A complete list of Purcell's compositions appears somewhat formidable
at a first glance, but when one comes to examine it carefully the
solidity seems somewhat to melt out of it. The long string of church
pieces is made up of anthems, many of them far from long. The forty
odd "operas" are not operas at all, but sets of incidental pieces and
songs for plays, and some of the sets are very short. Thus Dryden
talks of Purcell setting "my three songs," and there are only half a
dozen "curtain-tunes," _i.e._ entr'actes. Many of the harpsichord
pieces are of tiny proportions. The sonatas of three and four parts
are no larger than Mozart's piano sonatas. Still, taking into account
the noble quality that is constantly maintained, we must admit that
Purcell used astonishingly the short time he was given. Much of his
music is lost; more of it lies in manuscript at the British Museum and
elsewhere. Some of it was issued last century, some early in this.
Four expensive volumes have been wretchedly edited and issued by the
Purcell Society, and those amongst us who live to the age of
Methuselah will probably see all the accessible works printed by this
body. Some half century ago Messrs. Novello published an edition of
the church music, stupidly edited by the stupidest editor who ever
laid clumsy fingers on a masterpiece. A shameful edition of the "King
Arthur" music was prepared for the Birmingham Festival of 1897 by Mr.
J.A. Fuller-Maitland, musical critic of "The Times." A publisher
far-sighted and generous enough to issue a trustworthy edition of all
Purcell's music at a moderate price has yet to be found.
Purcell's list is not long, but it is superb. Yet he opened out no new
paths, he made no leap aside from the paths of his predecessors, as
Gluck did in the eighteenth century and Wagner in the nineteenth. He
was one of their school; he went on in the direction they had led; but
the distance he travelled was enormous. Humphries, possibly Captain
Cook, even Christopher Gibbons, helped to open out the new way in
church music; Lawes, Matthew Lock, and Banister were before him at the
theatres; Lock and Dr. Blow had written odes before he was weaned; the
form and plan of his sonatas came certainly from Bassani, in all
likelihood from Corelli also; from John Jenkins and the other writers
of fancies he got something of his workmanship and art of weaving many
melodies into a coherent whole, and a knowledge of Lulli would help
him to attain terseness, and save him from that drifting which is the
weak point of the old English instrumental writers; he was acquainted
with the music of Carissimi, a master of choral effect. In a word, he
owed much to his predecessors, even as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven owed to their predecessors; and he did as they did--won his
greatness by using to fine ends the means he found, rather than by
inventing the means, though, like them, some means he did invent.
Like his predecessors Purcell hung between the playhouse, the church,
and the court; but unlike most of them he had only one style, which
had to serve in one place as in another. I have already shown the
growth of the secular spirit in music. In Purcell that spirit reached
its height. His music is always secular, always purely pagan. I do not
mean that it is inappropriate in the church--for nothing more
appropriate was ever written--nor that Purcell was insincere, as our
modern church composers are insincere, without knowing it. I do mean
that of genuine religious emotion, of the sustained ecstasy of Byrde
and Palestrina, it shows no trace. I should not like to have to define
the religious beliefs of any man in Charles II.'s court, but it would
seem that Purcell was religious in his way. He accepted the God of
the church as the savage accepts the God of his fathers; he wrote his
best music with a firm conviction that it would please his God. But
his God was an entity placed afar off, unapproachable; and of entering
into communion with Him through the medium of music Purcell had no
notion. The ecstatic note I take to be the true note of religious art;
and in lacking and in having no sense of it Purcell stands close to
the early religious painters and monk-writers, the carvers of twelfth
century woodwork, and the builders of Gothic cathedrals. He thinks of
externals and never dreams of looking for "inward light"; and the
proof of this is that he seems never consciously to endeavour to
express a mood, but strenuously seeks to depict images called up by
the words he sets. With no intention of being flippant, but in all
earnestness, I declare it is my belief that if Purcell had ever set
the "Agnus Dei" (and I don't remember that he did) he would have drawn
a frisky lamb and tried to paint its snow-white fleece; and this not
because he lacked reverence, but because of his absolute religious
naïveté, and because this drawing and painting of outside objects (so
to speak) in music was his one mode of expression. It should be
clearly understood that word-painting is not descriptive music.
Descriptive music suggests to the ear, word-painting to the eye. But
the two merge in one another. What we call a higher note is so called
because sounds produced by the mere rapid vibrations make every
being, without exception, who has a musical ear, think of height, just
as a lower note makes us all think of depth. Hence a series of notes
forming an arch on paper may, and does, suggest an arch to one's
imagination through the ear. It is perhaps a dodge, but Handel used it
extensively--for instance, in such choruses as "All we like sheep,"
"When his loud voice" ("Jephtha"), nearly every choral number of
"Israel in Egypt," and some of the airs. Bach used it too, and we find
it--the rainbow theme in "Das Rheingold" is an example--in Wagner. But
with these composers "word-painting," as it is called, seems always to
be used for a special effect; whereas it is the very essence of
Purcell's music. He has been reproved for it by the eminent Hullah,
who prettily alludes to it as a "defect" from which other music
composed at the time suffers; but the truth is, you might as well call
rhyme a "defect" of the couplet or the absence of rhyme a "defect" of
blank verse. It is an integral part of the music, as inseparable as
sound from tone, as atoms from the element they constitute. But the
question, why did Purcell write thus, and not as Mozart and Beethoven,
brings me to the point at which I must show the precise relationship
in which Purcell stood to his musical ancestors, and how in writing as
he did he was merely carrying on and developing their technique.
