The Parataxis of "British Musical Modernism"

Abstract

Here, then, is something of England… . We are still a nation of individualists, and I think that comes out in this book, in which I have given a portrait gallery of people not yet standardized by the mass production of thought and character. In this machine age, which is killing some of our character and some of our beauty every day, England is still beautiful where one slips away from the roar of traffic and the blight of industrialism; and in these quiet places where there are still English meadows not yet taped out by the jerry builder, and trees not yet marked for the ax, and old houses with old timbers, there are, as I have shown, men and women still living very deep in tradition. The two worlds live side by side, the old-world England hardly touched by the increasing rhythm of the speed mania which is called Progress, hardly affected by the trash of the mind, the jazzing up of life, the restlessness, the triviality, which goes by the name of the Modern Spirit; yet in this other world of bricks and mortar, of picture palaces, of factories and flats, and electric trams and chain stores, there is something still very traditional in the crowds that pass and in the individuals which make up the crowds. All this modernization is, I find, very superficial. I mean, it has not yet bitten into the soul of England or poisoned its brain.