“You converse with his majesty?” exclaimed his companion. “And what did you say to him?”
“Oh! I said nothing. His majesty alone conversed.”
“And pray, what did he say to you?”
“He said: ‘Fellow, stand out of the way!’ ”
Who has ever thought of denying that the old plain chant suits exactly the ceremonies of the church? There were never any “Instructions” promulgated, that we know of, to curb its worldly, operatic, sensual, or effeminate tendencies, simply because by its essential melodic form it does not lend itself to any such aberrations. By its short intervals, its grave and unmeasured movement, and its intellectual [pg 322] character,[89] it is freed from all sensuousness. You can neither march to it, dance to it, nor make love with it. But you can appropriately accompany any of the ceremonies of the church with it, and pray with it; that is—to forestall the special plea of a theological “distinction”—you can adore with it, propitiate the divine justice with it, supplicate with it, praise and thank God with it; and doing all this, we respectfully ask, what more do you want, and, if you do want more, what right have you to ask it?
In the interests of art, do you say? Pshaw! You know well that the church can offer but a very confined field for the cultivation of music as an art, and, compared with music inspired by other wants and tastes, the music written for her use is not worth mentioning. It is only fit to be consigned to the flames, as our friend observes. Besides, the church is not an Academy of Arts and Sciences. Try again.
If being content with what the church prescribes, refusing to admit what she has not distinctly commanded, and contending stoutly for the fitness of that melody for the expression of her divine prayer, and as an accompaniment to her sublime offices, and which she has never declared to be unsuitable, be to “censure the whole church, and even the Pope himself,” as it is insinuated we do, then we offer ourselves at once for safe conduct to a lunatic asylum, for assuredly we have lost our senses.
Fourthly. We hear much of the coloring in the phraseology of modern music. That it is essentially rhetorical is plain enough. It is pretty much all made up of figures of speech, musically expressed. It is especially antithetical, full of striking contrasts, and highly metaphorical. We used to hear frequently in our own church, when we had a “mixed” choir and a gallery, a finale of the Gloria in Excelsis which the unlearned in musical gymnastics were accustomed to say sounded like the men scampering after the women, and the women scampering after the men, and neither coming out ahead of the other. This rhetorical character of music, this dealing in figures of musical speech, which we dare affirm is not free in many an instance from the faults of tautology, bombast, and mixed metaphor, lucidly explains the reason why the frequent repetition of morceaux de musique, whether anthems, motets, “grand Masses,” or “musical Vespers,” by any celebrated composer whomsoever, soon grows tiresome. The same rhetorical phrases and identical figures of speech in the discourses of a preacher Sunday after Sunday would set all the people yawning, and, if the sacredness of the place and of the speaker were not a hindrance to such emotional display, laughing and hissing as well.
The metaphorical character of music is the result of its theme, which may be, as we have already said, either pastoral, martial, amorous, saltatory, funereal, or even prayerful, etc.; but it is not really pastoral, for there are no green fields to pipe in or any hay-making going on. It is like pastoral music, and would be only tolerable, even in a concert-room, on the strength of the maxim, “Art for art's sake”—a principle we contend [pg 323] to be unphilosophical at best, and absolutely intolerable when applied to sacred ceremonies, and not sanctioned by a single instance in the rubrics. So, also, there are no military evolutions, no love-making or dancing, going on, for which reason the music is not really martial, amorous, or saltatory, but only like such music. But there may be a funeral, and there certainly is prayer going on; and what objection can there be to funereal and prayerful music? We have never heard any funereal music that was fit to accompany a Requiem Mass. We have heard musical howling, wailing, sobbing, groans and sighs of despair, and even the spiteful cursing and gnashing of teeth of the damned, as in the confutatis maledictis of Cherubini's Requiem; but let that pass for the present. Prayerful music there is of incomparable sweetness and ravishing harmony, but prayer music—i.e., music which is prayer—is quite another thing. Music does not lose its metaphorical character because its theme is prayerful. There is the greatest difference in the world between first-class paste and real diamond, or between vermeil and pure gold, although it is possible that neither you nor we could distinguish them without the application of a scientific test. The paste may have a perfect diamondful glitter, if you will; but that this glitter is the expression of the substance of real diamond needs no argument to disprove.
Let us again apply our test. The official acts of the celebrant and his assistants at the altar are not figurative, but real. The priest acts as a priest, and not like a priest. The chorus rise, kneel, bow, prostrate, as a chorus should, and not as a chorus might. All their acts are real, finding their ratio in themselves, and not in something else of which they are now a good and admirable, or now a poor and far-fetched, figure. Melody for such performances should be a faithful and true expression of these realities. That is to say, when you hear the melody, you should hear the prayer which is the form of the corpus rubricarum, as the soul is the form of the human body. Subjected to this test, the paste is easily distinguished.