Part 4 (2/2)

Mean beyond the facts, Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.[34]

The more distinctive artistic function (commonly so accepted) of gratifying the senses is not to be neglected, although it may not--as with the Greek--be cultivated to the exclusion, whole or partial, of that which is in its essence more enduring. The monkish painter (1412-69), whilst defending his realistic methods, yet perceives in vision the immensity of possible achievement if he ”drew higher things with the same truth.” To work thus were ”to take the Prior's pulpit-place, interpret G.o.d to all of you.”[35] In so far, then, as he strives towards this realization of the spiritual, the early Italian painter holds, according to Browning, higher place in the ranks of the artistic hierarchy than the Greek who had attained already to perfection in his particular department, feeling that ”where he had reached who could do more than reach?” No such perfection of attainment was possible to him who would ”bring the invisible full into play.” His glory lay rather ”in daring so much before he well did it.”

Thus

The first of the new, in our race's story, Beats the last of the old.[36]

As with the artist, so with the spectator, growth had only begun when

Looking [his] last on them all, [He] turned [his] eyes inwardly one fine day And cried with a start--What if we so small Be greater and grander the while than they?

Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature?

In both, of such lower types are we Precisely because of our wider nature; For time, theirs--ours, for eternity.[37]

They are perfect--how else? they shall never change: We are faulty--why not? we have time in store.

The Artificer's hand is not arrested With us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished.[38]

Bitter as is to Cleon the realization that ”What's come to perfection perishes,” to the Christian artist the same axiom serves but as incentive to more strenuous effort. In imperfection he recognizes the germ of future progress.

The help whereby he mounts, The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall, _Since all things suffer change save G.o.d the Truth_.[39]

As imperfection suggests progress, so to ”the heir of immortality” is failure but a step towards ultimate attainment. With confidence he may inquire

What is our failure here but a triumph's evidence[40]

For the fulness of the days?

The Greek, with his bounded horizon, realizes but the first aspect of the truth: that

In man there's failure, only since he left The lower and inconscious forms of life.

That

Most progress is most failure.

The horizon being bounded by the grave, progress cut short by the approach of death, failure may become failure absolute, irremediable. What wonder, then, that the horror should ”quicken still from year to year”; until the very terror itself demands relief in the imaginative creation of a future state. But for this there is no warrant; for the Greek all attainable satisfaction must be sought through the present phase of existence alone.

IV. Cleon's answer to the question of Protus with regard to Death's aspect to the man of thought, whose works outlast his personal existence (ll.

274-335), is but an utterance of the cry of human nature in all times and in all places. Individuality must be preserved! In a moment of artistic fervour the poet may acquiesce in the fate by which his friend has become ”a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely,”[41] but such acquiescence can only hold good where poetic imagination has overborne human affection. The soul of the man first, the poet afterwards, demands that

Eternal form shall still divide Eternal soul from all beside,

and that

I shall _know_ him when we meet.[42]

And what he claims for his friend, man requires also for himself. The individual soul, as at present const.i.tuted, cannot conceive of divesting itself of its own individuality, of becoming ”merged in the general whole.” As easy almost is it to conceive of annihilation. In hours of abstract thought such theories may be evolved, and in accordance with the mental const.i.tution of the thinker, be rejected or honestly accepted; but when brought face to face with the issues of Life and Death, the heart, freeing itself from the trammels of intellectual sophistries, cries out, ”I have felt”; and yearns for a creed which shall allow acceptance of a tenet involving future recognition and reunion, hence, by implication, preservation of individuality, and ident.i.ty. Whatever his nominal creed, experience teaches us that man at supreme moments of life craves for some such satisfaction as this.

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