of the Royal College of Music, a munificent gift, which has benefited all the music schools impartially, and has brought forward many young writers of merit who must otherwise have languished in obscurity until they died from privation and want of encouragement, like one of the best of the younger men, the late W. Y. Hurlstone. The institution of a prize for short pieces of chambermusic, and the occasional prize offered for operatic competition, have done good; but it is a commonplace to remark that, from no fault or prejudice on the part of the judges, the best men do not always gain the prize. Whether this be so or not, the fact remains that the opportunities which a young musician, composer, or executant enjoys to-day are a thousandfold more than they were a hundred or even fifty years ago.

It may be said that the mere enumeration of opportunities or the lists of those who exercise the profession of musical composer, are in no way to be considered as evidence of actual achievement that will last. The only answer to this is to give as illustrations of the best things in the modern English school the names of certain well-known works which will readily occur to the memory of any one already interested in the music of his country. To make such a list in any other country but England would be absurd, for in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Russia, and, in short, all over the civilised world, the man in the street knows the names of the chief musical products of his nation, and takes a natural if perhaps an excessive pride in them. It is only in England that there has reigned, down to the year 1908, a profound conviction that there was no such thing as English music. In this respect, however, things have changed so suddenly and so completely that it seems worth while to call to mind some of the best of the compositions that preceded Sir Edward Elgar's famous symphony; since there is a real danger of our forgetting the fact that he himself had previously written successful music, and that there are other composers of the English school. It is, of course, unlikely that any two persons, attempting to make an informal list of the things they think most remarkable, would make exactly the same list, or that any attempt at such a list could please everybody; but up to the present time people in

general have been so indifferent to the course of English music that any attempt, however imperfectly carried out, may remind readers of compositions that have given them pleasure in the past.

.

It is hardly necessary, in the first place, to point out the various excellences of the Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. These established a genre quite peculiar to England, and one upon which we may well pique ourselves. Sullivan's Golden Legend' had a long and prosperous career, and went far to compensate the musical world for the dreadful royalty-ballads and hymntunes which the composer consented from time to time to write. The work which ranks perhaps highest among Mackenzie's compositions is the breezy' Britannia' overture; and its vein of humour came out again in the single opera he contributed to the Savoy repertory, His Majesty'; his serious opera, Colomba,' the poetical 'Belle Dame sans Merci,' and the Scottish Rhapsodies for orchestra, are examples of his power of treating romantic subjects. Two of Parry's four symphonies (the 'Cambridge' in F and the English' in C), and three of Stanford's six (Elegiac,' Irish,' and 'Milton'), are noble specimens of the symphonic form, exhibiting points of interest in their various modifications of the stereotyped pattern; another most fruitful modification of the usual design is to be found in Parry's Characteristic Variations' for orchestra. Among Elgar's works none has reached a higher level of excellence than his Orchestral Variations,' the actual theme of which is an unsolved enigma. The choral works of these three composers have taken hold upon a wider public than that to which purely orchestral compositions appeal. It is only necessary to mention Parry's Blest Pair of Sirens,' 'Judith,' 'Job,' 'King Saul,' and the long series of devotional or contemplative cantatas which for some time were an annual attraction of the autumnal festivals-Stanford's Revenge,' Voyage of Maeldune,' 'Requiem,' Te Deum,' 'Stabat Mater'; Elgar's Dream of Gerontius,' Kingdom,' and 'Apostles'; Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha'; Walford Davies' Everyman'-to show that a greater amount of recognition has been bestowed upon choral works than upon any class of composition by the Englishmen. Of the five operas by Stanford that have been performed, only one, Shamus

6

O'Brien,' has yet met with the success that all deserve. Parry and Elgar have not hitherto attacked the strongholds of the enemy by writing operas; and one of the most original, vivid, and beautiful operas the world has produced since the days of Wagner and Verdi, Miss Smyth's Wreckers,' has only as yet been given upon the German stage. In the smaller forms of chamber-music, songs, etc., these composers and their followers have done things that deserve to be remembered.

