Purcell liked daring harmonies, and they arise organically out of the firm march of individual parts.  Excepting sometimes for a special purpose, he does not dump them down as accompaniment to an upper part.  The “false relations” and “harsh progressions” of which the theorists prate do not exist for an unprejudiced ear.  In writing the flattened leading note in one part against the sharpened in another he was merely following the polyphonists, and it sounds as well—­nay, as beautiful—­as any other discord, or the same discord on another degree of the scale.[2] This discord and his other favourites are beautiful in Purcell, and his determination to let them arise in an apparently unavoidable way from the collisions of parts, each going its defined road to its goal, must have determined the character of his part-writing.  In spite of his remarks in Playford’s book, it is plain that he looked at music horizontally as well as vertically, and constructed it so that it is good no matter which way it is considered.  His counterpoint has a freedom and spontaneity not to be found in the music of the later contrapuntal, fugal, arithmetical school.  Though he was pleased with musical ingenuities and worked plenty of them, he thought more of producing beautiful, expressive music than of mathematical skill.  Handel frequently adopted his free contrapuntal style.  Handel (and Bach, too) raised stupendous structures of ossified formulas, building architectural splendours of the materials that came to hand; but when Handel was picture-painting (as in Israel) and had a brush loaded with colour, he cared less for phrases that would “work” smoothly at the octave or twelfth than for subjects of the Purcell type.

[2] Since the above was written and in type I have read Mr. Ernest Walker’s most interesting book, “Music in England,” which contains a valuable chapter on the discords found in the music of Purcell and of earlier men.

THE ODES AND CHURCH MUSIC.

Some of the later odes are notable works.  Perhaps the St. Cecilia ode of 1692 is, on the whole, the finest.  Like the earlier works of the same class, in scheme the odes resemble the theatre sets, though, of course, there are neither dances nor curtain tunes.  All that has been said about the stage music applies to them.  The choruses are often very exhilarating in their go and sparkle and force, but I doubt whether Purcell had a larger number of singers for what we might call his concert-room works than in the theatre.  The day of overgrown, or even fairly large, choruses and choral societies was not yet; many years afterwards Handel was content with a choir of from twenty to thirty.  Had Purcell enjoyed another ten years of life, there is no saying how far he might have developed the power of devising massive choral designs, for we see him steadily growing, and there was no reason why the St. Cecilia ode of 1692 and the Te Deum and