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.