g as a literary artist first
and see what was his position. Philosophy is usually in the nature of a
summing up. The philosophy of a poet is best looked at when the poet has
been studied; therefore it is best to follow Chesterton's order and
take Browning's philosophical position at the end of this chapter.

He feels that in some ways the critics want Browning to be poet and
logician, and are rather cross when he is either. They want him to be a
poet and are annoyed that he is a logician; they want him to be a
logician and are annoyed that he is a poet. The fact of the matter is he
was probably a poet!

Chesterton is convinced that Browning was a literary artist--that is to
say, he was a symbolist. The wealth of Browning's poetry depends on
arrangement of language. It is so with all great literature: it is not
so much what is said as how it is said, in what way the sentences are
formed so that the climax comes in the right place.

For all practical purposes Browning was, our critic thinks, a deliberate
artist. The suggestion that Browning cared nothing for form is for
Chesterton a monstrous assertion. It is as absurd as saying that
Napoleon cared nothing for feminine love or that Nero hated mushrooms.
What Browning did was always to fall into a different kind of form,
which is a totally different thing to saying he disregarded it.

There is rather an assumption among a certain class of critics that the
artistic form is a quality that is finite. As a matter of fact, it is
infinite; it cannot be bound up with any particular mode of expression;
it is elastic, and so elastic that certain critics cannot adjust their
minds to such lucidity.

There is, our critic feels, another suggestion--that if Browning had a
form, it was a bad one. This really does not matter very much. Whether
form in an artistic sense is good or bad can only be determined by
setting up a criterion; this is not possible in the case of Browning,
because, though he has many forms, they are original ones, which render
them impervious to values of good and bad.

Chesterton is naturally aware that Browning wrote a great deal of bad
poetry--every poet does. The way to take with Browning's bad poetry is
not to condemn him for it, but to say quite frankly this poem or that
poem was a failure. It is by his masterpieces that Browning must be
judged.

Perhaps, as he points out, the peculiar characteristic of Browning's art
lay in his use of the grotesque, wh