Statue and the Bust,” however, includes a flatly stated moral: “Let a man contend to the uttermost/ For his life’s set prize,” and never miss that prize because of wasted opportunities.

Some have suggested that in examining the vicissitudes of love Browning was revealing flaws in his own marriage. “A Lover’s Quarrel,” for example, does involve disagreement over two subjects about which he and his wife differed: spiritualism (she believed in it; he scoffed at it) and Napoleon III, emperor of France (she was an admirer; he was not). The evidence is by no means conclusive, however, and the one poem in Men and Women that is openly autobiographical, “One Word More: To E. B. B.,” is Browning’s dedication—both his and that of the book—to Barrett.

Many of Browning’s favorite themes are broached in the poems of Men and Women. The idea that the course of one’s life may turn upon a moment’s decision is expressed in “The Statue and the Bust.” The idea that “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp” is the subject of “Andrea del Sarto,” as well as “Old Pictures in Florence” and “A Grammarian’s Funeral.” Browning’s attitudes toward religion and religious belief are presented in “Saul,” “Cleon,” “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” and “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.”

“Memorabilia,” a slight poem, is chiefly remembered because it alludes to Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of Browning’s early enthusiasms and the subject of Browning’s only important prose essay. “Popularity” is a tribute to another of Browning’s favorite poets, John Keats. In this poem there is further allusion to Browning’s belief that the poet’s role is somehow linked with the divine mission. One of Browning’s most explicit statements about what poetry should aim to be is found in “’Transcendentalism’: A Poem in Twelve Books.” In this work he makes clear his preference for Keatsian or Shelleyan “song” to the overlabored, earnest “thought” that characterizes so much bad Victorian poetry. One poet, speaking to another, says, “’Tis you speak, that’s your error. Song’s our art:/ Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts/ Instead of draping them in sights and sounds.” Browning has no objection to thought in poetry, but it should not be presented baldly, for its own sake. Rather, it should be draped “in sights and sounds.”

“I only knew one poet in my life,” says the speaker in “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” and the poem itself is in many ways Browning’s own description of what a poet should be. The poet, first of all, looks the world full in the face; the poet is no idle dreamer. The poet sees life and sees it whole, taking “such cognizance of men and things” that the poet can truthfully be called “a recording chief-inquisitor.” This poem can be seen as a veiled defense of Browning’s own tendency to write about characters and events that, to one who thinks poetry must be about pretty things, might not be sufficiently “poetic.” If, in Browning’s view, the poet’s proper sphere is life as it really is, the poet’s function is nonetheless an exalted one: The poet writes in the service of God. In “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” the poet “walked about and took account/ Of all thought, said and acted, then went home,/ And wrote it fully to our Lord the King.”

In the two dramatic monologues that are generally acknowledged to be the finest poems in Men and Women, “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto,” Browning gives further insights into his theories of art. It is obvious that, in bringing these two Renaissance painters to life, his own sympathies as an artist lie completely with Lippo Lippi and not at all with Andrea del Sarto. He depicts the latter as a skilled craftsperson whose hand and eye are deft, but who has only “something of a heart.” His paintings are accomplished, but cold-blooded and uninspired. In the poem del Sarto comes to realize that he has failed to infuse into his work the quality of a great soul. An artist’s success, Browning is saying, resides not merely in technical perfection but also in the ability to give sufficiently of oneself to make the work burn with the true “light of God.” Besides this self-revelation, del Sarto speaks of his troubled marriage, in that his wife desires the high life and living well beyond her means. Del Sarto is forced to compromise to gain sufficient commissions to keep up with her ambition, rather than his own.

In seeing the creation of a work of art as a moral act Browning is not advocating the kind of art that merely moralizes, although Browning’s own late poems, in the years after The Ring and the Book (1868-1869; 4 volumes), frequently do exactly that. Lippo Lippi’s monastic superiors have forced him to paint pious pictures that will “say to folk—remember matins,/ Or, mind you fast next Friday.” They have told him that his purpose is not to depict the world but to “forget there’s such a thing as flesh” and “to paint the souls of men.” Lippi himself, however, is too honest an artist, and too fully a man, to be content with their dictates: “zooks, sir, flesh and blood,/ That’s all I’m made of!” Lippi loves the things of the world, but not merely in and for themselves. He sees the beauty of the world as God’s creation and therefore not to be despised. The artist, he believes (and Browning with him), by portraying finite beauty, comes closest to portraying infinite beauty as well. “I never saw,” says Lippi, “beauty with no soul at all.” In his characterization of this Italian monk Browning has given readers, at a distance, a veritable portrait of himself as an artist.

Three poems in Men and Women are about artists. Three are about churchmen, two of which, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church” and “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” have been reckoned on an almost equal par with the two painterly monologues. All four poems delve into the respective speaker’s character and motivations; all four reveal Browning’s rich psychological insights as well as his ability to create the exact tones of the speaking voice as it reflects quickly changing states of mind.

“The Bishop Orders His Tomb” has a somewhat ambiguous title: Is the bishop putting his tomb in order or is he asking for it to be made in a certain way? Once again, Browning sets us in the High Renaissance, this time with “Rome, 15—,” a strange mixture of faith, worldliness, ambition, and cultured learning. The bishop’s rambling dying thoughts reveal his character and his values. Browning brilliantly reconstructs the obsessive nature of the bishop’s motives through constant repetitions and circular arguments. The obsessions form a judgment on the bishop as a person. After all, these are his dying concerns: not heavenly at all, or asking of forgiveness, but ones concerned that some material memorial be left to him that should signify his victory over his deadly rival, Gandolf. He has already beaten Gandolf in love, having kept the beautiful mistress who is the mother of the children now greedily clustering round his deathbed. He now wants to make sure his tomb outshines that of Gandolf.

The tension in the bishop’s ramblings is that the illegitimate children will not pay out the expenses for his grandiose order. He fears that the huge lump of lapis lazuli will not be placed in the tomb with him, and that the marble will not be of a fine enough quality. Even though he is bequeathing his children a fine villa, they may in their greed want more. Likewise, he fears the Latin of his epitaph will not be in a high enough style. He imagines himself lying in eternity in this tomb. There are no thoughts at all of being in Heaven. His is a purely material faith. Thus, Browning comments too on the quality of the Catholicism he sees typifying the Renaissance.

By contrast, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” is set in contemporary England. The context is the reinstatement of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Great Britain under Cardinal Wiseman, recently appointed archbishop of Westminster, the senior Catholic in the country. The reinstatement had produced an enormous outcry in a very Protestant era, when anti-Catholic sentiments were running high, some of which Browning shared. Browning admitted that his portrayal of Blougram was based on the brilliant Wiseman.

It has often been supposed, therefore, that Browning’s poem is a satire, exposing the bishop’s worldliness as being of the same sort as in the previous poem. At one level, it is. The bishop is talking to a second-rate journalist, probably modeled on a friend of Browning, Alfred Domett. The journalist has written something deprecatory on Blougram; in response, Blougram invites him to dinner, and the monologue takes place over glasses of wine after the meal is over. Blougram all the time stresses how materially advantageous his life of faith is, compared to Gigadibs’ life of meager earnings, derived from his unbelief.

Thus, Blougram’s defense of faith seems as materialistic as that of the other bishop, and as worthless. However, Blougram is shown to have a quick and self-aware mind, as well as a keen enjoyment in sophistry, that is, constructing clever, even shocking arguments for the sheer sake of argumentation. So the reader never quite knows whether Blougram actually believes anything he is arguing. At the end, Browning, unusually, writes an epigraph that suggests that Blougram’s real, gut beliefs have remained unspoken. Browning has been criticized for needing the epigraph, in which he also states that after the interview, Gigadibs had given up journalism and emigrated, just as Domett had done.

It may well be that Browning found himself warming to the rogue bishop and actually giving him sentiments that he, too, had believed—such as, for example, the fight of faith and the test of character such a struggle brings. Blougram takes over some of philosopher-theologian Blaise Pascal’s arguments about the divine wager, but mixes them provocatively with the idea of accommodation. The memorable image he uses is indeed about cabin accommodation on board ship, and the analogy works brilliantly.

When readers have sifted Browning’s poems for their ideas, even those about art, they have done him less than justice as a poet. His greatness is, ultimately, located in his creation of memorable characters: the Chaucerian Fra Lippo Lippi, the self-pitying Andrea del Sarto, the wily Bishop Blougram, the Greek Cleon, the Arab Karshish, the dying bishop concerned about his tomb, and a whole gallery of lovers in a splendid variety of moods. Browning’s early failures as a writer for the stage taught him a valuable lesson: His abilities were best suited for the delineation of “Action in Character, rather than Character in Action.” His psychological studies of action within his justly famous characters, particularly in the dramatic monologues, are the main basis for his great reputation.

It is interesting to note that, during his lifetime, Browning’s fame came slowly. The sale of so great a collection of poems as Men and Women was disappointingly small, and no second edition was ever called for. It was not until the publication of Dramatis Personae, in 1864, that Browning began to receive the recognition he deserved.