Chapter III (1)

The "Matthew" Passion arouses a very different mood from that aroused by the "John." One does not remember the turbulent people's choruses, nor the piercing note of anguish, nor any rapturous song or chorus; for all else is drowned in the recollection of an overwhelming utterance of love and human sorrow and infinite tenderness. Much else there is in the "Matthew" Passion, just as there is love and tenderness in the "John"; but just as these are subordinated in the "John" to the more striking features I have mentioned, so in the "Matthew" the noise of the people and the expression of keen remorse are subordinated to love and human tenderness and infinite sorrow. The small number and conciseness of the people's choruses have already been alluded to, and it may easily be shown that the penitential music is brief compared with the love music, besides having a great deal of the love, the yearning love, feeling in it. The list of penitential pieces is exhausted when I have mentioned "Come, ye daughters," "Guilt for sin," "Break and die," "O Grief," "Alas! now is my Saviour gone," and "Have mercy upon me"; and, on the other hand, we have "Thou blessed Saviour," the Last Supper music, the succeeding recitative and song, "O man, thy heavy sin lament," "To us He hath done all things," "For love my Saviour suffered," "Come, blessed Cross," and "See the Saviour's outstretched arm," every one of which, not to speak of some other songs and most of the chorales, is sheer love music of the purest sort. This, then, seems to me the difference between the "Matthew" Passion and its predecessor: in the "John" Bach tried to purge his audience in the regular evangelical manner by pity and terror and hope. But during the next six years his spiritual development was so amazing, that while remaining intellectually faithful to evangelical dogma and perhaps such bogies as the devil and hell, he yet saw that the best way of purifying his audience was to set Jesus of Nazareth before them as the highest type of manhood he knew, as the man who so loved men that He died for them. There is therefore in the "Matthew" Passion neither the blank despair nor the feverish ecstasy of the "John," for they have no part to play there. Human sorrow and human love are the themes. Whenever I hear a fine rendering of the "Matthew" Passion, it seems to me that no composer, not even Mozart, could be more tender than Bach. It is often hard to get into communication with him, for he often appeals to feelings that no longer stir humanity--such, for instance, as the obsolete "sense of sin,"--but once it is done, he works miracles. Take, for example, the scene in which Jesus tells His disciples that one of them will betray Him. They ask, in chorus, "Herr, bin ich's?" There is a pause, and the chorale, "_Ich bin's_, ich sollte buessen," is thundered out by congregation and organ; then the agony passes away at the thought of the Redeemer, and the last line, "Das hat verdienet meine Seel," is almost intolerable in its sweetness. The songs, of course, appeal naturally to-day to all who will listen to them; but it is in such passages as this that Bach spoke most powerfully to his generation, and speaks now to those who will learn to understand him. Those who understand him can easily perceive the "John" Passion to be a powerful artistic embodiment of an eighteenth century idea; and they may also perceive that the "Matthew" is greater, because it is, on the whole, a little more beautiful, and because its main idea--which so far transcended the eighteenth century understanding that the eighteenth century preferred the "John"--is one of the loftiest that has yet visited the human mind.

HANDEL

Mr. George Frideric Handel is by far the most superb personage one meets in the history of music. He alone of all the musicians lived his life straight through in the grand manner. Spohr had dignity; Gluck insisted upon respect being shown a man of his talent; Spontini was sufficiently self-assertive; Beethoven treated his noble patrons as so many handfuls of dirt. But it is impossible altogether to lose sight of the peasant in Beethoven and Gluck; Spohr had more than a trace of the successful shopkeeper; Spontini's assertion often became mere insufferable bumptiousness. Besides, they all won their positions through being the best men in the field, and they held them with a proud consciousness of being the best men. But in Handel we have a polished gentleman, a lord amongst lords, almost a king amongst kings; and had his musical powers been much smaller than they were, he might quite possibly have gained and held his position just the same. He slighted the Elector of Hanover; and when that noble creature became George I. of England, Handel had only to do the handsome thing, as a handsome gentleman should, to be immediately taken back into favour. He was educated--was, in fact, a university man of the German sort; he could write and spell, and add up rows of figures, and had many other accomplishments which gentlemen of the period affected a little to despise. He had a pungent and a copious wit. He had quite a commercial genius; he was an impresario, and had engagements to offer other people instead of having to beg for engagements for himself; and he was always treated by the British with all the respect they keep for the man who has made money, or, having lost it, is fast making it again. He fought for the lordship of opera against nearly the whole English nobility, and they paid him the compliment of banding together with as much ado to ruin him as if their purpose had been to drive his royal master from the throne. He treated all opposition with a splendid good-humoured disdain. If his theatre was empty, then the music sounded the better. If a singer threatened to jump on the harpsichord because Handel's accompaniments attracted more notice than the singing, Handel asked for the date of the proposed performance that it might be advertised, for more people would come to see the singer jump than hear him sing. He was, in short, a most superb person, quite the grand seigneur. Think of Bach, the little shabby unimportant cantor, or of Beethoven, important enough but shabby, and with a great sorrow in his eyes, and an air of weariness, almost of defeat. Then look at the magnificent Mr. Handel in Hudson's portrait: fashionably dressed in a great periwig and gorgeous scarlet coat, victorious, energetic, self-possessed, self-confident, self-satisfied, jovial, and proud as Beelzebub (to use his own comparison)--too proud to ask for recognition were homage refused. This portrait helps us to understand the ascendency Handel gained over his contemporaries and over posterity.

