Landor's Imaginary Conversation between Fra Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius the Fourth. Works, 1846, ii. 82, col. 1. "In fact there were only two genuine abbates, the third was Donna Lisetta, the good canonico's pretty niece, who looks so archly at your Holiness when you bend your knees before her at bed-time. Eugenius How? Where? Filippo. She is the angel on the right hand side of the Holy Family, with a tip of amethyst-coloured wing over a basket of figs and pomegranates. I painted her from memory: she was then only fifteen, and worthy to be the niece of an archbishop. Eugenius. Poor soul! So this is the angel with the amethyst-coloured wing? I thought she looked wanton.." As to M. Etienne's review in the Deux Mondes, p. 96 above:-When Browning wrote this poem, he knew that the mastership or pupilship of Fra Lippo to Masaccio (cald 'Guidi' in the poem), and vice versa, was a moot point; but in making Fra Lippo the master, he followed the best authority he had access to, the last edition of Vasari, as he stated in a Letter to the 'Pall Mall' at the time, in answer to M. Etienne. Since then, he finds that the latest enquirer into the subject, Morelli, believes the fact is the other way, and that Fra Lippo was the pupil. p. 54. (70) The incident of the horse in Childe Roland was imagined from a red horse with a glaring eye standing behind a dun one, on the right hand of a large tapestry that still hangs in Browning's drawing-room. The story is not an allegory, but simply a vivid dramatic piece, written in 1 day as pure imagining. p. 54. (73) The Bust was invented by Br. The Statue is that of the "GreatDuke Ferdinand" in the Square of the Santissima Annunziata, Florence. Fotografs of it will perhaps be orderd for all the Members of the Society next year. p. 54. (78) The Patriot was not meant for Arnold of Brescia. p. 54. (80) Note that tho Blougram exposes himself, he yet beats Gigadibs from his position, and sends him off to earn his bread in the Colonies. p. 55 (no. 82). Andrea del Sarto. A most interesting thing has just happend to me about this poem. On Saturday night, Nov. 19, 1881, the following letter reacht me : "MY DEAR SIR, "35, Piazza del Duomo, Florence, 16. 11. 81. "In the gallery of the Pitti palace, numbered in the catalogue 118, and painted by Andrea del Sarto, is a portrait of himself and his wife. I think no one can look at this picture, with Browning's most beautiful poem in his mind, without being deeply moved, and without feeling at the same time sure that it was from this picture that the poet received the impulse to his work. The mere facts (as we all know) are as old at least as Vasari. "As a student, Browning's deep penetration into matters of art has always delighted me. His clear divination of the restless individualities that can be subjugated, and lost sometimes to a careless eye, in the exhibition of the ordered graces of art (whether that art be a painter's, a musician's, or a poet's), he has shown again and again. There is a great band of artists-in all kinds-to whom he has revealed himself as a true friend; and we love him because he first loved us. The poem of Andrea del Sarto exhibits this power of penetration in a remarkable degree. Any one who has sat, as I have, looking at the picture of which I write, will feel that the poem is true-not merely typically but historically. "The catalogue says: "The painter, seen in three-quarter face, appears by the gesture of his left hand to appeal to his wife Lucrezia Fede. His right hand rests on her shoulder (his arm is around her, I may remark-an act of tenderness which has much to do with the pathos of the composition). Lucrezia is presented in full face, with a golden chain on her neck, and a letter in her hands.' "The artist and his wife are represented at half length. Andrea turns towards her with a pleading expression on his face-a face not so beautiful as that in the splendid portrait in the National Gallery; but when once felt, it strikes a deeper chord. It wears an expression that cannot be forgotten--that nothing can suggest 1 but the poem of Browning. Andrea's right arm, as I said, is round her; he leans forward as if searching her face for the strength that has gone from himself. She is beautiful. have seen the face (varied as a musician varies his theme) in a hundred pictures. She holds the letter in her hand, and looks neither at that nor at him, but straight out of the canvas. And the beautiful face, with the red brown hair, is passive and unruffled, and awfully expressionless. 