The tragedy is for us, not for him: he regrets little, and would change still less. The "silver-grey" lights of dreamy autumn eve were never with more delicate insight rendered in terms of soul.
Suddenly these autumnal half-tones give way to the flash of torches in the fragrant darkness of an Italian night. There is a scurry of feet along a dark alley, a scuffle at the end, and the genial rotundity of Brother Lippo Lippi's face, impudent, brilliant, insuppressible, leers into the torchlight. Fra Lippo Lippi is not less true and vivacious than the Andrea, if less striking as an example of Browning's dramatic power. Sarto is a great poetic creation; Browning's own robust temperament provided hardly any aid in delineating the emaciated soul whose gifts had thinned down to a morbid perfection of technique. But this vigorous human creature, with the teeming brain, and the realist eye, and the incorrigible ineptitude for the restraints of an insincere clerical or other idealism, was a being to which Browning's heart went out; [and] he even makes him the mouthpiece of literary ideas, which his own portrait as here drawn aptly exemplifies. There is not much "soul" in Lippo, but he has the hearty grasp of common things, of the world in its business and its labour and its sport and its joys, which "edifies" men more than artificial idealities designed expressly to "beat nature." He "lends his mind out" and finds the answering mind in other men instead of imposing one from without:—
"This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink."
"Ay, but," objects the Prior, "you do not instigate to prayer!" And it is the prior and his system which for Lippi stand in the place of Andrea's soulless wife. Lucrezia's illusive beauty lured his soul to its doom; and Lippo, forced, as a child of eight, to renounce the world and put on the cassock he habitually disgraced, triumphantly cast off the incubus of a sham spirituality which only tended to obscure what was most spiritual in himself. He was fortunate in the poet who has drawn his portrait so superbly in his sitter's own style.
These two monologues belong to the most finished achievements of Browning. But we should miss much of the peculiar quality of his mind, as well as a vivid glimpse into the hope-and-fear-laden atmosphere of Tuscany in the early 'Fifties, if we had not that quaint heterogeneous causerie called Old Pictures in Florence. There is passion in its grotesqueness and [method] in its incoherence; for the old painters, whose apologies he is ostensibly writing, with their imperfect achievement and their insuppressible idealism, sounded a congenial note to men whose eyes were bent incessantly upon the horizon waiting for the invisible to come into play, and Florence looked for her completion as Giotto's unfinished campanile for its spire.
If Italy deepened Browning's hold upon the problems of painting, it witnessed the beginnings of his equally characteristic achievement in the kindred poetry of music. Not that his Italian life can have brought any notable access of musical impressions to a man who had grown up within easy reach of London concerts and operas. But England was a land in which music was performed; Italy was a land in which it was made. Verdi's "worst opera" could be heard in many places; but in Florence the knowing spectator might see Verdi himself, at its close,
"Look through all the roaring and the wreaths
Where sits Rossini patient in his stall."
Italian music, with its facile melody and its relative poverty of ideas, could not find so full a response in Browning's nature as Italian painting. It had had its own gracious and tender youth; and Palestrina, whom he contrasts with the mountainous fuguists of "Saxe-Gotha" and elsewhere, probably had for him the same kind of charm as the early painters of Florence. Out of that "infancy," however, there had arisen no "titanically infantine" Michelangelo, but a race of accomplished [petits maîtres], whose characteristic achievement was the opera of the rococo age. A Goldsmith or a Sterne can make the light songs of their contemporaries eloquent even to us of gracious amenities and cultivated charm; but Browning, with the eternal April in his heart and brain, heard in the stately measures it danced to, only the eloquence of a dirge, penetrated with the sense of the mortality of such joy as theirs. Byron had sung gaily of the gaieties of Venice; but the vivacious swing of Beppo was less to Browning's mind than the "cold music" of Baldassare Galuppi, who made his world dance to the strains of its own requiem, and fall upon dreamy suggestions of decay in the very climax of the feast:—
"What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished,
sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions
—'Must we die?'
Those commiserating sevenths—"Life might last! We can
but try!"
The musician himself has no such illusions; but his music is only a more bitter echo:—