of _Cleon_.
The Greek mind fascinated Browning, though most of his renderings of it
have the savour of a salt not gathered in Attica, and his choice of
types shows a strong personal bias. From the heroic and majestic elder
art of Greece he turns with pronounced preference to Euripides the human
and the positive, with his facile and versatile intellect, his agile
criticism, and his "warm tears." It is somewhat along these lines that
he has conceived his Greek poet of the days of Karshish, confronted,
like the Arab doctor, with the "new thing." As Karshish is at heart a
spiritual idealist, for all his preoccupation with drugs and stones, so
Cleon, a past-master of poetry and painting, is among the most positive
and worldly-wise of men. He looks back over a life scored with literary
triumphs, as Karshish over his crumbs of learning gathered at the cost
of blows and obloquy. But while Karshish has the true scholar's
dispassionate and self-effacing thirst for knowledge, Cleon measures his
achievements with the insight of an epicurean artist. He gathers in
luxuriously the incense of universal applause,--his epos inscribed on
golden plates, his songs rising from every fishing-bark at
nightfall,--and wistfully contrasts the vast range of delights which as
an artist he imagines, with the limited pleasures which as a man he
enjoys. The magnificent symmetry, the rounded completeness of his life,
suffer a serious deduction here, and his Greek sense of harmony suffers
offence as well as his human hunger for joy. He is a thorough realist,
and finds no satisfaction in contemplating what he may not possess. Art
itself suffers disparagement, as heightening this vain capacity of
contemplation:--

"I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king!"

With great ingenuity this Greek realism is made the stepping-stone to a
conception of immortality as un-Greek as that of the Incarnation is
un-Semitic. Karshish shrank intuitively from a conception which
fascinated while it awed; to Cleon a future state in which joy and
capability will be brought again to equality seems a most plausible
supposition, which he only rejects with a sigh for lack of outer
evidence:--

"Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!"

The little vignette in the opening lines finely symbolises the brilliant
Greek decadence, as does the closing picture in Karshish the mystic dawn
of the Earth. Here the portico, flo