f-identification with each of his creations, in turn, remains
incomplete. His curious, analytic observation, his way of looking at
the soul from outside, gives a doubleness to the monologues in his
_Dramatic Lyrics_, 1845, _Men and Women_, 1855, _Dramatis Personae_,
1864, and other collections of the kind. The words are the words of
Caliban or Mr. Sludge; but the voice is the voice of Robert Browning.
His first complete poem, _Paracelsus_, 1835, aimed to give the true
inwardness of the career of the famous 16th century doctor, whose name
became a synonym with charlatan. His second, _Sordello_, 1840, traced
the struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not
reconcile his life with his art. _Paracelsus_ was hard, but _Sordello_
was incomprehensible. Mr. Browning has denied that he is ever
perversely crabbed or obscure. Every great artist must be allowed to
say things in his own way, and obscurity has its artistic uses, as the
Gothic builders knew. But there are two kinds of obscurity in
literature. One is inseparable from the subtlety and difficulty of the
thought or the compression {295} and pregnant indirectness of the
phrase. Instances of this occur in the clear deeps of Dante,
Shakspere, and Goethe. The other comes from a vice of style, a
willfully enigmatic and unnatural way of expressing thought. Both
kinds of obscurity exist in Browning. He is a deep and subtle thinker;
but he is also a very eccentric writer, abrupt, harsh, disjointed. It
has been well said that the reader of Browning learns a new dialect.
But one need not grudge the labor that is rewarded with an intellectual
pleasure so peculiar and so stimulating. The odd, grotesque impression
made by his poetry arises, in part, from his desire to use the artistic
values of ugliness, as well as of obscurity; to avoid the shallow
prettiness that comes from blinking the disagreeable truth: not to
leave the saltness out of the sea. Whenever he emerges into clearness,
as he does in hundreds of places, he is a poet of great qualities.
There are a fire and a swing in his _Cavalier Tunes_, and in pieces
like the _Glove and the Lost Leader_; and humor in such ballads as the
_Pied Piper of Hamelin_ and the _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_,
which appeal to the most conservative reader. He seldom deals directly
in the pathetic, but now and then, as in _Evelyn Hope_, the _Last Ride
Together_, or the _Incident of the French Camp_, a tende