easy difficult. The reader does
not get at what he means as he gets at what Homer, Dante, and
Shakespeare mean. Dante and Shakespeare are often difficult through the
depth and difficulty of their matter; they are not difficult, except
Shakespeare when he was learning his art, by obscurity or carelessness
of style. But Browning is difficult not by his thoughts, but by his
expression of them. A poet has no right to be so indifferent, so
careless of clearness in his art, I might almost say, so lazy. Browning
is negligent to a fault, almost to impertinence. The great poets put the
right words in the right places, and Tennyson is with them in that.
Browning continually puts his words into the wrong places. He leaves out
words necessary for the easy understanding of the passage, and for no
reason except his fancy. He leaves his sentences half-finished and his
meaning half-expressed. He begins a sentence, and having begun it, three
or four thoughts connected with it slide into his mind, and instead of
putting them aside or using them in another place, he jerks them into
the middle of his sentence in a series of parentheses, and then inserts
the end of the original sentence, or does not insert it at all. This is
irritating except to folk who like discovery of the twisted rather than
poetry; and it is quite needless. It is worse than needless, for it
lowers the charm and the dignity of the poetry.

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 sty