The Good Old Days For What We Have Received. The
Autobiography of Francis Toye. (Heinemann. i 6s.) THIS book is not to be recommended to Socialists or social planners, whom it will infuriate—unless, of course, they like to take it as a manual guide to the bad old days. Mr. Toye writes with engaging simplicity of his career as music critic and man about town during The last years of the reign of the gentleman-amateur, when (as he nostalgically recalls) there was no nonsense about merit and social connections_were more useful to a man in search of a job than any ;number of degrees or diplomas.
Beginning with his life as a boy at Winchester, where his father (was a housemaster and he himself a scholar, he gives a pleasant and !easy-going account of what must have been a pleasant and easy- going life in the musical circles of first Edwardian and then post-
11918 London, varied by long holidays in France and Italy and hardly .. nterrupted by the 1914-18 war. Perhaps a phrase of his own-
` fashionable Bohemian London "—describes most clearly the point of view from which the book is written. Mr. Toye is patently 'proud of his prejudices, which are sociological rather than artistic For intellectual. The concept of the gentleman is central in his philo- tophy of life, and this probably accounts for the rare appearance n his narrative of members of those " lesser breeds without the law," hom one might expect to meet in the autobiography of a music critic. Many would, no doubt, be written off by him as highbrows, It term which he uses in a vague pejorative sense which whets the reader's appetite for a sharper definition.
There is altogether very little about music and not much more );bout musicians. In one passage he speaks of English music as baying " never been nearer breaking into bloom than in the years immediately before 1914," This is a puzzling—and presumably Vevealing—judgement coming from one who assisted in an official Capacity at the full flowering of such composers as Hoist, Vaughan 'Williams, Bax, Bliss and Walton. It is hard to believe that Mr. Toye thought more highly of the group of composers coming to maturity in 1914, of whom he mentions Cyril Scott, Percy Grainger, Frank Bridge and Eugene Goossens ; and yet his words seem to bear no other interpretation. Certainly his enthusiasm seems most spon- taneous for the music of Verdi and Rossini, and he has little more sympathy with modern music than with modern social and political deals. Yet this confirmed laudator ternporis acti recognises the .part played by his own class and generation in bringing the regime to its death, and, although by age and temperament an Edwardian, he pays whole-hearted tribute to the superiority of Victorian ideals and ways of life.
The most winning characteristics of the book are its naiveté and Its good humour. Few writers have the assurance to admit to Unfashionable failings, to those which diminish rather than magnify them in the eyes of their readers. And there is something endearing in his admission that " after a thirty-five years' acquaintance I am still a little afraid of Somerset Maugham because he is the one person in the world who, I feel, deliberately and successfully sets out to make me feel ill at ease."
MARTIN COOPER.
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