incentive, not to better work, but to work that will make more money.

It is dusk now, and they go in. She is in haste to go to a certain "cousin." He wishes her to stay this evening, if only that he may dream of one great picture "a virgin, not his wife this time"-that should justify the praise of Agnolo, and after that he will find her the money she wants. But no; he will never, he sees, do better work here. Will he anywhere take his place with the great ones? He does not know; he knows only the bondage he cannot break.

In "Andrea del Sarto," then, we have a study of character, and of art as qualified by character. The study of character is both exact and gentle. Candid self-judgment is the quality of men like Andrea. He describes himself and his work frankly, touching the source of evils in life and art. He is weak, and his art limited. His love for a selfish, worldly woman. has been a hindrance; but a radical and insuperable hindrance lay in himself. He has not the passion or stuff of the higher minds; their power and their divine necessity are both wanting to him. He can express well what is in him, and there is nothing in him he cannot express; but his mastery and expression are adequate just because his thoughts are inadequate to the life of man and the meaning of the world. His technical perfection results from his limitation. That perfection is not the highest note of art. In the highest art a certain incompleteness may be the result of greatness, and great work is often true and sug

gestive because of that incompleteness which conveys the artist's sense of the greatness of his theme-or even Fra Lippo's sense of the wonder and beauty of the world, and of man's life in it.

Then these poems, taken together, touch certain ideas in the history of art. The early masters went beyond Greek art so far as they expressed the Christian ideal. But they missed truth and greatness in art, not only for technical reasons, but because of their ascetic view of the Christian ideal. With the Renaissance came a new impulse and idea-the impulse of free enjoyment and the antique idea of life and beauty. These ideals could not, as then seen, be combined; and not only did art fail for that reason, but life had become worldly and corrupt, and the old motives and ideas had lost their inspiring power and sincerity, as the temper and work of Andrea clearly show.

And, taken with "Pictor Ignotus," which is put with them, these poems are studies of unfulfilled lives. Lippi through circumstances, Andrea through moral defects, and the unknown painter through moral sensibility and ascetic ardour, fail to reach an ideal they see; and the fact is very general, so general that it must be accounted for, which this poet does by regarding life with reference to the "soul," and by taking fidelity and aspiration as its measure.

CHAPTER XVI.

POEMS ON ART: CHIEFLY POETRY.

BROWNING has shared our age's romantic interest in art. He has also shared its interest in art-theories, and most of his poems on art have a critical quality. It is matter of regret to some that since Goethe's days our artists have been so often occupied with these points. They hold that art should be instinctive, and think it has been made self-conscious by all this criticism. It is, to a great extent, a result of the intellectual and inward quality of our interests and work-our self-consciousness has produced the criticism, if it has also been increased by it.

And since the days of "Sordello," which so strongly expressed the poet's theoretic and ethical interest in art, he has touched these things with power and strong sense. The poems on art we have still to consider are mainly of this critical kind, and if their ideas should not seem, after all our criticism, original, they throw light on the poet's mind and aims, and put forcibly his ideas about his own art.

1. We take a group dealing with the conditions of art in the lives of the artists. The story of the sculptor in "Pippa Passes" bears finely on this. The love into which he has been entrapped reveals to him a principle higher than he had yet known, shows him how helpful love is, how it is the true principle of life and work. True work must rest on the true spirit and the right relation to men-must be made in a spirit of pure service.

"Youth and Art" (vi. 154) has the same truth. Two artists, one a woman and a singer, the other a man and a sculptor, lived in their early days of struggle in opposite garrets. They had something more than kindness for each other, and might have helped each other. But, with fame and fortune to make, they had no room in their lives for simple love. They have made, not all they wished, but some part of what they hoped, of both now, yet she feels something lost never to be gained. They are worldly and cold, and you know their art is less because they are So. With more of the heart, and less of the world, their lives had been happier and their art higher.

"Pictor Ignotus" (v. 231) touches the above point, and the next to be considered. As the poet has put this poem, made in 1845, with his "Men and Women," and in the Renaissance series, he means it as a study of the meeting of the older, religious, and freer popular The work and breath of a new time were round the painter-breath of popular interest and work of popular appeal. He would gladly have made such

art.

work, and had the joy of the fuller passion and the wider service. Why not make the work, then? Because he saw that popular work must reflect and gratify the popular mind. He would not degrade his art to that. And so he made his choice-the cloister with its seclusion and its integrity. He has missed fame, but he has kept his aims true, his heart pure. With his proud self-respect and severe conscience this was his only course, and, though he feels the loss of influence, and feels too the narrow scope, the cold and shadowy quality of his art, he rests in the conviction that it could not have been other than it is without loss of that inward honour which to such as he is more than life.

The poem called "Shop," with its blunt phrase and tone, bears on life, but touches the artist as well as the merchant. Its main point is the folly and essential poverty of those who have no life or interest except in their trade or calling; who starve and crush the man into a hole behind the "shop." There are writers who have no life except in their books, artists to whom nothing has interest except their pictures. The man and the work both suffer in such cases. The best work requires a man's free soul and true life behind it.

2. Our next group is one dealing with the relations of the popular judgment to art. And first, "Respectability" (iii. 201). This is its theme. An artist and his wife have had a free ramble in Paris, with picturesque views of the city's life. But what would the world,