In the days when Saul loved David greatly, and found comfort in the
constant presence of his favourite, it sometimes “came to pass that when
the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and
played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil
spirit departed from him.”
That there is something more than ordinary in music, Bishop Beveridge, in
his “Private Thoughts,” infers from this fact—that David made use of the
harp for driving away the evil spirit from Saul, as well as for bringing
the good spirit upon himself. The gentle prelate therefore recognises
in music a sort of secret and charming power, such as naturally dispels
“those black humours which the evil spirit is apt to brood upon,” and
such too as composes the mind into a more regular, sweet, and docile
disposition, thereby rendering it “the fitter for the Holy Spirit
to work upon, the more susceptive of Divine grace, and more faithful
messenger to convey truth to the understanding.” And he cites his
personal experience—_experto crede_—in favour of this view.
Anatomizing melancholy, old Burton adds to the instance of David that
of Elisha, who when he was troubled by importunate kings, called for a
minstrel, “and when he played, the hand of the Lord came upon him.” Of
course the erudite anatomist heaps up corroborative instances of all
kinds and ages, mythological, classical, mediæval; and he quotes many of
those obscure and obsolete authorities whom it has been the cheap policy
of many a bookmaker to cite from Burton’s _thesaurus_ second-hand.
Spenser opens a canto of his “Faerie Queene” with a tribute to the powers
of minstrelsy as exercised by Orpheus,—
“Or such as that celestial psalmist was,
That when the wicked fiend his lord tormented,
With heavenly notes, that did all others pass,
The outrage of his furious fit relented.”
Or again, to quote a parallel passage from a later poet of the didactic
school, whom, perhaps simply because he (Dr. Armstrong) was didactic,
some people think as essentially prosy as Spenser is on all sides allowed
to be quintessentially poetical:—
“Such was the bard, whose heavenly strains of old
Appeased the fiend of melancholy Saul.”
Buretti declares music to have the power of so affecting the whole
nervous system as to give sensible ease in a large variety of disorders,
and in some cases a radical cure. Particularly he instances sciatica as
capable of being relieved by this agency. Theophrastus is mentioned by
Pliny as recommending it for the hip gout; and there are references on
record by old Cato and Varro to the same effect. Æsculapius figures in
Pindar as healing acute disorders with soothing songs.
“Music exalts each joy, allays each grief,
Expels diseases, softens every pain,
Subdues the rage of poison and of plague:
And hence the wise of ancient days adored
One power of Physic, Melody, and Song.”
Over Luther, as Sir James Stephen has remarked, there brooded a
constitutional melancholy, sometimes engendering sadness, but more often
giving birth to dreams so wild that, if vivified by the imagination of
Dante, they might have passed into visions as awful and majestic as those
of the “Inferno.” Various were the spells to which Luther had recourse,
to cast out the demons that haunted him; and of these remedial agencies
the most potent perhaps was music. “He had ascertained and taught
that the spirit of darkness abhors sweet sounds not less than light
itself; for music (he says), while it chases away the evil suggestions,
effectually baffles the wiles of the tempter. His lute, and hand, and
voice, accompanying his own solemn melodies, were therefore raised to
repel the vehement aggressions of the enemy of mankind.”
A story is told of Farinelli, the famous singer, being sent for express
to Madrid, to try the effect of his magical voice on the king of Spain,
who was then buried in the profoundest melancholy—proof against every
appeal to exertion, living without signs of life in a darkened chamber,
the unresisting prey of dejection beyond relief. But relief came with
Farinelli. The vocalist was desired by the physicians to sing in an outer
room, which for a day or two he did, without any apparent effect upon
the royal patient. But at length it was noticed that the king seemed
partially roused from his stupor, and became an evident listener; next
day tears were seen starting from his eyes; the day after he ordered the
door of his chamber to be left open; and at last “the perturbed spirit
entirely left our modern Saul, and the medicinal voice of Farinelli
effected what no other medicine could.” Well known in modern verse is the
poet’s picture of a despairing sufferer, whom nought avails to move until—
“At last a slave bethought her of a harp:
The harper came, and tuned his instrument;
At the first notes, irregular and sharp,
On him her flashing eyes a moment bent,
Then to the wall she turned as if to warp
Her thoughts from sorrow through her heart re-sent.
