They have then their human interest for a reader who does not wish for beauty, passion, imagination, or the desires of the spirit in his poetry; but who hankers at his solitary desk after realistic psychology, fanciful ethics, curiosities of personal philosophy, cold intellectual play with argument, and honest human ugliness.
Moreover, the method Browning attempts to use in them for the discovery of truth is not the method of poetry, nor of any of the arts.

It is almost a commonplace to say that the world of mankind and each individual in it only arrives at the truth on any matter, large or small, by going through and exhausting the false forms of that truth--and a very curious arrangement it seems to be.

It is this method Browning pursues in these poems.

He represents one after another various false or half-true views of the matter in hand, and hopes in that fashion to clear the way to the truth.

But he fails to convince partly because it is impossible to give all or enough of the false or half-true views of any one truth, but chiefly because his method is one fitted for philosophy or science, but not for poetry.