[In the following essay, Fuller-Maitland traces the relationship between the musical and literary arts in England from the Elizabethan age to the twentieth century.]

Once upon a time the world of letters included Music among its departments. The education of the average Englishman in the Elizabethan days would not have been thought complete if he had not been taught something concerning the art, or at least something in the way of what we now call appreciation. The often-quoted passage in Morley's Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), telling how a guest was put to confusion when the part-books were brought out and he was expected to join in madrigal-singing, may have been a little too highly coloured to be accepted as a literal statement of fact, since the treatise naturally gives an awful warning against ignorance of what it undertakes to teach. But Shakespeare's many references to music may surely be taken to imply a certain amount of musical knowledge in the audience, for if the technicalities which Bianca had to learn had been quite unintelligible to the bulk of the spectators, would they have endured their length and minuteness? At any rate, the sixteenth-century hearer who was conscious that he had 'no music in himself' would not like to find that he was unworthy of confidence, and would probably keep quiet about his disability. He would not take pride in 'not knowing one tune from another', as many an otherwise educated man has been known to boast in fairly recent times.

Throughout the seventeenth as through the sixteenth century, music was recognized, if not actively practised, by educated people in general. Down to the Restoration, as we are apt to forget, musical performances took place almost exclusively in private houses or in church. 1665 is the earliest date that has been found for a public concert in England (a subscription concert at Oxford), and this date is considerably earlier than any notice of public concerts on the continent. No doubt it often happened that musicians were paid for their services on special occasions; and it is likely that among the nobility there were some who emulated the 'King's Band of Musick' and employed musicians of their own, thus befriending the art in a way that resembled the beneficent patronage exerted at so many small courts abroad, the influence of which was powerful on the development of the art in the classical days. But the bulk of the music that was to be heard must have been of the domestic kind, and its executants what we should now call amateurs.

Somewhere about the end of the seventeenth century Milton's sphere-born sisters ceased to be harmonious; we can only guess at the severance between their divine sounds; but the wedding celebrated in the poet's immortal words had to wait for its final consummation until the breach had been healed, and Parry's music could glorify the union.

Even after this splendid epithalamium, the arts of Music and Poetry were often treated as if they were in opposition; as late as 1912, W. H. Hudson, in A Hind in Richmond Park, closed a beautiful comparison between the two, with these words: 'As they grew to womanhood they changed, and progressing from beauty to beauty, they grew less and less alike until, their sisterhood forgotten, they were become strangers to one another and drew further and further apart; and finally, each on her own throne, crowned a queen and goddess, and worshipped by innumerable devoted subjects, they dwell in widely-separated kingdoms.'

It is tempting to lay the blame for the separation between music and literature upon the fashionable adoration of foreign performers of whom such a torrent swept over the country not long after the Hanoverian Succession. This suggestion is perhaps less paradoxical than appears at first; we all know how common it is for games and sports to become professionalized and to lose their charm for those who were fond of them in a quiet way, and who, finding themselves so easily surpassed by the professors, lost their interest as actual participants and took to watching players who were paid for their exertions. What happened soon after the advent of Italian Opera followed exactly this course; music left the home for the theatre and concert-room, and from about this time musical references become rarer and rarer in the general literature of the day, being almost entirely confined to easy sneers at the operatic conventions and makeshifts. The rivalries between Cuzzoni and Faustina, the combat of Nicolini with the property lion, cannot have excited much interest among those who did not frequent the Opera; and the two papers in The Tatler (nos. 153,157) in which Addison likens various types of people to various musical instruments do not show much more than that the general characteristics of the mediums of sound were recognized. When Fielding's Amelia goes 'to the oratorio' (name not specified) she has to wait two hours before catching sight of 'Mr. Handel's back', a passage which incidentally helps us to realize some of the conditions under which such concerts were given, for it is evident that seats were not reserved, and also that Handel conducted in the way to which we are now accustomed, not seated at the harpsichord (unless, indeed, the party's seats were at the side of the auditorium). But musical allusions such as this are comparatively rare during the Augustan age of our literature. Appreciation of music was ever more and more closely confined to a small body of cognoscenti, and the art gradually lost its interest for those who were not specialists, whether professional or amateur. Goldsmith, whose references to music are always to the point and accurate, seems to be the latest of the distinguished writers of the eighteenth century to make any allusion to music as if it were part of ordinary education.

It is not impossible that even the superficial knowledge of the Italian language which was needed for the enjoyment of the Opera may have done something to widen the gulf between general literature and music. That gulf remained yawning till well on in the nineteenth century, to the great disadvantage of musical progress, while to some extent letters suffered too.

