hope, and charity—­not with any more definite consolation.  And again, with the choral works, the settings of Hoelderlin’s Schicksalslied, Schiller’s Naenie, Goethe’s Gesang der Parzen (the first-fruits of the essentially modern spirit which has impelled so many composers to choral settings of great poetry)—­they deal with the ultimate things, but the expression is never, so to speak, orthodox:  it is imaginative, sometimes perhaps ironical, but never anything but intensely non-ecclesiastical.

Brahms’s Requiem represents, as I have said, the beginning of the change in the conception of concert-room religious music, of the abandonment of the old type of oratorio in favour of something much more conscious and individual; and in refusing to take things for granted, religious music has been altogether in line with general religious development.  The change can perhaps be observed in English music more markedly than elsewhere.  Oratorio, in the sense in which we ordinarily use the term, is to all intents and purposes an invention of the genius of Handel reacting on his English environment:  the form was of course older, but he gave it a specific shape that set the fashion for future times.  It had its birth in a business speculation; it was a novelty designed to occupy the Lenten season when the theatres were not available for opera.  Like the opera, it supplied narrative and incident and characterization though without scenery or action, and it dealt with biblical history.  The history of the oratorio is the history of this loose compromise; it has afforded an attractive flavour of the theatre even to those to whom drama may in itself have seemed disreputable, and it has had the advantage of possessing subjects which combined unquestioningly accepted literal truth with unlimited possibilities for wholesale edification, and at the same time made no intimately personal claims.  The libretto of Mendelssohn’s Elijah is perhaps at once the most familiar and the most skilfully compiled example of the type; but it is now, so far as great music is concerned, extinct.  Here in England—­where, for something like a century and a half, the demand was so large that composers, when tired of writing oratorios themselves, still went on producing them out of the mangled fragments of other music—­Parry’s Judith of 1888 is the last of the old type from the pen of a great composer; and his subsequent works show, in striking fashion, the direction of the newer paths.  There is no longer the assumption that everything in the Bible or the Apocrypha is at one and the same time literally true and somehow or other edifying. Job and King Saul are great literature and vivid drama; they stand on their own merits.  And the long succession of smaller choral works, in which Parry mingled in curious but intensely personal fusion his own earnest but somewhat pedestrian poetry with fragments of the Old Testament prophets, represent