music and has, however fruitless it may have been
elsewhere, made the services in Westminster Cathedral,
under Dr. Terry’s direction, a Mecca for musicians
of all faiths who are interested in the great sixteenth-century
masterpieces. There are also the aristocratically
Catholic composers of latter-day France, centring
round Vincent d’Indy and the
Schola Cantorum
and looking back for inspiration to Cesar Franck.
And again, in the English communion, there is the
marked High-Church movement for the encouragement of
dignified music, a movement that has had great influence
in the purification of popular taste. And the
pivot round which all this turns is the dogmatic faith
that definitely Christian expression in music is the
property, the exclusive property, of those who by
temperament and conviction are Christians. The
attitude, like the conditions which have brought it
about, is, I think, new: but some of its adherents
go surely too far when they urge that those whose
minds work otherwise cannot really appreciate this
music at its due worth. Cesar Franck, that simple-minded
childlike genius, once pronounced Kant’s
Kritik
der reinen Vernunft ’very amusing’—a
surely unique criticism—simply, it would
seem, because it was eccentric enough not to take
Catholicism as a primary postulate: I do not
myself happen to have any information about Kant’s
musicianship—perhaps, like too many great
thinkers, he knew little about music and cared less—but
I think we may venture to say, in the abstract, that
his philosophy would have made him fairer to Franck
than Franck was to him.
And thus perhaps we may conclude that recent musical
development has kept pace with religious development
in concentrating more and more on individual sincerity,
whether on the one side or the other, and abandoning
the old easy-going haphazard routine. But, in
reaction from the extreme right and the extreme left
of the movement, we have also the sincere dislikers
of stark thinking, whom their opponents call by dignified
names of abuse, such as pragmatists or undenominationalists:
and here again music keeps pace with religion.
It is not the old routine again (though perhaps in
practice it may at times come rather perilously near
it); it is the more or less conscious adoption of a
compromise. We can see its musical working best
of all in the recent history of church music in England;
it is true that the great mass of the younger musicians,
here as in all other countries, stand outside these
developments, and look both for ideals and practice
elsewhere, but the developments have none the less
been very significant. There have been three
stages. A couple of generations ago there was
no conflict and no call for compromise. The ecclesiastical
musician of the time was expected, whether as composer,
as organist, or as administrator, to do his best according
to his lights: it was his accepted business, as
presumably knowing more about the matter than the artistic