wearing one kind of hat or adopting one attitude. A genuine government is simply the attitude of that special people. What we require for every man (or State) is life, health, muscular freedom to choose his own attitude. Let us be for the democracy and leave the rest. Who cares for the figure at the helm so long as the people's wind is in the sails? I care little. Only I do care that the democracy should have power-that each man should have the inheritance of a man and the right of voting where he is taxed. So this is my creed. "Napoleon will come out admirably in the Italian results. He has had Europe at the end of the diplomatical sword of fence and a European coalition against him as no remote contingency. Often what has seemed like opposition to our progress here has simply been putting on the drag down-hill when the wheel was inclined to a perilous velocity. But there are some who cannot understand, and more who will not. It will be enough that the Italian nation understands." In these letters we have the actual spirit of the Italian poems. Browning's own attitude was much less pronounced. In the prefatory note to Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau in the Cambridge edition, a quotation is made from a letter to Miss Blagden that sums up his personal view. "I am glad you have got my little book," he says, "and seen for yourself whether I make the best or the worst of the case. I think, in the main, he meant to do what I say, and but for weakness-grown more apparent in his last years than formerly-would have done what I say he did not. I thought badly of him at the beginning of his career, et pour cause: better afterward on the strength of the promises he made and gave indications of intending to redeem. I think him very weak in the last miserable year. At his worst I prefer him to Thiers's best." It is not, indeed, any single work or passage that connects Browning with Italy in the minds of those who care for his poems. It is the fact that he never wrote of any other country with so much of the feeling the Japanese have for the very trees and flowers of their land; the continual turning of his mind to Italian symbols, to impressions gained from the intricate web of her history, from the aspect of her houses, the smile of her women, the interests of her men, the paintings of her churches, the warmth and fulness of light in her streets and piazzas; and this long before he went there to live with his wife and long after he had left her Florentine grave to return to England. Shortly before he died the fancy seized him to own some land in Asolo, the little town he "discovered" fifty years before on his first Italian visit, and he hit upon property belonging to the old castle which the municipality had previously refused to sell. The day the vote was taken authorising the purchase was the day of the poet's death, and on the same day the book Asolando was published. The little old fortified city, where the voices of Queen and Court are all stilled, where the silk mills no longer busily whir, and the pretty girls have ceased to go to and from their work," showed her gratitude toward the English poet in whose verse her name is countlessly mentioned by placing a mural tablet on the house he occcupied. The municipality of Venice, also, placed on the outer wall of the vast Rezzonico Palace (the home of Browning's son) a tablet bearing this inscription : A ROBERTO BROWNING MORTO IN QUESTO PALAZZO VENEZIA POSE and in the right-hand corner his own lines Then on the walls of Casa Guidi in Florence is the marble slab with its inscription by the Italian poet, Tommaseo QUI SCRISSE E MORÌ ELISABETTA BARRETT BROWNING CHE IN CUORE DI DONNA CONCILIAVA PONE QUESTA LAPIDE FIRENZE GRATA Thus in three towns of Italy the memory of the Brownings is preserved by a people as responsive as they themselves were to any form of genuine affection. B CHAPTER IX. POEMS ON MUSIC AND PAINTING. ROWNING has been called by some rash spirit the "Leonardo of the Nineteenth Century." It is only necessary to recall the true Leonardo,-anatomist, botanist, physiologist, sculptor, architect, musician, astronomer, chemist, geologist, geographer, engineer, and the painter of Mona Lisa, -to smile at a comparison that would certainly have moved the poet's laughter if not his scorn. Yet Browning's interest in all forms of intellectual activity, and his insatiable curiosity concerning the minds of men preoccupied with art and science, justify, in a way, the use of that tremendous name to indicate his humbler range. -- In music and painting, at least, he is at home as in poetry, or, possibly, the truer statement would be that he is a familiar guest in these neighbouring regions. Rossetti said of him that his knowledge of early Italian art was beyond that of anyone he ever met, and encyclopædically beyond that of Ruskin himself"; and a writer in Music calls him 66 |