That he was himself aware of the shortcomings of “Sordello” as a work of art is not disputable.  In 1863, Mrs. Orr says, he considered the advisability of “rewriting it in a more transparent manner, but concluded that the labour would be disproportionate to the result, and contented himself with summarising the contents of each ‘book’ in a continuous heading, which represents the main thread of the story.”

The essential manliness of Browning is evident in the famous dedication to the French critic Milsand, who was among his early admirers.  “My own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either?  I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since.”

Whatever be the fate of “Sordello,” one thing pertinent to it shall survive:  the memorable sentence in the dedicatory preface—­“My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul:  little else is worth study.”

The poem has disastrous faults, but is a magnificent failure.  “Vast as night,” to borrow a simile from Victor Hugo, but, like night, innumerously starred.

CHAPTER VI.

“Pippa Passes,” “The Ring and the Book,” “The Inn Album,” these are Browning’s three great dramatic poems, as distinct from his poetic plays.  All are dramas in the exact sense, though the three I have named are dramas for mental and not for positive presentation.  Each reader must embody for himself the images projected on his brain by the electric quality of the poet’s genius:  within the ken of his imagination he may perceive scenes not less moving, incidents not less thrilling, complexities of motive and action not less intricately involved, than upon the conventional stage.

The first is a drama of an idea, the second of the immediate and remote consequences of a single act, the third of the tyranny of the passions.

I understand the general opinion among lovers and earnest students of Browning’s poetry to be that the highest peaks of his genius tower from the vast tableland of “The Ring and the Book”; that thenceforth there was declension.  But Browning is not to be measured by common estimates.  It is easy to indicate, in the instances of many poets, just where the music reaches its sweetest, its noblest, just where the extreme glow wanes, just where the first shadows come leaping like greyhounds, or steal almost imperceptibly from slow-closing horizons.

But with Browning, as with Shakspere, as with Victor Hugo, it is difficult for our vision to penetrate the glow irradiating the supreme heights of accomplishment.  Like Balzac, like Shakspere again, he has revealed to us a territory so vast, that while we bow down before the sun westering athwart distant Andes, the gold of sunrise is already flashing behind us, upon the shoulder of Atlas.

It is certain that “The Ring and the Book” is unique.  Even Goethe’s masterpiece had its forerunners, as in Marlowe’s “Faustus,” and its ambitious offspring, as in Bailey’s “Festus.”  But is it a work of art?  Here is the only vital question which at present concerns us.