have sounded to even an intelligent many like an exercise in intricacy, and to the world at large like something to which it is useless to listen.  Or, to look at the other end of his career, it is not extraordinary that the work of his last period—­’The Ring and the Book,’ ’Red Cotton Nightcap Country,’—­those wonderful minute studies of human motive, made with the highly specialized skill of the psychical surgeon and with the confidence of another Balzac in the reader’s following power—­should always remain more or less esoteric literature.  But when it is remembered that between these lie the most vivid and intensely dramatic series of short poems in English,—­those grouped in the unfortunately diverse editions of his works under the rubrics ’Men and Women,’ ‘Dramatic Lyrics,’ ‘Dramatic Romances,’ ‘Dramatis Personae,’ and the rest, as well as larger masterpieces of the broad appeal of ‘Pippa Passes,’ ’A Blot on the ‘Scutcheon,’ or ’In a Balcony,’—­it is hard to understand, and will be still harder fifty years hence, why Browning has not become the familiar and inspiring poet of a vastly larger body of readers.  Undoubtedly a large number of intelligent persons still suspect a note of affectation in the man who declares his full and intense enjoyment—­not only his admiration—­of Browning; a suspicion showing not only the persistence of the Sordello-born tradition of “obscurity,” but the harm worked by those commentators who approach him as a problem.  Not all commentators share this reproach; but as Browning makes Bishop Blougram say:—­

     “Even your prime men who appraise their kind
     Are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel,
     See more in a truth than the truth’s simple self—­
     Confuse themselves—­”

and beyond question such persons are largely responsible for the fact that for some time to come, every one who speaks of Browning to a general audience will feel that he has some cant to clear away.  If he can make them read this body of intensely human, essentially simple and direct dramatic and lyrical work, he will help to bring about the time when the once popular attitude will seem as unjustifiable as to judge Goethe only by the second part of ‘Faust.’

The first great characteristic of Browning’s poetry is undoubtedly the essential, elemental quality of its humanity—­a trait in which it is surpassed by no other English poetry but that of Shakespeare.  It can be subtile to a degree almost fantastic (as can Shakespeare’s to an extent that familiarity makes us forget); but this is in method.  The stuff of it—­the texture of the fabric which the swift and intricate shuttle is weaving—­is always something in which the human being is vitally, not merely aesthetically interested.  It deals with no shadows, and indeed with few abstractions, except those that form a part of vital problems—­a statement which may provoke the scoffer, but will be found to be true.