Fourth Book. MUSIC IN ENGLAND. 1 HE English are not a musical people, and the English are not an artistic people. But the English are more artistic than musical; that is to say, they have produced better artists than musicians. A country is not musical or artistic when you can get its people to look at pictures or listen to music, but when its people are themselves composers and artists. It cannot be affirmed that Englishmen are, or ever were, either one or the other. Let us explain. Painting is older, and has had a longer time to develop, than music. There have been great English painters, who have painted in the Dutch, Italian, and Spanish styles-there has even been a really original school of English portrait and landscape painters and these later years have witnessed some very remarkable and original developments of the art in England; but the spirit of it is not in the people for all that, and the appreciation of good art is not in the public. No one mourns over this more than our painters themselves. There is want of enthusiasm and want of knowledge. The art of our common workmen is stereotyped, not spontaneous. When our architects cease to copy they become dull. Our houses are all under an Act of Uniformity. Music in England has always been an exotic, and whenever the exotic seed has escaped and grown wild on English soil, the result has not been a stable and continuous growth. The Reformation music was all French and Italian; the Restoration music (1650), half French and half German. No one will deny that Tallis, Farrant, Byrd, in church music-Morley, Ward, Wilbye in the madrigal, made a most original use of their materials; but the materials were foreign, for all that. At the Restoration, Pelham Humphreys, called by Pepys "an absolute monsieur," is as really French as Sir Sterndale Bennett is really German. Purcell, the Mozart of his time, was largely French, although he seemed to strike great tap-roots into the old Elizabethan period, just as Mendelssohn struck them deep into S. Bach. But all these men have one thing in common, they were composers in England, they were not English composers. They did not write for the people, the people did not care for their music. The music of the people was ballads-the music of the people is still ballads. Our national music vibrates "When other lips" and Champagne between Charley." 66 These ballads of all kinds are not exotic: they represent the national music of the English people. The people understand music to be a pleasant noise and a jingling rhythm; hence their passion for loudness and for the most vulgar and pronounced melody. That music should be to language what language is to thought, a kind of subtle expression and counterpart of it; that it should range over the wordless region of the emotions, and become in turn the lord and minister of feeling-sometimes calling up images of beauty and power, at others giving an inexpressible relief to the heart by clothing its aspirations with a certain harmonious form ;-of all this the English people know nothing. And as English music is jingle and noise, so the musician is the noisemaker for the people, and nothing more. Even amongst the upper classes, except in some few cases, it has been too much the fashion to regard the musician as a kind of servile appendage to polite society; and no doubt this treatment has reacted disastrously upon musicians in England, so that many of them are or become what society assumes them to be-uncultivated men, in any true sense of the word. And this will be so until music is felt here, as it is felt in Germany, to be a kind of necessity-to be a thing without which the heart pines and the emotions wither-a need, as of light, and air, and fire. |