Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey
Placid and perfect with my art:—the worse
"Here," he says, "is a piece of Rafael. The arm is out of drawing, and I could make it right. But the passion, the soul of the thing is not in me. Had you, my love, but urged me upward, to glory and God, I might have been uncontent; I might have done it for you. No," and again he sweeps round on himself, out of his excuses, "perhaps not, 'incentives come from the soul's self'; and mine is gone. I've chosen the love of you, Lucrezia, earth's love, and I cannot pass beyond my faultless drawing into the strife to paint those divine imaginations the soul conceives."
That is the meaning of Browning. The faultless, almost mechanical art, the art which might be born of an adulterous connection between science and art, is of little value to men. Not in the flawless painter is true art found, but in those who painted inadequately, yet whose pictures breathe
Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.
In this incessant strife to create new worlds, and in their creation, which, always ending in partial failure, forces fresh effort, lies, Browning might have said, the excuse for God having deliberately made us defective. Had we been made good, had we no strife with evil; had we the power to embody at once the beauty we are capable of seeing; could we have laid our hand on truth, and grasped her without the desperate struggle we have to win one fruit from her tree; had we had no strong crying and tears, no agony against wrong, against our own passions and their work, against false views of things—we might have been angels; but we should not have had humanity and all its wild history, and all its work; we should not have had that which, for all I know, may be unique in the universe; no, nor any of the great results of the battle and its misery. Had it not been for the defectiveness, the sin and pain, we should have had nothing of the interest of the long evolution of science, law and government, of the charm of discovery, of pursuit, of the slow upbuilding of moral right, of the vast variety of philosophy. Above all, we should have had none of the great art men love so well, no Odyssey, Divine Comedy no Hamlet, no Oedipus, no Handel, no Beethoven, no painting or sculpture where the love and sorrow of the soul breathe in canvas, fresco, marble and bronze, no, nor any of the great and loving lives who suffered and overcame, from Christ to the poor woman who dies for love in a London lane. All these are made through the struggle and the sorrow. We should not have had, I repeat, humanity; and provided no soul perishes for ever but lives to find union with undying love, the game, with all its terrible sorrow, pays for the candle. We may find out, some day, that the existence and work of humanity, crucified as it has been, are of untold interest and use to the universe—which things the angels desire to look into. If Browning had listened to that view, he would, I think, have accepted it.
Old Pictures in Florence touches another side of his theory. In itself, it is one of Browning's half-humorous poems; a pleasantly-composed piece, glancing here and glancing there, as a man's mind does when leaning over a hill-villa's parapet on a sunny morning in Florence. I have elsewhere quoted its beginning. It is a fine example of his nature-poetry: it creates the scenery and atmosphere of the poem; and the four lines with which the fourth verse closes sketch what Browning thought to be one of his poetic gifts—
And mark through the winter afternoons.