Another Duchess, who pined for freedom and never attained it, has her cold obituary notice from her bereaved Duke’s lips in the Dramatic Lyrics of 1842. My Last Duchess was there made a companion poem to Count Gismond; they are the pictures of the bond-woman and of the freed-woman in marriage.  The Italian Duchess revolts from the law of wifehood no further than a misplaced smile or a faint half-flush, betraying her inward breathings and beamings of the spirit; the noose of the ducal proprieties is around her throat, and when it tightens “then 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 not of green fields but of his blue lump of lapis-lazuli; and the last word of all is alive only with senile luxury and the malice of perishing recollection.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 30:  In a Balcony, published in Men and Women, 1855, is said to have been written two years previously at the Baths of Lucca.]