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