The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning

[The Poem.] The musician has been extemporising on his organ, and as the performance in its beauty and completeness impresses his mind with wonderful and mysterious imagery, he wishes it could be permanent. He has created something, but it has vanished. He compares it to a palace built of sweet sounds, such a structure as angels or demons might have reared for Solomon, a magic building wherein to lodge some loved princess, a palace more beautiful than anything which human architect could plan or power of man construct. His music structure has been real to him, it took shape in his brain, it was his creation: surely, somewhere, somehow, it might be permanent. It was too beautiful, too perfect to be lost. Only the evil perishes, only good is permanent; and this music was so true, so good, so beautiful, it could not be that it was lost, as false, bad, ugly things are lost! But Vogler was but an extemporiser, and such musicians cannot give permanence to their performances. He has reached a state almost of ecstasy, and the spiritual has asserted its power over the material, raising the soul to heaven and bringing down heaven to earth. In the words of Milton, he had become —

“All ear,And took in strains that might create a soulUnder the ribs of death,”

and in this heavenly rapture he saw strange presences, the forms of the better to come, or “the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone.” The other arts are inferior to music, they are more human, more material than music, – “here is the finger of God.” And this was all to go – “Never to be again!” This reflection starts the poet on a familiar train of thought – the permanence of good, the impermanence, the nullity of evil. The Cabbalists taught that evil was only the shadow of the Light; Maimonides, Spinoza, Hegel and Emerson taught the doctrine which Mr. Browning here inculcates. Leibnitz speaks of “evil as a mere set-off to the good in the world, which it increases by contrast, and at other times reduces moral to metaphysical evil by giving it a merely negative existence.” “God,” argued Aquinas (Sum. Theol., i., § 49), “created everything that exists, but Sin was nothing; so God was not the Author of it.” So, Augustine and Peter Lombard maintained likewise the negative nature of moral evil: —

“Evil is more frail than nonentity.”(Proclus, De Prov., in Cory’s Fragm.)

“Let no one therefore say that there are precedaneous productive principles of evil in the nature of intellectual paradigms of evil in the same manner as there are of good, or that there is a malefic soul or an evil-producing cause in the gods, nor let him introduce sedition or eternal war against the First God” (Proclus, Six Books, trans. Thomas Taylor, B. i., c. 27). In heaven, then, we are to find “the perfect round,” “the broken arcs” are all we can discover here. Rising in the tenth stanza to the highest stature of the philosophical truth, the poet proclaims his faith in the existence of a home of pure ideals. The harmony of a few bars of music on earth suggests the eternal harmonies of the Author of order; the rays of goodness which brighten our path here suggest a Sun of Righteousness from which they emanate. The lover and the bard send up to God their feeble aspirations after the beautiful and the true, and these aspirations are stored in His treasury. Failure? It is but the pause in the music, the discords that set off the harmony. To the musician this is not something to be reasoned about mathematically; it is knowledge, it is a revelation which, however informing and consoling while it lasts, must not too long divert a man from the common things of life; patient to bear and suffer because strengthened by the beautiful vision of the Mount of Transfiguration, proud that he has been permitted to have part and lot with such high matters, he can solemnly acquiesce in the common round and daily task. He feels for the common chord, descends the mount, gliding by semitones, glancing back at the heights he is leaving, till at last, finding his true resting-place in the C Major of this life, soothed and sweetly lulled by the heavenly harmonies, he falls asleep. The Esoteric system of the Cabbalah was largely the outcome of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, and from these have sprung the theosophy of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme. It is certain that Mr. Browning was a student of the latter “theosophist” par excellence. In his poem Transcendentalism he refers to the philosopher by name, and there are evidences that the poet’s mind was deeply tinctured with his ideas. The influence of Paracelsus on Boehme’s mind is conspicuous in his works, and the sympathy with that great medical reformer which the poem of Paracelsus betrays on every page was no doubt largely due to Boehme’s teaching. The curious blending of theosophy and science which is found in the poem of Paracelsus is not a less faithful picture of Mr. Browning’s philosophical system than of that of his hero. Professor Andrew Seth, in the article on theosophy in the Encyclopædia Britannica, thus expounds Boehme’s speculation on evil: it turns “upon the necessity of reconciling the existence and the might of evil with the existence of an all-embracing and all-powerful God… He faces the difficulty boldly – he insists on the necessity of the Nay to the Yea, of the negative to the positive.” Eckhart seems to have largely influenced Boehme. We have in this poem what has been aptly called “the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language.” (Symons.) Mr. Browning was a thorough musician himself, and no poet ever wrote what the musician felt till he penned the wonderful music-poems Abt Vogler, Master Hugues of Saxe Gotha and A Toccata of Galuppi’s. The comparison between music and architecture is as old as it is beautiful. Amphion built the walls of Thebes to the sound of his lyre – fitting the stones together by the power of his music, and “Ilion’s towers,” they say, “rose with life to Apollo’s song.” The “Keeley Motor” was an attempt in this direction. Coleridge, too, in Kubla Khan, with “music loud and long would build that dome in air.” In the May 1891 number of the Century Magazine there is a very curious and a very interesting account by Mrs. Watts Hughes of certain “Voice-figures” which have lately excited so much interest in scientific and musical circles. “By a simple method figures of sounds are produced which remain permanent. On a thin indiarubber membrane, stretched across the bottom of a tube of sufficient diameter for the purpose, is poured a small quantity of water or some denser liquid, such as glycerine; and into this liquid are sprinkled a few grains of some ordinary solid pigment. A note of music is then sung down the tube by Mrs. Watts Hughes, and immediately the atoms of suspended pigment arrange themselves in a definite form, many of the forms bearing a curious resemblance to some of the most beautiful objects in Nature – flowers, shells, or trees. After the note has ceased to sound the forms remain, and the pictorial representations given in the Century show how wonderfully accurate is the lovely mimicry of the image-making music.” (Spectator, May 16th, 1891.) The thought of some soul of permanence behind the transience of music, provided the motive of Adelaide Procter’s Lost Chord. In the Idylls of the King Lord Tennyson says —

