Music: Critic Newman

It is becoming more and more clear that Ernest Newman, who writes for The Manchester Guardian, is the world’s premier music critic of these years and perhaps of all others. Music criticism consists usually of muddled impressions expressed in standard terms of the profession, meaningless yet full of majesty, such as ” nothing to say ” or ” splendidly architectural” or ” pulsing rhythms.” Newman brings to music a blessing always rare in music—intelligence. He is clear and simple, but not with the epigrammatic clarity of the French, whose clarity is mostly a crispness and pointedness of rhetoric, nor with the badly labored simplicity of the American, who, with a great display of abandon, translates the stale terms of esthetics into the equally stale jargon of the sporting page. Especially does this British critic shine in violating the ancient saw ” to understand all is to forgive all.” Only the man who understands has a right not to forgive.