A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 35

aeschylus (to Apollo).--"Aye, such were your feats in the house of Pheres, where you persuaded the fates to make a mortal immortal: you it was destroyed the ancient arrangement and deceived the G.o.ddesses with wine."

Homer.--"The Fates are three virgin sisters,--winged and white-haired,--dwelling below Parna.s.sus: they feed on honey, and so get drunk, and readily tell the truth. If deprived of it they delude."

Mr. Browning, however, varies the legend, first by making the Fates find truth in the fumes of wine; and, secondly, by a.s.suming that they never knew an inspiring drunkenness until they tasted it: profoundly intoxicating as their (fermented) honey must have been.

Apollo urges his request that Admetus, now threatened with premature death, may live out the appointed seventy years. The Fates retort on him by exclamations on the worthlessness of such a boon. They enumerate the follies and miseries which beset the successive stages of man's earthly career, and maintain that its only brightness lies in the delusive suns.h.i.+ne, the glamour of hope, with which he (Apollo) gilds it.

Apollo owns that human happiness may rest upon illusion, but undertakes to show that man holds the magic within himself; and to that end persuades the sisters to drain a bowl of wine which he has brought with him. In the moment's intoxication the scales fall from their eyes, and they see that life is good. They see that if its earlier course means conflict, old age is its recorded victory. They see it enriched by the joys which are only remembered as by the good which only might have been. They praise the Actual and still more the Potential--the infinite possibilities to which Man is born and which imagination alone can antic.i.p.ate; and joining hands with Apollo in a delirious dance, proclaim the discovery of the lost secret: _Fancy compounded with Fact._

This philosophy is, however, ill-suited to the dark ministers of fate; and an oracular explosion from the earth's depths startles them back into sobriety; in which condition they repudiate the new knowledge which has been born of them, flinging it back on their accomplice with various expressions of disgust. They admit, nevertheless, that the web of human destiny often defeats their spinning; its intended good and evil change places with each other; the true significance of life is only revealed by death; and though they still refuse to yield to Apollo's demand, they compromise with it: Admetus shall live, if someone else will voluntarily die for him. It is true they neutralize their concession by deriding the idea of such a devoted person being found; and Apollo also shows himself a stranger to the decrees of the higher powers by making wrong guesses as to the event; but the whole episode is conceived in a humorous and very human spirit which especially reveals itself in the att.i.tude of the contending parties towards each other. The Fates display throughout a proper contempt for what they regard as the showy but unsubstantial personality of the young G.o.d; and the natural antagonism of light and darkness, hope and despair, is as amusingly parodied in the mock deference and ill-disguised aversion with which he approaches them.

Apollo finally vindicates Mr. Browning's optimistic theism by claiming the gifts of Bacchus, youngest of the G.o.ds, for the beneficent purpose and anterior wisdom of Zeus.

The one serious idea which runs through the poem is conveyed in its tribute to the power of wine: in other words, to the value of imagination as supplement to and interpreter of fact. Its partial, tentative, and yet efficient illumining of the dark places of life is vividly ill.u.s.trated by Apollo: and he only changes his imagery when he speaks of Reason as doing the same work. It is the imaginative, not the scientific "reason" which Mr. Browning invokes as help in the perplexities of experience;[122] as it is the spiritual, and not scientific "experience" on which, in the subsequent discussions, he will so emphatically take his stand.[123]

In the first "parleying" Mr. Browning invokes the wisdom of BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE on certain problems of life: mainly those of the existence of evil and the limitations of human knowledge; and the optimistic views in which he believes Dr. Mandeville to concur with him are brought to bear on the more gloomy philosophy of Carlyle, some well-known utterances of whom are brought forward for confutation. The chief points of the argument are as follows:--

Carlyle complains that G.o.d never intervenes to check the tyranny of evil, so that it not only prevails in the present life, but for any sure indications which exist to the contrary may still do so in the life to come. It would be something, he thinks, if even triumphant wrong were checked, although (here we must read between the lines) this would be tantamount to the condoning of evil in all its less developed forms; better still if he who has the power to do so habitually crushed it at the birth.

