Robert Browning: How to Know Him Part 22

V

Had I but all of them, thee and thy treasures, What a wild crowd of invisible pleasures!

To carry pure death in an earring, a casket, A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket!

VI

Soon, at the King's, a mere lozenge to give, And Pauline should have just thirty minutes to live!

But to light a pastile, and Elise, with her head And her breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead!

VII

Quick--is it finished? The colour's too grim!

Why not soft like the phial's, enticing and dim?

Let it brighten her drink, let her turn it and stir, And try it and taste, ere she fix and prefer!

VIII

What a drop! She's not little, no minion like me!

That's why she ensnared him: this never will free The soul from those masculine eyes,--say, "no!"

To that pulse's magnificent come-and-go.

IX

For only last night, as they whispered, I brought My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all!

X

Not that I bid you spare her the pain; Let death be felt and the proof remain: Brand, burn up, bite into its grace-- He is sure to remember her dying face!

XI

Is it done? Take my mask off! Nay, be not morose; It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close: The delicate droplet, my whole fortune's fee!

If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?

XII

Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill, You may kiss me, old man, on my mouth if you will!

But brush this dust off me, lest horror it brings Ere I know it--next moment I dance at the King's!

_Fra Lippo Lippi_ and _Andrea del Sarto_ are both great art poems, and both in striking contrast. The former is dynamic, the latter static. The tumultuous vivacity of the gamin who became a painter contrasts finely with the great technician, a fellow almost d.a.m.ned in a fair wife. Fra Lippo Lippi was a street mucker, like Gavroche; he unconsciously learned to paint portraits by the absolute necessity of studying human faces on the street. Nothing sharpens observation like this. He had to be able to tell at a glance whether the man he accosted would give him food or a kick. When they took him to the cloister, he obtained a quite new idea about religion. He naturally judged that, as he judged everything else in life, from the practical point of view. Heretofore, like many small boys, he had rather despised religion, and thought the monks were fools.

"Don't you believe it," he cries: "there is a lot in religion. You get free clothes, free shelter, three meals a day, and you don't have to work! Why, it's the easiest thing I know." The monks discovered his talent with pencil and brush, and they made him decorate the chapel. When the work was done, he called them in. To their amazement and horror, the saints and angels, instead of being ideal faces, were the living portraits of the familiar figures about the cloister. "Why, there's the iceman! there's the laundress!" He rebelled when they told him this was wicked: he said it was all a part of G.o.d's world, that the business of the artist was to interpret life; he wished they would let him enter the pulpit, take the Prior's place, and preach a sermon that would make them all sit up.

The philosophy of aesthetics has never been more truly or more succinctly stated than in these lines:

Or say there's beauty with no soul at all-- (I never saw it--put the case the same--) If you get simple beauty and nought else, You get about the best thing G.o.d invents: That's somewhat: and you'll find the soul you have missed, Within yourself, when you return him thanks.

Contemplation of beautiful objects in nature, art, and literature, which perhaps at first sight have no significance, gradually awakens in our own hearts a dawning sense of what Beauty may mean; and thus enlarges and develops our minds, and makes them susceptible to the wonder and glory of life. The relation of art to life--art being the teacher that makes us understand life--is perfectly well understood by Fra Lippo Lippi.

For, don't you mark? we're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have pa.s.sed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.

If one stands to-day in the Ancient and Modern Gallery in Florence, and contemplates Fra Lippo Lippi's masterpiece, _The Coronation of the Virgin_, and reads the lines about it in this poem, one will get a new idea of the picture. It is a representation of the painter's whole nature, half genius, half mucker--the painting is a glory of form and color, and then in the corner the artist had the a.s.surance to place himself in his monk's dress among the saints and angels, where he looks as much out of place as a Bowery Boy in a Fifth Avenue drawing-room. Not content with putting himself in the picture, he stuck a Latin tag on himself, which means, "This fellow did the job."

