When we were aforetime groping in the darkness of heretical error, and denied all privilege of stretching out our hands in prayer to help our beloved dead through the mysterious way that death had opened to them, and sternly forbidden to hope for a deeper look into the future than the yawning chasm of corruption opened to our gaze in the earth, we felt—alas! how keenly—the appropriateness of the only burial service we knew of then, whose doleful burden—“ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and “We commit this body to the ground”—expressed well the faith that was of the earth, earthy. But [pg 328] now our voice is lifted up in praise, and our heart-strings tuned to strains of festive joy, when God has spared our innocent loved ones the dangers and sorrows of life, chanting their translation to the skies in robes of white, and in words of joy that erst were sung by angels proclaiming “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to men”; and at the borders of the tomb which hides from our sight the forms of those who for many a year have grown with our growth, and knit our very existence unto theirs, the earth with its darkening clouds is made to disappear, and heaven itself is revealed as the herald who precedes the soul to the gates of everlasting light, chants in our hearing its melodious welcome to the home of rest and glory.
“In paradisum deducant te angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem.”[93]
The Catholic Church calm in the face of death, and triumphant at the edge of the grave! Why does not the sight convert every Protestant and unbeliever before the setting of the sun? This is our answer: Because you have brought upon the true Israel the calamity which Mardochai the just prayed God to avert when “the mouths of them that sing unto God are shut,” and by your music have bedimmed one of the most sublime manifestations of the church, and by the banishment of her chant have silenced her voice in that supreme, faith-inspiring hour!
Music at a funeral! We would as soon think of getting an Episcopalian parson to read his gloomy burial service, or of hiring a Methodist preacher to declaim by the hour, for the purpose of exhibiting his own vanity and ministering to ours.
The reason why the much-lauded musical Masses, whether of requiem or for other occasions, have failed to meet the requirements of Catholic devotion, is because their composers have sought by word-painting to illustrate the words, as separately defined in a dictionary, instead of grasping the chief and leading ideas to which the church strives to give expression; pretty much as if a painter, intending to paint a man, should most carefully sketch apart every separate bone, muscle, nerve, artery, and organ in the body. The result obtained would be a series of most excellently delineated anatomical drawings, no doubt, but no bodily form of a man, and no expression of what makes the body a living body, which is the soul.
Hence we deduce a most important conclusion. The form of modern music is not prayer, but recreation, the delectation of the imaginative faculty. It aims at producing the impressions which material things excite by their contact with the senses. It seeks to imitate motion in direction or velocity, light and darkness, cold and heat, serenity or disturbance in nature. The piano alone is supposed to make us hear the booming of cannon, the galloping and neighing of horses (the tritone Si, Fa, which in the palmy days of Gregorian chant was called diabolus in musica, and which is the essential chord in the tonality of modern music, will be found to give the exact notes of [pg 329] an ass' braying), the dying moans of the wounded in battle, the rising and setting of the sun, and a host of other equally curious things. “I shouldn't wonder,” exclaims a witty writer, “if one day I might see upon a piece of sheet music, ‘Demonstration of the square of the hypothenuse,’ or ‘The theory of free trade!’ ” Will not some composer produce a “work” which will give the impressions produced on the souls of the people at Mass and Vespers? It might be found convenient for home use on rainy Sundays!
This suggestion quite tickles our fancy. It has the smack of originality about it, and we feel like playing with it, as a cat plays with a mouse. Who does not see at once that it opens a vast field for development of music as an art, and precisely in the order in which musicians are now striving to give it expression? Yes, the glory of the invention is ours.
“Patent Musical Impressions, adapted to every want in church and state.”
“Save your fuel! Summer Impressions, warranted for the coldest climate.”
“Watering-places superseded! Refreshing Winter Impressions, deliciously cool, flavored with hops, serenades, moonlight excursions, sea-views, Adirondack trips, etc., according to taste.”