THE GUARDIAN-ANGEL
A PICTURE AT FANO
I
Dear and great Angel, wouldst thou only leave
That child, when thou hast done with him, for me!
Let me sit all the day here, that when eve
Shall find performed thy special ministry,
And time come for departure, thou, suspending
Thy flight, may’st see another child for tending,
Another still, to quiet and retrieve.
II
Then I shall feel thee step one step, no more,
From where thou standest now, to where I gaze.
– And suddenly my head is covered o’er
With those wings, white above the child who prays
Now on that tomb – and I shall feel thee guarding
Me, out of all the world; for me, discarding
Yon heaven thy home, that waits and opes its door.
III
I would not look up thither past thy head
Because the door opes, like that child, I know,
For I should have thy gracious face instead,
Thou bird of God! And wilt thou bend me low
Like him, and lay, like his, my hands together,
And lift them up to pray, and gently tether
Me, as thy lamb there, with thy garment’s spread?
IV
If this was ever granted, I would rest
My head beneath thine, while thy healing hands
Close-covered both my eyes beside thy breast,
Pressing the brain which too much thought expands,
Back to its proper size again, and smoothing
Distortion down till every nerve had soothing,
And all lay quiet, happy and suppressed.
V
How soon all worldly wrong would be repaired!
I think how I should view the earth and skies
And sea, when once again my brow was bared
After thy healing, with such different eyes.
O world, as God has made it! All is beauty:
And knowing this, is love, and love is duty.
What further may be sought for or declared?
VI
Guercino drew this angel I saw teach
(Alfred, dear friend!) – that little child to pray,
Holding the little hands up, each to each
Pressed gently, – with his own head turned away
Over the earth where so much lay before him
Of work to do, though heaven was opening o’er him,
And he was left at Fano by the beach.
VII
We were at Fano, and three times we went
To sit and see him in his chapel there,
And drink his beauty to our soul’s content
– My angel with me too: and since I care
For dear Guercino’s fame (to which in power
And glory comes this picture for a dower,
Fraught with a pathos so magnificent),
VIII
And since he did not work thus earnestly
At all times, and has else endured some wrong —
I took one thought his picture struck from me,
And spread it out, translating it to song.
My love is here. Where are you, dear old friend?
How rolls the Wairoa at your world’s far end?
This is Ancona, yonder is the sea.
“The Guardian Angel” is given as a slight specimen of an important class, dealing with painting and painters. In the lovely poem, “One Word More,” Browning disclaims all ability to paint; but no one could have a more exquisite appreciation of the art.
Has the tender pathos of these verses ever been surpassed? The calm of heaven is in this thought spread out – translated into song. Let it be read in connection with Spenser’s exquisite lines, beginning “And is there care in heaven?”
“Alfred, dear friend,” is Mr. Alfred Domett, who was then Prime Minister of New Zealand, at which far end of the world the Wairoa rolls to the sea.
DEAF AND DUMB
A GROUP BY WOOLNER
Only the prism’s obstruction shows aright
The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white;
So may a glory from defect arise:
Only by Deafness may the vexed love wreak
Its insuppressive sense on brow and cheek,
Only by Dumbness adequately speak
As favoured mouth could never, through the eyes.
This is a “gem of purest ray.” In order to understand it fully, it is necessary to know that the “group by Woolner” is of two deaf and dumb children – the one as if speaking, the other in the attitude of listening. The speech denied passage through the lips, breaks out in rarer beauty from the eyes; and for the hearing denied entrance by the ears, there is, instead, a subtle responsiveness of brow and cheek to the spirit utterance from the soul of the other; so that love, though “vexed,” is not suppressed.
The exquisite beauty of the illustration of “the prism’s obstruction,” and the tender pathos of the thought, will be manifest to every reader.
ABT VOGLER
(AFTER HE HAS BEEN EXTEMPORIZING UPON THE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT OF HIS INVENTION.)
I
Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,
Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willed
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly, – alien of end and of aim,
Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed, —
Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable Name,
And pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the princess he loved!
II
Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine,
This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise!
Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine,
Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise!
And one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell,
Burrow awhile and build, broad on the roots of things,
Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well,
Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs.
III
And another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was,
Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest,
Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass,
Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest:
For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire,
When a great illumination surprises a festal night —
Outlining round and round Rome’s dome from space to spire)
Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.
IV
In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man’s birth,
Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;
And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,
As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:
Novel splendours burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,
Not a point nor peak but found, but fixed its wandering star;
Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,
For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.
V
Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow,
Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast,
Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,
Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last;
Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone,
But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new:
What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;
And what is, – shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.
VI
All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,
All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth,
All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,
Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth.
Had I written the same, made verse – still, effect proceeds from cause,
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws
Painter and poet are proud, in the artist-list enrolled: —
VII
But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws: that made them, and, lo, they are!
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.
Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;
It is everywhere in the world – loud, soft, and all is said:
Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought,
And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!
