There are, however, many true lovers of poetry who are enthusiastic about these poems.  And parts of them deserve this enthusiasm, for they have been conceived and made in a wild borderland between analysis and imagination.  They occupy a place apart, a backwater in the noble stream of English poetry, filled with strange plants; and the final judgment of Browning’s rank as an artist will not depend on them but on the earlier poems, which, being more “simple, sensuous and passionate,” are nearer to the common love and life of man.  When, then, we apply this test, the difference of rank between him and Tennyson is not great, but it is plain.  Yet comparison, on this point, is difficult.  Both drew mankind.  Tennyson is closer to that which is most universal in the human heart, Browning to the vast variety within it; and men in the future will find their poetic wants best satisfied by reading the work of both these poets.  Let us say then that in this matter they are equal.  Each has done a different part of that portraiture of human nature which is the chief work of a poet.

But this is not the only test we may apply to these men as poets.  The second question which tries the endurance and greatness of poetic work is this:  “How far is any poet’s representation of what is true and loving in itself lovely?” Their stuff may be equally good.  Is their form equally good?  Is it as beautiful as an artist, whose first duty is to be true to beauty as the shape of love and truth, ought to make it?  The judgment of the future will also be formed on that ground, and inevitably.

What we call form in poetry may be said to consist of, or to depend on, three things:  (1) on a noble style; (2) on a harmonious composition, varied but at unity; (3) on a clear, sweet melody of lawful movement in verse.  These are not everything in poetry, but they are the half of its whole.  The other half is that the “matter”—­that is, the deep substance of amalgamated Thought and Emotion—­should be great, vital and fair.  But both halves are necessary, and when the half which regards form is weak or unbeautiful, the judgment of the future drops the poems which are faulty in form out of memory, just as it drops out of its affections poems which are excellent in form, but of ignoble, unimpassioned, feeble or thoughtless matter.  There was, for example, a whole set of poets towards the end of the Elizabethan period who were close and weighty thinkers, whose poetry is full of intellectual surprises and difficulties, who were capable of subtlety of expression and even of lovely turns and phantasies of feeling; whom students read to-day, but whom the poetical world does not read at all.  And the reason is that their style, their melody, and their composition do not match in excellence their matter.  Their stuff is good, their form is bad.  The judgment of the future gives them no high rank.  They do not answer well to the test of which I speak.

I do not mean to apply that analogy altogether, only partly, to Browning.  He rises far above these poets in style, composition and melody, but he skirts their faults.  And if we are asked to compare him to Tennyson, he is inferior to Tennyson at all these points of Form.