SECURITY AGAINST ABUSE.
All things human are certainly liable to abuse and degeneracy, yet all are very far from being on a par with each other in this respect. In all human undertakings, order, discipline, and system are the divinely-appointed securities against abuse. Now, the Ritual Chant, as all who are acquainted with it know, is, like the ceremonial of the church, a perfect system. It has two large folio volumes of music, embracing the whole annual range of canonical offices, and a body of rules prescribing even the minutiæ of their celebration. On the other hand, the modern art has no such system, no such rules. Its use is, in practice, altogether subject to the dominion of individual taste. The choir-master who likes Haydn’s music, takes Haydn; another, who likes Mozart, takes Mozart; another, who takes a trip on the continent, comes back with the newest French, German, or Italian novelties. I am not here insisting on the singularly small portion of the liturgy that is set to compositions of modern art, but on the entire absence of all system in the use of the pieces themselves, on the complete subjection of the whole thing to individual caprice and taste.
It is quite true that the Bride of Christ is encompassed with variety (circumdata varietate). But the church is also the kingdom of the God of order; and I apprehend that between the varietate characteristic of such a kingdom, and the variety actually introduced into Catholic worship by the unrestrained dominion of individual taste in music, there is the widest possible difference.
The obvious exposure of modern music to the easiest inroads of every kind of abuse, in consequence of this absence of system, has been felt by its best-disposed advocates; and an able writer has maintained the notion, that the compulsory use of the organ alone, to the exclusion of all orchestral instruments, especially the violin, would be an all-sufficient safeguard. But it is not very easy to see upon what principle orchestral instruments are to be excluded, when the whole thing is built on the principle of the supremacy of individual taste; and even could they be excluded, it would still remain to be seen whether the organ itself were really the impeccable instrument it is represented.
Let us hear a witness in the Established Church, where, according to this writer, its dominion has been so unexceptionable. In the Ecclesiastic for July, 1846, the following remarks occur: “How intolerable to such saints (Ambrose and Gregory) would have been the attempt to give effect, as it is called, to the Psalms, by the organist’s skilful management of the stops. What would they have thought of the mimic roll of the water-floods, and the crash of the thunder, and the hail rattling on the ground, the lions roaring after their prey down in the bass, and the birds singing among the branches, represented by a twittering among the small pipes? From a heathen poet these gentry might learn a lesson of reverence—Virgil seems to make it a point of natural piety not to counterfeit the thunder of the Highest—
“Vidi et crudeles dantem Salmonea pœnas,
Dum flammas Jovis et sonitus imitatur Olympi.
Demens qui nimbos et non imitabile fulmen
Ære et cornipedum pulsu simularat equorum.”