Chapter 4 - Page 2

things. He was interested in the life in Italian art and in the life
in Italian politics.

Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this
matter is in Browning's interest in art. He was immeasurably
fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn in
Italy gave him, of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities for
the study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in these studies
was not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the Italian
cities. Thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endless
lines of magnificent Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all
the Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk about
them, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in their
diaries. But the way in which they affected Browning is described very
suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. She describes
herself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him to
write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband
was engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them as
fast as he made them. This is Browning's interest in art, the interest
in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable
interest in how things are done. Every one who knows his admirable
poems on painting--"Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" and
"Pictor Ignotus"--will remember how fully they deal with
technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a
mess of colours. Sometimes they are so technical as to be mysterious
to the casual reader. An extreme case may be found in that of a lady I
once knew who had merely read the title of "Pacchiarotto and how he
worked in distemper," and thought that Pacchiarotto was the name of a
dog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilment
of his duty. These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting;
they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not
what it is to so many of the non-professional lovers of art, a thing
accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops
continually growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning was
interested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art. There
is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but
Browning could not merely talk art with artists--he could talk shop
with them. Personally he may not have known enough about painting to
be more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to be
more than a sixth-rate organist. But there are, when all is said and
done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate
art critic does not know; there are some things