In this case, the old tunes have actually been worked over by the more modern composer whose form has not yet sufficiently gone by to fail of an immediate appeal to this person with feelings kindled by similar experiences. What the speaker in the poem perceives is not merely the fact of the feelings experienced but the power of the music to take him off upon a long train of more or less philosophical reasoning born of that very element of change. In this power of suggestiveness lies music’s greater range of spiritual force even when the feeling expressed is not of the deepest.
If we look at his poems on painting, the same principles of art are insisted upon except that more emphasis is laid upon the positive value of the incompleteness of the form. In so far as painting or sculpture reaches a perfect unity of thought and form it loses its power of suggesting an infinite beauty beyond any that our earth-born race may express.
This in Browning’s opinion is the limitation of Greek art. It touches perfection or completion in expression and in so doing limits its range to the brief passion of a day. The effect of such art is to arouse a sort of despair, for it so far transcends merely human beauty that there seems nothing left to accomplish:
“So, testing your weakness by their strength,
Your meagre charms by their rounded beauty
Measured by Art in your breadth and length,
You learned—to submit is a mortal’s duty.”
When such a deadlock as this is reached through the stultifying effect of an art expression which seems to have embodied all there is of passion and physical beauty, the one way out is to turn away from the abject contemplation of such art and go back again to humanity itself, in whose widening nature may be discovered the promise of an eternity of progression. Therefore, “To cries of Greek art and what more wish you?” the poet would have it that the early painters replied:
“To become now self-acquainters,
And paint 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?”
The revolution in art started by these early worthies had more of spiritual promise in it than the past perfection—“The first of the new, in our race’s story, beats the last of the old.”
His emphasis here upon the return to humanity in order to gain a new source of inspiration in art is further illustrated in his attitude toward the two painters which he portrays so splendidly: Fra Lippo Lippi, the realist, whose Madonnas looked like real women, and who has scandalized some critics on this account, and Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter, who exclaims in despair as he gazes upon a picture by Raphael, in which he sees a fault to pardon in the drawing’s line, an error that he could alter for the better, “But all the play, the insight and the stretch,” beyond him.
The importance of basing art upon the study of the human body is later insisted upon in Francis Furini, not as an end in itself, but as the dwelling place of the soul. “Let my pictures prove I know,” says Furini,
“Somewhat of what this fleshly frame of ours
Or is or should be, how the soul empowers
The body to reveal its every mood
Of love and hate, pour forth its plenitude
Of passion.”