* It has not been thought necessary, in these Arguments, touse quotation marks wherever expressions from the poems areincorporated; and especially where they are adapted inconstruction to the place where they are introduced.
“Love, the soul of soul, within the soul”, the Christ-spirit, the spirit of the “Comer” (o’ e’rxo/menos, Matt. 11:3), completes incompletion, reanimates that which without it is dead, and admits to a fellowship with the soul of things; ‘Ubi caritas, ibi claritas’. See passage from ‘Fifine at the Fair’, quoted under ‘My Star’.
The following passage from ‘Fifine at the Fair’, section 55, is an expansion of the idea involved in ‘My Star’, and is the best commentary which can be given on it:—
“I search but cannot seeWhat purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it triesConclusions with, unless the fruit of victoriesStay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its ownFor ever, by some mode whereby shall be made knownThe gain of every life. Death reads the title clear—What each soul for itself conquered from out things here:Since, IN THE SEEING SOUL, ALL WORTH LIES, I ASSERT,—AND NOUGHT I’ THE WORLD, WHICH, SAVE FOR SOUL THAT SEES, INERTWAS, IS, AND WOULD BE EVER,—STUFF FOR TRANSMUTING—NULLAND VOID UNTIL MAN’S BREATH EVOKE THE BEAUTIFUL—BUT, TOUCHED ARIGHT, PROMPT YIELDS EACH PARTICLE, ITS TONGUEOF ELEMENTAL FLAME,—no matter whence flame sprungFrom gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness,So long as soul has power to make them burn, expressWhat lights and warms henceforth, leaves only ash behind,Howe’er the chance: if soul be privileged to findFood so soon that, at first snatch of eye, suck of breath,It shall absorb pure life:” etc.
In ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ we are presented with a generous soul-life, as exhibited by the sweet, glad Duchess, linked with fossil conventionalism and mediaevalsim, and an inherited authority which brooks no submissiveness, as exhibited by the Duke, her husband, “out of whose veins ceremony and pride have driven the blood, leaving him but a fumigated and embalmed self”. The scene of the poem is a “rough north land”, subject to a Kaiser of Germany. The story is so plainly told that no prose summary of it could make it plainer. Its deeper meaning centres in the incantation of the old gypsy woman, in which is mystically shadowed forth the long and painful discipline through which the soul must pass before being fully admitted to the divine arcanum, “how love is the only good in the world”.
The poem is one which readily lends itself to an allegorical interpretation. For such an interpretation, the reader is referred to Mrs. Owen’s paper, read before the Browning Society of London, and contained in the Society’s Papers, Part IV., pp. 49* et seq. It is too long to be given here.
“The speaker is a man who has to give up the woman he loves; but his love is probably reciprocated, however inadequately, for his appeal for ‘a last ride together’ is granted. The poem reflects his changing moods and thoughts as ‘here we are riding, she and I’. ‘Fail I alone in words and deeds? Why, all men strive, and who succeeds?’ Careers, even careers called ‘successful’, pass in review—statesmen, poets, sculptors, musicians—each fails in his ideal, for ideals are not attainable in this life of incompletions. But faith gains something for a man. He has loved this woman. That is something gained. If this life gave all, what were there to look forward to? ‘Now, heaven and she are beyond this ride.’ Again,—and this is his closing reflection,—
“‘What if heaven be, that, fair and strong’”, etc.—Browning Soc. Papers, V., 144*.
Perhaps in no other of Mr. Browning’s poems are the spiritual uses of “the love of wedded souls” more fully set forth than in the poem, ‘By the Fireside’.
