The Renascence of Dutch Music

Extract

Those of us who are students of history know, and those who are readers of Mr. Bernard Shaw's Prefaces take his word for it, that it was not until well on towards the end of what we call the Middle Ages that France and England began to feel and to show a national consciousness, and then only in a vague and indeterminate way. Italy, the Kingdoms and Principalities of Germany, and the Provinces and Countries of the Netherlands arrived at this condition still later. It is not surprising, therefore, that National Music, music which is the unconscious yet definite expression of this feeling, should be a comparatively modern thing. Art belongs to some extent to races and still more to individuals, and it was long before it became a possession of nations as nations. Nations even to-day are so often merely agglomerations of peoples under the government of one king or one state, and so rarely are separate and complete entities in themselves, with common feelings of race or family life, that it is only by long association in work or war, in personal loyalty to a sovereign or in joint effort against a common enemy, that they find and express any feeling which is either common to humanity or antipathetic as between the different peoples or districts making up the nation.