The Shadow of the Cathedral Part 10

The child in her arms was also laughing and placing his hand on the bosom of the beautiful woman, as though he intended to tear the covering from her breast. The image of painted stone, stuffed and gilt, wore a blue mantle strewn with stars, from whence its name.

"Even you, who have read so much, uncle, may possibly not know the history of this chapel, which is far more ancient than the Cathedral.

The woolstaplers, carders, and weavers of Toledo had their patroness here long before the church was built, and they only gave up their right to the ground on the condition that they should be entire masters of the chapel, and do in it whatever they pleased and in all this piece of the Cathedral as far as those nearest pillars. Oh! the trouble this wrought! On the days they held their feasts to the Virgin they never paid any heed to the canons in the choir, and they greatly disturbed all the offices with 'rabeles,'[1] lutes and disorderly songs. If the canons begged them to be silent, they replied that it was they in the choir who ought to keep silence, considering that they were in their own chapel, which was far more ancient than the Cathedral. Did you know this, uncle?"

[Footnote 1: An ancient instrument with three strings, played with a bow.]

"Yes, I remember it now. The Archbishop Valero Loza brought a suit against them at the beginning of the eighteenth century; you can see his tomb at the foot of the altar. He lost his suit, and died from disappointment. He desired to be buried in that place, so that the insolent wool merchants should trample on him in death, even as they had vanquished him in his lifetime. The haughtiness of these ecclesiastical princes drove them to the proudest humility. But is this all you wished to show me?"

"You shall see better things than this. Let us say good-bye to the Virgin. But do look at her! What a face! What alluring eyes! The beautiful woman! I spend hours looking at her; she is my sweetheart.

Oh! the many nights I have dreamt of her."

They walked on a little towards the great doorway of the Cathedral, so as to obtain a better view of the exterior face of the choir. Above the three hollows or chapels that pierce it runs a frieze of ancient relievos, the work of some obscure mediaeval artist. Gabriel recognised these coa.r.s.e sculptures as being contemporaneous with the Puerta del Reloj, and by far the most ancient work in the Cathedral.

"Look you, in the first medallion Adam and Eve are as naked as worms; but the Lord drives them out of Paradise, and they are obliged to dress themselves to appear in the world; and see what they do directly they get their clothes. But look at the fifth medallion on our right hand; the old gossip who cut that had a lively turn of mind."

Gabriel looked for the first time attentively at these forgotten sculptures. They were carved with all the naturalistic simplicity of the Middle Ages, with all the directness with which the artists represented their profane conceptions, with the desire to perpetuate the triumph of the flesh in some ignored corner of the mystical buildings, in order to testify that human life was not dead.

The Tato was delighted at the surprise on his uncle's face.

"Eh! what do you think of that? I discovered it wandering about the church. The canons sing every day on the other side of this wall without ever suspecting what gay doings they have over their heads.

And the stained gla.s.s, uncle, look at it well. At first so many colours blind one and the forms are indistinct; besides, the lead cuts the figures and it is difficult to make out anything, but I know them to my fingers' ends. They are stories, things of their own times, that these gla.s.s-workers painted; the intrigues have been forgotten, and no one has disentangled them."

He pointed to the windows of the second nave, through which the evening light was s.h.i.+ning with a ruddy glow.

"Look up there," went on the Perrero. "A gallant in a red cape and sword mounts by a rope ladder; at the window a nun is waiting for him.

It seems something like the Don Juan Tenorio that they represent at All Saints'. Further on, you see those two in bed, and people knocking at the door. They must be the same pair of birds with the family surprising them. Then in the next window--look well at it--lovers, with scarcely any clothes beyond bare skin. These things belong to the days when people had no shame, when they went with their heads covered and the rest of their flesh bare."

Gabriel smiled at the whimsical ideas with which ancient art inspired the Perrero.

"But in the choir, uncle, there is also something to see. Let us go there; the service is over and the canons are coming out."

Luna felt overpowered by admiration as he always did on entering the choir. Those magnificent stalls, the work on one side of Philip of Burgundy, and on the other side of Berruguete, bewildered him with their profusion of marbles, jaspers, gildings, statues and medallions.

It was the genius of Michael Angelo reviving in the Toledan Cathedral.

