er, but
he gave it a specific shape that set the fashion for future times. It
had its birth in a business speculation; it was a novelty designed to
occupy the Lenten season when the theatres were not available for opera.
Like the opera, it supplied narrative and incident and characterization
though without scenery or action, and it dealt with biblical history.
The history of the oratorio is the history of this loose compromise; it
has afforded an attractive flavour of the theatre even to those to whom
drama may in itself have seemed disreputable, and it has had the
advantage of possessing subjects which combined unquestioningly accepted
literal truth with unlimited possibilities for wholesale edification,
and at the same time made no intimately personal claims. The libretto of
Mendelssohn's _Elijah_ is perhaps at once the most familiar and the most
skilfully compiled example of the type; but it is now, so far as great
music is concerned, extinct. Here in England--where, for something like
a century and a half, the demand was so large that composers, when tired
of writing oratorios themselves, still went on producing them out of the
mangled fragments of other music--Parry's _Judith_ of 1888 is the last
of the old type from the pen of a great composer; and his subsequent
works show, in striking fashion, the direction of the newer paths. There
is no longer the assumption that everything in the Bible or the
Apocrypha is at one and the same time literally true and somehow or
other edifying. _Job_ and _King Saul_ are great literature and vivid
drama; they stand on their own merits. And the long succession of
smaller choral works, in which Parry mingled in curious but intensely
personal fusion his own earnest but somewhat pedestrian poetry with
fragments of the Old Testament prophets, represent a still further
abandonment of the old routine; they form a connected exposition of his
philosophy of life, on the whole theistic rather than specifically
Christian, and always transparently individual. Individual--that is the
real issue. According to their differing temperaments, different
composers may swing towards either the right or the left wing of thought
in these non-ecclesiastical expressions of ultimate things: Stanford may
join with Whitman or Robert Bridges, Vaughan-Williams with Whitman or
George Herbert, Frank Bridge with Thomas a Kempis, Walford Davies with a
mediaeval morality-play, Gustav Hoist with the Rig-Veda, Bantock