to attract and conciliate a poet like
Browning, whose visionary idealism went along with so unaffected a
relish for the world and the talents which succeed there. A great
spiritual ruler, performing with congenial ease the enormous and varied
functions of his office, and with intellectual resources, when they were
discharged, to win distinction in scholarship, at chess, in society,
appealed powerfully to Browning's congenital delight in all strong and
vivid life. He was a great athlete, who had completely mastered his
circumstances and shaped his life to his will. Opposed to a man of this
varied and brilliant achievement, an ineffectual dilettante appeared a
sorry creature enough; and Browning, far from taking his part and
putting in his craven mouth the burning retorts which the reader in vain
expects, makes him play helplessly with olive-stones while the great
bishop rolls him out his mind, and then, as one cured and confuted,
betake himself to the life of humbler practical activity and social
service.

It is plain that the actual Blougram offered tempting points of contact
with that strenuous ideal of life which he was later to preach through
the lips of "Rabbi ben Ezra." Even what was most problematic in him, his
apparently sincere profession of an outworn creed, suggested the
difficult feat of a gymnast balancing on a narrow edge, or forcibly
holding his unbelief in check,--

"Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe."

But Browning marks clearly the element both of self-deception and
deliberate masquerade in Blougram's defence. He made him "say right
things and call them by wrong names." The intellectual athlete in him
went out to the intellectual athlete in the other, and rejoiced in
every equation he seemed to establish. He played, and made Blougram
play, upon the elusive resemblance between the calm of effortless
mastery and that of hardly won control.

The rich and varied poetry reviewed in the last three sections occupies
less than half of _Men and Women_, and leaves the second half of the
title unexplained. In that richer emotional atmosphere which breathes
from every line of his Italian work, the profound fulfilment of his
spiritual needs which he found in his home was the most vital and potent
element. His imaginative grasp of every kind of spiritual energy, of
every "incident of soul," was deepened by his new but incessant and
unqual