elementary school; the learned doctors, taking up Byrde, found he had
disregarded all the rules--rules, be it remembered, formulated after
Byrde's time, just as our modern rules of spelling were made after
Chaucer's time; and as Artemus Ward jocularly condemned Chaucer, and
showed his wit in the joke, so the doctors seriously condemned Byrde,
and showed their stupidity in their unconscious joke. They could
understand one side of Tallis. His motet in forty parts, for instance:
they knew the difficulties of writing such a thing, and they could see
the ingenuity he showed in his various ways of getting round the
difficulties. They could not see the really fine points of the
forty-part motet: the broad scheme of the whole thing, and the almost
Handelian way of massing the various choirs so as to heap climax on
climax until a perfectly satisfying finish was reached. Still, there
was something for them to see in Tallis; whereas in Byrde there was
nothing for them to see that they had eyes to see, or to hear that
they had ears to hear. They could see that he either wrote consecutive
fifths and octaves, or dodged them in a way opposed to all the rules,
that he wrote false relations with the most outrageous recklessness,
that his melodies were irregular and not measured out by the bar; but
they could not feel, could not be expected to feel, the marvellous
beauty of the results he got by his dodges, the marvellous
expressiveness of his music. These old doctors may be forgiven, and,
being long dead, they care very little whether they are forgiven or
not. But the modern men who parrot-like echo their verdicts cannot and
should not be forgiven. We know now that the stiff contrapuntal school
marked a stage in development of music which it was necessary that
music should go through. The modern men who care nothing for
rules--for instance Wagner and Tschaikowsky--could not have come
immediately after Byrde; even Beethoven could not have come
immediately after Byrde and Sweelinck and Palestrina, all of whom