a
poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should
also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary
mistakes. There is one of them, a glaring one, in _Pippa Passes_; and,
as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an
artist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole
beauty of _Pippa Passes_ to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in
the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself. The
whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is
utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and
transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of
them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in
its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Having
done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be
her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly
married. Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic
power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. But
its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike
remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate
intellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and
neglects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. Browning's
poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in
_Dramatic Lyrics_, published in 1842. Here he showed himself a
picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner. And the
two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most
commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers,
passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new
modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in
fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a
wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators.
But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and
almost unexpectedly otherwise.

Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of
Browning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of the _Dramatic
Lyrics_. The first item consists of those splendid war chants called
"Cavalier Tunes." I do not imagine that any one will maintain that
there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. The second item
is the fine poem "The Lost Leader," a poem wh