It is a curious thing about this great singer that not only should she have been (as she has always seemed to me) strikingly like Handel in the face, and not only should she have been such an incomparable renderer of Handel’s music—I cannot think that I shall ever again hear any one who seemed to have the spirit of Handel’s music so thoroughly penetrating his or her whole being—but that she should have been struck with paralysis at, so far as I can remember, the same age that Handel was. Handel was struck in 1737 when he was 53 years old, but happily recovered. I forget Madame Patey’s exact age, but it was somewhere about this. Handel and Shakespeare Jones and I had been listening to Gaetano Meo’s girls playing Handel and were talking about him and Shakespeare, and how those two men can alike stir us more than any one else can. Neither were self-conscious in production, but when the thing had come out Shakespeare looks at it and wonders, whereas Handel takes it as a matter of course. A Yankee Handelian I only ever met one American who seemed to like and understand Handel. How far he did so in reality I do not know, but _inter alia_ he said that Handel “struck ile with the _Messiah_,” and that “it panned out well, the _Messiah_ did.” Waste Handel and Shakespeare have left us the best that any have left us; yet, in spite of this, how much of their lives was wasted. Fancy Handel expending himself upon the Moabites and Ammonites, or even the Jews themselves, year after year, as he did in the fulness of his power; and fancy what we might have had from Shakespeare if he had gossipped to us about himself and his times and the people he met in London and at Stratford-on-Avon instead of writing some of what he did write. Nevertheless we have the men, seen through their work notwithstanding their subjects, who stand and live to us. It is the figure of Handel as a man, and of Shakespeare as a man, which we value even more than their work. I feel the presence of Handel behind every note of his music. Handel a Conservative He left no school because he was a protest. There were men in his time, whose music he perfectly well knew, who are far more modern than Handel. He was opposed to the musically radical tendencies of his age and, as a musician, was a decided conservative in all essential respects—though ready, of course, to go any length in any direction if he had a fancy at the moment for doing so. Handel and Ernest Pontifex It cost me a great deal to make Ernest [in _The Way of All Flesh_] play Beethoven and Mendelssohn; I did it simply _ad captandum_. As a matter of fact he played only the music of Handel and of the early Italian and old English composers—but Handel most of all. Handel’s Commonplaces