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Title: Cardinal Newman as a Musician

Author: Edward Bellasis

Release Date: August 25, 2008 [EBook #26427]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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CARDINAL NEWMAN

AS A MUSICIAN.

BY

EDWARD BELLASIS,

_Author of "Cherubini: Memorials Illustrative of his Life."_

[Illustration]

LONDON:
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUeBNER, AND CO.
1892.

REPRINTED (WITH ADDITIONS AND MUSICAL EXAMPLES) FROM
"THE MONTH" OF SEPTEMBER, 1891.

ROEHAMPTON: PRINTED BY JAMES STANLEY.

Music's ethereal fire was given
Not to dissolve our clay,
But draw Promethean beams from Heaven,
And purge the dross away.

J.H.N.

_Cardinal Newman as a Musician._

It is a remark of St. Philip Neri's latest biographer that, "Our Saint
was profoundly convinced that there is in music and in song a
mysterious and a mighty power to stir the heart with high and noble
emotion, and an especial fitness to raise it above sense to the love
of heavenly things."[1] In like manner the Saint's illustrious son,
Cardinal Newman, has spoken of "the emotion which some gentle,
peaceful strain excites in us," and "how soul and body are rapt and
carried away captive by the concord of musical sounds where the ear is
open to their power;"[2] how, too, "music is the expression of ideas
greater and more profound than any in the visible world, ideas which
centre, indeed, in Him whom Catholicism manifests, who is the seat of
all beauty, order, and perfection whatever."[3] Music, then, to him
was no "mere ingenuity or trick of art like some game or fashion of
the day without meaning."[4] For him man "sweeps the strings and they
thrill with an ecstatic meaning."[5] "Is it possible," he asks, "that
that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so
simple, so int