Chapter 2

Distrusting their talent lest it should run away with them, and they neglect the rubrics, Dr. Newman was sensitive over musicians of the day setting to work upon liturgy. Of sorts of liberty taken we have modern examples in Gounod's _Mors et Vita_ Oratorio, where _O felix culpa_, &c., is planted in the middle of the _Dies Irae_, and in his _Messe Solennelle_, where _Domine, non sum dignus_, &c., figures as a solo in the _Agnus Dei_ (a less objectionable case, the treatment being fortunately devotional). Berlioz, too, in his _Requiem_, introduces before the _Tuba mirum_ the words, _Et iterum venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos_. And in a passage where he would appear to be depicting Beethoven's power, after alluding to "the marvellous development which musical science has undergone in the last century," Dr. Newman continues: "Doubtless, here, too, the highest genius may be made subservient to religion," but "it is certain that religion must be alive and on the defensive, for if its servant sleep a potent enchantment will steal over it.... If, then, a great master in this mysterious science ... throws himself on his own gifts, trusts its inspirations and absorbs himself in those thoughts which, though they come to him in the way of nature belong to things above nature, it is obvious he will neglect everything else. Rising in his strength he will break through the trammels of words; he will scatter human voices, even the sweetest, to the winds; he will be borne upon nothing else than the fullest flood of sounds which art has enabled him to draw from mechanical contrivances; he will go forth as a giant, as far as ever his instruments can reach, starting from their secret depths fresh and fresh elements of beauty and grandeur as he goes, and pouring them together into still more marvellous and rapturous combinations; and well indeed, and lawfully, while he keeps to that line which is his own; but should he happen to be attracted, as he well may, by the sublimity, so congenial to him, of the Catholic doctrine and ritual, should he engage in sacred themes, should he resolve by means of his art to do honour to the Mass, or the Divine Office--(he cannot have a more pious, a better purpose, and religion will gracefully accept what he gracefully offers; but) is it not certain from the circumstances of the case, that he will be carried on rather to use religion than to minister to it, unless religion is strong on its own ground, and reminds him that if he would do honour to the highest of subjects, he must make himself its scholar, must humbly follow the thoughts given him, and must aim at the glory, not of his own gift, but of the Great Giver."[28] How entirely is this spirit in accord with the Congregation of Rites; with the sentiments, indeed, of every lover of true church-music. He was thus very slow to take (if he ever really took) to new-comers on the field of sacred music. And holding, as he did, that no good work could be adequately adjudged without a thorough knowledge of it, he was disinclined to be introduced to fresh musical names at all, on the bare chance, that might never occur, of what had been a casual acquaintanceship ripening into intimate friendship. He had in early days found time and opportunity to comprehend certain masters, Corelli, Handel, Haydn, Romberg, Mozart, and Beethoven, but Schubert, Schumann, Wagner ("I cannot recollect all the fellows' names"[29]); who were these strangers, intruding somewhat late in the evening upon a dear old family party? Thus, writing of Mendelssohn's chief sacred work in March, 1871, which he had been reluctantly induced to go and listen to, and which he never got to hear again: "I was very much disappointed the one time that I heard the _Elijah_, not to meet with a beautiful melody from beginning to end. What can be more beautiful than Handel's, Mozart's, and Beethoven's melodies?" Now, of course, there is plenty of melody in the _Elijah_, though it may be conceded that Mendelssohn's melodious gift is less _copious_ than that of Mozart, but the fact was, Cardinal Newman never got to know the _Elijah_, doubtless deemed it long, and felt content to feed upon the musical _pabulum_ that he had so long found satisfying. And underlying this particular form of the _gravamen_ against Mendelssohn, we should say that there existed a species of irritation with some of the modern oratorio. Was it not very possibly in his eyes a kind of Protestant rejuvenescence of an eighteenth century Biblical institution, all quietly founded, without acknowledgment, on St. Philip's own Catholic creation,[30] and nowadays bidding fair to do duty at convenient intervals for proper religious worship with large numbers alike of church-goers and of people who never go to church? Better oratorio here, it may be said, than nothing at all, and that may be conceded; but we have an impression that the Cardinal looked jealously at the use of Scripture for general musical performances in concert-halls. He was a little put out, too, by librettists interlarding Holy Writ with their own "copy." Scripture was good, and Gounod, for example, might be good, but both together in literary collaboration were--well, not so good. While allowing that there was something of interest in the history of the latter's _Redemption_ Oratorio, insomuch as when first conceived long ago its composer had entertained thoughts of embracing the religious state, he could with difficulty be induced to go and hear it, at its first production in Birmingham on the last day of August, 1882. Nor could he be got to say anything about it by way of a compliment. "As the work of a man of genius one does not like to criticize it," was what he let fall, and he was rather troubled by its "March to Calvary," which he likened in private to "the bombardment of Alexandria." At the 1876 Festival, Wagner's _Supper of the Apostles_ was to his ear "sound and fury," and Brahms' _Triumphlied_ fared no better in 1882. We happened to be with him at the Friday morning performance, September 1. A certain party came in late, and talked away behind us all through the G minor Symphony of Mozart, whose "exuberant inventiveness"[31] excited our wonder. When the din of the _Triumphlied_ came on, her voice was quite drowned, and the Cardinal whispered: "Brahms is a match for her."[32]

