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a "Now love, that everlasting boy"; but in several places the sublime
is reached--in "Then round about the starry throne," the last page of
which is worth all the oratorios written since Handel's time save
Beethoven's "Mount of Olives"; in "Fixed is His everlasting seat,"
with that enormous opening phrase, irresistible in its strength and
energy as Handel himself; and in the first section of "O first created
beam." The pagan choruses are full of riotous excitement, though there
is not one of them to match "Ye tutelar gods" in "Belshazzar." But
there is little in "Belshazzar" to match the pathos of "Return, O God
of hosts," or "Ye sons of Israel, now lament." The latter is a notable
example of Handel's art. There is not a new phrase in it: nothing,
indeed, could be commoner than the bar at the first occurrence of
"Amongst the dead great Samson lies," and yet the effect is amazing;
and though the "for ever" is as old as Purcell, here it is newly
used--used as if it had never been used before--to utter a depth of
emotion that passes beyond the pathetic to the sublime. This very
vastness of feeling, this power of stepping outside himself and giving
a voice to the general emotions of humanity, prevents us recognising
the personal note in Handel as we recognise it in Mozart. But
occasionally the personal note may be met. The recitative "My genial
spirits fail," with those dreary long-drawn harmonies, and the
orchestral passage pressing wearily downwards at "And lay me gently
down with them that rest," seems almost like Handel's own voice in a
moment of sad depression. It serves, at anyrate, to remind us that the
all-conquering Mr. Handel was a complete man who had endured the
sickening sense of the worthlessness of a struggle that he was bound
to continue to the end. But these personal confessions are scarce.
After all, in oratorio Handel's best music is that in which he seeks
to attain the sublime. In his choruses he does attain it: he sweeps
you away with the immense rhythmical impetus of the music, or
overpowers you with huge masses of tone hurled, as it were, bodily at
you at just the right moments, or he coerces you with phrases like the
opening of "Fixed in His everlasting seat," or the last (before the
cadence) in "Then round about the starry throne." It is true that with
his unheard-of intellectual power, and a mastery of technique equal or
nearly equal to Bach's, he was often tempted to write in his
uninspired mome