Chapter 2

The learned branch of the English school reached its climax. Meantime another branch, not unlearned, but caring less for scholastic perfection than for perfect expression of poetic sentiment, was fast growing. The history of the masque is a stale matter, so I will merely mention that Campion, and many another with, before, and after him, engaged during a great part of their lives in what can only be called the manufacture of these entertainments. A masque was simply a gorgeous show of secular ritual, of colour and of music--a kind of Drury Lane melodrama in fact, but as far removed from Drury Lane as this age is from that in the widespread faculty of appreciating beauty. The music consisted of tunes of a popular outline and sentiment, but they were dragged into the province of art by the incapacity of those who wrote or adapted them to touch anything without leaving it lovelier than when they lighted on it. Pages might be, and I daresay some day will be, written about Dr. Campion's melody, its beauty and power, the unique sense of rhythmic subtleties which it shows, and withal its curiously English quality. But one important thing we must observe: it is wholly secular melody. Even when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has no, or the very slightest, ecclesiastical tinge. It is folk-melody with its face washed and hair combed; it bears the same relation to English folk-melody as a chorale from the "Matthew" Passion bears to its original. Another important point is this: whereas the church composers took a few Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat them so as to make sense in the singing, but made the words wait upon the musical phrases, in Dr. Campion we see the first clear wish to weld music and poem into one flawless whole. To an extent he succeeded, but full success did not come till several generations had first tried, tried and failed. Campion properly belongs to the sixteenth century, and Harry Lawes, born twenty-five years before Campion died, as properly belongs to the seventeenth century. In his songs we find even more marked the determination that words and music shall go hand in hand--that the words shall no longer be dragged at the cart-tail of the melody, so to say. In fact, a main objection against Lawes--and a true one in many instances--is that he sacrificed the melody rather than the meaning of the poem. This is significant. The Puritans are held to have damaged church music less by burning the choir-books and pawning the organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may say) on One word one note. As a matter of fact, this was not exclusively a plank in the political platform of the Puritans. The Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist Lawes, and many another Loyalist insisted on it. Even when they did not write a note to each word, they took care not to have long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words, but to derive the accent of the music from that of the poem. This showed mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other towards the entirely new technique which was to supersede the contrapuntal technique of Byrde and Palestrina. In making a mass or an anthem or secular composition, the practice of these old masters was to start with a fragment of church or secular melody which we will call A; after (say) the trebles had sung it or a portion of it, the altos took it up and the trebles went on to a new phrase B, which dovetailed with A. Then the tenors took up A, the altos went on to B, the trebles went on to a new phrase C, until ultimately, if we lettered each successive phrase that appeared, we should get clear away from the beginning of the alphabet to X, Y, and Z. This, of course, is a crude and stiff way of describing the process of weaving and interweaving by which the old music was spun, for often the phrase A would come up again and again in one section of a composition and sometimes throughout the whole, and strict canon was comparatively rare in music which was not called by that name; but the description will serve. This technique proved admirable for vocal polyphony--how admirable we have all the Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal music to show. But it was no longer available when music was wanted for the single voice, unless that voice was treated as one of several real parts, the others being placed in the accompaniment. A new technique was therefore wanted. For that new technique the new composers went back to the oldest technique of all. The old minstrels used music as a means of giving accent and force to their poems; and now, as a means of spinning a web of tone which should not only be beautiful, but also give utterance to the feeling of the poem, composers went back to the method of the minstrels. They disregarded rhythm more and more (as may be seen if you compare Campion with Lawes), and sought only to make the notes follow the accent of the poetry, thus converting music into conventionally idealised speech or declamation. Lawes carried this method as far as ever it has been, and probably can be, carried. When Milton said,

