dined at the royal table, and, in some subtle manner, managed to keep himself free from the intrigue which swept through the courts.

Steffani's fifty-four years had mellowed him to the ways of all peoples and all classes. One can imagine this person of experience, therefore, impressing Handel, and possibly pointing out to him the advantages of rich patronage, which he might expect at Hanover, in preference to the wandering happy-go-lucky existence the Saxon had been leading.

Unlike Mattheson, Steffani had no sense of jealousy. There was too much of the wanderer in him. At all events, when Handel arrived at Hanover he at once put his footsteps on the right road. "When I first arrived in Hanover I was a young man," Handel said in later years," Steffani received me with great kindness and introduced me to the Princess Sophia, and the Elector's son, giving them to understand that I was a virtuoso in music."

Steffani exercised a greater influence over Handel than any of the many with whom the young musician became acquainted during his Italian years. Steffani was, indeed, a master. His word was accepted everywhere. He was amiable and kind, and possessed an exquisite courtesy. But he had a quick temper, an easily-wounded dignity. Soon after Handel arrived. at Hanover, Steffani quarrelled with his singers. The affair seems to have been due to his punctiliousness on insisting that his singers kept precisely to the score as written. Whatever the cause, the master's dignity suffered rebuff, and without and went

waiting for further argument he threw up his post

off to Rome.

Such an incident might have proved a musical débâcle at the Court. Certainly if it had taken place a couple of years earlier it would have done. Steffani, who had ruled so long, who had brought the music of the Court to a precision hitherto unknown there, left Hanover, never to return. And Handel stepped into his shoes, at a fee equivalent to £300 a year. He became Kapellmeister.

For a youth of twenty-five the honour was exceptional.

1 To Sir John Hawkins.

2 Chrysander, vol. i.

Affairs at Home

And in more ways than one. Handel had not proved himself to the Elector at the time the appointment was made. He was largely taken on trust, to some extent on the recommendation of Steffani, whose last act before leaving the Court was to urge that Handel should succeed him. He therefore had everything to satisfy him, and yet his first request was for leave of absence to go to England. No call had come to him from England, no invitation from high quarters. It was the old demand of impulse. He obtained his permission just when summer was in full blaze at Hanover, and set off at once for Halle instead of going direct to London.

Much had happened at the Schlamm house since Handel left it. His youngest sister, Johanna Christiana, had died the year previous, and his elder sister, Dorothea Sophia, had effected a successful marriage with a well-to-do official, Dr Michael Michaelsen, who later became a prominent member of the Prussian Imperial Service, War Councillor and Lord of the Manor of Eptingen. Handel found Frau Dorothea ageing fast,1 cast about as she was by penurious habits for which there does not appear to have been any real necessity. Not that she was well off, but the sale of her husband's practice to Möller must have kept her from want. Solitude and lack of direct interest in things was doubtless responsible for her circumstances. As for Aunt Anna, she was Frau Dorothea's sole companion in the large house. Two ageing women alone, slaves to an overriding piety, so ignorant of the ways of the world that this dashing from one country to another on the part of George Frideric must have amazed them.

But into the house one day stalked George Frideric with all the dust of travel upon him. No longer the stripling who had set out for Hamburg. No longer the youth seeking fortune on a high road strange to his feet. Nevertheless he remained only a very few days, and took the mail-coach towards Düsseldorf at the invitation of the Elector Johann Wilhelm. The Elector was an ardent patron of music, and his wife, Anna Maria, was the sister of Prince Gaston, who had lured Handel from Hamburg to Italy. None of the German Courts had music

1 Mainwaring declares that Handel found his mother blind, but she did not lose her sight till 1730.

equal to that at Düsseldorf. The Elector ran operas on a magnificent scale, but if the motive that lay behind the invitation to Handel was to secure his services, he failed signally, for, with a gift of plate from the Elector to mark the visit, Handel left him and set out for Holland.

By that route he reached London. The autumn of 1710 was waning when he set foot on these shores, friendless, unable to speak a word of the language. Other German musicians had come before him and settled down in comparative affluence. There was Pepusch, there was Haym; both must have wondered what had drawn Handel to London. Pepusch openly mocked. He had just started his Academy of Ancient Music, and doubtless felt that he could afford to laugh at the invader.

Handel did just what he had intended. He put up an opera in London, made an extraordinary hit with it, then went quietly back to the Hanoverian Court to answer his parole.

By which time, no doubt, Pepusch had ceased to laugh, and Haym had serious thoughts of writing a libretto for the Saxon who came here and did things in this stampede fashion.

Handel was a force to be reckoned with. Haym knew it, even if Pepusch's more solemn intelligence had failed to absorb the fact.

CHAPTER V

THE FIRST VISIT TO LONDON

WHEN Handel arrived in London, Purcell had been dead fifteen years.

Purcell had carried English music to the heights, and the years that followed his passing found it at its lowest point of mediocrity. Only just before his death, Purcell had said: "Music is yet in its nonage, a froward child which gives hope of what he may be hereafter in England, when the masters of it shall find more encouragement. It is now leaving Italian, which is its best master, and studying a little of the French air, to give it somewhat more of gaiety and fashion.” 1

Prophetic words. After the death of Purcell, English music collapsed. The woful efforts of men who knew nothing of the first rudiments of harmony and counterpoint appeared on the London stage, failed miserably, and cost their patrons small fortunes. Itinerant Italian musicians had begun to flock to London, drawn by the knowledge that London looked to Italy to retrieve its opera from the "Slough of the devil." Operas of indifferent worth were staged with Italian and English words, so that the audiences only understood half that was sung and were bored to death.

So important was this Italian influence that Addison of Spectator fame had made a special journey to Italy to study it. When he returned he put on Rosamund to Thomas Clayton's music, a perpetration of noise which irritated audiences for three nights only, and then dropped into permanent oblivion. The failure fired Addison's blood. He hectored and advised through the Spectator on the absurdities of Italian operas. He esteemed them as no higher than the devil's artless strumming, so that when Handel arrived with his Italian reputa1 "Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne," vol. ii. p. 339.

tion behind him, Addison, a slave to his liver through overdining, and with a pen ever ready to tilt at the first excuse, settled himself into his chair and waited for him.

London in 1710 was in a curious state of discord. Operas had failed in strings, and their attractions were so few that the inhabitants of the town thought again before venturing into the night for a theatre with the risk of being waylaid and robbed on the way home. A wave of crime had swept over the metropolis. Robberies were enacted in were enacted in Piccadilly; houses in Bond Street openly pilfered in broad daylight. Night watchmen were trussed like fowls in the principal thoroughfares while my lady's coach on its way to the theatre passed within a few yards. The streets were ill-lit and stank of stale garbage, and the courtyards that led from them were thieves' kitchens and murder shops. One was arrested on the word of an informer for nothing at all when passing down a main London street at night. The Haymarket Theatre played continuously to a losing box-office. Drury Lane-a forbidding thoroughfare, which only the boldest would traverse at night-turned out failure after failure. Small wonder, then, that those who alone could keep a theatre open preferred to linger over their wine and gaming, rather than venture through a gauntlet of marauders, to hear indifferent music and piffling libretti.

When Handel arrived in London every condition of the theatrical world was against him, and was heaped as a mighty load upon the burden he already had to bear in his ignorance of the language and his lack of influence. By some means he came in touch at once with Aaron Hill, who was running the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket, and finding it difficult to make the box-office balance the expenses.

Hill was a figure of opportunity, and he was precisely Handel's age. He had knocked about the world, after being left unprovided for as an urchin of fourteen in the London streets. At fifteen he went to Constantinople, where his relation, Lord Paget, was English Ambassador. Lord Paget was surprised to have this scion of his poor relations thrust upon him in a strange capital. He was considerably annoyed. Being rather a proud and pompous person he almost responded