a 
 chapter in the history of that " College tradi- 
 tion " which was so dear to the Director's 
 heart. Second thoughts, however, will con- 
 vince them that to do so would be to act clean 
 contrary to that principle of joining hands with 
 others which he was never weary of inculcating. 
 
LOCAL HISTORY 7 
 
 Year by year the addresses contained ap- 
 preciative references to the work of the most 
 distinguished scholars and pupils who had 
 completed their courses ; to the deaths and 
 retirements as they occurred of professors and 
 other devoted servants of the College ; there 
 were allusions to local politics, to the events 
 such as concerts and opera performances of 
 the past term and those in prospect for the 
 coming term. Latterly the deaths in action of 
 members of the College who had joined the 
 army for the war, and occasionally congratu- 
 lation on distinctions won in the field, claimed 
 attention. 
 
 All these things belong to the life of the 
 place, and are necessarily intensely interesting 
 to its alumni, though they cannot be so to 
 others. For them they are recorded in the 
 pages of the R.C.M. Magazine, in which the 
 last ten years of the addresses were first 
 printed. To reproduce them here would be 
 to shut out that wider audience from sharing 
 in Sir Hubert Parry's thoughts merely in order 
 to give to the immediate circle of Royal Col- 
 legians a handier chronicle than the volumes 
 of the R.C.M. Magazine supply. 
 
 Individuals and their affairs were often the 
 
8 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 text of his discourses, but they were rarely 
 anything more. It is frequently possible to 
 withhold the text without in the least marring 
 the larger appositeness of his remarks. 
 
 Talking of sermons in a parenthesis (Sir 
 Hubert was fond of parentheses) he once said : 
 
 " I cannot help thinking that it might 
 be a great advantage if the preacher 
 informed them (the congregation) that he 
 would not read out the text at the begin- 
 ning, but would invite them to guess it 
 at the end, and the excitement of guessing 
 it would impel them to improve their 
 acquaintance with the book from which 
 the texts would be selected, while the 
 prospect of a solemn guessing competition 
 would probably make people flock to 
 church in unprecedented numbers. " 
 
 Applying the suggestion to this situation 
 Royal Collegians may rediscover the texts of 
 this collection by a combination of memory 
 and guess-work. They may recall for example 
 that the distinction between tradition and 
 convention (one of his dearest themes, to which 
 he continually recurred) was developed in the 
 
A ROLL OF HONOUR 9 
 
 essay here published on an occasion when he 
 was faced with " an exceptional misfortune." 
 Having chronicled the achievements of brilliant 
 scholars and students who had finished their 
 time at the College and thus added their names 
 to what in pre-war days he liked to call the 
 " roll of honour," he had to add the painful 
 announcement that " for once in a way we 
 have had to dispense with a gifted scholar in 
 the very first year of his tenure of a scholarship, 
 and to cancel the renewal of a scholarship 
 which had been granted to another." The 
 contrast presented naturally led to the discus- 
 sion of right and wrong uses of institutions and 
 the opportunities they offer. 
 
 Again the two essays on Character delivered 
 at a year's distance from one another were 
 prompted by the deaths of two faithful friends 
 of the College, one Henry Blower, a dis- 
 tinguished professor of singing, the other W. 
 L. Broadbelt, for many years chief of the 
 clerical staff. But these and like cases could 
 not be very illuminating to those who did not 
 know the men of whom he spoke, while his 
 views on the building up and influence of 
 character undoubtedly are illuminating. 
 
 Of the last-named case he said : 
 
io HUBERT PARRY 
 
 " When I hold up Mr. Broadbelt's 
 career to you as a thing worthy of honour, 
 I am not afraid of seeming to propose to 
 you an example. Your lines of life and 
 work are not likely to be at all similar to 
 his. His career was a quite exceptional 
 one. But the spirit of it which we honour 
 is not a concrete example, but the evidence 
 of a devoted and honourable character 
 which it warms one to think of." 
 
 So the object has been here to take that 
 which came from the warmth of his heart as 
 well as the penetration of his intellect, and 
 through the substance rather than through the 
 figure to let him express himself in the clearest 
 terms to all who have ears to hear. 
 
 But if a second line of defence is needed for 
 the selective principle, Sir Hubert himself 
 again supplies it in one of those openings 
 which expresses the difficulty of which he was 
 conscious. 
 
 " I get rather uncomfortable about these 
 addresses. It is quite right and proper to 
 go on encouraging the assembled pupils to 
 have an affection for the College and to 
 
THAT TRUTHFUL MAGAZINE 1 1 
 
 feel proud of it, and to be proud of the 
 share they may have in making it a place 
 fit to be proud of. But it is liable to lose its 
 force and to become wearisome by repeti- 
 tion. The situation is really rather awk- 
 ward, for there always are a good number 
 of new pupils to whom any one in the 
 Director's position would want to say 
 some essential things which he has said 
 before to other pupils ; and there are some 
 things which he would want to lay stress 
 on which seem capable of being made 
 emphatic only by being put in the same 
 group of words. But if he does say the 
 same things a few times over in the same 
 words, that truthful Magazine comes along 
 and puts the fact right under the eyes of 
 such as can read, and their faith may be 
 sorely shaken by being reminded that they 
 have heard it all before. ,, 
 
 What he feared from a magazine reproduc- 
 ing his words at intervals of four months would 
 have been intensified at the sight of a book 
 which laid his repetitions before the reader at 
 a single sitting. The fact that he spoke to 
 a constantly changing audience was sufficient 
 
12 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 justification for repetition at the time. A man 
 of less fertile brain and less human sympathy 
 would have crystallised his ideas into a specified 
 course and delivered it to each succeeding 
 generation of pupils. 
 
 Such an idea would have been unthinkable 
 to him. The slip of paper in his left hand was 
 scribbled for the one occasion only, and as has 
 been said its thoughts were based on the 
 circumstances of the moment. In the earlier 
 days it too often went into the waste -paper 
 basket as soon as he had packed off his flock 
 to get their time-sheets. Sometimes he would 
 keep it if the notes had been a little fuller than 
 usual, or when they referred to some event of 
 more than ordinary importance, or possibly 
 by mere inadvertence. At any rate it is only 
 by the fact that Miss Emily Daymond, going 
 carefully through his papers after his death, 
 came across notes for early addresses on half- 
 sheets of notepaper, the backs of envelopes, 
 and fragments of music paper, that it has been 
 possible to print here the study of Sir George 
 Grove (his first address as Director), and the 
 tribute to the character and work of Johannes 
 Brahms. 
 
 Latterly these fragments were kept to form 
 
THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE 13 
 
 the basis of a careful manuscript written out 
 subsequently in his own hand for " that truthful 
 Magazine.' ' But in either case they were never 
 used again. So while it is true that the ideas 
 recur, and sometimes reappear in the same, or 
 almost the same groups of words, both ideas 
 and words frequently take on a fresh com- 
 plexion from the fresh context to which he 
 found them applicable. To banish completely 
 this sort of repetition would be to lose all view 
 of both the balance and the bias of his mind, 
 and a good deal of it will be found in the 
 pages of this volume. One of the chief diffi- 
 culties of editing it has been to decide between 
 different presentations of the same theme in 
 addresses of different periods. 
 
 He was always pleading for width of view 
 in all work and life, and his insistence on it 
 as the first of the " essential things " is the 
 biggest evidence of his extraordinarily balanced 
 mind. 
 
 " The happiest people are those who 
 have the widest outlook. The most suc- 
 cessful institution is that which realises its 
 mission in the widest sense, and welcomes 
 whatever is finely done or whatever is 
 
i 4 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 genuinely serviceable to the world, even if 
 it has missed the chance of taking a hand 
 in it." 
 
 As a means to the attainment of that width 
 of outlook he urged strongly the importance of 
 pursuing other interests besides the artistic one 
 which brought the students to the College. 
 He was the more insistent on this theme 
 because they were musicians, and the experi- 
 ences of his own early life had given him a 
 horror of what may be called mere 
 " musicalism." 
 
 He spoke even scathingly of this more than 
 once. On the occasion of the Diamond 
 Jubilee of Queen Victoria he said : 
 
 " When I think of the stodginess, the 
 meanness, the back-slumminess of most 
 music of my younger days, the total 
 absence of taste for orchestral music, the 
 pedantic complacency of many representa- 
 tive musicians, the slur which was implied 
 in decent society by the term " musical 
 man " ; when I compare this with what 
 we have now — the advance and expansion 
 of young musicians, the splendid orchestral 
 
VICTORIAN MUSIC 15 
 
 performances, the widening of taste, the 
 genuine warmth of musical perception — 
 I do feel that there is something singularly 
 happy in the reign of such a Queen as ours 
 has been ; and that it fits the rough English 
 disposition to have such an arrangement." 
 
 Musicians agree that the accession to their 
 ranks of such a man of parts as Parry in the 
 latter half of the Queen's reign was a powerful 
 lever in changing the status of themselves and 
 their art in public estimation. His direct 
 example was the biggest inspiration, but it 
 was supplemented by his spoken teaching. 
 
 His views on the all-round cultivation of 
 the individual are summed up in the essay 
 called " Enjoyments," but there are many 
 other passages to the same effect, one or two 
 of which may be quoted here, since they set 
 the subject in a rather different light while they 
 enforce the same conclusion. 
 
 " I should be delighted to hear of any 
 scions of the College who had been getting 
 into three figures at cricket matches, or dis- 
 tinguishing themselves at tennis, or show- 
 ing good pace and stamina in swimming, 
 
1 6 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 or beating the record in cycling, or success- 
 fully steering a craft of any sort to victory 
 in home waters, or navigating to more 
 distant shores through the invigorating 
 buffets of the open sea, or otherwise dis- 
 tinguishing themselves in the wholesome 
 activities which are never practised with 
 success without some gifts of head and 
 nerve. 
 
 " But don't imagine, because I am an 
 advocate of wholesome activity of bodily 
 exercise and the invigorating influence 
 of friendly emulation in open-air games 
 and sports, that I cast in my lot with the 
 extravagant estimates put upon sport by 
 the world. There is no doubt that the 
 worship of sport is carried to a very ex- 
 cessive pitch in this country, to the injury 
 and depreciation of the higher pursuits 
 of art and literature and the achievements 
 of mind and imagination. . . . 
 
 " For all that there is a place for all those 
 healthy activities which are so character- 
 istic of our British race ; it is the curious, 
 persistent love of open air, and of things 
 which are mostly done in the open air, 
 whether on sea or land, that seems to give 
 
ATHLETICS AND LITERATURE 17 
 
 a special cachet to our nation. If in excess 
 it begets obtuseness and heaviness of 
 spirit, or absence of subtlety and artistic 
 perception, in moderation it begets frank- 
 ness, open-hearteuness ; it keeps us from 
 getting befogged with morbid fancies or 
 being easily misled by trumpery illusions 
 of superstition or charlatanry. It gives 
 us generous fits of impulse which are 
 sometimes interpreted as unscrupulous, 
 hypocritical scheming. But after all it 
 is better to make generous mistakes than 
 to make the ungenerous mistake of con- 
 stantly thinking and speaking evil of our 
 neighbours through having a bad heart 
 or a faulty digestion/ ' 
 
 Here he puts the case for athletics and sport 
 at its highest; more frequently he dwelt on 
 the cultivation of intellectual pursuits. Among 
 the notes for 1898 we find: 
 
 " There is nothing better for musicians 
 than to cultivate literary tastes, poetry, 
 history, even philosophy. But to all it 
 is not allotted to have tastes in these 
 directions. Still I recommend you all 
 
 c 
 
1 8 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 to try and read something better than 
 ' penny dreadfuls,* journalese poetry and 
 ' yellow backs.' It gives you a chance 
 of widening your range of enjoyments 5 
 and getting into touch with the higher 
 and more enjoyable things of music itself 
 — and of becoming independent and large- 
 sighted artists, instead of copyists and 
 what may be called * well-pruned practical 
 musicians.' It is better to be a well- 
 pruned practical musician than nothing 
 at all; but a well-pruned practical one is 
 only a half-baked pudding — he has just 
 stopped short of the genuine and complete 
 artist, and misses all that is most vital in 
 the art"; 
 
 from which it will be seen that he did not 
 disdain to put his advice in the most elementary 
 form, nor did he find terrors in a mixed 
 metaphor ! 
 
 Parry preached independence at all times. 
 "It is better to be a rebel than a slave"; 
 and while he stood up for the value of order, 
 he was, it may be hazarded, almost unique as 
 the head of an academic institution, in counsel- 
 ling the students against blind obedience to 
 
TEACHERS AND PUPILS 19 
 
 orders and the acceptance of rules. He could 
 deal boldly with the delicate question of the 
 relations between teachers and pupils. 
 
 " To attain to complete artisthood you 
 need to roam at large, and taste and see 
 what music is, and not depend only on 
 what your professors tell you. You must 
 indeed thankfully accept their help in 
 pointing out what music consists of ; but 
 you must try and apply it to a wider range 
 than the mere details and particular points 
 the professor deals with. . . . You must 
 not think your professor can do every- 
 thing for you. It is much better to come 
 to grief, now and then, with a genuine 
 human impulse, than to be always cautiously 
 feeling your way lest somebody should 
 think you a fool for not knowing some silly 
 conventional tradition. . . . 
 
 " In the majority of cases heaven helps 
 them best who help themselves; and it is 
 better to work out your own salvation with 
 a reasonable amount of help than to let 
 other people work it out for you without 
 you putting any effort of your own into 
 the business. The attitude of loyalty and 
 
20 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 attention and deference is the best towards 
 your professor, but may be overdone in 
 one respect by taking him to be a sort of 
 Mahomet, and thinking he is all-sufficing. 
 All men, even Beethoven and Shakespeare, 
 have always been human. 
 
 " But it is worse on the other side. Dis- 
 trust, disloyalty, indifference, carelessness, 
 make the relations between professor and 
 pupil impossible, and render futile all work 
 done. Better dispute everything and be 
 the regular nag of the class than nurse 
 distrust and disloyalty, and pull contrary 
 ways in secret." 
 
 Openness and straight dealing were the 
 very backbone of his message, and with these 
 as postulates he had no fear of the disintegrating 
 effect of differences. Rather he welcomed 
 them as signs of vitality. 
 
 " If you keep your eyes open you will 
 find the same conflict between apparently 
 diametrical opposites in almost everything 
 in life, which has to be accommodated at 
 every step. . . . There are the ardent 
 spirits on the one hand who chafe at the 
 
FRICTION GENERATES HEAT 21 
 
 judgements of experience, and indeed at 
 any restrictions which gall their youthful 
 exuberance, and on the other there is the 
 pernicious pedant who wants to have all 
 human nature regulated into perfect auto- 
 matism by his stupefying theories. People 
 who have any generosity and breadth of 
 view will always be on the side of the 
 youthful exuberance. But it is even 
 better to try to admit that there may also 
 be some good hidden away beneath the 
 piles of cinders which obscure the inten- 
 tions of the pundits. 
 
 " For in the ultimate the friction between 
 such opposites keeps us alive. It is equiva- 
 lent to the physical law that friction 
 generates heat, and that heat is a mode 
 of motion, and by no means necessarily 
 a producer of disintegration and disorder. 
 
 " We even infer that the conflict of 
 opposites is necessary to life of any sort, 
 and that to eliminate one of them is to 
 induce either stagnation or chaos." 
 
 These extracts, and more particularly the 
 last sentences, will convince the reader of the 
 balance of mind to which allusion has been 
 
22 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 made, and at the same time give unmistakable 
 evidence of its bias. The " pernicious pedant " 
 with his " stupefying theories " was certainly 
 no favourite with Parry; all his nature glowed 
 in sympathy with the ardours of " youthful 
 exuberance." I remember him one day stop- 
 ping a student in the corridor to ask after the 
 progress of a new debating society started 
 among the " boys," and adding, with the eager 
 expectation of an answer in the affirmative, 
 " And do any of you young fellows talk wild ? " 
 
 Next to the balance the bias was the biggest 
 thing about him, yet it often puzzled people 
 that with so obvious a bias he did not hasten 
 to adopt policies which had for others the 
 attractions of daring enterprise and " up-to- 
 dateness." 
 
 But the reason was that above all considera- 
 tions of policy he was controlled by principle. 
 From the first he had set before him a standard 
 to which he adhered inflexibly. Very early in 
 his career as Director he said : 
 
 " We do not want to be a popular 
 institution. We do not want to play down 
 to the public outside who would like to 
 advise us as to what will pay. We do 
 
IN THE OPEN SUNLIGHT 23 
 
 not want to be told what commodities will 
 bring the quickest returns for the smallest 
 expenditure. We want to train ourselves 
 to make sure of what is really first-rate in 
 every line of art ; to achieve what we 
 undertake not only soundly and correctly 
 but with something of the genuine verve 
 which comes of being really alive and awake 
 in the open sunlight." 
 
 For this end he could be infinitely patient. 
 The very suggestion of a short-cut aroused all 
 the intolerant impatience of which his im- 
 petuous nature was capable. Needless to say 
 that in this frame of mind he would sometimes 
 reject too hastily a course of action desirable 
 in itself which had happened to be recom- 
 mended to him by a false argument, the worst 
 being that he and the College should do 
 something because some other individual or 
 institution was doing it. Such a suggestion 
 was simply to show a red rag to a bull. Self- 
 seeking and advertisement called forth his 
 most vehement invective or withering pity. 
 
 " Many of the lamentable and bewilder- 
 ing failures of people most richly gifted 
 
24 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 come from their incapacity to realise their 
 true relations to the world outside them. 
 Such unfortunate folk as lack a sense of 
 proportion, who are too self-centred and 
 over-eager for their own little prominence, 
 and such as are incapable of generous 
 recognition of others, and see things out 
 of focus when their own interests are 
 concerned, generally fail to make their 
 life's product as a whole equal to their 
 natural outfit. Even when they get what 
 their shallow view of life makes them 
 desire, and their names are noised abroad, 
 it is not much better than ashes and Dead 
 Sea fruit in the end." 
 
 It followed that he did not always do justice 
 to the legitimate desire for success and recogni- 
 tion of his more struggling colleagues and 
 pupils. While he believed the workman to 
 be worthy of his hire, circumstances having 
 relieved him from the necessity of exacting it 
 himself, he was apt to misjudge the importance 
 which others were compelled to attach to the 
 " hire." Yet that was only in the moments 
 when his impetuosity got the better of his sober 
 judgement. His was so generous a nature 
 
DOING AND SEEMING 25 
 
 that he could change and acknowledge himself 
 to have been at fault when he had judged hastily. 
 The conviction from which nothing could stir 
 him was that 
 
 " The thing is to do, not to be said to 
 do; and it is doing rather than the seeming 
 to do which brings a man content at the 
 last." 
 
 His horror of cheaply-earned reputations, 
 of shoddiness and tawdriness in art, was not 
 the selfish one of the luxurious amateur to 
 whom such things are merely distasteful and 
 personally offensive. He remembered that 
 
 " Many people never have a chance of 
 appreciating anything spiritual or even of 
 looking for the pleasures that have any 
 lasting quality in them. ... It is not so 
 long ago that well-to-do people seem 
 literally to have hated those who lived in 
 squalor and brutality as though it were 
 • their own choice. . . . People nowadays 
 are beginning to be aware of and to under- 
 stand something beyond the narrow range 
 of their own daily lives ; and instead of 
 
26 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 hating dirty, low, squalid and feckless 
 people, they are becoming conscious of 
 their own share in society's responsibility 
 to the victims of untoward circumstances, 
 and they try to help in lifting them up." 
 
 His own actions constantly attested his 
 consciousness of responsibility in this direction. 
 No one will ever know the number of occasions 
 on which he held out the helping hand to lift. 
 But he saw that in public matters and in art, 
 in which he was more particularly concerned, 
 
 " People are hoaxed by shams. . . . 
 They lend themselves to be hoaxed by 
 people whose interest it is to induce them 
 to delight in trash and spurious concoctions, 
 which is not the product of any artistic 
 impulse, but merely the impulse to get 
 plentiful pay or a short-lived popularity." 
 
 Such hoaxing made him angry, not for 
 his own sake but for that of others who had 
 not the chance to distinguish the true from 
 the false, and he was always ready to break 
 a lance in their service. But with it went a 
 constant eagerness to extend the most whole- 
 
FRENCH AND ENGLISH 27 
 
 hearted recognition to fine work, even when 
 it was antipathetic to his own taste. He was 
 not greatly attracted, for example, to the music 
 of the modern French school, and several of 
 his remarks in these pages show that distrust 
 of the French genius which was characteristic 
 of the Victorian Englishman. Yet he pro- 
 cured an early performance of Debussy's 
 string quartet at a College concert, and re- 
 ceived a letter from the composer as a result 
 of it which expressed surprise that a work 
 so little calculated to appeal to academic 
 instincts should receive such a welcome at 
 an academic institution. It would have been 
 wholly contrary to his nature to shut his eyes 
 to any new manifestation of art because it was 
 not immediately congenial. The tendency 
 to do so was, he saw, a lingering symptom 
 of that " stodginess, meanness and back- 
 slumminess " which he had found to be the 
 canker eating out the heart of English 
 musicianship a generation ago. His clear- 
 sightedness, however, would not allow him 
 to take refuge in the opposite extreme of 
 thoughtless enthusiasm over new things 
 because they were new. 
 
 He followed himself his own oft-repeated 
 
28 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 counsel of searching diligently for all things 
 good and true. It would be impossible to 
 count the number of times I have found Sir 
 Hubert sitting at the back of some small 
 concert-hall, or lurking in the aisles of some 
 half-empty church, to which he had come 
 because he knew that some little-known work 
 was to be played or a fine performance of a 
 great one given, but to which scarcely another 
 musician in London had thought it worth 
 while to turn out. 
 
 There can be little need, however, to draw 
 his character here by personal reminiscence, 
 except in so far as such reminiscence may help 
 to drive home the conviction that his words 
 were the outcome of his life. He spoke from 
 a deep-seated conviction which he had tested 
 practically through life, and it was this fact 
 which sufficiently distinguished his addresses 
 from the type of preaching which he found so 
 tiresome. 
 
 Nor were his words only the result of a 
 burning desire to share with others less experi- 
 enced and less fully equipped than himself 
 the considerations which had guided him 
 through life. He believed in the building up 
 of a corporate spirit for constructive work, 
 
A RATIONAL DIRECTION 29 
 
 not the forming of coteries and " mutual 
 admiration societies,' ' things which he loathed, 
 but the union of different personalities, making 
 full allowance for their differences, in the 
 pursuit of a common ideal. 
 
 " That familiar proverb about too many 
 cooks is only true when people are working 
 at cross-purposes, and get in one another's 
 way. Where efforts are rationally directed 
 the more people pull the faster and surer 
 you go. And there is no reason to be 
 distressed by differences of opinion, even 
 violent differences of opinion, which are 
 generated necessarily and inevitably when 
 any progress is being made. What would 
 really matter would be if there were none." 
 
 It was this " rational direction " which he 
 conceived it to be his business as Director to 
 give. Some remarked that for a radical he 
 could be surprisingly autocratic, and indeed 
 his views on " collective wisdom " were 
 strikingly at variance with the doctrinaire 
 utterances of any political party. 
 
 " When we go in for collective wisdom 
 
3° 
 
 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 we have to make sure that the conditions are 
 favourable. If we do not we find by experi- 
 ence that we are liable to get the collective 
 reverse of it. Collective wisdom is sometimes 
 what people call slangily " a toss up." 
 So few people have developed a sufficient 
 sense of responsibility to make sure what 
 they do really think, and express it inde- 
 pendently in the face of other people; 
 and very few can keep clear of personal 
 feelings which mislead the judgement. . . . 
 " You know the saying that * the voice 
 of the people is the voice of God.' It 
 wants expansion. . . . When it is pro- 
 duced in a hurry it is too often the voice 
 from down below. The voice of the 
 people in countries which are in a whole- 
 some state of growth comes right in the 
 end through their being persuaded by 
 the few who keep on thinking till they 
 have found out what is right and true. 
 But it does take time, and people are always 
 observing that the verdicts of one generation 
 are reversed by the next." 
 
 He was emphatically one of the few who 
 keep on thinking," and his persistence and 
 
SENTIMENT 31 
 
 its persuasiveness went far towards the establish- 
 ment of that corporate spirit and tradition 
 which was the aim of his directorate. 
 
 One more quotation shall be the last before 
 leaving the reader to the perusal of the extended 
 essays which form the substance of this volume. 
 It puts in a nutshell his conclusion as to the 
 attitude of the individual towards a wider 
 social existence. 
 
 " Sentiment is a word which makes 
 some people squirm, because the thing 
 itself is so basely parodied and betrayed 
 by those incapable of it. But you cannot 
 have true fellowship without it. By senti- 
 ment we mean the appreciation of things 
 which are lovable in our fellow-men — 
 devotion, unselfishness, sincerity and single- 
 ness of heart, strenuous effort to do some- 
 thing which is of use to some one without 
 thought of recognition ; and the pathos of 
 heroic mistakes and failures. 
 
 " We have sentiment about ancient in- 
 stitutions, about the homes of great men, 
 about the places where we spent our 
 childhood, if we had any luck in such things. 
 ... It is not after all indispensable that 
 
32 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 anything should be of a venerable age to 
 inspire sentiment. It seems conceivable 
 that an institution should be so fortunate 
 as to accumulate lovable features so rapidly 
 as to inspire sentiments of love and affection 
 even in twenty-five years. • 
 
 " It depends on the extent to which it 
 shows the finer qualities I have spoken of, 
 and that depends on the individuals who 
 belong to it. If we find the College 
 capable of inspiring such sentiments we 
 have to thank those who went before us, 
 and praise them for what they were and 
 did. And then we may remember with 
 satisfaction that we all can take our share, 
 and even strengthen it for those who 
 are to come after us, by trying our utmost 
 to live up to the standard so happily 
 achieved/ ' 
 
 A word will suffice to explain the arrange- 
 ment of what follows. Only a rough chrono- 
 logy has been observed, that is to say, the 
 collection begins with the first address delivered 
 by Sir Hubert Parry when he accepted the 
 reins of government from the hands of his 
 predecessor, and ends with the last one, when 
 
A GENEROUS CONFESSION 33 
 
 he seems to have had an almost prophetic 
 presage of his approaching end. 
 
 What lies between these extremes has 
 grouped itself naturally into three divisions. 
 A few addresses, the obvious outcome of 
 events of public or local history, are placed 
 first ; then come those delivered in the years 
 before the war, in which he developed most 
 fully the ideas on education for life which 
 he had already adumbrated in earlier addresses 
 quoted from above. Later came the war, 
 changing the view-point of many, and calling 
 forth from Parry himself the confession that 
 he had been wrong in the exalted estimate 
 which he had hitherto placed upon German 
 culture, a confession as honourable as the 
 false estimate had been generous. 
 
 The war addresses form a group by them- 
 selves, but they are thoroughly in keeping 
 with the tenor of what had preceded them. 
 What he had said at an earlier date about 
 loyalty even to one's enemies he preserved 
 untarnished throughout. The spirit of aggres- 
 sive selfishness now as ever called forth his 
 severest strictures, but he was incapable of 
 allowing his severity to degenerate into noisy 
 partisanship and abuse. 
 
34 HUBERT PARRY 
 
 At the beginning of 191 8 he celebrated 
 his seventieth birthday amongst signs of love 
 and affection on the part of the remaining 
 Collegians which delighted and surprised him; 
 but the times were too dark and had weighed 
 too heavily upon him for the festival to be 
 unclouded. 
 
 " The days of our age are threescore years 
 and ten ; and though men be so strong that 
 they come to fourscore years, yet is their life 
 then but labour and sorrow, so soon passeth 
 it away and we are gone." 
 
 The words seemed to be graven on his 
 memory, so that he could not escape their 
 influence. He alluded to them in his address, 
 and in his replies to the congratulations of 
 friends. That hardly- won cheerfulness of out- 
 look, which made thoughtless people imagine 
 him to be a man of an easy and sanguine 
 temperament, was maintained only by a struggle. 
 It was with difficulty that he could force him- 
 self to say, " Yes, I'm seventy, but I'm good 
 for ten years more.'* 
 
 It was in this mood that the two last ad- 
 dresses were spoken, which here stand by 
 themselves beneath the heading " At the Last." 
 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 35 
 
 It only remains to make acknowledgement 
 (thanks would be misplaced) of what this 
 collection owes to the co-operation of friends. 
 Lady Maude Parry has willingly consented to 
 the publication of her husband's addresses. 
 Not only some of the earjier addresses, but 
 many of the .quotations included in the above 
 " Recollection " have been recovered from 
 among Sir Hubert's stray papers by the 
 devoted care of Miss Emily Daymond. 
 
 The advice of Mr. Claude Aveling (Registrar 
 of the Royal College of Music and Sir Hubert's 
 co-executor with Lady Maude Parry), and the 
 facilities extended for the use of the files of 
 The R.C.M. Magazine by Mr. T. F. Dunhill, 
 its Editor, as well as suggestions made by 
 both as to the treatment of the material they 
 afforded, have been very helpful. 
 
 Above all, the collaboration of Mrs. Arthur 
 Ponsonby, Sir Hubert Parry's daughter, in 
 this small effort to preserve and give promi- 
 nence to some of the things of her father's 
 mind which mattered most to him and to those 
 about him, has been invaluable. 
 
 H. C. COLLES. 
 
 HlNDHEAD, July 1 91 9- 
 
ADDRESSES 
 
 CURRENT EVENTS 
 
 37 
 
SIR GEORGE GROVE, 1894 
 
 I cannot help being conscious that the strongest 
 feeling which is present in our minds at this 
 moment is the sense of the great loss we have 
 sustained in the absence of our dear old first 
 Director, Sir George Grove. It is the first 
 serious loss our College has sustained, and it 
 is one we shall inevitably feel the results of 
 for a long while. But the energy and ability 
 of our professors and the goodwill and honour- 
 able conduct of all you scholars, exhibitioners, 
 and students may carry our College through the 
 crisis ; and it is rather as the loss of a personal 
 friend who made a part almost of our daily lives 
 that we shall feel his absence most severely. 
 
 There are few of you here present who 
 have not felt the influence of his personality 
 and realised the whole-hearted enthusiasm for 
 whatever is really good which was his most 
 marked characteristic. And we unluckily older 
 
 39 
 
4 o SIR GEORGE GROVE 
 
 people, who could call him friend even in the 
 days before many of you were born, can recall 
 an even more lively phase of his vital and 
 energetic delight in the best art, and the best 
 literature, and the best music, as well as in the 
 loveliest scenes of landscape or of sea, and even 
 in the joyous impressions of mountain and of 
 forest which rested in his lively imagination. 
 You who have only known him for years can 
 have no such idea of him as we who have 
 known him for tens of years. 
 
 It makes me often smile inwardly when I 
 recall the jolly time he and I had together some 
 twenty years ago, when I had the privilege and 
 good fortune to work with him as a sort of 
 sub-editor on his well-known Dictionary of 
 Music, We had some uncommonly dreary 
 and tiresome work to do. If you could have 
 seen the state in which some of the articles 
 were sent in you would wonder how they were 
 ever got into shape. I remember we not only 
 had to recast the details of the language of 
 many of them, but to turn the articles inside 
 out and upside down, to put the end at the 
 beginning and the middle at the end, and to 
 cut out whole paragraphs of rigmarole, till we 
 were driven nearly distracted. 
 
WHITEHALL TO JAMAICA 41 
 
 But all the while our dear old friend was 
 sandwiching in stories of his many experi- 
 ences, such as the memories of his boyhood, 
 when he was a clerk in Whitehall, and 
 remembered such ancient incidents as the 
 first appearance of lucifer matches, and 
 hearing and seeing boys in the streets selling 
 bits of stick with sulphur at the end to 
 make it easier to get a light from flint and 
 steel; and at another time he would tell 
 me of his adventures when he was building 
 the first lighthouse in Jamaica, and nearly got 
 killed by tumbling through a hole down the 
 middle of the building ; and at another time 
 of the strange and wonderful relics of the 
 ancient work and manners of men which he 
 came across when he was in Palestine as Secre- 
 tary of the Palestine Exploration Fund ; and 
 of the interesting talks he had with exception- 
 ally interesting men like Dean Stanley ; and 
 of the thrilling artistic excitements of the time 
 when he went to Vienna with Sir Arthur 
 Sullivan, and found buried under the accumu- 
 lated dust of years the priceless products of 
 Schubert's genius, which had been hidden in 
 old cupboards all forgotten since the days 
 when the composer had last laid his hand upon 
 
42 SIR GEORGE GROVE 
 
 them. And you can imagine yourselves how 
 he was always ready with some humorous 
 quotation from Dickens, or some deep thought 
 from Browning, or some beautiful musical 
 phrase of Tennyson, or some happy and 
 pathetic fragment from an out-of-the-way poet, 
 whose very name we hardly remember. 
 
 When did any of us meet with a man so alive 
 to everything that was honourably delightful, 
 whether as beauty of thought, or grace of 
 language, or noble dignity of sentiment, or 
 vivacity of humour ? What mind so well 
 stocked or so cosmopolitan ? But, alas, all 
 human things are transient in a sense — and 
 in a sense we lose him. 
 
 But it is the happy outcome of an honour- 
 able life that things that belong to it are not so 
 transient as they seem. It is true we lose the 
 immediate influence of his personality. But 
 the influence of his work may last long beyond 
 the limited vista of the lives even of the youngest 
 of us. For not only the fruits of his actual 
 organisation will still subsist with us, in the 
 system and plan of our College, but the 
 example of his high-minded, whole-hearted 
 devotion may inspire us constantly, not only 
 to develop such talents as we have to the 
 
A PATRON SAINT 4 3 
 
 highest we can, and to put them to the most 
 honourable uses, but also to go forward un- 
 falteringly, never yielding to the shallow 
 sophisms of a vulgar, greedy, vain, and money- 
 grubbing world, but clinging steadfastly to 
 high ideals ; seeking to serve and to help all 
 our fellow-creatures whenever occasion offers, 
 and doing our best to develop our own selves 
 into honourable and refined men and women. 
 Let our old Director be as it were our patron 
 saint. If we can but live and act as he would 
 have us, truly this College will be an honour 
 to our country, a very beacon set on a hill, and 
 will help to make our art to be held in such 
 honour as has not been paid to it for hundreds 
 of years. ... I look forward to the day when 
 many of you here present will be winning 
 honours for honourable achievements, and 
 giving the world assurance that the College is 
 a worthy mother of worthy children — a place 
 where all may learn to love what is best and 
 purest and noblest — both in music and in 
 other products of human skill and devotion; 
 so that in the days to come we may all look 
 back to having taken our part in making our 
 College a centre from which light and enlighten- 
 ment may radiate through all the country. 
 
JOHANNES BRAHMS, 1897 
 
 An overwhelming loss seems to make a void 
 in the musical world which we cannot hope to 
 see filled in our time. The great heroes of 
 the world are so rare that it is fortunately but 
 seldom in the brief spell of our lives that we 
 have to try and realise what parting with them 
 means. When the career of a great hero ends 
 we stand amazed, and wonder how the immense 
 powers it represented can have really ceased. 
 
 When we think of the vital force which the 
 work of a man like Johannes Brahms represents, 
 we can scarcely bring ourselves to face the fact 
 that there will be no more symphonies, quar- 
 tets, " Schicksalslied," requiems, songs, sona- 
 tas, part-songs, nor any other treasures of art 
 marked by the strong and noble individuality 
 of that particularly heroic tone-poet. Not 
 heaven itself, nor all the combined ingenuity 
 of all the cleverest scientists and artists in the 
 
 44 
 
THE GREAT HEROES 45 
 
 world can ever produce one single work which 
 would represent truly and adequately the noble 
 type of thought and the essentially character- 
 istic qualities in the now familiar works of that 
 single-hearted man. 
 
 The life-work is ended, and nothing of 
 quite the same order can again be done in 
 the world. The mortal part of him lies 
 fitly in close proximity to the resting-places 
 of Beethoven and Schubert in the cemetery 
 at Vienna. And what comfort have we ? 
 Truly, the comfort of heroic work heroically 
 done — a noble life lived out in untainted 
 devotion to generous ideals. The knowledge 
 that here was a man who formed the most 
 exalted ideals of art, and carried them out un- 
 flinchingly ; who never coquetted with the 
 mob or the " gallery " ; who accepted the 
 exalted responsibilities of knowing what was 
 first-rate, and never belied himself by putting 
 trumpery catch-phrases into his work to tickle 
 the ears of the groundlings and gain a little 
 cheap popularity. And it is something to 
 comfort ourselves with that, notwithstanding 
 the wrath of the Philistine and the ribaldry of 
 the frivolous and the vain, there is still enough 
 wholesome energy left in humanity to give 
 
46 JOHANNES BRAHMS 
 
 the highest place in honour and loving reverence 
 to the work of the last of the great German 
 heroes of musical art. 
 
