An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry Part 17

"I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines {'The Bishop orders his Tomb'}, of the Renaissance spirit,--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I said of the Central Renaissance in thirty pages of the 'Stones of Venice'

put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work.

The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much SOLUTION before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinable."

Professor Dowden, in regard to Mr. Browning's doctrines on the subject of art, remarks:--

"It is always in an unfavorable light that he depicts the virtuoso or collector, who, conscious of no unsatisfied aspirations such as those which make the artist's joy and sorrow, rests in the visible products of art, and looks up to nothing above or beyond them. . . . The unbelieving and worldly spirit of the dying Bishop, who orders his tomb at St. Praxed's, his sense of the vanity of the world simply because the world is pa.s.sing out of his reach, the regretful memory of the pleasures of his youth, the envious spite towards Gandolf, who robbed him of the best position for a tomb, and the dread lest his reputed sons should play him false and fail to carry out his designs, are united with a perfect appreciation of Renaissance art, and a luxurious satisfaction, which even a death-bed cannot destroy, in the splendor of voluptuous form and color. The great lump of lapis lazuli,

"'Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape, Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast',

must poise between his sculptured knees; the black basalt must contrast with the bas-relief in bronze below:--

"'St. Praxed in a glory, and one Pan Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off';

the inscription must be 'choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word'."

A Toccata of Galuppi's.

The speaker is listening to a Toccata of Galuppi's, and the music tells him of how they lived once in Venice, where the merchants were the kings.

He was never out of England, yet it's as if he SAW it all, through what is addressed to the ear alone.

But the music does more than reflect the life of mirth and folly which was led in the gay and voluptuous city. It has an undertone of sadness; its lesser thirds so plaintive, its sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, tell the votaries of pleasure something; its suspensions, its solutions, its commiserating sevenths, awaken in them the question of their hold on life. That question the music answers.

Abt Vogler.

(After he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention.)

The Abbe Georg Joseph Vogler was born at Wuerzburg (Bavaria), June 15, 1749; appointed Kappelmeister to the King of Sweden, in 1786. While in this capacity, the "musical instrument of his invention", called the Orchestrion, was constructed; *

went to London with his organ, in 1790, and gave a series of successful concerts, realizing some 1200 Pounds, and making a name as an organist; commissioned to reconstruct the organ of the Pantheon on the plan of his Orchestrion; and later, received like commissions at Copenhagen and at Neu Ruppin in Prussia; founded a school of music at Copenhagen, and published there many works; in 1807 was appointed by the Grand Duke, Louis I., Kappelmeister at Darmstadt; founded there his last school, two of his pupils being Weber and Meyerbeer; died in 1814.

Browning presents Vogler as a great extemporizer, in which character he appears to have been the most famous. For a further account, see Miss Eleanor Marx's paper on the Abbe Vogler, from which the above facts have been derived ('Browning Soc. Papers', Pt. III., pp. 339-343). Her authorities are Fetis's 'Biogr. Univ. des Musiciens'

and Nisard's 'Vie de l'Abbe Vogler'.

-- * "This was a very compact organ, in which four key-boards of five octaves each, and a pedal board of thirty-six keys, with swell complete, were packed into a cube of nine feet.

See Fetis's 'Biographie Universelle des Musiciens'.--G. Grove."

'Note to Miss Marx's Art. on Vogler'.

Mrs. Turnbull, in her paper on 'Abt Vogler' ('Browning Soc. Papers', Pt. IV., pp. 469-476), has so well traced the argument of the monologue, that I cannot do better than quote the portion of her paper in which she presents it:--

"Abt Vogler has been extemporizing on his instrument, pouring out through it all his feelings of yearning and aspiration; and now, waking from his state of absorption, excited, and trembling with excess of emotion, he breaks out into the wish, 'Would it might tarry!' In verses {stanzas} one and two he compares the music he has made to a palace, which Solomon (as legends of the Koran relate) summoned all creatures, by the magic name on his ring, to raise for the princess he loved; so all the keys, joyfully submitting to the magic power of the master, combine to aid him, the low notes rus.h.i.+ng in like demons to give him the base on which to build his airy structure; the high notes like angels throwing decoration of carving and tracery on pinnacle and flying b.u.t.tress, till in verse three its outline, rising ever higher and higher, shows in the clouds like St. Peter's dome, illuminated and towering into the vasty sky; and it seems as if his soul, upborne on the surging waves of music, had reached its highest elevation. But no. Influences from without, inexplicable, unexpected, join to enhance his own attempts; the heavens themselves seem to bow down and to flash forth inconceivable splendors on his amazed spirit, till the limitations of time and s.p.a.ce are gone--'there is no more near nor far'.

". . .In this strange fusion of near and far, of heaven and earth, presences hover, spirits of those long dead or of those yet to be, lured by the power of music to return to life, or to begin it.

Figures are dimly descried in the fervor and pa.s.sion of music, even as of old in the glare and glow of the fiery furnace.

"Verses four and five are a bold attempt to describe the indescribable, to shadow forth that strange state of clairvoyance when the soul shakes itself free from all external impressions, which Vogel tells us was the case with Schubert, and which is true of all great composers-- 'whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot say'.

"In the sixth verse we come to a comparison of music with the other arts. Poetry, painting, and sculpture deal with actual form, and the tangible realities of life. They are subject to laws, and we know how they are produced; can watch the painting grow beneath the artist's touches, or the poem take shape line by line.

"True it needs the soul of the artist to combine and to interfuse the elements with which he wishes to create any true work of art, but music is almost entirely independent of earthly element in which to clothe and embody itself. It does not allow of a realistic conception, but without intermediate means is in a direct line from G.o.d, and enables us to comprehend that Power which created all things out of nothing, with whom TO WILL and TO DO are one and the same.

"Schopenhauer says, 'There is no sound in Nature fit to serve the musician as a model, or to supply him with more than an occasional suggestion for his sublime purpose. He approaches the original sources of existence more closely than all other artists, nay, even than Nature herself.'

"Heine has also noticed this element of miracle, which coincides exactly with Browning's view expressed in the lines:--

"'Here is the finger of G.o.d, a flash of the will that can, Existent behind all laws, that made them, and, lo, they are!'

Now, these seven verses contain the music of the poem; in the remaining ones we pa.s.s to Browning's Platonic philosophy.

"In the eighth verse a sad thought of the banished music obtrudes-- 'never to be again'. So wrapt was he in the emotions evoked, he had no time to think of what tones called them up, and now all is past and gone. His magic palace, unlike that of Solomon, has 'melted into air, into thin air', and, 'like the baseless fabric of a vision', only the memory of it is left. . . . And, depressed by this saddest of human experiences, . . .he turns away impatient from the promise of more and better, to demand from G.o.d the same-- the very same. Browning with magnificent a.s.surance answers, 'yes, you shall have the same'.

"'Fool! all that is at all, Lasts ever, past recall.'

"'Ay, what was, shall be.'

". . .the ineffable Name which built the palace of King Solomon, which builds houses not made with hands--houses of flesh which souls inhabit, craving for a heart and a love to fill them, can and will satisfy their longings; . . .I know no other words in the English language which compresses into small compa.s.s such a body of high and inclusive thought as verse nine.

(1) G.o.d the sole changeless, to whom we turn with pa.s.sionate desire as the one abiding-place, as we find how all things suffer loss and change, ourselves, alas! the greatest. (2) His power and love able and willing to satisfy the hearts of His creatures-- the thought expatiated on by St. Augustine and George Herbert here crystallized in one line:--'Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?' (3) Then the magnificent declaration, 'There shall never be one lost good'--the eternal nature of goodness, while its opposite evil. . .is a non-essential which shall one day pa.s.s away entirely, and be swallowed up of good. . . .

"Now follows an announcement, as by tongue of prophet or seer, that we shall at last find all our ideals complete in the mind of G.o.d, not put forth timorously, but with triumphant knowledge-- knowledge gained by music whose creative power has for the moment revealed to us the permanent existence of these ideals.

"The sorrow and pain and failure which we are all called upon to suffer here, . . .are seen to be proofs and evidences of this great belief. Without the discords how should we learn to prize the harmony?

"Carried on the wings of music and high thought, we have ascended one of those Delectable mountains--Pisgah-peaks from which

"'Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us. .h.i.ther';

and whence we can descry, however faintly, the land that is very far off to which we travel, and we would fain linger, nay, abide, on the mount, building there our tabernacles.

"But it cannot be. That fine air is difficult to breathe long, and life, with its rounds of custom and duty, recalls us.

So we descend with the musician, through varying harmonies and sliding modulations. . .deadening the poignancy of the minor third in the more satisfying rea.s.suring chord of the dominant ninth, which again finds its rest on the key-note--C major-- the common chord, so sober and uninteresting that it well symbolizes the common level of life, the prosaic key-note to which unfortunately most of our lives are set.

"We return, however, strengthened and refreshed, braced to endure the wrongs which we know shall be one day righted, to acquiesce in the limited and imperfect conditions of earth, which we know shall be merged at last in heaven's perfect round, and to accept with patience the renunciation demanded of us here, knowing

"'All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good shall exist.'"

In his 'Introductory Address to the Browning Society', the Rev. J. Kirkman, of Queen's College, Cambridge, says of 'Abt Volger':--

"The spiritual transcendentalism of music, the inscrutable relation between the seen and the eternal, of which music alone unlocks the gate by inarticulate expression, has never had an articulate utterance from a poet before 'Abt Vogler'. This is of a higher order of composition, quite n.o.bler, than the merely fretful rebellion against the earthly condition imposed here below upon heavenly things, seen in 'Master Hughes' {of Saxe-Gotha}. In that and other places, I am not sure that persons of musical ATTAINMENT, as distinguished from musical SOUL AND SYMPATHY, do not rather find a professional gratification at the technicalities. . .than get conducted to 'the law within the law'. But in 'Abt Vogler', the understanding is spell-bound, and carried on the wings of the emotions, as Ganymede in the soft down of the eagle, into the world of spirit. . . .