Cristina’s lover had bitterly reflected.  Courts, as the focuses of social artifice and ceremonial restraint, were for him the peculiar breeding-places of such tragedies, and in several of the most incisive of the Lyrics and Romances he appears as the champion of the love they menace.  The hapless Last Duchess suffers for the largess of her kindly smiles.  The duchess of The Flight and the lady of The Glove successfully revolt against pretentious substitutes for love offered in love’s name. The Flight is a tale, as Mrs Browning said, “with a great heart in it.”  Both the Gipsy-woman whose impassioned pleading we overhear, and the old Huntsman who reports it, are drawn from a domain of rough and simple humanity not very often trodden by Browning.  The genial retainer admirably mediates between the forces of the Court which he serves and those of the wild primitive race to which his world-old calling as a hunter makes him kin; his hearty, untutored speech and character envelop the story like an atmosphere, and create a presumption that heart and nature will ultimately have their way.  Even the hinted landscape-background serves as a mute chorus.  In this “great wild country” of wide forests and pine-clad mountains, the court is the anomaly.

Similarly, in The Glove, the lion, so magnificently sketched by Browning, is made to bear out the inner expressiveness of the tale in a way anticipated by no previous teller.  The lion of Schiller’s ballad is already assuaged to his circumstances, and enters the arena like a courtier entering a drawing-room.  Browning’s lion, still terrible and full of the tameless passion for freedom, bursts in with flashing forehead, like the spirit of the desert of which he dreams:  it is the irruption of this mighty embodiment of elemental Nature which wakens in the lady the train of feeling and thought that impel her daring vindication of its claims.

* * * * *

Art was far from being as strange to the Browning of 1842-45 as love.  But he seized with a peculiar predilection those types and phases of the Art-world with which love has least to do.  He studies the egoisms of artists, the vanities of connoisseurs; the painter Lutwyche showing “how he can hate”; the bishop of St Praxed’s piteously bargaining on his death-bed for the jasper and lapislazuli “which Gandolph shall not choose but see and burst”; the duke of the Last Duchess displaying his wife’s portrait as the wonder of his gallery, and unconcernedly disposing of her person.  In a single poem only Browning touches those problems of the artist life which were to occupy him in the ’Fifties; and the Pictor Ignotus is as far behind the Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi in intellectual force as in dramatic brilliance and plasticity.  Browning’s sanguine and energetic temperament always inclined him to over-emphasis, and he has somewhat over-emphasised the anaemia of this anaemic soul.  Rarely again did he paint in such resolute uniformity of ashen grey.  The “Pictor” is the earliest, and the palest, of Browning’s pale ascetics, who make, in one way or another, the great refusal, and lose their souls by trying to save them in a barrenness which they call purity.