important thing we must observe: it is wholly secular melody. Even
when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has no, or the very
slightest, ecclesiastical tinge. It is folk-melody with its face
washed and hair combed; it bears the same relation to English
folk-melody as a chorale from the "Matthew" Passion bears to its
original. Another important point is this: whereas the church
composers took a few Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat
them so as to make sense in the singing, but made the words wait upon
the musical phrases, in Dr. Campion we see the first clear wish to
weld music and poem into one flawless whole. To an extent he
succeeded, but full success did not come till several generations had
first tried, tried and failed. Campion properly belongs to the
sixteenth century, and Harry Lawes, born twenty-five years before
Campion died, as properly belongs to the seventeenth century. In his
songs we find even more marked the determination that words and music
shall go hand in hand--that the words shall no longer be dragged at
the cart-tail of the melody, so to say. In fact, a main objection
against Lawes--and a true one in many instances--is that he sacrificed
the melody rather than the meaning of the poem. This is significant.
The Puritans are held to have damaged church music less by burning the
choir-books and pawning the organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may
say) on One word one note. As a matter of fact, this was not
exclusively a plank in the political platform of the Puritans. The
Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist Lawes, and many another Loyalist
insisted on it. Even when they did not write a note to each word, they
took care not to have long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words,
but to derive the accent of the music from that of the poem. This
showed mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic
feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other towards
the entirely new technique which was to supersede the contrapuntal