 The man Johannes Brahms has gone from 
 us, but his work and his example are our 
 possession still, and will be, not for us only, but 
 for the generations that come after us. The 
 example enforces the pre-eminence of the in- 
 dividual element in art. For, even as it is said 
 that faith without works is dead, so art, without 
 the stamp of a strong personal character, is 
 stillborn. The grandest distinction of speci- 
 ally notable men is that this particular work 
 can be done by no other man whatsoever in 
 the world. A man may utter artistic things 
 with the technique of a superhuman conjuror, 
 and if he have not temperament and character 
 of his own he is become but a spinner of super- 
 fluities and a tinkling cackler. 
 
 And it is worth remembering that it is in 
 that respect that the English race is so peculi- 
 arly deficient. In the intensity and fervour 
 which gives the full nature without stint to the 
 expression of artistic ideals, foreign natures 
 have much better aptitudes. We are too 
 cautious and reticent to abandon ourselves to 
 the full absorption in a musical thought or 
 
ARTISTIC RESERVE 4 7 
 
 expression. We have too much respect for 
 grand and wide principles of organisation to 
 give our individuality full scope. 
 
 But here, too, the example of Johannes 
 Brahms is full of encouragement for us. His 
 was no nature always laid open to receive any 
 chance external impression. He was no ex- 
 pansive, neurotic, ecstatic, hysterico-sensitive 
 bundle of sensibilities, but even as full of 
 dignified artistic reserve and deliberate artistic 
 judgement as the most serious of our own people. 
 But he joined with it the great nature, the 
 cultivated comprehensive taste, the imagination 
 fostered and fed by dwelling on noble subjects 
 and keeping far from triviality and conventions. 
 To all, it is open to follow the example — in 
 small things as well as in great. You know 
 how one of the profoundest of men said : 
 
 To thine own self be true . . . 
 
 Thou canst not then be false to any man. 
 
 But it is not only by being true to yourselves 
 that you will be true to one another ; it is, in 
 art, a higher truth that it is only by following 
 the highest native qualities and being true 
 to them that you can ever arrive at a genuine 
 niche of your own in your art. As far as true 
 
48 JOHANNES BRAHMS 
 
 happiness is concerned, it will not matter much 
 whether the niche is high or low, so long as it 
 is your own. Every man has some personal 
 characteristics which mark him from his fellows 
 and some lines of endeavour into which they 
 are impelled. And it is by following out these 
 lines and developing these characteristics that 
 a man is happiest and most likely to be of 
 service to his fellow-men. It is when conven- 
 tion and indolence stifle them that men become 
 torpid, bored, useless, insufferable. You must 
 try to see things with your own eyes, not to 
 take even what wise men tell you as so many 
 formulas you have to learn by rote, but to try 
 to see through what look like formulas at first 
 into the principles and truths that they really 
 express. Then you may rise above the mere 
 knowledge of details into the genuine appre- 
 ciation of great artistic ideas, and be worthy 
 of belonging to the brotherhood of artists of 
 which Brahms was the greatest and most noble 
 member in our time, and feel without false 
 presumption the honourable exaltation of be- 
 longing to the same calling as he did. 
 
 May 1897. 
 
A QUARTER OF A CENTURY 
 
 The Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the 
 Opening of the Royal College of Music 
 
 I won't waste any time over personal matters, 
 as there are so many things which happen to 
 have special interest to-day in a wide general 
 Collegiate sense. And first of all — it is 
 possibly known to a good many of you that 
 to-day is the 7th of May. But it is probably 
 unknown to most of you that on that same day 
 of the month, May 7, in the year 1883, this 
 same Royal College of ours was definitely and 
 decisively launched on its problematical career 
 by an inaugural ceremony whereat the Prince 
 of Wales, our President as he was until his 
 accession, read a long and excellent address, 
 and declared that the building opposite the 
 West Theatre of the Albert Hall (about the 
 worst ever constructed for any purpose) was 
 open. 
 
 49 E 
 
50 A QUARTER OF A CENTURY 
 
 So the College has been in existence a 
 quarter of a century to-day. Twenty-five 
 years is a very short space of time compared 
 with epochs of history. But the best measure 
 of time, in one sense, is what has been got out 
 of it, and I doubt whether there are many in- 
 stitutions known to history which have managed 
 to get so much done, and so effectually done, 
 in twenty-five years of their existence. 
 
 If I tried even to touch on the more salient 
 individual facts, I should be deferring your 
 lunch into the neighbourhood of tea-time ! 
 And, moreover, though facts are very easy to 
 listen to, they are not so useful as the inferences 
 they carry. Still, one can't help being struck 
 by some that actually glare. Personally, I 
 can't help feeling what grand luck it has been 
 that so many of those who took part in launch- 
 ing the ship are still very much alive and ready 
 for plenty more work for the College, such as 
 Mr. Franklin Taylor, 1 who did a vast lot of 
 the actual preparatory work before the launch- 
 ing. There is our dear Sir Walter Parratt, the 
 most inspiring of teachers, who has radiated 
 life-force and wisdom into young people during 
 the whole twenty-five years ; then there is Sir 
 
 1 Retired, 1916 ; died March 79, 1919. 
 
THE START 51 
 
 Charles Stanford, who has led the College forces 
 to brilliant victories times out of number ; Mr. 
 Visetti, whose, devotion and enthusiasm have 
 spread his representatives all over the world ; 
 and Sir Frederick Bridge, whose humorous 
 views of counterpoint have made " fifths " so 
 popular. Those five are all that are left of 
 the original Board of Professors — men who 
 bore the burden and heat of the day. Of the 
 other first professors there are still left Mr. 
 Sharpe, Mr. Cliffe, Mr. Barnett, 1 Mr. Kemp, 2 
 Dr. Gladstone, 3 and Mr. Barrett, 4 and all of 
 them from the first regarded the new institu- 
 tion, not as an opportunity to get self-advertise- 
 ment, but as a means to do grand, generous, 
 and permanent work. 
 
 How great the change in the aspect of 
 musical art has been in those twenty-five years, 
 even the most hostile admit — and only those 
 who have been in the heart of it all are capable 
 of estimating how much of it has been due to 
 the consistent and unwavering policy of our 
 Royal College ; the initiative to which was 
 mainly defined by the enthusiasm of that dear 
 old friend of the old days, whom we all loved 
 
 1 Died November 24, 191 6. 2 Died October 30, 191 8. 
 
 3 Now retired. 4 Now retired. 
 
52 A QUARTER OF A CENTURY 
 
 so dearly, the first Director, Sir George Grove. 
 Most of the substantial work of giving the 
 impetus to the College was done by him and 
 the professors above mentioned, seconded by 
 the first Registrar, George Watson, and the 
 Staff. But nothing could be done till there 
 were plenty of pupils to back up and carry the 
 College message about in the world — and it 
 makes one smile inwardly to think how small 
 the beginnings were. 
 
 We began in May 1883 with just 50 
 open scholars and 44 paying pupils — 94 all 
 told — so the entire College of those days 
 would hardly fill a dozen of the rows of 
 chairs in front here. It was a tiny little 
 College — but every one connected with it was 
 keen and full of life, and it soon mounted 
 up. It got to 200 in Easter term 1886 and 
 arrived at 329 in the Summer Term of 189 1 — 
 that is only eight years — and then it stuck 
 fast for a while. It arrived at 400 in 1898 ; 
 and there again it stuck fast, the highest 
 numbers so far having been 443. 
 
 But we do not want to be a big crowd — we 
 cannot fancy maintaining the particular kind 
 of family feeling we enjoy if we get much 
 more numerous. And it is much more im- 
 
THE FIRST LAP S3 
 
 portant to find quality than quantity. When 
 we were quite little we had some of the very 
 finest pupils we ever turned out. Did not 
 we find Dr. Charles Wood, and Dr. Emily 
 Daymond, and Mr. W. H. Squire, Mr. 
 Barton, Mr. Bent, Mr. Inwards, Mr. Kreuz, 
 Mr. Dan Price, Mr. Sutcliffe, and Mr. 
 Waddington in the very first lap of all, in the 
 days when we were but a scanty hundred ? 
 And it was the fine standard of character 
 of the earliest pupils which materially helped 
 to establish a great part of the tone which 
 has become characteristic of the place — that 
 atmosphere of singleness of aim and enthusiastic 
 fellowship, among professors as well as pupils, 
 which is almost of more importance than 
 single ability and genius. We cannot help 
 looking back over these twenty-five years 
 with some complacency, when we think of 
 all its output ; of the singers who are uni- 
 versally acknowledged to have attained to 
 the highest position in their branch of art, 
 the great number of our organists who hold 
 the highest appointments in cathedrals and 
 important churches, our brilliant fiddlers and 
 viola players, our violoncellists and double 
 bassists, our hosts of composers and pianists, 
 
54 A QUARTER OF A CENTURY 
 
 some of the finest wind instrument players 
 in Europe, and general musicians of mark, 
 and even dancers and elocutionists. 
 
 But we cannot limit our retrospect to 
 pupils, but are impelled to think also of our 
 doings — -of the vast number of first-rate 
 concerts we have given, the number of per- 
 formances of important new works, the many 
 performances of almost unknown operas, as 
 well as distinguished performances of well- 
 known ones ; our loyal culture of ensemble 
 music, and the influence which such loyalty, 
 in connection especially with instrumental 
 music, has had upon the taste of the country. 
 It has all been done by unstinted co-operation, 
 — by zeal begotten of sympathetic enthusiasm. 
 And one of the happiest manifestations of 
 this feature in our College life is the College 
 Union l — which is the outward and visible 
 sign of a very delightful inward and spiritual 
 grace — which, as I have said before, found 
 its initiative among the pupils themselves, 
 and spreads and gains in vitality by the feelings 
 of good fellowship born of mutual respect. 
 
 One hears that even cannibals and gangs 
 
 1 Founded in 1905, a society of past and present members of the 
 R.CM. 
 
CANNIBAL AND COLLEGIAN 5 S 
 
 of burglars and the men who prey on their 
 fellow -men in money markets have their 
 implied codes of honour so called, which even 
 torture could hardly make them violate. The 
 College has its tradition, and most of those, 
 who belong to it know — as well as a cannibal 
 knows what is expected of a well-constituted 
 cannibal — what is expected of a Royal Collegian ; 
 and would sooner starve and be relegated to a 
 workhouse than fall short of it. 
 
 That is one of the good reasons for looking 
 back on what has been done ; no one but a 
 wretched, rotten degenerate would look back on 
 achievements as an excuse for taking it easy 
 and letting things slide. People who have any 
 generosity of disposition can only regard the 
 well-doing of their predecessors as an incitement 
 to emulation. We may well say that it will be 
 hard to do better than the College has done — 
 but you never know what you can do till you 
 try. When we point with pride to the achieve- 
 ments of earlier College heroes, it would be 
 absurd and feeble of you of the present to 
 take a back seat. The true principle is to 
 praise the men of earlier days without stint, 
 and thereby set the standard for yourselves. 
 The rivalry will not be only between those 
 
S 6 A QUARTER OF A CENTURY 
 
 of the present day, between College and Aca- 
 demy, College and Gewandhaus and Con- 
 servatoire, but between College of the past 
 and College of the present. And to judge 
 by your present appearance you will be quite 
 worthy of the incitement of such honourable 
 rivalry. 
 
 A last word and a familiar one : Remember 
 that nothing is so important as the formulation, 
 within the bounds of College decorum, of 
 your own personality. We must be ever 
 expanding, and without thinking whether we 
 get any thanks for it, ever doing something to 
 make life worth living. 
 
 May 1908. 
 
KING EDWARD VII. 
 
 (Founder of the R.C.M.) 
 
 We always meet on these occasions in a very 
 joyful mood, and no one is more glad of it than 
 I am. But for once I feel bound to harden 
 my heart and ask for a spell of seriousness, as 
 we have a tribute to pay which we cannot 
 ignore. 
 
 A change has come in the circumstances of 
 the College since we met at the beginning of 
 last term such as has never happened since the 
 College came into existence, and cannot happen 
 again. We have lost our best and most loyal 
 and most powerful friend. The King, who 
 was the inventor and Founder of the College 
 in days before most of you were born, was so 
 true and liberal and large-hearted in his good- 
 will to the College that our circumstances can 
 never be quite the same now he is gone from 
 us. However gladly we may appreciate the 
 
 57 
 
58 KING EDWARD VII. 
 
 proofs which his successor has already given 
 of his sense of the responsibilities and oppor- 
 tunities of his great position, of his readiness 
 to encourage and support work that is being 
 worthily done, and his unselfish readiness to 
 help forward anything which is for the good 
 of his people, we must face the fact that the 
 peculiarly personal interest which Edward VII. 
 took in its foundation cannot be expected to 
 find a counterpart in the time to come. 
 
 We have enjoyed conditions which have 
 been quite exceptionally favourable for the 
 first quarter of a century of the College's 
 existence, and we may gladly admit that it has 
 helped us beyond computation ; and now we 
 must be prepared to depend more upon our 
 own energies and resources. It is fortunate 
 for us that we have got such good foundations 
 to start from, and it is as well that we should 
 realise how much of the solidity of those 
 foundations we owe to the wisdom and discern- 
 ment of the true friend we have lost. No 
 institution ever had occasion to hold its 
 Founder in more loving remembrance. The 
 extent to which we owe our existence to him 
 would hardly be believed if we had not the 
 undoubted facts to prove it. You can read 
 
LIBERALITY OF MIND 59 
 
 for yourselves, in the excellent article by Dr. 
 Shinn in this term's Magazine, how strenu- 
 ously he worked and how successfully ; and 
 the liberality of mind he showed when he had 
 started the College on its career was as remark- 
 able as his energy in getting it founded. 
 
 For one of the most remarkable things in 
 the late King's attitude towards the College 
 was the extent to which he left us free and 
 independent to work out our own salvation. 
 With any one less clear-minded one would 
 have expected a great deal of superfluous 
 guidance ; and even an occasional manifestation 
 of a disposition to extract personal pleasure 
 from the product of his own energy. It is 
 not so long ago that such an institution would 
 have been regarded by people at Court as a 
 convenient means of providing for dependants, 
 favourites, and importunate schemers. But 
 times have changed, and though no doubt the 
 importunate folk were not absent, appointments 
 have always been made at the College on the 
 basis of tried ability and worth, and not on 
 mere personal favour. 
 
 The King knew quite well how coddling 
 can ruin man, woman, or institution, and 
 he knew that it was better for us to find 
 
60 KING EDWARD VII. 
 
 out our own way than to have it made 
 too easy for us. So far from resenting any 
 independence from his views, he once ex- 
 pressly said, in discussing an important matter 
 in the arrangements of the College, that 
 he always meant to act as a constitutional 
 President, and not to insist upon his private 
 views if the views of those who ventured to 
 differ from him proved to be substantially 
 grounded. And the result has been that we 
 have thriven much better than if we had 
 been coddled. We developed as the nation 
 developed, by feeling that there was plenty of 
 room for our independent activities. There 
 is a thing also that I should like to underline 
 in the King's Speech at the opening of the 
 College, because it is such an extraordinary 
 proof of wide-mindedness coming from such 
 a quarter as long ago as May 7, 1883. The 
 President Prince then said : 
 
 " The establishment of an Institution such 
 as I open to-day is not the mere creation of a 
 new Musical Society. The time has come 
 when class can no longer stand aloof from 
 class ; and that man does his duty best who 
 works most earnestly in bridging over the gulf 
 between different classes which it is the tendency 
 
INAUGURAL SPEECH 61 
 
 of increased wealth and increased civilisation 
 to widen. I claim for music the merit that 
 it has a voice that speaks, in different tones 
 perhaps, but with equal force to the cultivated 
 and the ignorant, to the peer and the peasant. 
 I claim for music a variety of expression which 
 belongs to no other art, and therefore adapts 
 it more than any other art to produce that 
 union of feeling which I much desire to 
 promote." 
 
 It is one of the most delightful things about 
 music that it brings all sorts and conditions 
 of men and women together upon equal terms, 
 and obliterates the tiresome barriers of Class. 
 Its equalising power has been constantly 
 shown at the College. If a scion of the 
 aristocracy plays a violin in the orchestra and 
 is not specially distinguished as a performer, 
 he or she does not lead the orchestra by right 
 of social position, but takes his or her place 
 at a back desk which represents his or her 
 actual standard of artistic efficiency, and con- 
 tentedly submits to be led by any one of 
 whatever rank who plays the violin well 
 enough. No one would ever think of enquir- 
 ing whether the leader of the orchestra was 
 nobly born, or the son of an artisan or bank 
 
62 KIIHG EDWARD VII. 
 
 clerk. The only thing that matters is whether 
 the individual is artistically fit to lead. And 
 it is the same in all the other departments of 
 musical activity. The singer rises to a promi- 
 nent position at the College because she can 
 sing, not because her father might be able to 
 flatter her vanity with dazzling diamonds ; and 
 the pianist who has all the advantages of 
 conventional social position drops them when 
 she comes into contact with superior talent. 
 The mere chance of so-called advantages of 
 birth counts for nothing at all. The foresight 
 of our Founder has been abundantly verified, 
 and it is the more pleasing to think of it because 
 the verification has been purely spontaneous; 
 inasmuch as it is unlikely that any one was 
 aware of his having uttered the sincere and 
 pregnant words which might have given us 
 the cue. But now that we know them we 
 may gladly take them as one of our College 
 mottoes. 
 
 The immediate future will put us to the 
 test, and there is no denying that we have 
 arrived at a notable moment in the history of 
 the College. So far we have been frequently 
 encouraged by the well-grounded belief that 
 what we have done justified the hopes of our 
 
THE DEBT TO THE FOUNDER 6 3 
 
 Founder. He often expressed, in the days 
 when he was President and since, his satisfac- 
 tion at the work his College was doing and the 
 position it had attained in the world ; and now 
 we can look no longer for that kindly encourage- 
 ment. But it would be paltry if we thought 
 our debt was paid. If we owed it to him to 
 justify his Foundation while we could still win 
 acknowledgement and recognition, it will be 
 still more to the purpose if we can go on 
 justifying it now he is gone from us. Every 
 man, whether he be king or ordinary mortal, 
 longs for his work to bear good fruit after he 
 is gone. We can all of us in our several ways 
 minister to that end, and take a pride in repay- 
 ing our debt to his memory by maintaining a 
 standard of character and a constancy in well- 
 doing, which shall give to his Foundation a 
 unique position among institutions of like 
 character throughout the world. 
 
 It would not be right to ignore the fact 
 that the loss of our Founder inevitably carried 
 with it the loss of our President ; as the King 
 of this country cannot by law be a President 
 of such an institution as the College. And 
 the loss is also a very serious one to us. During 
 the too short time that the College had the 
 
64 KING EDWARD VII. 
 
 present King for its President it was in clover. 
 A President more completely free from the 
 obstructiveness of punctilio or etiquette, or 
 fussiness or meddlesomeness, it would be 
 difficult to imagine. The tradition of kindly 
 consideration descended from father to son. 
 Whenever officials of the College had to deal 
 immediately with him, his frankness and open- 
 mindedness and naturalness gave a comfortable 
 feeling of reliance ; a sense that the President 
 approved what was well done, and indeed 
 actually cared that things should be well done. 
 That kindly support we shall now miss, as the 
 position of Patron, which the King has so 
 kindly consented to accept, is not so intimate 
 in its relations with the College as that of 
 President. But his being Patron guarantees 
 his continued interest in the College, and his 
 attitude towards it in the past makes us con- 
 fident that his help and furtherance would be 
 forthcoming if ever the College were in need 
 of it in the future. 
 
 It is almost inevitable that we should now 
 also lose touch with some of those who gave 
 the College the support at least of their dis- 
 tinguished names, in view of its connection 
 with the Founder, or for official reasons. If 
 
PRINCE CHRISTIAN 6$ 
 
 • 
 
 ever by chance any of you look at the page 
 at the beginning of our Syllabus, you are no 
 doubt uplifted by the imposing list of peers 
 and important public men whose names figure 
 on the Council and Committees ; and, no 
 doubt, you think they all devote themselves 
 night and day to help the College to maintain 
 a position worthy of its Founder. It is 
 probably very fortunate that they do not. As 
 a matter of fact it is a small group of devoted, 
 loyal, and energetic friends who do all the 
 important work that is required of the Execu- 
 tive and Finance Committees, and among 
 those loyal friends there is no one to whom 
 we are more indebted than to our new Presi- 
 dent, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. 
 He began working for the College before it 
 came into existence, and his support and 
 helpfulness have never faltered or diminished 
 through the quarter of a century and more 
 which has elapsed since. We have every 
 reason to welcome the King's approval of his 
 occupying the position for which he has shown 
 such eminent fitness, and we can feel that under 
 his Presidency we will show our mettle as 
 vigorously as under his predecessors. 
 
 I have begged you to take on a serious mood 
 
 F 
 
66 KING EDWARD VII. 
 
 for a while, and I know the reason approves 
 itself to you. But there is no need that it 
 should stand in the way of the good spirits 
 which fit your coming back to work again. 
 Our Founder would not at all approve of our 
 suppressing good spirits on his account. He, 
 of all men, was of a mind to approve a cheerful 
 humour, and knew what a splendid help it 
 is to getting work done. You cannot pay a 
 much better compliment to his memory than 
 to continue to enjoy your College life and its 
 good fellowship as of old. A serious experience 
 can be a very serviceable thing. It gives a 
 man a distaste for things trivial and frivolous, 
 and helps him to distinguish between things 
 that are really enjoyable, even in times of 
 seriousness, and the silly, roystering, unprofit- 
 able foolishness which betokens semi-idiocy. 
 People who are capable of being serious enjoy 
 life much more than those who are not, as you 
 may judge from the profound boredom which 
 often afflicts most of those who try to spend 
 their lives in amusing themselves. 
 
 The man gets the most out of life whose 
 nature is capable of taking in the widest range 
 of experiences. We of the College have had 
 a new experience — one that we would rather 
 
GOOD FELLOWSHIP 67 
 
 not have had. But thanks to our lost Founder, 
 we still have the College, and it will be quite 
 in accordance with his views that we should 
 enjoy what the College provides for us to do 
 with all our mights. The more we enjoy it, 
 the better will be the fruit of our energy ; and 
 the better will be the fruit of the work of the 
 Founder. 
 
 September 1910. 
 
A LOYAL RIVAL, THE R.A.M. 
 
 Just at the moment I should like to get away 
 from the College and its aims, and to think 
 for a while of another Institution which 
 probably enjoys similar advantages; as one of 
 the things which appeals to me most to-day is 
 the attainment by our amiable rival, the Royal 
 Academy of Music, of fine and commodious 
 new quarters. 
 
 Perhaps you may be a little surprised at 
 my devoting attention to a place to which you 
 do not belong, but I think it is a good occasion 
 to say something of its virtues. It is right and 
 proper that you should appreciate thoroughly 
 the loyalty and fairness which has characterised 
 the behaviour of that Institution toward us 
 from the first. One must admit that at the 
 beginning of our existence the appearance of 
 a rival on the scene, supported conspicuously 
 by favour in the highest quarters, could 
 
 68 
 
THE ASSOCIATED BOARD 69 
 
 hardly be otherwise than a considerable trial 
 to an ancient institution which had thriven 
 and begotten numbers of very distinguished 
 and brilliant musicians since coming into 
 existence early in the nineteenth century. 
 
 The College must have looked like a young 
 and aggressive upstart and the claims that were 
 made for it, and the hopes that were expressed 
 about it, were liable to be uncomfortable and 
 distasteful to supporters of the old-established 
 house. But they never showed any ill-will or 
 soreness against us. They maintained a per- 
 fectly dignified and sympathetic demeanour, 
 and even before long condescended to combine 
 with us in that invaluable scheme for providing 
 people with something definite to work for, 
 and diffusing opportunities of becoming ac- 
 quainted with first-rate music, which is now 
 well known throughout the Empire as the 
 " Associated Board." 
 
 Ungainly as its name is, that association 
 deserves recognition for having something even 
 poetic in its aims ; and one of the most admir- 
 able features of its history was the readiness of 
 the older Institution to associate itself with the 
 younger on equal terms. The foundation of 
 the Board was most happy in affording personal 
 
yo A LOYAL RIVAL, THE R.A.M. 
 
 contact between members of the two Institu- 
 tions, as personal contact is such a safeguard 
 against misunderstandings. 
 
 It is when people do not know one another 
 that they get into the way of attributing mean 
 and unworthy motives to the actions of rivals. 
 The essence of our relation with the Academy 
 is friendly rivalry. The rivalry is in itself 
 quite invaluable because it keeps us both up 
 to the mark. But if it had been mere rivalry, 
 without opportunities of personal contact, one 
 can imagine the air being poisoned by sus- 
 picions and rumours and perverse misrepre- 
 sentations such as attend party rivalries of all 
 sorts. 
 
 As it is, the Academy professors come to 
 us, and our professors go to them, and they 
 meet constantly as personal friends, and our 
 respective efforts to outpace one another tend 
 only to the general advantage of music in this 
 country. It would have been quite natural 
 for them to give themselves haughty airs and to 
 look down upon us as juvenile pretenders, and 
 so to set things going in a wrong direction. But 
 they did not ; and the result is warm regard 
 and mutual recognition, and the great part of 
 the credit seems to be due to the Academy. 
 
SYMPATHETIC COMPETITION 71 
 
 There can be nothing better for us than to 
 return to them full measure of loyal apprecia- 
 tion. For that is a kind of loyalty that cannot 
 do harm to any one but rather does good all 
 round. It may even do good to consider a 
 little what loyalty means and how thoughtless 
 and hazy ways of regarding it may make 
 mischief. People are so fascinated with the 
 idea of it that it seems a kind of sacrilege to 
 inquire into it at all. But all things are better 
 for being inquired into, even virtues and so- 
 called moral principles. From the persona] 
 point of view we take it as a matter of course 
 that a man must be loyal to his friends and his 
 family and the people he mixes with. But in 
 the far back of our minds it is well to remember 
 that being blindly loyal to a friend because he 
 is a friend, or to one's party because it is one's 
 party, without considering whether they are 
 in the right or not is a kind of egotism upside 
 down, and means being disloyal to any enemy 
 just because he is an enemy and does not belong 
 to us. It is quite sure to entail wrong and 
 injustice somewhere. 
 
 The highest ideal of loyalty should be able 
 to embrace enemies and rivals and competitors 
 as well as friends. If a friend is manifestly 
 
72 A LOYAL RIVAL, THE R.A.M. 
 
 in the wrong, there are better ways of being 
 loyal than stubbornly insisting that he is not. 
 It would be of much more service to him as 
 well as to the world to make him see that he 
 is wrong and try to put himself and every one 
 else right. Blindly refusing to admit that he 
 is in the wrong is only encouraging him to go 
 wrong again. That sort of romantic loyalty 
 which merely ignores the rights and wrongs 
 of a position is disloyalty to every one who is 
 in the right. It is only a romantic and fanciful 
 way of being dishonest. 
 
 Loyalty to principle is a thing which covers 
 all sorts of relations with people and things. 
 There is a right way of being loyal to your 
 friends and your family and your clan, to people 
 of like occupations and opinions with yourself, 
 to your College and your country, to your 
 rivals and competitors and to your enemies (or 
 people you think are your enemies), and even 
 to the people you believe to be vicious and 
 spiteful, and to all sorts and conditions of 
 men! 
 
 On the whole, there is something even 
 more chivalrous and fine about loyalty to an 
 enemy and a rival than to people who merely 
 engage our personal interest and regard. Such 
 
CHIVALRY 73 
 
 loyalty means readiness to admit and welcome 
 whatever is well and honestly done, wherever 
 we come across it, especially in rivals and 
 adversaries if we have any. 
 
 It is very natural and easy to belittle the 
 successes and abilities of rivals and competi- 
 tors; and nowadays commercialism has so 
 infected the atmosphere that people seem very 
 often to lose the sense of what is due to facts, 
 and only observe that when some one else has 
 got something which is in competition with 
 something that they have got themselves they 
 must do everything to discredit the rival 
 product, for fear their own should get left on 
 their hands. 
 
 Commerce seems to find it necessary to 
 disparage everything in which men are not 
 personally interested, and to look for every flaw 
 in a competitor's work and make it look as big 
 as possible : to keep other people's products 
 out of the way by any means available, even by 
 tariff walls, and to throw everything in which 
 they are personally interested at the heads of 
 the public, and make the world hideous with 
 their aggressive advertisements. And the 
 commercial attitude of mind must be confessed 
 to have got into artistic circles, and introduces 
 
74 A LOYAL RIVAL, THE R.A.M. 
 
 a new and disagreeable type of mere business 
 loyalty which we could very well and profitably 
 dispense with. It is not really loyalty at all 
 but a keen eye for business and profits. 
 
 What is suitable for commercial purposes 
 is certainly not suitable for art. People who 
 are engaged in art do much better by adopting 
 the more chivalrous attitude of looking for 
 what is good in other people's work. In the 
 first place, if a man has a rival it must be more 
 inspiring for him to have a rival worthy of his 
 steel than one whom he despises ; and art 
 differs from commerce in making it quite 
 legitimate to learn from a rival and borrow 
 his best strokes. In fact when a man finds his 
 best strokes and ideas annexed by some one 
 else it is generally considered that he ought to 
 like it. 
 
 All great masters in every branch of art 
 have always learnt from one another; and the 
 progress of art consists in the discoveries and 
 achievements of an infinite variety of different 
 minds, all contributing according to their capa- 
 cities to the general good, solving problems of 
 technique, discovering new ways of interpreting 
 more profitably the intentions of composers, 
 finding out new ways to enable audiences to be 
 
PARTY FEELING 75^ 
 
 interested in and understand what they hear, 
 enhancing the methods of art all round and 
 making it richer. 
 
 But I am also aware that all this is not 
 entirely applicable to you. It is when people 
 get older that the temptations to be ungenerous 
 to rivals and to adopt the injurious form of 
 what they would complacently misdescribe as 
 loyalty are more prevalent. Young people are 
 rather disposed to be eagerly omnivorous, and 
 to welcome everything that gives them new 
 experiences and new sensations ; and naturally 
 they do not have great capacities of discrimina- 
 tion. They are easily led to adopt a party, 
 and to take sides, and to think poorly of any 
 institution which seems in rivalry with the one 
 they belong to. It is to be hoped that we are 
 safe from top to bottom from having any such 
 mere party feeling towards the Academy; and 
 that we are loyally able to recognise and admit 
 its fine qualities and its fine achievements. 
 Its members at all events are rivals worthy of 
 our steel, and we shall do well to keep a sharp 
 look-out and take wrinkles from them when- 
 ever they do something better than we do. 
 
 Apart from any reference to the Academy, 
 it would be well to caution you from thinking 
 
76 A LOYAL RIVAL, THE R.A.M. 
 
 I only recommend you to look for good in 
 everything. That would not do at all. As 
 the world grows older, there are more varieties 
 of bad in it as well as more of good, and more 
 chance of going wrong if you do not keep your 
 eyes open. When a thing is plainly bad, 
 mean, common, and stupid, it is a great pity 
 that personal interest, specious advertisement, 
 or whimsical fashion should induce people to 
 think it is good, in spite of their being able 
 to judge that it is not. It is not so difficult as 
 it seems to distinguish what is good from what 
 is bad. Many of the difficulties arise from 
 personal interests, mistaken views of loyalty, 
 what we may call side issues. People find fault 
 more than they praise because it is easier and 
 more amusing, and they often praise what is 
 not good because it is their interest to do so. 
 We are bewildered by the hosts of conflicting 
 voices, one saying a thing is good, and another 
 saying it is rubbish. We are bewildered by 
 the haste with which we have to make up our 
 minds about things in this short spell of life 
 which we have got to make the most of; by 
 the craft of the clever ones who have to present 
 stale things in new aspects and twaddle as deep 
 thought ; even by the necessities of journalists, 
 
DISCRIMINATION 77 
 
 who, poor things, have to provide copy of 
 some sort even when their heads are as empty 
 as bladders and possibly aching. Yet the 
 good survives. In spite of ephemeral distrac- 
 tions, sooner or later men sift out the mistakes 
 and misrepresentations, and get at the genuine 
 things and hold on to them. How else would 
 the finest things in our art survive ? The 
 majority of people always hate any art which 
 has any quality about it at first, but they are 
 brought round by degrees by the firmness of the 
 few people who have some understanding, and 
 by the lasting qualities in the things themselves. 
 Most of you know through your own ex- 
 periences how you can come back to some 
 things again and again; things which really 
 are genuine and come from the sincerity and 
 generosity of a man's heart. You may be 
 attracted for a time by little artificial trifles 
 which chime with passing inclinations. But if 
 they are too slight, too limited, too devoid of 
 things which appeal to more than passing 
 inclination, they lose their hold on you, and 
 you forget them even gladly. It is the same 
 with books and poems and plays, and with 
 everything we occupy or amuse ourselves with, 
 even our games. 
 
78 A LOYAL RIVAL, THE R.A.M. 
 
 The things which have many sides to them, 
 that interest us in all sorts of fresh ways, that 
 can satisfy even the instinct for change, appeal 
 to more than mere chance moods and keep 
 us ; and to them we return again and again, 
 however many may be the interludes which 
 our inevitable human vagaries impose. If we 
 look and think, we find it is either because we 
 are constantly finding out new sides in the 
 finest things or because we can see them in 
 all manner of different connections and sur- 
 roundings and from all sorts of points of view, 
 and in various frames of mind or feeling, 
 without their losing their hold upon us. 
 
 Art does not differ from the ordinary 
 circumstances of life in such respects. All 
 through the history of all sorts of races in all 
 ranks and in all ages, people have been able 
 ultimately to recognise in their fellow-men the 
 things that permanently stir them to love and 
 admiration. Whether we go back as far as 
 Homer, or as wide as the primitive stories of 
 primitive people, such as the Sagas of the 
 North, the same traits of humanity stir man- 
 kind : such as generosity, courage, firmness, 
 devotion, unworldliness, sincerity, things which 
 are not trivial and small and petty. Every- 
 
CYNICISM 79 
 
 body who has ever written plays, books, 
 poems, or stories has always gone to work 
 with the assumption that he could make 
 his readers or hearers love certain characters 
 and loathe others ; because at bottom men are 
 all agreed upon the things that excite admira- 
 tion or detestation. 
 
 Most people would like to do the things 
 that win appreciation, but their lack of control 
 of less honourable impulses betrays them ; 
 and when they yield more and more to those 
 impulses, they lose the faculty of doing what 
 in their saner moments they knew it would 
 be more honourable and profitable to do. 
 And then sometimes they take up with the 
 cynics who try to confuse things, and make 
 themselves believe that doing low and mean 
 things is necessary, because so many people 
 are reported to do them, and to get on better 
 in consequence. People who try to persuade 
 the world that low and mean actions are 
 profitable are about the most noisome and 
 mischievous criminals that can be found ; 
 infinitely worse than the unfortunates who are 
 hanged or sent to long periods of penal servi- 
 tude for sudden explosions of passion. But 
 the happy thing is that humanity is not more 
 
80 A LOYAL RIVAL, THE R.A.M. 
 
 corrupted by such " advocates of the devil." 
 Down below in the innermost of them, men keep 
 firm hold of their appreciation of really fine 
 qualities of character and art, such as are not 
 merely kept for show or profit and which thrive 
 in a great many more people than would be 
 readily admitted, even sometimes in the very 
 rottenest specimens of humanity. And one of 
 the most interesting and profitable occupations 
 in life is to look for fine qualities wherever they 
 may be found, in art and poetry and in friends 
 and relations, as well as in rivals and competi- 
 tors; and also to find out what it feels like to 
 grow a few of them oneself. 
 
 September 191 1. 
 
EDUCATION FOR LIFE 
 
 81 
 
THE BEAUTY OF ORDER 
 
 There's nothing so tiresome as preaching. 
 But I find that last term I advised, in the 
 recklessness of the moment, rebellion rather 
 than slavery. So perhaps it will be better 
 this time to qualify it a little, and I had 
 better say something of the beauty of order. 
 
 I daresay most of you do not care much 
 about orderliness — it sounds so smug ; you are 
 too young, and the indulgence of impulses is 
 infinitely more to your taste. But you will 
 find, if ever you arrive at years of discretion 
 (which is, of course, doubtful!), that there are 
 two sides to every question. There is nothing 
 more essential in the pursuit of art than 
 impulse, except order. 
 
