Robert Browning: How to Know Him | Page 5

a piece of music for Elizabeth, for in both of these arts he had attained moderate proficiency: but he wished not only to make a gift just for her, but to give it to her in public, with the whole world regarding; therefore it must be of his best.
He calls her his _moon_ of poets. He reminds her how a few days ago, they had seen the crescent moon in Florence, how they had seen it nightly waxing until it lamped the facade of San Miniato, while the nightingales, in ecstasy among the cypress trees, gave full-throated applause. Then they had travelled together to London, and now saw the same dispirited moon, saving up her silver parsimoniously, sink in gibbous meanness behind the chimney-tops.
The notable thing about the moon is that whereas the earth, during one revolution about the sun, turns on its own axis three hundred and sixty-five times, the shy moon takes exactly the same length of time to turn around as she takes to circle once around the earth. For this reason, earth's inhabitants have never seen but one side of the moon, and never will. Elizabeth Browning is _his_ moon, because she shows the other side to him alone. The radiant splendor of her poetry fills the whole earth with light; but to her husband she shows the other side, the loving, domestic woman, the unspeakably precious and intimate associate of his daily life. The world thinks it knows her; but it has seen only one side; it knows nothing of the marvellous depth and purity of her real nature.
ONE WORD MORE
TO E.B.B. 1855
I
There they are, my fifty men and women?Naming me the fifty poems finished!?Take them, Love, the book and me together:?Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.
II
Rafael made a century of sonnets,?Made and wrote them in a certain volume?Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil?Else he only used to draw Madonnas:?These, the world might view--but one, the volume.?Who that one, you ask? Your heart instructs you.?Did she live and love it all her life-time??Did she drop, his lady of the sonnets,?Die, and let it drop beside her pillow?Where it lay in place of Rafael's glory,?Rafael's cheek so duteous and so loving--?Cheek, the world was wont to hail a painter's,?Rafael's cheek, her love had turned a poet's?
III
You and I would rather read that volume,?(Taken to his beating bosom by it)?Lean and list the bosom-beats of Rafael,?Would we not? than wonder at Madonnas--?Her, San Sisto names, and Her, Foligno,?Her, that visits Florence in a vision,?Her, that's left with lilies in the Louvre--?Seen by us and all the world in circle.
IV
You and I will never read that volume.?Guido Reni, like his own eye's apple?Guarded long the treasure-book and loved it?Guido Reni dying, all Bologna?Cried, and the world cried too, "Ours, the treasure!"?Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.
V
Dante once prepared to paint an angel:?Whom to please? You whisper "Beatrice."?While he mused and traced it and retraced it,?(Peradventure with a pen corroded?Still by drops of that hot ink he dipped for,?When, his left-hand i' the hair o' the wicked,?Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma,?Bit into the live man's flesh for parchment,?Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle,?Let the wretch go festering through Florence)--?Dante, who loved well because he hated,?Hated wickedness that hinders loving,?Dante standing, studying his angel,--?In there broke the folk of his Inferno.?Says he--"Certain people of importance"?(Such he gave his daily dreadful line to)?"Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet."?Says the poet-"Then I stopped my painting."
VI
You and I would rather see that angel,?Painted by the tenderness of Dante,?Would we not?--than read a fresh Inferno.
VII
You and I will never see that picture.?While he mused on love and Beatrice,?While he softened o'er his outlined angel,?In they broke, those "people of importance":?We and Bice bear the loss for ever.
VIII
What of Rafael's sonnets, Dante's picture??This: no artist lives and loves, that longs not?Once, and only once, and for one only,?(Ah, the prize!) to find his love a language?Fit and fair and simple and sufficient--?Using nature that's an art to others,?Not, this one time, art that's turned his nature.?Ay, of all the artists living, loving,?None but would forego his proper dowry,--?Does he paint? he fain would write a poem,--?Does he write? he fain would paint a picture,?Put to proof art alien to the artist's,?Once, and only once, and for one only,?So to be the man and leave the artist,?Gain the man's joy, miss the artist's sorrow.
IX
Wherefore? Heaven's gift takes earth's abatement!?He who smites the rock and spreads the water,?Bidding drink and live a crowd beneath him,?Even he, the minute makes immortal,?Proves, perchance, but mortal in the minute,?Desecrates, belike, the deed in doing.?While he smites, how can he but remember,?So he smote before, in such a peril,?When they stood and mocked--"Shall smiting help us?"?When they drank and sneered--"A stroke