Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this matter is in Browning’s interest in art.  He was immeasurably fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn in Italy gave him, of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities for the study of painting and sculpture.  But his interest in these studies was not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the Italian cities.  Thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endless lines of magnificent Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all the Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk about them, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in their diaries.  But the way in which they affected Browning is described very suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife.  She describes herself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him to write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband was engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them as fast as he made them.  This is Browning’s interest in art, the interest in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable interest in how things are done.  Every one who knows his admirable poems on painting—­“Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto” and “Pictor Ignotus”—­will remember how fully they deal with technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a mess of colours.  Sometimes they are so technical as to be mysterious to the casual reader.  An extreme case may be found in that of a lady I once knew who had merely read the title of “Pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper,” and thought that Pacchiarotto was the name of a dog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilment of his duty.  These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting; they smell of paint.  They are the works of a man to whom art is not what it is to so many of the non-professional lovers of art, a thing accomplished, a valley of bones:  to him it is a field of crops continually growing in a busy and exciting silence.  Browning was interested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art.  There is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but Browning could not merely talk art with artists—­he could talk shop with them.  Personally he may not have known enough about painting to be more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to be more than a sixth-rate organist.  But there are, when all is said and done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate art critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth-rate organist knows which a first-rate judge of music does not know.  And these were the things that Browning knew.