[Footnote 28: _Idea_, dis. iv. 80, 81. In a Bull of 1749, Pope Benedict the Fourteenth lays great stress on the words being heard and understood, "Curandum est ut verba quae cantantur plane perfecteque intelligantur," and this is best secured in the unaccompanied chant. In an interesting article of the _Dublin Review_ (New Series, vol. ii. January-April, 1864), the effect of official pronouncements on the questions affecting the plain chant and concerted music is thus succinctly summed up: "1. That music, properly so called, may be admitted as well as plain chant. 2. That the music of the church is to possess a certain gravity and to minister to devotion. 3. That instrumental music may be allowed, under certain restrictions."]

[Footnote 29: _Discussions and Arguments_, p. 343, Fourth Edit. 1882.]

[Footnote 30: We have it, however, on good authority that a Jesuit Father told a Mr. Okely that "one of our Fathers received him (Mendelssohn) into the Church shortly before his death." Our informant thinks the occurrence took place in Switzerland. If so, the fact ought to be better known than it is. Moreover, he adds, that the late Father W. Maher, S.J., on one occasion, previous to Mendelssohn's _Lauda Sion_ being done at Farm Street, addressed the congregation: "Perhaps you would like to know that the author of the music we are about to hear died a Catholic."]

[Footnote 31: _Oxford University Sermons_, p. 346.]

[Footnote 32: She subsequently resumed talk, trying to draw him out about Ireland and Gounod, but all in vain. It was nearly 3 p.m. ere this _morning_ concert came to an end, when a second lady, introduced by a noble lord, appeared on the scene, and detained him upon questions relative to the state of the soul after death, what St. Thomas had said, &c. Meanwhile sweepers, uninterested in this ill-timed discussion, were pursuing their avocation in the emptying hall, and stewards were set wondering as to when His Eminence would be released.]

