Ill

THE ACCOMPANIMENT

IT happened that the tram in which I was coming home last night passed the Town Hall just as the concert closed. The audience was streaming into the street, and the car quickly filled. Two young ladies, whose handsome furs only partly concealed their charming evening frocks, took seats immediately opposite me. Except by deliberately putting my fingers to my ears, how could I help listening to their conversation? I need scarcely say that I could not bring myself to behave so rudely. I therefore heard every word.

‘What did you think of Yvonne Gray?’ asked the girl in pale blue.

‘Oh, Addie,’ replied her companion, her face clouding as she spoke, ‘I thought she sang divinely; but the song was simply murdered by the accompaniment.’

I heard no more. I did not wish to do so. Like a bee smothered with pollen, I felt that I had gathered as much as I could carry. I determined to unburden myself as soon as I could get to my desk this morning. And here I am! I shall have to be careful. Music is not my forte. I recognize that I am skating on very thin ice. But, for all that, I fancy I can see my way to one or two conclusions that no expert is likely to challenge or dispute.

A song depends for its success upon a number of distinct factors. It depends partly upon the words; partly upon the enunciation and expression of those words; partly upon the music; partly upon the rendering of that music; and partly upon the capacity and mood of the hearer. It depends to some extent upon the words. There was a time when I should have attributed to the words a paramount and supreme importance. The discipline of the years has, however, led me to modify that early judgment. It may be that I have learned to love music a little more; it may be that I have come to esteem words a little less; I do not know. I only know that, much as I like to hear the words, a song is not entirely lost upon me even though the singer’s lips convey no clear syllable or concrete sentiment to my eager mind.

A few years ago I was spending a holiday at Beechington. A certain song was just then at the height of its popularity. Everybody was singing snatches of it, especially towards the close of the day. I sauntered along the sands one evening as the sun was setting, and was surprised at the number of people who were singing it, or humming it, or whistling it. It was one of those haunting airs that seemed made for the twilight, and at twilight lt ^an^ to one’s lips of its own accord. A week or two later, in the course of a motor tour through a country district, we paused for the night at a little wayside inn. On the piano, I saw to my delight the song that I seemed to know so well. I picked it up and read the words of which, until then, I knew only a line or two. It was a sad disillusionment. I could make nothing of them. I asked several of those present to expound to me their meaning; but they were as much in the dark as I was. Nobody could make sense of them. I then understood why I had so often heard the air crooned in the gloaming without having been able to learn the words to which it was supposed to be wedded. Something of the same kind sometimes happens at home. In the street in which I live a very musical family resides. I enjoy sitting on the verandah of an evening listening to the distant music. I can seldom distinguish the words; but I am astonished at the degree to which my spirit is affected by the plaintiveness or the gaiety of the songs. Such experiences have taught me that the general impression created by the song depends less upon the words than I once upon a time supposed.

In the ideal state of things, however, we are not asked whether we will have bread or cheese, almonds or raisins, strawberries or cream. We are offered bread and cheese, almonds and raisins, strawberries and cream. It is not a case of the words or the music; the model singer will be careful to give us the words and the music. We all have a good deal of sympathy with Charles Finney, the eminent evangelist, who used to be extremely vexed if the words used in worship were not clearly rendered. On a very memorable occasion he rose, at the conclusion of the anthem, to lead the congregation in prayer. ‘O Lord,’ he exclaimed, in a voice full of genuine distress, ‘we have no doubt that Thou hast known and understood all that Thy gifted servants have been singing, but, as for us, we haven’t caught a blessed word!’ It is a pity “when, with strawberries and cream both available, we have to be satisfied with the one or with the other.

