But to the Greek the door of actuality remains fast closed.
Before concluding an examination of this section of the poem which has suggested, as was inevitable, a comparison between the pagan and the Christian conception of life; between an estimate into which physical and intellectual considerations alone enter, and that in which spiritual also find place, it may not be unprofitable to recall the method by which Browning has treated the same subject elsewhere, in a different connection. Old Pictures in Florence, published originally in the volume of the Men and Women Series, which likewise contained Cleon, is one of the few poems in which the author may be assumed to speak in his own person. The contrast there drawn is that between the products of Greek Art which “ran and reached its goal,” and the works of the mediaeval Italian artists. Having pointed to the Greek statuary, to the figures of Theseus, of Apollo, of Niobe, and Alexander, the speaker recognizes therein a re-utterance of
The Truth of Man, as by God first spoken,
Which the actual generations garble,
... Soul (which Limbs betoken)
And Limbs (Soul informs) made new in marble.[32]
Here all is perfection, man sees himself as he wishes he were, as he “might have been,” as he “cannot be.” In such finished work no room is left for “man’s distinctive mark,” progress,—growth. When, then, according to Browning, did growth once more begin? When was the depression of Cleon’s day out-lived? Vitality, he asserts, once more became apparent when the eye of the artist was turned from externals to that which externals may denote or conceal, not outwards but inwards, from the form betokening the existence of Soul to Soul itself. The mediaeval painters started on a new and endless path of progress when in answer to the cry of
Greek Art, and what more wish you?
they replied,
To become now self-acquainters,
And paint man man, whatever the issue!
Make new hopes shine through 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?[33]
Browning’s estimate of Art, as of all departments of work, was necessarily one which would lead him to sympathize with that form which strives, however imperfectly, to bring “the invisible full into play,” though the achievement must be effected, not by neglect of, but rather by the fullest treatment of the visible. The avowed function of Art, in the most comprehensive acceptation of the term, was with him to achieve “no mere imagery on the wall,” but to present something, whether in Music, Poetry, or Painting, which should
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 God 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