Mr. Browning (alias Mandeville) replies by the parable of a garden in which beneficent and noxious plants grow side by side. "You must either," he declares, "admit--which you do not--that both good and evil were chance sown, or refer their joint presence to some necessary or pre-ordained connection between them. In the latter case you may use your judgment in pruning away the too great exuberance of the noxious plant, but if you destroy it once for all, you have frustrated the intentions of him who placed it there."

Carlyle reminds his opponent of that other parable, according to which it was an enemy who surrept.i.tiously sowed the tares of evil, and these grow because no one can pull them out. Divine power and foresight are, in his opinion, incompatible with either theory, and both of these mistaken efforts on man's part to "cram" the infinite within the limits of his own mind and understand what pa.s.ses understanding. He deprecates the folly of linking divine and human together on the strength of the short s.p.a.ce which they may tread side by side, and the anthropomorphic spirit which subjects the one to the other by presenting the illimitable in human form.

Mr. Browning defends his position by an ill.u.s.tration of the use (as also abuse) of symbols spiritual and material; Carlyle retorts somewhat impatiently that in thinking of G.o.d we have no need of symbolism; we know Him as Immensity, Eternity, and other abstract qualities, and to fancy Him under human attributes is superfluous; and Mr. Browning dismisses this theology, with the intellectual curiosities and intellectual discontents which he knows in the present case to have accompanied it, in a modification of the Promethean myth--such a one as the more "human" Euripides might have imagined. "When the sun's light first broke upon the earth, and everywhere in and on this there was life, man was the only creature which did not rejoice: for he said, I alone am incomplete in my completeness; I am subject to a power which I alone have the intellect to recognize, hence the desire to grasp. I do not aspire to penetrate the hidden essence, the underlying mystery of the sun's force; but I crave possession of one beam of its light wherewith to render palpable to myself its unseen action in the universe. And Prometheus then revealed to him the 'artifice' of the burning-gla.s.s, through which henceforward he might enslave the sun's rays to his service while disrobing them of the essential brilliancy which no human sight could endure."

In the material uses of the burning-gla.s.s we have a parallel for the value of an intellectual or religious symbol. This too is a gathering point for impressions otherwise too diffuse; or, inversely conceived, a sign guiding the mental vision through s.p.a.ces which would otherwise be blank. Its reduced or microcosmic presentment of facts too large for man's mental grasp suggests also an answer to those who bemoan the limitations of human knowledge. Characteristic remarks on this subject occur at the beginning of the poem.

Bernard de Mandeville figures throughout the "parleying" as author of "The Fable of the Bees"; and it is in this work that Mr. Browning discovers their special ground of sympathy. "The Fable of the Bees,"

also ent.i.tled "Private Vices Public Benefits," and again "The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned Honest," is meant to show that self-indulgence and self-seeking carried even to the extent of vice are required to stimulate the activities and secure the material well-being of a community. The doctrine, as originally set forth, had at least an appearance of cynicism, and is throughout not free from conscious or unconscious sophistry; and though the theological condemnation evoked by it was nothing short of insane, we cannot wonder that the morality of the author's purpose was impugned. He defends this, however, in successive additions to the work, a.s.serting and re-a.s.serting, by statement and ill.u.s.tration, that his object has been to expose the vices inherent to human society--in no sense to justify them; and Mr. Browning fully accepts the vindication and even regards it as superfluous. He sees nothing, either in the fable itself or the commentary first attached to it, which may not equally be covered by the Christian doctrine of original sin, or the philosophic acceptance of evil as a necessary concomitant, or condition, of good: and finds fresh guarantees for a sound moral intention in the bright humour and sound practical sense in which the book abounds. This judgment was formed (as I have already implied) very early in Mr. Browning's life, even before the appearance of "Pauline," and supplies a curious comment on any impression of mental immaturity which his own work of that period may have produced.

Bernard de Mandeville was a Dutch physician, born at Dort in the second half of the last century, but who settled in England after taking his degree. He published, besides "The Fable of the Bees," some works of a more professional kind. His name, as we know it, must have been Anglicized.

