Yet, there is something to say on the other side. It is said, and with a certain justice, that "the style is the man. Strip his style away, and where is the man? Where is the real Browning if we get him to change a way of writing in which he naturally shaped his thought?" Well, no one would ask him to impose on himself a style which did not fit his nature. That would be fatal. When he has sometimes tried to do so, as in a few of the dramas, we scarcely recognise our poet, and we lose half of his intellectual and poetic charm. Just as Carlyle when he wrote away from his natural style, as in the life of Sterling and Schiller, is not the great writer he is elsewhere, so was it with Browning. Were we savage satirists, blinded by our savagery, we might then say both of Browning and Carlyle that half their power lay in their fantastic, rocky style. We should be quite wrong. Their style was the exact clothing of their thought. They wrote exactly as they thought; and when they put their thought into 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 _manège_, 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.