 The beauty of order is that there is so much 
 more room for things. If you have twenty 
 letters by post of a morning, and open them, 
 and throw them all down helter-skelter on the 
 
 83 
 
84 THE BEAUTY OF ORDER 
 
 table, they look perfectly awful — it looks as if 
 it would be best to put them in the waste-paper 
 basket at once, and not try to answer them. 
 But if you put them in a few piles, in accord- 
 ance with the nature of their contents, they 
 look ever so much smaller, and you don't 
 despair of answering them all. Now one of 
 the first objects of life is to get as much into 
 it as you can. When you get old enough to 
 look back a little, you will get a bit worried 
 not to have done some things that were worth 
 doing, and it is always well to remember we 
 each have a little spell to get things done, and 
 we do not get the chance to get them done 
 again. The older you get, the shorter you 
 will find your one chance ; and the only way 
 to pack life as full as it will hold is to put its 
 contents into some sort of order. But there 
 is no order that does for every one, and every 
 one has to find the order that suits his disposi- 
 tion best — and that is where the room comes 
 for your impulses and queernesses. 
 
 No one is good for much who has not 
 something different about him from other 
 people, and who does not make the best of the 
 chances life affords him. The best that any 
 man does he must do for himself. The best 
 
THE CHANCES OF LIFE 85 
 
 masters in the world can only show you how 
 to use your own aptitudes — they can stuff you 
 as full of learning as a human animal can hold, 
 but if you cannot use it, you are no better off 
 than a cook with a larder full of raw materials, 
 who cannot even make a suet pudding. That 
 is why I preach rebellion. It is no use only 
 doing what you are told — I would much rather 
 you did what you were told not, than go on 
 repeating what people tell you like a paltry 
 parrot. 
 
 But you can even do what you are told not 
 to do in an orderly manner. It is getting 
 square things mixed up with round things, 
 and long things all at angles with one another 
 that does the mischief — they all get in one 
 another's way. It resolves itself, somehow, 
 into the familiar saying, whatever you find to 
 do, do it with all your might. And even that 
 wants qualifying — for it is as well before you 
 try to do anything with all your might, to 
 make sure it is worth doing at all. Most of 
 you have made up your mind that one thing 
 is worth doing, and that is developing your 
 musical abilities; and having so made up your 
 mind saves a lot of trouble. You have no need 
 to go fooling around like unfortunate young 
 
86 THE BEAUTY OF ORDER 
 
 members of the over-prosperous class, not 
 quite sure whether it is best to loaf round to 
 see what somebody else is doing, or whether 
 you had better go out and kill something, or 
 whether you will go to a race meeting, or go 
 and play golf, or smoke a cigarette, or do 
 something else — read a magazine, or practise 
 diabolo, or call on your tailor. At least you 
 have got something definite to do, and the 
 better you do it the happier you are. And 
 you know quite well that if you want to do 
 it well you have got to get some sort of order 
 into your ways of doing it. Of course you 
 are helped here, to a certain extent, by the way 
 your lessons are regularly timed, so that the 
 ground plan of general order is already plotted 
 out for you; and the way people come up to 
 time at the College is, taking it all round, very 
 wholesome. 
 
 But the other kind of order — the order 
 that is in your own hands — is difficult; getting 
 things so spaced out that they do not get 
 in one another's way. Some people, when 
 they find something that gives them trouble, 
 have not backbone enough to stick to it, and 
 go slithering off to something else ; and once 
 begun, the process of letting things slide goes 
 
SCALES AND EXERCISES 87 
 
 on getting worse and worse ; and, when they 
 arrive at years which are called those of discre- 
 tion, they find they have just been doing 
 nothing, and that life has become a jumble, 
 and they begin to hope that Heaven will make 
 up for the muddle they have made of their 
 chances on earth. 
 
 Now you would like me to tell you how to 
 get order into the things you want to do, and 
 I can't. No doubt you think you are all 
 alike, but you are not, and I would much rather 
 you were not. You have got to find out for 
 yourselves ; what applies to you does not apply 
 to another. If I were to say, " You can't play 
 the piano well enough to play to any one unless 
 you practise your scales," most of you would 
 say, "We do — we do"; and then I should 
 have to remember that many of you play 
 Beethoven and Mozart, and Brahms and 
 Schumann, and even Bach, just as you play 
 your scales — and I should be sorry I spoke. 
 
 The fact is that the dear good people who 
 play their scales and their exercises are just those 
 who by temperament and feeling will find it 
 most difficult to play anything else; while 
 those who feel music deeply, and are passion- 
 ately eager to get to the works they can enjoy, 
 
88 THE BEAUTY OF ORDER 
 
 have not the patience to develop their technique. 
 If I say, " Go and do what your masters tell 
 you," you might say you always do, and then I 
 should have to remember that that is just the 
 way to get stupid. You have got to under- 
 stand what your master tells you to do, in 
 order to do it your own way. If you do not 
 do it your own way, you must be doing it 
 like some one else, and then it is little better 
 than making things by machinery. You have 
 got to find out, each one, what is the best way 
 to do things with the particular qualities you 
 have got, and order things accordingly. 
 
 Every man's order must be his own order 
 in the end, and there are three simple things 
 to keep in mind : first, that what he does 
 is worth doing ; secondly, that when he is 
 doing it he does it with all his might, and 
 does not let vagrant impulses distract him and 
 have one thing getting in the way of another ; 
 and thirdly, that it is of use to some one else 
 besides himself. 
 
 Of course, while you are very young, it is 
 useful to be saved all the bother of thinking 
 by having your work cut out for you, and not 
 having to worry about the object of what you 
 do ; and there the College spirit comes in. 
 
WRONG THINKING 89 
 
 Where everybody has the feeling that what he 
 does is a credit to the College, the inspiration 
 of local patriotism is a fine spur — and then 
 there is competition and examination, and 
 pleasing your pastors and pastresses; all of 
 which is helpful. But, unfortunately, we are 
 not all so very young, and some are old enough 
 to think ; and when you are old enough to 
 think, you are also old enough to think wrong. 
 And the way not to think wrong is to think 
 in some sort of order; a confused state of wild 
 incoherent impulses only leaves you sitting in 
 a quagmire. All the same, it is better to think 
 wrong than not to think at all — if you think 
 wrong hard enough, you will most likely fall 
 over something, and then you'll find it out, 
 and if you have got any sense, you'll see you 
 have been thinking wrong, and try another 
 line. 
 
 You know the delightful saying that people 
 who make no mistakes make nothing — we are 
 not likely to forget that there are such things 
 as fatal mistakes. But the spirit of a place like 
 the College will prevent College people making 
 these sorts of mistakes. The mistakes College 
 people may make are those which show a lot 
 of spirit and energy, and they just serve to let 
 
9 o THE BEAUTY OF ORDER 
 
 them know when they have broken their shins 
 over something, and had better try another 
 way of going. When you are in the humour 
 to think a bit, you will find a sort of universal 
 order — you cannot attain any good thing 
 without keeping your eye on its opposite. 
 Every good thing has in itself the roots of 
 badness and barrenness; too much order 
 merely results in mechanical lifelessness. 
 
 As I have said before, it is essential in art 
 for human beings to express themselves — to 
 see things for themselves — to present their 
 art or their thoughts to their fellow-men in 
 terms of their own personalities. But if, while 
 you are trying to think for yourselves, you do 
 not keep your eye on what other people are 
 thinking, and what is due to a place like the 
 College, you will get steering wild, and there 
 will be a smash-up. Similarly, if you are 
 trying to develop your technique in order to 
 overcome difficulties or physical deficiencies, 
 if you do not keep your eye on the larger sides 
 of art — the things which really are music — 
 there is a chance that your appreciations will 
 get dulled and stupefied. 
 
 The same with the necessity of getting hold 
 of the colossal amount of detail there is to learn 
 
WAGNER AND THE MODERNS 91 
 
 about the bulk of art itself — the necessity for 
 pianoforte people to know all the readings of 
 the greatest works of art, and for the singers 
 to know how to interpret thousands of vocal 
 pieces of all sorts ; it is very fine to know all 
 about it, but while you are getting to know all 
 about it, you may be losing sight of all that is 
 most of value in connection with it — your own 
 capacity to appreciate it yourself. While you 
 are trying to master everything there is to 
 know, it is just possible you may come to be 
 no better than a registering automaton. It is 
 the lack of consciousness of this that makes 
 fashion sway about so violently. 
 
 Thirty years ago, a man who dared to say 
 he appreciated Wagner was loaded with im- 
 precations by the ultra- classicists, who were 
 then the fashion. Now it is the other way 
 round, and a man who will not go the whole 
 hog in manifesting enthusiasm for orgies of 
 mere reckless extravagance becomes the butt 
 of all the self-constituted champions of progress 
 in art. Classicism is good — quite good — 
 but it is easy to make it a mere bore if you 
 do not really understand it; and poetic fervour 
 is good, but it easily degenerates into hysterics 
 and spluttering incoherence. Somehow we 
 
92 THE BEAUTY OF ORDER 
 
 have got to balance the opposite extremes. 
 Classicism wants the infusion of human 
 appreciation, the power to see through the 
 formalities to the thing that appeals as human 
 art. 
 
 So also the poetic fervour; we really cannot 
 do without it, but it has to be kept in touch 
 with realities. It has got to be somehow kept 
 in order — and things are kept in order by- 
 fitting them in with the things that are outside 
 them. Just so the development of your own 
 selves, which is so essential to your life being 
 good for anything, can be kept in order by 
 your keeping your eyes open to what is going 
 on outside you. 
 
 The self is a very poor, futile, mean circum- 
 ference. Spread it out, and join it on to the 
 rest of the world, and make it expand its 
 power by the consonance of its energy with all 
 that is going on around it, and there is a fine 
 chance of making life worth living. 
 
 September 1908. 
 
ROUTINE AND UNDERSTANDING 
 
 At the moment there does not appear to be 
 anything which urgently calls for report or 
 comment ; and we may be thankful there is 
 nothing of such serious import to induce 
 sobriety as there was last term. The thing 
 which is most likely to induce a sort of sobriety 
 in some of us is the unalluring prospect of an 
 exacting spell of routine. It is the inevitable 
 kind of routine which is part and parcel of the 
 necessary order of things in an institution like 
 ours ; and orderly routine is good for us if we 
 can get a sufficiently detached view of it. 
 
 Our human nature is apt to rebel against 
 things which have a tiresome way of turning 
 up in orderly succession, and seem to tend to 
 monotony and limitation of our sense of 
 liberty — and I am afraid I must confess to 
 having secret sympathy with people who 
 sometimes feel driven to break loose and get 
 
 93 
 
94 ROUTINE & UNDERSTANDING 
 
 away from the insistent trammels of law and 
 order. But we clearly cannot do without 
 them. Even Christmas, which seems to come 
 oftener and oftener as we get older, always 
 persists in coming on the same day — whereas 
 Easter, which is the only event of the kind 
 which is not regular in its incidence, too often 
 gives us the impression that its caprices are 
 extremely annoying. Human nature, being 
 what it is, must be expected sometimes to 
 desire more latitude of caprice than would be 
 profitable. 
 
 But the thing that always compensates for 
 the weariness of routine is having something 
 interesting to do — and the fact that most of 
 you are genuinely interested in what you are 
 doing is probably the reason why we find the 
 impulse to break loose so little in evidence at 
 the College. We are most of us even so 
 interested that we almost seem to forget the 
 College is an educational establishment ! 
 
 I do not want to emphasise the fact un- 
 necessarily. It has an oppressive sound in 
 spite of all the hopeful changes which have 
 come about in theories of education since I 
 was a boy. The newest idea is that all pro- 
 cesses of education ought to be enjoyable, 
 
DRY-AS-DUST SCHOOLS 95 
 
 because people assimilate so much more quickly 
 what they enjoy, and it is surprising how fast 
 and to what an extent the idea is being realised. 
 It cannot be as much as a little half-century 
 ago that people used to think of schools as 
 places where dry-as-dust old fogeys used to 
 keep what order they could with birch or big 
 stick, and tried to drum into young peopled 
 heads a lot of things which did not mean 
 anything to them, and which they learned 
 with distaste, and forgot with promptitude. 
 They taught us symbols and technicalities and 
 formulas, and did not explain what they meant. 
 Nowadays we go to the other extreme and try 
 to appeal to young peopled imaginations and 
 to enlarge their understanding from the first ; 
 and are even impelled to extenuate, and 
 apologise for reference to formulas at all ! 
 
 It really ought to be quite obvious that you 
 can neither learn nor enjoy anything much 
 unless you understand it ; and that when once 
 you begin to understand, you understand more 
 and more, and the more you understand the 
 more you enjoy. But the mere knowledge of 
 formulas and technicalities cannot give any 
 decently constituted human being any legiti- 
 mate pleasure. The pleasure comes rightly 
 
96 ROUTINE & UNDERSTANDING 
 
 enough when they begin to be understood 
 and to mean something, but it has no right 
 to come before. It is one of the most difficult 
 of things to make people who are learning 
 anything realise that the cramming of their 
 memories with mere formulas and theories is 
 no better than stuffing their minds with husks, 
 and spoils their mental digestion. There are 
 some hapless people who have such dangerous 
 memories that they get positively choked with 
 the mere confused lumber of things that have 
 not any meaning or coherence, and lose the 
 capacity to think at all. Getting to be able to 
 think is much more important than piling up 
 huge slag-heaps of disconnected facts. It is 
 excellent for you to read all you can, and know 
 all you can, but it is not much good in the end 
 if what you read does not soak in and get 
 assimilated. And it will not matter how much 
 you forget if you get your mind enlarged and 
 expanded and more capable of understanding 
 things. 
 
 What people call Academicism is for the 
 most part knowledge of formulas without 
 understanding. It is a thing every institution 
 like ours has constantly to be on the look out 
 for and to circumvent. It arises through 
 
ACADEMICISM 97 
 
 the difficulty of providing for so many different 
 types of human beings. Every individuality 
 has its own special aptitudes, its special ways 
 of taking things in, and special things which 
 have attraction for it. But even the most 
 luminous-minded teacher cannot see into the 
 nature of every pupil who comes to him, and 
 find out how to teach him what he has to know 
 in the particular way the particular individual 
 requires. 
 
 What is good for one is not good for 
 another, and a teacher who has to tackle a 
 large and reluctant harmony class would soon 
 be only fit for a lunatic asylum if he tried 
 to keep in mind all the individual difficulties 
 which beset the particular individuals. Some 
 would have particular difficulty in avoiding 
 consecutive fifths, some in avoiding false 
 relations; some would want to resolve their 
 discords in the wrong parts, and some would 
 not want to resolve them at all. It would be 
 waste of time to devote prolonged attention 
 to the difficulty which besets some particular 
 individual and is no difficulty to any of the 
 others; and so some sort of general average 
 has to be found which more or less applies 
 to various types of mind, and too often just 
 
 H 
 
98 ROUTINE & UNDERSTANDING 
 
 leaves out the best types and merely galls 
 them — which often has very unfortunate re- 
 sults and puts the best type of mind at cross 
 purposes with its teacher, and makes its 
 teacher annoyed with his best type of pupil. 
 
 The only absolute solution of such compli- 
 cated situations is for people to do most of 
 their learning for themselves. It has been said 
 before, and may be serviceably said again 
 many times, that the best teachers are those 
 who can teach people to find out things for 
 themselves ; and. it may be added that the 
 best learners are those who do not expect 
 to learn everything from their teachers. Each 
 one of us has his own particular way of being 
 bothered, and in the end he has to find it out 
 for himself, and if he does not and gives up 
 the tussle, he goes on being permanently 
 ineffectual . 
 
 But in the majority of cases such failures 
 arise from going the wrong way to work ; 
 and we get plenty of proofs of it. When we 
 look at some of the paralytic answers which 
 are given in the harmony examinations, for 
 instance, it is obvious that the makers of them 
 have been trying to write their harmonisations 
 mechanically, without looking at them from 
 
BREAKING RULES 99 
 
 any musical point of view. The things do 
 not approach to anything like musical sounds 
 in their heads; and they are trying to apply 
 rules which have no background of perceptible 
 fact in them — and as they do not understand 
 the rules in the light of anything but formulas, 
 they merely break them in the very feeblest 
 fashion. 
 
 There are good ways of breaking rules 
 and bad ways. The good ways are the ways 
 of those who understand something, and 
 have reasons even for breaking rules ; and 
 the bad ways are the ways of those who have 
 never approached the understanding of what the 
 rules mean. And it is just the same with every 
 branch of musical learning. There is nothing 
 so dreary and hopeless as people solemnly 
 doing just what their teachers tell them to do 
 without any kind of sense of what they are 
 doing. When they only play their passages 
 and do their phrasing as they are told to do, 
 they are no better than machines. They 
 certainly are not nearly so effectual as parrots, 
 because parrots are inherently funny, and 
 mere mechanical performance of pieces just 
 as instructed is not at all funny, but too often 
 exasperating, because it usually is a parody. 
 
too ROUTINE & UNDERSTANDING 
 
 The only way to arrive successfully at play- 
 ing things as you are told is to attain to the 
 actual realisation in effect of the rightness of 
 what you are told, and to play the things not 
 as you are told but better; to feel in your own 
 persons that some special piece of phrasing 
 or musical elocution is admirable and de- 
 lightful, and to contrive to give the phrase with 
 that feeling, not merely following mechanical 
 instructions. 
 
 I know quite well the excuse that is made, 
 that the mastery of countless details of technique 
 and the accepted readings of well-known 
 masterpieces absorbs so much of the energies 
 that the mind has not any vigour left for any 
 more, and it becomes atrophied. It is partly 
 because people do not realise that they would 
 not have to learn each detail separately if they 
 really understood, and could thereby sort the 
 details into the groups to which the same rules 
 or methods apply. When you understand 
 a few things you find the oppressiveness of 
 details begins to lift, and there does not then 
 seem to be so many of them, because so many 
 come together by affinities ; and the difficulty 
 of arriving at this kind of understanding too 
 often comes of having to do things one does 
 
FILLING LIFE FULL 101 
 
 not enjoy. One hardly expects people to 
 enjoy practising scales and technical exercises, 
 yet if one understands such things in their 
 wider sense, one can enjoy the feeling that 
 they are helping to a desired end. Enjoyment 
 does not consist solely in the sense of immedi- 
 ate pleasure, but in the sense of the relation 
 of what one is doing to what is to come out of it. 
 
 There are all sorts of gradations of enjoy- 
 ment, and some of them are even painful. To 
 enjoy life fully you have to realise that every- 
 thing that a man can do in this world has 
 some relation to something else — and the 
 wider the range of relations you are capable of 
 feeling, the more complete and constant is the 
 sum of your enjoyment. There is no more 
 futile misconception than the theory of living 
 in the present. What is the present ? It is a 
 moment and it is gone ! It becomes interesting 
 solely through what it is connected with. If 
 it is linked on to something wider it begins 
 to spread out and become big, and the little 
 moments become greater and greater when 
 their connection with more and more other 
 moments is realised. We believe that the way 
 to enjoy life is to fill it as full as it will hold. 
 
 But it is of no use to fill it with details of 
 
102 ROUTINE & UNDERSTANDING 
 
 which the inherent connection is not perceived. 
 You might as well fill yourself with bran and be 
 a doll at once. If you could only see it, there 
 is an obvious connection between all the things 
 you do. Your harmony is connected with your 
 practical work ; your playtime with your 
 working time ; your gossip with your wisdom ; 
 your achievements with your failures ; your 
 appreciation with your criticism ; your laughter 
 with your tears. It is the bane of the un- 
 developed mind to overestimate immediate 
 sensations and vivid moments, and what you 
 are here for is to develop your mind, and learn 
 how all things that have any value in life are 
 not isolated but inherently connected ; and 
 that vivid moments are only vivid because 
 of their connection with other moments. 
 
 In these days we are slowly realising that 
 everything is achieved by mind. Mere blun- 
 dering brute strength is quite out of date. 
 The powers of a dozen elephants are quite 
 useless to cope with the smallest and weakest 
 little man who can use his wits. And the 
 little man gets the better of the elephants 
 by understanding what he has got to do — 
 and it is the same with the things you have 
 to do here. You have a vast lot of different 
 
MIND AND BRUTE FORCE 103 
 
 objects to achieve. Some of you want to be 
 public singers, some to be solo pianists, some 
 to be great violinists and some to be cathedral 
 organists, some to be successful teachers and 
 some to compose masterpieces. But whatever 
 you want to do, the same facts apply. If 
 you merely concern yourselves with the letter, 
 and do not find out the spirit which the letter 
 spells, you are condemned to be little better 
 than lay figures. You cannot teach people 
 what you yourselves do not understand, and 
 you cannot convince people of what you play 
 unless you really understand it, and under- 
 standing in your case is feeling the genuine 
 music in what you have to deal with. Of 
 course you have to hear and to play plenty of 
 things that are uncongenial ; some things 
 that it is impossible to translate into terms 
 of musical feeling. But it does not necessarily 
 follow that things which appear to be uncon- 
 genial at first may not prove to have meanings 
 if you look hard enough at them. It is a 
 very paltry attitude of mind which despises 
 everything which does not jump to the eyes 
 at once. 
 
 People generally despise most what is too 
 good for them. There is a familiar French 
 
io 4 ROUTINE & UNDERSTANDING 
 
 proverb that " To understand all is to pardon 
 all " ; and we might give this an English 
 flavour by saying " The more a man under- 
 stands the less he despises. " Getting under- 
 standing is a wonderful way of helping people 
 to have fellow feelings with other people 
 who are quite different from themselves. If 
 the French proverb and its English parallel 
 are true, the application of them would have 
 a great influence on the general diffusion 
 of friendliness and open-mindedness. 
 
 In the same way the more people under- 
 stand different kinds of minds and different 
 kinds of occupations, the better chance they 
 have of judging both of their own type and of 
 every fresh contingency that presents itself. 
 And this has important bearing on your own 
 situation. If the College has any drawbacks, 
 it is that every one who is taking advantage of 
 its inestimable facilities for learning is being 
 what is called specialised. And specialisation 
 has the effect of limiting the range of the 
 judgement. 
 
 Judgement is the power of discerning the 
 true proportionate relation of the facts or 
 factors of any situation which presents itself. 
 It is the hardest thing to come by in the 
 
SPECIALISATION 105 
 
 world, and the most valuable. Some people 
 are born with an aptitude for it. Those 
 who are not so fortunate can only develop 
 it by extending the range of subjects and 
 situations and personalities of which they have 
 some serviceable understanding. It is by such 
 expansion of the understanding that a man gets 
 more clues to test things by. Specialisation 
 such as we get at the College makes people 
 judge things mainly in the light of the one 
 special subject to which they devote themselves 
 and in the attitude of mind which belongs to 
 it ; and they are liable to be at a loss when 
 they have to judge of things outside the range 
 or system of that one subject. One of the 
 things which caused musicians in this country 
 to be so isolated and put in a back street 
 half a century ago was that they were over- 
 specialised. They were so absorbed in their 
 own profession that they had no standards 
 whereby to judge things outside it, and their 
 understanding of their own business was even 
 narrowed by not being able to see it in its 
 relation to other things. 
 
 I am quite aware that it is difficult for young 
 people to understand what is meant by under- 
 standing, and why it is so desirable. It is 
 
106 ROUTINE & UNDERSTANDING 
 
 mostly only old people who arrive at it after 
 a great deal of mixed experience ; and it must 
 be sadly admitted that many old people after 
 a life of mere conventionality and comfort 
 understand less at sixty-five than they did at 
 ten. For young people have much greater 
 capacity for adapting themselves to facts, and 
 much greater readiness for generalising than 
 old people. The misfortune is that they are 
 in too great a hurry to generalise before they 
 have understood enough facts to make general- 
 ising safe. Generalising in a hurry sometimes 
 induces as much lack of understanding as 
 not thinking at all. And it is through lack 
 of understanding that there is so much misery 
 and squalor and destitution, and groundless 
 ill-will, and vice and folly and crime in the 
 world. 
 
 The object of education is not to supply 
 mere concrete knowledge, but to widen the 
 understanding and thereby help to better con- 
 ditions for all men, and to make judgement 
 prevail over chance whims and perverse spasms 
 of primitive instinct. It must help men to be 
 fair to one another and to see things as they 
 really are ; to abolish the stupid worship of 
 wealth and luxury and deceptive titles, and 
 
AN EXCEPTIONAL FEAT 107 
 
 to put the genuine delight in art, such as we 
 feel it, in its proper pre-eminence, as a better 
 thing to live for and help other people to than 
 all the things mere possession of millions 
 can give. 
 
 If the world only understood, how different 
 would be the position of our art ! It ought to 
 be a lesson to us to try and get some under- 
 standing of important things outside our art 
 when we see how stupid people are when they 
 repudiate it, and deny it any sphere among the 
 things that are of service to mankind. We 
 can all see lack of understanding and its piteous 
 results when it is in respect of something we 
 ourselves more or less understand. An in- 
 stance in my own experience will bring it home 
 as well as anything. 
 
 One evening last term I went to hear 
 an old College pupil perform one of the 
 greatest feats it is possible for a pianist to 
 undertake. Now people in general profess 
 to like to see exceptional feats, and plume 
 themselves on the knowledge which can dis- 
 tinguish special strokes of skill. They crowd 
 to see acrobats, strong men, jugglers, and 
 singers who can screech a note or two 
 higher than other people. Such people will 
 
108 ROUTINE & UNDERSTANDING 
 
 talk of a feat as if it were in itself a concrete 
 universal thing that every one who respects 
 himself ought to witness. In reality they are 
 only setting up as admirable the standard of 
 their own meagre understanding. They appre- 
 ciate things which are within the narrow limits 
 of their minds, and are impelled to set up a 
 barrier to prevent other people from under- 
 standing more than they do. They understand 
 the difficulty of spinning a plate, or taking a 
 bicycle to pieces while a man is riding it, 
 because they know that if they tried themselves 
 they would break the plate and have to send 
 for the doctor to repair their own bruises. 
 But they would not have the very remotest 
 idea of the nature of the feat performed by 
 the young pianist I referred to. 
 
 The night that he played there were several 
 millions of people in London, and out of those 
 millions there were certainly not fifty people 
 or anywhere near it who could have performed 
 the feat which he did, even to do it mechanic- 
 ally. Yet there was only a sprinkling of 
 people in the hall, and hardly any of them 
 understood enough about it to appreciate the 
 complexity of attention, the judgement, the 
 skill, the endurance, and the many factors of 
 
CHEAP FOOLING 109 
 
 mind and memory and muscle which the feat 
 illustrated. 
 
 The same evening I had to look in at a 
 theatre where there was a sort of mixed enter- 
 tainment, and found myself trying to make out 
 why the people on the stage were making such 
 piteous, abject idiots of themselves. They were 
 propounding the very thinnest and silliest of 
 artificial funniments, accompanied by grimaces 
 and contortions and gestures and noises which 
 they evidently hoped would prove amusing to 
 the people who came to see and hear them. 
 
 When one comes to think of it, that sort of 
 thing is not a high compliment to an audience ; 
 and not being engrossed by what was going 
 on on the stage, I turned to see if there was 
 anything interesting to be got out of my fellow 
 spectators. There were plenty of them, and 
 most of them had their mouths wide open 
 and were making delighted guffaws. The 
 management had rightly gauged the standard 
 of understanding of its patrons. 
 
 Here is a case of a first-rate feat on the one 
 hand and a piteous exhibition of hollow 
 mechanical cheap fooling on the other, and 
 the favour of the many was on the side of the 
 fooling. The anomaly is purely the result 
 
no ROUTINE & UNDERSTANDING 
 
 of insufficient diffusion of understanding. If 
 there had been enough people in this huge 
 city who had developed their understanding 
 even to an elementary stage, the real feat would 
 have been witnessed by a crowd of enthusiastic 
 watchers of every point achieved. And so it 
 is with every several branch of art with which 
 you are concerned. If people understood 
 they would be interested. But so far they 
 most of them do not even understand that art 
 is worth understanding ; so even the mere 
 feats of skill which can be done in the name 
 of art are treated by the majority as if they did 
 not exist. 
 
 But you cannot fairly blame them if you 
 labour under the same disability yourselves 
 about things of which you have not troubled 
 to get any understanding. Of course it is 
 not either possible or desirable to have expert 
 knowledge of many different subjects. But 
 it is possible to have a sympathetic insight 
 into many diverse things that concern the 
 mind and give an aptitude to judge rightly. 
 But it is not to be done by the mere learning 
 of somebody's formulas and figures. It is 
 not till you have got behind formulas and 
 feel what they are meant to represent that 
 
MEANS AND ENDS in 
 
 knowledge begins to be of service to you. 
 The technicalities of harmony and counterpoint, 
 of pianoforte playing and violin playing, and 
 analysis of great works of art, are all supposed 
 to amount to knowledge. But a man has to 
 pass through knowledge to understanding. 
 Even if the mere knowledge passes away, the 
 mind through which it has passed and been 
 assimilated attains a wider range of mental 
 vision. As far as your own special work is 
 concerned this means that the most hopeful 
 course is constantly to remember that the 
 technicalities are not ends in themselves but 
 means to ends ; that they are only steps to 
 the realisation of music, and that it needs 
 persistent energy to keep the actual musical 
 feeling alive, and prevent it being drowned 
 by the burden of the mechanical things when 
 the purely mechanical things are allowed to 
 dominate and occupy attention as if they were 
 ends in themselves. 
 
 But if this is true of your own special work 
 it is true also of all sorts of things outside it. 
 If you keep the right attitude of mind also 
 towards them you are sure to widen your 
 understanding and help to make your judge- 
 ment more sure and your life more full of 
 
ii2 ROUTINE & UNDERSTANDING 
 
 interest — and it will react even upon your 
 music and make you understand that better 
 too and find more in it ; in due time it will 
 also enable you to make other people see more 
 in it, which will be a good thing for every 
 one concerned. 
 
 January 191 1. 
 
ENJOYMENTS 
 
 In the first place let me say that I believe it 
 to be of the highest importance that you should 
 enjoy holidays with all your might. It is of the 
 greatest importance that people who make art 
 the object of their lives should keep fresh and 
 capable of enjoying all enjoyable things. No 
 institution of our kind can be expected to take 
 first rank that does not concern itself with 
 anything but its own particular business. If 
 you concern yourselves only with just the 
 limited sphere of your own personal work you 
 only see a very small bit of life, and get but a 
 very limited range of experience. You may 
 sometimes see a man working furiously night 
 and day to perfect himself in something for 
 which he appears to have an aptitude, and, 
 apparently, never going ahead at all. It really 
 does happen sometimes that the more a man 
 works in a limited area the less he can do. It 
 
 113 1 
 
ii 4 ENJOYMENTS 
 
 is not only that he needs change and relaxation, 
 but that the conditions of life are so compli- 
 cated, and reach out their tentacles in so many 
 directions, that if all things outside a man 
 are shut out his character and disposition get 
 stunted. 
 
 Character begins with innate qualities, but 
 it grows only by experience. Music, of 
 all the arts, touches most widely on things 
 which are humanly interesting ; and if you 
 shut out the knowledge of what is interesting 
 in your fellow human beings, how is your art 
 going to grow ? Art, like many other things, 
 gets its food from outside, and it is a mistake 
 to suppose it can feed exclusively on itself. 
 And art is always interwoven with character, 
 and we even have frequently to observe that 
 character counts for more in the end than 
 natural gifts of any kind, whether artistic or 
 literary. And overmuch concentration in one 
 direction has a tendency to lessen the finer 
 qualities of character. Character comprises 
 a vast number of traits. One of the foremost 
 is judgement, which is also one of the rarest 
 and is not disposed to grow very luxuriantly 
 under the pressure of profuse and prolonged 
 doses of scales and Czerny exercises. 
 
CAPACITY AND JUDGEMENT 115 
 
 Character also includes steadfastness and 
 honesty, spirit and endurance, open-minded- 
 ness and cheerfulness under all manner of 
 varying conditions, and one of its most im- 
 portant attributes is the capacity to enjoy. 
 The capacity to enjoy grows and gets finer 
 with experience of really enjoyable things. 
 Then, again, different attributes of character 
 help one another. For instance, the capacity 
 really to enjoy depends in a great measure 
 upon judgement. Lots of people make a 
 mess of their lives by not exercising judge- 
 ment in the things they take as their enjoy- 
 ments. Young people are not to be expected 
 to exercise much judgement in such matters. 
 They are sometimes so ready to enjoy that 
 they take whatever comes, without any concern 
 as to whether the enjoyable things are likely 
 to last or lead to new and more enjoyable 
 enjoyments. In that case, of course, holidays 
 are very useful, as they keep people's capacities 
 for enjoying things outside their special pro- 
 vinces in a lively condition, and give experience. 
 If people make mistakes, that is useful too. 
 For those who have any sense at all can learn 
 as much from making mistakes as from any- 
 thing else they make or mar. 
 
u6 ENJOYMENTS 
 
 When people get old and have had a lot 
 of experience and think about it, they realise 
 that enjoyments are the food on which fruitful 
 work can be done. I remember once being 
 venturesome enough to say to the famous 
 philosopher, Mr. Herbert Spencer, that I had 
 seen him a few nights before at rather a 
 trumpery play ; to which he gave the solemn 
 answer, " I cultivate amusements on principle.' ' 
 He had probably observed scientifically that 
 his nature was in urgent need of such treatment. 
 What he meant was that every hard worker 
 has to keep his personal self fresh by something 
 which he can enjoy in some different manner 
 from his own absorbing work. And if this is 
 necessary for the philosopher it is very much 
 more necessary for the musician. Of course, 
 there are pleasures and pleasures ! The people 
 who live for their pleasures altogether, and 
 think they can enjoy things without work, 
 generally end by being hopelessly bored. 
 Their pleasures merely make them silly, and 
 the sillier they get the more futile their pleasures 
 become. 
 
 But we come to the College with the inten- 
 tion of doing something; and the people who 
 have made up their minds to do something 
 
DIFFERENT WAYS 117 
 
 are in a position of advantage, and are unlikely to 
 choose forms of distraction which lead up to such 
 distressing futilities as the giggling and guzzling 
 which appear to occupy such a wide space in 
 the lives of some aimless people. People who 
 address themselves to some definite work or 
 other are more likely to choose enjoyments 
 which are enhanced by being interesting, and 
 in the very enjoyment lay the foundations of 
 higher enjoyments; and they can afford to 
 choose their pleasures with growing judgement. 
 Of course, different people have different 
 ways of enjoying themselves. It is not given 
 to all people to enjoy fine poetry, and the 
 splendid records of human fortunes and mis- 
 fortunes which make history, or the subtleties 
 of philosophy, or the fortifying certainties of 
 science, or even the finer branches of fiction. 
 But it is worth while for most people to try. 
 The sphere of poetry lies very near the domain 
 of music, and those who feed themselves upon 
 it enhance their artistic outfit. And even those 
 who cannot find enjoyment in literature can 
 sometimes find it in great questions which 
 exercise the public mind. If they cannot even 
 do that, it is better to play cricket and football 
 and tennis and hockey, and do some of the 
 
n8 ENJOYMENTS 
 
 thousand things which give health to body 
 and mind than to think there is nothing 
 outside their particular business. But, of 
 course, I should be happiest when young people 
 can find some of their greatest enjoyments 
 outside their art in things which build up their 
 finer qualities of nature, of which reading is 
 one of the most hopeful. 
 
 You have some fine examples near at hand. 
 Do you never observe how much higher and 
 stronger the musicians stand who enjoy things 
 outside their art ? Think of Sir Walter Parratt, 
 who gets through almost more musical work 
 than any one of our time, and see how vast his 
 enjoyment of literature, and how great his 
 knowledge of it is. How he has absorbed it 
 into himself and has the memory of it at 
 command, and how it gives him a position of 
 quite special delightfulness, even in the range 
 of his art. Think of Dr. Walford Davies, and 
 realise that so much of the charm of his actual 
 compositions lies in the cultivated mind which 
 expresses its deep delight in the fine poems 
 he selects and sets in such intimately interest- 
 ing musical terms. Think of his delightful 
 " Nursery Rhymes " we had at the Union At 
 Home, and realise that their freshness and point 
 
FINE EXAMPLES 119 
 
 and subtle quaintness come from his having kept 
 his nature fresh with the enjoyment of things 
 outside his art — things which dive into the 
 problems of humanity — even into the humanity 
 of the babes ! Think of the musicians who have 
 not been so fortunate as to have capacities for 
 such enjoyments, and what a chance of widening 
 their art they seem to have missed. 
 
