Part 22

In town-planning literature and talk much is said about houses, roads, centre-points to design, architectural features, treatment of junctions, and many other items both important and interesting; but the tone of thought pervading all that I have yet read is that it is the healthy and happy, the respectable and the prosperous, for whom all is to be arranged. It takes all sorts to make a world, and the town planner who excludes in his arrangements the provision for the lonely, the sick, the sorrowful, and the handicapped will lose from the midst of the community some of its greatest moral teachers.

The children should be specially welcomed amid improved or beautiful surroundings, for the impressions made in youth last through life, and on the standards adopted by the young will depend the nation’s welfare. A vast army of children are wholly supported by the State, some 100,000, while to them can be added nearly 200,000 more for whom the public purse is partly responsible. In town planning the needs of these children should be considered, and the claims of the sick openly met.

Hospitals are intended to help the sick poor, so, in planning the town or its growth, suitable sites should be chosen in relation to the population who require such aid; but in London many hospitals are clustered in the centre of the town, are enlarged, rebuilt, or improved on the old positions, though the people’s homes and workshops have been moved miles away; thus the sick suffer in body and become poorer in purse, as longer journeys have to be undertaken after accidents, or when as out-patients they need frequent attention.

The wicked, the naughty, the sick, the demented, the sorrowful, the blind, the halt, the maimed, the old, the handicapped, the children are facts--facts to be faced, facts which demand thought, facts which should be reckoned with in town planning--for all, even the first-named, can be helped by being surrounded with “whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, and whatsoever things are of good report”.

Every one who has been to Canada must have been struck with the evidence of faith in educational appreciation which the Canadians give in the preparation of their vast teaching centres.

“What impressed me greatly,” said Mr. Henry Vivian in his speech at the dinner given in his honour on his return from the Dominion, “was the preparation that the present people have made for the education of the future people,” and he described the planning of one University, whose buildings, sports-grounds, roads, hostels, and gardens were to cover 1300 acres. Compare that with the statement of the Secretary of a Borough Council Education Authority, who told me the other day, with congratulatory pleasure, that long negotiations had at last obtained one acre and a quarter for the building of a secondary school and a hoped-for three acres some distance off for the boys’ playground.

The town planning of the future will make, it is to be hoped, generous provision for educational requirements, and not only for the inhabitants of the immediate locality. As means of transit become both cheaper and easier, it will be recognized as a gain for young people to go out of town to study, into purer air, away from nerve-wearing noise, amid flowers and trees, and with an outlook on a wider sky, itself an elevating educational influence both by day and night.

The need of what may be called artificial town addition can only concern the elder nations, who have, scattered over their lands, splendid buildings in the centre of towns that have ceased to grow. As an example, I would quote Ely. What a glorious Cathedral! kept in dignified elderly repair, its Deans, Canons, Minors, lay-clerks, and choir, all doing their respective daily duties in leading worship; but, alas! there the population is so small (7713 souls) that the response by worshippers is necessarily inadequate--the output bears no proportion to the return. Beauty, sweetness, and light are wasted there and West Ham exists, with its 267,000 inhabitants, its vast workshops and factories, its miles of mean streets of drab-coloured “brick boxes with slate lids”--and no Cathedral, no group of kind, leisured clergy to leaven the heavy dough of mundane, cheerless toil.

If town planning could be treated nationally, it might be arranged that Government factories could be established in Ely. Army clothiers, stationery manufactories, gunpowder depôts would bring the workers in their train. A suitable expenditure of the Public Works Loans money would cause the cottages to appear; schools would then arise, shops and lesser businesses, which population always brings into existence, would be started; and the Cathedral would become a House of Prayer, not only to the few religious ones who now rejoice in the services, but for the many whose thoughts would be uplifted by the presence in their midst of the stately witness of the Law of Love, and whose lives would be benefited by the helpful thought and wise consideration of those whose profession it is to serve the people.

Pending great changes, something might perhaps be done if individual owners and builders would consider the appearance, not only of the house they are building, but of the street or road of which it forms a part. A few months ago, in the bright sunshine, I stood on a hill-top, facing a delightful wide view, on a newly developed estate, and, pencil in hand, wrote the colours and materials of four houses standing side by side. This is the list:--

No. 1 HOUSE.--Roof, grey slates; walls, white plaster with red brick; yellow-painted woodwork; red chimneys.

No. 2 HOUSE.--Roof, purpley-red tiles; walls, buff rough cast; brown-painted woodwork; yellow chimneys.

