wor

pause, no breathing time for heart or mind-the alternate voices taking up the incessant strain as if the verses were only written as verses to shew where one choir should strike in and dovetail with the other. Can it be a wonder if the whole category of so-called "Services," of which this Te Deum is, as I said, a vaunted type, should fail to harmonize with the devotions of those who have been taught to ship the Father?" After all this recklessness of the logic of pause, the reader will have anticipated a congenial one as to the logic of rhythm and accent. And he will need, I trust, no assurance of mine as to the value of these in all our use, whether of spoken or written language. Now, of the rhythmical recklessness of this Te Deum of Dr. Aldrich, it is, of course, difficult to give any adequate account without the music. I know, also, that an occasional departure from conventional usage may be more than lost in the general fidelity of the whole phrase. This is an affair of discretion: I am quite sure it has nothing to do with such cases as "We acknowledge thee," &c.; or, "con-tin-u-al-ly do ery;" or, "The glo-ri-ous company;" or, "Thine hon-o-RA-ble, true, and only Son."

*

But, to come further down in our chronology, I suppose I can scarce cite a more respectable name in the annals of our Addison and Atterbury church music than that of Dr. Boyce. I shall particularize his "Service in A," because it may be more or less familiar to the majority of your readers. And it is the more instructive, because, in the sixty or seventy years that intervened between the deaths of Dr. Aldrich and of Dr. Boyce, the powers of music as a language had become fully developed and fully recognised. In fact, Dr. Boyce survived, by twenty years, that incomparably greatest of all musicians, whose name has become identified, in English hearts, with sacred song.

And of him I will venture to say, that this is just the special reason why Handel has become, as the Times happily expressed it the other day, "a power" amongst us. It is not so much his profound learning, or his exhaustless fertility, or even that simple but thrilling harmony of which Glück was used to say that "every note draws blood;" as that in his hands music is really a language, and a language as really and truly "married to immortal verse;" that its nervous melodies and its commanding chords do not trample down, but just bring out, the manly eloquence of our Saxon tongue-every step of the majestic march being the sounding forth of the words, not only with the undefinable but constraining power of expressive music, but in all the unbroken energy of their own rhythm and accent. This it most assuredly is, and not learned elaboration, that makes Handel, to this great intelligent nation, the musician of all musicians. This is why the national heart thrills with untiring rapture at each successive burst of his great master tones. This makes his music a type and utterance of the national character itself.

Now of all this Dr. Boyce could not be professionally ignorant. He must have felt, also, one would imagine, the peculiar power of tune or melody. It is here, in fact, that the hearer first catches, and the composer must first have conceived, the true identity of word and

I invite the clerical reader to look a moment, by way of example, at Ephes. iv. or 1 Thess. v. in the inspired original..

note. Melody is nature's music. If the words express the idea, then the melody must express the words. Harmony may add shade and colour; but tune or melody is the essential form. Tried by this instinctive test, Dr. Boyce's Te Deum is wretchedly wanting. I do not say it has no good passages: there are others which compel the painful question, did the composer really mean to pray the words in music? Take, for instance, those pre-eminently solemn sentences, from "We acknowledge thee to be the Lord," to "Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of Thy glory," and "We believe that Thou shalt come," &c. One can scarce conceive a more melancholy contrast than between a page of old Stephen Charnock "on the holiness of God," and the easy-going holiday tune in which Dr. Boyce makes cherubim and seraphim cry, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth;" or, if speaking of music, we propose a musical parallel, between Handel's "Lord, remember David," and Dr. Boyce's "We therefore pray Thee, help Thy servants." It is, indeed, impossible to understand the amazing levity that, amidst sober and mitigating harmonies, pervades, in some of the most critical parts, the tune of this Te Deum, than by the conviction that, with all its learning, there is no heart in it. Labour provided, as in duty bound, the solemnizing shades of colour I just now spoke of; but the root of the matter was wanting. If the style rose a moment above the level of conventionalism, it was at such words as "sharpness of death;" not "the Father everlasting," or "redeemed with Thy precious blood."

I am not hypercritical. I have such a sense of the power of the words, and of the power of music to utter them, that I cannot conceal my sense of these kinds of services. Dr. Aldrich lived at a time when it seems as if musicians were taught to look on tune as but a necessary element in the construction of fugues and canons, or a sort of peg on which to hang some not inexpressive, but by all means correct and authorized harmony. Looking on these phrases of Dr. Boyce in the contemporary light of Handel, it seems as if he had just gone far enough to make melody an offence. I remember a Swiss minister preaching, some years since, in the Protestant church at Thun: it was but too palpable that "he had a heart, and got his" sermons "by it." It was equally evident that he felt bound to provide action as well as words, and that the one was about as much the result of any immediate impulse as the other; for he went on ceaselessly sawing the air, first on this side, and then on that, without the remotest conceivable reference to the sense of what he was saying, but with the imperturbable regularity of an automaton. Dr. Boyce should seem to have been under a similar necessity in regard to tune.

