ouring through the practice of
painting very young women undraped; and we may infer that he repented
this from the current report that when he felt himself dying he
entreated those about him to have his pictures burnt. But Baldinucci
also relates that he had a specious answer ready for whoever
remonstrated with him on thus endangering his soul. The answer, which he
frankly quotes, is by no means "specious" in the sense in which it is
made; and Mr. Browning cannot believe that a man so inspired by the true
artistic passion as those words imply, could in any circumstances become
ashamed of the acts to which they refer. "If," Furini says, "those
scrupulous persons only knew what is the agony of endeavour with which
the artist strives at faithfully imitating what he sees, they would also
know how little room this leaves in him for the intrusion of alien"
(immoral) "thoughts." Mr. Browning goes farther still. He asserts not
only the innocence, but the religiousness, of the painter's art when
directed towards the marvels of the female form. He declares its
exercise, so directed, to be a subject, not of shame in the sight of the
Creator, but of thanksgiving to Him, and also the best form in which
human thanks can be conveyed; and he employs all the vividness of his
illustration and all the force of his invective against the so-called
artist who sees in the Divineness of female beauty only incitement to
low desires; in the art which seeks to reproduce it only a cloak for
their indulgence. His argument is very strong, and would be
unanswerable, but for the touch of speciousness which Baldinucci by
anticipation detects in it: Mr. Browning--as did Furini--regards the
breach of formal chastity exclusively from the artist's point of view.
But he may also argue that this will in the long run determine that of
the spectator and that the model herself is from the first amenable to
it.

Mr. Browning lays stress upon the technical skill which results from the
close copying of nature, and by virtue of which Furini must be styled a
good painter, whether or not a great one: and though he has never
underrated the positive value of technical skill, we do not feel that in
this third page of the "parleyings" he gives to the inspiring thought as
high a relative place as in his earlier works. The old convictions
reappear at pages 182-3 of vol. xvi., when he asserts the danger in
which the skilled hand may involve the artistic soul, by stifling it