He got to know fairly well Mendelssohn's canzonet quartet and Schumann's pianoforte quintet Op. 44; but we recall no musical works heard by him for the first time in very late life making any particular impression on the Father, with one notable exception; Cherubini's First Requiem in C minor, done at the Festival, August 29, 1879. We were to have gone with him, but a Father who accompanied him wrote to us instead next day: "The Father was quite overcome by it, and that is the fact. He kept on saying, 'beautiful, wonderful,' and such-like exclamations. At the _Mors stupebit_ he was shaking his head in his solemn way, and muttering, 'beautiful, beautiful.' He admired the fugue _Quam olim_ very much, but the part which struck him most by far, and which he spoke of afterwards as we drove home, is the ending of the _Agnus Dei_--he could not get over it--the lovely note C which keeps recurring as the 'requiem' approaches eternity." When it was done twice in its true home, the church, later, on the 2nd and 13th November, 1886, he said, "It is magnificent music." "That is a beautiful Mass" (adding, with a touch of pathos), "but when you get as old as I am, it comes rather too home." A diary noting the service on All Souls' day, says: "His Eminence was at the throne in his purple robes. I was in the gallery at the end of the nave, and the dim-lit sanctuary (with the Cardinal's _zucchetto_ the only bit of bright colour in the gloom), the sublime music, all had a most impressive effect." On November 13, 1885, he heard in the church and for the first time, the Florentine's Second Requiem in D minor, for male voices; and thought it beautiful and devotional, and in no way lacking in effect through the absence of _soprani_ and _contralti_, which he had not missed. He was most struck with the _piano_ passage in canon beginning with the words _Solvet saeclum_. On September 1, 1882, he heard at the Festival the same composer's Mass in C, and characterized as "beautiful" the fugue at the end of the _Gloria_, the part in the Offertory where the chorus enters in support of the soprano solo, and the conclusion of the _Dona_. It came as a relief to him after Brahms, who was not understood at a first hearing, and this inability in general to grasp good music at once is exhibited in his Italian correspondence. "This last week," he writes from Rome in April, 1833, "we have heard the celebrated _Miserere_, or rather the two _Misereres_, for there are two compositions by Allegri and Boii [it should be Bai, and a third is now added, composed by Father Baini] so like each other that the performers themselves can scarcely tell the difference between them. One is performed on the Thursday and the other on Good Friday. The voices are certainly very surprising; there is no instrument to support them, but they have the art of continuing their notes so long and equally that the effect is as if an organ were playing, or rather an organ of violin strings, for the notes are clearer, more subtle and piercing, and more impassioned (so to say) than those of an organ. The music itself is doubtless very fine, as everyone says, but I found myself unable to understand all parts of it. Here and there it was extremely fine, but it is impossible to understand such a composition on once or twice hearing. In its style it is more like Corelli's music than any other I know (though very different too). And this is not wonderful, as Corelli was Master of the Pope's Chapel, and so educated in the school of Allegri, Palestrina, and the rest. These are the only services we have been to during the week."[33]

[Footnote 33: Mozley, _Corr._ i. 380. We do not think that Corelli ever was Papal choirmaster. For some years, however, he led the orchestra of the Roman Opera, and was a great friend of Cardinal Ottoboni. How different the _Tenebrae_ music at St. Peter's can be from that at the Sixtine chapel, is seen by the three _Misereres_ at the former being by Basili, Guglielmi, and Zingarelli, all composers of light opera.]

For good operatic music Cardinal Newman had, we believe, more of a liking than for the more modern oratorio. Rossini, as a religious composer, was, we fear, in his bad books, yet when the choice had to be made at the 1879 Festival as to what performance he would attend, he at first said, "I shall go once, and I choose _Mose in Egitto_." He was, he continued, fond of operatic music, and heard very little of it. "However," he added to two of the Fathers, "there's no reason why you shouldn't go to all." Perhaps there was one reason against that course; it would be expensive. There is an amusing notice of Rossini in the Anglican Letters of Mr. Newman. "Bowden tells me," he wrote in March, 1824, "that Sola, his sister's music-master, brought Rossini to dine in Grosvenor Place not long since; and that as far as they could judge (for he does not speak English) he is as unassuming and obliging a man as ever breathed. He seemed highly pleased with everything, and anxious to make himself agreeable. Labouring, indeed, under a severe cold, he did not sing, but accompanied two or three of his own songs in the most brilliant manner.... As he came in a private, not a professional, way, Bowden called on him, and found him surrounded, in a low, dark room, by about eight or nine Italians, all talking as fast as possible, who, with the assistance of a great screaming _macaw_, and of Madame Rossini in a dirty gown and her hair in curl papers, made such a clamour that he was glad to escape as fast as he could."[34]

[Footnote 34: Mozley, _Corr._ i. 83.]

