competent to do so-with the views expressed by Mr. Findon as to Sullivan's high musical attainments, and I believe the recital of the meagre incidents of Sullivan's public career is substantially correct. My objection to the memoir is that it fails to make its readers acquainted with the man as he was known to those who knew him otherwise than by repute. I attribute this failure not so much to any deficiency on the part of Mr. Findon as to the inherent difficulties of the task. When all is said and done, there is little to be written about the life of Arthur Sullivan, as known to the outer world, except in connection with his career as a musician and a composer. No educated man can be more hopelessly ignorant of the art of music than I am myself, but from my literary and journalistic experience I have learnt thus much: that it is the rarest thing in the newspaper world to find a musical critic who can write about musical subjects in such a way as to make his criticisms interesting or even intelligible to the non-musical public. I am not cognizant-though on this, as in all matters connected with music, 1 speak with the greatest hesitation-of any biography of a celebrated British musician which has enrolled itself amidst the standard classics of British literature. Whether this is due to the fault of the biographers, of the subject matter of the biographies, or of the reading public, is a question I am incompetent to answer. Be the cause what it may, there can, I think, be no doubt as to the fact.

These remarks pretty well exhaust all I have to say on the Life of Sir Arthur Sullivan which has recently been published. What I have to say further applies to Sullivan rather as a man than as a musician. The first time I made his acquaintance was, curiously enough, in connection with musical criticism. Some thirty odd 1366

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XXVI.

years ago, I had undertaken the editorship of the Observer newspaper, which at that period stood in sore need of reorganization. In those bygone days, I remember my old friend E. L. Blanchard remarking to me "that the one faculty required for dramatic and musical criticism was a copious repertory of complimentary adjectives." Unmindful of this advice, I thought the public might appreciate a more independent tone of musical criticism than was then in vogue. There being a vacancy in the post of musical critic of the Observer, I called on Arthur Sullivan, to ascertain whether he was disposed to write the musical criticisms for the Observer. He accepted the proposal subject to the understanding that either of us remained at liberty to terminate the engagement if for any reason it should prove unsatisfactory. Shortly afterwards a new opera by an almost unknown but not impecunious composer was brought out in London, and on the following Sunday Sullivan's notice appeared in our columns. I was personally much struck with the article. The style was as clear as the handwriting-and to those who knew Sullivan's writing at this period of his life that is saying a good deal. I have forgotten, or do not trouble myself to recall, the names of the opera and its composer. All I care to remember is that the criticism was distinctly unfavorable, and formed a marked contrast to the wishy-washy eulogistic notices which appeared in most of our contemporaries, and in consequence it attracted a certain amount of attention. Within a few days of its appearance I received intimations to the effect that this style of criticism was viewed with disfavor in the quarters whence musical advertisements were issued, and that the continuance of such criticisms would involve the withdrawal of the musical advertisements. I had to consider other people's interests as well as

my own, and I came at once to the conclusion that to put the matter plainly the game was not worth the candle. It was, as I held, no part of my duty as an editor to elevate the tone of musical criticism, and I entertained grave doubts as to whether there was a sufficient public interested in musical notices to increase our circulation to such an extent as would have compensated us for the money loss accruing from the withdrawal of operatic and concert advertisements. I had therefore no option except to discharge the somewhat unpleasant task of informing Sullivan that I had determined to discontinue his notices. Nothing could be more charming than the way in which he received my communication. He assured me that he appreciated fully the reasons of my action, and added that he had already entertained doubts as to whether it was prudent for him, as a musician himself, to criticise in print members of his own profession. We parted on the friendliest terms. The article in question was, to the best of my belief, the one and only musical criticism which Sullivan ever contributed to the Press, and I can say with even greater certainty that it was the one and only attempt ever made by me to improve the status of British music as an art. This incident-which with another man might easily have led to a permanent estrangement-formed the commencement of a lifelong friendship. I learnt from it how singularly free Sullivan was from the personal vanity which is often said to be inseparable from the artistic nature. I realized how fair-minded and how sensible he was in business matters. I discerned the sweetness of temper, the kindliness of heart, and the affectionate disposition which rendered him so charming a companion, so true a friend.

