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Page 4
The learned branch of the English school reached its climax. Meantime
another branch, not unlearned, but caring less for scholastic
perfection than for perfect expression of poetic sentiment, was fast
growing. The history of the masque is a stale matter, so I will merely
mention that Campion, and many another with, before, and after him,
engaged during a great part of their lives in what can only be called
the manufacture of these entertainments. A masque was simply a
gorgeous show of secular ritual, of colour and of music--a kind of
Drury Lane melodrama in fact, but as far removed from Drury Lane as
this age is from that in the widespread faculty of appreciating
beauty. The music consisted of tunes of a popular outline and
sentiment, but they were dragged into the province of art by the
incapacity of those who wrote or adapted them to touch anything
without leaving it lovelier than when they lighted on it. Pages might
be, and I daresay some day will be, written about Dr. Campion's
melody, its beauty and power, the unique sense of rhythmic subtleties
which it shows, and withal its curiously English quality. But one
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
technique of Byrde and Palestrina. In making a mass or an anthem or
secular composition, the practice of these old masters was to start
with a fragment of church or secular melody which we will call A;
after (say) the trebles had sung it or a portion of it, the altos took
it up and the trebles went on to a new phrase B, which dovetailed with
A. Then the tenors took up A, the altos went on to B, the trebles went
on to a new phrase C, until ultimately, if we lettered each
successive phrase that appeared, we should get clear away from the
beginning of the alphabet to X, Y, and Z. This, of course, is a crude
and stiff way of describing the process of weaving and interweaving by
which the old music was spun, for often the phrase A would come up
again and again in one section of a composition and sometimes
throughout the whole, and strict canon was comparatively rare in music
which was not called by that name; but the description will serve.
This technique proved admirable for vocal polyphony--how admirable we
have all the Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal music to
show. But it was no longer available when music was wanted for the
single voice, unless that voice was treated as one of several real
parts, the others being placed in the accompaniment. A new technique
was therefore wanted. For that new technique the new composers went
back to the oldest technique of all. The old minstrels used music as a
means of giving accent and force to their poems; and now, as a means
of spinning a web of tone which should not only be beautiful, but also
give utterance to the feeling of the poem, composers went back to the
method of the minstrels. They disregarded rhythm more and more (as may
be seen if you compare Campion with Lawes), and sought only to make
the notes follow the accent of the poetry, thus converting music into
conventionally idealised speech or declamation. Lawes carried this
method as far as ever it has been, and probably can be, carried. When
Milton said,
"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured notes
First taught our English music how to span
Words with just note and accent,"
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