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When I least expected it, in Paris, God suddenly seized me and drew me back to the Church, taking advantage of my love of Art, of mysticism, of the Liturgy, and of plain-song. "Still, during the travail of this conversion, I could not study mysticism anywhere but in books; I knew it only in theory and not in practice.
He lived within himself and could not see beyond. His mind, imbued with a mystic idealism, delighted itself in solitary reading or in meditations in the house of prayer. The only emotion he ever betrayed was caused by the organ music accompanying the hymnal plain-song, and by the pomp of religious ceremony. At the age of eighteen, he left the St.
Not so, however, as regards personal mysticism, which still dwells acclimatized and flourishing in convents. As to the Liturgy and plain-song, they too have gone through very various phases.
*Winter's Tale, Act IV Scene ii. *John Aubrey. He knew the lore of fields and woods, of trees and flowers, and birds and beasts. He sang of "The ousel-cock so black of hue, With orange-tawny bill, The throstle with his note so true, The wren with little quill. The finch, the sparrow, and the lark, The plain-song cuckoo gray, Whose note full many a man doth mark, And dares not answer nay."*
'The ouzel-cock so black of hue, With orange-tawny bill; The throstle with his note so true: The wren with little quill; The finch, the sparrow, and the lark, The plain-song cuckoo gray' and all the rest of the birds of the air. Why is it, again, that so few of our modern songs are truly songful, and fit to be set to music?
He heard the sound of sonorous plain-song from the monastic choir, of gross exuberant gaiety from the rich vineyards; he listened to the eternal mystic mirth of those that halted in the purple shadow of the sorbier by the white, steep road.
"Well, then, I may tell you that ecclesiastical art, brought to its very highest expression, is fascinating in that monastery. No one can conceive of the magnificence of the liturgy and of plain-song who has not heard them at Solesmes. If Notre Dame des Arts had a special sanctuary, it undoubtedly would be there." "Is the chapel ancient?"
A side skirmish on the music field was at this time fought between the treble and the tenor parts. Ravenscroft's Psalms and Walter's book had given the melody, or plain-song, to the tenor.
But as, five minutes later, he stood in the high western gallery of the church, and saw that enormous place stretching beyond calculation to where thin clear glass sanctuary windows rose in a group, like sword-blades, above the white pavement before the altar; as he saw the ranks of stalls running up, tier above tier, and understood that, all told, they numbered ten thousand, one third of them on this side of the screen, in the lay brothers' choir, and two thirds beyond; as he imagined what it must be to watch this congregation of elect souls stream in, each with his lantern in his hand, through the countless doors that ended each little narrow gangway that disappeared among the stalls; as he pictured the thunder of the unemotional Carthusian plain-song as he saw all this with his bodily eyes standing silent beside the silent monk, and began little by little to take in what it all meant, and what this world must be in which such a condition of things was accepted a world where Contemplatives at last were honoured as the kings of the earth, and themselves controlled and soothed the lives of whom the world had despaired; as his imagination ran out still farther, and he remembered that this was but one of innumerable houses of the kind as he began to be aware of all this, and of what it signified as regards the civilization in which he found himself his terror began to pass, and to give place to an awe, and to a kind of exaltation, such as neither Rome nor Lourdes nor London had been able even to suggest. . . .
Durtal would look no more; he tried to concentrate his mind while the priest was wiping his hands, for the only prayers he could honestly offer up to God were verses and texts repeated in an undertone. This only had he in his favour, but this he had: that he passionately loved mysticism and the liturgy, plain-song and cathedrals.
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