Chapter XIII: Section V: Social Service (1)

Of Town Planning--The Mission of Music--The Real Social Reformer--Where Charity Fails--Landlordism Up-to-date--The Church and Town Planning.

OF TOWN PLANNING.[1]

BY MRS. S. A. BARNETT.

January, 1911.

[1] From “The Cornhill Magazine”. By kind permission of the Editor.

Much has been said lately about town planning. Conferences have been held, speeches have been made, articles have been written, papers have been read, and columns of newspaper-notices have appeared, and yet I am daring to occupy eleven pages of the CORNHILL MAGAZINE to try and add a few more remarks to what has already been so well and so forcibly put forth.

But in apology for the presumption, it can be said that what I want to say does not entrench upon the province of the architect, the surveyor, or the artist. The questions of traffic-congestion, density of population, treatment of levels, arrangement of trams, water or gas, relation of railway termini or docks to thoroughfares, organization of periodic excess of street usage, relative positions of municipal buildings, harmony of material and design, standardization of streets and road grading, appreciation of scale; on these matters I will not write, for on them contributions, interesting, dull, suggestive, or learned, have been abundantly produced, and “are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles” of the great Conference held last month under the auspices of the Royal Institute of British Architects? And are not their potentialities visible beneath the legal phraseology of Mr. John Burns’ Town-planning Act of last Parliament?

It is so delightful to realize that some of the best brains of this and other countries are turning their thoughts to the solution of what Mr. T. S. Horsfall (who for many years was a voice crying in the wilderness) demanded as the elemental right of every human being, “the conditions of a healthy life”. It is comforting to know that others are doing the thinking, especially when one is old, and can recall one’s passionate, youthful indignation at the placid acceptance of stinking courts and alleys as the normal homes for the poor, when the memory is still vivid of the grand day when one portion of the network of such courts, in St. Jude’s parish, was swept away, and a grave, tall, carefully planned tenement building, erected by the public-spirited kindness of the late Mr. George M. Smith, arose in its stead, “built to please Barnett as an experiment”.

Some five-and-twenty years ago, when old Petticoat Lane was pulled down, my husband sent in to the Local Authority a suggestion of laying the area out so that Commercial Road should be continued right through to Bishopsgate; the letter and plans were merely acknowledged and the proposal ignored. Five years ago we filled one of the rooms in the Whitechapel Exhibition with plans of how East London might be improved, but it elicited only little interest, local or otherwise; and now last month, but a few years later, all the walls of Burlington House were covered with town-planning exhibits, drawings, plans, and designs, and its floor space amply supplied with models from all parts of the world.

And the thought given is so fresh, so unconventional, and so full of characteristics, that one came away from a careful study of that great Exhibition with a clear sense of the individualities of the various nations, as they had stated their ideals for their towns. Some in broad avenues, great piazzas, parallel streets, careful to adopt Christopher Wren’s ideal, that “gardens and unnecessary vacuities ... be placed out of the town”. Some in fairy cities, girt with green girdles of open space, tree-lined roads, parks designed for quiet as well as for play, waterways used for pleasure locomotion as well as for business traffic, contours considered as producers of beauty, the view as well as the shelter planned for. Some with scrupulous care for the history of the growth of the city, its natural features, the footmarks left by its wars, each utilized with due regard to modern requirements and the tendencies of the future. Some glorying in the preservation of every scrap which could record age or civic history, others blatantly determined to show that the old was folly, and that only of the brand-new can it be said “the best is yet to be”.

The imagination is stirred by the opportunities which the Colonies possess, and envy is mixed with gratitude that they will have the chance of creating glorious cities warned by the Old Country’s mistakes, and realizing by the progress of economic science that the flow of humanity is ever towards aggregation. The “Back-to-the-land” cry falls on ninety irresponsive ears to ten responsive ones, for the large majority of human beings desire to live in juxtaposition with mankind. It behoves thinkers all the more, therefore, to plan beautiful cities, places to live as well as to work in, and enough of them to prevent a few becoming so large as to absorb more than a healthy share of national life and wealth.

But if all of us may think imperially, it is given to most of us only to act locally, and, therefore, I will convey your minds and mine back from the visions of town planning amid the plains of Canada, the fiords and mountains of British Columbia, the high lands and broad velds of Africa, the varied beauties of wood, hill, and sea of Australia and New Zealand, back from the stimulating, almost intoxicating, vision of the work lying before our great Colonies, to the sobering atmosphere of a London or a Manchester suburb, with its miles of mean streets already built, or its open fields and new-made roads, laid out as if under the ruler of the office-boy.

