Old Scores and New Readings | Page 4

very greatest the
world has seen. And to-day, when he is persistently libelled, not more
in blame than in the praise which is given him, it seems worth while
making a first faint attempt to break through the net of tradition that has
been woven and is daily being woven closer around him, to see him as
he stands in such small records as may be relied upon and not as we
would fain have him be, to understand his relation to his predecessors
and learn his position in musical history, to hear his music without
prejudice and distinguish its individual qualities. This is a hard task,
and one which I can only seek to achieve here in the roughest and
barest manner; yet any manner at all is surely much better than letting
the old fictions go unreproved, while our greatest musician drifts into
the twilight past, misunderstood, unloved, unremembered, save when
an Abbey wants a new case for its organ, an organ on which Purcell
never played, or a self-styled Purcell authority wishes to set up a sort of
claim of part or whole proprietorship in him.
II.
Hardly more is known of Purcell than of Shakespeare. There is no
adequate biography. Hawkins and Burney (who is oftenest Hawkins at

second-hand) are alike rash, random, and untrustworthy, depending
much upon the anecdotage of old men, who were no more to be
believed than the ancient bandsmen of the present day who tell you
how Mendelssohn or Wagner flattered them or accepted hints from
them. Cummings' life is scarcely even a sketch; at most it is a
thumbnail sketch. Only ninety-five pages deal with Purcell, and of
these at least ninety-four are defaced by maudlin sentimentality, or
unhappy attempts at criticism (see the remarks on the Cecilia Ode) or
laughable sequences of disconnected incongruities--as, for instance,
when Mr. Cummings remarks that "Queen Mary died of small-pox, and
the memory of her goodness was felt so universally," etc. Born in 1658,
Purcell lived in Pepys' London, and died in 1095, having written
complimentary odes to three kings--Charles the Second, James the
Second, and William the Third. Besides these complimentary odes, he
wrote piles of instrumental music, a fair heap of anthems, and songs
and interludes and overtures for some forty odd plays. This is nearly
the sum of our knowledge. His outward life seems to have been
uneventful enough. He probably lived the common life of the day--the
day being, as I have said, Pepys' day. Mr. Cummings has tried to show
him as a seventeenth century Mendelssohn--conventionally
idealised--and he quotes the testimony of some "distinguished divine,"
chaplain to a nobleman, as though we did not know too well why
noblemen kept chaplains in those days to regard their testimony as
worth more than other men's. The truth is, that if Purcell had lived
differently from his neighbours he would have been called a Puritan.
On the other hand, we must remember that he composed so much in his
short life that his dissipations must have made a poor show beside those
of many of his great contemporaries--those of Dryden, for instance,
who used to hide from his duns in Purcell's private room in the
clock-tower of St. James's Palace. I picture him as a sturdy, beef-eating
Englishman, a puissant, masterful, as well as lovable personality, a
born king of men, ambitious of greatness, determined, as Tudway says,
to exceed every one of his time, less majestic than Handel, perhaps, but
full of vigour and unshakable faith in his genius. His was an age when
genius inspired confidence both in others and in its possessor, not, as
now, suspicion in both; and Purcell was believed in from the first by
many, and later, by all--even by Dryden, who began by flattering

Monsieur Grabut, and ended, as was his wont, by crossing to the
winning side. And Purcell is no more to be pitied for his sad life than to
be praised as a conventionally idealised Mendelssohn. His life was
brief, but not tragic. He never lacked his bread as Mozart lacked his; he
was not, like Beethoven, tormented by deafness and tremblings for the
immediate future; he had no powerful foes to fight, for he did not bid
for a great position in the world like Handel. Nor was he a romantic
consumptive like Chopin, with a bad cough, a fastidious regard for
beauty, and a flow of anaemic melody. He was divinely gifted with a
greater richness of invention than was given to any other composers
excepting two, Bach and Mozart; and death would not take his gifts as
an excuse when he was thirty-seven. Hence our Mr. Cummings has
droppings of lukewarm tears; hence, generally, compassion for his
comparatively short life has ousted admiration for his mighty works
from the