But his lofty position was not entirely due to his overwhelming personality. His intellect, if less vast, less comprehensive, than Beethoven's, was less like the intellect of a great peasant: it was swifter, keener, surer. Where Beethoven plodded, Handel leaped. And a degree of genius which did nothing for Bach, a little for Mozart, and all for Beethoven, did something for Handel. Without a voice worth taking into consideration, he could, and at least on one occasion did, sing so touchingly that the leading singer of the age dared not risk his reputation by singing after him. He was not only the first composer of the day, but also the first organist and the first harpsichord player; for his only possible rival, Sebastian Bach, was an obscure schoolmaster in a small, nearly unheard-of, German town. And so personal force, musical genius, business talent, education, and general brain power went to the making of a man who hobnobbed with dukes and kings, who ruled musical England with an iron rule, who threatened to throw distinguished soprano ladies from windows, and was threatened with never an action for battery in return, who went through the world with a regal gait, and was, in a word, the most astonishing lord of music the world has seen.

That this aristocrat should come to be the musical prophet of an evangelical bourgeoisie would be felt as a most comical irony, were it only something less of a mystery. Handel was brought up in the bosom of the Lutheran Church, and was religious in his way. But it was emphatically a pagan way. Let those who doubt it turn to his setting of "All we like sheep have gone astray," in the "Messiah," and ask whether a religious man, whether Byrde or Palestrina, would have painted that exciting picture on those words. Imagine how Bach would have set them. That Handel lived an intense inner life we know, but what that life was no man can ever know. It is only certain that it was not a life such as Bach's; for he lived an active outer life also, and was troubled with no illusions, no morbid introspection. He seemed to accept the theology of the time in simple sincerity as a sufficient explanation of the world and human existence. He had little desire to write sacred music. He felt that his enormous force found its finest exercise in song-making; and Italian opera, consisting nearly wholly of songs, was his favourite form to the finish. The instinct was a true one. It is as a song-writer he is supreme, surpassing as he does Schubert, and sometimes even Mozart. Mozart is a prince of song-writers; but Handel is their king. He does not get the breezy picturesqueness of Purcell, nor the entrancing absolute beauty that Mozart often gets; but as pieces of art, each constructed so as to get the most out of the human voice in expressing a rich human passion in a noble form, they stand unapproachable in their perfection. For many reasons the English public refused to hear them in his own time, and Handel, as a general whose business was to win the battle, not in this or that way, but in any possible way, turned his attention to oratorio, and in this found success and a fortune. In this lies also our great gain, for in addition to the Italian opera songs we have the oratorio choruses. But when we come to think of it, might not Buononcini and Cuzzoni laugh to see how time has avenged them on their old enemy? For Handel's best music is in the songs, which rarely find a singer; and his fame is kept alive by performances of "Israel in Egypt" at the Albert Hall, where (until lately) evangelical small grocers crowded to hear the duet for two basses, "The Lord is a man of war," which Handel did not write, massacred by a huge bass chorus.