A Presbyterian minister was telling me only a few days ago of an experience that befell a missionary of his church whose duty it is to visit the lonely settlers in the vast solitudes of our Never-Never country. After riding for many miles through the virgin bush, he discerned towards evening a friendly column of smoke. Making his way towards it, he suddenly came upon a little humpy built of corrugated iron, the home of a solitary herdsman. Delighted at seeing a human face and hearing a human voice, the man eagerly welcomed the missionary’s advent and at once asked him to stay the night. Seated on boxes beside the open camp fire, the two men spent the evening in discussing a thousand themes, and each soon took the measure of the other. Among other things, the herdsman told his companion how sorely he needed rain. It had been a dry season, and, unless a change soon came, half the settlers in the district would be ruined. Strangely enough, the two had scarcely retired for the night when the heavy drops began to drum on the iron roof, and, an hour later, the roar of the rain made sleep almost impossible. Both were astir early in the morning; and the missionary was astonished at noticing that the herdsman, as he busied himself about the preparations for breakfast, was singing, and singing a well-known hymn, and singing as one sings when all his heart is glad. The visitor was puzzled, for the singing seemed so out of keeping with the man’s conversation overnight.

‘I thought,’ he ventured to say, ‘that you did not believe in that?’

‘No,’ replied the man, ‘I don’t; but I like the tune!’

The incident struck me at the time as being very suggestive; and, the more I have thought of it since, the more has it grown upon me. The herdsman sang because his heart was overflowing: he sang the hymn, he said, because he liked the tune; but I cannot rid my mind of the suspicion that, the longer he sang, the less incredible and the more attractive the words themselves must have seemed to him. A man may sing ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds’ because he loves the strains of ‘St. Peter’; but let him sing it long enough, and his heart will begin to acknowledge the charm of the sacred Name that his lips have so often framed.

Now this is an allegory. As the angels knew, on the night on which they proclaimed to wondering shepherds the Saviour’s birth, God’s message to His world is not a sermon, nor a speech, but a song. Like all songs, it consists of words set to music. The words, of course, are the words of the gospel; the words of everlasting life; the words that fell from the lips of Jesus. ‘The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.’ And these beautiful words are set to the music of beautiful lives. The Australian herdsman sang the hymn because he loved the tune; men listened spellbound to the words that fell from the lips of Jesus because they were set to the music of a life that was so inexpressibly lovely.

‘Yvonne Gray sang divinely,’ the girl opposite me said to her friend last night, ‘but the song was simply murdered by the accompaniment.’

That was the tragedy of the concert at the Town Hall; and that is the tragedy of the world’s history. The sweetest song that angels or men have ever heard has often been murdered by the accompaniment. Let me give one or two examples of what I mean.

Let us go West! Mr. Prescott has told us in his own vivid way how Velasquez led his conquering Spaniards, early in the sixteenth century, into Cuba. The conquest was accomplished, and the brave old warrior, Hatuey, for no other crime than the heroic resistance that he had offered to his European conquerors, was lashed to the stake and sentenced to a cruel death. As his pale-faced tormentors approached with torches to light the faggots at the hero’s feet, the priests drew near and implored him to embrace the faith of the Spaniards. He declined. They multiplied their entreaties, reminding him that only by kissing the crucifix could his soul find admission into heaven. ‘And will the souls of the white men go to heaven?’ inquired the doomed chief. ‘Most assuredly,’ replied the priest. ‘Then,’ exclaimed Hatuey, with finely flashing eyes, ‘I will not be a Christian; for I would not go to a place where I shall find men so cruel’.’ The message that the priest was commissioned to carry was the message of the Cross; and there is no music in earth or heaven like it. But the accompaniment! The music was murdered by the accompaniment.

Let us go East! The gospel was introduced into Japan by Francis Xavier in 1547. The Dominicans and Franciscans who followed in the steps of that devoted pioneer were, however, men who knew nothing of his spirit and had learnt nothing from his example. Their arrogance, oppression, and cruelty made them hated by the whole population. A terrible persecution broke out in 1587, and was from time to time renewed. In 1637 there was a slaughter of thirty-seven thousand Christians, the Roman Catholic martyrs dying with the greatest possible heroism. For more than two hundred years the name of Christian was mentioned in Japan with blanched cheek and pallid lip. During that

long period notice-boards stood beside the highways, ferries, and mountain-passes, bearing the following inscription:

So long as the sun shall warm the earth let no Christian be so bold as to come to Japan; and let all know that, be he the King of Spain himself, or the Christian’s God, or the great God of all, if he violate this commandment, he shall pay for it with his head! In the East, as in the West, the matchless music has been murdered by its accompaniment.

