Sec.  I. In the close of the last chapter it was noted that the phases of transition in the moral temper of the falling Venetians, during their fall, were from pride to infidelity, and from infidelity to the unscrupulous pursuit of pleasure.  During the last years of the existence of the state, the minds both of the nobility and the people seem to have been set simply upon the attainment of the means of self-indulgence.  There was not strength enough in them to be proud, nor forethought enough to be ambitious.  One by one the possessions of the state were abandoned to its enemies; one by one the channels of its trade were forsaken by its own languor, or occupied and closed against it by its more energetic rivals; and the time, the resources, and the thoughts of the nation were exclusively occupied in the invention of such fantastic and costly pleasures as might best amuse their apathy, lull their remorse, or disguise their ruin.

Sec.  II.  The architecture raised at Venice during this period is amongst the worst and basest ever built by the hands of men, being especially distinguished by a spirit of brutal mockery and insolent jest, which, exhausting itself in deformed and monstrous sculpture, can sometimes be hardly otherwise defined than as the perpetuation in stone of the ribaldries of drunkenness.  On such a period, and on such work, it is painful to dwell, and I had not originally intended to do so; but I found that the entire spirit of the Renaissance could not be comprehended unless it was followed to its consummation; and that there were many most interesting questions arising out of the study of this particular spirit of jesting, with reference to which I have called it the Grotesque Renaissance.  For it is not this period alone which is distinguished by such a spirit.  There is jest ­perpetual, careless, and not unfrequently obscene ­in the most noble work of the Gothic periods; and it becomes, therefore, of the greatest possible importance to examine into the nature and essence of the Grotesque itself, and to ascertain in what respect it is that the jesting of art in its highest flight, differs from its jesting in its utmost degradation.

Sec.  III.  The place where we may best commence our inquiry is one renowned in the history of Venice, the space of ground before the Church of Santa Maria Formosa; a spot which, after the Rialto and St. Mark’s Place, ought to possess a peculiar interest in the mind of the traveller, in consequence of its connexion with the most touching and true legend of the Brides of Venice.  That legend is related at length in every Venetian history, and, finally, has been told by the poet Rogers, in a way which renders it impossible for any one to tell it after him.  I have only, therefore, to remind the reader that the capture of the brides took place in the cathedral church, St. Pietro di Castello; and that this of Santa Maria Formosa is connected with the tale, only because it was yearly visited with prayers by the Venetian maidens, on the anniversary of their ancestors’ deliverance.  For that deliverance, their thanks were to be rendered to the Virgin; and there was no church then dedicated to the Virgin, in Venice, except this.

Neither of the cathedral church, nor of this dedicated to St. Mary the Beautiful, is one stone left upon another.  But, from that which has been raised on the site of the latter, we may receive a most important lesson, introductory to our immediate subject, if first we glance back to the traditional history of the church which has been destroyed.

Sec.  IV.  No more honorable epithet than “traditional” can be attached to what is recorded concerning it, yet I should grieve to lose the legend of its first erection.  The Bishop of Uderzo, driven by the Lombards from his Bishopric, as he was praying, beheld in a vision the Virgin Mother, who ordered him to found a church in her honor, in the place where he should see a white cloud rest.  And when he went out, the white cloud went before him; and on the place where it rested he built a church, and it was called the Church of St. Mary the Beautiful, from the loveliness of the form in which she had appeared in the vision.

The first church stood only for about two centuries.  It was rebuilt in 864, and enriched with various relics some fifty years later; relics belonging principally to St. Nicodemus, and much lamented when they and the church were together destroyed by fire in 1105.

It was then rebuilt in “magnifica forma,” much resembling, according to Corner, the architecture of the chancel of St. Mark; but the information which I find in various writers, as to the period at which it was reduced to its present condition, is both sparing and contradictory.

Sec.  V. Thus, by Corner, we are told that this church, resembling St. Mark’s, “remained untouched for more than four centuries,” until, in 1689, it was thrown down by an earthquake, and restored by the piety of a rich merchant, Turrin Toroni, “in ornatissima forma;” and that, for the greater beauty of the renewed church, it had added to it two façades of marble.  With this information that of the Padre dell’ Oratoria agrees, only he gives the date of the earlier rebuilding of the church in 1175, and ascribes it to an architect of the name of Barbetta.  But Quadri, in his usually accurate little guide, tells us that this Barbetta rebuilt the church in the fourteenth century; and that of the two façades, so much admired by Corner, one is of the sixteenth century, and its architect unknown; and the rest of the church is of the seventeenth, “in the style of Sansovino.”

