. Robert Browning . etry,and it is idle to pursue irrelevant analogies between it and thegrotesquerie of Swift, Butler, Barham, Hood, Lear, and LewisCarroll. But although it is new, it is, 1 think, a direct outcomeof the great literary revival which Mr. A^^atts-Dunton has called the renascence of wonder. The poets of wonder, Blake,Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, fed theirspiritual astonishment on the incongruity of life as seen throughnature. Browning took this spiritual astonishment from thepoets of wonder, but he fed it on the incongruity of lifeas seen through humanity.
. Robert Browning . etry,and it is idle to pursue irrelevant analogies between it and thegrotesquerie of Swift, Butler, Barham, Hood, Lear, and LewisCarroll. But although it is new, it is, 1 think, a direct outcomeof the great literary revival which Mr. A^^atts-Dunton has called the renascence of wonder. The poets of wonder, Blake,Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, fed theirspiritual astonishment on the incongruity of life as seen throughnature. Browning took this spiritual astonishment from thepoets of wonder, but he fed it on the incongruity of lifeas seen through humanity. They looked at man throughnature ; he looked at nature through man. They glorified theexternal egoisms ; he glorified the internal egoisms. He saw thatlife is essentially the energy of the one man transmuting thecolossal comedy of external relations into terms of his own NO. ig, WARWICK CRESCENT, PADDINGTON1861 TO 1887 Where Browning resided in London for twenty-five years afterthe death of his wife ROBERT BROWNING. idiosyncrasy. His poetry isone long, rapturous vindica-tion of that central egoismof humanity which is the fort-ress of optimism. The poet, says , in his recentmonograph on Browning, inhis ancient office gave menhalters and haloes; Browninggives men neither halter norhalo—he gives them it is a very fine, reso-nant, hilarious, rollicking voicethat he gives Mr. Chesterton;a voice which preaches thegospel of the grotesque andthe gospel of optimism in amost brilliant, most original,and most suggestive piece ofcriticism, a criticism which is a revelation of the critic as well as of the creator. The better thecritic the more subjecti\e the criticism, for criticism is an art ofspiritual reverberations as well as an art of spiritual and literature, which is life in language, are things toonervously alive to be arranged, as a numismatist arranges coins,without passion and without prejudice. The spiritual blow struckby a poet is struc
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