nth
century was coming. The formal outlines had not been invented, for
rules and themes that would work without breaking the rules were
little thought of. Byrde evades the rules in the frankest manner: in
this Mass alone there are scores of evasions that would have been
inevitably condemned a century afterwards, and might even be
condemned by the contrapuntists of to-day. The eighteenth-century
doctors who edited Byrde early in this century did not in the least
understand why he wrote as he did, and doubtless would have put him
right if they had thought of having the work sung instead of simply
having it printed as an antiquarian curiosity. The music does not
suggest the eighteenth century with its jangling harpsichords, its
narrow, dirty streets, its artificiality, its brilliant candle-lighted
rooms where the wits and great ladies assembled and talked more or
less naughtily. There is indeed a strange, pathetic charm in the
eighteenth century to which no one can be indifferent: it is a dead
century, with the dust upon it, and yet a faint lingering aroma as of
dead rose petals. But the old-world atmosphere of Byrde's music is, at
least to me, something finer than that: it is the atmosphere of a
world which still lives: it is remote from us and yet very near: for
the odour of dead rose petals and dust you have a calm cool air, and a
sense of fragrant climbing flowers and of the shade of full foliaged
trees. All is sane, clean, fresh: one feels that the sun must always
have shone in those days. This quality, however, it shares with a
great deal of the music of the "spacious days" of Elizabeth. But of
its expressiveness there is not too much to be found in the music of
other musicians than Byrde in Byrde's day. He towered high above all
the composers who had been before him; he stands higher than any
other English musician who has lived since, with the exception of
Purcell. It is foolish to think of comparing his genius with the
genius of Palestrina; but the two men will also be reckoned close
together by those who know this Mass and the Cantiones Sacrae. They
were both consummate masters of the technique of their art; they both
had a fund of deep and original emotion; they both knew how to express
it through their music. I have not space to mention all the examples I
could wish. But every reader of this article may be strongly
recommended at once to play, even on the piano, the sublime passage
beginning at the words "Qui p