The Perrero examined the lower stalls, ferreting out among the Gothic relievos the discoveries enjoyed by his unwholesome curiosity. This first row of stalls, almost on a level with the ground, were occupied by the inferior clergy, and were anterior by half a century to the upper stalls; but in those fifty years art had made a great stride, from the hard and rigid Gothic to the flowing lines and good taste of the Renaissance. They had been carved by Maestre Rodrigo at the time when Christian Spain, roused to enthusiasm, was helping the Catholic kings with all its strength to complete the reconquest. On the backs of the stalls, and on the entablature of the frieze fifty-four carved pictures represented the princ.i.p.al incidents of the conquest of Granada.

The Tato did not look at these carvings of walnut or oak, with troops of hors.e.m.e.n and companies of soldiers scaling the walls of Moorish towns. What interested him most were the arms of the stalls, the handrails of the steps leading to the upper seats, and the salients dividing the stalls which served to rest the head, all covered with animals, grotesque beings, dogs, monkeys, big birds, friars, and little birds, all in difficult postures, some beautiful, some obscene.

Hogs and frogs wound themselves up together in inextricable tangles, monkeys with ign.o.ble gestures were mixed up with interlaced birds in never ending variety--it was a world of caricatures of voluptuousness, of monkey-like actions and satirical suggestions, in which appeared carnal pa.s.sion with the most grotesque animal grimaces.

"Look here, uncle. Is not this capital--it is far the best."

And the Tato showed Gabriel the little chubby figure of a preaching friar with enormous donkey's ears.

When they came out of the choir Gabriel spied the Chapel-master close to the fresco of Saint Christopher. He had just emerged from a little door close to the giant, which led by a circular staircase to the musical archives. He was carrying under his arm a big book with dusty pages which he showed to Gabriel.

"I am taking it upstairs. You shall hear something out of it; it is worth the trouble."

And turning his eyes from the book to the little door close by he exclaimed:

"Ay! these archives, Gabriel, how it pains one! Each time I visit them I come out sadder. The vandals have been at work there; nearly all the music books have pages torn out, pieces cut out wherever there was an illuminated letter, a vignette or anything pretty. The senor canons do not care for music, neither do they understand it, and they are incapable of devoting a few pesetas so that it might be heard on festival days. It is quite enough for them to walk in procession to some piece of Rossini's; and as far as regards the organ, all they care about is that it must play slowly, very slowly. The slower it plays, the more religious they think it, even though the organist may be playing a Habanera."

He continued looking at the little door with melancholy eyes as though he were ready to weep over the decay of music.

"In there, Gabriel, are many beautiful works, that ought not to be forgotten as long as art lives in the world. In profane music we have not been great, but believe me that Spain has been far otherwise with religious authors. That is, provided that profane music and religious music really exist, which I doubt; for me there is only--music--and I think he will be a clever man who draws the line where one ends and where the other begins. Behind this wall of Saint Christopher's, the works of all the great Spanish musicians sleep, mutilated and covered with dust. Perhaps it is better they do sleep, when you hear what is sung in this choir! Here you will find Christobal Morales, who three hundred years ago was Chapel-master here, and began the reform of music twenty years before Palestrina. In Rome he shares the glory with the famous master; his portrait is in the Vatican, and his lamentations, his motets, and his Magnificat rest here, forgotten for centuries. And Victoria? Do you know him? Another of the same period; his jealous contemporaries called him 'Palestrina's monkey' taking all his works to be imitations, in consequence of his long sojourn in Rome; but, believe me, instead of being plagiarisms from the Italian, they are far superior. Here also is Rivera, a Toledan master who no one remembers, but in the archives there is a whole volume of his ma.s.ses, and Romero de Avila, who more than anyone had studied the Muzarabe chants, and Ramos de Pareja, not the least musician of the fifteenth century, who wrote in Bologna his book 'De Musica Tractatus,' and destroyed the ancient system of Guido de Arezzo, discovering the tonality of sound; and the Monk Urena, who added the note 'si' to the scale, and Javier Garcia, who in the last century reformed music, leading it towards Italy (G.o.d forgive him!), a beaten track from which we have not yet emerged; and Nebra, the great organist of Carlos III., who, a century before Wagner was born, used musical discords. When he wrote the Requiem for the funeral of Dona Barbara di Braganza, foreseeing the surprise and difficulties that the musicians and singers would meet with in the innovations in his score, he wrote on the margin, 'This is to give notice that there are no mistakes in the score.' His Litany became so celebrated that it was forbidden to copy it, under pain of excommunication; but I think to-day the persons who remember it would be the excommunicated.

Believe me, Gabriel, these archives are a pantheon of great men, but a pantheon, unluckily, from which no one emerges."

