an alertness of
intelligence equal to his own. When it needs a leaping-pole to pass from
subject to verb across the chasm of a parenthesis, when a reader swings
himself dubiously from relative to some one of three possible
antecedents, when he springs at a meaning through the fissure of an
undeveloped exclamatory phrase, and when these efforts are demanded
again and again, some muscular fatigue naturally ensues. Yet it is true
that when once the right connections in these perplexing sentences have
been established, the sense is flashed upon the mind with singular
vividness; then the difficulty has ceased to exist. And thus, in two
successive stages of study, the same reader may justly censure
_Sordello_ for its obscurity of style, and justly applaud it for a
remarkable lucidity in swiftness. Intelligent, however, as Browning was,
it implied a curious lack of intelligence to suppose that a poem of many
thousand lines written I in shorthand would speedily find decipherers.
If we may trust the words of Westland Marston, recorded by Mr W.M.
Rossetti in _The Preraphaelite Brotherhood Journal_ (26 February 1850),
Browning imagined that his shorthand was Roman type of unusual
clearness: "Marston says that Browning, before publishing _Sordello_,
sent it to him to read, saying that this time I the public should not
accuse him at any rate of being unintelligible." What follows in the
_Journal_ is of interest, but can hardly be taken as true to the letter:
"Browning's system of composition is to write down on a slate, in prose,
what he wants to say, and then turn it into verse, striving after the
greatest amount of condensation possible; thus, if an exclamation will
suggest his meaning, he substitutes this for a whole sentence." In
climbing an antique tower we may obtain striking flashes of prospect
through the slits and eyelet-holes which dimly illuminate the winding
stair, but to combine these into an intelligible landscape is not always
easy. Browning's errors of style are in part attributable to his unhappy
application of a passage in a letter of Caroline Fox which a friend had
shown him. She stated that her acquaintance John Sterling had been
repelled by the "verbosity" of _Paracelsus_: "Doth Mr Browning know,"
she asked, "that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the
discovery of a single word that is the one fit for his sonnet?"[17]
Browning was determined to avoid "verbosity"; but the method which seems
to have occ