"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured notes First taught our English music how to span Words with just note and accent,"

he did not mean that Lawes was the first to bar his music, for music had been barred long before Lawes. He meant that Lawes did not use the poem as an excuse for a melody, but the melody as a means of effectively declaiming the poet's verse. The poet (naturally) liked this--hence Milton's compliments. It should be noted that many of the musicians of this time were poets--of a sort--themselves, and wished to make the most of their verses; so that it would be a mistake to regard declamation as something forced by the poet, backed by popular opinion, upon the musician. With Lawes, then, what we may call the declamatory branch of the English school culminated. Except in his avowedly declamatory passages, Purcell did not spin his web precisely thus; but we shall presently see that his method was derived from the declamatory method. Much remained to be done first. Lawes got rid of the old scholasticism, now effete. But he never seemed quite sure that his expression would come off. It is hard at this day to listen to his music as Milton must have listened to it; but having done my best, I am compelled to own that I find some of his songs without meaning or comeliness, and must assume either that our ancestors of this period had a sense which has been lost, or that the music played a less important part compared with the poem than has been generally supposed. Lawes lost rhythm, both as an element in beauty and a factor in expression. Moreover, his harmonic resources were sadly limited, for the old device of letting crossing parts clash in sweet discords that resolved into as sweet or sweeter concords was denied him. What would be called nowadays the new harmony, the new rhythm and the new forms were developed during the Civil War and the Puritan reign. The Puritans, loving music but detesting it in their churches, forced it into purely secular channels; and we cannot say the result was bad, for the result was Purcell. John Jenkins and a host of smaller men developed instrumental music, and, though the forms they used were thrown aside when Charles II. arrived, the power of handling the instruments remained as a legacy to Charles's men. Charles drove the secular movement faster ahead by banning the old ecclesiastical music (which, it appears, gave him "the blues"), and by compelling his young composers to write livelier strains for the church, that is, church music which was in reality nothing but secular music. He sent Pelham Humphries to Paris, and when Humphries came back "an absolute Monsieur" (who does not remember that ever-green entry in the Diary?) he brought with him all that could possibly have been learnt from Lulli. He died at twenty-seven, having been Purcell's master; and though Purcell's imagination was richer, deeper, more strenuous in the ebb and flow of its tides, one might fancy that the two men had but one spirit, which went on growing and fetching forth the fruits of the spirit, while young Humphries' body decayed by the side of his younger wife's in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey.

IV.

A complete list of Purcell's compositions appears somewhat formidable at a first glance, but when one comes to examine it carefully the solidity seems somewhat to melt out of it. The long string of church pieces is made up of anthems, many of them far from long. The forty odd "operas" are not operas at all, but sets of incidental pieces and songs for plays, and some of the sets are very short. Thus Dryden talks of Purcell setting "my three songs," and there are only half a dozen "curtain-tunes," _i.e._ entr'actes. Many of the harpsichord pieces are of tiny proportions. The sonatas of three and four parts are no larger than Mozart's piano sonatas. Still, taking into account the noble quality that is constantly maintained, we must admit that Purcell used astonishingly the short time he was given. Much of his music is lost; more of it lies in manuscript at the British Museum and elsewhere. Some of it was issued last century, some early in this. Four expensive volumes have been wretchedly edited and issued by the Purcell Society, and those amongst us who live to the age of Methuselah will probably see all the accessible works printed by this body. Some half century ago Messrs. Novello published an edition of the church music, stupidly edited by the stupidest editor who ever laid clumsy fingers on a masterpiece. A shameful edition of the "King Arthur" music was prepared for the Birmingham Festival of 1897 by Mr. J.A. Fuller-Maitland, musical critic of "The Times." A publisher far-sighted and generous enough to issue a trustworthy edition of all Purcell's music at a moderate price has yet to be found.

Purcell's list is not long, but it is superb. Yet he opened out no new paths, he made no leap aside from the paths of his predecessors, as Gluck did in the eighteenth century and Wagner in the nineteenth. He was one of their school; he went on in the direction they had led; but the distance he travelled was enormous. Humphries, possibly Captain Cook, even Christopher Gibbons, helped to open out the new way in church music; Lawes, Matthew Lock, and Banister were before him at the theatres; Lock and Dr. Blow had written odes before he was weaned; the form and plan of his sonatas came certainly from Bassani, in all likelihood from Corelli also; from John Jenkins and the other writers of fancies he got something of his workmanship and art of weaving many melodies into a coherent whole, and a knowledge of Lulli would help him to attain terseness, and save him from that drifting which is the weak point of the old English instrumental writers; he was acquainted with the music of Carissimi, a master of choral effect. In a word, he owed much to his predecessors, even as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven owed to their predecessors; and he did as they did--won his greatness by using to fine ends the means he found, rather than by inventing the means, though, like them, some means he did invent.

Like his predecessors Purcell hung between the playhouse, the church, and the court; but unlike most of them he had only one style, which had to serve in one place as in another. I have already shown the growth of the secular spirit in music. In Purcell that spirit reached its height. His music is always secular, always purely pagan. I do not mean that it is inappropriate in the church--for nothing more appropriate was ever written--nor that Purcell was insincere, as our modern church composers are insincere, without knowing it. I do mean that of genuine religious emotion, of the sustained ecstasy of Byrde and Palestrina, it shows no trace. I should not like to have to define the religious beliefs of any man in Charles II.'s court, but it would seem that Purcell was religious in his way. He accepted the God of the church as the savage accepts the God of his fathers; he wrote his best music with a firm conviction that it would please his God. But his God was an entity placed afar off, unapproachable; and of entering into communion with Him through the medium of music Purcell had no notion. The ecstatic note I take to be the true note of religious art; and in lacking and in having no sense of it Purcell stands close to the early religious painters and monk-writers, the carvers of twelfth century woodwork, and the builders of Gothic cathedrals. He thinks of externals and never dreams of looking for "inward light"; and the proof of this is that he seems never consciously to endeavour to express a mood, but strenuously seeks to depict images called up by the words he sets. With no intention of being flippant, but in all earnestness, I declare it is my belief that if Purcell had ever set the "Agnus Dei" (and I don't remember that he did) he would have drawn a frisky lamb and tried to paint its snow-white fleece; and this not because he lacked reverence, but because of his absolute religious naïveté, and because this drawing and painting of outside objects (so to speak) in music was his one mode of expression. It should be clearly understood that word-painting is not descriptive music. Descriptive music suggests to the ear, word-painting to the eye. But the two merge in one another. What we call a higher note is so called because sounds produced by the mere rapid vibrations make every being, without exception, who has a musical ear, think of height, just as a lower note makes us all think of depth. Hence a series of notes forming an arch on paper may, and does, suggest an arch to one's imagination through the ear. It is perhaps a dodge, but Handel used it extensively--for instance, in such choruses as "All we like sheep," "When his loud voice" ("Jephtha"), nearly every choral number of "Israel in Egypt," and some of the airs. Bach used it too, and we find it--the rainbow theme in "Das Rheingold" is an example--in Wagner. But with these composers "word-painting," as it is called, seems always to be used for a special effect; whereas it is the very essence of Purcell's music. He has been reproved for it by the eminent Hullah, who prettily alludes to it as a "defect" from which other music composed at the time suffers; but the truth is, you might as well call rhyme a "defect" of the couplet or the absence of rhyme a "defect" of blank verse. It is an integral part of the music, as inseparable as sound from tone, as atoms from the element they constitute. But the question, why did Purcell write thus, and not as Mozart and Beethoven, brings me to the point at which I must show the precise relationship in which Purcell stood to his musical ancestors, and how in writing as he did he was merely carrying on and developing their technique.