His "Messiah" is in much the same plight as Milton's "Paradise Lost," the plays of Shakespeare and the source of all true religion--it suffers from being so excessively well known and so generally accepted as a classic that few want to hear it, and none think it worth knowing thoroughly. A few years ago the late Sir Joseph Barnby went through the entire work in St. James's Hall with his Guildhall students; but such a feat had not, I believe, been accomplished previously within living memory, and certainly it has not been attempted again since. We constantly speak of the "Messiah" as the most popular oratorio ever written; but even in the provinces only selections from it are sung, and in the metropolis the selections are cut very short indeed, frequently by the sapient device of taking out all the best numbers and leaving only those that appeal to the religious instincts of Clapham. I cannot resist the suspicion that but for the words of "He was despised," "Behold, and see," and "I know that my Redeemer liveth," Clapham would have tired of the oratorio before now, and that but for its having become a Christmas institution, like roast beef, plum-puddings, mince-pies, and other indigestible foods, it would no longer be heard in the provinces. And perhaps it would be better forgotten--perhaps Handel would rather have seen it forgotten than regarded as it is regarded, than existing merely as an aid to evangelical religion or an after-dinner digestive on Christmas Day. Still, during the last hundred and fifty years, it has suffered so many humiliations that possibly one more, even this last one, does not so much matter. First its great domes and pillars and mighty arches were prettily ornamented and tinted by Mozart, who surely knew not what he did; then in England a barbarous traditional method of singing it was evolved; later it was Costa-mongered; finally even the late eminent Macfarren, the worst enemy music has ever had in this country, did not disdain to prepare "a performing edition," and to improve Mozart's improvements on Handel. One wonders whether Mozart, when he overlaid the "Messiah" with his gay tinsel-work, dreamed that some Costa, encouraged by Mozart's own example, and without brains enough to guess that he had nothing like Mozart's brains, would in like manner desecrate "Don Giovanni." Like "Don Giovanni," there the "Messiah" lies, almost unrecognisable under its outrageous adornments, misunderstood, its splendours largely unknown and hardly even suspected, the best known and the least known of oratorios, a work spoken of as fine by those who cannot hum one of its greatest themes or in the least comprehend the plan on which its noblest choruses are constructed.

Rightly to approach the "Messiah" or any of Handel's sacred oratorios, to approach it in any sure hope of appreciating it, one must remember that (as I have just said) Handel had nothing of the religious temperament, that in temperament he was wholly secular, that he was an eighteenth century pagan. He was perfectly satisfied with the visible and audible world his energy and imagination created out of things; about the why and wherefore of things he seems never to have troubled; his soul asked no questions, and he was never driven to accept a religious or any other explanation. It is true he went to church with quite commendable regularity, and wished to die on Good Friday and so meet Jesus Christ on the anniversary of the resurrection. But he was nevertheless as completely a pagan as any old Greek; the persons of the Trinity were to him very solid entities; if he wished to die on Good Friday, depend upon it, he fully meant to enter heaven in his finest scarlet coat with ample gold lace and a sword by his side, to make a stately bow to the assembled company and then offer a few apposite and doubtless pungent remarks on the proper method of tuning harps. Of true devotional feeling, of the ecstatic devotional feeling of Palestrina and of Bach, there is in no recorded saying of his a trace, and there is not a trace of it in his music. When he was writing the "Hallelujah Chorus" he imagined he saw God on His throne, just as in writing "Semele" he probably imagined he saw Jupiter on his throne; and the fact proves only with what intensity and power his imagination was working, and how far removed he was from the genuine devotional frame of mind. There is not the slightest difference in style between his secular and his sacred music; he treats sacred and secular subjects precisely alike. In music his intention was never to reveal his own state of mind, but always to depict some object, some scene. Now, never did he adhere with apparently greater resolution to this plan, never therefore did he produce a more essentially secular work, than in the "Messiah." One need only consider such numbers as "All they that see Him" and "Behold the Lamb of God" to realise this; though, indeed, there is not a number in the oratorio that does not show it with sufficient clearness. But fully to understand Handel and realise his greatness, it is not enough merely to know the spirit in which he worked: one must know also his method of depicting things and scenes. He was wholly an impressionist--in his youth from choice, as when he wrote the music of "Rinaldo" faster than the librettist could supply the words; in middle age and afterwards from necessity, as he never had time to write save when circumstances freed him for a few days from the active duties of an impresario. He tried to do, and succeeded in doing, everything with a few powerful strokes, a few splashes of colour. Of the careful elaboration of Bach, of Beethoven, even of Mozart, there is nothing: sometimes in his impatience he seemed to mix his colours in buckets and hurl them with the surest artistic aim at his gigantic canvases. A comparison of the angels' chorus "Glory to God in the highest" in Bach's "Christmas Oratorio" with the same thing as set in the "Messiah" will show not only how widely different were the aims of the two men, but also throws the minute cunning of the Leipzig schoolmaster into startling contrast with the daring recklessness of the tremendous London impresario. Of course both men possessed wonderful contrapuntal skill; but in Bach's case there is time and patience as well as skill, and in Handel's only consummate audacity and intellectual grip. Handel was by far a greater man than Bach--he appears to me, indeed, the greatest man who has yet lived; but though he achieves miracles as a musician, his music was to him only one of many modes of using the irresistible creative instinct and energy within him. Any one who looks in Handel for the characteristic complicated music of the typical German masters will be disappointed even as the Germans are disappointed; but those who are prepared to let Handel say what he has to say in his own chosen way will find in his music the most admirable style ever attained to by any musician, the most perfect fusion of manner and matter. It is a grand, large, and broad style, because Handel had a large and grand matter to express; and if it errs at all it errs on the right side--it has too few rather than too many notes.

