le, they did
not represent what they really thought. No sensible person then would
have asked Browning to change his style, but would have asked him not to
exaggerate it into its defects. It is plain he could have kept it within
bounds. He has done so frequently. But as frequently he has allowed it
to leap about as wildly as a young colt. He should have submitted it to
the _manege_, and ridden it then where he pleased. A very little
trouble on his part, a very little sacrifice of his unbridled
fancifulness, would have spared us a great deal of unnecessary trouble,
and made his poetry better and more enduring.

Another excuse may be made for his faults of style. It may be said that
in one sense the faults are excellences. When a poet has to represent
excessively subtle phases of thought and feeling, with a crowd of
side-thoughts and side-feelings intruding on them; when he has to
describe the excessive oddities, the curious turns of human emotion in
strange inward conditions or outward circumstances or when he has to
deal with rugged or even savage characters under the sway of the
passions; he cannot, we are told, do it otherwise than Browning did it,
and, instead of being lazy, he used these quips and cranks of style
deliberately.

The excuse has something in it. But, all the same, an artist should have
managed it otherwise. Shakespeare was far more subtle in thought than
Browning, and he had to deal with every kind of strange circumstance and
characters; but his composition and his style illuminate the characters,
order the circumstances, and render clear, as, for example, in the
Sonnets, the subtleties of his thought. A great artist, by his
comprehensive grasp of the main issue of his work, even in a short lyric
or a small picture, and by his luminous representation of it, suggests,
without direct expression of them, all the strange psychology, and the
play of character in the situations. And such an artist does this
excellent thing by his noble composition, and by his lofty, clear, and
melodious style. The excuse is, then, of some weight, but it does not
relieve Browning of the charge. Had he been a greater artist, he would
have been a greater master of the right way of saying things and a
greater pleasurer of the future. Had he taken more pains with his style,
but without losing its individual elements, he might have had as high a
poetic place as Tennyson in the judgment of posterity.

(3) In one thing more--in t