"The Guardian-Angel: a Picture at Fano." ("Dramatic Lyrics."
Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)
"Eurydice to Orpheus: a Picture by Leighton." ("Dramatis
Personæ." 1864.)
"A Face." ("Dramatis Personæ." 1864.)
"FRA LIPPO LIPPI" is a lively monologue, supposed to be uttered by that
friar himself, on the occasion of a night frolic in which he has been
surprised. Cosmo dei Medici had locked him up in one room of the palace
till some pictures he was painting for him should be finished;[73] and
on this particular night he has found the confinement intolerable. He
has whipped his bed clothes into a rope, scrambled down from his window,
and run after a girlish face which laughingly invited him from the
street; and was about to return from the equivocal neighbourhood into
which the fun had led him, when his monkish dress caught the attention
of the guard, and he was captured and called to account. He proceeds to
give a sketch of his life and opinions, which supplies a fair excuse for
the escapade. The facts he relates are, including this one, historical.
Fra Lippo Lippi had no vocation for the priesthood. He was enticed into
a Carmelite convent when a half-starved orphan of eight years old, ready
to subscribe to any arrangement which promised him enough to eat. There
he developed an extraordinary talent for drawing; and the Prior, glad to
turn it to account, gave him the cloisters and the church to paint. But
the rising artist had received his earliest inspirations in the streets.
His first practice had been gained in scrawling faces in his copybooks,
and expanding the notes of his musical texts into figures with arms and
legs. His conceptions were not sufficiently spiritual to satisfy the
Prior's ideal of Christian art. The men and women he painted were all
true to life. The simpler brethren were delighted as they recognized
each familar type. But the authorities looked grave at so much obtruding
of the flesh; and the Prior clearly laid down his theory that painting
was meant to inspire religious thoughts, and not to stifle them; and
must therefore show no more of the human body than was needed to image
forth the soul.
Fra Lippo Lippi comments freely and quaintly on the absurdity of showing
soul by means of bodies so ill-painted that no one can bear to dwell
upon them, as on the fallacy involved in all contempt for the earthly
life. "He will never believe that the world, with all its life and
beauty, is an unmeaning blank. He is sure, 'it means intensely and means
good.' He is sure, too, that to reproduce what is beautiful in it is
the mission of Art. If anyone objects, that the world being God's work,
Art cannot improve on it, and the painter will best leave it alone: he
answers that some things are the better for being painted; because, as
we are made, we love them best when we see them so. The artist has lent
his mind for us to see with. That is what Art means; what God wills in
giving it to us."
Nevertheless (he continues) he rubbed out his men and women; and though
now, with a Medici for his patron, he may paint as he likes, the old
schooling sticks to him.[74] And he works away at his saints, till
something comes to remind him that life is not a dream, and he kicks the
traces, as he has done now. He ends with a half-joking promise to make
the Church a gainer through his misconduct (supposing that the secret
has been kept from her), by a beautiful picture which he will paint by
way of atonement.
This picture, which he describes very humorously, is that of the
Coronation of the Virgin, now in the "Belle Arti" at Florence.[75]
ABT VOGLER is depicted at the moment when this composer of the last
century has "been extemporizing on the musical instrument of his
invention." His emotion has not yet subsided; and it is that of the
inspired musician, to whom harmonized sound is as the opening of a
heavenly world. His touch upon the keys has been as potent to charm, as
the utterance of that NAME which summoned into Solomon's presence the
creatures of Earth, Heaven, and Hell, and made them subservient to his
will. And the "slaves of the sound," whom he has conjured up, have
built him a palace more evanescent than Solomon's, but, as he describes
it, far more beautiful. They have laid its foundations below the earth.
They have carried its transparent walls up to the sky. They have tipped
each summit with meteoric fire. As earth strove upwards towards Heaven,
Heaven, in this enchanted structure, has yearned downwards towards the
earth. The great Dead came back; and those conceived for a happier
future walked before their time. New births of life and splendour united
far and near; the past, the present, and the to-come.
The vision has disappeared with the sounds which called it forth, and
the musician feels sorrowfully that it cannot be recalled: for the
effect was incommensurate with the cause; they had nothing in common
with each other. We can trace the processes of painting and verse; we
can explain their results. Art, however triumphant, is subject to
natural laws. But that which frames out of three notes of music "not a
fourth sound, but a star" is the Will, which is above law.
And, therefore, so Abt Vogler consoles himself, the music persists,
though it has passed from the sense of him who called it forth: for it
is an echo of the eternal life; a pledge of the reality of every
imagined good--of the continuance of whatever good has existed. Human
passion and aspiration are music sent up to Heaven, to be continued and
completed there. The secret of the scheme of creation is in the
musician's hands.
Having recognized this, Abt Vogler can subside, proudly and patiently,
on the common chord--the commonplace realities, of life.
"PICTOR IGNOTUS" (Florence, 15--), is the answer of an unknown painter
to the praise which he hears lavished on another man. He admits its
justice, but declares that he too could have deserved it; and his words
have all the bitterness of a suppressed longing which an unexpected
touch has set free. He, too, has dreamed of fame; and felt no limits to
his power of attaining it. But he saw, by some flash of intuition, that
it must be bought by the dishonour of his works; that, in order to bring
him fame, they must descend into the market, they must pass from hand to
hand; they must endure the shallowness of their purchasers' comments,
share in the pettiness of their lives. He has remained obscure, that his
creations might be guarded against this sacrilege. "He paints Madonnas
and saints in the twilight stillness of the cloister and the aisle; and
if his heart saddens at the endless repetition of the one heavenward
gaze, at least no merchant traffics in what he loves. There, where his
pictures have been born, mouldering in the dampness of the wall,
blackening in the smoke of the altar, amidst a silence broken only by
prayer, they may 'gently' and 'surely' die." He asks himself, as he
again subsides into mournful resignation, whether the applause of men
may not be neutralized at its best by the ignoble circumstances which it
entails.
"THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB AT SAINT PRAXED'S CHURCH" (Rome, 15--)
displays the artistic emotion in its least moral form: the love of the
merely beautiful as such; and it shows also how this may be degraded: by
connecting it in the mind of the given person, with the passion for
luxury, and the pride and jealousies of possession. The Bishop is at the
point of death. His sons (nominally nephews) are about him; and he is
urging on them anxious and minute directions for the tomb they are to
place for him in St. Praxed's church.
This tomb, as the Bishop has planned it, is a miracle of costliness and
beauty; for it is to secure him a double end: the indulgence of his own
tastes, and the humiliation of a former rival who lies modestly buried
in the same church. In the delirium of his weakness, these motives,
which we imagine always prominent, assume the strength of mania. His
limbs are already stiff; he feels himself growing into his own monument;
and his fancy revels in the sensations which will combine the calm of
death with the consciousness of sepulchral magnificence. He pleads, as
for dear life, with those who are to inherit his wealth, and who may at
their pleasure fulfil his last wishes or disregard them: that he may
have jasper for his tomb--basalt (black antique) for its slab--the
rosiest marble for its columns--the richest design for its bronze
frieze! A certain ball of lapis-lazuli (such as never yet was seen) is
to "poise" between his knees; and he gasps forth the secret of how he
saved this from the burning of his church, and buried it out of sight in
a vineyard, as if he were staking his very life on the revelation.
But in his heart he knows that his entreaties are useless: that his sons
will keep all they can; and the tone of entreaty is dashed with all the
petulance of foreseen disappointment. Weakness prevails at last. He
resigns himself to the inevitable; blesses his undutiful sons; and
dismisses them.