Whoever undertakes the area to be laid out, whether it is the municipality or a public land company, should see that the planning is done on a large scale. The injury wrought to towns hitherto has been often due to the narrowness of personal interests and the limitation of the acres dealt with, both of which dim the far sight. The almost unconscious influence of dealing with a wide area is shown in existing schemes, which have been undertaken by owners of large estates, whether the area be planned for an industrial village, such as Mr. Lever’s at Port Sunlight, or for a housing-reform scheme like Mr. Cadbury’s at Bournville; or to accommodate the leisured, as the Duke of Devonshire’s at Eastbourne, or the artistic, as Mr. Comyns Carr’s at Bedford Park; or to create a fresh commercial city, as conceived by Mr. Ebenezer Howard at Letchworth; or to house all classes in attractive surroundings as at the Hampstead Garden Suburb. Whatever be the purpose, the fact of a large area has influenced them all. It has had, as it were, something of the same effect as the opportunity of the Sistine Chapel had on Michael Angelo. The population to be accommodated was large enough to require its own places of worship, public halls, or clubs, its schools, and recreation-grounds. So the lines were drawn with a generous hand, and human needs considered, with a view to their provision within the confines of the estate, instead of being treated as the organ-grinder, and advised to seek satisfaction in the next street--or accommodation on neighbouring land.

The idea of town or suburb planning has not yet found its way into the minds which dominate local Public Authorities, but a few examples will doubtless awaken them to the benefits of the Act, if not from the æsthetic, yet from the economic point of view, and then borough or ward boundaries will become as unnoticeable for town-planning purposes as ecclesiastical parish ones now are for educational administration.

Foremost among the problems will be the allotment of different positions of the area under consideration to different classes of society, or perhaps it would be better to say different standards of income.

No one can view with satisfaction any town, whether in England, America, or the Colonies, where the poor, the strenuous, and the untutored live as far as possible removed from the rich, the leisured, and the cultivated. The divorce is injurious to both. Too commonly is it supposed that the poor only suffer from the separation, but those who have the privilege of friendships among the working-people know that the wealthy lose more by not making their acquaintance than can possibly be computed.

“I often advise you to make friends,” said the late Dr. Jowett to a body of undergraduates assembled in Balliol Hall to hearken to my husband and Mr. C. S. Loch, as they spoke of the inhabitants of East or South London in the early ’seventies, but “now I will add further advice: Make some of your friends among the poor.”

Excellent as the advice is, it is hardly possible to follow when certain classes live at one end of the town, and other classes dwell in the extreme opposite district. It may be given to the few to create artificial methods of meeting, but to the large mass of people, so long as they live in separate neighbourhoods, they must remain ignorant of each other to a very real, if undefinable, loss--the loss of understanding, mutual respect, and that sense of peace which comes when one sits in the parlour and knows the servants are doing their best, or works in the kitchen and knows that those who govern are directed by a large-hearted sympathy. Again and again in 1905-6, when the idea of provision being made for all classes of society in the Hampstead Garden Suburb was being submitted to the public, I was told that the cultivated would never live voluntarily in the neighbourhood of the industrial classes, but I was immensely surprised when I laid the scheme before a leading workman and trade-unionist to be told:--

“It is all very nice as you say it, Mrs. Barnett, but I’m mistaken if you will find any self-respecting workman who cares to bring his family to live alongside of the rich. They’re a bad example with their pleasure-loving sons and idle, vain daughters, always thinking of dressing, and avoiding work and natural duties as if they were sins.”

The acceptance of society newspaper paragraphs and divorce reports as accurate and exhaustive accounts of the lives of the leisured, even by thinking workmen, serves as an additional evidence of the need of common neighbourhood to correct so dangerous and disintegrating a view.

There can be no doubt but that Part III of the Housing Act of 1890 is, in so far as it affects recent town development, responsible for much of this lamentable ignorance, for under its powers provision can only be made to house the industrial classes, and thus whole neighbourhoods have grown up, as large in themselves as a small provincial town occupied by one class, or those classes the range of whose difference is represented by requiring two or three bedrooms, a “kitchen,” or a “parlour cottage”.

