the sun, this isle,
Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole--He made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?

It may seem perhaps to most readers that these lines are very
difficult, and that they are unpleasant. And so they are. We quote
them to illustrate, not the _success_ of grotesque art, but the
_nature_ of grotesque art. It shows the end at which this species of
art aims, and if it fails, it is from over-boldness in the choice of a
subject by the artist, or from the defects of its execution. A
thinking faculty more in difficulties--a great type,--an inquisitive,
searching intellect under more disagreeable conditions, with worse
helps, more likely to find falsehood, less likely to find truth, can
scarcely be imagined. Nor is the mere description of the thought at
all bad: on the contrary, if we closely examine it, it is very clever.
Hardly any one could have amassed so many ideas at once nasty and
suitable. But scarcely any readers--any casual readers--who are not of
the sect of Mr. Browning's admirers will be able to examine it enough
to appreciate it. From a defect, partly of subject, and partly of
style, many of Mr. Browning's works make a demand upon the reader's
zeal and sense of duty to which the nature of most readers is unequal.
They have on the turf the convenient expression 'staying power': some
horses can hold on and others cannot. But hardly any reader not of
especial and peculiar nature can hold on through such composition.
There is not enough of 'staying power' in human nature. One of his
greatest admirers once owned to us that he seldom or never began a new
poem without looking on in advance, and foreseeing with caution what
length of intellectual adventure he was about to commence. Whoever
will work hard at such poems will find much mind in them: they are a
sort of quarry of ideas, but whoever goes there will find these ideas
in such a jagged, ugly, useless shape that he can hardly be