Places and Persons

...From that point a landscape which seems to belong to some better time, some more golden and pastoral era, stretches to the right and the left along the dreaming river...

...Cahill, preferred the liturgical atmosphere of Quarr to that of his own cathedral...

...History repeats itself, but often paradoxically...

...On one side, a vista of foaming weirs, fresh pastures, white cattle and sleeping woodland...

...Smoke rises from its chimneys, mingled with the white mist of the spring morning, with the incense from the open church...

...Shortly after the millennial year 1000, a period which saw the rapid florescence of so many abbeys and priories affiliated to an order already five centuries old, a seigneur of Sable, Geoffrey the Old, gave the black monks one of his fiefs on which to build a church and monastery...

...The Revolution, the key to the modern world, the sword which cuts European history in two unequal lengths, explains this apparent contradiction...

...At first glance, the monastery seems a peak in the primeval rock from which it rises, 260 meters in the air...

...It is not an abbey, one says, it is a fortress...

...So it is thanks to the Corsican, the fathers still say with a lively gratitude, that they now have their "saints...

...It is no longer a semi-modern habitation, raised in great part to Dom Prosper Gueran-ger circa 1830...

...This force he can seek in himself, in his work or in what Baudelaire named "the reservoir of all strength and of all goodness, namely in God...

...The first speaks to the eye, then to the intellect...

...Shortly after Napoleon reestablished the Catholic religion in France, the imperial appointee to the see of Mans, Monsignor de Pidoll, felt, not unnaturally, that the "saints" of Solesmes would be better placed in his own beautiful cathedral than in the hands of a lay connoisseur...

...His biographer recounts that the favorite promenade of Dom Gueranger, then a schoolboy, was along the quiet river Sarthe, from his birthplace to the fallen and neglected abbey...

...In the long run, none of these great people came to his aid, but two old ladies named Cosnard who sacrificed most of their modest fortune so that the monk's desperate dream be fulfilled...

...Then occurred one of those small and adorable incidents which make the joy of the historian and are particularly rejoicing in the annals of Bonaparte...

...This was in 1832, about a year after the triumph of romanticism as signalized by the production of Her-nani commemorated recently in France...

...Wandrille in Belgium, to Silos in Spain, to Quarr, Farnborough and Stanbrook in England...

...And the places that have been desolate for ages shall be built up in thee...

...We must show," he wrote, "to all those who confuse a Benedictine monastery with an academy of letters in permanence, that the intellect is not the reality of the monastic life...

...To the Christian, the Catholic, these statements will seem sad commonplaces, but it is curious to see how it sometimes takes half a lifetime to appreciate them in their strength, and the modern world is full of those who will understand them never...

...The landscape, save by an effort of fancy, remains commonplace, or rather, as said my friend, it contains nothing but the abbey, and the latter is not an abbey but a fortress, a kind of castle of the soul...

...the second, like Elizabethan poetry, mainly to the ear, the sense of music...

...Everyone knows that the Melodies Gregoriennes of Dom Pothier, followed by the Solesmes editions of the Gradual and Antiphonal and by the more recent researches of Dom Mocquereau, have proved the basis of the present Gregorian reform of sacred music and have set the standard for the whole Church...

...In 1837, Dom Gueranger received the constitutions of the revived order from the sovereign pontiff, Gregory XVI...

...When thou shalt pour out thy soul to the hungry, and shalt satisfy the afflicted, then shalt thy light rise up in darkness, and thy darkness be as the noonday...

...he appealed to Lamennais, then a power in the land, to Montalembert, the author of The Monks of the West, to the marquis de Dreux-Breze...

...It was affiliated to Monte Cassino, but declared the heir of the ancient French foundations of Cluny and St...

...A stronghold in any case, a place of defense, a sanctuary in the old sense of the word...

...Dom Gueranger himself believed that the name "Benedictine" demanded in the nineteenth century a certain modification in the public sense...

...A more striking impression is obtained if the pilgrim leaves the train one station this side, at Juigne...

