Part 12
The transcendental Mr. March would never have sung it; but he and his knew something akin to those resolute discriminations.
Another point is perhaps even more interesting. There are not, I believe, any other books in the world so blatantly full of morality--of moral issues, and moral tests, and morals passionately abided by--and at the same time so empty of religion. The Bible is never quoted; almost no one goes to church; and they pray only when very young and in extreme cases. The only religious allusion, so far as I know, in _Little Women_, is the patronizing mention of the Madonna provided for Amy by Aunt March’s Catholic maid. And even then, you can see how broad-minded Mrs. March considers herself, to permit Amy the quasi-oratory; and Amy does not attempt to disguise the fact that she admires the picture chiefly for its artistic quality. Yet it is only fair to remember that, in Miss Alcott’s day, people were reading, without so much as one grain of salt, the confessions of “escaped” nuns, and the novels of Mrs. Julia McNair Wright--and that Elsie Dinsmore developed brain fever when her father threatened to send her to a convent school. Perhaps Mrs. March had a right to flatter herself. Again, as I say, these are documents.
There are many other straws to show which way the wind blows. Would any one but Miss Alcott, for example, have allowed her chief heroine to marry a Professor Bhaer? No modern child ever quite recovers from the shock of it. But we must remember that, in Miss Alcott’s time, German metaphysicians were not without honor in Concord. The breath of reform, too, is hot upon the pages. “Temperance”--remember Charlie’s unlucky glass of champagne, and Laurie’s promise to Meg on her wedding-day; the festivals of the virtuous are a perpetual bath of lemonade. “Woman Suffrage”--recall the discussions alluded to in “The Pickwick Portfolio,” and the fate of the few scoffers in co-educational Plumfield. The children are all passionate little Abolitionists; and the youths are patriotic with a fervid, unfamiliar patriotism, which touches, at its dim source, emotions that to us are almost more prehistoric than historic.
In the minds of Miss Alcott’s world, there is still a lively distrust of the British. They are wont to oppress their colonies, and they cheat at croquet. Indeed, Miss Alcott’s characters look a little askance at all foreigners--except German professors. There is no prophecy of the Celtic Revival in their condescending charity to poor Irishwomen. The only people, not themselves, whom they wholly respect, are the negroes. The rich men are nearly all East India merchants, and their money goes eventually to endow educational institutions. The young heroes have a precocious antipathy to acquiring wealth for its own sake. Demi would rather, he says, sweep door-mats in a publishing-house than go into business, like “Stuffy” and his kind. “I would rather be a door-keeper in the house of the Lord”--it would hardly over-emphasize Demi’s so typical feeling for the sanctity of the printed page; for the utter desirability of the publisher’s own office, where, as he says, great men go in and out, with respect. And--to complete the evidence--the books do not lack the note of New English austerity, though they come by it indirectly enough. The New English literary tradition seems to be fairly clear: either passion must be public, or, if it is private, it must be thwarted. There is a good deal of public passion--for philanthropy, for education, and what-not--in the books, after all. There is no private passion at all: though the books brim with sentiment. Miss Alcott writes as one who had never loved. It would be difficult to find, anywhere, stories so full of love-making and so empty of emotion.
Straws show which way the wind blows; and these straws are all borne in the same direction. Is not this the New England on which, if not in which, we were all brought up? Any honest New Englander--a New Englander of the villages, I mean--will admit that the New English are singularly ungifted for social life and manners. We suspected that long ago, when we first read Miss Alcott, if we happened to turn, after _Little Women_, to any one of Mrs. Ewing’s or Mrs. Molesworth’s stories. Imagine Jo dressed, as Mrs. Molesworth’s heroines all were, by Walter Crane! The real “old-fashioned girl” was not Polly Milton, but Griselda, in _The Cuckoo Clock_. Polly was simply of no fashion at all. There was some (wistful?) sense of this in us, even then. Yet of course we admitted that, in comparison, Mrs. Molesworth lacked plot--as Heaven knows she did! Any New Englander of the villages is familiar, too, with the passion for “education”; a passion that, I suspect, you can match now only in the Middle West. We all know that bigoted scholarliness, in combination, precisely, with nasal and ungrammatical speech, which there is no special point in flattering with the term “idiomatic.” One or two of Mr. Churchill’s novels have preserved to us instances of it. We are fortunate if we have come off quite free of the superstition, so prevalent through the March family, that a book--“any old” book--is sacred. We scoff heartily at the _parvenu_ whose books are bound without first being printed; but I am not sure that any pure-bred villager would not rather have sham books than no books at all. We cannot help it. No other furniture seems to us quite so good.
