JOACHIM'S CORRESPONDENCE"
WHEN one reflects on the peculiarly international character of the republic of music, one cannot avoid the conclusion that Joachim was fortunate in closing his long and honoured life before the outbreak of the present conflict. The ties of family—his brother had settled and lived for a great many years in London—and the many intimate friendships he made in the sixty years which elapsed between his first visit to our shores and his death; the great influence that he exerted and the universal reverence with which be was regarded—greater than that inspired by any other foreign musician of his time —had made England something like a second borne to him. Yet it is only right to admit that these bonds, strong and unshaken as they bad been for many years, were slowly knitted. At the outset of his artistic career he was inclined to regard England as at best a stepmother of the arts, satisfied with a low standard of taste and of performance, and unable to distinguish between charlatans and genuine artists. He found' commercialism unduly prominent, and he was naturally dis- appointed by the unsympathetic attitude adopted by the leading critics towards the composers — Schumann and Brahms—whom he recognized as his masters, and whose works he strove to popularize. Again, in the attempt to • Letters from and to Joseph Joaehim. Selected End traneated by Nora Bickley. With Preface by J. A. Fuller•Maitland. With 8 Fail-page Plate* and Photogravure Frontispiece. London: Macmillan and Co. [12a. 6d. net.) imagine bow Joachim would have felt were he now alive, let us never forget that he was an uncompromisingly patriotic -German, and a whole-hearted supporter of Bismarck's policy, as these letters abundantly prove. In July, 1870, he wrote : "I have no fear of the ultimate result; the sense of right and my faith in the mission of the German people to spread its learning abroad will sustain me "; and on Bismarck's retire- ment in 1890 : " Even if we did not always agree with him, we always felt sure that his decisions were made after much thought and from the purest motives." The most we can conjecture is that, had he known what was coming, he would have earnestly hoped that he might never live to see the two countries at war.
Those who only knew Joachim on the concert platform will find after reading these letters little to impair an estimate founded on his public record. Great artists are not always renowned for their stability of character, but in Joachim's case the consistent pursuit of the highest ideals, and the resolute refusal to conciliate the majority, reflected a consistency of purpose which marked him in other than musical relations. There have been great executants who have been that and little more—men with few resources or interests outside their art. But Joachim was not only a splendidly equipped musician, a distinguished composer and conductor, but a highly educated man, widely read in European literature, and, as his correspondence shows, capable of bolding his own in any company. His observations on non-musical matters were always intelligent, often extremely shrewd. Take, for example, his impressions of Ireland in a letter to his wife dated March, 1868: "Dublin is a beautiful town ; the only pity is that one sees so much poverty, drunkenness, and shameless dirt about. England has much of this on her conscience, and she is begin- ning to realize it. But the republican Fenianism is imported from America and has no future in the Emerald Isle, which really seems feudally inclined, enjoys display, and would gladly indulge its aristocracy,if its self-love were fostered and thepeople -treated kindly." We do not say that this diagnosis is entirely correct, but few foreign musicians would have come so near the mark. Another trait in Joachim's character which emerges very clearly is the sense of his limitations. Schumann prophesied for him a great future as a composer, and he cherished aspira- tions in that direction himself. But though be has left us some fine scores, he was never under any illusion as to the relative importance of his creative work when compared with that of Schumann and Brahma. He speaks of his composi- tions with invariable modesty, and during the latter part of his long career was content to be the interpreter of others. He knew what was due to his dignity, but he never exploited his reputation, and no money bribe ever tempted him to accept an engagement where the conditions conflicted with his artistic principles. Of the money-getting instinct of his race he was entirely free, and there is a curious passage in a letter to his friend Herman Grimm, written just before his formal adhesion to Christianity, in which he says : "I feel . . . as if I were armed against all the sordidness of Judaism, against which I became more inimical the more I had to conquer the -disadvantages under which I suffered, at first unconsciously, and afterwards consciously, owing to my Jewish upbringing." The consistency of purpose and rigid adherence to the highest aims were not maintained without considerable sacrifice. We have already alluded to Joachim's refusal of engagements ; but there remains the estrangement from friends and colleagues, notably from Liszt, whose benevolence and encouragement, whose transcendent gifts as an executant, and the charm of whose personality he never ceased to acknowledge, but whom as a composer and propagandist he came to view with an ever- increasing distaste. The letter in which he informed Liszt of this conflict of opinions is perhaps the most remarkable of the many evidences of Joachim's honesty to be found in this volume. In it he plays the most difficult and invidious role —that of the candid friend—without any taint of self- righteousness or priggishness :—
"Gifernsuasif, August 27, .1857.
