Page:Poet Lore, volume 3, 1891.djvu/274

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HE word "music" is too often the sign for the opening of the flood-gates of a sentimental criticism born of ignorance, so lowering to the true dignity of the art that one is tempted to cry out, "If thou hast any music that may not be heard to't again."

As the poet par excellence of music, Browning has not escaped the undiscriminating praise of the sentimentalist.

Because he has shown an unusual grasp of music's complexities, psychologic as well as technical, his personality is invariably confounded with that of the musician whom he has chosen to honor as a subject of his art. He is supposed to be capable of digesting "mountainous fugues" and old-fashioned "toccatas" with the same relish as he might a symphony of Beethoven or a "glad glorious subject" of Bach. Browning it is who masquerades as Galuppi, and the dramatic character and delicate humor of the poem are completely overshadowed by the supposition that Galuppi's music is a concrete symbol of the absolute truths revealed by music, instead of an individual point with relations to a past and future growth not only of music but of all art and the breath of art's life—the soul.

In the picture of Venice called up by the Toccata, a picture drawn with a sadness akin to mirth, we see the gay, frivolous, fashionable life, the unstable, fleeting pleasure, pursued for pleasure's sake, the love that feeds upon itself, and in so doing dissipates itself. The beauties, the cavaliers dancing the whole night through, could yet stop and listen when they heard a master play. But what of the "Master" who flourished in such an environment!

To the belles and beaux of Venice, Galuppi's music with its dominant's persistence until "an octave struck the answer" taught