It is everywhere in the world—loud, soft, and all is said:
Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought:
And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!
Robert Browning (Abt Vogler).
See the preceding note. The poet says that Painting and Poetry are “art in obedience to laws,” but the musician exerts a higher creative will akin to that of God. The painter has before him the pictures he reproduces, the poet borrows his imagery from visible things and has apt words in which to express his thoughts: the musician has nothing visible, nothing outside his own soul, to assist him, and can use only the meaningless sounds which we hear everywhere around us. By combining, however, three of those empty sounds (in a chord) he evolves a fourth sound, which so transcends all that other arts can do in expressing emotion that Browning compares it to a “star.”
But this expresses only part of the poet’s meaning. In using this tremendous comparison to a star, as also in enthroning music supreme above art and poetry, he means that it transcends their loftiest flights and rises above our world to the heavens above. In the earlier part of the poem the “pinnacled glory” built by the slaves of sound at the bidding of the musician’s soul is based “broad on the roots of things” and ascends until it “attains to heaven.”
F. W. H. Myers, in “The Renewal of Youth,” has a passage on music. His theme is that while music (as in Mozart’s operas) may express human passion, it also (as in Beethoven) rises to greater heights and appears to voice the emotions of a world beyond our senses. In the lines I have italicized in the following passage he no doubt refers to Browning’s line, “That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star!”—the “star” meaning that music ascends to a higher world than our own:—
... Music is a creature bound,
A voice not ours, the imprisoned soul of sound,—
Who fain would bend down hither and find her part