In the province of music, with which I was more concerned, I have still to mention several of the Sacred-Music Society’s concerts, which I attended in the large room at Exeter Hall.  The oratorios given there nearly every week have, it must be admitted, the advantage of the great confidence which arises from frequent repetition.  Neither could I refuse to recognise the great precision of the chorus of seven hundred voices, which reached quite a respectable standard on a few occasions, particularly in Handel’s Messiah.  It was here that I came to understand the true spirit of English musical culture, which is bound up with the spirit of English Protestantism.  This accounts for the fact that an oratorio attracts the public far more than an opera.  A further advantage is secured by the feeling among the audience that an evening spent in listening to an oratorio may be regarded as a sort of service, and is almost as good as going to church.  Every one in the audience holds a Handel piano score in the same way as one holds a prayer-book in church.  These scores are sold at the box-office in shilling editions, and are followed most diligently—­out of anxiety, it seemed to me, not to miss certain points solemnly enjoyed by the whole audience.  For instance, at the beginning of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ it is considered proper for every one to rise from his seat.  This movement, which probably originated in an expression of enthusiasm, is now carried out at each performance of the Messiah with painful precision.

All these recollections, however, are merged in the all-absorbing memory of almost uninterrupted ill-health, caused primarily, no doubt, by the state of the London climate at that season of the year, which is notorious all over the world.  I had a perpetual cold, and I therefore followed the advice of my friends to take a heavy English diet by way of resisting the effect of the air, but this did not improve matters in the least.  For one thing, I could not get my home sufficiently warmed through, and the work that I had brought with me was the first thing to suffer.  The instrumentation of the Walkure, which I had hoped to finish off here, only advanced a paltry hundred pages.  I was hindered in this principally by the circumstance that the sketches from which I had to work on the instrumentation had been written down without considering the extent to which a prolonged interruption of my working humour might affect the coherence of the sketch.  How often did I sit before those pencilled pages as if they had been unfamiliar hieroglyphics which I was incapable of deciphering!  In absolute despair I plunged into Dante, making for the first time a serious effort to read him.  The Inferno, indeed, became a never-to-be-forgotten reality in that London atmosphere.

But at last came the hour of deliverance from even those evils which I had brought upon myself by my last assumption that I might be accepted, not to say wanted, in the great world.  The sole consolation I had was in the deep emotion of my new friends when I took leave of them.  I hurried home by way of Paris, which was clothed in its summer glory, and saw people really promenading again, instead of pushing through the streets on business.  And so I returned to Zurich, full of cheerful impressions, on the 30th of June, my net profits being exactly one thousand francs.