Men and Women | Page 4

of the present century the very men of the elder
day of religion. Their robes shine with an unearthly light, and their
abstracted eyes are hypnotized by the effulgence of their own haloes.
Yet the poet never fails to insinuate some naive foible in their
personification, a numbness of the heart or an archaism of soul, which
reveals the possessed one as but a human brother, after all, shaped by
his environment, and embodying the spirit of an historic epoch out of
which the current of modern life is still streaming.
The group of art poems which follows similarly presents a dramatic
synthesis of the art of the Renaissance as represented by three types of
painters. The religious devotion of the monastic painter, whose ecstatic
spirit breathes in "Pictor Ignotus," probably gives this poem its place
adjoining Agricola and Lazarus. His artist's hankering to create that
beauty to bless the world with which his soul refrains from grossly
satisfying, unites the poem with the two following ones. In the first of
these the realistic artist, Fra Lippo, is graphically pictured personally
ushering in the high noon of the Italian efflorescence. In the second, the
gray of that day of art is silvering the self- painted portrait of the
prematurely frigid and facile formalist, Andrea del Sarto. In "Pictor
Ignotus" not only the personality of the often unknown and unnamed

painting-brother of the monasteries is made clear, but also the nature of
his beautiful cold art and the enslavement of both art and personality to
ecclesiastical beliefs and ideals. In "Fra Lippo Lippi" not alone the
figure of the frolicsome monk appears caught in his pleasure-loving
escapade, amid that picturesque knot of alert-witted Florentine guards,
ready to appreciate all the good points in his story of his life and the
protection the arms of the Church and the favor of the Medici have
afforded his genius, but, furthermore, is illustrated the irresistible
tendency of the art-impulse to expand beyond the bounds set for it
either by laws of Church or art itself, and to find beauty wheresoever in
life it chooses to turn the light of its gaze. So, also, in "Andrea del
Sarto," the easy cleverness of the unaspiring craftsman is not embodied
apart from the abject relationship which made his very soul a bond-

slave to the gross mandates of "the Cousin's whistle." Yet in all three
poems the biographic and historic conditions
contributing toward the
individualizing of each artist are so unobtrusively epitomized and
vitally blended, that, while scarcely any item of specific study of the art
and artists of the Renaissance would be out of place in illustrating the
essential truth of the portraiture and assisting in the better appreciation
of the poem, there is no detail of the workmanship which does not fall
into the background as a mere accessory to the dominant figure through
whose relationship to his art his station in the past is made clear.
This sort of dramatic synthesis of a salient, historical epoch is again
strikingly disclosed in the following poem of the Renaissance period,
"The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church." In this, again,
the art- connoisseurship of the prelacy, so important an element in the
Italian movement towards art-expression, is revealed to the life in the
beauty-loving personality of the dying bishop. And by means, also, of
his social ties with his nephews, called closer than they wish about him
now; with her whom "men would have to be their mother once"; with
old Gandolf, whom he fancies leering at him from his onion-stone tomb;
and with all those strong desires of the time for the delight of being
envied, for marble baths and horses and brown Greek manuscripts and
mistresses, the seeds of human decay planted in the plot of Time,
known as the Central Renaissance, by the same lingering fleshliness
and
self-destroying self- indulgence as was at home in pagan days,
are livingly exposed to the historic sense.
Is the modern prelate portrayed in "Bishop Blougram's Apology," with
all his bland subtlety, complex culture, and ripened perceptions, distant
as the nineteenth century from the sixteenth, very different at bottom
from his Renaissance brother, in respect to his native hankering for the
pleasure of estimation above his fellows? Gigadibs is his Gandolf,
whom he would craftily overtop. He is the one raised for the time
above the commonalty by his criticism of the bishop, to whom the
prelate would fain show how little he was to be despised, how far more
honored and powerful he was among men. As for Gigadibs, it is to be
noticed that Browning quietly makes him do more than leer enviously
at his complacent competitor from a tomb-top. The "sudden healthy

vehemence" that struck him and made him start to test his first plough
in a