ng in
themselves, nothing, that is, save temporary guide-posts or landmarks
which the contrapuntal men set up for their own private use while they
were exploring the unknown fields of music. We should know, though
many of us do not, that it is simply stupid to pass adverse judgment
on the early composers who did not use, and because they did not use,
these guide-posts, which had not then been set up, though one by one
they were being set up. For a very short time the rules of
counterpoint were looked upon as eternal and immutable. During that
period the early men were human-naturally looked upon as barbarians.
But that period is long past. We know the laws of counterpoint to be
not eternal, not immutable; but on the contrary to have been
short-lived convention that is now altogether disregarded. So it is
time to look at the early music through our own, and not through the
eighteenth-century doctors' eyes; and when we do that we find the
early music to be as beautiful as any ever written, as expressive, and
quite as well constructed. There are, as I have said, people who
to-day prefer Mr. Jackson in F and his friends to Byrde. What, I
wonder, would be said if a literary man preferred, say, some
eighteenth-century poetaster to Chaucer because the poetaster in his
verse observed rules which Chaucer never dreamed of, because, to drag
in Artemus Ward once again, the poetaster's spelling conformed more
nearly to ours than Chaucer's!

The Mass is indeed noble and stately, but it is miraculously
expressive as well. Its expressiveness is the thing that strikes one
more forcibly every time one hears it. At first one feels chiefly its
old-world freshness--not the picturesque spring freshness of Purcell
and Handel, but a freshness that is sweet and grave and cool, coming
out of the Elizabethan days when life, at its fastest, went
deliberately, and was lived in many-gabled houses with trees and
gardens, or in great palaces with pleasant courtyards, and the Thames
ran unpolluted to the sea, and the sun shone daily even in London, and
all things were fair and clean. It is old-world music, yet it stands
nearer to us than most of the music written in and immediately after
Handel's period, the period of dry formalism and mere arithmetic.
There is not a sign of the formal melodic outlines which we recognise
at once in any piece out of the contrapuntal time, not an indication
that the Academic, "classical," unpoetic, essay-writing eightee