“The city is builtTo music, therefore never built at all,And therefore built for ever.”

Cardinal Newman, too, as the writer in the Spectator points out, expresses the same thought in his Oxford sermon, “The Theory of Development in Christian Doctrine.” The preacher said: “Take another example of an outward and earthly form of economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified – I mean musical sounds, as they are exhibited most perfectly in instrumental harmony. There are seven notes in the scale: make them fourteen; yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master create his new world! Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some fashion of the day, without reality, without meaning?.. Is it possible that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound which is gone and perishes? Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is not so! It cannot be.”

Notes. – Stanza I. “Solomon willed.” Jewish legend gave Solomon sovereignty over the demons and a lordship over the powers of Nature. In the Moslem East these fables have found a resting-place in much of its literature, from the Koran onwards. Solomon was thought to have owed his power over the spiritual world to the possession of a seal on which the “most great name of God was engraved” (see Lane, Arabian Nights, Introd., note 21, and chap. i., note 15). In Eastern philosophy, the “Upādana” or the intense desire produces WILL, and it is the will which develops force, and the latter generates matter, or an object having form (see Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky, vol. ii., p. 320). “Pile him a palace.” Goethe called architecture “petrified music.” “The ineffable Name”: the unspeakable name of God. Jehovah is the European transcription of the sacred tetragrammaton יהוה. The later Jews substituted the word Adonai in reading the ineffable Name in their law and prayers. Mysterious names of the Deity are common in other religions than the Jewish. In the Egyptian Funeral Ritual, and in a hymn of the Soul, the Word and the Name are referred to in connection with hidden secrets. The Jewish enemies of Christ said that the miracles were wrought by the power of the ineffable Name, which had been stolen from the Sanctuary. (See Isis Unveiled, vol. ii, p. 387.) – Stanza III. Rampired: an old form of ramparted. “The Illumination of Rome’s Dome.” One of the great sights of Rome used to be the illumination of the dome of St. Peter’s on great festivals, such as that of Easter. Since the occupation of Rome by the Italian Government such spectacles, if not wholly discontinued, have been shorn of most of their splendour. – Stanza IV. “No more near nor far.” Hegel says that “Music frees us from the phenomena of time and space,” and shows that they are not essentials, but accidents of our condition here. – Stanza V. “Protoplast.” The thing first formed, as a copy to be imitated. – Stanza VII. “That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.” “A star is perfect and beautiful, and rays of light come from it.” Stanza XII. “Common chord.” A chord consisting of the fundamental tone with its third and fifth. “Blunt it into a ninth.” A ninth is (a) An interval containing an octave and a second; (b) a chord consisting of the common chord, with the eighth advanced one note. “C Major of this life.” Miss Helen Ormerod, in a paper read to the Browning Society of London, November 30th, 1888, has explained these musical terms and expressions. “C Major is what may be called the natural scale, having no sharps or flats in its signature. A Minor, with A (a third below C) for its keynote, has the same signature, but sharps are introduced for the formation of correct intervals. Pauer says that minor keys are chosen for expressing ‘intense seriousness, soft melancholy, longing, sadness, and passionate grief’; whilst major keys with sharps and flats in their signatures are said to have distinctive qualities; – perhaps Browning chose C major for the key, as the one most allied to matters of everyday life, including rest and sleep. The common chord, as it is called, the keynote with its third and fifth, contains the rudiments of all music.”

