It is not only of this popularity, a little banal, of which I wish to speak, which one could not ignore--for it is only a stupid pride and a small heart which denies great value to the art which pleases humble people;--what I wish to notice chiefly in the popular character of Handel's music is that it is always truly conceived for the people, and not for an _élite dilettanti_ as was the French Opera between Lully and Gluck. Without ever departing from his sovereign ideas of beautiful form, in which he gave no concession to the crowd, he reproduced in a language immediately "understanded of the people" those feelings in which all could share. This genial improvisor, compelled during the whole of his life (a half-century of creative power) to address from the stage a mixed public, for whom it was necessary to understand immediately, was like the orators of old, who had the cult of style and instinct for immediate and vital effect. Our epoch has lost the feeling of this type of art and men: pure artists who speak _to_ the people and _for_ the people, not for themselves or for their confrères. To-day the pure artists lock themselves within themselves, and those who speak to the people are most often mountebanks. The free England of the nineteenth century was in a certain measure related to the Roman republic, and indeed Handel's eloquence was not without relation to that of the epic orators, who sustained in the form their highly finished and passionate discourses, who left their mark on the shuddering crowd of loiterers. This eloquence did on occasion actually thrust itself into the soul of the nation as in the days of the Jacobite invasion, where _Judas Maccabæus_ incarnated the public feeling. In the first performances of _Israel in Egypt_ some of the auditors praised the heroic virtues of this music, which could raise up the populace and lead armies to victory. By this power of popular appeal, as by all the other aspects of his genius, Handel was in the robust line of Cavalli and of Gluck, but he surpassed them. Alone, Beethoven has walked in these broader paths, and followed along the road which Handel had opened. LIST OF HANDEL'S WORKS I. OPERAS In chronological order, with the dates and places of the first performance. (The figures in brackets refer to the number of the Volume in the Complete Edition of Handel's Works.)