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

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 HandelIs 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

CHAPTER XXV

TRANSFORMED AND TRANSFORMING ART

English art stimulated and strengthened to a degree second only to science by the movements with which, through the Prince Consort, the Victorian Court identified itself. Contrast between the social consideration of artists now and fifty years ago. From Gandish to Gaston Phœbus. Progress in the association of art with the government of England, and general gain to all concerned in consequence. Gradual endowment of art by the State and establishment of the existing machinery for teaching art and displaying its triumphs to a cultivated public. The work of South Kensington. Success of the Academy tested by figures and facts. Reciprocal benefits to art workers and art patrons. Foreign recognition of English art. The past, present and future of English sculpture.

The popularization and improvement of art in all its manifestations followed the 1851 Exhibition and the initiative of the Prince Consort in a degree second only to the development of science and music themselves. That the Court of Victoria and Albert should have been to the painters of a later day what the Court of Charles I. was to Van Dyck could not have been expected. The Consort’s interest and judgment in pictures were inferior to his genuine concern for science. The complacency with which he regarded the canvases of Winterhalter could not promise much enthusiasm in the patronage of English painters. His rescue from disorder and decay of the Raphael cartoons, long before the Prince’s day belonging to our Court, but by him first properly cared for and arranged, was not a work of creation, but was one of artistic development. His were the active mind and useful hand that rendered available for national instruction or delight the hereditary treasures of Crown and country which before his day were not indeed unknown, but were not perhaps properly appreciated in the country which possessed them. The rise of a moneyed and fairly cultivated class in English society was the chief element in the improvement of the social and commercial position of the English painter. These agencies happily coincided with the example set by the Prince to his successors of assisting at the great artistic gatherings of the year.

Before May 3, 1851, the Crown had not been represented at the Royal Academy dinner. It has seldom been unrepresented since. Sir Charles Eastlake, in whose election to the Presidency the Queen and Prince had been much interested, had not brought oratorical euphuism to the same perfection as his successor, Lord Leighton. He was, however, a man of cultivated mind, of acceptable presence, and of well-bred speech. His proposal of the Prince’s health was made in words that have to-day an historical value. The reply of the Prince blended a philosophic criticism less English than German, with an appreciation of our national masters which was entirely patriotic. It was, he said, the fate of all aristocracies to be assailed habitually from without, sometimes from within. The Academy being an aristocracy of the brush, must accept the position and turn to practical account any hints for improvement which it might contain.81

These were still the days when art and artists had not migrated from the gloomy studios of unfashionable Bloomsbury to the gleaming palaces of modish Kensington. Sir Charles Eastlake’s predecessor had been Sir Martin Archer Shee, who, very faintly disguised, appears in Thackeray’s Mr Smee in The Newcomes. Gandish, the unappreciated genius of the palette at whose school, on Mr Smee’s advice Clive Newcome is placed, is not a caricature at all of the most serviceable art teacher of that period whose real name was Sass and who counted among his pupils John Everett Millais. What has taken place since then is that in the smiles of popular favour, Thackeray’s Gandish has blossomed into the Mr Gaston Phœbus of Lord Beaconsfield’s Lothair. Colonel Newcome thought it a condescension to ask the painter of ‘Boadishia’ to dinner. That artist’s later and transformed self would have resented an invitation at short notice as an impertinence; he would have bluntly excused himself on the plea of being pre-engaged to the Prime Minister,82 the Heir Apparent, or to Windsor three months ago. The social prejudice, confined to a small section of the upper middle class, against the studio which lingered so long and so unintelligently in England is easily explained. It is identical in its origin with an equally unreasoning and antiquated feeling against doctors, singers and players. This superstition had disappeared in the days of Sir Henry Holland who, half a century ago was a welcome and honoured guest at the most exclusive houses; under men like Sir James Paget and Sir Richard Quain it has long since ceased even to be a memory. In each of these cases money is regarded as passing directly between the patronizing public and the employed professional. The purse is opened at the door of the theatre, the concert hall, or in the consulting room of the physician. That the payment is in the other cases as real though not as sensibly direct is ignored. The terms on which Sir Charles Eastlake was a visitor at the Victorian Court are those that have marked the subsequent relations of his successors with the Crown. The intellectual influences of a whole school of intelligent and highly educated critics following as nearly as they could the example of Mr Ruskin, has shed a dignity on the painter’s calling that could not have resulted from material prosperity or the favour of high place alone.

