“...  Who fished the murex up? 
    What porridge had John Keats?”

So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, but is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem.  Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say.  He is both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in a particular manner.  The manner is as natural to him as a man’s physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps.  Here comes in the fundamental difference between Browning and such a writer as George Meredith, with whom the Philistine satirist would so often in the matter of complexity class him.  The works of George Meredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean.  They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconscious certainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhat curious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence of these.  But the great part of Browning’s actual sentiments, and almost all the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain and popular and eternal sentiments.  Meredith is really a singer producing strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicate rhythm of the song he sings.  Browning is simply a great demagogue, with an impediment in his speech.  Or rather, to speak more strictly, Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate:  he becomes eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the love of sanity.

If Browning and George Meredith were each describing the same act, they might both be obscure, but their obscurities would be entirely different.  Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaic and material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another man to whom he had given the lie, Meredith’s description would refer to something which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least could not describe.  It might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain of the assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of the object of the assault.  He might write, “Wainwood’s ’Men vary in veracity,’ brought the baronet’s arm up.  He felt the doors of his brain burst, and Wainwood a swift rushing of himself through air accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated.”  Meredith, in other words, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mental experiences.  But Browning might simply be describing the material incident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his description would run:—­

    “What then?  ‘You lie’ and doormat below stairs
    Takes bump from back.”

This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness.  Browning is not like Meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations of the combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety.  He is only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly that he leaves out about half the story.