Part 6

A story is told of Farinelli, the famous singer, being sent for express to Madrid, to try the effect of his magical voice on the king of Spain, who was then buried in the profoundest melancholy—proof against every appeal to exertion, living without signs of life in a darkened chamber, the unresisting prey of dejection beyond relief. But relief came with Farinelli. The vocalist was desired by the physicians to sing in an outer room, which for a day or two he did, without any apparent effect upon the royal patient. But at length it was noticed that the king seemed partially roused from his stupor, and became an evident listener; next day tears were seen starting from his eyes; the day after he ordered the door of his chamber to be left open; and at last “the perturbed spirit entirely left our modern Saul, and the medicinal voice of Farinelli effected what no other medicine could.” Well known in modern verse is the poet’s picture of a despairing sufferer, whom nought avails to move until—

“At last a slave bethought her of a harp: The harper came, and tuned his instrument; At the first notes, irregular and sharp, On him her flashing eyes a moment bent, Then to the wall she turned as if to warp Her thoughts from sorrow through her heart re-sent. ... Anon her thin wan fingers beat the wall In time to his old tune ... ... And in a gushing stream The tears rushed forth from her o’erclouded brain, Like mountain mists at length dissolved in rain.”

Nor be forgotten the impressive instance of Schiller’s Wallenstein, in his hour of darkness, tranquillised by Thekla’s voice and lute:—

“Come here, my girl. Seat thee by me, For there is a good spirit on thy lips. Thy mother praised to me thy ready skill; She says a voice of melody dwells in thee, Which doth enchant the soul. Now such a voice Will drive away from me the evil demon That beats his black wings close above my head.”

William Godwin makes his savage Tyrell amenable to well warbled melody. Readers of Scott will remember how a frenzied Highlander is soothed into self restraint by the minstrelsy of Annot Lyle. Goethe makes the first bar of an air by Gretchen suffice to lull the sorrows of young Werter, who protests that “instantly the gloom and madness which hang over me are dispersed, and I breathe freely again.” Another Charlotte—our English Richardson’s—is less successful in her manipulation of medicinal melody, when essaying to subdue an angry spirit by the spells of song: “I go to my harpsichord; music enrages him. He is worse than Saul; for Saul could be gloomily pleased with the music even of the man he hated,” But this is antedating Saul’s aversion; in those days Saul loved David greatly.

Dr. Croly, in an eloquent paragraph of his elaborate eastern romance, records how carefully music, “of all pleasures the most intellectual, that glorious painting to the ear, that rich mastery of the gloomier emotions of our nature,” was studied by the Jewish priesthood, and with a skill that influenced the habits of the country. “How often,” exclaims Salathiel, “have my fiercest perturbations sunk, at the sounds that once filled the breezes of Judæa! How often, when my brain was burning, and the blood ran through my veins like molten brass, have I been softened down to painless tears by the chorus from our hills, the mellow harmony of harp and horn, blending with the voices of the youths and maidens of Israel!”

It is characteristic, as Herr Kohl observes, of music-loving Bohemia, that in the lunatic asylum of its capital, music should be considered one of the chief aids and appliances for the improvement of the patients. In addition to the garden concerts, in which all assist who can, there is chamber music—quartets, trios, etc.,—every morning and evening in the wards; and a musical director takes high rank in the official staff of the establishment.

Elizabeth Charlotte of Orleans, mother of the Regent, describes in one of her letters a Madame de Persillie, well born and well bred, but a dangerous lunatic; who however, if you could but slip a guitar into her hand when the fury-fit came on, would become calm again as soon as she began to play. “I pity her greatly,” writes the good-natured duchess (whose homely German nature never became properly assimilated to the French court); “she was very fond of me, and used to address me as _Mon aimable_; but whenever she came to see me I always had a guitar quite ready for her.” It was but common prudence to be thus prepared for the worst; and when the worst came to the worst, then a guitar was best.