My intimate acquaintance with Sullivan was, however, brought about by

our having a common friend in the person of Frederick Clay, the son of James Clay, then M.P. for Hull. Memories are so short-lived in the world in which we both passed many years of our lives that I am afraid to many of my readers the name of Fred Clay will be well-nigh unknown. At the period of which I speak, he was a clerk in the Treasury, and acting as private secretary to George Glyn, the Whip of Mr. Gladstone's first Administration, who, later on, succeeded his brother as Lord Wolverton. Clay was, I have reason to know, a most efficient secretary, and would in all likelihood have risen very high in the public service if he had not insisted on resigning his clerkship upon his father's death. Fortunately or unfortunately, as one may choose to think, he had-or believed he had-sufficient means to live in comfort without his official salary, and was anxious to devote himself to the study of music, to which he was passionately attached. He had before this published a number of songs, some of which had attracted considerable notice. I have often heard Sullivan express an opinion that Fred Clay had higher musical talent than he himself possessed, and might have been a great musician if he had ever devoted himself seriously to the study of the art. Sullivan was singularly free from any professional jealousies, and was perhaps inclined to overestimate the talents of his friends. However this may be, Clay applied himself to music too late to make any real progress, and soon involved himself in pursuits fatal to serious study of any kind. The story of a wasted life is one sad to read, sadder still to tell. After many losses and disappointments, borne with imperturbable cheeriness, the tide seemed to have turned for a moment in Fred Clay's favor. He had been commissioned to write the music for a spectacular piece brought out at the

Alhambra. The first night's performance was a decided success. On the following evening he dined with me at the Garrick Club, when he was in far better spirits than I had seen him for a long time. On the same evening he was struck down with paralysis, and from that time to the end of his days his life was a living death. The cruellest part of a cruel fate was that his mind remained active while the means of expressing his thoughts by speech or writing or gestures was almost taken from him. In the last communication I ever received from him he asked me to propose as an honorary member of the Garrick Club an American visitor to England who had shown him much hospitality during his own sojourn in the United States. letter was signed in a sprawling hand utterly unlike his beautiful handwriting of former days, but still recognizable, and was signed, "Poor Freddy." The words have always seemed to me his fittest epitaph.

The

old

Sullivan and Clay were united by a very close intimacy, by a common love for music, and by the attraction they mutually exercised over one another. Clay was then living with his father, and by his invitation I became a frequent visitor to his house in Montagu Square, and there got to know Sullivan more closely than I should have done otherwise. Fred Clay was then a very well-known personage in all classes of London society, and was liked by everybody, loved by many. No doubt Arthur's high professional reputation would have ultimately got him the entry into any society he wished to frequent. But he was not the kind of man who wears his heart upon his sleeve; he had a certain reluctance to putting himself forward on his own initiative; and I fancy that Fred Clay was the immediate instrument of Arthur's introduction to general society. Whether this introduction was bene

ficial or otherwise to his professional progress may be open to question. It is certain, however, that the knowledge of the political, fashionable, and financial worlds, for which Sullivan was to a certain extent indebted to Fred Clay, saved him from the narrowness of view which, as a rule, characterizes all musicians, actors, and painters who associate exclusively with members of their own profession. This much I can say with certainty, that Sullivan never forgot the friendship that had existed for many years between himself and the Clay family. He never spoke of Fred without affection, and showed his affection, to the best of my belief, in more substantial ways than in mere kindly greetings.

I am not sure that the accident which associated him with the author of the Bab Ballads in the production of the Savoy musical plays was an unmixed advantage to Sullivan as a musician. From a pecuniary point of view the association was a brilliant success; but I fancy the great reputation which accrued to Sullivan as the musical partner in the Gilbert-Sullivan-d'Oyly Carte firm militated to some extent against the recognition of his claims to be regarded as one of the past-masters of musical art. The British public is apt to identify any member of the artistic professions with the particular style of art in connection with which his name has become a household word; and I am inclined to think that the reputation which Sullivan earned as the composer of Pinafore, The Mikado, and The Yeomen of the Guard told against the full recognition of his classical works, such as The Martyr of Antioch and The Golden Legend. If I am not gravely mistaken, this opinion was that of the man most competent to judgeSullivan himself. Never was there a man less inclined to sing his own praises, to complain of his own griev ances, or to speak disparagingly of his

own colleagues. During the period when he was half worried out of his life by the dissension between his partners in the Savoy venture, I never heard him say a word concerning his coadjutors, other than friendly and appreciative. I knew, however, that throughout the latter years of his life he was under the impression that British musicians, as a body, had never quite done justice to the eminence he had attained as a composer throughout the civilized world, and that it was owing to the lack of hearty recognition on their part that he had never obtained the meed of praise to which the higher class of his musical compositions had entitled him so deservedly. His disappointment at the comparatively scanty appreciation bestowed upon Ivanhoe was felt keenly by Sullivan, not so much for himself as for the art he loved so well. He attached an importance to the development of musical art in our English land which I, as an utter ignoramus in musical matters, could hardly understand. But I knew him too intimately not to be aware that he believed in music as a necessary concomitant of national greatness, and worshipped his art with the reverence of an ardent believer, if not of a fanatic. The one failure of his professional career, the collapse of the English Opera Company, was a source of bitter disappointment to him, not so much from the personal loss he sustained thereby, as from the frustration of his hopes that an English opera, in which the composers would be English and the artists would be English also, might become a national institution. I have seldom known a man who bore so cheerfully as Arthur Sullivan losses which only affected his pocket. It so happened I was with him on the morning when he received the news that a financial firm conducted by a personal friend of his own, and to whom he had entrusted a very large

