The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning. Edward Berdoe

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СКАЧАТЬ gold for her. The keynote of the poem is struck in these opening words. It is evening, and Andrea is weary with his work, but never weary of praising Lucrezia’s beauty; sadly he owns that he is at best only a shareholder in his wife’s affections, that even her pride in him is gone, that she neither understands nor cares to understand his art. He tells her that he can do easily and perfectly what at the bottom of his heart he wishes for, deep as that might be; he could do what others agonise to do all their lives and fail in doing, yet he knows for all that there burns a truer light of God in them than in him. Their works drop groundward, though their souls have glimpses of heaven that are denied to him. He could have beaten Rafael had he possessed Rafael’s soul; for the Urbinate’s technical skill, as he half hesitatingly shows, is inferior to his own; and had his Lucrezia urged him, inspired him, to claim a seat by the side of Michelangelo and Rafael, he might for her sake have done it. He sees he is but a half-man working in an atmosphere of silver-grey. He had his chance at Fontainebleau; there he sometimes seemed to leave the ground, but he had a chain which dragged him down. Lucrezia called him. Not only for her did he forsake the higher art ambitions, but the common ground of honesty; he descended to cement his walls with the gold of King Francis which he had stolen, and for her. From dishonesty to connivance at his wife’s infidelity is an easy step; and so, while in the act of expressing his remorse at his ingratitude to the king, we find him asking Lucrezia quite naturally, as a matter of ordinary occurrence —

      “Must you go?

      That cousin here again? he waits outside?

      Must see you – you, and not with me?”

      Here we discover the secret of the soullessness: the fellow has the tailor in his blood, even though the artist is supreme at the fingers’ ends. He is but the craftsman after all. Think of Fra Angelico painting his saints and angels on his knees, straining his eyes to catch the faintest glimpse of the heavenly radiance of Our Lady’s purity and holiness, feeling that he failed, too dazzled by the brightness of Divine light, to catch more than its shadow, and we shall know why there is soul in the great Dominican painter, and why there is none in the Sarto. Lucrezia, despicable as she was, was not the cause of her husband’s failure. His marriage, his treatment of Francis, his allowing his parents to starve, to die of want, while he paid gaming debts for his wife’s lover, – all these things tell us what the man was. No woman ruined his soul; he had no soul to ruin!

      Notes. —Fiesole, a small but famous episcopal city of Italy, on the crown of a hill above the Arno, about three miles to the west of Florence. Morello, a mountain of the Apennines. The Urbinate: Rafael was born at Urbino. George Vasari, painter and author of the “Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects.” Rafael, Raphael Sanzio of Urbino. Agnolo: Michel Agnolo is the more correct form of Michael Angelo. Francis, King Francis I. of France, the royal patron of Andrea. Fontainebleau, a town of France 37 miles S.E. of Paris; its palace is one of the most sumptuous in France. “The Roman’s is the better when you pray.” Catholics, however, do not use the works of the great masters for devotional purposes nearly so much as might be supposed. No “miraculous” picture is by this class. Cue-owls: The Scops Owl: Scops Giú (Scopoli). Its cry is a ringing “ki-ou” – whence Italian “chiù” or “ciù.” “Walls in the New Jerusalem.” Revelation xxi. 15-17. Leonard, Leonardo da Vinci.

      Andromeda. In Pauline, Mr. Browning has commemorated the fascination for his youthful mind which was exercised by an engraving of a picture by Caravaggio of Andromeda and Perseus. This picture was always before him as a boy, and he loved the story of the divine deliverer and the innocent victim which it presented. The lines begin

      “Andromeda!

      And she is with me, – years roll, I shall change,

      But change can touch her not.”

      Another Way of Love. See One Way of Love, this poem being its sequel.

      Any Wife to Any Husband. A dying wife finds the bitterest thing in death to be the certainty that her husband’s love for her, which, would life but last, she could retain, will fade and wither when she is no longer present to tend it:

      “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,

      ’Tis woman’s whole existence.”

      The great pure love of a wife is a reign of love. Woman’s love is more durable and purer than man’s, and few men are entirely worthy of being the objects of that which they can so imperfectly understand. Mr. Nettleship, commenting on this poem, very truly says, “The real love of the man is never born until the love of the woman supplements it.” The wife of the poem feels that there would be no difficulty in her case about being faithful to the memory of her husband; but she foresees that his love will not long survive the loss of her personal presence. This will be to depreciate the value of his life to him; his love will come back to her again at last, back to the heart’s place kept for him, but with a stain upon it. The old love will be re-coined, re-issued from the mint, and given to others to spend, alas! with some alloy as well as with a new image and superscription. She foresees that he will dissipate his soul in the love of other woman, he will excuse himself by the assurance that the light loves will make no impression on the deep-set memory of the woman who is immortally his bride; he will have a Titian’s Venus to desecrate his wall rather than leave it bare and cold, – but the flesh-loves will not impair the soul-love.

      Apollo and the Fates. (See Prologue to Parleyings.) Apollo (the Sun God), having offended Jupiter by slaying the Cyclopes, who forged his thunderbolts by which he had killed Æsculapius for bringing dead men to life, had been banished from heaven. He became servant to Admetus, king of Thessaly, in whose employment he remained nine years as one of his shepherds. He was treated with great kindness by his master, and they became true lovers of each other. When Apollo, restored to the favour of heaven, had left the service of Admetus and resumed his god-like offices, he heard that his old master and friend was sick unto death, and he determined to save his life. Accordingly he descended on Mount Parnassus, and penetrated to the abode of the Fates, in the dark regions below the roots of the mountains, and there he found the three who preside over the destinies of mankind – Clotho with her distaff, Lachesis with her spindle, and Atropos with a pair of scissors about to cut the thread of Admetus’ life – and begins to plead for the life of his friend Admetus, whom Atropos has just doomed to death. The Fates bid Apollo go back to earth and wake it from dreams. Apollo demands a truce to their doleful amusement, and requests them to extend the years of Admetus to threescore and ten. The Fates ask him if he thinks it would add to his friend’s joy to have his life lengthened, seeing that life is only illusion? Infancy is but ignorance and mischief, youth becomes foolishness, and age churlishness. Apollo should ask for life for one whom he hates, not for the friend he loves. The Sun’s beams produce such semblance of good as exists by simply gilding the evil. Apollo objects that if it were happier to die, men’s greeting would not be “Long life!” but “Death to you!” Man loves his life, and he ought to know best. The Fates say this is all the glamour shed by Apollo’s rays. Apollo concedes that man desponds when debarred of illusion: “suppose he has in himself some compensative law?” and the God then produces a bowl of wine, man’s invention, of which he invites them to taste. The Fates, after some objection, drink and get tipsy and merry, Atropos even declaring she could live at a pinch! Apollo delivers them a lecture; he tells them Bacchus invented the wine; as he was the youngest of the gods, he had to discover some new gift whereby to claim the homage of man. He tampered with nothing already arranged, yet would introduce change without shock. As the sunbeams and Apollo had transformed the Fates’ cavern without displacing a splinter, so has the gift of Bacchus turned the adverse things of life to a kindlier aspect; man accepts the good with the bad, and acquiesces in his fate; this is the work of Zeus. He demands of the Fates if, after all, Life be so devoid of good? “Quashed be our quarrel!” they exclaim, and they dance till an explosion from the earth’s centre brings them СКАЧАТЬ