Selections From The Poems And Plays Of Robert Browning Part 39

UP AT A VILLA--DOWN IN THE CITY

"It is an admirable piece of work crowded with keen descriptions of Nature in the Casentino, and of life in the streets of Florence. And every piece of description is so filled with the character of the 'Italian person of quality' who describes them--a petulant, humorous, easily angered, happy, observant, ignorant, poor gentleman--that Browning entirely disappears. The poem retains for us in its verse, and indeed in its light rhythm, the childlikeness, the navete, the simple pleasures, the ignorance and the honest boredom with the solitudes of Nature--of a whole cla.s.s of Italians, not only of the time when it was written, but of the present day. It is a delightful, inventive piece of gay and pictorial humor." (Stopford Brooke, _The Poetry of Browning_, p.

322.)

33. _Corn._ In Great Britain the word is generally applied to wheat, rye, oats, and barley, not to maize as in America.

34. _Stinking hemp._ In Chapter I of James Lane Allen's _The Reign of Law_ is the following pa.s.sage on the odor of the hemp-field: "And now borne far through the steaming air floats an odor, balsamic, startling: the odor of those plumes and stalks and blossoms from which is exuding freely the narcotic resin of the great nettle." When the long swaths of cut hemp lies across the field, the smell is represented as strongest, "impregnating the clothing of the men, spreading far throughout the air." To many this odor is essentially unpleasant.

42. _Pulcinello-trumpet._ Pulcinello was originally the clown in the Neapolitan comedy. Later he became the Punch in Punch and Judy shows.

The trumpet announces that one of these puppet plays is to be given in the public square.

43. _Scene-picture._ A picture advertising the new play.

44. _Liberal thieves._ Members of the liberal party, the party striving for Italian independence. The Person of Quality is, of course, of the aristocratic party.

47. _A sonnet._ Laudatory poetical tributes with ornamental borders were posted in public places as a method of doing homage. In this case the unknown "Reverend Don So-and-so" is ranked by his admirer with Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, the greatest Italian poets; with St. Jerome, one of the most celebrated Fathers of the Latin Church; with Cicero, one of the greatest of Roman orators; and with St. Paul, the greatest of Christian preachers.

51. _Our Lady._ The seven swords represent symbolically the seven sorrows of the Virgin Mary, but this Person of Quality regards the gilt swords and the smart pink gowns merely as gay decorations. Religious processions of the sort described here and in lines 60-64 are frequent in European countries.

55. _It's dear._ According to the system of taxation in Italy, town dues must be paid on all provisions brought into the city.

60. _Yellow candles._ Used at funerals and in penitential processions in the Roman Church.

A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI'S

Mrs. Ireland says of this poem: "The Toccata as a form of composition is not the measured, deliberate working-out of some central musical theme as is the Sonata or _sound_-piece. The _Toccata_, in its early and pure form, possessed no decided subject, made such by repet.i.tion, but bore rather the form of a capricious Improvisation, or 'Impromptu.'" ("A Toccata of Galuppi's" by Mrs. Alexander Ireland, published in _London Browning Society Papers_.)

1. _Galuppi._ Balda.s.sare Galuppi (1706-1784) was an Italian composer born near Venice. He spent many years in England and Russia. In 1768 he became organist at St. Mark's, Venice.

4. _Your old music._ At the sound of the music Browning imaginatively re-creates the Venetian social life of the eighteenth century.

6. _St. Mark's._ The great cathedral. The Doge of Venice used to throw a ring into the sea from the s.h.i.+p _Bucentaur_ to "denote that the Adriatic was subject to the republic of Venice as a wife is subject to her husband."

8. _Shylock's bridge._ The Rialto, a bridge over the Grand Ca.n.a.l. It has two rows of shops under arcades.

18. _Clavichord._ An instrument with keys and strings, something like a piano.

19-30. The musical terms in these lines show Browning's knowledge of the technicalities of the art. To one without such expert knowledge the exact musical connotation is doubtless obscure. But the epithets and phrases are in themselves sufficient to suggest the varying moods of the Venetian merrymakers. The plaintiveness, the sighs, the sense of death, the trembling hope that life may last, the renewed love-making, the new round of futile pleasures or evil deeds, the end of it all in the grave, are clearly brought forth. An elaborate explanation of the musical terms is given in the notes to the Camberwell edition of Browning's poems.

31. _But when I sit down to reason._ The first thirty lines of the poem have recorded the effect of the music in re-creating in the poet's imagination the gay, careless life of eighteenth century Venice, and its close in death. Now when the poet endeavors to turn from that picture of death lurking under smiles, he finds that the cold music has filled his mind with an inescapable sense of the futility of life, and even his own chosen mental activities seem to him, along with the rest, hardly more than dust and ashes. Ambition and enthusiasm fade before the spell of the music.