The Monologue is addressed by a happy husband to his “perfect wife, my Leonor”. He looks forward to what he will do when the long, dark autumn evenings come—the evenings of declining age, when the pleasant hue of his soul shall have dimmed, and the music of all its spring and summer voices shall be dumb in life’s November. In his “waking dreams” he will “live o’er again” the happy life he has spent with his loved and loving companion. Passing out where the backward vista ends, he will survey, with her, the pleasant wood through which they have journeyed together. To the hazel-trees of England, where their childhood passed, succeeds a rarer sort, till, by green degrees, they at last slope to Italy, and youth,—Italy, the woman-country, loved by earth’s male-lands. She being the trusted guide, they stand at last in the heart of things, the heaped and dim woods all around them, the single and slim thread of water slipping from slab to slab, the ruined chapel perched half-way up in the Alpine gorge, reached by the one-arched bridge where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond, where all day long a bird sings, and a stray sheep drinks at times. Here, where at afternoon, or almost eve, the silence grows conscious to that degree, one half feels it must get rid of what it knows, they walked side by side, arm in arm, and cheek to cheek; cross silent the crumbling bridge, pity and praise the sweet chapel, read the dead builder’s date, ‘five, six, nine, recross the bridge, take the path again—but wait! Oh moment one and infinite! the west is tender, with its one star, the chrysolite! the sights and sounds, the lights and shades, make up a spell; a moment after, and unseen hands are hanging the night around them fast, but they know that a bar has been broken between life and life, that they are mixed at last in spite of the mortal screen.
“The forests had done it; there they stood;We caught for a moment the powers at play:They had mingled us so, for once and for good,Their work was done—we might go or stay,They relapsed to their ancient mood.”
Browning everywhere lays great stress on those moments of exalted feeling, when the soul has an unchecked play and is revealed to itself. See in the section of the Introduction on Personality and Art, the passage quoted from the Canon’s Monologue in ‘The Ring and the Book’, and the remarks on conversion.
Mr. Nettleship, in his ‘Essays on Browning’s Poetry’, has traced somewhat minutely the symbolical meaning which he sees in the scenery and circumstances of ‘By the Fireside’. Readers are referred to these Essays.
The speaker in this noble monologue is one who, having fought a good fight and finished his course, lived and wrought thoroughly in sense, and soul, and intellect, is now ready and eager to encounter the ‘Arch-Fear’, Death; and then he will clasp again his Beloved, the soul of his soul, who has gone before. He leaves the rest to God.
With this monologue should be read the mystical description, in ‘The Passing of Arthur’ (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King), of “the last, dim, weird battle of the west”, beginning,—
“A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea.”
This poem is the Prologue to ‘Fifine at the Fair’.
Amphibian is one who unites both lives within himself, the material and the spiritual, in complete concord and mutual subservience— one who “lives and likes life’s way”, and can also free himself of tether, leave the solid land, and, unable to fly, swim “in the sphere which overbrims with passion and thought”,— the sphere of poetry. Such an one may be said to be Browning’s ideal man. “The value and significance of flesh” is everywhere recognized in his poetry. “All good things are ours,” Rabbi Ben Ezra is made to say, “nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.” The full physical life, in its relation to the spiritual, was never more beautifully sung than it is sung by David, in the poem of ‘Saul’. See the passage beginning, “Oh! our manhood’s prime vigor!” and the passage in ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’, descriptive of Hercules, as he returns, after his conflict with Death, leading back Alkestis.
The original title in ‘Dramatis Personae’ (first published in 1864) was ‘James Lee’.
The poem consists of a succession of soliloquies (rather than monologues*), separated, it must be supposed, by longer or shorter intervals of time, and expressive of subjective states induced in a wife whose husband’s love, if it ever were love, indeed, gradually declines to apathy and finally entire deadness. What manner of man James Lee was, is only faintly intimated. The interest centres in, is wholly confined to, the experiences of the wife’s heart, under the circumstances, whatever they were.
—* For the distinction between the soliloquy and themonologue, see the passage given in a note, from Rev. Prof.Johnson’s paper on ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, under thetreatment of the monologue, p. 85 {part III of Intro.}.—
The scene is a cottage on a “bitter coast of France”.
I. ‘James Lee’s Wife speaks at the Window’.—The first misgivings of her heart are expressed; and these misgivings are responded to by the outer world. Summer has stopped. Will the summer of her husband’s love stop too, and be succeeded by cheerless winter? The revolt of her heart against such a thought is expressed in the third stanza.