As the musical forms became more and more highly organized, and the 'classical' ideals more and more widely recognized, a fresh obstacle arose to keep literary and musical people apart; for the former there was yet another language to be learnt before the more elaborate patterns of construction could be assimilated, and those who had not time or opportunities for undertaking the trouble involved in the attempt to grasp the elements of musical form very naturally enrolled themselves among the really unmusical people, and were very properly angry when the few who had mastered what they themselves had shirked spoke a language to which they had no key.

It would probably be quite wrong to suppose that the period during which music was virtually banished from the world of letters was sterile in musical talent. The wind of artistic genius bloweth where it listeth, and it may well be that even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were born in England some who in the more favourable conditions of Germany would have made a name for themselves as musicians; and here reference may be made to such careers as those of Pearsall and Pierson, the former of whom preferred to expatriate himself for reasons not unconnected with ambitions other than artistic, while he did obtain a considerable degree of recognition in England by his part-songs, which became household words among English amateurs. The latter, a son of 'Pearson on the Creed', sought in Germany (where he changed the spelling of his name) a congenial atmosphere he could not find at home, and eventually became eminent as a German composer, whose music to Faust was regularly employed whenever Goethe's drama was revived. As things then were in England, the exercise of music as a serious branch of art was completely discredited as an occupation for male children, though the daughters of any well-to-do family were compelled to learn pianoforte pieces whatever their natural propensities might be, and any young woman who could boast a shapely arm was similarly enjoined to play the harp. These performances of course went in and out of fashion, just as the custom of playing the flute was at one time quite normal among young men, so much so that, when the Cambridge University Musical Society was first started, the difficulty was to find employment for the very numerous amateur flautists, and to discover any undergraduate students of stringed instruments. Though domestic performances are often referred to by Jane Austen, who often makes one of her characters go to 'the instrument', and be accompanied by some gentleman on the flute, she is careful not to give us any details, and it is evident that the music was rather a convenient way of disposing of characters that for the moment were not wanted, than an episode in the story. When we consider what was the standard probably attained on such occasions, it is impossible to be surprised that the number of professedly unmusical people should have been so markedly increased. In fact, the more delicate the musical sensibilities were, the greater the certainty that those who felt tortured by these displays would seek the company of others similarly afflicted, and would establish themselves as haters of music. Jane Austen wisely did not commit herself to any musical details and avoided the trap into which so many of the Victorian novelists fell, although we must not forget that Thackeray gives us a memorable picture of the performance of Mme. Schroeder-Devrient in Fidelio, while at the other end of the scale he created the celebrated 'finger' of Miss Wirt, a member as famous as Sir Willoughby Patterne's 'leg'. Those variations on 'Sich a gettin' upstairs' must surely have had an actual, audible existence before they reached immortality in one of the indisputably admirable passages in The Book of Snobs.

It is curious that George Eliot, who had a more definite musical training than the average lady of her time, should have committed herself to such a blunder as the passage in Mr. Gilfil's Love Story: 'Handel's "Messiah" stood open on the desk, at the chorus "All we like sheep", and Caterina threw herself at once into the impetuous intricacies of that magnificent fugue'; but she makes ample amends in Middlemarch and must evidently have made a complete study of the usual view of music held by two types of English gentlemen and one typical English lady. Mr. Brooke remarks,' "There is a lightness about the feminine mind—a touch and go—music, the fine arts, that kind of thing—they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know. A woman should be able to sit down and play you or sing you a good old English tune. That is what I like; though I have heard most things—been at the opera in Vienna: Gluck, Mozart, everything of that sort. But I'm a conservative in music—it's not like ideas, you know. I stick to the good old tunes." "Mr. Casaubon is not fond of the piano, and I am very glad he is not," said Dorothea, whose slight regard for domestic music and feminine fine art must be forgiven her, considering the small tinkling and smearing in which they chiefly consisted at that dark period.

' "I never could look on it in the light of a recreation, to have my ears teased with measured noises," said Mr. Casaubon. "A tune much iterated has the ridiculous effect of making the words in my mind perform a sort of minuet to keep time … As to the grander forms of music, worthy to accompany solemn celebrations, and even to serve as an educating influence according to the ancient conception, I say nothing, for with these we are not immediately concerned."

' "No; but music of that sort I should enjoy," said Dorothea. "When we were coming home from Lausanne my uncle took us to hear the great organ at Freiberg, and it made me sob."

' "That kind of thing is not healthy, my dear," said Mr. Brooke.'

The attitude of the average Englishman of the early nineteenth century, so well indicated by George Eliot, is illustrated in Charles Lamb's well-known lines beginning

Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,
Just as the whim bites; for my part,
I do not care a farthing candle
For either of them, or for Handel.

