I do not see how a reasonable person can refuse to admit that such is the positive authority attaching to the liturgical song-books, and that it is to the devout and skilful use of these books by her own priests, cantors, and devout people, that the church mainly looks for the fulfilment of the divine idea with respect to sacred music. How otherwise will you account for their existence? to what purpose has the wisdom of saints who contributed and collected their contents been exerted? Why has the church not let the Gregorian system of music alone, as she has the modern? why has she formed a complete system and body of song in the one, and not in the other, if her work, when complete, has no positive authority? Or will the advocate of modern art say, that this her work is defective and superannuated; and that it is time it should be locked up, out of the way, in collections of antiquities, and cease to be an offence to ears polite? Yet, if such be the case, an abrogation is not to be presumed; it must be proved. But the fact is, that the Council of Trent caused the song-books to be reissued, and directed the ecclesiastical chant to be taught in the seminaries of the clergy.[139] And when those very canonized saints, of whose conditional approbation of the use of modern art so very much is made, came to the dignity of obtaining a record in the church’s song of her warriors departed, here was surely a fit occasion, if, indeed the church had abandoned her former song, and disembarrassed herself of its defective scale and wearisome monotony, to call for the charms of modern art, that at least it might be identified with its votaries. Yet with this very natural supposition contrast the fact that the Ritual chant and its singers continue year by year to hand on the memory of the virtues of S. Philip Neri and S. Charles Borromeo; while for these, its supposed patrons, modern art has not even a little memorial. To the Ritual song it leaves what would seem to be to itself the unwelcome task of keeping up the record of their sanctity and their example.
Nor do I see to what purpose a reference can be made to the anecdote of Pope Marcellus’ approbation of Palestrina’s composition, since named Missa Papæ Marcelli, with the view to establish an authority for the system of modern music; for the idea of deviation from the order of the Ritual chant once admitted to toleration, nothing can be more natural than that a pontiff, equally with any other person, might come to express his very high commendation of a particular composition. And if we allow that such a commendation is not without its weight, it would surely be a violent inference, singularly betraying the absence of better argument, if an instance of such approbation of a particular work were to be claimed as an ex cathedra legislative authorization of a whole system of music to which it cannot be said to belong.[140] For it should not be forgotten that Palestrina’s music is essentially different from the existing system of modern art, inasmuch as his works are either mere harmonies upon the Canto Fermo, or else consist of themes borrowed from it, which frequently preserve that distinct tonality of the modes of the ecclesiastical chant which modern art has quite abandoned.
It has been objected, “that an assertion that the church does not authorize the use of modern harmony, because she has not herself furnished her children with any individual compositions, is about as reasonable a conclusion as the notion that she does not authorize and sanction sermons, because their composition is left to the judgment, good or bad, of private clergymen.” But the objection fails, as there is a total want of parity between the office of singer and preacher. The preacher passes through a long course of training to the state of priesthood, before he receives a license to preach; and every person in the church who has the license to preach, is to be presumed to be duly qualified both to make known the divine law and recommend it by his words and example. This is not the case with the singer, who is not necessarily even in the minor orders, and whose duty is merely to sing what is placed before him correctly and with feeling. If the education of the priests were left to the same hazard and caprice that would seem to be desired for the choice of music for the church, it is easy to imagine the result. But very far from this, the most thoughtful care is bestowed by the church on the training of her future ministers: obliged to fixed and unalterable dogmas of the faith, versed in one sacred volume, bound to one uniform office of daily prayer and pious reading, trained in an almost uniform system of studies and external discipline, the preacher comes forth the living organ of a divine system, fitted to be the spokesman of a kingdom that is endowed with the power of drawing its manifold materials to a concordant and coherent system, and moulding multiform and varied minds to a unity of type and consistency of action. “Such was the strict subordination of the Catholic Church,” says the historian Gibbon (Hist., ch. XX.), “that the same concerted sounds might issue at once from a hundred pulpits of Italy or Egypt, if they were tuned by the master hand of the Roman or Alexandrian primate.” Carry the same principle of system and order into the song of the church, and it will be found impossible to stop short of the Ritual chant-books.
2. With regard to the moral authority of the chant: moral authority, in the legislation of the church, is ever a necessary companion of any act of her legislative authority. We should not, however, overlook what seems to be a distinct element of moral authority, in the historical connection of the Ritual chant with the generations now past and gone to their rest. It was their song, the song of saints long ago departed. It is the song which S. Augustine sang, and which drew forth his tears: “Quantum flevi in hymnis et canticis, suave sonantis ecclesiæ tuæ vocibus commotus acriter; voces illæ influebant auribus meis, et eliquebatur veritas tua in cor meum, et ex ea æstuabat. Inde affectus pietatis, et currebant lacrymæ, et bene mihi erat cum illis”—“How often have these sacred hymns and songs moved me to tears, as I have been carried away with the sweetly musical voices of thy church. How these sounds used to steal upon my ear, and thy truth to pour itself into my heart, which felt as if it were set on fire! Then would come tender feelings of devotion, my tears would flow, and I felt that all was then well with me” (Confess. lib. vi. cap. 6). It was the song of S. Augustine, the apostle of Saxon England, of S. Stephen the Cistercian, and of all the holy warriors of our Isle of Saints. Nor is it only the song which the saints sang, but it is the song that sings of the saints—the only song which cares to pour the sweet odor of their memory over the year, or to spread around them its melodious incense, as they too surround the throne of their Lord and King.
