RESPECTIVE CAPACITY FOR DURABLE POPULARITY.

God, who gave the Ecclesiastical Chant as a gift of mercy to the people, must needs contemplate it as popular. For except it were really popular, it would fail to attain its end. This, then, will be the place to examine what indications are to be found that the Ritual Chant is really, in this particular, the fulfilment of the Divine idea.

When an invention or an art is such that people come to borrow from it popular expressions, or when it gives birth to new phrases or metaphors, or a word or words come to be engrafted from it upon one or many languages, this becomes an argument for its popularity, such as no one will be inclined to dispute. Such phrases as those of “Go ahead,” “Get the steam up,” are quite sufficient to prove the fact of everybody being well acquainted with the steam-engine, from which they are derived. Now, if a similar fact can be found relative to the Gregorian chant, its popularity is in a manner placed beyond the reach of doubt.

When the poet Gray uses a well-known word in the lines,

“The next, with dirges due, in sad array.

Slow through the church-yard path we saw him borne,”

he bears testimony to such a fact. The initial word of the first Antiphon of the Matins for the dead, “Dirige gressus meos, Domine,” has given this well-known word to our language. It can be hardly necessary to refer to a similar reception of the word “Requiem” into many different languages, which is the initial word of the Introit in the Mass for the dead.

The following anecdote, related by Padre Martini, page 437 of the third volume of his History of Music, may be here to the point. It is of Antonio Bernacchi, the most celebrated singer of his day (the beginning of the XVIIIth century), and narrated to him by Bernacchi himself: that, as he happened to be on a journey in Tuscany, near a monastery of Trappist monks, he felt a desire to visit it, in order to become acquainted with the way of life of these religious. He entered their church exactly at the time they were singing Tierce. Bernacchi was overcome by the effect of a multitude of voices in such perfect union that they seemed to be only one voice. He admired their precision in the utterance of every syllable, and in the softening, swelling, and sustaining of the voice, that although no more than men, they seemed to him like angels occupied in praising God; whereupon Bernacchi fell into the following soliloquy: “How deceived have I been in myself; I thought that, after a long and diligent application to the art of singing under such a master as Pestocchi, and having the natural gift of a good voice, I might pretend to exercise my profession without any question. How have I been deceived, being obliged to confess that the psalmody of these religious has in it a value and a quality that renders their song superior to mine!”

Dom Martene relates that, in his travels to visit the churches of France, he passed by a church of Benedictine nuns, who met with a patron and benefactor in the following manner: The Duc de Bournonville retiring from Paris in disgrace to “Provins,” on his arrival inquired for the nearest church; and, upon being shown the church of these nuns, he entered it as they were singing Vespers. So charmed was he by the sweetness of their song, that he seemed to himself to be listening to angels, and not to human creatures. On hearing, in an interview that followed, that the community were in debt, he gave the lady abbess an immediate present of one thousand ecus, and ever afterwards continued to be a benefactor to the convent (Voyage Littéraire, etc., part i. p. 79).

Baini (Mem. Stor., vol. ii. p. 122) quotes a letter, which is thus addressed to some English gentlemen who had visited Rome: “To Mr. Edward Grenfield, Fellow of the Royal Academy of London, to Mr. Davis, Mr. Morris, and other learned Englishmen, whose ears have not been altered by fashion, and made obtuse by habit, and who have been more than once heard to say, that they felt themselves more moved by the Gregorian Chant than by all the noisy performances of the greater part of our theatres.”