Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic quality.  But here again Browning’s work requires a somewhat more cautious and sympathetic analysis.  There is a certain kind of fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting uncertainty even at the end.  It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.  One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it.  There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things.  There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange and unclassified artistic merits of Browning.  He was always trying experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought.  Far more often he triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of which taken separately might have founded an artistic school.  But whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce hunt after poetic novelty.  He never became a conservative.  The last book he published in his life-time, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than Paracelsus.  This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an artist.  He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn.  An admirable example can be found in that splendid poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”  It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth itself.  Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this.  He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes.  That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before.

    “If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
       Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
       Were jealous else.  What made those holes and rents
    In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
    All hope of greenness? ’tis a brute must walk
       Pashing their life out, with a brute’s intents.”