"'If that lower-middle-class Dutchman Beethoven (or as my Cynthia calls him: "Bête au vent") wants to exhale his moral distress and sentimental indigestion, let him do so by all means, but in a lonely room. Why does he interfere with the even tenor of our well-varnished life? If my charming Japanese china figures, or my pretty girls and shepherds in vieux Saxe suddenly began to roar out their sentiments, I should have them destroyed or sold without any further ado. Why should I accept such roarings from an ugly, beer-drinking, unmannered Teuton? Why, I ask you?'
"'Music is the art of poor nations and poor classes. Outside a few Jews, no great musician came from among the rich classes; and Jews are socially impoverished. I can understand the attraction of ditties nursed in the music halls. They fan one with a gentle breeze of light tones, and here and there tickle a nerve or two. But what on earth shall we do with such plesiosauri as the monsters they call symphonies, in which fifty or sixty instruments go amuck in fifty different ways? The flute tries to serpentine round the bassoon in order to instil in it drops of deadly poison; the violins gallop recklessly à la Mazeppa against and over the violas and 'celli, while the brass darts forth glowing bombs falling with cruelty into the finest flower-beds of oboes and harps. It is simply the hoax of the century. Would you at Athens ever have endured such a pandemonium?'
"'You are quite right, ma très charmante dame,' I said, 'we never had such music and we should have little cared for it. Our way of making symphonies was to write epics, crowded with persons, divine and human, and with events and incidents of all colours and shades. The Continental nations have lost the epic creativeness proper, and must therefore write epics in sound. Just as your languages do not allow you to write very strictly metred poetry such as we have written without impairing the fire and glamour of poetry, and the only way left for you of imitating the severe metres of Archilochus, Alcæus or Sappho is in the form of musical canons, fugues, or other counterpointed music. It seems to me that you English have not done much by way of music epics, because, like ourselves, you were busily engaged in writing epics of quite a different kind: the epic of your Empire. The nations that have written musical epics, did do so at a time when these were the only epics they could write,—the symphony of Empire being refused them.'
"'I see,' said Mrs Blazing. 'You mean to say that our Mozarts and Beethovens are Lord Chatham, Clive, Nelson and Wellington?'
"'In a manner, yes. Few nations, if any, can excel both in arts and in Empire-making, and had you English been able to hold in your imperial power considerable parts of Europe, say, of France, Germany or Spain, you would never have had either Walter Scott or Byron, Shelley or Tennyson. For the efforts required to conquer and hold European territory would have taxed all your strength so severely that no resources would have been left for conquests in the realm of the arts and literature.
"'This is why the Romans, who conquered, not coloured races, but the mightiest white nations, could never write either great epics or great dramas. They wrote only one epic, one drama of first and to this day unparalleled magnitude: the Roman Empire. I meant to do a similar thing for Athens, but I failed. I now know why. My real enemies were not in the camp of my political adversaries, but in the theatre of Dionysus and in the schools of the philosophers. Do not, therefore, ma chère amie, begrudge the Germans their great musicians. They are really very great, and not even your greatest minds surpass, perhaps do not even equal them. Your consolation may be in this, that the Germans too will soon cease writing music worth the hearing. They now want to write quite different epics. And no nation can write two sorts of epics at a time.'
"'I am so glad to hear you say so,' said Mrs Blazing. 'It relieves me of a corvée that I hitherto considered to be a patriotic duty. I mean, I will henceforth never attend the representations of the new school of soi-disant English music. Inwardly I never liked it; it always appeared to me like an Englishwoman who tries to imitate the grâce and verve of a Parisian woman, with all her easy gestures, vivacious conversation, and delicate coquetry. It will not do.
"'We English women do not shine in movement; our sphere is repose. We may be troublesome, but never troublante.