XVII. AN ACCOUNT OF ABBÉ VOGLER. (FROM FÉTIS & NISARD.) BY MISS ELEANOR MARX. THE Abbé George Joseph Vogler was born at Würzburg (Bavaria) on the 15th June, 1749. His father, a musical instrument maker, had the boy taught the clavecin, but George soon surpassed his master. Alone, and without any instruction, he learnt to play upon several instruments, and also invented a new system of fingering, which he subsequently taught in his schools. Abt Vogler began his humanities in the Jesuit College of his native town, and concluded his studies at the Jesuit Seminary of Bamberg. In 1771 he went to Mannheim, where he obtained permission to compose a ballet for the Court Theatre. Charles Theodore, the Elector Palatine, now became his patron, and at his own expense sent Vogler to study counterpoint under the direction of Father Martini at Bologna. Vogler, however, soon wearied of the old teacher's slow method, and with characteristic impatience left him after six weeks. He now proceeded to Padua, and while studying theology there, also took lessons in harmony and musical composition with Father Valotti. This time the pupil proved more persevering, and remained with his instructor for five months. Valotti's system of harmony delighted Vogler, who founded his own system upon it. His theological studies ended, Vogler set out for Rome, where he was ordained priest. In spite of his youth, the Abbé seems to have already enjoyed a certain reputation, for he met with a most sympathetic reception in the Eternal City. He was even made "apostolic protonotary, chamberlain to the Pope, chevalier of the Golden Spur, and member of the Academy of 'Arcades' (?)." In 1775 he returned to Mannheim, where his first act was to open a School of Music. He now published several works: 1 an exposition of his Theory of Music and Composition (Tonwissenschaft und 1 A complete list is given in Nisard's Vie de L'Abbé Vogler. B Faith has passed into sight, and the human will is effaced in the Divine. "Indeed the special marking of the man, Is prone submission to the heavenly will— But therefore is the moral discipline of life over for him; he can will only God's will. But in the order of God's education it is necessary we should walk first by faith, afterwards by sight; should work out the moral law ere we recognize it as Divine, else we could not know God as good, and there could be no personal life, only the absorption of the human will in the infinite. Virtue can take root only in the darkness; we need to live in a world opaque for us. If, whilst enduring the agony, we could see the joy set before us, how could our spiritual nature attain its full growth! No; we must utter the cry "lama sabachthani" ere we can say, 66 It is finished." "Clouds and darkness must be round about Him," that we may learn that "righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat." We must do right not only because we know God wills it, but we must know that God wills it because it is right. We are to yield not a "prone submission," a satisfied assent, but the gladness of a full consent. There may be submission to the Almighty, but there can be concord only with the All-good. And it seems that Lazarus has lost his characteristics as a man, because for him the work of this life is over; he has anticipated the next stage of existence ere he has entered on it, and so there is discord. "The law of that is known to him as this, His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here, This life, too, has lost with its educative power its interest; for to enjoy we must ever be seeking the unattained, ever advancing. "He listened not, except I spoke to him, But folded his two hands, and let them talk, Sayeth he will wait patient to the last For that same death, which must restore his being To equilibrium, body loosening soul, Divorced even now by premature full growth." And he is no longer able to help others. We must feel their diffilties ere we can meet them; there must be a measure of stupidity in us; one may be too clever to be a teacher. He despairs of unfolding spiritual realities, as we of explaining sight to the blind. "How can he give his neighbour the real ground, His own conviction." "Hence I perceive not he affects to preach The doctrine of his sect." In conclusion the poet leads us to feel that we must learn by degrees to use the heavenly treasure, not demand our inheritance ere we have attained our majority; that the all-sufficient gospel is this-to know that the heart of God beats in sympathy with the heart of man. "So All-great were the All-loving too— So, through the thunder comes a human voice, Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of Mine : And thou must love Me who have died for thee!'" We have said that Browning deals especially with the problems which force themselves most upon our age, and answers them as a poet, by appealing to our deepest consciousness, to our sense of what must be, to our moral intuitions. Perhaps in none are we made more conscious of his deep spiritual sympathies than in the companion poems, Easter Day and Christmas Eve. Browning knows people better than they know themselves. Which of us has not at some time professed to hold a creed, and thought perhaps we did believe, what in the depths of our hearts we abhorred? So he faces the superficial thinker, and makes him know himself. Does the agnostic approach with a smiling countenance, saying, "I am content with this world's beauty, with science and art and law; Browning leads him to an earthly paradise, where no voice of God is heard among the trees of the garden; he casts at his feet all the gifts of beauty, but they are gifts from no one; he places him in a tabernacle vast and glorious, and it becomes to