Schleiermacher exclaims in one of his letters, “Surely, if there was any good in Saul’s innermost soul it must have been an _adagio_ that exorcised the evil spirit.” The evil spirit in question is introduced by name, Malzah, in a recent Canadian drama, and is made to avow the accomplished fact of exorcism in the following strain:—

“Music, music hath its sway: Music’s order I obey, I have unwound myself at sound From off Saul’s heart, where coiled I lay.”

Which snaky or serpentine similitude is akin to a passage in Mr. Browning’s “Paracelsus”—distant as the kinship between the two poems may be in other respects:

“My heart! they loose my heart, those simple words; Its darkness passes, which nought else could touch; Like some dank snake that force may not expel, Which glideth out to music sweet and low.”

Again and again in Shakspeare is the remedial agency of music resorted to by afflicted royalty. At one time it is Queen Katharine, fading and heartsore, who bids one of her women cease working, and sing—

“Take thy lute, wench; my soul grows sad with troubles; Sing, and disperse them if thou canst.”

And the singer’s theme is how “in sweet music is such art, killing care and grief at heart.” At another time it is dying Harry IV., who prays his attendants, as they bear him to an inner room—

“Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends! Unless some dull[8] and favourable hand Will whisper music to my weary spirit.”

And once more, we have Lear’s physician prescribing music for the safer awakening of the distraught old man from that long sleep which was only not his last.

_FREE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS._

ROMANS vi. 20.

In being, and so long as they continued, slaves of sin (δοῦλοι τής ἁμαρτίας), the recipients of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans are forcibly described by him as having been, _ipso facto_, free from righteousness (ἐλεύθεροι τῇ δικαιοσύνῃ). But what fruit had they in the freedom of which they were now ashamed?

“He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, And all are slaves beside.”

They knew that to whom men yield themselves servants to obey, his servants they are to whom they are obedient, whether of sin unto death, or of loyal service unto righteousness. There is a freedom from righteousness, which is servitude to sin; and there is that service of God which, though a service, or rather because a service, is perfect freedom.

Gray, in the best known of his odes (best known by heart) devises this expressive phrase,

“Constraint, that sweetens liberty.”

It refers to schoolboys, enjoying all the more their playground freedom for the previous and succeeding restraints and constraints of the schoolroom. All work and no play makes a dull boy; but so does all play and no work. In this sense, as in so many others, does the paradox hold good that half is more than the whole (πλέον ἥμισυ παντός), and even a schoolboy can find by experience that a half holiday may be more than a whole one.

Wordsworth sounds the depths of this philosophy in his magnificent Ode to Duty. He is fatigued by freedom; he would be no longer the sport of every random gust; he would no longer stray in smooth walks, but would serve Duty more strictly if he might:—

“Through no disturbance of my soul, Or strong compunction in me wrought, _I supplicate for thy control_; But in the quietness of thought: _Me this uncharted freedom tires_; I feel the weight of chance desires; My hopes no more must change their name, I long for a repose that ever is the same.”

Whose service is perfect freedom—that is God’s service only. The true character of that service (in Greek Testament phrase, _slavery_) is aptly indicated by St. Paul to the Ephesians, where he speaks of _with good will doing service_—μετ’ εὐνοίας ΔΟΥΛΕΥΟΝΤΕΣ, ὡς τῷ Κυρίῳ καὶ οὐκ ἀνθρώποις. The law of the Spirit of life makes free from the law of sin and death, that the righteousness of spiritual law may be fulfilled in those who sometime were free from righteousness. Freedom from righteousness is, in fact, identical with that bondage of corruption from which they are delivered into the glorious liberty of the children of God. He that is so called, being free, is yet Christ’s servant, δοῦλος. And, as a servant, whatsoever he doeth he is to do heartily, as to the Lord, and not to men—τῷ γὰρ Κυρίῳ Χριστῷ ΔΟΥΛΕΥΕΙ. Goethe’s biographer tells us how he would assert, against the encyclopedists, that “whatever frees the intellect, without at the same time giving us command over ourselves, is pernicious;” or would utter one of his profound and pregnant γνῶμαι such as _Nur das Gesetz kann uns die Freiheit geben_, i.e., only within the circle of law can there be true freedom. “We are not free when we acknowledge no higher power, but when we acknowledge it, and in reverence raise ourselves by proving that a Higher lives in us.” We may wrest to our purpose the lines of Schiller, in _Wallensteins Tod_:

“Nay, let it not afflict you that your power Is circumscribed. Much liberty, much error! The narrow path of duty is securest.”

