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 the sixteenth century, he would not have written a poem like ‘The Ring and the Book’; and if Edmund Spenser had lived in the nineteenth century he would not have written a poem like the ‘Faerie Queene.’

It is therefore idle to arraign Mr. Browning’s later method and style for possessing difficulties and intricacies which are inherent to it.  The method at all events has an interest of its own, a strength of its own, a grandeur of its own.  If you do not like it you must leave it alone.  You are fond, you say, of romantic poetry; well, then, take down your Spenser and qualify yourself to join “the small transfigured band” of those who are able to take their Bible-oaths they have read their ‘Faerie Queene’ all through.  The company, though small, is delightful, and you will have plenty to talk about without abusing Browning, who probably knows his Spenser better than you do.  Realism will not for ever dominate the world of letters and art—­the fashion of all things passeth away—­but it has already earned a great place:  it has written books, composed poems, painted pictures, all stamped with that “greatness” which, despite fluctuations, nay, even reversals of taste and opinion, means immortality.