A Musical Motley Author:Ernest Newman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SOMEBODY, either in the Bible or Shakespeare, once expressed a desire that his enemy would write a book—obviously in the malignant hope and belief that the enemy... more », not being quite at home in literary expression, would be unable to open his mouth without putting his foot in it. An old friend of mine, Mr Cyril Scott, has recently written a book— no less than a book of poems; and I find Cyril Scott the poet throwing such a flood of light on Cyril Scott the musician that I cannot help wishing that all the musical friends whose psychology I am trying to get to the bottom of would open a similar window for me into their souls. Not, of course, that I should long have the privilege of calling them friends after that; for if nothing pleases a critic more than to find another man out, nothing annoys the other man so much as the consciousness that he has given himself away. But after all, the critic is more at home in enmity than in friendship. The latter is a variable quantity; about the former there is a satisfying finality. No man whose horrible business it is to criticize others can be sure of how long he will keep a friend ; but an enemy, he knows, is a permanent acquisition. To the critic a friend is merely a delicate annual, while an enemy is a hardy perennial; and while the critic cannot get any man's friendship u by merely asking for it, the number of the enemies he can acquire depends entirely on i i/- h1mself. I wish, then, that all my musical friends would write books so informative as this of Mr Cyril Scott's; if they would, I myself should be prepared to milnerize the consequences to our friendship. For here Mr Scott has given himself up naked to his critics. The defects of his poetry are so unmistakably those of his later music that anyone who may have been in d...« less