En Route Part 43

"It is superb," answered Durtal. And he said dreamily, "Would that one could have the whole complete! to bring here, instead of this uninteresting chapel, the apse of St. Severin; hang on the walls the pictures of Fra Angelico, Memling, Grunewald, Gerard David, Roger van den Weyden, Bouts; add to these, admirable sculptures such as those of the great door of Chartres, altar screens of sculptured wood, such as those of the Cathedral of Amiens, what a dream!"

"Yet," he went on after a silence, "this dream has been a reality, it is evident. This ideal church existed for ages, everywhere in the Middle Ages! The chant, the goldsmith's work, the panels, the sculptures, the tissues were all attractive; the liturgies possessed, to give them value, fabulous caskets, but all that is far off."

"But you certainly cannot say," replied M. Bruno, with a smile, "that the church ornaments are ugly here!"

"No; they are exquisite. First, the chasubles have not the shapes of a miner's ap.r.o.n, and they do not hoist themselves up on the shoulders of the priest, that excrescence, that puffing like the ear of a little donkey lying back, which the vestment makers use at Paris.

"Nor is it any more that cross in stripe or woven, filling all the stuff, falling like a sack-coat over the back of the celebrant; the Trappist chasubles have kept the old form, as the old image makers and the old painters preserved them in their religious scenes; and that cross with four leaves, like those which the Gothic style chiselled on the walls of its churches, is related to the very expanded lotus a flower so full-blown that its falling petals droop."

"Without counting," pursued Durtal, "that the stuff which seems cut in a sort of flannel or thick soft felt must have been plunged in threefold dyes, for it takes a depth, and a magnificent clearness of tone. The religious tr.i.m.m.i.n.g-makers could trim these watered and plain silks with silver and gold, yet never attain to give a colour at once so vehement and so familiar to the eye as that crimson with sulphur-yellow flowers, which Father Maximin wore the other day."

"Yes, and the mourning chasuble with its lobed crosses, and its discreet white fullings, in which the Father abbot vested himself, the day on which he communicated us, is not it also a caress for the eyes?"

Durtal sighed: "Ah! if the statues in the chapel showed a like taste!"

"By the way," said the oblate, "come and salute that Notre Dame de l'Atre, of which I have spoken to you, found among the remains of the old cloister."

They rose from table, pa.s.sed along a corridor, and struck into a lateral gallery, at the end of which they stopped before a statue of life size, in stone.

It was heavy and ma.s.sive, representing in a robe of long folds, a peasant woman, crowned, and round-cheeked, holding on her arm a child who blessed a ball.

But in this portrait of a robust peasant woman, sprung from Burgundy or Flanders, there was a candour, a goodness almost tumultuous, which sprang from her smiling face, her innocent eyes, her good and large lips, indulgent, ready for all forgiveness.

She was a rustic Virgin made for the humble lay brothers; she was not a great lady who could hold them at a distance, but she was indeed the nursing mother of their souls, their true mother. "How was it they had not understood her here? how instead of presiding in the chapel, did she grow chill at the end of a corridor?" cried Durtal.

The oblate turned the conversation--"I warn you," he said, "that Benediction will not take place after Vespers as your placard indicates, but directly after Compline; this latter office will therefore be advanced a quarter of an hour at least."

And the oblate went up to his cell, while Durtal went towards the large pond. There he lay down on a bed of dry reed, looking at the water which broke in wavelets at his feet. The coming and going of these limited waters, folding back on themselves, yet never overpa.s.sing the basin they had hollowed for themselves, led him on into long reveries.

He said to himself that a river was the most exact symbol of the active life; one follows it from its source through all its courses across the territories it fertilizes; it has fulfilled its a.s.signed task before it dies, immersing itself in the gaping sepulchre of the seas; but the pond, that tamed water, imprisoned in a hedge of reeds which it has itself caused to grow in fertilizing the soil of its bank, has concentrated itself, lived on itself, not seemed to achieve any known work, save to keep silence and reflect on the infinite of heaven.

"Still water troubles me," continued Durtal. "It seems to me that unable to extend itself, it grows deeper, and that while running waters borrow only the shadows of things they reflect, it swallows them without giving them back. Most certainly in this pond is a continued and profound absorption of forgotten clouds, of lost trees, even of sensations seized on the faces of monks who hung over it. This water is full, and not empty, like those which are distracted in wandering about the country and in bathing the towns. It is a contemplative water, in perfect accord with the recollected life of the cloisters.

