proof of this is that he seems never consciously to endeavour to
express a mood, but strenuously seeks to depict images called up by
the words he sets. With no intention of being flippant, but in all
earnestness, I declare it is my belief that if Purcell had ever set
the "Agnus Dei" (and I don't remember that he did) he would have drawn
a frisky lamb and tried to paint its snow-white fleece; and this not
because he lacked reverence, but because of his absolute religious
naïveté, and because this drawing and painting of outside objects (so
to speak) in music was his one mode of expression. It should be
clearly understood that word-painting is not descriptive music.
Descriptive music suggests to the ear, word-painting to the eye. But
the two merge in one another. What we call a higher note is so called
because sounds produced by the mere rapid vibrations make every
being, without exception, who has a musical ear, think of height, just
as a lower note makes us all think of depth. Hence a series of notes
forming an arch on paper may, and does, suggest an arch to one's
imagination through the ear. It is perhaps a dodge, but Handel used it
extensively--for instance, in such choruses as "All we like sheep,"
"When his loud voice" ("Jephtha"), nearly every choral number of
"Israel in Egypt," and some of the airs. Bach used it too, and we find
it--the rainbow theme in "Das Rheingold" is an example--in Wagner. But
with these composers "word-painting," as it is called, seems always to
be used for a special effect; whereas it is the very essence of
Purcell's music. He has been reproved for it by the eminent Hullah,
who prettily alludes to it as a "defect" from which other music
composed at the time suffers; but the truth is, you might as well call
rhyme a "defect" of the couplet or the absence of rhyme a "defect" of
blank verse. It is an integral part of the music, as inseparable as
sound from tone, as atoms from the element they constitute. But the
question, why did Purcell write thus, and not as Mozart and Beethoven,