No. 3 HOUSE.--Roof, orangey-red tiles; walls, grey-coloured rough cast; white-painted woodwork; red chimneys.

No. 4 HOUSE.--Roof, crimson-red tiles; walls, stone-coloured rough cast; peacock-blue paint; red chimneys.

This bare list tells of the inharmonious relation of colours, but it cannot supply the variety of tones of red, nor yet the mixture of lines, roof-angles, balcony or bow projections, one of which ran up to the top of a steep-pitched roof, and was castellated at the summit. The road was called “Bon-Accord”. One has sometimes to thank local authorities for unconscious jokes.

My space is filled, and even a woman’s monologue must conclude some time! But one paragraph more may be taken to put in a plea for space for an Open-air Museum. It need not be a large and exhaustive one, for there is something to be said for not making museums “too bright and good for human nature’s daily food”. There might be objects of museum interest scattered in groups about the green girdle which the young among my readers will, I trust, live to see round all great towns; or an open-air exhibit on a limited subject might be provided, as the late Mr. Burt arranged so charmingly at Swanage; or the Shakespeare Gardens, already started in some of the London County Council parks, might be further developed; or the more ambitious schemes of Stockholm and Copenhagen intimated; but whichever model is adopted the idea of open-air museums (which might be stretched to include bird sanctuaries) is one which should find a place in the gracious environment of our well-ordered towns when they have come under the law and the gospel of the Town-planning Act.

HENRIETTA O. BARNETT.

THE MISSION OF MUSIC.[1]

BY CANON BARNETT.

July, 1899.

[1] From “International Journal of Ethics”. By permission of the Editor.

“We must have something light or comic.” So say those who provide music for the people, and their words represent an opinion which is almost universal with regard to the popular taste. The uneducated, it is thought, must be unable to appreciate that which is refined or to enjoy that which does not make them laugh and be merry.

Opinions exist, especially with regard to the tastes and wants of the poor, by the side of facts altogether inconsistent with those opinions. There are facts within the knowledge of some who live in the East End of London which are sufficient, at any rate, to shake this general opinion as to the people’s taste in music.

In Whitechapel, where so many philanthropists have tried “to patch with handfuls of coal and rice” the people’s wants, the signs of ignorance are as evident as the signs of poverty. There is an almost complete absence of those influences which are hostile to the ignorance, not, indeed, of the mere elements of knowledge (the Board Schools are now happily everywhere prominent), but to the ignorance of joy, truth, and beauty. Utility and the pressure of work have crowded house upon house; have filled the shops with what is only cheap, driven away the distractions of various manners and various dresses, and made the place weary to the body and depressing to the mind.

Nevertheless, in this district a crowd has been found willing, on many a winter’s night, to come and listen to parts of an oratorio or to selections of classical music. The oratorios have sometimes been given in a church by various bodies of amateurs who have practised together for the purpose; the concerts have been given in schoolrooms on Sunday evenings by professionals of reputation. To the oratorios men and women have come, some of them from the low haunts kept around the city by its carelessly administered charity, all of them of the class which, working for its daily bread, has no margin of time for study. Amid those who are generally so independent of restraint, who cough and move as they will, there has been a death-like stillness as they have listened to some fine solo of Handel’s. On faces which are seldom free of the marks of care, except in the excitement of drink, a calm has seemed to settle and tears to flow, for no reason but because “it is so beautiful!” Sometimes the music has appeared to break gradually down barriers that shut out some poor fellow from a fairer past or a better future than his present: the oppressive weight of the daily care lifts, other sights are in his vision, and at last, covering his face or sinking on his knees, he makes prayers which cannot be uttered. Sometimes it has seemed to seize one on business bent, to transport him suddenly to another world, and, not knowing what he feels, has forced him to say, “It was good to be here”. A church filled with hundreds of East Londoners, affected, doubtless, in different ways, but all silent, reverent, and self-forgetful, is a sight not to be forgotten or to be held to have no meaning. To the concerts have crowded hard-headed, unimaginative men, described in a local paper as being “friends of Bradlaugh”. These have listened to and evidently taken in difficult movements of Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin. The loud applause which has followed some moments of strained, rapt attention has proclaimed the universal feeling.

With a knowledge of the character of the music, the applications for admission have increased, and the announcement of a hope that the concerts might be continued the following winter, and possibly also extended to weekday evenings, has brought from some of those present an expression of their desire for other high-class music. The poor quarters of cities have been too long treated as if their inhabitants were deficient in that which is noblest in human nature. Human beings want not something which will do, but the best.

