history sufficiently to reserve his ballet till after the passage
of the Red Sea, when Moses celebrated the miracle with a song and
"Miriam, the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her
hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with
dances"?




CHAPTER II

BIBLE STORIES IN OPERA AND ORATORIO


It was the fond belief of Dr. Chrysander, born of his deep devotion
to Handel, in whose works he lived aud moved and had his being,
that the heroic histories of the Jews offered no fit material for
dramatic representation. In his view the Jews never created
dramatic poetry, partly because of the Mosaic prohibition against
plastic delineation of their Deity, partly because the tragic
element, which was so potent an influence in the development of the
Greek drama, was wanting in their heroes. The theory that the Song
of Songs, that canticle of canticles of love, was a pastoral play
had no lodgment in his mind; the poem seemed less dramatic to him
than the Book of Job. The former sprang from the idyllic life of
the northern tribes and reflected that life; the latter, much more
profound in conception, proved by its form that the road to a real
stage-play was insurmountably barred to the Hebrew poet. What
poetic field was open to him then? Only the hymning of a Deity,
invisible, omnipresent and omnipotent, the swelling call to combat