Another characteristic of Browning was his consummate comprehension of artistic ideals, those of temperaments so opposite as Fra Lippo Lippi, Pictor Ignotus, and that too-perfect painter Andrea del Sarto. His poem on the last-named was written and forwarded to a friend, who had begged him to procure a copy of the Pitti portrait of Del Sarto and his wife. It tells far more than any portrait could: and expresses the writer's doctrine that in art, as in life, the aspiration toward the higher is greater than the achievement of the lower: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for?" According to Browning's belief, a soul's probation, its growth, its ultimate value, lie mainly if not wholly in this choice between the high and the less high.
... Love, we are in God's hand.
How strange now, looks the life He makes us lead!
So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!
I feel He laid the fetter: let it lie!
This chamber for example—turn your head—
All that's behind us! you don't understand
Nor care to understand about my art,
But you can hear at least when people speak;
And that cartoon, the second from the door
—It is the thing, Love! so such things should be—
Behold Madonna, I am bold to say.
I can do with my pencil what I know,
What I see, what at bottom of my heart
I wish for, if I ever wish so deep—
Do easily, too—when I say perfectly
I do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge
Who listened to the Legate's talk last week,
And just as much they used to say in France.
At any rate 'tis easy, all of it,
No sketches first, no studies, that's long past—
I do what many dream of all their lives
—Dream? strive to do, and agonise to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive—you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,—
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter) so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia! I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed, beating, stuffed and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate'er else, that goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.
Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,
Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me,
Enter and take their place there sure enough,
Though they come back and cannot tell the world.
My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here.
(Andrea del Sarto.)
Social intercourse occupied a large portion of the day. Browning identified himself with the daily life of Venice, and, besides this, English and American acquaintances were frequently in Venice: the poet, his reputation now firmly established and extending, was sought after by innumerable admirers. He was a man of great social charm,—a brilliant talker, full of amusing anecdotes,—his memory for historical incident was only paralleled by his immense literary knowledge, upon which he drew for apt illustration. Yet he was naturally a reticent man, of painfully nervous excitability; "nervous to such a degree," as he said of himself, "that I might fancy I could not enter a drawing-room, did I not know from my experience that I could do it." This very nervousness, however, often induced an almost abnormal vivacity of speech: and Browning was warmly welcomed amongst the notable and even royal folk whose names were included in Mrs. Bronson's circle; they recognised in him, as Frederick Tennyson had done, "a man of infinite learning, jest, and bonhomie, and moreover a sterling heart that reveals no hollowness." To women he was specially attracted, and vice-versâ; "that golden-hearted Robert," as his wife had termed him, had an intimate understanding of the woman's mind. But towards children, he was, so to speak, almost numb. Devoted though he was to his only son, "the essential quality of early childhood was not that which appealed to him:" and the fervour of parental instinct finds practically no expression in his poems.
In the course of the day the poet would lose no opportunity of hearing any important concert: an accomplished musician himself, his love for the tone-art amounted to a passion: and in many of his greatest poems, he had voiced the most secret meanings of music, and the yearning aspirations of a composer. We "sit alone in the loft" with the organist, Master Hughes of Saxe-Gotha, and his "huge house of the sounds," to listen and wonder while his fugue "broadens and thickens, greatens and deepens and lengthens," and the intricacy of constructive technique forms, as someone has said, "an interposing web spun by the brain between art and things divine." Or we stand with Abt Vogler in his "palace of music" as it falls to pieces, and the magic of inspiration over-rides the mastery of construction. The void of the silence is filled with "the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen," and faith is born of the composer's very impotence to realize the heights of his own ambition—yet one more rendering of that triumphant failure, of which Browning was the prophet:
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.
And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know.
(Abt Vogler.)
And, as a final contrast, drawn out of that shoreless sea of contrasts which music can reveal, we have A Toccata of Galuppi's, suffused with the melancholy of mundane pleasure, steeped in the ephemeral voluptuousness of eighteenth-century Venice. In these lines, it has been pointed out, "Browning's self-restraint is admirable.... The poet will not say a word more than the musician has said in his Toccata."
Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?
* * * * * * * * *
Well (and it was graceful of them) they'd break talk off and afford—
—She to bite her mask's black velvet, he to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?