criticising life; once more the borderkingdom fell in danger of a double secession and saw its government passing into the hands of the undistinguished multitude.

From this it was partly rescued by the accession of Handel. But Handel, though, when he took the trouble, he was strong enough to maintain an equal administration, yet even in oratorio had his occasional moments of laxity, and throughout his long reign did very little for the lyric. Sometimes he transferred to one text music that had been originally composed for another, and so refuted in his own case any doctrine of a pre-established harmony. Sometimes he constructed a whole song,-first part, second part, and the inevitable da capo,-out of a single quatrain, repeating the words till their very sound was wearisome and their meaning lost in a tangle of reiterated clauses. In short, for all his power of vivid and picturesque expression, a power unsurpassed, perhaps, by any of his contemporaries, he was yet content to rule by conventional method, and only conceded as an occasional act of grace what, in the ideal commonwealth, poetry ought to claim as an inalienable right.

So there grew up in England a hopelessly inartistic fashion of regarding the tune as paramount and the words as of no importance. Our public listened complacently to foreign languages which it did not even pretend that it understood, or followed them in translations which it would have found itself wholly incompetent to parse. yet entirely passed away. We still accept inarticulate singers and unknown tongues without any thought that the value of the song is thereby impaired to us. We still accept translations which it would be flattery to describe as doggerel, not because they are the best that we can get, but be

And the fashion has not

cause we do not realise that there is anything amiss with them. Take Haydn's CREATION for example. During the better part of a century England has been tolerating a libretto of which the following may be given as a speci

men:

The Heavens are telling the glory of God, The wonder of His work displays the firma

ment.

To day that is coming speaks it the day,
The night that is gone to following night.
In all the lands resounds the word,
Never unperceived, ever understood.

This is bad enough in oratorio and opera, when the attention is divided among several points of interest; it is a thousand times worse when it appears, as it soon began to appear, in the closer concentration of lyric song. No wonder if our poets came away dissatisfied; no wonder if they concluded that anything was good enough for musical treatment. And when our dark age came and music itself was looked upon as a foreign import, both elements alike began to decay and to infect each other with a fatal taint of corruption.

On the Continent a better state of things was inaugurated by Gluck and carried on by the great masters of Germany and Austria. In some of Haydn's canzonets the balance is adequately maintained: then came Mozart's VEILCHEN, then Beethoven, then the Romantic school which gave due equality to the poet and brought song to the highest consummation that it has yet attained. But meanwhile the tide ebbed away from England, and its flood is but now returning. During the most active and strenuous period in all musical history our own art was virtually in abeyance; we held aloof from the struggle, we looked upon the leaders of advance with an unintelligent suspicion, and we paid. the penalty not only by loss of repute but by the heavier loss of power

opportunity. And now that our musicians are once more resuming the place which they held before the death of Purcell, it is only to find that the poets have forgotten the old terms of agreement, and have begun to set up new customs of their own. There is probably no lyric verse in the world so difficult to set to music as that of our English contemporaries; it has been written without thought of the composer, without regard to his special claims and requirements; it is too individual, too self-centred, to ask or admit the aid of the collaborator. In a word, though much must be allowed for particular conditions of character and temperament, one proximate reason of our failure in song is the present divergence between English music and English poetry; and of this one ultimate reason may be found in our fathers' maintenance of a bad musical tradition.

Now it is clearly best, as a matter of ideal, that the two elements in song should both be of the same age and of the same country. For in the first place art depends in some degree upon national characteristics, and is itself the purer for the purity of its lineage; and in the second place there have been successive stages in musical as in poetic expression, and it undoubtedly makes for unity that the two should pass through these stages together. Schubert, no doubt, occurs as an exception, but Schubert's whole position in music is exceptional. Schumann, Franz and Brahms are at their highest as song-writers when they are setting the poets of their own people; so are Grieg and Dvorák, so are Gounod and Jensen and Hans Sommer. It is therefore only a partial solution of the problem if we bid our composers seek alliance from France and Germany, or even from our own lyric masters of the Stuart period. In the former case the music, to be congruous, will

take a foreign tinge: in the latter it will be touched with archaism; and both alike will give us a sense of unreality that is fatal to art as a living force. With the Bible, with Shakespeare, the case is different; they have both grown up afresh in each successive generation and are as much a part of our own life as of our forefathers'. But the Bible lies beyond the limits of the present question; with much of Shakespeare we have been already forestalled, and our music has learned a different language from that known to Herrick and Suckling. It is to our own contemporaries, to Tennyson and Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne, that we should look for aid, and it is here, by the irony of circumstance, that aid is most unattainable.

