University of Virginia Library

11. ELEVENTH INSTALLMENT.

In order to quiet the public mind and to relieve the
city from a task too onerous for its weak exchequer, I
swept away all the houses from Gamble's Hill and converted
it into one of the prettiest little terraced parks
imaginable. Near the centre of the grounds, a little to
the west of the former site of Pratt's Castle, and on the
highest point of the hill, arose an immense monument to
the Black Crook Club: Jonah White, in the costume of a
Roman Senator, on top, and beneath and around him all
the members of the club, life-size and accurate likenesses
every one, grouped together, hand in hand, with their
mouths wide open and singing at the full pitch of their
voices,—

At a little distance from the main group (the figures
were carefully cast of hematite iron at Tanner's foundry)
stood my friend Dr. W. Leigh Burton,[1] attired as Orpheus,
with a fiddle in one hand and a forceps in the
other, leading the chorus. The little park, known as Nat.
Sturdivant Terrace, was a great place of resort for strangers
and for nurses with babies in baby-carriages. Strangers
always burst into roars of laughter, and complained that
looking at the monument made them thirsty.

This reminds me of a fact which I had entirely overlooked,
viz., the completion of the Hermann Garden by
Louis Euker[2] and myself simultaneously with the completion
of the Shields House. The square between Seventh
and Eighth on Broad was equally divided between the
hotel and the garden. The latter was beautifully laid out,
the fine holly-tree on Dr. Trent's lot being religiously
preserved, other trees, shrubs, vines, etc., being added,
together with two fountains as graceful in design as any I
ever saw; indeed, the whole place was made as attractive
as possible. My object in establishing the garden was to
prepare the way for that excellent European custom of
associating the sexes in all enjoyments whatsoever, even
in conviviality. Why make human animals cannot get
along without drinking I simply do not know, but the
majority of them either cannot or will not; at all events
they do not, and the only method yet discovered of toning
them down, of stopping them from swilling, boozing,
and guzzling to excess is to associate the female animal
with them, so that even in their cups her benign influence
is exerted over them. “But this lowers the female
animal.” I don't know about that. In Holland, Germany,
France, and Italy the plan seems to have worked well,
made races eminently temperate and healthy as compared
with the English and American, and substituted mild for
strong drinks—the entering wedge to no drinks at all, if
that time is ever to come. I am told that the plan succeeded
so well at Hermann Garden that in the course of
a few years cold tea in summer and hot coffee in the
winter became the favorite drinks. “But surely the ladies
did not go there in winter?” Yes, they did. By a simple
arrangement of iron columns, ribs, etc., which could
be quickly put up and taken down, Louis converted his
garden about the first of December into a crystal palace,
more attractive in some respects than it had been during
the summer.

No sooner had I announced my intention of building
my Cathedral on the southeast corner of Fifth and Main
Streets, than there was a general outcry,—

“Why, man, you might as well build the house down
at Rocketts; if you want a really appropriate site for it,
Union Hill is the place; that's where the city ought to
have been built originally, anyway, and would have been
built but for the folly of some old curmudgeon or other,
whose name has gone into merited oblivion. Don't you
see that the city has extended already a mile beyond Monroe
Park? There's no telling where it will go in that
direction. Come, reconsider the matter.”

“Too late, my friends; the purchase money has been
paid, the deed signed and delivered. Besides, I know
what I'm about.”

There is no more perfect specimen of Gothic architecture
on earth than Cornelia[3] Cathedral. Interior and exterior
alike are as near perfection as it is in the power of
human hands to make a house for the worship of God.
It is large enough, but not too large; it is dim enough,
without being too dim; the elevation of nave and transept
lifts the soul, but does not crush it into insignificance, as
in St. Peter's, and there is about the inner atmosphere a
hush and a charm peculiar to this house. At least I fancy
so. There is no pulpit, nor will there ever be one. No
voice of preacher or of public prayer will ever be heard
there. The service is wholly musical—an organ of great
power and sweetness, and a choir trained thoroughly to
render devotional music in a manner truly and unaffectedly
devotional. As a rule, the organ is the only instrument
used, but at fit times and seasons every instrument
that can increase and intensify religious emotion is introduced.
The choir of men, women and boys, is paid by
the year, and sufficiently well paid to devote their whole
time to the service of the Cathedral. There are three
services daily, an hour each in length, at morning, noon,
and evening,—the matins, nones, and vespers of the

Catholics[4] a little altered. In the summer the matin service
occurs while it is yet cool, but in winter not until ten
o'clock, after people have had their breakfasts. Worship
on an empty stomach does not suit civilization and dyspepsia.
Nones in winter are at three P.M., as the bulk of
the better classes (six o'clock dinners are still the exception
in Richmond) are on their way to dine, and vespers
at eight or half-past eight, after tea has been comfortably
taken.

The backs of the pews are very high—no temptation to
peep at bonnets and pretty faces being possible—and most
of them are provided with keys, so that the worshiper
may lock himself in. All the pews for one person, of
which there are a great number, are under lock and key.
The organ-loft at the rear of the church, where the pulpit
usually is, may be looked into, but a screen of bronze
open-work hides organist[5] and choir from the public
gaze. Absolute silence is demanded of every one who
enters, and is rigidly enforced. Locked in his pew, the
worshiper listens and adores. His soul goes to heaven
on the wings of music. Doctrine, dogma, creed of any
kind, vain babbling of always fallible interpretations of the
Uninterpretable, of Him whose ways are past finding out,
there is none to disturb him. “My son, give me thine
heart.” And his heart cries out, and up, and on to his
Father, “I know not what to believe—I do not believe—
I love. Slay me if Thou wilt for my want of faith, but
this love, this joy beyond all words, all thoughts, shall
life me into life again. I adore so much I cannot fear!”
And if with streaming eyes and bent knees he wishes to
give way to his emotion, and to stretch appealing hands
to Him that heareth prayer,—he is alone in his locked
pew, let him do what he will.

Tell me nothing about the debilitations of music. I
know its power and I know its perversions. But, my
good friend, subtract from religious exercises the element
of music, and what have you left? Only the intellect,
argument, reason for the faith, etc. Ah! that is what
those wretched scientists demand, and little else but that.

One stern exaction was enforced upon the organist and
every member of the choir, viz., that under no circumstances
whatever should there be the least approach to
trapeze-work, ground and lofty tumbling upon the keyboards,
wild hullaballooing and cattle-stampeding along
the octaves, alternations of peacock-screamings and sick-kitten
sorrowings, pounding the chords in the mortar of
self-conceit and fancying it inspiration—in a word, no
showing off, no exhibition of purely personal skill in instrumentation
or vocalization. Immediate and hopeless
loss of situation followed every violation of this rule. To
present the compositions really worthy to be called sacred
of the best German[6] masters, and of the earlier and in
some respects still better Italian school (Palestrina and
Allegri, for example), when profound faith and profound
feeling went hand in hand, and to present them in the
spirit as nearly as possible in which they were first delivered
by the inspired composers, that was the duty of
the choir, and that was their whole duty. Nor were the
hymns and psalms to which the mass of hearers had been
accustomed from childhood by any means neglected. A
standing reward of five thousand dollars for a first-rate
devotional composition failed, after ten years' trial, to
produce anything worthy of the name, the committee
withholding the reward all that time, after which it was
withdrawn. I suppose the scientific spirit had killed the
sacred spirit [Some contradiction here of views before
given. But between diction and contradiction somewhere
lies the truth most likely], or else that mankind in general,
out-evolving the musicians, got so far ahead that the

latter could never catch up, so that even the “music of
the future” failed to satisfy the cravings of the people of
the present, who thereupon fell back perforce upon the
good old music of the past.

At first there was a large attendance of the curious;
afterwards the excellence of the music drew crowds of
women and children, and music-lovers of the male sex;
but by degrees the men of business who contemned Cornelia
Cathedral and the mode of its worship, dropped in
on their way to or from their offices and shops to rest
awhile, and “just to look, you know.” It was so cool
within the thick stone walls in summer and so comfortable
in winter. Then the high vaulted roof—yes, the whole
interior was so beautiful, and the solemn stillness so refreshing
after the bustle and worry of work, after the
dirty, soul-dirtying work of making money. And ere
long these men of business contrived to get to the Cathedral
in time to hear a little music. Bashful enough in the
beginning, ashamed indeed to be caught, they slipped in
slyly; but a year had not passed before they went in
boldly, in couples often, and in groups. They found it
to be a good thing to go down-town with some motet,
fugue, or anthem warming their hearts, or to return home
after a voiceless prayer in the Cathedral.

My point was gained. My object in building so low
down in the city and so close to its business haunts was
fully explained, and, in the eyes of all but the bigots, justified.

The Cathedral was never closed day or night the whole
year round. It was not a refuge, though, for vagrants
and tramps, or for fashionable loungers of either sex.
The tramps were kindly turned away to some place where
needed assistance could be had; the fops and their giggling
females were simply not admitted at all. The organist
and his best pupils were permitted to play whenever the
spirit moved them—a privilege seldom abused, but much
coveted by the more gifted and spiritual scholars, who
desired to breathe out their deepest and most devout
thoughts; and so it often happened that business and
professional men and strangers, dropping in at odd hours,
heard the best music. Far into the night, sometimes, the

belated worker or the reveler, passing the Cathedral and
feeling the pavement trembling under his feet, would go
in and have his heart lifted unto God by the mighty organ,
touched by the hand of one who could not find sleep until
his inspired thought had found expression. The vergers
and watchmen told me that the men who came in most
frequently late at night and who appeared to be most
moved to penitence, were journalists and artists recovering
from some bout at drinking. The overwhelming effect
of the music upon their sin-stricken souls, when they
thought no one observed them, was said to be affecting in
the extreme. That a thorough reformation from their
unfortunate habits was ever accomplished may be doubted,
because the outward intoxication by which they occasionally
disgrace themselves is but the reflex of that inward
intoxication, more or less habitual with men of their
temperament, which has in it something almost divine.
I have been told, moreover, that drinking men never get
really penitent until they get sick of liquor, that what appears
to be remorse is only nausea, and that penitence
darts away as soon as the tone of the stomach and nerves
is restored. I don't think this is altogether true; on the
contrary, I think somewhat of the penitence lingers and
abides, is remembered in the soberest intervals, provokes a
shudder of horror at past sin, and many a heartfelt prayer
against a relapse. For all that, I can readily believe that
a man with an absolutely gin-proof stomach might keep
on a continuous spree during the whole of his lifetime.

The midnight services on the days set apart for the celebration
of the birth of our Saviour[7] and the incoming of

the New Year were as sublime as the art at my command
enabled me to make them. If I should say that the crush
on these occasions equaled that at St. Peter's when the
Miserere is sung during Holy Week, I would be accused
of exaggeration; therefore I will simply say that it was
very great, and that many persons came from distant
States, and some from over the sea, to enjoy the music.
I do with that I knew thorough bass from counterpoint,
etc., sufficiently well to enable me to describe the soul-moving
harmonies of the great composers as rendered by
the Cornelia Cathedral choir. [I had laid away a newspaper
scrap, in which the description is finely and technically
done by a critic of the highest order, a Jewish gentleman
of Hamburg as I was told; but like many other
things it is laid away so carefully that it might as well
have been laid in the grave. If any one finds it after I
am gone he will do me a great favor by inserting it just
here. If not found the reader must trust to his imagination,
or better still go to the Cathedral and hear for himself.]