II. ‘By the Fireside’.—Here the faintly indefinite misgiving expressed in the first soliloquy has become a gloomy foreboding of ill; “the heart shrinks and closes, ere the stroke of doom has attained it.”
The fire on the hearth is built of shipwreck wood, which tells of a “dim dead woe befallen this bitter coast of France”, and omens to her foreboding heart the shipwreck of their home. The ruddy shaft of light from the casement must, she thinks, be seen by sailors who envy the warm safe house and happy freight. But there are ships in port which go to ruin,
“All through worms i’ the wood, which crept,Gnawed our hearts out while we slept:That is worse.”
Her mind reverts to the former occupants of their house, as if she felt an influence shed within it by some unhappy woman who, like herself, in Love’s voyage, saw planks start and open hell beneath.
III. ‘In the Doorway’.—As she looks out from the doorway, everything tells of the coming desolation of winter, and reflects the desolation which, she feels, is coming upon herself. The swallows are ready to depart, the water is in stripes, black, spotted white with the wailing wind. The furled leaf of the fig-tree, in front of their house, and the writhing vines, sympathize with her heart and her spirit:—
“My heart shrivels up and my spirit shrinks curled.”
But there is to them two, she thinks, no real outward want, that should mar their peace, small as is their house, and poor their field. Why should the change in nature bring change to the spirit which should put life in the darkness and cold?
“Oh, live and love worthily, bear and be bold!Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange.”
IV. ‘Along the Beach’.—It does not appear that she anywhere in the poem addresses her husband, face to face. It is soliloquy throughout. In this section it does appear, more than in the others, that she is directly addressing him; but it’s better to understand it as a mental expostulation. He wanted her love, and got it, in its fulness; though an expectation of all harvest and no dearth was not involved in that fulness of love.
Though love greatens and even glorifies, she knew there was much in him waste, with many a weed, and plenty of passions run to seed, but a little good grain too. And such as he was she took him for hers; and he found her his, to watch the olive and wait the vine of his nature; and when rivers of oil and wine came not, the failure only proved that he was her whole world, all the same. But he has been averse to, and has resented, the tillage of his nature to which she has lovingly devoted herself, feeling it to be a bondage;
“And ‘tis all an old story, and my despairFit subject for some new song:”
such as the one with which she closes this soliloquy, representing a love which cares only for outside charms (which, later in the poem, we learn she has not) and looks not deeper.
V. ‘On the Cliff’.—Leaning on the barren turf, which is dead to the roots, and looking at a rock, flat as an anvil’s face, and left dry by the surf, with no trace of living thing about it (Death’s altar by the lone shore), she sees a cricket spring gay, with films of blue, upon the parched turf, and a beautiful butterfly settle and spread its two red fans, on the rock. And then there is to her, wholly taken up, as she is, with their beauty,
“No turf, no rock; in their ugly stead,See, wonderful blue and red!”
and they symbolize to her, Love settling unawares upon men, the level and low, the burnt and bare, in themselves (as are the turf and the rock).
VI. ‘Reading a Book, under the Cliff’.—The first six stanzas of this section she reads from a book. *
—* They were composed by Mr. Browning when in his 23d year,and published in 1836, in ‘The Monthly Repository’, vol. x.,pp. 270, 271, and entitled simply ‘Lines’. They wererevised and introduced into this section of ‘James Lee’,which was published in ‘Dramatis Personae’ in 1864.—
Her experiences have carried her beyond what these Lines convey, and she speaks of them somewhat sarcastically and ironically. This “young man”, she thinks, will be wiser in time,
“for kindCalm years, exacting their accomptOf pain, mature the mind:”
and then the wind, when it begins among the vines, so low, so low, will have for him another language; such as this:—
“Here is the change beginning, here the linesCircumscribe beauty, set to blissThe limit time assigns.”
This is the language SHE has learned: We cannot draw one beauty into our hearts’ core, and keep it changeless. This is the old woe of the world; the tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die. RISE WITH IT, THEN! REJOICE THAT MAN IS HURLED FROM CHANGE TO CHANGE UNCEASINGLY, HIS SOUL’S WINGS NEVER FURLED! To this philosophy of life has she been brought. But she must still sadly reflect how bitter it is for man not to grave, on his soul, one fair, good, wise thing just as he grasped it! For himself death’s wave; while time washes (ah, the sting!) o’er all he’d sink to save.
This reflection must be understood, in her own case, as prompted by her unconquerable wifely love. It is this which points the sting.
VII. ‘Among the Rocks’.—The brown old earth, in autumn, when all the glories of summer are fading, or have faded, wears a good gigantic smile, looking not backward, but forward, with his feet in the ripples of the sea-wash, and listening to the sweet twitters of the ‘white-breasted sea-lark’. The entire stanza has a mystical meaning and must be interpreted in its connection.
She has reached, in this soliloquy, high ground:—
“If you loved only what were worth your love,Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:Make the low nature better by your throes!GIVE EARTH YOURSELF, GO UP FOR GAIN ABOVE!”
The versification of the first stanza of this section is very lovely, and subtly responsive to the feeling. It exhibits the completest inspiration. No mere metrical skill, nor metrical sensibility even, could have produced it.
VIII. ‘Beside the Drawing-Board’.—She is seated at her drawing-board, and has turned from the poor coarse hand of some little peasant girl she has called in as a model, to work, but with poor success, after a clay cast of a hand by Leonardo da Vinci, who
“Drew and learned and loved again,While fast the happy moments flew,Till beauty mounted into his brainAnd on the finger which outviedHis art, he placed the ring that’s there,Still by fancy’s eye descried,In token of a marriage rare:For him on earth his art’s despair,For him in heaven his soul’s fit bride.”
Her effort has taught her a wholesome lesson: “the worth of flesh and blood at last!” There’s something more than beauty in a hand. Da Vinci would not have turned from the poor coarse hand of the little girl who has been standing by in wondering patience. He, great artist as he was, owed all he achieved to his firm grasp upon, and struggle with, and full faith in, the real. She imagines him saying:—
“Shall earth and the cramped moment-spaceYield the heavenly crowning grace?Now the parts and then the whole! *Who art thou with stinted soulAnd stunted body, thus to cry‘I love,—shall that be life’s strait dole?I must live beloved or die!’This peasant hand that spins the woolAnd bakes the bread, why lives it on,Poor and coarse with beauty gone,—What use survives the beauty? Fool!”—* “On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfectround.”—Abt Vogler.—
She has been brought to the last stage of initiation into the mystery of Life. But, as is shown in the next and final section of the poem, the wifely heart has preserved its vitality, has, indeed, grown in vitality, and cherishes a hope which shows its undying love, and is not without a touch of pathos.
IX. ‘On Deck’.—In Sections V.-VIII. the soliloquies are not directed to the husband, as they are in I.-IV. In this last, he is again mentally addressed. She is on board the vessel which is to convey, or is conveying, her to her English home, or somewhere else. As there is nothing in her for him to remember, nothing in her art efforts he cares to see, nothing she was that deserves a place in his mind, she leaves him, sets him free, as he has long shown to her he has wished to be. She, conceding his attitude toward her, asks him to concede, in turn, that such a thing as mutual love HAS been. There’s a slight retaliation here of the wounded spirit. But her heart, after all, MUST have its way; and it cherishes the hope that his soul, which is now cabined, cribbed, confined, may be set free, through some circumstance or other, and she may then become to him what he is to her. And then, what would it matter to her that she was ill-favored? All sense of this would be sunk in the strange joy that he possessed her as she him, in heart and brain. Hers has been a love that was life, and a life that was love. Could one touch of such love for her come in a word of look of his, why, he might turn into her ill-favoredness, she would know nothing of it, being dead to joy.
The speaker in this monologue is the wife of a poet, and she tells the story to her husband, of the little cricket that came to the aid of the musician who was contending for a prize, when one of the strings of his lyre snapped. So he made a statue for himself, and on the lyre he held perched his partner in the prize. If her poet-husband gain a prize in poetry, she asks, will some ticket when his statue’s built tell the gazer ‘twas a cricket helped his crippled lyre; that when one string which made “love” sound soft, was snapt in twain, she perched upon the place left vacant and duly uttered, “Love, Love, Love”, whene’er the bass asked the treble to atone for its somewhat sombre drone?