DANIEL BARTOLI was a Jesuit and historian of his order. Mr. Browning characterizes him in a footnote as "a learned and ingenious writer," and while acknowledging his blindness in matters of faith would gladly testify to his penetration in those of knowledge;[124] but the Don's editor, Angelo Cerutti, declares in the same note that his historical work so overflows with superst.i.tion and is so crammed with accounts of prodigious miracles as to make the reading it an infliction; and the saint-wors.h.i.+p involved in this kind of narrative is the supposed text of the "parleying." Mr. Browning claims Don Bartoli's allegiance for a secular saint: a woman more divine in her non-miraculous virtues than some at least of those whom the Church has canonized, and whose existence has the merit of not being legendary. The saint in question was Marianne Pajot, daughter of the apothecary of Gaston Duke of Orleans; and her story, as Mr. Browning relates it, a well-known episode in the lives of Charles IV., Duke of Lorraine, and the Marquis de La.s.say.

Charles of Lorraine fell violently in love with Marianne Pajot, whom he met at the "Luxembourg" when visiting Madame d'Orleans, his sister. She was "so fair, so modest, so virtuous, and so witty" that he did not hesitate to offer her his hand; and they were man and wife so far as legal formalities could make them when the Monarch (Louis XIV.) intervened. Charles had by a recent treaty made Louis his heir. This threatened no obstacle to his union, since a clause in the marriage contract barred all claims to succession on the part of the children who might be born of it. But "Madame" resented the mesalliance; she joined her persuasions with those of the Minister le Tellier; and the latter persuaded the young King, not absolutely to prevent the marriage, but to turn it to account. A paper was drawn up pledging the Duke to fresh concessions, and the bride was challenged in the King's name to obtain his signature to it. On this condition she was to be recognized as d.u.c.h.ess with all the honours due to her rank; failing this, she was to be banished to a convent. The alternative was offered to her at the nuptial banquet, at which le Tellier had appeared--a carriage and military escort awaiting him outside. She emphatically declined taking part in so disgraceful a compact:[125] and after doing her best to allay the Duke's wrath (which was for the moment terrible), calmly allowed the Minister to lead her away, leaving all the bystanders in tears. A few days later Marianne returned the jewels which Charles had given her, saying, it was not suitable that she should keep them "since she had not the honour of being his wife." He seems to have resigned her without farther protest.

De La.s.say was much impressed by this occurrence, though at the time only ten years old. He too conceived an attachment for Marianne Pajot, and married her, being already a widower, at the age of twenty-three. Their union, dissolved a few years later by her death, was one of unclouded happiness on his part, of unmixed devotion on hers; and the moral dignity by which she had subjugated this somewhat weak and excitable nature was equally attested by the intensity of her husband's sorrow and by its transitoriness. The military and still more amorous adventures of the Marquis de La.s.say make him a conspicuous figure in the annals of French Court life. He is indirectly connected with our own through a somewhat pale and artificial pa.s.sion for Sophia Dorothea, the young Princess of Hanover, whose husband became ultimately George I. Mr.

Browning indicates the later as well as earlier stages of de La.s.say's career; he only follows that of the Duke of Lorraine into an imaginary though not impossible development. Charles had shown himself a being of smaller spiritual stature than his intended wife; and it was only too likely, Mr. Browning thinks, that the diamonds which should have graced her neck soon sparkled on that of some venal beauty whose challenge to his admiration proceeded from the opposite pole of womanhood.

Nevertheless he feels kindly towards him. The n.o.bler love was not dishonoured by the more ign.o.ble fancy, since it could not be touched by it. Duke Charles was still faithful as a man may be.

With CHRISTOPHER SMART is an interrogative comment on the strange mental vicissitudes of this mediocre poet, whose one inspired work, "A Song to David," was produced in a mad-house[126]. Of this "Song" Rossetti has said (I quote the "Athenaeum" of Feb. 19, 1887) in a published letter to Mr. Caine, "This wonderful poem of Smart's is the only great _accomplished_ poem of the last century. The _un_accomplished ones are Chatterton's--of course I mean earlier than Blake or Coleridge, and without reckoning so exceptional a genius as Burns. A masterpiece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and reverberant sound." How Mr.

