here is sadness, apart and different from the sadness that was of
the man's own soul. It is the sadness that clings to forlorn things of
an order that is dead and past: it tinkles in the harpsichord
figurations and cadences; it makes one think of lavender scent and of
the days when our great-grandmothers danced minuets. Purcell's music,
too, is sad at times, but the human note reaches us blended with the
gaiety of robust health and the clean young life that is renewed each
year with the lengthening days.

The beauty of sanity, strength, and joyousness--this pervades all he
wrote. It was modern when he wrote; it is modern to-day; it will be
modern to-morrow and a hundred years hence. In it the old modes of his
mighty predecessors Byrde and Tallis are left an eternity behind; they
belong to a forgotten order. Of the crabbedness of Harry Lawes there is
scarcely a trace: that belonged to an era of experiments. The strongest
and most original of his immediate predecessors, Pelham Humphries,
influenced him chiefly by showing him the possibility of throwing off
the shackles of the dead and done with. The contrapuntal formulas and
prosaic melodic contours, to be used so magnificently by Handel, were
never allowed to harden and fossilise in Purcell's music. Even where a
phrase threatens us with the dry and commonplace, he gives it a
miraculous twist, or adds a touch of harmony that transforms it from a
dead into a living thing, from something prosaic into something poetic,
rare and enchanting. Let me instance at once how he could do this in the
smallest things. This is ordinary enough; it might be a bit of
eighteenth-century counterpoint:

[Illustration]

But play it with the second part:

[Illustration]

The magic of the simple thirds, marked with asterisks, is pure Purcell.
And it is pure magic: there is no explaining the effect. He got into his
music the inner essence that makes the external beauty of the
picturesque England he knew. That essence was in him; he made it his own
and gave it to us. He did not use much of the folk-songs born of our
fields and waters, woods and mountains, and the hearts of our
forefathers who lived free and did not dream of smoky cities and
stinking slums; though 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 stor