Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

In another passage is shown how the permanence of feeling conserves even the form, if we will bring ourselves into touch with it:

“Never dream
That what once lived shall ever die! They seem
Dead—do they? lapsed things lost in limbo? Bring
Our life to kindle theirs, and straight each king
Starts, you shall see, stands up.”

This kindling of an old form with our own life is more difficult in the case of music than it is in painting or poetry, for in these we have a concrete form to deal with—a form which reflects the thought with much more definiteness than music is able to do. The strength and weakness, at once, of music is that it gives expression to subtler regions of thought and feeling than the other arts, at the same time that the form is more evanescent, because fashioned out of elements infinitely less related to nature than those of other art forms. In his poems on music, the poet always emphasizes these aspects of music. Its supremacy as a means of giving expression to the subtlest regions of feeling is dwelt upon in “Abt Vogler” and “Fifine at the Fair.” The Abbé, from the standpoint of the creator of music, feels so strongly from the inside its power for expressing infinite aspiration that in his ecstasy he exclaims: “The rest may reason and welcome. ’Tis we musicians know.” Upon the evanescence of the form peculiar emphasis is also laid in this poem, through the fact that the music is improvised. Yet even this fact does not mean the entire annihilation of the form. In the tenth stanza of the poem the idea of the permanence of the art form as well as of the feeling is expanded into a symbol of the immortality of all good:

“All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity confirms the conception of an hour,
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.”

The sophistical arguer in “Fifine” feels this same power of music to express thoughts not to be made palpable in any other manner.

“Words struggle with the weight
So feebly of the False, thick element between
Our soul, the True, and Truth! which, but that intervene
False shows of things, were reached as easily by thought
Reducible to word, and now by yearnings wrought
Up with thy fine free force, oh Music, that canst thrill,
Electrically win a passage through the lid
Of earthly sepulchre, our words may push against,
Hardly transpierce as thou.”

And again, in another passage, he gives to music the power of conserving a mood of feeling, which in this case is not an exalted one, since it is one that chimes in with his own rather questionable feeling for Fifine, the fiz-gig. It is found in Schumann’s “Carnival”:

“Thought hankers after speech, while no speech may evince
Feeling like music,—mine, o’er-burthened with each gift
From every visitant, at last resolved to shift
Its burthen to the back of some musician dead
And gone, who feeling once what I feel now, instead
Of words, sought sounds, and saved forever, in the same,
Truth that escapes prose,—nay, puts poetry to shame.
I read the note, I strike the Key, I bid record
The instrument—thanks greet the veritable word!
And not in vain I urge: ‘O dead and gone away,
Assist who struggles yet, thy strength becomes my stay,
Thy record serve as well to register—I felt
And knew thus much of truth! With me, must knowledge melt
Into surmise and doubt and disbelief unless
Thy music reassure—I gave no idle guess,
But gained a certitude I yet may hardly keep!
What care? since round is piled a monumental heap
Of music that conserves the assurance, thou as well
Was certain of the same! thou, master of the spell,
Mad’st moonbeams marble, didst record what other men
Feel only to forget!’”

The man in the case is merely an appreciator, not a creator, yet he experiences with equal force music’s power as a recorder of feeling. He notes also that the feeling must appear from time to time in a new dress,

“the stuff that’s made
To furnish man with thought and feeling is purveyed
Substantially the same from age to age, with change
Of the outside only for successive feasters.”