None can answer yet for the generality, whose decisive franchise
will elect a fit arbiter in due time.

So, for myself, let me summarise what I have already written
in several sections of this book, and particularly in the closing pages
of Chapter 6. There, it will be remembered -- after having found
that Browning's highest achievement is in his second period --
emphasis was laid on the primary importance of his life-work in its having
compelled us to the assumption of a fresh critical standpoint involving
the construction of a new definition. In the light of this new definition
I think Browning will ultimately be judged. As the sculptor in "Pippa Passes"
was the predestinated novel thinker in marble, so Browning himself
appears as the predestinated novel thinker in verse; the novel thinker,
however, in degree, not in kind. But I do not for a moment believe
that his greatness is in his status as a thinker: even less,
that the poet and the thinker are indissociable. Many years ago
Sainte-Beuve destroyed this shallow artifice of pseudo-criticism:
"Venir nous dire que tout poe"te de talent est, par essence,
un grand PENSEUR, et que tout vrai PENSEUR est ne/cessairement
artiste et poe"te, c'est une pre/tention insoutenable et que de/ment
a\ chaque instant la re/alite/."

When Browning's enormous influence upon the spiritual and mental life
of our day -- an influence ever shaping itself to wise and beautiful issues --
shall have lost much of its immediate import, there will still surely be
discerned in his work a formative energy whose resultant is pure poetic gain.
It is as the poet he will live: not merely as the "novel thinker in verse".
Logically, his attitude as `thinker' is unimpressive. It is the attitude,
as I think some one has pointed out, of acquiescence with codified morality.
In one of his `Causeries', the keen French critic quoted above