But they all agree in one point—­that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles.  He talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to give that neat and aesthetic character to his speech which is almost invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental superiority.  When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was mostly in the form of pouring out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over.  We have therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and contempt of his readers.

There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary theory that Browning’s obscurity was a part of the intoxication of fame and intellectual consideration.  We constantly hear the statement that Browning’s intellectual complexity increased with his later poems, but the statement is simply not true. Sordello, to the indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, was begun before Strafford, and was therefore the third of his works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring Pauline, the second.  He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four.  It was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the conclusion that Browning’s obscurity had altogether the opposite origin to that which is usually assigned to it.  He was not unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was humble.  He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious.

A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the difference between his readers’ intelligence and his own that he talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity.  What poet was ever vainer than Byron?  What poet was ever so magnificently lucid?  But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think that they are discoveries.  He thinks that the whole street is humming with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like himself.  Browning’s impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of this beautiful optimism. Sordello was the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man.