That this segregation of classes into distinct areas is unnecessary as well as socially dangerous, is evidenced by many small English towns, such as Wareham, Godalming, Huntingdon, where the grouping together of all sorts of people has taken place under normal conditions of growth, as well as in the Garden Suburb at Hampstead, where the areas to house people of various degrees of income were clearly defined in the original plan, and have been steadfastly adhered to. In that estate the rents range from tenements of 3s. 3d. a week to houses standing in their own gardens of rentals to £250 a year, united by cottages, villas, and houses priced at every other figure within that gamut. The inhabitants can dwell there as owners, or by renting their dwellings, or through the welcoming system and elastic doors of the co-partners, or as weekly tenants in the usual way. No sort of difficulty has arisen, and the often-expressed fears have proved groundless. Indeed, the result of the admixture of all classes has been a kindlier feeling and a richer sympathy, as people of varied experience, different educational standards, and unequal incomes feel themselves drawn together in the enjoyment of good music, in the discussion of social problems, in the preparation by their children of such a summer’s day festival as the “Masque of Fairthorpe,” or to enjoy the unaffected pleasure of the public open spaces and wall-less gardens.

In England we have not yet reached the gorgeous, riotous generosity of the Americans, who plan parks by the mile, and cheerfully spend, as Boston did, £7,500,000 for a girdle of parks, woods, meadows, sea and lake embankments; or vote, as Chicago did, £3,600,000 for the creation of a connected system of twenty-two parks; but we in humbler England have some ground for congratulation, that, as a few years ago a flowerless open space was counted adequate, now a well-kept garden is desired; but on the definition of their uses and the difficulties of their upkeep something has yet to be said.

Every one has seen derelict open spaces, squares, crescents, three-angled pieces of ground deliberately planned to create beauty, but allowed to become the resting places of too many weary cats or disused household utensils, the grass neither mown, protected, nor re-sown. “The children like it kept so,” people say, but I doubt if they do. In Westminster there are two open spaces, one planted and cared for, the other just an unkept open space. Both face south, both overlook the river, both are open free, but the children flock into the garden, leaving the open space drearily empty. It is to be regretted, for their noise, even when it is happy shouting and not discordant wrangling, is disturbing to those whose strenuous lives necessitate that they take their exercise or rest without disturbance. But, on the other hand, the children are entitled to their share of the garden, and those “passionless reformers,” order, beauty, colour, may perhaps speak their messages more effectually into ears when they are young.

The solution of the difficulty has been found by the Germans in their thoughtful planning of parks, and few things were more delightful in the Town-planning Exhibition than the photographs of the children paddling in the shallow pools, making castles (I saw no sign of fortifications!) in the sand, playing rough running games on gravel slopes, or quieter make-believes in the spinneys, all specially provided in specially allocated children’s areas. Isolated instances of such provision are existent in our English parks, but the principle, that some people are entitled to public peace as well as others to public play, is not yet recognized, and that there should be zones in which noise is permitted, and zones in which silence must be maintained is as yet an inconceivable restriction. So the children usually shout, race, scream, or squabble amid the grown-ups, kept even in such order as they are by the fear of the park-keeper, whom their consciences encourage them to credit with supernatural powers of observation. He is usually a worthy, patient man, but an expensive adjunct, and one who could sometimes be dispensed with if the children’s “sphere of influence” were clearly defined. The promiscuous presence of children affects also both the standard of cost of the upkeep of open spaces, although the deterioration of their standard is more often due to the lapse of the authority who created them.

It is because the changes of circumstances so frequently affect disastrously the appearance of public spaces that I would offer for consideration the suggestion that they should be placed under the care of the municipality, under stringent covenants concerning their uses, purposes, maintenance, and reservation for the inhabitants of special dwellings. This step would not, of course, be necessary where the owner or company still holds the land, but in cases where the houses for which the square or joint garden was provided have each strayed into separate ownership, and their ground-rents treated only as investments, then everyone’s duty usually becomes no one’s duty, and the garden drops into a neglected home for “unconsidered trifles”. I could quote instances of this, not only in East London, but in Clifton, Reading, Ventnor, York, or give brighter examples of individual effort and enthusiasm which have awakened the interest of the neighbours to take pride in the appearance, and pay towards the upkeep, of their common pleasance.

The arguments in favour of the municipality having the care of these publicly enjoyed or semi-private open spaces would be the advantages of a higher gardening standard, the economy of interchange of roots, seeds, and tools, the benefit of a staff large enough to meet seasonal needs, the stimulating competition of one garden against another, and the additional gift of beauty to the passers-by, who could thus share without intrusion the fragrance of the flowers and the melody of symphonies in colour.

“But how can the public enjoy the gardens when they are usually behind walls?” I hear that delightful person, the deadly practical man, murmur; and this brings me to another question, “Are walls round open spaces necessary?”

English people seem to have adopted the idea that it is essential to surround their parks and gardens with visible barriers, perhaps because England is surrounded by the sea--a very visible line of demarcation; but, in the stead of a dancing joy, a witchful barrier, uniting while it separates, they have put up grim hard walls, ugly dividing fences, barriers which challenge trespass, and make even the law-abiding citizen desire to climb over and see what is on the other side.

It is extraordinary how firmly established is the acceptance of the necessity of walls and protection. Nearly thirty-five years ago, when the first effort was made to plant Mile End Road with trees, and to make its broad margins gracious with shrubs and plants, we were met by the argument that they would not be safe without high railings. I recall the croakings of those who combated the proposal to open Leicester Square to the public, and who of us has not listened to the regrets of the landowner on the expense entailed by his estate boundary fences?

If you say, “Why make them so high, or keep them up so expensively, as you do not preserve your game? Why not have low hedges or short open fences, over which people can see and enjoy your property?” he will look at you with a gentle pity, thinking of you as a deluded idealist, or perhaps his expression will change into something not so gentle as it dawns on him that, though one is the respectable wife of a respectable Canon, yet one may be holding “some of those--Socialist theories”.

Not long ago I went at the request of a gentleman who owned property, with his agent to see if suggestions could be made to improve the appearance of his estate and the happiness of his tenants. The gardens were small enough to be valueless, but between and around each were walls, many in bad repair.

“The first thing I should do would be to pull down those walls, and let the air in; things will then grow, self-respect as well as flowers,” I said.

“What!” exclaimed the agent, “pull down the walls? Why, what would the men have to lean against?” thus conjuring up the vision one has so often seen of men leaning listlessly against the public-house walls, a sight which the possession of a garden, large enough to be profitable as well as pleasurable, ought to do much to abolish.

It is difficult to find arguments for walls. In many towns of America the gardens are wall-less, the public scrupulously observing the rights of ownership. In the Hampstead Garden Suburb all the gardens are wall-less, both public and private. The flowers bloom with the voluptuous abundance produced by virgin soil, but they remain untouched, not only by the inhabitants, which, of course, is to be expected, but by the thousands of visitors who come to see the realization of the much-talked-of scheme, and respect the property as they share its pleasures.

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.

In some degree all art is a parable, as it makes known in a figure that which is unknown, revealing the truth the artist has felt to others just in so far as they by education and surroundings have been qualified to understand it. Titian’s picture of the Assumption helped the mediæval saint to worship better the Virgin Mother, and also helps those of our day to realize the true glory of womanhood.

But music, even more than painting and poetry, fulfils this condition. It reveals that which the artist has seen, and reveals it with no distracting circumstance of subject, necessary to the picture or the poem. The hearer who listens to a great composition is not drawn aside to think of some historical or romantic incident; he is free to think of that of which such incidents are but the clothes. Age succeeds to age; the music which sounded in the ears of the fathers sounds also in the ears of the children. Place and circumstance force men asunder, but still for those of every party or sect and for those in every quarter of the world the great works of the masters of music remain. The works may be performed in the West End or in the East End--the hearers will have different conceptions, will see from different points of view the vision which inspired the master, but will nevertheless have the sense that the music which serves all alike creates a bond of union.

Music then would seem fitted to be in this age the expression of that which men in their inmost hearts most reverence. Creeds have ceased to express this and have become symbols of division rather than of unity! Music is a parable, telling in sounds which will not change of that which is worthy of worship, telling it to each hearer just in so far as he by nature and circumstance is able to understand it, but giving to all that feeling of common life and assurance of sympathy which has in old times been the strength of the Church. By music, men may be helped to find God who is not far from any one of us, and be brought again within reach of that tangible sympathy, the sympathy of their fellow-creatures.

