Sir Hubert Parry

Abstract

The twin arts of Music and Poetry, the “sphere-born harmonious sisters, voice and verse,” have met with curiously different fortunes in the history of this country. Our poetry has the most continuous, and except for Greece, the most famous record in Europe: apart from our dark century—and that not so dark but that it produced some of the best of our English ballads—the line of succession is virtually unbroken from Beowulf to the present day: there is no generation, there is almost no decade, in which Englishmen were not at the forefront of skill and invention. But our musical history contains a lamentable number of what Bacon calls the deserts and waste-places of time—indeed, it has one century of lavish fruitfulness, and for the rest has been until now a desert with a few infrequent oases. There was one lyric outburst in the thirteenth century, it was followed by silence for over a hundred years. John Dunstable was the first musician of his time: at his death the sceptre passed, not to his English imitators, but to his Flemish disciples. Then, no doubt, came our glorious period of Tudor and Elizabe than composers, the period at which English music and English poetry attained side by side to the heights of human achievement; but there was no musical Milton to follow that Elizabethan age, only a Dryden, and he short-lived and without successors. It is to no service to make excuse—to say that Handel was an English musician of German extraction or to complain that his brilliance reduced our native genius to darkness. German art was not obliterated by Haydn, or French by Lulli: they were strong enough to accept the foreigner's music and graft it into the parent-stock. We let Handel overshadow us like a beech tree, under whose spreading and magnificent foliage nothing prosperous can grow.