and as for the _matter_, if your interest in human nature is
keen, curious, almost professional--if nothing man, woman, or child
has been, done, or suffered, or conceivably can be, do, or suffer, is
without interest for you; if you are fond of analysis, and do not
shrink from dissection--you will prize 'The Ring and the Book' as the
surgeon prizes the last great contribution to comparative anatomy or
pathology.

But this sort of work tells upon style. Browning has, I think, fared
better than some writers. To me, at all events, the step from 'A Blot
in the 'Scutcheon' to 'The Ring and the Book' is not so marked as is
the _mauvais pas_ that lies between 'Amos Barton' and 'Daniel
Deronda.' But difficulty is not obscurity. One task is more difficult
than another. The angles at the base of the isosceles triangles are
apt to get mixed, and to confuse us all--man and woman alike. 'Prince
Hohenstiel' something or another is a very difficult poem, not only to
pronounce but to read; but if a poet chooses as his subject Napoleon
III.--in whom the cad, the coward, the idealist, and the sensualist
were inextricably mixed--and purports to make him unbosom himself over
a bottle of Gladstone claret in a tavern in Leicester Square, you
cannot expect that the product should belong to the same class of
poetry as Mr. Coventry Patmore's admirable 'Angel in the House.'

It is the method that is difficult. Take the husband in 'The Ring and
the Book.' Mr. Browning remorselessly hunts him down, tracks him to
the last recesses of his mind, and there bids him stand and deliver.
He describes love, not only broken but breaking; hate in its germ;
doubt at its birth. These are difficult things to do either in poetry
or prose, and people with easy, flowing Addisonian or Tennysonian
styles cannot do them.