Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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As to the poem itself, Browning plunges at once into his matter; no long
approaches, no elaborate porches belong to his work. The man and his
character are before us in a moment--

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
You need not clap your torches to my face.
Zooks, what's to blame? You think you see a monk!
What, 'tis past midnight, and you go the rounds,
And here you catch me at an alley's end
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?

For three weeks he has painted saints, and saints, and saints again, for
Cosimo in the Medici Palace; but now the time of blossoms has come.
Florence is now awake at nights; the secret of the spring moves in his
blood; the man leaps up, the monk retires.

Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air.
There came a hurry of feet and little feet,
A sweep of lute-strings, laughs and whifts of song,--
_Flower o' the broom._
_Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!_
_Flower of the quince,_
_I let Lisa go, and what good in life since?_
_Flower of the thyme_--and so on. Round they went.
Scarce had they turned the corner when a titter,
Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight,--three slim shapes,
And a face that looked up ... zooks, sir, flesh and blood,
That's all I'm made of! Into shreds it went,
Curtain and counterpane and coverlet,
All the bed furniture--a dozen knots,
There was a ladder! Down I let myself,
Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped,
And after them. I came up with the fun
Hard by St. Laurence, hail fellow, well met,--
_Flower o' the rose,_
_If I've been merry, what matter who knows?_

It is a picture, not only of the man, but of the time and its temper,
when religion and morality, as well as that simplicity of life which
Dante describes, had lost their ancient power over society in Florence;
when the claim to give to human nature all it desired had stolen into
the Church itself. Even in the monasteries, the long seclusion from
natural human life had produced a reaction, which soon, indulging itself
as Fra Lippo Lippi did, ran into an extremity of licence. Nevertheless,
something of the old religious life lasted at the time of this poem. It
stretched one hand back to the piety of the past, and retained, though
faith and devotion had left them, its observances and conventions; so
that, at first, when Lippo was painting, the new only peeped out of the
old, like the saucy face of a nymph from the ilexes of a sacred grove.
This is the historical moment Browning illustrates. Lippo Lippi was
forced to paint the worn religious subjects: Jerome knocking his breast,
the choirs of angels and martyrs, the scenes of the Gospel; but out of
all he did the eager modern life began to glance! Natural, quaint,
original faces and attitudes appeared; the angels smiled like Florentine
women; the saints wore the air of Bohemians. There is a picture by
Lippo Lippi in the National Gallery of some nine of them sitting on a
bench under a hedge of roses, and it is no paradox to say that they
might fairly represent the Florentines who tell the tales of the
_Decameron_.

The transition as it appeared in art is drawn in this poem. Lippo Lippi
became a monk by chance; it was not his vocation. A starving boy, he
roamed the streets of Florence; and the widespread intelligence of the
city is marked by Browning's account of the way in which the _boy_
observed all the life of the streets for eight years. Then the coming
change of the aims of art is indicated by the way in which, when he was
allowed to paint, he covered the walls of the Carmine, not with saints,
virgins, and angels, but with the daily life of the streets--the boy
patting the dog, the murderer taking refuge at the altar, the white
wrath of the avenger coming up the aisle, the girl going to market, the
crowd round the stalls in the market, the monks, white, grey, and
black--things as they were, as like as two peas to the reality; flesh
and blood now painted, not skin and bone; not the expression on the face
alone, but the whole body in speaking movement; nothing conventional,
nothing imitative of old models, but actual life as it lay before the
painter's eyes. Into this fresh aera of art Lippo Lippi led the way with
the joy of youth. But he was too soon. The Prior, all the
representatives of the conservative elements in the convent, were sorely
troubled. "Why, this will never do: faces, arms, legs, and bodies like
the true; life as it is; nature as she is; quite impossible." And
Browning, in Lippo's defence of himself, paints the conflict of the
past with the coming art in a passage too long to quote, too admirable
to shorten.

