Perhaps the story had better begin with a letter which Swift received one morning at his Deanery in Dublin, in the spring of the year 1729. It was from his old friend Dr. Arbuthnot, formerly physician to Queen Anne. He writes that he has just been attending poor John Gay, and has pulled him through a very severe attack of fever, from which “a physician who had not been passionately his friend could not have saved him. I had beside my personal concern for him” the doctor goes on, “other motives of my care. He is now become a public person, a little Sacheverell;. … one of the obstructions to the peace of Europe, the terror of ministers. He has got several turned out of their places, the greatest ornament of the court banished from it for his sake, another great lady in danger of being chassée likewise, about seven or eight duchesses pushing forward who shall suffer martyrdom upon his account first. He is the darling of the city. If he should travel about the country he would have hecatombs of roasted oxen sacrificed to him … and I can assure you this is the very identical John Gay—the inoffensive John Gay—whom you formerly knew and lodged with in Whitehall two years ago.”

I have nothing very extraordinary to communicate to you, and I do not know that you will think what you hear to-night is worth the trouble of coming to; but it has occurred to me that this would be an opportunity for many of you just to make the acquaintance of a particular class of music with which I have been rather intimately connected for some little time. Most of you know that I have been able to recover certain music composed by the best musicians in the early seventeenth century embodying fortunately nearly 150 of the old Cryes of London, many of them not at all known; and a very interesting study it has been to me, and I hope interesting also to those who have heard them. We are anxious nowadays to recover and preserve old folk songs. A great mine of these real old Cryes, beautiful old tunes many of them, had been overlooked. They had never been printed so far as I know. Those that have come before me have all been in manuscript.

Some people may ask: “Why have centenary celebrations?” My answer must be in the form of a legend of a certain British composer. He was praised by foreigners and called “The Father of Counterpoint.” Most of his MSS. are in Vienna; and about twenty years ago Vienna honoured him and honoured herself by publishing some of them. Here in England, however, his music is absolutely unknown. His name was even confused at one time with that of an early Saint of the Church, who was thus, quite unjustifiably, endowed with miraculous musical powers. Such a thing could only happen in England; and this is sufficient answer to those who decry centenary celebrations. They may be dangerous; but England needs at least one a week. 1923 is a good year to begin; for 1623 saw the death not only of Byrd and Weelkes, but of Rosseter, the Lutenist composer, and the birth of John Playford, the first systematic collector of English folk-dances and their tunes; while in 1523 Merbecke was born, who was the first to write a special plainsong for the (then) new English Prayer Book, and Hugh Aston died, who was called the “Inventor of Instrumental Music in Europe”; but about whom so little is known.

It is a great pleasure to come here to-night to talk to so learned a gathering about a problem which interests me much but with which nevertheless I feel that I am not very well qualified to deal. It is a difficult problem and it has to be examined from all kinds of angles. We get sometimes on rather dangerous ground, but we must try to face the difficulties, and I hope to learn a great deal from the discussion which will follow.

I find that it is advisable amongst musicians to speak the truth at the outset, otherwise they are liable to mistake fiction for fact; so let me say at once that this short paper contains no matter that has not already been sifted and probed, no criticisms that have not been adequately capped, and no suggestions that are not practically commonplaces to all present in this room. For if, as has been said with unction, there is nothing new in art, then obviously there is nothing new to be said about it, though million pens splutter and a myriad tongues wag. Always the same music rises to the same accompaniment of chatter, and indeed we are so inured to reading and talking about it in preference to hearing it, that we are often enabled to combine the three functions simultaneously, digesting as we do our analytical programmes and forming our considered judgments therefrom, actually during the performance of the music to which they refer. So what tones of quality can be superimposed on this bedrock of sound to season the appearance of the new in music, which as we are told is but the reappearance of the old, bidding us the prima donna's everlasting farewell?

Instead of “translation,” which is the title of this lecture, I want to use, if I can remember to stick to it, the word “version.” For “translation” has certain connotations which seem best avoided. It suggests faithfulness to the original, which does not seem to me to be at all necessary when words are there only for the sake of the music. Because music does not repeat what the words have already said, but broods on the feelings which they arouse; and to substitute one verbal expression for another need not alter the intensity of those feelings (which is all that music is concerned with) though it might if clumsily or casually done. We can think of cases, even without music, where one feeling can be substituted for another without diminution of force. The Song of Solomon is a decided love song, but it takes its place in the Bible because it is referred to divine love, I should say that mistranslation, if by accident, is an affront to the poet, if by design, is a concession to the audience. The difficulty in most intellectual things is to be purist enough without being too much of a purist.