Liberty of will is likened by Jeremy Taylor to the motion of a magnetic needle towards the north, full of trembling and uncertainty till it be fixed in the beloved point: “it wavers as long as it is free, and is at rest when it can choose no more.” What is liberty? asks M. Jules Simon; and answers, The power of doing or not doing. But, he proceeds to inquire, can this liberty exist independent of law?—_cette liberté peut-elle subsister sans règle?_ Nay, liberty without rule, or law, so far from ennobling him who possesses it, degrades him. Liberty is not given to us to withdraw us from the authority of law, but that we may obey it in recognising its great First Cause. Unrestrained liberty is our ruin; liberty subjected to law, and that an immovable law, is the instrument and the token of our true greatness. Wordsworth philosophically affirms that “all men may find cause, when life is at a weary pause, and they have panted up the hill of duty with reluctant will,” to

“Be thankful, even though tired and faint, For the rich bounties of constraint; Whence oft invigorating transports flow, That choice lacked courage to bestow.”

The truth admits of exemplification in a thousand minor details of every-day life. Mrs. Gaskell relates how she heard Charlotte Brontè declare, in reference to the “exact punctuality and obedience to the laws of time and place” enforced by her somewhat despotic aunt on the motherless family at Haworth parsonage, that no one but themselves could tell the value of this control in after life: “with their impulsive natures it was positive repose to have learnt obedience to external laws.” In the last of her own fictions—and, though unfinished, the ripest and best—Mrs. Gaskell herself suggestively observes of a patient who, when a medical adviser is at length called in, finds it a great relief to be told what to do, what to eat, drink, and avoid, that “such decisions _ab extra_ are sometimes a wonderful relief to those whose habit has been to decide, not only for themselves, but for every one else;” and that occasionally the relaxation of the strain which a character for infallible wisdom brings with it does much to restore health. M. de Vigny, in one of his highly finished _historiettes_, speculates on the nature and power of the instinct which seems to urge mankind, as by a kind of necessity, to seek pleasure in obedience, and to feel a desire to depose, as it were, their free agency and consequent responsibility in other hands; as if thereby a burden was laid down, too weighty to be voluntarily supported; and how this sensation of relief seems to give a secret feeling of complacency, and a freedom to the act of obedience, which reconcile it to the pride of human nature. Soldiers, observes Sir Walter Scott, are always most pleased when they are best in order for performing their military service; and licence or inactivity, however acceptable at times, are not, when continued, so agreeable to men of the camp as strict discipline and a prospect of employment. “I have heard men talk of the blessings of freedom,” says Wamba to himself, when suddenly freed from sharing the captivity of his master; “but I wish any wise man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.” So Elia, in his essay on The Superannuated Man, to whom life being now one long holiday has no holiday henceforth; where he expatiates on the sight of “busy faces to recreate the idle man, who contemplates them ever passing by—the very face of business a charm by contrast to his relaxation from it.” Many an individual experience can put its own private interpretation on the averment of one of Rousseau’s correspondents—_Ce lien si redouté me delivre d’une servitude beaucoup plus redoubtable_.

Of significant application again is De Quincey’s denial of the truth of Lessing’s æsthetical assertion, that the sense of necessary and absolute limitation is banished from the idea of a fine art. On the contrary, he maintains this sense is indispensable as a means of resisting (and therefore realizing) the sense of freedom: “the freedom of a fine art is found not in the absence of restraint, but in the conflict with it.” So in literature. That certain rules of composition sustain themselves at all is due, according to Mr. W. Caldwell Roscoe, to the fact that creative genius of a high order is not impatient of forms, but rather loves, on the contrary, to have certain limits defined for it, and to be freed to some extent from “the weight of too much liberty.” Shakspeare, he adds, did not fret because tragedies are limited to five acts, nor Milton quarrel with the formal conditions of an epic poem. Here again shall we find in Wordsworth a passage to the point:—

“In truth the prison, unto which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground; Pleased, if some souls (for such there needs must be), Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found.”