We have all been brought up, too, to be moral snobs. New England mothers must often be put to it to find purely moral grounds for discriminating against some of the playmates their children would ignorantly bring home. They must often yearn to say, without indirection, “I do not wish you to play with the butcher’s little girl, and her being in your Sunday-school class makes no difference whatever.” But the real New England mother never does. She must manage it otherwise; since the only legitimate basis for her discriminations would be some sort of proof that butchers’ little girls were apt to be naughty. The respective fates of Nat and Dan are, I dare to say, as accurate as if they had been recorded by the official investigators of the Eugenics Society. The lack of religion, some one may object, is anything but typically New English. Perhaps, a hundred years ago, it would not have been. And we have not, to be sure, been transcendental with impunity: we have the Calvinistic Unitarian. But the average New England conscience has always had a more natural turn for ethics than for pure piety. Children in Miss Alcott’s books were brought up like ourselves, to obey their parents. It was Elsie Dinsmore, on her Southern plantation, who (like a Presbyterian St. Rose of Lima) defied her father for religion’s sake. Of course we all had to read about Elsie surreptitiously. We knew that without asking. There was a good deal of plain thinking, as well as of high thinking, in our and Miss Alcott’s world. As for our unworldliness: we have come a long way since Miss Alcott; yet I verily believe that, even now, almost any bounder can take us in if he poses as a philosopher. So many have done it!
I have not done more than indicate Miss Alcott’s exceeding fidelity. Begin recalling her for yourself, and you will agree that she gives us social life as New Englanders, for decades, have, on the whole, known it. The relations of parent and child, brother and sister, community and individual, of playmates, of lovers, of citizens, are all such as we know them. They are familiar to us, if not positively in our own experience. Life has grown more complicated everywhere. Yet I doubt if, even now, any New English child would instinctively call Miss Alcott’s people underbred. We still understand their code, if we do not practise it. New England is still something more than a convenient term for map-makers. These be our own villages.
THE SENSUAL EAR
I have a friend who always calls--when he remembers to, for alas! he sometimes forgets--the Methodist Church building in our village, a “conventicle.” I wish he did not sometimes forget, for nothing makes me so at peace with my hereditary nonconformity as to hear an Anglican imply, by such verbal affectations, what he thinks of the dissidence of dissent. Methodism is as foreign to me as Anglicanism; yet, I doubt not, the Epworth League sings, in its handsome “conventicle,” just the hymns that of old were sung by the Y. P. S. C. E. It is many a year since I attended a Y. P. S. C. E. meeting; and I have an idea--it is almost a fear--that _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_, is by this time _Gospel Hymns, No. 10_, and that some of the most haunting melodies are gone therefrom. Perhaps the “Endeavorers” are now chanting _Hymns Ancient and Modern_. But I hope not. Oh, I cannot think it!
When life grows very dreary; when the Hindenburg line seems to turn from shadow to substance; when the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies has indulged in a new “democratic” vagary; when flour has gone up two dollars more a barrel and the priceless potato is but a soggy pearl, deserving to be cast before swine; when another member of the family has broken a leg or had appendicitis--then my husband (he, too, of yore an “Endeavorer”) and I are wont to burst, simultaneously, mechanically, unthinking and unconspiring, into song. And the songs we hear each other humming in separate recesses of the house are _Gospel Hymns_. Humming, we converge upon the drawing-room from our different retreats; and sometimes we look each other in the eye and say hardily, “Let’s.” Then we sit down and incite each other to a desperate vocalism. We see how many we can remember, out of our evangelistic youth, and we sing them all. We remember a good many, if truth be told; and once I found a rapt huddle of colored servants on the stair-landing getting a free “revival.” Neither of us has a voice worth mentioning, so I think that we must, without realizing it, have reproduced the fervor along with the words.
