Men and Women (Browning)/Volume 2/Old Pictures in Florence
OLD PICTURES IN FLORENCE.
1.The morn when first it thunders in March,The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say.As I leaned and looked over the aloed archOf the villa-gate, this warm March day,No flash snapt, no dumb thunder rolledIn the valley beneath, where, white and wide,Washed by the morning's water-gold,Florence lay out on the mountain-side.
2.River and bridge and street and squareLay mine, as much at my beck and call,Through the live translucent bath of air,As the sights in a magic crystal ball.And of all I saw and of all I praised,The most to praise and the best to see,Was the startling bell-tower Giotto raised:But why did it more than startle me?
3.Giotto, how, with that soul of yours,Could you play me false who loved you so?Some slights if a certain heart enduresIt feels, 1 would have your fellows know!'Faith—I perceive not why I should careTo break a silence that suits them best,But the thing grows somewhat hard to bearWhen I find a Giotto join the rest.
4.On the arch where olives overheadPrint the blue sky with twig and leaf,(That sharp-curled leaf they never shed)'Twixt the aloes I used to lean in chief,And mark through the winter afternoons,By a gift God grants me now and then,In the mild decline of those suns like moons,Who walked in Florence, besides her men.
5.They might chirp and chaffer, come and goFor pleasure or profit, her men alive—My business was hardly with them, I trow,But with empty cells of the human hive;—With the chapter-room, the cloister-porch,The church's apsis, aisle or nave,Its crypt, one fingers along with a torch—Its face, set full for the sun to shave.
6.Wherever a fresco peels and drops,Wherever an outline weakens and wanesTill the latest life in the painting stops,Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains!One, wishful each scrap should clutch its brick,Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster,—A lion who dies of an ass's kick,The wronged great soul of an ancient Master.
7.For oh, this world and the wrong it does!They are safe in heaven with their backs to it,The Michaels and Rafaels, you hum and buzzRound the works of, you of the little wit!Do their eyes contract to the earth's old scope,Now that they see God face to face,And have all attained to be poets, I hope?'Tis their holiday now, in any case.
8.Much they reck of your praise and you!But the wronged great souls—can they be quitOf a world where all their work is to do,Where you style them, you of the little wit,Old Master this and Early the other,Not dreaming that Old and New are fellows,That a younger succeeds to an elder brother,Da Vincis derive in good time from Dellos.
9.And here where your praise would yield returnsAnd a handsome word or two give help,Here, after your kind, the mastiff girnsAnd the puppy pack of poodles yelp.What, not a word for Stefano there—Of brow once prominent and starry,Called Nature's ape and the world's despairFor his peerless painting (see Vasari)?
10.There he stands now. Study, my friends,What a man's work comes to! so he plans it,Performs it, perfects it, makes amendsFor the toiling and moiling, and there's its transit!Happier the thrifty blind-folk labour,With upturned eye while the hand is busy,Not sidling a glance at the coin of their neighbour!'Tis looking downward makes one dizzy.
11.If you knew their work you would deal your dole.May I take upon me to instruct you?When Greek Art ran and reached the goal,Thus much had the world to boast in fructu—The truth of Man, as by God first spoken,Which the actual generations garble,Was re-uttered,—and Soul (which Limbs betoken)And Limbs (Soul informs) were made new in marble.
12.So you saw yourself as you wished you were,As you might have been, as you cannot be;And bringing your own shortcomings there,You grew content in your poor degreeWith your little power, by those statues' godhead,And your little scope, by their eyes' full sway,And your little grace, by their grace embodied,And your little date, by their forms that stay.
13.You would fain be kinglier, say than I am?Even so, you will not sit like Theseus.You'd fain be a model? the Son of PriamHas yet the advantage in arms' and knees' use.You're wroth—can you slay your snake like Apollo?You're grieved—still Niobe's the grander!You live—there's the Racers' frieze to follow—You die—there's the dying Alexander.
14.So, testing your weakness by their strength,Your meagre charms by their rounded beauty,Measured by Art in your breadth and length,You learn to submit is the worsted's duty.—When I say "you" 'tis the common soul,The collective, I mean—the race of ManThat receives life in parts to live in a whole,And grow here according to God's own plan.
15.Growth came when, looking your last on them all,You turned your eyes inwardly one fine dayAnd cried with a start—What if we so smallAre greater, ay, greater the while than they!Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature?In both, of such lower types are wePrecisely because of our wider nature;For time, theirs—ours, for eternity.
16.To-day's brief passion limits their range,It seethes with the morrow for us and more.They are perfect—how else? they shall never change:We are faulty—why not? we have time in store.The Artificer's hand is not arrestedWith us—we are rough-hewn, no-wise polished:They stand for our copy, and, once investedWith all they can teach, we shall see them abolished.
17.'Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven—The better! what's come to perfection perishes.Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven.Works done least rapidly, Art most cherishes.Thyself shall afford the example, Giotto!Thy one work, not to decrease or diminish,Done at a stroke, was just (was it not?) "O!"Thy great Campanile is still to finish.
18.Is it true, we are now, and shall be hereafter,And what—is depending on life's one minute?Hails heavenly cheer or infernal laughterOur first step out of the gulf or in it?And Man, this step within his endeavour,His face, have no more play and actionThan joy which is crystallized for ever,Or grief, an eternal petrifaction!