Browning loves Fra Lippo Lippi, in spite of the man's impudence and debauchery; because the painter loved life, had a tremendous zest for it, and was not ashamed of his enthusiasm. The words he speaks came from the poet's own heart:

The world and life's too big to pa.s.s for a dream....

It makes me mad to see what men shall do And we in our graves! This world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

The change from _Fra Lippo Lippi_ to _Andrea del Sarto_ is the change from a bl.u.s.tering March day to a mild autumn twilight. The original picture in Florence which inspired the poem represents Andrea and his wife sitting together, while she is holding the letter from King Francis. This is a poem of acquiescence, as the other is a poem of protest, and never was language more fittingly adapted to the mood in each instance. One can usually recognise Andrea's pictures clear across the gallery rooms; he has enveloped them all in a silver-grey gossamer mist, and in some extraordinary manner Browning has contrived to clothe his poem in the same diaphanous garment. It is a poem of twilight, of calm, of failure in success. Andrea's pictures are superior technically to those of his great contemporaries--Rafael, Michel Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci--but their imperfect works have a celestial glory, the glory of aspiration, absent from his perfect productions. His work indeed is,

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more.

It is natural, that he, whose paintings show perfection of form without spirit, should have married a woman of physical beauty devoid of soul. She has ruined him, but she could not have ruined him had he been a different man. He understands her, however, in the quiet light of his own failure. He tells her she must not treat him so badly that he can not paint at all; and adds the necessary explanation that his ceasing to paint would stop her supplies of cash.

For although it is incomprehensible to her, people are willing to give large sums of money for her ridiculous husband's ridiculous daubs. His mind, sensitive to beauty, is drunk with his wife's loveliness of face and form; and like all confirmed drunkards, he can not conquer himself now, though otherwise he knows it means death and d.a.m.nation. He has a complete knowledge of the whole range of his powers, and of his limitations. He can not help feeling pride in his marvellous technique, that he can do what other men dream of doing; but he knows that without aspiration the soul is dead.

Poor Andrea! History has treated him harshly. He is known throughout all time as "the tailor's son," and Browning has given him in this immortal poem a condemnation that much of his work does not really deserve. For there is inspiration in many of Andrea's Madonnas.

Browning, with his fixed idea of the glory of the imperfect, the divine evidence of perpetual development, could not forgive Andrea for being called the "faultless painter." Thus Browning has made of him a horrible example, has used him merely as the text for a sermon.

There was just enough truth to give Browning his opportunity. The superiority of Rafael over Andrea lies precisely in the aspiration of the former's work. Schopenhauer says the whole Christian religion is in the face of Rafael's _Saint Cecilia_, "an entire and certain gospel." Andrea's virgins have more of the beauty of this world: Rafael's have the beauty of holiness.

ANDREA DEL SARTO (CALLED "THE FAULTLESS PAINTER")

1855

But do not let us quarrel any more, No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once: Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.

You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?

I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear, Treat his own subject after his own way, Fix his own time, accept too his own price, And shut the money into this small hand When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?

Oh, I'll content him,--but to-morrow, Love!

I often am much wearier than you think, This evening more than usual, and it seems As if--forgive now--should you let me sit Here by the window with your hand in mine And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole, Both of one mind, as married people use, Quietly, quietly the evening through, I might get up to-morrow to my work Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try.

To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this!

Your soft hand is a woman of itself, And mine the man's bared breast she curls inside.

Don't count the time lost, neither; you must serve For each of the five pictures we require: It saves a model. So! keep looking so-- My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds!

--How could you ever p.r.i.c.k those perfect ears, Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet-- My face, my moon, my everybody's moon, Which everybody looks on and calls his, And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn, While she looks--no one's: very dear, no less.

You smile? why, there's my picture ready made, There's what we painters call our harmony!

A common greyness silvers everything,-- All in a twilight, you and I alike --You, at the point of your first pride in me (That's gone you know),--but I, at every point; My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.

There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top; That length of convent-wall across the way Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, And autumn grows, autumn in everything.

Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape As if I saw alike my work and self And all that I was born to be and do, A twilight-piece. Love, we are in G.o.d's hand.

How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead; So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!