proved, 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 En