nonsense-verse.

Now shift the interest from the form to the meaning contained in the work
of art, that is, to its significance. An expressive face is one that
reveals character. Its lines are suggestive of something. They are
associated, like the lines of purely decorative beauty, with more or less
obscure tracts of our experience, but they arouse a keen mental interest.
They stimulate, they are packed closely with meaning, with fact, with
representative quality. The same thing is true of certain landscapes.
Witness Thomas Hardy's famous description of Egdon Heath in _The Return of
the Native_. It is true of music. Certain modern music almost breaks down,
as music, under the weight of meaning, of fact, of thought, which the
composer has striven to make it carry.

There is no question that the principle of significance may be pushed too
far, just as the principle of decorative or purely formal beauty may be
emphasized too exclusively. But is there any real antagonism between the
elements of form and significance, beauty and expressiveness? This
question has been debated ever since the time of Winckelmann and Lessing.
The controversy over the work of such artists as Wagner, Browning,
Whitman, Rodin has turned largely upon it.

Browning himself strove to cut the difficult aesthetic knot with a rough
stroke of common sense:

"Is it so pretty
You can't discover if it means hope, fear,
Sorrow or joy? Won't beauty go with these?"
[Footnote: "Fra Lippo Lippi."]