and second trebles run down in liquid
thirds with magical effect; once more at the fourteenth bar of "Thou
art the King of Glory," where he uses the old favourite device of
following up the flattened leading note of the dominant key in one
part by the sharp leading note in another part--a device used with
even more exquisite result in the chorus of "Full fathom five."
Purcell is in many ways like Mozart, and in none more than in these
incessantly distinctive touches, though in character the touches are
as the poles apart. In Mozart, especially when he veils the poignancy
of his emotion under a scholastic mode of expression, a sudden tremor
in the voice, as it were, often betrays him, and none can resist the
pathos of it. Purcell's touches are pathetic, too, in another
fashion--pathetic because of the curious sense of human weakness, the
sense of tears, caused by the sudden relaxation of emotional tension
that inevitably results when one comes on a patch of simple naked
beauty when nothing but elaborate grandeur expressive of powerful
exaltation had been anticipated. That Purcell foresaw this result, and
deliberately used the means to achieve it, I cannot doubt. Those
momentary slackenings of tense excitement are characteristic of the
exalted mood and inseparable from it, and he must have known that they
really go to augment its intensity. All Purcell's choruses, however,
are not of Handelian mould, for he wrote many that are sheer
loveliness from beginning to end, many that are the very voice of the
deepest sadness, many, again, showing a gaiety, an "unbuttoned"
festivity of feeling, such as never came into music again until
Beethoven introduced it as a new thing. The opening of one of the
complimentary odes, "Celebrate this festival," fairly carries one off
one's feet with the excess of jubilation in the rollicking rhythm and
living melody of it. One of the most magnificent examples of
picturesque music ever written--if not the most magnificent, at any
rate the most delightful in detail--is the anthem, "Thy way, O God, is
holy." The picture-painting is prepared for with astonishing artistic
foresight, and when it begins the effect is tremendous. I advise
everyone who wishes to realise Purcell's unheard-of fertility of great
and powerful themes to look at "The clouds poured out water," the
fugue subject "The voice of Thy thunders," the biting emphasis of the
passage "the lightnings shone upon the ground," and the irresis