'I've but one simile, and that's a blunder, For a proud angry woman, and that's silent thunder!' writes Byron (I will not vouch for my quotation). There is 'silent thunder' in this face if there ever was, tho' there is no anger. It suggests only a very mild, and at the same time immutable determination to have her own way'. It seems rather a personification of obstinacy in the female type (which would have looked well in stone, had the Greeks thought of it) than a portrait. She is a magnificent Rosamund Vincy, and will lure her husband to his own damnation as kindly and surely as George Eliot's heroine does the unfortunate Lydgate [in Middlemarch ']. "There is no photograph of this picture, or I should have sent you one. Really whilst looking at it the words of the poem come little by little into my mind, and it seems as if I had read them in Andrea's face. And so now when I read it in my room, the picture is almost as vividly before me as when I am in the gallery, so completely do the two seem complementary. Wishing your society all success, "I remain, my dear Sir, yours very truly, "ERNEST RADFORD." On Sunday morning, Nov. 20, some 14 hours after the letter above came, I askt Browning whether the Pitti picture had suggested his picture. He said, Yes, it had. Mr. Kenyon, his wife's old friend and his own, had askt him to buy for him, Mr. K., a copy of the Pitti Andrea. None was on sale, or to be got; and so Browning, as he couldn't send a copy of the painting, wrote what it told him in words, and sent his poem to Mr. Kenyon. Mr. Radford's letter is at once a witness to his own penetration, and to the power and truth of Browning's creative art,-which makes us claim him as the greatest "Maker," and master of characterization, since Shakspere. p. 55. (88) The Queen's part seems to me the intensest in Br.'s dramatic work. p. 55. (89) Note Br.'s love for Italy, and cp. the end of the Italian review, p. 139 abuv. p. 55. (93) Alinari has the commission to get a good foto of Guercino's 'Angel,' and print copies for all our Members. 1 Compare Hawthorne: 1858, Sept. 10. "I paid a visit to the gallery of the Pitti Palace. There is too large an intermixture of Andrea del Sarto's pictures in this gallery; everywhere you see them, cold, proper, and uncriticisable, looking so much like first-rate excellence, that you inevitably quarrel with your own taste for not admiring them . . . "It was one of those days when my mind misgives me whether the pictorial art be not a humbug, and when the minute accuracy of a fly in a Dutch picture of fruit and flowers seems to me something more reliable than the master-touches of Raphael." Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ii. 165. (But see p. 118 for H.'s comments on a Pitti Raphael, and p. 60 for those on Titian's Magdalen: She a penitent! She would shake off all pretence to it as easily as she would shake aside that clustering hair. . . Titian must have been a very good-for-nothing old man." But H. is at home on Englishmen : see p. 176-9.) 2 I have orderd one to be made for the Society, and every Member will have two copies. But the negative will have to be much toucht. The pure foto is a mere blotch. Mr. J. Dykes Campbell will see that Alinari does the work rightly. So again : p. 56. (102) In this Br. remonstrates with himself, and points out, dramatically, his own fault: he speaks naked thoughts,' whilst Song' is his art. "But here's your fault: 'grown men want thought' you think; "Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse:' Boys seek for images and melody; Men have reason. . . . QUITE OTHERWISE. [Men don't want thought, they want pleasure, emotion.] p. 56. (105) Ben Karshook had better be scand as iambics. p. 57. In 1862 came out 'Last Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. London. 1862. R. B. wrote the Dedication—“To‘Grateful Florence' [see p. 111 above], to the Municipa.ity, her Representative, and to Tommaseo, its Spokesman, most gratefully," and the "Advertisement. These Poems are given as they occur on a list drawn up last June. A few had already been printed in periodicals. There is hardly such direct warrant for publishing the Translations; which were only intended, many years ago, to accompany and explain certain Engravings after ancient Gems, in the projected work of a friend, by whose kindness they are now recovered but as two of the original series (the 'Adonis' of Bion, and Song to the Rose' from Achilles Tatius) have subsequently appeared, it is presumed that the remainder may not improperly follow. A single recent version is added. London, February, 1862." : p. 59. (107) This tells the gradual estrangement of a low-natured husband from a noble-natured artistic wife, and their separation in § IX. In § VIII the peazant girl has been sitting as a model to the artist-wife. The girl's coarse hand is, I suppoze, a lesson to teach the wife that, tho her earthly love leaves her, there's plenty of work for her to do in the world, and then heaven to follow. In § VI the wife speaks, as in all the other stanzas. p. 61. (113) Rabbi Ben Ezra or Ibn Ezra was a learned Jew, 1092-1167, A.D. He must not be confuzed with the only man of the name in the Biogr. Universelle :-— "EZRA (Juan-Josafat Ben), pseudonyme de l'auteur inconnu de la Venida del Mezius (the Coming of the Messiah). On croit que cet auteur était Américain et vivait vers le milieu du dix-huitième siècle. On trouve dans son livre une érudition étendue et une critique hardie. Cet ouvrage a été réédité par P. de Chamrobert, sous le titre de La Venida del Mezias en gloria y magestad; edicion emendada particularmente en cuanto a las citas; Paris, 1826, 5 vol. in 12.