they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and
the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. If
Browning had written the passage which opens _The Princess_,
descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park,
he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the
shrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer. He
would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have
changed the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel
and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done,
as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the
impression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy and joy, the
father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. We
should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of
which Mr. Henley writes--

"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 a