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.

But of the stuffs one can be master of,
How I divined their capabilities!
From the soft-rinded smoothening facile chalk
That yields your outline to the air's embrace,
Half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom:
Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure
To cut its one confided thought clean out
Of all the world. But marble!--'neath my tools
More pliable than jelly--as it were
Some clear primordial creature dug from depths
In the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself.
And whence all baser substance may be worked;
Refine it o