for Solomon, a magic building wherein to lodge some loved princess, a palace more beautiful than anything which human architect could plan or power of man construct. His music structure has been real to him, it took shape in his brain, it was his creation: surely, somewhere, somehow, it might be permanent. It was too beautiful, too perfect to be lost. Only the evil perishes, only good is permanent; and this music was so true, so good, so beautiful, it could not be that it was lost, as false, bad, ugly things are lost! But Vogler was but an extemporiser, and such musicians cannot give permanence to their performances. He has reached a state almost of ecstasy, and the spiritual has asserted its power over the material, raising the soul to heaven and bringing down heaven to earth. In the words of Milton, he had become —
“All ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of death,”
and in this heavenly rapture he saw strange presences, the forms of the better to come, or “the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone.” The other arts are inferior to music, they are more human, more material than music, – “here is the finger of God.” And this was all to go – “Never to be again!” This reflection starts the poet on a familiar train of thought – the permanence of good, the impermanence, the nullity of evil. The Cabbalists taught that evil was only the shadow of the Light; Maimonides, Spinoza, Hegel and Emerson taught the doctrine which Mr. Browning here inculcates. Leibnitz speaks of “evil as a mere set-off to the good in the world, which it increases by contrast, and at other times reduces moral to metaphysical evil by giving it a merely negative existence.” “God,” argued Aquinas (Sum. Theol., i., § 49), “created everything that exists, but Sin was nothing; so God was not the Author of it.” So, Augustine and Peter Lombard maintained likewise the negative nature of moral evil: —
“Evil is more frail than nonentity.”
(Proclus, De Prov., in Cory’s Fragm.)
“Let no one therefore say that there are precedaneous productive principles of evil in the nature of intellectual paradigms of evil in the same manner as there are of good, or that there is a malefic soul or an evil-producing cause in the gods, nor let him introduce sedition or eternal war against the First God” (Proclus, Six Books, trans. Thomas Taylor, B. i., c. 27). In heaven, then, we are to find “the perfect round,” “the broken arcs” are all we can discover here. Rising in the tenth stanza to the highest stature of the philosophical truth, the poet proclaims his faith in the existence of a home of pure ideals. The harmony of a few bars of music on earth suggests the eternal harmonies of the Author of order; the rays of goodness which brighten our path here suggest a Sun of Righteousness from which they emanate. The lover and the bard send up to God their feeble aspirations after the beautiful and the true, and these aspirations are stored in His treasury. Failure? It is but the pause in the music, the discords that set off the harmony. To the musician this is not something to be reasoned about mathematically; it is knowledge, it is a revelation which, however informing and consoling while it lasts, must not too long divert a man from the common things of life; patient to bear and suffer because strengthened by the beautiful vision of the Mount of Transfiguration, proud that he has been permitted to have part and lot with such high matters, he can solemnly acquiesce in the common round and daily task. He feels for the common chord, descends the mount, gliding by semitones, glancing back at the heights he is leaving, till at last, finding his true resting-place in the C Major of this life, soothed and sweetly lulled by the heavenly harmonies, he falls asleep. The Esoteric system of the Cabbalah was largely the outcome of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, and from these have sprung the theosophy of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme. It is certain that Mr. Browning was a student of the latter “theosophist” par excellence. In his poem Transcendentalism he refers to the philosopher by name, and there are evidences that the poet’s mind was deeply tinctured with his ideas. The influence of Paracelsus on Boehme’s mind is conspicuous in his works, and the sympathy with that great medical reformer which the poem of Paracelsus betrays on every page was no doubt largely due to Boehme’s teaching. The curious blending of theosophy and science which is found in the poem of Paracelsus is not a less faithful picture of Mr. Browning’s philosophical system than of that of his hero. Professor Andrew Seth, in the article on theosophy in the Encyclopædia Britannica, thus expounds Boehme’s speculation on evil: it turns “upon the necessity of reconciling the existence and the might of evil with the existence of an all-embracing and all-powerful God… He faces the difficulty boldly – he insists on the necessity of the Nay to the Yea, of the negative to the positive.” Eckhart seems to have largely influenced Boehme. We have in this poem what has been aptly called “the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language.” (Symons.) Mr. Browning was a thorough musician himself, and no poet ever wrote what the musician felt till he penned the wonderful music-poems Abt Vogler, Master Hugues of Saxe Gotha and A Toccata of Galuppi’s. The comparison between music and architecture is as old as it is beautiful. Amphion built the walls of Thebes to the sound of his lyre – fitting the stones together by the power of his music, and “Ilion’s towers,” they say, “rose with life to Apollo’s song.” The “Keeley Motor” was an attempt in this direction. Coleridge, too, in Kubla Khan, with “music loud and long would build that dome in air.” In the May 1891 number of the Century Magazine there is a very curious and a very interesting account by Mrs. Watts Hughes of certain “Voice-figures” which have lately excited so much interest in scientific and musical circles. “By a simple method figures of sounds are produced which remain permanent. On a thin indiarubber membrane, stretched across the bottom of a tube of sufficient diameter for the purpose, is poured a small quantity of water or some denser liquid, such as glycerine; and into this liquid are sprinkled a few grains of some ordinary solid pigment. A note of music is then sung down the tube by Mrs. Watts Hughes, and immediately the atoms of suspended pigment arrange themselves in a definite form, many of the forms bearing a curious resemblance to some of the most beautiful objects in Nature – flowers, shells, or trees. After the note has ceased to sound the forms remain, and the pictorial representations given in the Century show how wonderfully accurate is the lovely mimicry of the image-making music.” (Spectator, May 16th, 1891.) The thought of some soul of permanence behind the transience of music, provided the motive of Adelaide Procter’s Lost Chord. In the Idylls of the King Lord Tennyson says —
“The city is built
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built for ever.”
Cardinal Newman, too, as the writer in the Spectator points out, expresses the same thought in his Oxford sermon, “The Theory of Development in Christian Doctrine.” The preacher said: “Take another example of an outward and earthly form of economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified – I mean musical sounds, as they are exhibited most perfectly in instrumental harmony. There are seven notes in the scale: make them fourteen; yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master create his new world! Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some fashion of the day, without reality, without meaning?.. Is it possible that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound which is gone and perishes? Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is not so! It cannot be.”
Notes. – Stanza I. “Solomon willed.” Jewish legend gave Solomon sovereignty over the demons and a lordship over the powers of Nature. In the Moslem East these fables have found a resting-place in much of its literature, from the Koran onwards. Solomon was thought to have owed his power over the spiritual world to the possession of a seal on which the “most great name of God was engraved” (see Lane, Arabian Nights, Introd., note 21, and chap. i., note 15). In Eastern philosophy,
