And yet, one may ask oneself, is London served so well artistically that it can claim, apart from its power and its attraction, to be as a whole the inspirer, the source, the fount of what may be called the indigenous, the native art of the soil? We can at once make an illustration by calling in the beautiful example of Wagner's "Meistersinger." Although momentarily, at the period in which he set his opera, Wagner had allowed the worm of pedantry to creep into the guild of Mastersingers, whose art was the glory of Nuremberg, here, however, he gave us an illustration of the music regarded as a civic matter, with its civic contests, jealousies, rivalries, and prizes. Now, it is precisely this sort of bonded interest in the art of music which is acutely lacking in everything that concerns that art in London. It has often been said that London is no more than a huge congeries of innumerable villages; and, from the musically artistic point of view, this is a matter that cannot be contradicted. The splendid artists whom we hear here are not of, or from, London; they come to please us Londoners, they do not develop from within our midst; they are not part and parcel of ourselves. It is the art, if you please, of Leipsic, or Munich, or Düsseldorf, or what you will; it is not the art of London. We make, of course, an exception to so splendid a band as the Queen's Hall orchestra; but is that the most—fine as it is as a single combination—that this huge metropolis can do for us?
We have often thought that had Wagner been an Englishman he would have chosen York as the central city in which to place the guild of his Mastersingers. Its river, the Ouse, is like the river near which Nuremberg stands. The old guilds of each place have a certain family resemblance. Mediaevalism broods over both cities. The old gates of York, its narrow streets, its aristocracy of lingering beauty, its splendid Minster, all (save, perhaps, in the last instance) have their counterpart in the German town; and they have both seen war, and have endured sieges; the defences of Nuremberg that are left are not so complete as the walls of York, but they are in the same relation of things. Wagner could not have chosen a better dwelling-place for Hans Sachs than near the open space where Stonegate almost runs into Lendal.
Moreover, York and its county are famous for musical enthusiasm; and it is to this point that we would now come. The present organist of the cathedral Mr. T. Tertius Noble, is a man, sufficiently young not to be near middle-aged, who by his personal energy is proving month by month, year by year, that a place like York may be capable of doing that which we have shown London to be incapable of doing, that which Wagner in his noble romance dreamed - partly through the records of history, partly through the halo which his own visions cast upon that history - that Nuremberg had done. That is to say, there is gradually rising up in this northern town a sort of guild of musicians who, under Mr. Noble's guidance, have advanced from the simple to the less simple, and finally to quite complex, orchestral performances of well-known works of musical art. Enthusiasm is the note among these players. Like so many whose lives are wrought out to an issue in a quiet city where interests are not loosely spread, those who have built up this orchestra, sprung from so little, dream naturally of doing much in that one lovely art that belongs to these players for the study, almost for the asking; and we cannot encourage too persistently the zeal and the enthusiasm which have created a condition of things so honourable to English art, a condition of things, one may add, all the more engrossing because it still looks from "eyes of youth." When, one may ask in conclusion, are we to have a York Festival?