 But, of course, there are times and seasons 
 for everything. There are the times for 
 holidays and the times for work — and, with 
 some people, it is just as well that the period 
 of holidays is clearly defined. Though one 
 may counsel the widening of outlook by every 
 means possible, it will be worse than useless 
 if it cannot be done without interfering with 
 concentration when it is time for work. I 
 know too well how difficult it is to prevent 
 one interest interfering with another ; what 
 temptations there are to drop a thing directly 
 it gets wearisome or boring and take to some- 
 thing else ! There are some natures which, 
 when there is something which has got to 
 be done, are driven by an almost imperious 
 necessity to want to do something else. But 
 one of the greatest secrets of making life worth 
 living, and achieving something, whether in 
 
*2o ENJOYMENTS 
 
 art or in business, is to develop the capacity 
 to do a thing when it has got to be done. It 
 sounds very simple, but human nature being 
 what it is, it is not so easy to achieve ; and when 
 people are inclined to give way to indolence 
 or other lower impulses, they even sometimes 
 persuade themselves that a thing has not got 
 to be done when it has. So we must add the 
 amendment that the secret is to see when a 
 thing has to be done and then do it. Now 
 that you have done with your long holidays, 
 it is to be hoped they will bear fruit in making 
 you enjoy work as much as holidays, till the 
 time comes round for another spell of letting 
 human nature have a fling, at Christmas time. 
 
 September 1909. 
 
APPRECIATION— TRUE AND FALSE 
 
 It is pleasant to be able to begin the term with 
 an exhilarating ceremony. I have received 
 intimation from the Royal Humane Society * 
 that they propose to give Mr. Claud P. Mack- 
 ness, a student of the College, their certificate 
 
 x From the R.C.M. Magazine, Christmas Term, 191 1. (Vol. viii. 
 No. 1, p. 31.) 
 
 "• At a meeting of the Royal Humane Society, held at their office, 
 4 Trafalgar Square, on the 14th of November 191 1, Admiral Sir George 
 Digby Morant, K.C.B., in the chair, it was resolved unanimously * That 
 the Honorary Testimonial of this Society, inscribed on parchment, be 
 hereby given to 
 
 Claud P. Mackness 
 
 for having on the 26th of August 1911 gone to the rescue of E. L. J. 
 Durant, who was in imminent danger of drowning in the sea at Bar- 
 mouth, and whose life he gallantly saved. 
 
 ' F. A. Claughton, Secretary. 
 
 ' G. Digby Morant, Chairman? " 
 
 The following is an extract from a letter to Sir Hubert Parry from 
 Engineer Lieutenant Griffith W. Jones (H.M.S. Actaeon), an eye- 
 witness of the accident, who made a recommendation to the Society :j 
 
 " I was one of the witnesses of this determined and courageous effort, 
 and no doubt, had it not been for Mr. Claud Mackness, the gentleman 
 would have lost his life. . . . Mr. Mackness himself is ignorant of the 
 fact that the Society has- recognised his effort." 
 
 121 
 
122 APPRECIATION 
 
 for pluckily rescuing a man who was carried 
 out of his depth by the tide at Barmouth and 
 in danger of being drowned. The Society 
 having expressed the desire that the document 
 should be presented to him in form before an 
 assembly of sympathetic witnesses, I take this 
 opportunity to present it, feeling sure that there 
 could not be any collection of people who 
 would be more pleased than you will be. For 
 the manner in which Mr. Mackness gripped 
 his opportunity makes us proud. We feel 
 that he has not only won honour for himself 
 but also for the College. 
 
 There is something especially agreeable in 
 his having shown his mettle in an achievement 
 quite outside our own normal activities. We 
 like to realise that when any one belonging 
 to the College has a chance to show spirit in 
 things outside music, he is equal to the occa- 
 sion. The more we have evidence that pupils 
 can show up well in other things besides 
 music, such as cricket and football and saving 
 people from drowning, the more there is to 
 show that the College is enjoying good health 
 and vigour. And though our gallant Collegian 
 may modestly deprecate our making too much 
 fuss about his successful exploit, we must be 
 
THE PLEASURE OF IT 123 
 
 sure it is very agreeable to him that we are 
 proud of it. 
 
 Appreciation is so very pleasant. We all 
 like it very much, though it does not fall to 
 many to win it in so decisive a manner. Most 
 people, if they get it at all, have to get it by 
 prolonged patience and hard work. But that 
 does not lessen the credit of an action which 
 leaves a bright and permanent mark of distinc- 
 tion on a man's life. For every one has not 
 the generous impulse nor the spirit to do the 
 right thing at a moment's notice. Actions of 
 this sort are generally the spontaneous out- 
 come of a well-constituted disposition. There 
 is not much time to think of appreciation. 
 There is the call to do something that requires 
 energy and possibly entails danger, and if the 
 man's instincts are sound and healthy his 
 nature responds. Some people do not seem 
 to be able to do anything without a prospect 
 of reward or appreciation. When the thirst 
 to be appreciated takes possession, it too 
 often happens that a man does not care a bit 
 whether he deserves it or not, nor whether the 
 people whose appreciation he tries to win have 
 enough sense for their appreciation to be worth 
 having. 
 
i2 4 APPRECIATION 
 
 The matter of getting appreciated is indeed 
 a very complicated and puzzling affair. Some 
 very few natures, of heroic mould, seem to go 
 on doing the best they can with such abilities 
 as they have got, without concerning themselves 
 whether the results get them any reputation or 
 acknowledgement. They deserve our highest 
 admiration, and they often achieve great things 
 with a certain aloofness which seems to set 
 them above their fellow-mortals. They go on 
 quietly enjoying the sense of getting the best 
 out of themselves. The pleasure of achieving 
 is sufficient for them. There is for them the 
 sense of growth, which is one of the surest 
 guarantees of the individual life's being worth 
 living, and we learn in due time how happily 
 they are constituted. In any case, we feel how 
 agreeable the contrast is to the type of man 
 who is always dragging conversation round to 
 his personal affairs, and calling attention to 
 his wonderful qualities and his distinguished 
 achievements and the things which he can do 
 so much better than any one else. We all of 
 us infinitely prefer the man who lets us find 
 out his greatness for ourselves to the person 
 who is always hustling us into acknowledging 
 it ; and we always know that the man who 
 
THE SNARE OF IT 125 
 
 does not throw his abilities at our heads on 
 every possible occasion is much more likely 
 to do something really great and fine than the 
 man who wants to induce all and sundry to 
 grovel before him on insufficient evidence. 
 
 In reality, the man who cannot get along 
 without incessant praise and adulation is much 
 weaker and more dependent on the opinions 
 of his fellow-men than the man who delights 
 in doing good work because doing good work 
 satisfies him. The man who is too greedy for 
 appreciation too often produces not the best 
 he might do if he were perfectly sincere, but 
 the thing which will get him credit with a lot 
 of people who are incapable of really judging 
 whether what he does is good or bad. The 
 poor thing thirsts for sympathy, and would 
 sacrifice everything — his happiness and cleanli- 
 ness of mind and his general well-being and 
 his good relations with really intelligent friends, 
 and all that really makes life worth living — to 
 get it. And the result is that the appreciation 
 he gets is less worth having every day he lives. 
 For as he goes on adapting his achievements 
 to those who have no understanding, he goes 
 on making them stupider day by day, and his 
 own work becomes worse and worse as it 
 
126 APPRECIATION 
 
 follows their increasing dulness ; and he ends 
 by being little better than a crazy egotist, who 
 has lost the capacity to enjoy doing things 
 well and lives only to hear his excitable dupes 
 pouring hysterical flatteries into his ears. The 
 craving stupidly gratified becomes a kind of 
 disease, and the pretence of great achievement 
 a mockery. 
 
 And such absurd situations come out of it. 
 When the craving has taken possession of 
 a singer or a performer, directly he comes 
 before an audience he feels that he must have 
 their applause at all costs. Yet if he were to 
 meet any individual member of that audience 
 personally in private, he would not only have 
 absolute contempt for his opinions, he would 
 think it an impertinence for him to have any 
 opinions at all ! One might ask why it should 
 be so important to please unintelligent people 
 just because there are a lot of them together, 
 while if they were taken individually by the 
 person who wants to win their applause, he 
 would think their taste and intelligence quite 
 worthless. 
 
 There is another very queer paradox which 
 is the outcome of the excessive craving to be 
 appreciated. When a person who is before 
 
INFLATED REPUTATIONS 127 
 
 the public gets to find out that they are incap- 
 able of appreciating his finest strokes of art, it 
 sometimes occurs to him that they are capable 
 of being interested by fantastic behaviour and 
 eccentricities which have nothing whatever to 
 do with it. It may perhaps be admitted that 
 it is an open chance whether a big public would 
 pay attention to the greatest performer of the 
 greatest music unboomed, as long as he 
 behaved like an ordinary simple person. But 
 if he adopted strange gesticulations, turned 
 round and made faces at his audience, inter- 
 jected funny remarks, wore preposterous locks, 
 and generally gave them antics and the idea 
 that he was something quaint and odd, they 
 would soon be in raptures. 
 
 But if we look at it a little attentively, both 
 sides seem to be hopelessly illogical. It is the 
 poorest compliment to the audience to indicate 
 their lack of intelligence by giving them antics 
 and gesticulations to get the applause and 
 appreciation which they would not give to a 
 man's art, however fine ; and the appreciation 
 which the fantastic performer gets is totally 
 worthless, because it is given for the antics 
 and not for the art, for which he pretends that 
 he seeks it. The mockery is in the form of 
 
128 APPRECIATION 
 
 tit-for-tat, and as far as both parties realise the 
 fact it amuses them. 
 
 One might plausibly think it would be 
 much better for the person who craved for 
 sympathy to get two or three people together 
 who really understood — men and women of 
 tried judgement and discernment — and win 
 appreciation from them. Truly such appre- 
 ciation might be the most worth having of 
 any there is ; and where it is really to be had 
 it is a stand-by and a comfort to those whose 
 destiny it is to go through a good deal of life 
 and effort alone. 
 
 But, unfortunately, we have to admit that 
 the audience of two or three does not come off. 
 To be quite fair and to look at both sides of 
 the matter, it is the sort of thing that ends too 
 often in little cliques and coteries and mutual 
 admiration societies ; it ministers to self-com- 
 placency and narrow views, and takes all the 
 warmer humanity and generous freedom of 
 thought out of what is done or attempted. 
 Even the most enlightened people need the 
 contact with infinite varieties of minds and 
 dispositions. 
 
 That is how some compensation comes out 
 of the thirst for sympathetic response from a 
 
THE BIG AUDIENCE 129 
 
 multitude. Very few people are capable of 
 being really exhilarated by an audience of half 
 a dozen, however enlightened. Most people, 
 even of fine disposition and fine abilities, 
 infinitely prefer an audience of a thousand 
 dolts. There is such exhilaration in being 
 the focus of two thousand eyes, and seeing 
 the flash of a thousand faces. It thrills the 
 speakers, the performers, the actors. To the 
 person who has any humanity about him it 
 gives extra vitality; it enhances his wits and 
 the passion to exercise power over a throng, 
 and to get into touch with the innermost 
 springs of their natures spurs to the utmost 
 effort the man is capable of. And what 
 supreme intoxication of delight it is to the 
 man who seems to lift an audience, to take 
 them along with him, to make their rapt 
 expression follow every mood ! 
 
 Though we may criticise and point to the 
 absurdities which arise from allowing the 
 craving for appreciation too free a rein, the 
 value of sympathetic response in helping a 
 man to the best he can get out of himself is 
 undeniable. It is well to glorify the heroic 
 attitude of apparent indifference and aloofness 
 from such inspiration, In reality it is almost 
 
 K 
 
i 3 o APPRECIATION 
 
 inconceivable. Possibly it does not really exist, 
 but is only suggested by a shy, unobtrusive or 
 un-egotistical nature ; or by a nature too proud 
 to admit the apparent lack of power to win 
 recognition, and too noble to condescend. One 
 can hardly imagine a person making art of any 
 kind, which he must necessarily make for his 
 fellow - creatures, and being really indifferent 
 whether they like it or not. Nearly all the 
 best art that is ever made is made with the 
 help of appreciation. The great orator would 
 become quite an indifferent spokesman if he 
 addressed an audience of savages who did 
 not understand a word of what he was saying. 
 The greatest of composers would be paralysed 
 if he knew that the only music his audience 
 would sympathise with would have to be in a 
 scale of whole tones. 
 
 The responsive sympathy takes effect in 
 the kind of art which either the performer or 
 the composer produces. One thinks of art as 
 the product of the individual, but it is not so 
 entirely. The appreciative public has a most 
 wonderful influence in directing the course of 
 the artist. Its sympathy impels to renewed 
 efforts and even supplies additional strength. 
 Its indifference petrifies. It is in this way 
 
RESPONSIVE SYMPATHY 131 
 
 that a nation exercises its power over its art. 
 The unenlightened public can encourage 
 shoddy and shams and blatancy and levity 
 and vulgarity, and such things flourish like 
 the green slime of the foul pool under their 
 influence. They can also be induced to favour 
 fine things in art when the artistically endowed 
 people who know what is fine and honourable 
 are true to themselves. That is where the 
 solution of the puzzling problem is to be 
 found ; and it cannot be pretended that it is 
 a comforting or encouraging solution to those 
 who are in a hurry to see their portraits in the 
 picture papers, and anecdotes about them in 
 gossip columns. 
 
 We try to mould history as it passes in 
 accordance with our own ideas and wishes ; 
 but we are not masters of it, however much 
 true education may help us to anticipate it. 
 We can only go our several ways in honesty. 
 It is the unenlightened egotism that is the 
 enemy. It is the egotism that looks for the 
 favourable verdict of the crowd and yields to 
 it to win the suffrages of those who have no 
 understanding. Enlightened egotism might, 
 it is true, be pleased to see its portrait in the 
 picture papers, not because its personal vanity 
 
132 APPRECIATION 
 
 was gratified, but because it proved that it 
 had got the herd, or some of them, to under- 
 stand something worth understanding, which 
 they would not have understood unless some 
 people, enlightened egotist included, had 
 worked hard to get them to understand. 
 
 A man who forgoes the use of his best 
 powers and only uses lower ones for a reward, 
 defeats his own life and the lives of others. It 
 is by his best powers that he will achieve the 
 best results, not by his lower powers. Every 
 man who courts mere barren reputation by 
 forgoing the use of his best powers makes 
 it more difficult for the bewildered public to 
 award their appreciation to those who really 
 do the best work of which they are capable. 
 It makes it more difficult for people to develop 
 their understanding and to make their lives 
 really fuller and more enjoyable. It makes it 
 easier for the public to indulge their worst 
 qualities instead of their best. 
 
 Every step which the public makes in the 
 direction of understanding, whether of art, 
 literature, politics, social questions, scientific 
 questions, or personal qualities of character, 
 makes it more easy for it to bestow its 
 appreciation where it is most fully deserved, 
 
A WORTHY STANDARD 133 
 
 and makes that appreciation more worth 
 having. 
 
 So there really is no need to decry the 
 craving for appreciation, but only the senseless 
 and unintelligent form of it. It is the standard 
 which is so often faulty. If we judge of success 
 as the world judges of it, we shall be easily 
 discontented because we do not win a success 
 which is not worth having. A man cannot 
 really be a success who does not get the best 
 out of himself. No doubt it is painful to have 
 to do without appreciation. There must be 
 martyrs at all times, but they most of them 
 win appreciation of some kind, sometimes the 
 appreciation which they are most fit for. Some 
 people are happier as martyrs than the idols of 
 the market-place. We have to go our own 
 ways. If we get appreciation we have ulti- 
 mately to gauge its true worth; if we do not, 
 the public does in the end. 
 
 We are banded together here at the College 
 to try to help the public to understand a few 
 things in connection with music; and to 
 enable it to bestow some of its encouraging 
 appreciation serviceably. Our efforts have not 
 always met with sympathetic interpretation. 
 But we pull together and try to take what 
 
i 3 4 APPRECIATION 
 
 comes with equanimity and understanding. 
 The race is not always to the swift nor the 
 battle invariably to the strong, but time and 
 chance happen to all. The best frame of 
 mind is to welcome appreciation if it comes 
 with due modesty, and to find out how to do 
 without it if we must. 
 
 January 19 12. 
 
TRADITIONS AND CONVENTIONS 
 
 We feel confident after ample experience that 
 the spiritual atmosphere of the College helps 
 weak ones to go straight, and encourages im- 
 pulses that are healthy and generous. There 
 cannot be any doubt that such influence is of 
 the very greatest importance, and it is inspiring 
 to think that we can all of us in our several 
 ways take part in maintaining and strengthen- 
 ing it. 
 
 It is attained by building up a consistent 
 College tradition, by the maintenance of a 
 high standard of life, in which straightness, 
 keenness, good sense, good fellowship, the 
 capacity for taking pleasure in doing well and 
 promptly what has to be done, and enjoying 
 life intelligently are conspicuous features. It 
 is good for every one to have the feeling 
 of being a member of a community which 
 is winning its way to an individual and 
 
 135 
 
136 TRADITIONS & CONVENTIONS 
 
 honourable position in the world ; to take 
 pride in following those who have helped to 
 build up the College tradition in the past, 
 and to go on building and maintaining its 
 constant progress. 
 
 In this connection it may be useful to 
 consider a little more decisively what tradition 
 means. For young people who are trying to 
 do something worth doing and are still in the 
 early stages of that endeavour sometimes find 
 it difficult, through inexperience, to distinguish 
 between tradition and convention — and they 
 sometimes repudiate traditions under the im- 
 pression that they are warding off conventions. 
 So it is of importance to have a clear idea of 
 the difference between them. 
 
 The difference really is that traditions are 
 alive and conventions are dead. Young people 
 are hindered from distinguishing between 
 them because while both traditions and conven- 
 tions are recommended to them by elderly 
 advisers, it is to be observed that a good many 
 people when they get old have relapsed into 
 mechanical habits and do a lot of things in 
 art and elsewhere which have no real sense in 
 them, because it saves the trouble of thinking 
 or of trying to do things differently from what 
 
THOSE WHO WENT BEFORE 137 
 
 they are accustomed to, or from what they see 
 other people doing. So when old people of 
 sense preach the advisability of doing things 
 in accordance with wisdom garnered from the 
 experience of those who have gone before, 
 some ardent young people quite naturally 
 rebel, and think they are preaching conven- 
 tions ; and, as they feel themselves very much 
 alive, they resent the advice which seems to 
 involve giving up being alive in their own 
 way ; they repudiate things which would even 
 help their own vitality, if misconceptions did 
 not blind them. 
 
 All the advantages we enjoy in the general 
 ordering of our lives are the outcome of 
 strenuous and devoted endeavour on the part 
 of those who have gone before us. All our 
 methods of art are the discoveries and con- 
 trivances of countless generations of wise 
 people who were physically and mentally as 
 much alive as we are. Our College tradition 
 has been built up by those who were most 
 active in doing well ; by people who showed 
 good sense in the ordering of their lives and 
 their interests ; by people who were set on 
 enjoying their lives by making good use of 
 them. It is not possible to make life worth 
 
1 38 TRADITIONS & CONVENTIONS 
 
 living without taking advantage of what the 
 people who have gone before have found out 
 about it. And that is tradition. Rules which 
 are merely followed because they are rules, 
 and without any sense of what they mean, are 
 little better than dead conventions. 
 
 If you want to be thoroughly alive and to 
 make life worth living you must question things 
 which appear to be mere conventions; if you 
 do not tney will choke you. 
 
 That appears to be the origin of the re- 
 bellious attitude which is frequent and familiar 
 in young people. It is a very healthy instinct, 
 and it comes to harm merely because people 
 without much experience are not in the most 
 favourable position to distinguish traditions 
 which are profitable from conventions which 
 are unprofitable and stupefying. It does 
 require a certain amount of understanding to 
 distinguish between one and the other ; and 
 that is the reason why people who do not want 
 to be bothered to think have to follow customs 
 so blindly. Some customs are serviceable 
 enough and society in general could not well 
 get on without them. But like rules they are 
 most likely to be serviceable when they are 
 understood and their appositeness proved by 
 
USEFUL CUSTOMS 139 
 
 practical experience. Lots of customs which 
 are serviceable in certain conditions are worse 
 than useless in other conditions, and it wants 
 but little thinking to see it. When electric 
 light superseded candles the custom of having 
 a rim to catch the guttering wax or tallow 
 became absurd ; but people who do not use 
 their minds like to see the rim in an ornamental 
 electric-light bracket because they are accus- 
 tomed to it ; and it is the same in art and in 
 the ordinary affairs of daily life. Most people 
 do not think, they only feel ; and when they 
 feel comfortable in doing what they are accus- 
 tomed to do, or what they see other people 
 are accustomed to do, they do not enquire 
 whether what they are doing has any sense or 
 advantage in it. One of the things they miss 
 is the chance of establishing their own personal 
 individuality. 
 
 We have not developed our College tradi- 
 tion by following established customs, but 
 by exerting our own individual judgement 
 about things, and by dispensing with things 
 that are mere dead conventions and finding 
 out what customs and traditions had life in 
 them, and adopting the good sense we got 
 out of them for our own needs. We naturally 
 
i 4 o TRADITIONS & CONVENTIONS 
 
 want the College to be different from other 
 institutions in its characteristic spirit. It 
 could not be that if it were merely content to 
 do what it was customary to do or modelled 
 its life on that of other similar institutions. 
 We had to find out our own way, taking as 
 a foundation such apposite traditions as we 
 could lay hold of; then slowly building our 
 own particular tradition on these foundations; 
 and dispensing, in the light of experience, 
 with the conventions which are merely bits 
 of tradition which have no life left in them 
 and have become ossified. 
 
 The spirit of our British race is shown in 
 the determination not to be sat upon or over- 
 whelmed by conventions. But it gets the 
 reputation of being slow because it is careful 
 to choose patiently the things that will be 
 serviceable, and not to throw away with the 
 rubbish a great deal that still might serve 
 admirably for personal and general well-being. 
 The persistence of energy is at the bottom of 
 it — the persistence which can control itself 
 till it is sure of the difference between live 
 traditions and dead conventions. 
 
 A certain amount of apparent disorder in 
 art and in other things is a sign of life. The 
 
SIGNS OF LIFE 141 
 
 world does not get on by doing the same 
 things every day, but by finding out the things 
 it is not worth while doing or putting up 
 with, and doing something better or more 
 serviceable. 
 
 When we come across things which appear 
 to be disorderly we ought to distinguish between 
 what is merely wanton and silly and such 
 things as upset existing order to get something 
 better. Before you take it upon yourselves 
 to disturb existing order it is advisable to get 
 some capacity to distinguish between what is 
 merely formal and obstructive and what is 
 alive and sensible. It must be confessed 
 that impatience with existing order does not 
 often go with the amount of understanding 
 which is necessary before there is a likelihood 
 of its being disturbed with wisdom and profit. 
 Some people are in such a hurry to do things 
 their own way that they cannot wait to see 
 whether their way is better than other people's 
 — and they sometimes make a splash, and 
 very often make very little more. And what, 
 in heaven's name, when you come to think 
 of it, is the use of a splash ? 
 
 We all of us want help from one another. 
 There is no such thing as being wise all by 
 
1 42 TRADITIONS & CONVENTIONS 
 
 oneself. The man is wisest who can pick 
 out and apply the "wisdom of other people, 
 of the past as well as the present. We pick 
 the brains of the past most because the brains 
 of the present bewilder us so much. Personal 
 and social relations and misdevised reputa- 
 tions prevent our seeing clearly the drift of 
 our contemporaries, whereas the people who 
 have gone before have got sifted and do 
 represent something definite. The general sum 
 of what we can learn from them is that which 
 makes tradition ; and in our particular case 
 the sum of all the best thinking and doing 
 and living of the College people of the past 
 is what is building up our College tradition 
 and attitude of mind. 
 
 Before I leave the subject, there are two 
 small things it is desirable not to overlook. 
 On the one hand the good traditions of any 
 institution or school are most helpful supports 
 for the feeble-minded and the feeble -willed 
 when they are looked at in the right way ; 
 but on the other they can become seductive 
 demoralisers where they are looked at in the 
 wrong way. When we belong to an institution 
 which has sound and sensible traditions, we 
 find we have a lead given us by the general 
 
TAKING IT EASY 143 
 
 attitude of mind without our having to decide 
 between conventions and traditions. Lots of 
 people who do not trouble their heads whether 
 things are conventions or living guides of 
 action are kept in the ways of good sense by 
 the general mental attitude which is the out- 
 come of sane traditions ; and as long as the 
 institution which has them continues to be 
 alive and moving it will always be so. 
 
 But there often comes to well-established 
 institutions and to old people, and also to young 
 people who inherit the prestige of fine tradi- 
 tions, a condition which is not helpful but the 
 reverse. That danger arises when an institu- 
 tion or branch of society has attained to such 
 prestige that those who belong to it become 
 over-complacent, and think they may take 
 things easy and sun themselves in the glory 
 that has been accumulated by others and is 
 being adopted by themselves. It is like the 
 young man who says to himself and all comers, 
 " I am the son of Jones who made the first 
 wireless to the moon, and I am twiddling 
 my thumbs. My dad made enough for us 
 both." 
 
 The type is unfortunately familiar, and we 
 know what it is bad and good for. And it 
 
i 4 4 TRADITIONS & CONVENTIONS 
 
 would be just the same with people who sat 
 down and said, " We belong to this or that 
 institution, which is a jolly fine place, and can 
 even put letters to our names which show 
 that we are distinguished. Now we can take 
 it easy." That is the way institutions as well 
 as people go to the dogs. It is under such 
 circumstances that traditions degenerate into 
 conventions and even nations collapse in mere 
 self-complacency. We have not got to that 
 stage of prestige as yet. If the College ever 
 does get there it will be through the spirit 
 and good sense of yourselves as well as of those 
 who have gone before you. It will be a 
 grand thing to have helped in achieving it ; 
 but a Very pitiful situation if those who here- 
 after enjoyed the advantages of having it 
 achieved for them thought they could sit down 
 and take it easy. We owe it to those who 
 have gone before us to improve upon what 
 they have done, and those who come after us 
 will owe it to us to improve on what we have 
 done and so keep the tradition growing. 
 
 The College grows and prospers only 
 when it is thoroughly alive — that is obvious 
 — not when it is taking it easy and feeling 
 comfortable. One of the surest incentives 
 
THE BEST RETROSPECT 145 
 
 to progress is to feel uncomfortable. If we 
 are healthily constituted we feel uncomfortable 
 when we realise that something might be made 
 better than it is, and then we start to help to 
 make it so. The best retrospect a man can 
 have when he is getting to the end of his little 
 spell of living is to look back and feel in him- 
 self that there were some things that wanted 
 making better in his time, and that he had 
 really helped 'to make them so. 
 
 Even here there must be things which might 
 be made better, and for the present there cannot 
 be a much pleasanter occupation than finding 
 them out and trying to make them better. 
 Every little person's little life counts ; and 
 when it is made better — really better — it is 
 better for those who are associated with it. 
 The little life counts in its relation to the 
 College, and the College counts in its relation 
 to the country at large, and so by ever-expand- 
 ing relations to wider and wider spheres of 
 influence. 
 
 The tradition which is built up by the 
 activities of individual lives does not concern 
 the College itself alone, but helps to the better- 
 ing of a considerable part of humanity. No 
 doubt it is but. a little place by the side of 
 
 L 
 
146 TRADITIONS & CONVENTIONS 
 
 a great university, but it is not by size or 
 numbers alone that its value can be gauged ; 
 but by the amount of wholesome influence it 
 is capable of radiating on all sides. And 
 that is achievable mainly by fine traditions. 
 
 May 191 2. 
 
CHARACTER 
 
 I. Its Formation 
 
 It takes some of the remorselessness out of 
 death if we think that we can any of us be doing 
 such things and leading such lives that men 
 will admit that we have run honourable courses 
 when our time comes. Some are disheartened 
 because they think their apportionment of 
 gifts is limited and that they never can make 
 a gallant show among their fellows. But it 
 is not by gifts alone that men may win honour 
 among their fellows, but by the consistent 
 cleanness and straightness and strenuousness 
 of their lives, and the honest use of such gifts 
 as they have. There are plenty of men en- 
 dowed with great gifts and powers who win 
 no deep regard and who do not excite hearty 
 pleasure when men think of them — such 
 as use their gifts for mere personal and selfish 
 
 147 
 
148 CHARACTER 
 
 ends in crooked and ignoble ways ; seeking 
 what they call the main chance and barren 
 lip-service from the casual - minded, and a 
 reputation that has no real human glow in it. 
 
 It is very commonly held that the majority 
 cannot discern fine qualities or rightly judge 
 a noble life. It is no doubt true that silly, 
 trivial people are not naturally disposed to 
 look for what is noble and generous in their 
 fellows. And if that is so, what would it 
 matter whether they were pleased or not ? 
 But even they are not always silly and trivial. 
 When they are pulled up sharp by some serious 
 crisis or trouble they find there is something 
 besides triviality to engage their feelings. 
 Nobody is trivial at all hours — and when it 
 is said that it is not worth while to please 
 trivial people, it might be more true to say 
 that it is not worth while to please people 
 when they happen to be in the trivial humour. 
 If one could catch them at a moment when 
 they are not silly and trivial their appreciation 
 would be worth having. And in the end, a 
 life that is led with steadfast honesty, self- 
 mastery, and goodwill to others gets under- 
 stood by the veriest idiots. For all that may 
 be said by the prophets of confusion, men of 
 
A GAP IN THE OUTFIT 149 
 
 all sorts like to see really fine qualities in 
 their fellow-men. It makes them feel pleased 
 with their kind and hopeful. 
 
 One of the most familiar of our experiences 
 is to see people greatly amused by the type 
 of man who has a genius for finding base 
 motives in other men for everything they do, 
 especially if it has an honourable complexion 
 — and people laugh and seem to agree. But 
 that is when they are not thinking ; when 
 they come to use their minds a little they much 
 prefer to think that everybody is capable of 
 honest motives, however easy and amusing 
 it may be to make out that they are actuated 
 by bad ones. But when it does come to pass 
 that some man gives proof time after time 
 that he is actuated by short-sighted, mean, 
 ungenerous motives they do not put him 
 among their heroes, however much he may 
 entertain them by his perversities or astonish 
 them by his remarkable gifts. They do not 
 take such men for their models or their leaders 
 except in the things in which they happen to 
 excel. 
 
 It is worth remarking that many men 
 who have great special gifts seem to have 
 gaps in their mental outfit in other respects, 
 
ISO 
 
 CHARACTER 
 
 and sometimes are singularly stupid and blind. 
 Nearly all the crooked things that are done 
 are the result of stupidity and blindness. They 
 never bring any solid fruit that is worth having 
 and generally defeat themselves ; for it is 
 astonishing how quickly people scent crooked- 
 ness and how it puts them on their guard. If 
 the men who are inclined to such things were 
 only a little more wide-awake they would not 
 do them. It is sometimes through being en- 
 grossed in other things that they do not keep 
 wide-awake to their deficiencies ; so we can find 
 excuses for being charitable even if we know 
 better than to imitate them. 
 
 It is very difficult to keep wide-awake in 
 many directions, and life has so many sides 
 that most people are defeated in one direction 
 or another. One of the things people need 
 to be wide-awake about is the special way in 
 which their own mischievous impulses could 
 make havoc of their lives. Most people get 
 by experience some kind of notion of the direc- 
 tion in which they are liable to go wrong, 
 and when they have any sense they are on their 
 guard. The worst of it is that when they do 
 go wrong they have such a tiresome way of 
 forgetting it, and people have grown so con- 
 
ON KEEPING WIDE-AWAKE 151 
 
 siderate nowadays that when they have found 
 out the particular line in which any one is 
 liable to go crooked, as it is easy enough for 
 any onlooker to do, they take very particular 
 care not to mention it. So the man who has 
 begun to let his lower impulses get the better 
 of him, before long loses the power of being 
 aware of it ; and tells himself fairy stories 
 about his own beautiful character, until going 
 wrong becomes part of his regular habits 
 whenever inclination comes. It is as well to 
 remember that when a man has done anything 
 crooked or poisonous or foolish it becomes 
 part of him. He cannot again be the man 
 who has not made a fool of himself. His 
 misdoing is just as much part of him as his 
 nose or his ears. There is something about 
 him thenceforward that his better nature would 
 be glad to be rid of and cannot. 
 
 But of course it would be absurd to suppose 
 that any man could go through life without 
 doing something stupid and perverse some- 
 times. All that the best of men can hope for 
 is to have at the end a good, solid balance of 
 the things he has done which are not foolishness. 
 
 Looking at it one way, life becomes a grand 
 sort of game in which there is an infinity of 
 
152 CHARACTER 
 
 chances and an infinity of possibilities of taking 
 the wrong turning ; we have to keep wide- 
 awake to face the chances and mischances 
 and make the best of them ; and to be able 
 to recognise the seductive wrong turnings 
 that lead to quagmires and to decline their 
 alluring falsities. The best we can hope for 
 when the game comes to an end is to feel 
 that we have not been beaten, and that we can 
 say good-bye to the world with the confidence 
 that the number of times we have done the 
 wrong thing does not altogether swamp the 
 number of times we have done the right thing. 
 The game is infinitely various, for no two 
 people are alike. Some have much harder 
 work than others because they have a more 
 copious outfit of adventurous impulses, more 
 irrepressible curiosity, or more mischievous 
 pugnacity about them. It is getting beaten 
 by stupid and mischievous impulses that 
 wrecks a man's life and prevents its being 
 worth living. The devils that used to be 
 supposed to tempt men are not outside them 
 but inside. All the evil that men do comes 
 from their own impulses. Men do not cheat 
 and lie and deceive and speak evil of their fellows 
 because some pernicious supernatural imp 
 
COLOURLESS FOLK 153 
 
 comes along and invites them to ; but because, 
 in the multitude of impulses which make their 
 temperamental outfit, there is the impulse 
 to cheat and lie and deceive and speak evil; 
 when opportunity offers that impulse carries 
 the day against the impulses which are in 
 consonance with a nobler reasonableness and 
 honesty — and the chance for the nobler im- 
 pulses becomes weaker every time it happens. 
 But it must be acknowledged that the people 
 who are endowed with mischievous impulses 
 are much more interesting than the people 
 who are colourless ; and when they do come 
 out the right side they get more out of life 
 than the colourless ones. They get more done. 
 For tempestuous and dangerous impulses are 
 often associated with great force of character. 
 Everything is more strongly accentuated and 
 the dangers are easy to see. The colourless 
 ones have more subtle hidden dangers to 
 cope with. They are colourless because all 
 their impulses have a low level of force ; and 
 they are liable to drift into being next to nothing 
 at all. Negative goodness is not of much 
 account and always tends to be purely futile. 
 There are times when one wishes that colour- 
 less people would do something outrageously 
 
154 CHARACTER 
 
 bad to vary the monotony. It would at least 
 give us the assurance that there was something 
 inside them. 
 
 The colourless good ones have very little 
 chance of making anything definite of their 
 personalities ; and that is a great drawback. 
 The man who is born with decisive impulses 
 has a great advantage in that respect. People 
 can see plainly what he is. The outlines of 
 his spiritual physiognomy are definite. The 
 outlines of the real characters of the colourless 
 ones are vague and difficult to identify. Men 
 distrust their own estimates of them. They 
 persistently think there must be something 
 hidden ; while the more dangerous dispositions 
 make every one see there is something there ; 
 and unless their possessors give up the game 
 and let the lower impulses swamp or crush 
 the higher ones they have the chance of arriving 
 at the crown of life — the establishment of a 
 clear and consistent personality. 
 
 A man establishes his definite identity 
 by making consistent and sensible use of 
 such special qualities and aptitudes and 
 impulses as he has. He cannot alter them 
 or pick and choose what he will have, any 
 more than he can pick and choose his parents. 
 
CLEAR PERSONALITY 155 
 
 But he can direct them. Whether we are 
 weak or strong, healthy or delicate, gifted 
 or ungifted, each of us has to accept the outfit 
 which has got to serve for the making of a 
 life. As every man's outfit is different from 
 every other man's it is as well to recognise 
 early that each must make the sum total of 
 his life in a different way from other men. 
 That is to say, each man has the supreme 
 opportunity of being something himself, 
 instead of being an ineffectual copy of what 
 he thinks his neighbours are. A man may 
 take pride in having the energy to be self- 
 dependent and definite. Nothing is more 
 likely to make life feel worth living. 
 
