This is good fooling, and Naddo is an ass.  Nevertheless, though Naddo makes nonsense of the truth, he was right in the main, and Browning as well as Sordello suffered when they forgot or ignored that truth.  And, of course, Browning did not forget or ignore it in more than half his work.  Even in Sordello he tells us how he gave himself up to recording with pity and love the doings of the universal soul.  He strove to paint the whole.  It was a bold ambition.  Few have fulfilled it so well.  None, since Shakespeare, have had a wider range.  His portraiture of life was so much more varied than that of Tennyson, so much more extensive and detailed, that on this side he excels Tennyson; but such portraiture is not necessarily poetic, and when it is fond of the complex, it is always in danger of tending to prose.  And Browning, picturing human life, deviated too much into the delineation of its more obscure and complex forms.  It was in his nature to do and love this kind of work; and indeed it has to be done, if human life is to be painted fully.  Only, it is not to be done too much, if one desires to be always the poet.  For the representation of the complex and obscure is chiefly done by the analysing understanding, and its work and pleasure in it lures the poet away from art.  He loses the poetic turn of the thing of which he writes, and what he produces is not better than rhythmical prose.  Again and again Browning fell into that misfortune; and it is a strange problem how a man, who was in one part of his nature a great poet, could, under the sway of another, cease to be a poet.  At this point his inferiority to Tennyson as a poet is plain.  Tennyson scarcely ever wrote a line which was not unmistakably poetry, while Browning could write pages which were unmistakably not poetry.

I do not mean, in saying all this, that Browning did not appeal to that which is deepest and universal in nature and human nature, but only that he did not appeal to it as much as Tennyson.  Browning is often simple, lovely and universal.  And when he speaks out of that emotional imagination wherein is the hiding of a poet’s power, and which is the legitimate sovereign of his intellectual work, he will win and keep the delight and love of the centuries to come.  By work of this type he will be finally judged and finally endure; and, even now, every one who loves great poetry knows what these master-poems are.  As to the others, the merely subtle, analytic poems in which intellect, not imagination, is supreme, especially those into which he drifted in his later life when the ardour of his poetic youth glowed less warmly—­they will always appeal to a certain class of persons who would like to persuade themselves that they like poetry but to whom its book is sealed; and who, in finding out what Browning means, imagine to their great surprise that they find out that they care for poetry.  What they really care for is their own cleverness in discovering riddles, and they are as far away from poetry as Sirius is from the Sun.