There is, however, still one other requisite in a perfect form of religious expression. The age is new and thoughts are new, but nevertheless they are rooted in the past. More than any one acknowledges is he under the dominion of the buried ages. He who boasts himself superior to the superstitions of the present is the child of parents whose high thoughts, now transmitted to their child, were intertwined with those superstitions. Any form of expression therefore which aims at covering emotions said to be new must, like these emotions, have associations with the past. A brand new form of worship, agreeable to the most enlightened reason and surrounded with that which the present asserts to be good, would utterly fail to express thoughts and feelings, which, if born of the present, share the nature of parents who lived in the past. It is interesting to notice how machines and institutions which are the product of the latest thought bear in their form traces of that which they have superseded; the railway carriage suggests the stage-coach, and the House of Commons reminds us of the Saxon Witanagemot. The absolutely new would have no place in this old world, and a new form of expression could not express the emotions of the inner life.

Music which offers a form in which to clothe the yearnings of the present has been associated with the corresponding yearnings of the past, and would seem therefore to fulfil the necessary condition. Those who to-day feel music telling out their deepest wants and proclaiming their praise of the good and holy, might recognize in the music echoes of the songs which broke from the lips of Miriam and David, of Ambrose and Gregory, and of those simple peasants who one hundred years ago were stirred to life on the moors of Cornwall and Wales.

The fact that music has been thus associated with religious life gives it an immense, if an unrecognized power. The timid are encouraged and the bold are softened! When the congregation is gathered together and the sounds rise which are full of that which is and perhaps always will be “ineffable,” there float in, also, memories of other sounds, poor perhaps and uncouth, in which simple people have expressed their prayers and praises; the atmosphere, as it were, becomes religious, and all feel that the music is not only beautiful, but the means of bringing them nearer to the God after Whom they have sought so long and often despaired to find.

For these reasons music seems to have a natural fitness for becoming the expression of the inner life. The experiment, at any rate, may be easily tried. There is in every parish a church with an organ, and arrangements suitable for the performance of grand oratorios; there are concert halls or schoolrooms suitable for the performance of classical music. There are many individuals and societies with voices and instruments capable of rendering the music of the masters. Most of them have, we cannot doubt, the enthusiasm which would induce them to give their services to meet the needs of their fellow-creatures.

Money has been and is freely subscribed for the support of missions seeking to meet bodily and spiritual wants; music will as surely be given by those who have felt its power to meet that need of expression which so far keeps the people without the consciousness of God. Members of ethical societies, who have taught themselves to fix their eyes on moral results, may unite with members of churches who care also for religious things. Certain it is that people who are able to realize grand ideals will be likely in their own lives to do grand things, and doing them make the world better and themselves happier.

SAMUEL A. BARNETT.

THE REAL SOCIAL REFORMER.[1]

BY CANON BARNETT.

January, 1910.

[1] From “The Manchester Weekly Times”. By permission of the Editor.

The world is out of joint. Reformers have in every age tried to put it right. But still Society jerks and jolts as it journeys over the road of life. The rich fear the poor, the poor suspect the rich, there is strife and misunderstanding; children flicker out a few days’ life in sunless courts, and honoured old age is hidden in workhouses; people starve while food is wasted in luxurious living, and the cry always goes up, “Who will show us any good?”

The response to that cry is the appearance of the Social Reformer. Philanthropists have brought forward scheme after scheme to relieve poverty, and politicians have passed laws to remove abuses. Their efforts have been magnificent and the immediate results not to be gainsaid, but in counting the gains the debit side must not be forgotten. Philanthropists weaken as well as strengthen society; law hinders as well as helps. When a body of people assume good doing as a special profession, there will always be a tendency among some of their neighbours to go on more unconcerned about evil, and among others to offer themselves as subjects for this good doing. The world may be better for its philanthropists, but when after such devotion it remains so terribly out of joint the question arises whether good is best done by a class set apart as Social Reformers.

There is an often-quoted saying of a monk in the twelfth century: “The age of the Son is passing, the age of the Spirit is coming”. He saw that the need of the world would not always be for a leader or for a class of leaders, but rather for a widely diffused spirit.

The present moment is remarkable for the number of societies, leagues, and institutions which are being started. There never were so many leaders offering themselves to do good, so many schemes demanding support. The Charities Register reveals agencies which are ready to deal with almost any conceivable ill, and it would seem that anyone desiring to help a neighbour might do so by pressing the button of one of these agencies. The agencies for each service are, indeed, so many, that other societies are formed now for their organization, and the would-be good-doer is thus relieved even from inquiring as to that which is the best fitted for his purpose.