Or, as Mr. Hardy, in Friends Beyond, says of his own creations:
William Dewy, Tranter Reuben,
Farmer Ledlow late at plough,
Robert’s kin, and John’s, and Ned’s,
And the Squire and Lady Susan
Lie in Mellstock churchyard now.
The clergy, who were responsible for the disappearance of the old choirs, did not succeed at one stroke in sweeping them away, and in many parishes it was not until the leader had died that they broke up the old rustic harmony. “The ‘church singers,’ who played anthems, with selections ‘from Handel, but mostly composed by themselves,’ had a position in their parish. They had an admiring congregation. Their afternoon anthem was the theme of conversation at the church porch before the service, and of enquiry and critical disquisition after. ‘And did John,’ one would ask, ‘keep to his time?’ ‘Samuel was crowding very fitly until his string broked.’ This was said after a performance difficult in all the categories in which difficulty—close up even to impossibility—may be found. And there was, I was about to say, a finale, but it seemed endless; it was a concluding portion, and a long one, of the anthem.
“Mary began an introductory recapitulation, in which she was ably followed, of the words, the subject of the composition, the masterpiece of one, or many, if the choir had lent a helping hand. It happened that Mary had to manage three full syllables, and all the cadences, and trills, and quavers connected therewith, as a solo. Then followed, through all the turns of the same intricate piece, Thomas, of tenor voice, who evolved his music, but did not advance to any elucidation of the subject of his concluding effort. He only dwelt upon the same syllables, at which the good minister was seen to smile and become restless, particularly when Jonathan took on with his deep bass voice, accompanied by the tones he drew from his bass-viol. He, as best suited a bass singer, slowly repeated the syllables that Mary and Thomas had produced in so many ways, and with such a series of intonations, ‘OUR—GREAT—SAL.’ May some who tittered at this canonisation of, as it were, a female saint, be forgiven!’ Had they waited a few minutes, the grand union of all the performers in loud chorus would have enlightened them to the fact that the last syllable was only the first of one of three ending in ‘vation,’ which would be loudly repeated by the whole choir till they appeared fairly tired out.”
The very last surviving vestige of the old village choirs of the West of England became extinct in 1893. Until then the startled visitor from London, or indeed any other part of a country by that time given over to harmoniums in chapels, cheap and thin organs in small churches, and more full-toned ones in larger, would have found the village choir of Martinstown still bass-viol and fiddle-scraping, flute-blowing, and clarionet-playing, as their forefathers had been wont to do. “Martinstown” is the style by which Wessex folk, not quite equal to the constant daily repetition of the name of Winterborne St. Martin, know that village, a little to the west of Dorchester. It is a considerable place and by no means remote, and it was therefore not the general inaccessibility of Martinstown to modern ideas that caused this survival, when every other parish had put away such things. Martinstown then provided itself with an organ, as understood to-day; and so escaped a middle period to which many another parish fell a victim, between the decay of the old church music and the adoption of the new. When, about the accession of Queen Victoria, village minstrelsy began to relax, there came in a fashion, or rather a scourge, of mechanical barrel-organs, fitted to play a dozen or fewer, sacred tunes, according to the local purse, or the local requirements. Precisely like secular barrel organs, save only in the matter of the tunes they were constructed to play, church minstrelsy with them not only became mechanical but singularly unvaried, for, when your dozen tunes were played, there was nothing for it—if, like Oliver Twist, the congregation called for more—but to grind the same things over again. The only variety—and that was one not covenanted for—was when portions of the melody-producing works decayed and broke off. A tooth missing from a cog-wheel, or something wrong with the barrel, was apt to give an ungodly twist to the Old Hundredth, calculated to impart a novelty to that ancient stand-by of village churches, and would even have made the air of “Onward, Christian Soldiers!” stream forth in spasms, as though those soldiers were an awkward squad learning some ecclesiastical goose-step. In short, the barrel-organs were not “things seemly and of good report,” and they presently died the death.
Many regretted the old order of things, largely destroyed by the current movements in the Church. Reforming High Churchmen had seized upon the signs of weakness exhibited in the old choirs, and had made away with them wherever possible. The rustic music had, as we have seen, its humorous incidents, but it was enthusiastic and was understood and sympathised with by the people. Surpliced choirs, and others, formed as they now commonly are, from classes superior to those of which the old instrumental and vocal choirs were composed, have not that hold upon congregations, who do not sing, as the Prayer-book and the Psalm enjoin, but listen while others do the singing for them.
“Why, daze my old eyes,” said a Wessex rustic, reviewing the trend of modern life, “everything’s upsey-down. ’Tis, if ye want this and if ye want that, put yer hand in yer pocket and goo an’ git some’un to do’t for ye, or goo to the Stowers (he meant the Stores) up to Do’chester, and buy yer ’taters and have’m sint home for ’ee, cheaper’n ye can grow’m, let be the back-breakin’ work of a hoein’ of ’em, and a diggin’ of ’em and a clanin’ of ’em. An’ talking of church, why bless ’ee, tidden no manner of good yer liftin’ up yer v’ice glad-like, an’ makkin’ a cheerful noise onto the Lord, as we’m bidden to do. Not a bit. Ef ye do’t passon looks all of a pelt, and they boys in their nightshirts sets off a-sniggerin’ and they tells yer ye bissen much of a songster, they ses.”
It has already been said that the instruments, as well as the old village players of them, have perished, but at least one specimen of that oddly named instrument, the “serpent,” frequently mentioned by Mr. Hardy, has survived. This example is in the possession of Messrs. H. Potter & Co., of West Street, Charing Cross Road. The serpent belongs to such a past order of things that, like the rebecs, dulcimers, and shawms of Scriptural references, it requires explanation.
The “serpent,” then, it may be learned, although invented by one Guillaume so far back as the close of the sixteenth century, first came into general use in the early part of the eighteenth. It was a wind instrument, the precursor of the bass horn, or ophicleide, which in its turn has been superseded by the valved bass brasses of the present day. The serpent of course owed its name to its contorted shape. It was generally made of wood, covered with leather, and stained black, and ranged in length from about twenty-nine to thirty-three inches. The earlier form of serpent had but six holes, but these were gradually increased, and keyed, until this now obsolete instrument, as improved by Key, of London, about the beginning of the nineteenth century, finally became possessed of seventeen keys. It went out of use, contemporaneously with the decay of the old village choirs, about 1830.
The geographical area of the heart of the Hardy Country is not very great, but the difficulties of finding one’s way about it are not small. The Vale of Great Dairies opens out, and the many runnels of the Frome make the byways so winding that to clearly know whither one is going demands the use of a very large-scale Ordnance Map. But to lose one’s self here is no disaster. You will find your way out again, and in the meanwhile will have come into intimate touch with dairying, and perhaps, if it be early summer, will find the barns and the waterside busy with sheepshearers. Seeing the dexterous shearing, the quick, practised movements of the men and the panting helplessness of the sheep, one is reminded of the similar scene in Far from the Madding Crowd.