On the whole, the "Messiah" is as vigorous, rich, picturesque and tender as the best of Handel's oratorios--even "Belshazzar" does not beat it. There is scarcely any padding; there are many of Handel's most perfect songs and most gorgeous choruses; and the architecture of the work is planned with a magnificence, and executed with a lucky completeness, attained only perhaps elsewhere in "Israel in Egypt"--for which achievement Handel borrowed much of the bricks and mortar from other edifices. Theological though the subject is, the oratorio is as much a hymn to joy as the Ninth symphony; and there is in it far more of genuine joy, of sheer delight in living. Of the sense of sin--the most cowardly illusion ever invented by a degenerate people--there is no sign; where Bach would have been abased in the dust, Handel is bright, shining, confident, cocksure that all is right with the world. Mingled with the marvellous tenderness of "Comfort ye" there is an odd air of authority, a conviction that everything is going well, and that no one need worry; and nothing fresher, fuller of spring-freshness, almost of rollicking jollity, has ever been written than "Every valley shall be exalted." "And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed" is in rather the same vein, though a deeper note of feeling is struck. The effect of the alto voices leading off, followed immediately by the rest of the chorus and orchestra, is overwhelming; and the chant of the basses at "For the mouth of the Lord" is in the biggest Handel manner. But just as "He was despised" and "I know that my Redeemer liveth" tower above all the other songs, so three or four choruses tower above all the other choruses in not only the "Messiah," but all Handel's oratorios. "Worthy is the Lamb" stands far above the rest, and indeed above all choruses in the world save Bach's very best; then comes "For unto us a Child is born"; and after that "And He shall purify," "His yoke is easy," and "Surely He hath borne our griefs"--each distinctive, complete in itself, an absolute piece of noble invention. "Unto us a Child is born" is written in a form devised by Handel and used with success by no other composer since, until in a curiously modified shape Tschaikowsky employed it for the third movement of his Pathetic symphony. The first theme is very simply announced, played with awhile, then the second follows--a tremendous phrase to the words "The government shall be upon His shoulders"; suddenly the inner parts begin to quicken into life, to ferment, to throb and to leap, and with startling abruptness great masses of tone are hurled at the listener to the words "Wonderful, Counsellor." The process is then repeated in a shortened and intensified form; then it is repeated again; and finally the principal theme, delivered so naively at first, is delivered with all the pomp and splendour of full chorus and orchestra, and "Wonderful, Counsellor" thundered out on a corresponding scale. A scheme at once so simple, so daring and so tremendous in effect, could have been invented by no one but Handel with his need for working rapidly; and it is strange that a composer so different from Handel as Tschaikowsky should have hit upon a closely analogous form for a symphonic movement. The forms of the other choruses are dissimilar. In "He shall purify" there are two big climaxes; in "His yoke is easy" there is only one, and it comes at the finish, just when one is wondering how the splendid flow of music can be ended without an effect of incompleteness or of anti-climax; and "Surely He hath borne our griefs" depends upon no climactic effects, but upon the sheer sweetness and pathos of the thing.

Handel's secular oratorios are different from anything else in the world. They are neither oratorios, nor operas, nor cantatas; and the plots are generally quaint.

Some years ago it occurred to me one morning that a trip by sea to Russia might be refreshing; and that afternoon I started in a coal-steamer from a northern seaport. A passport could hardly be wrested from hide-bound officialdom in so short a time, and, to save explanations in a foreign tongue at Cronstadt, the reader's most humble servant assumed the lowly office of purser--wages, one shilling per month. The passage was rough, the engineers were not enthusiastic in their work, some of the seamen were sulky; and, in a word, the name of God was frequently in the skipper's mouth. Otherwise he did not strike one as being a particularly religious man. Nevertheless, when Sunday evening came round he sat down and read the Bible with genuine fervour, spelling the hard words aloud and asking how they should or might be pronounced; and he informed me, by way of explaining his attachment to the Book, that he had solemnly promised his wife never to omit his weekly devotions while on the deep. Though I never shared the literary tastes of Mr. Wilson Barrett, the captain's unfathomable ignorance of the Gospels, Isaiah and the Psalms startled even me; but on the other hand he had an intimate acquaintance with a number of stories to be found only in the Apocrypha, with which he had thoughtfully provided himself. To gratify my curiosity he read me the tale of Susanna and the Elders. Being young, my first notion was that I had chanced on a capital subject for an opera; and I actually thought for ten minutes of commencing at once on a libretto. Later I remembered the censor, and realised for the first time that in England, when a subject is unfit for a drama, it is treated as an oratorio. As soon as possible I bought Handel's "Susanna" instead, and found that Handel curiously--or perhaps not curiously--had also been before me in thinking of treating the subject operatically. In fact "Susanna" is as much an opera as "Rinaldo," the only difference being that a few choruses are forcibly dragged in to give colour to the innocent pretence. Handel's librettist, whoever he was, did his work downright badly. That he glorifies the great institution of permanent marriage and says nothing of the corresponding great institution of the Divorce Court, is only what might be expected of the horrible eighteenth century--the true dark age of Europe; but surely even a composer of Handel's powers could scarcely do himself justice with such a choice blend of stupidity and cant religion as this--