The biographer of Edward Irving tells us how deeply he was affected when the decision of the presbytery against him removed him from the range of their control, so that, “notwithstanding all his independence, the profound loyalty of his soul was henceforth baulked of its healthful necessities.” He felt himself with a pang to be cast unnaturally free of restraint—“that lawful, sweet restraint, ... to which the tender dutifulness so seldom wanting to great genius naturally clings.”[9] Habits of instant and mechanical obedience are affirmed by Sir Henry Taylor to be those that give rest to the child, and spare its health and temper. Men are but children of a larger growth; and though as regards obedience to a Father which is in heaven, “mechanical” obedience may not be the word, yet is cheerfully implicit obedience the thing; obedience is the privilege of the child.

“For obedience is nobler than freedom. What’s free? The vexed straw on the wind, the frothed spume on the sea. The great ocean itself, as it rolls and it swells, In the bonds of a boundless obedience dwells.”

The next section takes up the same theme under another heading, and with a fresh set of variations.

_THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM._

ST. MATTHEW xi. 29, 30.

It is in tones of winning promise and invitation that men are offered the wearing of Christ’s yoke. Let all who are weary and heavy laden come to Him: come, that they may take His yoke upon them. There is a seeming paradox in the invitation. Should not the weary be invited by promised freedom from all yoke-bearing? Should not the heavy-laden be attracted by a pledge of entire immunity from burdens grievous to be borne, whether heavy or light? Not so. Christ’s yoke is easy, but it is a yoke. The burden he imposes is light, but a burden of some sort He does impose. Being made free from sin, men become the servants—servitors, slaves even, δοῦλοι, of righteousness. But in so being made free from sin, and becoming servants, δοῦλοι, to God, they have their fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. And the yoke of privilege promised by Christ differs from the irksome bonds and rigid constraint of scribes and rabbis; a yoke which, says St. Peter, neither we nor our fathers were able to bear, inasmuch as it implies and involves a purely spiritual service—that we should serve (δουλεύειν) in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”

Keble says of men, in the “Christian Year,” that,

“Freely they own, or heedless prove, The curse of lawless hearts, the joy of self-control.”

The joy of self-control. For what Wordsworth expressively calls “unchartered freedom,” as revelled in by those who ignore a holy and happy-making law of duty, is not in the long run, a boon, but a bane. True, that, as Cowper has it,

“’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume, And we are weeds without it. All constraint, Except what wisdom lays on evil men, Is evil.”

But the constraint that sweetens liberty is excepted; the control that enfranchises from servitude to self, and exalts to a liberty which monarchs cannot grant: “’Tis liberty of heart, derived from Heaven,” “and held by charter;” “a clean escape from tyrannizing lust.” “Grace makes the slave a freeman;” for “He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves beside.” Byron was drawing on his own bitter experience when he wrote the lines,

“Lord of himself—that heritage of woe, That fearful empire which the human breast But holds to rob the heart within of rest.”

Imlac, the sage, describes, in “Rasselas” the placid flow of life enjoyed by a devout brotherhood, whose “time is regularly distributed; one duty succeeds another, so that they are not left open to the distraction of unguided choice, nor lost in the shades of listless inactivity. There is a certain task to be performed at an appropriated hour,” and the constraint is to them a pledge of happiness, hallowed as it is with a Divine sanction, and promissory of “an ampler ether, a diviner air” to come, in which they shall breathe more freely, and inhale more deeply, the breath of life.