Browning was impressed by such a work of genius, springing up from the dead level of the author's own and his contemporary life, he describes in a simile.

He is exploring a large house. He goes from room to room, finding everywhere evidence of decent taste and sufficient, but moderate, expenditure: nothing to repel and nothing to attract him in what he sees. He suddenly enters the chapel; and here all richness is ma.s.sed, all fancy is embodied, art of all styles and periods is blended to one perfection. He pa.s.ses from it into another suite of rooms, half fearful of fresh surprise; and decent mediocrity, respectable commonplace again meet him on every side. Thus, it seems to him, was the imagination of Christopher Smart for one moment transfigured by the flames of madness to resume for ever afterwards the prosaic character of its sanity; and he now asks the author of "A Song to David" how one who had thus touched the absolute in art could so decline from it. He a.s.sumes that the madness had but revealed the poet: whether or not the fiery outbreak was due to force suppressed or to particles of brain substance disturbed.

Why was he after as before silent?

It might be urged in answer that the full glory of that vision did not return--that the strength and beauty of the universe never came to him again with so direct a message for the eye and ear of his fellow men.

But, Mr. Browning continues, impressions of strength and beauty are only the materials of knowledge. They contain the lesson of life. And that lesson is not given in the reiterated vision of what is beautiful, but in the patient conversion into knowledge and motive of such impressions of beauty--in other words, of strength or power--as Man's natural existence affords. The poet's privilege, as the poet's duty, is not merely to impart the pleasure, but to aid the process of instruction. He only suggests the explanation to disclaim it in Smart's name.

These arguments are very typical of Mr. Browning's philosophy of Art: of his conviction that Art has no mission, its intuitions have no authority, distinct from moral and intellectual truth. He concludes the little sermon by denouncing that impatience of Fancy which would grasp the end of things before the beginning, and scale the heights of Knowledge, while rejecting Experience, through which, as by a ladder, we scale them step by step.

The lines in "Paracelsus," vol. ii., p. 36, which are in this view so appropriate to the case of Christopher Smart, bore reference to him. The main facts of his life may be found in any biographical dictionary.

With GEORGE BUBB DODINGTON is a lesson in the philosophy of intrigue, or the art of imposing on our fellow men. It is addressed to Bubb Dodington[127] as to an ambitious, obsequious, unscrupulous, and only partially successful courtier; and undertakes to show that, being (more or less) a knave, his conduct also proclaimed him a fool, and lost him the rewards of knavery. Mr. Browning does not concern himself with the moralities of the case; these, for the time being, are put out of court.

He a.s.sumes, for the purposes of the discussion, that everyone is selfish and no one need be sincere, and that "George" was justified in labouring for his own advancement and cheating others, if possible, into subservience to it; but he argues that the aim being right, the means employed were wrong, and could only result in failure.

The argument begins and ends in the proposition, in itself a truism but which receives here a novel significance, that nothing in creation obeys its like, and that he who would mount by the backs of his fellow men must show some reason why they should lend them. In the olden time, we are reminded, such reasons were supplied by physical force; later, force was superseded by intelligence, _i.e._, wit or cunning; and this must now be supplemented by something deeper, because it has become the property of so many persons as to place no one person at an advantage.

Bubb Dodington's methods have been those of simple cunning, and therefore they have not availed him. The mult.i.tude whom he cajoled have seen through his cajoleries, and have resented in these both the attempt to deceive them and the pretension--unfounded as it proved--to exalt himself at their expense.

How then can the mult.i.tude be deceived into subservience?--By the pretence of indifference to them. An impostor is always supposed to be in earnest. The commonplace impostor is so: he has staked everything on the appearance of being sincere. He, on the other hand, who is reckless in mendacity, who cheats with a laughing eye; who, while silently strenuous in a given cause, appears to take seriously neither it, himself, nor those on whom both depend, irresistibly strikes the vulgar as moved by something greater than himself or they. A "quack" he may be, but like the spiritualistic quack, he invokes the belief in the Supernatural, and perhaps shares it. He has the secret which Bubb Dodington had not.