The continued goodness and confidence which you show me, ;rest and courageous spirit, in including me in that community If friends who are dominated by your power, gives me a sense of shame for the lack of candour I have shown up to the present—a tearing which I am not now experiencing for the first time, and sakiall would deeply humiliate me in my own eyes, if I were not at the same time consoled by the knowledge that this lack of candour, which contrasts so badly with my life at Weimar and your unchanging kindness, is not cowardice, but has its root rather in my best feelings. It is as though my humble self, however insignifi- cant my mental power and energy may appear to you, yet had the power, by means of the intense love of truth and the real affection for you which you know are rooted in me, to turn into a thorn which I dared not use to wound you. But what is the good of hesitating any longer to tell you plainly what I feel—my passive attitude towards your work would surely reveal it, thinly veiled, to you who are accustomed to meet with enthusiasm, and who know me to be capable of a genuine and active friendship. So I shall remain silent no longer on a subject which, I confess to you, your manly spirit had the right to demand to know long before. Your music is entirely antagonistic to me ; it contradicts every- thing with which the spirits of our great ones have nourished my mind from my earliest youth. If it were thinkable that I could ever be deprived of, that I should ever have to renounce all that I learnt to love and honour in their creations, all that I feel musics to be, your strains would not fill one corner of the vast waste of nothingness. How, then, can I feel myself to be united in aim with those who, under the banner of your name and in the belief (I am speaking of the noblest among them) that they must join forces against the artists for the justification of their con- temporaries, make it their life task to propagate your works by every means in their power? I must rather make up my mind to strive for that which I have marked out for myself, to separate myself more and more from them, and to work on my own responsibility, though it were never so quietly, for that which I know to be good, and which I consider to be my mission. I can be of no assistance to you, and I can no longer allow you to think that the aims for which you and your pupils are working are mine. I must therefore refuse your last kind invitation to take part in the festival at Weimar in honour of Carl August; I respect your character too highly to act hypocritically, and I revere the memory of the Prince, who lived with Goethe and Schiller and wished to rest with them, too much to be present out of curiosity. Forgive me if I have given you a moment of sadness during your preparations for the Festival; I had to do it. Your awe-inspiring industry, the number of your followers, will soon console you, but when you think of this letter believe one thing of me : that I shall never cease to carry in my heart a grateful pupil's deep and faithful memory of all that you were to me, of the often undeserved praise you bestowed on me at Weimar, of all your divine gifts by which I strove to profit."
For the rest, the letters which will appeal most strongly to musical readers are those that Joachim wrote to or received from Brahms and Mme. Schumann. As might be expected in the case of persons of such strong and independent acharacters, occasional friction, and even estrangement, was inevitable. Brahms's harshness, freakish humour, and lack of consideration often irritated Joachim, though it never affected his profound admiration of his friend's genius. Mme. Schumann, for all her splendid courage and nobility of mind, was often apt to be exigeanle, and to imagine slights where none were intended. And Joachim's candour may well have been disconcerting at times. But the bond of mutual affection and common allegiance to art was never snapped by these temporary jars, and the triple friendship—one of the
most remarkable in the annals of music—was only severed by death.
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