le who did not like him
found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. One
lady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowd
and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day
with your head up. Another lady who did not know him, and therefore
disliked him, asked after a dinner party, "Who was that too-exuberant
financier?" These are the diversities of feeling about him. But they
all agree in one point--that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk
cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He
talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to
give that neat and aesthetic character to his speech which is almost
invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental
superiority. When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was
mostly in the form of pouring out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole
epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the
literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We have
therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that
Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and
contempt of his readers.

There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary
theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of
fame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statement
that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later
poems, but the statement is simply not true. _Sordello_, to the
indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached,
was begun before _Strafford_, and was therefore the third of his
works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring _Pauline_, the
second. He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. It
was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and
publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this
horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any
knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the
conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite
origin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was not
unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was
humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but
because to him they were obvious.

A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself
incomprehensible, because h