The speaker is a dying man, who replies very decidedly in the negative to the question of the attendant priest as to whether he views the world as a vale of tears. The memory of a past love, which is running through his mind, still keeps the world bright. Of the stolen interviews with the girl he loved he makes confession, using the physic bottles which stand on a table by the bedside to illustrate his story.
The monologue is a choice bit of grotesque humor touched with pathos.
By the title of the poem is meant respectability according to the standard of the beau monde.
The speaker is a woman, as is indicated in the third stanza. The monologue is addressed to her lover.
Stanza 1 shows that they have disregarded the conventionalities of the beau monde. Had they conformed to them, many precious months and years would have passed before they found out the world and what it fears. One cannot well judge of any state of things while in it. It must be looked at from the outside.
Stanza 2. The idea is repeated in a more special form in the first four verses of the stanza; and in the last four their own non-conventional and Bohemian life is indicated.
Stanza 3, vv. 1-4. The speaker knows that this beau monde does not proscribe love, provided it be in accordance with the proprieties which IT has determined upon and established. v. 5. “The world’s good word!” a contemptuous exclamation: what’s the world’s good word worth? “the Institute!” (the reference is, of course, to the French Institute), the Institute! with all its authoritative, dictatorial learnedness! v.6. Guizot and Montalembert were both members of the Institute, and being thus in the same boat, Guizot conventionally receives Montalembert. vv. 7 and 8. These two unconventional Bohemian lovers, strolling together at night, at their own sweet will, see down the court along which they are strolling, three lampions flare, which indicate some big place or other where the “respectables” do congregate; and the woman says to her companion, with a humorous sarcasm, “Put forward your best foot!” that is, we must be very correct passing along here in this brilliant light.
By the two lovers are evidently meant George Sand (the speaker) and Jules Sandeau, with whom she lived in Paris, after she left her husband, M. Dudevant. They took just such unconventional night-strolls together, in the streets of Paris.
An Englishman, in some foreign land, longs for England, now that April’s there, with its peculiar English charms; and then will come May, with the white-throat and the swallows, and, most delightful of all, the thrush, with its rapturous song! And the buttercups, far brighter than the gaudy melon-flower he has before him!
A paean, inspired by the sight, from the sea, of Cape Trafalgar and Gibraltar, both objects of patriotic pride to an Englishman; the one associated with the naval victory gained by the English fleet, under Nelson, over the combined French and Spanish fleets; the other, England’s greatest stronghold.
The first four verses make a characteristic Turner picture.
The speaker in the monologue is looking down upon Florence, in the valley beneath, from a villa on one of the surrounding heights. The startling bell-tower Giotto raised more than startles him. (For an explanation of this, see note under Stanza 2.) Although the poem presents a general survey of the old Florentine masters, the THEME of the poem is really Giotto, who received the affectionate homage of the Florentines, in his own day, and for whom the speaker has a special love. The poem leads up to the prophesied restoration of Freedom to Florence, the return of Art, that departed with her, and the completion of the Campanile, which will vindicate Giotto and Florence together, and crown the restoration of freedom to the city, and its liberation from the hated Austrian rule.
Mrs. Browning’s ‘Casa Guidi Windows’ should be read in connection with this monologue. The strong sympathy which is expressed in the last few stanzas of the monologue, with Italian liberty, is expressed in ‘Casa Guidi Windows’ at a white heat.
“We find,” says Professor Dowden, “a full confession of Mr. Browning’s creed with respect to art in the poem entitled ‘Old Pictures in Florence’. He sees the ghosts of the early Christian masters, whose work has never been duly appreciated, standing sadly by each mouldering Italian Fresco; and when an imagined interlocutor inquires what is admirable in such work as this, the poet answers that the glory of Christian art lies in its rejecting a limited perfection, such as that of the art of ancient Greece, the subject of which was finite, and the lesson taught by which was submission, and in its daring to be incomplete, and faulty, faulty because its subject was great with infinite fears and hopes, and because it must needs teach man not to submit but to aspire.”
