Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne
To Him that sits thereon,
With saintly shout and solemn jubilee;
Where the bright seraphim in burning row
Their loud uplifted angel-trumpets blow,
And the cherubic host in thousand quires
Touch their immortal harps of golden wires,
With those just spirits that wear victorious palms,
Hymns devout and holy psalms
Singing everlastingly.
Crashaw speaks of “ravished souls,” “strong ecstasies” that carry the spirit
through all the spheres
Of Music’s heaven; and seat it there on high
In th’ empyrean of pure harmony.
For Dryden, harmony is “heavenly harmony.”
But O, what art can teach,
What human voice can reach,
The sacred organ’s praise?
Notes inspiring holy love,
Notes that wing their heavenly ways
To mend the choirs above.
Orpheus could lead the savage race;
And trees uprooted left their place,
Sequacious of the lyre;
But bright Cecilia raised the wonder higher;
When to her organ vocal breath was given,
An angel heard and straight appeared,
Mistaking Earth for Heaven.
Cowley, in the first book of his “Davideis” has a digression on music which I like extremely for its ingenious absurdity and which I quote, because the absurdity has something genuinely poetical about it and because the whole passage illustrates yet once more the tendency of poets to speak of music in terms of the Supernatural.
Tell me, O Muse (for thou, or none, canst tell
The mystic powers that in blest numbers dwell,
Thou their great nature knowest, nor is it fit
This noblest gem of thine own crown to omit),
Tell me from whence these heavenly charms arise;
Teach the dull world to admire what they despise.
As first a various unformed hint we find
Rise in some god-like poet’s fertile mind,
Till all the parts and words their places take,
And with just marches verse and music make:—
Such was God’s poem, this world’s new essay;
So wild and rude in its first draft it lay.
The ungoverned parts no correspondence knew,
An artless war from thwarting motions grew;
Till they to number and fixt rules were brought
By the eternal Mind’s poetic thought.
Water and Air he for the tenor chose,
Earth made the base, the treble Flame arose;
To the active Moon a quick brisk stroke he gave,
To Saturn’s string a touch more soft and grave.
The motions straight and round, and swift, and slow,
And short, and long, were mixt and woven so,
Did in such artful figures smoothly fall,
As made this decent measured dance of All.
And this is Music: sounds that charm our ears
Are but one dressing that rich science wears.
Though no man hear’t, though no man it rehearse,
Yet will there still be music in my verse.
In this Great World so much of it we see,
The Lesser, man, is all o’er harmony.
Storehouse of all proportions! single quire!
Which first God’s breath did tunefully inspire!
From hence blest Music’s heavenly charms arise,
From sympathy which them and man allies.
Thus they our souls, thus they our bodies win,
Not by their force, but party that’s within.
Thus when two brethren strings are set alike,
To move them both, but one of them we strike.
One could multiply examples; but I have quoted enough, I think, to make my original point clear: when pure-sensuous images prove inadequate, poets have recourse to images of Nature and images of the Supernatural.
Certain poets, more knowledgeable than the majority of their kind in the theory and practice of the sister art, have tried, from time to time, to give a direct and technical rendering of music. A passage in the eleventh book of Paradise Lost is famed among musicians for its concentrated accuracy.
His volant touch,
Instinct through all proportions low and high,
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.
“Fled and pursued”—the words describe to a nicety the entries and developments of the various themes. “Transverse” expresses the fact that the music is polyphonic rather than homophonic; horizontal, not vertical. And “resonant” taken in its strict, etymological meaning, implies the repetitions which are the essence of fugal form. To a reader who knows what a fugue is, the lines conjure up very precisely a certain kind of music. Browning did something similar in his “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.” More elaborately and diffusely, and on the whole less successfully, he tried to render in terms half musical-technical, half dramatic, the essence of an imaginary fugue—a fugue, moreover, as he implies, intrinsically rather dull in its elaborate polyphony. The poem has most of the defects of Browning—from literariness, and excessive facility, to an entire lack of the “magical” quality and of that penetrative force, that “X-radiance,” which only a concentrated aptness of stylistic beauty can give—most of the defects, I repeat, and very few of Browning’s compensating merits. I shall leave it unquoted. A much more successful attempt in the same kind is his “Toccata of Galuppi.”
