absence of passion give him an old-world charm,
grateful in this hot and dusty age. If he was not greatly original, he
was at least flawlessly consistent: there is scarce a trait in his
character that is not reflected somewhere in his music, and hardly a
characteristic of his music that one does not find quaintly echoed in
some recorded saying or doing of the man. His placid and even
vivacity, his sprightliness, his broad jocularity, his economy and
shrewd business perception of what could be done with the material to
hand, his fertility of device, even his commonplaceness, may all be
seen in the symphonies. At rare moments he moves you strongly, very
often he is trivial, but he generally pleases; and if some of the
strokes of humour--quoted in text-books of orchestration--are so broad
as to be indescribable in any respectable modern print, few of us
understand what they really mean, and no one is a penny the worse.

The "Creation" libretto was prepared for Handel, but he did not
attempt to set it; and this perhaps was just as well, for the effort
would certainly have killed him. Of course the opening offers some
fine opportunities for fine music; but the later parts with their
nonsense--Milton's nonsense, I believe--about "In native worth and
honour clad, With beauty, courage, strength, adorned, Erect with front
serene he stands, A MAN, the Lord and King of Nature all," and the
suburban love-making of our first parents, and the lengthy references
to the habits of the worm and the leviathan, and so on, are almost
more than modern flesh and blood can endure. It must be conceded that
Haydn evaded the difficulties of the subject with a degree of tact
that would be surprising in anyone else than Haydn. In the first part,
where Handel would have been sublime, he is frequently nearly sublime,
and this is our loss; but in the later portion, where Handel would
have been solemn, earnest, and intolerably dull, he is light,
skittish, good-natured, and sometimes jocular, and this is our gain,
even if the gain is not great. The Representation of Chaos is a
curious bit of music, less like chaos than an attempt to write music
of the Bruneau sort a century too soon; but it serves. The most
magnificent passage in the oratorio immediately follows, for there is
hardly a finer effect in music than that of the soft voices singing
the words, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,"
while the strings gently pulse; and the fo