Chapter III: Boot and Saddle (7)

He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

XXIX

What though the earlier grooves
Which ran the laughing loves
Around thy base, no longer pause and press?
What though, about thy rim,
Scull-things in order grim
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?

XXX

Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal,
The new wine's foaming flow,
The Master's lips a-glow!
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel?

XXXI

But I need, now as then,
Thee, God, who mouldest men;
And since, not even while the whirl was worst,
Did I,--to the wheel of life
With shapes and colours rife,
Bound dizzily,--mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst:

XXXII

So, take and use Thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!
My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!

Browning wrote four remarkable poems dealing with music: _A Toccata of Galuppi's_, _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_, _Abt Vogler_, and _Charles Avison_. In _Abt Vogler_ the miracle of extemporisation has just been accomplished. The musician sits at the keys, tears running down his face: tears of weakness, because of the storm of divine inspiration that has passed through him: tears of sorrow, because he never can recapture the fine, careless rapture of his unpremeditated music: tears of joy, because he knows that on this particular day he has been the channel chosen by the Infinite God.

If he had only been an architect, his dream would have remained in a permanent form. The armies of workmen would have done his will, and the world would have admired it for ages. If he had only been a poet or a painter, his inspiration would have taken the form of fixed type or enduring shape and color: but in the instance of music, the armies of thoughts that have worked together in absolute harmony to elevate the noble building of sound, which has risen like an exhalation, have vanished together with the structure they animated. It has gone like the wonderful beauty of some fantastic cloud.

His sorrow at this particular irreparable loss gives way to rapture as he reflects on the source whence came the inspiration. He could not possibly have _constructed_ such wonderful music: it was the God welling up within him: for this past hour divine inspiration has spoken through him. He has had one glimpse at the Celestial Radiance. How can he now think that the same God who expanded his heart lacks the power to fill it? The Source from whence this river came must be inexhaustible, and it was vouchsafed to him to feel for a short time its infinite richness. The broken arcs on earth are the earnest of the perfect round in heaven.

Abt Vogler says that the philosophers may each make his guess at the meaning of this earthly scheme of weal and woe: but the musicians, the musicians who have felt in their own bosoms the presence of the Divine Power and heard its marvellous voice,--why, the philosophers may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know!

ABT VOGLER

(AFTER HE HAS BEEN EXTEMPORISING UPON THE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT
OF HIS INVENTION)

1864

I

Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,
Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon
willed
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly,--alien of end and of aim,
Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,--
Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable Name,
And pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the princess he loved!

II

Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine,
This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise!
Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine,
Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise!
And one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell,
Burrow awhile and build, broad on the roots of things,
Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well,
Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs.

III

And another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was,
Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest,
Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass,
Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest:
For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire,
When a great illumination surprises a festal night--
Outlined round and round Rome's dome from space to spire)
Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in
sight.

IV

In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man's
birth,
Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;
And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,
As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:
Novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,
Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star;
Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,
For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.

V

Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow,
Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast,
Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,
Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last;
Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and
gone,
But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their
new:
What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;
And what is,--shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect
too.

VI

All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,
All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth,
All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,
Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth:
Had I written the same, made verse--still, effect proceeds from
cause,
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,
Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled:--

VII

But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.
Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is naught:
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!

VIII

Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;
Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow;
For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,
That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.
Never to be again! But many more of the kind
As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?
To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind
To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall
be.

IX

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name.
Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.

X

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 affirms 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.

XI

And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue
thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know.

XII

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semitones till I sink to the minor,--yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

In the autumn following his wife's death Browning wrote the poem _Prospice_, which title means _Look Forward_! This is the most original poem on death in English Literature. It shows that Browning strictly and consistently followed the moral appended to _The Glove_ --_Venienti occurrite morbo_, run to meet approaching disaster!

