No criticism of Browning’s poems can be vital, none in the face of the poems themselves can be even intelligible, which is not based upon the fact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate artist.  He may have failed as an artist, though I do not think so; that is quite a different matter.  But it is one thing to say that a man through vanity or ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite another to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and did not know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first-class hotel.  Browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if the reader does not like his art, at least the author did.  The general sentiment expressed in the statement that he did not care about form is simply the most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived.  It would be far nearer the truth to say that he cared more for form than any other English poet who ever lived.  He was always weaving and modelling and inventing new forms.  Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as many different metres as there are different poems.

The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for form than Browning did, cared less at least in this sense—­that they were content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had new ideas.  Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea than he tried to make a new form to express it.  Wordsworth and Shelley were really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy.  Nevertheless, the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality” is a perfectly normal and traditional ode, and “Prometheus Unbound” is a perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama.  But if we study Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic forms.  It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were. The Ring and the Book, for example, is an illuminating departure in literary method—­the method of telling the same story several times and trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into several different and equally interesting stories. Pippa Passes, to take another example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detached dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated figure.  The invention of these things is not merely like the writing of a good poem—­it is something like the invention of the sonnet or the Gothic arch.  The poet who makes them does not merely create himself—­he creates other poets.  It is so in a degree long past enumeration with regard to Browning’s smaller poems.  Such a pious and horrible lyric as “The Heretic’s Tragedy,” for instance, is absolutely original, with its weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses, mocking echoes indeed—­