MASTER HUGUES OF SAXE GOTHA, also a monologue, is christened after an imaginary composer; and consists of a running comment on one of his fugues, as performed 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 opinion.

“POPULARITY” is an expression of admiring tenderness for some person whom the supposed speaker knows and loves as a poet, though it is the coming, not the present age, which will bow to him as such.  But the main idea of the poem is set forth in a comparison.  The speaker “sees” his friend in the character of an ancient fisherman landing the Murex-fish on the Tyrian shore.  “The ‘murex’ contains a dye of miraculous beauty; and this once extracted and bottled, Hobbs, Nobbs, and Co. may trade in it and feast; but the poet who (figuratively) brought the murex to land, and created its value, may, as Keats probably did, eat porridge all his life.”