the
failure is in art, not in thought.

He chooses his subjects from abnormal character types, such as are
presented, for example, in _Caliban upon Setebos_, the _Grammarian's
Funeral, My Last Duchess_ and _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_. These are all
psychological studies, in which the poet gets into the inner
consciousness of a monster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and gives
their point of view. They are dramatic soliloquies; but the poet's
self-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. Browning has denied that he was 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 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 was a
deep and subtle thinker, but he was 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