Sir Edwin Landseer, elected R.A. 1830, it may be said, years before the transformation now spoken of, was welcome in any house whose threshold he pleased to cross. His was rather the exception which proved the rule, and for these reasons; he flourished most just when Court patronage was making the Scotch Highlands fashionable; he was the painter of hounds, horses, animals themselves so eminently aristocratic that no Englishman with any pretensions to social breeding could affect disregard for them, or for their reproducer in art without losing caste. Hence it is that while fifty years since, the Clive Newcomes who took to painting were spoken of by their families in a low voice much as if they had taken to drink, the painter of repute to-day who chose to receive pupils83 would have no more difficulty in filling his studio twice over, than a fashionable crammer for the army or Civil Service in filling his lecture room. As a fact it is not in the private studios of great artists that the Royal Academician of the future, unlike the intending exhibitor in the Parisian salon, is to-day generally trained. Sass had a rival, or a professional descendant, in the father of a clever versifier H. S. Leigh. Since that day, English artists have generally learnt their craft in the Royal Academy, or the Slade or other schools of England, or in foreign ateliers. These have transformed the surface of Victorian England. The same organization of art teaching, which is to-day at the disposal of all is said to have discouraged the development of individuality. Where genius exists, it is not very likely to be strangled by the conventions of a public school, nor to be prevented from exchanging State teachers for those whom native inspiration prompts it to prefer.

The South Kensington84 machinery is not the only artistic growth of the Victorian age. The National Gallery had been in existence more than ten years before the reign began (since 1824). It was not a popular institution until a year later, the architect Wilkins having made the design, the present building in Trafalgar Square was opened, April 9, 1838. The nucleus of the collection was the Angerstein pictures, thirty-eight in number, bought by the Government for £57,000. Twenty-seven years had still to pass before the Trafalgar Square structure was enlarged to its existing size by a parliamentary vote of £50,000. The immediate era of the Queen’s accession was marked by the purchase of a masterpiece of Murillo, a landscape by Salvator Rosa, and an important picture by Rubens. Still the Gallery lingered below the Imperial dignity of the nation to which it belonged. The Vernon bequest enriched it only when the Queen had been on the Throne ten years. It was not till after the Crimean War that Parliament could attend to artistic claims, and that under the Directorship of Sir Charles Eastlake, deservedly trusted by Crown and country, the rooms designed by Barry were added to the block which Wilkins had shaped.

The institution, now endowed with the paintings that had belonged to Sir Robert Peel, began steadily to approach towards the dimensions and the dignity of an Art Gallery comparable with that of any other capital in the world. Nor probably have its perfections or its premises yet reached their final limit.

While this was going on in London, the entire provinces were vigorously taking their part in the new movement. The death of the Duchess of Gloucester in 1857 was not allowed by the Queen’s representative to interfere with his opening in that year the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, the completeness of which was largely due to the Royal encouragement to private owners to send their statues and paintings to the show. Thirty years later the Jubilee anniversary of 1887 was observed in the same city by a like display of the creations of British genius. Then the objects exhibited were the property no longer of the leisured, or a patrician class. They belonged also to the new patrons whom, during less than half a century, success in manufacture and commerce, accompanied by the liberal agencies of travel and education have stimulated to competition with the social order whose exclusive appanage art encouragement once was. The material proof of art progress is the increase of art values. Many instances of these were given in an earlier chapter. During his lifetime David Cox was glad to sell his landscapes for £20. Cox had formed his genius amid the rural scenes of Hereford. He never liked London. After living there fourteen years he settled at Birmingham. Here, during his lifetime he had the satisfaction of seeing his masterpiece in oil colour bought for £40. Ten years later, when the painter was dead, it secured £50 in the open market. In the early seventies a Birmingham manufacturer, the former partner of Mr Chamberlain gave for it £2,300. In the same way De Wint’s landscapes during his lifetime seldom commanded more than £50. To-day they sometimes fetch £1,000, and are reckoned cheap at 700 or 800 guineas.

