his reputation by singing after him.  He was not only the first composer of the day, but also the first organist and the first harpsichord player; for his only possible rival, Sebastian Bach, was an obscure schoolmaster in a small, nearly unheard-of, German town.  And so personal force, musical genius, business talent, education, and general brain power went to the making of a man who hobnobbed with dukes and kings, who ruled musical England with an iron rule, who threatened to throw distinguished soprano ladies from windows, and was threatened with never an action for battery in return, who went through the world with a regal gait, and was, in a word, the most astonishing lord of music the world has seen.

That this aristocrat should come to be the musical prophet of an evangelical bourgeoisie would be felt as a most comical irony, were it only something less of a mystery.  Handel was brought up in the bosom of the Lutheran Church, and was religious in his way.  But it was emphatically a pagan way.  Let those who doubt it turn to his setting of “All we like sheep have gone astray,” in the “Messiah,” and ask whether a religious man, whether Byrde or Palestrina, would have painted that exciting picture on those words.  Imagine how Bach would have set them.  That Handel lived an intense inner life we know, but what that life was no man can ever know.  It is only certain that it was not a life such as Bach’s; for he lived an active outer life also, and was troubled with no illusions, no morbid introspection.  He seemed to accept the theology of the time in simple sincerity as a sufficient explanation of the world and human existence.  He had little desire to write sacred music.  He felt that his enormous force found its finest exercise in song-making; and Italian opera, consisting nearly wholly of songs, was his favourite form to the finish.  The instinct was a true one.  It is as a song-writer he is supreme, surpassing as he does Schubert, and sometimes even Mozart.  Mozart is a prince of song-writers; but Handel is their king.  He does not get the breezy picturesqueness of Purcell, nor the entrancing absolute beauty that Mozart often gets; but as pieces of art, each constructed so as to get the most out of the human voice in expressing a rich human passion in a noble form, they stand unapproachable in their perfection.  For many reasons the English public refused to hear them in his own time, and Handel, as a general whose business was to win the battle, not in this or that way, but in any possible way, turned his attention to oratorio, and in this found success and a fortune.  In this lies also our great gain, for in addition to the Italian opera songs we have the oratorio choruses.  But when we come to think of it, might not Buononcini and Cuzzoni laugh to see how time has avenged them on their old enemy?  For Handel’s best music is in the songs, which rarely find a singer; and his fame is kept alive by performances of “Israel in Egypt” at the Albert Hall, where (until lately) evangelical small grocers crowded to hear the duet for two basses, “The Lord is a man of war,” which Handel did not write, massacred by a huge bass chorus.