the re-birth of naturalism in Florence, from the earliest
music and poetry to the latest, interested Browning profoundly; and he
speaks of them, not as a critic from the outside, but out of the soul of
them, as an artist. He is, for example, the only poet of the nineteenth
century till we come to Rossetti, who has celebrated painting and
sculpture by the art of poetry; and Rossetti did not link these arts to
human life and character with as much force and penetration as Browning.
Morris, when he wrote poetry, did not care to write about the other
arts, their schools or history. He liked to describe in verse the
beautiful things of the past, but not to argue on their how and why. Nor
did he ever turn in on himself as artist, and ask how he wrote poetry or
how he built up a pattern. What he did as artist was to _make_, and when
he had made one thing to make another. He ran along like Pheidippides to
his goal, without halting for one instant to consider the methods of his
running. And all his life long this was his way.

Rossetti described a picture in a sonnet with admirable skill, so
admirable that we say to ourselves--"Give me the picture or the sonnet,
not both. They blot out one another." But to describe a picture is not
to write about art. The one place where he does go down to its means and
soul is in his little prose masterpiece, _Hand and Soul_, in which we
see the path, the goal, the passion, but not the power of art. But he
never, in thought, got, like Browning, to the bottom-joy of it. He does
not seem to see, as clearly as Browning saw, that the source of all art
was love; and that the expression of love in beautiful form was or ought
to be accomplished with that exulting joy which is the natural child of
self-forgetfulness. This story of Rossetti's was in prose. In poetry,
Rossetti, save in description from the outside, left art alone; and
Browning's special work on art, and particularly his poetic studies of
it, are isolated in English poetry, and separate him from other poets.

I cannot wish that he had thought less and written less about other arts
than poetry. But I do wish he had given more time and trouble to his own
art, that we might have had clearer and lovelier poetry. Perhaps, if he
had developed himself with more care as an artist in his own art, he
would not have troubled himself or his art by so much devotion to
abstract thinking and intellectual analysis. A strange preference also
for naked fac