This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music, and the man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound of soldiers marching by.  This, then, roughly is the main fact to remember about Browning’s poetical method, or about any one’s poetical method—­that the question is not whether that method is the best in the world, but the question whether there are not certain things which can only be conveyed by that method.  It is perfectly true, for instance, that a really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as—­

    “Thou art the highest, and most human too”
and
    “We needs must love the highest when we see it”

would really be made the worse for being translated into Browning.  It would probably become

    “High’s human; man loves best, best visible,”

and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness.  But it is quite equally true that any really characteristic fragment of Browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organist in “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”—­

    “Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there! 
    Down it dips, gone like a rocket. 
    What, you want, do you, to come unawares,
    Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers,
    And find a poor devil has ended his cares
    At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs? 
    Do I carry the moon in my pocket?”

—­it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymes ending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in energy and spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, and ran—­

    “What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find
    Disjected bones adrift upon the stair
    Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I
    Pouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun?”

Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellent poetry of its kind, and yet would be bad exactly in so far as it was good; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of the preposterous and grotesque original?  In fact, we may see how unmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in Tennyson himself.  The humorous passages in The Princess, though often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble because they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour.  If Browning had written the passage which opens The Princess, descriptive of the “larking” of the villagers in the magnate’s park, he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the shrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer.  He would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have changed the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done, as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the impression of a certain eternal human energy.  Energy and joy, the father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem.  We should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of which Mr. Henley writes—­