...
Anon her thin wan fingers beat the wall
In time to his old tune ...
... And in a gushing stream
The tears rushed forth from her o’erclouded brain,
Like mountain mists at length dissolved in rain.”
Nor be forgotten the impressive instance of Schiller’s Wallenstein, in
his hour of darkness, tranquillised by Thekla’s voice and lute:—
“Come here, my girl. Seat thee by me,
For there is a good spirit on thy lips.
Thy mother praised to me thy ready skill;
She says a voice of melody dwells in thee,
Which doth enchant the soul. Now such a voice
Will drive away from me the evil demon
That beats his black wings close above my head.”
William Godwin makes his savage Tyrell amenable to well warbled melody.
Readers of Scott will remember how a frenzied Highlander is soothed into
self restraint by the minstrelsy of Annot Lyle. Goethe makes the first
bar of an air by Gretchen suffice to lull the sorrows of young Werter,
who protests that “instantly the gloom and madness which hang over me are
dispersed, and I breathe freely again.” Another Charlotte—our English
Richardson’s—is less successful in her manipulation of medicinal melody,
when essaying to subdue an angry spirit by the spells of song: “I go to
my harpsichord; music enrages him. He is worse than Saul; for Saul could
be gloomily pleased with the music even of the man he hated,” But this is
antedating Saul’s aversion; in those days Saul loved David greatly.
Dr. Croly, in an eloquent paragraph of his elaborate eastern romance,
records how carefully music, “of all pleasures the most intellectual,
that glorious painting to the ear, that rich mastery of the gloomier
emotions of our nature,” was studied by the Jewish priesthood, and with
a skill that influenced the habits of the country. “How often,” exclaims
Salathiel, “have my fiercest perturbations sunk, at the sounds that once
filled the breezes of Judæa! How often, when my brain was burning, and
the blood ran through my veins like molten brass, have I been softened
down to painless tears by the chorus from our hills, the mellow harmony
of harp and horn, blending with the voices of the youths and maidens of
Israel!”
It is characteristic, as Herr Kohl observes, of music-loving Bohemia,
that in the lunatic asylum of its capital, music should be considered one
of the chief aids and appliances for the improvement of the patients. In
addition to the garden concerts, in which all assist who can, there is
chamber music—quartets, trios, etc.,—every morning and evening in the
wards; and a musical director takes high rank in the official staff of
the establishment.
Elizabeth Charlotte of Orleans, mother of the Regent, describes in one
of her letters a Madame de Persillie, well born and well bred, but a
dangerous lunatic; who however, if you could but slip a guitar into her
hand when the fury-fit came on, would become calm again as soon as she
began to play. “I pity her greatly,” writes the good-natured duchess
(whose homely German nature never became properly assimilated to the
French court); “she was very fond of me, and used to address me as _Mon
aimable_; but whenever she came to see me I always had a guitar quite
ready for her.” It was but common prudence to be thus prepared for the
worst; and when the worst came to the worst, then a guitar was best.
Schleiermacher exclaims in one of his letters, “Surely, if there was
any good in Saul’s innermost soul it must have been an _adagio_ that
exorcised the evil spirit.” The evil spirit in question is introduced
by name, Malzah, in a recent Canadian drama, and is made to avow the
accomplished fact of exorcism in the following strain:—
“Music, music hath its sway:
Music’s order I obey,
I have unwound myself at sound
From off Saul’s heart, where coiled I lay.”
Which snaky or serpentine similitude is akin to a passage in Mr.
