element in Bach's music. So with Purcell, with a difference. The early
"imitative" men had sought chiefly for dainty conceits. Pepys was the
noted composer of "Beauty, Retire" and his joy when he went to church,
"where fine music on the word trumpet" will be remembered. He
doubtless liked the clatter of it, and liked the clatter the more for
occurring on that word, and probably he was not very curious as to
whether it was really beautiful or not. But Purcell could not write an
unlovely thing. His music on the word trumpet would be beautiful (it
is in "Bonduca"); and if (as he did) he sent the bass plunging
headlong from the top to the bottom of a scale to illustrate "they
that go down to the sea in ships," that headlong plunge would be
beautiful too--so beautiful as to be heard with as great pleasure by
those who know what the words are about as by those who don't. Like
Bach, Purcell depended much on rhythm for the effect of his pattern;
unlike Bach, his patterns have a strangely picturesque quality;
through the ear they suggest the forms of leaf and blossom, the
trailing tendril,--suggest them only, and dimly, vaguely,--yet, one
feels, with exquisite fidelity. Thus Purcell, following those who, in
sending the voice part along the line, pressed it up at the word
"high" and down at "low," and thus got an irregularly wavy line of
tone or melody, solved the problem of spinning his continuous web of
sound; and the fact that his web is beautiful and possesses this
peculiar picturesqueness is his justification for solving the problem
in this way. After all, his way was the way of early designers, who
filled their circles, squares, and triangles with the forms of leaf
and flower. And just as those forms were afterwards conventionalised
and used by thousands who probably had no vaguest notion of their
origin, so many of Purcell's phrases became ossified and fell into the
common stock of phrases which form the language of music. It is
interesting to note that abroad Pasquini and Kuhlau went to work very