“Will I widen thee out till thou turnest
    From Margaret Minnikin mou’ by God’s grace,
    To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest.”

This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in Swinburne.  But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital aesthetic deficiency.  In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that the question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian to have written the Hymn to Proserpine.  In the same way, the essential issue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote bad poetry, but whether in any other style except Browning’s you could have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such incomparable lyrics as “The Patriot” or “The Laboratory.”  The answer must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the whole justification of Browning as an artist.

The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his functions as an artist?  We have already agreed that his artistic originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the grotesque.  It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serious use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the eternal and fundamental elements in life?

One of the most curious things to notice about popular aesthetic criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which are intended to express an aesthetic failure, and which express merely an aesthetic variety.  Thus, for instance, the traveller will often hear the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, “The scenery round such and such a place has no interest; it is quite flat.”  To disparage scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite white, or an Italian sky as quite blue.  Flatness is a sublime quality in certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality in others.  In the same way there are a great number of phrases commonly used in order to disparage such writers as Browning which do not in fact disparage, but merely describe them.  One of the most distinguished of Browning’s biographers and critics says of him, for example, “He has never meant to be rugged, but has become so in striving after strength.”  To say that Browning never tried to be rugged is to say that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, or that Mr. W.S.  Gilbert never tried to be extravagant.  The whole issue depends upon whether we realise the simple and essential fact that ruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance.  Some poems ought to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth.  When we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not say that the cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges.