1919–1920

It was ‘the war to end all wars’, and was supposed to have cleared the decks for a whole new cultural order to put on a sudden magical appearance. A hundred years on, received opinion on this postwar period in British music, so hopeful to its contemporaries, is that it was cripplingly parochial. The full story is much more complex:3 for one thing, they were experimenting, and much has not stood the test of time, although this attitude is changing as the music of that period re-emerges. Dent continued to do what he had always done, pushing at the boundaries through performance, through new institutions such as the British Music Society, and increasingly, through his writings. For a while his efforts were as chaotic as the cultural world around him, dispersed around theatre, music and opera, with a frantic social life to match; eventually through his writing he found his centre.

The journals coming into life after the war – The Athenaeum, the London Mercury, The Nation, Truth, Music & Letters – nurtured fresh literary and critical talent, providing many writers with necessary income, while the current London literary universe was made up of small tangential circles. Dent quickly became a part of this floating journalistic world, writing on music and theatre, with its cross-fertilisation beside the back-stabbing, bitchiness, professional jealousy and other such symptoms of a healthy culture, mostly expressed in elegant prose. Paul Fussell has commented on what he called ‘The Persistent Enemy’ in the postwar literary scene, the adversary perceived by Osbert Sitwell and Percy Wyndham Lewis5 as philistinism persisting in the shape of Georgian Poetry and other such relics of prewar ‘high’ culture; music was not much different.

‘I do eternally miss you & Denis’, Dent wrote to Clive, still out in Italy, ‘not merely as friends but as types: the thoroughly competent musicians … ready to take on any job that wanted brains and understanding’. The ideas raised in William Foss's 1915 letter were now being realised in the new Drama League movement, headed by Dent's friend, Geoffrey Whitworth, and supported by Bernard Shaw and a number of Stage Society people.