with
Omar Khayyam. But the essentials, for any composer worth the name, are
that his theme shall have its birth in personal vision and shall appeal
to personal intelligence. The routine oratorio fulfilled neither of
these conditions; and it is dead beyond recall. It was a curious
illustration of foreign ignorance of British musical life that
Saint-Saens, when asked to write a choral work for the Gloucester
Festival of 1913, should have imagined that he was meeting our national
tastes with an oratorio on the most prehistoric lines. However, the
unanimous chilliness with which _The Promised Land_ was received must
have effectually disillusioned him.

But the liberalisers, though the more numerous force, have no monopoly
of sincerity: among the genuine conservatives also we can find, I think,
signs of the correlation of musical with religious development. We have
had, during the last generation, many works that are in the legitimate
line of descent from the great classical settings of ritual words or (as
with the Passions and Cantatas of Bach) words that are intended anyhow
to appeal not as literature but as dogma. When Elgar prints on the
title-pages of his oratorios the letters A.M.D.G.--_ad majorem Dei
gloriam_--the personal note is, in these days, obvious. His own libretti
to _The Apostles_ and its sequel _The Kingdom_ (and to the further
sequels which had been sketched out twelve years ago, though none has as
yet seen the light) resemble those of the older type of oratorio in so
far as they include narrative and dramatic incident and religious
moralizing; but there is not a trace of the old lethargic taking things
for granted, it is all a ringing sacramental challenge to the individual
soul. Elgar's work is indeed the typical musical expression of recent
Roman Catholic developments; but there are others also. There was
Perosi, the Benedictine priest, whose oratorios, tentative, childishly
sincere mixtures of Palestrina and Wagner, were forced upon Europe in
the late 'nineties with the full driving power of his Church, and who,
when his musical insufficiency became palpable, was dropped in favour of
Elgar himself, whose sudden rise into deserved fame coincides in time.
There was again the allocution of Pius X, known as the _Motu proprio_,
which sought to reform ecclesiastical music and has, however fruitless
it may have been elsewhere, made the services in Westminster Cathedral,
under Dr. Terry's direction, a Mecca for