The new art conquered the old. The whole life of Florence was soon
painted as it was: the face of the town, the streets, the churches, the
towers, the winding river, the mountains round about it; the country,
the fields and hills and hamlets, the peasants at work, ploughing,
sowing, and gathering fruit, the cattle feeding, the birds among the
trees and in the sky; nobles and rich burghers hunting, hawking; the
magistrates, the citizens, the street-boys, the fine ladies, the
tradesmen's wives, the heads of the guilds; the women visiting their
friends; the interior of the houses. We may see this art of human life
in the apse of Santa Maria Novella, painted by the hand of Ghirlandajo:
in the Riccardi Palace, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli; in more than half
the pictures of the painters who succeeded Fra Lippo Lippi. Only, so
much of the old clings that all this actual Florentine life is painted
into the ancient religious subjects--the life of the Baptist and the
Virgin, the embassage of the Wise Men, the life of Christ, the legends
of the saints, the lives of the virgins and martyrs, Jerusalem and its
life painted as if it were Florence and its life--all the spiritual
religion gone out of it, it is true, but yet, another kind of religion
budding in it--the religion, not of the monastery, but of daily common
life.

the world
--The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades.
Changes, surprises--and God made it all!

Who paints these things as if they were alive, and loves them while he
paints, paints the garment of God; and men not only understand their own
life better because they see, through the painting, what they did not
see before; but also the movement of God's spirit in the beauty of the
world and in the life of men. Art interprets to man all that is, and God
in it.

Oh, oh,
It makes me mad to think what men shall do
And we in our graves! This world's no blot for us,
No blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

He could not do it; the time was not ripe enough. But he began it. And
the spirit of its coming breaks out in all he did.

We take a leap of more than half a century when we pass from _Fra Lippo
Lippi_ to _Andrea del Sarto_. That advance in art to which Lippo Lippi
looked forward with a kind of rage at his own powerlessness had been
made. In its making, the art of the Renaissance had painted men and
women, both body and soul, in every kind of life, both of war and peace;
and better than they had ever been painted before. Having fulfilled
that, the painters asked, "What more? What new thing shall we do? What
new aim shall we pursue?" And there arose among them a desire to paint
all that was paintable, and especially the human body, with scientific
perfection. "In our desire to paint the whole of life, we have produced
so much that we were forced to paint carelessly or inaccurately. In our
desire to be original, we have neglected technique. In our desire to
paint the passions on the face and in the movements of men, we have
lost the calm and harmony of the ancient classic work, which made its
ethical impression of the perfect balance of the divine nature by the
ideal arrangement, in accord with a finished science, of the various
members of the body to form a finished whole. Let the face no longer
then try to represent the individual soul. One type of face for each
class of art-representation is enough. Let our effort be to represent
beauty by the perfect drawing of the body in repose and in action, and
by chosen attitudes and types. Let our composition follow certain
guiding lines and rules, in accordance with whose harmonies all pictures
shall be made. We will follow the Greek; compose as he did, and by his
principles; and for that purpose make a scientific study of the body of
man; observing in all painting, sculpture, and architecture the general
forms and proportions that ancient art, after many experiments, selected
as the best. And, to match that, we must have perfect drawing in all we
do."

This great change, which, as art's adulterous connection with science
deepened, led to such unhappy results, Browning represents, when its aim
had been reached, in his poem, _Andrea del Sarto_; and he tells
us--through Andrea's talk with his wife Lucretia--what he thought of it;
and what Andrea himself, whose broken life may have opened his eyes to
the truth of things, may himself have thought of it. On that element in
the poem I have already dwelt, and shall only touch on the scenery and
tragedy, of the piece:

We sit with Andrea, looking out to Fiesole.

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.

As the poem goes on, the night falls, falls with the deepening of the
painter's depression; the owls cry from the hill, Florence wears the
grey hue of the heart of Andrea; and Browning weaves the autumn and the
night into the tragedy of the painter's life.

That tragedy was pitiful. Andrea del Sarto was a faultless painter and a
weak character; and it fell to his lot to love with passion a faithless
woman. His natural weakness was doubled by the weakness engendered by
unconquerable passion; and he ruined his life, his art, and his honour,
to please his wife. He wearied her, as women are wearied, by passion
unaccompanied by power; and she endured him only while he could give her
money and pleasures. She despised him for that endurance, and all the
more that he knew she was guilty, but said nothing lest she should leave
him. Browning fills his main subject--his theory of the true aim of
art--with this tragedy; and his treatment of it is a fine example of his
passionate humanity; and the passion of it is knitted up with close
reasoning and illuminated by his intellectual play.

