Again, clearness is one of the first elements in style, and on poetry attaining clearness, depends, in great measure, its enduringness in the future.  So far as clearness carries him, Tennyson’s poetry is sure to last.  So far as Browning’s obscurity goes, his poetry will not last like Tennyson’s.  It is all very well for his students to say that he is not obscure; he is.  Nor is it by any exceptional depth of thought or by any specially profound analysis of the soul that Browning is obscure.  It is by his style.  By that he makes what is easy difficult.  The reader does not get at what he means as he gets at what Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare mean.  Dante and Shakespeare are often difficult through the depth and difficulty of their matter; they are not difficult, except Shakespeare when he was learning his art, by obscurity or carelessness of style.  But Browning is difficult not by his thoughts, but by his expression of them.  A poet has no right to be so indifferent, so careless of clearness in his art, I might almost say, so lazy.  Browning is negligent to a fault, almost to impertinence.  The great poets put the right words in the right places, and Tennyson is with them in that.  Browning continually puts his words into the wrong places.  He leaves out words necessary for the easy understanding of the passage, and for no reason except his fancy.  He leaves his sentences half-finished and his meaning half-expressed.  He begins a sentence, and having begun it, three or four thoughts connected with it slide into his mind, and instead of putting them aside or using them in another place, he jerks them into the middle of his sentence in a series of parentheses, and then inserts the end of the original sentence, or does not insert it at all.  This is irritating except to folk who like discovery of the twisted rather than poetry; and it is quite needless.  It is worse than needless, for it lowers the charm and the dignity of the poetry.

Yet, there is something to say on the other side.  It is said, and with a certain justice, that “the style is the man.  Strip his style away, and where is the man?  Where is the real Browning if we get him to change a way of writing in which he naturally shaped his thought?” Well, no one would ask him to impose on himself a style which did not fit his nature.  That would be fatal.  When he has sometimes tried to do so, as in a few of the dramas, we scarcely recognise our poet, and we lose half of his intellectual and poetic charm.  Just as Carlyle when he wrote away from his natural style, as in the life of Sterling and Schiller, is not the great writer he is elsewhere, so was it with Browning.  Were we savage satirists, blinded by our savagery, we might then say both of Browning and Carlyle that half their power lay in their fantastic, rocky style.  We should be quite wrong.  Their style was the exact clothing of their thought.  They wrote exactly as they thought; and when they put their thought into