“Praise the generous gods for giving,
    In this world of sin and strife,
    With some little time for living,
    Unto each the joy of life,”

the thought that every wise man has when looking at a Bank Holiday crowd at Margate.

To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style most would be to go very deep into his spirit indeed, probably a great deal deeper than it is possible to go.  But it is worth while to suggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in art generally and in his art in particular.  There is one very curious idea into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are commonly understood.  The whole world of the fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of Robert Browning.  But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all this instinct of caricature.  Nature may present itself to the poet too often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who live in the country; they are men who go to the country for inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go to bed in Westminster Abbey.  Men who live in the heart of nature, farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and 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.”