anticipated of him; the suspicion of any musical genius in him would probably have shocked his father, the barbersurgeon, into disowning him. All that his parents demanded was that he should become a good citizen and pay his way in some respectable craft; be God-fearing, if not God-chosen ; ultimately marry and rear children, and, in the fullness of time, pass to an honoured corner in the Halle churchyard, and be remembered with respect.

The Handels had always done things that way. They had never been original, but ever respectable. From the time that they first settled in Breslau in mediæval ages, till and after grandfather Handel-Valentine by name came and established the Handel respectability at Halle, they had been the same. He opened a small coppersmith's shop to which he very vigilantly attended. He was unimaginative, and unsuspecting, this man, that any grandchild of his would one day demand the silence of kings.

In 1685, when the birth of the future musician occurred in the Am Schlamm at Halle, Middle Europe was in a curious. mood of unoriginality. It had its own scheme of things; its slow progress was a change as slowly conceived. It was rather hidebound with Lutheranism, relieved with patches-very eruptive patches of Judaism, and occasional upheavals of Catholicism and free thought. Its business was as respectable as its religion. It did not wish to do anything in a new way. It made things and sold them. This Middle Europe of 1685 wanted to go on making things and selling them in the same fashion for ever. There was no political disturbance that tore at the roots of industry and thrust them rudely up into the glare of progress. One was born and educated and trained to narrow issues, and taught above all things to be supremely careful. But to strike out and be a pioneer-it was one of those acts which the better circle abhorred because such peculiar conduct was not understood. It was a form of heresy usually purged from the higher families by disowning the offender. A pioneer in a Saxon family in 1685 was not talked about. The drawing-rooms, which were dovecotes of righteousness, insincerity and trivial scandal, did not mention these pioneers, these few. Its people were too well bred. As a matter of

On Ancestry

fact, the few pioneers usually drifted into the cities, became debauchees, and died very namelessly, as those families that had once owned them hoped they would do. There was a singular connivance between Fate and the smug conscience in those days.

Moreover, 1685 was a rather mean age. It was an age of snobbery in saving money. It was ungenerous. It was interested in the suffering, in the charities of the time, only by an occasional mild mood of religious revivalism, and extreme Church ceremony. There was no secret charity. To trample on the weak was the act of a man who really had achieved some object in getting born. The weak were there to be trampled upon, and a man was the better listened to at the dinner-table according to the heaviness of his step.

The Handels were a rather peculiar family. They succeeded in Middle Europe at this age because they were so clearly typical of their age. They were extremely efficient, quiet people. They had no family scandals, no skeletons in the family cupboard. They made no noise; they rose to no honours. They did not attempt to govern. They married just the kind of people they were themselves, for they adventured neither in business nor in marriage. They made their profits in their occupations, and paid their debts, and were buried, as they would have wished to be buried, with the little pompous funerals of seventeenth-century Germany. They lived very gamely and straightly round the narrow arc which their mentality perceived, and came to the same very revered end. Just dust to the earth that had yielded it. Dust and no memories.

Suddenly this very circumspect family developed an eruptive mood. Early in the seventeenth century Valentine Handel packed himself up, bag and baggage, at Breslau and went south to Halle. He followed the usual custom of the time for an apprentice who had become "Gesell" to take to the road. The Saxon town had no special call for him. But he responded to a mood. Like some irresponsible bird of passage, he did what no Handel had ever done hitherto―he went out to discover. To fight.

It is possible that en route he stopped at the neighbouring

town of Eisleben and worked in the copper-mines for some time. Scarcely a year before his arrival at Halle, he married an Eisleben girl, Anne, the daughter of the master coppersmith, Samuel Beichling, who was to be the grandmother of the musician. At all events it is on record that on Tuesday after "Reminiscere" (14th March) 1609, he took the oath as a Halle citizen, and paid the citizen-right's fee of six guilders. He was then twenty-six years of age.

He arrived at Halle with his few sticks of belongings, and the knowledge of his craft as a coppersmith-the only stable things to which he had pegged his adventure. Often he must have meditated on the complete lack of object which had drawn him to Halle. It was just a call from some vague destiny, just as the sea in these days will drag a man from an office stool, or a sudden mood will send a driven city slave to the wildest ends of the earth in pursuit of a shadow.