Sec.  VI.  There is no occasion to examine, or endeavor to reconcile, these conflicting accounts.  All that is necessary for the reader to know is, that every vestige of the church in which the ceremony took place was destroyed at least as early as 1689; and that the ceremony itself, having been abolished in the close of the fourteenth century, is only to be conceived as taking place in that more ancient church, resembling St. Mark’s, which, even according to Quadri, existed until that period.  I would, therefore, endeavor to fix the reader’s mind, for a moment, on the contrast between the former and latter aspect of this plot of ground; the former, when it had its Byzantine church, and its yearly procession of the Doge and the Brides; and the latter, when it has its Renaissance church “in the style of Sansovino,” and its yearly honoring is done away.

Sec.  VII.  And, first, let us consider for a little the significance and nobleness of that early custom of the Venetians, which brought about the attack and the rescue of the year 943:  that there should be but one marriage day for the nobles of the whole nation, so that all might rejoice together; and that the sympathy might be full, not only of the families who that year beheld the alliance of their children, and prayed for them in one crowd, weeping before the altar, but of all the families of the state, who saw, in the day which brought happiness to others, the anniversary of their own.  Imagine the strong bond of brotherhood thus sanctified among them, and consider also the effect on the minds of the youth of the state; the greater deliberation and openness necessarily given to the contemplation of marriage, to which all the people were solemnly to bear testimony; the more lofty and unselfish tone which it would give to all their thoughts.  It was the exact contrary of stolen marriage.  It was marriage to which God and man were taken for witnesses, and every eye was invoked for its glance, and every tongue for its prayers.

Sec.  VIII.  Later historians have delighted themselves in dwelling on the pageantry of the marriage day itself, but I do not find that they have authority for the splendor of their descriptions.  I cannot find a word in the older Chronicles about the jewels or dress of the brides, and I believe the ceremony to have been more quiet and homely than is usually supposed.  The only sentence which gives color to the usual accounts of it is one of Sansovino’s, in which he says that the magnificent dress of the brides in his day was founded “on ancient custom." However this may have been, the circumstances of the rite were otherwise very simple.  Each maiden brought her dowry with her in a small “cassetta,” or chest; they went first to the cathedral, and waited for the youths, who having come, they heard mass together, and the bishop preached to them and blessed them:  and so each bridegroom took his bride and her dowry and bore her home.

Sec.  IX.  It seems that the alarm given by the attack of the pirates put an end to the custom of fixing one day for all marriages:  but the main objects of the institution were still attained by the perfect publicity given to the marriages of all the noble families; the bridegroom standing in the Court of the Ducal Palace to receive congratulations on his betrothal, and the whole body of the nobility attending the nuptials, and rejoicing, “as at some personal good fortune; since, by the constitution of the state, they are for ever incorporated together, as if of one and the same family." But the festival of the 2nd of February, after the year 943, seems to have been observed only in memory of the deliverance of the brides, and no longer set apart for public nuptials.

