ese lie the most vivid and
intensely dramatic series of short poems in English,--those grouped in
the unfortunately diverse editions of his works under the rubrics 'Men
and Women,' 'Dramatic Lyrics,' 'Dramatic Romances,' 'Dramatis Personae,'
and the rest, as well as larger masterpieces of the broad appeal of
'Pippa Passes,' 'A Blot on the 'Scutcheon,' or 'In a Balcony,'--it is
hard to understand, and will be still harder fifty years hence, why
Browning has not become the familiar and inspiring poet of a vastly
larger body of readers. Undoubtedly a large number of intelligent
persons still suspect a note of affectation in the man who declares his
full and intense enjoyment--not only his admiration--of Browning; a
suspicion showing not only the persistence of the Sordello-born
tradition of "obscurity," but the harm worked by those commentators who
approach him as a problem. Not all commentators share this reproach; but
as Browning makes Bishop Blougram say:--

"Even your prime men who appraise their kind
Are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel,
See more in a truth than the truth's simple self--
Confuse themselves--"

and beyond question such persons are largely responsible for the fact
that for some time to come, every one who speaks of Browning to a
general audience will feel that he has some cant to clear away. If he
can make them read this body of intensely human, essentially simple and
direct dramatic and lyrical work, he will help to bring about the time
when the once popular attitude will seem as unjustifiable as to judge
Goethe only by the second part of 'Faust.'

The first great characteristic of Browning's poetry is undoubtedly the
essential, elemental quality of its humanity--a trait in which it is
surpassed by no other English poetry but that of Shakespeare. It can be
subtile to a degree almost fantastic (as can Shakespeare's to an extent
that familiarity makes us forget); but this is in method. The stuff of
it--the texture of the fabric which the swift and intricate shuttle is
weaving--is always something in which the human being is vitally, not
merely aesthetically interested. It deals with no shadows, and indeed
with few abstractions, except those that form a part of vital
problems--a statement which may provoke the scoffer, but will be found
to be true.

A second characteristic, which, if not a necessary result of this first,
would at least be impossible without it, is the exten