Adam, Lilith, and Eve (Jocoseria, 1883). The Talmudists, in their fanciful commentaries on the Old Testament, say that Adam had a wife before he married Eve, who was called Lilith; she was the mother of demons, and flew away from Adam, and the Lord then created Eve from one of his ribs. Lilith had been formed of clay, and was sensual and disobedient; the more spiritual Eve became his saviour from the snares of his first wife. Mr. Browning in this poem merely uses the names, and makes no reference to the Talmudic or Gnostic legends connected with them. Under the terror inspired by a thunderstorm, two women begin a confession of which they make light when the danger has passed away. The man says he saw through the joke, and the episode was over. It is a powerful and suggestive story of falsehood, fear, and a forgiveness too readily accorded by a man who makes a joke of guilt when he has lost nothing by it.

Adelaide, The Tuscan (Sordello), was the second wife of Eccelino da Romano, of the party of the Ghibellines.

Admetus (Balaustion’s Adventure). King of Pheræ, in Thessaly. Apollo tended his flocks for one year, and obtained the favour that Admetus should never die if another person could be found to lay down his life for him: his wife, Alcestis, in consequence cheerfully devoted herself to death for him.

Æschylus. The Greek tragic poet who wrote the Agamemnon translated by Mr. Browning. Æschylus was born in the year 525 before Christ, at Eleusis, a town of Attica opposite the island of Salamis. When thirty-five years old Æschylus not only fought at Marathon, but distinguished himself for his valour. He was fifty-three years old when he gained the prize at Athens, B.C. 472, for his trilogy or set of three connected plays. He wrote some seventy pieces, but only seven have come down to our times: they are Prometheus Chained, The Suppliants, The Seven Chiefs against Thebes, Agamemnon, The Choëphoræ, The Furies, and The Persians. The Agamemnon, which Mr. Browning has translated, is one of the plays of the Oresteia, the Choëphoræ and the Eumenides or Furies completing the trilogy. The poet died at Gela, in Sicily, B.C. 456. Æschylus both in order of time and power was the first of the three great tragic poets of ancient Greece. Euripides and Sophocles were the other two.

After. See Before and After.