Sec.  X. There is much difficulty in reconciling the various accounts, or distinguishing the inaccurate ones, of the manner of keeping this memorable festival.  I shall first give Sansovino’s, which is the popular one, and then note the points of importance in the counter-statements.  Sansovino says that the success of the pursuit of the pirates was owing to the ready help and hard fighting of the men of the district of Sta.  Maria Formosa, for the most part trunkmakers; and that they, having been presented after the victory to the Doge and the Senate, were told to ask some favor for their reward.  “The good men then said that they desired the Prince, with his wife and the Signory, to visit every year the church of their district, on the day of its feast.  And the Prince asking them, ‘Suppose it should rain?’ they answered, ’We will give you hats to cover you; and if you are thirsty, we will give you to drink.’  Whence is it that the Vicar, in the name of the people, presents to the Doge, on his visit, two flasks of malvoisie and two oranges; and presents to him two gilded hats, bearing the arms of the Pope, of the Prince, and of the Vicar.  And thus was instituted the Feast of the Maries, which was called noble and famous because the people from all round came together to behold it.  And it was celebrated in this manner:....”  The account which follows is somewhat prolix; but its substance is, briefly, that twelve maidens were elected, two for each division of the city; and that it was decided by lot which contrade, or quarters of the town, should provide them with dresses.  This was done at enormous expense, one contrada contending with another, and even the jewels of the treasury of St. Mark being lent for the occasion to the “Maries,” as the twelve damsels were called.  They, being thus dressed with gold, and silver, and jewels, went in their galley to St. Mark’s for the Doge, who joined them with the Signory, and went first to San Pietro di Castello to hear mass on St. Mark’s day, the 31st of January, and to Santa Maria Formosa on the 2nd of February, the intermediate day being spent in passing in procession through the streets of the city; “and sometimes there arose quarrels about the places they should pass through, for every one wanted them to pass by his house.”

Sec.  XI.  Nearly the same account is given by Corner, who, however, does not say anything about the hats or the malvoisie.  These, however, we find again in the Matricola de’ Casseleri, which, of course, sets the services of the trunkmakers and the privileges obtained by them in the most brilliant light.  The quaintness of the old Venetian is hardly to be rendered into English.  “And you must know that the said trunkmakers were the men who were the cause of such victory, and of taking the galley, and of cutting all the Triestines to pieces, because, at that time, they were valiant men and well in order.  The which victory was on the 2nd February, on the day of the Madonna of candles.  And at the request and entreaties of the said trunkmakers, it was decreed that the Doge, every year, as long as Venice shall endure, should go on the eve of the said feast to vespers in the said church, with the Signory.  And be it noted, that the vicar is obliged to give to the Doge two flasks of malvoisie, with two oranges besides.  And so it is observed, and will be observed always.”  The reader must observe the continual confusion between St. Mark’s day the 31st of January, and Candlemas the 2nd of February.  The fact appears to be, that the marriage day in the old republic was St. Mark’s day, and the recovery of the brides was the same day at evening; so that, as we are told by Sansovino, the commemorative festival began on that day, but it was continued to the day of the Purification, that especial thanks might be rendered to the Virgin; and, the visit to Sta.  Maria Formosa being the most important ceremony of the whole festival, the old chroniclers, and even Sansovino, got confused, and asserted the victory itself to have taken place on the day appointed for that pilgrimage.

Sec.  XII.  I doubt not that the reader who is acquainted with the beautiful lines of Rogers is as much grieved as I am at the interference of the “casket-makers” with the achievement which the poet ascribes to the bridegrooms alone; an interference quite as inopportune as that of old Le Balafre with the victory of his nephew, in the unsatisfactory conclusion of “Quentin Durward.”  I am afraid I cannot get the casket-makers quite out of the way; but it may gratify some of my readers to know that a chronicle of the year 1378, quoted by Galliciolli, denies the agency of the people of Sta.  Maria Formosa altogether, in these terms:  “Some say that the people of Sta.  M. Formosa were those who recovered the spoil ("predra;” I may notice, in passing, that most of the old chroniclers appear to consider the recovery of the caskets rather more a subject of congratulation than that of the brides), and that, for their reward, they asked the Doge and Signory to visit Sta.  M. Formosa; but this is false.  The going to Sta.  M. Formosa was because the thing had succeeded on that day, and because this was then the only church in Venice in honor of the Virgin.”  But here is again the mistake about the day itself; and besides if we get rid altogether of the trunkmakers, how are we to account for the ceremony of the oranges and hats, of which the accounts seem authentic?  If, however, the reader likes to substitute “carpenters” or “house-builders” for casket-makers, he may do so with great reason (vide Galliciolli, lib. ii.  Se; but I fear that one or the other body of tradesmen must be allowed to have had no small share in the honor of the victory.