Freedom is not the being free to do nothing, or to do just what one likes, and when, and how, without why or wherefore. _La liberté n’est pas oisiveté_, says La Bruyère; and then he proceeds to say what liberty is: “C’est le choix de travail et de l’exercice: être libre, en un mot, n’est pas ne rien faire, c’est être seul arbitre de ce qu’on fait, ou de ce qu’on ne fait point. Quel bien en ce sens que la liberté!” But how much worthier of that note of admiration the gospel definitions, explicit or implicit, of _ce que c’est la liberté_!

There is a touching suggestiveness in what Frederick Perthes says in a letter after the death of his wife. All his doings and plannings for four and twenty years past had been solely, he declares, in reference to her. “But now all this is over. I am no longer bound; I can do what I will, and next to the yearning after her, I am most oppressed in my solitude by the consciousness of freedom.” Fain would he be in those dear bonds again; to apply a passage in one of Shakspeare’s minor poems, he

“In her fillet still would bide, And, true to bondage, would not break from thence.”

Or as Ferdinand says of Miranda, in the “Tempest,”

“All corners else o’ the earth Let liberty make use of; space enough Have I in such a prison.”

In this sense may be applied in earnest what Butler writes in sport, of an independent spirit who

“Disdains control, and yet can be Nowhere, but in a prison, free.”

So the sculptor in Hawthorne’s tale of “Transformation,” intent on winning winsome Hilda for his own, “would try if it were possible to take this shy, yet frank and innocently fearless creature captive, and imprison her in his heart, and make her sensible of a larger freedom there than in all the world besides.” “I have read somewhere,” says a simple maiden in one of Lord Lytton’s fictions, “that the slave is gay in his holiday from toil; if you free him, the gaiety vanishes, and he cares no more for the dance under the palm-tree.” Don Alphonse, in Madame de Rémusat’s “Lettres Espagnoles,” writes to his sister an account of the courtiers’ embarrassment on being released by the king from ceremonial attendance, and allowed to do each one as he liked. “L’improvisation en tout est chose assez difficile, et particulièrement celle de la liberté. Il faut que je confesse que nous n’avons su que faire de la nôtre.” The moral of the fable may be read in Landor’s lines, supposed to be indited by the caged nightingales so tenderly tended by Agapenthe, and brought to Athens for her from Thessaly, and who bid the reader think not

“That we would gladly fly again To gloomy wood or windy plain. Certain we are we ne’er should find A care so provident, so kind.... O may you prove, as well as we, That e’en in Athens there may be A sweeter thing than liberty.”

Apply, again, to the general subject the special fact, by way of illustration, that restrictions and shackles are essential to rhythmic writing, and voluntary thraldom the natural condition of poetry. The Chevalier de la Faye, in his “Apology” for the supposed difficulties of rhyme in our Cisalpine dialects (one Italian poet being “distinguishable among his fellow-captives by the light aërial nature of his fetters,”) suggests an ingenious parallel to the _jets d’eau_ that ornament the gardens of the Tuileries, Versailles, and St. Cloud, in a copy of verses which have been thus Englished by Father Prout:—

“From the rhyme’s restrictive rigour Thought derives its impulse oft, Genius draws new strength and vigour, Fancy springs and shoots aloft. So, in leaden conduits pent, Mounts the liquid element, By pressure forced to climb: And he who feared the rule’s restraint Finds but a friendly ministrant In Reason’s helpmate, Rhyme.”

Pithy and pertinent too are Mr. Coventry Patmore’s lines on those who

“Live by law, not like the fool, But like the bard, who freely sings In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule, And finds in them, not bonds, but wings.”

They who so live are in every sense the happier, without an “except these bonds,” but because of them. They find in them not bonds, but wings; and thenceforth have free course, and go on their way rejoicing. They, like the repentant rebels in Shakspeare’s “King John,” and by the same river metaphor,

“Leaving their rankness and irregular course, Stoop low within those bounds they had o’erlook’d, And calmly run on in obedience.”

What they are no longer free to do, is to do ill. And that freedom is as perfect servitude as the service of God is perfect freedom. In fine, and in the words (but expanding the meaning) of one of Samuel Butler’s metrical reflections:—