 But then we have to remember that some 
 very self-dependent people seem to have the 
 gift of making other people's lives not worth 
 living. The capacity for self-dependence does 
 not always go with the mental outfit and judge- 
 ment which justify it. And that is one of 
 the ways in which a community principle, 
 such as is illustrated in the College, is 
 useful. The community can offer a service- 
 able check to a nature which is unjustifiably 
 aggressive. One might say that it reduces 
 too salient angles by attrition ! At any rate, 
 
156 CHARACTER 
 
 the other members of the community can 
 comfort one another when they come into 
 unpleasant contact with the protuberances. 
 
 The community feeling checks a fair 
 amount of irresponsibility by the fact that 
 where there are hundreds of different char- 
 acters there must be an average ; and an average 
 has the tendency to become a counterpoise to 
 extreme aberrations. While it helps natures 
 endowed with energy to choose between injuri- 
 ous and helpful impulses, it also infuses some 
 vitality into the colourless ones, and helps them 
 to the best type of character prevailing in 
 the particular community or institution. If 
 that type has been developed by sane and 
 wholesome people it is no small gain that 
 people who would otherwise be quite negative 
 should acquire some kind of definiteness. 
 
 The relation of the community principle 
 to individual character is of course a very big 
 and important subject, and we cannot venture 
 to be drawn into it now. But the effect it 
 has, both in awakening life in dull places and 
 in restraining exuberance in dangerous places, 
 is obvious. In the community tradition the 
 lives of those who have belonged to it are 
 of great importance. A life that has been 
 
UNTARNISHED QUALITY 157 
 
 well lived lives on in the lives of those that 
 come after. No doubt a life being well lived 
 is also a help to others, but one that is com- 
 plete has something more of sanctity about it; 
 it is complete, rounded off, assured. A living 
 example might disappoint us — we give our 
 admiration with reserve. But with the life 
 that is complete we can — even in sorrow and 
 sympathy — feel glad that it is summed up 
 and that no surprises can tarnish it. 
 
 September 191 2. 
 
 II. Its Influence 
 
 I confess to a sense of exhilaration whenever 
 I meet with a human life which can be con- 
 templated fully and frankly with the certainty 
 of its true quality being untarnished. It soon 
 mitigates the bitterness of the ending of personal 
 relations. When people have led senseless, 
 silly, unprofitable lives, and come to the end in 
 the hope that some heaven or other will make 
 good their failure here, we have good reason 
 to be sorry. But when a man's life has been 
 really well spent, we can be glad that he had 
 enough time to find out how to make a good 
 
158 CHARACTER 
 
 thing of it and spend it with advantage. Every 
 life so spent strengthens the spirit of those 
 who are in contact with it. It is not merely 
 an example which is serviceable for moral 
 purposes. Devotion is contagious. When 
 you are constantly in touch with some one who 
 is doing what he has got to do with all his 
 might, never shuffling nor shirking, you can 
 hardly help doing the same. It sets up a 
 sort of standard which one is ashamed to fall 
 below. 
 
 The effect is very different from that 
 produced by moral examples, because it is 
 produced by actual living contact and by 
 the effect of a real human relation between 
 one person and another. As a rule, people 
 who are held up as moral examples of exemplary 
 living set up a perverse impulse to rebel and 
 to criticise in those to whom they are recom- 
 mended, especially if the latter have any 
 independent spirit. They are only too pleased 
 to be able to persuade themselves that such 
 examples are humbugs or prigs. The impulse 
 in people of spirit to develop their lives in 
 their own way, which is the source of individ- 
 uality, gives them a distaste for virtues that 
 are recommended on the basis of moral example. 
 
MORAL EXAMPLES 159 
 
 They are even sometimes driven into mischief 
 by the unpalatable form in which virtues are 
 presented to them ; and it is not so much 
 their fault as the fault of the uninspiring and 
 unconvincing manner in which the people 
 who recommend them present the examples of 
 virtuous action. 
 
 To be genuinely and effectually impressed 
 by any man one needs to know him in his 
 entirety, with all his weaknesses or perversities 
 or inevitable difficulties of disposition, and to 
 have an adequate opportunity to see how he 
 contended with such drawbacks and maintained 
 the general tenor of an honourable and helpful 
 life in spite of them. Shining virtuous actions 
 may be tokens of a sound and generous dis- 
 position, but they are not the things which 
 other people can endeavour to emulate with 
 success, because the exact conditions will not 
 be so obliging as to recur. 
 
 It is the general spirit of a man's life that 
 is important, not the incidents. What may 
 be heroic in one situation may be the very 
 reverse in another. The unintelligent creature 
 who tries to do what some saintly person 
 has been reported to do, because he was 
 told some saintly person did it, is merely a 
 
160 CHARACTER 
 
 futile nonentity. He is not doing it because 
 it is his nature so to do, or for any genuine 
 or fine impulse, but too often because it feeds 
 his self-complacency; or because he hopes for 
 pats on the back from his guides and spiritual 
 advisers, who understand the deeper aspects 
 of life as little as he does. 
 
 Individual virtuous actions are indeed the 
 accidents and superfluities of a life which is 
 running clear and clean below them. If 
 people are to be made high-minded, generous, 
 energetic, single-hearted, and honourable, it 
 seems best to keep these concrete individual 
 actions in the background. Concrete illustra- 
 tions are always liable to be exasperating. 
 Every human being has to be virtuous after 
 his own fashion. No two men have the same 
 temptations, no two men's relations with 
 other men are the same. The proportion of 
 primitive instinct which leads men astray to 
 the intelligence and understanding which 
 might keep them straight, is never the same 
 in any two human beings whatever. They 
 are so differently apportioned to different 
 individuals that what we regard as a sur- 
 prising piece of unexpected decency in one 
 man we should regard as rather degrading 
 
THE LOVABLE SINNER 161 
 
 in another, and as below what we should 
 have expected of him. It is the knowledge 
 we get by experience which enables us to 
 gauge our fellow-men in such respects, and 
 to see in what particular direction they have 
 difficulties to contend with in themselves ; 
 and our estimate of their worth depends on 
 the extent to which they persistently endeavour 
 to get the better of their mischievous impulses. 
 We often love people who are full of faults 
 when we see they determine not to be beaten 
 by them, and occasionally startle us by some 
 generous and unselfish thought or action ; 
 and we love much less a man whose outfit 
 of temptations is not so plentiful, but who 
 cynically and often consciously yields to them 
 on every provocation. We can even honour 
 the former and feel that the sum total of him 
 inspires us, while the latter only makes us 
 shudder and avoid him. 
 
 It is often the drawback of people who are 
 offered to us as examples that we become 
 oppressed by their virtues. The people who 
 recommend them often think that any betrayal 
 of the other side of their history will weaken 
 the impression they want to make. And 
 they are obviously wrong. It is the whole 
 
 M 
 
1 62 CHARACTER 
 
 man we want to know and not only the shining 
 part of him ; and then we can honour him 
 and learn from his story with confidence. 
 
 But on the other hand there are men whose 
 steadfastness and devotion we can honour 
 without stint as they are shown by the general 
 sense of their careers. Such qualities are of 
 general application, and bear fruit in helping 
 other men to live up to a like honourable 
 standard in things that fit their diverse lines 
 of life, and spread an atmosphere of good sense 
 and open - mindedness which keeps whole 
 groups of human beings in healthy spiritual 
 condition. 
 
 We have been fortunate in having many 
 such people at the College among the pro- 
 fessors and teachers, and among the office 
 staff, and among the pupils ; and though as 
 time passes by many of them are gathered by 
 the reaper or pass out of our immediate ken, 
 I believe there are still many among us yet, 
 and for all I can see, the average condition 
 of the spiritual atmosphere is hopeful. I say 
 hopeful, because no one can quite gauge the 
 caprices of the human mind or forecast with 
 certainty the strange eddies which affect the 
 moods and attitudes of mind of large groups 
 
A HOPEFUL PROSPECT 163 
 
 of human beings. The best - constituted 
 schemes can be upset by some incalculable 
 and apparently trifling trend of perversity. 
 
 The progress of a healthy organisation may 
 be turned into some unprofitable channel by 
 a flaw of unfavourable wind which no one 
 could have anticipated. At no time and 
 under no conditions is any human organisa- 
 tion settled and absolutely safe. We can 
 never sit down and take things easy with the 
 idea that we need not be always exerting our- 
 selves to keep things alive and healthy. Change 
 is the one thing that is always inevitable, and 
 if change is not watched, things can easily 
 change downwards. But on the other hand 
 it is change which makes things interesting. 
 Directly people lapse into ruts and mechanical 
 habits and do not keep vigorously alive interest 
 flags. 
 
 Moreover, one needs to watch things from 
 many points of view to approximate to con- 
 stant safety. It is as well to remember that 
 things do not look the same when you are a 
 little way ofT as they do when you are in the 
 middle of them. I do not know if you have 
 ever seen a first-rate painter at work on a big 
 picture and have noticed, when he has been 
 
i6 4 CHARACTER 
 
 working away for a long time with his brushes 
 with his nose close to the canvas, how he will 
 now and then draw his head away and try to 
 get a more comprehensive view of what he 
 has been doing, and even at times walk all 
 about his studio to get his work from many 
 points of view. 
 
 It is a very useful thing to do whatever you 
 are engaged upon — whether it is that you are 
 learning some difficult new work and concen- 
 trating your mind upon details, or whether you 
 are composing some colossal masterpiece and 
 have been. a good deal occupied with the details 
 of a second-horn part or the accidentals in a 
 remote modulation. The people who hear 
 your performance or your composition will not 
 be so deeply conscious of the details as of the 
 impression which the whole or its more spacious 
 parts make upon them ; and it is as well at 
 times to try to get something of the same view 
 yourselves. It is always useful to get some one 
 else's point of view of anything we are doing. 
 
 Too close a point of view is always de- 
 ceptive. We magnify the value of small 
 excellences, of the little things which appeal to 
 us personally from habit and familiarity, or 
 because we pride ourselves individually that 
 
THE LONG VIEW 165 
 
 such little details have been successfully done. 
 People who belong to a place like the College 
 are liable to see its qualities too much from 
 the inside, from the point of view of their daily 
 experiences, and it is very difficult to see it 
 as it appears from a wider point of view. And, 
 moreover, it is worth remembering that when 
 we compare it with other institutions of like 
 kind we are doing it on a fallacious basis ; 
 for we judge our own interests at close quarters, 
 and the institutions we compare them with 
 from a different point of view ; that is, from 
 a good way off. 
 
 There are hardly any things that any man 
 can do which are not capable of being made to 
 look ugly or beautiful by the interpretation 
 that is put on them. The most transparent 
 devotion can be made to look mean and sordid, 
 and the fruit of some ignoble motive ; and the 
 crookedest scheming can be made to look 
 heroic. 
 
 Some people attribute divine motives to 
 everything that people do who are allied with 
 or associated with themselves ; and wickedness 
 and dishonesty to everything that is done by 
 the folks who are supposed to be on the other 
 side. The most obvious illustrations are of 
 
1 66 CHARACTER 
 
 course in politics, where we see that when 
 anything is done on one side it is all that it 
 should be to the people on the same side, but 
 if done by any one on the other side, the 
 whole nation is invited to explode in virtuous 
 fury and loathing at its vileness. But the same 
 absurdity happens in small things as well as 
 in great ; and all the while it is not a proof of 
 wilful dishonesty or falseness, but merely of 
 short-sightedness and lack of understanding. 
 The person who is most likely to be right is 
 the one who looks for the best motive that can 
 explain even an apparently base action. 
 
 People say overmuch trustfulness is liable 
 to be abused ; and it must be confessed that 
 there are occasions when men who have mis- 
 conceived their place in the world and have 
 become mischievous, must meet with direct and 
 unfriendly language. But all the same, the 
 world and the people that live in it get on 
 better if they are dealt with in a spirit of good- 
 will. Men sometimes become hopelessly 
 vicious and impracticable because they do not 
 find any encouragement to be otherwise. If 
 a man's impulses are ever so perverse it is 
 always conceivable that he may act rightly 
 if he finds some one expects him to. A big 
 
HONEST INTENTION 167 
 
 institution, like an individual, can have an 
 air of frankness and generosity. In the first 
 place, it is a sign of health ; and in the second, 
 it is a proof of capacity to see the true merit 
 of things that are well done apart from self- 
 interest. To fight for one's own hand because 
 it is to one's apparent interest is getting quite 
 out-of-date and old-fashioned. 
 
 Yet in these days when men are abandoning 
 all the ancient standards under the impression 
 that they are mere formalities and barren 
 dogmas, it becomes more and more difficult 
 to discern what is grounded on honest intention. 
 There are so many who are crying out cease- 
 lessly that their new way is the only way ; 
 and we guess from their overmuch protesting 
 that it is nothing of the sort. Yet we can 
 afford to be patient, for we know that if it is 
 imposture the world will in due time find it 
 out. The many who are swayed hither and 
 thither by novel sensations and noisy adver- 
 tisement are unstable, and soon forget the 
 subjects of their own fervent worship ; while 
 the few who understand are steadfast and keep 
 to what they know is good, and win the day in 
 the end. 
 
 Nature is proverbially wasteful, and a vast 
 
1 68 CHARACTER 
 
 amount of energy is always being expended 
 on things that are destined to futility. But 
 after all, it is better to be ardent and eager 
 than merely conventional. Discoveries are 
 sometimes made by men who seem to the world 
 in general to be taking altogether the wrong 
 road. The finer temperaments and the natures 
 full of vitality must always press on. It is 
 when they are not imbued with the essence 
 of live tradition that they go astray, and this 
 they may do through lack of opportunity as 
 well as through lack of will. But even then 
 there is more hope of getting something out 
 of their vagaries than is to be got out of the 
 barren complacency of those who are wedded to 
 ease and comfort, and to the old wives' tales 
 that have ceased to be true as men move on- 
 wards to explore and take possession of new 
 spheres of thought and imagination. 
 
 There is never much likelihood of the best 
 results from people who think too well of 
 themselves ; but there are always good hopes 
 of the highest from such as are generously 
 open-minded to other people's labours and 
 achievements. 
 
 September 191 3. 
 
THE WINDOWS OF LIFE 
 
 From the look of you, one would guess 
 that you have been enjoying the customary 
 Christmas weather; and it seems to have 
 agreed with you. Very likely the fact of its 
 being Christmas had something to do with it. 
 When people make up their minds to be 
 cheerful whatever happens, it does not make 
 much difference whether it is rain or fine. I 
 suppose we should all like to have skated or 
 slid and thrown snowballs at one another's 
 heads as our forefathers did, but as we could 
 not, we found some other ways of enjoying 
 life. It is a pity we cannot apply the same 
 principle more often. If we had a sort of 
 Christmas every week, that pledged us to find 
 pleasure in whatever there came in our way to 
 do, we should make much more serviceable 
 things of our lives. The wonderful effect 
 that Christmas produces in us is less owing to 
 
 169 
 
170 THE WINDOWS OF LIFE 
 
 turkeys and mince pies, and plum puddings 
 and crackers, than to making up our minds to 
 be merry and keen whatever comes. And the 
 result is that we get much more pleasure out 
 of things because we throw ourselves more 
 into them, and are interested even in our fun. 
 
 At the bottom of enjoying things is getting 
 some way to be really interested in them — 
 because being interested wakes up our instincts. 
 Getting interested is just the reverse of what 
 careless people think. It is not mere intellec- 
 tual pleasure that we get, such as the careless 
 person despises as priggish, but the opening 
 it makes for the play of primitive and uni- 
 versal instincts — curiosity, the overcoming of 
 difficulties, the masterful impulses, mischief, 
 human feeling, sympathy. People are thrilled 
 through their minds. 
 
 We can always be keen about doing things 
 that are our special business. Being parti- 
 cipators in activities of all sorts is the keenest 
 pleasure, especially if we participate well. 
 But a very great part of our lives is necessarily 
 spent in looking on, and that is more difficult 
 to provide for. It is a very inferior sort of 
 pleasure to the active mind. But even such 
 an inferior occupation as looking on has its 
 
CRICKET 171 
 
 ways of being applied successfully. We cannot 
 begin with doing things ; we must look on for 
 a while to learn how to do them. And there 
 are many different ways of looking on. We 
 are aware mainly of two ways of doing it. 
 Some people do really look on and take part 
 mentally in whatever is going on ; and other 
 people are always thinking about something 
 else. You have it clearly illustrated in the 
 attendances at cricket matches which are 
 fashionable. There are some people whose 
 eyes are glued to the cricketers, and who 
 cannot bear to be distracted by irrelevant 
 remarks. They understand the points of the 
 game, applaud a good stroke with pleasure, 
 and grunt displeasure at a bad one. 
 
 There are a good many of another sort, 
 who do not concern themselves with the cricket 
 at all, but only look at one another's hats and 
 dresses, and discuss what they have to eat and 
 drink, and the people they saw at the last 
 fashionable party they attended. The people 
 who have been really looking on at the cricket 
 have added to their capacity for enjoying 
 cricket. They have sharpened their wits and 
 know more about it, and will enjoy the next 
 chance of looking on at a first-rate match all 
 
172 THE WINDOWS OF LIFE 
 
 the more. While those who have not been 
 doing what they pretended to come for are 
 just where they were, and will only go over 
 the same ground when they go to another 
 cricket match ; or even when they go to some- 
 thing else, such as an opera, where they do 
 not attend to the opera at all, but discuss their 
 tiaras and other decorations, and vie with one 
 another in irrelevant futilities. 
 
 There is obviously a sensible way of looking 
 on and a non-sensible way. There is a way of 
 attending keenly to what you are doing or 
 looking on at, and a way of missing the kernel 
 of it altogether, and thinking about something 
 else. It is not helpful merely to say that 
 people whose chief interests are their hats and 
 frocks never could take sensible interest in 
 anything. People are generally silly out of 
 mere dishevelment of mind. They are in- 
 attentive by nature, and for lack of a little 
 spirit and energy they are always distracted 
 from the matter in hand. People who are 
 easily distracted in one thing are easily dis- 
 tracted in another ; and the result is they never 
 get good solid enjoyment out of anything. 
 
 Most people can enjoy looking on at any- 
 thing if they can only get a point of view which 
 
THE THING TO DO 173 
 
 gives them a hold on it. That is getting in a 
 sense an interest in it. People sometimes fail 
 to get into touch with a thing because in 
 vulgar parlance it is not the thing to do. In 
 some grades of society it is not the thing to be 
 seen carrying a brown paper parcel in the 
 street, in others it is not the thing to be seen 
 travelling first-class, and in some it would be 
 felt to be a loss of caste to be seen . on an 
 omnibus or in a four-wheeler. All these 
 conventional privations take their revenges, 
 as they do in more important things. Those 
 of us who have had much to do with music in 
 this country in the past forty years or so have 
 had plenty of occasion to observe the effects 
 of such conventions. With certain types 
 of' English people music was till recently a 
 thing people who respected themselves thought 
 beneath serious consideration. When it was 
 going on, especially if it was good music, 
 they always talked at the tops of their voices ; 
 and the natural result was that they knew 
 nothing about it, and were quite incapable of 
 enjoying any but the very worst, stupidest and 
 vulgarest kinds. They liked what was stupid 
 and vulgar, and things which were devoid of 
 any artistic merit or feeling whatever, because 
 
174 THE WINDOWS OF LIFE 
 
 they had no intelligence in connection with 
 better things. The language was to them an 
 unknown tongue. The same result obtains 
 with everything we come across ; whether it 
 is convention that prevents our giving our 
 minds to it or our own indifference. We can 
 enjoy all sorts of things if we give our minds 
 to them a little and look on in a sensible way. 
 And looking on stupidly makes us liable to be 
 taken in by twaddle and vulgarity and inepti- 
 tude, because such things as we do not give 
 our minds to are out of the circuit of our 
 understanding. 
 
 An enormous waste of life comes about 
 from our not taking our opportunities to see 
 into things that come in our way. People 
 take to spending their lives in such unprofit- 
 able futilities as card-playing, and even worse, 
 because they have not had energy enough to 
 look sensibly at the thousands of things that 
 happen around them every day. The man 
 who has any sense tries to find a way of getting 
 into touch with the things that offer themselves. 
 That is not to say that he need be looking for 
 things to take interest in. Man's life is so 
 devised that the things he comes across are 
 for the most part within the circuit which 
 
GLOBE-TROTTERS 1 75 
 
 concerns his life ; and there is always plenty 
 of variety at hand, without hunting about for 
 it, and getting dissipated and incapable of 
 prolonged attention. 
 
 There are many thousands of windows out 
 of which we can look upon life. The great 
 point is to see something out of each window 
 which can best be seen from that particular 
 window. The trouble with the feeble people 
 who will always be looking at one another's 
 hats and frocks wherever they are, is that 
 they are always looking at the same things ; 
 like the wealthy travellers, who, when they 
 arrive at some fantastically interesting place, 
 Cairo, or Rome, or Tokyo, start off at once 
 to find out if any people they know are 
 there, and then arrange for the same routine 
 of luncheons and five o'clock teas as if they 
 were at home. The difference in the window 
 they are looking out of at any moment makes 
 no difference to their experiences. They do 
 not add to the range of their enjoyments in 
 life, but always keep within the same narrow 
 circuit. They look out of a window which 
 might give them a larger view of life and a 
 wider experience, and they see nothing out of 
 it at all. The other kind of people can widen 
 
176 THE WINDOWS OF LIFE 
 
 the scope of their lives wherever they are, 
 however slight and insignificant the thing is 
 they have to look at. 
 
 And there is another point worth consider- 
 ing. Every one knows that the sort of people 
 who cannot apply their minds to diverse things 
 and cannot occupy themselves with more than 
 one or two trivialities, are always getting bored. 
 The things that can keep them feeling alive 
 are so few. There is no denying that the most 
 sensible man can be bored at times. He can 
 be bored by the insufferable twaddle empty- 
 headed idiots inflict upon him. He can be 
 bored by a stupid address or lecture, or by 
 dull, stupid, pointless music or poetry. But 
 he is much less likely to be bored than the 
 man or woman whose mind is limited to a very 
 few ways of looking at things. His boredom 
 is often simple weariness. If he were feeling 
 fit and had full command of himself, he might 
 ward off boredom by trying to make out how 
 the man who bored him came to be such a 
 tiresome idiot, why the paltry music or poetry 
 came to be such twaddle, or even how it came 
 to exist at all. Indeed, as long as a sensible 
 man is master of himself, there are few things 
 out of which he could not extract entertainment 
 
MUSCLES OF THE MIND 177 
 
 or profit,- and so keep the deadly boredom at 
 bay. 
 
 We can always get pleasure out of a thing 
 if we look for something in it. Even if we 
 do not find what we are looking for, we may 
 find something else which is better worth 
 finding, and if we do not find anything at all 
 there will at least have been the amusement 
 of looking for it. Different occupations and 
 different kinds of work and play exercise 
 different muscles of the mind and group the 
 mental faculties differently in exercise ; just as 
 different games and different kinds of manual 
 work exercise different muscles of the body. 
 
 And this brings us to the point that 
 specialists who have their hearts and minds 
 engrossed in their special subjects are liable 
 to fall into a relatively similar position to that 
 of the people whose interests are centred in 
 hats and frocks. They are liable to get their 
 outlook on life narrowed to the little circuit 
 of their special subject. A specialist is liable 
 to see all life out of one window, and not to 
 know what it looks like out of another window. 
 He may know his own subject all right, but 
 when he comes across a man who is equally 
 engrossed in another special subject, the two 
 
 N 
 
178 THE WINDOWS OF LIFE 
 
 are mutually unintelligible. If a hemmed-in 
 specialist in music finds himself sitting at 
 dinner between an equally absorbed ento- 
 mologist on one side and an equally absorbed 
 conchologist on the other, what sort of inter- 
 course do you think he is going to get with 
 them ? They mutually lack appreciation of 
 one another's work, and as nothing seems worth 
 talking about but their own subject, they have 
 no common ground for mutual interchange of 
 ideas. 
 
 The hemmed-in specialist does not see his 
 subject in relation to other subjects, or to the 
 manifold phases of human life, but merely the 
 relations of its parts to one another. His 
 humanity is stunted, and his work becomes 
 stodgy. Moreover, nothing is more certain 
 than the fact that a man can never know his 
 own subject thoroughly till he feels its relation 
 to other things. When you have time and 
 opportunity to consider such matters, you will 
 find that all great specialists, whether in 
 branches of science, law or art, are men who 
 take keen interest in other things besides their 
 special subject. It enables them to take a 
 broader view of their own subject; to place it 
 in relation to other subjects and to the world 
 
THE DILETTANTE 179 
 
 in general. It makes them more supple- 
 minded, and their variety of interests affords 
 relief and rest and change when they need it, 
 without their having to resort to the purely 
 comatose condition of resting by doing nothing. 
 
 All this applies very strongly to most of 
 you, because you are destined by the laws of 
 your nature to be specialists. Some of you 
 are so wrapped in your special subject that 
 you almost resent anything which keeps you 
 away from it. But there is often a curious 
 compensation in cases of devotion to an art, 
 that the keenness about it is part of a general 
 keenness. Sometimes the readiness to be keen 
 is even dangerous, especially with those who 
 have various aptitudes. 
 
 This brings us into the neighbourhood of 
 the objections commonly urged against people's 
 diffusing their interests ; which are that it leads 
 to desultoriness and dilettantism. Desultori- 
 ness and dilettantism generally come from a 
 peculiar and unfortunate type of mind — the 
 type of mind that cannot concentrate or keep 
 to anything for any length of time — the type 
 of mind that soon gets tired — the type of mind 
 that wants snippets and snacks, and flits about 
 from one thing to another, and cannot settle 
 
180 THE WINDOWS OF LIFE 
 
 decisively on anything. The course I advocate 
 is calculated to correct such weaknesses ; as it 
 does not advise going in search of distractions 
 and amusements merely for the sake of change 
 and difference ; but to take the differences that 
 present themselves and make the best use of 
 them. 
 
 The best use is always to enlarge our 
 powers of realising things, even when they 
 are quite ordinary everyday happenings ; such 
 as must happen even to the most devoted 
 specialist. The more devoted and absorbed 
 a specialist is, the more serviceable is it to get 
 into touch with all sorts of things and fill his 
 life with more opportunities. Your holiday 
 papers often give me lights on these points. 
 It is very pleasant to find so many of the 
 writers appreciating poetry, and even re- 
 membering passages which were apt to the 
 experiences they have met with and the 
 situations they found themselves in. But 
 another thing which has often struck me in 
 the holiday papers is that most of those who 
 come to the front musically are keenest about 
 their experiences outside music. Those who 
 are most prominent in their own art generally 
 have seemed in the holiday papers to be 
 
HOLIDAYS 181 
 
 entering into life's experiences with more zest 
 than those who plod along with their music 
 and only make a commonplace result with the 
 most meritorious devotion to work. 
 
 We all know how much personality counts 
 in an art, and how essential it is. It is essential 
 to develop our own individual views of the 
 artistic products we have to deal with. No 
 doubt a commonplace mind is difficult to 
 make uncommonplace ; but there is no likelier 
 way to achieve it and attain personality than to 
 develop capacity to take vigorous pleasure in 
 all manner of things. People who devote 
 themselves to an art need to see life through 
 as many windows as they can. It gives them 
 more understanding of the various people they 
 have to offer their art to, and how different 
 minds can be appealed to. It broadens their 
 field of operations, and helps them to see their 
 art whole instead of in disconnected fragments. 
 It gives them a stronger and better hold of the 
 world they have to live in. It makes them 
 modest, because it enables them to realise that 
 their art is only one among many thousands 
 of subjects to which men may serviceably 
 and justly devote their lives; and it relieves 
 them of shyness, because it puts them on a 
 
1 82 THE WINDOWS OF LIFE 
 
 better footing with those who are occupied 
 with other subjects. 
 
 Some people are keen by nature, and keen- 
 ness is one of the most fortunate gifts a man 
 can possess — infinitely more fortunate than the 
 inheritance of untold millions, which, by the 
 same token, are generally unmanageable mill- 
 stones. Keenness makes life worth living, and 
 millions choke it. Those who have not either, 
 will find it much more serviceable to try to 
 develop the former than to waste their energies 
 in trying to accumulate the latter. Keenness 
 in general helps to the attainment of adequate 
 returns in the shape of the necessaries of 
 livelihood. But over-eagerness for returns in 
 themselves only deadens the general keenness 
 for things that are much more worth having. 
 
 If we look at the matter from the most 
 spacious point of view, we shall find occasion 
 to observe also that among the tendencies of 
 these days against which we need most con- 
 stantly to find a safeguard, is the tendency to 
 concentrate on mere details and to be over- 
 whelmed by them, and to lose the power and 
 the will to see things whole. The advent of 
 the working classes into daylight, and their 
 participation in the highest interests of the 
 
CONCENTRATION ON DETAIL 183 
 
 mind, such as art, is much to be welcomed ; 
 but it brings with it the attitude of minds 
 which are driven to concentrate on details and 
 to judge things too much by them. They are 
 most apt to be taken in by conjuring tricks 
 and accessories, and to miss the wider meanings 
 of things. 
 
 Moreover, all theoretic teaching and analysis 
 drives the mind towards detail in proportion 
 as the analysis becomes more searching 
 and comprehensive. Men's noses are kept 
 so close to the objects of attention that they 
 are hardly aware they exist in their wider 
 aspects. The pitfall of teachers is that they are 
 impelled to drive the taught to lose sight of 
 the larger spaces in arduous attention to the 
 minutiae. They have to discuss Bach and 
 Beethoven, and even the speculative experi- 
 ments of those who maintain that people are 
 going to appreciate their works when we are 
 all dead and buried, as if they were made up 
 of a lot of bars, or even beats, and the way 
 the bars and beats formed connected wholes 
 did not matter. They drive men to forget 
 that the essential of a work of art is to be 
 something that is whole, and that a man cannot 
 be worthy of a real work of art till he realises 
 
184 THE WINDOWS OF LIFE 
 
 it as a whole and in its widest aspects. It is 
 not by picking out a pretty phrase or an 
 interesting progression here and there, that a 
 man shows appreciation of a work of art, but 
 by his realisation of the way the thing comes 
 to be a complete whole. 
 
 As with a work of art, so with a special 
 subject as a whole. The only way is to get 
 far enough away from it at times to see it in 
 its completeness. And that is mainly attain- 
 able by getting into touch with other fields of 
 human activity, and seeing one's own subject 
 from the point of view of those who are 
 occupied with something else. 
 
 Your musical art is in itself but a detail 
 in the vast infinity of possible forms of mental 
 and spiritual activity. If you want to expand 
 your mind and your life to the utmost, the 
 likeliest way is to realise the relation of your 
 art to some of these other things. And you 
 can only do that by knowing something about 
 them. There is no need to set solemnly to 
 work to study entomology or conchology or 
 any other " ology ": the Christmas attitude of 
 mind which is keen to enter into the things 
 that come your way will do it for you. 
 
 January 191 3. 
 
THE ENGLISH ATTITUDE 
 TOWARDS ART 
 
 The surest mark of intelligent and sensible 
 people is stability of opinion. And stability 
 of opinion is only achieved in the first place 
 by keeping at bay the personal influences 
 which interfere with right judgement. Most 
 of you know, even with short experience of 
 life, that in some countries they are always 
 changing their governments, and people are 
 always quarrelling and disputing and making 
 a miserable failure of public affairs. It is 
 mainly because they allow all sorts of personal 
 and irrelevant considerations to pervert their 
 judgement on wider issues ; because their 
 mental vision is limited, and they are incapable 
 of judging sanely where a wider range of con- 
 siderations than everyday interests of home 
 and acquaintances is concerned. 
 
 You can take a homely parallel. What 
 185 
 
1 86 THE ENGLISH ATTITUDE 
 
 would you think if in the College the scholar- 
 ships and exhibitions were not awarded to the 
 pupils who are most gifted or most efficient, but 
 to those who could get the backing of dukes 
 and marquises and millionaires, and people 
 who are familiarly described as influential ; or 
 if the parents of candidates for certificates of 
 Associateship had to go round and pull wires 
 and interview officials and cajole examiners 
 to get their children passed ? Yet such 
 things used to happen in this country and still 
 happen in other countries. 
 
 People with undeveloped minds fail to see 
 that the interests of a community include the 
 interests of the individuals which constitute 
 it. It is obviously to the interest of the com- 
 munity that if some one is to fill a position 
 which requires special capacities the person 
 that has those capacities shall be chosen ; that 
 if somebody is to be educated or financed 
 because his gifts are likely to be of service to 
 the world, that person shall be selected who 
 is most gifted and most fit, and not merely 
 one in whose favour influential people exercise 
 their persuasions. It is mere low dishonesty 
 to try to get a person chosen on grounds 
 which are not relevant. It is mere cheating 
 
WIRE-PULLING 187 
 
 to try to obtain through influence without 
 ability what is meant for people of special 
 ability. The people of ability are defrauded, 
 the community is defrauded, and the person 
 who defrauds is denuded of the rags of his 
 honour. 
 
 But the undeveloped mind cannot see it ; 
 and when there is anything going, as the 
 commercial world says, it thinks that every 
 kind of pressure should be put on to get it. 
 And in some quarters unscrupulous, blind 
 intrigue is more successful from this selfish 
 point of view than honesty. Aberrations 
 of this kind used to go on in this country, 
 and still go on in some unfortunate countries, 
 with consequences which you frequently hear 
 of — and affairs sometimes arrive at free shooting 
 all round, revolutions, uprisings, and even the 
 hideous scenes of promiscuous murder which 
 are enacted under the name of war. 
 
 Our comparative freedom from such things 
 in this country is to a great extent owing to 
 our having realised early that justice to small 
 as well as great cannot be provided for unless 
 private opinions on public affairs are widely 
 allowed to carry weight. In the first instance 
 I think this was owing to the fact that the 
 
1 88 THE ENGLISH ATTITUDE 
 
 inhabitants of our little islands have, from 
 quite early times, refused to be put upon ; 
 and having forcibly resisted disregard of justice 
 even in the smallest things, found that they 
 had to think more widely in relation to public 
 affairs. They found themselves unconsciously 
 in the position of having to extend the scope 
 of their sense of relations. That is to say, 
 the individual learnt to consider his own 
 apparent personal interests in relation to the 
 interests of his family ; his family interests 
 in relation to the interests of his class or town 
 or locality; and the interests of his class or 
 locality in its relation to the interests of his 
 country at large. And the extension of his 
 point of view conduced to stability. 
 
 But when men think of things in such wide 
 combinations of relations they have to go slow, 
 and they have to criticise and reconsider. 
 The higher attitude of mind makes this in- 
 evitable. So it is with the inhabitants of our 
 islands. It is one of their quaintest qualities 
 that they are always criticising themselves. 
 Among the criticisms one of the most familiar 
 is that we are too staid and decorous and 
 self-repressed — that we do not have feelings, are 
 devoid of imagination, commonplace and dull. 
 
CAUTION 189 
 
 To people of fervid and impatient temper, 
 who are always in ecstasies and constantly 
 indulging their promiscuous and ill-regulated 
 instincts, we must naturally be an annoying 
 people. It is perfectly true that we do set 
 immense store by self-control, self-contain- 
 ment, self-mastery, even — if you will — by 
 caution, in accepting the grounds of action. 
 And it is a mercy we do. Unless people 
 have an unnatural quickness for estimat- 
 ing the values of facts which bear upon a 
 question, to act in a hurry is in most cases to 
 act wrongly. 
 
 It is the English people's habit to weigh 
 things and to hold back and avoid rushing 
 into action under misleading influences. It is 
 their habit to try to avoid being beguiled by 
 a specious, plausible, seductive exterior, and 
 to look into the insides of things and see what 
 they are made of before either going into 
 transports of enthusiasm for pasteboard and 
 tinsel, or into rabid fury with a thing which 
 is genuine, but requires a little exercise of 
 patience and energy to appreciate. Of course 
 it is not to be supposed that some of us are not 
 sometimes beguiled into misplaced impetuosity 
 of feeling, but the attitude of mind which 
 
i 9 o THE ENGLISH ATTITUDE 
 
 deliberates certainly prevails and affects our 
 conduct and our achievements. 
 
 A Frenchman who wrote a book on English 
 methods of rule in India said : " The English 
 are just but not amiable/ ' He was looking 
 at us from a different stratum of thought from 
 ours. If it were a question of appearance of 
 amiability as against the likelihood of being 
 unjust through being in too much haste, we 
 should be quite content with the Frenchman's 
 opinion. To be patiently just is much more 
 amiable in a finer sense than to be carried 
 away by picturesque gusts of impulse. The 
 Frenchman likes the appearance of doing 
 a thing with ease, with all the graces of style, 
 and he gets brilliant results in the way that 
 suits him. The English are content to plod 
 along so long as they can ultimately get where 
 they want to be. 
 