The revised Latin play, and music in conjunction, and all played by the boys themselves, were two striking traditions (not, we trust, to die out) of the Oratory School in our time, and they were institutions introduced by Dr. Newman there, and rooted in his affections from boyhood's associations. "Music was a family taste and pursuit," writes the late Miss Mozley, "Mr. Newman, the father, encouraged it in his children. In those early days they could get up performances among themselves, operatic or simply dramatic."[35] At Ealing School he took the parts of Davus in the _Andria_, Cyrus in the _Adelphi_, and Pythias in the _Eunuchus_, as he told us himself; a varied _repertoire_, _i.e._ the confidential family servant, the young man about town, and the maid of all work! We see not only plays, and then music, and lastly the two together, but original composition also, early engaging his attention. He tells us, "In the year 1812 I think I wrote a mock drama of some kind.... And at one time I wrote a dramatic piece in which Augustus comes on. Again, I wrote a burlesque opera in 1815, composing tunes for the songs."[36]

[Footnote 35: _Ibid._ i. 19.]

[Footnote 36: Mozley, _Corr._ i. 19.]

As to composing, he writes to his mother in March, 1821: "I am glad to be able to inform you that Signor Giovanni Enrico Neandrini has finished his first composition. The melody is light and airy, and is well supported by the harmony."[37] We may add that Mr. Newman, Mr. Walker (afterwards Canon of Westminster), and Mr. Bowles, played together at Littlemore instrumental trios written by the Cardinal himself, and which Father Bowles once told us were "most pleasing." What has become of them?[38] On our showing the Father in 1869 an original song to his words "The Haven,"[39] he pointed to the second chord, exclaiming, "Ah, a diminished seventh!" We had no notion at that time what perpetrated iniquity that might be, but two years later he wrote: "Every beginner deals in diminished sevenths. At least, I did as a boy. I first learnt the chord from the overture to _Zauberfloete_; and henceforth it figured with powerful effect in my compositions. You must try to make a melody. Without it you cannot compose. Perhaps, however, it is that which makes a musical genius." If you have no ideas, in fact, go in _con amore_, for the chord of the diminished seventh.

[Footnote 37: _Ibid._ p. 61.]

[Footnote 38: Mrs. J. Mozley to J.H.N., December 1, 1842: "I suppose you are able to make use of your violin now you are at Littlemore. I have been practising hard lately, and wish you could come, that I might turn my practice to good account." (Mozley, _Corr._ ii. 405.) Father Lockhart, too, refers to Newman's playing at Littlemore "exquisite sonatas of Beethoven." (_Paternoster Review_, Sept. 1890.) Father Coffin, afterwards Bishop of Southwark, assisted at the musical performances.]

[Footnote 39: _Verses on Various Occasions_, p. 86, Edit. 1888.]

On receiving a march, written by a pupil in 1873, he gently indicated faults while giving encouragement, and wrote in July, "It shows you are marching in your accomplishments. It is a very promising beginning.... On reading it, I thought I had found some grammatical faults, but perhaps more is discovered in the province of discords, concords, and coincidences of notes than when I was a boy." And in September of the same year, "Thank you for your new edition of _St. Magnus_. On what occasion did he march? I know Bishops were warlike in the middle ages. However, whenever it was, his march is very popular here, and it went off with great _eclat_." Then he wrote to his correspondent in April, 1880, who talked about not being "skilled," "Why should you not qualify yourself to deserve the title of a 'skilled musician?' 'Skilled' is another word for 'grammatical' or 'scholarlike.'"

When an Oratory organist in the early days was shown a hymn with tune and accompaniment all composed by Dr. Newman himself (for insertion in the printed Birmingham Oratory Hymn Book), unaware of the authorship he at once corrected some of the chords. The Father Superior noticed this, and asked him why he had made the changes. The organist proceeded to advert to some consecutive fifths in the harmony. But, urged the Father, Beethoven and others make use of them. "Ah," came the answer, "it's all very well for those great men to do as they like, but that don't make it right for ordinary folk to do as they like." Dr. Newman therefore learned that musically he was only an ordinary folk, and he would have been the first to laugh down the notion that he was anything else; for a modest estimate of himself in many things was a very marked characteristic with him, and made him call his beautiful verse "ephemeral effusions" to Badeley, and write in May, 1835, _apropos_ of a suggested uniform edition of his revised Latin plays, "I have not that confidence in my own performance to think I can compete with a classical Jesuit" (_i.e._ Father Jouvency). In 1828 he had contemplated writing an article on music for the _London Review_, along with one on poetry. The latter, in the event, alone saw the day; the former "seems to have remained an idea only."[40] He is apologetic in the _Idea of a University_, when about to descant so eloquently upon music: "If I may speak," he says, "of matters which seem to lie beyond my own province;"[41] but in very early Oratory days at Edgbaston, he essayed some lectures on music to some of the community in the practice-room. And at the opening of the new organ there in August, 1877, he "preached a most beautiful discourse [taken down at the time], upon the event of the day; and on music, first as a great natural gift, then as an instrument in the hands of the Church; its special prominence in the history of St. Philip and the Oratory; the part played by music in the history of God's dealings with man from first to last, from the thunders of Mount Sinai to the trumpets of the Judgment; the mysterious and intimate connection with the unseen world established by music, as it were the unknown language of another state. Its quasi-sacramental efficacy, _e.g._, in driving away the evil spirit in Saul and in bringing upon Eliseus the spirit of prophecy; the grand pre-eminence of the organ in that it gave the nearest representation of the voice of God, while the sound of strings might be taken as more fitted to express the varying emotions of man's state here on earth."[42]

[Footnote 40: _Essays_, i. Fifth Edit. 1881; Mozley, _Corr._ i. 194.]

[Footnote 41: _Idea_, dis. iv. 80.]

[Footnote 42: _Tablet_, 25 Aug. 1877.]

At Oxford, in his time, he said, there were none of the facilities for music that now form part of the institutions of the place; there was little to encourage individual musical talent. At St. Clement's we only learn, "I had a dispute with my singers in May, which ended in their leaving the church, and we now sing _en masse_,"[43] and in June still, "My singers are quite mute."[44] At St. Mary's, Mr. Bennett, who was killed on his way to Worcester Festival by the upsetting of a coach,[45] and after him Mr. Elvey, elder brother of Sir George Elvey, sometime organist at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, were Mr. Newman's organists. "I shall never forget," writes a hearer, "the charm it was to hear Elvey play the organ for the hymn at Newman's afternoon parochial service at St. Mary's on a Sunday. The method was to play the tune completely through on the organ before the voices took it up, and the way he did it was simply perfect."

[Footnote 43: Mozley, _Corr._ i. 97.]

[Footnote 44: _Ibid._]

[Footnote 45: "There is a chant of his composing," writes a friend, "which was reckoned at the time a stroke of genius--quite a new idea. I have it in a Collection made by his father, who was organist of Chichester Cathedral," and Bennett's elder brother "was my master at Chichester in 1842. He used to speak of his brother's genius, and what a loss he was to music."]

Still the Anglican service, taken as a whole, was scarcely then calculated to stir artistic fervour, and this listener, so delighted with Elvey at St. Mary's, went home to his village parish church only to hear the hymn murdered, or if it were Advent, Christmas, or Easter, a tradesman shout from the gallery, "We will now sing to the praise and glory of God a _h_anthem!" when a motet would be sacrificed to incompetency with every circumstance of barbarity attending the execution. Mr. Newman in language of appalling force, written a year after his conversion, has described the Anglican service as "a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piecemeal; prayers clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no longer even good prose; antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, shovelled away; Scripture lessons turned into chapters; heaviness, feebleness, unwieldiness, where the Catholic rites had had the lightness and airiness of a spirit; vestments chucked off, lights quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worship annihilated; a dreariness which could be felt, and which seemed the token of an incipient Socinianism, forcing itself upon the eye, the ear, the nostrils of the worshipper; a smell of dust and damp, not of incense; a sound of ministers preaching Catholic prayers, and parish clerks droning out Catholic canticles; the royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in the place of the mysterious altar; and long cathedral aisles unused, railed off, like the tombs (as they were) of what had been and was not; and for orthodoxy, a frigid, unelastic, inconsistent, dull, helpless dogmatic, which could give no just account of itself, yet was intolerant of all teaching which contained a doctrine more or a doctrine less, and resented every attempt to give it a meaning."[46] The Catholic Church's ritual he found very different.