But I need have gone neither to the East nor to the West. The fact is that, wherever the Church has, by her influence or behavior, misrepresented her Lord, the heavenly harmonies have been marred and men have been shocked by discords in the angel-music. The caricature of Christianity under Constantine led to the revolt against Christianity under Julian. The foul misrepresentation of Christianity which became fashionable under Louis the Fourteenth led to the age of infidelity that reached its climax with Voltaire. Macaulay shows that the hypocrisies of a decadent Puritanism were directly responsible for the revolt against religion which disfigured the seventeenth century.

In his Les Miserables, Victor Hugo tells the story of the dire distress of Jean Valjean, the ex-galley slave. He was driven out of one inn and then out of another. At last he took his knapsack and stick and went away. As he strode off, some boys who had followed him from the Cross of Colbas, and seemed to have been waiting for him, threw stones at him. He turned savagely, and threatened them with his stick, and the boys dispersed like a flock of birds. He passed in front of the prison, and pulled the iron bell-handle; a wicket was opened.

‘Mr. Jailer,’ he said, as he humbly doffed his cap, ‘would you be kind enough to open the door and give me a night’s lodging?’

A voice answered, ‘A prison is not an inn; get yourself arrested, and then I will open the door.’

As he did not know the streets, he wandered about without purpose. He thus reached the prefecture and then the seminary. It occurred to him that, if the influence of the Church were what it should be, the people beneath its sway would have shown more pity to an outcast like himself. At that moment he passed into Cathedral Square. The great dome towered above him. The resentment of his soul reached its climax in a striking gesture. He looked up bitterly and shook his fist at the church. Victor Hugo probably meant the incident to stand as an allegorical representation of the greatest tragedy in the religious experience of his country. One of the most intensely pathetic books that I have ever read is Lord Moriey’s Voltaire-the life of a sceptic by a sceptic. Again and again in the course of the volume, Lord Morley half apologizes for the iconoclasms of Voltaire. ‘It cannot be too often repeated,’ he says, ‘that the Christianity which Voltaire assailed was not that of the Sermon on the Mount. He saw only a besotted people led in chains by a crafty priesthood: he heard only the unending repetition of records that were fictitious and of dogmas that drew a curtain of darkness over the understanding. There is no instance of Voltaire mocking at any set of men who lived good lives. He did not mock the English Quakers.’ It was at the accompaniment that his soul recoiled.

If only the accompaniment last night had been in perfect tune, and in perfect time, and in perfect sympathy with the singer! I should never have seen the look of disgust on the fair face opposite me, nor heard her indignant and contemptuous words! If only the Church’s accompaniment had always been in keeping with the eternal harmonies! I came upon a lovely thing the other day in Lionel Trotter’s Life of John Nicholson. Nicholson was, of course, one of the ablest, bravest, and best of our great Indian soldiers and administrators. On one of the closing pages of Captain Trotter’s biography, he gives a copy of a letter written shortly after Nicholson’s death which tells of the extraordinary impression made upon Nicholson’s native followers by the news that he had fallen. When they heard of his gallant and glorious death, they gathered together that they might join in a united lamentation. ‘What happiness can there be in living in a world which no longer holds our Nicholson?’ asked one; and, suiting the action to the word, he committed suicide upon the spot. ‘That,’ said another, pointing to the body of his self-slain comrade, ‘that is not the way to please our great chief. If we wish to see our great Nicholson again, and to look into his face without shame, we must learn to worship and serve Nicholson’s God!’ The rest applauded, and off they all went to the missionary’s house. ‘Teach us,’ they implored, ‘so that his God may be our God, and so that we may go to him again at last.’ For a year they applied themselves with the greatest assiduity to the missionary’s instructions. And, at the end of that period, their teacher being perfectly satisfied with their sincerity, and altogether delighted with their clear grasp of the Christian message, they were baptized and welcomed to the fellowship of the Church. It was the accompaniment that did it. The missionary’s message is as beautiful and wonderful as an angel’s song; but it is only when it is accompanied by lives like Nicholson’s that it achieves its most golden conquests.

Wisps of Wildfire

Related Articles:

• C S LEWIS: A Christian for all Christians (H&S 1990)
• C S LEWIS: A Christian for all Christians (H&S 1990)
• Review: Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings
• Abraham Joshua Heschel quotes
• Who Is John Stott?

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.