And He that with His hand the Vessel made
Will surely not in after Wrath destroy.'
After a momentary silence spake
Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make;
'They sneer at me for leaning all awry:
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?'"
There is not here the sensuous anodyne of Wagner's music, but there is something equally precious; the thought is farther flung; it brings more elements of reality back with it to be bathed and softened in emotion; it stirs the more vital philosophic depths. As one reads the verses, one thinks sadly of all the bruised and broken beings of the world, the poor misshapen souls who carry within them, from no fault of their own, the seeds of the things that are to blight or slay them—the men afflicted with incurable vices of body or mind or will, the criminals, often more sinned against than sinning, upon whom society wreaks its legalised vengeance. We have not merely a warm wave of pity passing through us, as in the case of Parsifal; the exquisite art of the thing is strengthened by the closeness of its association with innumerable problems of theology, of philosophy, and of social science. So, again, with the line Maeterlinck himself places in the mouth of old Arkel, after one of the most terrible scenes in Pelleas and Melisanda: "If I were God, how I should pity the heart of men!" Music, in its grave, wise speech after a dire catastrophe, may almost compass some such wealth of ethical significance as this; but there is in Maeterlinck's line a peculiar fulness of divination that can be conveyed to us only in words. Numberless other instances might be cited, all proving this existence of a philosophic sphere to which even the greatest music can, by reason of its indefiniteness, never have access. Matthew Arnold may have been a prejudiced witness, being a poet himself; yet one feels that he has the right with him in that passage, in his Epilogue to Lessing's Laocöon, in which he points out how the painter and the musician excel respectively in expressing "the aspect of the moment" and "the feeling of the moment," but that the poet deals more philosophically with the total life and interlacement of things:—
"He must life's movement tell!
The thread which binds it all in one,
And not its separate parts alone.