It may be wondered why Mr. Browning treats the shallower political cunning as merely a foil to the deeper, instead of opposing to it something better than both: but he finds the natural contrast to the half-successful schemer in the wholly triumphant one: and the second picture, like the first, has been drawn from life. It is that of the late Lord Beaconsfield--as Mr. Browning sees him.

With FRANCIS FURINI is a defence of the study of the nude, based on the life and work of this Florentine painter (born 1600), who at the age of forty also became a priest. According to his biographer, Filippo Baldinucci,[128] Furini was not only a skilful artist, but a conscientious priest, and a good man. No reproach attached to him but that he attained a special charm of colouring through the practice of painting very young women undraped; and we may infer that he repented this from the current report that when he felt himself dying he entreated those about him to have his pictures burnt. But Baldinucci also relates that he had a specious answer ready for whoever remonstrated with him on thus endangering his soul. The answer, which he frankly quotes, is by no means "specious" in the sense in which it is made; and Mr. Browning cannot believe that a man so inspired by the true artistic pa.s.sion as those words imply, could in any circ.u.mstances become ashamed of the acts to which they refer. "If," Furini says, "those scrupulous persons only knew what is the agony of endeavour with which the artist strives at faithfully imitating what he sees, they would also know how little room this leaves in him for the intrusion of alien"

(immoral) "thoughts." Mr. Browning goes farther still. He a.s.serts not only the innocence, but the religiousness, of the painter's art when directed towards the marvels of the female form. He declares its exercise, so directed, to be a subject, not of shame in the sight of the Creator, but of thanksgiving to Him, and also the best form in which human thanks can be conveyed; and he employs all the vividness of his ill.u.s.tration and all the force of his invective against the so-called artist who sees in the Divineness of female beauty only incitement to low desires; in the art which seeks to reproduce it only a cloak for their indulgence. His argument is very strong, and would be unanswerable, but for the touch of speciousness which Baldinucci by antic.i.p.ation detects in it: Mr. Browning--as did Furini--regards the breach of formal chast.i.ty exclusively from the artist's point of view.

But he may also argue that this will in the long run determine that of the spectator and that the model herself is from the first amenable to it.

Mr. Browning lays stress upon the technical skill which results from the close copying of nature, and by virtue of which Furini must be styled a good painter, whether or not a great one: and though he has never underrated the positive value of technical skill, we do not feel that in this third page of the "parleyings" he gives to the inspiring thought as high a relative place as in his earlier works. The old convictions reappear at pages 182-3 of vol. xvi., when he a.s.serts the danger in which the skilled hand may involve the artistic soul, by stifling its insight into the spiritual essence of fleshly things or silencing its testimony to it; when, too, he admits that not the least worthy of the "sacred" ones have been thus betrayed. He still, however, maintains that the true offender against Art will ever be the mock artist--the Philistine--who sees cause of offence in it.

After proclaiming the religiousness of Art, Furini is called upon to unfold his theology: and he then pa.s.ses to a confession of faith in which Mr. Browning's known personal Theism is contrasted with the scientific doctrines of Evolution. The Scientist and the Believer would as he distinguishes them join issue on the value of the artistic study of man, since man is for both of them the one essential object of knowledge; but the study (artistic or scientific) is, Mr. Browning considers, unrepaying in the one case, while it yields all necessary results in the other. According to the scientist, Man reigns supreme by his intelligence; according to the Believer, he is subject to all the helplessness of his ignorance. In reasoning, therefore, each from his own consciousness, the one finds his starting point at the summit of creation, the other virtually at the bottom of it. The Scientist acknowledges no mind beyond that of man; he seeks the impulse to life within itself, and can therefore only track it through the descending scale of being into the region of inorganic atoms and blind force. The _believer_ refers that impulse to a conscious external First Cause, and is content to live surrounded by its mystery, entrenched within the facts of his own existence, guided (i.e., drawn upwards) by the progressive revelations which these convey to him.

It is so that Furini has lived and learned. He has found his lesson in the study of the human frame. There, as on a rock of experience, he has planted his foot, finding confusion and instability wherever he projected this beyond it; striking out sparks of knowledge at every stamp on the firm ground. He has learned that the Cause of Life is external, because he has seen how the soul permeates and impels the body, how it makes it an instrument of its own raptures and a sharer in them; and he believes that that which caused the soul and thus gifted it will ultimately silence the spiritual conflict with Evil and perfect Its own creation. He believes this because Evil has revealed itself to him as the necessary complement of Good--the ant.i.type through which alone the type defines itself; as a condition of knowledge; as a test of what is right; as a motive to life and virtue so indispensable that it must exist as illusion if it did not exist as fact; because, therefore, its existence cannot detract from the goodness of the First Cause or the promise which that contains.

This constant a.s.sertion of the necessity of evil would land Mr. Browning in a dilemma, if the axiom were presented by him in any character of dogmatic truth: since it claims priority for certain laws of thought over a Being which, if Omnipotent, must have created them. But the anomaly disappears in the more floating outlines of a poetic personal experience; and Mr. Browning (alias Furini) once more a.s.sures us that what he "knows" of the nature and mode of action of the First Cause he knows for himself only. How it operates for others is of the essence of the mystery which enfolds him. Whether even the means of his own instruction is reality or illusion, fiction or fact, is beyond his ken; he is satisfied that it should be so.

Mr. Browning reverts to his defence of the nude in the description of a picture--exhibited last year at the Grosvenor Gallery--the subject of which he offers to Furini for treatment in the manner described.[129]

With GERARD DE LAIRESSE is a critical reminiscence of the unreal and mythological in art, and its immediate subject a Belgian painter, born at Liege, but who nourished at Amsterdam in the second half of the seventeenth century. De Lairesse was a man of varied artistic culture as well as versatile skill; but he was saturated with the pseudo-cla.s.sical spirit of the later period of the renaissance; and landscape itself scarcely existed for him but as a setting for mythological incident or a subject for embellishment by it. This is curiously apparent in a treatise on the Art of Painting, which he composed, and, by a form of dictation, also ill.u.s.trated, when at the age of fifty he had lost his sight. An English version of this fell into Mr. Browning's hands while he was yet a child, and the deep and, at the time, delightful impression which it made upon him is the motive of the present poem. Foremost in his memory is an imaginary "Walk,"[130] in which the exercise of fancy which the author practises and, Mr. Browning tells us, enjoins, is strikingly displayed by his "conjecturing" Phaeton's tomb from the evidence of a carved thunderbolt in an empty sepulchre, and the remains of the "Chariot of the Sun" from a piece of broken wheel and some similar fragment buried in the adjoining ground.

The remembrance converts itself into a question: the poet's fancy no longer peoples the earth with G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses; has his insight become less vivid? has the poetic spirit gone back? The answer is unwavering; retrogression is not in the creative plan. The poet does not go back. He is still as of yore a seer; he has only changed in this, that his chosen visions are of the soul; their objects are no longer visible unrealities, but the realities which are unseen. He can still, if he pleases, evoke those as these, and Mr. Browning proceeds to show it by calling up a series of dissolving views representing another "walk."

A majestic and varied landscape unfolds before us in the changing lights of a long summer's day; and at each appropriate artistic moment becomes the background of a mythological, idyllic, or semi-mythical scene. In the early dawn we see Prometheus amidst departing thunders chained to his rock:[131] the glutted, yet still hungering vulture cowering beside him; in the dews of morning, Artemis triumphant in her double character of huntress-queen and G.o.ddess of sudden death; in the heats of noon, Lyda and the Satyr, enacting the pathetic story of his pa.s.sion and her indifference;[132] in the lengthening shadows, the approaching shock of the armies of Darius and Alexander;[133]--in the falling night, a dim, silent, deprecating figure: in other words, a ghost.