They were cannily arranged, those Moody and Sankey hymns: if you sing them at all, you cannot help pounding down on the essential words. They wallow in beat and accent. “A _Shelter_ in the _Time_ of _Storm_.” We usually begin with that. It is ineluctable. But oh, how I wish that either of us could remember more than one “verse” of
Well, wife, I’ve found the model church, And worshipped there to-day; It made me think of good old times Before my hair was gray.
I have never heard it sung--I never “belonged” to the Y. P. S. C. E.--but my husband says that he has. My husband also says that he has heard “the trundle-bed one.” I do not believe it, though he is a truthful man. I cannot believe it; the less, that he remembers none of the words, and that it is only I, who recall, visually, in the lower corner of a page,--
Poking (perhaps it was another verb) ’mid the dust and rafters There I found my trundle-bed.
A slight altercation always develops here. Why should he be more royalist than the king? It is not conceivable that it was ever _sung_; and even he cannot remember the tune; so we join forces in “To the Work, to the Work,” or “There Shall Be Showers of Blessing.”
(Mercy-drops round us are _fall_-ing, But for the _showers_ we plead.)
He has an uncanny and inexplicable prejudice against “God Be with You Till We Meet Again”--perhaps because they always sang it for the last one. But I can usually get him to “oblige” with a solo--“Throw Out the Life-Line”--which I am sure was not in “No. 5,” because we never, never sang it; though I do remember hearing a returning delegate to a Y. P. S. C. E. convention say that it was the one “the people of Montreal seemed to like best.” Somewhere in the nineties, Endeavorers in thousands sang it all up and down Sherbrooke Street, apparently. Well: I am like the people of Montreal. It always “gets” me, in the dissenting marrow of my dissenting soul; and when my husband has “obliged” me with it, I am ready to forget the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies. What _can_ the devil do in the face of “Throw Out the Life-Line,” and its “linked sweetness long drawn out”?
By all of which it is made evident that, in the matter of hymns, mine is the “sensual ear.” (Not so my husband’s: he sings them in the critical spirit, as he might illustrate a violation of rhetoric. He loathes “Throw Out the Life-Line,” even while the chorus makes his voice appeal and yearn in spite of him. As I said, he does it only to oblige.) The church of my choosing, if not of my profession, is the same as that of my friend who talks of “conventicles.” There I sing _Hymns Ancient and Modern_ (or that American corruption thereof, the _Hymnal_) with the most conforming. And certainly, except for a few time-honored chants which they share with all Dissenters, their hymns are to me “ditties of no tone.” My husband disagrees with me; but he is not, equally with me, the predestined prey of the brass band. He is better educated than I; has listened oftener at twilight to the enchanted choirs of New College and Magdalen. He likes the non-committal melodies of the _Hymnal_ far, far better than the sentimental _parti pris_ of _Gospel Hymns_.
I know as well as he does that the sentimental quality is of a sort that ought not to be there at all. I know that the music of “Throw Out the Life-Line” belongs morally with the music of “Old Black Joe,” and “Oh, Promise Me,” and “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night.” I know that the appeal of that tune is sensuous and emotional and personal, and, for a hymn, all, all wrong. I realize that, for church, Gregorian is the only wear; and that the less you diverge therefrom, the more decent you are. I, too, prefer Bach and Palestrina, and, for congregational singing, the oldest Latin hymns you can get. I can even see that the aridity and sameness of the Anglican “hymn-tunes” are more dignified, and more to the purpose, than the plangent and catchy refrains by which Sankey lured “wandering boys” back to be safe-folded with “the ninety and nine.” And yet, when my husband (by request) croons “Throw Out the Life-Line,” I cannot resist. I am evangelized.
True, I perceived this perniciousness early. Perhaps the white light dawned on me when, in Y. P. S. C. E. days, an older friend (who was in love) confided to me that the words of a certain Gospel Hymn seemed to her not altogether reverent: they could so easily be applied to a human love-affair. She was quite right, I think. Some of us have felt the same about Crashaw and Giles Fletcher. But though the words were, in all conscience, carnal enough, I believe it was the tune that did the trick and set her dreaming of her young hero.
