Part 10 (2/2)
Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse.
Boys seek for images and melody, Men must have reason--so, you aim at men.
It is ”quite otherwise,” Browning tells him, and he ill.u.s.trates the matter by a story.
Jacob Bohme did not care for plants. All he cared for was his mysticism.
But one day, as if the magic of poetry had slipped into his soul, he heard all the plants talking, and talking to him; and behold, he loved them and knew what they meant. Imagination had done more for him than all his metaphysics. So we give up our days to collating theory with theory, criticising, philosophising, till, one morning, we wake ”and find life's summer past.”
What remedy? What hope? Why, a brace of rhymes! And then, in life, that miracle takes place which John of Halberstadt did by his magic. We feel like a child; the world is new; every bit of life is run over and enchanted by the wild rose.
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, Over us, under, round us every side, Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all--Buries us with a glory, young once more, Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.
So come, the harp back to your heart again!
I return, after this introduction, to Browning's doctrine of life as it is connected with the arts. It appears with great clearness in _Easter-Day_. He tells of an experience he had when, one night, musing on life, and wondering how it would be with him were he to die and be judged in a moment, he walked on the wild common outside the little Dissenting Chapel he had previously visited on Christmas-Eve and thought of the Judgment. And Common-sense said: ”You have done your best; do not be dismayed; you will only be surprised, and when the shock is over you will smile at your fear.” And as he thought thus the whole sky became a sea of fire. A fierce and vindictive scribble of red quick flame ran across it, and the universe was burned away. ”And I knew,” thought Browning, ”now that Judgment had come, that I had chosen this world, its beauty, its knowledge, its good--that, though I often looked above, yet to renounce utterly the beauty of this earth and man was too hard for me.” And a voice came: ”Eternity is here, and thou art judged.” And then Christ stood before him and said: ”Thou hast preferred the finite when the infinite was in thy power. Earthly joys were palpable and tainted.
The heavenly joys flitted before thee, faint, and rare, and taintless.
Thou hast chosen those of this world. They are thine.”
”O rapture! is this the Judgment? Earth's exquisite treasures of wonder and delight for me!”
”So soon made happy,” said the voice. ”The loveliness of earth is but like one rose flung from the Eden whence thy choice has excluded thee.
The wonders of earth are but the tapestry of the ante-chamber in the royal house thou hast abandoned.
All partial beauty was a pledge Of beauty in its plenitude: But since the pledge sufficed thy mood, Retain it! plenitude be theirs Who looked above!
”O sharp despair! but since the joys of earth fail me, I take art. Art gives worth to nature; it stamps it with man. I'll take the Greek sculpture, the perfect painting of Italy--that world is mine!”
”Then obtain it,” said the voice: ”the one abstract form, the one face with its one look--all they could manage. Shall I, the illimitable beauty, be judged by these single forms? What of that perfection in their souls these artists were conscious of, inconceivably exceeding all they did? What of their failure which told them an illimitable beauty was before them? What of Michael Angelo now, who did not choose the world's success or earth's perfection, and who now is on the breast of the Divine? All the beauty of art is but furniture for life's first stage. Take it then. But there are those, my saints, who were not content, like thee, with earth's sc.r.a.p of beauty, but desired the whole.
They are now filled with it. Take thy one jewel of beauty on the beach; lose all I had for thee in the boundless ocean.”
”Then I take mind; earth's knowledge carries me beyond the finite.
Through circling sciences, philosophies and histories I will spin with rapture; and if these fail to inspire, I will fly to verse, and in its dew and fire break the chain which binds me to the earth;--Nay, answer me not, I know what Thou wilt say: What is highest in knowledge, even those fine intuitions which lead the finite into the infinite, and which are best put in n.o.ble verse, are but gleams of a light beyond them, sparks from the sum of the whole. I give that world up also, and I take Love. All I ask is leave to love.”
”Ah,” said the voice, ”is this thy final choice? Love is the best; 'tis somewhat late. Yet all the power and beauty, nature and art and knowledge of this earth were only worth because of love. Through them infinite love called to thee; and even now thou clingest to earth's love as all. It is precious, but it exists to bear thee beyond the love of earth into the boundless love of G.o.d in me.” At last, beaten to his last fortress, all broken down, he cries:
Thou Love of G.o.d! Or let me die, Or grant what shall seem heaven almost.
Let me not know that all is lost, Though lost it be--leave me not tied To this despair--this corpse-like bride!
Let that old life seem mine--no more-- With limitation as before, With darkness, hunger, toil, distress: Be all the earth a wilderness!
Only let me go on, go on, Still hoping ever and anon To reach one eve the Better Land!
This is put more strongly, as in the line: ”Be all the earth a wilderness!” than Browning himself would have put it. But he is in the pa.s.sion of the man who speaks, and heightens the main truth into an extreme. But the theory is there, and it is especially applied to the love of beauty and therefore to the arts. The ill.u.s.trations are taken from music and painting, from sculpture and poetry. Only in dwelling too exclusively, as perhaps the situation demands, on the renunciation of this world's successes, he has left out that part of his theory which demands that we should, accepting our limits, work within them for the love of man, but learn from their pressure and pain to transcend them always in the desire of infinite perfection. In _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, a masterpiece of argumentative and imaginative pa.s.sion--such a poem as only Browning could have written, who, more than other poets, equalised, when most inspired, reasoning, emotions and intuitions into one material for poetry--he applies this view of his to the whole of man's life here and in the world to come, when the Rabbi in the quiet of old age considers what his life has been, and how G.o.d has wrought him through it for eternity. But I leave that poem, which has nothing to do with art, for _Abt Vogler_, which is dedicated to music.
”When Solomon p.r.o.nounced the Name of G.o.d, all the spirits, good and bad, a.s.sembled to do his will and build his palace. And when I, Abt Vogler, touched the keys, I called the Spirits of Sound to me, and they have built my palace of music; and to inhabit it all the Great Dead came back, till in the vision I made a perfect music. Nay, for a moment, I touched in it the infinite perfection; but now it is gone; I cannot bring it back. Had I painted it, had I written it, I might have explained it. But in music, out of the sounds something emerges which is above the sounds, and that ineffable thing I touched and lost. I took the well-known sounds of earth, and out of them came a fourth sound, nay, not a sound--but a star. This was a flash of G.o.d's will which opened the Eternal to me for a moment; and I shall find it again in the eternal life. Therefore, from the achievement of earth and the failure of it, I turn to G.o.d, and in him I see that every image, thought, impulse, and dream of knowledge or of beauty--which, coming whence we know not, flit before us in human life, breathe for a moment, and then depart; which, like my music, build a sudden palace in imagination; which abide for an instant and dissolve, but which memory and hope retain as a ground of aspiration--are not lost to us though they seem to die in their immediate pa.s.sage. Their music has its home in the Will of G.o.d and we shall find them completed there.
<script>