Chapter 3

III. Mr. Browning's "Obscurity".

It was long the FASHION -- and that fashion has not yet passed away
-- with skimming readers and perfunctory critics to charge Mr. Browning
with being "wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless,
and perversely harsh."

There are readers and readers. One class, constituting, perhaps,
not more than one-tenth of one per cent, or a thousandth part
of the whole number, "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest";
the remaining ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent,
through a habit of loose and indiscriminate reading, are unequal to
the sustained concentration of mind demanded by the higher poetry,
the language of which is characterized by a severe economy
of expression -- a closeness of texture, resulting from
the elliptical energy of highly impassioned thought.

Reading is, perhaps, more superficial at the present day
than it ever was before. There is an almost irresistible temptation
to reverse the "multum legendum esse non multa" of Quintilian,
overwhelmed as we are with books, magazines, and newspapers,
which no man can number, and of which thousands and tens of thousands
of minds endeavor to gobble up all they can; and yet, from want of
all digestive and assimilating power, they are pitiably famished
and deadened.

Sir John Lubbock has lately been interested in the preparation
of a list of the best hundred books, and to that end has solicited
the aid of a number of prominent scholars. Prof. Edward Dowden
remarks thereupon, in an article on 'The Interpretation of Literature',
"It would have been more profitable for us had we been advised
how to read any one of the hundred; for what, indeed, does it matter
whether we read the best books or the worst, if we lack the power or
the instinct or the skill by which to reach the heart of any of them?
Books for most readers are, as Montaigne says, 'a languid pleasure';
and so they must be, unless they become living powers, with a summons
or a challenge for our spirit, unless we embrace them or wrestle
with them."

To return from this digression to the charge against Browning
of obscurity. And, first, it should be said that Browning has
so much material, such a large thought and passion capital,
that we never find him making a little go a great way,
by means of EXPRESSION, or rather concealing the little by means of
rhetorical tinsel. We can never justly demand of him what the Queen
in 'Hamlet' demands of Polonius, "more matter with less art".
His thought is wide-reaching and discursive, and the motions
of his mind rapid and leaping. The connecting links of his thought
have often to be supplied by an analytic reader whose mind
is not up