-P. de Chamrobert. Préface de son édition. -Wolf, Bibliotheca Hebraica,-Rossi, Dizionario storico degli Autori Ebrei.' Ibn Ezra, and Maimonides, whom he is said to have visited in Egypt, were two of the four great Philosophers or Lights of the Jews in the Middle Ages. Ibn Ezra was born at Toledo in Spain, about 1092 or 1093 A.D., or in 1088 according to Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vi. 198. He was poor, but studied hard, composed poems wherewith to "Adorn my own, my Hebrew nation," married, had a son Isaac (a poet too), traveld to Africa, the Holy Land, Rome in 1140, Persia, India, Italy, France, England. He wrote many treatises, on Hebrew Grammar, astronomy, mathematics, &c., commentaries on the books of the Bible, &c.-many of them in Rome-and two pamflets in England 'for a certain Salomon of London.' Joseph of Maudeville was one of his English pupils. He died in 1167, at the age of 75, either in Kalahorra, on the frontier of Navarre, or in Rome. His commentary on Isaiah has been englisht by M. Friedländer, and publisht by the Society of Hebrew Literature, Trübner, 1873. From the Introduction to that book I take these details. Ibn Ezra believd in a future life. In his Commentary on Isaiah lv. 3, "And your soul shall live," he says (p. 253), "That is, your soul shall live for ever after the death of the body, or you will receive new life through Messiah, when you will return to the Divine Law." See also p. 168, on Isaiah xxxix. 18. Of the potter's clay passage, Is. xxix. 16, he has only a translation, "Shall man be esteemed as the potter's clay,' and no comment that could have given Browning a hint for his use of the metaphor in his poem, even if he had ever seen Ibn Ezra's commentary. p. 61. (122) Apparent Failure: the bodies were seen in the Morgue by Browning himself. p. 61. (113) See Rabbi ben Ezra's fine "Song of Death" in stanzas 12-20 of the grimly humourous Holy-Cross Day, no. 92. p. 62. In the reading of Luria at our house in November last, I noted many improvements in the text in the '68 edition as compar'd with my '63 one. Probably many other poems and plays were revized for the new 6-vol. edition. And Mr. Ernest Radford has made another interesting discovery about Br.'s sympathy with Art. In Luria I. 121-7, the Secretary tells Braccio that Luria drew the charcoal sketch that attracted his notice, a Moorish front to the unfinisht Duomo or Cathedral of Florence, typifying Luria's leadership of the Florentine army. Br. makes Braccio say, 'I see: A Moorish front, nor of such ill design!" Br. had instinctively felt that the lines of the Duomo lent themselves to eastern treatment. Well, Mr. Radford, poking about, went to a small and rarely visited museum, cald the Opera del Duomo, containing drawings and models relating to the Cathedral, and there his eye was caught by a drawing of the Duomo completed by a Moorish front (drawn in 1822, and given to the Museum in 1833). Some architect or artist had been moved by the same feeling as Br., and had carried it out on paper. Br. had of course never seen or heard of this drawing. p. 65. (127) Hervé Riel: the facts of the story had been forgotten and were denied at St. Malo, but the Reports to the French Admiralty at the time were lookt up, and the facts establisht. See the account in the Promenade au Croisic, par Gustave Grandpré, iii. 186, and Notes sur le Croisic, par Caillo Jeune, p. 67, a 'Croisic Guide-Book.' Browning's only alteration is that Hervé Riel's holiday to see his wife "La Belle Aurore," was not to last a day only, but his life-tine: ce brave homme ne demanda pour récompense d'un service aussi signalé, qu'un congé absolu pour rejoindre sa femme, qu'il nommait la Belle Aurore." The battle of La Hogue was fought on May 19, 1692. 66 p. 66. (129) Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.1 Mrs. Orr on: "The Emperor is supposed to describe or imagine the leading actions of his reign under three different aspects as they appear in the light of his own conscience, as they would have been if they had conformed to a general rule of right, and as they must have appeared to those who measured them by such a rule. He begins by admitting and defending his wavering policy as dictated by the highest expedience; and then proceeds to enumerate the acts and motives which eulogistic historians of the Thiers and Hugo type would impute to him; opposing to this ideal version, step by step, the rejected suggestions of sagacity, which depict his actual thoughts and deeds in the obvious shallowness of their temporizing worldly wisdom. The argument which occupies the first half of the book is an elaborate vindication of the policy of leaving things as they are, saving only such improvement as implies no radical change. A piece of paper lying close to the speaker's hand supplies him with an illustration. The paper has two blots upon it, and he mechanically draws a line from one to the other; it does not occur to him to make a third, but it does occur to him to connect the two already made. That he does this, and no more, is typical of his conduct through life. He has not been gifted with the genius that could create, but he has been gifted with the sober intelligence which appreciates the risk of destroying. The great renewing changes of life are wrought by special agencies and under special conditions, as in the physical world. . . . And he is convinced that the highest wisdom of a non-inspired ruler is to assist those who are subject to his rule, to live the life into which they were born, trusting to the deeper laws of existence to vindicate good through evil, and perfection through imperfection. He too has recognized the destroying folly of sects and opinions, (p. 939) but he has seen that to suppress the one would be to give predominance to the other, and has thought it best to leave truth to assert itself in the balance of error; he has thought society best saved by being left alone. He too has had dreams of a higher utility . . . 'Hear ye not still "Be Italy again"?' But with the time for action had come a new sense of responsibility; nearer duties to fulfil, more urgent needs to satisfy; mouths craving food, hands craving work, eyes that begged only for the light of life-and he has worked first for these. In this strain he continues.. At the end of the book [is] an appeal, half playful, half pathetic, from the vanity of words to the incommuni 1 Hohen Schwangau is one of the Castles of the King of Bavaria. He disappeard suddenly from it, just before Christmas, 1881. cable essence of individual truth." (On p. 946-7 Mrs. Orr expounds her view that "The dominant impression that all truth is a question of circumstance, and consequently all picturesque force a question of detail, explains every peculiarity of form and conception [in Br.]. It explains more or less directly everything that charms us in his writings, and everything that repels us." I hope other readers who turn to the passage will get more help from it than I have been able to do.) p. 71 (no. 166). Pietro of Abano. In Bp. Thirlwall's 'Letters to a Friend,' 1881, ii. 77-9, is a story like Peter's. "A young student calls on Don Manuel at Seville, and asks for a spell to get him along in life. Don Manuel calls to his housekeeper, 'Jacinta, roast the partridges. Don Diego will stay to dinner.' The student makes a grand career; is Dean, Bishop, and then Pope soon after he is fourty. When Don Manuel calls on him in Rome, he threatens the magician, who has made him, with the prisons of the Holy Office. And then hears Don Manuel call out, Jacinta, you need not put down the partridges. Don Diego will not stay to dinner.' And, lo! Diego found himself at Don Manuel's door, with his way yet to make in the world." This is from an englishing of an old Spanish collection of stories, El Conde Lucanor. Mr. Matthew gives me the reference. Mr. Garnett has since handed me a cutting from the 'St. James's Gazette' of Aug. 1880, telling the same story from the German poet Chamisso, who had versified it, but treated it simply as an anecdote. Mr. Sharpe's Paper on this Poem (below) is an admirable one. p. 72. Browning's Printed Letters. Jn. Forster cites several to himself from R. B. about Landor, in his 'W. S. Landor, a Biography,' 1869. ii. 563 (Aug. 13, 1859); ii. 565-6 (close of August, Sept. 5, and Oct. 1859); ii. 566 (Dec. 9, 1859); ii. 570 (June 15, 1860). See too mentions of B. on ii. 576, 590; and i. 178. In 1859, Landor wrote to Forster: "Nothing can exceed Mr. Browning's continued kindness. Life would be almost worth keeping for that recollection alone.' ii. 568. Mr. Domett has printed part of a letter of R. B. to him in 1872, on his poem 'Ranolf and Amohia,' in a sheet of critical Notices of that poem. p. 90. Landor's short poem "To Robert Browning" first appeard in 'The Morning Chronicle,' Saturday, Nov. 22, 1845, p. 5, col. 1, at foot. p. 102. Mr. Domett's lines are from his 'Ranolf and Amohia,' 1872, Canto XIX, p. 342-3. As the copy sent me before was not correct, I print them again :— 'strange melodies' That lustrous Song-Child languished to impart, Breathing his boundless Love through boundless Art Impassioned Seraph, from his mint of gold By our full-handed Master-Maker flung; By him, whose lays, like eagles, still upwheeling Blasting the Real to its own dumb despair,- In words condensed to diamond, indite A lay dark-splendid as star-spangled Night :- |