To the musician, this insistence on race is in the main a quite modern thing.  It is true that, as the successive waves of Italian influence flowed northward in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, they met in England, France, and Germany, and, at the end, in Russia, native cross-currents; and there was plenty of controversy between the opposing parties.  But this controversy was mainly concerned with matters of technique; whereas the whole force of the modern movement consists in its reliance on the simple folk-music which is supposed to be characteristic of the race as a whole, and about which hardly any composers of the past consciously troubled themselves at all.  Haydn and Beethoven, no doubt, used folk-tunes in their own works to some extent, but the former’s adaptations from the uncultivated tunes of his own Croatian people are polished nearly out of recognition, and when the latter commandeers from Ireland or Russia or elsewhere, nothing but pure Beethovenishness remains after his masterful hand has done its will.  We may say, indeed, that nationality, as such, was never in their time a conscious factor in musical composition.

The modern movement seems to owe its origin to several non-musical causes.  For example, the spread of political democracy had no little influence in arousing interest in the music specifically characteristic of at any rate the non-urban sections of the newly enfranchised classes.  But, in the main, it was caused by the modern rise into something like political prominence of the smaller nations, smaller either in size or in historical importance.  The events of 1848, for example, brought Hungarian folk-music before the world; Bohemian claims against Austria produced the work of Smetana and Dvo[vr]ak, largely based on the general style of their own native melodies; the Irish Question made us know the Irish songs; and the dominating races followed those leads, at any rate in so far as to take interest in their own traditional music, and try to evaluate its differentiating factors.  Conscious connexion between artistic composition and folk-music has varied very much:  very strong in Russia and other Slavonic countries, it has been very weak in Italy and France; in Germany we find all stages between the work of Brahms, where the folk-element is very notable, and of Wolf, where it is non-existent; in our own islands it has been very weak, but is now becoming very strong.  But, whether this connexion has been conscious or not, still, sooner or later, all the insisters on the importance of the element of nationality have joined hands with the enthusiasts for the folk-music of the people.  In the work of preserving the knowledge of this folk-music England has been one of the last of all countries:  even the last edition of Grove’s Dictionary, our standard authority, gives many pages to Scotland and Ireland and Wales, and smuggles English folk-music into an appendix.  Only indeed in the twentieth century has anything like an adequate study of the varied treasures of English folk-music become possible, and we have learned enough to realize that great folk-music is no monopoly of the races that have been either politically or socially decentralized.