He is an enormously learned person, and has rummaged in a thousand old dust-bins of history, and acquired a million details of names and places and things; he pays you the generally quite undeserved compliment of assuming that you know all this as well as he does. If he wishes to tell you about some unknown musician in the court of some obscure Renaissance ruler, he will begin by talking about a ring this musician used to wear, and the first dozen lines of the poem will depend upon an ancient Greek legend concerning the stone that is in the ring. If you don’t know the legend about the stone in the ring of the musician in the court of the Renaissance ruler, why then the opening of the poem has no meaning to you, and the Browning Society might hold a hundred sessions on the subject without making head or tail of it. Such writing is simply a bad joke; it is one of the many forms of leisure-class art perversions. When Browning chooses to write real poetry, he can make it just as simple and as melodious as Tennyson’s, and far more passionate. He invented a new and fascinating poetical form, the dramatic lyric, or dramatic soliloquy. He will take some strange and complicated character, whom he has picked up in the junk-rooms of the past, and let this character start to talk and reveal himself to you--not merely the things he wants you to know, but the things he is trying to hide from you, and which he lets slip between the lines. Thus we have Mr. Sludge, the spiritualist medium, who would have converted Mrs. Browning if the poet had not kicked him out of the house. Thus we have Bishop Blougram, an elegant and thoroughly modern Catholic prelate, discussing with an intimate friend over the wine and cigars the delicate question of how he justifies himself for feeding base superstition to the people, who want it and can’t get along without it. Browning knew how to be direct, when his feelings were deeply enough stirred. He was direct when he dealt with the old poet Wordsworth and his apostasy from the cause of freedom. Anyone can understand the title, “The Lost Leader,” and the opening lines Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a riband to stick in his coat. Likewise, when the Brownings went to Italy and took fire at the struggle of the Italian people for freedom, everybody understood the poetry they wrote home; even the Austrian police understood it, for they opened Browning’s mail, to his furious indignation. Likewise, when Mrs. Browning died and some persons proposed to write her biography without her husband’s permission, the husband was able to make known his opposition. He spoke of “the paws of these blackguards in my bowels,” and said he would “stop the scamp’s knavery along with his breath.”