Sec.  XIII.  But whatever doubt attaches to the particular circumstances of its origin, there is none respecting the splendor of the festival itself, as it was celebrated for four centuries afterwards.  We find that each contrada spent from 800 to 1000 zecchins in the dress of the “Maries” entrusted to it; but I cannot find among how many contrade the twelve Maries were divided; it is also to be supposed that most of the accounts given refer to the later periods of the celebration of the festival.  In the beginning of the eleventh century, the good Doge Pietro Orseolo II. left in his will the third of his entire fortune “per la Festa della Marie;” and, in the fourteenth century, so many people came from the rest of Italy to see it, that special police regulations were made for it, and the Council of Ten were twice summoned before it took place. The expense lavished upon it seems to have increased till the year 1379, when all the resources of the republic were required for the terrible war of Chiozza, and all festivity was for that time put an end to.  The issue of the war left the Venetians with neither the power nor the disposition to restore the festival on its ancient scale, and they seem to have been ashamed to exhibit it in reduced splendor.  It was entirely abolished.

Sec.  XIV.  As if to do away even with its memory, every feature of the surrounding scene which was associated with that festival has been in succeeding ages destroyed.  With one solitary exception, there is not a house left in the whole Piazza of Santa Maria Formosa from whose windows the festa of the Maries has ever been seen:  of the church in which they worshipped, not a stone is left, even the form of the ground and direction of the neighboring canals are changed; and there is now but one landmark to guide the steps of the traveller to the place where the white cloud rested, and the shrine was built to St. Mary the Beautiful.  Yet the spot is still worth his pilgrimage, for he may receive a lesson upon it, though a painful one.  Let him first fill his mind with the fair images of the ancient festival, and then seek that landmark the tower of the modern church, built upon the place where the daughters of Venice knelt yearly with her noblest lords; and let him look at the head that is carved on the base of the tower, still dedicated to St. Mary the Beautiful.

Sec.  XV.  A head, ­huge, inhuman, and monstrous, ­leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be beheld for more than an instant:  yet let it be endured for that instant; for in that head is embodied the type of the evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline; and it is well that we should see and feel the full horror of it on this spot, and know what pestilence it was that came and breathed upon her beauty, until it melted away like the white cloud from the ancient fields of Santa Maria Formosa.

Sec.  XVI.  This head is one of many hundreds which disgrace the latest buildings of the city, all more or less agreeing in their expression of sneering mockery, in most cases enhanced by thrusting out the tongue.  Most of them occur upon the bridges, which were among the very last works undertaken by the republic, several, for instance, upon the Bridge of Sighs; and they are evidences of a delight in the contemplation of bestial vice, and the expression of low sarcasm, which is, I believe, the most hopeless state into which the human mind can fall.  This spirit of idiotic mockery is, as I have said, the most striking characteristic of the last period of the Renaissance, which, in consequence of the character thus imparted to its sculpture, I have called grotesque; but it must be our immediate task, and it will be a most interesting one, to distinguish between this base grotesqueness, and that magnificent condition of fantastic imagination, which was above noticed as one of the chief elements of the Northern Gothic mind.  Nor is this a question of interesting speculation merely:  for the distinction between the true and false grotesque is one which the present tendencies of the English mind have rendered it practically important to ascertain; and that in a degree which, until he has made some progress in the consideration of the subject, the reader will hardly anticipate.

Sec.  XVII.  But, first, I have to note one peculiarity in the late architecture of Venice, which will materially assist us in understanding the true nature of the spirit which is to be the subject of our inquiry; and this peculiarity, singularly enough, is first exemplified in the very façade of Santa Maria Formosa which is flanked by the grotesque head to which our attention has just been directed.  This façade, whose architect is unknown, consists of a pediment, sustained on four Corinthian pilasters, and is, I believe, the earliest in Venice which appears entirely destitute of every religious symbol, sculpture, or inscription; unless the Cardinal’s hat upon the shield in the centre of the impediment be considered a religious symbol.  The entire façade is nothing else than a monument to the Admiral Vincenzo Cappello.  Two tablets, one between each pair of flanking pillars, record his acts and honors; and, on the corresponding spaces upon the base of the church, are two circular trophies, composed of halberts, arrows, flags, tridents, helmets, and lances:  sculptures which are just as valueless in a military as in an ecclesiastical point of view; for, being all copied from the forms of Roman arms and armor, they cannot even be referred to for information respecting the costume of the period.  Over the door, as the chief ornament of the façade, exactly in the spot which in the “barbarous” St. Mark’s is occupied by the figure of Christ, is the statue of Vincenzo Cappello, in Roman armor.  He died in 1542; and we have, therefore, the latter part of the sixteenth century fixed as the period when, in Venice, churches were first built to the glory of man, instead of the glory of God.

