ON THE ALLEGED OBSCURITY OF MR. BROWNING'S POETRY.


'The sanity of true genius' was a happy phrase of Charles Lamb's. Our
greatest poets were our sanest men. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
Milton, and Wordsworth might have defied even a mad doctor to prove
his worst.

To extol sanity ought to be unnecessary in an age which boasts its
realism; but yet it may be doubted whether, if the author of the
phrase just quoted were to be allowed once more to visit the world he
loved so well and left so reluctantly, and could be induced to
forswear his Elizabethans and devote himself to the literature of the
day, he would find many books which his fine critical faculty would
allow him to pronounce 'healthy,' as he once pronounced 'John Buncle'
to be in the presence of a Scotchman, who could not for the life of
him understand how a book could properly be said to enjoy either good
or bad health.

But, however this may be, this much is certain, that lucidity is one
of the chief characteristics of sanity. A sane man ought not to be
unintelligible. Lucidity is good everywhere, for all time and in all
things, in a letter, in a speech, in a book, in a poem. Lucidity is
not simplicity. A lucid poem is not necessarily an easy one. A great
poet may tax our brains, but he ought not to puzzle our wits. We may
often have to ask in Humility, What _does_ he mean? but not in