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Before Purcell's position in musical history can be ascertained and fixed, it is absolutely necessary to make some survey of the rise of the school of which he was the close.

In our unmusical England of to-day it is as hard to believe in an England where music was perhaps the dominant passion of the people as it is to understand how this should have been forgotten in a more musical age than ours. Until the time of Handel's arrival in this country there was no book printed which did not show unmistakably that its writer loved music. It is a fact (as the learned can vouch) that Erasmus considered the English the most given up to music of all the peoples of Europe; and how far these were surpassed by the English is further shown by the fact that English musicians were as common in continental towns in those days as foreign musicians are in England nowadays. I refrain from quoting Peacham, North, Anthony Wood, Pepys, and the rest of the much over-quoted; but I wish to lay stress on the fact that here music was widespread and highly cultivated, just as it was in Germany in the eighteenth century. Moreover, an essential factor in the development of the German school was not wanting in England. Each German prince had his Capellmeister; and English nobles and gentlemen, wealthier than German princes, differing from them only in not being permitted to assume a pretentious title, had each his Musick-master. I believe I could get together a long list of musicians who were thus kept. It will be remembered that when Handel came to England he quickly entered the service of the Duke of Chandos. The royal court always had a number of musicians employed in the making or the performing of music. Oliver Cromwell retained them and paid them; Charles the Second added to them, and in many cases did not pay them at all, so that at least one is known to have died of starvation, and the others were everlastingly clamouring for arrears of salary. It was the business of these men (in the intervals of asking for their salaries) to produce music for use in the church and in the house or palace; that for church use being of course nearly entirely vocal—masses or anthems; that for house use, vocal and instrumental—madrigals and fancies (i.e. fantasias). As generation succeeded generation, a certain body of technique was built up and a mode of expression found; and at length the first great wave of music culminated in the works of Tallis and Byrde. Their technique and mode of expression I shall say something about presently; and all the criticism I have to pass on them is that Byrde is infinitely greater than Tallis, and seems worthy indeed to stand beside Palestrina and Sweelinck. Certainly anyone who wishes to have a true notion of the music of this period should obtain (if he can) copies of the D minor five-part mass, and the Cantiones Sacræ, and carefully study such numbers as the "Agnus Dei" of the former and the profound "Tristitia et anxietas" in the latter.

The learned branch of the English school reached its climax. Meantime another branch, not unlearned, but caring less for scholastic perfection than for perfect expression of poetic sentiment, was fast growing. The history of the masque is a stale matter, so I will merely mention that Campion, and many another with, before, and after him, engaged during a great part of their lives in what can only be called the manufacture of these entertainments. A masque was simply a gorgeous show of secular ritual, of colour and of music—a kind of Drury Lane melodrama in fact, but as far removed from Drury Lane as this age is from that in the widespread faculty of appreciating beauty. The music consisted of tunes of a popular outline and sentiment, but they were dragged into the province of art by the incapacity of those who wrote or adapted them to touch anything without leaving it lovelier than when they lighted on it. Pages might be, and I daresay some day will be, written about Dr. Campion's melody, its beauty and power, the unique sense of rhythmic subtleties which it shows, and withal its curiously English quality. But one important thing we must observe: it is wholly secular melody. Even when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has no, or the very slightest, ecclesiastical tinge. It is folk-melody with its face washed and hair combed; it bears the same relation to English folk-melody as a chorale from the "Matthew" Passion bears to its original. Another important point is this: whereas the church composers took a few Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat them so as to make sense in the singing, but made the words wait upon the musical phrases, in Dr. Campion we see the first clear wish to weld music and poem into one flawless whole. To an extent he succeeded, but full success did not come till several generations had first tried, tried and failed. Campion properly belongs to the sixteenth century, and Harry Lawes, born twenty-five years before Campion died, as properly belongs to the seventeenth century. In his songs we find even more marked the determination that words and music shall go hand in hand—that the words shall no longer be dragged at the cart-tail of the melody, so to say. In fact, a main objection against Lawes—and a true one in many instances—is that he sacrificed the melody rather than the meaning of the poem. This is significant. The Puritans are held to have damaged church music less by burning the choir-books and pawning the organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may say) on One word one note. As a matter of fact, this was not exclusively a plank in the political platform of the Puritans. The Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist Lawes, and many another Loyalist insisted on it. Even when they did not write a note to each word, they took care not to have long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words, but to derive the accent of the music from that of the poem. This showed mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other towards the entirely new technique which was to supersede the contrapuntal technique of Byrde and Palestrina. In making a mass or an anthem or secular composition, the practice of these old masters was to start with a fragment of church or secular melody which we will call A; after (say) the trebles had sung it or a portion of it, the altos took it up and the trebles went on to a new phrase B, which dovetailed with A. Then the tenors took up A, the altos went on to B, the trebles went on to a new phrase C, until ultimately, if we lettered each successive phrase that appeared, we should get clear away from the beginning of the alphabet to X, Y, and Z. This, of course, is a crude and stiff way of describing the process of weaving and interweaving by which the old music was spun, for often the phrase A would come up again and again in one section of a composition and sometimes throughout the whole, and strict canon was comparatively rare in music which was not called by that name; but the description will serve. This technique proved admirable for vocal polyphony—how admirable we have all the Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal music to show. But it was no longer available when music was wanted for the single voice, unless that voice was treated as one of several real parts, the others being placed in the accompaniment. A new technique was therefore wanted. For that new technique the new composers went back to the oldest technique of all. The old minstrels used music as a means of giving accent and force to their poems; and now, as a means of spinning a web of tone which should not only be beautiful, but also give utterance to the feeling of the poem, composers went back to the method of the minstrels. They disregarded rhythm more and more (as may be seen if you compare Campion with Lawes), and sought only to make the notes follow the accent of the poetry, thus converting music into conventionally idealised speech or declamation. Lawes carried this method as far as ever it has been, and probably can be, carried. When Milton said,

"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured notes

First taught our English music how to span

Words with just note and accent,"

he did not mean that Lawes was the first to bar his music, for music had been barred long before Lawes. He meant that Lawes did not use the poem as an excuse for a melody, but the melody as a means of effectively declaiming the poet's verse. The poet (naturally) liked this—hence Milton's compliments. It should be noted that many of the musicians of this time were poets—of a sort—themselves, and wished to make the most of their verses; so that it would be a mistake to regard declamation as something forced by the poet, backed by popular opinion, upon the musician. With Lawes, then, what we may call the declamatory branch of the English school culminated. Except in his avowedly declamatory passages, Purcell did not spin his web precisely thus; but we shall presently see that his method was derived from the declamatory method. Much remained to be done first. Lawes got rid of the old scholasticism, now effete. But he never seemed quite sure that his expression would come off. It is hard at this day to listen to his music as Milton must have listened to it; but having done my best, I am compelled to own that I find some of his songs without meaning or comeliness, and must assume either that our ancestors of this period had a sense which has been lost, or that the music played a less important part compared with the poem than has been generally supposed. Lawes lost rhythm, both as an element in beauty and a factor in expression. Moreover, his harmonic resources were sadly limited, for the old device of letting crossing parts clash in sweet discords that resolved into as sweet or sweeter concords was denied him. What would be called nowadays the new harmony, the new rhythm and the new forms were developed during the Civil War and the Puritan reign. The Puritans, loving music but detesting it in their churches, forced it into purely secular channels; and we cannot say the result was bad, for the result was Purcell. John Jenkins and a host of smaller men developed instrumental music, and, though the forms they used were thrown aside when Charles II. arrived, the power of handling the instruments remained as a legacy to Charles's men. Charles drove the secular movement faster ahead by banning the old ecclesiastical music (which, it appears, gave him "the blues"), and by compelling his young composers to write livelier strains for the church, that is, church music which was in reality nothing but secular music. He sent Pelham Humphries to Paris, and when Humphries came back "an absolute Monsieur" (who does not remember that ever-green entry in the Diary?) he brought with him all that could possibly have been learnt from Lulli. He died at twenty-seven, having been Purcell's master; and though Purcell's imagination was richer, deeper, more strenuous in the ebb and flow of its tides, one might fancy that the two men had but one spirit, which went on growing and fetching forth the fruits of the spirit, while young Humphries' body decayed by the side of his younger wife's in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey.