youngest of these was George Händel, the father of the composer. Being a man of will and aspiration, he left the kettles to the care of his two brothers, and attained by successive steps to the ranks of apothecary, surgeon, and physician, with some court office, the German description of which brings in all the titular dignities of the Elector of Saxony. A far more important fact is, that, after having a family of six children by a first marriage, he contracted a second at the age of sixty-three, with a lady of about half that age, and that one of the four children resulting from this union was the Handel, but for whom the very existence of the ambitious doctor would have been long ago forgotten.

Passing strange is the greatness in this way thrust upon some men. Poor Doctor Händel, through all his life-struggle for the little items which go to the making of a 'good position,' never had the smallest inkling of the quarter from which was to come his most enduring honour. He was, indeed, not only unconscious of his fortune, but blindly opposed to it. He fought against the friendly stars. When providing for the sons of his former marriage he was on the lower steps of the social ladder, and could do but little for them; but having now been blessed with a son of his old age, he designed to secure for him all the furtherance rendered possible by his own late advancement. He should be a great man and a lawyer. Upon this famous scheme the old man seems to have brooded during the boy's infancy, till it became almost a passion with him; and, knowing though we do, so much of what he knew not at all, it is yet hard not to sympathize with the grief and disgust with which he saw the lisping child take to musical sounds, with an ardour which could only mean a vocation and a destiny! He had his own views-not uncommon at the time, nor quite obsolete now-of the trivial and undignified character of the musical profession. But he was not a doctor to be vanquished by mere symptoms. A little wholesome depletion and gentle dosing was needful. Away, then, with tinkling claviers, and let reason and the Latin primer rule! But the case was quite beyond the doctor, being, in fact, a case of rude health mistaken for disease. So the prescription failed. The little clavier was smuggled, with some feminine connivance-whether of his mother or aunt seems doubtful-into an attic, where the child tinkled away in the night, inaudible to the sleep-muffled ears of the family. The situation was a pitiful one, and the conspirators must have been sorely troubled to baffle the doctor's diagnostic vigilance. Soon afterwards, however, a crisis occurred which resulted in the case being surrendered to the wiser pharmacy of Nature. In this instance, Nature took the odd disguise of a German Duke-one

Doctor versus Nature-Maternal Influence.

39

of those multitudinous little potentates whose affairs of state left them sufficient leisure to carry out the paternal theory of government, by intervening in the domestic affairs of their handfuls of subjects. By sheer force of will, the boy Handel had constrained his father to let him share a journey which he was making to visit his nephew, who was in the ducal service. A short drive over the border took them to the heart of the realm; and as, of course, the Duke had a chapel, and the chapel had an organ, every key of which was a resistless magnet to the boy's fingers, it was not long before the Court heard a sort of music to which it had been little accustomed. This led to an interview between the father and son on the one side and the Duke on the other, in the course of which the latter, having learned something of the case, proceeded to expound its true pathology, in a way which vanquished the doctor's practice, if not his theory. Excellent Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels! Few German princes have rendered the world a greater service than he; and for that alone we could have wished that his little territory might have escaped conquest or mediatisation to the end of time.

These incidents of Handel's childhood bring into strong relief the qualities of will and energy which he had in common with his father. There were in him, however, other and very different qualities, giving colour and depth to his genius; but whence these were inherited, and by what influences fostered, could only be guessed, until Dr. Chrysander lately discovered a copy of a funeral sermon preached at the death of the Frau Händel, and afterwards printed at the expense of her son. This quaint old German document gives a curiously detailed account of the lady's character, and throws a flood of light on the development of those sensibilities which so subtly qualified all the products of Handel's mind. We now understand the intense love and reverence which the composer felt for his mother during her life, and for her memory after her death,-this being the only passion in Handel which could match the love of his art. Here was one more of the many women who have done noble things through their sons; and no memorial of Handel should henceforth be left without a word of grateful justice to his mother.

This, then, was the turning point. Handel's father, finding himself beaten from his purpose, showed the usual tact of his profession, and adjusted himself handsomely to the case as it stood. He himself took his son to the renowned Master Zackau, cathedral organist and composer, and bespoke his services for the cultivation of a gift that had been so unwelcome to him. At the same time he comforted himself with making sure that the

lad's Latinity was well cared for. So the Gradus was planted side by side with the musical scale, and the young student mounted them both pari passú. Zackau's style was dry and learned; his habits, on the contrary, were of the vulgarly 'wet' kind, which carried him to the tavern, while Handel performed his duties at the Cathedral organ. But he was honest and painstaking, and in due time he had the candour to confess that his pupil knew more than himself.

Handel had, in his tenth year, already produced many of those works which have ranked him as one of the most remarkable of infant composers. The cases of Telemann, Mozart, and Mendelssohn, who, in their befrocked childhood, threw off sonatas and fugues to the amazement of those who best knew the depth and breadth of faculty required for their production, are full of curious psychological interest; but the adverse circumstances under which the child Handel accomplished similar results place him quite apart, and surround his infancy with a special element of wonder.

