You smile? why, there’s my picture ready made,
    There’s what we painters call our harmony! 
    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. 
    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.

In God’s hand?  Yes, but why being free are we so fettered?  And here slips in the unbidden guest of the theory.  Andrea has chosen earthly love; Lucrezia is all in all; and he has reached absolute perfection in drawing—­

    I do what many dream of, all their lives.

He can reach out beyond himself no more.  He has got the earth, lost the heaven.  He makes no error, and has, therefore, no impassioned desire which, flaming through the faulty picture, makes it greater art than his faultless work.  “The soul is gone from me, that vext, suddenly-impassioned, upward-rushing thing, with its play, insight, broken sorrows, sudden joys, pursuing, uncontented life.  These men reach a heaven shut out from me, though they cannot draw like me.  No praise or blame affects me.  I know my handiwork is perfect.  But there burns a truer light of God in them.  Lucrezia, I am judged.”

    Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
    Or what’s a heaven for?  All is silver-grey
    Placid and perfect with my art:—­the worse

“Here,” he says, “is a piece of Rafael.  The arm is out of drawing, and I could make it right.  But the passion, the soul of the thing is not in me.  Had you, my love, but urged me upward, to glory and God, I might have been uncontent; I might have done it for you.  No,” and again he sweeps round on himself, out of his excuses, “perhaps not, ’incentives come from the soul’s self’; and mine is gone.  I’ve chosen the love of you, Lucrezia, earth’s love, and I cannot pass beyond my faultless drawing into the strife to paint those divine imaginations the soul conceives.”

That is the meaning of Browning.  The faultless, almost mechanical art, the art which might be born of an adulterous connection between science and art, is of little value to men.  Not in the flawless painter is true art found, but in those who painted inadequately, yet whose pictures breathe

    Infinite passion and the pain
    Of finite hearts that yearn.