at High Mass on any Sunday in the year. "The people will not listen to it!" is another prophecy. We leave the answer to any one who has assisted at our services and who has a spark of correct musical or æsthetic taste.

Organists and choirmasters and musicians generally, from all over the country, seem to make it a point to visit the Church during their vacation, and, what is still more important, they come year after year. Cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and priests from all parts of the world have given their approbation and expressed their pleasure at what they have seen and heard. Among them may be mentioned Cardinal McCloskey, Cardinal Satolli, the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Martinelli, Archbishop Falconio, Archbishop Agius, and almost all the archbishops and bishops of this country.

Cardinal Satolli, in speaking of the "Motu Proprio," said of St. Paul's Church: "It is the only Church in the United States where nothing will have to be changed."

Archbishop Falconio said: "It is the only Church in the United States where everything is done in exact accordance with the wishes of the Holy Father."

Archbishop Agius, after one of the services at which he was present, took occasion to go into the choir-room to express his approbation and to thank the choir for the great and excellent work they were doing for the honor and glory of God and of the Church.

A few words concerning the organization and work of this choir may not be out of place. The choir was organized in 1871 and its work was commenced under the special blessing of his Holiness, Pope Pius IX., and of his Grace, the Most Rev. John McCloskey, Archbishop of New York, and it has gone on without any interruption ever since. The chant-books selected for the use of the choir were those published in Montreal, which were also the official books of the Diocese of New York, being used in the Provincial Seminary at Troy, and their use has been continued ever since. After the publication of the Ratisbon book our retention of the Montreal editions subjected us to many a good-natured criticism from the adherents of the Ratisbon, most of whom, by the way, are now just as enthusiastic for the Solesmes as they were then for the Ratisbon.

The choir consists of about seventy-five young men and boys. They sing the proper and ordinary of the Mass on

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every Sunday and holyday in the year in Flain Chant exclusively; the proper Vespers, with all commemorations, and Compline on the Wednesdays of Lent. They are able to sing, if necessary, the entire proper and ordinary of the Mass and the entire proper Vespers in Plain- Chant at first sight in the Church, without any rehearsal whatever, and they could take entire charge of the music for any or all the ceremonies in the Pontificale, provided time was given to prepare copies of the music.

The boys, for the most part, are from the public schools, and their rehearsals take place after school hours-a serious handicap, as they are generally tired after their school work. The men are mostly young men of the parish, quite a large percentage of them having been boys in the choir. Their rehearsals take place in the evening, after their day's work is done. No salary whatever is paid to either boys or men.

The parish is not an ideal one, as far as the worldly prosperity of its inhabitants is concerned, nor is the location particularly conducive to the development of good voices. There is an elevated railroad station at the corner, for the Sixth and Ninth Avenue roads, and four lines of trolley cars converge at the same corner. Besides being thoroughly grounded in chant, the choir is well versed in modern music also. A piece of modern music is generally sung after the proper offertorium of the day; and an oratorio chorus, or a motet, after Vespers, while the preparations are being made for Benediction.

Among the composers whose works have been drawn upon for this purpose, I may mention Palestrina, Allegri, Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, Haydn, Gounod, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Witt, Hanisch, Oberhoffer, and others.

It must not be supposed that in the development of this choir all has been plain sailing. Far from it. We have had the difficulties inseparable from a volunteer choir. We have suffered from misrepresentations, covert sneers, and ill-natured remarks. It certainly is discouraging, in a measure, for one of my singers to ask whether the Gregorian Chant we are singing is real Gregorian chant, because A had told him that he had heard from B that it is not..

It must not be inferred from what I have said that we resent criticism; we do not, provided that it comes from one competent to criticise. Gregorian Chant is one of the branches.

of musical art, and as such it and its exponents must be prepared to stand competent criticism; but in every art and science there are pretenders, and music, unfortunately, has many more than its fair share.

While searching for information on recent developments and discoveries in Plain-Chant, I have found some curious statements; to some of these I have already referred. Some of them are musically untrue; and others are loose, misleading, and calculated to make Gregorian Chant, and all connected with it, a laughing-stock for musicians.