Halle was become too small for Handel in his eleventh year, and his father, who by this time had quite rectified his diagnosis of the case, allowed him to be taken to Berlin, where his powers were immediately recognised, and he became an object of universal interest. Here he met the eminent composers Bononcini and Attilio, the former of whom promptly did the boy the honour of hating him, while the latter took great delight in taking him on his knee, and giving him friendly hints as he played. Handel's defeat of Bononcini by his brilliant execution of a Cantata which the wily Italian had placed before him, in the hope that its enormous difficulties would baffle the small hands of the Saxon lad, was a foreshadowing of the more tremendous defeat which he was to inflict on his enemy long afterwards in England. It was an unfortunate penalty of Handel's greatness that his friend Attilio was to be involved in the same fate.

The young Elector, afterwards Frederick the First, expressed a wish to be at the charge of Handel's further education, and to send him to Italy; but the old doctor, now growing infirm, declined this mark of favour, on the ground that he desired to have his son near him for his remaining days. Probably he foresaw that the acceptance of the proposal would have established an inconvenient tie of service; and in any case it would have taken out of his hands that care for his son's Latin which was the last remaining relic of a dear defeated scheme. So the boy came home to his father, but only to see him decay and die, leaving this and all other relics of schemes behind him, and his

Musical Precocity-Berlin and Hamburg.

4)

widow and children in a state of poverty. The res angusta, however, did not prevent Handel from entering the newlyestablished university of Halle, where he devoted himself as strenuously to Latin and Law as if, after all, the paternal will had prevailed against the apparent course of destiny. Surely a noble instance of filial piety is this, of the child-hero of the secret clavier and the subsequent monarch of musical creation, putting aside for five years the full indulgence of an impassioned pursuit to realize as much as could be of a dream that might have been supposed hopelessly dead in the grave of its dreamer! But this five years' episode in Handel's early life was not a loss -it was a gain in every sense. The motive to the effort was worth two or three operas, or even an oratorio; for all that he afterwards did takes a new charm from the discovery of a feature of moral beauty in himself. And the effort itself was a gain. No artist was ever the worse artist for being something besides. The tissue of man's life and work gains both in pattern and strength from complex crossings in its texture.

But there was never any danger that Handel would be permanently seduced from music by the blandishments of law. Even if Nature had not put her veto on such an act, the urgent necessity for a livelihood for himself and his mother required the exertion of whatever talent was within his easiest command. And there could be no doubt what that was. Music was still surging through his brain and oozing from his fingers. While working through his curriculum at Halle, he had lived his little separate life in his art, in his intercourse with the kindred spirit of Telemann on a footing of equitable barter in ideas, and in his compositions for the churches of the city. Now, however, the combined needs of bread and culture urged him to seek a wider sphere. He was longing to bask his strengthened wings in the sun of Italy, but had no means of making so great a journey. At that time Hamburg was in the height of its commercial prosperity, and it had already become the most musical place in Germany. For Handel's purpose it had also the special advantage over Berlin that it was a free city, and therefore did not present the same danger from which he had narrowly escaped in his first little flight, of being caught and caged in a royal aviary. For men who combined high talents with love of freedom it was at that period a wholesome thing to keep at a distance from serene Highnesses, whose serenity was not proof against a baffled purpose. So in 1703 Handel went to Hamburg.

He could not have arrived at a more favourable period. The famous Keiser had just retired from the theatre, ruined by costly habits, after his fine operas had trained the public mind to the

appreciation of good music. The only important composer then in the city was Mattheson, an eccentric young man, who at that time combined the functions of composer, conductor, and chief singe in his own operas, but was afterwards secretary to the British Envoy, and ultimately the most voluminous of musical historians. Handel soon made his acquaintance, and the incidents of their friendship during the ensuing three years, as related by Mattheson,* would supply materials for a romance in which comic and tragic elements would be mingled in telling proportions. On Handel's side they include an escape from marriage with the Lübeck organist's orphan daughter as a condition of succession to the office, and a still narrower escape from death at the hand of his friend, in a duel caused by a jocular slight to Mattheson in the conduct of his opera of Cleopatra. A fatal termination to the latter event was only prevented by the shivering of Mattheson's blade on one of Handel's metal buttons. It is trite to moralize on the agency of apparent trifles in great issues, but certainly this button of the composer, covering with its little shield a nascent glory which Sydenham palaces have nowa-days much ado to contain, has acquired a lustre never attained before by any of its ignoble race.

During his residence in Hamburg, Handel produced four operas, a cantata on the Passion, and several minor compositions, which cannot now be traced. There is truth, however, in Dr. Chrysander's remark, that 'it is only in an antiquarian point of 'view that we can speak of lost works of his youth; in an intellectual sense all has been preserved. At every step which he 'took forward, the sum of his past achievement followed him.' The time was now come when he must gather up his past and take another step forward. The law of his mental growth required a change of outward conditions. The cold North had done what it could for him. He had strength, breadth, and boldness; his counterpoint was full of science and resource; and, what was not less important, he felt a consciousness of something yet to be developed. His genius yearned towards the ripening southern sun. From it he would receive the impulse to fertility, to expression, and to the ultimate charm of a spontaneous rhythm.

Melody is the bloom of musical art, as harmony may be said to be its foliage; and like all other growths of graceful life, this efflorescence of music is in Italy native and supreme. For ages the wind blowing northward over this marvellous peninsula which is bathed in beauty as it is in its own sparkling sea-has

*Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte, &c. Von Mattheson.