For we must not forget that the whole problem for the seventeenth
century was one of technique. The difficulty was to spin a tone-web
which should be at once beautiful, expressive, and modern--modern
above all things, in some sort of touch with the common feeling of the
time. I have told how the earlier composers spun their web, and how
Lawes attained to loveliness of a special kind by pure declamation. In
later times there was an immense common fund of common phrases, any
one of which only needed modification by a composer to enable him to
express anything he pleased. But Purcell came betwixt the old time and
the new, and had to build up a technique which was not wholly his own,
by following with swift steps and indefatigable energy on lines
indicated even while Lawes was alive. Those lines were, of course, in
the direction of word-painting, and I must admit that the first
word-painting seems very silly to nineteenth century ears and
eyes--eyes not less than ears. To the work of the early men Purcell's
stands in just the same relation as Bach's declamation stands to
Lawes'. Lawes declaims with a single eye on making clear the points of
the poem: the voice rises or falls, lingers on a note or hastens away,
to that one end. Bach also declaims--indeed his music is entirely
based on declamation,--but as one who wishes to communicate an emotion
and regards the attainment of beauty as being quite as important as
expression. With him the voice rises or falls as a man's voice does
when he experiences keen sensation; but the wavy line of the melody as
it goes along and up and down the stave is treated conventionally and
changed into a lovely pattern for the ear's delight; and as there can
be no regular pattern without regular rhythm, rhythm is a vital
element in Bach's music. So with Purcell, with a difference. The early
"imitative" men had sought chiefly for dainty conceits. Pepys was the
noted composer of "Beauty, Retire" and his joy when he went to church,
"where fine music on the word trumpet" will be remembered. He
doubtless liked the clatter of it, and liked the clatter the more for
occurring on that word, and probably he was not very curious as to
whether it was really beautiful or not. But Purcell could not write an
unlovely thing. His music on the word trumpet would be beautiful (it
is in "Bonduca"); and if (as he did) he sent the bass plunging
headlong from the top to the bottom of a scale to illustrate "they
that go down to the sea in ships," that headlong plunge would be
beautiful too--so beautiful as to be heard with as great pleasure by
those who know what the words are about as by those who don't. Like
Bach, Purcell depended much on rhythm for the effect of his pattern;
unlike Bach, his patterns have a strangely picturesque quality;
through the ear they suggest the forms of leaf and blossom, the
trailing tendril,--suggest them only, and dimly, vaguely,--yet, one
feels, with exquisite fidelity. Thus Purcell, following those who, in
sending the voice part along the line, pressed it up at the word
"high" and down at "low," and thus got an irregularly wavy line of
tone or melody, solved the problem of spinning his continuous web of
sound; and the fact that his web is beautiful and possesses this
peculiar picturesqueness is his justification for solving the problem
in this way. After all, his way was the way of early designers, who
filled their circles, squares, and triangles with the forms of leaf
and flower. And just as those forms were afterwards conventionalised
and used by thousands who probably had no vaguest notion of their
origin, so many of Purcell's phrases became ossified and fell into the
common stock of phrases which form the language of music. It is
interesting to note that abroad Pasquini and Kuhlau went to work very
much in Purcell's fashion, and added to that same stock from which
Handel and Bach and every subsequent composer drew, each adding
something of his own.
It was not by accident that Purcell, with this astonishing fertility
of picturesque phrases, should also have written so much, and such
vividly coloured picturesque pieces--pieces, I mean, descriptive of
the picturesque. Of course, to write an imitative phrase is quite
another matter from writing a successful piece of descriptive music.
But in Purcell the same faculty enabled him to do both. No poet of
that time seems to have been enamoured of hedgerows and flowers and
fields, nor can I say with certitude that Purcell was. Yet in
imagination at least he loves to dwell amongst them; and not the
country alone, the thought of the sea also, stirs him deeply. There
need only be some mention of sunshine or rain among the leaves, green
trees, or wind-swept grass, the yellow sea-beach or the vast
sea-depths, and his imagination flames and flares. His best music was
written when he was appealed to throughout a long work--as "The
Tempest"--in this manner. Hence, it seems to me, that quality which
his music, above any other music in the world, possesses: a peculiar
sweetness, not a boudoir sweetness like Chopin's sweetness, nor a
sweetness corrected, like Chopin's, by a subtle strain of poisonous
acid or sub-acid quality, but the sweet and wholesome cleanliness of
the open air and fields, the freshness of sun showers and cool morning
winds. I am not exaggerating the importance of this element in his
music. It is perpetually present, so that at last one comes to think,
as I have been compelled to think this long time, that Purcell wrote
nothing but descriptive music all his life. Of course it may be that
the special formation of his melodies misleads one sometimes, and that
Purcell in inventing them often did not dream of depicting natural
objects. But, remembering the gusto with which he sets descriptive
words, using these phrases consciously with a picturesque purpose, it
is hard to accept this view. In all likelihood he was constituted
similarly to Weber, who, his son asserts, curiously converted the
lines and colours of trees and winding roads and all objects of nature
into thematic material (there is an anecdote--apparently, for a
wonder, a true one--that shows he took the idea of a march from a heap
of chairs stacked upside down in a beer-garden during a shower of
rain). But Purcell is infinitely simpler, less fevered, than Weber.
Sometimes his melodies have the long-drawn, frail delicacy, the
splendidly ordered irregularity of a trailing creeper, and something
of its endless variety of leaf clustering round a central stem. But
there is an entire absence of tropical luxuriance. A grave simplicity
prevails, and we find no jewellery; showing Purcell to have been a
supreme artist.