But let me not be misunderstood. It is as a representative, and a most respectable one, that I thus signalize this composer. His faults are those of his class. It was not the fashion, then, to pray the prayers. Men were too genteel to think that the kingdom of heaven could "suffer violence." To say or sing those awful words as if one really meant them, would have been tantamount to an assumption of Methodism. Thus all music is, in truth, a parable.

And here, though not unmindful of limits, I must stop to say a word. I have spoken of music as a language. The fact that it is so, is so the very pivot of the whole question before us, that I must not

hesitate to recur to it. To unfold all I mean by this expression, is beyond my purpose, if not beyond the limits of the most rigorous analysis. Mr. Young has touched some of the points, though professedly by way of suggestion only, in his appendix. I will content myself with a single illustration. That beautiful air of Handel's, "O Thou that tellest," includes all I care to affirm. The absolute identity of word and note throughout the whole air, but pre-eminently at the words "Lift up thy voice with strength, lift it up, be not afraid;" and then the transporting message, "Say unto the cities of Judah," &c., exhibits all one can look for as to rhythm, accent, inflection, progression, and other elements of musical adaptation. Such passages are

worth a volume of rules and definitions.

Now, what I am anxious to bring out is the broad portentous fact, that the Gregorian system of chanting, and the pendulum power, both of tune and harmony, that grew out of it, have organized a prescriptive style as "church music;" which, however, on its own principles, ingenious, interesting, or even solemn and impressive (and I freely and fully admit that in some cases it is all of these) is at best but expressive of the general sentiment, and not the precise, articulate, meaning of the words-does not really originate with their textual sense, but is always following its own impulse, producing its own effect; a sort of parasitic music, mingling with the words-clinging to them like the ivy; but, like the ivy, very beautiful and very fatal.

Of the absolute flippancy (for in its melodic character it is nothing less) of the phrase in which Dr. Boyce has enveloped "Holy, holy, holy Lord God of Sabaoth," it is of course impossible to give due notion without quoting the music. But the reader may get a glimpse when he sees that they are thus presented by the choral voices, 'Ho-ly-ho-ly-ho-ly Lord-God-of-Sab-a-oth-of Sab-a-oth;" the words "ly Lord" being jammed together, and "of Sabaoth" dragged out by repetition, for the undisguisable purpose of accommodation to a musical phrase below the dignity of a melodrame. He has only to turn his eye to Handel's Dettingen Te Deum, to see that the word "holy" is thrice repeated in the same identical notes, and with a reverential pause between. But this is just the difference between religion and scholasticism. To say that Dr. Boyce is not Handel, is to throw dust in one's own eyes. The difference is not one of degree, but of kind.

In contrasting the music of Handel with the "Services" of his contemporaries, I must not stop to speculate on the marvellous fact that his great masterpiece was, at its first performance in London, a notorious failure; and that it was held by its author in silent abeyance for five long years in consequence. One thing I cannot pass unnoticed. Handel was never invited to write, strictly and properly speaking, for the church. The Utrecht and Dettingen Te Deums, no less than the Coronation and Funeral anthems, were state compositions, and owed their origin to royal favour. Of the great mass of productions professedly liturgical, and written for "common prayer," I feel myself warranted in taking the two I have particularized as fair average examples. Some are, of course, incidentally a little better; some not a little worse; but all may be classed under the general head of heartless mechanisms-all technicality, no psychology, vibrating

here and there with solemn as well as elaborate harmonies, but with no vital union with the glorious words; sounding as if some skeleton had been converted into a musical instrument.

All this brings us, therefore, to a paradox perhaps more startling than anything in my first letter. "The Messiah," is the most sacred music in the world, because it is the most faithful, energetic, and impressive musical utterance of the most sacred words. And it is thus the most sacred music, because its author was not indoctrinated in the formalistic schools of "church music;" because, having learned elsewhere the essential elements of musical language, he sat down to his mighty task under the direct unsophisticated influence of those mighty words-not to write a school-boy theme on the cold conventional principles of constructive science, but to give those words, if I may so speak, reverent play; to let them throw themselves into their own musical form in all the freshness and fulness of their own attributes.

