Andrea Del Sarto by Robert Browning — Read

Called "the Faultless Painter"

But do not let us quarrel any more, / No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once: / Sit down and all shall happen as you wish. / You turn your face, but does it bring your heart? / I 'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear, / Treat his own subject after his own way, / Fix his own time, accept too his own price, / And shut the money into this small hand / When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly? / Oh, I 'll content him, -- but to-morrow, Love! / I often am much wearier than you think, / This evening more than usual, and it seems / As if -- forgive now -- should you let me sit / Here by the window with your hand in mine / And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole, / Both of one mind, as married people use, / Quietly, quietly the evening through, / I might get up to-morrow to my work / Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try. / To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this! / Your soft hand is a woman of itself, / And mine the man's bared breast she curls inside. / Don't count the time lost, neither; you must serve / For each of the five pictures we require: / It saves a model. So! keep looking so -- / My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds! / -- How could you ever prick those perfect ears, / Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet -- / My face, my moon, my everybody's moon, / Which everybody looks on and calls his, / And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn, / While she looks -- no one's: very dear, no less. / You smile? why, there 's my picture ready made, / There 's what we painters call our harmony! / A common grayness silvers everything, -- / All in a twilight, you and I alike / -- You, at the point of your first pride in me / (That 's gone you know), -- but I, at every point; / My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down / To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. / There 's the bell clinking from the chapel-top; / That length of convent-wall across the way / Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; / The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything. / Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape / As if I saw alike my work and self / And all that I was born to be and do, / A twilight-piece. Love, we are in God's hand. / How strange now looks the life he makes us lead; / So free we seem, so fettered fast we are! / I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie! / This chamber for example -- turn your head -- / All that 's behind us! You don't understand / Nor care to understand about my art, / But you can hear at least when people speak: / And that cartoon, the second from the door / -- It is the thing, Love! so such thing should be -- / Behold Madonna! -- I am bold to say. / I can do with my pencil what I know, / What I see, what at bottom of my heart / I wish for, if I ever wish so deep -- / Do easily, too -- when I say, perfectly, / I do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge, / Who listened to the Legate's talk last week, / And just as much they used to say in France. / At any rate 't is easy, all of it! / No sketches first, no studies, that 's long past: / I do what many dream of all their lives, / -- Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, / And fail in doing. I could count twenty such / On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, / Who strive -- you don't know how the others strive / To paint a little thing like that you smeared / Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, -- / Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, / (I know his name, no matter) -- so much less! / Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. / There burns a truer light of God in them, / In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, / Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt / This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine. / Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know, / Reach many a time a heaven that 's shut to me, / Enter and take their place there sure enough, / Though they come back and cannot tell the world. / My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here. / The sudden blood of these men! at a word -- / Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too. / I, painting from myself and to myself, / Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame / Or their praise either. Somebody remarks / Morello's outline there is wrongly traced, / His hue mistaken; what of that? or else, / Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?