One wonders how such a poem, if it could have been perpetrated, mutatis mutandis, in the spacious Elizabethan days, or at any moment when music was at peace with letters, would have been received, or what punishment would have been thought appropriate for such ribaldry.

Another instance of the width of the separation between literature and music is to be found in the popularity and no doubt financial success of an absurd novel called Charles Auchester, in which the scarcely-disguised portraits of Mme. Sainton-Dolby, Mendelssohn, and Sterndale Bennett are framed in a mass of high-falutin' stuff that reveals an uncommonly superficial knowledge of the art to whose lovers it appeals.

Though the vogue of this book cannot be taken as a completely trustworthy sign of the average English reader's attitude towards music, it might be profitable to compare it with such a story as Facing the Music if an illustration were wanted of the change in public appreciation.

In the comfortable days of Queen Victoria, when the words 'glimpse' and 'sense' were still content with their position as nouns substantive, the graphic arts, unlike that of music, were not banished from literature or from general conversation, for among the small change of talk in the London season, one of the commonest conversational openings was 'Have you been to the Royal Academy?'; but it would have been a solecism to ask one's neighbour if she had been to such and such a concert without first ascertaining whether she was musical or not.

Yet another indication of the width of the chasm between music and letters may be found in the condition of the song-writing of the period. Down to the time of Purcell, the words chosen by composers for musical treatment were such as were likely to be accepted by educated people, and these were set with due appreciation of the natural inflection or accentuation intended by the poet. In the days of the estrangement I have spoken of, the purveyors of songs either chose words of exquisite ineptitude, or, when they ventured to embark upon snatches of real poetry (as was occasionally done by men like Stevens, Bishop, Balfe, and others) they ignored the obvious accent and even the meaning of the words, or tortured them to fit their silly little tunes. Of the art that is sometimes called 'declamation', or more properly 'accentuation', there is hardly a trace until we come to the work of a great man like Parry, to whose skill, in this regard, Milton's sonnet to Henry Lawes is entirely appropriate.

The case of Tennyson is very curious, for the ear that was so delicately attuned to the music of words was completely deaf to that of notes. He was aware of his deficiency, for he said to Hubert Parry: 'Browning is devoted to music, and knows a good deal about it; but there is no music in his verse. I know nothing about music, and don't care for it in the least; but my verse is full of music.' (The words are reported by Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, in his Victorian Vintage.) Yet he must have had an instinctive appreciation of what musicians call 'height' and 'depth'; for, when Stanford played through to him an album of settings of his songs by various writers, the poet made singularly apt comments on the way in which the melodies went up or down, and the songs he elected to praise on this account were exactly those which a musician would have picked out as coming from the pens of distinguished composers. The queer orchestra of 'flute, violin, bassoon', to which the dancers in Maud contrived to dance 'in tune', may be contrasted with Hardy's delicious descriptions of village music of the old type, and of the little groups of instruments that were used in country churches. The quarter of a century that separates Maud from the early books of Hardy did actually see the beginnings of the bridge that was to unite letters and music once more.

Browning, whose practical knowledge of music was considerable, is the most satisfactory of the Victorian poets who have dealt with music, and his words are sometimes so apt that the music he describes can be almost literally translated into notes; still, there is always that stumbling-block of 'the mode Palestrina' which neither Pope Gregory nor the authorities of the Solesmes chant could possibly identify. By a strange perversity, the most easily accessible edition of his complete works is a treasure-house of musical 'howlers', as indeed it is of blunders other than musical. For example, the editors' definition of fugue as 'a kind of melody', of 'girandole' as 'a dance', and of a toccata as 'an overture—a touch-piece' can never be forgotten now that the chasm has been bridged and most people know enough to be amused, not misled, by these wonderful statements. One of the best musical 'howlers' was perpetrated after the breach between music and letters was healed. A well-known clerical poet in the North of England, in a pamphlet telling of the formation of some local industry and the opposition the committee met with, wrote 'A tumult arose, wild as a Parsifal chorus'. Some female novelist, whose book has passed into a well-merited oblivion, said: 'She roguishly played on her violin some short piece of Palestrina.'

If there were faults on the literary side, the musicians were perhaps even more to blame. Through the earlier half of the Victorian era, most of the professional musicians were apt to look upon their art as a mere trade, and few indeed were those who had enough imagination to consider it from a higher point of view. Of course there were some brilliant exceptions, but the bulk of cathedral organists and professional musicians were content to go on in their narrow groove of work, and it must be remembered that to become an expert musician is a 'whole-time job', what with the necessary technical practice and the education of others in the same branch of knowledge and skill. It must be remembered, too, that music stands apart from the other arts, since it alone, in Lord Balfour's words, 'is without external reference'. Still, when all allowances have been made, the fact remains that, as a body, the practitioners of music had not much general culture, or indeed much reverence for the ideals they were supposed to profess.

