It is unnecessary in this place to detail either the methods or the pernicious effects of this unnatural domination. Händel was a great, good, and pure-minded man, but when he came to England in 1710 he came to be a curse and an incubus brooding over the English spirit for 150 years. Music very nearly died there and, when the corpse showed any signs of reviving, some foreign professor was always at hand to stifle its faint cries, or, if that was not enough, to do a little quiet blood-letting 'just to make sure.' Even in the third quarter of the nineteenth century England maintained men like Karl Halle (later Charles Hallé, and later still Sir Charles Hallé) who were content to accept position, affluence, and titles, giving in exchange bitter and persistent opposition to the creative art of their adopted country.
This deplorable state of affairs continued more or less down to the middle year of last century. About that time certain forces came into play which have markedly changed the social and artistic conditions of England. And only in this sense can we say that there has been such a thing as a renaissance or rebirth of music. Looked at from the twentieth-century end of the telescope the changes seem violent and unbelievable; but, if we put the glass down and walk through the country itself, we shall be forced to accept them as only a natural and inevitable broadening of the landscape.
The main fact on which we wish to dwell here is that between the years 1870 and 1915 England has been able to assert her nationality in music. And this is a matter of the deepest interest to all Americans who love their country. The preponderance of blood here is Anglo-Saxon and, though America has the advantages and disadvantages of a mixed population, she has yet to learn the lesson already learned by some other peoples, that only by the paths of nationalism can she scale the heights of internationalism.
In more ways than one America's 1915 is England's 1870. The American composer need not engrave this fact on his notepaper, but he may be recommended by a sincere well-wisher to keep it in his heart. On both the material and the spiritual sides it is true. Watch the orchestral players on a Sunday night at the 'Metropolitan.' They are the sons of the men who were playing in 1870 at Covent Garden. But since then the Englishman has asserted his personality; and to-day there is scarcely a foreigner in any first-class English orchestra. Again, read through the synopses of novelties in any season's concert programs here. How many are American? Almost none. A hundred million people owning half a continent with vast waterways, prairies, and mountain ranges—yet musically nearly inarticulate! There must be something wrong here.
Let us hasten to add that the brain-stuff of the American composer is just as good as the brain-stuff of any other composer. More than that, he alone of all his countrymen seems to be aware that the price of victory is battle and death in battle.
No one can say that England has yet conquered the world in a musical sense. Still her achievements are much greater than are generally recognized on this side of the Atlantic. The art-works which represent these achievements lie mostly on composers' shelves and in publishers' cellars, kept there partly by their own strangeness and partly by the timidity and self-effacement of their authors.
Already similar works are being produced in America; and it is therefore hoped that a consideration of the musical conditions and processes in England between 1870 and 1915 may be helpful to American composers. One may add that at the earlier date the outside English public was just as heavily ignorant and indifferent as the American public is now. In the one case the leaven came, and in the other is coming from within.
II
In a short sketch like the present it is not possible to discuss fully the changed social conditions which brought about the English musical renaissance. One must, however, mention two forces which, acting somewhat blindly on the individual, yet produced great effects in the mass. The first of these was the re-cognition that the man who mattered was the man of the soil. From this re-cognition sprang the whole folk-song movement—a movement whose depth and importance are still very little understood in America. The second is the growth of healthy liberal opinions and the partial reconsideration of the English caste-system. On this change the example of democratic America has undoubtedly had great influence. The result of this levelling upwards and downwards can be seen in the fact that, whereas prior to 1870 the English composer was generally a scallywag, now he is a gentleman.[77]
We have already said that England was never quite dead musically. To the outsider she may have appeared so, but it was really only a 'deep surgical anæsthesia.' And the analogy holds. She had been operated on so often by her German specialists that, as she came out of her sleep, she only very gradually began to ask herself whether, without another operation, she might not be able to find health by dismissing her doctors and changing her mode of life. Naturally it was a wrench to her to send the doctors packing; and her weak system almost, but not quite, refused her new diet of English bread and English water. In other words, if we divide the men of the English musical renaissance into three groups according to age, we shall find that the oldest group—to whom belongs all the honor of the spade—were almost to a man foreign-trained. Their main ideals were Joachim and Brahms, and their chief quarrel with the second and third groups—their pupils, be it said—was the quarrel between German technique and English.