ART. VIII.-The Life of Handel. By VICTOR SCHŒELCHER. 8vo. London: 1857.

IT may be regarded as a peculiar misfortune to the art of Music that the biographies of its most eminent professors and performers have been less agreeably written, and are therefore less widely remembered, than the records of men who have risen to celebrity by the cultivation of the sister arts. St. Cecilia's disciples have had no Vasari. The lives of great musicians which are attractive to the general reader might almost be numbered on the fingers of one hand. The stock of musical anecdotes which has been collected for universal use- not technical guidance — might be printed in nearly as small a compass as Porpora's vocal manual of two pages, the study of which made Caffarelli the greatest singer of his time. Persons moderately conversant with literary gossip may have read how Lulli cheated the priests when he was lying on his death-bed;-how Handel held a refractory songstress out of the window till she consented to sing what he had set down for her; and how the same solitary giant eat, with his 'ca'pacious mouth,' the dinner which he had ordered for three. They may know Mozart's pertinent answer to the Emperor Joseph's complaint against Figaro,' as having too many notes; and the touching fable of his 'Requiem.' They may have heard how Signor Rossini saved the last act of his Mosè,' and astonished Signor Tottola, his poet, by scribbling, at a moment's warning, that Prayer of the Israelites,' which has served as the prototype for so many subsequent stage effects. They may have some idea that Beethoven was a rugged genius, deaf, and occasionally brutal, who delivered himself of high-flown rhapsodies to Bettina ;-that the composer of Der Freischütz,' when dying of his long illness in London, wrote affectionate letters to his wife; -that Mendelssohn, when a boy, was mentioned with hopeful expectation by Goethe in his correspondence, and grew up to be one of the most accomplished men of his time-but a dozen more traits and generalities like these would sum up the amount of knowledge of the great musicians in circulation among those who do not profess some musical proficiency. Considering the remarkable combination of gifts required to produce a great musician, and the exalted pleasure it is the good fortune of a great musician to diffuse among mankind, justice has hardly been done to this illustrious class of artists. Perhaps the engrossing nature of their pursuit tends to concentrate their fancy and their science on a single object;

perhaps the incessant publicity and personal exhibition which attends their professional life has somewhat lowered their true dignity. That something of the old contemptuous notion of the musician as mime or buffoon-something of Johnson's paradoxical and insulting speech, Punch has no feelings'-is involved in the matter cannot be doubted. But the philosophy of this subject, with its necessity or its inconsistency, is not to be discussed in a few paragraphs. The fact, for the moment, is all we have to deal with, when turning to one more record of the life, the triumphs, and the works of a man who, according to his order, was undoubtedly one among the great ones of the earth.'

Another peculiarity in musical biographies is, that they have been more largely and often more successfully undertaken by strangers than by personal friends. The most readable works on Mozart-no offence to those by Nissen, Jahn, and others— are by M. Oulibicheff, a Russian enthusiast, and by Mr. E. Holmes, our own countryman. The Italian musicians have, possibly, been more handsomely treated by French writers than by their own. Though the Germans have again and again attempted pieces of lumbering profundity, calling themselves Lives of Beethoven' (that most German among all German artists), their failure has been uniform, and M. Berlioz has been happier in the style of his French criticisms, without being less transcendental. In the present instance it is curious that the work before us should be the production of a writer who is not a musician, who is not a German, who is not an Englishman - but a native of France, where the works of Handel are least understood and least admired; yet we have had nothing so full in compilation concerning Handel, if not so immaculate in point of taste, as this new biography of that greatest of musicians. M. Schoelcher is mainly known as a member of the extreme French Republican party, who sate with the Mountain' in the Legislative Assembly, until the catastrophe of the 2nd December. Since that time he has passed in England the period of inactivity and proscription, rendered inevitable by his political opinions. Here it chanced that some notes of the world's grandest music broke on his ear during the pause after that ferocious storm. The impression made by these strains seems to have strengthened into another passion, more peaceful, but hardly less intense, than those which had already driven a fervid, but mistaken man into acts of great political violence. Out of that passion, which has attested its sincerity by collection, by patient labour, by sacrifice of time and of money, has grown the book before us.

But passion, we must continue, never made a great artistic biography; since in this department of literature, beyond almost every other, are required patience, calmness, judgment, and candour-deep, close, and minute special knowledge, in short. What is more, the man who would write the life of an exhibiting artist-which a musician's life must be, whether he be composer or interpreter should possess knowledge of the social world in which the musician lived, and of the precise art which he adorned. These requisites are not possessed by M. Schoelcher; and, therefore, his book, however well meant it be-and to a certain extent meritorious cannot satisfy the full demands of literature or of music in relation to so great a subject. He has not sufficiently apprehended the nobility of that subject and the dignity of the branch of literature to which his task belongs, to avoid impertinent allusions to passing things and living persons. He is inaccurate in his arithmetic; since the skeleton catalogue of Handel's works, printed in the appendix as a foretaste of the catalogue raisonnè, which M. Schoelcher announces to be in preparation, does not agree with the list which an exact index-maker would compile from the biography; German compositions being there spoken of, on hearsay, which do not figure in the record. The style of a polemical journalist pervades too many of M. Schoelcher's pages. He is in one breath provoked because Handel did not receive that patronage from our London nobility which his stupendous merits claimed; in another, he is extremely bitter on the tastes and tendencies of the royal personages who did adopt Handel's interests, and appreciate his compositions. In one page he falls into the old cry against the airs and impertinences of the opera-singers; in another, he rejoices (as in the case of Mistress Anastasia Robinson-Lady Peterborough-when, on her being offended by Senesino, Lord Peterborough caned the impudent coxcomb,) that the time is past when singers allowed themselves to be caned by lords.' There is, in short, no order or consistency in this book. Its orthography, moreover, is impure, as regards foreign words and names, to a degree which is strange in any well-educated foreigner. Yet in spite of these defects we have read it with considerable pleasure. Mr. Schoelcher's love of his subject is sincere and unaffected, and he has collected a large quantity of materials which, if not absolutely new, were not easily to be met with.