"The fact is," he concluded, "that a river would have here no meaning; it would only be pa.s.sing, would remain indifferent and in a hurry, would be in all cases unfit to pacify the soul which the monastic water of the ponds appeases. Ah! in founding Notre Dame de l'Atre, Saint Bernard knew how to fit the Cistercian rule and the site.

"But we must leave these fancies," he said, rising; and, remembering that it was Sunday, he transferred himself to Paris, and revisited in thought his halts on this day in the churches.

In the morning St. Severin enchanted him, but he ought not to thrust himself into that sanctuary for the other Offices. Vespers there were botched and mean; and if it were a feast day the organ master showed himself possessed by the love of ign.o.ble music.

Occasionally Durtal had taken refuge at St. Gervais, where at least they played at certain times motets of the old masters; but that church was, as well as St. Eustache, a paying concert, where Faith had nothing to do. No recollection was possible in the midst of ladies who fainted behind, their faces in their hands, and grew agitated in creaking chairs. These were frivolous a.s.semblies for pious music, a compromise between the theatre and G.o.d.

St. Sulpice was better, where at least the public was silent. There, moreover, Vespers were celebrated with more solemnity and less haste.

In general the seminary reinforced the choir, and rendered by this imposing choir they rolled on majestically sustained by the grand organ.

Chanted, only in half, and not in unison, reduced to a state of couplets, given, some by a baritone, others by the choir, they were twisted and frizzled by a curling iron, but as they were not less adulterated at the other churches, there was every advantage in listening to them at St. Sulpice, whose powerful choir, very well led, had not, as for example at Notre Dame, those dusty voices which break at the least whisper.

This only became really odious when, with a formidable explosion, the first strophe of the Magnificat struck the arches.

The organ then swallowed up one stanza out of two, and under the seditious pretext that the length of the Office of incensing was too long to be filled up entirely by singing, M. Widor, seated at his desk, rolled forth stale fragments of music splashed about above, imitating the human voice and the flute, the bagpipe and the ba.s.soon, or indeed, tired of affectations, he blew furiously on the keys, ending by imitating the roll of locomotives over iron bridges, letting all the stops go.

And the choirmaster, not wishing to show himself inferior to the organist in his instinctive hatred of plain chant, was delighted, when the Benediction began, to put aside Gregorian melodies and make his choristers gurgle rigadoons.

It was no longer a sanctuary, but a howling place. The "Ave Maria," the "Ave Verum," all the mystical indecencies of the late Gounod, the rhapsodies of old Thomas, the capers of indigent musicasters, defiled in a chain wound by choir leaders from Lamoureux, chanted unfortunately by children, the chast.i.ty of whose voices no one feared to pollute in these middle-cla.s.s pa.s.sages of music, these by-ways of art.

"Ah," thought Durtal, "if only this choirmaster, who is evidently an excellent musician; for indeed, when he must, he knows how to get executed better than anywhere else in Paris, the 'De Profundis' with organ accompaniment, and the 'Dies Irae'; if only this man would as at St. Gervais give us some Palestrina and Vittoria, some Aichinger and Allegri, some Orlando La.s.so and De Pres; but no, he must detest these masters also, consider them as archaic rubbish, good to send into the dust-heaps."

And Durtal continued,

"What we hear now at Paris, in the churches, is wholly incredible! Under pretence of managing an income for the singers, they suppress half the stanzas of canticles and hymns, and subst.i.tute, to vary the pleasure, the tiresome divagations of an organ.

"There they howl the 'Tantum Ergo' to the Austrian National air; or what is still worse, m.u.f.fle it up with operatic choruses, or refrains from canteens. The very text is divided into couplets which are ornamented like a drinking song with a little burthen.

"The other Church sequences are treated in the same manner.

"And yet the Papacy has formally forbidden, in many bulls, that the sanctuary should be soiled by those liberties. To cite one only, John XXII., in his Extravagant 'Doctor Sanctorum,' expressly forbade profane voices and music in churches. He prohibited choirs at the same time to change plain chant into fiorituri. The decrees of the Council of Trent are not less clear from this point of view, and more recently still a regulation of the Sacred Congregation of Rites has intervened to proscribe musical rioting in holy places.

"Then what are the parish-priests doing who, in fact, have musical police charge in their churches? Nothing, they laugh at it.

