Do you wake up in the night and involuntarily review your life, thinking of the terrible mistakes you've made, the (good) road not taken, good advice ignored, the doubling down on disastrous decisions until they bury you in a cascade of awfulness?
Do you find an unbearable resonance in the (sappy but heartfelt) words of John Greenleaf Whittier?
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies
Deeply buried from human eyes...
Does your left eyelid twitch with trauma when you run across Edward FitzGerald's
dicta:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
If not, just wait. It'll happen.
And when it happens, I recommend you turn on the light and reach for the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume II, or Robert Browning's Collected Poems, or if you can't find them on the bedside table under all the Terry Pratchetts and The Nations and the New Yorkers, for your laptop which is somewhere on the floor...maybe right over here....yes, there it is!
Then power it up and wallow in the regrets of Andrea del Sarto. I predict you'll cheer up and sleep like a baby.
(NOTE: It's possible that it will have the opposite effect and your dreams, if you ever do get to sleep, will be tormented ones, but what the heck, you were lying awake anyway.)
"Andrea Del Sarto" is one of Robert Browning's dramatic monologues. I've written about another of these before, and so has Brecht. Browning (1812-1889) was a British poet who took the soliloquy and ran with it. In his monologues, which are usually long blank verse poems, the speaker reveals both what he knows and what he doesn't know about himself. Both "Andrea del Sarto" and "Fra Lippo Lippi" are also all about painting. And all about art in general. But practically all great poetry is about art, so they tell me.
Anyway, Andrea del Sarto (1486-1531) was a real painter who was, according to himself (in the poem), and according to Giorgio Vasari (in The Lives of The Painters, on which Browning based the poem), very, very good at painting. But you never hear about him. He never reached the greatness of which he was capable. And that's what this poem is about.
As the poem opens, Andrea is sitting in his little house in Florence with his wife, who's just made a deal for him to paint a bunch of paintings in a hurry for a customer because she wants the money. He's not happy about this, but he agrees to do it, and asks her to just sit with him for a while,
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,
Both of one mind, as married people use,
Quietly, quietly the evening through...
Then he starts regretting everything he's ever done, while insisting that he doesn't regret anything.
He describes his current state:
A common greyness 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.
See what Browning does there? Andrea insists that everything's good (the greyness "silvers" everything; and the diminishment of his life, his ability, his wife's love are consistent with "sober, pleasant" surroundings). And Browning is standing behind him rolling his eyes and miming cutting his wrists. Isn't that cool?
See, Andrea continues, he knows he could've been the greatest:
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:
....
At any rate ’tis 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.
and he knows he's not:
All is silver-gray
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
I know both what I want and what might gain,
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh
“Had I been two, another and myself,
Our head would have o’erlooked the world!” No doubt.
And besides, when he was in the big time briefly, painting in the court of the king of France, he couldn't deal with it.
Too live the life grew, golden and not gray,
And I’m the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt
Out of the grange whose four walls make his world.
How could it end in any other way?
And then he stole money from the king:
Come from the window, love,—come in, at last,
Inside the melancholy little house
We built to be so gay with. God is just.
King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights
When I look up from painting, eyes tired out,
The walls become illumined, brick from brick
Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold,
That gold of his I did cement them with!
And he stopped supporting his aged parents, who died penniless.
My father and my mother died of want.
Well, had I riches of my own? you see
How one gets rich! Let each one bear his lot.
They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died;
And I have labored somewhat in my time
And not been paid profusely. Some good son
Paint my two hundred pictures—let him try!
(Both the theft and the nonsupport were probably at the instigation of Andrea's wife. Browning does a complex dance to portray her as Browning wants but using Andrea's point of view).
And (back to Andrea) more than anything, godsdammit, he really IS a better painter than Raphael (he's very focused on Raphael, who was a contemporary):
Said one day Agnolo [Michelangelo], his very self,
To Rafael … I have known it all these years…
....
“Friend, there’s a certain sorry little scrub
Goes up and down our Florence, none cares how,
Who, were he set to plan and execute
As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings,
Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours!”
To Rafael’s!
And furthermore, Raphael never could figure out how to even draw an arm:
Yonder’s a work now, of that famous youth [Raphael]
.... [I]t gives way;
That arm is wrongly put—and there again—
A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines,
Its body, so to speak: its soul is right,
He means right—that, a child may understand.
Still, what an arm! and I could alter it:
Just couldn't do it right...
And indeed the arm is wrong.
I hardly dare… yet, only you to see,
Give the chalk here—quick, thus the line should go!
Ay, but the soul! he’s Rafael! rub it out!
(That is absolutely my favorite part. I love that the wrongly drawn arm drives him crazy).
On the other other hand, he does have his wife, who is extremely hot, and Raphael didn't.
“Rafael did this, Andrea painted that;
The Roman’s is the better when you pray,
But still the other’s Virgin was his wife”—
But he's not blaming her. Well, she could've helped more.
But had you.... but brought a mind!
Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged
“God and the glory! never care for gain,
The present by the future, what is that?
Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo!
Rafael is waiting: up to God, all three!”
I might have done it for you. So it seems:
To his credit, and notwithstanding passive aggressive whining like that, he acknowledges that his screwups are all his own.
Beside, incentives come from the soul’s self;
The rest avail not. Why do I need you?
What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo?
In this world, who can do a thing, will not;
And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:
Yet the will’s somewhat—somewhat, too, the power—
And thus we half-men struggle.
And besides they're not screwups.
I am grown peaceful as old age to-night.
I regret little, I would change still less.
Arrrrr.
By the way, one of the really interesting things that I think Browning suggests in the poem is that Andrea's faultlessness as a painter may play a role in his inability to achieve greatness.
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.
I'm sure you've noticed, even if you've only read the excerpts above, the use of images of grayness, twilight, half light, limits. There are many more in the poem. The contrast, when Andrea talks about his time in France, is blinding:
In that humane great monarch's golden look,—
One finger in his beard or twisted curl
Over his mouth's good mark that made the smile,
One arm about my shoulder, round my neck,
The jingle of his gold chain in my ear,
I painting proudly with his breath on me,
All his court round him, seeing with his eyes,
Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of souls
Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts.
Well, it's a great portrait, but such a sad one, of failure and loss and defeat.
So, feel better? You may be sleepless now and then, but at least you didn't waste a one-in-a-million talent, or let your parents starve, or steal money from a benefactor who loved and trusted you, or justify all those things. I hope. And unless you're Dick Cheney or one of his merry men unexpectedly reading this diary, you didn't lie your country into war, either.
So cheer up and sleep tight!