Valentine Handel settled down in a little narrow street off the Markt-platz known as "Unter den Kleinschmieden " (street of the small smith). There were other coppersmiths there before him, but the records show that he was a brilliant craftsman in the more delicate forms of the work. He became known; he prospered. Rapidly he climbed the ladder till the citizens of Halle held such respect for him that they put him into the council with the position of bread-weigher.1

In a short time his shop was one of the foremost of the period. We can picture this man approaching old age, busying himself in his shop, a rather mournful but efficient figure with a small, close-fitting cap on his head. A man more than a little mean, but a man whose word was his bond.

Valentine Handel made money, and he saved money. As proof of it, let it be said that he bought two of the principal houses in the adjoining main street. No tradesman in those days could afford to buy houses unless he were making money heavily.

The Handel stock was particularly strong in this man. He had no ideas outside his business. He did not know one note of music from another. He was conscious of no appeal from

1 Julius Otto Opel, Periodical for General History, 1885.

2 A large shop now stands on the site of these houses.

Valentine Handel

any Art. He lived a rather closeted, furtive life, taking no chances unless he had previously measured every step of the way. But he was alert, and very conscious that in his epoch commercial Germany was about to be sold to the Jews. So he prospered; he prospered because he had been manufactured so closely to the pattern of his age. And he lived in a manner that became his lineage, a clean-trading, rather ignorant person, with ideals and beliefs in the hereafter for those who kept themselves unsullied from the Jewish vices that were breaking out in gross and disturbing fashion in the larger cities. A person rather dour and sanctimonious.

He died in the same unostentatious fashion in which he had lived, just as the Handel precedents ordained; his financial affairs very simple and arranged, and with a clear conscience that those for whom he had worked should never be troubled with any irritating annoyances about their heritage. He had thought it all out beforehand, and so planned his death that it should be as simple and understood as his life had been. He had always been a very safe person, rather difficult to live with at times, one may gather, but worthy of the elegant inscription they put upon his tomb. And when he died at the coppersmith's shop that had borne his name for so long and honourably over its portal, he left his two elder sons, Valentine and Christoph-already trained to his own pattern as coppersmiths to succeed him. Two other sons he had lost, but the fifth, George by name, never appears to have interested him. George had no inclinations towards the crafts of the smith. He was ambitious, dreamy; he lived a solitary life, out of joint with the family and its affairs. Yet Destiny was to choose him for the father of one of the world's greatest musicians.

This youth had just turned fourteen years when he followed his father's bier to its last resting-place, and he was of no more importance in that procession through the Halle streets than the family cat might have been. A small, insignificant creature in a great concourse of people. A solitary child.

Valentine and Christoph, in the strenuous life which followed immediately upon taking over the business, had no use whatever for him. His mother left the shop to the sons

and supported herself chiefly by distillery. He could wander from the family roof-tree as soon as he liked. And he did.

Possibly it was this solitude which built the strength of character in George Handel. Certainly it did not hinder him, for six years later he was the most respected burgher in Halle as a barber-surgeon. At the end of his life he was in his turn to pass on that strength of character to his last son George Frideric. The gift was the only thing that George did for that son of his late years.

Nevertheless it was this gift that brought the son in the fullness of time to Westminster Abbey.

When they had buried the old coppersmith of Halle in 1636, George, the boy of fourteen, was left more than ever to the seclusion of his own ways, his own thoughts. Whatever destiny there might be for him had given no sign. He had no one to turn toward for guidance, and, says one historian, he walked the streets and the wooded paths beside the banks of Halle's wonderful river, the Saale, " trapped by a great sense of ambition."

Then the destiny of George Handel began to shape itself. He became an apprentice to Christoph Oettinger, a barbersurgeon, one of the successful young men of Halle. He went into the Oettinger household, and began to pick up the rudiments of surgery. Oettinger was thrifty and prospering; he had no dream in the world beyond money, and he hammered this boy into being what he meant him to be-just a pawn in his game of building up success for himself and a handsome substance to leave behind him. Not that there was a great deal to learn in surgery in those days-the average medical student of modern times could master in a week the whole gamut of surgery as it was then known, and be glad enough to forget it afterwards. But the life was hard; the trivial round remorseless and unending. This was not so with the usual youth of Halle at this period. They roystered and loafed. They spent half their days and more than half their nights in the billiard-rooms, where the billardeurs, or room-keepers, did a thriving trade plying them with tea, coffee and chocolate, and then retired, comfortably off, to senile ease.