The 19th century was over bef ore any musician on the con tinent could be persuaded that there were composers in England. Schumann had repeated St. Gregory's pun about Angles and angels when he hailed Sterndale Bennett as "ein englischer Corn ponist"; but the trials of English musical life dried Bennett up. All who knew and loved him denied hotly that his music reflected Mendelssohn's ; and perhaps, to-day, a leisurely study of it might vindicate his independence. Macfarren (1813-1887), who suc ceeded Bennett in his educational offices, was a widely-cultured musician whose influence for good was frustrated by his violent conservatism which co-existed with a fatal readiness to be led by faddists. (See HARMONY.) The renascence of English music began in the work of Parry (1848-1918) and Stanford (1852— 1924). They put an end to the provincial absurdities of our British oratorio tradition, and consistently set great literature in a way that revealed to contemporary poets that the antithesis between musical and general culture was false. They also had wide and deep influence as teachers of composition.
Still, recognition of English music on the continent was rare and capricious. Englishmen wrote church music for the stage, stage music for the church, organ music for the orchestra, and, as far as we had any orchestral ideas at all, orchestral music for the organ. The one famous English composer who could be under stood on the continent as saying intelligible things in fit terms, was Sullivan, with his Savoy operas. And his serious colleagues and critics urged him with owlish solemnity to produce no more light masterpieces but to go on with his serious and luscious Golden Legends and Martyrs of Antioch and generally to consummate the final merging of English music into "The Lost Chord." We may thankfully hope that that chord is now lost for ever; but the Savoy operas live, and might, without delay to their popularity, have risen to the position of great music if Sullivan had had enough steadfast love of music to finish those parts of his work to which the public did not listen; if for example, he had pro vided his operas with better orchestral introductions than the perfunctory potpourris of their favourite tunes which he calls overtures and which are quite as long as artistically-decent over tures would have been.
It is customary to explain the failure of all but the most recent British music by saying that the native art was crushed by the ponderous genius of Handel. It is a great pity that the united ponderosity of Handel and the middle-weight Mendelssohn could not avail to dam the output of oratorios by composers who might have become good song-writers or even acquired some knowledge of orchestration beyond that of choral accompaniment. The complaint of foreign domination is nonsense. No nation has had its music so long and so completely dominated by foreigners as France; and French music has always remained exclusively French and has made thoroughly French artists of the foreigners who dominated it. The traces of foreign influence on English music have always been the echoes of individual phrases or man nerisms. While we have echoed, as the fashions change, Men.. delssohn, Brahms and Debussy, we have learnt no technical lessons from them. Such mechanical echoes show no foreign domination, but are the best proof of an inveterate provincialism and the kind of ignorant and irritable independence that goes with it. Since music ceased to be an integral part of an English man's culture (about the time of William and Mary) our musicians, as a rule, began its serious study far too late. The language of music cannot be begun at the age of 19 like courses in law or medicine. Our universities have played a considerable part in shaping British musical destinies; but a mighty Oxford treads on the tongue of the encyclopaedist who would pursue this topic.