The typical Victorian organist would go to his desk and turn out an anthem because his wife wanted a new bonnet; and the remark made by the wife of a well-known conductor during the first season of the Richter Concerts is hardly an exaggeration: 'Don't talk to me about Richter; me and—we've conducted the Philharmonic these twenty years and we don't want any foreigners coming to teach us how to conduct.' Whether or not such instances of a trade view of the art be actually true, it must be confessed that the Germans of that time did take a higher view of the art in which their nation had so long been eminent, and I am inclined to think that their artistic attitude, whether real or assumed, had something to do with the preference shown for so many years to everything that came out of Germany, so that a fifth-rate foreign performer was more highly paid and more warmly applauded than a first-rate English one.

The professional writers on music had little or no literary taste, and the jargon they used was calculated to disgust any educated reader who might chance upon the musical notices in the daily papers. This jargon was in some degree excusable when we remember how very few synonyms there are for the definite technical terms that must be used if any useful impression is to be conveyed. But the clichés we critics used were even farther removed from anything like a literary style; a favourite opening to an article upon any of the provincial festivals in the autumn was:'—was en fête to-day. The show of bunting, though not so abundant as on former occasions', &c., &c. In the end of the nineteenth century we should not have been shocked by such a sentence as 'The rendition of this item, and which was reminiscent of the palmy days of the lyric stage', &c.

How and when was the chasm bridged over? It is not easy to say very definitely, but it is probable that the first pier of the bridge was firmly planted when Sir George Grove, whose place in the world of letters was assured,—was he not editor of Macmillan's Magazine?—allowed his musical enthusiasms full play in his work at the Crystal Palace and the inception of his great Dictionary of Music. If he was not the actual beginner of the musical renaissance in England, he used his great influence in the encouragement of that movement, and it was mainly due to him that the musical education of the country reached a point at which literary people were compelled to recognize the tuneful art.

An important part in this bridge-building was played by certain official appointments, like Parratt's connexion with Oxford, Stanford's with Cambridge, and Harford Lloyd's with Eton. Each of these succeeded men whose ideals, such as they were, were bounded by the limits of the professional attitude already referred to. Each started a tradition of general cultivation, so that to-day it would be hard to find among cathedral organists any specimens of the old type, who would admit that they took no interest in general literature. Not only the standard of musical tuition in our great public schools, but the conditions in which it is given, have so marvellously improved that it is possible to believe in the recorded fact that the greatest masterpiece of music, Bach's Mass in B minor, was actually performed at Oundle School without extraneous help. Among those who 'assisted' at such a performance, whether as listeners or executants, there must have been many boys who would be classed as 'unmusical', but even these can no longer ignore music in the way their forefathers did, or echo their ancestors' favourite gibe: 'Musicians' heads are as empty as their fiddles.'

In many ways the institution of Musical Competition Festivals has done much to bring music into line with the other arts and with literature. For on the one hand the pattern of the festivals devised by Miss Mary Wakefield has given useful employment in their organization and direction to a very large number of intelligent people all over the country whose interest in music had been largely wasted in the old-fashioned amateur efforts, and whose friends, if not 'musical' themselves, are bound to recognize something of the importance of the art; and, on the other hand the improved culture of the young composers has led them to choose for their part-songs words of lasting beauty instead of the trumpery that was formerly thought good enough to be set to music.

The admirable catholicity of the Broadcasting programmes is another element in the healing of the old breach, as well as a sign of the reality of the healing process. To refer only to one side of its work; the weekly performance of the Bach cantatas, that series of masterpieces buried for so long, is not only an inestimable boon to musical hearers, but is an education in itself for the young people who have to learn them. It may be surmised that the mere neglect to switch off the current has often compelled literary and musical listeners respectively to hear parts at least of each other's delights.

It may be a mere coincidence that so many of the old dichotomies, such as that between Science and Religion, are in course of being brought into agreement, and it stands to reason that every effort of the kind is to the manifest advantage of both sides.

As I have already said, it is inconceivable that Charles Lamb's ribald rhymes could have been accepted in the earlier days when music was the property of all men; and it is just as impossible to imagine The Testament of Beauty as existing before the fulfilment of the revival of music and its restoration to the world of letters:—

And if the Greek Muses wer a graceful company
yet hav we two, that in maturity transcend
the promise of their baby-prattle in Time's cradle,
Musick and Mathematick: coud their wet-nurses
but see these foster-children upgrown in full stature,
Pythagoras would marvel and Athena rejoice.