Whether the 'fantasy' type of concerted piece, encouraged by the Cobbett prize, will take the place of the older pattern, remains to be seen; its aim is to provide something not quite as long as the classical quartets or trios, something not divided into separate movements, but changing its tempo and character according to the composer's fancy. Whether the newer ideas gain ground or not, the fact remains that the offer of a prize did serve to bring forward a surprising amount of original talent among the younger writers. It is obvious to any one who observes the tendency of music in this country that the general upheaval of old ideals which has been going on in other countries has not left England unmoved. It is perhaps too early as yet to trace the various influences that have caused what really looks like an artistic revolution in France and Germany. It is probably something more than a coincidence that in both countries some of the most original of the younger writers have adopted a style which strikes the student of the classics as being not only devoid of any recognisable form or design, but as lacking any perception of beauty, of melody, or harmony. This is of course the crudest way of expressing what most people of taste must have felt when they first heard music by Richard Strauss or Max Reger in Germany, of Debussy or Ravel in France. Beside the mere creation of an impression or an 'atmosphere,' which is present in the music of most of these leaders of the new school on the Continent, there is to be discerned, often very dimly, some notion of design; but with those of our own young men who affect the succession of unrelated discords, or who imitate the various devices of the continental revolutionaries, no such glimmerings of intention are to be perceived. Still, all the fermentation that seems to be going on among the younger men is a

sign of their real vitality in the art they misunderstand; and, when they have sown their wild oats, we may expect good work, if not great things, from some of them. Their vagaries may not be a very satisfactory sign, but they prove that there is a vigorous artistic life among us. That England has become again a musical country is, then, abundantly clear. The phrase 'a musical country' does not mean that every child in it is a performer or a composer, but that a knowledge and love of music are so widely diffused among its inhabitants that there is nothing exceptional in a musical allusion being made in general conversation, and that a person entirely lacking in musical perceptions is considered as rather to be pitied. Although music-publishers are still sadly lacking in enterprise, and we are still indifferent enough to the true interests of the art to allow music to regale us while we eat, yet there are everywhere unmistakable signs that we are not as we were fifty years ago. The mechanical piano, it may be said by a cynically disposed person, has left the streets for the drawing-room, and so has had a rise in life; but the vogue of appliances like the pianola is in part a sign that music of some sort or other is wanted in the household. By their means people who had no chance of knowing anything about music other than the usual drawing-room piece, are becoming acquainted with the outlines, at all events, of the great masters' creations. It will probably be long before the commercialism and professionalism of the present day cease to defile the holy places of music; but, in spite of these, and of other shortcomings which did not exist a hundred years ago, our general state is incomparably more satisfactory than it was; and the outlook for the future enables us with some confidence to say' E pur si muove.'

J. A. FULLER MAITLAND.

Art. 10.-INNOCENT THE GREAT.

1. Innocent III-Rome et l'Italie: La Croisade des Albigeois: La Papauté et l'Empire: La Question d'Orient: Les Royautés Vassales du Saint-Siège: Le Concile de Latran et la réforme de l'Eglise. Par Achille Luchaire, Membre de l'Institut. Vols. I-VI. Paris: Hachette,

1906-9.

2. Innocent the Great. By C. H. C. Pirie-Gordon. London: Longmans, 1907.

3. The History of Freedom, and other Essays. By the first Lord Acton. Edited by J. Neville Figgis and R. Vere Lawrence. London: Macmillan, 1907.

FAR as we have travelled from Voltaire's contemptuous ignorance of the Middle Ages, it may be doubted whether many Englishmen grasp their meaning as a distinct historical period, or know by what lines of descent our own institutions are related to them. Our classical training leaves an impression, faint, perhaps, yet not altogether mistaken, which enables the educated class to enter into the life and appropriate the leading thoughts of the men of Athens or old Rome. But literature as well as philosophy is tempted to spring lightly over the thousand years that separate Claudian from Erasmus. One incomparable name shines lonely in the medieval firmament, compelling every eye to acknowledge it-the name of Dante. Yet his isolation does but serve to bring out by contrast the denser gloom in which popes and emperors, schoolmen and saints, crusaders, visionaries, and even nonconforming sectaries themselves, are lost to the modern imagination. Such has been the triumph of the Renaissance, making a clean sweep and a new departure; for in the Vatican as in the Louvre, and at Oxford no less than at Berlin, it is still the age of Leo X. The Medicean pope reigns by virtue of his kinship with antiquity, while his predecessors have mostly become the shadows of a time which is utterly strange to us.

Political movements now going forward seem to bear out this contention. If we turn upon them a discerning gaze, instructed by principles of comparison, we shall discover amid all their entanglements that everywhere