Chapter XIX: Chaunters’

“I heard once more in college fanes
The storms their high-built organs make,
And thunder-music, rolling, shake
The prophets blazon’d on the panes.”

_In Memoriam._

Without any choice of mine, except in one instance, it has happened that since I left school, in 1860, I have always lived in cathedral cities. Oxford, London, Bangor, Norwich, Chester, Manchester in turns have been my dwelling-places. The cathedral city aspect of London (the above-mentioned exception) is little considered: only of Chester and Norwich can it be said that the atmosphere is Close. There bishop, dean, and canon in residence are persons to be reckoned with. Even the minor canon, a young man who comes with a tenor or baritone voice, and goes away with a wife and a living, receives in many quarters the brevet rank of canon, and is a welcome guest if he can sing comic songs in the drawing-room.

An Oxford college about the year 1860 instituted “Choral Scholarships,” with the view of attracting undergraduates, who should be able to take an intelligent part in rendering the choral services for which it was so famed; and the wag of the period unkindly described them as “_Vox et praeterea nihil_.” This is possibly true of some minor canons also, especially of those who are gifted with a tenor voice: for nature bestows this supreme gift with so sparing a hand that she can hardly be expected in every case to add wisdom. I cannot remember that I ever met a minor canon with a _basso profondo_. But baritones abound, and when they, or the tenors, retire to their country living, there is much lamentation in the Close.

One such glorified minor canon I used to meet annually. The Reverend A. Chaunters had risen to the rank of precentor[27] in a southern city: let us call it Sudchester: then he had been offered the snug rectory of Q., and in that country parish he had spent many happy years.

His cathedral days shared a fond place in his memory with his undergraduate days at Oxford. I think, if I may be allowed the vain thought, that it really pleased him to get me to lunch every autumn after his school inspection: and with coffee and tobacco to prolong the session till the October twilight warned me to go.

It was my part to tell him year by year of the Cathedral services in the city in which I dwelt; of Services[28] by Stainer and Stanford; of anthems by Gounod, Stainer, and Martin; of the surpassing merits of the organist and choirmaster. He would respond with chronicles of Magdalen and of New in the ’forties and ’fifties; of Elvey and Corfe; and of the Musical Society in which he took an active part; and then of the much-loved cathedral, where he was precentor; of the wonderful tenor, and of the surpassing boy who sang Rossini’s “Inflammatus”--“with the C in alt, you know”--and Mendelssohn’s “Hear my Prayer.” He would fetch out old folios, worn at the edges and weak in the back; and looking lovingly through them, he would ask, did I know “I beheld and lo,” _Blow_; and “They that go down,” _Attwood_? Had I ever seriously studied Purcell? Ah-h.

Then it was mine to tell him of changes in Oxford: of new buildings, even of new colleges: and it was his to bring up memories of (I forget what) college, where he matriculated before I was born. He was there at the time of the “Oxford Movement.” He had heard the sermon of Pusey which was condemned: he had sat under Keble: under John Henry Newman himself. He must have continued at Oxford as Chaplain of New, Magdalen, or Christ Church after he took his degree, for he remembered the day in 1845 when Bounder of Queen’s met him and said, “Have you heard that Newman has gone over at last, and a good job too?” That was John Bounder, who afterwards was Archdeacon of Nevermindwhere, &c., &c.

A little prompting from me would set the old man a-gate (in Cheshire phrase) with a crowd of memories of his cathedral life; so varied that I suspect that, like many in their anecdotage, he assimilated the experiences of others.

Of his Dean he had much to say. The very reverend gentleman had been incumbent of a town parish, where Evangelical views prevailed, and cathedral services were new to him. It was said that after watching the choir for some days he summoned the precentor (that was Chaunters’ predecessor) to the Chapter House, and began after the method of Socrates:

“Mr. Precentor, I’d be glad to know whether your choir is paid to sing, or to stand and do nothing?”

“Certainly, to sing, Mr. Dean.”

“Because I have been watching ’um for four days now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s an organised conspiracy among ’um. In the Psalms, for instance, ye’ll see ’um taking it in turns; one side singing a verse, and then resting, while the other side sings; so that half of ’um are idle all the time. It’s an organised conspiracy; nothing else.”

The precentor explained the antiphonal method, and the canon, who was present, rather staggered the dean by assuring him that this method was practised by the early Christians in the days of Trajan.[29]

After this the dean was quiet for some weeks: then he broke out again on the precentor: “I’ve been looking a good deal lately at your list of Services, and I notice that ye give us too much in the same key. There’s Kempton in B flat, and King in B flat, and Boyce in B flat, and so on. Couldn’t ye give us a little more variety?”

“By all means, Mr. Dean,” said the precentor: “glad to see that you take so much interest in the music.”

He withdrew, and revised the list for the coming week: there were four Services (out of fourteen) in the objectionable key, and in each case he erased B flat and substituted A sharp. Thus amended, the list was printed and submitted to the dean, who was pleased to express his gratitude that his suggestion had been adopted.

“Your precentor, I presume, didn’t explain that an organ has only one note to represent A sharp and B flat,” said I, anxious to let my host know that I saw the point of his story.

“Not he: he was a man who enjoyed a joke, and sometimes made one, when he would have done better to hold his tongue till he got outside. I remember one day, an old canon had died; he had always been in money difficulties, and had left a family very poorly provided for. The precentor came in just before service with a hymn-book, and suggested that the canon in residence should choose a hymn suitable to the melancholy occasion.

“‘To be sure,’ said the canon pensively, turning over the leaves in a vague way: ‘there’s a beautiful hymn beginning:

‘O let him whose sorrow
No relief can find--’

“‘The very thing,’ said the precentor:

‘Trust in God and borrow.’[30]

“‘That is what _he_ would have done.’”

Chaunters’ cathedral, he said, stood in the midst of a Close: there was the palace, there was the deanery, there were the houses of the four canons. Even the minor canons presumed to occupy modest dwellings or lodgings in the sacred precincts. There also was the devout centurion, Colonel A., and there the retired Admiral B. There, too, were godly matrons and still more godly spinsters, who revered the cathedral, adored either the bishop or the dean, associated with the canons’ families, and patronised the minor canons.

The canons were appointed by the Crown. The King can do no wrong, but he may be misguided. One canon was the head of a college at Oxbridge; he “resided” at Sudchester in the Long Vacation. When October came, it brought with it the incumbent of a huge London parish, which he neglected till Christmas. Then came the archdeacon, who indeed never went away, for the Close was his home. The fourth was a voluble Irishman who had obliged his political party--Chaunters did not tell me which party--at a critical time, and had received his reward in the form of a canonry; though he was of opinion that a deanery would have been more fitting, and his wife criticised with some acerbity two recent appointments to the episcopal bench.

The archdeacon, I have said, was a fixture; the others let their houses, when they were not in residence, and thus added a modest sum to their revenues. Two of them sided with the bishop, who was High; the others with the dean, who was Low. Chaunters was epigrammatic and symmetrical in his account.

Just outside the Close, for the convenience of his music pupils, lived the organist, Dr. Pedler, whose Services--Pedler in C, and Pedler in E flat--are as well known as his anthems, “Oh my soul,” _Pedler_, and “Great and marvellous,” _Pedler_. He even wrote an oratorio, called Sennacherib. It was performed by the local Philharmonic Society, and