Although the prayer-book expresses the wish that the Good Lord will deliver us from battle, murder, and sudden death, that hope was founded on the old superstition that it was more important how a man died than how he lived. If a man who had lived a righteous, sober and godly life died while playing cards or in innocent laughter, with no opportunity for the ministrations of a priest, his chances for the next world were thought to be slim. On the other hand, a damnable scoundrel on the scaffold, with the clergyman's assurances assented to, was supposed to be jerked into heaven. This view of life and death was firmly held even by so sincere and profound a thinker as Hamlet: which explains his anguish at the fate of his father killed in his sleep, and his own refusal to slay the villain Claudius at prayer.

It is probable that thousands of worshippers who now devoutly pray to be delivered from sudden death, would really prefer that exit to any other. The reason is clear enough: it is to avoid the pain of slow dissolution, the sufferings of the death-bed, and the horrible fear of the dark. Now Browning boldly asks that he may be spared nothing of all these grim terrors. True to his conception of a poet, as a man who should understand all human experiences, he hopes that he may pass conscious and aware through the wonderful experience of dying. Most sick folk become unconscious hours before death and slip over the line in total coma: Browning wants to stay awake.

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.

I want to taste it all, the physical suffering, the fear of the abyss: I want to hear the raving of the fiend-voices, to be in the very thick of the fight. He adds the splendid line,

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave.
Brave hearts turn defeat into victory.

Browning died twenty-eight years after he wrote this poem, and his prayer was granted. He was conscious almost up to the last second, and fully aware of the nearness of death. Even the manner of death, as described in the first line of the poem, came to be his own experience: for he died of bronchitis.

PROSPICE

1864

Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!

One can hardly repress a smile at Browning's thorough-going optimism, when he reads the poem, _Apparent Failure_, and then glances back at the title. _Apparent_ failure! Of all the defeated sons of earth, the nameless suicides whose wretched bodies are taken to the public morgue, ought surely, we should imagine, to be classed as absolute failures. But Browning does not think so. It is possible, he says, that the reason why these poor outcasts abandoned life, was because their aspirations were so tremendously high that dull reality overpowered their spirits. Goodness is better than badness: meekness better than ferocity: calm sense than mad ravings. But, after all, these poor fellows were God's creatures. His sun will eventually pierce the darkest cloud earth can stretch. Somewhere, after many ages in the next life, these men will develop into something better under the sunshine of the smile of God.

APPARENT FAILURE

1864

"We shall soon lose a celebrated building."
_Paris Newspaper_.

I

No, for I'll save it! Seven years since,
I passed through Paris, stopped a day
To see the baptism of your Prince;
Saw, made my bow, and went my way:
Walking the heat and headache off,
I took the Seine-side, you surmise,
Thought of the Congress, Gortschakoff,
Cavour's appeal and Buol's replies,
So sauntered till--what met my eyes?

II

Only the Doric little Morgue!
The dead-house where you show your drowned:
Petrarch's Vaucluse makes proud the Sorgue,
Your Morgue has made the Seine renowned.
One pays one's debt in such a case;
I plucked up heart and entered,--stalked,
Keeping a tolerable face
Compared with some whose cheeks were chalked:
Let them! No Briton's to be baulked!

III

First came the silent gazers; next,
A screen of glass, we're thankful for;
Last, the sight's self, the sermon's text,
The three men who did most abhor
Their life in Paris yesterday,
So killed themselves: and now, enthroned
Each on his copper couch, they lay
Fronting me, waiting to be owned.
I thought, and think, their sin's atoned.

IV

Poor men, God made, and all for that!
The reverence struck me; o'er each head
Religiously was hung its hat,
Each coat dripped by the owner's bed,
Sacred from touch: each had his berth,
His bounds, his proper place of rest,
Who last night tenanted on earth
Some arch, where twelve such slept abreast,--
Unless the plain asphalte seemed best.