Again: a moral authority attaches to the Roman Ritual chant in the very name Gregorian, by which it is so generally known. S. Gregory was the first to collect it from the floating tradition in which it existed in the church, and to digest it into that body of annual song for the celebration of the Ritual which has come down to us. This work came to be called after him, Cantus Gregorianus, and forms at this day the substance of the Roman chant-books, enriched and added to by the new offices and Masses that have since then been incorporated in the Ritual. Nothing is known with any positive historical certainty as to the authorship of the several pieces in the song-books; but as to the main fact, that the music of the Ritual is the work of the greatest saints of the church—of the Popes Leo, Damasus, Gelasius, and S. Gregory himself—of many holy monks in the retirement of their cloisters—history leaves no doubt. This fact, then, is beyond dispute: that the Roman Ritual chant, which the present inquiry concerns, is the creation of the saints of the Roman Church, for the decorum and solemnity of the public celebration of the Liturgy.
And now, to come to the comparison: if to the adequate realization of the divine idea of sacred song, as an instrument placed at the disposal of the church, to aid in carrying out her work of sanctification and instruction, the notion of a definite authority, both defining what it should be, and prescribing and regulating the manner of its use, necessarily belongs, the conclusion I think is that this authority is found attaching itself to the Ritual chant; and, from the nature of the case, it is incapable of attaching itself to the works of modern music. First, because it would seem to be an inseparable principle as regards their use, that every individual must be at liberty to ask for or to demand their employment according to his own pleasure; and secondly, because a positive authority can attach to that alone which exists in a definite and tangible shape, which is far from being the case with the works of modern music. They not only do not form a definite collection, but, such as they are, are subject to perpetual change—that which is on the surface to-day and admired, being to-morrow nauseated and condemned; and hence there is no resting point whatever in them for the idea of a positive authority.
And as regards the comparison on the score of moral authority, the attempt to draw it will, I fear, touch upon delicate ground; for, to confess the honest truth, it cannot be drawn without bringing to light the degeneracy of our popular ideas respecting sacred music. Who is there who seriously thinks of claiming for the works of modern music any connection with the saints, past or present? or who is there who either cares to ask for, or to attribute any character of sanctity to its authors? or would even be likely to think very much the more highly of the music if the fact of its saintly origin could be established? And what kind of persons, for the most part, have its authors been? Mozart died rejecting the last sacraments; Beethoven is supposed by his German biographer, Schindler, to have been a pantheist during the greater part of his life; Rink was a Protestant; Mendelssohn a Jew, who cared very little for his Jewish faith; and the different maestri di capella who have been throughout Europe the chief composers of these works, were, for the most part, also the directors of the theatres and opera-houses of their royal patrons.
But enough has been said to make it evident upon how different a footing the chant of the Ritual and the works of modern art respectively stand, as regards moral and ecclesiastical authority.
RESPECTIVE CLAIM TO THE COMPLETENESS AND ORDER OF A SYSTEM.
The idea of a God Incarnate, manifesting himself in the nature of man on earth, necessarily contains the idea of a system and order displayed in his works. All apparent system, it is true, does not necessarily imply God as its author; but absence of system and its consequence, positive confusion and disorder, is undeniably a sign that the mind of the Almighty is not there. If, then, the Catholic Church be the kingdom of God Incarnate, and the abiding-place of his Spirit, it follows that her song is a system, if God is at all to acknowledge it in any respect of his own. But the idea of system leads at once to the Ritual song-books. Modern art has not as yet furnished even the necessary materials out of which to construct a system, not to speak of the hopelessness of forming one, when the materials should exist. Do but remove the Ritual chant from the church, and you remove a wonderful and perfect system, which an order-loving mind takes pleasure in contemplating—one that moves with the ecclesiastical year, that accompanies the Redeemer from the annunciation of his advent, the Ave Maria of his coming in the flesh, to his birth, his circumcision, his manifestation to the Gentiles, his presentation and discourse with the learned doctors in the Temple, his miraculous fast in the companionship of the wild beasts in the wilderness, his last entry into his own city, his betrayal, his institution of the Holy Eucharist, his agony in the garden, his death upon the cross, his resurrection from the dead, his ascension into heaven—a system of song which places around him, as jewels in a crown, his chosen and sainted servants, as the stars which God set in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth. Cœli enarrant gloriam Dei, et opera manuum ejus annuntiat firmamentum—“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork” (Ps. xviii.) Yet if we saw the heavens only in the way in which we are treated to the performances of modern music, the greater and the lesser light occasionally changing places, after the manner of the vicissitudes of Mozart and Haydn, the planets moving out of their orbits in indeterminate succession, at the caprice of some archangel, as the organist changes his motets and introits, the Psalmist would hardly have spoken of the “firmament showing God’s handiwork.” Where is there a trace of order and system in the use of the works of modern art? Where is the musician who regards “duplex,” “semiduplex,” or “simplex”? Mozart in one church, Haydn in another, Beethoven in a third, and a host of others whose name is Legion, taken like lots from a bag, as whim or fancy may at the moment direct, like the chaos described by the poet, where