Browning does not mean that art in its passionate pursuit of the highest ends should be indifferent to the means, or that things spiritual do not require as adequate a sensuous embodiment as they are capable of receiving from the painter’s brush or the poet’s pen.  Were art a mere symbol or suggestion, two bits of sticks nailed crosswise might claim to be art as admirable as any.  What is the eye for, if not to see with vivid exactness? what is the hand for, if not to fashion things as nature made them?  It is through body that we reach after the soul; and the passion for truth and reality is a passion for the invisible which is expressed in and through these.  Such is the pleading of Fra Lippo Lippi, the tonsured painter caught out of bounds, in that poem in which the dramatic monologue of Browning attains its perfection of life and energy.  Fra Lippo is intoxicated by the mere forms and colours of things, and he is assured that these mean intensely and mean well: 

    The beauty and the wonder and the power,
    The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
    Changes, surprises—­and God made it all!

These are the gospel to preach which he girds loin and lights the lamp, though he may perforce indulge a patron in shallower pieties of the conventional order, and though it is not all gospel with him, for now and again, when the moon shines and girls go skipping and singing down Florence streets—­“Zooks, sir, flesh and blood, that’s all I’m made of!” Fra Lippo with his outbreaks of frank sensuality is far nearer to Browning’s kingdom of heaven than is the faultless painter; he presses with ardour towards his proper goal in art; he has full faith in the ideal, but with him it is to be sought only through the real; or rather it need not be sought at all, for one who captures any fragment of reality captures also undesignedly and inevitably its divine significance.[68]

The same doctrine which is applied to art in Old Pictures in Florence, that high aims, though unattained, are of more worth than a lower achievement, is applied, and with a fine lyrical enthusiasm, to the pursuit of knowledge in A Grammarian’s Funeral.  The time is “shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe”; the place—­

     a tall mountain, citied to the top,
    Crowded with culture!—­

is imagined to suit the idea of the poem.  The dead scholar, borne to the summit for burial on the shoulders of his disciples, had been possessed by the aspiration of Paracelsus—­to know; and, unlike Paracelsus, he had never sought on earth both to know and to enjoy.  He has been the saint and the martyr of Renaissance philology.  For the genius of such a writer as the author of Hudibras, with his positive intellect and dense common sense, there could hardly have been found a fitter object for mockery than this remorseless and indefatigable pedant.  Browning, through the singing voices of the dead master’s disciples, exalts him to an eminence of honour and splendid fame.  To a scholar Greek particles may serve as the fittest test of virtue; this glorious pedant has postponed life and the enjoyments of life to future cycles of existence; here on earth he expends a desperate passion—­upon what?  Upon the dryasdust intricacies of grammar; and it is not as though he had already attained; he only desperately follows after: