Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/66

54 expedients, equally pitiable, to cause him injury." Händel would very probably have left the United Kingdom, but for the unexpected sympathy which he found in Ireland, where he proceeded to spend a year.—In 1745, after all his masterpieces, after the Messiah, Samson, Belshazzar, and Herakles, the cabal was reconstituted, and was even more violent than before. Bolingbroke and Smollet mention the tenacity with which certain ladies gave tea-parties, entertainments and theatrical performances—which were not usually given in Lent—on the days when Händel's concerts were to take place, in order to rob him of his audience. Horace Walpole was greatly entertained by the fashion of going to the Italian opera when Händel was giving his oratorios.

In short, Händel was ruined; and although he was victorious in the end the causes of his victory were quite unconnected with art. To him there happened in 1746 what happened to Beethoven in 1813, after he had written the Battle of Vittoria and his patriotic songs for a Germany that had risen against Napoleon: Händel suddenly became, after the Battle of Culloden and his two patriotic oratorios, the Occasional Oratorio and Judas Maccabaeus, a national bard. From that moment his cause was gained, and the cabal had to keep silence; he was a part of England's patrimony, and the British lion walked beside him. But if after this period England no longer grudged his fame she nevertheless made him purchase it dearly; and it was no fault of the London public that he