It was thus a deeper poetical rather than a religious or doctrinal
interest which drew Browning in these Italian years, again and again to
seek his revealing experiences of souls amid the eddies and convulsions,
the exultations and the agonies, brought into the world by the amazing
"revelation of God in Christ." It is true that we nowhere approach this
focus of interest, that we have no glimpse, through Browning's art, how
that "revelation" shaped itself in the first disciples, far less of
Christ himself. But that was at no time Browning's way of bringing to
expression what he deeply cared for. He would not trumpet forth truth in
his own person, or blazon it through the lips of the highest recognised
authority; he let it struggle up through the baffling density, or
glimmer through the conflicting persuasions of alien minds, and break
out in cries of angry wonder or involuntary recognition. And nowhere is
this method carried further than in the Christian poems of the Italian
time. The supreme musicians and painters he avoids, but Fra Lippo Lippi
and Master Hugues belong at least to the crafts whose secrets they
expound; while the Christian idea is set in a borrowed light caught from
the souls of men outside the Christian world--an Arab physician, a Greek
poet, a Jewish shepherd or rabbi, or from Christians yet farther from
the centre than these, like Blougram and the Abbe Deodaet. In method as
in conception these pieces are among the most Browningesque things that
Browning ever wrote. It is clear, however, that while his way of
handling these topics is absolutely his own, his peculiar concern with
them is new. The _Karshish_, the _Clean_, and the _Blougram_ have no
prototype or parallel among the poems of Browning's previous periods. In
the early Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and in the plays, there is
exquisite rendering of religion, and also of irreligion; but the
religion is just the simple faith of Pippa or of Theocrite that "God's
in his world"; and the irreligion is the Humanist paganism of St