Page images
PDF
EPUB

brave what is so opposite to his own soul. He is, indeed, too noble to resent or revenge, or look on the case other than as God may

Luria-In my own Fast-if you would stoop to help

My barbarous illustration—it sounds ill,
Yet there's no wrong at bottom-rather praise.
Dom.-Well!

Luria.

We have creatures there which if you saw
The first time, you would doubtless marvel at,
For their surpassing beauty, craft and strength,
And tho' it were a lively moment's shock
Wherein you found the purpose of their tongues-
That seemed innocuous in their lambent play,

Yet, once made known, such grace required a guard,
Your reason soon would acquiesce, I think,

In th' Wisdom which made all things for the best,
So take them, good with ill, contentedly-
The prominent beauty with the secret sting.

I am glad to have seen you, wondrous Florentines.

And having seen them, and staked his heart entirely on the venture, he went through with them-and lost. He cannot sur. vive the shock of their treachery. He arranges all things nobly in their behalf, and dies, for he was of that mould, the "precious porcelain of human clay" which

[blocks in formation]

ture under the crucifixion they have prepared for him; especially the feelings of the rival, who learns from his remorse to understand genius and magnanimity, are admirably depicted. Such repentance always comes too late for the one injured; men kill him first, then grow wiser and mourn; this dreadful and frequent tragedy is shown in Luria's case with its full weight of dark sig nificance, spanned by the rainbow beauty that springs from the perception of truth and nobleness in the victim.

The second piece, "A Soul's Tragedy," is another of the deepest tragedies-a man fancying himself good because he was harsh, honourable because he was not sweet, truer than the lovely and loving natures, because unskilled to use their winning ways. His self-deception is revealed to him by means the most original and admirably managed. Both these dramas are full of genius; both make the heart ache terribly. A text might well suit the cover-a text we must all of us learn ever more and more deeply to comprehend: "Let him who thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall."

We hope these eight numbers of "Bells and Pomegranates" will now be reprinted here. They would make one volume of proper size to take into the woods and fields.

19*

LIVES OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS;

HAYDN, MOZART, HANDEL, BACH, BEETHOVEN.

THE lives of the musicians are imperfectly written for this obvious reason. The soul of the great musician can only be ex. pressed in music. This language is so much more ready, flexible, full, and rapid than any other, that we can never expect the minds of those accustomed to its use to be expressed by act or word, with even that degree of adequacy, which we find in those of other men. They are accustomed to a higher stimulus, a more fluent existence. We must read them in their works; this, true of artists in every department, is especially so of the high-priests of sound.

.Yet the eye, which has followed with rapture the flight of the bird till it is quite vanished in the blue serene, reverts with pleasure to the nest, which it finds of materials and architecture, that, if wisely examined, correspond entirely with all previously imagined of the songster's history and habits. The biography of the artist is a scanty gloss upon the grand text of his works, but we examine it with a deliberate tenderness, and could not spare those half-effaced pencil marks of daily life.

In vain the healthy reactions of nature have so boldly in our own day challenged the love of greatness, and bid us turn from Boswellism to read the record of the village clerk. These obscure men, you say, have hearts also, busy lives, expanding souls. Study the simple annals of the poor, and you find there,

only restricted and stified by accident, Milton, Calderon, or Michel Angelo. Precisely for that, precisely because we might be such as these, if temperament and position had seconded the soul's behest, must we seck with cagerness this spectacle of the occa sional manifestation of that degree of development which we call hero, poet, artist, martyr. A sense of the depths of love and pity in "our obscure and private breasts" bids us demand to see their sources burst up somewhere through the lava of circumstance, and Peter Bell has no sooner felt his first throb of peni tence and piety, than he prepares to read the lives of the saints. Of all those forms of life which in their greater achievement shadow forth what the accomplishment of our life in the ages must be, the artist's life is the fairest in this, that it weaves its web most soft and full, because of the material most at com. mand. Like the hero, the statesman, the martyr, the artist dif. fers from other men only in this, that the voice of the demon within the breast speaks louder, or is more early and steadily obeyed than by men in general. But colors, and marble, and paper scores are more easily found to use, and more under com. mand, than the occasions of life or the wills of other men, so that we see in the poet's work, if not a higher sentiment, or a deeper meaning, a more frequent and more perfect fulfilment than in him who builds his temple from the world day by day, or makes a nation his canvass and his pallette.

It is also easier to us to get the scope of the artist's design and its growth as the area where we see it does not stretch vision beyond its power. The Sybil of Michel Angelo indeed shares the growth of centuries, as much as Luther's Reformation, but the first apparition of the one strikes both the senses and the soul, the other only the latter, so we look most easily and with liveli est impression at the Sybil.

Add the benefits of rehearsal and repetition. The grand Na poleon draina could be acted but once, but Mozart's Don Gio

[blocks in formation]

vanni presents to us the same thought seven times a week, if we wish to yield to it so many.

The artists too are the young children of our sickly manhood, or wearied out old age. On us life has pressed till the form is marred and bowed down, but their youth is immortal, invincible, to us the inexhaustible prophecy of a second birth. From the naive lispings of their uncalculating lives are heard anew the tones of that mystic song we call Perfectibility, Perfection.

Artist biographies, scanty as they are, are always beautiful. The tedious cavil of the Teuton cannot degrade, nor the surley superlatives of the Italian wither them. If any fidelity be preserved in the record, it always casts new light on their works. The exuberance of Italian praise is the better extreme of the two, for the heart, with all its blunders, tells truth more easily than the head. The records before us of the great composers are by the patient and reverent Germans, the sensible, never to be duped Englishman, or the sprightly Frenchman; but a Vasari was needed also to cast a broader sunlight on the scene. All artist lives are interesting. And those of the musicians, peculiarly so to-day, when Music is the living, growing art. Sculpture, Painting, Architecture are indeed not dead, but the life they exhibit is as the putting forth of young scions from an old root. The manifestation is hopeful rather than commanding. But music, after all the wonderful exploits of the last century, grows and towers yet. Beethoven towering far above our heads, still with colossal gesture points above. Music is pausing now to explain, arrange, or explore the treasures so rapidly accumulated; but how great the genius thus employed, how vast the promise for the next revelation! Beethoven seems to have chronicled all the sobs, the heart-heavings, and god-like Promethean thefts of the Earth-spirit. Mozart has called to the sister stars, as Handel and Haydn have told to other spheres what has been actually performed in this; surely they will answer through the next magician.

most dive

[blocks in formation]

The thought of the law that supersedes all thoughts, which pierces us the moment we have gone far in any department of knowledge or creative genius, seizes and lifts us from the ground in music. "Were but this known all would be accomplished," is sung to us ever in the triumphs of harmony. What the other arts indicate and philosophy infers, this all-enfolding language declares, nay publishes, and we lose all care for to-morrow or modern life in the truth averred of old, that all truth is comprised in music and mathematics..

By one pervading spirit

Of tones and numbers all things are controlled,

As sagos taught where faith was found to merit
Initiation in that mystery old.

WORDSWORTH. "Stanzas on the power of sound."

A very slight knowledge of music makes it the best means of: interpretation. We meet our friend in a melody as in a glance of the eye, far beyond where words have strength to climb; we explain by the corresponding tone in an instrument that trait in our admired picture, for which no sufficiently subtle analogy had yet been found. Botany had never touched our true knowledge of our favourite flower, but a symphony displays the same attitude and hues; the philosophic historian had failed to explain the motive of our favourite hero, but every bugle calls and every trumpet proclaims him. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear!

Of course we claim for music only a greater rapidity, fullness, and, above all, delicacy of utterance. All is in each and each in all, so that the most barbarous stammering of the Hottentot indicates the secret of man, as clearly as the rudest zoophyte the perfection of organized being, or the first stop on the reed the harmonies of heaven. But music, by the ready medium, the stimulus and the upbearing elasticity it offers for the inspirations of thought, alone seems to present a living form rather than a dead monument to the desires of Genius.'

« PreviousContinue »