Sec.  XVIII.  Throughout the whole of Scripture history, nothing is more remarkable than the close connection of punishment with the sin of vain-glory.  Every other sin is occasionally permitted to remain, for lengthened periods, without definite chastisement; but the forgetfulness of God, and the claim of honor by man, as belonging to himself, are visited at once, whether in Hezekiah, Nebuchadnezzar, or Herod, with the most tremendous punishment.  We have already seen, that the first reason for the fall of Venice was the manifestation of such a spirit; and it is most singular to observe the definiteness with which it is here marked, ­as if so appointed, that it might be impossible for future ages to miss the lesson.  For, in the long inscriptions which record the acts of Vincenzo Cappello, it might, at least, have been anticipated that some expressions would occur indicative of remaining pretence to religious feeling, or formal acknowledgement of Divine power.  But there are none whatever.  The name of God does not once occur; that of St. Mark is found only in the statement that Cappello was a procurator of the church:  there is no word touching either on the faith or hope of the deceased; and the only sentence which alludes to supernatural powers at all, alludes to them under the heathen name of fates, in its explanation of what the Admiral Cappello would have accomplished, “nisi fata Christianis adversa vetuissent.”

Sec.  XIX.  Having taken sufficient note of all the baseness of mind which these facts indicate in the people, we shall not be surprised to find immediate signs of dotage in the conception of their architecture.  The churches raised throughout this period are so grossly debased, that even the Italian critics of the present day, who are partially awakened to the true state of art in Italy, though blind, as yet, to its true cause, exhaust their terms of reproach upon these last efforts of the Renaissance builders.  The two churches of San Moise and Santa Maria Zobenigo, which are among the most remarkable in Venice for their manifestation of insolent atheism, are characterized by Lazari, the one as “culmine d’ogni follia architettonica,” the other as “orrido ammasso di pietra d’Istria,” with added expressions of contempt, as just as it is unmitigated.

Sec.  XX.  Now both these churches, which I should like the reader to visit in succession, if possible, after that of Sta.  Maria Formosa, agree with that church, and with each other, in being totally destitute of religious symbols, and entirely dedicated to the honor of two Venetian families.  In San Moise, a bust of Vincenzo Fini is set on a tall narrow pyramid, above the central door, with this marvellous inscription: 

  “OMNE FASTIGIVM
   VIRTVTE IMPLET
   VINCENTIVS FINI.”

It is very difficult to translate this; for fastigium, besides its general sense, has a particular one in architecture, and refers to the part of the building occupied by the bust; but the main meaning of it is that “Vincenzo Fini fills all height with his virtue.”  The inscription goes on into farther praise, but this example is enough.  Over the two lateral doors are two other laudatory inscriptions of younger members of the Fini family, the dates of death of the three heroes being 1660, 1685, and 1726, marking thus the period of consummate degradation.

Sec.  XXI.  In like manner, the Church of Santa Maria Zobenigo is entirely dedicated to the Barbaro family; the only religious symbols with which it is invested being statues of angels blowing brazen trumpets, intended to express the spreading of the fame of the Barbaro family in heaven.  At the top of the church is Venice crowned, between Justice and Temperance, Justice holding a pair of grocer’s scales, of iron, swinging in the wind.  There is a two-necked stone eagle (the Barbaro crest), with a copper crown, in the centre of the pediment.  A huge statue of a Barbaro in armor, with a fantastic head-dress, over the central door; and four Barbaros in niches, two on each side of it, strutting statues, in the common stage postures of the period, ­Jo.  Maria Barbaro, sapiens ordinum; Marinus Barbaro, Senator (reading a speech in a Ciceronian attitude); Franc.  Barbaro, legatus in classe (in armor, with high-heeled boots, and looking resolutely fierce); and Carolus Barbaro, sapiens ordinum:  the decorations of the façade being completed by two trophies, consisting of drums, trumpets, flags and cannon; and six plans, sculptured in relief, of the towns of Zara, Candia, Padua, Rome, Corfu, and Spalatro.