amount of money, had stopped payment, and that his money, as the event proved, was irretrievably lost. His first impulse was to express his sorrow for the friend who was the cause of his losses; he uttered no futile reproaches or idle complaint. The only comment I recall his making was that it was hard lines he should have learnt the misfortune on the morning of the day when he had to conduct the orchestra at the Savoy on the occasion of his first performance of a new piece; I think it was Princess Ida. I myself had been a loser by the bankruptcy, though happily to a comparatively small extent, and the subject was one which we had frequently to discuss at subsequent periods. But to the best of my recollection I never heard him utter an unkindly word on the subject of his losses or concerning those who were responsible for the catastrophe. This is the more remarkable as his organization was extremely sensitive alike to pain or pleasure.

In the year 1893, if my memory is correct, he was invited by his old friend, the late Sir Frederick Leighton, as President of the Royal Academy, to be the guest of the Academicians at their annual dinner. In addition he was requested to respond to the toast of music, which, for the first time in the annals of the Academy, was to be acknowledged as a sister art with painting and sculpture. Sullivan, to my thinking, attached a somewhat exaggerated importance to the invitation. The Academy dinners are, to speak the truth, neither more nor less than trade banquets, to which the Academicians invite their patron-customers, and throw in a certain limited number of political and social celebrities, just as careful cooks insert a few plums into a pudding to make it appetizing. If I may venture to say so, the Royal Academy had far more cause to be proud of having Sullivan

as their guest than the latter had of being the guest of the former. He wrote begging me to come and dine with him, and to bring with me a draft speech. I have had some little experience in my life of drafting strings of appropriate commonplaces for after-dinner orations, and I put together a reply which seemed to me adequate for the occasion. I found, however, that Sullivan was absolutely indifferent to the personal aspect of the question. His one wish was to lay stress upon the fact that the Royal Academy had at last recognized the claim of English music to be represented at their banquets, and had thereby removed a sort of stigma which he had long resented.

We sat

up till very late at night concocting and revising the speech which he ultimately delivered. To my mind, the views expressed in the revised speech were those of a musical enthusiast; but the dream-if dream it was-of being the founder of a school of British music was one to which Sullivan remained faithful to the end of his life.

I dwell on this phase of Sullivan's character because it seems to me there is a tendency on the part of his contemporary critics to represent him as a musician who had deserted the higher walks of his art for the lower, who had sacrificed his ideal for the sake of money easily earned and of a reputation cheaply purchased. I hold this view of his character to be erroneous, and I trust that whenever his true life can be written the writer will not fail to bring out the steady labor he devoted to his art, the earnestness with which he sought to extend its influence and to advance its interests.

It is undoubtedly true that a portion of Sullivan's daily life was spent in clubs, and often in their card-rooms. But yet-and this is a point on which I am far more competent to form an opinion than on the most elementary

It

musical question-he was never, in my opinion, a true clubman. By nature and disposition he was essentially domestic. His home, his books, his pictures, his dogs and birds, his household, had a sort of personal attraction which they rarely possess for men of the world, worldly. As a rule, he preferred dining at home to dining at the various clubs to which he belonged, in all of which he was a welcome visitor. His dinners to his intimate friends, about which he took any amount of personal trouble, were held, with rare exceptions, in his own flat in Victoria Street, not at restaurants or clubs. was often a marvel to me why, being what he was, he never married; but somehow or other he remained single to the end of his life, though I have grounds to believe that he more than once seriously contemplated matrimony. All that I or any of his friends can state on this subject is a conviction that if he had ever married he would have proved the most affectionate of husbands, the kindliest of parents. He was greatly sought after in society, and it is a complete illusion to imagine, as I have seen hinted in comments on his career, that he wasted in amusement the time he might have employed to greater advantage in the study of his art. As long as his health lasted, he worked hard throughout the day, and it was only in the evenings he was seen much abroad, and when dinner was over he was not unfrequently to be found in club cardrooms. The art of musical composition, if carried out with the earnestness and energy Sullivan devoted to it, involves, in as far as my observation goes, high mathematical ability; and anyone who watched Sullivan's play, as I have often had the opportunity of doing, could not but perceive that he played his cards thoughtfully and intelligently. He was, I think, a bad card-holder, and, in common with most