The Crown of Wild Olive
contrary is also true, all foul or miscreant Art is accusation, [Greek:
diabole]: 'She gave me of the tree and I did eat' being an entirely
museless expression on Adam's part, the briefly essential contrary of
Love-song.
With these four perfect forms of Christian chant, of which we may take
for pure examples the 'Te Deum,' the 'Te Lucis Ante,' the 'Amor che
nella mente,'[177] and the 'Chant de Roland,' are mingled songs of
mourning, of Pagan origin (whether Greek or Danish), holding grasp still
of the races that have once learned them, in times of suffering and
sorrow; and songs of Christian humiliation or grief, regarding chiefly
the sufferings of Christ, or the conditions of our own sin: while
through the entire system of these musical complaints are interwoven
moralities, instructions, and related histories, in illustration of
both, passing into Epic and Romantic verse, which gradually, as the
forms and learnings of society increase, becomes less joyful, and more
didactic, or satiric, until the last echoes of Christian joy and melody
vanish in the 'Vanity of human wishes.'
And here I must pause for a minute or two to separate the different
branches of our inquiry clearly from one another. For one thing, the
reader must please put for the present out of his head all thought of
the progress of 'civilisation'--that is to say, broadly, of the
substitution of wigs for hair, gas for candles, and steam for legs. This
is an entirely distinct matter from the phases of policy and religion.
It has nothing to do with the British Constitution, or the French
Revolution, or the unification of Italy. There are, indeed, certain
subtle relations between the state of mind, for instance, in Venice,
which makes her prefer a steamer to a gondola, and that which makes her
prefer a gazetteer to a duke; but these relations are not at all to be
dealt with until we solemnly understand that whether men shall be
Christians and poets, or infidels and dunces, does not depend on the way
they cut their hair, tie their breeches, or light their fires. Dr.
Johnson might have worn his wig in fulness conforming to his dignity,
without therefore coming to the conclusion that human wishes were vain;
nor is Queen Antoinette's civilised hair-powder, as opposed to Queen
Bertha's savagely loose hair, the cause of Antoinette's laying her head
at last in scaffold dust, but Bertha in a pilgrim-haunted tomb.
Again, I have just now used the words 'poet' and 'dunce,' meaning the
degree of each quality possible to average human nature. Men are
eternally divided into the two classes of poet (believer, maker, and
praiser) and dunce (or unbeliever, unmaker, and dispraiser). And in
process of ages they have the power of making faithful and formative
creatures of themselves, or unfaithful and _de_formative. And this
distinction between the creatures who, blessing, are blessed, and
evermore _benedicti_, and the creatures who, cursing, are cursed, and
evermore _maledicti_, is one going through all humanity; antediluvian in
Cain and Abel, diluvian in Ham and Shem. And the question for the public
of any given period is not whether they are a constitutional or
unconstitutional vulgus, but whether they are a benignant or malignant
vulgus. So also, whether it is indeed the gods who have given any
gentleman the grace to despise the rabble, depends wholly on whether it
is indeed the rabble, or he, who are the malignant persons.
But yet again. This difference between the persons to whom Heaven,
according to Orpheus, has granted 'the hour of delight,'[178] and those
whom it has condemned to the hour of detestableness, being, as I have
just said, of all times and nations,--it is an interior and more
delicate difference which we are examining in the gift of _Christian_,
as distinguished from unchristian, song. Orpheus, Pindar, and Horace are
indeed distinct from the prosaic rabble, as the bird from the snake; but
between Orpheus and Palestrina, Horace and Sidney, there is another
division, and a new power of music and song given to the humanity which
has hope of the Resurrection.
_This_ is the root of all life and all rightness in Christian harmony,
whether of word or instrument; and so literally, that in precise manner
as this hope disappears, the power of song is taken away, and taken away
utterly. When the Christian falls back out of the bright hope of the
Resurrection, even the Orpheus song is forbidden him. Not to have known
the hope is blameless: one may sing, unknowing, as the swan, or
Philomela. But to have known and fall away from it, and to declare that
the human wishes, which are summed in that one--'Thy kingdom come'--are
vain! The Fates ordain there shall be no singing after that denial.
For observe this, and earnestly. The old Orphic song, with its dim hope
of yet once more Eurydice,--the Philomela song--granted after the cruel
silence,--the Halcyon song--with its fifteen days of peace, were all
sad, or joyful only in some vague vision of conquest over death. But the
Johnsonian vanity of wishes is on the whole satisfactory to
Johnson--accepted with gentlemanly resignation by Pope--triumphantly and
with bray of penny trumpets and blowing of steam-whistles, proclaimed
for the glorious discovery of the civilised ages, by Mrs. Barbauld, Miss
Edgeworth, Adam Smith, and Co. There is no God, but have we not
invented gunpowder?--who wants a God, with that in his pocket?[179]
There is no Resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but have we not
paper and pens, and cannot every blockhead print his opinions, and the
Day of Judgment become Republican, with everybody for a judge, and the
flat of the universe for the throne? There is no law, but only
gravitation and congelation, and we are stuck together in an everlasting
hail, and melted together in everlasting mud, and great was the day in
which our worships were born. And there is no Gospel, but only, whatever
we've got, to get more, and, wherever we are, to go somewhere else. And
are not these discoveries, to be sung of, and drummed of, and fiddled
of, and generally made melodiously indubitable in the eighteenth century
song of praise?
