greater mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough to
understand his own poetry; and if he understood it, we can understand
it. But he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was
never clever enough to understand his own character; consequently we
may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly
hidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier to
understand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary of
his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation,
and can tell us how he came to feel this or to say that. But a man
like Browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than about
the state of his pulse; they are things greater than he, things
growing at will, like forces of Nature. There is an old anecdote,
probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to
Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and
received the following reply: "When that poem was written, two people
knew what it meant--God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows
what it means." This story gives, in all probability, an entirely
false impression of Browning's attitude towards his work. He was a
keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and
he had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does,
in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning's
attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. If a man
had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he
could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked
him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in _Sordello_, he
could have given an account of the man and an account of his father
and his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought of
himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he
would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew.