almost of
defeat. Then look at the magnificent Mr. Handel in Hudson's portrait:
fashionably dressed in a great periwig and gorgeous scarlet coat,
victorious, energetic, self-possessed, self-confident, self-satisfied,
jovial, and proud as Beelzebub (to use his own comparison)--too proud
to ask for recognition were homage refused. This portrait helps us to
understand the ascendency Handel gained over his contemporaries and
over posterity.

But his lofty position was not entirely due to his overwhelming
personality. His intellect, if less vast, less comprehensive, than
Beethoven's, was less like the intellect of a great peasant: it was
swifter, keener, surer. Where Beethoven plodded, Handel leaped. And a
degree of genius which did nothing for Bach, a little for Mozart, and
all for Beethoven, did something for Handel. Without a voice worth
taking into consideration, he could, and at least on one occasion did,
sing so touchingly that the leading singer of the age dared not risk
his reputation by singing after him. He was not only the first
composer of the day, but also the first organist and the first
harpsichord player; for his only possible rival, Sebastian Bach, was
an obscure schoolmaster in a small, nearly unheard-of, German town.
And so personal force, musical genius, business talent, education, and
general brain power went to the making of a man who hobnobbed with
dukes and kings, who ruled musical England with an iron rule, who
threatened to throw distinguished soprano ladies from windows, and was
threatened with never an action for battery in return, who went
through the world with a regal gait, and was, in a word, the most
astonishing lord of music the world has seen.

That this aristocrat should come to be the musical prophet of an
evangelical bourgeoisie would be felt as a most comical irony, were it
only something less of a mystery. Handel was brought up in the bosom
of the Lutheran Church, and was religious in his way. But it was
emphatically a pagan way. Let those who doubt it turn to his setting
of "All we like sheep have gone astray," in the "Messiah," and ask
whether a religious man, whether Byrde or Palestrina, would have
painted that exciting picture on those words. Imagine how Bach would
have set them. That Handel lived an intense inner life we know, but
what that life was no man can ever know. It is only certain that it
was not a life such as Bach's; for he lived an active outer life also,
and was t