The Music Critic Explains

ERNEST NEWMAN

A Critic's Lot—Like the Policeman's—is Not a Happy One—Happy One!

OF all the people who have to do with the arts and letters, the musical critic is the most disliked and most despised. The reason for his being disliked is obvious: he is always wounding the vanity of some one or other, either at first or at second hand. Actors and musical performers are notoriously the vainest and touchiest people among the artists. They are made so by coming into direct contact with their admirers. A poet or a novelist or a painter is admired and loved in silence, and unknown to him—except by the evidence of his sales. Mr. Hutchinson, for example, cannot see the love-light that comes into the eyes of the cultured shop girl as she reads This Freedom, cannot hear the sighs that rise from her deliciously stricken heart. Mr. Hutchinson, indeed —apart, of course, from the letters that every public man receives from enraptured women— realizes the esteem in which he is held only when he gets his royalty account for the halfyear. Again, Mr. Blank, the sweet-singer of cubism, may have the profoundest contempt for the work of Mr. Blink, whose muse grows lvrical over old-fashioned, conventional things like nightingales and moons and maidens' cheeks; but at least he is spared the anguish of seeing young ladies clasping Mr. Blink's latest slender volume to their bosoms, in default of the chance to perform that operation, as no doubt they would like to do, upon Mr. Blink himself.

AIDA, however, does know from the evidencc of her own cars and eyes, when Amneris is getting too much of the applause, and I myself have been in the opera house when the heart of an elderly Juliet, who, by rights, should have been sitting by the fireside surrounded by her adoring grandchildren, was visibly rent by the obvious preference of the audience for a youthful and most romantic Romeo.

Few people are robust enough to stand a cold douche immediately after a hot bath; and we cannot be surprised that the performer, after having spent an evening opening his spiritual pores, so to speak, in the heated air of the public's applause, should catch a chill when he opens his paper next morning and finds that the critic thought rather small bones of his performance. And the singer's admirers are almost as annoyed as he is by the criticism; the man who has exhausted his lungs and his palms to show his enthusiasm for the singer, feels, when he reads the critic's assurance that the singer had neither voice nor style, that the critic has as good as called him—the reader—a fool. So he joins the performer in a vendetta against that particular critic; and as every performer has his following (strange as that may seem in some cases) and as at some time or other some critic or other has fallen foul of each man's idol, there soon comes into being a league of music-lovers against critics and criticism in general. The very word "critic" is a term of reproach among these good people, as "Mus, Doc." is said to be among musicians, or, it has been darkly hinted, "tenor" is among the critics.

The word itself is a damnation without qualification. Housewives do not discriminate between cockroaches, agreeing that cockroach Jones is a vile creature but that cockroach Robinson has something likeable about him. Even so is it with the public and the Critics. "Critic" is simply the species name of a certain order of vermin, and since the species is vile, it follows that there cannot be any commendable individuals in it. A Society for the Extermination of Musical Critics would merely have to be started by some public benefactor in order to have an enormous membership; all singers and pianists and fiddlers and conductors would probably join it immediately. We may yet live to see our concert and opera programmes adorned with the slogan, "Swat that critic!"

I myself have been too long in the business to cherish any illusions as to the feelings of the performers and the public towards musical critics; and being a fair-minded man, I am bound to confess that the detestation in which we are held is, in the main, no more than we deserve. At the same time there is something to be said for us. I have long been of the opinion that the newspaper criticisms of concerts are unnecessary. Whenever I have expressed this view, my colleagues have heatedly told me that if newspaper editors and proprietors took me seriously, their (my colleagues') occupation would be gone. I have rejoined that I can hardly regard that as a serious objection to my views. Rather more serious would be the fact that mv own occupation would be gone; but in my passion for the truth and the right I am almost capable, like Wotan, of willing my own destruction.

THE question has many sides; but, although I am a critic, my own sympathies are entirely with the performers. These people take a purely commercial view of their activities, and, to my thinking, are quite right in doing so. It is perhaps no disgrace to a man to be a fiddler. There may be more useful occupations, there may be occupations that involve less cruelty to others. But in a free country, if a man chooses to earn his living by irritating with the hair from a horse's tail the intestines of a defunct sheep (who does not even get the credit for his own contribution to the proceedings, for the product goes by the name of catgut), he has every right to do so. He bitterly resents an unfavourable criticism—not, of course, because it is unfavourable, for he is too broad-minded to care about that, and in any case he understands the difficulty any critic must have in comprehending art so exquisite as his—but for the plain, simple, solid and sufficient reason that he thinks it may be bad for his business. I myself have heard him and his like protest against criticism on these grounds. The other day,, in England, they actually got a lawyer to speak for them in the press. If, said this learned gentleman to the critics, you went into a man's shop and then wrote an article disparaging his goods, and thereby diminished or tended to diminish his sales, he could sue you for damages. It was a moot point, he added, whether a disparaging article on a theatrical or operatic or concert performance did not lay the writer open to the same legal pains and penalties.

