Duke grew straightway brave and wise.
And then follow delays of convenience, excuses, postponements, and the Duke's flood of passion dwindles to a thread, and is lost in the sandy flats of life:
So weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam
The glory dropped from their youth and love,
And both perceived they had dreamed a dream.
Their end was a crime, but Browning's contention is that a crime may serve for a test as well as a virtue; in that test the Duke and the lady had alike failed through mere languor of soul:
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is—the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.
Had Tennyson treated the same subject he would probably have glorified their action as a victorious obedience to the law of self-reverence and self-control.
The reunion and the severance of lovers are presented in three poems. Winter, chill without but warm within, with its pastimes of passion, the energies of joy breaking forth in play, is contrasted in A Lovers' Quarrel with springtime, all gladness without and a strange void and shiver at the heart of things, because alienation has taken the place of camaraderie between the lover and his mistress. The mass and intensity of colour in the stanza which dashes in a sketch of the Pampas, with its leagues of sunflowers, and a wild horse, "black neck and eyeballs keen" appearing through them, almost afflict the reader's sense of sight. There is a fine irony in the title of the other poem of contention, A Womans Last Word: In a quarrel a woman will have the last word, and here it is—the need of quietude for a little while that she may recover from the bewildering stroke of pain, and then entire oblivion of the wrong with unmeasured self-surrender. The poem of union, Love among the Ruins, is constructed in a triple contrast; the endless pastures prolonged to the edge of sunset, with their infinity of calm, are contrasted with the vast and magnificent animation of the city which once occupied the plain and the mountain slopes. The lover keeps at arm's-length from his heart and brain what yet fills them all the while; here in this placid pasture-land is one vivid point of intensest life; here where once were the grandeur and tumult of the enormous city is that which in a moment can abolish for the lover all its glories and its shames. His eager anticipation of meeting his beloved, face to face and heart to heart, is not sung, after the manner of Burns, as a jet of unmingled joy; he delays his rapture to make its arrival more entirely rapturous; he uses his imagination to check and to enhance his passion; and the poem, though not a simple cry of the heart, is entirely true as a rendering of emotion which has taken imagination into its service. In like manner By the Fireside, A Serenade at the Villa, and Two in the Campagna, include certain studies of nature and its moods, sometimes with a curiously minute observation of details; and these serve as the overture to some intense moment of joy or pain, or form the orchestration which sustains or reinforces a human voice.
Of the pieces relating to art those connected with the art of poetry are the least valuable. Transcendentalism sets forth the old doctrine that poetry must be sensuous and passionate, leaving it to philosophy to deal with the naked abstractions of the intellect. How it strikes a Contemporary shows by a humorous example how a poet's character and private life may be misconceived and misrepresented by those among whom he moves. Popularity maintains that the poet who is in the highest sense original, an inventor of new things, may be wholly disregarded for long, while his followers and imitators secure both the porridge and the praise; one day God's hand, which holds him, will open and let out all the beauty. The thought is an obvious one enough, but the image of the fisher and the murex, in which the thought is embodied, affords opportunity for stanzas glowing with colour. Two poems, and each of them a remarkable poem, are interpretations of music. One, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, is a singularly successful tour de force, if it is no more. Poetry inspired by music is almost invariably the rendering of a sentiment or a mood which the music is supposed to express; but here, in dealing with the fugue of his imaginary German composer, Browning finds his inspiration not in the sentiment but in the structure of the composition; he competes, as it were, in language with the art or science of the contrapuntist, and evolves an idea of his own from its complexity and elaboration. The poem of Italian music, A Toccata of Galuppi's, wholly subordinates the science to the sentiment of the piece. It is steeped in the melancholy of pleasure; Venice of the eighteenth century lives before us with its mundane joys, its transitory passions, its voluptuous hours; and in the midst of its warmth and colour a chill creeps upon our senses and we shiver. Browning's artistic self-restraint is admirable; he has his own truth to utter aloud if he should please; but here he will not play the prophet; the life of eighteenth-century Venice is dust and ashes; the poet will say not a word more than the musician has said in his toccata; the ruthlessness of time and death make him a little remorseful; it is enough, and too much, that through this music of the hours of love and pleasure we should hear, as it were, the fall of the clay upon a coffin-lid.
Shelley was more impressed by the sculpture than the paintings of Italy. There are few evidences of the influence of the most ideal of the arts that appeal to the mind through the eye in Browning's poetry; and his sympathies would be more apt to respond to such work as Michael Angelo's, which sends the spectator beyond itself, than to the classical work which has the absoluteness and the calm of attained perfection.[[66]] The sensuous and the spiritual qualities of colour were vividly felt by him; a yellowing old marble seemed perhaps to impose itself with a cold authority upon the imagination. But the suggestion of two portrait busts of the period of classical decadence, one in marble representing a boy, and the other the powerful head of a man in granite, gave rise to Protus, one of the few flawless poems of Browning. His mastery over the rhymed couplet is nowhere seen to greater advantage, unless it be in a few passages of Sordello. The poem is, however, more a page from history than a study in the fine arts; and Browning's imagination has made it a page which lives in our memory through a pathos veiled under strong objective touches, never protruding itself sentimentally in quest of tenderness or pity.
"I spent some most delightful time," Rossetti wrote to Allingham shortly after the publication of Men and Women, "with Browning at Paris, both in the evenings and at the Louvre, where (and throughout conversation) I found his knowledge of early Italian art beyond that of any one I ever met—encyclopedically beyond that of Ruskin himself." The poem Old Pictures at Florence, which Rossetti calls "a jolly thing," and which is that and much more, is full of Browning's learned enthusiasm for the early Italian painters, and it gives a reason for the strong attraction which their adventures after new beauty and passion had for him as compared with the faultless achievements of classical sculpture. Greek art, according to Browning, by presenting unattainable ideals of material and mundane perfection, taught men to submit. Early Christian art, even by faultily presenting spiritual ideals, not to be attained on earth but to be pursued through an immortal life, taught men to aspire. The aim of these painters was not to exhibit strength or grace, joy or grief, rage or love in their complete earthly attainment, but rather to