VIII
Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;
Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow;
For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,
That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.
Never to be again! But many more of the kind
As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?
To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind
To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall be.
IX
Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.
X
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist,
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.
XI
And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome; ’tis we musicians know.
XII
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 unfold 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.”
ONE WORD MORE
TO E. B. B
London, September, 1855
I
There they are, my fifty men and women
Naming me the fifty poems finished!
Take them, love, the book and me together:
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.
II
Rafael made a century of sonnets,
Made and wrote them in a certain volume
Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil
Else he only used to draw Madonnas:
These, the world might view – but one, the volume.
Who that one, you ask? Your heart instructs you.
Did she live and love it all her life-time?
Did she drop, his lady of the sonnets,
Die and let it drop beside her pillow
Where it lay in place of Rafael’s glory,
Rafael’s cheek so duteous and so loving —
Cheek, the world was wont to hail a painter’s,
Rafael’s cheek, her love had turned a poet’s?
III
You and I would rather read that volume,
(Taken to his beating bosom by it)
Lean and list the bosom-beats of Rafael,
Would we not? than wonder at Madonnas —
Her, San Sisto names, and Her, Foligno,
Her, that visits Florence in a vision,
Her, that’s left with lilies in the Louvre —
Seen by us and all the world in circle.
IV
You and I will never read that volume.
Guido Reni, like his own eye’s apple,
Guarded long the treasure-book and loved it.
Guido Reni dying, all Bologna
Cried, and the world cried too “Ours, the treasure!”
Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.
V
Dante once prepared to paint an angel:
Whom to please? You whisper “Beatrice.”
While he mused and traced it and retraced it,
(Peradventure with a pen corroded
Still by drops of that hot ink he dipped for,
When, his left hand i’ the hair o’ the wicked,
Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma,
Bit into the live man’s flesh for parchment,
Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle,
Let the wretch go festering through Florence) —
Dante, who loved well because he hated,
Hated wickedness that hinders loving,
Dante standing, studying his angel, —
In there broke the folk of his Inferno.
Says he – “Certain people of importance”
(Such he gave his daily dreadful line to)
“Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet.”
Says the poet – “Then I stopped my painting.”
VI
You and I would rather see that angel,
Painted by the tenderness of Dante,
Would we not? – than read a fresh Inferno.
VII
You and I will never see that picture.
While he mused on love and Beatrice,
While he softened o’er his outlined angel,
In they broke, those “people of importance:”
We and Bice bear the loss for ever.
VIII
What of Rafael’s sonnets, Dante’s picture?
This: no artist lives and loves, that longs not
Once, and only once, and for one only,
(Ah, the prize!) to find his love a language
Fit and fair and simple and sufficient —
Using nature that’s an art to others,
Not, this one time, art that’s turned his nature.
Ay, of all the artists living, loving,
None but would forego his proper dowry, —
Does he paint? he fain would write a poem, —
Does he write? he fain would paint a picture,
Put to proof art alien to the artist’s,
Once, and only once, and for one only.
So to be the man and leave the artist,
Gain the man’s joy, miss the artist’s sorrow.
IX
Wherefore? Heaven’s gift takes earth’s abatement.
He who smites the rock and spreads the water,
Bidding drink and live a crowd beneath him,
Even he, the minute makes immortal,
Proves, perchance, but mortal in the minute.
Desecrates, belike, the deed in doing.
While he smites, how can he but remember,
So he smote before, in such a peril,
When they stood and mocked – “Shall smiting help us?”
When they drank and sneered – “A stroke is easy!”
When they wiped their mouths and went their journey,
Throwing him for thanks – “But drought was pleasant.”
Thus old memories mar the actual triumph;
Thus the doing savours of disrelish;
Thus achievement lacks a gracious somewhat;
O’er-importuned brows becloud the mandate,
Carelessness or consciousness – the gesture.
For he bears an ancient wrong about him,
Sees and knows again those phalanxed faces,
Hears, yet one time more, the ’customed prelude —
“How should’st thou, of all men, smite, and save us?”
Guesses what is like to prove the sequel —
“Egypt’s flesh-pots – nay, the drought was better.”
X
Oh, the crowd must have emphatic warrant!
Theirs, the Sinai-forehead’s cloven brilliance,
Right-arm’s rod-sweep, tongue’s imperial fiat.
Never dares the man put off the prophet.
XI
Did he love one face from out the thousands,
(Were she Jethro’s daughter, white and wifely,
Were she but the Æthiopian bond-slave,)
He would envy yon dumb patient camel,
Keeping a reserve of scanty water
Meant to save his own life in the desert;
Ready in the desert to deliver
(Kneeling down to let his breast be opened)
Hoard and life together for his mistress.
XII
I shall never, in the years remaining,
Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues,
Make you music that should all-express me;
So it seems: I stand on my attainment.
This of verse alone, one life allows me;
Verse and nothing else have I to give you.
Other heights in other lives, God willing:
All the gifts from all the heights, your own, love!
