FOOTNOTES:
[76] See Volume IX, chapter XIV.
CHAPTER XIII
THE ENGLISH MUSICAL RENAISSANCE
Social considerations; analogy between English and American conditions—The German influence and its results: Sterndale Bennett and others; the first group of independents: Sullivan, Mackenzie, Parry, Goring Thomas, Cowen, Stanford and Elgar—The second group: Delius and Bantock; McCunn and German; Smyth, Davies, Wallace and others, D. F. Tovey; musico-literary workers, musical comedy writers—The third group: Vaughan Williams, Coleridge Taylor and W. Y. Hurlstone; Holbrooke, Grainger, Scott, etc.; Frank Bridge and others; organ music, chamber music, songs.
I
The word renaissance when applied to English musical conditions from about 1870 onwards is convenient but slightly inaccurate. It gives us an easy group-symbol for a large and unexpected outburst of activity; but it does not either state or explain a fact. Re-naissance means 'a being born again,' and that implies previous death. But the flame of life had never quite died out in the country to whose first great composer (Dunstable) the modern world owes the invention of musical art.
In its church and choral music especially there had always been a flicker of life which at least once, in the reigns of Elizabeth and the first James, had blazed up into an astounding vitality. However, it was not to be expected that the nation could go on living at this white heat. The flame burnt itself down, but not out; and the embers of a national art that had once been great enough to light up the wide spaces of the world smouldered through the eighteenth century and far into the nineteenth.
The history of this ecclesiastical music might almost have been predicted. Its postulates are merely the isolation and selfishness of the English Church from the days of William and Mary to those of the Oxford movement. But there are some other factors governing the productions of 'secular' music; and these we must examine.
From about the time of Purcell's death onwards (1695) England was engaged in eating up as much of the world as possible. And the result was national indigestion. Already in Charles II's time there had been alarming signs of an after-dinner torpidity which could find pleasure only in the latest trickeries imported from France. The old healthy delight in music as the recreation of freemen was disappearing; and the Englishman, spending his long day in the conquest, the civilization, and the administration of his great empire, found himself in the evening too weary for anything but contemptuous applause.
Hence began the artistic invasion of England. The foreigner was quick to see his opportunity in the preoccupations of the nation. Over the sea he came in shoals, impelled partly by the very natural belief in his own nation as the source of all kultur, and principally by his interest in the pound sterling. And, once landed, there he remained. His motto was that of the old Hanoverian countess: 'Ve kom for all your goots.'