Browning’s “Paracelsus”—distant as the kinship between the two poems may
be in other respects:
“My heart! they loose my heart, those simple words;
Its darkness passes, which nought else could touch;
Like some dank snake that force may not expel,
Which glideth out to music sweet and low.”
Again and again in Shakspeare is the remedial agency of music resorted
to by afflicted royalty. At one time it is Queen Katharine, fading and
heartsore, who bids one of her women cease working, and sing—
“Take thy lute, wench; my soul grows sad with troubles;
Sing, and disperse them if thou canst.”
And the singer’s theme is how “in sweet music is such art, killing care
and grief at heart.” At another time it is dying Harry IV., who prays his
attendants, as they bear him to an inner room—
“Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends!
Unless some dull[8] and favourable hand
Will whisper music to my weary spirit.”
And once more, we have Lear’s physician prescribing music for the safer
awakening of the distraught old man from that long sleep which was only
not his last.
_FREE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS._
ROMANS vi. 20.
In being, and so long as they continued, slaves of sin (δοῦλοι τής
ἁμαρτίας), the recipients of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans are
forcibly described by him as having been, _ipso facto_, free from
righteousness (ἐλεύθεροι τῇ δικαιοσύνῃ). But what fruit had they in the
freedom of which they were now ashamed?
“He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside.”
They knew that to whom men yield themselves servants to obey, his
servants they are to whom they are obedient, whether of sin unto
death, or of loyal service unto righteousness. There is a freedom from
righteousness, which is servitude to sin; and there is that service of
God which, though a service, or rather because a service, is perfect
freedom.
Gray, in the best known of his odes (best known by heart) devises this
expressive phrase,
“Constraint, that sweetens liberty.”
It refers to schoolboys, enjoying all the more their playground freedom
for the previous and succeeding restraints and constraints of the
schoolroom. All work and no play makes a dull boy; but so does all play
and no work. In this sense, as in so many others, does the paradox hold
good that half is more than the whole (πλέον ἥμισυ παντός), and even a
schoolboy can find by experience that a half holiday may be more than a
whole one.
Wordsworth sounds the depths of this philosophy in his magnificent Ode to
Duty. He is fatigued by freedom; he would be no longer the sport of every
random gust; he would no longer stray in smooth walks, but would serve
Duty more strictly if he might:—
“Through no disturbance of my soul,
Or strong compunction in me wrought,
_I supplicate for thy control_;
But in the quietness of thought:
_Me this uncharted freedom tires_;
I feel the weight of chance desires;
My hopes no more must change their name,
I long for a repose that ever is the same.”
Whose service is perfect freedom—that is God’s service only. The true
character of that service (in Greek Testament phrase, _slavery_) is
aptly indicated by St. Paul to the Ephesians, where he speaks of _with
good will doing service_—μετ’ εὐνοίας ΔΟΥΛΕΥΟΝΤΕΣ, ὡς τῷ Κυρίῳ καὶ οὐκ
ἀνθρώποις. The law of the Spirit of life makes free from the law of
sin and death, that the righteousness of spiritual law may be fulfilled
in those who sometime were free from righteousness. Freedom from
righteousness is, in fact, identical with that bondage of corruption from
which they are delivered into the glorious liberty of the children of
God. He that is so called, being free, is yet Christ’s servant, δοῦλος.
And, as a servant, whatsoever he doeth he is to do heartily, as to the
Lord, and not to men—τῷ γὰρ Κυρίῳ Χριστῷ ΔΟΥΛΕΥΕΙ. Goethe’s biographer
tells us how he would assert, against the encyclopedists, that “whatever
frees the intellect, without at the same time giving us command over
ourselves, is pernicious;” or would utter one of his profound and
pregnant γνῶμαι such as _Nur das Gesetz kann uns die Freiheit geben_,
i.e., only within the circle of law can there be true freedom. “We are
not free when we acknowledge no higher power, but when we acknowledge it,
and in reverence raise ourselves by proving that a Higher lives in us.”
