The original VW - perfectly tuned and English

Vaughan Williams by Simon Heffer (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99)

Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of those Englishmen with a Welsh name who straddle the Bristol Channel, was a duck. VW was one of the good men of music, like Rimsky-Korsakov and Mendelssohn. If never called upon to be as heroically good as Bartok, who joined the Friends Ambulance Service in 1914 when age (42) and distinction waived him clear, he had a comparable sense of duty.

It went with the Lib-Lab humanitarian views he held all his life. He was a prop of Morley College, member of committees, doer of all sorts of trudging work. His hand, like Rimsky's, was always held out to struggling young composers. The only joke in Simon Heffer's 150 pages has VW enduring a crypto-modernist grind from a young American before saying: "Very good my boy, but if a good tune should occur to you, don't hesitate to use it."

The modernists and their critical allies derided him. Since Simon Heffer is a friend of modern tonal music, I wish he had said more about this blight, which came too late to do more than bruise VW, but chained up younger men of quality - such as Edmund Rubbra - in silence. It was Elizabeth Lutyens who coined the phrase "cowpat music"; and Elizabeth Lutyens, for all her friends at Radio 3, has since been lost in a market where VW sells as briskly as ever.

Too much is made here of the Englishness, or rather the non-Germanness, of the composer. VW's mentor, Parry "led the movement to free English music of its German subservience". VW was advised by Stanford to go to Italy "so that he could hear the native opera at La Scala and rid himself of the influence of the Teuton". A Sea Symphony violated "the polite norms of English - for which read German -choral music".

There was indeed a nationalist music movement. It started with the Czechs 40 years before the English, and in Eastern Europe had the advantage of drawing on folk rhythms - polka, mazurka, dumky. English composers had only folk tunes, if often beautiful ones such as "Dives and Lazarus", which Vaughan Williams turned to such account.

But the mainstream status of German music is not worth arguing about. Everyone worth hearing in some way derives from it. Now that the English have produced Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Britten and Tippett, be content to put them in that company. Music is above Euroscepticism.

For the great weakness of this otherwise decent short life is its Anglocentricity. Once we get past VW's studies with Ravel (warning his pupil against a "heavy contrapuntal Teutonic manner"), no continental composer rates comparison. Which is a pity, for Heffer's passionate love of the Sixth - a symphony about and against war - would have gained so much from contrast with Shostakovich, and with the Fourth and Fifth symphonies of that supreme musical proclaimer of the pity of war, Carl Nielsen.

Certainly, VW came from and made gifts back to an English tradition. He clad the Anglican rite in gold with his English Hymnal, scoured Sussex and Essex for folk tunes, chose English themes for his choral and operatic works. He set Hardy and Housman, poets exceptionally English, with great understanding. For the Mystical Songs, he reached back into the 17th century to George Herbert, a rare kind of Englishman, his work numinous with religious devotion. For VW's own kind of pluralist Englishness was expressed when he wrote so happily and well for the Church (Anglican and Catholic alike) while being, on quiet principle, an unbeliever.

He worked devotedly simply to promote music, playing a major hand in the war-defying National Gallery concerts where Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and other stodgy Teutons were gloried in for their own sakes. Tolerant, open and interested until the day he died, the creator of the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, Five Tudor Portraits, In the Fen Country, Job and the great Fifth Symphony was a nationalist composer, but not a nationalist against anywhere else. An Englishman who wrote wonderful music - settle for that.