ÀҾ˹éÒ˹ѧÊ×Í
PDF
ePub

works undertaken by him received little or none of his attention; for which reason Cosimo de' Medici, wishing him to execute a work in his own palace, shut him up, that he might not waste his time in running about; but having endured this confinement for two days, he then made ropes with the sheets of his bed, which he cut to pieces for that purpose, and so having let himself down from a window, escaped, and for several days gave himself up to his amusements. When Cosimo found that the painter had disappeared, he caused him to be sought, and Fra Filippo at last returned to his work, but from that time forward Cosimo gave him liberty to go in and out at his pleasure, repenting greatly of having previously shut him up, when he considered the danger that Fra Filippo had incurred by his folly in descending from the window; and ever afterwards laboring to keep him to his work by kindness only, he was by this means much more promptly and effectually served by the painter, and was wont to say that the excellencies of rare genius were as forms of light and not beasts of burden."

A FACE.

The speaker imagines the head of a beautiful girl he knows, "painted upon a background of pale gold, such as the Tuscan's early art prefers," and details the picture as he would have it.

THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB AT ST. PRAXED'S CHURCH.1 [ROME, 15-.]

The dying Bishop pleads with his natural sons that they give him the sumptuous tomb they stand pledged to, such a tomb as will excite the envy of his old enemy Gandolf, who cheated him out of a favorite niche in St. Praxed's Church, by dying before him, and securing it for his tomb.

It is not necessary to suppose that the natural sons are present. His, perhaps, delirious mind is occupied with the precious marbles

1 First published in 'Hood's Magazine,' March, 1845, No. III., vol. iii., Pp. 237-239, under the title 'The Tomb at St. Praxed's (Rome, 15—).'

“This poem and "The Flight of the Duchess' were sent by Browning to help make up the numbers of the magazine while Hood lay dying." — FURNI VALL'S Bibliography of Robert Browning, p. 48.

and stones and other luxuries he has loved so much, and with his old rival and enemy, Gandolf.

John Ruskin, in his 'Modern Painters' (Vol. IV., chap. XX., § 32), remarks:

"Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art, . . . there is hardly a principle connected with the mediæval temper, that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his. There is a curious instance, by the way, in a short poem 1 referring to this very subject of tomb and image sculpture; all illustrating just one of those phases of local human character which, though belonging to Shakespeare's own age, he [Shakespeare] never noticed, because it was specially Italian and un-English; connected also closely with the influence of mountains on the heart, and therefore with our immediate inquiries. I mean the kind of admiration with which a southern artist regarded the stone he worked in; and the pride which populace or priest took in the possession of precious mountain substance, worked into the pavements of their cathedrals, and the shafts of their tombs.

"Observe, Shakespeare, in the midst of architecture and tombs of wood, or freestone, or brass, naturally thinks of gold as the best enriching and ennobling substance for them; in the midst also of the fever of the Renaissance he writes, as every one else did, in praise of precisely the most vicious master of that school - Giulio Romano; $ but the modern poet, living much in Italy, and quit of the Renaissance influence, is able fully to enter into the Italian feeling, and to see the evil of the Renaissance tendency, not because he is greater than Shakespeare, but because he is in another element, and has seen other things.

"I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines ['The Bishop orders his Tomb '], of the Renaissance spirit, - its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin.

1The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church.'

2 The Mountain Glory,' the subject of the chapter from which this is

taken.

8 Winter's Tale,' V. 2. 106.

It is nearly all that I said of the Central Renaissance in thirty pages of the 'Stones of Venice' put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinable."

Professor Dowden, in regard to Mr. Browning's doctrines on the subject of art, remarks:

"It is always in an unfavorable light that he depicts the virtuoso or collector, who, conscious of no unsatisfied aspirations such as those which make the artist's joy and sorrow, rests in the visible products of art, and looks up to nothing above or beyond them. . . . The unbelieving and worldly spirit of the dying Bishop, who orders his tomb at St. Praxed's, his sense of the vanity of the world simply because the world is passing out of his reach, the regretful memory of the pleasures of his youth, the envious spite towards Gandolf, who robbed him of the best position for a tomb, and the dread lest his reputed sons should play him false and fail to carry out his designs, are united with a perfect appreciation of Renaissance art, and a luxurious satisfaction, which even a death-bed cannot destroy, in the splendor of voluptuous form and color. The great lump of lapis lazuli,

"Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape,

Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast,'

nust poise between his sculptured knees; the black basalt must contrast with the bas-relief in bronze below: :

"St. Praxed in a glory, and one Pan

Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off;'

the inscription must be choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word.'"

