Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country

Whewell’s survey of the inductive sciences at the beginning of the reign dimly forecasts some discoveries which have since been verified. It contains no word prophetic of the doctrine by which, in the countless possibilities of its application, every branch of science in little more than a quarter of a century was potentially if not actually to be transformed. The eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the Queen’s accession has witnessed the completion by Mr Herbert Spencer of the monumental treatise that applies the doctrines of Darwin to subjects that Darwin had not specially studied, perhaps with results which Darwin himself had not entirely foreseen. Whether a reaction against Darwinism has already, as some think, set in; how far, and with what consequences, that movement may go, are as yet only matters of speculation.

The exploration of the Italian soil has caused many chapters of Roman history to be rewritten more in accordance with the older traditions than with the newer learning. Like processes near the sites of Babylon and Nineveh have done much to vindicate the authors of the Pentateuch as chroniclers of fact; and have even created a reaction in favour of the Mosaic cosmogony, and the sacred narrative of the Deluge. Evolution as a philosophy is not altogether rejected by physicists of orthodoxy so unimpeachable as Mr St. George Mivart. More lately it has been discovered that an Anglican divine may keep an open mind on the subject of Darwinism and yet be made Archbishop of Canterbury. To the unlearned English vulgar the question is whether the visible universe and its inhabitants are more likely to have developed themselves by a series of indescribable processes than to have developed, as the Scriptural tradition has been interpreted as teaching, by a Power external to them and directing every stage of their progress. If it be said that evolution is the method in which that superhuman Power who is behind and above all often chooses to act, there is no reason why the occupant of Lambeth should not be as good an evolutionist as the scientific investigator whose nearest country neighbour at Down, Sir John Lubbock, appropriately presided over the Jubilee meeting of the British Association at York.

The transformations effected in other departments of physical study during our age are not less remarkable. Many of them have been appreciably assisted by the social intercourse of mind with mind which the British Association has so signally promoted. Lyell’s Principles of Geology was published in pre-Association days and seven years before the Victorian age began. Its influence was in the same direction as that of Darwin; it suggested, that is, the enquiry why the natural processes that are said to explain the globe we inhabit should not explain also the presence of man upon it. Biology and anthropology, the two studies which have most been promoted by the Darwinian doctrine, can consequently be pronounced with truth the creations of the present age. As far back as Elizabethan times, electrical phenomena had been systematically studied. Many of these manifestations, however, especially their relations with heat and light, as well as most of their adaptations to the offices of daily life, belong to the era that opened in 1837.

Photography of course was an unknown art in pre-Victorian days. Even when its predecessor, the Daguerreotype, discovered in 1839, had been considerably improved upon, it still remained a contrivance rather for distorting the human features than for faithfully reproducing them as photography does upon glass or paper, and with the addition of natural colours as photography now bids fair soon to have done.

These achievements of a science which is generically new have not been accompanied with inactivity on the part of those sciences which, like astronomy, are probably in one shape or another nearly coeval with Creation itself. Long before the planet was actually discovered, the telescopes that swept the heavens had brought within their ken the spot at which in 1846 Neptune was proved to be. If the number of the heavenly bodies has not of late received many additions, new asteroids are constantly swimming into sight in the quarters where they had been suspected; comets, less looked for than these apparitions, are often announced to have flashed themselves upon the observer’s sight.

The influence of scientific thought and conceptions upon the language of literature as well as of daily life, is only less remarkable than the material conquests of science themselves. The most instructive instance of this is afforded by the scholarly and illustrious woman of genius who will always be known to fame as George Eliot. The popular idea of Mr Herbert Spencer having influenced her studies and her phraseology is not quite true. Mr Spencer was her own, and her companion’s, friend. Her diction in her later works was inspired by the intellectual forces of her day. Of the formative power of these she was probably herself unconscious. If Herbert Spencer had a place among them, he was at least only one of several. From George Eliot, in that phase of her genius now under consideration, there has sprung a school. However original the gift of writers like Mrs Humphry Ward, it seems unlikely that their talents would have taken the direction they have received and found their expression in the language they employ unless the author of Adam Bede and Middlemarch had first supplied a new want or created a fresh intellectual taste by a style that our forefathers might have admired, but might not always have been able to understand.

