"Fair and True" dates from 1926, the year after Warlock, with E.J. Moeran, ensconced himself in a cottage in Eynsford, Kent, where riotous weekend drinking parties—attended by a number of young artists and their hangers-on up from London—spurred the Warlock legend. Weekdays, however, were given to scholarly and creative work—the same year and milieu saw the composition of "The Birds," "Ha'nacker Mill," "The Night," and "My Own Country," all to poems by Belloc partaking of eldritch fantasy, as does Robin Goodfellow (that is, Puck), and the bibulous Maltworms (in collaboration with Moeran) and Jillian of Berry. Though the poem concerns a wedding party, the zanier-by-the-verse "Away to Twiver" captures better than any other single item in Warlock's work the riotous abandon, the "mirth" which, passing through hallucinatory states, drinks itself to insensible collapse, and according to witnesses, characterized the Eynsford years. "Sorrow's Lullaby," an essay in "grisliness" for soprano, baritone, and string quartet—to a poem by Beddoes drawing on the same depths of despair aired in "The Curlew"—provides a depressive drone to the year's productions. And true to form, "Fair and True," to a poem by Nicholas Breton (1542-1626)—drawn from his "Melancholic Humours" (1600)—works the vein of woman-worship touched upon early and late in such thing as "There is a Lady," "Yarmouth Fair," "Passing By," and "After Two Years." Here, she is "Lovely kind, and kindly loving, Such a mind were worth the moving; Truly fair, and fairly true...." Warlock's biographer, Barry Smith, noted, "It is perhaps not without significance that in 1928, when Philip [Heseltine, i.e., Peter Warlock] inscribed a copy of this song for the composer John Longmire (1902-1986) who was then director of music at Sevenoaks School, he wrote the words: 'To John Longmire, fellow admirer of the Reverend J. B. D[ykes]. from whom this song so obviously derives.'" Smith found "Fair and True" "less-distinguished" than its companions, "with its somewhat over-harmonized, four-square melody...." That is one way of hearing it—and performing—though, to anyone who knows their music, Warlock's compositional debt is not to Longmire or Dykes but to his mentor, Bernard van Dieren, in whose "Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen" a similarly distracted stream-of-consciousness accompaniment belies a straightforwardly Romantic lied melody. In "Fair and True" the admiringly hymnic melody is beset by an accompaniment ranging all over the keyboard to posit blithesomeness, giddiness, shyness, but, whatever it may token, a dislocating irony with the vocal line.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi