Rightly to approach the “Messiah” or any of Handel’s sacred oratorios, to approach it in any sure hope of appreciating it, one must remember that (as I have just said) Handel had nothing of the religious temperament, that in temperament he was wholly secular, that he was an eighteenth century pagan.  He was perfectly satisfied with the visible and audible world his energy and imagination created out of things; about the why and wherefore of things he seems never to have troubled; his soul asked no questions, and he was never driven to accept a religious or any other explanation.  It is true he went to church with quite commendable regularity, and wished to die on Good Friday and so meet Jesus Christ on the anniversary of the resurrection.  But he was nevertheless as completely a pagan as any old Greek; the persons of the Trinity were to him very solid entities; if he wished to die on Good Friday, depend upon it, he fully meant to enter heaven in his finest scarlet coat with ample gold lace and a sword by his side, to make a stately bow to the assembled company and then offer a few apposite and doubtless pungent remarks on the proper method of tuning harps.  Of true devotional feeling, of the ecstatic devotional feeling of Palestrina and of Bach, there is in no recorded saying of his a trace, and there is not a trace of it in his music.  When he was writing the “Hallelujah Chorus” he imagined he saw God on His throne, just as in writing “Semele” he probably imagined he saw Jupiter on his throne; and the fact proves only with what intensity and power his imagination was working, and how far removed he was from the genuine devotional frame of mind.  There is not the slightest difference in style between his secular and his sacred music; he treats sacred and secular subjects precisely alike.  In music his intention was never to reveal his own state of mind, but always to depict some object, some scene.  Now, never did he adhere with apparently greater resolution to this plan, never therefore did he produce a more essentially secular work, than in the “Messiah.”  One need only consider such numbers as “All they that see Him” and “Behold the Lamb of God” to realise this; though, indeed, there is not a number in the oratorio that does not show it with sufficient clearness.  But fully to understand Handel and realise his greatness, it is not enough merely to know the spirit in which he worked:  one must know also his method of depicting things and scenes.  He was wholly an impressionist—­in his youth from choice, as when he wrote the music of “Rinaldo” faster than the librettist could supply the words; in middle age and afterwards from necessity, as he never had time to write save when circumstances freed him for a few days from the active duties of an impresario.  He tried to do, and succeeded in doing, everything with a few powerful strokes, a few splashes of colour.  Of the careful elaboration of Bach, of Beethoven, even of Mozart, there is nothing:  sometimes in his impatience