V

How did it happen, my poor boy?
You wanted to be Buonaparte
And have the Tuileries for toy,
And could not, so it broke your heart?
You, old one by his side, I judge,
Were, red as blood, a socialist,
A leveller! Does the Empire grudge
You've gained what no Republic missed?
Be quiet, and unclench your fist!

VI

And this--why, he was red in vain,
Or black,--poor fellow that is blue!
What fancy was it turned your brain?
Oh, women were the prize for you!
Money gets women, cards and dice
Get money, and ill-luck gets just
The copper couch and one clear nice
Cool squirt of water o'er your bust,
The right thing to extinguish lust!

VII

It's wiser being good than bad;
It's safer being meek than fierce:
It's fitter being sane than mad.
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.

The poem _Rephan_, the title of which was taken from the Book of Acts, has the same pleasant teaching we find in the play by Ludwig Fulda, called _Schlaraffenland_, published in 1899. In this drama, a boy, ragged, cold, and chronically hungry, falls asleep in a miserable room, and dreams that he is in a country of unalloyed delight. Broiled chickens fly slowly by, easy to clutch and devour: expensive wardrobes await his immediate pleasure, and every conceivable wish is instantly and completely fulfilled. For a short time the boy is in ecstasies of joy: then the absence of effort, of counterbalancing privation, begins to make his heart dull: finally the paradise becomes so intolerable that he wakes with a scream--wakes in a dark, cold room, wakes in rags with his belly empty: and wakes in rapture at finding the good old earth of struggle and toil around him.

Contentment is stagnation: development is happiness. The mystery of life, its uncertainty, its joys paid for by effort, these make human existence worth while.

Browning delights to prove that the popular longing for static happiness would result in misery: that the sharp sides of life sting us into the real joy of living. He loves to take popular proverbs, which sum up the unconscious pessimism of humanity, and then show how false they are to fact. For example, we hear every day the expression, "No rose without a thorn," and we know very well what is meant. In _The Ring and the Book_, Browning says:

So a thorn comes to the aid of and completes the rose.

REPHAN

1889

How I lived, ere my human life began
In this world of yours,--like you, made man,--
When my home was the Star of my God Rephan?

Come then around me, close about,
World-weary earth-born ones! Darkest doubt
Or deepest despondency keeps you out?

Nowise! Before a word I speak,
Let my circle embrace your worn, your weak,
Brow-furrowed old age, youth's hollow cheek--

Diseased in the body, sick in soul,
Pinched poverty, satiate wealth,--your whole
Array of despairs! Have I read the roll?

All here? Attend, perpend! O Star
Of my God Rephan, what wonders are
In thy brilliance fugitive, faint and far!

Far from me, native to thy realm,
Who shared its perfections which o'erwhelm
Mind to conceive. Let drift the helm,

Let drive the sail, dare unconfined
Embark for the vastitude, O Mind,
Of an absolute bliss! Leave earth behind!

Here, by extremes, at a mean you guess:
There, all's at most--not more, not less:
Nowhere deficiency nor excess.

No want--whatever should be, is now:
No growth--that's change, and change comes--how
To royalty born with crown on brow?

Nothing begins--so needs to end:
Where fell it short at first? Extend
Only the same, no change can mend!

I use your language: mine--no word
Of its wealth would help who spoke, who heard,
To a gleam of intelligence. None preferred,

None felt distaste when better and worse
Were uncontrastable: bless or curse
What--in that uniform universe?

Can your world's phrase, your sense of things
Forth-figure the Star of my God? No springs,
No winters throughout its space. Time brings

No hope, no fear: as to-day, shall be
To-morrow: advance or retreat need we
At our stand-still through eternity?

All happy: needs must we so have been,
Since who could be otherwise? All serene:
What dark was to banish, what light to screen?

Earth's rose is a bud that's checked or grows
As beams may encourage or blasts oppose:
Our lives leapt forth, each a full-orbed rose--

Each rose sole rose in a sphere that spread
Above and below and around--rose-red:
No fellowship, each for itself instead.