We may wrest to our purpose the lines of Schiller, in _Wallensteins Tod_:
“Nay, let it not afflict you that your power
Is circumscribed. Much liberty, much error!
The narrow path of duty is securest.”
Liberty of will is likened by Jeremy Taylor to the motion of a magnetic
needle towards the north, full of trembling and uncertainty till it be
fixed in the beloved point: “it wavers as long as it is free, and is
at rest when it can choose no more.” What is liberty? asks M. Jules
Simon; and answers, The power of doing or not doing. But, he proceeds
to inquire, can this liberty exist independent of law?—_cette liberté
peut-elle subsister sans règle?_ Nay, liberty without rule, or law,
so far from ennobling him who possesses it, degrades him. Liberty is
not given to us to withdraw us from the authority of law, but that
we may obey it in recognising its great First Cause. Unrestrained
liberty is our ruin; liberty subjected to law, and that an immovable
law, is the instrument and the token of our true greatness. Wordsworth
philosophically affirms that “all men may find cause, when life is at
a weary pause, and they have panted up the hill of duty with reluctant
will,” to
“Be thankful, even though tired and faint,
For the rich bounties of constraint;
Whence oft invigorating transports flow,
That choice lacked courage to bestow.”
The truth admits of exemplification in a thousand minor details of
every-day life. Mrs. Gaskell relates how she heard Charlotte Brontè
declare, in reference to the “exact punctuality and obedience to the
laws of time and place” enforced by her somewhat despotic aunt on the
motherless family at Haworth parsonage, that no one but themselves could
tell the value of this control in after life: “with their impulsive
natures it was positive repose to have learnt obedience to external
laws.” In the last of her own fictions—and, though unfinished, the ripest
and best—Mrs. Gaskell herself suggestively observes of a patient who,
when a medical adviser is at length called in, finds it a great relief to
be told what to do, what to eat, drink, and avoid, that “such decisions
_ab extra_ are sometimes a wonderful relief to those whose habit has
been to decide, not only for themselves, but for every one else;” and
that occasionally the relaxation of the strain which a character for
infallible wisdom brings with it does much to restore health. M. de
Vigny, in one of his highly finished _historiettes_, speculates on the
nature and power of the instinct which seems to urge mankind, as by a
kind of necessity, to seek pleasure in obedience, and to feel a desire
to depose, as it were, their free agency and consequent responsibility
in other hands; as if thereby a burden was laid down, too weighty to be
voluntarily supported; and how this sensation of relief seems to give a
secret feeling of complacency, and a freedom to the act of obedience,
which reconcile it to the pride of human nature. Soldiers, observes Sir
Walter Scott, are always most pleased when they are best in order for
performing their military service; and licence or inactivity, however
acceptable at times, are not, when continued, so agreeable to men of the
camp as strict discipline and a prospect of employment. “I have heard men
talk of the blessings of freedom,” says Wamba to himself, when suddenly
freed from sharing the captivity of his master; “but I wish any wise
man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.” So Elia,
in his essay on The Superannuated Man, to whom life being now one long
holiday has no holiday henceforth; where he expatiates on the sight of
“busy faces to recreate the idle man, who contemplates them ever passing
by—the very face of business a charm by contrast to his relaxation from
it.” Many an individual experience can put its own private interpretation
on the averment of one of Rousseau’s correspondents—_Ce lien si redouté
me delivre d’une servitude beaucoup plus redoubtable_.
Of significant application again is De Quincey’s denial of the truth of
Lessing’s æsthetical assertion, that the sense of necessary and absolute
limitation is banished from the idea of a fine art. On the contrary,
he maintains this sense is indispensable as a means of resisting (and
therefore realizing) the sense of freedom: “the freedom of a fine art
is found not in the absence of restraint, but in the conflict with it.”
