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laughing at my rusticity. Well, then," replied he, we will say that this sonnet would confuse clearer heads than thine; it is all the better for that. Sonnets, odes-in short, all compositions which partake of the sublime-are, of course, the reverse of the simple and natural: they are enveloped in clouds, and their darkness constitutes their grandeur. Let the poet only fancy that he understands himself, no matter whether his readers understand him or not." No, says Gil; that will not do at all. "Let Poetry be of what species it may, good sense and intelligible diction are essential to its powers of pleasing." 1 "1 Indeed to speak with perfect candour, I can discover no excuse for the existence of such a volume as the Series of Sonnets entitled 'The House of Life.' It seems to me to be a compilation of vague extravagances, maudlin incoherencies, and suggests that they might have been written under the influence of a bad opiate. It would be as profitable to read them backward as forward. How such compositions come to be printed and published is a curious question to consider. Do not Moses and all the Prophets address themselves to the wayfaring man? If they don't, I beg to say that they should do so-the whole two hundred and twenty-four thousand of them. We even say, with conviction, Maxima debitur pueris reverentia. To whom was Rossetti addressing himself? No wayfaring man certainly; and no youth, however intelligent, I fancy, will be able to extract a meaning out of many of those sonnets. For one, I would fain "lose no time in reading them.” It is clear and noble meaning we want. Yet the work has earned a laborious panegyric in one of

1 'Gil Blas,' Vol. iii. pp. 180-1. So Byron, "A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases at least in composition."-Moore's 'Byron,' Vol. ii. p. 250.

our leading reviews! 1 The critic has noble functions to fulfil. It is sad when he forgets his duty, and accepts the vogue or the popularity or the notoriety of an author as the leading index of merit, or degrades his pen in the service of puffery. Introduce such a critic to some new but unrenowned great work, and it would probably be as if you introduced an owl to a magnificent

sunrise.

7a. Lucidity is necessary in plot and narrative.And whilst we should have lucidity and terseness of thought and expression in all kinds of composition, it is no less necessary that we should have perspicuity in the construction of plot and narrative. Obscurity or confusion anywhere points to weakness-is weakness, indeed, and therefore to be remedied if possible. All the best plots and narratives, I think, will be found to be easily followable, going forward simply and clearly: not so simply as to show the end in the beginning, but conducting, perhaps, from more or less darkness into daylight-from perplexity to understanding, from complexity to disentanglement. Or to express it in another way, the plot should grow as from the seed to the stalk, from the stalk to the ear, and to the full corn in the ear, in what we might call an inevitable sequence. Thus interest is likely to be created and preserved to a profitable end. Also, there should be as few subsidiary interests or entanglements as possible; and such of these as may be necessary should be organically connected with the main plot as the branches with the trunk, or as the tributaries with the main stream. Many books so offend in these particulars : they are so complex, so tortuous, so obscure, that

1 'Athenæum,' 1885, Vol. i. pp. 82-3. See also a review of Browning's Parleyings,' Ib., Vol. i. p. 248, and a recent critic's ecstasies over 'The House of Life,' Appendix, Note D.

to read one of them is no more delectable than the reading of a Chancery Brief. Needless to say, anything like the Chancery Brief is wholly inadmissible in Literature. In a word, the measure of an author's tortuosity and obscurity must be accepted as a measure of his worthlessness; whilst the measure of his simplicity and lucidity must no less be accepted as a measure of his worth.

