8

INAUDIBLE HARMONY.

of all the human race was made audible. It is in pursuance of his argument, rhetorically enforced, that all deep things are Song, it seeming somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls;-the primal element of us, and of all things;-that Mr. Carlyle goes on to say, "The Greeks fabled of SphereHarmonies it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music." It was reserved for a latter-day poet to give expression, to the non possumus of these latter days:

"I've heard of music in the spheres,

Which all men hear of, all admire,

But not a human mortal hears."

Enough of the inaudible, and the incredible, if so it must be. Pass we on to what ear hath heard, or may hear, in a less questionable and a more practical sense.

Among the things which the Scriptures both of the Old and of the New Testament may be said to take for granted is this, that man is, by what is human in him, and that he ought to be, by what is divine about him, a lover of music. Choral symphonies consecrated the worship of the Jewish Temple. The apocalypse of heaven, as foreseen by the seer of Patmos, may have been very limited in details, but at any rate a main constituent in the

DISCORD AND DISGUST.

9

beatific vision is the throng of harpers harping with their harps. And indeed

"What know we of the blest above,

But that they sing, and that they love?"

A too one-sided acceptance of, and insistance upon, this partial view of heaven, has done much to set some people, especially young people, against any such ideal of the life to come. They are repelled by the narrow conventionalism which strictly confines the raptures of eternity to sitting upon clouds and playing on stringed instruments. Perhaps they have been accustomed to an extremely rude and crude type of church or chapel psalmody,-offensive to every notion they cherish of culture and æsthetical refinement; and when they remember with what stentorian zest, bellowed forth as if by blatant beasts and bulls of Bashan, the words of the hymn have deafened, dazed, and distressed them,

"I have been there, and still would go;
'Tis like a little heaven below,"-

their involuntary, or perhaps too voluntary, inference has been, that if the greater heaven above be really in this respect like the little heaven below, they, for their part, having not yet been there, would almost rather not go.

Pope has his Horatian sneer at Hopkins and

ΙΟ

STERNHOLD AND HOPKINS.

Sternhold who "glad the heart with psalms," as sung by charity children, when "the silenced preacher yields to potent strain," and "heaven is won by violence of song." Addison's country clergyman has another kind of grievance connected with Sternhold and Hopkins, in the bravura flourishes of a fashionable visitor at his church,* who startles the parish from its propriety. It is sad, exclaims the author of Music's Monument,†

* "But what gives us the most offence is her theatrical manner of singing the psalms. She introduces about fifty Italian airs into the hundredth psalm; and whilst we begin All people, in the old solemn tune of our forefathers, she, in a quite different key, runs divisions on the vowels, and adorns them with the graces of Nicolini; if she meets with eke or aye, which are frequent in the metre of Hopkins and Sternhold, we are certain to hear her quavering them half a minute after us to some sprightly airs of the opera." The good parson can assure Mr. Spectator he is far from being an enemy to church music, but he fears this abuse of it may make his parish ridiculous, for his parishioners already look on the singing psalms as an entertainment, and not part of their devotion.

† Which Dr. Burney calls a matchless book, not to be forgotten among the curiosities of the seventeenth century. Southey devotes some pages to it in The Doctor. Here is a pertinent and rather piquant specimen of the manner of the man Mace :

"That counsel given by the Apostle Pau
Does certainly extend to Christians all.
Colossians the third, the sixteenth verse;
(Turn to the place :) that text will thus rehearse,

SCREECHING CHORISTERS.

II

Thomas Mace, "to hear what whining, toting, yelling, or screeching there is in many country

Let the word of Christ dwell in you plenteously,
(What follows? Music in its excellency.)
Admonishing yourselves in sweet accord,

In singing psalms with grace unto the Lord;
Sed sine arte, that cannot be done,

Et sine arte, better let alone."

Thomas Mace would have sympathized with the early contempt of the Italians for tramontane singing, as expressed by John the deacon, and reproduced in Muratori and Gibbon : Alpina scilicet corpora vocum suarum tonitruis altisone perstrepentia, susceptæ modulationis dulcedinem proprie non resultant, etc. And Mace would have relished the allusion in one of Washington Irving's letters: “It is Saturday evening. I hear a solemn though rather nasal strain of melody from the kitchen. It is the good —, setting his mind in tune for the morrow." And then the writer records his satisfaction at having brimstoned his cider according to Uncle Natt's receipt; it would stand a poor chance, otherwise, against such melody.

The church music of Scotland in the reign of David the First has been graphically reviewed by his friend Ethelred, "of high authority," says Tytler, who argues that it was a pretty close imitation of the English. Ethelred is sarcastic on so many organs and cymbals," such "terrible blowing of the bellows," such vocal "quavering like the neighing of horses." He hits out right and left at the choristers, who gesticulate and grimace "like comedians"-much as Hartley Coleridge, in a racy diatribe on parish clerks of the old school (happily now all but extinct), owns to having been reminded more of Punch than of any animated comedian. Hartley complains of the psalmody becoming, in such hands, as dis

12

SQUALLING-BOXES IN CHURCH.

congregations, as if the people were affrighted or distracted." That is better, however, than the bravura type. The American Professor at the Breakfast-table expresses delight in the unsophisticated blending of all voices and all hearts in one common song of praise: some will sing a little loud perhaps, and now and then an impatient chorister will get a syllable or two in advance, or an enchanted (not enchanting) singer so lose all

tracting and irrelevant an episode as the jigs and countrydances scraped between the acts of a tragedy.

Mr. Newbigging remarks of the musicians of Rossendale Forest, in his topographical history of that district, that, far from being of yesterday's growth, they are a venerable race, and can count their congeners back through the centuries; and although he allows they may be taken at a disadvantage with the "formal and new-fangled squalling-boxes which are regulated by clockwork, and troll forth their music by the yard, as a carding-engine measures out its sliver,” yet, place before them, he adds, the glorious choruses of Handel and Haydn, and the creations of these masters of harmony find ready interpreters and strongly-appreciative minds. Oldfashioned folk are fain to utter the wish that it were everywhere so the harmoniums and school-choirs of our country villages may have improved the church music of our time, but they have destroyed, through no inconsiderable part of England, the old corporations of village singers, through whom the songs and ballads of the country-side had been handed down for centuries. An archæological critic in the Saturday Review supposes that all this is quite as it should be, but is sorry for it nevertheless.