In '98 or thereabouts, my granddaughter, Mary Davidson,
was born, in the county of Rockbridge, and in her
eighteenth year appeared as the leading soprano singer in
our choir. She was as beautiful a woman as ever lived,
fair, blue-eyed and golden-haired, as pure as light itself,
and sweet as charity. A Sabbath peace and sanctity
(“the Sabbaths of eternity, one Sabbath deep and wide”)
seemed to have passed into her being at birth, and her
whole life was in accord with that holiness. No nun was
ever more devoutly or wholly religious. Her piety and her
existence were one. God was with her, in her, and about
her ever; she was in this world and above it in some
supernatural way, of which every one who saw her became
instantly conscious. Her voice was literally the voice of
a seraph—clear and sweet, but infinitely more than that
—so thrilling and penetrating that all who heard it were at
once awed as by a sound coming immediately from the
heavens. She sang sacred music as it ought to be sung.
She gave all its meaning, all its power, all its pathos,
without that constant tremor (tremolo) which from Tamberlik's
day to the present has been so overdone as to dis

figure and impair the effect of church-music everywhere.
Some of her sustained notes, pure and unbroken as a sun-ray,
went to the heart and soul with a force that transcends
language. One felt as if touched by the wing of
the angel of death—as if the other world was to be opened
on the instant, and the whole nature and being shuddered
and gasped to take in the larger life that was coming.
But why attempt to tell about it? They who listened remember
and know all about it; those who did not can
never know.

By unanimous request the choir screen was taken down,
so that all might see this beautiful woman while she was
singing the holiest music. She did not object. A true
woman, she loved to be loved and admired, but no man
dared ever to address her. Her life was far beyond and
above that. For two years she sang twice a day and
sometimes oftener at the Cathedral; the intervals between
the choir services were spent in good works. She it was
who so aided me in the “sky-surprises” heretofore alluded
to. She died without sickness and without pain, and the
mightiest concourse that ever went to Hollywood accompanied
her to her grave. Such passionate grief I never
saw exhibited by a whole people as was exhibited then.
Her tomb, by far the most beautiful in Hollywood, attests
the love the people bore her. For myself, I was glad that
she died. My own end was near, my work was drawing
to a close, and I did not wish to be long parted from her.

Not the least of Mahone's[8] many titles to distinction
was the fact that in my time he was almost the only man in
Virginia, so far as my large acquaintance went, who really
cared to patronize (no, not patronize, but to encourage)
Virginia artists. Virginia was then passing through that
phase of folly, long before sneered out of Great Britain
and the North, which is marked by the purchase of copies
of so-called “old masters,” wretched in conception and

execution, and the utter neglect of works of merit done
at home by native artists. I employed Elder, Fisher, and
Sheppard, at twenty thousand dollars per annum each
(and would have employed Myers at the same, had he
not gone to a better land), to work exclusively for me.
The scenes, the life, public and private, of the blacks
and whites of Virginia as it was in the days of slavery,
at least all that was left of that rapidly-disappearing life,
I had put upon canvas. Woodward painted for me a
dozen or so of charming landscapes, but was so sought
after by Northern publishers that I could seldom get
him to work for me. In addition to the genre pictures,
executed for me by the artists named above, there were a
number of historical paintings by the same, which I presented
to the Virginia Historical Society. Nearly every
one of these pictures commanded the approval of Mr. G.
Watson James,[9] but other critics, including myself, were
not so lenient. I soon found that fixed work, done to
order, however highly paid for, trammeled the free spirit
of art, and palsied the genius of my friends. What comes
unprompted into their own heads and hearts, what is
given them from the mysterious original font of power,—
that is what artists want, and at which they can work
best. So when my friends got tired, and could paint no
more, I let them off, pensioned them on ten thousand
dollars a year, and allowed them to paint exactly what
they pleased. They did better then. And meeting them
one day in Jack's studio, I said to them,—