The Fates will not have it so. No word of song is possible, in that
century, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententious
pentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enough
without dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping,
suddenly Astraea returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort,
and there bursts out a song at last again, a most curtly melodious
triplet of Amphisbaenic ryme. '_Ca ira._'
Amphisbaenic, fanged in each ryme with fire, and obeying Ercildoune's
precept, 'Tong is chefe of mynstrelsye,' to the syllable.--Don
Giovanni's hitherto fondly chanted 'Andiam, andiam,' become suddenly
impersonal and prophetic: IT shall go, and you also. A cry--before it is
a song, then song and accompaniment together--perfectly done; and the
march 'towards the field of Mars. The two hundred and fifty
thousand--they to the sound of stringed music--preceded by young girls
with tricolor streamers, they have shouldered soldier-wise their shovels
and picks, and with one throat are singing _Ca ira_.'[180]
Through all the springtime of 1790, 'from Brittany to Burgundy, on most
plains of France, under most city walls, there march and
constitutionally wheel to the Ca-iraing mood of fife and drum--our clear
glancing phalanxes;--the song of the two hundred and fifty thousand,
virgin led, is in the long light of July.' Nevertheless, another song is
yet needed, for phalanx, and for maid. For, two springs and summers
having gone--amphisbaenic,--on the 28th of August 1792, 'Dumouriez rode
from the camp of Maulde, eastwards to _Sedan_.'[181]
And Longwi has fallen basely, and Brunswick and the Prussian king will
beleaguer Verdun, and Clairfait and the Austrians press deeper in over
the northern marches, Cimmerian Europe behind. And on that same night
Dumouriez assembles council of war at his lodgings in Sedan. Prussians
here, Austrians there, triumphant both. With broad highway to Paris and
little hindrance--_we_ scattered, helpless here and there--what to
advise? The generals advise retreating, and retreating till Paris be
sacked at the latest day possible. Dumouriez, silent, dismisses
_them_,--keeps only, with a sign, Thouvenot. Silent, thus, when needful,
yet having voice, it appears, of what musicians call tenor-quality, of a
rare kind. Rubini-esque, even, but scarcely producible to fastidious
ears at opera. The seizure of the forest of Argonne follows--the
cannonade of Valmy. The Prussians do not march on Paris _this_ time, the
autumnal hours of fate pass on--_ca ira_--and on the 6th of November,
Dumouriez meets the Austrians also. 'Dumouriez wide-winged, they
wide-winged--at and around Jemappes, its green heights fringed and maned
with red fire. And Dumouriez is swept back on this wing and swept back
on that, and is like to be swept back utterly, when he rushes up in
person, speaks a prompt word or two, and then, with clear tenor-pipe,
uplifts the hymn of the Marseillaise, ten thousand tenor or bass pipes
joining, or say some forty thousand in all, for every heart leaps up at
the sound; and so, with rhythmic march melody, they rally, they advance,
they rush death-defying, and like the fire whirlwind sweep all manner of
Austrians from the scene of action.' Thus, through the lips of
Dumouriez, sings Tyrtaeus, Rouget de Lisle,[182] 'Aux armes--marchons!'
Iambic measure with a witness! in what wide strophe here beginning--in
what unthought-of antistrophe returning to that council chamber in
Sedan!
While these two great songs were thus being composed, and sung, and
danced to in cometary cycle, by the French nation, here in our less
giddy island there rose, amidst hours of business in Scotland and of
idleness in England, three troubadours of quite different temper.
Different also themselves, but not opponent; forming a perfect chord,
and adverse all the three of them alike to the French musicians, in this
main point--that while the _Ca ira_ and Marseillaise were essentially
songs of blame and wrath, the British bards wrote, virtually, always
songs of praise, though by no means psalmody in the ancient keys. On the
contrary, all the three are alike moved by a singular antipathy to the
priests, and are pointed at with fear and indignation by the pietists,
of their day;--not without latent cause. For they are all of them, with
the most loving service, servants of that world which the Puritan and
monk alike despised; and, in the triple chord of their song, could not
but appear to the religious persons around them as respectively and
specifically the praisers--Scott of the world, Burns of the flesh, and
Byron of the devil.
To contend with this carnal orchestra, the religious world, having long
ago rejected its Catholic Psalms as antiquated and unscientific, and
finding its Puritan melodies sunk into faint jar and twangle from their
native trumpet-tone, had nothing to oppose but the innocent, rather than
religious, verses of the school recognised as that of the English
Lakes; very creditable to them; domestic at once and refined; observing
the errors of the world outside of the Lakes with a pitying and tender
indignation, and arriving in lacustrine seclusion at many valuable
principles of philosophy, as pure as the tarns of their mountains, and
of corresponding depth.[183]
I have lately seen, and with extreme pleasure, Mr. Matthew Arnold's
arrangement of Wordsworth's poems; and read with sincere interest his
high estimate of them. But a great poet's work never needs arrangement
by other hands; and though it is very proper that Silver How should
clearly understand and brightly praise its fraternal Rydal Mount, we