OLD PICTURES IN FLORENCE

3. _Aloed arch._ The genus aloe includes trees, shrubs, and herbs. The American variety is the century-plant. Browning's hill-side villa evidently had aloes trained to grow in an arch.

15. _The startling bell-tower Giotto raised._ Giotto began the Campanile in 1334, and after his death in 1337 the work was continued by Andrea Pisano. Its striking beauty impresses the poet as he looks out over the city. But it does more than that, for it rouses in him reflections on the progress and meaning of art.

17-24. The address to Giotto, thrown in here as it is with conversational freedom, is partially explained in lines 184-248. See note on l. 236.

30. _By a gift G.o.d grants me._ The power to re-create vividly and minutely the past. The artists of bygone centuries are called back by his imagination to their old haunts in Florence.

44. _Stands One._ The "one" (l. 44), "a lion" (l. 47), "the wronged great soul" (l. 48), and "the wronged great souls" (l. 58), all refer to the unappreciated early artists.

50. _They._ That is, the famous great artists such as Michael Angelo and Raphael. Critics "hum and buzz" around them with praise to which they are indifferent.

59. _Where their work is all to do._ Their place in the development of art is not yet understood. It must be made clear, Browning thinks, that painters like Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) come in natural succession from earlier obscure artists like Dello, that art is a real and continuous record of the human mind and heart.

67. _The mastiff girns._ When some influential critic snarls, all the imitative inferior critics take the same tone. Cf. Sh.e.l.ley's "Adonais,"

stanzas 28, 37, 38.

69. _Stefano._ A pupil of Giotto and called "Nature's ape" because his accurate representations of the human body.

72. _Vasari._ Author of _Lives of the Most Eminent Painters and Sculptors_. (Published 1550. Translated by Mrs. Foster in _Bohn's Library_.) In his studies of art Browning made constant use of this book.

76. _Sic transit. Sic transit gloria mundi._ "So pa.s.ses away the glory of the world."

84. _In fructu._ "As fruit." The fruit of Greek art at its best was that it presented in marble ideally perfect human bodies.

98. _Theseus._ The kingly statue of the reclining Theseus in the frieze of the Parthenon.

99. _Son of Priam._ In the sculptures of aesina, Paris, the son of Priam, kneeling and drawing his bow, has a grace beyond that of any man who might think to pose as a model.

101. _Apollo._ At Delphi Apollo slew an enormous python.

102. _Niobe._ Through the vengeance of Apollo and Diana, Niobe's seven sons and seven daughters were all slain. In the Imperial Gallery of Florence there is a statue of Niobe clasping her last child.

103. _The Racer's frieze._ In the Parthenon.

104. _The dying Alexander._ A piece of ancient Greek sculpture at Florence.

108. _To submit is a mortal's duty._ The supreme beauty of the statues led men to content themselves with admiration and imitation.

113. _Growth came._ New life came to art when men ceased to rest in the perfect achievement of the past, and found a new realm opened up to them in representing the subtler activities of the soul. Lines 145-152 state the ideals that actuated the new art. The reference is to the religious art of the Italian Renaissance.

115-144. These lines sum up the reasons for the importance of the art that strives "to bring the invisible full into play" (l. 150). It may be rough-hewn and faulty; but it is greater and grander than Greek art because of its greater range, variety, and complexity, and because it reaches beyond any possible present perfection into eternity.

134. _Thy one work ... done at a stroke._ Giotto when asked for a proof of his skill to send to the Pope, drew with one stroke of his brush a perfect circle, whence the proverb, "Rounder than the O of Giotto."

156. _Quiddit._ Quibble. The humorous rhyme "did it--quiddit" is but one of the many whimsical rhyming effects in the poem. The use of a light, semi-jocose form to give the greater emphasis to serious subject-matter is characteristic of Browning. Lowell in "A Fable for Critics" employs the same device.

161-176. Not Browning's usual att.i.tude. Even this poem is a deification of progress through effort, not through repose.

178. _Art's spring-birth._ Nicolo the Pisan and Cimabue lived in the second half of the thirteenth century. From them to Ghiberti (1381-1455), who made the famous bronze doors of the Baptistry at Florence, and Ghirlandajo (1449-1494), a Florentine fresco painter, was a period in which Browning was especially interested. Mrs. Orr says that he owned pictures by all the artists mentioned here.

192. _Italian quicklime._ Many of the fine old Italian fresco paintings have been whitewashed over.