line. But people do not say that this
proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and
metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form;
they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference
to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this
failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the
exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a
mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original
poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are
subject to one most disastrous habit--the habit of writing imitations
of themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblest
classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts
from an American book of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when he
wrote the couplet--

"From the lilies and languors of virtue
To the raptures and roses of vice,"

wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation
which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of
proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial
letters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line--

"Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star,"

was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit
of American humour. This tendency is, of course, the result of the
self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of
us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a _dramatis personae_
and act perpetually in character. Browning sometimes yielded to this
temptation to be a great deal too like himself.

"Will I widen thee out till thou turnest
From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace,
To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest."

This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in
Swinburne. But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in
Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital
aesthetic deficiency. In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that the
question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about
lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but
whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian
to have written the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the essential
issue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with
Byron, Word