Sec.  XXII.  When the traveller has sufficiently considered the meaning of this façade, he ought to visit the Church of St. Eustachio, remarkable for the dramatic effect of the group of sculpture on its façade, and then the Church of the Ospedaletto (see Index, under head Ospedaletto); noticing, on his way, the heads on the foundations of the Palazzo Corner della Regina, and the Palazzo Pesaro, and any other heads carved on the modern bridges, closing with those on the Bridge of Sighs.

He will then have obtained a perfect idea of the style and feeling of the Grotesque Renaissance.  I cannot pollute this volume by any illustration of its worst forms, but the head turned to the front, on the right-hand in the opposite Plate, will give the general reader an idea of its most graceful and refined developments.  The figure set beside it, on the left, is a piece of noble grotesque, from fourteenth century Gothic; and it must be our present task to ascertain the nature of the difference which exists between the two, by an accurate inquiry into the true essence of the grotesque spirit itself.

Sec.  XXIII.  First, then, it seems to me that the grotesque is, in almost all cases, composed of two elements, one ludicrous, the other fearful; that, as one or other of these elements prevails, the grotesque falls into two branches, sportive grotesque and terrible grotesque; but that we cannot legitimately consider it under these two aspects, because there are hardly any examples which do not in some degree combine both elements; there are few grotesques so utterly playful as to be overcast with no shade of fearfulness, and few so fearful as absolutely to exclude all ideas of jest.  But although we cannot separate the grotesque itself into two branches, we may easily examine separately the two conditions of mind which it seems to combine; and consider successively what are the kinds of jest, and what the kinds of fearfulness, which may be legitimately expressed in the various walks of art, and how their expressions actually occur in the Gothic and Renaissance schools.

First, then, what are the conditions of playfulness which we may fitly express in noble art, or which (for this is the same thing) are consistent with nobleness in humanity?  In other words, what is the proper function of play, with respect not to youth merely, but to all mankind?

Sec.  XXIV.  It is a much more serious question than may be at first supposed; for a healthy manner of play is necessary in order to a healthy manner of work:  and because the choice of our recreation is, in most cases, left to ourselves, while the nature of our work is generally fixed by necessity or authority, it may be well doubted whether more distressful consequences may not have resulted from mistaken choice in play than from mistaken direction in labor.

Sec.  XXV.  Observe, however, that we are only concerned, here, with that kind of play which causes laughter or implies recreation, not with that which consists in the excitement of the energies whether of body or mind.  Muscular exertion is, indeed, in youth, one of the conditions of recreation; “but neither the violent bodily labor which children of all ages agree to call play,” nor the grave excitement of the mental faculties in games of skill or chance, are in anywise connected with the state of feeling we have here to investigate, namely, that sportiveness which man possesses in common with many inferior creatures, but to which his higher faculties give nobler expression in the various manifestations of wit, humor, and fancy.

With respect to the manner in which this instinct of playfulness is indulged or repressed, mankind are broadly distinguishable into four classes:  the men who play wisely; who play necessarily; who play inordinately; and who play not at all.

Sec.  XXVI.  First:  Those who play wisely.  It is evident that the idea of any kind of play can only be associated with the idea of an imperfect, childish, and fatigable nature.  As far as men can raise that nature, so that it shall no longer be interested by trifles or exhausted by toils, they raise it above play; he whose heart is at once fixed upon heaven, and open to the earth, so as to apprehend the importance of heavenly doctrines, and the compass of human sorrow, will have little disposition for jest; and exactly in proportion to the breadth and depth of his character and intellect, will be, in general, the incapability of surprise, or exuberant and sudden emotion, which must render play impossible.  It is, however, evidently not intended that many men should even reach, far less pass their lives in, that solemn state of thoughtfulness, which brings them into the nearest brotherhood with their Divine Master; and the highest and healthiest state which is competent to ordinary humanity appears to be that which, accepting the necessity of recreation, and yielding to the impulses of natural delight springing out of health and innocence, does, indeed, condescend often to playfulness, but never without such deep love of God, of truth, and of humanity, as shall make even its slightest words reverent, its idlest fancies profitable, and its keenest satire indulgent.  Wordsworth and Plato furnish us with, perhaps, the finest and highest examples of this playfulness:  in the one case, unmixed with satire, the perfectly simple effusion of that spirit ­in

  “Which gives to all the self-same bent,
   Whose life is wise, and innocent;”

Plato, and, by the by, in a very wise book of our own times, not unworthy of being named in such companionship, “Friends in Council,” mingled with an exquisitely tender and loving satire.