If it be asked what proof there be that such music has a permanent effect on the hearers, the only answer is that people do not always know how they have been most influenced. It is the air unconsciously breathed which affects the cure much more often than the medicine so consciously taken. Music may most deeply and permanently affect those who themselves can express no appreciation with their words or show results in their lives. Like the thousand things which surrounds the child and which he never notices, music may largely serve in the formation of character and the satisfaction of life. That the performance of this music in the East End is not followed by expressions of intelligent appreciation or by immediate change of life is no proof of its failure to influence. The fact that crowds come to listen is sufficient to make the world reconsider its opinion that the people care only for what is light or laugh-compelling. There is evidently in the highest music something which finds a response in many minds not educated to understand its mysteries nor interested in its creation. This suggests that music has in the present time a peculiar mission.

“Man doth not live by bread alone,” expresses a truth which even those will allow who profess themselves careless about present-day religion. There is in human beings, in those whom the rich think to satisfy by increased wages and improved dwellings, a need of something beyond. The man who has won an honourable place, who by punctuality, honesty, and truthfulness has become the trusted servant of his employer, is often weary with the very monotony of his successful life. He has bread in abundance, but, unsatisfied, he dreams of filling quite another place in the world, perhaps as the leader daring much for others, perhaps as the patriot suffering much for his class and country, or perhaps as the poet living in others’ thoughts. There flits before him a vision of a fuller life, and the vision stirs in him a longing to share such life. The woman, too, who in common talk is the model wife and mother, whose days are filled with work, whose talk is of her children’s wants, whose life seems so even and uneventful, so complete in its very prosaicness, she, if she could be got to speak out the thoughts which flit through her brain as she silently plies her needle or goes about her household duties, would tell of strange longings for quite another sort of life, of passions and aspirations which have been scarcely allowed to take form in her mind. There is no one to whom “omens that would astonish have not predicted a future and uncovered a past”.

Beyond the margin of material life is a spiritual life. This life has been and may still be believed to be the domain of religion, that which science has not known and can never know, which material things have not helped and can never help. It has been the glory of religion to develop the longing to be something higher and nobler by revealing to men the God, Who is higher than themselves.

Religion having abdicated this domain to invade that of science has to-day suffered by becoming the slave of æsthetic and moral precepts. Her professors often yield themselves to the influence of form and colour or boast only of their morality and philanthropy.

It is no wonder, therefore, that many who are in earnest and feel that neither ritualism nor philanthropy have special power to satisfy their natures, reject religion. But they will not, if they are fair to themselves, object to the strengthening of that power which they must allow to have been a source of noble endeavour and of the very science whose reign they acknowledge. The sense of something better than their best, making itself felt not in outward circumstance but inwardly in their hearts, has often been the spring of effort and of hope. It is because the forms of present-day religion give so little help to strengthen this sense, that so many now speak slightingly of religion and profess their independence of its forms. Religion, in fact, is suffering for want of expression.

In other times men felt that the words of the Prayer Book and phrases now labelled “theological” did speak out, or at any rate did give some form to their vague, indistinct longing to be something else and something more; while the picture of God, drawn from the Bible history and Bible words, gave an object to their longing, making them desire to be like Him and to enjoy Him for ever.

In these days, however, historical criticism and scientific discoveries have made the old expressions seem inadequate to state man’s longings or to picture God’s character. The words of prayers, whether the written prayers of the English Church or that rearrangement of old expressions called “extempore prayer,” do not at once fit in with the longings of those to whom, in these later days, sacrifice has taken other forms and life other possibilities. The descriptions of God, involving so much that is only marvellous, jar against minds which have had hints of the grandeur of law and which have been awed not by miracles but by holiness. The petitions for the joys of heaven do not always meet the needs of those who have learnt that what they are is of more consequence than what they have, and the anthropomorphic descriptions of the character of God make Him seem less than many men who are not jealous, nor angry, nor revengeful.

Words and thoughts alike often fail to satisfy modern wants. While prayers are being said, the listless attitude and wandering gaze of those in whose souls are the deepest needs and loftiest aspirations, proclaim the failure. Religion has not failed, but only its power of expressing itself. There lives still in man that which gropes after God, but it can find no form in which to clothe itself. The loss is no light one. Expression is necessary to active life, and without it, at any rate, some of the greater feelings of human nature must suffer loss of energy and be isolated in individuals. Free exercise will give those feelings strength; the power of utterance will teach men that they are not alone when they are their best selves.