 But all habits of mind and all qualities 
 have their defects as well as their merits. 
 Our habit of reserve and self-containment 
 is a drawback sometimes. It gets overdone 
 and becomes mere lifelessness. It is too 
 often a serious hindrance in our art. Self- 
 repression makes us wooden. It prevents our 
 performers from getting into the heart of 
 
JUST BUT NOT AMIABLE 191 
 
 things, when it should by rights do just the 
 reverse. They get into the habit of thinking 
 too much of the letter, and what they consider 
 the orthodox readings ; or of the interpreta- 
 tions supposed to be sanctified by the con- 
 currence or usage of the most celebrated 
 musicians of the past, and they miss the spirit. 
 They seem to be repeating lessons and never 
 getting themselves expressed in what they do. 
 They get bored and jaded before they have 
 got through the difficulties of the letter into 
 the spirit. 
 
 If a man is to play from his soul, he must 
 get what he has to play into his soul first. I 
 recognise the inevitable suggestion that there 
 are such a lot of things that people have to 
 play which they do not want to let into their 
 souls at all — and that no one of any sense 
 would want them to. But this is a by-lane, 
 and we must pass it by for the present. 
 
 In relation to our art our English attitude 
 of mind need only be a hindrance to second- 
 rate and unstrenuous types of performers — 
 the sort of people who have not the tenacity to 
 assimilate a work of art, and want to perform 
 it before they know what it is they have to 
 perform. Such people risk making fools of 
 
1 92 THE ENGLISH ATTITUDE 
 
 themselves when they give themselves away ; 
 so perhaps it is as well they should confine 
 themselves to reproducing the mere letter. 
 But those who have really got the things into 
 their souls can give themselves away without 
 stint. 
 
 Some people have souls that are quickly 
 receptive, and they make a great show in the 
 world. But if quickness is the thing they 
 rejoice in most, they can never stay long in 
 one mind, but must always be looking for 
 something new to exercise their quickness 
 upon. They get into the habit of being 
 inconstant. Without doubt they often show 
 some of the qualities of genius, and give delight 
 to people who are of like nature with themselves. 
 But such a course is much better suited to 
 people of other races, who habitually practise 
 guesswork, and love the risks and uncer- 
 tainties it entails. Such guesswork, with 
 our lack of practice, too often lands us in 
 vulgarity, pretence, blatancy, dishonesty, even 
 in some quarters in uncleanliness, which is 
 strangely at variance with the scheme of life 
 we have worked out for ourselves. People 
 who have intensity enough to try to get things 
 into their souls in their fullest significance 
 
GUESSWORK 193 
 
 know that it entails risks. For when things 
 have really got into people's souls they have a 
 tendency to stick. So a person of any mental 
 elevation goes warily when there is a question 
 of making something a part of himself. But 
 such an attitude need not in the least impair 
 our self-dependence and independence, which 
 are of such infinite importance in interpretation. 
 It was the intrinsic independence of the race 
 which originated our attitude of mind, and 
 if we can only wait a little and sustain the 
 freshness of our impulses till we have got 
 complete hold of a thing, we can be just as 
 fervent and devoted as the members of races 
 who set so much store by what they miscall 
 spontaneity. 
 
 The value of steadfastness of opinion of 
 course depends upon the opinion being more 
 or less right — or at all events right in direction. 
 Truths are all single, however many facets 
 they may have ; and the nearer men are to 
 them the less likely are they to be frequently 
 changing about and at variance with one 
 another. It is only when they are completely 
 at sea that they are constantly advocating some 
 new nostrum or new theory. It is the people 
 who do not understand anything who have 
 
 o 
 
i 9 4 THE ENGLISH ATTITUDE 
 
 always got some new short cut to solve all 
 the problems of humanity. There is no limit 
 to the number of things that are not true, or 
 the capacity of human kind to be gulled by 
 the speciousness of advertisers and humbugs, 
 and to take up with them merely because they 
 seem to be new. 
 
 But on the other hand there is a pathetic 
 fact which has to be kept in mind — that when 
 people set their faces sturdily against being 
 seduced by the wiles of false prophets, they 
 frequently steel themselves against the true 
 ones also. On the whole it is worth while. 
 Every attitude of mind has its drawbacks. It 
 is the margin of the delicate adjustment in the 
 balance of advantages between one course and 
 another which has to be weighed ; and the 
 right estimate is only found when many minds 
 of different calibres address themselves keenly 
 to the questions that have to be solved — and 
 the concurrence of many minds becomes more 
 and more necessary as life gets more complex. 
 
 The conclusion of it all is that the line we 
 have taken as a race is to weigh well and get 
 at the true meaning of things, and not to be 
 misled by worldly interests and conveniences 
 — and to recognise that the true interests 
 
WEIGHING WELL 195 
 
 of the individual are included in the interests 
 of the community. It is not to be pretended 
 that this is the only way of doing things, but 
 the attitude of mind implies the admission 
 of our inherent racial weaknesses and makes 
 some provision for accommodating them. And 
 human nature not being either perfect or 
 " desperately wicked," steadfastness of direc- 
 tion can probably be best secured in that way. 
 
 May 191 3. 
 
ASPIRATIONS 
 
 I made up my mind when I began to try to 
 think of things I might talk about this morn- 
 ing that at all events I would not talk about 
 the war. It is quite possible that such a 
 decision may be annoying to some people, 
 and anxious friends might warn me that I 
 should fall just into that very misfortune I 
 always dread most and preach a sermon, as 
 that is the likeliest result of refusing to discuss 
 things in which people are really interested. 
 
 But one thing in which sermons often differ 
 from these addresses is that it is so often the 
 duty of preachers to remind us that we are 
 " miserable sinners." I hardly ever have occa- 
 sion to remind you that you are " sinners," 
 and if I called you " miserable " it would 
 appear too obvious a form of humour. 
 Preachers have the justification that people are 
 constantly describing themselves as " miserable 
 
 196 
 
MISERABLE SINNERS 197 
 
 sinners " ; and this frequency of reiteration 
 seems to suggest that there must be something 
 in it which it is worth while to search for. 
 
 No doubt the confession is very often what 
 is called academic, or perfunctory, and does 
 not appear to induce much depression. It is 
 said because it is printed in a book to be said, 
 and it serves useful as well as beneficent 
 purposes. It might be said, for instance, to 
 be of service to an unscrupulous business 
 man, who cheats and tricks his fellow -men 
 all the week, and sets Sunday apart to conform 
 to the usual regulations of respectable society, 
 and recommences his usual round of roguery 
 on Monday. If he did not set Sunday apart 
 for the admission of his sinfulness and to listen 
 to a sermon endorsing the admission, he would 
 probably be engaged in roguery seven days a 
 week instead of six. 
 
 But there is a very different side to the 
 matter. For there are a great many devout 
 and lovable people to whom it is an ecstasy 
 to repeat the same words that have been 
 repeated through the centuries by devout 
 people like themselves, and to feel the thrill 
 of abasement and humility, and the reverence it 
 implies for some great ideal they worship and 
 
198 ASPIRATIONS 
 
 long for. They may be some of the best and 
 purest people in the world, but they always long 
 for something higher and 'more perfect. They 
 long to be in some more perfect accord with an 
 ideal of sinlessness of which even they cannot 
 formulate the lineaments. Their expression of 
 " miserable sinfulness " is indeed figurative. 
 They are miserable in a sense because they 
 seem to themselves to fall short of an ideal 
 which they cannot define. They are sinners 
 because according to the theory they have 
 accepted all men are necessarily sinners. It is 
 all a question of degree. The man who has 
 arrived almost as near perfection as is possible 
 for a human being still aspires. It is the 
 fruit of his aspiration that he is so near 
 perfection. 
 
 It might be counted unto him for a small 
 blemish on an almost untarnished record that 
 he seems to over - emphasise his being so 
 miserable. He really is not miserable at all, 
 but he has to express himself so because it is 
 necessary to formulate the words in such a 
 way as can be uttered by a great number of 
 people all at once. In certain combined acts 
 of worship it is inevitable that the individual 
 should be merged in the crowd. When a 
 
THE CRAFTY MAN 199 
 
 vast number of people of all sorts of different 
 grades ' of sinfulness have to participate in 
 expressions of contrition or abasement the 
 actual words have to be accepted as figurative 
 — for they cannot be exactly true of every one. 
 And it may be taken as a general rule that 
 those who feel the words most are those who 
 have the least sinfulness about them ; and 
 those who merely reiterate them as a meaning- 
 less formula are the most vicious and frivolous 
 and self-indulgent and unscrupulous. The 
 lowest natures are just those who are contented 
 to be low, and the highest are those who are 
 never satisfied even when they bump their 
 heads against the divine stars. 
 
 As a matter of fact all human beings aspire, 
 only they differ a great deal in what they 
 aspire for. The crafty business man, to whom 
 I have referred above, aspires without ceasing 
 to increase his possessions. He aspires to 
 arrive at the position in which he expects to 
 be gazed at with envy and admiration by the 
 vast majority of his fellow-men. He assumes 
 that they all have the same stupefying ideals 
 as he has and will honour him for what he has 
 instead of what he is and does. He aspires 
 so much that nothing satisfies him, even if he 
 
2oo ASPIRATIONS 
 
 becomes a multi-millionaire and gets a peerage. 
 He probably is never so happy again as when 
 he was an errand boy or a ragged urchin in the 
 streets. He never can be satisfied, because the 
 more he succeeds the more he chokes his mind 
 by the mass of lumber he piles on the top of 
 it. The contrast between him and the nobler 
 kind of aspirer is that the spirit of the latter 
 always grows larger and more radiant, and the 
 spirit of the worshipper of pelf always grows 
 narrower and more rayless. 
 
 People have aspirations according to their 
 conditions. Members of every class aspire 
 to reach the class immediately above them. 
 They pathetically ape their manners and 
 fashions. They have little opportunity to 
 judge better. It is the main thing which lies 
 obviously before them as an aim. A parson 
 aspires to be a canon or a dean or a bishop ; 
 the usher in a school aspires to be a head- 
 master ; the grocer's assistant aspires to be a 
 grocer ; the lawyer aspires to be a judge, or, 
 even further on, to be a member of Parlia- 
 ment ; the subaltern aspires to be a brigadier ; 
 the " middy " to be commander, or, still in the 
 distant heights, an admiral ; the man with 
 active social instincts hopes, like those a step 
 
OUT OF SAVAGERY 201 
 
 higher, to see his name in smart society para- 
 graphs ; the footman to be a butler. 
 
 The aspirations generally seem to follow 
 the obvious line belonging to their social 
 position and circumstances ; and there is 
 something pathetic about it, because the gain 
 is often no gain at all, and when it is a gain it 
 is so pitifully small. 
 
 Yet this instinct of aspiration is one of the 
 most serviceable things humanity possesses. 
 It is one of the original essential instincts, 
 through which it has climbed out of the 
 original slough of savagery. It is only lack 
 of enlightenment and understanding which 
 makes it so often futile. It is when it is 
 expended on the things which are merely con- 
 ventional and obvious that it is so ineffectual. 
 Without understanding, even so honourable and 
 serviceable a quality is but half effective. 
 
 Yet there is plenty of impulse in men to 
 aspire after what is not obvious. The most 
 vigorous and enterprising minds always have 
 aspirations which seem to have nothing to do 
 with their normal occupation ; and sometimes 
 these are very quaint and curious. A great 
 novelist aspires to be celebrated as a sportsman, 
 a great chemist aspires to be a composer, a 
 
202 ASPIRATIONS 
 
 brilliant composer aspires for fame in the world 
 of books, a great statesman aspires to be a 
 philosopher, a distinguished government official 
 aspires to be a clarinettist. It often happens 
 that a man is more proud of some infantile 
 attempt to do something for which he has no 
 gift than of all his achievements in regions 
 where his powers and mastery are acknow- 
 ledged to be supreme. It is a sort of 
 unconscious protest against being shut up 
 in one little corner. 
 
 The aspirations which mark more generous 
 and vigorous natures are always towards things 
 that are not obvious, and that is because all 
 generous dispositions rebel against the liability 
 to be made specialists. The rebellion of 
 youthful minds against education is generally 
 misunderstood. It is not rebellion against 
 education but against the way it is adminis- 
 tered. Every human being is bound to pro- 
 test against being cabined, cribbed, confined 
 to one special subject, and being shut off 
 from any understanding of the great world 
 outside it. As the tendency of most profes- 
 sional education is inevitably to specialise and 
 to tie a man down to some miserable little 
 detail in life, it is a mercy that there is an 
 
DIVISION OF LABOUR 203 
 
 instinctive impulse in man to oppose it, even 
 if it does it in a very clumsy way, which lends 
 itself to being misunderstood. 
 
 One of the most difficult problems which 
 humanity has to face in the immediate future 
 is how to prevent the " division of labour," 
 which is inevitable for efficient and rapid 
 production, causing specialisation which will 
 narrow the mind of the workers to their own 
 infinitely insignificant detail of work, and 
 completely stunt their understanding any great 
 and important questions of the world and the 
 well-being of the people in it, and man's 
 spiritual needs. Apart even from things of 
 wider significance there can be but few jobs 
 so trivial and mechanical that they will not 
 be done better if a man knows and understands 
 some things outside them. When a man has 
 to spend his whole life fitting pins' heads on 
 to the shafts of pins, the blatant profit-monger 
 will say his having any mind outside pinheads 
 will not enable him to fit more pinheads or 
 fit them better. But the man has to live 
 somewhere : he ought to be able to have a 
 wife and family, he ought to have the chance 
 to develop enough understanding to keep him 
 from drinking and debauching all his wages 
 
2o 4 ASPIRATIONS 
 
 and making his home life so utterly squalid 
 and miserable that his health and spirit are 
 both broken, and he becomes incapable of 
 doing even his pitifully trivial work well 
 enough to earn starvation wages. 
 
 As the world gets older it becomes even 
 more indispensable to have a wider and more 
 sympathetic outlook ; we all know that. Yet 
 the ever-increasing call for mere efficiency 
 works absolutely in the opposite direction. 
 All things in the universe are so intimately 
 connected with one another that it is not 
 possible to separate absolutely one line of 
 activity or thought from another. The hide- 
 bound specialist, who concentrates his whole 
 being on his own subject, is missing a lot of 
 things which must bear on his subject. He 
 misses altogether the relation of his own 
 subject to others. He misses altogether the 
 sense of his own personal relation to the rest 
 of the " miserable sinners " who are engrossed 
 in their own special subjects. He becomes 
 one of those I referred to above, whose aspira- 
 tions being satisfied by the daily round of 
 obvious activities, never get to the thrill 
 of real achievement. Everything he does is 
 wanting in something. His life is incomplete. 
 
FURIOUS COMPETITION 205 
 
 The moral of it all is that most of man's 
 serviceable aspirations are outside his normal 
 and obvious occupations. They are the aspira- 
 tions which raise his normal activities above 
 the range of the purely mechanical. They are 
 the things which give a generous air to what 
 a man achieves. In these days of furious 
 competition in exactitude, people protest 
 against any distraction; against any attention 
 being given to anything but a special subject. 
 Their argument is specious. We agree with 
 them in their contentions as far as they go. 
 Mere dissipation of energy is completely futile. 
 It is deplorable when a man has so little power 
 of coherence and concentration that at one 
 moment he is studying geology, the next 
 painting in water colours, and the next listening 
 eagerly to the theories of a fad doctor, and the 
 next practising a mouth-organ, and the next 
 studying the pedigrees of race-horses, and the 
 next becoming a faith healer, and so on ad 
 infinitum. 
 
 But such futility is not the result of 
 generous aspiration but of personal deficien- 
 cies. Such a man would be best tied down 
 with his nose against some durable grind- 
 stone; otherwise he would never understand 
 
206 ASPIRATIONS 
 
 even the paltriest of subjects. One must dis- 
 tinguish between incapacity of attention and 
 lively interests in many aspects of life and the 
 universe. Mere incapacity of attention is the 
 result of mental and temperamental feebleness. 
 It shows itself in hopeless inconsequence and 
 incoherence. The so-called butterfly exist- 
 ence, which is often thought so pretty by 
 half-witted people, is all very well for butterflies, 
 but for human kind it is unutterably stupid. 
 It produces neither happiness for the human 
 butterfly nor profit for those with whom he 
 associates. 
 
 When any one of sense advocates the 
 direction of aspiration towards things outside 
 a special subject, he means subjects which are 
 coherent — subjects which throw light on one 
 another ; subjects which enhance the range of 
 mind ; subjects which minister to the develop- 
 ment of personality ; subjects, finally, which 
 minister to the development of character and 
 judgement. 
 
 Education has two very distinct objects, 
 which are of pre-eminent urgency. There is 
 on the one hand the urgency of efficiency. 
 Many of you feel it over much perhaps in 
 the mechanical practice which is necessary to 
 
FRUIT AT THE LAST 207 
 
 attain technical mastery. But, on the other 
 hand, there is the absolute need of the develop- 
 ment of the understanding which directs and 
 applies the efficiency. So there are efficiency 
 and understanding, these two ; and the greatest 
 of these is understanding. The development 
 of understanding is the most appropriate field 
 of aspiration. Aspiration which projects itself 
 towards merely mechanical things almost always 
 dries up. But aspiration which projects itself 
 towards the spiritual things by which the 
 mechanical things are glorified always brings 
 a man fruit at the last. It is through under- 
 standing that mechanical efficiency is made 
 fruitful. Mere efficiency works in the exter- 
 nals ; understanding delves to the innermost 
 of the meaning and purpose of things. 
 
 Let us take an illustration from our own inti- 
 mate experience. The commonplace specialist 
 devotes himself to the exact reproduction of 
 the notes and signs of a composition he has 
 to perform. He does not know that it has 
 any meaning ; he does not even approach to 
 feeling its aesthetic qualities. As far as under- 
 standing goes, he is only on the level of the 
 stupidest of the herd to whom he will, as 
 performer, purvey the choicest specimens of 
 
208 ASPIRATIONS 
 
 the great masters. His idea of satisfying the 
 great public and winning the name of a great 
 performer are such as appeal to the lowest 
 stratum of his audience. The poor dear great 
 masters suffer unspeakable indignities at his 
 hands. If a thing is to go fast, he tries to 
 make it go faster than ever it went before, 
 and sacrifices everything to that. There is no 
 question of grace, elegance, expression, phras- 
 ing, humour, playfulness, or any other things 
 that appeal to the mind. It is pace that tells, 
 and what the public wants, and pace it shall 
 have. If a thing is to be thumped, our expert 
 specialist tries to thump it harder than ever it 
 was thumped before, and the public rocks with 
 the joy of pure sensation ; if a thing is to be 
 accented, he hits it so hard that every nervous 
 old woman in the audience nearly jumps off 
 her seat. 
 
 To produce such prodigious results is the 
 aspiration of the specialist in technique. It 
 is what you may call sacrificing the higher 
 considerations to the lower. It is the effect 
 in some cases of irrepressible longing for public 
 recognition, of low ideals, and lack of under- 
 standing ; but it is also sometimes the painful 
 effect of too persistent drudgery ; of too 
 
ARDOUR IN TECHNIQUE 209 
 
 prolonged specialisation; of repeating things 
 over and over again in the hope of master- 
 ing them, till they cease to have any meaning 
 at all. 
 
 The person who aspires to develop his 
 understanding and his personality is generally 
 too much interested in what he is working at 
 to care much whether it will interest the 
 public or not ; or to dream of such a thing 
 as attempting to astonish them. It is hard 
 indeed for him to concentrate on technique. 
 Very likely he hates his scales and exercises. 
 He wants to play what interests him and to 
 make it mean something. Sometimes his 
 ardour develops a technique far beyond that 
 of the mere mechanician. The craving to 
 vanquish some special difficulty, which stands 
 obstructive to the perfect interpretation, inspires 
 him to superhuman effort ; and he triumphs 
 where the aspirant to mere efficiency would 
 never get further than a stalemate. No doubt 
 he occasionally sacrifices the higher considera- 
 tion to the lower because of his personal 
 limitations, and that lack of discrimination 
 between live and dead tradition to which young 
 people of his type are liable. But tradition 
 that is really alive will survive such trifling 
 
 p 
 
210 ASPIRATIONS 
 
 misapprehensions, and the individual mistakes 
 are more capable of being corrected than those 
 that have been borrowed from other people. 
 And everybody knows that a few bars of 
 something really fine, presented with the real 
 genuine aspiration after insight and under- 
 standing, are worth a great deal more than all 
 the most brilliant tricks of the human pianola ; 
 and it is the same with all the circumstances of 
 life. 
 
 So aspiration can become an inspiring 
 impulse which gives vigorous life to all things 
 which come within its influence. It becomes 
 limp and stunted if it is only applied to some 
 little special subject, and people who use their 
 store of it so miss the more spacious view of 
 individual life. One can generally distinguish 
 between the profitable and unprofitable aspira- 
 tions by the extent to which they are directed 
 towards ends which lie beyond the merely 
 mechanical efforts, or towards such mechanical 
 efforts as ends in themselves. It is the old 
 familiar relation of the spirit to the letter. 
 The meaning of the letter cannot be found 
 by studying the letter by itself. It can only 
 be found through the knowledge of things 
 outside it, which bear upon it and throw light 
 
THE GREATEST SERVICE 211 
 
 on it. It is in such ways that the aspiration 
 after things that are not obvious becomes of 
 such infinite service. 
 
 The things which are of greatest service in 
 life are generally those in which most people 
 do not see any service at all. It is the things 
 which only reveal themselves when people 
 begin to use their minds a little which are most 
 fruitful. 
 
 January 191 6. 
 
WAR 
 
 213 
 
i 9 H 
 
 I am quite pleasantly surprised to find that I 
 seem to have seen most of you before. I fully 
 expected to find you overwhelmed by the 
 dreadful topic which discomposes most people's 
 nerves, and that even familiar faces would 
 look strange. It is delightful to find such 
 anticipations superfluous, and to realise that 
 the College spirit is undaunted, and that you 
 come together again with the same bright-eyed 
 keenness as on ordinary occasions. Under 
 the circumstances it seems an open question 
 whether I ought to dwell upon the events 
 which have moved the world so much, or 
 discuss only such things as concern us at the 
 College. Some very ideal people might say 
 that I ought on such an occasion to devote 
 myself to our domestic concerns and treat the 
 great issues outside as if they did not affect us. 
 But quite apart from the uselessness of being 
 
 215 
 
2i6 1914 
 
 guided by fantastic abstractions we cannot 
 regard our domestic interests as being un- 
 affected by the strange nightmare which attracts 
 universal attention. For one thing which con- 
 cerns us deeply is that quite a lot of our happy 
 family party have been honourably inspired 
 to go and chance the risks of military life ; and 
 among them are some very distinguished young 
 musicians. 
 
 We feel a thrill of regard for them. It 
 gives a comfortable feeling of admiration for 
 our fellow-countrymen when we see them 
 moved by fine and honourable motives to face 
 the awful conditions of modern warfare — to 
 risk their lives, and sometimes even worse, 
 for generous ideals. We like the College 
 to be represented by such spirited young 
 people. 
 
 But then we must also face the facts with 
 open minds. The College in relation to war 
 is in a different position from other educational 
 institutions. Our pupils are made of different 
 stuff from the pupils of ordinary schools. They 
 are gifted in a rare and special way. Some of 
 them are so gifted that their loss could hardly 
 be made good. It would be a special loss to 
 the community. They might bring special 
 
DRESDEN, 1849 2I 7 
 
 honour to their country by their special gifts, 
 and if that were frustrated it is an open 
 question whether the cost would not be too 
 heavy. The world cannot afford to throw 
 away such lives as if they were of no more 
 account than lives which gave no special 
 promise of a rare kind. 
 
 Think for yourselves what it Would have 
 meant if Wagner had happened to lose his life 
 in the Dresden disturbances in 1 849, and the 
 world had never had Tristan or Meister singer, 
 or the Ring or Parsifal. We hear of Kreisler 
 being in the Austrian Army, and Rachmaninoff 
 with the Russians, and we honour them for 
 their devotion, even if we think such beings 
 should be set apart for other purposes. And 
 we may have the feeling, parenthetically, that if 
 they happened to meet in hostile squadrons the 
 murderous frenzy of war would be stilled and 
 they would fall on one another's necks instead 
 of trying to kill one another. The claims of 
 art would vindicate themselves as of higher 
 cogency. 
 
 There is too great a liability where a thing or 
 being that represents spiritual value is thrown 
 into the conflict of material issues. It is, indeed, 
 a painful thought that a human creature, 
 
2i8 1914 
 
 delicately and subtly organised for the spiritual 
 needs of humanity, should be thrown into the 
 vortex of savage slaughter. As if the spiritual 
 qualities were of no moment at all ! It seems 
 almost as pitiful as sending highly cultivated 
 and highly organised beings to go to work 
 with the butchers, and slaughter pigs and 
 cattle and amiable, playful little lambs, instead 
 of devoting themselves to spiritual activities 
 which will be of infinitely greater value to 
 humanity. 
 
 But yet, on the other hand, we cannot help 
 being very glad that musicians should show 
 the same spirit, and show that their mettle is 
 as good for strenuous doings as that of men 
 of other occupations in life. No doubt the 
 average silly notion has been that musicians 
 are soft. It might have been so in this 
 country when there was so much of the back 
 street about English music. Now that music 
 has come into the light of day here, and is 
 cultivated by others besides the commercial 
 classes, at both ends of the social scale, musi- 
 cians are as full of courage and vigour as other 
 people. But our feelings on the question are 
 inevitably in frequent conflict. At one moment 
 we are feeling joyful that the College should be 
 
FIGHTING MUSICIANS 219 
 
 represented among the fighting hosts, and then 
 at another we waver and count the cost. 
 
 It is a bewildering fact that the people 
 who offer themselves to such risks are often of 
 the very best quality, and very often such as 
 the world can ill spare ; while numbers of those 
 who do not offer themselves are mere loafers 
 and shirkers who would be no loss, and would 
 even be better and happier for being forced to 
 face the guns and learn what a gain some 
 experience of a really strenuous life would be 
 to them. Again, we are glad that we have 
 amongst us those mortals of the finer fibre, 
 even if we can ill spare them. We must 
 spare them if they are set on going, and we 
 must keep a warm place in our hearts for them, 
 and honour them to the full for maintaining 
 the credit of musicians and of the College in 
 this fearful crisis. We must even do all we 
 can to make it easy for them to go, and keep 
 their scholarships waiting for them in the hope 
 that they will some day come back ; and we 
 must release pupils from their pledge to be 
 with us for three terms if they have not com- 
 pleted them when the call comes to them to go. 
 
 But we shall do it with full recognition of 
 the exceptional value of what we spare ; and 
 
220 1914 
 
 also in confidence that they will go into the 
 inferno of shot and shell with the same light- 
 hearted gaiety that is so thrilling in the British 
 soldiers and sailors. This parting with some 
 of our best will bring the reality of the war 
 home to us, and steady us, and make us think 
 of all it means in a serious spirit. But there 
 are plenty of other ways in which such a 
 tremendous event must affect us. It is useless 
 to try to put it aside. 
 
 Apart from the mere daily excitement of 
 war news, there is one great thought which 
 overshadows all others. There is forced upon 
 us the overwhelming and soul-shaking experi- 
 ence of seeing the downfall of a great nation 
 from honour and noble estate. We cannot 
 help recalling the splendid hexameter in our 
 English version of Isaiah, " How art thou fallen 
 from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning ! " 
 This is the German nation which in former 
 times was glorified by. producing some of 
 the noblest minds that shone in the world 
 of art. Heinrich Schiitz, Johann Sebastian 
 Bach, Handel, Gluck, Beethoven, Schumann, 
 Brahms — the nation which has produced great 
 poets, great philosophers, great scientists, great 
 scholars, great inventors of things which have 
 
NIETZSCHE'S TEXT 221 
 
 benefited humanity to the utmost. And now 
 it falls painfully to our lot to see them commit 
 the most gigantic crime that has ever been per- 
 petrated by a nation in history — the wilfully 
 sudden declaration of war against France, 
 which they purposely made sudden in the 
 hope that it would take the French unprepared. 
 And we have seen them follow it up with a 
 crime as base and hideous : the invasion of 
 peaceful, industrious little Belgium, because 
 they thought it insignificant and incapable of 
 resisting them. And then we have seen them 
 go on from crime to crime, throwing all honour 
 and truth and decency to the winds — feeding 
 on falsehoods, destroying things irreplaceable 
 — insulting all intelligent humanity — wallow- 
 ing in reckless infamy. Can this be the 
 nation with a glorious past of thinkers, artists, 
 and heroes? What can have perverted them? 
 They have become a nation that hates ! 
 The so-called philosophy that represents their 
 present state is the philosophy of hatred and 
 destruction. We used to laugh at their much- 
 vaunted philosopher Nietzsche for the concen- 
 trated essence of bitter spite which he expressed. 
 We stared in bewildered incredulity at the text- 
 books of their War-lords, and thought it 
 
222 1914 
 
 t 
 
 impossible that such things could really be 
 meant by any human being, however grossly 
 perverted. Many of us thought they were 
 mere eccentric individual aberrations, not in 
 any way representative of the general opinion 
 and feeling of the nation. 
 
 I have my own confession to make. For 
 I have been a quarter of a century and more 
 a pro-Teuton. I owed too much to their 
 music and their philosophers and authors of 
 former times to believe it possible that the 
 nation at large could be imbued with the 
 teaching of a few advocates of mere brutal 
 violence and material aggression ; with the 
 extravagance of those who talked about super- 
 morality ; with the ruthless implications of 
 their insistence that the State is power, and 
 nothing but power, and has no concern with 
 honour, right, justice, or fair play. 
 
 But we are painfully disabused. We are 
 forced to admit that men who seemed to libel 
 and traduce them have proved to be right. 
 These seeming incredible theories of their pro- 
 minent writers prove to be the present spiritual 
 expression of a nation we once honoured, and 
 many members of which we greeted with 
 ungrudging friendliness. We know now that 
 
ARROGANCE RUN MAD 223 
 
 it is arrogance run mad. We know it is the 
 hideous militarism of the Prussians that has 
 poisoned the wells of the spirit throughout 
 Germany — that it has poisoned them by- 
 cynical manipulation of the Press, and all 
 the channels through which enlightenment 
 can flow to the millions, for nearly half a 
 century — by actually preventing their govern- 
 ment-controlled newspapers from publishing 
 truth, by cultivating the arts of false sug- 
 gestion, and by holding up to general worship 
 the fetish formula of " Blood and Iron," 
 which has been their bane ! We know now 
 that if we cannot scotch the war-fiend the 
 world will not be worth living in. We know 
 too that we must be prepared for tremendous 
 sacrifices, for sufferings, for losses, for terrible 
 blows and anxieties. And we must learn to 
 look them steadfastly and coolly in the face. 
 
 So far as we have gone we must admit that 
 we have been fortunate in many ways. It is far 
 easier to keep an equal frame of mind when you 
 are confident that your honour is so far without 
 a blemish. We may justifiably be proud that 
 we went into this war for absolutely honourable 
 motives, and that it has proved that the things 
 that were spitefully prophesied about us are 
 
224 i9 x 4 
 
 utterly untrue. We can be proud to find that 
 Britishers can still fight and go into the fight 
 rejoicing. Our soldiers and sailors have vindi- 
 cated our honour magnificently, and if it had 
 not been for our Fleet and the Army our 
 enemies professed to despise, the butchers and 
 brigands of Berlin would have been in Paris 
 long ago, and all the northern French ports 
 would have been bombarded and destroyed 
 by their navy. We have reason to be proud, 
 too, of the universal goodwill which has been 
 shown by the Colonies and India, and the 
 cordial unity which the crisis has proved 
 throughout the Empire. 
 
 These things the war has done for us 
 already, and they create obligations. It rests 
 with every one of us to pay willingly his share 
 of the cost, and to keep himself in hand ; and 
 if bad times should come, not to rush about 
 like a lot of aimless distracted rabbits, but 
 to show the calm and courage that is worthy 
 of the nation. The courage we are called 
 upon to show is that which will enable us to 
 go on with our lives and occupy ourselves as 
 usual, as if there was no dreadful and violent 
 war going on. Do not forget that civil life 
 and domestic life has to go on. It is much 
 
BALLASTED MINDS 225 
 
 best that it should go on as far as possible as 
 usual, and that we should keep on in our 
 several ways doing what is marked out for us 
 to do with steadiness of nerve and even cheer- 
 fulness. It is a great comfort to see that the 
 College can go on with its work in spite of 
 such dreadful distractions : that there are plenty 
 of people who are not reduced to idiocy by 
 panic, and do not want to sit helplessly doing 
 nothing but groan and babble about horrible 
 outrages and pour out useless imprecations 
 against the Germans. 
 
 It is always bad for people's nerves to have 
 only one subject that engrosses their attention. 
 If we cannot find something else to occupy our 
 minds now and then we run the risk of becom- 
 ing monomaniacs and spending our lives in 
 hunting for the last silly rumour, and putting 
 our faith in any nonsense that happens to 
 flatter our hopes or excite our fears. It is 
 for the honour of the nation that we should 
 keep our minds duly ballasted, and maintain 
 the capacity to hold ourselves well in hand, 
 and have patience to verify things before we 
 allow ourselves to be carried away by the excite- 
 ment that betrays people into credulity and 
 hysterical folly. 
 
226 1914 
 
 I hope the College will set an example of 
 self-possession, and if, ultimately, the imperial 
 bird of Prussia, which to me looks so much 
 like a spatchcocked carrion crow, waves over 
 our towers in the place of the Union Jack, 
 all the people belonging to it will prefer 
 extermination to submission ; and I confidently 
 believe that if we have to stand in rows over 
 against the Albert Hall with files of Prussian 
 soldiers ready to demolish us, we shall all 
 look down the murderous barrels without 
 winking an eyelash. But if, on the other 
 hand, that hideous bird is duly and properly 
 cooked, I hope we shall show none of that 
 same arrogance which has caused it to be the 
 most poisonous emblem in the whole universe, 
 but display our victorious joy with modesty, 
 and even with chivalrous courtesy to our 
 enemies. 
 
 It is a time like this which tests the genuine- 
 ness of our work. The art we follow is fit 
 to be pursued and cultivated even by the side 
 of the greatest doings of active life. Its 
 highest guarantee is that it should be capable 
 of being a divine consoler in times of most 
 piteous distress. The trivial art of the 
 superficial-minded may well be set aside at 
 
THE VICTORIES OF MUSIC 227 
 
 such a time. Even the feeble mind can feel 
 its inadequacy. Perhaps indeed war may teach 
 trivial people a little sense, and enable them 
 to realise the futility of a life of frivolous and 
 purposeless amusement. The great thoughts 
 of real composers, to which we devote our- 
 selves, are as valuable to the world as great 
 victories. They are such spiritual food as 
 keeps on lifting us into the higher spheres 
 when great victories are mere memories. 
 
 But one may grant too that our art may 
 be greatly inspired by heroism: not the fussy, 
 aggressive, blatant heroism of the Prussian 
 Heldenleben^ but the heroism we hear of 
 daily in stories from the front. Real heroism 
 is chivalrous and frank, modest and un- 
 aggressive, cheerful in adversity and un- 
 boastful in success. True music can be 
 inspired by such qualities, and when it really 
 is so inspired it can convey a noble message 
 to us. And we all in our various ways may 
 contribute our little mite to the sum total of 
 the heroism of the nation by the cleanliness 
 and wholesomeness of our lives, by truthful- 
 ness and large-heartedness, and by going on 
 steadfastly applying ourselves to the things 
 it is our lot to do, and patiently denying 
 
228 I9H 
 
 ourselves the excitement of trying to do things 
 we are not fit for and leaving them to those 
 who are. 
 
 We may also remember that our devotion 
 to our art is one of the things which help 
 to that better state of man which counteracts 
 the brutalising impulses. We know from 
 such a book as Lieutenant Bilse's Life in a 
 German Garrison what a shallow thing the 
 boasted diffusion of culture by Prussia is: 
 how militarism stupefies the privileged officers 
 and makes them cynically corrupt and immoral, 
 and how it debases the unfortunate private 
 soldiers, whose destiny it is to be driven for 
 the vulgar ambition of Prussia like sheep to 
 the shambles. A truly independent demo- 
 cratic spirit would not submit to such a 
 monstrous system. And it is by encouraging 
 the democracy to be independent and to take 
 interest in things which make them reasonable 
 and genuinely enlightened that such enormities 
 and savageries as seem inevitable in warfare 
 may be ultimately ended. All those things 
 which encourage men to believe in mutual 
 helpfulness, mutual appreciation, good fellow- 
 ship, generosity of mind and temper, tend to 
 the highest kind of real civilisation. And in 
 
REAL CIVILISATION 229 
 
 devoting yourselves to your art and fitting your- 
 selves to make its highest examples under- 
 stood and appreciated by the multitude you 
 may help the world to escape from orgies of 
 brutality such as are now going on, as well 
 as from the unutterable stupidity and blindness 
 which is the inevitable penalty men pay for 
 worshipping false gods. 
 
