By the time I heard _Israel in Egypt_ at the Handel Festival, I had also heard the _St. Matthew Passion_ at St. Paul’s, and I quite definitely compared them. Probably it is a mistake ever to compare one achievement with another even if they are built on an appeal to the same sense: it is no more use comparing Handel with Bach than it is comparing a sunset with the view of the Bernese Oberland. But, taken by itself, that performance of _Israel in Egypt_ seemed to me a monstrous attempt to cover up a common invention by inflating it with noise. The fact that there were four thousand (or perhaps four million) singers all bawling, “He gave them hailstones for rain,” did not essentially make the hailstorm one whit the stormier, though the immensity of the row pleasantly stunned the senses. It would be as unreasonable to take a carte-de-visite photograph of a man with a stupid mouth and a chin-beard, and hope to make it impressive by enlarging it to the size of the Great Pyramid. Indeed, the bigger the enlargement, the sorrier would be the result. But by that time I had the sense to see how delicate and delightful an artist is Handel when he confines himself to the limits of his true territory. For sweetness and neatness of melody, in the violin sonata in A, the piano sonatas, and songs from countless operas, I knew he had no rival--in the silver standard. But no one, with the one exception of Bach, has ever defeated the awful limitations of the “form” of oratorio, and, as a rule, the larger the orchestra, the more stupendous the body of voice, the more shaky becomes the credit of the composer. Indeed, the very fact that so gigantic a representation as a Crystal Palace Handel Festival was ever desired or enjoyed postulates not only a complete want of musical perception on the part of the public, but a corresponding want of musical achievement on the part of Handel. No one would deny that the “Hailstone Chorus” sounds better when a huge band and an immense chorus all produce the utmost noise of which they are capable. We all like hearing a quantity of voices and a Nebuchadnezzar-band thundering out commonplace melodies, because a loud and tuneful noise has a stimulating effect on the nerves, and because we like our ears (occasionally) to be battered into a hypnotized submission. But we submit not to the magic of the music, but to the overpowering din of its production. And when “the feast is over and the lamps expire,” when we have had “the louder music and the stronger wine” of noise, our hearts steal back to the spell of Cynara....