Montaigne, in one of his essays, says that to stop gracefully is sure proof of high race in a horse:  certainly to stop in time is imperative upon the poet.  Of Browning may be said what Poe wrote of another, that his genius was too impetuous for the minuter technicalities of that elaborate art so needful in the building up of monuments for immortality.  But has not a greater than Poe declared that “what distinguishes the artist from the amateur is architectonike in the highest sense; that power of execution which creates, forms, and constitutes:  not the profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of imagery, not the abundance of illustration.”  Assuredly, no “new definition” can be an effective one which conflicts with Goethe’s incontrovertible dictum.

But this much having been admitted, I am only too willing to protest against the uncritical outcry against Browning’s musical incapacity.

A deficiency is not incapacity, otherwise Coleridge, at his highest the most perfect of our poets, would be lowly estimated.

     “Bid shine what would, dismiss into the shade
      What should not be—­and there triumphs the paramount
      Surprise o’ the master.” ...

Browning’s music is oftener harmonic than melodic:  and musicians know how the general ear, charmed with immediately appellant melodies, resents, wearies of, or is deaf to the harmonies of a more remote, a more complex, and above all a more novel creative method.  He is, among poets, what Wagner is among musicians; as Shakspere may be likened to Beethoven, or Shelley to Chopin.  The common assertion as to his incapacity for metric music is on the level of those affirmations as to his not being widely accepted of the people, when the people have the chance; or as to the indifference of the public to poetry generally—­and this in an age when poetry has never been so widely understood, loved, and valued, and wherein it is yearly growing more acceptable and more potent!

A great writer is to be adjudged by his triumphs, not by his failures:  as, to take up Montaigne’s simile again, a famous race-horse is remembered for its successes and not for the races which it lost.  The tendency with certain critics is to reverse the process.  Instead of saying with the archbishop in Horne’s “Gregory VII.,” “He owes it all to his Memnonian voice!  He has no genius:”  or of declaring, as Prospero says of Caliban in “The Tempest,” “He is as disproportioned in his manners as in his shape:”  how much better to affirm of him what Ben Jonson wrote of Shakspere, “Hee redeemed his vices with his vertues:  there was ever more in him to bee praysed than to bee pardoned.”  In the balance of triumphs and failures, however, is to be sought the relative measure of genius—­whose equipoise should be the first matter of ascertainment in comparative criticism.