Then he added, lowering his voice:

"The Church has never been a great lover of music. To feel and understand it you must be born a musician, and you know well enough that these gentlemen who are paid to sing in the choir know nothing about music. When I see you, Gabriel, smiling at religious things, I guess by your manner how much you conceal, and I am sure you are right. I was interested to know the history of music in the Church.

I have followed step by step the long Calvary of this unhappy art, carrying the cross of wors.h.i.+p uphill through the long centuries. You have heard people often talk of religious music, as if it were a thing apart, believed in by the Church; but it is all a lie, for religious music does not exist."

The Perrero had moved off when he heard that the Chapel-master, whose loquacity was indefatigable when he spoke of his art, had started on the theme of music. He had formed his own opinion of Don Luis and told it to everyone in the upper cloister. He was a simpleton who only knew how to play melancholy ditties on his harmonium, without ever thinking of enlivening the poor people in the Claverias by playing something to which they could dance, as the niece of Silver Stick had asked him.

The priest and Gabriel walked slowly through the silent naves talking the while; the only people to be seen were a group of the household at the door of the sacristy, and two women kneeling before the railing of the high altar praying aloud. The early twilight of the winter evenings was beginning to darken the Cathedral, and the first bats were coming down from the vaulting and fluttering through the columns.

"Ecclesiastical music," said the artist, "is a real anarchy; but in the Church everything is anarchy. I believe there is a great deal to be said for the unity of the Catholic wors.h.i.+p throughout the world.

When Christianity began to form itself into a religion it did not invent even a single bad melody; it borrowed its hymns and the manner of singing them from the Jews, a primitive and barbarous music that would shock our ears if we heard it now. Out of Palestine, and where there were no Jews, the earliest Christian poets--Saint Ambrose, Prudencio and others--adopted their new hymns and psalms to the popular songs that were then in vogue in the Roman world, or possibly to Greek music. It seems as though that word 'Greek music' ought to mean a great deal; is it not so, Gabriel? The Greeks were so great in their poetry and in the plastic arts that anything that bears their name would seem to be surrounded by an atmosphere of undying beauty.

But it is not so: the march of the arts has not been parallel in human life; when sculpture had its Phidias, and had reached its climax, painting had hardly pa.s.sed that rudimentary stage that we see in Pompeii, and music was only a childish babbling. Writing could not perpetuate music, for there seemed as many musical styles as there were peoples, and everything was left to the judgment of the executant. You could not fix on parchment what mouths and instruments played, and so progress was impossible. For this reason, though there was a Renaissance for sculpture, for painting, for architecture, at the revival of the arts after the Middle Ages, music was found in the same elementary stage in which it was at the break-up of the ancient world."

Gabriel nodded his head a.s.senting to the words of the Chapel-master.

"This was the first Christian music," continued Don Luis. "Confided to tradition and transmitted orally, the religious songs soon became disfigured and corrupt. In every church they sang in a different way, and religious music became a hotch-potch. The mystics leaned to rigid unity, and in the sixth century Saint Gregory published his 'Antifonario,' a collection of all liturgic melodies, purifying them according to his ideas. They were a mixture of two elements: the Greek, rather oriental and florid, very much like the present debased style; and the grave and rough Roman. The notes were expressed by letters, the Phrygian and Lydian styles followed, and so the intricacies of Greek music continued though much altered, with fioriture, rests, and breathing pauses. The collection became lost, and many who think a return to the old style would be best, much regret it. To judge by the fragments that remain, if such music was now executed it would have very little that was religious about it, as we understand religion in art to-day; it would more resemble the songs of the Moors, or the Chinese, or those of some schismatic Greeks who still use the ancient liturgies. The harp was the princ.i.p.al instrument in the churches till the organ appeared in the tenth century, a rough and barbarous instrument that had to be played with blows, and was supplied with wind from inflated skins. Guido di Arezzo made a musical rule on the basis of Gregory's collection, and this was sufficient for the invention of the pentagramma[1] to be a.s.signed to the Benedictine.