"_Chorus_. How long, O Lord, shall Israel groan
In bondage and in pain?
Jehovah! hear Thy people moan,
And break the tyrant's chain!

"_Joachim._ Our crimes repeated have provok'd His rage,
And now He scourges a degen'rate age.
O come, my fair Susanna, come,
And from my bosom chase its gloom," etc.

Or is the abrupt third line of Joachim's speech to be regarded as a masterstroke of characterisation? I will tell the whole story, to show what manner of subject has been thought proper for an oratorio. Joachim and Susanna are of course perfect monsters of fidelity; though it is only fair to say that Joachim's virtue is not insisted on, or, for that matter, mentioned. Joachim goes out of town--he says so: "Awhile I'm summoned from the town away"--and Susanna, instead of obeying his directions to entertain some friends, goes into a dark glade, whither the Elders presently repair. She declines their attentions; then they declare they caught her with an unknown lover, who fled; and she is condemned to death, the populace seeing naught but justice in the sentence. But before they begin to hurl the stones, Daniel steps forward and by sheer eloquent impudence persuades the people to have the case re-tried, with him for judge. He sends one elder out of court, and asks the other under what tree Susanna committed the indiscretion. The poor wretch, knowing no science, foolishly makes a wild shot instead of pleading a defective education, and says, "A verdant mastick, pride of all the grove." The other, in response to the same question, says, "Yon tall holm-tree." Incredible as it seems, on the strength of this error, which would merely gain a policeman the commendation of an average London magistrate, the two Elders are sent off to be hanged! Why, even the late Mr. Justice Stephen never put away an innocent man or woman on less evidence! But the chorus flatters Daniel just as the Press used to flatter Mr. Justice Stephen; Susanna is complimented on her chastity; and all ends with some general reflections--

"A virtuous wife shall soften fortune's frown,
She's far more precious than a golden crown."

Nothing is said about the market value of a virtuous husband. Probably the eighteenth century regarded such a thing as out of the question. As I have said, I tell this story to show what the British public will put up with if you mention the word oratorio. Voltaire's dictum needs revision thus: "Whatever is too improper to be spoken (in England) is sung, and whatever is too improper to be sung on the stage may be sung in a church."

