Victor, too, went thither intoxicated, but with joy. There is nothing more agreeable than to be a parson's wife, and to say to one's husband, while putting on his clerical bands, "Make the service a little longer to-day, else the mutton will not be quite roasted through."—Domestic trifles gratified my hero full as much as courtly ones provoked him.
He went with the Parson and with the Parson's wife, who abridged all the processes of kitchen and toilet in a summary and manlike way. His toleration for the faults of the clerical order had nothing in common with that of the distinguished people who are fit for high dignities and dinners, which arises from supreme contempt, and which can endure a Christian priest as easily as an Egyptian; but it grew out of his opinion that the churches are still the only Sunday-Schools and Spartan school-gates for the poor commoners, who cannot hear their cours de morale from the state. Besides, he loved, as a youth, the favorites of his childhood.
Many preachers try to combine the rule of Quintilian, who requires that bad arguments should be put forward in the earlier part of the discourse, with that of Cicero, who is for keeping them back till the latter part, by posting them in both places; but Eymann held good feelings to be better than bad reasons, and wound around the peasants chains, not of reasoning, but of flowers.
The friseur above-mentioned, at first, would not go to church, because it was beneath his dignity, but afterward he could not do otherwise; for, on account of the court stranger present to-day, church-music was to be made.
It is the only fault of the peruke-maker Meuseler, that he loves to sing too well, and is too fond of intruding his natural pipes into all church-music that is made in his perukial diocese, especially on Holy Whitsuntide. The St. Luna chorister could never bear this; but how to cheat him and feast a thousand ears? Simply thus: He frizzled out to-day what was still to be frizzled, (not to-day alone, but it was always so,) and merely glided up the choir-steps. Here he leaned and watched, till the chorister, seated on the musical sausage-sledge, struck with his finger the first note of the church-music. Then, like a sunbeam, he darted up into the choir, and filched away from the young counter-tenor his part, and sang it into the ears of the congregation, but with much whining and puffing, as if he were chanting his manuscript to the reviewers. For one must now, once for all, make it known to the world, that the enraged musician at the clavichord had, with a sharp-cornered triangle of elbows, furiously thrust back at the frizzling counter-tenor, in order to push the strange singing-bird out of the bird-house of the choir. But as the singer made his right arm the firm note-desk of his text, and the other a war-club,—like the Jews, who built up Jerusalem with one hand full of building-tools and the other full of weapons,—one sees that the peruke-maker, even amidst this continuance of fighting and fa-sol-la-ing, could do his very best, and execute somewhat during the musical truce of God. But so soon as the music had drawn its last breath, then the harmonious bird-of-passage and stormy-petrel skipped nimbly out across the choir, accompanied by the memory of a thousand ears and a single elbow. The chorister could not catch him, nor get scent of him.
If, on the contrary, he had the good fortune to be passing with his bandboxes through a village just as parson and schoolmaster and pedagogic frog-spawn were quacking and croaking[[220]] round a deaf corpse,—all which many name, more concisely, a dirge,—then could the virtuoso, without the counter-prop of elbows, spring gayly with both feet into the motet,[[221]] work out the funeral serenade given to the dead man by his heirs, throw in gratis some final cadences to the funeral procession, and yet have time to offer in the village to the bailiff an entirely new bag-wig.—
To our hero the music in country churches gave the greatest satirical pleasure. But little should we get by it, had I not the forethought to beg leave just for one poor little extra-syllable—one shall hardly see it—upon church-music.
POOR LITTLE EXTRA-SYLLABLE ON CHURCH-MUSIC.
It always gives me pleasure to see the people keep their seats during church-music, because it is a proof that no one is bitten by the tarantula; for, if they should run out, one would see that they could not endure any discords, and so had been bitten. I, as profane music-master, compose for few churches,—that is to say, only the consecration-noise for new ones, or old ones that have been repaired,—and therefore, in truth, I understand nothing of the matter whereupon, in passing, I purpose to express myself; but thus much let me still be allowed to assert, that the Lutheran church-music is good for something,—in the country, not in the capitals, where, perhaps, the fewest discords are correctly delivered. Verily, a miserable, sottish, blue chorister, who in bravura-airs sings himself brown and beats others brown,—there are, therefore, two kinds of bravura-airs,—is able, with a few mechanics who on Sundays work at the fiddle, with a trumpeter who might blow down without an instrument the walls of Jericho, with a smith who lays about him with the sticks of the kettle-drums, with a few spasmodic youngsters that do not yet even understand singing, and still resemble a female singer, who labors, not, like the fine arts, for ear and eye alone, but also (only in a worse acceptation than the youngsters) for a third sense, and with the little wind which he draws from the lungs of the organ and his own lungs,—such a thumper, I say, is able, with so extraordinarily little musical rubbish, nevertheless, to get up a much louder thundering and fiddle-rosin-lightning around the pulpit Sinai—I mean, to draw a far more vehement and discordant church-music out of his choir—than many much better sustained theatre-orchestras and chapels, with whose harmonies temples are so often desecrated. Hence such a noisy man is pained afterward, when people misunderstand and falsely judge his church scraping and squeaking and groaning. Shall, then, the soft, low Moravian music steal into all our provincial churches?—Fortunately, however, there are still city choristers who are working against this, and who know wherein pure choral tone and discord are to be distinguished from court-tone.
I expect, not readers, but organists, to know why mere dissonances—for consonances are to be endured only among the voices of the instruments—belong to the choir. Dissonances—according to Euler and Sulzer—are relations of tones which are expressed in high numbers; they displease us, therefore, not on account of their incongruity, but on account of our inability to reduce them rapidly to an equation. Higher minds would find the near relations of our harmonies too easy and monotonous,—the larger ones of our discords, on the contrary, charming and not above their comprehension. Now, as divine service is held more in honor of higher beings than for the profit of men, the church style must insist upon this, that a music shall be made, suitable for higher beings,—namely, of discords,—and that precisely that which is the most abominable to our ears shall be chosen as most appropriate for the temple.