the real character of this Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognised about Browning’s work.  It is this—­that it is absolutely necessary to remember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple and indisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of the badness of his artistic aim.  Browning’s style may be a good style, and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it.  On this point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by the public towards the poets.  It is very little realised that the vast majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad poetry.  The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be almost alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a certain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson.

Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions should not be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, but treated simply as his failures.  It is really true that such a line as

    “Irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?”

is a very ugly and a very bad line.  But it is quite equally true that Tennyson’s

    “And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,”

is a very ugly and a very bad line.  But people do not say that this proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and metaphysician.  They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson’s form; they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson’s indifference to form.  Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry.  But almost all original poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are subject to one most disastrous habit—­the habit of writing imitations of themselves.  Every now and then in the works of the noblest classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts from an American book of parodies.  Swinburne, for example, when he wrote the couplet—­

    “From the lilies and languors of virtue
    To the raptures and roses of vice,”

wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial letters.  Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line—­

    “Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star,”

was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit of American humour.  This tendency is, of course, the result of the self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a dramatis personae and act perpetually in character.  Browning sometimes yielded to this temptation to be a great deal too like himself.