all smiles stopped together." Never was an agony hinted with more
gentlemanly reserve. But the poem is remarkable chiefly as gathering up
into a typical representative a whole phase of civilisation. The Duke is
Italian of Renaissance days; insensible in his egoistic pride to the
beautiful humanity alive before him; yet a connoisseur of art to his
finger-tips; and after all a Duchess can be replaced, while the bronze
of Glaus of Innsbruck--but the glory of his possessions must not be
pressed, as though his nine hundred years old name were not enough. The
true gift of art--Browning in later poems frequently insists upon
this--is not for the connoisseur or collector who rests in a material
possession, but for the artist who, in the zeal of creation, presses
through his own work to that unattainable beauty, that flying joy which
exists beyond his grasp and for ever lures him forward. In _Pictor
Ignotus_ the earliest study in his lives of the painters was made by the
poet. The world is gross, its touch unsanctifies the sanctities of art;
yet the brave audacity of genius is able to penetrate this gross world
with spiritual fire. Browning's unknown painter is a delicate spirit,
who dares not mingle his soul with the gross world; he has failed for
lack of a robust faith, a strenuous courage. But his failure is
beautiful and pathetic, and for a time at least his Virgin, Babe, and
Saint will smile from the cloister wall with their "cold, calm,
beautiful regard." And yet to have done otherwise to have been other
than this; to have striven like that youth--the Urbinate--men praise so!
More remarkable, as the summary of a civilisation, than _My Last
Duchess_, is the address of the worldling Bishop, who lies dying, to the
"nephews" who are sons of his loins. In its Paganism of
Christianity--which lacks all the manly virtue of genuine Paganism--that
portion of the artistic Renaissance which leans towards the world and
the flesh is concentrated and is given as in quintessential form. The
feeble fingers yet cling to the vanities of earth; the speaker babbles