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.
Having given specimen poems dealing with the arts of poetry, painting,
and sculpture, we add one on the subject of music, which, though
difficult to understand fully, has beauties which are apparent even to
those who do not enter into its deepest thought. Vogler is not known as
a composer of the first rank, having left no works behind him which
entitle him to a place among the great masters; but, for this very
reason, he is better suited for the poet’s purpose, which is to deal
with music, not as represented by printed notes, but as existing for the
moment in all its perfection, and at once melting away into silence and
apparent nothingness. It is as extemporizer, not as author, he is
chosen, and as Abbé (_Ger._ Abt) he appropriately thinks of those deep
spiritual truths on which the loftier hopes of the latter part of the
poem are founded.
The musician “has been extemporizing,”—pouring out his whole soul
through the keys of his organ, and from that state of ecstasy he
suddenly awakes and cries out, “Would that the structure brave, the
manifold music I build ... might tarry!” It has been no mere “volume,”
but a “palace” of sound. As Solomon (according to the well-known legend)
summoned all spirits from above and from below, and all creatures of the
earth, to build him a palace at once, so by a touch, “calling the keys
to their work,” he has summoned demons of the bass, angels of the
treble, earth creatures of the middle tones, who, by eager and
tumultuous and yet harmoniously united efforts, have caused “the
pinnacled glory” to “rush into sight” (stanzas 1-3).
Into sight? There was far more in it than could be seen. As the soul of
the musician ascended from earth, heaven descended on him; its stars
crowned his work; its moons, its suns were close beside him—“there was
no more near nor far” (4). And the boundaries of time, as well as the
limits of space, were gone. The _absolute_, the _perfect_ was reached;
and to this palace of perfection had flocked “presences plain in the
place,” from the far Future and from the mystic Past. “There was no more
sea”—no more distance or separation—all one, together, perfect (5).
Reached how? Through music—the only one of the arts that leads into the
region of the absolute and perfect, its effects not springing from
causes the operation of which can be traced, and the law of their
production defined, but responding directly to the will, even as
creation responded to the _fiat_ of God. Out of such simple elements can
that be evoked, which should lead those who “consider” these things to
“bow the head” (6, 7).
But was it only for a moment? Is it gone? Forever? (8).
I turn to God, and know it cannot be. Then follows that glorious
passage, one of the finest in any language, every word of which should
be studied, beginning—“There shall never be one lost good!” on to the
end of stanza 11, which is the true climax of the poem.
The last stanza may be compared to the closing one of “Saul.” It is the
return from the empyrean to the plain of common life. Let some musical
friend show how at the cadence of a very grand piece he would feel his
way down the chromatic scale, and then pause on that poignant discord,
known as “the minor ninth,” effecting, as it were, a separation (“alien
ground”) from the heights just descended, and giving thus the
opportunity of looking up once more before a resting-place is found in
“the common chord,”—“the C major of this life.”
This is a poem which should be read over and over till the music of it
has fairly entered the soul.
It has become common now to speak slightingly of those representations
of heaven which make large use of music to give them body in our
thought, as if the idea intended to be conveyed were that the joy of
heaven was to consist in an endless idle singing, a concert without a
finale; but this easy criticism is surely too disregardful of the
distinctive feature of music so strikingly set forth in this poem—viz.,
that it is the only one of the arts which while strongly appealing to
sense, yet in its essence belongs to the realm of the unseen, so that it
is in fact the only symbol within the range of man’s experience which
can even suggest the absolute, the perfect, the pure heavenly.
The following passage, from the “Memorials of Frances Ridley Havergal,”
(p. 151) is so strikingly illustrative of “Abt Vogler,” that we cannot
forbear quoting it:—
“In the train I had one of those curious musical visions which only very
rarely visit me. I hear strange and very beautiful chords, generally
full, slow and grand, succeeding each other in most interesting
sequences. I do not invent them, I could not; they pass before my mind,
and I only listen. Now and then my will seems aroused when I see ahead
how some fine resolution might follow, and I seem to _will_ that certain
chords should come, and then they do come; but then my will seems
suspended again, and they go on quite independently. It is so
interesting, the chords seem to _fold over each other_, and die away
down into music of infinite softness, and then they _un_fold and open
out, as if great curtains were being withdrawn one after another,
widening the view, till, with a gathering power and intensity and
fulness, it seems as if the very skies were being opened out before one,
and a sort of great blaze and glory of music, such as my outward ears
never heard, gradually swells out in perfectly sublime splendour. This
time there was an added feature; I seemed to hear depths and heights of
sound beyond the scale which human ears can receive, keen, far-up
octaves, like vividly twinkling _starlight_ of music, and mighty slow
vibrations of gigantic strings going down into grand thunders of depths,
octaves below anything otherwise appreciable as musical notes. Then, all
at once, it seemed as if my soul had got a new sense, and I could _see_
this inner music as well as hear it; and then it was like gazing down
into marvellous _abysses of sound_, and up into dazzling regions of
what, to the eye, would have been light and colour, but to this new
sense was _sound_.”
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