But there is yet another point to which I must request earnest attention-without due notice, indeed, of which, all I have been saying may be misapprehended. Mr. Young has made, though without explaining it, a distinction between "Services" and Anthems; and the distinction is, on theological as well as historical grounds, a very important one. Historically, though there was but one Handel, many noble and expressive anthems were written both before this time, and by the very men-our Greenes, Blakes, Clarkes, and Crofts-by whom Te Deums were put forth, thus cold, dry, and utterly lifeless. Theologically, there is a reason for it. The Anthem supposes-if I may use the word reverently-a sort of dramatic exhibition of prayer; the "Service," the actual exercise of prayer itself. The Anthem was, in fact, something like a miniature Oratorio, in which the hearer might indulge any degree of imaginative joy or sorrow, but with no more necessary appropriation of the feelings to his own case, than when a spectator sheds delicious tears over the hero he is to meet next day at a convivial party. The distinction stamped itself on the whole theory of church music. It was not, perhaps, in the written canons; but it was a law-an occult, morbific principle; "the veil was upon the heart."

And it is singularly illustrated by a passage in that matchless work in which Handel has translated into musical language the very deepest meaning of the deepest words. There is one place where the mighty master has, as it were, whispered, "This is an Oratorio, and nothing more." I allude to the well-known chorus, "All we, like sheep." Here the holy prophet makes mournful confession; the musician converts his words, without change of a single syllable, into a dramatic spectacle; we have turned" being repeated over and over again with the most graphic demonstration of wanton sheep skipping hither and thither across the fence. It was not inadvertence, or unskilfulness, much less want of reverence, that misled the musician; but the hypothesis that he was not uttering a prayer, but depicting a scene. We have but to apply the distinction to Anthems and Services, to see how dramatic feeling may have done its utmost in the one, whilst the very demon of formalism held the other in his icy grasp.

The contrast comes out in striking relief when we find the church

instinct of Dr. Pepusch, who lived so late as A.D. 1750, demanding a direct return to the semi-barbaric chant of pope Gregory; and the musical instinct of Dr. Burney exclaiming, "If imperfection in one place be perfection in another, let a mutilated scale be a meritorious characteristic only in the church."*

But it becomes incomparably more instructive when we put this latter personage himself-critic, historian, and doctor of music-in the witness-box.

Before writing his elaborate history, in four thick quarto volumes, Dr. Burney made a special tour, collecting, from every place and individual of eminence in the then musical world, whatever might contribute to the completeness of his projected work. This "Musical Tour" he published; and I venture to make the following quotation from it:

"After studying counterpoint, which he" (the accomplished musician of the musical Frederick the Great) " calls music for the eye, he went to work for the ear; and was then obliged to unlearn things in practice which theory had taught him.”

"C. P. E. Bach (whom Burney calls one of the greatest composers that ever existed') spoke irreverently of canons; which, he said, were dry and despicable pieces of pedantry, that any one might make who would sacrifice his time to them."

"Scarletti said, he had broken through all the rules of composition; and that there was scarcely any other rule worth the attention of a man of genius than that of not displeasing the only sense of which music is the object." Burney himself observes that, "from all the learned calculations of professed mathematicians, not a single piece of practical music has ever been produced that is supportable to the ears of persons of taste." That "Graun was among the first Germans to quit fugue and learned contrivances, and to allow that such a thing as melody exists, which harmony should support and not suffocate." That "Gluck is simplifying music;" that, his works are sufficient proof that the first vocal music was the voice of passion and the cry of nature." "†

All this is sufficiently decisive; but what then? What says this same judicious writer as to church music? I extract the following extraordinary passage from the self-same volume :

:

"By church music, properly so called, I mean grave and scientific compositions, for voices only, of which the excellence consists more in good harmony, learned modulation, and fugues upon ingenious and other subjects"-(musical phrases)—“ than in light airs and turbulent accompaniments."‡

As there is no question here of light airs or turbulent accompaniments, we may confine ourselves to the affirmative parts of the doctor's statements. Nor need we even stay to notice the total absence of all mention of the words the "voices only" may have to sing. Language can scarce present a stronger or a stranger contrast than we find in these two categories. And that the above may not be taken for the record of a transient thought, I must confirm it by another quotation from his greater work, where this same Dr. Burney, the friend of Gluck, of Bach, and Metastasio, and Burke, and Johnson, lays it down as a golden rule that—

"Good taste has banished fugue, canon, and elaborate counterpoint from dramatic music, yet sound judgment has retained them in the church."§

Is it possible for anything to be more conclusive? Can the most

*Hist. of Music, Vol. ii. p. 23.

+ Burney's Musical Tour, Vol. ii. pp. 182, 251; Vol. i. p. 248; Vol. ii. pp. 224-231; Vol. i. pp. 237-289.

Ibid. Vol. i. p. 330.

Hist. of Music, Vol. iii. p. 195.