A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI'S.

The speaker is listening to a Toccata of Galuppi's, and the music tells him of how they lived once in Venice, where the mer

chants were the kings. He was never out of England, yet it's as if he saw it all, through what is addressed to the ear alone.

But the music does more than reflect the life of mirth and folly which was led in the gay and voluptuous city. It has an undertone of sadness; its lesser thirds so plaintive, its sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, tell the votaries of pleasure something; its suspensions, its solutions, its commiserating sevenths, awaken in them the question of their hold on life. That question the music

answers.

ABT VOGLER.

(After he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention.)

The Abbé Georg Joseph Vogler was born at Würzburg (Bavaria), June 15, 1749; appointed Kappelmeister to the King of Sweden, in 1786. While in this capacity, the "musical instrument of his invention," called the Orchestrion, was constructed;1 went to London with his organ, in 1790, and gave a series of successful concerts, realizing some £1200, and making a name as an organist; commissioned to reconstruct the organ of the Pantheon on the plan of his Orchestrion; and later, received like commissions at Copenhagen and at Neu Ruppin in Prussia; founded a school of music at Copenhagen, and published there many works; in 1807 was appointed by the Grand Duke, Louis I., Kappelmeister at Darmstadt; founded there his last school, two of his pupils being Weber and Meyerbeer; died in 1814. Browning presents Vogler as a great extemporizer, in which character he appears to have been the most famous. For a further account, see Miss Eleanor Marx's paper on the Abbé Vogler, from which the above facts have been derived (Browning Soc. Papers,' Pt. III., pp.

1 "This was a very compact organ, in which four key-boards of five octaves each, and a pedal board of thirty-six keys, with swell complete, were packed into a cube of nine feet. See Fétis's 'Biographie Universelle des Musiciens.'-G. GROVE." Note to Miss Marx's Art. on Vogler.

339-343). Her authorities are Fétis's Biogr. Univ. des Musiciens' and Nisard's 'Vie de l'Abbé Vogler.'

Mrs. Turnbull, in her paper on 'Abt Vogler' ('Browning Soc. Papers,' Pt. IV., pp. 469–476), has so well traced the argument of the monologue, that I cannot do better than quote the portion of her paper in which she presents it:

"Abt Vogler has been extemporizing on his instrument, pouring out through it all his feelings of yearning and aspiration; and now, waking from his state of absorption, excited, and trembling with excess of emotion, he breaks out into the wish, 'Would it might tarry!' In verses [stanzas] one and two he compares the music he has made to a palace, which Solomon (as legends of the Koran relate) summoned all creatures, by the magic name on his ring, to raise for the princess he loved; so all the keys, joyfully submitting to the magic power of the master, combine to aid him, the low notes rushing in like demons to give him the base on which to build his airy structure; the high notes like angels throwing decoration of carving and tracery on pinnacle and flying buttress, till in verse three its outline, rising ever higher and higher, shows in the clouds like St. Peter's dome, illuminated and towering into the vasty sky; and it seems as if his soul, upborne on the surging waves of music, had reached its highest elevation. But no. Influences from without, inexplicable, unexpected, join to enhance his own attempts; the heavens themselves seem to bow down and to flash forth inconceivable splendors on his amazed spirit, till the limitations of time and space are gone-'there is no more near nor far.'

"... In this strange fusion of near and far, of heaven and earth, presences hover, spirits of those long dead or of those yet to be, lured by the power of music to return to life, or to begin it. Figures are dimly descried in the fervor and passion of music, even as of old in the glare and glow of the fiery furnace.

"Verses four and five are a bold attempt to describe the indescribable, to shadow forth that strange state of clairvoyance when the soul shakes itself free from all external impressions, which Vogel tells us was the case with Schubert, and which is true of all great composers 'whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot say.'

[ocr errors]

'In the sixth verse we come to a comparison of music with the other arts. Poetry, painting, and sculpture deal with actual form, and the tangible realities of life. They are subject to laws, and we know how

« ¡è͹˹éÒ´Óà¹Ô¹¡ÒõèÍ
 »