...Should a man seek this supernatural energy in himself, and find instead the negation of life, the demon of sterility, the void in person, he is already beaten in advance...

...Only a few years before this event, in 1805, the year of Trafalgar, the man whom the Benedictines venerate as the restorer of their order in France, Prosper Gueranger, was born at Sable...

...Places and Persons THE SECRET OF SOLESMES By CUTHBERT WRIGHT ORDINARILY, the visitor reaches Solesmes by a rapid train from Montparnasse which drops him at an uninteresting town called Sable, and then departs majestically into the night, bearing its tourists toward Brittany and the remote lands of the west...

...The secret of Solesmes, after all, what is it but that of the universal and eternal Church of God...

...One can take a carriage to the abbey which is about three miles away, but it is far from being the best manner of approach...

...Everyone knows that the latter did not hesitate, amid the flames of burning Moscow and the appalling catastrophe of the Russian retreat, to forward a decree to Paris, establishing a national theatre, the present Comedie Franchise...

...In the meantime, the persistent M. de Chantelou had sold the whole property to newcomers, recently enriched, who at once announced their intention of demolishing what was left of the church and priory...

...We place above everything the canonical celebration of the divine office in which we intend to maintain the solemnity and the splendor amid the universal decadence which surrounds us...

...It is just to say that the success of this literary movement had its effect in the salvage of a good many ancient churches and mediaeval monuments, but the distant lands of Maine and Anjou were deaf to the voices of Hugo and Chateaubriand...

...One is the more moved in penetrating the abbey if he knows something of its past...

...In the spring of 1081, Hoel, bishop of Mans, driven from his episcopal town by the usual communal troubles, took refuge at Solesmes and there celebrated the ceremonies of Holy Week, including the consecration of the holy oils...

...It is a moment from one of the most vaporous and magical couplets of Tennyson in his Arthurian cycle...

...One would like to quit Solesmes for that turmoil of struggles and vices which any great city, especially Paris, represents on this note, for example: "Thus saith the Lord God: If thou wilt take away the chain out of the midst of thee, and cease to speak that which profiteth not...

...Should he seek it in his work, he is confronted always with the inescapable truth uttered by the priest on Ash Wednesday as he traces the cross on the forehead of his penitent: "Memento homo quia pulvis est...

...Everything in the vast place seems subordinated to, concentrated upon, the sanctuary, and entering the latter one observes that everything within is half concealed, all but effaced, before a plain table of communion, rising beyond slim white columns, surmounted by a suspended tabernacle in which dwells the one Hope and Salvation of humanity...

...In such a place, that sublime Lenten liturgy speaks to the heart, or better yet, to the will, as that of no other season possibly could...

...The following year, the abbey was put up for sale, and found its purchaser in a certain M. Lenoir de Chantelou, from the same district...

...The black mass of construction turns vaporous and opaque...

...Very little allowance seems to have been made by nature or man for the physical or sensuous aspect of things...

...After all, I did not go into Maine for archaeological reasons...

...The rest of the landscape-woodlands, aqueducts, bridges-falls away into insignificance...

...The secret of Solesmes is that everything there tends to simplify and fortify a soul in danger of losing itself...

...I experienced no particular hunger for historical monuments, nor for pure plainchant, nor for monastery gardens, nor for any of the accidents which grace the path of the happy pilgrim...

...The secret of Solesmes pursued him as he went out into the world and rose ever higher in the secular Church of the Restoration, as secretary to the bishop of Mans, as administrator of the foreign missions at Paris, as canon of the Mans cathedral, finally as novice at Monte Cassino...

...besides, it is doubtful if they had ever heard their names...

...Moreover, one sees nothing of it save its Homeric refectory, and its church...

...We do not know to what degree this gentleman was a friend to the persecuted faith, but he soon showed a laudable, and in the long run, a providential intention of keeping the artistic relics of the abbey in his own possession...

...Forty thousand francs were required immediately to buy the former fief...

...There remains God, and one must not imagine, with the amiable Puritan poet, Lowell, that "only God can be had for the asking," that it is as easy as all that...

