“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 worship 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 worship 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 passed 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.”