One better than I--would prove I lacked
Somewhat: one worse were a jarring fact
Disturbing my faultlessly exact.

How did it come to pass there lurked
Somehow a seed of change that worked
Obscure in my heart till perfection irked?--

Till out of its peace at length grew strife--
Hopes, fears, loves, hates,--obscurely rife,--
My life grown a-tremble to turn your life?

Was it Thou, above all lights that are,
Prime Potency, did Thy hand unbar
The prison-gate of Rephan my Star?

In me did such potency wake a pulse
Could trouble tranquillity that lulls
Not lashes inertion till throes convulse

Soul's quietude into discontent?
As when the completed rose bursts, rent
By ardors till forth from its orb are sent

New petals that mar--unmake the disc--
Spoil rondure: what in it ran brave risk,
Changed apathy's calm to strife, bright, brisk,

Pushed simple to compound, sprang and spread
Till, fresh-formed, facetted, floretted,
The flower that slept woke a star instead?

No mimic of Star Rephan! How long
I stagnated there where weak and strong,
The wise and the foolish, right and wrong,

Are merged alike in a neutral Best,
Can I tell? No more than at whose behest
The passion arose in my passive breast,

And I yearned for no sameness but difference
In thing and thing, that should shock my sense
With a want of worth in them all, and thence,

Startle me up, by an Infinite
Discovered above and below me-height
And depth alike to attract my flight,

Repel my descent: by hate taught love.
Oh, gain were indeed to see above
Supremacy ever--to move, remove,

Not reach--aspire yet never attain
To the object aimed at! Scarce in vain--
As each stage I left nor touched again.

To suffer, did pangs bring the loved one bliss,
Wring knowledge from ignorance,--just for this--
To add one drop to a love-abyss!

Enough: for you doubt, you hope, O men,
You fear, you agonize, die: what then?
Is an end to your life's work out of ken?

Have you no assurance that, earth at end,
Wrong will prove right? Who made shall mend
In the higher sphere to which yearnings tend?

Why should I speak? You divine the test.
When the trouble grew in my pregnant breast
A voice said "So wouldst thou strive, not rest?"

"Burn and not smoulder, win by worth,
Not rest content with a wealth that's dearth?
Thou art past Rephan, thy place be Earth!"

Browning was an optimist with his last breath. In the _Prologue_ to _Asolando_, a conventional person is supposed to be addressing the poet: he says, "Of course your old age must be sad, because you have now lost all your youthful illusions. Once you looked on the earth with rose-colored spectacles, but now you see the naked and commonplace reality of the things you used to think so radiant."

Browning's answer is significant, and the figure he uses wonderfully apt. Suppose you are going to travel in Europe: you go to the optician, and you ask for a first-rate magnifying-glass, that you may scan the ocean, and view the remote corners of cathedrals. Now imagine him saying that he has for you something far better than that: he has a lovely kaleidoscope: apply your eye to the orifice, turn a little wheel, and you will behold all sorts of pretty colored rosettes. You would be naturally indignant. "Do you take me for a child to be amused with a rattle? I don't want pretty colors: I want something that will bring the object, _exactly as it is_, as near to my eyes as it can possibly be brought."

Indeed, when one buys a glass for a telescope, if one has sufficient cash, one buys a glass made of crown and flint glass placed together, which destroys color, which produces what is called an _achromatic_ lens. Now just as we judge of the value of a glass by its ability to bring things as they are within the range of our vision, so, says Browning, old age is much better than youth. In age our old eyes become achromatic. The rosy illusions of youth vanish, thank God for it! The colors which we imagined belonged to the object were in reality in our imperfect eyes--as we grow older these pretty colors disappear and we see what? We see life itself. Life is a greater and grander thing than any fool's illusion about it. The world of nature and man is infinitely more interesting and wonderful as it is than in any mistaken view of it. Therefore old age is better than youth.