Purcell | Page 2

folk-song shaped and modified his melodies. In
himself he had the spirit of Nature, and it made his music come forth as
it makes the flowers blow. The very spirit of the earth seemed to find
its voice through him, the spirit of storm and the spirit of fair weather
that sports when sweet rains make a musical clatter among the leaves.
The music in which he found a voice for Nature cannot grow old while
the earth renews its youth with each returning spring. In its pathos and
in its joy the soul of seventeenth-century England is in his music in
perennial health.

This is not a fanciful description: it is the plainest, most matter-of-fact
description. Purcell's music has the same effect on the mind as a crowd
of young leaves shooting from a branch in spring; it has a quality of
what I risk calling green picturesqueness, sweet and pure, and fresh and
vigorous. It is music that has grown and was not made. That Purcell
knew perfectly well what he was doing we realise easily when we turn
to the music he set to particular words. Take The Tempest music, and
turn to the song "Arise, ye subterranean winds." See how the
accompaniment surges up in imperious, impetuous strength. Turn to
"See, the heavens smile": note how the resonant swinging chords and
that lovely figure playing on the top give one an instant vision of vast,
translucent sea-depths and the ripples lapping above. Look at "Come
unto these yellow sands" and "Full fathom five": he almost gives us the
colour of the sea and the shore. These things did not come by accident,
nor do they exist only in an enthusiastic fancy. They were meant; they
are there; and only the deaf and the stupid, or those over-steeped in the
later classical music, can help feeling them.
Purcell, then, was the last of the English musicians. So fair and sweet a
morning saw the end that many good folk have regarded the end as the
beginning, as only the promise of an opulent summer day. How
glorious the day might have been had Purcell lived, no one can say; but
he died, and no great genius has arisen since. As for the cathedral
organists who followed him chronologically, the less said about them
the better. What kind of composers they were we can with sorrow see
in the music they wrote; what skill as executants they possessed we
may judge from the music they played and the beggarly organs they
played on. We read of our "great Church musicians"--but these men
were not musicians; and of the rich stores of Church music--but,
however vast its quantity, it is not, properly speaking, music. The great
English musicians who wrote for the Church before Purcell's time were
Tallis, Byrde, Whyte, Orlando Gibbons, and they composed not for the
English, but for the Roman Church. When I say that Pelham
Humphries and Purcell were not religious at all, but purely secular
composers, thoroughly pagan in spirit, I imply--or, if you like,
exply--that the Church of England has had no religious musicians
worth mentioning. Far be it from me to doubt the honest piety of the

men who grubbed through life in dusty organ-lofts. Their intentions
may have been of the noblest, and they may have had, for all I or
anyone can know, sincere religious feeling. But they got no feeling
whatever into their intolerably dreary anthems and services; and as for
their intentions, the cathedrals of England might be paved with them.
Tallis has often been called "the father of English Church music." If his
ghost ever wanders into our cathedral libraries, let us hope he is proud
of his progeny. He, like his contemporaries, was a Catholic, and he
dissembled. About his birth it has only been conjectured that he was
born in the earlier part of the sixteenth century. He was organist of
Waltham Abbey in 1540, and remained there till the dissolution of the
monasteries, when he became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He
and Byrde in 1575 got a patent giving them a monopoly of the printing
of music and of music paper, and they printed their own works, which
it is a good thing publishers abstain from doing nowadays. In 1585 he
died. He was a fine master of polyphony, and as a genuine composer is
second only to Byrde. William Byrde, however, stands high above him
and all other composers of the time. He was born about 1538, and died
in 1623. His later life would have been full of trouble, and the noose or
the flames at the stake might have terminated it, if powerful patrons
had not sheltered him. The Nonconformist conscience was developing
its passion for interfering in other people's private