England, Spring 1945

Extract

‘It is a blessing’—a friend once told me—‘that as a rule you musicians should be inarticulate.’ I need hardly add that my outspoken friend was himself a literary man. The answer, which of course did not then occur to me, might have been: ‘Well, what of it? if we take it that the only thing worth bothering about is the ineffable,’ though I doubt whether my friend could have agreed. He went on: ‘Look at all the nonsense your best people have uttered as soon as they generalize upon characteristics and, above all, upon the merits of their own or other nations’ music. From Rousseau, if you take him to be one of you, to Debussy's Monsieur Croche Anti-dilettante, one could make a staggering anthology, and that is leaving contemporaries in peace.’ True enough. Clearly, we must needs take the literary man at his word, but who would dream of taking a musician at his? ‘The English: that unmusical nation par excellence’, is a notion still deeply rooted in Continental minds. English music since Delius leading the world in ‘quality and quantity’ is a more recent view, propounded by no mean authority on this side of the Channel. The extremes, I suppose, compensate and cancel each other. Still, one often wishes to exclaim with Swift: ‘I have hated all nations, professions and communities, and all my love is for individuals.’