on' and 'Daniel Deronda.' But
difficulty is not obscurity. One task is more difficult than another.
The angles at the base of the isosceles triangles are apt to get mixed,
and to confuse us all--man and woman alike. 'Prince Hohenstiel'
something or another is a very difficult poem, not only to pronounce but
to read; but if a poet chooses as his subject Napoleon III.--in whom the
cad, the coward, the idealist, and the sensualist were inextricably
mixed--and purports to make him unbosom himself over a bottle of
Gladstone claret in a tavern at Leicester Square, you cannot expect that
the product should belong to the same class of poetry as Mr. Coventry
Patmore's admirable 'Angel in the House.'

It is the method that is difficult. Take the husband in 'The Ring and
the Book.' Mr. Browning remorselessly hunts him down, tracks him to the
last recesses of his mind, and there bids him stand and deliver. He
describes love, not only broken but breaking; hate in its germ; doubt at
its birth. These are difficult things to do either in poetry or prose,
and people with easy, flowing Addisonian or Tennysonian styles cannot
do them.

I seem to overhear a still, small voice asking, But are they worth
doing? or at all events, is it the province of art to do them? The
question ought not to be asked. It is heretical, being contrary to the
whole direction of the latter half of this century. The chains binding
us to the rocks of realism are faster riveted every day; and the Perseus
who is destined to cut them is, I expect, some mischievous little boy at
a Board-school. But as the question has been asked, I will own that
sometimes, even when deepest in works of this, the now orthodox school,
I have been harassed by distressing doubts whether after all this
enormous labor is not in vain; and wearied by the effort, overloaded by
the detail, bewildered by the argument, and sickened by the pitiless
dissection of character and motive, have been tempted to cry aloud,
quoting--or rather, in the agony of the moment, misquoting--Coleridge:--

"Simplicity--thou better name
Than all the family of Fame."

But this ebullition of feeling is childish and even sinful. We must take
our poets as we do our meals--as they are served up to us. Indeed, you
may, if full of courage, give a cook notice, but not the time-spirit who
makes our poets. We may be sure--to appropriate an idea of the late Sir
James Stephen--that if Robert Browning had lived in t