These words cannot be given excitedly or dramatically without realizing the rôle the police are playing, their rough handling of Lippo, and their discovery that they have seized a monk at an unseemly hour of the night and not in a respectable part of the city. We must identify ourselves with Lippo and feel the torches of the police in the face, and the hand “fiddling” on his throat. This whole situation must be as definitely conceived as if a part of a play. The reference to “Cosimo of the Medici” should be spoken very suggestively, and we should feel with Lippo the consequent relief that resulted, and the dismay also of the police on finding they have in hand an artist friend of the greatest man in Florence. “Boh! you were best!” means that the hands of the policeman have been released from his throat.
All this dramatic action, however, must be secondary to the conception of the character of the monk-painter. Almost immediately, in the very midst of the excitement, possibly with reference to the very fellow who had grasped his throat, the artist, with the true spirit of a painter, exclaims,
“He’s Judas to a tittle, that man is!
Just such a face!”
and as the chief of the squad of police sends his watchmen away, the painter’s heart once more awakes and discovers a picture, and he says, almost to himself:
“I’d like his face—
His, elbowing on his comrade in the door
With the pike and lantern,—for the slave that holds
John Baptist’s head a-dangle by the hair
With one hand (‘Look you, now,’ as who should say)
And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped!
It’s not your chance to have a bit of chalk,
A wood-coal or the like? or you should see!
Yes, I’m the painter, since you style me so.
What, brother Lippo’s doings, up and down,
You know them, and they take you? like enough!
I saw the proper twinkle in your eye—
’Tell you, I liked your looks at very first.
Let’s sit and set things straight now, hip to haunch.”
Thus the monologue is introduced, and with a captain of a night-watch in Florence as listener, this great painter, who tried to paint things truly, pours out his critical reflections,—
“A fine way to paint soul, by painting body
So ill, the eye can’t stop there, must go further
And can’t fare worse!”
This great reformer in art is made by Browning to declare why men should paint
“God’s works—paint anyone, and count it crime
To let a truth slip by,”
for according to this man, who initiated a new movement in art,