So in literature. That certain rules of composition sustain themselves
at all is due, according to Mr. W. Caldwell Roscoe, to the fact that
creative genius of a high order is not impatient of forms, but rather
loves, on the contrary, to have certain limits defined for it, and to be
freed to some extent from “the weight of too much liberty.” Shakspeare,
he adds, did not fret because tragedies are limited to five acts, nor
Milton quarrel with the formal conditions of an epic poem. Here again
shall we find in Wordsworth a passage to the point:—
“In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased, if some souls (for such there needs must be),
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.”
The biographer of Edward Irving tells us how deeply he was affected when
the decision of the presbytery against him removed him from the range
of their control, so that, “notwithstanding all his independence, the
profound loyalty of his soul was henceforth baulked of its healthful
necessities.” He felt himself with a pang to be cast unnaturally free
of restraint—“that lawful, sweet restraint, ... to which the tender
dutifulness so seldom wanting to great genius naturally clings.”[9]
Habits of instant and mechanical obedience are affirmed by Sir Henry
Taylor to be those that give rest to the child, and spare its health and
temper. Men are but children of a larger growth; and though as regards
obedience to a Father which is in heaven, “mechanical” obedience may not
be the word, yet is cheerfully implicit obedience the thing; obedience is
the privilege of the child.
“For obedience is nobler than freedom. What’s free?
The vexed straw on the wind, the frothed spume on the sea.
The great ocean itself, as it rolls and it swells,
In the bonds of a boundless obedience dwells.”
The next section takes up the same theme under another heading, and with
a fresh set of variations.
_THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM._
ST. MATTHEW xi. 29, 30.
It is in tones of winning promise and invitation that men are offered
the wearing of Christ’s yoke. Let all who are weary and heavy laden come
to Him: come, that they may take His yoke upon them. There is a seeming
paradox in the invitation. Should not the weary be invited by promised
freedom from all yoke-bearing? Should not the heavy-laden be attracted by
a pledge of entire immunity from burdens grievous to be borne, whether
heavy or light? Not so. Christ’s yoke is easy, but it is a yoke. The
burden he imposes is light, but a burden of some sort He does impose.
Being made free from sin, men become the servants—servitors, slaves
even, δοῦλοι, of righteousness. But in so being made free from sin, and
becoming servants, δοῦλοι, to God, they have their fruit unto holiness,
and the end everlasting life. And the yoke of privilege promised by
Christ differs from the irksome bonds and rigid constraint of scribes and
rabbis; a yoke which, says St. Peter, neither we nor our fathers were
able to bear, inasmuch as it implies and involves a purely spiritual
service—that we should serve (δουλεύειν) in newness of spirit, and not in
the oldness of the letter. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye
shall be free indeed.”
Keble says of men, in the “Christian Year,” that,
“Freely they own, or heedless prove,
The curse of lawless hearts, the joy of self-control.”
The joy of self-control. For what Wordsworth expressively calls
“unchartered freedom,” as revelled in by those who ignore a holy and
happy-making law of duty, is not in the long run, a boon, but a bane.
True, that, as Cowper has it,
“’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,
And we are weeds without it. All constraint,
Except what wisdom lays on evil men,
Is evil.”
But the constraint that sweetens liberty is excepted; the control that
enfranchises from servitude to self, and exalts to a liberty which
monarchs cannot grant: “’Tis liberty of heart, derived from Heaven,”
“and held by charter;” “a clean escape from tyrannizing lust.” “Grace
makes the slave a freeman;” for “He is the freeman whom the truth makes
free, and all are slaves beside.” Byron was drawing on his own bitter
experience when he wrote the lines,
“Lord of himself—that heritage of woe,
That fearful empire which the human breast
But holds to rob the heart within of rest.”
