But there is much more in Blougram than this.  The imposing personality of Wiseman contained much 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 unqualified experience of love.  His poetry focussed itself more persistently than ever about those creative energies akin to love, of which art in the fullest sense is the embodiment, and religion the recognition.  It would have been strange if the special form of love-experience to which the quickening thrill was due had remained untouched by it.  In fact, however, the title of the volume is significant as well as accurate; for Browning’s poetry of the love between men and women may be said, save for a few simple though exquisite earlier notes, to begin with it.