native music was only for the humbler classes of society. When Handel
condescended to it, as he did in the political excitement of 1745, he
deliberately adopted the musical style of a tavern song.

Handel's serious music was never written for popular audiences; in his
later oratorios he sometimes admittedly wrote down to the taste of the
middle classes, but we have the records of his conversations with Gluck,
Hawkins, and others to prove how little respect he had for that taste. He
composed for the needs of the moment, and not with a view to immortality,
but he composed for a society which was cultured enough to desire, even in
its entertainments, grace, dignity, and serenity.

If Handel's works have for later generations become a source of joy and
delight to a very different social class, it is because they are the
musical equivalents of those palaces and gardens of Handel's day which
are now national monuments and open to all comers. We walk beneath their
colonnades, peopling them in imagination with the gracious and stately
figures of the past; and from the museum of memory there arise the unheard
strains of Handel's music:

_Hark! the heavenly sphere turns round,
And silence now is drown'd,
In ecstasy of sound!
How on a sudden the still air is charm'd,
As if all harmony were just alarm'd
And every soul with transport fill'd!_


BIBLIOGRAPHY