illing to allow even fictitious artists to be driven into
imperfect conduct by the failure of those about them to live up to their
standards. For example, Fra Lippo Lippi, disgusted with the barren
virtue of the monks, confesses,

I do these wild things in sheer despite
And play the fooleries you catch me at
In sheer rage.

But invariably, whatever a poet hero's failings maybe, the author
assures the philistine public that it is entirely to blame.

If the poet is unable to find common ground with the plain man on which
he can make his morality sympathetically understood, his quarrel with
the puritan is foredoomed to unsuccessful issue, for whereas the plain
man will wink at a certain type of indulgence, the puritan will be
satisfied with nothing but iron restraint on the poet's part, and
systematic thwarting of the impulses which are the breath of life to
him.

The poet's only hope of winning in his argument with the puritan lies in
the possibility that the race of puritans is destined for extinction.
Certainly they were much more numerous fifty years ago than now, and
consequently more voluble in their denunciation of the poet. At that
time they found their most redoubtable antagonists in the Brownings.
Robert Browning devoted a poem, _With Francis Furini_, to exposing the
incompatibility of asceticism and art, while Mrs. Browning, in _The
Poet's Vow_, worked out the tragic consequences of the hero's mistaken
determination to retire from the world,

That so my purged, once human heart,
From all the human rent,
May gather strength to pledge and drink
Your wine of wonderment,
While you pardon me all blessingly
The woe mine Adam sent.

In the end Mrs. Browning makes her poet realize that he is crushing the
best part of his nature by thus thwarting his human instincts.

No, the poet's virtue must not be a pruning of his human nature, but a
flowering of it. Nowhere are the Brownings more in sympathy than in
their recognition of this fact. In _Pauline_, Browning traces the poet's
mistaken effort to find goodness in self-restraint and denial. It is a
failure, and the poem ends with the hero's recognition that "life is
truth, and truth is good." The same idea is one of the leading motives
in _Sordello_.

One seems to be coming perilously near the decadent poet's argument
again. And there remains to be dealt with a poet more extreme than
Browning--Walt Whitman, who challenges us with his slogan, "