XIII
Yet a semblance of resource avails us —
Shade so finely touched, love’s sense must seize it.
Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly,
Lines I write the first time and the last time.
He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush,
Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly,
Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little,
Makes a strange art of an art familiar,
Fills his lady’s missal-marge with flowerets.
He who blows through bronze, may breathe through silver,
Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess.
He who writes, may write for once as I do.
XIV
Love, you saw me gather men and women,
Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,
Enter each and all, and use their service,
Speak from every mouth, – the speech, a poem.
Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows,
Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving:
I am mine and yours – the rest be all men’s,
Karshish, Cleon, Norbert and the fifty.
Let me speak this once in my true person,
Not as Lippo, Roland or Andrea,
Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence —
Pray you, look on these my men and women,
Take and keep my fifty poems finished;
Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also!
Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things.
XV
Not but that you know me! Lo, the moon’s self!
Here in London, yonder late in Florence,
Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured.
Curving on a sky imbrued with colour,
Drifted over Fiesole by twilight,
Came she, our new crescent of a hair’s-breadth.
Full she flared it, lamping Samminiato,
Rounder ’twixt the cypresses and rounder,
Perfect till the nightingales applauded.
Now, a piece of her old self, impoverished.
Hard to greet, she traverses the houseroofs.
Hurries with unhandsome thrift of silver,
Goes dispiritedly, glad to finish.
XVI
What, there’s nothing in the moon note-worthy?
Nay: for if that moon could love a mortal,
Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy)
All her magic (’tis the old sweet mythos)
She would turn a new side to her mortal,
Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman —
Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace,
Blind to Galileo on his turret,
Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats – him, even!
Think, the wonder of the moon-struck mortal —
When she turns round, comes again in heaven,
Opens out anew for worse or better!
Proves she like some portent of an iceberg
Swimming full upon the ship it founders,
Hungry with huge teeth of splintered crystals?
Proves she as the paved work of a sapphire
Seen by Moses when he climbed the mountain?
Moses, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu
Climbed and saw the very God, the Highest,
Stand upon the paved work of a sapphire.
Like the bodied heaven in his clearness
Shone the stone, the sapphire of that paved work,
When they ate and drank and saw God also!
XVII
What were seen? None knows, none ever shall know
Only this is sure – the sight were other,
Not the moon’s same side, born late in Florence,
Dying now impoverished here in London.
God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her!
XVIII
This I say of me, but think of you, Love!
This to you – yourself my moon of poets!
Ah, but that’s the world’s side, there’s the wonder,
Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you!
There, in turn I stand with them and praise you —
Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.
But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,
Come out on the other side, the novel
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence.
XIX
Oh, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas,
Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno,
Wrote one song – and in my brain I sing it,
Drew one angel – borne, see, on my bosom!
“Men and Women,” a collection of fifty poems, first published in 1855, is probably the best known of our author’s numerous volumes. Some of the very finest of his work is in it. To this collection “One Word More” is an appendix, in the form of a dedication of the fifty poems to his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As we learn from stanza 13, this work differs from all others in having been dashed off, the first time of writing being also the last time; and yet (such is the inspiration of love) it stands with the very highest of his works. It needs careful reading, but presents no such difficulties as “Abt Vogler.”
Rafael, painter for the world, becomes for once a poet for his dearest. If only these wonderful sonnets could be found, how we should prize them; but the volume is hopelessly lost (stanzas 2-4).
Dante, poet for the world, prepares for once to paint an angel for his dearest. But, alas! he is hindered by the breaking in of some “people of importance” of the city, the sort of people who served as character models for “the folk of his Inferno” (5-7).
There would evidently be less of art and more of nature in such an outpouring of soul; and, therefore, the true artist would long to do it “once, and only once, and for one only.” “The man’s joy” would be found in the mere utterance of his soul to his dearest, without any thought of art, which, to the true artist, lifts so high an ideal that his shortcoming is always a “sorrow” (8).
So is it with the prophet, the exercise of whose high calling can never be dissociated from its burdens and cares (9). If he dared, which he may not (10), how gladly for the one that he loved would he “put off the prophet” and provide water, not by the forth putting of power, but simply as the man, through the self-denial of love (11).
Browning himself has only the one art, so cannot leave his poetry to paint, or carve, or “make music” (12); but as the nearest equivalent possible to him will write “once, and only once, and for one only,” a purely extemporaneous production (13), which shall not, like his other works, be dramatic in principle, but spoken in his own “true person” (14).
Then follows the wonderful moon illustration, so marvellously wrought out, based upon the familiar astronomical fact that, through all her phases and movements she always presents exactly the same face to the earth (15), the other remaining entirely concealed (“unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman,” &c.), and therefore available as a new revelation (who knows of what grandeur?) for the loved and specially-favoured mortal (16).
The application of the illustration in stanzas 17 and 18 is exquisitely beautiful, as is the gem-like quatrain with which the poem closes.