VII
MUSIC
There is one field of culture—namely, music—in which Great Britain has played so small and negligible a part that it would seem impossible, even for the passionately patriotic editors of the Encyclopædia Britannica, to find any basis on which an impressive monument to England could be erected. Great Britain, admittedly, possesses but slight musical significance when compared with other nations. The organisms of her environment, the temper of her intellect, her very intellectual fibre, are opposed to the creation of musical composition.
This art in England, save during the Elizabethan era, has been largely a by-product. No great musical genius has come out of Great Britain; and in modern times she has not produced even a great second-rate composer. So evident is England’s deficiency in this field, that any one insisting upon it runs the risk of being set down a platitudinarian. Even British critics of the better class have not been backward in admitting the musical poverty of their nation; and many good histories of music have come out of England: indeed, one of the very best encyclopædias on this subject was written by Sir George Grove.
To attempt to place England on an equal footing with other nations in the realm of music is to alter obvious facts. Name all the truly great composers since 1700, and not one of them will be an Englishman. In fact, it is possible to write an extensive history of music from that date to the present time without once referring to Great Britain. England, as the world knows, is not a musical nation. Her temperament is not suited to subtle complexities of plastic harmonic expression. Her modern composers are without importance; and for every one of her foremost musical creators there can be named a dozen from other nations who are equally inspired, and yet who hold no place in the world’s musical evolution because of contemporary fellow-countrymen who overshadow them.
As I have said, it would seem impossible, even for so narrowly provincial and chauvinistic a work as the Encyclopædia Britannica, to find any plausible basis for the glorification of English musical genius. But where others fail to achieve the impossible, the Britannica succeeds. In the present instance, however, the task has been difficult, for there is a certain limit to the undeserved praise which even a blatant partisan can confer on English composers; and there is such a paucity of conspicuous names in the British musical field that an encyclopædia editor finds it difficult to gather enough of them together to make an extensive patriotic showing. He can, however, omit or neglect truly significant names of other nations while giving undue prominence to second- and third-rate English composers.
And this is exactly the method followed by the editors of the Britannica. But the disproportionments are so obvious, the omissions so glaring, and the biographies and articles so distorted, both as to space and comment, that almost any one with a knowledge of music will be immediately struck by their absurdity and injustice. Modern musical culture, as set forth in this encyclopædia, is more biased than any other branch of culture. In this field the limits of the Britannica’s insularity would seem to have been reached.
I have yet to see even a short history of modern music which is not more informative and complete, and from which a far better idea of musical evolution could not be gained. And I know of no recent book of composers, no matter how brief, which does not give more comprehensive information concerning musical writers than does that “supreme book of knowledge,” the Encyclopædia Britannica. So deficient is it in its data, and so many great and significant modern composers are denied biographical mention in it, that one is led to the conclusion that little or no effort was made to bring it up-to-date.
It would be impossible in this short chapter to set down anywhere near all the inadequacies, omissions and disproportions which inform the Britannica’s treatment of music. Therefore I shall confine myself largely to modern music, since this subject is of foremost, vital concern at present; and I shall merely indicate the more glaring instances of incompleteness and neglect. Furthermore, I shall make only enough comparisons between the way in which British music is treated and the way in which the music of other nations is treated, to indicate the partisanship which underlies the outlook of this self-styled “international” and “universal” reference work.
Let us first regard the general article Music. In that division of the article entitled, Recent Music—that is, music during the last sixty or seventy-five years—we find the following astonishing division of space: recent German music receives just eleven lines; recent French music, thirty-eight lines, or less than half a column; recent Italian music, nineteen lines; recent Russian music, thirteen lines; and recent British music, nearly four columns, or two full pages!
Regard these figures a moment. That period of German musical composition which embraced such men as Humperdinck, Richard Strauss, Karl Goldmark, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Bruch, Reinecke, and von Bülow, is allotted only eleven lines, and only two of the above names are even mentioned! And yet modern British music, which is of vastly lesser importance, is given thirty-five times as much space as modern German music, and ten times as much space as modern French music! In these figures we have an example of prejudice and discrimination which it would be hard to match in any other book or music in existence. It is unnecessary to criticise such bias: the figures themselves are more eloquently condemning than any comment could possibly be. And it is to this article on recent music, with its almost unbelievable distortions of relative importance, that thousands of Americans will apply for information. Furthermore, in the article Opera there is no discussion of modern realistic developments, and the names of Puccini and Charpentier are not even included!