Nevertheless, out of this wretched book Handel made a masterpiece. The tale of Susanna is not one in which a man of his character might be expected to take a profound interest; though it should always be remembered that hardly anything is known of his relations with the other sex save that he took a keen and lifelong interest in the Foundling Hospital. But so strong had the habit of making masterpieces become with him that he could not resist the temptation to create just one more, even when he had nothing better than "Susanna" to base it on; just as a confirmed drunkard cannot resist the temptation to get one drink more, even if he be accustomed to the gilded chambers of the West End, and must go for really the last to-night into the lowest drinking-saloon of the East. Some of the choruses are of Handel's best. The first, "How long, O Lord," shows that he could write expressive chromatic passages as well as Purcell and Bach; the second is surcharged with emotion; "Righteous Heaven" is picturesque and full of splendid vigour; "Impartial Heaven" contains some of the most gorgeous writing that even Handel achieved. But the last two choruses, and "The Cause is decided" and "Oh, Joachim," are common, colourless, barren; and were evidently written without delight, to maintain the pretext that the work was an oratorio. But it stands to this day, unmistakably an opera; and it is the songs that will certainly make it popular some day; for some of them are on Handel's highest level, and Handel's highest level has never been reached by any other composer. His choruses are equalled by Bach's, his dramatic strokes by Gluck's, his instrumental movements by Bach's and perhaps Lulli's; but the coming of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, and Wagner has only served to show that he is the greatest song-writer the world has known or is likely to know. Even Mozart never quite attained that union of miraculously balanced form, sweetness of melody, and depth of feeling with a degree of sheer strength that keeps the expression of the main thought lucid, and the surface of the music, so to speak, calm, when obscurity might have been anticipated, and some roughness and storm and stress excused. "Faith displays her rosy wing" is an absolutely perfect instance of a Handel song. Were not the thing done, one might believe it impossible to express with such simplicity--four sombre minor chords and then the tremolo of the strings--the alternations of trembling fear and fearful hope, the hope of the human soul in extremist agony finding an exalted consolation in the thought that this was the worst. As astounding as this is the quality of light and freshness of atmosphere with which Handel imbues such songs as "Clouds o'ertake the brightest day" and "Crystal streams in murmurs flowing"; and the tenderness of "Would custom bid," with the almost divine refrain, "I then had called thee mine," might surprise us, coming as it does from such a giant, did we not know that tenderness is always a characteristic of the great men, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and that the pettiness, ill-conditionedness, and lack of generous feeling observable in (say) our London composers to-day stamp them more unmistakably than does their music as small composers. If the poor fellows knew what they were about, they would at least conceal the littlenesses that show they are destined never to do work of the first order. The composer of the "Rex tremendae" (in the Requiem) wrote "Dove sono," Beethoven wrote both the finale of the Fifth symphony and the slow movement of the Ninth, Wagner both the Valkyries' Ride and the motherhood theme in "Siegfried," Handel "Worthy is the Lamb" and "Waft her, angels"; while your little malicious musical Mimes are absorbed in self-pity, and can no more write a melody that irresistibly touches you than they can build a great and impressive structure. And if Mozart is tenderest of all the musicians, Handel comes very close to him. The world may, though not probably, tire of all but his grandest choruses, while his songs will always be sung as lovely expressions of the finest human feeling.

"Samson" is not his finest oratorio, though it may be his longest. It contains no "Unto us a Child is born" nor a "Worthy is the Lamb," nor a "Now love, that everlasting boy"; but in several places the sublime is reached--in "Then round about the starry throne," the last page of which is worth all the oratorios written since Handel's time save Beethoven's "Mount of Olives"; in "Fixed is His everlasting seat," with that enormous opening phrase, irresistible in its strength and energy as Handel himself; and in the first section of "O first created beam." The pagan choruses are full of riotous excitement, though there is not one of them to match "Ye tutelar gods" in "Belshazzar." But there is little in "Belshazzar" to match the pathos of "Return, O God of hosts," or "Ye sons of Israel, now lament." The latter is a notable example of Handel's art. There is not a new phrase in it: nothing, indeed, could be commoner than the bar at the first occurrence of "Amongst the dead great Samson lies," and yet the effect is amazing; and though the "for ever" is as old as Purcell, here it is newly used--used as if it had never been used before--to utter a depth of emotion that passes beyond the pathetic to the sublime. This very vastness of feeling, this power of stepping outside himself and giving a voice to the general emotions of humanity, prevents us recognising the personal note in Handel as we recognise it in Mozart. But occasionally the personal note may be met. The recitative "My genial spirits fail," with those dreary long-drawn harmonies, and the orchestral passage pressing wearily downwards at "And lay me gently down with them that rest," seems almost like Handel's own voice in a moment of sad depression. It serves, at anyrate, to remind us that the all-conquering Mr. Handel was a complete man who had endured the sickening sense of the worthlessness of a struggle that he was bound to continue to the end. But these personal confessions are scarce. After all, in oratorio Handel's best music is that in which he seeks to attain the sublime. In his choruses he does attain it: he sweeps you away with the immense rhythmical impetus of the music, or overpowers you with huge masses of tone hurled, as it were, bodily at you at just the right moments, or he coerces you with phrases like the opening of "Fixed in His everlasting seat," or the last (before the cadence) in "Then round about the starry throne." It is true that with his unheard-of intellectual power, and a mastery of technique equal or nearly equal to Bach's, he was often tempted to write in his uninspired moments, and so the chorus became with him more or less of a formula; but we may also note that even when he was most mechanical the mere furious speed at which he wrote seemed to excite and exalt him, so that if he began with a commonplace "Let their celestial concerts all unite," before the end he was pouring forth glorious and living stuff like the last twenty-seven bars. So the pace at which he had to write in the intervals of bullying or coaxing prima donnas or still more petulant male sopranos was not wholly a misfortune; if it sometimes compelled him to set down mere musical arithmetic, or rubbish like "Honour and arms," and "Go, baffled coward," it sometimes drew his grandest music out of him. The dramatic oratorio is a hybrid form of art--one might almost say a bastard form; it had only about thirty years of life; but in those thirty years Handel accomplished wonderful things with it. And the wonder of them makes Handel appear the more astonishing man; for, when all is said, the truth is that the man was greater, infinitely greater, than his music.

