His
curious complicated puns are an example of this: Hood had used the pun
to make a sentence or a sentiment especially pointed and clear. In
Browning the word with two meanings seems to mean rather less, if
anything, than the word with one. It also applies to his trick of
setting himself to cope with impossible rhymes. It may be fun, though it
is not poetry, to try rhyming to ranunculus; but even the fun
presupposes that you _do_ rhyme to it; and I will affirm, and hold under
persecution, that "Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle-us" does not rhyme to
it.
The obscurity, to which he must in a large degree plead guilty, was,
curiously enough, the result rather of the gay artist in him than the
deep thinker. It is patience in the Browning students; in Browning it
was only impatience. He wanted to say something comic and energetic and
he wanted to say it quick. And, between his artistic skill in the
fantastic and his temperamental turn for the abrupt, the idea sometimes
flashed past unseen. But it is quite an error to suppose that these are
the dark mines containing his treasure. The two or three great and true
things he really had to say he generally managed to say quite simply.
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