In illustrating this point it is important not to confuse the issue by reference to our great choral compositions. Choral writing has its own special laws and characteristics, its own special qualities of mass and volume, and no inference can be drawn from it to the purely personal feeling of the lyric. It is no answer, therefore, to quote the magnificent work which Dr. Parry has done with Pope and Milton, or even such examples of noble achievement as THE LOTOSEATERS, or THE REVENGE, or the ODE TO ETON. It is of lyric song that we are speaking; it is in lyric song that our art is, on the whole, most deficient. Every one

remem

bers the sense of expectation which heralded the Tennyson volume a few years ago, and the bitter disappointment which ran through England on its appearance. Here were a score of poems written by Tennyson set by some of the greatest of our composers, and there was hardly a true song among them. Μία ἐκ πολλῶν οὐκ ἀπόμουσος; the rest were either preoccupied with some technical problem, or clearly over

given us, to name two examples, by Dr. Parry and Dr. Stanford. But it is true in a large number of cases, and wherever it is true, song in any real sense of the term is almost impossible. When CROSSING THE BAR was published, more than one of our composers took the poem in hand, and produced a set of tours de force of which some were brilliant and some were creditable, and not one was wholly satisfactory. The four stanzas have already attained finality and there is nothing left to add. The same holds good, though in varying degree, with our other great poets of the present age. Browning may almost be put out of consideration, he is no more a singer than his own Pacchiarotto: Rossetti often presents insuperable difficulties of phrase; and though Mr. William Morris and Mr. Swinburne come nearer to the musician's ideal, since they love those broad lines of emotion which it is the function of his art to follow and illustrate, yet the former occasionally forgets that he is writing in the nineteenth century, while the latter, like Keats and Shelley, will only respond to certain musical moods. It is a far cry from even the most adaptable of our lyrics to WIDMUNG or FRÜHLINGSNACHT or DU BIST WIE EINE BLUME.

This bare statement of cause and effect should not be pressed to the extremity of a hostile criticism. Song, in spite of M. de Banville, no more covers the whole of poetry than the whole of music; it is but a province of march-land, ceded from the territory of two separate empires, and governed by the representatives of a joint administration. On either hand lie wide expanses that spread from the near frontiers of romance and elegy and dance-measure to the remoter regions of drama and epic, of sonata

and symphony. In them the artist has free choice to take up his habitation one may devote himself to the service of pure tone, another to the methods and ideals of pure literature ; and, if a man does the best work for which his genius fits him, it is idle that we should complain because he has wrought it on this or that side of a particular border-line. There is no more reason for demanding that every lyric should be a song than for demanding that every play should be an opera; indeed the poet will often speak with a fuller meaning if he be bound by no restrictions but those of his own art. At the same time song is a possession that we would not willingly forego; and song is neither music nor poetry, but both together. The two elements are combined as gold and silver were fused in the electrum, each, it may be, losing some feature of its own beauty, each bearing its part in a result that is worth the sacrifice. And the whole contention of the present paper is that in our English song we should require true gold and true silver, and that we should not rest satisfied with the substitution of a baser metal.

Yet recently our choice has lain, for the most part, between base metal and imperfect fusion. In many forms of expression we have learned to rival Germany, in song we are still far behind her; and the reason is to be found less in the weakness of our music than in the alienation of our poetry. If we have no Heine we can have no Schumann; the future of our song is a matter in which both arts are equally concerned. It only remains that each should more fully recognise the requirements of the other, and should so join in a common cause, of which there already stands over sea a living example and illustration.

The

I THINK there is nothing fraught with so pathetic a burden as the atmosphere of a college which has gown gray with years and memories. Other remnants of antiquity, other links to bind us to a far distant past, have all a less penetrating influence, and seem to hold us by a shadowy and attenuated claim. We look on the domestic architecture of our ancestors with only a vague wonder what manner of men they were who built those houses and dwelt in them. footprints left in these places are very faint; the vicissitudes that have been at work here, to sever the connection between us and the generations whose impressions we would fain gather up, have been so many, can only be so imperfectly traced, that we seem to be looking on some stranded survival of an epoch wholly forgotten, about which we can only wonder, with which we are not in the slightest degree in touch. A castle, which is perhaps become a mere show-place, can at most be put to any vital use by sheer anachronism that is not very potent to kindle our imaginations. Great cathedrals, historic churches, though we still make a shift to worship in them, strike us with a chill sense of incongruity. We might as well be bowing down in a heathen temple. They were reared by men of another spirit than ours, of other hopes and fears and beliefs, for another ceremonial and worship. Changes, too numerous almost to allow of a bare record, have intervened between

us and the traditions which hallowed them. Such a feeling, more than a neglectful temper or pure bad taste, has been the prompter in our crude and fatal restorations.

But it is far otherwise within the college's austere pale. There the primitive traditions have struck in their roots with a tenacity which seems to promise that both shall be coeval in duration. Dynasties have been set up and fallen; Masters and Deans have come and gone, as transiently as the forest leaves or a season's snows; Charity Commissioners have done their worst; and we still hold by a manner of life intelligibly akin to that of the earliest members of our body. The most practical, utilitarian student who passes carelessly through the time-worn court, between, perhaps, the laboratories and the sports of the river, is still bound to a past (of which he may know or reck nothing) by simple usages of hall and chapel and a discipline which he despises or revolts from.

Collegiate life thus naturally is fuller of memories, vibrates with keener sympathies as between us and the silent centuries. Yet, in recalling this, we exhaust not one half of its significance. The generations of a college are so much more numerous than any other generations; a mere score of years there must leave behind them a voluminous history. How much more, then, the years that are to be counted by hundreds ? And these are generations of youth, for the