It is worth a reader's while to read, along with this poem, Alfred de
Musset's short play, _Andre del Sarto_. The tragedy of the situation is
deepened by the French poet, and the end is told. Unlike Browning, only
a few lines sketch the time, its temper, and its art. It is the depth of
the tragedy which De Musset paints, and that alone; and in order to
deepen it, Andrea is made a much nobler character than he is in
Browning's poem. The betrayal is also made more complete, more
overwhelming. Lucretia is false to Andrea with his favourite pupil, with
Cordiani, to whom he had given all he had, whom he loved almost as much
as he loved his wife. Terrible, inevitable Fate broods over this brief
and masterly little play.

The next of these imaginative representations of the Renaissance is,
_The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church_. We are placed in
the full decadence of the Renaissance. Its total loss of religion, even
in the Church; its immorality--the bishop's death-bed is surrounded by
his natural sons and the wealth he leaves has been purchased by every
kind of iniquity--its pride of life; its luxury; its semi-Paganism; its
imitative classicism; its inconsistency; its love of jewels, and fine
stones, and rich marbles; its jealousy and envy; its pleasure in the
adornment of death; its delight in the outsides of things, in mere
workmanship; its loss of originality; its love of scholarship for
scholarship's sake alone; its contempt of the common people; its
exhaustion--are one and all revealed or suggested in this astonishing
poem.

These are the three greater poems dedicated to this period; but there
are some minor poems which represent different phases of its life. One
of these is the _Pictor Ignotus_. There must have been many men, during
the vital time of the Renaissance, who, born, as it were, into the
art-ability of the period, reached without trouble a certain level in
painting, but who had no genius, who could not create; or who, if they
had some touch of genius, had no boldness to strike it into fresh forms
of beauty; shy, retiring men, to whom the criticism of the world was a
pain they knew they could not bear. These men are common at a period
when life is racing rapidly through the veins of a vivid city like
Florence. The general intensity of the life lifts them to a height they
would never reach in a dull and sleepy age. The life they have is not
their own, but the life of the whole town. And this keen perception of
life outside of them persuades them that they can do all that men of
real power can do. In reality, they can do nothing and make nothing
worth a people's honour. Browning, who himself was compact of boldness,
who loved experiment in what was new, and who shaped what he conceived
without caring for criticism, felt for these men, of whom he must have
met many; and, asking himself "How they would think; what they would do;
and how life would seem to them," wrote this poem. In what way will poor
human nature excuse itself for failure? How will the weakness in the man
try to prove that it was power? How, having lost the joy of life, will
he attempt to show that his loss is gain, his failure a success; and,
being rejected of the world, approve himself within?

This was a subject to please Browning; meat such as his soul loved: a
nice, involved, Daedalian, labyrinthine sort of thing, a mixture of real
sentiment and self-deceit; and he surrounded it with his pity for its
human weakness.

"I could have painted any picture that I pleased," cries this painter;
"represented on the face any passion, any virtue." If he could he would
have done it, or tried it. Genius cannot hold itself in.

"I have dreamed of sending forth some picture which should enchant the
world (and he alludes to Cimabue's picture)--

"Bound for some great state,
Or glad aspiring little burgh, it went--
Flowers cast upon the car which bore the freight,
Through old streets named afresh from the event.

"That would have been, had I willed it. But mixed with the praisers
there would have been cold, critical faces; judges who would press on me
and mock. And I--I could not bear it." Alas! had he had genius, no fear
would have stayed his hand, no judgment of the world delayed his work.
What stays a river breaking from its fountain-head?