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The lawyer, however, quite overlooked two little points. In the first place, it would be difficult, I imagine, for the music-giver to prove that whatever had business he may have suffered from was directly due to the criticism. I have been a long while in this nefarious profession, and my considered opinion is that criticism affects the box office neither one way nor the other. All the laudation in the world will not send the public to something it does not want5 all the damnation in the critical vocabulary will not keep it away from something it does want. I have often wondered how it is that the theatrical public in particular always acts with such extraordinary unanimity. The average theatregoer does not read the highbrow critics; yet again and again we see a poor play taken off after halfa-dozen performances, or a better one (or perhaps a still poorer one) playing to crowded houses immediately. The only conclusion I can come to is that the theatrical public has a strange faculty that African travellers tell us other primitive people possess: the savage has no railways, no telegraphs, no newspapers, yet somehow or other a piece of news that is started in one place is common knowledge hundreds of miles away in a day or two. A thousand Londoners go to the first night of a new play or a new opera, and before lunch time next day, by some mysterious telepathic means or other, the whole theatregoing population of London knows the sentiments of the thousand sufficiently well to wend its way to the theatre that night or to stay away.

THE second point overlooked by the lawyer was that the critic is there by the performer's request. He gives his opinion only because he has been asked there for that very purpose. When the performer angrily flourishes a-criticism that he thinks may damage him with the agents and the public, and asks the critic, "Who set thee up as a ruler and a judge over us?" the answer is simple: "My dear fellow, you did. If you voluntarily come before a tribunal of your own appointing, don't, when the verdict goes against you, turn round and peevishlv deny the competence of the judge."'

I fully admit that it must be very annoying for a performer or a composer who has done his best, to be sniffed at by the critics, especially when the rest of the audience has applauded him. But he is merely paying the just penalty for calling in an expert. (I am speaking now, of course, of the critic who is really competent and experienced.) The performer himself and his admirers are in much the same position as the owner and the beholders of a painting that is quite good but not a genuine old master. The expert annoys them all by coming in and saying, "Yes, it's not a real Velasquez, but it's quite a decent copy." The experienced and competent critic cannot help listening to everything against a background quintessentialised, as it were, from all his previous experiences. It is a sheer impossibility for him to listen in the purely objective way of the plain man who just takes in the impression of the moment. The critic's long habit of listening for the express purpose of recording his impressions develops in him a specialized kind of subconscious memory. Suppose, for example, what he is hearing tonight is Schubert's Auf dent Wasser zu sin gen. He has heard, perhaps, twenty good sopranos in the song, and three or four superlatively good ones. From each of these performances there remains in his subconsciousness some special nicety of tone, some special subtlety of rhythm, of feeling, of expression, of personality. Blended with all these is his own dream image of the song, the product of many broodings upon its loveliness in the quiet of his own room or on solitary walks. The result of it all is that he has subconsciously within him a superidealized Auf dem Wasser zu sin gen. The ladies who entered for a beauty competition would have rather a trying time of it before a judge who had formed his ideal of female beauty from the best-looking women he had personally met, plus his blended visions of Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Semiramis, Lady Hamilton, and a few more of the lovely women of legend. It is before a tribunal very much like this that the musical performer comes. Can he wonder that, however good he may be, he is never completely satisfactory to the critic?

Now what would we say of the lady at the beauty show, who, having received no more than a silver medal or a highly commended, should angrily protest that the judge's verdict was an outrage, in that it might prevent her getting a husband? The judge would be sorry for her, would regret that he had done anything to damage her in a business way, but would realize the impossibility of making her see that, pretty as she undoubtedly was, she could not compete with the ideal his own visions, his own broodings, had woven for him. Even so, the critic is truly sorry for the poor performer who has done his best, and perhaps quite a good best, but who, compared with the critic's ideal, is only a piece of an ordinary tea service putting itself forward as Sevres. Any movement that may be started for excluding the critics from the concert halls and the opera will have a cordial supporter in me, in the interest of the critics. Something ought to be done to help these poor fellows to preserve their ideals of beauty untarnished.