19.On which I conclude, that the early painters,To cries of "Greek Art and what more wish you?"—Replied, "Become now self-acquainters,And paint man, man,—whatever the issue!Make the hopes shine through the flesh they fray,New fears aggrandise the rags and tatters.So bring the invisible full into play,Let the visible go to the dogs—what matters?"
20.Give these, I say, full honour and gloryFor daring so much, before they well did it.The first of the new, in our race's story,Beats the last of the old, 'tis no idle quiddit.The worthies began a revolutionWhich if on the earth we intend to acknowledgeHonour them now—(ends my allocution)Nor confer our degree when the folks leave college.
21.There's a fancy some lean to and others hate—That, when this life is ended, beginsNew work for the soul in another state,Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins—Where the strong and the weak, this world's congeries,Repeat in large what they practised in small,Through life after life in unlimited series;Only the scale's to be changed, that's all.
22.Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seenBy the means of Evil that Good is best,And through earth and its noise, what is heaven's serene,—When its faith in the same has stood the test—Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod,The uses of labour are surely done.There remaineth a rest for the people of God,And I have had troubles enough for one.
23.But at any rate I have loved the seasonOf Art's spring-birth so dim and dewy,My sculptor is Nicolo the Pisan;My painter—who but Cimabue?Nor ever was man of them all indeed,From these to Ghiberti and Ghirlandajo,Could say that he missed my critic-meed.So now to my special grievance—heigh ho!
24.Their ghosts now stand, as I said before,Watching each fresco flaked and rasped,Blocked up, knocked out, or whitewashed o'er—No getting again what the church has grasped!The works on the wall must take their chance,"Works never conceded to England's thick clime!"(I hope they prefer their inheritanceOf a bucketful of Italian quick-lime.)
25.When they go at length, with such a shakingOf heads o'er the old delusions, sadlyEach master his way through the black streets taking,Where many a lost work breathes though badly—Why don't they bethink them of who has merited?Why not reveal, while their pictures dreeSuch doom, that a captive's to be out-ferreted?Why do they never remember me?
26.Not that I expect the great BigordiNor Sandro to hear me, chivalric, bellicose;Nor wronged Lippino—and not a word ISay of a scrap of Fra Angelico's.But are you too fine, Taddeo Gaddi,To grant me a taste of your intonaco—Some Jerome that seeks the heaven with a sad eye?No churlish saint, Lorenzo Monaco?
27.Could not the ghost with the close red cap,My Pollajolo, the twice a craftsman,Save me a sample, give me the hapOf a muscular Christ that shows the draughtsman?No Virgin by him, the somewhat petty,Of finical touch and tempera crumbly—Could not Alesso BaldovinettiContribute so much, I ask him humbly?
28.Margheritone of Arezzo,With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret,(Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so,You bald, saturnine, poll-clawed parrot?)No poor glimmering Crucifixion,Where in the foreground kneels the donor?If such remain, as is my conviction,The hoarding does you but little honour.
29.They pass for them the panels may thrill,The tempera grow alive and tinglish—Rot or are left to the mercies stillOf dealers and stealers, Jews and the English!Seeing mere money's worth in their prize,Who sell it to some one calm as ZenoAt naked Art, and in ecstaciesBefore some clay-cold, vile Carlino!
30.No matter for these! But Giotto, you,Have you allowed, as the town-tongues babble it,Never! it shall not be counted true—That a certain precious little tabletWhich Buonarroti eyed like a lover,—Buried so long in oblivion's womb,Was left for another than I to discover,—Turns up at last, and to whom?—to whom?
31.I, that have haunted the dim San Spirito,(Or was it rather the Ognissanti?)Stood on the altar-steps, patient and weary too!Nay, I shall have it yet, detur amanti!My Koh-i-noor—or (if that's a platitude)Jewel of Giamschid, the Persian Sofi's eye!So, in anticipative gratitude,What if I take up my hope and prophesy?
32.When the hour is ripe, and a certain dotardPitched, no parcel that needs invoicing,To the worse side of the Mont St. Gothard,Have, to begin by way of rejoicing,None of that shooting the sky (blank cartridge),No civic guards, all plumes and lacquer,Hunting Radetzky's soul like a partridgeOver Morello with squib and cracker.
33.We'll shoot this time better game and bag 'em hot—No display at the stone of Dante,But a kind of Witan-agemot("Casa Guidi," quod videas ante)To ponder Freedom restored to Florence,How Art may return that departed with her.Go, hated house, go each trace of the Loraine's!And bring us the days of Orgagna hither.
34.How we shall prologuise, how we shall perorate,Say fit things upon art and history—Set truth at blood-heat and the false at a zero rate,Make of the want of the age no mystery!Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras,Show, monarchy its uncouth cub licksOut of the bear's shape to the chimæra's—Pure Art's birth being still the republic's!
35.Then one shall propose (in a speech, curt Tuscan,Sober, expurgate, spare of an "issimo,")Ending our half-told tale of Cambuscan,Turning the Bell-tower's altaltissimo.And fine as the beak of a young beccacciaThe Campanile, the Duomo's fit ally,Soars up in gold its full fifty braccia,Completing Florence, as Florence, Italy.
36.Shall I be alive that morning the scaffoldIs broken away, and the long-pent fireLike the golden hope of the world unbaffledSprings from its sleep, and up goes the spire—As, "God and the People" plain for its motto,Thence the new tricolor flaps at the sky?Foreseeing the day that vindicates GiottoAnd Florence together, the first am I!