For we must not forget that the whole problem for the seventeenth century was one of technique. The difficulty was to spin a tone-web which should be at once beautiful, expressive, and modern--modern above all things, in some sort of touch with the common feeling of the time. I have told how the earlier composers spun their web, and how Lawes attained to loveliness of a special kind by pure declamation. In later times there was an immense common fund of common phrases, any one of which only needed modification by a composer to enable him to express anything he pleased. But Purcell came betwixt the old time and the new, and had to build up a technique which was not wholly his own, by following with swift steps and indefatigable energy on lines indicated even while Lawes was alive. Those lines were, of course, in the direction of word-painting, and I must admit that the first word-painting seems very silly to nineteenth century ears and eyes--eyes not less than ears. To the work of the early men Purcell's stands in just the same relation as Bach's declamation stands to Lawes'. Lawes declaims with a single eye on making clear the points of the poem: the voice rises or falls, lingers on a note or hastens away, to that one end. Bach also declaims--indeed his music is entirely based on declamation,--but as one who wishes to communicate an emotion and regards the attainment of beauty as being quite as important as expression. With him the voice rises or falls as a man's voice does when he experiences keen sensation; but the wavy line of the melody as it goes along and up and down the stave is treated conventionally and changed into a lovely pattern for the ear's delight; and as there can be no regular pattern without regular rhythm, rhythm is a vital element in Bach's music. So with Purcell, with a difference. The early "imitative" men had sought chiefly for dainty conceits. Pepys was the noted composer of "Beauty, Retire" and his joy when he went to church, "where fine music on the word trumpet" will be remembered. He doubtless liked the clatter of it, and liked the clatter the more for occurring on that word, and probably he was not very curious as to whether it was really beautiful or not. But Purcell could not write an unlovely thing. His music on the word trumpet would be beautiful (it is in "Bonduca"); and if (as he did) he sent the bass plunging headlong from the top to the bottom of a scale to illustrate "they that go down to the sea in ships," that headlong plunge would be beautiful too--so beautiful as to be heard with as great pleasure by those who know what the words are about as by those who don't. Like Bach, Purcell depended much on rhythm for the effect of his pattern; unlike Bach, his patterns have a strangely picturesque quality; through the ear they suggest the forms of leaf and blossom, the trailing tendril,--suggest them only, and dimly, vaguely,--yet, one feels, with exquisite fidelity. Thus Purcell, following those who, in sending the voice part along the line, pressed it up at the word "high" and down at "low," and thus got an irregularly wavy line of tone or melody, solved the problem of spinning his continuous web of sound; and the fact that his web is beautiful and possesses this peculiar picturesqueness is his justification for solving the problem in this way. After all, his way was the way of early designers, who filled their circles, squares, and triangles with the forms of leaf and flower. And just as those forms were afterwards conventionalised and used by thousands who probably had no vaguest notion of their origin, so many of Purcell's phrases became ossified and fell into the common stock of phrases which form the language of music. It is interesting to note that abroad Pasquini and Kuhlau went to work very much in Purcell's fashion, and added to that same stock from which Handel and Bach and every subsequent composer drew, each adding something of his own.

It was not by accident that Purcell, with this astonishing fertility of picturesque phrases, should also have written so much, and such vividly coloured picturesque pieces--pieces, I mean, descriptive of the picturesque. Of course, to write an imitative phrase is quite another matter from writing a successful piece of descriptive music. But in Purcell the same faculty enabled him to do both. No poet of that time seems to have been enamoured of hedgerows and flowers and fields, nor can I say with certitude that Purcell was. Yet in imagination at least he loves to dwell amongst them; and not the country alone, the thought of the sea also, stirs him deeply. There need only be some mention of sunshine or rain among the leaves, green trees, or wind-swept grass, the yellow sea-beach or the vast sea-depths, and his imagination flames and flares. His best music was written when he was appealed to throughout a long work--as "The Tempest"--in this manner. Hence, it seems to me, that quality which his music, above any other music in the world, possesses: a peculiar sweetness, not a boudoir sweetness like Chopin's sweetness, nor a sweetness corrected, like Chopin's, by a subtle strain of poisonous acid or sub-acid quality, but the sweet and wholesome cleanliness of the open air and fields, the freshness of sun showers and cool morning winds. I am not exaggerating the importance of this element in his music. It is perpetually present, so that at last one comes to think, as I have been compelled to think this long time, that Purcell wrote nothing but descriptive music all his life. Of course it may be that the special formation of his melodies misleads one sometimes, and that Purcell in inventing them often did not dream of depicting natural objects. But, remembering the gusto with which he sets descriptive words, using these phrases consciously with a picturesque purpose, it is hard to accept this view. In all likelihood he was constituted similarly to Weber, who, his son asserts, curiously converted the lines and colours of trees and winding roads and all objects of nature into thematic material (there is an anecdote--apparently, for a wonder, a true one--that shows he took the idea of a march from a heap of chairs stacked upside down in a beer-garden during a shower of rain). But Purcell is infinitely simpler, less fevered, than Weber. Sometimes his melodies have the long-drawn, frail delicacy, the splendidly ordered irregularity of a trailing creeper, and something of its endless variety of leaf clustering round a central stem. But there is an entire absence of tropical luxuriance. A grave simplicity prevails, and we find no jewellery; showing Purcell to have been a supreme artist.

V.