Thomson, Virgil
My Jesus, I Love Thee
[Paris, 1925]
t. and a. ms., llp. (with ten-page
carbon typescript copy)

So Also: Thomson, Virgil
Patented Iraisers

six

present becomes endurable; and the faith, the hope, the great yearning are projected toward that ultimate Paris to which wicked Americans make pilgrimages in this life, the poor or the timid in the next.

The hymnal of 1848 is a collection of devotional poetry
acceptable to any educated person of religious bent. It is
not cheap or tawdry or hysterical, and the music to which
it was sung could not have been far removed from the Anglican
style, the model in those days of good Protestant hymnody.
Now there is a Baptist book in present use which is a weak,
though not unworthy, descendant of that practice. It was
formerly obtained in the church where I obtained the Treasury
of Song. But since the service there has become markedly
revivalist, the more sober collection is not considered
satisfactory, revivalism being impossible without a different
language and especially a different music from that tradition-
ally associated with English hymns.

The success of the so-called Methodist revival in the
eighteenth century was due in large part to a musical device,
Before that time, congregational participation in the service
had been limited to a little chanting and psalm-cinging. The
Wesleyan hymns offered a new and gorgeous form of joy, Mob-
music (it had fought a hundred years of German war for Martin
Luther) released an energy which, having small outlet in use-

See Also: Thomson, Virgil
Patented Fraises

U

seven

ful deed, became quickly a public menace. There was not much to be done about it while it raged; equally fierce waves of crime and of colonisation seemed not to exhaust its energy.

Samuel Wesley himself made honest efforts to control it, especially the practice of singing in harmony, which he considered effeminate. He insisted, reasonably enough, that hymns should be sung in unaccompanied unison. But a popular musical renascence, whether it be Luther's howling soldiers of Alexander's Red-time Band, is scarcely amenable to reason. For the first time in history, pure harmony (reduced to the tabloid form of tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords) had been put on the market for the popular trade. It was carried by missionaries, along with syphilis and salvation, to America, Australia, and the islands of the sea. Indeed, from that day, the power of melodic generation has been virtually sterile in English-speaking peoples, and we have recently witnessed the extinction of other native styles by the introduction to the negroes and go the Hawaiians of this facile and seductive harmony.

Now the tonic and its dominants are the guiding points in any music, even the fluid plain-song. A sophisticated attention to them made possible the expressive compositions of Palestrina and the fugues of J S Bach. But music is primarily rhythmic and melodic, because rhythms and melody are forms of movement.

["[Paris, 1925]", "t. and a. ms., llp. (with ten-page\ncarbon typescript copy)", "A. M. L.: Thomson, Virgil\nPatented raises", "Harmony, the tonic and dominant contrast, is a sort of like to render definite the direction of this flow. To mistake it for music is to take the dam for the river. Of itself, it is immobile, without force, vitality, or expression.", "The tunes of my little red treasury, though they show an initiation into musical vice, undreamed of in the days of the
Wealeys, are nevertheless the products of that early mistake about the function of harmony; and they are, if I may continue the fluid figure, neither damned nor directed. They know neither the control of classic hymn-music nor the outbursts of the primitive sects. Like the stanzas that they accompany, they tease the worshipper with phrases. But they do not make sense. Wuffled pujations from the dance-hall are unquestionably implied beneath their bouncing syncopations; and there is no doubt that the writers have attempted to seduce, or at least to tickle, by means of chromatic harmony and the Viennese waltz. Half the pieces are, in fact, written in triple time; and more than nine-tenths of them contain non-modulatory chromatics. Yet, even as dance-music, they lack the energy that moves muscles.", "There is simply no life in them. They were never born. They are mechanical constructions. Rhythm seems to have been applied to them like a pulmotor or a galvanic battery. Chromatics have forced their rigid parts into suggestive postures. And hypnotic"]

To: Also: Thomson, Virgil
Patented Praises

nine

Incantations have been intoned. But the only response has
been certain jerkings which the mostibelied worshipper
could soaroly interpret as gestures from a god, Rhythmo-
trioke from 145th Street, melodic formulae from the Scottish
highlands, faked fragments of English folk-dance, strains
from the cafés of Vienna, decayed petals from every musical
wild-flower grown between Warshaw and Waikiki, haphazard
clusters of notes suitable to every instrument known to man
except the human voice, have all been cooked up together and
sold as a patented massage cream for the person of Our Lord.
Concerning its effect upon Him we are highly skeptical, But
there can be no doubt that the mixture is meant to act upon
the applicant as an aphrodisiac for private devotions, which,
considering the frankness of their imagery, can soaroly be
of a highly sublimate character,

It is not necessary to demonstrate at length that American
religion has changed since 1840. The hymn-collections which
I write about are simply amusing evidences of the difference.
Revivalism existed at that date (and not only among the so-
called lower classes), but it did not sell millions of hand-
books. And a certain gentle protestantism exists even today,
although its prestige is overwhelmed by the power, psychic
and financial, which organised revivalism enjoys. The various
changes in our life and feeling which have taken place during