The Growlery (April 2003) Essays by Michael Gilleland "Sit down, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce. "This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here." Charles Dickens, Bleak House, chapter VIII
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Pearls

The truth of Sturgeon's Revelation ("Ninety percent of everything is crud", usually misquoted as "Ninety percent of everything is crap") is evident in most spheres of everyday life, but nowhere more so than on the World Wide Web. All the more reason to cherish the remaining ten percent, the pearls glittering amidst the dung-heap.

Some pearls outstanding for their luster are the essays of Theodore Dalrymple, pseudonym of an English prison doctor. The roster of physicians who are also writers contains many eminent names (St. Luke, Rabelais, Chekhov, etc.), and Dalrymple deserves to be numbered among them, not only for the limpid beauty of his prose style but also for the stark clarity of his moral vision.

You can find Dalrymple's essays in many places on the World Wide Web, but a good starting place is the collection of those originally published in the City Journal. Damrymple casts a wide net. His essays include travelogues ( The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, Why Havana Had to Die), literary criticism ( Why Shakespeare Is For All Time, The Rage of Virginia Woolf), reflections on current events ( The People's Princess, The New Inquisitors), and studies of contemporary mores ( All Sex, All the Time, The Starving Criminal).

But it is misleading to lump the essays into narrow categories such as these. In each of them Dalrymple probes modern life with his sharp physician's scalpel, relentlessly uncovering diseases that lie festering beneath the surface, in a noble if ultimately futile effort to cure mankind of its deep-seated follies, errors, and brutishness. In so doing he also gives us glimpses of the quiet heroism of ordinary people, such as this vignette from an essay entitled "No One Tips Their Cap Any More":

I recall an elderly working-class widow who has experienced many tragedies, none of her own making, who recently lost three of her four children unexpectedly. She told me how, in the privacy of her own home, she often cried, but how she did not do so in public because "it wouldn't be right, would it, doctor?"

Others, she said, had to get on with their lives without being inconvenienced or embarrassed by her, and so she kept her grief to herself, without making a public exhibition of it.

The medicine that Dalrymple dispenses is often bitter and hard to swallow, but if we were to follow his prescriptions we would be the better for it, both individually and collectively.

New Songs

The Psalmist (96:1) bids us "Sing to the Lord a new song," but what if most of the new songs have music which is tawdry or jejune, and lyrics which are silly or maudlin? The prize for silly lyrics surely goes to the hymn "Earth and All Stars," with words by one Herbert Brokering (1926-), which has the line "Classrooms and labs, loud boiling test tubes, sing to the Lord a new song!" Can anyone sing this, or hear it, with a straight face?

It's almost impossible to go to Sunday Mass at a Catholic Church in the United States these days without the sentimental ditties of Marty Haugen and David Haas assaulting one's ears. I grit my teeth every time I'm forced to listen to Marty Haugen's execrable "Sing Out, Earth and Skies," and I agree wholeheartedly with Thomas G. McFaul's cri de coeur "What a shame for a young person to grow up thinking that Marty Haugen is the traditional music of the Catholic church!" in his essay on The Sad State of Liturgical Music.

I'm not such an uncritical laudator temporis acti that I automatically reject every new song. I confess, for example, to a fondness for Kathleen Thomerson's hymn "I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light", which was published in 1970, long after my usual cut-off date April 3, 1897, when Brahms died.

Last fall I joined a small men's choir which sings mostly traditional sacred music. At certain times of the year we sing together with a parallel women's choir. This has been a musical oasis in the desert for me. I've learned many "new songs" -- although they may have been written long ago, they're new to me, at least. One of my favorites is an exquisite, simple "Ave Maria" by Camille Saint-Saens. Selections in recent weeks have included "Wash me throughly," from Handel's setting of Psalm 51, and Antonio Lotti's motet "Vere Languores Nostros."

But the thing I most look forward to singing each week is the communion antiphon in Gregorian chant. This is a challenge for someone like me, who didn't know a porrectus from a scandicus six months ago. Even though I still don't know the names of all the neums, I'm slowly getting used to the notation. It lifts my soul up to chant this austere, hauntingly beautiful music, and I hope it has the same effect on those who hear it.

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