An unknown painter reflects, but without envy, upon the praise which has been bestowed on a youthful artist,—what that praise involves. He himself was conscious of all the power, and more, which the youth has shown; no bar stayed, nor fate forbid, to exercise it, nor would flesh have shrunk from seconding his soul. All he saw he could have put upon canvas;
“Each face obedient to its passion’s law,Each passion clear proclaimed without a tongue.”
And when he thought how sweet would be the earthly fame which his work would bring him, “the thought grew frightful, ‘twas so wildly dear!” But a vision flashed before him and changed that thought. Along with the loving, trusting ones were cold faces, that begun to press on him and judge him. Such as these would buy and sell his pictures for garniture and household-stuff. His pictures, so sacred to his soul, would be the subject of their prate, “This I love, or this I hate, this likes me more, and this affects me less!” To avoid such sacrilege, he has chosen his portion. And if his heart sometimes sinks, while at his monotonous work of painting endless cloisters and eternal aisles, with the same series, Virgin, Babe, and Saint, with the same cold, calm, beautiful regard, at least no merchant traffics in his heart. Guarded by the sanctuary’s gloom, from vain tongues, his pictures may die, surely, gently die.
“O youth, men praise so,—holds their praise its worth?Tastes sweet the water with such specks of earth?”
In this monologue, “the faultless painter” (Andrea Senza Errori, as he was surnamed by the Italians) is the speaker. He addresses his worthless wife, Lucrezia, upon whom he weakly dotes, and for whom he has broken faith with his royal patron, Francis I. of France, in order that he might meet her demands for money, to be spent upon her pleasures. He laments that he has fallen below himself as an artist, that he has not realized the possibilities of his genius, half accusing, from the better side of his nature, and half excusing, in his uxoriousness, the woman who has had no sympathy with him in the high ideals which, with her support, he might have realized, and thus have placed himself beside Angelo and Rafael. “Had the mouth then urged ‘God and the glory! never care for gain. The present by the future, what is that? Live for fame, side by side with Angelo— Rafael is waiting. Up to God all three!’ I might have done it for you.”
In his ‘Comparative Study of Tennyson and Browning’ *, Professor Edward Dowden, setting forth Browning’s doctrines on the subject of Art, remarks:—
—* Originally a lecture, delivered in 1868, and published in‘Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art’ (Dublin), 5thseries, 1869; afterwards revised, and included in theauthor’s ‘Studies in Literature, 1789-1877’. It is one ofthe best criticisms of Browning’s poetry that have yet beenproduced. Every Browning student should make a carefulstudy of it.—
“The true glory of art is, that in its creation there arise desires and aspirations never to be satisfied on earth, but generating new desires and new aspirations, by which the spirit of man mounts to God Himself. The artist (Mr. Browning loves to insist on this point) who can realize in marble or in color, or in music, his ideal, has thereby missed the highest gain of art. In ‘Pippa Passes’ the regeneration of the young sculptor’s work turns on his finding that in the very perfection which he had attained lies ultimate failure. And one entire poem, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, has been devoted to the exposition of this thought. Andrea is ‘the faultless painter’; no line of his drawing ever goes astray; his hand expressed adequately and accurately all that his mind conceives; but for this very reason, precisely because he is ‘the faultless painter’, his work lacks the highest qualities of art:—
“‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,Or what’s a Heaven for? all is silver-grey,Placid and perfect with my art—the worse.’
“And in the youthful Raphael, whose technical execution fell so far below his own, Andrea recognizes the true master:—
“‘Yonder’s a work, now, of that famous youth’, etc.
