One may surely be permitted, without being invidious, to contrast the performances of an Englishman like Mr. W. H. Squire with those of such exponents of their respective schools as Señor Casals and M. Gerardy, and express a preference for the northern virility and dignity of the Englishman.
Granted that many foreign artists who appear here display great ability, there are many more who do nothing of the kind, and the day should be past when every alien musician endowed with long hair and a pallid complexion is to be accepted by the British public as the highest type of musical genius. This delusion has lasted long enough.
Had England shown herself barren in producing sons possessing great musical gifts, the position to-day would at least be explicable, but this is not the case. There has been no time in the centuries since Purcell's death destitute of some living representative of the old English genius, although, perhaps, living in the comparative obscurity of a cathedral town, and far removed from the garish lights of the Metropolis.
Certain it is that of native composers who have shown any English characteristics in their music, the majority of them have been reared in our cathedral cities, and have imbibed their earliest impressions in cathedral choirs.
To go no further back than the Wesleys, Samuel and his son, Samuel Sebastian, we need only cite a few of them: Atwood, Pierson, Goss, Sterndale Bennett, Arthur Sullivan, Sir Frederick Bridge, Sir Walter Parratt--and crowds of others, both living and dead.
Removed from the centralised cosmopolitanism of London, many of them had a chance of giving expression to their thoughts in music not characterised by foreign idiom.
If the fine work of such men as Hubert Parry, Edward Elgar, Granville Bantock, Walford Davies, William Wallace, Joseph Holbrook, and others of the new British school does not convince the country of the fatuity of perpetuating the state of things existing at present, nothing will, and we must accept the fact that the idea of foreign supremacy in every branch of musical work, is so engrained in the blood of the "man in the street" as to be absolutely ineradicable.
One hardly dares to question the sanity of a nation, even on so elusive a subject as music.