In treatises on chant, intended for the instruction of singers and others, I have seen examples of chant in which the clef is wrongly placed; others in which the examples of chant are printed upside down (with the words printed under the reversed and consequently retrograde notes). In one instance, the chant is commenced incorrectly as chant, because it is not in the mode to which the piece in question belongs; but about half way from the end all the notes drop one degree, so that the piece, which commences, let us suppose, in the key of G ends in the key of F. An example taken from modern music is said to be in the key of D, but it has three sharps in its signature. Other instances show models for accompaniments, meagre, puerile, and ill sounding; with bare fifths, dissonances improperly resolved or not resolved at all, and consecutive fifths so barely avoided that they would still be held as violations of the rule by Cherubini, Albrechtsberger, and all other masters of counterpoint and harmony. I have read of "a chord or note" and that the "first beat of the bar is the weak beat, because it is the down beat"; the "diminished seventh," when the dominant seventh was meant, etc., etc.

We have endeavored to set forth what we judge to be the true theories of Plain- Chant; theories which we know, from our experience and from well known results, will, if adopted, contribute most efficaciously to the great and glorious work-the restoration of Plain-Chant.

STUDIES ON FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

BY M. D. PETRE.

II.

NIETZSCHE THE POET.

N his later introduction to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche regrets that this book was not written in poetry instead of prose; his soul should have sung and not spoken."

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What he said of his first work some of us would endorse, with far more conviction, of his later ones. He was capable of being many things, but he was a poet perhaps more than anything else. Could we have classed him altogether in this category, his position would have been, I think, more sure and more permanent. The good in him would have been more. forcible, the bad would have been less objectionable. His exaggerations would have had a clothing which, like a suitable dress, would have softened the harshness of their outline, making them seem that which they really were: not deliberate statements of truth, but suggestions and intuitions internal and momentary as flashes of light and sparks of fire.

Not but that a poet should be truthful as well as a philosopher or a scientist, but it is in a different way. In science we look for truth defined and limited, truth that we can measure and comprehend, whereas in poetry and in art we look for truth progressive, undefined, and unlimited. As Schopenhauer says, the artist must not explain everything; when we entirely understand him, then the art is thin. And Nietzsche also tells us that "as youth and childhood have a value of their own, and not only as stages of transition, so unfinished thoughts have likewise their value." In these words he gave us the apology of his own writings.

Between the years 1870 and 1876 appeared all the works of his first, and his undisguisedly poetic and artistic period. In 1886 he put prefaces to his earlier works, prefaces which

Menschliches, allzu Menschliches. I. 207.

It

contain the judgment of the later on the earlier Nietzsche. is difficult for any writer to realize that he is, perhaps, no more competent in advanced life to give a final opinion on his younger work than any other critic, and has no more right than any one else to pass on it a sentence of final condemnation. But Nietzsche thought he had; and the lesser mind of 1886 set itself up to judge and reprove the stronger, richer mind of ten years ago. All that he really commended in his first books was any indication he could find therein of his later philosophy.

It is quite true that in The Birth of Tragedy there is evidently something of the spirit of the later Anti-Christ; and that in the consideration on Wagner in Bayreuth we have just the hint of the criticisms contained in his last pamphlet, Nietzsche contra Wagner. But if it be true that these marks of consistent development are to be traced, it is none the less certain that the first works possess something which is lacking in the later ones-a completeness, an originality, a warmth and strength which stamp them as the work of a richer mind. We would all of us like to prove ourselves consistent, but one could have wished, in the case of Nietzsche, that he had sought an inverse consistency, of the later years with the earlier, rather than the other way about. The chief misfortune, however, is that the world has been too much influenced by his own valuation, and has accepted his relative estimation of his earlier and his later work. How many people have read the AntiChrist for one that knows his really beautiful work, The Birth of Tragedy or the Considerations out of due Time?

I cannot forbear from saying once more that Nietzsche does not appear to me to consist of successive and whole divided personalities; there is consistency; there are notes of self-assertion, self-restraint; there is a spirit of strenuous activity and forward movement which may be perceived throughout. But still he left a great deal of the best behind him in his advance; and he was, for this reason, the very worst critic of his own works. We will, then, in our study of Nietzsche as artist and poet, take him apart from his own self-appreciation, and learn what he has to teach us in spite of himself; that is to say, learn of the enthusiastic younger Nietzsche, and shut our ears to the bitter comments of the older man, who has no more right to pass a final judgment than we ourselves. The books that he has given us belong no longer to their author alone.