ss of his spiritual absorption
in music, is conducted into a realm of experience beyond that of speech
or even of articulate thought.

Another distinctly human aspect of art interests Browning, and that is
its power to represent and so to recall a vanished civilization. Greek
statues, the devotional pictures of the early Florentines, the work of
the later Italian realists, stand, in "Old Pictures in Florence," as
representatives of the life and thought that produced them. In "A
Toccata of Galuppi's" the music revivifies the superficial gaiety, the
undertone of fear, in the life of eighteenth century Venice. Highly
significant in this connection are the poems in which he traces the
evolution of art. Running through "Old Pictures in Florence" and "Fra
Lippo Lippi" we find an ordered statement of the chief changes in the
ideals of art as Browning saw them. The Greeks, we are told, had
produced in sculpture the most beautiful representations of the human
body. But if their successors had been content merely to admire this
perfect achievement, they would have purchased satisfaction at the price
of their own arrested development. Progress came only when, in the dawn
of Italian art, men turned from Greek perfection, from the supremely
beautiful but limited representations of the human body, to an attempt
to paint the invisible, the spiritual side of man's nature. The work of
these artists was great because it was not imitative and because it
stretched toward an unending and ideal future. But the idealistic and
aspiring temper of early Tuscan art had the defects of its qualities.
Its spiritual ecstasy once conventionalized and reduced to a formula led
to unreality, and, if not to untruth, at least to an unwholesome
ignoring of a part of truth. There was, therefore, an inevitable
reaction to the naturalism described with such verve and gusto by Fra
Lippo Lippi. But this is, after all, social history in terms of art, and
to Browning what has happened in painting is of value chiefly as showing
concretely what has happened in the mind of man.

From the instances already cited it is apparent that Browning's interest
centered, not in abstract or theoretical discussions of human problems,
but in the individuals who face the problems. In this point Browning is
sharply distinguished from his poetic contemporaries as a class. They
felt deeply "all the weary weight of this unintelligible world," so
deeply that while they gave much though