him a prison-house, because there is no escape from it into a larger life; and as for human love, this too dies in the desert, it has no root, it is cut off from all that can feed its life; and at last the soul is made to feel the utter desolation of a life without God, to know what is eternal death, to understand that deepest utterance of man's heart, "This is life eternal, to know Thee;" to understand that the resurrection for man is this—to come into the full consciousness of union with God. Without it we pine and die amidst all the earth has to give; but, if we know it, streams water the desert, it rejoices and blossoms as the rose, the mountains and hills break forth into singing, and everything that hath breath praises God And Christmas Eve is complementary to Easter Day. That has most with the relation of the individual soul to the source of its life—to the centre of the universe,-realized within. This deals with the relation of the soul to the life of God manifested in others; it teaches us that when we can say only My Father, not Our Father, we cannot enter into the mind of God, nor pray aright; that if we are not quite in darkness, we are only in the moonlight; if we are touching the hem of Christ's garment, we have not entered with Him the transfiguring cloud; we are not wrapt in that glory, we are only on the verge of light. And as in Easter Day, he forces us to face the thoughts, and see whether we really feel what we supposed we did, he shows us we cannot do without God; as we found in the one, that the love of God glorifies nature, and alone draws us into loving sympathy; so in Christmas Eve we find that same love it is, which, being shed abroad in our hearts, enables us to love man, to lose sight of what is merely phenomenal and faulty, and to go down to those deeper depths, where we meet in truest sympathy in the sense of a common need, a common aspiration, a common love. We have been sentimentalizing perhaps about love, bestowing our charity in inverse proportion to people's nearness to us. Browning brings us, as it were, face to face with our complacent religious selves, and he bids us then follow, cling to Christ, say with our hearts, "Where Thou goest, I will go." Then we listen to those words, "Where two or three are gathered together, there am I"-present, with infinite compassion and love; not with the refined and cultivated and æsthetic, but with those who are in your eyes ugly and ignorant and narrow; in that miserable little Bethel, out of which you have dashed with contempt; present, because their souls are seeking Me, and longing for the light, and are therefore growing up into it, though their life does seem so dreary and dark to you; present with those you despise for utter want of æsthetic sense. Present in the great cathedral, with those too whom you regard as superstitious, because the emotions of their souls are expressed in the ascending incense, the thrilling music, the pictured forms. Yes, even with him who knows Me not as a living Presence, but desires truth; who has with toilsome steps climbed the mountain-tops, that he might dwell in a region of pure light, and who is starving amidst the snows; even to him I come breathing warmth and love, and therefore life. None are cast out of My Presence; if you cast out from your love any human soul, you must let go then of the hem of that garment from whence virtue goes out to all suffering humanity. There is a musical trilogy which corresponds with the three poems on which I have previously dwelt. And here I may perhaps remark that I know of no modern poet at least, in whom art is so unified as in ing; the scenery and sound so harmonized with the thought. He owes his excellence in this partly to his familiarity with Greek drama, especially with Eschylus. Comparing the three poems, we may say Saul corresponds to Hugues of Suxe-Gotha; Caliban, the debased, the bestial, to the Toccata of Galuppi; Abt Vogler to Lazarus, the glorified, spiritualized man. The central poem, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, represents the truly human, the soul seeking to interpret the perplexed music of earth, arguing, disputing, contending, in the faith that there is a meaning in all, though the final answer is delayed. The very sound is given of the perplexed intricate fugue, with its many melodies, crossing, interpenetrating, and moving on together. "One says his say with a difference ; More of expounding, explaining; All now is wrangle, abuse, and vociference; Now there's a truce, all's subdued, self-restraining, Five, though, stands out all the stiffer hence. Est fuga, volvitur rota, On we drift: where looms the dim port? One, Two, Three, Four, Five, contribute their quota ; So your fugue broadens and thickens, And the same thought of the perplexities of life is repeated to the sight in the intricate mouldings of the roof. Our scene is a mediæval church, in which the musician lingers; the dim lights are growing dimmer as the sexton extinguishes one after another, and the golden cherubs which reflect some of that feeble light are partly hidden by the cobwebs. "There! see our roof, its gilt moulding and groining The answer does not come, the meaning cannot be evolved, the vision of glory is only dimly seen through the symbols of earth. "So we o'ershroud stars and roses, Cherub and trophy and garland; Nothings grow somethings which quietly closes Heaven's earnest eye; not a glimpse of the far land And as the last candle by which he had been able to interpret the music, sinks in its socket, he stumbles down the dangerous staircase, out of the dark church into the moonlight silence, whither we cannot follow; the lights of earth extinguished for him, the restless questioning over. |