For I am his, and he is mine, Forever and forever.
Oh, the yearning of that refrain: slow and honeyed and melancholy as “My Old Kentucky Home” or “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River”! Musically, doubtless, not so good; but musically of the same school, and suggestive--it, too--of plantations and moonlight and banjos and rich, heart-rending negro voices. My friend was right: they are not in the best tradition of reverence, those Moody and Sankey hymns. And yet--here’s the rub--why do we remember them, when all but the most universal of the hymns we sang in church and sang much oftener than these, have gone beyond recapturing? My husband resents remembering them; he would far rather remember more worthy things. But I do not: I would not, for anything, lose them out of the rag-bag which is my mind. I am not sure I would not rather lose certain stanzas from the Greek Anthology, which come to my lips in much the same unvolitional fashion. From those refrains I reconstruct a whole moral and social world, even as Cuvier reconstructed his mastodon. You remember what the “Evening Hymn” did for Mottram and Lowndes in “The End of the Passage”? Just that “I Know that My Redeemer Lives” does for me. And--this is the point--“Rock of Ages” and “Holy, Holy, Holy,” do not do it; though I knew these even earlier, and am still, on occasion, singing them. So it is not all a question of association and the power of youthful memories. It is the very quality of the music--the words were negligible, when they were not atrocious--that touched in me, and can still touch, something popular, emotional, vulgar; something very low-brow and democratic, not to say mobbish. “The sensual ear.”
Even in youth, I had the sense to differentiate. “Jerusalem the Golden,” discovered in another hymn-book than our own, was for many years my favorite hymn--even during those years when I was singing “Beulah Land” and “Wonderful Words of Life.” I knew it was better; I knew I liked it better; I knew that it had more to do with religion than all the “Beulah Lands” ever written. True, the words helped; and the words of the Gospel Hymns were a hindrance, even then. But my soul recognized the validity, the reality of the music. “Jerusalem the Golden” remained my favorite until “The Son of God Goes Forth to War” succeeded it in my affections; always to be, until I die, my very favorite. And even while we sang--
And view the shining glory shore, My heaven, my home, for evermore.
I had memories of something still better than “Jerusalem the Golden”: memories of an interval in a French convent where we chanted the Magnificat to its proper plain-song; Though, even there--but I shall come to that later.
Not long ago, we had a friend staying with us who was bred a Romanist. How Moody and Sankey got mentioned, I do not know--but they did; and our friend insisted that Moody and Sankey could not conceivably be so bad as the modern Catholic hymns. We exclaimed; she reaffirmed. There was nothing for it but to put the burning question to the proof. Quietly, by the fire, we staged a little contest. We sang our Gospel Hymns; and she--well, she sang dreadful things. There was in particular a hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodalities.... No, I think her “exhibit” was really worse than ours. It had the rag-time flatness without the rag-time catchiness, or the crooning negro quality. Bred up in part on such modern by-products of the Holy Catholic Church, no wonder that she succumbed utterly to my husband’s rendition of “Throw Out the Life-Line.” “I think it’s lovely,” she said; siding with me, to his great chagrin. How I wished that our friend of the “conventicles” were there to decide between us--he who in his youth was forbidden to accompany his friends to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings as he might have been forbidden to go to dime-museums. But he has no ear--“sensual” or other. Perhaps he could not have helped.
Our Catholic friend’s exhibit gave me pause. I knew that in France they sing, nowadays, hymns unworthy of Gothic architecture. Not so many years ago, in a beautiful French cathedral which I was by way of frequenting, I heard the children of some sodality or con-fraternity pouring forth as poor a piece of holy rag-time as any conventicle has ever echoed. It jerked me back into the past, violently, as Hassan’s carpet must have jerked its fortunate owner through space.
Vierge, notre espérance, Étends sur nous ton bras. Sauve, sauve la France, Ne l’abandonne pas, Ne l’abandonne pas.
