It is only when an idea has become a matter of course to the thinker that it becomes startling to the world.
It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground of Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about him.

Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different, and I think absolutely false, if we start with the conception that he was what the French call an intellectual.

If we see Browning with the eyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this.

For his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his followers.

Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself.
"Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, "and I am very far from being a Browningite." We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and abstruseness of his message.