An Introduction to the Study of Browning | Page 8

the impression you have received from the whole is
single and vivid, and, while you may not perceive it, it will generally be
the case that certain details at which your fastidiousness cries out,
certain uncouthnesses, as you fancy, are perfectly appropriate and in
their place, and have contributed to the perfection of the ensemble.
A word may here be said in reference to the charge of "obscurity,"
which, from the time when Browning's earliest poem was disposed of
by a complacent critic in the single phrase, "A piece of pure
bewilderment," has been hurled at each succeeding poem with re-iterate
vigour of virulence. The charge of "pure bewilderment" is about as
reasonable as the charge of "habitual rudeness of versification." It is a
fashion. People abuse their "Browning" as they abuse their
"Bradshaw," though all that is wanting, in either case, is a little patience
and a little common sense. Browning might say, as his wife said in an
early preface, "I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry,
nor leisure for the hour of the poet;" as indeed he has himself said, to
much the same effect, in a letter printed many years ago: "I never
pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or
a game at dominoes to an idle man." But he has not made anything like
such a demand on the reader's faculties as people, not readers, seem to
suppose. Sordello_ is difficult, _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is
difficult, so, perhaps, in parts, is Fifine at the Fair; so, too, on account
of its unfamiliar allusions, is Aristophanes' Apology; and a few smaller
poems, here and there, remotely argumentative or specially complex in
psychology, are difficult. But really these are about all to which such a
term as "unintelligible," so freely and recklessly flung about, could
with the faintest show of reason be applied by any reasonable being. In
the 21,116 lines which form Browning's longest work and masterpiece,
the "psychological epic" of The Ring and the Book, I am inclined to
think it possible that a careful scrutiny might reveal 116 which an
ordinary reader would require to read twice. Anything more clear than
the work as a whole it would be difficult to find. It is much easier to
follow than Paradise Lost_; the _Agamemnon is rather less easy to
follow than A Blot in the 'Scutcheon.
That there is some excuse for the accusation, no one would or could

deny. But it is only the excuse of a misconception. Browning is a
thinker of extraordinary depth and subtlety; his themes are seldom
superficial, often very remote, and his thought is, moreover, as swift as
it is subtle. To a dull reader there is little difference between cloudy and
fiery thought; the one is as much too bright for him as the other is too
dense. Of all thinkers in poetry, Browning is the most swift and fiery.
"If there is any great quality," says Mr. Swinburne, in those noble pages
in which he has so generously and triumphantly vindicated his
brother-poet from this very charge of obscurity--
"If there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr.
Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought,
his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant
resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as
to call Lynceus purblind, or complain of the sluggish action of the
telegraphic wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he
is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to
follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with
such incessant rapidity, or even to realise with what spider-like
swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro
and backward and
forward, as it lives along the animated line of its
labour, springs from thread to thread, and darts from centre to
circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living thought,
woven from the inexhaustible stores of his
perception, and kindled
from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination. He never thinks but at
full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man's as the
speed of a railway to that of a waggon, or the speed of a telegraph to
that of a railway."[6]
Moreover, while a writer who deals with easy themes has no excuse if
he is not pellucid at a glance, one who employs his intellect and
imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a
corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say, with Bishop
Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: "It must be acknowledged that
some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult; or,