So he sank back, saying the world was not worthy of his labours. "What?
Expose my noble work (things he had conceived but not done) to the prate
and pettiness of the common buyers who hang it on their walls! No, I
will rather paint the same monotonous round of Virgin, Child, and Saints
in the quiet church, in the sanctuary's gloom. No merchant then will
traffic in my heart. My pictures will moulder and die. Let them die. I
have not vulgarised myself or them." Brilliant and nobly wrought as the
first three poems are of which I have written, this quiet little piece
needed and received a finer workmanship, and was more difficult than
they.

Then there is _How it strikes a Contemporary_--the story of the gossip
of a Spanish town about a poor poet, who, because he wanders everywhere
about the streets observing all things, is mistaken for a spy of the
king. The long pages he writes are said to be letters to the king; the
misfortunes of this or that man are caused by his information. The
world thinks him a wonder of cleverness; he is but an inferior poet. It
imagines that he lives in Assyrian luxury; he lives and dies in a naked
garret. This imaginative representation might be of any time in a
provincial town of an ignorant country like Spain. It is a slight study
of what superstitious imagination and gossip will work up round any man
whose nature and manners, like those of a poet, isolate him from the
common herd. Force is added to this study by its scenery. The Moorish
windows, the shops, the gorgeous magistrates pacing down the promenade,
are touched in with a flying pencil; and then, moving through the crowd,
the lean, black-coated figure, with his cane and dog and his peaked hat,
clear flint eyes and beaked nose, is seen, as if alive, in the vivid
sunshine of Valladolid. But what Browning wished most to describe in
this poem was one of the first marks of a poet, even of a poor one like
this gentleman--the power of seeing and observing everything. Nothing
was too small, nothing uninteresting in this man's eyes. His very hat
was scrutinising.

He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade,
The man who slices lemons into drink,
The coffee-roaster's brazier, and the boys
That volunteer to help him turn its winch.
He glanced o'er books on stalls with half an eye,
And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor's string,
And broad-edged bold-print posters by the wall.
He took such cognisance of man and things,
If any beat a horse you felt he saw;
If any cursed a woman, he took note;
Yet stared at nobody, you stared at him,
And found, less to your pleasure than surprise,
He seemed to know you and expect as much.

That is the artist's way. It was Browning's way. He is describing
himself. In that fashion he roamed through Venice or Florence, stopping
every moment, attracted by the smallest thing, finding a poem in
everything, lost in himself yet seeing all that surrounded him, isolated
in thinking, different from and yet like the rest of the world.

Another poem--_My Last Duchess_--must be mentioned. It is plainly placed
in the midst of the period of the Renaissance by the word _Ferrara_,
which is added to its title. But it is rather a picture of two
temperaments which may exist in any cultivated society, and at any
modern time. There are numbers of such men as the Duke and such women as
the Duchess in our midst. Both are, however, drawn with mastery.
Browning has rarely done his work with more insight, with greater
keenness of portraiture, with happier brevity and selection. As in _The
Flight of the Duchess_, untoward fate has bound together two
temperaments sure to clash with each other--and no gipsy comes to
deliver the woman in this case. The man's nature kills her. It happens
every day. The Renaissance society may have built up more men of this
type than ours, but they are not peculiar to it.

Germany, not Italy, is, I think, the country in which Browning intended
to place two other poems which belong to the time of the
Renaissance--_Johannes Agricola in Meditation_ and _A Grammarian's
Funeral_. Their note is as different from that of the Italian poems as
the national temper of Germany is from that of Italy. They have no sense
of beauty for beauty's sake alone. Their atmosphere is not soft or gay
but somewhat stern. The logical arrangement of them is less one of
feeling than of thought. There is a stronger manhood in them, a grimmer
view of life. The sense of duty to God and Man, but little represented
in the Italian poems of the Renaissance, does exist in these two German
poems. Moreover, there is in them a full representation of aspiration to
the world beyond. But the Italian Renaissance lived for the earth alone,
and its loveliness; too close to earth to care for heaven.

It pleased Browning to throw himself fully into the soul of Johannes
Agricola; and he does it with so much personal fervour that it seems as
if, in one of his incarnations, he had been the man, and, for the moment
of his writing, was dominated by him. The mystic-passion fills the
poetry with keen and dazzling light, and it is worth while, from this
point of view, to compare the poem with Tennyson's _Sir Galahad_, and on
another side, with _St. Simeon Stylites_.

