ABSTRACT
We have looked at the folk music of Europe, but how did matters stand in Great Britain? Although folk-song collections were made in Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth century, there was no nationalism in English musical life till the end of the nineteenth century. When the Prince of Wales summoned the meeting at StJames's Palace in 1882 to launch his scheme for the foundation of a new national conservatoire, a scheme out of which the Royal College of Music was to come, he asked 'Why is it that England has no music recognized as national? (in comparison with Germany, France and Italy which he had just named). It has able composers but nothing indicative of national life or national feeling.' Francis Hueffer, music critic of The Times from 1878 to 188g, observed that in spite of an array of talent, Carl Rosa's operatic efforts, Barnby, Cowen 'whose Welsh and Scandinavian symphonies are as good as any by any living master' (Brahms was still alive!), and Sullivan (whose addiction to operetta he deplored), 'a genius in the proper sense of that much abused word ... has not yet made his appearance ... [and] in secular music at least we have not a .distinctively national type of art.' Indeed, the lack of a national style was recognized by most commentators on the Victorian scene, even though the country at large was content to go on living on Handel and Mendelssohn and Mendelssohn's epigones, who were numerous and of whom Sterndale Bennett might have founded an English school had his talent not
been Mendelssohnized at Leipzig and crushed to pulp by the working conditions of English musical life. The English musical renaissance did not begin till I88o when Hubert Parry broke on the scene.1 In the I 8gos the relevance of English folk-song was realized by the publication of English County Songs edited by Lucy Broad wood and J. A. Fuller Maitland in I 893 and the foundation in 18g8 of the Folk Song Society. England's delay, however, was not all loss, since the ethics of collecting, editing and preserving the materials of oral tradition were not realized all at once and some considerable outrages were perpetrated by Scottish and Irish editors.
