Part 9 (1/2)
The airace, joy or grief, rage or love in their complete earthly attainh the flesh they fray, New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: To bring the invisible full into play!
Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?
[Illustration: ANDREA DEL SARTO
_From a print after the portrait by himself in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence_]
The prophecy hich the poereat revival of Italian art consequent on the advent of political and intellectual liberty, has not obtained fulfilment in the course of the half century that has elapsed since it was uttered Browning's doctrine that aspiration towards what is higher is more to be valued in art than the attain ue placed in the lips of Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter His craftsines he can achieve; nothing in line or in colour is other than it ought to be; and yet precisely because he has succeeded, his failure is profound and irretrievable:
Ah, but a rasp, Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey Placid and perfect with ht the arly put in Rafael's work that fronts hiht and the stretch” of Rafael are lacking in his own faultless lines He looks back regretfully to his kingly days at Fontainebleau with the royal Francis, hat seemed a veritable fire was in his heart And he tries to find an excuse for his failure as artist and as man in the coldness of his beautiful Lucrezia--for he who has failed in the higher art has also failed in the higher love--Lucrezia, who values his work only by the coins it brings in, and who needs those coins just now for one whose whistle invites her away All ht be so much better otherwise! Yet otherwise he cannot choose that it should be; his art rey; and his Lucrezia may attend to the Cousin's whistle if only she retains the char does not hest ends should be indifferent to the s spiritual do not require as adequate a sensuous e from the painter's brush or the poet's pen Were art a estion, two bits of sticks nailed crosswise ht claim to be art as admirable as any What is the eye for, if not to see with vivid exactness? what is the hand for, if not to fashi+on things as nature h body that we reach after the soul; and the passion for truth and reality is a passion for the invisible which is expressed in and through these Such is the pleading of Fra Lippo Lippi, the tonsured painter caught out of bounds, in that poe attains its perfection of life and energy Fra Lippo is intoxicated by the s, and he is assured that these mean intensely and mean well:
The beauty and the wonder and the power, The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades, Changes, surprises--and God irds loin and lights the lae a patron in shallower pieties of the conventional order, and though it is not all gospel with hio skipping and singing down Florence streets--”Zooks, sir, flesh and blood, that's all I'm made of!”
Fra Lippo with his outbreaks of frank sensuality is far nearer to Browning's kingdom of heaven than is the faultless painter; he presses with ardour towards his proper goal in art; he has full faith in the ideal, but with hih the real; or rather it need not be sought at all, for one who captures any fragnedly and inevitably its divine significance[68]
The same doctrine which is applied to art in _Old Pictures in Florence_, that high aih unattained, are of more worth than a lower achievement, is applied, and with a fine lyrical enthusiase in _A Grammarian's Funeral_ The ti in Europe”; the place--
a tall mountain, citied to the top, Croith culture!--
is iined to suit the idea of the poem The dead scholar, borne to the summit for burial on the shoulders of his disciples, had been possessed by the aspiration of Paracelsus--to know; and, unlike Paracelsus, he had never sought on earth both to know and to enjoy He has been the saint and the enius of such a writer as the author of _Hudibras_, with his positive intellect and dense common sense, there could hardly have been found a fitter object for able pedant Browning, through the singing voices of the dead master's disciples, exalts him to an eminence of honour and splendid fame To a scholar Greek particles lorious pedant has postponed life and the enjoyments of life to future cycles of existence; here on earth he expends a desperate passion--upon what? Upon the dryasdust intricacies of grah he had already attained; he only desperately follows after:
That low hto pursue, Dies ere he knows it
But again the graue, transcendental ideal; he is not as one that beateth the air; his quest for knowledge is definite and positive enough; he throws all care for infinite things, except the infinite of philological accuracy, upon God; and the viaticuraic-grotesque and pathetic-grotesque froedy_ John, Master of the Teainst the faith and Holy Church; the glow of the blazing larch and pine alreat petals of this red rose of flaust of sulphur offends his nostrils And the rage of piety is hotter than the fire; it is a ht in the fierce spectacle, a thrilling ecstacy at the sight of a fellow-creature tortured, the self-complacency of conscious orthodoxy, and the horrible zeal of the Lord's house Yet though the event is sung by one of the rejoicing orthodox, somehoe are made to feel that when John the apostate, bound in the flaed, prays to Jesus Christ to save hie froe of faith was not selected with a view to please the mediaeval revivalists of the nineteenth century, but in truth its chief value is not theological or historical but artistic _Holy Cross Day_, a second fragment from history, does not fall from the sublime to the ridiculous but rises from the ridiculous to the subli churchwards to hear the Christian sermon (for He saith ”Corace has in it so of Callot Such a crew of devout impostors is at once comic and piteous But while they are cared for in the roan out the expected compunction, their ancient piety is not extinct; their hearts burn in them with the memory of Jacob's House and of Jerusaleed Hi these who outrage and insult them after His naion of Christ do not, however, disturb the faith of Browning in the Christian revelation of Divine love In _Cleon_ he exhibits the failure of Paganishest culture, to solve the riddle of life and to answer the requireal power liberally and wisely used can confer belongs to Protus in his Tyranny; all that genius, and learning and art can confer is the possession of Cleon; and a profound discourageresses from point to point; self-consciousness is deepened and quickened as generation succeeds generation; the sympathies of the individual are e, increases sorrow; hts only to perish there Every day the sense of joy grows ed; and every day the power to put our best attainments to use diminishes ”And how dieth the wise man? As the fool Therefore I hated life; yea, I hated all my labour that I had taken under the sun” The poeion The assurance of extinction is the hich gnaws at the heart of the rose:
It is so horrible I dare at tiine to my need Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, Unlimited in capability For joy, as this is in desire for joy
But this is no better than a dream; Zeus could not but have revealed it, were it possible Browning does not bring his Cleon, as Pater brings his Marius, into the Christian catacoht interpret the mystery of death, nor to that house of Cecilia where Marius sees a new joy illu every face Cleon has heard of Paulus and of Christus, but who can suppose that a mere barbarian Jew
Hath access to a secret shut from us?
The doctrine of Christ, preached on the island by certain slaves, is reported by an intelligent listener to be one which no sane ht be well e the moods of music--the later hours of a philosopher and a poet--on the futile creed of slaves
Ireat words pronounced by Paul and by Christ _Cleon_ is the despairing cry of Pagan culture for the life beyond the grave which would attune to harible its mournful obscurities _Saul_, in the completed form of 1855, and _An Epistle of Karshi+sh_ are, the one a prophecy, the other a divination, of the mystery of the love of God in the life and death of his Son The cul moment in the effort of David by which he rouses to life the sunken soul of the King, the moment towards which all others tend, is that in which he finds in his own nature love as God's ultiifts, the creature cannot surpass the Creator, he breaks forth into a prophecy of God's love made perfect in weakness:
O Saul, it shall be A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand like this hand Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!
What follows in the poem is only the awe, the soleh any processes of reasoning but by a passionate interpretation of the enthusiasm of love and self-sacrifice in David's own heart; only this awe, and the seee over the face of external nature, until night passes and with the dawn earth and heaven resume their wonted ways The case of Lazarus as studied by Karshi+sh the Arabian physician results not in a rapturous prophecy like that of David, but in a stupendous conjecture of the heart which all the scepticism of the brain of a nificance The unaccountable fascination of this case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy, is not to be resisted; Karshi+sh would write, if he could, of more important matters than the madman of Bethany; he would record his discoveries in scalp-disease, describe the peculiar qualities of Judea's guacanth, and disclose the secret of those virtues derived from the mottled spiders of the toe reular valuations of objects and events, his great ardour, his great cals to all things, the perfect logic of his irrationality, his unexaentleness and love--these are hted Arabian physician is unable to put by, so curious, so attaching a potency lies in the person of this ain, Karshi+sh has a certain sense of shame that he, a man learned in all the wisdoht of the secret possessed by this Judean maniac--it is the secret of Jesus--fills and expands the soul!
The very God! think, Abib: dost thou think?