Johannes Agricola was one of the products of the reforming spirit of the
sixteenth century in Germany, one of its wild extremes. He believes that
God had chosen him among a few to be his for ever and for his own glory
from the foundation of the world. He did not say that all sin was
permitted to the saints, that what the flesh did was no matter, like
those wild fanatics, one of whom Scott draws in _Woodstock_; but he did
say, that if he sinned it made no matter to his election by God. Nay,
the immanence of God in him turned the poison to health, the filth to
jewels. Goodness and badness make no matter; God's choice is all. The
martyr for truth, the righteous man whose life has saved the world, but
who is not elected, is damned for ever in burning hell. "I am eternally
chosen; for that I praise God. I do not understand it. If I did, could I
praise Him? But I know my settled place in the divine decrees." I quote
the beginning. It is pregnant with superb spiritual audacity, and
kindled with imaginative pride.

There's heaven above, and night by night
I look right through its gorgeous roof;
No suns and moons though e'er so bright
Avail to stop me; splendour-proof
Keep the broods of stars aloof:
For I intend to get to God,
For 'tis to God I speed so fast,
For in God's breast, my own abode,
Those shoals of dazzling glory, passed,
I lay my spirit down at last.
I lie where I have always lain,
God smiles as he has always smiled;
Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,
Ere stars were thunder-girt, or piled
The heavens, God thought on me his child;
Ordained a life for me, arrayed
Its circumstances every one
To the minutest; ay, God said
This head this hand should rest upon
Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun.
And having thus created me,
Thus rooted me, he bade me grow,
Guiltless for ever, like a tree
That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know
The law by which it prospers so:
But sure that thought and word and deed
All go to swell his love for me,
Me, made because that love had need
Of something irreversibly
Pledged solely its content to be.

As to _A Grammarian's Funeral_, that poem also belongs to the German
rather than to the Italian spirit. The Renaissance in Italy lost its
religion; at the same time, in Germany, it added a reformation of
religion to the New Learning. The Renaissance in Italy desired the
fulness of knowledge in this world, and did not look for its infinities
in the world beyond. In Germany the same desire made men call for the
infinities of knowledge beyond the earth. A few Italians, like
Savonarola, like M. Angelo, did the same, and failed to redeem their
world; but eternal aspiration dwelt in the soul of every German who had
gained a religion. In Italy, as the Renaissance rose to its luxury and
trended to its decay, the pull towards personal righteousness made by
belief in an omnipotent goodness who demands the subjection of our will
to his, ceased to be felt by artists, scholars and cultivated society. A
man's will was his only law. On the other hand, the life of the New
Learning in Germany and England was weighted with a sense of duty to an
eternal Righteousness. The love of knowledge or beauty was modified into
seriousness of life, carried beyond this life in thought, kept clean,
and, though filled with incessant labour on the earth, aspired to reach
its fruition only in the life to come.

This is the spirit and the atmosphere of the _Grammarian's Funeral_, and
Browning's little note at the beginning says that its time "was shortly
after the revival of learning in Europe." I have really no proof that
Browning laid the scene of his poem in Germany, save perhaps the use of
such words as "thorp" and "croft," but there is a clean, pure morning
light playing through the verse, a fresh, health-breathing northern air,
which does not fit in with Italy; a joyous, buoyant youthfulness in the
song and march of the students who carry their master with gay strength
up the mountain to the very top, all of them filled with his aspiring
spirit, all of them looking forward with gladness and vigour to
life--which has no relation whatever to the temper of Florentine or
Roman life during the age of the Medici. The bold brightness, moral
earnestness, pursuit of the ideal, spiritual intensity, reverence for
good work and for the man who did it, which breathe in the poem, differ
by a whole world from the atmosphere of life in _Andrea del Sarto_. This
is a crowd of men who are moving upwards, who, seizing the Renaissance
elements, knitted them through and through with reformation of life,
faith in God, and hope for man. They had a future and knew it. The
semi-paganism of the Renaissance had not, and did not know it had not.

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