"Nor is this a mere phrase, but with those priests who, hoping for receipts, permit on fete days the shameless voices of actresses to dance gambols to the heavy sounds of the organ, the poor Church has become far from clean.

"At St. Sulpice," Durtal went on, "the priest tolerates the villainy of jolly songs which are served up to him; but at least he does not, like the one at St. Severin, allow strolling women players to lighten up the Office by the shouts of such voices as remain to them. Nor has he accepted the solo on the English horn which I heard at St. Thomas one evening during the Perpetual Adoration. In short, if the grand Benedictions at St. Sulpice are a shame, the Complines remain in spite of their theatrical att.i.tude really charming."

And Durtal thought of those Complines of which the paternity is often attributed to Saint Benedict; they were in fact the integral prayer of the evenings, the preventive adjuration, the safeguard against the attempts of the Demon, they were in some measure the advanced sentinels of the out-posts placed round the soul to protect it during the night.

And the regulation of this entrenched camp of prayer was perfect. After the benediction the best trained voice, the most threadlike of the choir, the voice of the smallest of the children, sang forth the short lesson taken from the first Epistle of Saint Peter, warning the faithful that they must be sober and watch, not allow themselves to be surprised unexpectedly. A priest then recited the usual evening prayers; the choir organ gave the intonation, and the psalms fell, chanted one by one, the twilight psalms, in which before the approaches of night peopled with goblins, and furrowed by ghosts, man calls G.o.d to aid, and prays Him to guard his sleep from the violence of the ways of h.e.l.l, the rape of the lamias that pa.s.s.

And the hymn of Saint Ambrose, the "Te lucis ante terminum," made still more precise the scattered meaning of these psalms, gathering it up in its short stanzas. Unfortunately, the most important, that which foresees and declares the luxurious dangers of darkness, was swallowed up by the full organ. This hymn was not rendered in plain chant at St.

Sulpice as at La Trappe, but was sung to a pompous and elaborate air, an air full of glory, with a certain proud attractiveness, originating no doubt in the eighteenth century.

Then there was a pause--and man, feeling himself more sheltered, behind a rampart of prayers, recollected himself, more a.s.sured, and borrowed innocent voices to address new supplications to G.o.d. After the chapter read by the officiant, the children of the choir chanted the short response "In ma.n.u.s tuus Domine, commendo spiritum meum," which rolled out, dividing in two parts, then doubled itself, and resolved at the last its two separate portions by a verse, and part of an antiphon.

And after that prayer there was still the canticle of Simeon, who, as soon as he had seen the Messiah, desired to die. This "Nunc dimittis,"

which the Church has incorporated in Compline to stimulate us at eventide to self-examination--for none can tell whether he shall wake on the morrow--was raised by the whole choir, which alternated with the responses of the organ.

In fact, to end this Office of a besieged town, to take its last dispositions and try to repose in shelter from a violent attack, the Church built up again a few prayers, and placed her parishes under the tutelage of the Virgin, to whom it chanted one of the four antiphons which follow, according to the Proper.

"At La Trappe Compline was evidently less solemn, less interesting than at St. Sulpice," concluded Durtal, "for the monastic breviary is, for a wonder, less complete for that Office than the Roman breviary. As for Sunday Vespers, I am curious to hear them."

And he heard them; but they hardly differed from the Vespers adopted by the Benedictine nuns of the Rue Monsieur; they were more ma.s.sive, more grave, more Roman, if it may be said, for necessarily the voice of women drew them out into sharp points, made them like acute arches, as it were, in Gothic style, but the Gregorian tunes were the same.

On the other hand they resembled in nothing those at St. Sulpice, where the modern sauces spoilt the very essences of the plain chants. Only the Magnificat of La Trappe, abrupt, and with dry tone, was not so good as the majestic, the admirable Royal Magnificat chanted at Paris.

"These monks are astonishing with their superb voices," said Durtal to himself, and he smiled as they finished the antiphon of Our Lady, for he remembered that in the primitive Church the chanter was called "Fabarius cantor," "eater of beans," because he was obliged to eat that vegetable to strengthen his voice. Now, at La Trappe, dishes of beans were common; perhaps that was the secret of the ever young monastic voices.

He thought over the liturgy and plain chant while smoking cigarettes, in the walks, after Vespers.

He brought to mind the symbolism of those canonical hours which recalled every day to the Christian the shortness of life in summing up for him its image from infancy to death.