Agamemnon of Æschylus, The. A translation published in London, 1877. The scene of the play is laid by Æschylus at Argos, before the palace of Agamemnon, Mycenæ, however, really being his seat. Agamemnon was a son of Atreus according to Homer, and was the brother of Menelaus. In a later account he is described as the son of Pleisthenes, who was the son of Atreus. He was king over Argolis, Corinth, Achaia, and many islands. He married Clytemnestra, daughter of Tyndarus, king of Sparta, by whom he had three daughters Chrysothemis, Iphigenia and Electra, and one son Orestes. When Helen was carried off by Paris, Agamemnon was chosen to be commander-in-chief of the expedition sent against Troy by the Greeks, as he was the mightiest prince in Greece. He contributed one hundred ships manned with warriors, besides lending sixty more to the Arcadians. The fleet being detained at Aulis by a storm, it was declared that Agamemnon had offended Diana by slaying a deer sacred to her, and by boasting that he was a better hunter than the goddess; and he was compelled to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to appease her anger. Diana is said by some to have accepted a stag in her place. Homer describes Agamemnon as one of the bravest warriors before Troy, but having received Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses, priest of Apollo, as a prize of war, he arrogantly refused to allow her father to ransom her. This brought a plague on the Grecian host, and their ruin was almost completed by his carrying off Briseis, who was the prize of Achilles – who refused in consequence to fight, remaining sulking in his tent. After the fall of Troy the beautiful princess Cassandra fell to Agamemnon as his share of the spoils. She was endowed with the gift of prophecy, and warned him not to return home. The warning, however, was disregarded, although he was assured that his wife would put him to death. During the absence of Agamemnon Clytemnestra had formed an adulterous connection with Ægisthus, the son of Thyestes and Pelopia; and when he returned, the watchman having announced his approach to his palace, Clytemnestra killed Cassandra, and her lover murdered Agamemnon and his comrades. The tragic poets, however, make Clytemnestra throw a net over her husband while he was in his bath, and kill him with the assistance of Ægisthus, in revenge for the sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia. In the introduction to the translation of the Agamemnon in Morley’s Universal Library we have an excellent description of the great play. “In this tragedy the reader will find the strongest traces of the genius of Æschylus, and the most distinguishing proofs of his skill. Great in his conceptions, bold and daring in his metaphors, strong in his passion, he here touches the heart with uncommon emotions. The odes are particularly sublime, and the oracular spirit that breathes through them adds a wonderful elevation and dignity to them. Short as the part of Agamemnon is, the poet has the address to throw such an amiable dignity around him that we soon become interested in his favour, and are predisposed to lament his fate. The character of Clytemnestra is finely marked – a high-spirited, artful, close, determined, dangerous woman. But the poet has nowhere exerted such efforts of his genius as in the scene where Cassandra appears: as a prophetess, she gives every mark of the divine inspiration, from the dark and distant hint, through all the noble imagery of the prophetic enthusiasm; till, as the catastrophe advances, she more and more plainly declares it; as a suffering princess, her grief is plaintive, lively, and piercing; yet she goes to meet her death, which she clearly foretells, with a firmness worthy the daughter of Priam and the sister of Hector; nothing can be more animated or more interesting than this scene. The conduct of the poet through this play is exquisitely judicious: every scene gives us some obscure hint or ominous presage, enough to keep our attention always raised, and to prepare us for the event; even the studied caution of Clytemnestra is finely managed to produce that effect; whilst the secrecy with which she conducts her design keeps us in suspense, and prevents a discovery till we hear the dying groans of her murdered husband.” As Mr. Browning announces in his preface to his translation of the tragedy, he has aimed at being literal at every cost, and has everywhere reproduced the peculiarities of the original. He has also made an attempt to reproduce the Greek spelling in English, which has made the poem more difficult than some other translations to the non-classical reader. We have ample recompense for this peculiarity by the way in which he has imbibed the spirit of his author, and so faithfully reproduced, not alone his phraseology, but his mind. It required a rugged poet to interpret for us correctly the ruggedness of an Æschylus. Line for line and word for word we have the tragedy in English as the Greeks had it in their own tongue. If there are obscurities, we must not in the present instance blame Mr. Browning: a reference to the original, so authorities tell us, will prove that Greek poets were at times obscure. The Agamemnon is part of the Oresteian Trilogy or group of three plays; this trilogy of Æschylus is our only example extant, and it is necessary to say something of the other parts. Atreus, the son of Pelops, was king of Mycenæ. By his wife Ærope were born to him Pleisthenes, Menelaus, and Agamemnon. Thyestes, the brother of Atreus, had followed him to Argos, and there seduced his wife, by whom he had two, or according to some, three children. Thyestes was banished from court on account of this, but was soon afterwards recalled by his brother that he might be revenged upon him. He prepared a banquet where Thyestes was served with the flesh of the children who were the offspring of his incestuous connection with his sister-in-law the queen. When the feast was concluded, the heads of the murdered children were produced, that Thyestes might see of what he had been partaking. It was fabled that the sun in horror shrank back in his course at the horrible sight. Thyestes fled. The crime brought the most terrible evils upon the family of which Agamemnon was a member. When this hero was murdered by his wife and her paramour, young Orestes was saved from his mother’s dagger by his sister Electra. When he reached the years of manhood, he visited his ancestral home, and assassinated both his mother and her lover Ægisthus. In consequence of this he was tormented by the Furies, and he exiled himself to Athens, where Apollo purified him. The murder of Clytemnestra by her son is described in the second play of the Trilogy, called the Choëphoræ or the Libation Pourers. The Furies is the title of the third and concluding play of the Trilogy. (For an account of Æschylus see p. 8.)

Notes. – [N.B. The references here are to the pages of the poem in the last edition of the complete works in sixteen vols.] – P. 269, Atreidai, a patronymic given by Homer to Agamemnon and Menelaus, as being the sons of Atreus; Troia, the capital of Troas == Troy. p. 270, Ilion, a citadel of Troy; Menelaos, a king of Sparta, brother of Agamemnon. p. 271, Argives, the inhabitants of Argos and surrounding country; Alexandros, the name of Paris in the Iliad: Atreus, son of Pelops, was king of Mycenæ; Danaoi, a name given to the people of Argos and to all the Greeks; Troes == Trojans. p. 272, Tundareus, king of Lacedæmon, who married Leda; Klutaimnestra == Clytemnestra, daughter of Tyndarus by Leda. p. 273, Teukris land, the land of the Trojans – from Teucer, their king; “Achaians’ two-throned empery”: the brother kings Agamemnon and Menelaos. p. 274, Linos, the personification of a dirge or lamentation; Priamos, the last king of Troy, made prisoner by Hercules when he took the city. p. 275, Icïos Paian, an epithet of Apollo; Kalchas, a soothsayer who accompanied the Greeks to Troy. p. 277, Kalchis, the chief city of Eubœa, founded by an Athenian colony; Aulis, a town of Bœotia, near Kalchis; Strumon, a river which separates Thrace from Macedonia. p. 282, Hephaistos, the god of fire, according to Homer the son of Zeus and Hera. The Romans called the Greek Hephaistos Vulcan, though Vulcan was an Italian deity. The news of the fall of Troy was brought to Mycenæ by means of beacon fires, so fire was the messenger. Ide == Mount Ida; of Lemnos, an island in the Ægean Sea. p. 283, Athoan, of Mount Athos; Makistos == Macistos, a city of Tryphylia; Euripos, a narrow strait separating Eubœa from Bœotia; Messapios, a name of Bœotia; Asopos, a river of Thessaly; Mount Kitharion, sacred to the Muses and Jupiter. Hercules killed the great lion there; Mount Aigiplanktos was in Megaris; Strait Saronic: Saronicus Sinus was a bay of the Ægean Sea; Mount Arachnaios, in Argolis. p. 286, Ate, the goddess of revenge; Ares, the Greek name of the war-god Mars. p. 288, Aphrodite, a name of Venus. p. 290, Erinues == the Furies. p. 292, Puthian == Delphic; Skamandros, a river of Troas. p. 293, Priamidai, the patronymic of the descendants of Priam. p. 300, Threkian breezes == Thracian breezes; Aigaian Sea, the Ægean Sea; Achaian, pertaining to Achaia, in Greece. p. 301, Meneleos, son of Atreus, brother to Agamemnon and husband of Helen; water-Haides, the engulfing sea. p. 302, Zephuros, the west wind; Simois, a river in Troas which rises in Mount Ida and falls into the Xanthus. p. 304, Erinus, an avenging deity. p. 307, the Argeian monster == the company of Argives concealed in the wooden horse; Pleiads, a name given to seven of the daughters of Atlas by Pleione, one of the Oceanides. They became a constellation in the heavens after death. p. 309, “triple-bodied Geruon the Second,” Geryon, king of the Balearic Isles, fabled to have three bodies and three heads: Hercules slew him; Strophios the Phokian, at whose house Orestes was brought up with Pylades son of Strophios. p. 316, Kassandra, daughter of Priam, slain by Clytemnestra. p. 317, “Alkmene’s child” – Hercules was the son of Alkmene. p. 319, Ototoi– alas!; Loxias, a surname of Apollo. p. 322, papai, papai == O strange! wonderful! p. 324, Itus, or Itys, son of Tereus, killed by his mother. p. 325, “Orthian style,” in a shrill tone. p. 332, Lukeion Apollon– Lyceus was a surname of Apollo. p. 335, Surian == Syrian. p. 343, Chruseids, the patronymic of the descendants of Astynome, the daughter of Chryses. p. 348, Iphigeneia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; her father offered to sacrifice her to appease the wrath of Diana. p. 350, The Daimon of the Pleisthenidai, the genius of Agamemnon’s family. p. 351, Thuestes, son of Pelops, brother of Atreus; Pelopidai, descendants of Pelops, son of Tantalus.