there never lived upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his followers.  Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself.  “Wilkes was no Wilkite,” he said, “and I am very far from being a Browningite.”  We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and abstruseness of his message.  He took pleasure beyond all question in himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself.  But his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual.  He conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great fighter.  “I was ever,” as he says, “a fighter.”  His faults, a certain occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men.  His virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the aesthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour.  He had his more objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with literary egotism.  He was not vain of being an extraordinary man.  He was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one.

The Browning then who published Sordello we have to conceive, not as a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from each other.  If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, and Browning an intellectual democrat.  The particular peculiarities of Sordello illustrate the matter very significantly.  A very great part of the difficulty of Sordello, for instance, is in the fact that before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of Browning’s actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all human epochs—­the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in mediaeval Italy.  Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that impetuous humility which we have previously observed.  His father was a student of mediaeval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play cricket.  Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it talks English to an Italian organ grinder.  Beyond this the poem of Sordello, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant advance in Browning’s mental development on that already represented by Pauline