He was, in other words, what is called an amateur.  The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion.  Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality.  A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well.  Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.  Browning was in this strict sense a strenuous amateur.  He tried and practised in the course of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for a moment expected to succeed.  The story of his life is full of absurd little ingenuities, such as the discovery of a way of making pictures by roasting brown paper over a candle.  In precisely the same spirit of fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent a technical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, a technical expert in music.  In his old age, he shows traces of being so bizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing at length in letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italian town.  Indeed, his own Ring and the Book is merely a sublime detective story.  He was in a hundred things this type of man; he was precisely in the position, with a touch of greater technical success, of the admirable figure in Stevenson’s story who said, “I can play the fiddle nearly well enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a penny gaff, but not quite.”

The love of Browning for Italian art, therefore, was anything but an antiquarian fancy; it was the love of a living thing.  We see the same phenomenon in an even more important matter—­the essence and individuality of the country itself.

Italy to Browning and his wife was not by any means merely that sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many of those cultivated English men and women who live in Italy and enjoy and admire and despise it.  To them it was a living nation, the type and centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and flaming heart of Western history, the very Europe of Europe.  And they lived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas—­the making of a new nation, one of the things that makes men feel that they are still in the morning of the earth.  Before their eyes, with every circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama of the unification of Italy, with the bold and romantic militarism of Garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour.  They lived in a time when affairs of State had almost the air of works of art; and it is not strange that these two poets should have become politicians in one of those great creative epochs when even the politicians have to be poets.