other clothing, when they doctored their style, 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 this matter of form—­the beauty of poetry lies.  It is in sweetness of melody and its charm; in exquisite fitness of its music to its thought and its emotion; in lawful change of harmony making enchanting variety to the ear; in the obedience of the melodies to the laws of the different kinds of poetry; and in the lovely conduct of the harmonies, through all their changes, to that finished close which throws back its own beauty on all that has preceded it.  This part of the