“And dipt of his wings in Paris square,
They bring him now to lie burned alive.

[And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern,
ye shall say to confirm him who singeth—­

We bring John now to be burned alive.”

A hundred instances might, of course, be given.  Milton’s “Sonnet on his Blindness,” or Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” are both thoroughly original, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other such odes.  But can any one mention any poem of exactly the same structural and literary type as “Fears and Scruples,” as “The Householder,” as “House” or “Shop,” as “Nationality in Drinks,” as “Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis,” as “My Star,” as “A Portrait,” as any of “Ferishtah’s Fancies,” as any of the “Bad Dreams.”

The thing which ought to be said about Browning by those who do not enjoy him is simply that they do not like his form; that they have studied the form, and think it a bad form.  If more people said things of this sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeakably in clarity and common honesty.  Browning put himself before the world as a good poet.  Let those who think he failed call him a bad poet, and there will be an end of the matter.  There are many styles in art which perfectly competent aesthetic judges cannot endure.  For instance, it would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of Gothic to say that one of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches with bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in his opinion, ugly.  But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one to say that it had no form.  A man’s actual feelings about it might be better expressed by saying that it had too much.  To say that Browning was merely a thinker because you think “Caliban upon Setebos” ugly, is precisely as absurd as it would be to call the author of the old Belgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion.  The truth about Browning is not that he was indifferent to technical beauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty to which any one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses.

There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague and unmeaning criticism.  The usual way of criticising an author, particularly an author who has added something to the literary forms of the world, is to complain that his work does not contain something which is obviously the speciality of somebody else.  The correct thing to say about Maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let us say, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain beauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that really boisterous will to live which may be found in Martin Chuzzlewit.  The right thing to say about Cyrano de Bergerac is that it may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but that it really throws no light on the duty of middle-aged married couples in Norway.  It cannot