Sec.  XXVII.  Secondly:  The men who play necessarily.  That highest species of playfulness, which we have just been considering, is evidently the condition of a mind, not only highly cultivated, but so habitually trained to intellectual labor that it can bring a considerable force of accurate thought into its moments even of recreation.  This is not possible, unless so much repose of mind and heart are enjoyed, even at the periods of greatest exertion, that the rest required by the system is diffused over the whole life.  To the majority of mankind, such a state is evidently unattainable.  They must, perforce, pass a large part of their lives in employments both irksome and toilsome, demanding an expenditure of energy which exhausts the system, and yet consuming that energy upon subjects incapable of interesting the nobler faculties.  When such employments are intermitted, those noble instincts, fancy, imagination, and curiosity, are all hungry for the food which the labor of the day has denied to them, while yet the weariness of the body, in a great degree, forbids their application to any serious subject.  They therefore exert themselves without any determined purpose, and under no vigorous restraint, but gather, as best they may, such various nourishment, and put themselves to such fantastic exercise, as may soonest indemnify them for their past imprisonment, and prepare them to endure their recurrence.  This sketching of the mental limbs as their fetters fall away, ­this leaping and dancing of the heart and intellect, when they are restored to the fresh air of heaven, yet half paralyzed by their captivity, and unable to turn themselves to any earnest purpose, ­I call necessary play.  It is impossible to exaggerate its importance, whether in polity, or in art.

Sec.  XXVIII.  Thirdly:  The men who play inordinately.  The most perfect state of society which, consistently with due understanding of man’s nature, it may be permitted us to conceive, would be one in which the whole human race were divided, more or less distinctly, into workers and thinkers; that is to say, into the two classes, who only play wisely, or play necessarily.  But the number and the toil of the working class are enormously increased, probably more than doubled, by the vices of the men who neither play wisely nor necessarily, but are enabled by circumstances, and permitted by their want of principle, to make amusement the object of their existence.  There is not any moment of the lives of such men which is not injurious to others; both because they leave the work undone which was appointed for them, and because they necessarily think wrongly, whenever it becomes compulsory upon them to think at all.  The greater portion of the misery of this world arises from the false opinions of men whose idleness has physically incapacitated them from forming true ones.  Every duty which we omit obscures some truth which we should have known; and the guilt of a life spent in the pursuit of pleasure is twofold, partly consisting in the perversion of action, and partly in the dissemination of falsehood.

Sec.  XXIX.  There is, however, a less criminal, though hardly less dangerous condition of mind; which, though not failing in its more urgent duties, fails in the finer conscientiousness which regulates the degree, and directs the choice, of amusement, at those times when amusement is allowable.  The most frequent error in this respect is the want of reverence in approaching subjects of importance or sacredness, and of caution in the expression of thoughts which may encourage like irreverence in others:  and these faults are apt to gain upon the mind until it becomes habitually more sensible to what is ludicrous and accidental, than to what is grave and essential, in any subject that is brought before it; or even, at last, desires to perceive or to know nothing but what may end in jest.  Very generally minds of this character are active and able; and many of them are so far conscientious, that they believe their jesting forwards their work.  But it is difficult to calculate the harm they do, by destroying the reverence which is our best guide into all truth; for weakness and evil are easily visible, but greatness and goodness are often latent; and we do infinite mischief by exposing weakness to eyes which cannot comprehend greatness.  This error, however, is more connected with abuses of the satirical than of the playful instinct; and I shall have more to say of it presently.

Sec.  XXX.  Lastly:  The men who do not play at all:  those who are so dull or so morose as to be incapable of inventing or enjoying jest, and in whom care, guilt, or pride represses all healthy exhilaration of the fancy; or else men utterly oppressed with labor, and driven too hard by the necessities of the world to be capable of any species of happy relaxation.