And here Mr. Browning bids the "fooling" stop; for he has touched the point of extreme divergence between the cla.s.sic spirit and his own. The pallid vision which he repels speaks dumbly of pagan regret for what is past, of pagan hopelessness of the to-come. _His_ religion, as we are again reminded, is one of hope. Let us, he says, do and not dream, look forward and not back; ascend the tree of existence into its ripening glory, not hastening over leaf or blossom, not dallying with them; leave Greek lore buried in its own ashes, and accept the evidence of life itself that extinction is impossible; that death--mystery though it is, calamity though it may be--ends nothing which has once begun. We may then greet the spring which we do not live to see in other words than those of the Greek bard; and the words suggested are those of a dainty lyric, in which the note of gladness seems to break with a little sob, and rings, perhaps, on that account the truer.[134]

With CHARLES AVISON might be called a reverie on music and musicians, but for the extraordinary vividness of the images and emotions which it conveys. It was induced, Mr. Browning tells us, by a picturesque little incident which set his thoughts vibrating to the impressions of the word "March": and supplies a parable for their instinctive flight into a discredited and forgotten past. They have been feeling for a piece of march-music; they have bridged the gulf which separates the school of Wagner and Brahms from that of Handel or Buononcini; they alight on Charles Avison's "Grand March."[135] It is a simple continuous air, such as hearts could beat to in the olden time, though flat and somewhat thin, and unrelieved by those caprices of modulation which are essential to modern ears; and as it repeats itself in Mr. Browning's brain, the persistent melody gains force from its very persistence: till it fills with the sound, as it were glows with the aerial clas.h.i.+ngs, of many martial instruments, till it strides in the lengthening, drum-accentuated motion of many marching feet. He ponders the fact that such melody has lost its power, and asks himself why this must be: since the once perfected can never be surpa.s.sed, and the music of Charles Avison was in its own day as inspiring and inspired--in other words, as perfect--as that for which it has been cast aside.

He finds his answer in the special relation of this art to the life of man. Music resembles painting and poetry in the essential characteristic that her province is not Mind but Soul--the swaying sea of emotion which underlies the firm ground of attainable, if often recondite, fact. All three have this in common with the activities of Mind that they strive for the same result; they aim at recording feeling as science registers facts. The two latter in some measure attain this end, because they deal with those definite moments of the soul's experience which share the nature of fact. But music dredges deeper in the emotional sea. She draws forth and embodies the more mysterious, more evanescent, more fluid realities of the soul's life; and so, effecting more than the sister arts, she yet succeeds less. Her forms remain; the spirit ebbs away from them. As, however, Mr. Browning's own experience has shown, the departed spirit may return--

"... Off they steal-- How gently, dawn-doomed phantoms! back come they Full-blooded with new crimson of broad day-- Pa.s.sion made palpable once more." (P. 232.)

The revived pa.s.sion may breathe under the name of another man; it may stir again in the utterance of one dead and forgotten; and Mr. Browning, borrowing the language of chemistry, invokes the reactive processes through which its many-coloured flamelets may spring to life.[136] He then pa.s.ses by an insensible--because to him very natural--transition from the realities of feeling to those of thought, and to the underlying truth from which both series derive: and combats the idea that in thought, any more than in feeling, the present can disprove the past, the once true reveal itself as delusion. Time--otherwise growth--widens the range as it complicates the necessities of musical, _i.e._ emotional expression. It destroys the enfolding fictions which s.h.i.+eld without concealing the earlier stages of intellectual truth. But the emotions were in existence before music began; and Truth was potentially "at full" within us when as it were reborn to grow and bud and blossom for the mind of man.[137] Therefore, he has said, addressing Avison's March, "Blare it forth, bold C Major!" and "Therefore," he continues, in a swift return of fancy:--

"... Bang the drums, Blow the trumps, Avison! March-motive? That's Truth which endures resetting. Sharps and flats, Lavish at need, shall dance athwart thy score When ophicleide and bombardon's uproar Mate the approaching trample, even now Big in the distance--or my ears deceive-- Of federated England, fitly weave March-music for the future!" (P. 237.)