by the organist of some unnamed church. The latter
has just played it through: the scored brow and deep-set eyes of Master
Hugues fixed on him, as he fancied, from the shade; and he now imagines
he hears him say, "You have done justice to the notes of my piece, but
you must grasp its meaning to understand where my merit lies;" so he
plays the fugue again, listening for the meaning, and reading it as out
of a book. From this literary or dramatic point of view, the impression
received is as follows. Some one lays down a proposition, unimportant in
itself, and not justly open to either praise or blame. Nevertheless a
second person retorts on it, a third interposes, a fourth rejoins, and a
fifth thrusts his nose into the matter. The five are fully launched into
a quarrel. The quarrel grows broader and deeper. Number one restates his
case somewhat differently. Number two takes it up on its new ground.
Argument is followed by vociferation and abuse; a momentary
self-restraint by a fresh outbreak of self-assertion. All tempers come
into play, all modes of attack are employed, from pounding with a
crowbar to pricking with a pin. And where all this time is music? Where
is the gold of truth? Spun over and blackened by the tissue of jangling
sounds, as is the ceiling of the old church by cobwebs.

"Is it your moral of Life?
Such a web, simple and subtle,
Weave we on earth here in impotent strife,
Backward and forward each throwing his shuttle,
Death ending all with a knife?" (vol. vi. p. 202)

The organist admires Master Hugues, and approaches his creations with an
open mind; but he cannot help feeling that this mode of composition
represents the tortuousness of existence, and that its "truth" spreads
golden above and about us, whether we accept her or not. He ends by
bidding Master Hugues and the five speakers clear the arena; and leave
him to "unstop the full organ," and "blare out," in the "mode
Palestrina," what another musician has had to say.

This scene in an organ loft has many humorous touches which would in any
case forbid our taking it too seriously; and we must no more think of
Mr. Browning as indifferent to the possible merits of a fugue than as
indifferent to the beauties of a Greek statue. But the dramatic
situation has in this, as in the foregoing case, a strong basis of
personal truth.

Two more of these poems show the irony of circumstance as embodied in
popular op