 Just for the present you can also welcome 
 your art as a relief from preoccupation in 
 horrors, and as a safeguard against spending 
 superfluous time in trying to devise language 
 adequate to the situation. Do not be dis- 
 heartened it the goal proves to be a long way 
 off, and the progress to it slow. It is for the 
 honour of the nation that we should not be 
 impatient, but possess our souls with firmness 
 in the hope that things will come right in the 
 end, and with the resolve to use our own little 
 opportunities so as to add something to the 
 credit of the country in the million-faceted 
 consummation which must be achieved. 
 
 September 1914. 
 
COMRADES AND THE ENEMY 
 
 We have not been made callous by our 
 excitements ; the daily record of precious 
 lives thrown away in the senseless riot of 
 carnage has not yet deprived us of the power 
 to feel the loss of those who have earned our 
 affection and admiration in our home affairs. 
 The changed value that comes to be put on 
 life when people are actually engaged in war 
 does not apply to our civil life as yet; though 
 we do not know how we should feel if we had 
 had experiences such as have fallen to the lot 
 of the poor Belgians. 
 
 Perhaps if we had had to endure such home 
 tragedies our capacities for sympathy with 
 suffering and death might have become 
 exhausted. One can hardly imagine tender- 
 hearted people seeing human beings maimed 
 and tortured and dying of starvation every 
 day without being driven to adopt another 
 
 230 
 
COMMUNITY IN SUFFERING 231 
 
 standard of gauging individual disaster from 
 that of ordinary peace times. I suppose, in 
 such conditions, the feeling for the individual 
 becomes diffused ; the personal sympathy 
 gives place to the sympathy for the many. 
 Community in suffering and loss changes 
 the character even of mourning. There are 
 some people so hedged about with self-con- 
 centration that they are selfish even in their 
 distresses. They suffer helplessly, and have to 
 be supported by other people who have just 
 as much reason for suffering. If they could 
 realise that other people have their sufferings 
 and losses too they might not suffer less, but 
 they would support their losses and sorrows 
 with more considerate self-possession. They 
 would not abandon themselves to paroxysms 
 of unrestrained bewailings, but for the sake 
 of their fellows in suffering put restraint upon 
 the mere expression of it. 
 
 The feeling of what is due to others in like 
 case ministers here as elsewhere to strength, 
 and even to a strange cheerfulness in the face 
 of loss and disaster. Men speak of the growth 
 of the " community feeling " being so great 
 a gain. The community feeling is an expan- 
 sion of the sense of comradeship, and is one 
 
232 COMRADES AND THE ENEMY 
 
 of the few compensations which war seems to 
 offer ; and seems to counterbalance those 
 sterile class distinctions which make frank 
 companionship impossible. 
 
 In war time the individual is merged in 
 the mass of humanity which is engaged in 
 dangerous occupations. The sense of mutual 
 dependence must be enormously increased, 
 and the instinct of fellowship is called into 
 vivid activity. Fellowship in danger is ex- 
 hilarating. Men face death in a spirit they 
 never thought of before ; and if a man is 
 mortally wounded his distress at the ending 
 of his own life is generally discounted by 
 the feeling that there are numbers of others 
 left to deal with the enemy. Man, for once 
 in a way, recognises himself as part of some- 
 thing bigger. The sense of comradeship 
 shows itself in its noblest aspects, as the 
 great force it ought to be in all the affairs 
 of life. The sense of comradeship helps in 
 sorrow, and in effort, in danger and in dying. 
 It is the sense of it which enables men to 
 face the torrent of death-dealing lead and the 
 shards of the shrapnels. It is the sense of it 
 which enables men to think lightly of the 
 bitter cold of cruel wintry seas, when their 
 
THE CALL TO HELPFULNESS 233 
 
 ship may be struck at any moment by a torpedo 
 or a mine. 
 
 The comradeship feeling naturally gives 
 rise to the aspiration to do something that 
 man's fellows in danger would endorse as fine 
 and heroic. The world progresses by the 
 latent desire of all men to help one another, 
 and the consequent desire to have any good 
 service appreciated by others, as an endorse- 
 ment of the service being real. We hear 
 frequent stories of men who risk their lives> 
 and sometimes lose them, to help other 
 wounded men, even enemies, whom, it often 
 happens, they know nothing about. There 
 may be nothing to show that the wounded man, 
 lying helpless out in the open, exposed to the 
 hail of bullets, is not one of the greatest mis- 
 creants unhung, and would not be better dead 
 and done with. But there is no question 
 about that. The heroic moment offers, the 
 impulse comes, and off starts the possibly 
 quite ordinary man to help a fellow man in 
 trouble, at the risk of his own life. To him in 
 any case the moment is glorious, for it satisfies 
 the highest aspiration of which man is capable. 
 
 The most hopeful natural instinct of man 
 is to be of service, and to act in concert with 
 
234 COMRADES AND THE ENEMY 
 
 others. It is only when some mischievous 
 instinct perverts him that he wants to destroy 
 instead of helping. The instincts which 
 impel to destruction are the ones which the 
 world tries to get under control, because sane 
 people are aware that indulgence in destruction 
 profits no one. It not only profits no one, 
 but it leaves poisonous germs behind it. The 
 germs of hate go on slowly developing, as 
 they did after the Franco-German War in 1870 
 and 1 87 1; and there can be little doubt that 
 the present madness of fruitless destruction 
 is to a great extent the outcome of long pent-up 
 hostilities generated by that war of forty-four 
 years ago. Both nations have been constantly 
 bickering and girding at one another, and the 
 final explosion was almost inevitable. 
 
 A vast number of causes minister to any 
 great event. People mistake who lay too 
 much stress on one to the exclusion of the 
 others. We admit a vast number of different 
 things as having . combined to produce the 
 awful madness of this war, and among them 
 the memory of the previous war, and the 
 galling terms which were made the conditions 
 of peace — which show the utter futility of 
 war as a cure for anything. But another 
 
BLIND STUPIDITY 235 
 
 cause was also the outcome of that war and the 
 precursor of this one, which is the madness 
 of self-complacency which took possession of 
 the Prussians and impelled them to the in- 
 conceivable stupidity of thinking they could 
 conquer and Germanise the whole world. 
 It is the most colossal object-lesson the world 
 has ever had of the stupefying effect of an 
 absolutely false attitude of mind. For one 
 stupidity led to another. The Prussians 
 persuaded themselves that we should sit quiet 
 and look on while they harried poor Belgium; 
 while they committed gratuitous murders on 
 civilians ; while they destroyed things of beauty 
 and romance which were unreplaceable. They 
 persuaded themselves that we had egged on 
 the Belgians to attack them, and that it was 
 justifiable retaliation to drag millions of money 
 out of the dwellers in the ruins they had made. 
 They were stupid enough to think they could 
 get serviceable help by associating themselves 
 with the unspeakable Turk. They were 
 stupefied by false reports, most of which they 
 engineered themselves, into thinking that as 
 soon as war was declared all our Colonies, 
 as well as India, would cut adrift from us 
 and offer themselves as convenient victims 
 
236 COMRADES AND THE ENEMY 
 
 for Germany's ambitions. They were stupid 
 enough to maintain that after their professors, 
 authors, and philosophers had been writing 
 books for years describing their malignant 
 purposes against us, and reeking with hate 
 from every pore, they were but meek and 
 innocent lambs, against whom perfidious 
 Albion had organised a pogrom. 
 
 We might go on for hours recounting the 
 gross instances of blind stupidity that have 
 so amazed us. We have been accustomed to 
 regard the Germans as great thinkers — and 
 so they have been. They have been great at 
 metaphysics and such kinds of abstractions. 
 But metaphysics do not bring men into touch 
 with actualities; not even with the notorious 
 camel which the great German philosopher is 
 reported to have said it was unnecessary for 
 him to see as he could develop it out. of his own 
 inner consciousness. Metaphysics tend rather 
 to draw the mind away from the practical, and 
 to dull the capacities to deal with actual emer- 
 gencies; and they seem to make certain types 
 of men fit subjects to be cajoled into believing 
 impossibilities, such as the obvious impossi- 
 bility of dominating the world by force, and 
 even to induce them to extenuate force which 
 
RIGHT RULING 237 
 
 is used without a shadow of pretence of morality, 
 honesty^ frankness, or fairness. 
 
 It is always the case that an evil theory 
 or an evil habit, such as indulgence in things 
 which are of evil odour in matters of morality, 
 breeds consequences all around, like a poisonous 
 fungus. Corruption never confines itself to 
 its own area. It contaminates all things in 
 its neighbourhood. The German theory that 
 human beings can be ruled better by blows 
 than by good-will, that a country — which they 
 forget is a people — can be conquered in the 
 old mediaeval fashion, is in itself so poisonously 
 blind and stupid that it is sure to infect all 
 things in its neighbourhood. The ideal of 
 right ruling is ruling for the well-being of the 
 ruled. But how is it to be supposed that a 
 conquered people could be ruled for their 
 benefit, or even for the ultimate benefit of 
 the conquerors? If they were worth ruling 
 they would never submit. If they tamely 
 submitted they would not be worth ruling. 
 In either case there would be no chance of its 
 developing the vigorous vitality in making the 
 world fit to live in, which is essential to the 
 well-being of any people. The German theory 
 in this respect is justifiably called infernal, 
 
238 COMRADES AND THE ENEMY 
 
 because it is directly contrary to the spiritual 
 health and progress of the world. What the 
 world needs is helpfulness, the general good- 
 will that works to great ends in comradeship — 
 room for free play of individual energies of count- 
 less varieties; for free energies, which spring 
 spontaneously and healthily in men's natures. 
 
 The world needs to realise that things have 
 to be done by the concurrence of an infinite 
 variety of minds; that nothing is achieved by 
 ill-will but more ill-will, but that all things 
 are possible to good-will. The Germans have 
 fastened on the idea that good-will is only 
 needed for themselves. They are on a grand 
 scale like the walled-in selfish man who thinks 
 his own worldly interests are the only things 
 that concern him. The selfish monomaniac 
 achieves nothing that is of any real service 
 to any one, least of all to himself. If he is 
 strong he can do a lot of harm ; and so can the 
 Germans. He can be a danger to his neigh- 
 bourhood ; and so can 4:he Germans. Prussia 
 might ultimately effect the entire destruction 
 of our civilisation ; it might destroy in a few 
 years all that has been done to better human 
 conditions in many centuries. If Prussia 
 succeeded in permanently weakening the 
 
ABUSE OF PRIVILEGE 239 
 
 nations which uphold order and spiritual 
 health, they would provide more opportunities 
 for the disorderly and ill-regulated nations. 
 Europe might even be so debilitated that 
 that ominous expression, " the yellow peril," 
 might come to have some real meaning. 
 
 And it all comes out of the acceptance by 
 the nation of a false theory of life. It comes 
 mainly from the party, known as the Prussian 
 Junkers, who, one would surmise, must be 
 a great fount and source of stupidity, since 
 they still batten upon the worn-out theory of 
 class privilege ; which tries still to induce 
 men to believe that the world was made for 
 the few, and that when the few think it for 
 their advantage the many are to be driven 
 to kill one another in hundreds of thousands 
 and to suffer every kind of torment without 
 any one except the few gaining any advantage. 
 The many are taking an astonishingly long 
 time to realise that privileged people always 
 think of their own advantages, be they ever 
 so trivial, before they concern themselves 
 about the well-being of the people who grant 
 them privileges. No one ever thinks any 
 better of people who grant him privileges. He 
 generally thinks them fools, and treats them 
 
2 4 o COMRADES AND THE ENEMY 
 
 as such. There must have been a quite 
 remarkable proportion of docile fools in 
 Germany in recent years, or it would have 
 been impossible for"their privileged Junkers to 
 perpetrate such a colossal crime, after flaunt- 
 ing their intentions for years. The poor docile 
 fools have to pay by being driven by their 
 own countrymen like sheep to the shambles. 
 
 I suppose some of us may not see the end 
 of this war. 1 But we have that feeling of fellow- 
 ship with those who will survive it that we 
 project ourselves into the future as if we were 
 going to be there, and hope ardently that 
 humanity will join hands in good-will across 
 the frontiers and say to the privileged few 
 that they have made mischief enough, and 
 after the horrors of this prolonged orgy of 
 hatred really make up their minds not to be 
 used for the advantage or enrichment of the 
 few any longer. 
 
 But the basis of such good-will must always 
 lie in understanding. There is always hope 
 even for quarrelsome people if they try hard 
 to understand each other — if they try to get 
 into the convolutions of an adversary's mind 
 
 1 Sir Hubert Parry died October 7, 1918} one month before the 
 armistice with Germany. 
 
FALSE CONSTRUCTIONS 241 
 
 and see how he comes to think what he does. 
 That, we perceive, the Germans did not try 
 to do. They tried to do the very reverse. 
 Like hopelessly quarrelsome people they 
 always tried to put a false construction on 
 everything every one else did. They tried to 
 be so supremely clever that they could always 
 see something that was not there, especially 
 when any people did anything which was 
 simply honest and straightforward. They 
 developed such a situation that nobody could 
 trust them, and therefore they could trust 
 nobody. And distrust brought the usual 
 resort to violence. Somebody will have to 
 pay the penalty. We hope it will not be our- 
 selves. Humanity, at any rate, will have to 
 pay heavily, so let us hope that when it has 
 paid it will get wisdom and understanding 
 from the experience. 
 
 Do not think because I go on discussing 
 the Germans I am only thinking of them. I 
 think of the many parallels in all sorts of human 
 conditions. I have my eye ultimately on 
 ourselves. I believe we fully appreciate the 
 value of helpfulness ; and we know the delight 
 of doing things in companionship, and endorse 
 the truth that the world progresses better 
 
 R 
 
242 COMRADES AND THE ENEMY 
 
 by good-will than by any amount of remorse- 
 less driving. I do not have any apprehension 
 that the College will be afflicted by stupefying 
 aberrations ; but still, in times of violent 
 excitement, even our most ancient friends 
 sometimes astonish us. Violent excitement 
 always paralyses a certain* amount of common 
 sense. But in any case, we have definite and 
 pacific things on which we can concentrate 
 our minds, out of the range of bellicose excite- 
 ments ; and to such alleviations I should com- 
 mend all who are disposed to feed solely on 
 war news. If the Germans had been content 
 to devote themselves to metaphysics and music 
 the world might have been spared the painful 
 and offensive exhibition they have made of 
 themselves. I do not mean to recommend 
 metaphysics to you as a safeguard against 
 aberrations, but I might without hesitation 
 recommend music. We might add the hope 
 that the Germans may go back to their music 
 too, and leave alone the business of dominating 
 the world by any other means but peaceful art ; 
 which, in truth, until this evil day of their own 
 miscontriving, they had nearly accomplished. 
 
 January 191 5. 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL IN WAR 
 
 We have to part with some who have not 
 finished their College time, but have been 
 impelled by heroic impulses to join the Forces 
 who are upholding the nation's honour, and 
 to risk their lives in the dreadful turmoil of 
 war while they are still pupils of the College. 
 Nominally, their departure is only temporary; 
 but it gives us a little twitch of the heart to 
 use the word " temporary," for we know too 
 well how great the risks are, and that they 
 may never come back to us to develop to 
 completeness those fine artistic qualities which 
 might have brought special honour to us and 
 even to the nation. We must applaud their 
 spirit to the full, and look forward in the hope 
 that some day we shall see them among us 
 again after acquitting themselves worthily. 
 It will be a proud day for us, for it will remind 
 us that young musicians are as ready for things 
 
 243 
 
244 THE INDIVIDUAL IN WAR 
 
 that require bodily activity, energy, the en- 
 durance of very hard conditions, and the facing 
 of many horrible dangers, as the best of men 
 in other walks of life. 
 
 It is very natural that people should think 
 it unlikely that those who are musically en- 
 dowed should be fit for such experiences; they 
 are nurtured in things which breed refinement, 
 delicacy of sentiment, and the poetical and 
 sensitive qualities rather than those that are 
 supposed to help in action. The question 
 whether the real cultivation of the mind lessens 
 the hardihood of the body is one of the most 
 important ones humanity has to solve in these 
 days. There are excuses for the strenuous 
 sporting type of men despising the men of 
 study. They see so many mere loafers who 
 toy with art and poetry and other literature, 
 and make it an excuse for a life of languid 
 self-indulgence. So they think all people 
 who do not join their sports must be feeble 
 loafers. But their reasoning suffers from 
 incomplete observation. The real question 
 is whether the spiritual or artistic education 
 which brings much greater sensitiveness of 
 every kind, and makes pain and distress more 
 difficult to bear, does not bring also greater 
 
THE NEW ARMY 245 
 
 ardour and keenness, and greater self-mastery, 
 which amply compensate. People who dis- 
 like education and distrust all forms of mental 
 development, and there are plenty of them, 
 say it makes people soft, and that men fought 
 and endured better when they were more 
 nearly on a level with pigs. Our theory 
 is quite the reverse, that the development of 
 real capacities of mind makes men more stead- 
 fast, more capable of self-sacrifice, and more 
 brave — and the events going on now fortify- 
 that view. It is most improbable that any 
 large army ever known has approached within 
 hail of our present army in the matter of mental 
 development and education, because, being a 
 voluntary army, such a large proportion are 
 drawn from superior and more educated classes 
 than in conscript armies. But no one questions 
 their courage and devotion, or their capacity 
 to go through with the frightfully rough 
 conditions of the trenches. They know what 
 they have to do, and a well - nurtured mind 
 helps them to accomplish it. 
 
 One of our College boys, who has now got 
 a commission, told me a good while ago, before 
 he enlisted, that he had a horror of killing any- 
 thing. It inspired him with such loathing 
 
246 THE INDIVIDUAL IN WAR 
 
 that it kept him back for a while. But the 
 sense of duty prevailed, and the last time I 
 saw him he was dressed in khaki and looked 
 as fine and determined a soldier as ever you 
 could wish to see. I know of others too, 
 endowed with refined and delicate perceptions, 
 who found the rough conditions of camp 
 life, and the total cessation of all the finer 
 influences of the art they were born for, very 
 trying. But they have made themselves face 
 it, and one of them at least is now in the trenches. 
 We have no fear of their not being equal in 
 dash and daring to the best in any rank of 
 life. I am not sure indeed that there is not 
 some risk of their being too rash and need- 
 lessly exposing lives which really have rather 
 an exceptional value. Musicians are liable 
 to be lifted off their feet into the higher plane 
 of fervent enthusiasm, which makes personal 
 considerations of little moment ; and we know 
 one or two who in such a state of mind would 
 expose themselves to a fearful death without 
 any concern at all. 
 
 One of the cruellest things in warfare is 
 the uncertainty of it all. It is the merest 
 chance who falls and who survives, except 
 that those who are endowed with the finest 
 
WHEN HEROES FALL 247 
 
 qualities are likeliest to expose themselves to 
 danger. 
 
 In the awful waste of human life that is 
 now going on, there may be many men killed 
 who, if they were spared, might be numbered 
 among the world's greatest heroes. It is 
 always possible that a nation might fail at a 
 great crisis because the man who could cope 
 with it had been killed too soon. Nelson 
 might very well have been killed either in 
 Corsica or at Teneriffe, and there might not 
 have been any one left fit to make the battles 
 of the Nile and Trafalgar live among the 
 greatest episodes in our history of warfare. 
 Wellington was nearly killed in the abject 
 campaign in the Low Countries in 1794, of 
 which he himself said, " It has always been a 
 marvel to me how any of us escaped " ; and 
 where would the campaign of the Peninsula 
 and Waterloo have been then ? The unbeaten 
 Captain, Marlborough, nearly lost his life 
 in the wreck of the Gloucester on Yarmouth 
 Sands in 1682, and one wonders what history 
 would have been like without him at Blenheim 
 and Ramillies ; Clive, the founder of our 
 Indian Empire, merely survived through the 
 bewilderment of a Frenchman in a duel ; 
 
2 4 B THE INDIVIDUAL IN WAR 
 
 Clyde, 1 the hero of the suppression of the 
 Indian Mutiny, narrowly escaped at the Alma, 
 Roberts at Delhi, and many of our greatest 
 leaders of men in hundreds of vital contests 
 might easily have fallen in some obscure foray 
 before they revealed the great qualities which 
 have helped to make us love and be proud of 
 our England. 
 
 The terrible chances of war ought to make 
 us capable of taking thought seriously. . It is 
 very desirable in these days. We have no 
 need to be affected by that common mistake 
 of light-minded people, who think that those 
 who take serious things seriously cannot be 
 merry and light-hearted and joke and enjoy 
 fun, but live in gloomy preoccupation and 
 aloofness. A man can be among the merriest 
 and most light-hearted and be gay and glad 
 in all the joys of life, and yet feel serious things 
 deeply and fully. A glum face is no proof 
 of seriousness, nor a merry eye of levity. A 
 glum face is a proof as often as not of mere 
 personal discontent, or exasperated egotism; 
 not of sympathy with other people's distresses. 
 Some men can joke on the inevitable edge of 
 personal disaster, and laugh in the face of 
 
 1 Sir Colin Campbell. 
 
COURAGE AT HOME 249 
 
 death; but they would not laugh or joke in 
 the presence of a fellow creature's sufferings 
 or misfortunes. The man who has courage 
 enough to keep cheerful in his own misfortunes, 
 and is downcast only about other people's, 
 has the true and serviceable admixture of 
 seriousness and cheerfulness. We hear of 
 plenty of such splendid men in the trenches, 
 and you may be sure they take serious things 
 seriously enough. Their spirit ought to lift 
 us off our feet and give us a touch of their 
 heroism. 
 
 But in some ways the lot of those who go 
 into the fighting and accept discipline as part 
 of its necessities, and have something definite 
 to address themselves to, is easier than the lot 
 of those who stay at home. It is harder for 
 those who have to go about their daily avoca- 
 tions to show their mettle to the best advantage. 
 When people are surrounded with their usual 
 tables and chairs and all the comforts of regu- 
 larly ordered existence, with their breakfasts 
 and their dinners coming quite regularly, it 
 is hard to rise above the routine of trivialities 
 which have become habitual. It takes a long 
 time to get the average attitude of mind of 
 people in general changed. Habit is too 
 
250 THE INDIVIDUAL IN WAR 
 
 strong. Sometimes the apparent character 
 of a people is hustled into change by a 
 cataclysm. 
 
 No doubt if the enemy had succeeded in 
 smashing up our homes, even apparently silly 
 people might have been made serious. But 
 we have been in some ways too lucky ; and 
 silly and thoughtless people, seeing nothing 
 particular happen to their domestic arrange- 
 ments, go on being silly and thoughtless. 
 They merely drink in the excitements which 
 are daily supplied by the newspapers, or the 
 gratuitously idiotic rumours that flatter all 
 their lowest impulses. If you walk through 
 the park on a fine day you see vacant and com- 
 placent faces of loafers as usual, and the same 
 half-witted female dupes of fashion looking as 
 like chimpanzees decked out in fantastic 
 ribands and feathers as in peace times ; and 
 with all the horrors and tragedies and losses, 
 the over-rich empty-heads are as vulgar and 
 ostentatious as ever. There are too many 
 to whom the reality of what is happening has 
 not come home yet ; and there are ominous 
 signs that when their levity begins to fail 
 them they are becoming hysterical, and they 
 are showing themselves unworthy of the 
 
THE DUPES OF FASHION 251 
 
 splendid achievements of our soldiers and 
 sailors. Abuse of public men who are doing 
 their duty magnificently comes out in spasms. 
 Now it is one, and now another, and the 
 smouldering embers of party spirit are blown 
 into flame. 
 
 It is always so when people do not give 
 their minds properly to things and hold them- 
 selves in hand, and learn what fair judgement 
 requires. When stress comes, such people 
 are all abroad, and show utter lack of sense 
 of proportion and self-control. The people 
 who have had nothing to do but loaf and 
 amuse themselves are the trouble. They are 
 not accustomed to think, and are victims of 
 any temporary panic. Even when they try 
 to be useful in these difficult days, they, for 
 the most part, make a mess of it and get in 
 other people's way. If they have never tried 
 to do anything but indulge their momentary 
 and incoherent caprices, how can they be 
 expected to do anything useful all of a sudden! 
 
 If you will think, you can realise that every 
 nation, including our own, has an enormous 
 number of stupid, silly, vulgar, idle, unclean, 
 greedy, low-minded, dishonest people ; and 
 what makes the difference between one nation 
 
252 THE INDIVIDUAL IN WAR 
 
 and another is the proportion of those who have 
 fine qualities, such as sincerity, energy, sense 
 of honour, self-control, courage, keenness, 
 generosity, and high spiritual standards. The 
 comfort is that the great crisis has revealed 
 such a splendid number of high-spirited people. 
 One wonders, with great delight, where all 
 these hosts of keen young soldiers come from. 
 Their faces have, many of them, a new expres- 
 sion — the expression of purpose and object. 
 They, at least, have found their opportunity. 
 Life decisively ceases to be aimless for them, 
 and though endangered, it has some savour 
 of real achievement in it. Many of them 
 are inspired by the ideal of fine and devoted 
 service. We hardly expected the nation 
 could produce such a lot of them. They 
 come from every kind of occupation, where 
 their fine possibilities and qualities were 
 hidden ; where, likely as not, there were 
 no openings ; so we were in ignorance of 
 the existence of such a big reserve of spirit 
 and vitality among us. 
 
 It is no wonder foreigners were misled, for, 
 like ourselves, they were only able to judge 
 by what appears in newspapers ; and as news- 
 papers find more profitable copy in recording 
 
SPLENDID PEOPLE 253 
 
 the doings of the do-nothings and their levities 
 and follies, there was some excuse for the people 
 at home and elsewhere who thought we were 
 going to perdition. The event has proved 
 an inspiring surprise, for it has proved that 
 there are plenty of young and even old people 
 who are capable of taking serious things in the 
 right way. For it must be granted that break- 
 ing away from one's business moorings and 
 one's domestic amenities and affections, to 
 join the rough and tumble of the fighting array, 
 with a good chance of being killed or maimed 
 for life, is a serious matter. The soldiers, at 
 all events, realise by this time the dimensions 
 of the work they have got to do, and they can 
 still be merry in company with the hosts of 
 others who join in the serious work. And 
 we may gladly recognise that there are lots 
 of splendid people among the civil population, 
 too, who are quietly and devotedly giving all 
 they have to give of service (and of money, too) 
 to help those who are in difficulties, and the 
 wounded and the bereaved. They are for 
 the most part such as have had something 
 definite to do in life, and have been in the habit 
 of taking some things seriously. 
 
 You at the College, are happy in this respect, 
 
254 THE INDIVIDUAL IN WAR 
 
 for you have your own special work, which 
 naturally invites serious attention. So when 
 it is the affairs of the nation which need serious- 
 ness, it ought not to be difficult for you, young 
 as you are, to find the right attitude of mind. 
 Of course you are merry, and small blame to 
 you while you are young and the zest of life 
 is still strong in you. But your cheerfulness 
 is not, as far as I can see, the merriment of 
 levity, but the wholesome joy of life and doing, 
 which, in spite of the background of terrible 
 things, cannot and need not be extinguished. 
 As I have said before, civil life has to go on ; 
 and people who have definite things to do, such 
 as developing special gifts of art, can help 
 and keep their minds healthily balanced by 
 doing what they have got to do with all their 
 might — and as far as the great world issues are 
 concerned, by trying to understand them and 
 develop level judgement about them. They 
 can help by being patient and steadfast, not 
 blown about by every gust of capricious excite- 
 ment ; by lending a hand when chance offers, 
 without either selfish hanging back or equally 
 selfish obtrusiveness ; by lending a heart 
 when sympathy is called for, and trying to 
 contribute to the honour of our country in 
 
WHOLESOME JOY 255 
 
 the final outcome. And if the final outcome 
 for this country is victory, we shall do well 
 to remember that it can be completed only 
 by other victories than those of arms — by such 
 victories as those over our meaner and baser 
 selves, by victories over the worthless parts of 
 ourselves and our lower impulses. All the 
 nation can take part in such victories, and 
 without them mere victory in arms, however 
 dazzling, will be incomplete. 
 
 May 191 5. 
 
THE COLLEGE IN PEACE AND WAR 
 
 There is always so much joy in meeting 
 together here at the beginning of a term that 
 a visitor from another planet might infer we 
 were quite indifferent to everything but our 
 own domestic affairs, and that great events 
 outside cast no shadows within. From one 
 point of view it is a very good sign. It is a 
 sign of mutual good-will, and of vigorous 
 spiritual health, and of the whole-hearted belief 
 that the art to which circumstances have 
 caused us to devote ourselves is worthy of 
 the honour we pay it. But in spite of our 
 cheerfulness I feel that if we could lift its 
 kindly veil we should find that the great strife 
 of the nations is getting more and more hold 
 on us. It is a sign of pluck and endurance 
 that we can maintain such cheerfulness, and 
 we hope we may maintain it to the end. But 
 when every day that passes has quite an appreci- 
 
 256 
 
PRE-OCCUPATION 257 
 
 able amount of it occupied by one overwhelming 
 subject, it is not possible that we should escape 
 its affecting our feelings about other subjects. 
 It is not possible that we should escape criti- 
 cising our own pre-occupation with anything 
 but the urgent needs of the nation, and ask- 
 ing ourselves whether such pre-occupations are 
 justifiable at such a time. 
 
 As the war becomes more and more exacting, 
 the strain upon the country seems to demand 
 the services of every one. So it comes about 
 that we feel impelled to consider our work 
 in relation to it, and whether we can justify 
 ourselves in continuing to cultivate music 
 when the attention of the nation is for the most 
 part engrossed in war. 
 
 It must emphatically be said that the College 
 is not a place for merely teaching people music. 
 It is much more than that. It has always been 
 a place with big aims of doing special services 
 to the nation, and it was organised from the 
 first with a view to their attainment. It aimed 
 first of all, as the solid basis from which to 
 effect its objects, at a corporate life. That is 
 the kind of inspiring association of diverse 
 people with a common object which unites 
 human beings in the happiest of fellowship. 
 
258 COLLEGE IN PEACE AND WAR 
 
 And the spirit always shown at these meetings 
 at the beginning of term proves how com- 
 pletely it has succeeded. 
 
 When the College came into existence 
 the old country was doddering along com- 
 placently in the ruts which had been worn by 
 long continuance in one very limited range of 
 music. Its attachment to choral music and 
 oratorios and the old-fashioned cantatas was 
 still almost unbroken. It took its musical 
 pleasures, when it took them at all, very 
 seriously, and all of them that were worth 
 anything were of one cast. 
 
 So we had it in mind when we came into 
 existence to do what we could to spread the 
 appreciation of secular music, especially 
 orchestral music, chamber music, and opera. 
 With such aims we naturally gave much 
 attention to our orchestra, and the men 
 who devised the system of the College acted 
 wisely in providing a complete scheme of 
 scholarships for orchestral wind instruments, 
 as well as for strings. As soon as we got 
 to work the orchestra developed in a surprising 
 manner, and before long surpassed our fondest 
 anticipations. And after its mettle had been 
 thoroughly tested in London we ventured on 
 
A PAGE OF HISTORY 259 
 
 taking it down into the country to give people 
 in the provinces additional opportunities of 
 hearing spirited performances of the finest 
 kind of orchestral music. After a while, 
 when the appreciation of orchestral music 
 became more generally diffused and oppor- 
 tunities for hearing it out of London became 
 more frequent, it was no longer necessary to 
 go to such expense. Provincial towns began 
 to set up their own orchestras ; the example 
 of a fine standard of orchestral efficiency was 
 set ; the seed was well sown, and country 
 places enjoyed the fruit. 
 
 But we never lost sight of our objects. 
 We trained some of the finest young players 
 of wind instruments alive, and superb players 
 of the violoncello, viola and violin ; and 
 they became available for employment in 
 provincial orchestras, as well as in the orchestras 
 which were always increasing in numbers in 
 London, and were like a leaven spreading 
 healthily through the country. Under the 
 enterprising guidance of Sir Charles Stanford 
 we brought out new works of importance, 
 and always maintained the highest standards 
 both in the quality of the works and in their 
 performance. 
 
26o COLLEGE IN PEACE AND WAR 
 
 Another of our most cherished objects was 
 the cultivation of chamber music and the 
 fostering of the taste for it. We worked at 
 it systematically year after year, and the 
 amount of concentrated attention it has entailed 
 for those of our professors who devoted their 
 splendid talents to the teaching of ensemble 
 playing (not to speak of the cost) could hardly 
 be realised without actual experience. To test 
 the results and give effect to our efforts we made 
 it a rule to give two full-sized chamber com- 
 positions, such as quartets, quintets, or trios, 
 at each of our chamber concerts ; thereby 
 sustaining the appreciation of a lofty form of 
 art which meets with but scanty encouragement 
 in modern times, even from amateurs of fair 
 average intelligence and musical taste. The 
 result has not only been admirable performances 
 of chamber music of every school from Haydn 
 to Franck, Debussy, Reger, Schonberg, and 
 Ravel, but the foundation of admirable quartet 
 parties of old College pupils, who expanded 
 the work we had done at the College, and dif- 
 fused the taste for chamber music far and wide 
 through the country, and even in the slum 
 districts of our overgrown cities. 
 
 Then the practice of having a College opera 
 
CHAMBER MUSIC AND OPERA 261 
 
 performance once a year in a public theatre, 
 which, after some difficulty and opposition, 
 was established, afforded us opportunities of 
 bringing out little-known works and of train- 
 ing a good many singers who have ultimately 
 attained to very high positions among operatic 
 artists in other countries besides England, 
 and of constantly supplying singers who have 
 had some serviceable experience, for employ- 
 ment by any of the operatic companies who 
 venture on such a precarious line of musical 
 enterprise. 
 
 We may not presume to claim that what 
 has happened since we came into existence 
 some thirty-two years ago was all owing to 
 our efforts ; but the facts are there for any who 
 are willing to make honest inferences. The 
 spirit of the nation was out to discover new 
 fields of musical experience, and in the last 
 thirty years the whole aspect of music in this 
 country has changed. Whereas thirty years 
 ago there were but scanty opportunities to hear 
 even Beethoven's Symphonies, and a tolerable 
 performance of his Choral Symphony was a 
 nine-days' wonder, and chamber concerts were 
 almost limited to " Monday Pops," and an 
 occasional venture by some enterprising 
 
262 COLLEGE IN PEACE AND WAR 
 
 violinist ; nowadays, orchestral music of the 
 most up-to-date difficulty is heard everywhere, 
 and chamber concerts are familiar events even 
 in provincial towns, and provincial people 
 know orchestral music of all kinds, and the 
 great quartets and other fine specimens of 
 chamber music, as well as they used to know 
 glees and madrigals and Mendelssohn's part- 
 songs. 
 
 Apart from these decisive lines of action 
 our policy has always been to inspire our people 
 with the widest possible views, and to make 
 their education minister to their understand- 
 ing of far more than the individual studies to 
 which they specially devoted themselves, so 
 that wherever they went after they left us they 
 might diffuse more light. For instance, we 
 endeavoured to inspire our organists with the 
 knowledge and understanding of many things 
 which are quite out of the range of their work 
 with their organ and their choir. We en- 
 deavoured to widen their view of art by 
 giving them hearty appreciation of secular 
 and instrumental music, and to fit them to 
 take the lead in any provincial town where they 
 happened to get an appointment, by conduct- 
 ing local orchestras and encouraging people 
 
DIFFUSION OF LIGHT 263 
 
 to take enlightened interest in music outside 
 the limited range of their church services and 
 their choral societies. And our organists, 
 spread far and wide through the country, in 
 cathedrals and great churches, have become 
 some of our most effectual means of diffusing 
 enlightenment in secular directions. 
 