HAYDN AND HIS "CREATION"

It is a fact never to be forgotten, in hearing good papa Haydn's music, that he lived in the fine old world when stately men and women went through life in the grand manner with a languid pulse, when the earth and the days were alike empty, and hurry to get finished and proceed to the next thing was almost unknown, and elbowing of rivals to get on almost unnecessary. For fifty years he worked away contentedly as bandmaster to Prince Esterhazy, composing the due amount of music, conducting the due number of concerts, taking his salary of some seventy odd pounds per annum thankfully, and putting on his uniform for special State occasions with as little grumbling as possible, all as a good bandmaster should. He had gone through a short period of roughing it in his youth, and he had made one or two mistakes as he settled down. He married a woman who worked with enthusiasm to render his early life intolerable, and begged him in his old age to buy a certain cottage, as it would suit her admirably when she became a widow. But he consoled himself as men do in the circumstances, and did not allow his mistakes to poison all his life, or cause him any special worry. His other troubles were not very serious. A Music Society which he wished to join tried to trap him into an agreement to write important compositions for it whenever they were wanted. Once he offended his princely master by learning to play the baryton, an instrument on which the prince was a performer greatly esteemed by his retainers. Such teacup storms soon passed: Prince Esterhazy doubtless forgave him; the Society was soon forgotten; and Haydn worked on placidly. Every morning he rose with or before the lark, dressed himself with a degree of neatness that astonished even that neat dressing age, and sat down to compose music. Later in each day he is reported to have eaten, to have rehearsed his band or conducted concerts, and so to bed to prepare himself by refreshing slumber for the next day's labours. At certain periods of the year Prince Esterhazy and his court adjourned to Esterhaz, and at certain periods they came back to Eisenstadt: thus they were saved by due variety from utter petrifaction. Haydn seems to have liked the life, and to have thought moreover that it was good for him and his art. By being thrown so much back upon himself, he said, he had been forced to become original. Whether it made him original or not, he never thought of changing it until his prince died, and for a time his services were not wanted at Esterhaz or Eisenstadt. Then he came to England, and by his success here made a European reputation (for it was then as it is now--an artist was only accepted on the musical Continent after he had been stamped with the hall-mark of unmusical England). Finally he settled in Vienna, was for a time the teacher of Beethoven, declared his belief that the first chorus of the "Creation" came direct from heaven, and died a world-famous man.

To the nineteenth century mind it seems rather an odd life for an artist: at least it strikes one as a life, despite Haydn's own opinion, not particularly conducive to originality. To use extreme language, it might almost be called a monotonous and soporific mode of existence. Probably its chief advantage was the opportunity it afforded, or perhaps the necessity it enforced, of ceaseless industry. Certainly that industry bore fruit in Haydn's steady increase of inventive power as he went on composing. But he only took the prodigious leap from the second to the first rank of composers after he had been free for a time from his long slavery, and had been in England and been aroused and stimulated by new scenes, unfamiliar modes of life, and by contact with many and widely differing types of mind. Some of his later music makes one think that if the leap--a leap almost unparalleled in the history of art--had been possible twenty years sooner, Haydn might have won a place by the side of Mozart and Handel and Bach, instead of being the lowest of their great company. On the other hand, one cannot think of the man--lively, genial, kind-hearted, garrulous, broadly humorous, actively observant of details, careful in small money matters--and assert with one's hand on one's heart that he was cast in gigantic or heroic mould. That he had a wonderful facility in expressing himself is obvious in every bar he wrote: but it is less obvious that he had a great deal to express. He had deep, but not the deepest, human feeling; he could think, but not profoundly; he had a sense of beauty, delicate and acute out of all comparison with yours or mine, reader, but far less keen than Mozart's or Bach's. Hence his music is rarely comparable with theirs: his matter is less weighty, his form never quite so enchantingly lovely; and, whatever one may think of the possibilities of the man in his most inspired moments, his average output drives one to the reluctant conclusion that on the whole his life must have been favourable to him and enabled him to do the best that was in him. Yet I hesitate as I write the words. Remembering that he began as an untaught peasant, and until the end of his long life was a mere bandmaster with a small yearly salary, a uniform, and possibly (for I cannot recall the facts) his board and lodging, remembering where he found the symphony and quartet and where he left them, remembering, above all, that astonishing leap, I find it hard to believe in barriers to his upward path. It is in dignity and quality of poetic content rather than in form that Haydn is lacking. Had the horizon of his thought been widened in early or even in middle life by the education of mixing with men who knew more and were more advanced than himself, had he been jostled in the crowd of a great city and been made to feel deeply about the tragi-comedy of human existence, his experiences might have resulted in a deeper and more original note being sounded in his music. But we must take him as he is, reflecting, when the unbroken peacefulness of his music becomes a little tiresome, that he belonged to the "old time before us" and was never quickened by the newer modes of thought that unconsciously affected Mozart and consciously moulded Beethoven; and that, after all, his very smoothness and absence of passion give him an old-world charm, grateful in this hot and dusty age. If he was not greatly original, he was at least flawlessly consistent: there is scarce a trait in his character that is not reflected somewhere in his music, and hardly a characteristic of his music that one does not find quaintly echoed in some recorded saying or doing of the man. His placid and even vivacity, his sprightliness, his broad jocularity, his economy and shrewd business perception of what could be done with the material to hand, his fertility of device, even his commonplaceness, may all be seen in the symphonies. At rare moments he moves you strongly, very often he is trivial, but he generally pleases; and if some of the strokes of humour--quoted in text-books of orchestration--are so broad as to be indescribable in any respectable modern print, few of us understand what they really mean, and no one is a penny the worse.

