“’Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven—
The better! What’s come to perfection perishes.”
These quotations from Old Pictures in Florence, in which the poet, by using the first person in his references to the early masters of Italy places himself in their group and refers to Greek art in the third person, are indications of the spirit of the poem and of Browning’s entire attitude toward endeavor in art.
To summarize, then: few persons have as great an interest in expressing themselves through all the arts as did Robert Browning. Architecture and sculpture he appreciated least; therefore he expressed least concerning their spirit and feeling. Music was a fundamental part of his life; but he was able to embody his feelings about it in music itself, not merely in poetry about it. Yet because of his perfect understanding of it, he has embodied its spirit in a few choice poems, making permanent, by his treatment of its evanescent quality, the ideas that could not be left to the world by his playing. Painting he deeply appreciated from childhood; but beyond a few amateur efforts for diversion, he could not express his appreciation of it by means of that art itself. Consequently, in an unusually large number of his poems, he gave us his view of that art, his portraits of its followers, historical or imaginary.
III. Personality and the arts.
Art is also connected with Browning’s character portrayal in a secondary sort of way, of which The Ring and the Book furnishes excellent illustrations. In that poem people are characterized by their likeness to some work of art—e. g., Pompilia is compared to Raphael’s Madonna; or by their fondness for some particular work of art—e. g., the Pope chuckling over the Merry Tales.
While Browning mentioned the great masters in many different poems, it is noticeable that he never used one of them as the main subject of a poem. There are Andrea, Lippo, and Furini, but there is no Angelo and no Raphael. This is due to the one element of interest on Browning’s part that has already been emphasized in this chapter and previous ones—personality. Browning was interested in the artist he selected, not merely as an artist, not as a distinguished figure, but as a human being, whose attempts, partial failure, or development, the poet wished us to study with him.
Very often the characters whom Browning chose to present either in connection with the arts or otherwise, were such as we do not approve of—but neither did Browning approve of them. His theory of art was no mere aesthetic one of art for art’s sake, no mere dogma of didacticism. It was rather, art for the sake of human nature, of personality. Of all the characters he has drawn for us, the one whose expression of art best gives Browning’s own sentiments is Fra Lippo Lippi, the painter and realist, enthusiastic for
“The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colors, lights, and shades,