Of the many transformations wrought by Victorian science, not the least; – unscientific people might think it the greatest – is the assimilation of the idiom of fiction to that of the text books of the schools. The entire ethos of our oral diction not less than our literature has been revolutionized by science. When a parliamentary speaker illustrates his argument by a metaphor, it is not, as his forerunners once did, to the Latin and Greek classics, or even to literature at all, but to the laboratory, to the dissecting room, or to the crucible that he most frequently goes for his trope. The similes of the Attic masterpieces are taken habitually from those operations with which their naval empire familiarized the Athenian mind. Nor can these metaphors be understood without some remembrance of the processes which marine affairs involve. A similar acquaintance with the later operations of science is scarcely less useful for a proper appreciation of the most characteristic beauties of Victorian prose, by whatever master displayed. This dispossession of the literary by the scientific is universal. Following unconsciously perhaps the example of a great statesman, those who have in our day most widely differed from him on national affairs, a Randolph Churchill, or a Charles Stewart Parnell have reproduced the taste of a Salisbury in finding their recreations, not in the belles lettres that were congenial to the day of a Pitt or a Canning, but in the researches that a Tyndall, a Huxley, a Thomson, have popularized.

Galileo’s astronomical views found a useful ally by the incisive raillery of his literary style. The admirable prose of a Huxley and his fellow labourers has been no less effective for popularizing scientific studies with the public they have addressed. The social urbanity with which Nature and training have endowed Sir John Lubbock has prepossessed not a few on his own level in life in favour of those branches of physical enquiry that have enabled him to rehabilitate the moral character of the autumnal wasp.

CHAPTER XXIV
CECILIA’S TRIUMPHS

The revolution in the conditions of English music – effected since its first encouragement by the Victorian Court – illustrated by a contrast between the social status of the musician to-day, and forty years ago. Music always a tradition of the present dynasty. Handel. English machinery for teaching music instituted under the Georgian era, and perfected under the Victorian. Has English organization for musical teaching outstripped English capacity for learning? Certain reforms approved by high musical experts. Other individual agencies than those of the Court favourable to Music during this century. Mendelssohn; his encouragement of John Parry, the forerunner of Corney Grain, and Arthur Cecil. Sir Charles Hallé, Herr Joachim, Grove, Sullivan. Anglo-German ladies. Crystal Palace Concerts.

The transformation, at once artistic and scientific, with which the Prince Consort as the past representative of the Crown, and his descendents as its present representatives, will always be chiefly associated, remains to be glanced at. One need not have reached middle age to be able to realize the revolution in the English capacity for the enjoyment as well as for the performance of music, vocal or instrumental, that has taken place since the Victorian age began. A dowdily dressed young woman, alighting from an omnibus at the street corner, trailing after her a fragment of the straw that littered the floor of her conveyance; her clothes, what was then called shabby genteel. She carried under her arm a roll of papers or a portfolio; she was insolently eyed by the servant who opened the door of the house in Portland Place at which she timidly knocked, and contemptuously motioned to take a seat in the hall until the drawing room was ready for the music lesson to be given to the young lady of the family. A hungry looking gentleman, of foreign aspect, and slightly French or German accent, also descended from an omnibus in the same quarter; he bore in his hand a black case which might be from its appearance a sarcophagus for a deceased cat, but which might be identified by more experienced observers as containing a fiddle. He was received by the servant at the front door not more ceremoniously than the instructress of a few hours earlier. This was the proprietor of a little orchestra which attended private dances. A few hours after he might be accompanying with his fiddle the wind instruments of his troupe, for Thackeray’s Mrs Timmins gave that very night her little dance. If the musician played well, and pleased the head footman as well as the mistress of the house, he might as a special favour be invited downstairs to help the servants finish the cold chicken and the champagne heeltaps when the guests had gone.