The world has been moved to many a crusade by a picture of suffering humanity, and the darkness of heathenism calls forth missionaries of one Church and another. Almost as moving a picture might be drawn of those who wanting much can express nothing. Here are men and women, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh: they have that within them which raises them above all created things, powers by which they are allied to all whom the world honours, faculties by which they might find unfailing joy. But they have no form of expression and so they live a lower life, walking by sight, not by faith, giving rein to powers which find their satisfaction near at hand, and developing faculties in the use of which there is more of pain than joy. The power which has been the spring of so much that is helpful to the world seems to be dead in them; that sense which has enabled men to stand together as brothers, trusting one another as common possessors of a Divine spark, seems to be without existence. A few may go on walking grimly the path of duty, but for the mass of mankind life has lost its brightness. Dullness unrelieved by wealth, and loneliness undispersed by dissipation, are the common lot. In a sense more terrible than ever, men are like children walking in the night with no language but a cry. He that will give them the means once more to express what they really are and what they really want will break the bondage.

The fact that the music of the great masters does stir something in most men’s natures should be a reason for trying whether music might not, at any rate partially, express the religious life of the present day.

There is much to be said in favour of such an experiment. On the one side there is the failure of existing modes of expression. The prettinesses of ritualism and the social efforts of Broad Churchism, even for the comparatively small numbers who adopt these forms of worship, do not meet those longings of the inner life which go beyond the love of beauty and beyond the love of neighbours. The vast majority of the people belong to neither ritualism nor Broad Churchism; they live, at best, smothering their aspirations in activity; at worst, in dissipation, having forsaken duty as well as God. Their morality has followed their religion. In the East End of London this is more manifest, not because the people of the East are worse than the people of the West, but because the people of the East have no call to seem other than they are. Amid many signs hopeful for the future there is also among East Londoners, unblushingly declared at every street-corner, the self-indulgence which robs the young and weak of that which is their right, education and protection; the vice which saps a nation’s strength is boasted of in the shop and flaunted in the highways, and the selfishness which is death to a man is often the professed ground of action.

Morality for the mass of men has been dependent on the consciousness of God, and with the lack of means of expression the consciousness of God seems to have ceased. On this ground alone there would be reason for making an experiment with music, if only because it offers itself as a possible means of that expression which the consciousness of God supports. And, on the other side, there is the natural fitness of music for the purpose.

In the first place, the great musical compositions may be asserted to be, not arrangements which are the results of study and the application of scientific principles, but the results of inspiration. The master, raised by his genius above the level of common humanity to think fully what others think only in part, and to see face to face what others see only darkly, puts into music the thoughts which no words can utter and the descriptions which no tongue can tell. What he himself would be, his hopes, his fears, his aspirations, what he himself sees of that holiest and fairest which has haunted his life, he tells by his art. Like the prophets, having had a vision of God, his music proclaims what he himself would desire to be, and expresses the emotions of his higher nature.

If this be a correct account of the meaning of those great masterpieces which may every day be performed in the ears of the people, it is easy to see how they may be made to serve the purpose in view. The greatest master is a man with much in him akin to the lowest of the human race. The homage all pay to the great is but the assertion of this kinship, the assertion of men’s claim to be like the great when the obstructions of their mal-formation and mal-education shall be trained away. Men generally will, therefore, find in that which expresses the thoughts of the greatest the means of expressing their own thoughts. The music which enfolds the passions that have never found utterance, that have never been realized by the ordinary man, will somehow appeal to him and make him recognize his true self and his true object. Music being itself the expression of the wants of man, all who share in man’s nature will find in it an expression for longings and visions for which no words are adequate. It will be what prayers and meditations now so often fail to be, a means of linking men with the source of the highest thoughts and efforts, and of enabling them to enjoy God, a joy which so few now understand.

More than this, the best existing expression of that which men have found to be good has been by parables, whose meanings have not been limited to time or place but are of universal application. Heard by different people and at different times, parables have given to all alike a conception of that which eye cannot see nor voice utter; each hearer in each age has gained possibly a different conception, but in the use of the same words all have felt themselves to be united. The parable of the prodigal son has represented the God who has been won to love by the sacrifice of Christ and also the God who freely forgives. Such forms of expression it is most important to have in an age when movement is so rapid that things become old as soon as they are new, separating to-morrow those who have stood together to-day, and when at the same time the longing for unity is so powerful that the thought of it acts as a charm on men’s minds.