dated from his twenty-second year. If they had boldly stuck to their plan of attributing the music to the year of the first performance of the play to which it is attached, they might easily have shown him to have been a prolific composer before he was born. The prosaic truth is that Purcell came before the world as a composer for the theatre in the very year of his appointment to Westminster Abbey, and during the last five years of his life he turned out huge quantities of music for the theatre. It is easy to believe that his first experiments were for the Church. He was brought up in the Church, and sang there; when his voice broke he went on as organist. Some of his relatives and most of his friends were Church musicians. But Church and stage were not far apart at the Court of Charles, and, moreover, the more nearly the music of the Church resembled that of the stage, the better the royal ears were pleased. Pepys' soul was filled with delighted approval when he noticed the royal hand beating the time during the anthem, and, in fact, Charles insisted on anthems he could beat time to. Whilst "on his travels" he had doubtless observed how much better, from his point of view, they did these things in France. There was nothing vague or undecided in that curious mind. He knew perfectly well what he liked, and insisted on having it. He disliked the old Catholic music; he disliked quite as much Puritan psalm-singing—that abominable cacophony which to-day is called "hearty congregational singing." He wanted jolly Church music, sung in time and in tune; he wanted secular, not sacred, music in church. But his taste, though secular, was not corrupt—the music-hall Church music and Salvation Army tunes of to-day would probably have outraged his feelings. His taste coincided with Purcell's own. Along with some of the old-fashioned genuine devotional music, Purcell must have heard from childhood a good deal of the stamp he was destined to write; he must often have taken his part in Church music that might, with perfect propriety, have been given in a theatre. All things were ripe for a secular composer; the mood that found utterance in the old devotional music was a dead thing, and in England Humphries had pointed the new way. Purcell was that secular composer.

One spirit, the secular, pagan spirit, breathes in every bar of Purcell's music. Mid-Victorian critics and historians deplored the resemblance between the profane style of the stage pieces and the sacred style of the anthems and services. Not resemblance, but identity, is the word to use. There is no distinguishing between the two styles. There are not two styles: there is one style—the secular style, Purcell's style. Let us pause a moment, and ask ourselves if any great composer has ever had more than one style. Put aside the fifth-rate imitators who now copied Mozart, and now Palestrina, and could therefore write in as many styles as there were styles to copy, and not one of them their own. There is no difference between the sacred motets and the secular madrigals of the early polyphonists. Bach did not use dance-measures in his Church music, but in the absence of these lies the entire distinction between his Church and his secular compositions; the structure, manner and outlines of his songs are precisely alike—indeed, he dished up secular airs for sacred cantatas. The style of Handel's "Semele" and that of his "Samson" are the same; there is no dissimilarity between Haydn's symphonies and the "Creation"; Mozart's symphonies and his masses (though the masses are a little breezier, on the whole); Schubert's symphonies or songs and his masses or "The Song of Miriam"; Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the great Mass in D.

Purcell's style is largely a sort of fusion of all the styles in vogue in his lifetime. The old polyphonic music he knew, and he was a master of polyphonic writing; but with him it was only a means to the carrying out of a scheme very unlike any the old writers ever thought of—the interest of each separate part is not greater than the general harmonic interest. Then, as he admitted, he learnt a great deal from the Italians. From Lulli, through Humphries, he got declamatory freedom in the bonds of definite forms, not letting the poet's or the Bible words warp his music out of all reasonable shape. The outlines of his tunes show unmistakably the influence of English folk-song and folk-dance. There was an immense amount of household music in those days—catches, ballads, songs and dances. The folk-songs, even if they were invented before the birth of the modern key-sense, were soon modified by it: very few indications can be found of their having originated in the epoch when the modes had the domination; and the same is true of the dances. The sum of these influences, plus Purcell's innate tendencies, was a style "apt" (in the phraseology of the day) either for Church, Court, theatre, or tavern—a style whose combined loftiness, directness, and simplicity passed unobserved for generations while the big "bow-wow" manner of Handel was held to be the only manner tolerable in great music.

By 1680 Purcell's apprenticeship was at end. Early compositions by him had been published in Playford's "Choice Ayres" in 1676 and 1679; in 1677 he had been appointed "composer (to the King) in ordinary for the violin, in the place of Matthew Lock, deceased"; but none of the highest official posts were his. And we must remember that official position was a very different thing in Restoration times from what it is to-day. Nowadays the world is bigger and more thickly populated, and men of intellect and genius scorn Court appointments and official appointments generally. These are picked up by Court toadies, business-headed persons, men belonging to well-connected families—the Tite Barnacles of the generation. The men of power appeal to the vast public direct. In Purcell's day there was no vast public to appeal to. Concerts had scarcely been devised; no composer could live by publishing his works. The Court, the theatre, the Church—he had to win a position in one or other or all of these if he wished to live at all. So in 1680 Purcell the master passed over the head of his teacher, Dr. John Blow, to the organistship of Westminster Abbey—that is, he was recognised as the first organist living. In the same year he composed the first theatre pieces he is known to have composed—those for Lee's Theodosius. (I disregard as fatuous the supposition that in his boyhood he wrote the Macbeth music attributed, perhaps wrongly, to Locke.) It was not for some time that he gained the supremacy at the theatre which he now held in the Church. That very trustworthy weathercock John Dryden, Poet Laureate, continued to flatter others for many long days to come. In this same year he composed the first of a long series of odes of welcome, congratulation or condolence for royal or great personages, and about this year he married.

CHAPTER III

During the first ten years of his mastership Purcell composed much—precisely how much we can only guess. It was not until 1690 that he began the huge string of incidental theatre sets which were for so long spoken of as his operas. Mr. Barclay Squire, to whom all who are interested in Purcell are deeply indebted, has clearly established that by 1690, though not more than two years earlier, his one opera, Dido and Aeneas, was written. If we take this as belonging to the period which began in 1690, we have for these first ten years only ten plays to which he provided music, and of these several are very doubtful, and the rest not very important. During the remaining six years of his life he wrote music for forty-two plays. Several sets are of the greatest importance, amongst them Dioclesian, King Arthur, The Fairy Queen and