8. Obscurity is an injustice and insolence to readers. The writings of Browning, of course, furnish notorious and flagrant instances of the obscure. He not only speaks thick, but thinks thick. With much excellent matter in his works, he goes on venting "windy suspirations of forced breath "-stuttering trivialities and obscurities through heavy and painful volumes, obfuscating both his readers and himself in mere clouds of words. Many of his crooked and crabbed ratiocinations in wooden verse I am bound to confess that I cannot follow at all. They may be sensible if the meaning of them could be unravelled, but frequently they sound remarkably like sheer nonsense. Even in the narrative parts of his writings. one frequently finds the greatest difficulty in making out what he wishes to tell. In 'Sordello,' for instance, he writes :—

"Be it understood,

Envoys apprised Verona that her Prince,

Count Richard of Saint Boniface, joined since
A year with Azzo, Este's Lord, to thrust
Taurello Salinguerra, prime in trust
With Eccelin Romano, from his seat
Ferrara,-over-zealous in the feat
And stumbling on a peril unaware,

Was captive, trammelled in his proper snare,
They phrase it, taken by his own intrigue."

Obviously it is merely a bit of tangled and congested historic narrative, and by dint of careful reading we may extricate the sense of the prosy story so far; but he continues:

Immediate succour from the Lombard League
Of fifteen cities that affect the Pope,
For Azzo, therefore, and his fellow-hope
Of the Guelf cause, a glory overcast !
Men's faces late agape, are now aghast.
Prone is the purple pavis; Este makes
Mirth for the Devil when he undertakes
To play the Eccelin; as if it cost
Merely your pushing-by to gain a post
Like his! The patron tells ye, once for all,
There be sound reasons that preferment fall
On our beloved . . ."
[The dots are the poet's.]
"Duke o' the Rood, why not?'
Shouted an Estian, 'grudge ye such a lot?'”

And so on1 he goes

'Stumbling and halting through a chaos drear
Of cumbrous words that load the weary ear? "-

from which I am bound to say that I cannot make out an intelligible narrative. Even as a chronicle it would be quite intolerable. Better to labour as a water-carrier than be compelled to graduate in such works. Browning may have known what he was writing about; but if so, he has completely succeeded in keeping his knowledge to himself. From beginning to end it seems to be but a tissue of soulless stupidities. It is incredible almost that the bard himself had any lucent purpose in this lucubration. Compositions of such a kind we must not credit to a man's idiosyncracies," as some of the poet's awestricken admirers seem to do. Rather do they seem to have proceeded from a kind of craziness of perverse egotism. It is also supposed by some to criticise life with "unsurpassed subtlety "; but we do not particularly wish to have life criticised with unsurpassed subtlety. We want to have it criticised with simple sound sense and clarity, so

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1 'Works,' Vol. i. pp. 116-7. Your sonnet," said Gil Blas to his friend Fabricio, "is a roaring deluge of emptiness.' Vol. iii. p. 182. I wish we could have his opinion of 'Sordello' !

as to deepen and widen our knowledge of History and Humanity. A book should be a great-hearted, clear-headed commentary on men and things. It should be written either for profit or joy; or, better still, for both. If it fail in these demands, it has no right to exist. Surpassing subtlety is all too frequently nothing better than surpassing muddlement of thought and imbecility of purpose. The moment I hear a critic pretending to find great and glorious "subtleties" in an author, and pretending to rejoice in such subtleties and to enter into sublime esoteric relationships with him, I begin to suspect that there is something not quite genuine about that critic-that he is energising in the interests of egotism and pedantry, and not of truth. Briefly, I think we may say that obscurity is one of the worst of all literary crimes-disturbing, perplexing, or tormenting the reader in proportion to its intensity, and quite destructive of any possibility of literary effect ; whilst on the moral side it seems to involve insolence and injustice to all intelligent listeners. The writer of subtleties should remember that there are only four-and-twenty hours in anybody's day. Nothing very important is very subtle. minimum demand that I make upon any person who proposes to write or speak, is that he shall be lucid and sensible-even if he claim to be prophetic or apostolic.

The

9. Vagueness and Verbosity would mar an Angel's speech. Turning to another of Browning's poems -his "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," what is really the bone of the Soliloquist's contention with brother Lawrence? Why such hatred of him? What are all his curses about? Curse, if you like, with all the vigour and circumstantial detail of David of Israel; but if that be your game, do really let us know beyond doubt what is the matter. Or glance at "The Return of the