The social consideration, and with it the commercial possibilities, of any professional calling have in England always been regulated by its degree of connection with the State. The department of practical art established at South Kensington with the encouragement of the Prince Consort under the Directorship of Mr Henry Cole in 1852 had no sooner expanded into the science and art department under the President of the Council instead of under the Board of Trade than the social repute of practitioners in all branches of decorative art appreciably improved.

About this time, too, Marlborough House, up to that date an asylum for exhibited pictures and a receptacle for the Duke of Wellington’s funeral car, suggested itself as a future residence for the Prince of Wales when he came to have an establishment of his own. In 1856-7, therefore, the House of Commons, without demur, allotted £10,000 for the removal of the chaos of artistic treasures from their temporary resting place in Pall Mall to their permanent home in South Kensington. Hither, therefore, were sent the national purchases made at the sale of the Bernal collection, a full account of which has been given in an earlier chapter.

Directly art was in this way officially and substantially incorporated by the State, the golden stream of private munificence with no check and in great volume flowed towards Brompton. Most readers of these lines will remember the consignment to this wealthy spot of the Dickens manuscripts and relics as well as the library and paintings bequeathed to it by the friend and biographer of Dickens, the late John Forster, in 1876. These had some years earlier been preceded by the pictures, bric-à-brac, and foreign furniture collected by various private connoisseurs, now stowed away in the glass-covered cabinets which line the galleries and which, studied daily by English artizans, have probably done more than the ’51 Exhibition ever effected, towards improving the designs of English manufacture.

South Kensington, it should be remembered, is richer even than it appears. Its activities are ubiquitous. It is a bank of art treasures on which institutions affiliated to it throughout the Kingdom can draw at discretion. To-day this department of State, decorative as to its purpose, but distinctly remunerative as to its results, is supported by an annual endowment of nearly half a million. That outlay not only gives profitable holidays to countless pleasure seekers from every quarter of the Kingdom; it enables a yearly average of 30,000 pupils of both sexes to pass through its art and science classes.

This apparatus for developing and training the future artists of England has been accompanied with an increasingly lavish expenditure by the State when a chance has occurred of permanently adding to its artistic wealth. Thus, during the early eighties the Treasury paid for a single painting from the Blenheim collection, the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael, exactly the same sum that, thirty years earlier, had been voted for the entire collection of Sir Robert Peel.85

The transformation effected during the Victorian age in the position of English art is illustrated by the statistics of visitors to the Royal Academy exhibitions not less significantly than by the increase of prices itself. Only within the last few years has what is called the ‘private’ view of the Royal Academy become a fête day of fashionable society; – a promenade for the display of the latest devices in Parisian or Bond Street toilettes. Long after the great Exhibition or even the Prince Consort’s death, it was that the view of the critics, from being confined strictly to the judges of the press, began to be transformed into an immense meeting of authors, scholars, divines, novelists of both sexes, art fanciers of every degree; all of them able to produce some credentials of critical aptitude or profession, and of some slight connection with periodical letters. The figures themselves shall tell their tale. To the earliest exhibition at the Academy rooms, then in Trafalgar Square, of the Queen’s reign, the admissions were less than 79,000. Ten years later they just fell short of 91,000. Between 1846 and 1866 the increase was 94,000. The additions steadily continued till in 1879 the high water mark of 391,197 was reached. Since that date they have fluctuated: depending, as one might naturally expect, upon the state of trade in the country, upon the weather in town, or upon the general character of the London season. Thus, in 1896, which was not a very brilliant season, the admissions were 10 less than in the preceding year, or in the Queen’s jubilee year of 1887.