This was a tribute payed to him by his greatest successor, and was worthy of the man who did it and the occasion which prompted it. Enough has been said to shew how complete foreign supremacy had become. Its days are now numbered, it is true, but the effect remains.
It is idle to suppose that the work of a few men, however gifted they may be, can undo in a decade what has taken two hundred years to accomplish. Only by patience and sustained effort in the direction of making students endeavour to think English music rather than German, can any national character be developed.
This can be done by English masters only. It is evident that there is a spirit of revolt abroad against the position as it stands to-day. That a nation with four or five hundred years' musical history behind it should yet be in foreign leading-strings is as absurd as it is uncalled for, and national respect alone should insist on its suppression.
English musicians have recently shewn in manner absolutely convincing, that they can hold their own in any department of music, either as creators or exponents.
The north of England and the Midlands teem with men erudite and enthusiastic.
In Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and other towns they are ever in evidence, and it is mainly from these parts of England that the most striking of recent developments have come, and which give the greatest hope for the future. The fascination of a capital city and the apparently limitless opportunities for advancement naturally attract the consciously gifted young musician. He expects to be greeted on arrival with sympathy and encouragement, at least by people of his own race. He probably knows something of the history of music in London, but even that does not stay him.
His first experience is one of disillusion. He finds himself in an atmosphere of cosmopolitanism where the dominating influences are largely foreign, and if he enters one of the principal schools, he finds himself in a centre whence those influences largely radiate. If he elects to stay there, he will eventually emerge from it as an added unit to that vast army of foreign-taught Englishmen whose work has hitherto proved so abortive.
I would like to say here that there is not the least intention to cast reflections on the capabilities of these foreign teachers. Indeed, it would be a work of supererogation to insist upon the individual excellencies of many of them.
What words, for instance, could adequately portray the work of such men as Oscar Beringer or Johannes Wolff? to mention only two of them.