The race was over.

But who had won our party could not see, and
must wait to learn.

SHAKESPEARE MUSIC.

IN THREE ACTS.

FIRST ACT. FANTASTIC AND SUPERNATURAL
PLAYS.

THAT there is no profane writer (to adopt the
known distinction) who has furnished such
inspiration, to every creator, in every branch of
imaginative art, as England's dramatist, may be
proved, if merely one corner of the world of
poetry be glanced at, not explored to the fullest.
I have given up collection of facts in regard to
Shakespeare music as a task hopeless by reason
of its immensity, and in stringing together a
few notes made during some years, merely
open a subject which will furnish a substantial
decade's work to any one intending to dismiss
his labour as complete.

How to begin?—with a word or two on the
paucity of real inventions in art—pointing out
how Shakespeare quoted Hollinshed wholesale,
and patched Plutarch, and ravaged the world of
Italian fiction for his plots?—with a speculation
on the marvellous elements of reproduction
existing everywhere—so shadowed out by Hamlet
in the churchyard—so beautifully to be tested,
tasted, and handled, by any one who walks in
an old forest, and who sees how the trees feed
the turf, and how the soil beneath the turf,
gives aliment to the trees, and prepares new
ones to spring when the ancients shall fall in
the fulness of time? One could rhapsodise for
pages on these old truths, and illustrate them
musically with reference to the subject in hand.
No—for the moment let it suffice to glance
through the open gate of Dreamland, and then,
taking down from the shelf a chance copy of the
plays (the one here taken down is Theobald's,
with its old wiry Frenchified copper-plate
illustrations by Gravelot and Van der Gucht), to go
through the list of them, and to see what may
turn up from Memory and the memorandum-
book.

The first in Theobald's edition, is Shakespeare's
last, The Tempest.—This brings us at once into
what may be called his three supernatural plays
—the magical dream-drama, the faëry masque,
and the human tragedy of Destiny, Ambition,
and Crime.

It is a comparatively recent fancy to attempt
the supernatural in Music. The first legend
which got on the opera stage, more romantic in
its character than the histories of Mitridate and
Alessandro in ancient days, was that of Armida
with its duel betwixt Sense and Spirit;
Paganism and Christianity—Enchantment and Faith
stronger than Enchantment.—And Armida with
her faëry garden is possibly the heroine who
has appeared in the largest number of operas;
her devices and her discomfiture having been
set by some fifty composers—among these, Lulli,
Handel, Gluck, Haydn, Rossini. This may be
in part accounted for by the strong human
interest which keeps the fantastic story alive.
Less, if not comparatively little, of this belongs
to Shakespeare's Tempest. Miranda and Ferdinand
are in the second distance, Prospero, Ariel,
and Caliban, in the first. The temptation of
the story, then, to the musician, has been mainly
its supernatural element; and the exquisite
fancy showered over it everywhere by the
dramatist. Such are the limits of music, however,
that it is not possible to treat Ariel except
conventionally. The effects of elemental sound—
the sighing of breezes, the dropping of water,
the rustling of leaves, the distant echo on the
hill—can only be represented in one and the same
language; and the very thing which appears to
have seduced so many musicians is the one
which might more naturally have distanced
them.

At first, of course, musical illustration
confined itself to a mere setting of Ariel's and
Caliban's lyrics—to tunes which the actors might
sing on the stage. It is more probable that
these were snatched up and brought in from
any source in those old rude days (as the
vaudeville tunes in France are even now), than that
they were expressly written for the dramas—
stage music was little more advanced in
Shakespeare's time than stage scene-painting. There
was no orchestra meriting the name. There
was Tempest music composed by Lock or
Eccles, but it never took the place which the
Macbeth music, attributed to those two men, has
done, and which it still keeps. The first real
mark made on the play in music may be said to
be in the songs of Purcell—those sweet and
stately melodies of which we English shall never
tire. It is worth while, however, to remark in this
Purcell music for The Tempest a certain restraint
not shown by him in other of his settings of
poetry for the stage. That he could be
eminently and expressively fantastic in advance of
his time, his Frost Scene, and his deliciously
wayward cantata the Delirious Lady, remain to
attest. Strange that Dryden should, in one point of
view, have been more suggestive to the musician
than Shakespeare! Those, however, were the
days of Shakespeare's neglect in England—days
which lasted on even into the time of Handel.
The last named great man knew our poets, as his
L'Allegro, and Samson, and Cecilian Odes, bear
witness, and that he never set a line of
Shakespeare's verse is a case singular enough among
oversights and exceptions to be worth noting.
His right-hand man, Smith, had a finer sense;—
and wrote or fitted up music for The
Tempest, as well as The Midsummer Night's
Dream—the former being lost and forgotten,
and no wonder, seeing that The Tempest was
taken in hand by one of the best of Shakespearian
composers, Thomas Augustine Arne.

Among all the English songs of the last
century, those by this melodist to The Tempest
and As You Like It, stand out with a distinct
beauty and prominence, shared by none other
in the long list. Their freshness will be at once
felt if they be compared to the beautiful, but