Old Scores and New Readings | Page 2

after
Chaucer's time; and as Artemus Ward jocularly condemned Chaucer,
and showed his wit in the joke, so the doctors seriously condemned
Byrde, and showed their stupidity in their unconscious joke. They
could understand one side of Tallis. His motet in forty parts, for
instance: they knew the difficulties of writing such a thing, and they
could see the ingenuity he showed in his various ways of getting round

the difficulties. They could not see the really fine points of the
forty-part motet: the broad scheme of the whole thing, and the almost
Handelian way of massing the various choirs so as to heap climax on
climax until a perfectly satisfying finish was reached. Still, there was
something for them to see in Tallis; whereas in Byrde there was
nothing for them to see that they had eyes to see, or to hear that they
had ears to hear. They could see that he either wrote consecutive fifths
and octaves, or dodged them in a way opposed to all the rules, that he
wrote false relations with the most outrageous recklessness, that his
melodies were irregular and not measured out by the bar; but they
could not feel, could not be expected to feel, the marvellous beauty of
the results he got by his dodges, the marvellous expressiveness of his
music. These old doctors may be forgiven, and, being long dead, they
care very little whether they are forgiven or not. But the modern men
who parrot-like echo their verdicts cannot and should not be forgiven.
We know now that the stiff contrapuntal school marked a stage in
development of music which it was necessary that music should go
through. The modern men who care nothing for rules--for instance
Wagner and Tschaikowsky--could not have come immediately after
Byrde; even Beethoven could not have come immediately after Byrde
and Sweelinck and Palestrina, all of whom thought nothing of the rules
that had not been definitely stated in their time. Before Beethoven--and
after Beethoven, Wagner and all the moderns--could come, music had
to go through the stiff scientific stage; a hundred thousand things that
had been done instinctively by the early men had to be reduced to rule;
a science as well as an art of music had to be built up. It was built up,
and in the process of building up noble works of art were achieved.
After it was built up and men had got, so to say, a grip of music and no
longer merely groped, Beethoven and Wagner went back to the
freedom and indifference to rule of the first composers; and the mere
fact of their having done so should show us that the rules were nothing
in themselves, nothing, that is, save temporary guide-posts or
landmarks which the contrapuntal men set up for their own private use
while they were exploring the unknown fields of music. We should
know, though many of us do not, that it is simply stupid to pass adverse
judgment on the early composers who did not use, and because they did
not use, these guide-posts, which had not then been set up, though one

by one they were being set up. For a very short time the rules of
counterpoint were looked upon as eternal and immutable. During that
period the early men were human-naturally looked upon as barbarians.
But that period is long past. We know the laws of counterpoint to be
not eternal, not immutable; but on the contrary to have been short-lived
convention that is now altogether disregarded. So it is time to look at
the early music through our own, and not through the
eighteenth-century doctors' eyes; and when we do that we find the early
music to be as beautiful as any ever written, as expressive, and quite as
well constructed. There are, as I have said, people who to-day prefer
Mr. Jackson in F and his friends to Byrde. What, I wonder, would be
said if a literary man preferred, say, some eighteenth-century poetaster
to Chaucer because the poetaster in his verse observed rules which
Chaucer never dreamed of, because, to drag in Artemus Ward once
again, the poetaster's spelling conformed more nearly to ours than
Chaucer's!
The Mass is indeed noble and stately, but it is miraculously expressive
as well. Its expressiveness is the thing that strikes one more forcibly
every time one hears it. At first one feels chiefly its old-world
freshness--not the picturesque spring freshness of Purcell and Handel,
but a freshness that is sweet and grave and cool, coming out of the
Elizabethan days when life, at its fastest, went deliberately, and was
lived in many-gabled houses with trees and gardens, or in great palaces
with pleasant courtyards, and the Thames ran unpolluted to the sea, and
the sun shone daily even