They continued to use the letters of Boccio and Saint Gregory as notes, but they placed them on lines of three different colours. The imbroglio continued; to learn music badly took twelve years, and then they could not manage that singers from different towns could read from the same score. Saint Bernard, dry and austere as his times, ridiculed this music as not being solemn enough; he was a man antagonistic to all art; he would have liked to see the churches dismantled and without any architectural adornments; and the slower the music was, the better it seemed to him. He was the father of plain song, and he maintained that the more drawn out the music was, the more religious it became. But in the thirteenth century Christians found this chant most wearisome. The cathedrals in those days were the point of attraction: the theatre, the centre of all life. People went to the church to pray to G.o.d and to amuse themselves, forgetting for the moment all the wars and the violence and confusion outside. Once again popular music came into the churches, and you could hear intoned in the cathedrals all the songs most in vogue, and which were often obscene. The people took part in the religious music, singing in different tones, each one as seemed best to him, and these were the first beginnings of concerted singing. In those days religion was joyful, popular--democratic as you would say, Gabriel; there was no Inquisition, nor suspicion of heresy to embitter the soul with fanaticism and fear. All the coa.r.s.e wind and stringed instruments that the artisans had in the towns, or the labourers in the fields, came into the churches, and the organ was accompanied by violas, violins, bagpipes, flutes, guitars and lutes. The plain song was the established liturgy almost throughout Europe; but the people disliked it, and interspersed it with songs, and at the great festivals, religious hymns were sung, adapted to the popular melodies then in fas.h.i.+on, such as 'The song of the armed man,' 'Morencia, give me a kiss,' 'I know not what confuses me,' 'Weep for me, lady,' 'Bad luck to him who married you,' and others in the same style. And Rome, you will ask, and the Church? What did it say about such disorders? The Church lived without artistic perception: it never had any. What are the boundaries between religious and profane music? From the sixteenth to the seventeenth century all critics have asked themselves this question, but the Church let them talk, accepting everything without remark. Now and again Rome made itself heard by a Papal bull, to which no one paid any attention, because the Pontiff was incapable of saying this is religious art, and the other is profane. Palestrina was entrusted with the task of reforming church music; the Pope showed himself disposed not to leave anything but plain song, and to suppress even that if necessary. The ma.s.s of Papa Marcelo and other melodies was the result of this, but things did not advance much. It was necessary in order that music should be purified inside the Church that the great secular musical movement should begin with the Italian Monteverde, with the Frenchman Rameau, and with the Germans Sebastian Bach and Handel; what splendid times, Gabriel! And just think what genius followed: Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Mehul, Boieldieu, and, above all, our good friend Beethoven."

[Footnote 1: The stave.]

The Chapel-master was silent for a little as though the name of his idol imposed on him a religious silence. Presently he continued.

"All this avalanche of art pa.s.sed over the Church, and she, according to her habit, appropriated everything that was most to her taste; in any country the Catholic religion adopted the music most in accordance with its traditions--in Spain we have been saturated with the Italian style since the days of Palestrina, and German or French music never came to us. We were first of all fuguists and contrapuntists; but after the 'Stabat Mater' of Rossini we felt the attraction of theatrical melody so strongly that we have never wished to taste a fresh dish. Religious music in Spain has run parallel with Italian opera, a thing of which the canons are ignorant; they would be furious if at the ma.s.s you played them anything by Beethoven, which they would consider profane, but they listen with mystic unction to fragments which have gone the round of all the theatres in Italy. And about the plain song, you will ask? The plain song had its nest in this Primacy.

It was preserved here for centuries and purified; all the best was collected in Toledo, and from the books in this Cathedral have gone forth the chorales of all the churches in Spain and America. Poor plain song! it has long been dead. You see for yourself, Gabriel, who comes to the Cathedral at the hour of the choir? No one, absolutely no one. The matins are recited, and all the offices are intoned in the midst of perfect solitude. The people who still believe know nothing of the liturgy; they do not prize it and have forgotten all about it; they are only attracted by the novenas, the triduos and retreats, all that is termed tolerated and extra-liturgic wors.h.i.+p. The Jesuits, with their cunning, guessed that they must give their services a theatrical attraction, and for this reason their churches--gilt, carpeted, and decked with flowers like dressing-rooms--are always full, whereas the old cathedrals are as empty as tombs. They have not proclaimed the necessity for this reform aloud, but they have put it into practice by abolis.h.i.+ng the singing in Latin, and subst.i.tuting all sorts of romances and songs. In the churches, with the exception of the Tantum-ergo, nothing is sung in Latin, sermons and hymns are in the language of the country, just as in a Protestant church. For the ma.s.s of devout people, who believe without thinking, religions only differ in their exterior forms. It would be impossible to consign such a mult.i.tude to the bonfires, or that half Europe should again be in the clutches of the thirty years' war, or that the Popes should launch excommunication after excommunication, only to find in the end that the only difference between a Catholic or an evangelical church is a few images and a few wax tapers, but that the wors.h.i.+p in both is the same. But we must go, Gabriel; they are going to lock up."

