Surprise o' the master." . . .

Browning's music is oftener harmonic than melodic: and musicians know
how the general ear, charmed with immediately appellant melodies,
resents, wearies of, or is deaf to the harmonies of a more remote,
a more complex, and above all a more novel creative method.
He is, among poets, what Wagner is among musicians;
as Shakespeare may be likened to Beethoven, or Shelley to Chopin.
The common assertion as to his incapacity for metric music
is on the level of those affirmations as to his not being
widely accepted of the people, when the people have the chance;
or as to the indifference of the public to poetry generally --
and this in an age when poetry has never been so widely understood,
loved, and valued, and wherein it is yearly growing
more acceptable and more potent!

A great writer is to be adjudged by his triumphs, not by his failures:
as, to take up Montaigne's simile again, a famous race-horse
is remembered for its successes and not for the races which it lost.
The tendency with certain critics is to reverse the process.
Instead of saying with the archbishop in Horne's "Gregory VII.",
"He owes it all to his Memnonian voice! He has no genius:"
or of declaring, as Prospero says of Caliban in "The Tempest",
"He is as disproportioned in his manners as in his shape:"
how much better to affirm of him what Ben Jonson wrote of Shakespeare,
"Hee redeemed his vices with his vertues: there was ever more in him
to bee praysed than to bee pardoned." In the balance of triumphs
and failures, however, is to be sought the relative measure of genius --
whose equipoise should be the first matter of ascertainment
in comparative criticism.