Here I feel that many readers will be inclined to dissent from what I say, and as I shall not again recur to Law, I should like, in order to show my meaning, to call up his extreme example of an unmusical person singing in private devotion. If one pictures such a case as he supposes, is it not clear, whether one imagines oneself the actor or the unwilling auditor, that while such an exhibition of joy might perhaps pass, yet a similar incompetent attempt to express any of the last-named emotions would be only ridiculous? But between this single worshipper and the congregation the incompetence seems to me only a question of degree; while in the far more considerable respect of the sincerity of the feeling in the hearts of those expressing it, Law's singer has every advantage; indeed no objection on this score can be raised to him. But now suppose for a moment that he has not the emotion at heart corresponding to his attempt at song, and I think the differentiation of motives for congregational singing will seem justifiable.
All these last-named emotions,--which I have taken from congregational hymn-books,--and I suppose there may be more of them,--call for delicacy of treatment. A Lamentation, for instance, which might seem at first sight as if it would gain force by volume, will, if it is realistic or clumsy, become unmanly, almost so as to be ridiculous, and certainly depressing to the spirit rather than purifying. In fact while many of the subjects require beautiful expression, they are also more properly used when offered as inspiring ideals; and to assume them to be of common attainment or experience is to degrade them from their supreme sanctity. But in thus ruling them unfit for general singing one must distinguish large miscellaneous congregations from small united bodies, in which a more intimate emotion may be natural: and as there is no exact line of distinction here, so there is no objection to the occasional and partial intrusion of some of these more intimate subjects into congregational hymns.
To this first question then, as to what emotions are fit to be expressed by congregational music, the answer appears to be that the more general the singing, the more general and simple should be the emotion and that the universally fitting themes are those of simple praise, prayer, or faith: and we might inquire whether one fault of our modern hymn-books may not be their attempt to supply congregational music to unfitting themes.
To the next question, Whose emotion is this congregational music to excite or heighten? the answer is plain: It is the average man, or one rather below the average, the uneducated, as St. Augustin says the weaker, mind and that in England is, at least artistically, a narrow mind and a vulgar being. And it may of course be alleged that the music in our hymn-books which is intolerable to the more sensitive minds was not put there for them, but would justify itself in its supposed fitness for the lower classes. 'What use,' the pastor would say to one who, on the ground of tradition advocated the employment of the old plain-song and the Ambrosian melodies, 'What use to seek to attract such people as those in my cure with the ancient outlandish and stiff melodies that pleased folk a thousand years ago, and which I cannot pretend to like myself?' Or if his friend is a modern musician, who is urging him to have nothing in his church but what would satisfy the highest artistic sense of the day, his answer is the same: he will tell you that it would be casting pearls before swine; and that unless the music is 'tuney' and 'catchy' the people will not take to it. And we cannot hastily dismiss these practical objections. The very Ambrosian music which is now so strange to modern ears was doubtless, when St. Ambrose introduced it, much akin to the secular music of the day, if it was not directly borrowed from it: and the history of hymn-music is a history of the adaptations of profane successes in the art to the uses of the Church. Nor do I see that it can ever be otherwise, for the highest music demands a supernatural material; so that it would seem an equal folly for musicians to neglect the unique opportunity which religion offers them, and for religion to refuse the best productions of human art. And we must also remember that the art of the time, whether it be bad or good, has a much more living relation to the generation which is producing it, and exerts a more powerful influence upon it, than the art of any time that is past and gone. It is the same in all aspects of life: it is the book of the day, the hero or statesman of the hour, the newest hope, the latest flash of scientific light, which attracts the people. And it must be, on the face of it, true that any artist who becomes widely popular must have hit off, 'I know not by what secret familiarity,' the exact fashion or caprice of the current taste of his own generation.
And this is so true that it must be admitted that it is not always the uneducated man only whose taste is hit off. In the obituary notices of such men as Gladstone and Tennyson the gossip will inform us, rightly or wrongly, that their 'favourite hymn[[7]]' was, not one of the great masterpieces of the world,--which, alas, it is only too likely that in their long lives they never heard,--but some tune of the day: as if in the minds of men whose lives appealed strongly to their age there must be something delicately responsive to the exact ripple of the common taste and fashion of their generation.
All this makes a strong case: and it would seem, since our hymn-music is to stir the emotions of the vulgar, that it must itself be both vulgar and modern; and that, in the interest of the weaker mind, we must renounce all ancient tradition and the maxims of art, in order to be in touch with the music-halls.
This is impossibly absurd; and unless there is some flaw in our argument, the fault must lie in the premisses; we have omitted some necessary qualification.
The qualification which we neglected is this, that the music must be dignified, and suitable to the meaning; and we should only have wasted words in ignoring what we knew all along, if we had not, by so doing, brought this qualification into its vital prominence, and at the same time exposed the position of those who neglect it, and the real reason of the mean condition of our church music.
The use of undignified music for sacred purposes may perhaps be justified in exceptional cases, which must be left to the judgement of those who consider all things lawful that they may save some. But if from the mission service this licence should creep into the special service, and then invade every act of public worship, it must be met with an edict of unscrupulous exclusion. Not that it can be truly described as thus having crept in in our time. It is always creeping, it has flourished in special habitats for four or five hundred years, and before then there is the history of Palestrina's great reform of like abuses. If in our time in England we differ in any respect for the worse, it is rather in the universal prevalence of a mild form of the degradation, which is perhaps more degrading than the occasional exceptional abuses of a more flagrant kind, which cannot hide their scandal but bring their own condemnation.
There is indeed no extreme from which this abuse has shrunk; perhaps the worst form of it is the setting of sacred hymns to popular airs, which are associated in the minds of the singers with secular, or even comic and amatory words[[8]]: of which it is impossible to give examples, because the extreme instances are blasphemies unfit to be quoted; and it is only these which could convey an adequate idea of the licence[[9]] The essence of the practice appears to be the production of a familiar excitement, with the intention of diverting it into a religious channel.