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MUSIC AND CHORUS-SINGING 1'1'1
to venture, to act on a reasonable probability, instantly
to verify every experiment (though in this respect only
inferior to carpentering), besides the wonder at the beauty
underlying the chalk scratches, and the joy of co-operative
effort without self-obtrusion. Moreover, the mere fact of
its suitability to large classes ought to be a very strong
argument in its favour, since it seems that in the elementary
schools we are condemned to large classes for
many years to come. If you succeed in stirring a village
to a long-continued joint effort of handicraft or chorussinging,
you raise the whole life of a locality ; and if the
new owners of landed property take this fact to heart and
act upon it by cutting down their London seasons to the
minimum, so as to seize the rich opportunities of prolonged
residence in the country, we might almost be
reconciled to the displacing of the old landlords by the
new rich. But will they Y
At any rate, Dr. Sir Walford Davies-to whom honour is
due-asserted in a lecture that a good tune is a part of
God, and I hold he is right, though, like other truths, it
may ea&jly be perverted. Heflce an explanation of the
emphatic comment of my predecessor at Haileybury, James
Robertson, on hearing some admirable piano playing by
Miss Liddell : " N ourisliing." So in schools, if you teach
chorus-singing and reading at sight you not only train
the faculties of hearing and thinking, and strengthen the
lungs, but you also store in the young minds things of
beauty which do not pass away, but are potent to gild the
thoughts of the heart and quicken nascent hopes " forty
years on" in the din of Cheapside or in the bush of Australia
or in a Sunday Mattins in a fashionable church
at Cannes.
Now, the opportunity of establishing a tradition of fine
chOI'Ull-singing at Eton seemed undeniable. The number
of the boys from whom to select, abOut 1,000, gave promise
of a more massive volume of sound than could be raised
in any other school, and there were memories of delightful
concerts in the days of Barnby and Lloyd. But music at