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths, diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—“Must we die?”
Those commiserating sevenths—“Life might last! we can but try.”
“Were you happy?”—“Yes”—“And are you still as happy?—Yes. And you?”
—“Then more kisses!”—“Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?”
Hark, the dominant’s persistance till it must be answered to.
So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
“Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!”
Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.
But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o’er a secret wrung from Nature’s close reserve,
In you come with your cold music, till I creep thro’ every nerve.
Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:
“Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned,
The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.”
ROBERT BROWNING.
Of all the poets Browning and Milton seemed to have been the two who understood music the best. In that lovely passage from “Comus,” which is quoted on an earlier page, Milton says something which proves him a real and complete musician—one who loved music with all his mind as well as with his heart and the lower viscera (the organs most in request among listeners). “Yet they,” he writes, referring to Circe and the three Sirens,
Yet they in pleasing slumber lulled the sense,
And in sweet madness robbed it of itself;
But such a sacred and home-felt delight,
Such sober certainty of waking bliss,
I never heard till now.
“Such sober certainty of waking bliss”—it is the perfect statement of what one feels when one is listening to the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony, to the Mass in D, to Mozart’s Requiem or Ave Verum Corpus to any work into which a great man and a consummate musician (and, alas, how few of them there are!) has put the whole of his being.
Some people love music, not wisely, but too well. Even among the musically talented and well-educated you will find them. I know several, excellent performers and widely read, whose passion for music is such, that it robs them of their judgment. The sensuous pleasures which they derive from harmonious sounds as such, the emotional excitements into which almost any of the devices of composition can throw them—these are so intense that they can listen happily to works which, judged by the highest standards, are obviously not of the highest quality.
For them, music which
in pleasing slumber lulls the sense
And in sweet madness robs it of itself,
is just as satisfactory as the music that appeals to all the highest faculties of the spirit and so keeps the listener in a tense and focussed state of “waking bliss.” One can love music gluttonously and voluptuously (and I have known people whose appetite for sweet sounds was positively hoggish), or one can love it with heart, soul and mind, as a complete and fully developed human being. Milton, it is evident, loved in this latter way.
Nor cold, nor stern, my soul! yet I detest
These scented rooms where, to a gaudy throng,
Heaves the proud harlot her distended breast
In intricacies of laborious song.
These feel not Music’s genuine power, nor deign
To melt at Nature’s passion-warbled plaint;
But when the long-breathed singer’s uptrilled strain
Bursts in a squall, they gape for wonderment.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
The concentrated femaleness of most contralto voices is, I admit, a most distressing thing. Coleridge has perfectly expressed those emotions of dismay, embarrassment and indignation, which we have all so often felt while listening to a murderous rendering of even Schubert or Wolff.
But how deeply I distrust the judgment of people who talk about “Nature’s passion-warbled plaint” and disparage the intricacies of musical art! They are the sort of people whose bowels yearn at the disgusting caterwaulings of Tziganes; who love to listen to Negroes and Cossacks; who swoon at the noises of the Hawaiian guitar, the Russian balalaika, the Argentine saw and even the Wurlitzer organ; who prefer the simpleminded sadness, the rustically trampling merriment of English folk-songs to Figaro or the Mass in D. In other words, they are the sort of people who don’t really like music.
The Rest Is Silence
Think not it was those colours, red and white,
Laid but on flesh that could affect me so,
But something else, which thought holds under lock
And hath no key of words to open it.
They are the smallest pieces of the mind
That pass the narrow organ of the voice;
The great remain behind in that vast orb
Of the apprehension, and are never born.
MICHAEL DRAYTON.
If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds and muses, on admired themes;
If every heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;
If these had made one poem’s period,
And all combined
