594 Hon. Maurice Baring [June 2,. 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, June 2, 11)22. 



The Right Hon. Lord Justice Younger, P.O. G.B.E., 



Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Hon. Maurice Baring. 



Gilbert and Sullivan. 



[With Musical Illustrations by Major Geoffrey Toye.] 



The late Arthur Strong, who was librarian of the House of Lords, 

 and not only a scholar of encyclopedic knowledge, but who also had 

 a rare appreciation of all the arts, and an appreciation based on know- 

 ledge, used to say that the greatest English composer England had 

 produced since the days of Purcell was Arthur Sullivan, the Sullivan 

 of Pinafore and Ruddigore, and not the Sullivan of the Golden Legend, 

 and that compared with him most of our modern composers were but 

 the grammarians of music. He may have been right or wrong about 

 modern composers ; he may have been unjust ; he was not speaking 

 on oath. But it is certain that Sullivan carried on the true tradition 

 of English music, or rather that in his work the English musical 

 genius that produced tunes like " The Girl I Left Behind Me " and 

 " The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington " was born again and flowered 

 once more in a glorious spring-tide. The melodies in Sullivan's 

 comic operas are as English as those older tunes, that is to say, as 

 English as a picture of Constable, a lyric of Shakespeare, as English 

 as eggs and bacon. 



No foreigner, however painstaking, or however assimilative, can 

 cook eggs and bacon, just as no Englishman can make French coffee. 

 No nation can learn to make something which is peculiar to the 

 genius of another nation. The most striking instance of this I can 

 recall was the case of aeroplane manufacture during the war. When 

 the French made English machines from English designs, and the 

 English made French machines from French designs, the results were 

 never satisfactory. A French designed machine made by English- 

 men was never the same as a French machine, and an English 

 designed machine made by a Frenchman was never quite like an 

 English machine. And when the Germans copied either, the copy 

 though accurate and faithful was Teutonic. 



It is perhaps because Sullivan's lighter music is so essentially 