 Then we have been able to afford our 
 composers opportunities which were totally- 
 unknown thirty years ago for hearing a vast 
 amount of music of every period and style, 
 and we have encouraged them to experiment 
 far and wide, and to watch modern develop- 
 ments and learn and assimilate what is worthy 
 of the name of art, and to dispense with such 
 things as are made merely for vain show and 
 popularity with the thoughtless herd. And 
 the result in this particular branch of art has 
 been such as we may well be proud of. For, 
 though two of our most gifted composers 
 were cut off in the very heyday of their prime, 
 there are always many before the public in 
 every branch of music — some whose mastery 
 of technique is quite thrilling in brilliancy, 
 and others whose poetic fervour and geniality 
 of fancy make us rejoice that we have helped 
 in the development of their personalities. 
 
264 COLLEGE IN PEACE AND WAR 
 
 And in relation to composers there was a 
 very important consideration which had to be 
 faced. Thirty years ago there were no oppor- 
 tunities for a young composer to hear anything 
 he attempted in the line of secular instrumental 
 music ; and even in our more fortunate days 
 it happens too often that gifts of a high order 
 are baulked and artistic development thwarted 
 through the composer never having a chance 
 to test what he has put down on paper by 
 hearing it. We had not only our own com- 
 posers in mind, but those who did not belong 
 to the College when, with the assistance of 
 Mr. S. Ernest Palmer, 1 we devised the Patron's 
 Fund. It was instituted to perform orchestral 
 works and chamber compositions by young 
 British composers, and it was the College 
 itself which insisted upon the proviso that it 
 was not to be confined to College composers, 
 but to be extended to young British composers 
 wherever they could be found, whether in 
 other musical institutions or attached to none. 
 And the result has been that a very large 
 number of young composers have had the best 
 lesson possible in hearing their works as they 
 
 1 The Royal College of Music Patron's Fund was founded by Mr 
 (now Sir) Ernest Palmer in 1 903 with an endowment of £27,000. 
 
THE PATRONS FUND 265 
 
 wrote them, and the public has also had the 
 opportunity of hearing a great many of them, 
 and the critics of exercising their wits upon 
 them. 
 
 If an institution is to be free to devote itself 
 to big aims and not concern itself specially 
 with its own interests and reputation it must 
 be sure of its resources. An institution which 
 has only indifferent professors and inadequate 
 appliances, and has to do things cheaply must, 
 no doubt, consider every course which may 
 induce the ignorant and gullible public to 
 glorify it and acclaim it the greatest institution 
 in the world. But such an institution is handi- 
 capped in carrying out any wide and generous 
 aims. 
 
 To enable the College to carry out its objects 
 it had to have professors of the finest quality 
 in every branch — men and women whose 
 knowledge of their art and powers of mind 
 were unrivalled. And if we look back to 
 the lists of our teaching staff we can see good 
 reasons why the College had little reason to 
 be anxious about mere reputation, but could 
 address itself to big projects. If we think of 
 the organ branch, or composition, or singing, 
 or pianoforte, or strings, or harmony, or 
 
266 COLLEGE IN PEACE AND WAR 
 
 counterpoint, or wind instruments or orchestra 
 or ensemble playing, in every branch we can 
 discern past and present teachers who have 
 stood almost unapproachable in their particular 
 spheres. 
 
 Then if we turn to the young people who 
 constitute the means through which the country 
 and our art is to be served, and through whom 
 the aims of the College are to be carried 
 out, we can see how fortunate we have been 
 in being able to range through the whole 
 country, and draw into the College fold a 
 large proportion of the most gifted young 
 people by means of our scholarships. The 
 College was extraordinarily fortunate in its 
 first group of scholars. They were not only 
 very gifted, but had, with a few exceptions, 
 decisive qualities of fine character, which set a 
 standard which has ever since been perceptible 
 in the College scholars as a body ; and being 
 the nucleus of the whole mass of the pupils 
 their tone has seemed to influence the general 
 atmosphere of the College in a wholesome, 
 strenuous, and serious way. The last word 
 rests with the pupils in general. If they are 
 responsive and have an inkling of what the 
 objects of the College are, and of their oppor- 
 
CONSTANCY OF AIM 267 
 
 tunities in furthering them, those objects are 
 constantly being accomplished. 
 
 Now it is the existence of such aims and our 
 constancy in pursuing them which justifies 
 our devoting ourselves to our usual work at 
 the College at a time like the present. I do 
 not feel sure that people who cannot see any- 
 thing beyond their own little personal interests 
 are justified in ignoring the special claims of 
 the country upon them. People who cultivate 
 art as a mere relaxation or amusement are, for 
 the most part, only serving themselves. If 
 they could serve their country more effectually 
 by joining with others in some work which 
 would be of national service perhaps it would 
 be better for them to give their music a rest 
 for a time. But people who are concerned 
 with larger issues are not justified in giving 
 them up because the times are unfavourable. 
 We are bound to be aware that music must 
 drop into the background for a time. But 
 that is all the more reason why we should be 
 faithful to it. 
 
 I hope I have made it clear to you that the 
 College has been working for over thirty years, 
 steadfastly and consistently, at definite objects, 
 and that the effects of those efforts cannot 
 
268 COLLEGE IN PEACE AND WAR 
 
 justly be ignored. As a matter of fact there 
 never was a time when it was more necessary 
 to be faithful to such objects. Music is one 
 of the most effectual ministers of civilisation. 
 And when civilisation is imperilled, as it is 
 now, by a fearful reversion to methods of 
 violence and destruction, it behoves those who 
 are concerned with the spiritual constituents 
 of civilisation to maintain their efforts to the 
 utmost. If we were to relax our efforts the 
 set-back to music would be so much the worse. 
 A great deal of what has been effected would 
 be lost again, and there would be another 
 long climb uphill. 
 
 It is impossible to guess what will happen 
 when the war is over. Perhaps people may 
 take their arts more seriously. Perhaps they 
 will be so wearied that they will only want 
 the most trivial kinds of music, as many do 
 now. When we see the wisest heads, the 
 men for whose judgement and intelligence we 
 have considerable respect, making prophecies 
 and having them falsified in a few days, we 
 become wary of keeping them company. 
 The best we can do is to try to discern what 
 will be serviceable to do, and do it with all 
 our might. The work the College has been 
 
SPIRITUAL CONSTITUENTS 269 
 
 doing will be needed even more in the future 
 than it has been in the past, and each of us can 
 contribute something towards it. It is always 
 much happier, as well as more profitable, to 
 work together for ends with which we can 
 sympathise than to play for our own hands. 
 It is, moreover, a lower type of being who is 
 only concerned for his own private interests. 
 Even when a man is straining every nerve 
 to get the best out of himself and develop such 
 talents as he has, he will get better results 
 and make a much more enjoyable business 
 of his life if he can see his work in its 
 relation to other people, and can feel that 
 what he is making of himself will minister to 
 their good. 
 
 There never was a time when it was more 
 needful to take our art seriously. The College 
 has been a happy place, mainly because so 
 many of its people have taken their work 
 heartily and honestly, and have tried to under- 
 stand its infinite variety, and discern in what 
 ways it can be of most service to humanity. 
 It is a mere truism to say that the best of any- 
 thing is that which is most widely serviceable. 
 As long as we aim steadfastly at the best we 
 can concentrate ourselves on our College work 
 
270 COLLEGE IN PEACE AND WAR 
 
 in war time as in peace time with clear con- 
 sciences. We have our special way of serving 
 our country, and we shall serve it best by making 
 that service as hearty as we can. 
 
 September 191 5. 
 
AT THE LAST 
 
 271 
 
ORDER AND DISORDER 
 
 I daresay you may have noticed that we are 
 constantly being told in speeches and in print 
 that when the war is over the old world, to 
 which we had grown accustomed before it, 
 will have disappeared, and a new order of 
 things will prevail. As some one says, " The 
 old order changeth, yielding place to new." I 
 confess I do not believe it. There are things 
 that are too deeply rooted to be abolished in a 
 few short years, even with such turmoil as we 
 have been going through. 
 
 After all, what do people mean by the old 
 order changing ? It is quite possible that they 
 themselves have got caught up in some tangle 
 of folly and frivolity which they have not the 
 strength of mind and will to get out of, and as 
 they are dimly conscious that such a state of 
 affairs is not satisfactory, they hope for a 
 revolution to take the muddle away and make 
 
 273 t 
 
274 ORDER AND DISORDER 
 
 them sane and wholesome by force. But that 
 is not the way the universe works. The change 
 must be in the men themselves. If they are 
 slaves to their baser animal instincts and their 
 rotten personal pleasures, they are not going 
 to be cured by any amount of bitter warfare, 
 or revolution either. As a matter of fact, 
 such commotions bring out the worst side of 
 the worst people. They are more likely to 
 engender recklessness than sanity. The people 
 who are fit to lead and behave with decent 
 sense are submerged by the crazy ravings of 
 people in hysterics, and the wild scrambling 
 of those who want to drown care or thought 
 in any kind of dissipation. 
 
 Think of the thousands whose highest aim 
 in life is to show off their vulgar clothes, 
 or to get tasty foods, or to be tickled with 
 the vapid trash and suggestive ineptitudes of 
 music halls and cinemas. All their delights 
 are at the expense of more sensible people. 
 Those whose only conception of life is to 
 fill it full of incoherent pleasures will want 
 them all the more when the tension of these 
 distracting days is over. The men who have 
 borne the burden and heat of the day will 
 want to have what they call " a good time " ; 
 
INCOHERENT PLEASURES 275 
 
 and as the general idea of a good time is the 
 gratification of least reputable impulses, it is 
 hardly likely that at such a moment they 
 will become sane and serious. The fighting 
 man is splendid when he is fighting, but 
 it would be superfluous to expect him to 
 be a thinking man too. There are a noble 
 few who keep the steadfast beacons in view, 
 and whose minds are not extinguished by the 
 horrors they have to endure, but with the 
 majority of those whose business is fighting 
 the great questions which concern humanity 
 most urgently hardly exist. And those will 
 be the things which will call for all our best 
 energies when we are trying to settle down 
 again. 
 
 It is very likely that we shall have a lot of 
 wrangling and plenty of impracticable pro- 
 posals. Perhaps there will be attempts to 
 take property away from people who had 
 plenty and give it to those who had none to 
 speak of. But transferring property to people 
 who never had any idea of using it to any 
 advantage either to themselves or any one else 
 is not likely suddenly to inspire them with 
 serviceable ideals. We are, unfortunately, too 
 painfully conscious that many of the over-rich 
 
276 ORDER AND DISORDER 
 
 have behaved in recent years with repulsive 
 selfishness and levity and blindness, and have 
 set a bad example to their less materially 
 fortunate fellows. But not all of them by any 
 means. The way many of them have behaved in 
 the times that have tested their mettle has been 
 magnificent. They had lacked opportunity of 
 doing anything serviceable before, but when 
 the opportunity came they proved astonishingly 
 worthy of it. We are naturally dazzled by 
 the magnificent grit and courage and devotion 
 of our fighting men. They, indeed, have 
 renewed our pride and confidence in the dear 
 old country. But what has been done at 
 home by devoted civilians, whom we do not 
 hear so much about, is quite as much a thing 
 to be proud of. 
 
 It is splendid to see on all sides the people 
 who are giving themselves heart and soul to 
 the service of the nation without thought for 
 their petty selves or getting anything out of it. 
 If the war has done anything to mend the old 
 pitiful disorder, it is by giving such splendid 
 human nature opportunities for showing that 
 noble qualities are really plentiful, and to what 
 good use they can be put. 
 
 But humanity has a very mixed outfit, and 
 
A MIXED OUTFIT 277 
 
 most of us are capable of being idiots at times. 
 You will remember the familiar saying that 
 " people who do not make mistakes do not 
 make anything." You cannot have personal 
 initiative without risk of making mistakes ; 
 and you cannot get things done without 
 personal initiative. One has to put up with 
 the liability of personal initiative to induce a 
 man to behave like an idiot, because one 
 cannot get on without it. One forgives the 
 mistakes for the sake of the keenness and 
 pluck and independence which are such 
 valuable qualities. 
 
 But then again, on the other hand, there 
 are a terrible lot of mistakes which are not 
 the result of initiative or independence but 
 very much the reverse. They are rather the 
 effect of lack of it, and of that unfortunate 
 herding instinct of the race which makes 
 people take their cues from one another, and 
 lean up against one another, and do stupid 
 things because so many other stupid people 
 do them — and that makes us feel depressed. 
 For the world is, as a rule, quite superfluously 
 occupied with exciting itself over follies and 
 mistakes, and about incapable people who 
 manage to push themselves into responsible 
 
278 ORDER AND DISORDER 
 
 positions for which they are quite unfit, and 
 serenely smiling idiots who sun themselves in 
 an imagined noontide of their own importance. 
 
 It is so much easier to see things that are 
 wrongs than things that are right. Real 
 devoted work does not obtrude itself. It is 
 too much in accordance with the natural and 
 profitable growth of the universe to strike 
 the attention ; it is too happy in doing what it 
 can do and is fit to do to trouble about recogni- 
 tion or personal profit. But, in fact, there is 
 a strange usefulness in our attention being so 
 much more arrested by rotten things than 
 sound ones. Bad smells are extremely useful 
 when they call our attention to things which 
 have gone wrong and have to be put right. 
 The people who correspond to them in actual 
 life deserve to be recognised as useful when 
 they call so much attention to themselves, 
 because it gives opportunities to realise in 
 time what is wrong with them. The essential 
 curse of the days we have been living in was 
 that so many people set their trivial amuse- 
 ments above their natural and serviceable 
 activities. 
 
 It was the weak surrender to the desire 
 for trivial personal pleasures which insidiously 
 
THE PRUSSIANS AGAIN 279 
 
 took possession of the well-to-do classes, and 
 so contaminated and weakened the nation 
 that many of us thought we should not 
 be able to stand up to a big war like this. 
 Fortunately, the follies and trivialities of gay 
 society, which occupy more space in the news- 
 papers than any other subject, were mainly 
 superficial. But there again the excessive 
 attention which was bestowed upon them was 
 useful, because it misled the Prussians, who 
 were watching and waiting for the opportunity 
 for a predatory onslaught on the rest of the 
 world. And they started too soon on their 
 campaign of might against right and reason, 
 thinking all our grit was gone and that we 
 were utterly demoralised by our indulgence in 
 mere pleasure and had become incapable of 
 strenuous persistence in effort. The pictures 
 afforded by the newspapers of the gross 
 levities of the over-wealthy misled them. The 
 fact that newspapers are not concerned with 
 quiet efforts to do good, and that the big 
 pleasure-seeking multitude do not care to know 
 anything about them, had compensations. If 
 the Prussians had waited a generation or so till 
 the poison had done its work more completely, 
 they might have had a better chance of success. 
 
280 ORDER AND DISORDER 
 
 Some of the thousands, who think the aim 
 of life is not to do something worth doing but 
 to indulge all their rottenest impulses every 
 moment they can, have learnt better ; but we 
 have not to go far to see plenty who are un- 
 converted. There are an extraordinary number 
 of people who still think mere dissipation is 
 the principal aim of existence. It is because 
 there have become such a lot of them that it 
 takes so long to get a little sense into them. 
 To make any great change in the world, or 
 even in a small bit of it like England, changes 
 have to be made in so many of the people who 
 inhabit it ; and that takes time and patience. 
 
 By this time people might have learnt that 
 trying to cure evils in spasms is useless. They 
 can only be cured by men making up their 
 minds what it is necessary and serviceable to 
 do and sticking to it. And it is one of the 
 things they might have learnt from this war : 
 that it takes a long time to do a big job. Even 
 some of the stupidest people are compelled to 
 learn from the prolonged anguish of such a 
 struggle. You will remember how half-witted 
 people about three years ago raved about 
 smashing Germany and exterminating its 
 inhabitants. They had not even looked at 
 
SPASMODIC CURES 281 
 
 their maps and considered the vast extent of 
 it, or the vast numbers of huge cities it con- 
 tains ; nor how many men you would have to 
 kill a day to dispose of a million in a year ! 
 Such people were too much occupied with 
 their ardent pursuit of trivial personal pleasures 
 ever to exert their minds enough to grapple 
 with big facts. And in spite of all we have 
 gone through there are a great many — too 
 many — of such people left still. One can 
 only hope that a big cataclysm will reduce their 
 numbers : it cannot do anything more. 
 
 It seems strange to us that people should 
 go on in their paltry self-indulgences when 
 men are suffering and dying for them, as they 
 are for the rest of the community, daily. But, 
 unfortunately, the facts glare upon us ! And 
 that is a proof of the continuity of things. 
 Both evil and good go on. The former can 
 only be eliminated, as the latter can only be 
 built up, by patience and steadfastness. So 
 when people make big assertions about world 
 changes which are to result from certain rather 
 astonishing events, we may well ask them to 
 discriminate. If the continuity of things was 
 really to be broken we should merely plunge 
 into chaos. We want to hold fast to the 
 
282 ORDER AND DISORDER 
 
 good with all our might ; and by all means 
 take such opportunities as offer to get rid of 
 folly and levity and selfishness and all the 
 plague of things which produce disorder and 
 injustice. 
 
 If the world had been nothing but disorder 
 and injustice before the war, there would be 
 some excuse for hoping it would be all changed 
 at one fell swoop. But it was not. If it had 
 been, our men at the front would not have 
 made us so proud, and our devoted people at 
 home would not have made such splendid 
 sacrifices or done such noble work. The 
 foundations were sound, though some people 
 had managed to build such ugly and rotten 
 rubbish on the top of them. There must be 
 all sorts of natures, and it is wisest to admit 
 it, and also to make sure that we ourselves do 
 not, through carelessness and self-indulgence, 
 get among the wrong ones. 
 
 And we can have no chance of coming to 
 any useful conclusions how to make our lives 
 serviceable and worth living if we do not try 
 to understand the past and how wise people 
 have tried to interpret mankind's experiences 
 and efforts. There is no need to agree with 
 what wise men have said and thought. As a 
 
STEADFAST PROGRESS 283 
 
 matter of fact the wise men always disagreed 
 with one another, and they go on doing so 
 still. That is where our personal share and 
 responsibility come in. What we have got to 
 do is to take interest in their views, and try 
 to understand them sufficiently to choose those 
 which are right and just, and not pick and 
 choose only the things that seem to favour our 
 own little personal interests. 
 
 It is on the thought and action of the past 
 that our own judgements have to be formed, 
 and if the old world is to pass away and count 
 as nothing, where shall we find the basis of 
 our own judgements and conduct ? The 
 glorious literature of our country will still 
 exist, which is one of the greatest heritages a 
 nation can have, and the noblest music will 
 still be available to inspire us ; and the finest 
 qualities of men will still be displayed, as well 
 as a good many of the worst. And it is 
 mainly on the ways in which people maintain 
 the slow but steadfast progress of the past that 
 it depends whether the former increase in 
 numbers and the latter decrease. 
 
 It is strange to think of, if we can think 
 of it frankly. Here we have one little allow- 
 ance of life to each of us ; and we can choose 
 
284 ORDER AND DISORDER 
 
 whether we make a sensible use of it or use it 
 for stupid blundering indulgence of unprofit- 
 able selfish impulses. One would think that 
 by this time men would have found out that it 
 was more worth while to try to understand life's 
 opportunities and how to make it really worth 
 living. But the insidious little moments, when 
 primitive instincts pluck at some of us little 
 by little, sap too often the defences of the best 
 intentions, and they go to wreck ; and the 
 defeated ones capitulate and spend all the 
 time allowed to them in trying to get away 
 from what is worth doing in order to enjoy 
 mere sensations, and guzzle and be dazzled 
 with shams, and laugh at ineptitudes and make 
 life into a pitiful failure. 
 
 It is a peculiarity of those who make music 
 the centre of their lives' activities that they 
 should have been specially connected with the 
 people who are able to make amusement the 
 main object of their lives, because by the mere 
 chance of having more than sufficiency of this 
 world's goods they are not obliged to wrestle 
 with the rubs. The classes which concentrate 
 on amusements think music is a sort of amuse- 
 ment. They keep it in sight as one, of their 
 possible resources of pleasure or distraction. 
 
MUSIC AN AMUSEMENT 285 
 
 It does to fill up vacant hours ; and the best 
 of them are sometimes saved from perdition 
 through the interest it wakens in them. 
 A musician used to be a sort of rather petted 
 menial servant. When not occupied domestic- 
 ally he was a doubtful but tolerated member 
 of the lower middle classes. The result now 
 is that it is not altogether easy for a musician 
 to come into close and frequent contact with 
 men who are doing the more strenuous work 
 of the world. Such men think musicians can 
 have no minds for anything outside their art, 
 and class them with the pleasure-seekers, and 
 think that they are not to be trusted because 
 they are supposed to supply pleasure for 
 pay, and not to do anything that is really 
 serviceable. It is indeed none too easy to 
 escape being absorbed among the pleasure- 
 seekers when they offer us dazzling baits to 
 be subservient and act as ministers to their 
 wantonness. 
 
 But in that respect things are changing. 
 There is the prospect of music becoming again 
 capable of taking a place in the real life of the 
 country. There is a prospect that men of 
 action and responsibility will regard it as a 
 genuine factor in the welfare of the nation, 
 
286 ORDER AND DISORDER 
 
 and not as a mere plaything for the vacant 
 hours of wastrels, or an appanage of fashion. 
 
 We shall have to adapt ourselves to a 
 more spacious and responsible position. We 
 shall have to look at our art from outside as 
 well as inside, and develop capacity to take 
 interest in wider spheres of existence. We 
 shall have to learn to judge it from the standard 
 of its value to humanity rather than its pleasure 
 to ourselves. And in so doing we shall ensure 
 the high standard of its quality. The influ- 
 ences which lower and degrade our art come 
 from narrow and personal aims. It is when 
 people have no scope of understanding, and 
 merely seek to gratify their petty personal 
 impulses without looking at the effect they 
 produce upon other peopled interests, that 
 demoralisation comes. Some people are find- 
 ing out through the stress that the war has 
 made how exhilarating it is to be able to be 
 of some service in the world, and how it makes 
 life worth living. The College has been 
 successful in doing some service to the world 
 already for a good many years. But there is 
 no limit, and we can always go on expanding 
 that service by developing more good sense, 
 and finding out how to steer our particular 
 
A SPACIOUS POSITION 287 
 
 work so as to escape the passing gusts of 
 fashion and the glimpses of trivial distractions 
 and space it out to wider and wider spheres of 
 helpfulness. 
 
 January 191 8. 
 
YOUTH AND AGE 
 
 I have never had the luck to see many of you 
 together to speak to since a day last term when 
 you did your kindly best to reconcile me to 
 some rather uncomfortable things which it 
 suggested. It is no use blinking the fact 
 that the world is moving on, and that some 
 obvious and usual consequences must ensue ; 
 and it is better to face them than try to behave 
 as if they were not happening. 
 
 It is splendid luck for the College that so 
 many of the people who took part in guiding 
 its precarious childhood are still participating 
 in its operations. But though they give proofs 
 of astonishing vigour, after some thirty-five 
 years of constant work in its interests, it is 
 inevitable that some of them must be getting 
 on in years ; and must appear to some young 
 people to be quite uncannily ancient, however 
 much they themselves feel young inside. 
 
 288 
 
ZEEBRUGGE 289 
 
 It is rather surprising to people who have 
 kept on hammering away all this while to 
 think that when the College began, a great 
 many of you, who now look quite grown up, 
 were not even in the world at all — and of 
 course it was a very different world from what 
 it is now, and, very likely, you have not much 
 idea of what it was like, and the joy of youth 
 is so all-sufficing that you do not much care 
 either whether such times were worth living 
 in or whether they were worth anything at all. 
 But all the same it was a very busy world, then 
 as now, though there was no hideous madness 
 of war to harrow our nerves, or such wildly 
 exciting performances as the singeing of the 
 devil's whiskers at Zeebrugge we had a few 
 days ago ! That it was not altogether rotten, 
 bad, and ineffectual is proved by the fact that 
 it got the R.C.M. founded and into working 
 trim, and that those who prepared the way 
 went through the throes of vast exertions to 
 get it done. 
 
 It is only fair to ask the young ones who 
 missed the opportunity to take part in such 
 exhilarating efforts because they were born too 
 late, not to think the days before they came on 
 the scene must have been dull and common- 
 
 u 
 
290 YOUTH AND AGE 
 
 place. I cannot help wishing the younger 
 members of the College could have some idea 
 of the way people worked for it. It was 
 splendid ! It would be useful, in these days 
 when indiscriminate repudiation is so much in 
 the air, if young people could realise that the 
 old people were not always old and could tackle 
 new developments and new achievements with 
 all the zest of the youngest in the present. It 
 might help them to understand the older 
 people, and give the old a better chance of 
 understanding them. 
 
 The relations of young and old are always 
 
 a puzzle to every one who thinks. The old 
 
 ought in the nature of things to understand 
 
 best because they must have been young 
 
 themselves, in a sort of way, once upon a time. 
 
 But in spite of it they most of them do not 
 
 face facts they ought to know. When they 
 
 were young they often thought the old people 
 
 old fogies, slow-coaches, stiff and creaking 
 
 physically and mentally, wedded to conventions, 
 
 unenterprising, obstructive and futile, and they 
 
 rarely take to heart that it is only natural that 
 
 the young, in the days when they have become 
 
 old, should have the same feelings towards 
 
 themselves. 
 
EAGERNESS AND PATIENCE 291 
 
 The opportunities of the young to judge of 
 the old ones are quite different — one would 
 think not so favourable. They have the dis- 
 advantage of never having been old, so they 
 cannot know what it feels like. It is glorious 
 to be young, when life is full of eagerness, and 
 there is zest for everything that comes — so it 
 is hardly to be expected they should do much 
 patient thinking. It is true that young minds 
 are more receptive than old ones, and they 
 get impressions more quickly; but they have 
 not come across anything like so many various 
 things. They have not had the chance to 
 know a tithe of the various facets of life, and 
 they can only judge by the limited experiences 
 that have come their way. So they often 
 think that the old people, who have seen many 
 sides of life and had a vast lot more experiences, 
 are rather tiresome when they advise them not 
 to do this and that which they want to do and 
 damp the ardour of youthful venturesomeness 
 and exuberance. 
 
 In one respect you are very fortunate in the 
 College, for the old people you have to deal 
 with have mostly continued young. They 
 keep on being young because they are always 
 in intimate contact with young people, and 
 
292 YOUTH AND AGE 
 
 keep their minds alive in intimate relations 
 with them. The old-fashioned pedagogue, 
 such as one used to see and hear a lot about 
 half a century ago, put a sort of brazen barrier 
 between youth that was to be taught and the 
 teacher, which shut out the human relations 
 between them, and quite justified the rebellious 
 attitude of the young people. He did not 
 understand much himself, and was afraid they 
 would find it out. That sort of pedagogue 
 used to be old before he was forty. 
 
 Nowadays when people go to work to 
 teach they try to get into sympathy with the 
 humanity of those who have to be taught. 
 They recognise them as their equals in many 
 respects, and try to get into touch with their 
 motives and the springs of their minds, and to 
 see things from their point of view — and this 
 brings youth and age happily together. You 
 will hear old-fashioned people decry such 
 friendly relations, because they suppose youth 
 will lose the respect due to age. But it is no 
 good forcing respect when it is not fairly 
 earned. That was the attitude of those to 
 whom in old days little or no respect was due 
 except on the basis of the birch rod and the 
 scale of punishments rigged up to suppress 
 
A RULE OF TERROR 293 
 
 infringements of tiresome and arbitrary sins 
 and wickednesses, which for the most part were 
 not sins and wickednesses at all. 
 
 Such people had to establish a sort of rule 
 of terror in order to maintain their position ; 
 and the result was that the young spent great 
 part of their time trying to defeat their tyrants, 
 and in mocking at them behind their backs. 
 
 I do not think you have any idea how 
 fortunate you are that the world has changed 
 so much in these respects. When people are 
 only drubbed and bullied into behaving them- 
 selves it only makes them want all the more to 
 misbehave themselves. There is always the 
 inviting excitement of escaping the punish- 
 ment, and it does not conduce to honesty or 
 right understanding. Order that is only main- 
 tained by force is always precarious. It makes 
 people like disorder. 
 
 Fortunately the College came into existence 
 just at the time people were getting wiser about 
 such things, and realised that the best way 
 to get order and good sense is to help those 
 who are wanted to be orderly and sensible to ap- 
 preciate the advantages of orderliness and good 
 sense. The old idea was that young people 
 were incurably mischievous and rebellious ; 
 
294 YOUTH AND AGE 
 
 the modern idea is that they are quite as 
 capable of judging of what is sensible as old 
 people if they are appealed to in the right way. 
 
 No doubt young people are more prone to 
 mischief and adventure than the old. They 
 have got full measure of the zest of life and are 
 keen for any new experience that will thrill 
 them. The world would not get on very well 
 if they were not. It is mainly through their 
 spirit and ardour that it keeps on moving 
 ahead. The inspirations which come to young 
 people keep the world alive and prevent it 
 lapsing into humdrum acceptance of conven- 
 tional complacency. A world that contained 
 nothing but old people would be very dull 
 and monotonous. There would not be much 
 spring or variety in it. It would mostly be 
 regular routine, and each day would be 
 parcelled out into its hourly duties and occu- 
 pations, with little chance to make experiments 
 or to do anything original or daring. 
 
 When old people are enterprising and 
 adventurous it is because they got into some 
 streak of adventure or speculative interest when 
 they were young and have kept on in the same 
 spirit ever since. There are not many old 
 people who could start a new line and face 
 
THE BLESSED YOUNG 295 
 
 a life of changed energies. Their mental 
 muscles have got into the way of doing the 
 same things over and over again and will 
 not adapt themselves to new ways. And then 
 they have had the opportunity to know a great 
 deal more than when they were young, and 
 that has the tendency to make them cautious. 
 
 But the blessed young are supple and fresh. 
 Their minds are not too much burdened by 
 experiences. They love the stir and bustle of 
 life which is still inviting and unexplored. 
 
 So in reality it is an enormous advantage 
 to combine the respective qualities of youth 
 and age. They can both learn from each 
 other, and the great change which has fortu- 
 nately come about in their relations is of the 
 greatest advantage to the world in general. 
 One might say that their respective spheres 
 of usefulness are marked out for them. The 
 young have the delightful privilege of pushing 
 the old along and not letting them get into 
 humdrum ways ; and the old have an equally 
 delightful privilege of helping the young not 
 to make too many mistakes, or tumble over 
 obstacles which they have not, in their eager- 
 ness, foreseen. 
 
 Life is a very complicated affair, and it 
 
296 YOUTH AND AGE 
 
 cannot always move ahead as fast as the young 
 think it ought to do ; and sometimes it might 
 move faster than the old think safe. So it is 
 as well that both parties should be patient with 
 one another and try to see if there is any sense 
 of the other party's apparent misconceptions. 
 
 The world gets on best by different people 
 trying to understand each other ; not by 
 banning certain things as out of the range of 
 discussion, and refusing to listen and think. 
 On the whole I think that in these days the 
 old are more inclined to listen to the young 
 and weigh their eager speculations than the 
 young to the old. I am not sure that it is 
 not a good sign. For nothing could be more 
 unprofitable than general respectable con- 
 formity to a local standard. Even when 
 initiative goes wild it has life in it, whereas a 
 complacent conformity even with the estab- 
 lished tone of a place like the College is tending 
 towards somnolence. 
 
 The acceptance of danger as inevitable is 
 one of the most helpful conditions of life. It 
 makes life much more worth living even in 
 the " feel of it." There cannot be any initia- 
 tive without some risks. Perhaps that is why 
 we must look to the young for it ; for it must 
 
THOSE THAT COME AFTER 297 
 
 be admitted without reserve that they are much 
 more ready to take risks than the old. One 
 might almost venture to suggest that the liner 
 the youthful spirit the more ready it is to 
 venture everything on the cast. It is there 
 again that the service of the old can come in ; 
 and is there anything the best of the old long 
 for more than to be of service to the young ? 
 They have always had a burning desire to love 
 and serve them. Even in the old days when 
 they used to whack them indiscriminately they 
 really wanted to serve them by so doing. 
 You remember of course " whom the Lord 
 loveth He chasteneth ! " We accept the say- 
 ing because we verify it in general application. 
 Old people try to show their love in other ways 
 now, and perhaps it is therefore not so easily 
 discernible, and where it is not discerned it is 
 easily flouted, and love that is flouted tends to 
 take an unpleasant flavour. It is just there 
 that the young are most liable to take the 
 wrong road. They cannot realise fully that 
 what all the best of men live for is the service 
 of the young, and of those that are to come 
 after — that their lives may be better and more 
 profitable than their own. It is the greatest 
 pre-occupation of all the old who have any 
 
2 98 YOUTH AND AGE 
 
 youthful energy left, and the young in their 
 headlong impetuosity often rebuff it, and so 
 miss or even destroy the most admirable 
 relations that can exist between them. 
 
 It might all be saved if people could main- 
 tain a high sense of courtesy. Courtesy has 
 in recent years been a good deal discounted 
 by the poisonous influences of competitive 
 commercialism. But there is no better token 
 of real fine quality than that same steadfast 
 spirit of courtesy which yields opportunities 
 first to others before taking them oneself — 
 the courtesy that never lacks consideration to 
 a human being — that gives real generous 
 recognition to other people's interests — the 
 courtesy that refrains from flinging the self in 
 the face of every one that comes, and develops 
 the feeling that we are all joined together by the 
 workings of something bigger than ourselves. 
 
 There are few things more charming than 
 the tokens of chivalrous courtesy in young 
 people. It becomes more valuable as the 
 world gets older, and in some parts of the 
 world it also grows more scarce. Where it 
 flourishes the relations of young and old 
 are sure to be fruitful, and the various pos- 
 sible mischances are safeguarded. Chivalrous 
 
CHIVALROUS COURTESY 299 
 
 courtesy is not merely a veneer. It has to 
 come from genuine qualities of nature and 
 attitude of mind. It only flourishes when we 
 give up the futile insistence on ourselves, and 
 recognise that the little insignificant item of 
 our own persons, which is ultimately all we 
 have to show, can only become of consequence 
 by its joining in the ardours and the efforts and 
 the interests of other people. Maybe courtesy 
 would save the older people from too much 
 pre-occupation in their memories ; it would 
 distract them if they are not altogether free 
 from aggravating flaws. It might even pro- 
 long the period of their energies ! 
 
 For though there seems to be something 
 of a trifle of selfishness in being absorbed in 
 one's own memories, it seems on the other 
 hand a very useful provision in man's life that 
 when his energies are becoming feeble he 
 should have the opportunity to look back over 
 the record and gladly recall and live again 
 those things which afford contentment and 
 happiness to remember. If the young people 
 have the luck they will some day be old them- 
 selves ; and then there will be a new basis of 
 valuation of life. They, too, will find out that 
 cheering and beautiful memories are among 
 
300 YOUTH AND AGE 
 
 the most precious of human possessions, and 
 outweigh all the utmost wealth that can be 
 piled up by millionaires. And they may find 
 out another thing too ; that though, as the old 
 Latin poet said, " The good things we have 
 had even the envious gods cannot take away," 
 there is a disagreeable fact that is not often 
 referred to, that of unpleasant memories even 
 the kindliest gods cannot relieve us. 
 
 A man's age is happy in proportion to 
 the few things which he can look back to 
 with shame. If he has been greedy, and 
 mean, and self-indulgent, and dishonourable, 
 and cowardly, and crafty, and self-seeking, he 
 is forced to try and forget. Such a man 
 generally spends most of his time in making 
 out the worst of every one, and interpreting 
 all other people's actions in the most unfavour- 
 able light in order to cajole his own conscious- 
 ness of failure ; and persuade himself that 
 other people are as abject muddlers as he is. 
 
 I sometimes think one of the reasons why 
 people got drunk so much a hundred years 
 ago was that they had such a lot of beastliness 
 on their consciences. 
 
 But if a man has lived generously and 
 frankly and kindly it helps his old age to be 
 
SWEET CONTENT 301 
 
 genial and kindly and happy. Even if adverse 
 fates have dealt cruelly with him he has such 
 compensations as help him to smile still with 
 the sense that he cannot be defeated — and it 
 does not matter much if the time is short 
 before him, when the good long time behind 
 him is a constant pleasure and content to look 
 back to. 
 
 So when you begin to think about it, it 
 will be helpful to remember that youth must 
 soon be gone, and to try to provide for the 
 possibility of old age, however keen and eager 
 you may be. Remember that it will be most 
 worth getting to if your memories are plenti- 
 fully worth cherishing, and never bring you 
 anything but a quiet sense of contentment in 
 having done your best to live a life that was 
 worth recalling ; then, the fight won by the 
 better self against the worse self, you will 
 have contrived to help the world to be a 
 better place to live in before it is time to take 
 leave of it. 
 
 April 191 8. 
 
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