The next poem belonging to this subject is the second part of Pippa Passes.  What concerns us here is that Jules, the French artist, loves Phene; and on his return from his marriage pours out his soul to her concerning his art.

In his work, in his pursuit of beauty through his aspiration to the old Greek ideal, he has found his full content—­his heaven upon earth.  But now, living love of a woman has stolen in.  How can he now, he asks, pursue that old ideal when he has the real? how carve Tydeus, with her about the room?  He is disturbed, thrilled, uncontent A new ideal rises.  How can he now

    Bid each conception stand while, trait by trait,
    My hand transfers its lineaments to stone? 
    Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth—­
    The live truth, passing and repassing me,
    Sitting beside me?

Before he had seen her, all the varied stuff of Nature, every material in her workshop, tended to one form of beauty, to the human archetype.  But now she, Phene, represents the archetype; and though Browning does not express this, we feel that if Jules continue in that opinion, his art will die.  Then, carried away by his enthusiasm for his art, he passes, through a statement that nature suggests in all her doings man and his life and his beauty—­a statement Browning himself makes in Paracelsus—­to a description of the capabilities of various stuffs in nature under the sculptor’s hand, and especially of marble as having in it the capabilities of all the other stuffs and also something more a living spirit in itself which aids the sculptor and even does some of his work.

This is a subtle thought peculiarly characteristic of Browning’s thinking about painting, music, poetry, or sculpture.  I believe he felt, and if he did not, it is still true, that the vehicle of any art brought something out of itself into the work of the artist.  Abt Vogler feels this as he plays on the instrument he made.  Any musician who plays on two instruments knows that the distinct instrument does distinct work, and loves each instrument for its own spirit; because each makes his art, expressed in it, different from his art expressed in another.  Even the same art-creation is different in two instruments:  the vehicle does its own part of the work.  Any painter will say the same, according as he works in fresco or on canvas, in water-colour or in oil.  Even a material like charcoal makes him work the same conception in a different way.  I will quote the passage; it goes to the root of the matter; and whenever I read it, I seem to hear a well-known sculptor as he talked one night to me of the spiritual way in which marble, so soft and yet so firm, answered like living material to his tool, sending flame into it, and then seemed, as with a voice, to welcome the emotion which, flowing from him through the chisel, passed into the stone.