To-day the lady who condescends to teach the art of pianoforte execution to the young people in a popular London quarter drives up to the house in her own victoria and would no more be kept waiting a minute for her appointment than if she were a duchess in her own right. The accomplished foreigner who plays the violin alights from a brougham drawn by a pair of thoroughbreds. If he is to be induced to honour a friend in Grosvenor Square with his company at dinner, the invitation must be given at least three weeks beforehand. The ‘master’ must choose his own fellow guests, and supervise the menu before it is finally decided on; the dinner itself must be so arranged that to a moment it will occupy the time which the great man prescribes. The conversation must be so contrived as to coruscate with epigram, and to fascinate with anecdotes all warranted to be new, lest the diner of the evening should have the slightest touch of boredom. If these conditions are not satisfied, this arbiter of taste may refuse to sit through the meal. He is the chartered libertine of the dining rooms and drawing rooms of the great.

England has always possessed a considerable school of national composers. These might have achieved the highest triumphs of genius without acquiring a fraction of that social ascendancy for their art which it has gradually won. Under the auspices of the Prince Consort first, the patronage of the Court was secured for the art of St Cecilia. That day already mentioned on which Lady Lyttelton first heard the Queen’s husband playing on the organ at Windsor was an eventful one for the social esteem of music in the adopted country of the Royal executant. After this came the Prince’s directorship of the Ancient Concerts, and the arrangement of its programmes on special occasions by himself. The club principle during the married life of the Queen had in its popular illustration not gone beyond infancy. Otherwise, one of the Royal Family would, as he has since done, regularly have handled the conductor’s baton; while for the special amusement of another a series of smoking concerts might as to-day have been arranged in Piccadilly palaces.

Music of course has always been a tradition of English Royalty. The Royal Academy of Music now domiciled in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square, was founded in 1822 with the King as patron. It was opened March 24, 1823, with a small and precarious attendance of pupils seldom exceeding two or three score, even at the date of its receiving the Royal charter, June 23, 1830. The number of students at Christmas 1896 was 500, all of whom were regular in their visits. The Royal College of Music at Kensington Gore was first founded as the National Training School in 1875. Its avowed motive was to honour the Consort’s memory. It was due partly to the efforts of the Prince of Wales with a Committee of which the then Duke of Edinburgh was chairman. He was also a most indefatigable promoter of the whole scheme from the very first. Its first Principal was Dr, now Sir Arthur, Sullivan. Some years later, again at the Heir Apparent’s initiative, as a result of a meeting held at St James’s Palace, February 28, 1882, this institution was re-formed. It was opened in the building formerly occupied by the National Training School by the Prince and Princess of Wales, May 7, 1883. Of this Sir George Grove was the first director, holding the post till Christmas 1894 when he was succeeded by Dr. C. H. H. Parry. The Charter of the Royal College was obtained in 1883. It has to-day an endowment of £130,000 which provides some 60 different scholarships. This, too, in its existing shape was opened by the Prince Consort’s descendants, the Prince and Princess of Wales; it had at the Christmas of 1896, 300 regular pupils. A very important part of the institution consists of the Donaldson museum of musical instruments; these were given to the College by Mr G. Donaldson in 1894.

The Guildhall School of Music was founded in 1880 by that same Corporation which has done more perhaps than any other single body since the Queen’s accession to promote the humanities of life. Its first Principal was Mr Weist Hill; he was succeeded by Sir Joseph Barnby, who again in 1896 was followed by Mr W. H. Cummings. This Guildhall School is undoubtedly the most popular institution of the kind which we possess. Its pupils at the Christmas of 1896 were 3,496. The other great metropolitan school of music is Trinity College, London. This was incorporated in 1875 under the Companies Act. Six years later, in 1881, it was reorganized upon a wider basis. The number of pupils at Christmas 1896 shows a steady increase.

These and other institutions less important are only some of the national monuments to the progress of the study of music as an art during the last two or three decades.

The organization and the educational machinery of music have now, in the opinion of those competent judges to whom the writer of these lines is indebted, reached a point beyond which further development is neither necessary nor desirable. Production and execution leave perhaps little to be wished for. Appreciation, however, of musical excellence is not universally proportionate to musical activity. Audiences more intelligently critical and better trained are apparently the chief desiderata, if composers and performers are to rise above mediocrity. Instruction in the art now spoken of has, of course, shared in the advantages incidental to the transformation of London from an insular into a cosmopolitan capital. As a result, the best teachers from all countries are available for the London learner.

Nor in this respect does England to-day, as thirty years ago it did, compare disadvantageously with Leipsic, Paris, Berlin, Stuttgardt. There seems however reason to fear that, like Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda before Klesmer, we fail in that important and indefinable quality, style. The best critics complain that, when a student has been through the regular course here, and has perhaps become a first rate technical musician, he seldom seems to get any further; he never, in other words, develops any individuality. To some extent this result follows the collective teaching of all academies. The area of level mediocrity is, however, it may be feared, larger here than in France or Germany. There is more of delicacy and daintiness in the French student; there is more of individual expansion and thoughtfulness in the German. Both are trained in academies. The quicker intuition and more intelligent appreciation of French and German audiences are in the opinion of unprejudiced critics attributed to this cause. Hence the expert, if consulted by an English student, probably would advise him to go abroad for a year or two when his technical course has been finished in England. Unfortunately the advice too often resembles that of a medical man who might prescribe a generous diet and a glass of port wine to an invalid labourer, earning less than £1 a week.

In respect of education, cheapness and free scholarships seem to have been carried at least as far as is conducive to the real interest of learners in this country. A reform, favoured by many good judges, is to make payment for teaching universal with a few exceptions; then to give to students of promise an allowance sufficient to enable them to go abroad and complete their education. As it is, some risk is run of gratuitously training mediocrities, launching them on professional careers which can only land them in disappointment and poverty.

The late Prince Consort, though the most highly placed, is only one of several individuals whose personal influence has conspicuously encouraged the growth and the gratification of a musical taste more or less cultivated. The discussion which agitated English taste in the eighteenth century as to the merits of German and other music is summed up in a familiar epigram as the difference between tweedledum and tweedledee: —

 
Some say, compared to Bononcini,
That Mynheer Handel’s but a ninny;
Others aver that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.
 

The commanding genius of the great German composer is enough to account for the traditional complaint that native genius in England has been eclipsed by foreign products. The Elector of Hanover had recognized Handel’s genius before he became George I. of England, but began his reign by showing little favour to the composer, who had absented himself without leave from his duties at the Electoral Court. Already in Queen Anne’s reign Handel’s Te Deum had celebrated in St Paul’s Cathedral the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht. It was not till after his Water Music had procured his restoration to favour that the new English monarch took him back into his service. Gradually, however, till in 1741 it was confirmed by the Messiah produced in Dublin and by his operas in London, the triumph of the German over the Italian school thus advanced. Neither then nor later did it involve neglect of the great English composer of the seventeenth century, our own Henry Purcell,⁷⁸ organist at Westminster Abbey at eighteen years of age, and author of a greater number of songs, anthems, operas, glees and cantatas, at once famous and popular, than probably any other musician whom England has produced. Felix Mendelssohn of Hamburg, not less precocious than our own Purcell, also at eighteen produced an opera. His personal influence in England was scarcely less great than that of Handel, and of course tended towards the further popularization of Teutonic art: he lived on terms of intimate friendship during his different sojourns in this country with English musicians. The popular and accomplished pianoforte improvisatore, John Parry, who was familiar to the English public of this age from his connection with the German-Reed company, 1860-9, the forerunner of the Corney Grain and Arthur Cecil of a later day, might almost be called Mendelssohn’s pupil. By Mendelssohn, Parry was first encouraged to adopt music as a profession; the present writer well remembers how he heard from John Parry himself the account of Mendelssohn’s listening during half a winter night to the piano improvisations devised by the versatile genius of the then young man.

