people; its
exhaustion--are one and all revealed or suggested in this astonishing
poem.

These are the three greater poems dedicated to this period; but there
are some minor poems which represent different phases of its life. One
of these is the _Pictor Ignotus_. There must have been many men, during
the vital time of the Renaissance, who, born, as it were, into the
art-ability of the period, reached without trouble a certain level in
painting, but who had no genius, who could not create; or who, if they
had some touch of genius, had no boldness to strike it into fresh forms
of beauty; shy, retiring men, to whom the criticism of the world was a
pain they knew they could not bear. These men are common at a period
when life is racing rapidly through the veins of a vivid city like
Florence. The general intensity of the life lifts them to a height they
would never reach in a dull and sleepy age. The life they have is not
their own, but the life of the whole town. And this keen perception of
life outside of them persuades them that they can do all that men of
real power can do. In reality, they can do nothing and make nothing
worth a people's honour. Browning, who himself was compact of boldness,
who loved experiment in what was new, and who shaped what he conceived
without caring for criticism, felt for these men, of whom he must have
met many; and, asking himself "How they would think; what they would do;
and how life would seem to them," wrote this poem. In what way will poor
human nature excuse itself for failure? How will the weakness in the man
try to prove that it was power? How, having lost the joy of life, will
he attempt to show that his loss is gain, his failure a success; and,
being rejected of the world, approve himself within?

This was a subject to please Browning; meat such as his soul loved: a
nice, involved, Daedalian, labyrinthine sort of thing, a mixture of real
sentiment and self-deceit; and he surrounded it with his pity for its
human weakness.

"I could have painted any picture that I pleased," cries this painter;
"represented on the face any passion, any virtue." If he could he would
have done it, or tried it. Genius cannot hold itself in.

"I have dreamed of sending forth some picture which should enchant the
world (and he alludes to Cimabue's picture)--

"Bound for some great state,
Or glad aspiring little burgh, it went--
Flowers cast upon the car which bore the freight,
Thro