A study of any monologue will furnish an illustration of situation, but we are naturally, in the study of the subject, led back again to Browning.
In his "Andrea del Sarto," we are introduced to a scene common in the lives of artists. It has grown too dark to paint, and, dropping his brush, the painter sits in the gray twilight and talks with his wife, who serves him as a model, and muses over his work and his life. No one can fully appreciate the poem who has not been in a studio at some such moment when the artist stopped work and came out of his absorption to talk to those dear to him. At such a time the artist will be personal, will criticize himself severely, and throw out hints of what he has tried to do, of his higher aims, visions, and possibilities, and, while showing appreciation of what other artists have said of him, will recognize, also, the mistakes and failures of his art or life. It is the unfolding of a sensitive soul, a transition from a world of ideals, imaginations, and visions, to one of reality.
Nowhere else in poetry has any author so fully caught the essence of such an hour. Nowhere else can there be found art criticism equal to this self-revelation of the artist who is called "the faultless painter." What a revelation! What might he have done! What has he been! What a woman is beside him, his greatest curse, but one whose willing slave he recognizes himself to be! What a weak acquiescence, and what a fall!
Notice also the abrupt beginning: "But do not let us quarrel any more." She is asking ostensibly for money for her "cousin," but really, to pay the gambling debts of one of her lovers. He grants her request, but pleads that she stay with him in his loneliness and promises to work harder, and again and again in his criticism of himself, of his very perfection, even while he shows Raphael's weakness in drawing, he hints that there is something in the others not in him. In fact, he recognizes one of the deepest principles of life, as well as art, and exclaims,
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's heaven for? All is silver-gray, Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!"
He reveals his deep grief, how he dare not venture abroad all day lest the French nobles in the city should recognize him and deal with him for having used for himself--or rather for his wife, to build her a house, at her entreaty--the money which had been given by Francis for the purchase of pictures and for his return to Paris. And yet we find a weak soul's acquiescence in fate--