Charles Hallé, born in Westphalia in 1819, and so just ten years younger than Mendelssohn was driven from Paris to London by the Revolution of 1848, to which England was indebted for such an influx of foreign genius of all kinds to her shores. Beethoven, like Handel, first became known in Europe through a German Elector, him of Cologne. He died in 1827. Though the charm and fame of Beethoven had been steadily growing upon English critics and musicians first and upon the general public afterwards, to Charles Hallé⁷⁹ belongs the distinction of having done much towards popularizing this great author of classical music with the English public. The Musical Union which preceded the Popular Concerts was then directed by John Ella, whose programmes included Beethoven’s sonatas, played by Hallé with great applause.

The English public, if by voluntary culture it had not been disciplined into a genuine admiration for Teutonic music, as interpreted by various foreign executants, would have been wooed to its love by the educating influences of the Hungarian violinist Herr Joachim, deservedly reverenced by all circles of English society, ever receiving his homage with the dignified modesty of great genius. This director of the Royal Academy of Music at Berlin had, before that appointment, received the degree of Doctor of Music at Cambridge. The bow with which he elicited entrancing strains from his instrument was a social sceptre as well. When George Eliot was writing Daniel Deronda, Herr Joachim’s social and artistic ascendancy had just reached its culminating point. A scientific musician herself, George Eliot visited those circles where first-rate music was to be heard. No writer more artistically found the suggestions of her characters in real life. The Herr Joachim whom English society knew is reflected so strikingly in the Herr Klesmer of whom the Daniel Deronda public reads as to warrant the conjecture that the master before whom Gwendolen Harleth trembled had been suggested by the violinist at whose feet the aristocracy of birth, beauty, wit, intellect and wealth with unfeigned admiration knelt down.

Other individuals deserve a place in the catalogue of those who have helped on the musical movement of our times. Sir George Grove made a substantial addition to the musical wealth of the world by contributing a chapter to its musical romance; that which relates his discovery of the lost scores of Schubert in a Vienna cupboard. His dictionary of music will survive when the honourable record of his Directorship of the Royal College of Music may be forgotten. Sir Arthur Sullivan has not only illustrated with melodies, that have at once caught the ear of the town, the fantastic conceptions of Mr W. S. Gilbert’s intellect; he has used his personal popularity on all levels of social London to diffuse improved notions of musical taste. Agencies of the same kind, collective as well as individual have not, during the Victorian age, been wanting.

The personnel of upper middle class society in England has been perceptibly affected by the entrance into it through the gate of marriage, of ladies of German origin, of great taste and accomplishments generally, and like all their nation, devoted to music. Hence among other things the increased patronage of the Italian Opera, of all high-class concerts in public as well as of musical artists in private by that well to do section of the Queen’s subjects which combines the tastes of culture and of birth with the resources of trade. Its composition of the veritable materials of Paxton’s Glass House for the Great Exhibition is not the only respect in which the Crystal Palace at Sydenham is connected with that enterprise of the Prince Consort as a reformer of English taste. To mention only its connection with the subject now being specially considered, the Crystal Palace has maintained its full orchestra since 1854. These concerts have been admittedly during near half a century prime instruments of metropolitan and suburban civilization. They have practically revolutionized the home life of tens of thousands of the prosperous commercial class which fixes its household gods out of earshot of Bow Bells. The impulse thus given to the study of the art on a basis wider and deeper than anything formerly existing can scarcely be exaggerated. It is of itself enough to explain why the number of English students of music in the nineties is so vastly larger than it was during any of the preceding decades.⁸⁰