When such a deadlock as this is reached through the stultifying effect of an art expression which seems to have embodied all there is of passion and physical beauty, the one way out is to turn away from the abject contemplation of such art and go back again to humanity itself, in whose widening nature may be discovered the promise of an eternity of progression. Therefore, "To cries of Greek art and what more wish you?" the poet would have it that the early painters replied: "To become now self-acquainters, And paint man, whatever the issue! Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: To bring the invisible full into play! Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?" The revolution in art started by these early worthies had more of spiritual promise in it than the past perfection--"The first of the new, in our race's story, beats the last of the old." His emphasis here upon the return to humanity in order to gain a new source of inspiration in art is further illustrated in his attitude toward the two painters which he portrays so splendidly: Fra Lippo Lippi, the realist, whose Madonnas looked like real women, and who has scandalized some critics on this account, and Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter, who exclaims in despair as he gazes upon a picture by Raphael, in which he sees a fault to pardon in the drawing's line, an error that he could alter for the better, "But all the play, the insight and the stretch," beyond him. The importance of basing art upon the study of the human body is later insisted upon in Francis Furini, not as an end in itself, but as the dwelling place of the soul. "Let my pictures prove I know," says Furini, "Somewhat of what this fleshly frame of ours Or is or should be, how the soul empowers The body to reveal its every mood Of love and hate, pour forth its plenitude Of passion." The evolutionary ideal appears again in his utterances upon poetry, though when speaking of poetry it is the value of the subject matter and its intimate relation to the form upon which he dwells. The little poem "Popularity" shows as clearly as any the importance which he attaches to a new departure in poetic expression, besides giving vent to his scorn of the multitude which sees nothing in the work of the innovator but which is ready at a later date to laud his imitators. Any minor poet, for that matter, any Nokes or Stokes who merely prints blue according to the poetic conventions of the past, possessing not a suspicion of the true inspiration which goes to the making of a poet of the new order, is more acceptable to an unseeing public than him with power to fish "the murex up" that contains the precious drop of royal blue.