“In Andrea del Sarto,” says Vasari, “art and nature combined to show all that may be done in painting, where design, coloring, and invention unite in one and the same person. Had this master possessed a somewhat bolder and more elevated mind, had he been as much distinguished for higher qualifications as he was for genius and depth of judgment in the art he practised, he would, beyond all doubt, have been without an equal. But there was a certain timidity of mind, a sort of diffidence and want of force in his nature, which rendered it impossible that those evidences of ardor and animation which are proper to the more exalted character, should ever appear in him; nor did he at any time display one particle of that elevation which, could it but have been added to the advantages wherewith he was endowed, would have rendered him a truly divine painter: wherefore the works of Andrea are wanting in those ornaments of grandeur, richness, and force, which appear so conspicuously in those of many other masters. His figures are, nevertheless, well drawn, they are entirely free from errors, and perfect in all their proportions, and are for the most part simple and chaste: the expression of his heads is natural and graceful in women and children, while in youths and old men it is full of life and animation. The draperies of this master are beautiful to a marvel, and the nude figures are admirably executed, the drawing is simple, the coloring is most exquisite, nay, it is truly divine.”
Mr. Ernest Radford, quoting this passage, in the Browning Society’s ‘Illustrations to Browning’s Poems’, remarks that “nearly the whole POEM of ‘Andrea del Sarto’ is a mere translation into the SUBJECTIVE Mood (if I may so say) of this passage in which the painter’s work is criticised from an external standpoint. . . .
“Recent researches into Andrea’s life throw doubt upon a good deal that Vasari has written concerning the unhappiness of his marriage and the manner of his death. And the biographer himself modifies, in his second edition, the account he had given of the fair Lucrezia. Vasari, it should be said, was a pupil of Andrea, and therefore must, in this instance, have had special opportunities of knowledge, though he may, on the same account, have had some special ‘animus’ when he wrote. For the purposes of his poem, Browning is content to take the traditional account of the matter, which, after all, seems to substantially accurate. The following is from the first edition:—
“At that time there was a most beautiful girl in Via di San Gallo, who was married to a cap-maker, and who, though born of a poor and vicious father, carried about her as much pride and haughtiness, as beauty and fascination. She delighted in trapping the hearts of men, and amongst others ensnared the unlucky Andrea, whose immoderate love for her soon caused him to neglect the studies demanded by his art, and in great measure to discontinue the assistance which he had given to his parents.
“Certain pictures of Andrea’s which had been painted for the King of France were received with much favor, and an invitation to Andrea soon followed their delivery, to ‘go and paint at the French Court’. He went accordingly, and ‘painted proudly’, as Browning relates, and prospered every way. But one day, being employed on the figure of a St. Jerome doing penance, which he was painting for the mother of the King, there came to him certain letters from Florence; these were written him by his wife; and from that time (whatever may have been the cause) he began to think of leaving France. He asked permission to that effect from the French King accordingly, saying that he desired to return to Florence, but that, when he had arranged his affairs in that city, he would return without fail to his Majesty; he added, that when he came back, his wife should accompany him, to the end that he might remain in France the more quietly; and that he would bring with him pictures and sculptures of great value. The King, confiding in these promises, gave him money for the purchase of those pictures and sculptures, Andrea taking an oath on the gospels to return within the space of a few months, and that done he departed to his native city.
“He arrived safely in Florence, enjoying the society of his beautiful wife, and that of his friends, with the sight of his native city, during several months; but when the period specified by the King, and that at which he ought to have returned, had come and passed, he found himself at the end, not only of his own money, but, what with building” (the “melancholy little house they built to be so gay with”) “indulging himself with various pleasures, and doing no work, of that belonging to the French monarch also, the whole of which he had consumed. He was, nevertheless, determined to return to France, but the prayers and tears of his wife had more power than his own necessities, or the faith which he had pledged to the King.”
“And so for a pretty woman’s sake, was a great nature degraded. And out of sympathy with its impulses, broad, and deep, and tender as only the greatest can show, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, our great, sad poem, was written.”
