m stylistic defects than from the
subject matter. What Mr. Chesterton calls Browning's love for "the
holes and corners of history," leads him to the use of much unfamiliar
detail. A large part of the difficulty in reading _Sordello_ arises from
the fact that all Browning's accumulated knowledge of medieval Italy is
there poured forth in an allusive, taken-for-granted manner, till even
the practiced reader turns away perplexed and overwhelmed. So, too, "Old
Pictures in Florence," "Pictor Ignotus," and "Fra Lippo Lippi" assume on
the part of the reader a minute familiarity with early Florentine art.
Occasionally the poems demand an exceptional technical knowledge of some
sort, as in "Abt Vogler," where only a trained musician can fully
understand the terminology. Many even of the minor poems belong to
realms of thought and experience so remote that only by distinct effort
do we transport ourselves thither. It would, for instance, be absurd to
call "Two in the Campagna" difficult in form or phrasing, yet it
narrates an experience intelligible only to those who have loved deeply
but have found in the very heart of that love a baffling sense of
inevitable personal isolation. Sometimes the difficulty arises from the
extreme subtlety of the thought. "Evelyn Hope," the simplest of poems in
expression, presents novel and elusive ideas. Mr. Chesterton ingeniously
ascribes Browning's obscurity to "intellectual humility," to an
assumption that his readers were in possession of a native endowment and
an acquired intellectual wealth on a par with his own; but the defense
seems rather forced. Mrs. Browning gave one of the best brief analyses
of Mr. Browning's obscurity. He had been attacked as being "misty" and
she wrote to him, "You never _are_ misty, not even in 'Sordello'--never
vague. Your graver cuts deep, sharp lines, always--and there is an extra
distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which,
crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to
escape." But the classic defense of Browning from this point of view
may be found in Swinburne's Introduction to Chapman's _Poems_:

"The difficulty found by many in certain of Mr. Browning's works arises
from a quality the very reverse of that which produces obscurity,
properly so-called. Obscurity is the natural product of turbid forces
and confused ideas; of a feeble and clouded or of a vigorous but unfixed
and chaotic intellect.... Now if there is any