The life of Handel, however, was worthy the best hand of the best writer of biographies. The period of English history which it embraces is full of interest and rich in anecdote.

If the Elizabethan æra gave us our poems, the first fifty years of the eighteenth century yielded us our memoirs. It

was a time of wit, a time of imperfect settlement, a time of political intrigue, a time of conspiracy. The Kilmansegges and Schulembergs who came over for our goods' from Hanover, in the train of the new German sovereign, trembled over their chocolate-cups, or their tankards, at the thought of a Stuart hidden in disguise at Kensington, or holding his illicit levees in Grosvenor Square. The new opera-manager, or the foreigner who arrived to sing, stood a chance of being mobbed as a secret emissary, besides being cordially hated as an interloper who arrived to fatten on the food which England should have distributed among its children. The French dancingmaster was possibly one French spy; the French hairdresser might be another. The Court was torn with family dissensions, in which the name and the fame of the music-master of the Princess Royal were mixed up. The Queen was compelled to swallow gross epithets from the over-familiar minister who taught her how to manage the King. The King sate under the sarcasms of a neighbour no less redoubtable than Duchess Sarah of Marlborough, who dared to sneer at the temporary gallery built at St. James' on the occasion of a royal marriage-as at neighbour George's orange chest.' It was in one respect an age poor in imagination, but rich in those marked characters and vehement contrasts which are so precious to so precious to a biographer a biographer-an age, moreover, which did not lack its chroniclers, its diarists, its correspondents-the age during which Pope was writing his letters, and Hervey keeping his memoirs, and Hogarth painting his satires, and Lady Mary Wortley breaking out into the eccentricities of foreign adventure, for subsequent Walpoles to lampoon -when Dryden, as a tragic author, had not been altogether superseded by Addison and Aaron Hill-when the comedies of Congreve still prolonged upon the stage the wit and the license of the Restoration when an English duke kept up the state of a chapel and an orchestra with a resident capell meister, as the Esterhazys and Palffys of Austria, or the small princes of Italy, have done an age, in short, prepared for the uses of any painter of life, manners, and character who desired to find a sumptuous framework and a rich background for a great artist-his principal figure.

As regards Music, too, the epoch in which Handel appeared, his training, his choice of residence, and that august fame of his which bestrid the world,' offer a wide field for any one capable of dealing with them. In the absence of mighty painters, or architects, or romancers, or dramatists, posterity may point to him as the greatest Poet of the first half of the seventeenth century. The Shade of Swift might rise to protest

against such honour being awarded to one who was 'a fiddler,' fit companion to a drab so ran the Dean of St. Patrick's choicely coarse phraseology. Yet the title would not be unjustly bestowed. What Michael Angelo was in Painting, what Shakspeare was in Drama, Handel was within the limits of his own art; as gigantic in conception, as daring in execution, as the great Florentine-as carelessly fertile, as boundlessly rich, as unconsciously simple, as our universal dramatist. Handel was born, too, into a world of art ripe for discovery. Music was never more scientific than at the commencement of the last century; but by that time it had been lately proved that Music meant something more than science alone. The seductions of rhythmical melody-the charms of beautiful tone and delicate expression which lie in the human voice, had broken through the walls of ancient custom and pedantry. It was still demanded of the Musician that he should be severely ingenious and strictly accurate in counterpoint the orthography and syntax of expression; but grace, grandeur, variety, fascination in his ideas, and in their garniture, had begun also to take their place in the vocabulary of his art. Palestrina had shown the world how much sonorous beauty was to be produced out of a string of mere chords. Corelli and Scarlatti-the one with his stately band of violins, the other with his more fiery and freakish harpsichordhad begun to methodize known dancing measures, and to apply them to the more august forms of instrumental composition. Marcello had already found among the singers of Venice such graceful and not ignoble melodies, to accompany the Psalms of David, as remind us of the saints of Giorgione and Palma, and the patrician ladies of Bonifazio. The high finish as an instrument to which the Organ had been brought, had called out in Germany that executive ingenuity which in its turn engenders and quickens thought. The school of great players numbered Zackau, Kuhnau, and that greatest of living or dead masters of the organ, Sebastian Bach. Opera was no longer that sort of cumbrous masque, absurdly amateur, childishly theatrical, or irreverently ecclesiastical in its pomps, which it had been in its earliest years. The great singers then in being, though spoilt as a class by ignorance and affectation, and a vulgar vanity, which reduced their notions of art to a mere fancy for personal display, already included some who had brains as well as throats, and who cherished that desire to help art forward, by the production of new effects, which fired the ambition of the composer. There was already some attempt at dramatic interest on the musical stage, which, crippled and timid