...I have felt this bit of history to be useful in establishing the peculiar atmosphere of Solesmes, but on second thoughts, I doubt very much whether its peculiar atmosphere depends in the least, either on its history or its achievements...

...Dom Gueranger raised heaven and earth...

...It seems only yesterday that we read of the expulsion of the religious orders from France at the hands of a radical government, that is to say, a government of village atheists and worse...

...It suggests at once Saint Michel and the palace of the Popes at Avignon in the south...

...These included, principally, the two great groups of fifteenth-century statuary, the famous "saints" of Solesmes, which now flank, in manner of reredos, the transepts of the actual abbey-church...

...In a sense, it is one of the oldest Benedictine foundations in Gaul, in another sense, it is one of the youngest...

...There is not the space to recount what everyone doubtless knows already-the intellectual and liturgical reform sponsored by the new Benedictines under the direction of this energetic and profoundly Christian priest...

...But this time they were the sons of Saint Benedict who were unjustly banished from their own fatherland and their holy place...

...Between the seeker and his unique Aim there is often a gulf from which rise obscurely, like the vapors of a ravine, all the bad miasmas of inherited inferiorities and acquired perversities, of an abject scepticism, of that vanity still more abject which Carlyle called the eighth deadly sin...

...Assuming that it is still day and the weather is sunny, he will descend on foot the precipitous lanes of that charming mediaeval village to the ramparts of its church...

...on the other, at a further distance, beyond a garland of arched bridges, "the great vision of the guarded mount," mirrored in the stream, the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes...

...There is nothing now between us and the sweetness of the Angevin sky but this stupendous work of man, sanctified to God...

...On February 13, 1790, the National Assembly decreed that monastic vows were invalid before the law, and suppressed the foundations where they were in use...

...Among the orders, the Benedictines, who had already done so much for France and the Church, were naturally the first to go, to begin life afresh under British jurisdiction at Quarr abbey on the Isle of Wight...

...I went because I could not do otherwise...

...The imperial prefect of the department intervened on the side of his ecclesiastical colleague, and this rare union of prefect and diocesan seemed likely to be too strong for M. de Chantelou, when the latter unexpectedly appealed to the emperor, at that moment far away on the eastern front (1812...

...there at any rate he loved to come on Holy Thursday to perform the same ceremony as his French predecessor in the middle-ages...

...It is said that the English bishop of Portsmouth, Dr...

...Dom Delatte, who ruled over the community, at the time of the expulsions at the end of the century, spoke in the same sense: "The day when we will sacrifice on the altar of studies the solemnity of our offices, our regularity, our monastic stability, we will have lost our true character, and even our right to exist...

...The war waged by the Revolution against the Catholic faith in France terminated the first long chapter in the history of Solesmes...

...The discipline demanded to descend into the pit on one side only to mount into the light on the other is the very reason and motive of the type of monasticism we have attempted to describe...

...He would enter the dismantled church to contemplate that world of imagery, still marvelously living amid the ruins, "those apostles, those seraphim, those women, the dragon with its seven heads...

...Those introits and grad-uals, those stripped and classic collects, above all the epistles, taken mostly from the Prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel, have taught us to admire the English of the Roman Catholic Scriptures more than that of the King James version...

...It was a simple son of Saint Benedict who returned in haste from Italy with the intention of saving the glorious patrimony of his spiritual fathers...

...Maur...

...In the same fashion, a few days later, the emperor sent a special order from his camp at Wilna, authorizing M. de Chantelou to keep his statues...

...It is not to underline the darker side of things to say that life, once the age of illusion be past, is a battle against powers visible and invisible, and this being the case, a man has need of all the moral force he can summon to his aid...

...Finally, the order has spread from Solesmes into distant provinces and other countries, from Liguge in Poitu, where Huysmans was an oblate, to Wisque near Calais, to St...

...It is Carbonek, the heaven-kissing citadel, the City of the Cup...

...Then the sun reappears from behind a cloud, and in the sudden change of light, the whole tremendous silhouette is transformed...