Flute-music with an Accompaniment. (Asolando, 1889.) “Is not outside seeming real as substance inside?” A man hears a bird-like fluting; he wonders what sweet thoughts find expression in such sweet notes. Passion must give birth to such expression. Love, no doubt! Assurance, contentment, sorrow and hope—he detects all these moods in the music, softened and mellowed by the interposing trees. His lady companion brushes away all his fancy-spun notions by telling the prosy fact that the music proceeds from a desk-drudge, who spends the hour of his luncheon with the Youth’s Complete Instructor how to Play the Flute, the plain truth being that his hoarse and husky tootlings have not the remotest relation to the romantic ideas with which her male companion has associated them. Distance has altered the sharps to flats; the missing bar was not due to “kissing interruption,” but to a blunder in the playing. The man philosophises on this to the effect that, if fancy does everything for us, it matters little what may be the facts. If appearance produces the effect of reality, seeming is as good as being.
Forgiveness, A. (Pacchiarotto, and other Poems, 1876.) A man kneels in confession before a monk in a church. He tells the story of a life destroyed by an insane jealousy of his wife, who was innocent of any fault in the matter but some slight deception. The penitent was a statesman, happy in the love of wife and home, but neglectful of his duties to both in his absorption in the affairs of his sovereign. Returning home one night, he enters by the private garden way, and sees the veiled figure of a man flying from the house. Before him, as he turns to enter his door, he sees his wife, “stone-still, stone-white.” “Kill me!” she cried. “The man is innocent; the fault is mine alone. I love him as I hate you. Strike!” But he refrains from this speedy vengeance: henceforth they act a part before strangers—all goes on as though nothing had happened; alone, they never meet, never speak. Three years of this life pass, when one night the wife demands that the acting shall end; she will explain. “Follow me to my study,” he replies. The wife begins, “Since I could die now....” and then tells him she had loved him and had lost him through a lie. She had thought he gave away his soul in statecraft; she strung herself therefore, to teach him that the first fool she threw a fond look upon would prize beyond life the treasure which he neglected. It was contempt for the woman which filled his mind now. At this avowal his feeling rose to hate. He made her write her confession in words which he dictated, and with her own blood, drawn by the point of a poisoned poniard. The monk was the woman’s lover; the husband killed him also.
Founder of the Feast, The. This was the title of some inedited lines by Browning, written in the album presented to Mr. Arthur Chappell (of the St. James’s Hall Saturday and Monday Popular Concerts), April 5th, 1884. They are printed in the Browning Society’s Notes and Queries, vol. ii., p. 18*.
Fra Lippo Lippi. (Men and Women, 1855; Rome, 1853-54.) [The Man.] Fra Filippo Lippi (1412-69), the painter, was the son of a butcher in Florence. His mother died while he was a baby, and his father two years later than his mother. His aunt, Monna Lapaccia, took him to her home, but in 1420, when the boy was but eight years old, placed him in the community of the Carmelites of the Carmine in Florence. He stayed at the monastery till 1432, and there became a painter. He seems to have ultimately received a more or less complete dispensation from his religious vows. In 1452 he was appointed chaplain to the convent of S. Giovannino in Florence, and in 1457 he was made rector of S. Quirico at Legnaia. At this time he made a large income; but ever and again fell into poverty, probably on account of the numerous love affairs in which he was constantly indulging. Lippi died at Spoleto on or about Oct 8th, 1469. Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters, tells the whole romantic story of his life.
[The Poem.] Brother Lippo the painter, working for the munificent House of the Medici, has been mewed up in the Palace, painting saints for Cosimo dei Medici. Unable longer to tolerate the restraint (for he was a dissolute friar, with no vocation for the religious life), he has tied his sheets and counterpane together and let himself out of the window for a night’s frolic with the girls whom he heard singing and skipping in the street below. He has been arrested by the watchmen of the city, who noticed his monastic garb, and did not consider it in accord with his present occupation. He is making his defence and bribing them to let him go. He tells them his history: how he was a baby when his mother and father died, and he was left starving in the street, picking up fig skins and melon parings, refuse and rubbish as his only food. One day he was taken to the monastery, and while munching his first bread that month was induced to “renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world,” and so became a monk at eight years old. They tried him with books, and taught him some Latin; as his hard life had given him abundant opportunity for reading peoples’ faces, he found he could draw them in his copybooks, and so began to make pictures everywhere. The Prior noticed this, and thought he detected genius, and would not hear of turning the boy out: he might become a great painter and “do our church up fine,” he said. So the lad prospered; he began to draw the monks—the fat, the lean, the black, the white; then the folks at church. But he was too realistic in his work: his faces, arms and legs were too true to nature, and the Prior shook his head—
“And stopped all that in no time.”
He told him his business was to paint men’s souls and forget there was such a thing as flesh:
“Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!”
And so they made him rub all out. The painter asks if this was sense:
“A fine way to paint soul, by painting body
So ill, the eye can’t stop there, must go further
And can’t fare worse!”