At Oxford, in his time, he said, there were none of the facilities for music that now form part of the institutions of the place; there was little to encourage individual musical talent. At St. Clement's we only learn, "I had a dispute with my singers in May, which ended in their leaving the church, and we now sing en masse,"[43] and in June still, "My singers are quite mute."[44] At St. Mary's, Mr. Bennett, who was killed on his way to Worcester Festival by the upsetting of a coach,[45] and after him Mr. Elvey, elder brother of Sir George Elvey, sometime organist at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, were Mr. Newman's organists. "I shall never forget," writes a hearer, "the charm it was to hear Elvey play the organ for the hymn at Newman's afternoon parochial service at St. Mary's on a Sunday. The method was to play the tune completely through on the organ before the voices took it up, and the way he did it was simply perfect."
Still the Anglican service, taken as a whole, was scarcely then calculated to stir artistic fervour, and this listener, so delighted with Elvey at St. Mary's, went home to his village parish church only to hear the hymn murdered, or if it were Advent, Christmas, or Easter, a tradesman shout from the gallery, "We will now sing to the praise and glory of God a hanthem!" when a motet would be sacrificed to incompetency with every circumstance of barbarity attending the execution. Mr. Newman in language of appalling force, written a year after his conversion, has described the Anglican service as "a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piecemeal; prayers clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no longer even good prose; antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, shovelled away; Scripture lessons turned into chapters; heaviness, feebleness, unwieldiness, where the Catholic rites had had the lightness and airiness of a spirit; vestments chucked off, lights quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worship annihilated; a dreariness which could be felt, and which seemed the token of an incipient Socinianism, forcing itself upon the eye, the ear, the nostrils of the worshipper; a smell of dust and damp, not of incense; a sound of ministers preaching Catholic prayers, and parish clerks droning out Catholic canticles; the royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in the place of the mysterious altar; and long cathedral aisles unused, railed off, like the tombs (as they were) of what had been and was not; and for orthodoxy, a frigid, unelastic, inconsistent, dull, helpless dogmatic, which could give no just account of itself, yet was intolerant of all teaching which contained a doctrine more or a doctrine less, and resented every attempt to give it a meaning."[46] The Catholic Church's ritual he found very different.
"What are her ordinances and practices," he asks, "but the regulated expression of keen, or deep, or turbid feeling, and thus a 'cleansing' as Aristotle would word it, of the sick soul? She is the poet of her children; full of music to soothe the sad, and control the wayward—wonderful in story for the imagination of the romantic; rich in symbol and imagery, so that gentle and delicate feelings, which will not bear words, may in silence intimate their presence, or commune with themselves. Her very being is poetry; every psalm, every petition, every collect, every versicle, the cross, the mitre, the thurible, is a fulfillment of some dream of childhood, or aspiration of youth. Such poets as are born under her shadow, she takes into her service, she sets them to write hymns, or to compose chants, or to embellish shrines, or to determine ceremonies, or to marshal processions; nay, she can even make schoolmen of them, as she made St. Thomas, till logic becomes poetical."[47]
And, of course, as the Catholic poet that he now was, he duly set about to "write hymns" and "to compose chants." Since 1834, it will be found, his original muse, amid the "encircling gloom," had been entirely silent, but once emerging into the light of the true faith, it struck the lyre again with those most lovely notes of "Candlemas"—
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The Angel-lights of Christmas-morn, Which shot across the sky, Away they pass at Candlemas, They sparkle and they die.[48] |
In 1849 appeared his most original and pathetic "Pilgrim Queen," or No. 38, Regina Apostolorum, in the Hymn Book, the sweet music thereto being his own composition, (or in part adaptation?)
[[Listen]]
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There sat a Lady all on the ground, Rays of the morning circled her round; Save thee, and hail to thee, gracious and fair, In the chill twilight what wouldst thou there? |
In 1850 came two more exquisite hymns in honour of the Mother of God, i.e., the "Month of Mary," and the "Queen of Seasons," both headed Rosa Mystica in the hymn-book. The hymns and tunes of two others, of No. 51. "Regulars and St. Philip," (an expressive melody),