obscure.  Had he been an experienced artist he would have left out at least a third of the thoughts and scenes he inserted.  As it was, he threw all his thoughts and all the matters he had learnt about the politics, cities, architecture, customs, war, gardens, religion and poetry of North Italy in the thirteenth century, pell-mell into this poem, and left them, as it were, to find their own places.  This was very characteristic of a young man when the pot of his genius was boiling over.  Nothing bolder, more incalculable, was ever done by a poet in the period of his storm and stress.  The boundless and to express it, was never sought with more audacity.  It was impossible, in this effort, for him to be clear, and we need not be vexed with him.  The daring, the rush, the unconsciousness and the youth of it all, are his excuse, but not his praise.  And when the public comes to understand that the dimness and complexity of Sordello arise from plenteousness not scarcity of thought, and that they were not a pose of the poet’s but the natural leaping of a full fountain just let loose from its mountain chamber, it will have a personal liking, not perhaps for the poem but for Browning.  “I will not read the book,” it will say, “but I am glad he had it in him.”

Still it was an artistic failure, and when Browning understood that the public could not comprehend him—­and we must remember that he desired to be comprehended, for he loved mankind—­he thought he would use his powers in a simpler fashion, and please the honest folk.  So, in the joy of having got rid in Sordello of so many of his thoughts by expression and of mastering the rest; and determined, since he had been found difficult, to be the very opposite—­loving contrast like a poet—­he wrote Pippa Passes.  I need not describe its plan.  Our business is with the women in it.

Ottima, alive with carnal passion, in the fire of which the murder of her husband seems a mere incident, is an audacious sketch, done in splashes of ungradated colour.  Had Browning been more in the woman’s body and soul he would not have done her in jerks as he has done.  Her trick of talking of the landscape, as if she were on a holiday like Pippa, is not as subtly conceived or executed as it should be, and is too far away from her dominant carnality to be natural.  And her sensualism is too coarse for her position.  A certain success is attained, but the imagination is frequently jarred.  The very outburst of unsensual love at the end, when her love passes from the flesh into the spirit, when self-sacrifice dawns upon her and she begins to suffer the first agonies of redemption, is plainly more due to the poet’s pity than to the woman’s spirit.  Again, Sebald is the first to feel remorse after the murder.  Ottima only begins to feel it when she thinks her lover is ceasing to love her.  I am not sure that to reverse the whole situation would not be nearer to the truth of things; but that is matter of discussion.