The monologue exhibits great perfection of finish. Its composition was occasioned, as Mr. Furnivall learned from the poet himself (see ‘Browning Society’s Papers’, Part II., p. 161), by the portrait of Andrea del Sarto and his wife, painted by himself, and now in the Pitti Palace, in Florence. Mr. Browning’s friend, and his wife’s friend, Mr. John Kenyon (the same to whom Mrs. Browning dedicated ‘Aurora Leigh’), had asked the poet to buy him a copy of Andrea del Sarto’s picture. None could be got, and so Mr. Browning put into a poem what the picture had said to himself, and sent it to Mr. Kenyon. It was certainly a worthy substitute.
The Italian artist, Lippi, is the speaker. Lippi was one of the representatives of the protest made in the fifteenth century against the conventional spiritualization in the art of his time. In the monologue he gives expression to his faith in the real, in the absolute spiritual significance of the lineaments of the human face, and in the forms of nature. The circumstances under which this faith is expressed, are somewhat droll. Lippi was a wild fellow and given to excesses of various kinds. When a boy he took refuge against starvation in the convent of the Carmelites, in Florence, and became a monk; but he proved unfaithful to his religious vows, and, impelled by his genius for art, made his escape from the convent, having first profited by the work of Masaccio, and devoted himself to painting. After many romantic experiences, and having risen to distinction in his art, he returned to Florence and became known to Cosimo de’ Medici, in whose employ he is at the time he is presented to us in the monologue. It appears he had been shut up by his patron, for three weeks, in order to be kept at work, “a-painting for the great man, saints and saints and saints again. I could not paint all night—Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air. There came a hurry of feet, and little feet, a sweep of lutestrings, laughs, and whifts of song,”—etc. In his eagerness to join in the fun, he tears into shreds curtain, and counterpane, and coverlet, makes a rope, descends, and comes up with the fun hard by Saint Laurence, hail fellow, well met. On his way back toward daybreak, he is throttled by the police, and it is to them the monologue is addressed. He ingratiates himself with them by telling his history, and by his talk on art, and a most interesting and deeply significant talk it is, the gist of it being well expressed in a passage of Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’, “paint a body well, you paint a soul by implication, like the grand first Master. . . . Without the spiritual, observe, the natural’s impossible;— no form, no motion! Without sensuous, spiritual is inappreciable;— no beauty or power! And in this twofold sphere the two-fold man (and still the artist is intensely a man) holds firmly by the natural, to reach the spiritual beyond it,—fixes still the type with mortal vision, to pierce through, with eyes immortal, to the antetype, some call the ideal,—better called the real, and certain to be called so presently when things shall have their names.”
Browning has closely followed, in the monologue, the art-historian, Giorgio Vasari, as the following extracts will show (the translation is that of Mrs. Jonathan Foster, in the Bohn Library):—
“The Carmelite monk, Fra Filippo di Tommaso Lippi (1412-1469) *1* was born at Florence in a bye-street called Ardiglione, under the Canto alla Cuculia, and behind the convent of the Carmelites. By the death of his father he was left a friendless orphan at the age of two years, his mother having also died shortly after his birth. The child was for some time under the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, the sister of his father, who brought him up with very great difficulty till he had attained his eighth year, when, being no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she placed him in the above-named convent of the Carmelites. Here, in proportion as he showed himself dexterous and ingenious in all works performed by hand, did he manifest the utmost dulness and incapacity in letters, to which he would never apply himself, nor would he take any pleasure in learning of any kind. The boy continued to be called by his worldly name of Filippo, *2* and being placed with others, who like himself were in the house of the novices, under the care of the master, to the end that the latter might see what could be done with him; in place of studying, he never did anything but daub his own books, and those of the other boys, with caricatures, whereupon the prior determined to give him all means and every opportunity for learning to draw. The chapel of the Carmine had then been newly painted by Masaccio, and this being exceedingly beautiful, pleased Fra Filippo greatly, wherefore he frequented it daily for his recreation, and, continually practising there, in company with many other youths, who were constantly drawing in that place, he surpassed all the others by very much in dexterity and knowledge. . . . Proceeding thus, and improving from day to day, he had so closely followed the manner of Masaccio, and his works displayed so much similarity to those of the latter, that many affirmed the spirit of Masaccio to have entered the body of Fra Filippo. . . .