be too much insisted upon that at least three-quarters of the blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authors falls under this general objection, and is essentially valueless.  Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence, upon the whole greatly under-rated.  They are blamed for not doing, not only what they have failed to do to reach their own ideal, but what they have never tried to do to reach every other writer’s ideal.  If we can show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyally pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written In Memoriam if he had tried.

Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from his opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of the matter, so to speak, by the wrong end.  They believe that what is ordinarily called the grotesque style of Browning was a kind of necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express novel and profound ideas.  But this is an entire mistake.  What is called ugliness was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a quite unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake.  For reasons that we shall see presently in discussing the philosophical use of the grotesque, it did so happen that Browning’s grotesque style was very suitable for the expression of his peculiar moral and metaphysical view.  But the whole mass of poems will be misunderstood if we do not realise first of all that he had a love of the grotesque of the nature of art for art’s sake.  Here, for example, is a short distinct poem merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs in which it is to be presumed Tokay had been served to him.  This is the whole poem, and a very good poem too—­

    “Up jumped Tokay on our table,
    Like a pigmy castle-warder,
    Dwarfish to see, but stout and able,
    Arms and accoutrements all in order;
    And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South
    Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth,
    Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather,
    Twisted his thumb in his red moustache,
    Jingled his huge brass spurs together,
    Tightened his waist with its Buda sash,
    And then, with an impudence nought could abash,
    Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder,
    For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder: 
    And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting,
    And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting,
    Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!”

I suppose there are Browning students in existence who would think that this poem contained something pregnant about the Temperance question, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic movement in Germany.  But surely to most of us it is sufficiently apparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ridiculous knick-knack, exactly as if he were actually moulding one of these preposterous German jugs.  Now before studying