More Than Music, by Alec Robertson (Collins, 21s.).

This is one of the most enrichingly human books it has been my good fortune to read. Alec Robertson is known primarily, of course, as a musician—as author, critic, broadcaster, lecturer, and as Music Editor of The Gramophone (for which he has been reviewing records since its foundation in 1923); but as the title of his autobiography justly says, his life has been "more than music". I naturally turned to the book to read his reflections on a lifetime's experience of the art, but I was soon caught up in something even more absorbing: the honest account of a man's struggle to find the truth about life and about himself, in which music figures as a part—a central and crucial part— of this greater quest. It is for this reason that I feel obliged to deal with it at greater length than is usual for a music-book review.

The story is that of a man possessed of three special gifts, which later came into conflict with a fourth, hardly suspected one, producing a crisis which threatened spiritual disaster but eventually brought a hard-earned wisdom. The gift of artistic sensibility needs no stressing, as it is responsible for the large and fascinating musical element of the book: there are vivid evocations of some of the fabulous musical events of this century, such as the pre-1914 Diaghilev Ballet and Beecham Opera Company, and the superb German opera seasons of the "twenties"; delightful vignettes of famous artists—in the earlier part Ellen Terry, Emmy Destinn, and Nijinsky, and in the later Elisabeth Schumann, Kirsten Flagstad, John McCormack, Walter Gieseking, and many others; and penetrating studies of the great music of all periods—plainsong, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Verdi, Delius, Stravinsky, Britten.

But side by side with all this one finds a deep love of nature and the rare gift of genuine friendship for people of all classes; and these are seen to be inextricably mingled in the larger whole of a full life. Thus, when the outbreak of the 1914 war brought service as a young subaltern with the Army in India, the artistic activity of music-making, either in private houses or in concert-parties, gave rise to many close friendships with the British notabilities; but the overwhelming impact of the Indian landscape and the mystery of Indian music acted as a compulsion to get to know and love the Indian people, from the statesman and the poet to the native bearer and the taxi-driver.

After the war, the combined gifts of music and love of ordinary people enabled Alec Robertson to find a congenial vocation as a pioneer of musical appreciation for The Gramophone Company (H.M.V.). Helping the ordinary man to love and understand music is a tricky and much-abused business, but the whole justification for it is put trenchantly here, in the course of a fine character-sketch of the restaurant-car conductor Peter, encountered by chance during regular railway journeys between Norfolk and London: "I soon found out that he had a consuming passion for music and very soon he began to come to see me whenever possible for the whole of his free day. He could not read musical notation and had no technical knowledge whatsoever, but somehow or other he nearly always went intuitively to the heart of the matter. Time and time again he would beg me to play or sing that bit over again and yet again, his face radiant with delight . . . It was for people like him that I wanted to work . .. it means everything for them to come into intimate association with a trained musician and it is sad that so few musicians seem to understand this . ."

This warm human note is the first reason why the book is about "more than music". In the descriptions of great works and performances, there is always the sense, not merely of aesthetic pleasure, but of a wide life-experience, in which composer, performer and listener are bound up together; and in the same way the charactersketches of artists are essentially portraits of friends whose friendship is as precious as their artistry.

But as early as 1920, the fourth gift had become apparent—a deep sense of the spiritual purpose of life, which human friendship, nature, and even music could not fully satisfy; and after much self-examination, Alec Robertson entered the Catholic Church, spending a year as a Benedictine novice at Ampleforth Abbey. Some years later, feeling called to the vocation of the priesthood, he studied for four years at The Beda College, Rome, and was ordained as a secular priest—a position for which his wide compassion for humanity would seem to have admirably fitted him; but this step led to a fierce conflict with conscience, in private and in public, which can only make the reader, whatever his own religious views, search his own heart. The issues are too complex and delicate to deal with summarily; but, broadly speaking, the climax of the story—the thorny years as a chaplain at Westminster Cathedral and the bitter decision to relinquish a vocation so devoutly believed in—reveals a tragic conflict between the all-embracing human concept of Christianity characteristic of the artist and the firm and unalterable dogmas of the Church. It is heart-warming, however, to read of the kindness of so many of those concerned, such as Cardinal Hinsley and Father Leeming; and also of Alec Robertson's eventual acceptance of music itself as the musician's inevitable approach to God, helped by some truly wonderful letters— quoted extensively—from a woman friend who had in fact been reconciled to the Church by his reading of one of the B.B.C.'s Sunday night Epilogues.

An autobiography of this kind—the settling of an account with life—is a notoriously difficult task, but it has been finely achieved here. The tone is that of a man talking easily to friends— frankly, without fear or favour, but with a natural modesty and humility; justly, but with passion and an infectious humour; and above all, with an abiding love of the things that really matter in life. DERYCK COOKE.