The "Creation" libretto was prepared for Handel, but he did not attempt to set it; and this perhaps was just as well, for the effort would certainly have killed him. Of course the opening offers some fine opportunities for fine music; but the later parts with their nonsense--Milton's nonsense, I believe--about "In native worth and honour clad, With beauty, courage, strength, adorned, Erect with front serene he stands, A MAN, the Lord and King of Nature all," and the suburban love-making of our first parents, and the lengthy references to the habits of the worm and the leviathan, and so on, are almost more than modern flesh and blood can endure. It must be conceded that Haydn evaded the difficulties of the subject with a degree of tact that would be surprising in anyone else than Haydn. In the first part, where Handel would have been sublime, he is frequently nearly sublime, and this is our loss; but in the later portion, where Handel would have been solemn, earnest, and intolerably dull, he is light, skittish, good-natured, and sometimes jocular, and this is our gain, even if the gain is not great. The Representation of Chaos is a curious bit of music, less like chaos than an attempt to write music of the Bruneau sort a century too soon; but it serves. The most magnificent passage in the oratorio immediately follows, for there is hardly a finer effect in music than that of the soft voices singing the words, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," while the strings gently pulse; and the fortissimo C major chord on the word "light," coming abruptly after the piano and mezzo-forte minor chords, is as dazzling in its brilliancy to-day as when it was first sung. The number of unisons, throwing into relief the two minor chords on C and F, should be especially noted. The chorus in the next number is poor, matched with this, though towards the end (see bars 11 and 12 from the finish) Haydn's splendid musicianship has enabled him to redeem the trivial commonplace with an unexpected and powerful harmonic progression. The work is singularly deficient in strong sustained choruses. "Awake the harp" is certainly very much the best; for "The heavens are telling" is little better than Gounod's "Unfold, ye everlasting portals" until the end, where it is saved by the tremendous climax; and "Achieved is the glorious work" is mostly mechanical, with occasional moments of life. As for the finale, it is of course light opera. On the whole the songs are the most delightful feature of the "Creation," and the freshness of "With verdure clad," and the tender charm of the second section of "Roaming in foaming billows," may possibly be remembered when Haydn is scarcely known except as an instrumental composer. The setting of "Softly purling, glides on, thro' silent vales, the limpid brook" is indeed perfect, the phrase at the repetition of "Thro' silent vales" inevitably calling up a vision, not of a valley sleeping in the sunlight, for of sunlight the eighteenth century apparently took little heed, but of a valley in the dark quiet night, filled with the scent of flowers, and the far-off murmur of the brook vaguely heard. The humour of the oratorio consists chiefly of practical jokes, such as sending Mr. Andrew Black (or some other bass singer) down to the low F sharp and G to depict the heavy beasts treading the ground, or making the orchestra imitate the bellow of the said heavy beasts, or depicting the sinuous motion of the worm or the graceful gamboling of the leviathan. It has been objected that the leviathan is brought on in sections. The truth, of course, is that the clumsy figure in the bass is not meant to depict the leviathan himself, but his gambolings and the gay flourishings of his tail. It is hard to sum up the "Creation," unless one is prepared to call it great and never go to hear it. It is not a sublime oratorio, nor yet a frankly comic oratorio, nor entirely a dull oratorio. After considering the songs, the recitatives, the choruses, in detail, it really seems to contain very little. Perhaps it may be described as a third-rate oratorio, whose interest is largely historic and literary.

MOZART, HIS "DON GIOVANNI" AND THE REQUIEM