Frederick Delius

Extract

Of all men in any walk of life that I have known during a career spent almost as much in other countries as in my own, Frederick Delius is the most remarkable. His biographers have styled him an Englishman, born of German parents settled in Yorkshire in the early part of the nineteenth century, and this is correct so far as it goes. But it does not take us nearly far enough in probing the problem of a highly complex personality, and the truth is that Delius was of no decided nationality but a citizen of all Europe, with a marked intellectual bias towards the northern part of it. His family was almost definitely of Dutch origin, and some time in the sixteenth century had changed its patronymic from Delij or Deligh to a latinized form of it, a common enough practice at the time. A member of it was numbered among the chaplains of Edward VI of England and others are traceable to Spain, France and Germany. But whatever were the diverse elements that united to make up the increasing amalgam of Frederick, anything less Teutonic would be hard to imagine. His earthy solidity and delicate romanticism were English, his uncompromising logic and analytical insight French, and his spiritual roots went down deep to that layer of far northern culture which, half Icelandic, half Celtic, gave birth centuries ago to the beautiful folk-music of Scotland and Ireland and in the nineteenth century to the boundless imaginative genius of Ibsen.