CHAPTER III
Italian Music in the Poems of Browning.
I. General statement.
Thus while Browning is known, even to the general mind, as a poet who writes about musicians, his fame in this particular field is founded on a very few well-known poems. Suppose it were possible to eliminate Abt Vogler from the text of Browning’s poetry and from the consciousness of the world. Would the cursory student then know him as the celebrator of music? Or at least, if one could filch from the human race both Abt Vogler and A Toccata of Galuppi’s, their author might still be known in the popular mind as an admirer of the arts, but hardly as a devotee of music. Quality rather than quantity, then, is the measure of the element of music in the poems of Robert Browning.
II. Catholic hymns.
The Ring and the Book, in five of the twelve sections, includes the names of Catholic hymns. In Part IV the Magnificat signifies the triumphant spirit of Violante Comparini, the old woman who has completed the bargain by means of which she is to trick her husband into the belief that he is to have an heir. The same section gives an account of the plan of Pietro and Violante Comparini to find a titled husband for their so-called daughter, and illustrates the situation in these words—“And when such paragon was found and fixed, Why, they might chant their ‘Nunc dimittis’ straight.” Both of these passages, then, mark psychological states, in one or both of the parents of Pompilia. Section VI, the defense of Caponsacchi, contains two references which mark the time of day. The first, in a quotation from one of the forged letters purporting to be from Pompilia to Caponsacchi, suggests that he come to her window at the time of the Ave. The second, in the account of the flight of Pompilia and Caponsacchi to Rome, is phrased “At eve we heard the angelus,” indicating time and suggesting, also, a certain regret for the past on the part of Pompilia. In Section VII, Pompilia, yielding at last to her own desires for rescue and to the importunities of her treacherous maid, names the Ave Maria to indicate the time when she will be standing on the terrace to talk with Caponsacchi. The Pope, in Section X, gives his opinion of what will be said of his leniency to the church, should he free Caponsacchi, and sarcastically observes “in the choir Sanctus et Benedictus, with a brush Of soft guitar strings that obey the thumb.” Section XII, in describing the death of Guido, the wife-murderer, gives his last words as a request for a Pater, an Ave, with the hymn Salve Regina Cœli. This completes the list of Catholic hymns mentioned by Browning—six in all.
III. Poetic functions of the references to music.
Bishop Blougram’s Apology presents that politic churchman’s defense of his fidelity to established doctrines on the ground of expediency—ease in this life and a possible reward in the next. He admits that wise men look beneath his pretense of a belief in the winking Virgin and class him as either knave or fool. In this respect the Bishop likens himself to Verdi at the close of his worst opera. Though the populace applauded, the composer looked beyond them for the judgment of Rossini, the master.
In Youth and Art, the struggling girl with aspirations for operatic honors, who misses a possibility for happiness in her futile quest for fame, compares herself with Grisi in her hopes of success. To surpass that prima donna, which, by the way, she never succeeds in doing, constitutes the height of her dream of happiness. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, with its fantastic symbolism of night-caps, mentions the many varieties of that article and compares them to the various kinds of violins on exhibition at Kensington when the poem was composed, with special reference to those of Italy: