Herein we find the secret of Browning's failure. Though he rightly proclaimed that all his poetry was 'dramatic in principle,' yet he never wrote a successful drama. The reason is that in him the spirit of reflexion predominates unduly over the spirit of action. In his plays the action stagnates, because he has no interest in it. All his wealth of intellect is devoted to the unfolding of motive and inner feeling, because, little as he cares for what a man does, he cares very much for what he _is_ and _why_ he does it. The characters therefore, in Browning's mode of conception, are seen individually, each in himself; they are not developed, in accordance with the true dramatic method, by mutual interaction. Hence too it comes that Browning's stage is never more than half filled, and that even of the sparse _dramatis personæ_ only one as a rule, or at most two or three, are brought out with tolerable fulness of detail. In the dramas then we may say that Browning was merely learning what he could not do. Side by side with them he was doing work which taught him what he could do eminently well. His name is associated, more than that of any other poet, with the dramatic monologue. Excluding the regular dramas, nearly all his work of the period under consideration is either dramatic monologue or closely akin to it. _Pippa Passes_ is only slightly different, a series of dramatic scenes, bound together by a lyric thread and by the character and doings of the girl Pippa. Most of the _Dramatic Lyrics_ and _Dramatic Romances_ are pure monologues. _Paracelsus_ may be described as modified monologue. And not only during these years, but throughout his life, Browning's success depended principally upon two things; first, on the fidelity with which he kept to monologue; and secondly, on his remembrance of the fact that the poet must be not only intellectual, but artistic. With few exceptions Browning's greatest things--in _Men and Women_, in _Dramatis Personæ_ and in _The Ring and the Book_, as well as in the works above named--are monologues in which he bears this fact in mind. With few exceptions his failures in later days are due to the fact that he forgets the poet in the philosopher.