Imlac, the sage, describes, in “Rasselas” the placid flow of life enjoyed
by a devout brotherhood, whose “time is regularly distributed; one duty
succeeds another, so that they are not left open to the distraction of
unguided choice, nor lost in the shades of listless inactivity. There
is a certain task to be performed at an appropriated hour,” and the
constraint is to them a pledge of happiness, hallowed as it is with a
Divine sanction, and promissory of “an ampler ether, a diviner air” to
come, in which they shall breathe more freely, and inhale more deeply,
the breath of life.
Freedom is not the being free to do nothing, or to do just what one
likes, and when, and how, without why or wherefore. _La liberté n’est pas
oisiveté_, says La Bruyère; and then he proceeds to say what liberty is:
“C’est le choix de travail et de l’exercice: être libre, en un mot, n’est
pas ne rien faire, c’est être seul arbitre de ce qu’on fait, ou de ce
qu’on ne fait point. Quel bien en ce sens que la liberté!” But how much
worthier of that note of admiration the gospel definitions, explicit or
implicit, of _ce que c’est la liberté_!
There is a touching suggestiveness in what Frederick Perthes says in a
letter after the death of his wife. All his doings and plannings for four
and twenty years past had been solely, he declares, in reference to her.
“But now all this is over. I am no longer bound; I can do what I will,
and next to the yearning after her, I am most oppressed in my solitude
by the consciousness of freedom.” Fain would he be in those dear bonds
again; to apply a passage in one of Shakspeare’s minor poems, he
“In her fillet still would bide,
And, true to bondage, would not break from thence.”
Or as Ferdinand says of Miranda, in the “Tempest,”
“All corners else o’ the earth
Let liberty make use of; space enough
Have I in such a prison.”
In this sense may be applied in earnest what Butler writes in sport, of
an independent spirit who
“Disdains control, and yet can be
Nowhere, but in a prison, free.”
So the sculptor in Hawthorne’s tale of “Transformation,” intent on
winning winsome Hilda for his own, “would try if it were possible to
take this shy, yet frank and innocently fearless creature captive, and
imprison her in his heart, and make her sensible of a larger freedom
there than in all the world besides.” “I have read somewhere,” says a
simple maiden in one of Lord Lytton’s fictions, “that the slave is gay in
his holiday from toil; if you free him, the gaiety vanishes, and he cares
no more for the dance under the palm-tree.” Don Alphonse, in Madame de
Rémusat’s “Lettres Espagnoles,” writes to his sister an account of the
courtiers’ embarrassment on being released by the king from ceremonial
attendance, and allowed to do each one as he liked. “L’improvisation en
tout est chose assez difficile, et particulièrement celle de la liberté.
Il faut que je confesse que nous n’avons su que faire de la nôtre.” The
moral of the fable may be read in Landor’s lines, supposed to be indited
by the caged nightingales so tenderly tended by Agapenthe, and brought to
Athens for her from Thessaly, and who bid the reader think not
“That we would gladly fly again
To gloomy wood or windy plain.
Certain we are we ne’er should find
A care so provident, so kind....
O may you prove, as well as we,
That e’en in Athens there may be
A sweeter thing than liberty.”
Apply, again, to the general subject the special fact, by way of
illustration, that restrictions and shackles are essential to rhythmic
writing, and voluntary thraldom the natural condition of poetry. The
Chevalier de la Faye, in his “Apology” for the supposed difficulties of
rhyme in our Cisalpine dialects (one Italian poet being “distinguishable
among his fellow-captives by the light aërial nature of his fetters,”)
suggests an ingenious parallel to the _jets d’eau_ that ornament the
gardens of the Tuileries, Versailles, and St. Cloud, in a copy of verses
which have been thus Englished by Father Prout:—
“From the rhyme’s restrictive rigour
Thought derives its impulse oft,
Genius draws new strength and vigour,
Fancy springs and shoots aloft.
So, in leaden conduits pent,
Mounts the liquid element,
By pressure forced to climb:
And he who feared the rule’s restraint
Finds but a friendly ministrant
In Reason’s helpmate, Rhyme.”