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John Curtis Underwood is not only a dynamic, but an insurgent poet and critic. He has published four volumes of poems, The Iron Muse , Americans , Processionals , and War Flames . The roar of city streets and the deafening pounding of machinery resound through his pages; yet he somehow or other makes a singing voice heard amid the din.
The sunlight filtering through the windows of stained glass splashed fantastic colors over the long surpliced train which wound through the aisles down to the chancel, singing processionals of joyous hope; the air was full of the sense of solemn meaning; the organ pealed; the noble words of the fine old ritual spoke to the hearts of the hearers, and carried their message of a faith which took hold upon the unseen.
In spite of the opposition of a large body of the bishops, an Act was passed ordering the destruction of all missals, antiphonals, processionals, manuals, ordinals, etc., used formerly in the service of the Church and not approved of by the king's majesty, as well as for the removal of all images "except any image or picture set or graven upon any tomb in any church, chapel or churchyard only for a monument of any king, prince, nobleman or other dead person who had not been commonly reputed and taken for a saint."
There is a reversion to the use of colored lights and brilliant spectacles, a freer use of symbols, orchestral music and incense, and one may even detect in "processionals" and "recessionals" and in richly varied genuflexional evolutions, an incipient reversion to so antique an accessory of worship as the sacred dance.
The very masonry and river-spans, the bursting towns, the fury and expansiveness of existence shed his idiom, shadowed forth his proud processionals, his resonant gold, his tumultuous syncopations and blazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody; appeared to be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art.
They are finely various and depart almost entirely from the one-two, one-two, the one-two-three, one-two-three that makes monotonous so much of Chopin. At moments, the tones of the piano march with some of the now festive, now majestic, now solemn, movement of the orchestral processionals of a Moussorgsky and a Borodin.
Neale and others have shown how the choral processionals with all the added charm of vestment and intonation have had far more to do in Christianizing many low tribes, who could not understand the language of the church, than has preaching.
There were few Bibles, but Missals, Breviaries, large choir-books to be laid on the lectern, Graduals and Processionals, are legion. Such things were common wedding-presents, it seems.
If church ceremonials are still open to amendment, I would suggest, in no spirit of irreverence, that a study of pelican processionals would be certain to yield edifying results. Nothing done in any cathedral could be more solemn. Indeed, their solemnity was so great that I came at last to find it almost ridiculous; but that, of course, was only from a want of faith on the part of the beholder.
Travelers told strange tales of France, where the Order was stronger than it was in England tales of unhallowed processionals and midnight incantations learned from the infidels of Syria. A Preceptor, Gregory of Hildesheim, was said to possess writings of a wizard who had suffered death some years before, and to have used them for the profit of the Order.
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