nd pigs, and
creatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book of
Callot. And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of
the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which
takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so far
as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in
the legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees,
dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is
top-heavy like the toadstool. Energy which disregards the standard of
classical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the
uproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of
a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a
philosophical idea. Here, for example, we have a random instance from
"The Englishman in Italy" of the way in which Browning, when he was
most Browning, regarded physical nature.

"And pitch down his basket before us,
All trembling alive
With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit;
You touch the strange lumps,
And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner
Of horns and of humps,
Which only the fisher looks grave at."

Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, but
to Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities
and living mysteries of the sea. And just as these strange things
meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts
and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world. When, in
one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a
supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled
with God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the
image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception.

"The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst,
The simplest of creations, just a sac
That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives
And feels, and could do neither, we conclude,
If simplified still further one degree."

(SLUDGE.)

These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which
the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in
the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the
Everlasting.

There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but
which is definitely valuable in B