So we sang it, too, at the Assomption, in happier days, each with a veil and a candle, winding in and out among the green alleys of the convent park. But the young Tourangeaux went on to sing worse things: songs less catholic, more evangelical, with words more bitter and tones more shrill. I escaped, to return only at the hour of Benediction, when I knew that the “O Salutaris Hostia” and “Tantum Ergo” would mount again with the incense towards the rich mediæval windows.
I fear it is true, as our Catholic friend said, that the Church has fallen musically, as it has done architecturally, on evil days. Well: these shrill and senseless tunes are their equivalent for our Moody and Sankey. Even in conventicles, we have more dignified hymn-books for use in “church” as opposed to Sunday-school or Y. P. S. C. E., and the like. And as our Primary Department (of the Sunday-school) was handed over to the works of Fanny Crosby (did she write
Roses in bloom, Filling the room. With perfume rich and rare.
I wonder? Anyhow, she wrote most of them), so the young Catholics in both France and America are handed over to the musical divagations of ill-educated priests. It is a pity; for they have a tradition that cannot be bettered. _My_ ancestors sang lustily out of the old _Bay Psalm Book_:
Ye monsters of the mighty deep, Your Maker’s praises spout; Up from the sands ye codlings peep. And wag your tails about.
But, at the same period, _their_ ancestors were singing the Latin hymns of the Middle Ages in undegenerate solemnity. It is natural enough, perhaps, that I should have emerged on “There’s a Light in the Valley for Me”; but why should they have emerged on “Souvenez-vous, Jésus,” and the Mariolatrous wailing of “Im-mac-u-late, Im-mac-u-late”? Take as fine a Protestant hymn as, on the whole, we have inherited--“O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Its tune is, to my thinking, bad: difficult to sing and monotonous to hear. But in the very church that these poor French infants are innocently desecrating, a few hours, more or less, see a whole congregation chanting, with passionless and awful reverence,
Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo; nec in æternum irascaris nobis.
Whoever has heard that welling slowly from crowded choir, nave, and transept, the coifed peasant and the trained _séminariste_ singing in unison (no staginess of part-singing there!), and has joined his voice to the multitudinous supplication, will not cease to regret that modern vulgarity is as Catholic as it is Protestant.
It was the most delightful of Huysmans’s perversities to contend, in all seriousness, that the Devil, driven out of an immemorial haunt of his own near Lourdes by the advent in that spot of the Blessed Virgin, took his sullen revenge on the æsthetic sense of her priests. He could no longer hold his filthy Sabbaths there; but he could and did bewitch the clergy into making Lourdes a thing of ugliness. Their taste went wrong with everything they touched in Lourdes; and while Satan could not prevent the Blessed Virgin from working miracles, he could still bring it about that the faithful should be healed amid the most hideous architectural surroundings. Perhaps Huysmans would have credited the modern Catholic music unhesitatingly to the devil.
But certainly Moody and Sankey were not clerics of Lourdes. Nor could the Presbyterians who first sang the rhymed version of the Twenty-Third Psalm to the air of “So bin ich vergessen, vergessen bin ich” be suspected of any part in the Devil’s private feuds with the Virgin. Indeed, the particular Presbyterians whom I have heard sing it thus had not, I fancy, much more reverence for the one than for the other.
I do not think that we can account for _Gospel Hymns No. 5_ by the Huysmans formula. Even the hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodalities, is, I believe, mere modern pandering to the uncultured majority: revivalism in essence, like Moody and Sankey and the Salvation Army and Billy Sunday. But at least the Catholics have this advantage: that though they too have indulged in operatic music and have even sunk to “Vierge, notre espérance,” they still hear from their choirs the ancient music and the ancient words. You lose the sodalities and confraternities when you hear once more the familiar “Tantum Ergo” (I do not mean the florid one that they sing at St. Roch in Paris, and elsewhere); the new vulgarity is forgotten, as many vulgarities have been touched and then forgotten by Rome, in her time.
I used to think that the worst of our bad Protestant hymns was their ignoring of the human intelligence.
Many giants great and tall, Stalking through the land, Headlong to the earth would fall If met by Daniel’s Band.