The bell-ringer was hurrying through the naves, shaking his bunch of keys and startling the bats which were becoming more and more numerous. The two devout women had disappeared; no one remained in the Cathedral save Gabriel and the Chapel-master. From the farther end of the nave were coming the night watchmen, to take up their charge till the following morning, preceded by the dog.

The two friends went out into the cloister, guided through the dusk by the rich glow from the stained gla.s.s windows; outside, the last rays of the sun were touching both the garden and the cloister of the Claverias with crimson.

"I repeat," continued the musical priest, looking back at the door from which they had come out, "that in there they do not love music and they do not understand it. The Church has only rendered one service to music, and that without wis.h.i.+ng it: they have been obliged to have instrumentalists and vocalists for the services, and that made them support the chapels and choir-schools that have served for musical education in default of schools. We who represent art in the cathedrals are as much despised as were the minstrels in the old chapels, players of the clarion and ba.s.soon. For the canons, all that sleeps in the musical archives is so much Greek, and we, the artistic priests, form a race apart, and are only just a step above the sacristans. The Chapel-master, the organist, the tenor, contralto, and the ba.s.s form the chapel. We are clergy like the canons, we become beneficiaries by appointment, we have studied religious science as they have, and, moreover, we are musicians; but in spite of this we receive less than half the salary of a canon, and to remind us constantly of our inferior position we have to sit in the lower stalls. We, the only ones in the choir who know anything about music, have to occupy the lowest places. The precentor is by right the chief of the singers, and the precentor is a canon named by Rome without compet.i.tion, probably not knowing a note of the pentagramma. Oh! the anarchy, friend Gabriel! Oh! the contempt of the Church for music which has always been its slave and never its daughter! In many convents of nuns the organist and the singers are despised and called sergeants. There seems money for everything in the Church: the revenues of the building are ample for everything except for music.

The canons look upon us as fools masking in ecclesiastical robes. When the feast of Corpus or that of the Virgin of the Sagrario comes round, and I dream of a fine ma.s.s worthy of the Cathedral, the Canon Obrero attacks me and begs for something Italian and simple, an affair of half-a-dozen musicians that I must pick up in the town, and then I have to conduct a few bungling musicians, raging to hear how the miserable orchestra sounds under these vaults, which were built for something grander. In the end, friend Luna, it is dead, quite dead."

The complaint of the Chapel-master did not surprise Gabriel. Everyone in the Cathedral complained of the miserable and sordid way in which the services were conducted. Some, like the Silver Stick, declared that it was due to the impiety of the age, others, like the musician, made that same religion responsible, but they did not dare to say so aloud. Respect to the Church and to the higher powers, instilled since their childhood, kept the population of the Cathedral silent. The greater part of the servitors of the Church were living morally in the sixteenth century, in an atmosphere of servility and superst.i.tious fear of their superiors, feeling the injustice of their position, but without daring to give form, even in their thoughts, to their vague notions of protest.

Only at night, in the silence of the upper cloister, in the privacy of those families who were born and died among the stones of the Cathedral, did they dare to repeat the murmurs of the Church, the interminable tangle of tattle which grew over the monotonous ecclesiastical existence, the complaints of the canons against His Eminence, and what the cardinal said about the Chapter, an underground war which was reproduced at every archiepiscopal elevation, intrigues and heart-burnings of celibates, embittered by ambition and favouritism, primitive hatreds that reminded one of the time when the clergy elected their own prelates and ruled over them, instead of groaning as now under the iron rule of the archbishop's will.

Everyone in the cloister knew of these quarrels, and the remarks that the canons allowed themselves to make in the sacristy reached their ears; but these humble servitors kept silence when these murmurs were repeated in their presence, fearing to be reported by their neighbour, who possibly might covet their post. It was the terror of the Inquisition still alive amidst this little stagnant world.

The Perrero was the only one who seemed to have no fear, and who spoke openly about the Chapter and the cardinal. What did it matter to him!

Possibly he may have wished to be turned out of "that den" to give himself up to his favourite pursuit, going to the bull-ring without any objections from the household. Moreover, he delighted in speaking evil of the gentlemen of the Chapter, who had given him more than one cuff when he was an acolyte.

He gave nicknames to all the canons, and pointing them out one by one to Gabriel, related the most intimate secrets of their lives. He knew the houses where each prebendary pa.s.sed the evening after the choir time, and the names of all the ladies and nuns who crimped their surplices, and could tell of the fierce and deadly rivalries between these admirers of the Chapter, endeavouring to vanquish each other by the exquisite way in which they washed and ironed the canonical batiste. As the choir were coming out he pointed out the precentor, an obese prebendary with his face covered with red spots.