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!
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!” …
Browning’s ‘Andea del Sarto’: see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43745/andrea-del-sarto for whole poem.
I find myself quoting Andrea del Sarto all the time these days. It isn’t because I admire the character Browning captured in this incredible poem, for del Sarto is a man who never fails for he never attempts anything at which he might fail. But the wisdom Browning embodies in this imperfect creature (but aren’t we all that!) is that of knowing his imperfection and still doing nothing about it, except to moan, even inwardly when he is most quiet. The whole point of him is to show that imperfection matters. This was a serious subject for Victorian aesthetics – Ruskin wrote book after book on it and even located it in a particular kind of beauty he called the Gothic, and which he believed to have manifested itself in the Middle Ages. Ironic then that The Stones of Venice was used as a blueprint for achievement in Victorian architecture and why so many works are entirely an aping of the Gothic (note St. Pancras station in London or the Pugin House of Commons extension).
In Andrea imperfection defines ‘Man’ (his term is sexist even within the poem for he is using it in part to compare his virility with those of the male lovers who await and whistle for his wife Lucrezia (money incarnate) outside their window. Man’s ‘reach should exceed his grasp’ says the painter but his reason for that is not only full of pathos, but pathetic in a derogatory sense: ‘Else what’s a heaven for’. It is as if Browning here puts his finger on the pulse of not only the Tractarian movement in Anglo-Catholic thinking (John Henry Newman and his like as he does too in the under-rated Bishop Blougram’s Apology) but also on the aesthetic of a culture that was prepared for failure and imperfection in order to show there was a need for an afterlife.
An afterlife, after all, becomes a big reason to consequently renounce any attempt to amend the world’s political structures in favour of the Many not the Few (I am one of those Browning readers who thinks Browning never truly tired either of Shelley, his poetry and political aspirations). There is a sense in which, if we admit that if there is a Heaven, its existence never justifies the demand for human perfection – the goal of the Unitarian thinkers like Charles James Fox and intellectuals like Richard Henry Horne (in his youth at least, when he wrote The New Spirit of the Age aping his radical hero Hazlitt ,till he became Browning’s Waring and ‘gave us all the slip’. In fact Horne became an Imperialist agent in Australia – murdering native populations with the worst of them. Just another Lost Leader as Wordsworth had been in renouncing youthful radicalism.
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
—He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!
‘The Lost Leader’: see – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43762/the-lost-leader
The desire to change is now urgent – more so than for Marx and the post Hegelian historical idealists – because the world is extinguishing under human imperfections and failure to reach out further, but instead to promise old goals in a mid-way populism – think of the labour Party programme for the next election tied entirely to and dependent on economic ‘growth’. Not growth of spirit, love or community but financially led growth – the dream of an ever-providing capitalism and another one in the eye for the old enemy of that seven-headed beast, Thomas Malthus and his warning of an endgame scarcity. One can see why they do it. But it is a failure to ‘grasp’ (even in the cognitive sense of understand) and beyond that grasping to then act to protect and nurture the values of life and living.
One gets blamed for supporting the worst kind of Toryism for saying that, but that is from people who believe in only reaching out for what you know you can achieve. ‘
I know both what I want and what might gain,
And yet how profitless to know
How profitless indeed, though that is a compromised word (‘profit’) in this context. Let’s exceed our grasp and the words we can use to express what we find outside that limitation. This used to be a matter of ideology against pragmatics, now (as the globe and its species threaten to become uninhabitable and die respectively) it is a matter of necessity and still we bruit the technology of mass destruction (of that small poor strip of land called the Gaza strip for instance) over the urgencies. It’s difficult and none of us fully understand or ‘grasp’ it of course, but I feel like Milton’s Samson, we are all now ‘Eyeless in Gaza / At the mill with slaves’.
With love
Steve
Steve_Bamlett_blog 