s a vast
step from the music written in the old modes. Let me beg everyone not to
be so foolish as to believe the nonsense of the academic text-books when
they speak of the new type and structure of the newer music as an
"improvement" on the old. The older were perfect for the things that had
to be expressed; the newer became necessary only when other things had
to be expressed. By the substitution of the two scales, the major and
the minor, with the dominant always on the same degree of the scale, the
fifth, and the order of the tones and semitones fixed immovably, for the
numerous modes with the dominants and the order of the tones and
semitones here, there and everywhere, the problems of harmony could be
grappled with, and its resources exploited in a methodical way that had
been impossible. But melodically the loss was enormous. We of this
generation have by study to win back some small sense of the value and
beauty of the intervals of the ancient scales, varying in each scale, a
sense that was once free and common to everyone who knew anything of
music at all.

Purcell and his immediate predecessors and contemporaries came into what
Hullah rightly called the "transition period." Purcell is now to be
considered, and of the others it need only be said that we see in their
music the old modes losing their hold and the new key sense growing
stronger. Their music compared with the old is modern, though compared
with all music later than Handel it is archaic.

CHAPTER II

What we know of Purcell's life is nothing, or next to nothing; what is
written as his life is conjecture, more or less ingenious inference, or
pure fiction. In that we know so little of him he is blessed, but the
blessedness has not as yet extended to his biographers. At one time a
biographer's task was easy: he simply took the hearsay and inventions of
Hawkins, and accepted them as gospel truth whenever they could not be
tested. The fact that whenever they could by any means be tested they
were found to be false--even this did not dismay the biographer.
Hawkins's favourite pastime was libelling the dead. He libelled Dr.
Johnson, and Boswell promptly and most vigorously dealt with him; he
libelled Purcell grossly--he deliberately devised slanderous tales of
him. The biographers, with simple, childlike credulity, went on whenever
possible repeating his statements, for the obvious reason that this
course was the easiest. Hawkins knew nothing of