rowning's poetry, and indeed in all
poetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend
to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the
intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It is
difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without
becoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul's
Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the
moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done
all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations. Now
it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make
the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a
man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we
ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that
man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a
moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in
his presence. When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the
huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of
Behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of
wonder provoked by the grotesque. "Canst thou play with him as with a
bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?" he says in an admirable
passage. The notion of the hippopotamus as a household pet is
curiously in the spirit of the humour of Browning.

But when it is clearly understood that Browning's love of the
fantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when we
understand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a Chinese potter
might enjoy making dragons, or a mediaeval mason making devils, there
yet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as a
fault. He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in
his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at
all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only
just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. Probably it was only
one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in
details. He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are
fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himself
on having written _The Ring and the Book_, and he also prided himself
on knowing good wine when he tasted it. He prided himself on
re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be