Читать книгу Things That Have Interested Me - Arnold Bennett - Страница 10

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It was in the half-forgotten days when there were horse-omnibuses, driven and conducted by men, and wit flourished in the thoroughfares. A bus-horse, checked too late, knocked his nose against a policeman's arm. The policeman, very ugly in face, cursed heartily. The wise driver said naught, but just listened and listened to the imprecations. As he was moving off, he gazed inoffensively curious at the policeman's features, and remarked with gentle melancholy: "You never sent me that photograph as you promised me." And then, at a later day, when motor-buses had begun seriously to compete with horse-omnibuses, a motor-bus was trying ineffectually to start, and making those gramophonic noises which we all remember. The conductor of the horse-omnibus just in front, taking down the way-bill from its pocket, threw over his shoulder: "Try another record, Bill."

Which reminds me of conductors in general, and especially of English conductors, though it is said that there are none. A certain English conductor is noted among orchestras for the beauty of his language at rehearsals. In fact, his remarks have been recorded verbatim by an orchestral player interested in literature. He said to the orchestra, in the way of guidance: "Sigh and die." He said: "Don't handicap the crescendo." He said: "I want a savage staccato." He said: "All this passage must be nice and manifold." He said to a particular player: "Weep, Mr. Parker, weep. [Mr. Parker makes his instrument weep.] That's jolly. That's jolly." He said, persistent in getting an effect: "Sorry to tease you, gentlemen." He said: "Now, side-drums, assert yourself." He said: "I want it mostly music." He asked for: "That regular tum-tum which you do so ideally." He said: "Now I want a sudden exquisite hush." He said: "Everybody must be shadowy together." He said: "Let the pizzicato act as a sort of springboard to the passage." He demanded: "Can't we court that better?" And he said: "Gentlemen of the first fiddles, this isn't a bees' wedding; it's something elemental."

Which reminds me that I was once talking to a celebrated Hungarian pianist about English conductors, and I mentioned an English conductor renowned for his terrific energy. Although I authoritatively informed the pianist that the methods of the conductor in question at rehearsals were so conducive to perspiration that on the days preceding musical festivals he regularly changed all his clothes three times a day, the pianist would not admit that he was a conductor at all. "I will tell you why," said the pianist, very serious and very convinced. "He always stands with his legs together while conducting. You cannot conduct if you always stand with your legs together. It is physically impossible."

Which reminds me somehow of music. I once went to a Philharmonic concert, and it was not so very long ago either—as music goes. Precisely, it was in November 1912. Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra was in the programme. Now, Also sprach Zarathustra was composed about 1896, and first performed in England, at the Crystal Palace, in 1897. But the Philharmonic programme in 1912 said: "First time at these concerts." And the very characters of the printing seemed to show a British pride in that dignified delay of sixteen years.

Music is a vast subject, and I recall all sorts of things about it. I remember meeting an orchestral player lugging his violoncello one night late in the streets of London. "Hello!" I said in the vernacular. "Where you been?" "Where I been?" he replied. "I been with a few pals to play at Virginia Water. There's a lunatic asylum there. There was a ball for the lunatics, with an interval in the middle. We were the interval." And still speaking of music, a certain fervent professor of the piano, pointing to a passage in a Beethoven sonata, said: "You can see him writing a passage like that and shaking his hair." "Yes," brightly observed the girl-pupil, "he had rather long hair, hadn't he?" Even sonatas, though but a branch, are a vast subject in themselves. I am reminded that a young lady went into a music shop and said: "I want a piece called 'Sonata.'" Shopman, after hesitating: "Which one, miss?" Young lady: "I'll take the one in the window."

A similar incident occurred on the very same day. A wealthy lady remarked to a friend of mine: "I bought quite a batch of six-shilling novels the other day for ninepence each, as good as new." "Really!" exclaimed my friend. "What were they? Who are the authors?" Said the lady: "Oh! I don't know. But the shop-girl assured me that she had read them herself and they were all very good." Which inevitably reminds me, and must remind all readers, of the British attitude towards the arts. At the very Philharmonic concert referred to above, I heard one musical dilettante say to another, after the Strauss: "Pity that a man with so much talent should prostitute himself in that way, isn't it?"

And I remember being at a picture-show at the Grafton Galleries when entered a large woman of the ruling caste with a large voice and a lorgnette. She smiled her self-satisfaction all over the place, revelling in the opportunity which such shows give to a leisured class of feeling artistically superior. She went straight to a Cézanne and said loudly: "Now no one will persuade me that the man who painted that was serious. He was just pulling our legs." She said it to the whole room. She said it to me. "Madam," I nearly, but not quite, answered, "a leg like yours must want some pulling." Which reminds me that I have lived intimately with painters, and that one of them in Paris, who had discovered that he could mix better colours than he could buy, once said to me: "I still go on with my colour-mixing. I get up rather late, paint until lunch, paint after lunch till it's dark, and then till dinner I mix my colours. It makes you feel virtuous. It makes you feel like an old master. Goodness knows, it's the only time when you do feel like an old master." And that reminds me of a group of provincial old masters of the British art of football, who, after a final cup-tie at the Crystal Palace, and an evening at the Empire, turned into their hotel just at closing-time on a Saturday night. They were seven. Said the oldest master of them all, glancing about him and counting: "Seven. A round each. Waiter, bring forty-nine whiskies-and-sodas. Then you can go to bed." And I was once—years ago—discussing English history with a young athletic friend. I pointed out that no battles, except civil scraps, had been fought on British soil for centuries. "Yes," he said, "all our fixtures have been away."