Sec.  XXXI.  We have now to consider the way in which the presence or absence of joyfulness, in these several classes, is expressed in art.

1.  Wise play.  The first and noblest class hardly ever speak through art, except seriously; they feel its nobleness too profoundly, and value the time necessary for its production too highly, to employ it in the rendering of trivial thoughts.  The playful fancy of a moment may innocently be expressed by the passing word; but he can hardly have learned the preciousness of life, who passes days in the elaboration of a jest.  And, as to what regards the delineation of human character, the nature of all noble art is to epitomize and embrace so much at once, that its subject can never be altogether ludicrous; it must possess all the solemnities of the whole, not the brightness of the partial, truth.  For all truth that makes us smile is partial.  The novelist amuses us by his relation of a particular incident; but the painter cannot set any one of his characters before us without giving some glimpse of its whole career.  That of which the historian informs us in successive pages, it is the task of the painter to inform us of at once, writing upon the countenance not merely the expression of the moment, but the history of the life:  and the history of a life can never be a jest.

Whatever part, therefore, of the sportive energy of these men of the highest class would be expressed in verbal wit or humor finds small utterance through their art, and will assuredly be confined, if it occur there at all, to scattered and trivial incidents.  But so far as their minds can recreate themselves by the imagination of strange, yet not laughable, forms, which, either in costume, in landscape, or in any other accessaries, may be combined with those necessary for their more earnest purposes, we find them delighting in such inventions; and a species of grotesqueness thence arising in all their work, which is indeed one of its most valuable characteristics, but which is so intimately connected with the sublime or terrible form of the grotesque, that it will be better to notice it under that head.

Sec.  XXXI.  Necessary play.  I have dwelt much in a former portion of this work, on the justice and desirableness of employing the minds of inferior workmen, and of the lower orders in general, in the production of objects of art of one kind or another.  So far as men of this class are compelled to hard manual labor for their daily bread, so far forth their artistical efforts must be rough and ignorant, and their artistical perceptions comparatively dull.  Now it is not possible, with blunt perceptions and rude hands, to produce works which shall be pleasing by their beauty; but it is perfectly possible to produce such as shall be interesting by their character or amusing by their satire.  For one hard-working man who possesses the finer instincts which decide on perfection of lines and harmonies of color, twenty possess dry humor or quaint fancy; not because these faculties were originally given to the human race, or to any section of it, in greater degree than the sense of beauty, but because these are exercised in our daily intercourse with each other, and developed by the interest which we take in the affairs of life, while the others are not.  And because, therefore, a certain degree of success will probably attend the effort to express this humor or fancy, while comparative failure will assuredly result from an ignorant struggle to reach the forms of solemn beauty, the working-man, who turns his attention partially to art, will probably, and wisely, choose to do that which he can do best, and indulge the pride of an effective satire rather than subject himself to assured mortification in the pursuit of beauty; and this the more, because we have seen that his application to art is to be playful and recreative, and it is not in recreation that the conditions of perfection can be fulfilled.

Sec.  XXXIII.  Now all the forms of art which result from the comparatively recreative exertion of minds more or less blunted or encumbered by other cares and toils, the art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.  And it is noble or inferior, first, according to the tone of the minds which have produced it, and in proportion to their knowledge, wit, love of truth, and kindness; secondly, according to the degree of strength they have been able to give forth; but yet, however much we may find in it needing to be forgiven, always delightful so long as it is the work of good and ordinarily intelligent men.  And its delightfulness ought mainly to consist in those very imperfections which mark it for work done in times of rest.  It is not its own merit so much as the enjoyment of him who produced it, which is to be the source of the spectator’s pleasure; it is to the strength of his sympathy, not to the accuracy of his criticism, that it makes appeal; and no man can indeed be a lover of what is best in the higher walks of art, who has not feeling and charity enough to rejoice with the rude sportiveness of hearts that have escaped out of prison, and to be thankful for the flowers which men have laid their burdens down to sow by the wayside.

Sec.  XXXIV.  And consider what a vast amount of human work this right understanding of its meaning will make fruitful and admirable to us, which otherwise we could only have passed by with contempt.  There is very little architecture in the world which is, in the full sense of the words, good and noble.  A few pieces of Italian Gothic and Romanesque, a few scattered fragments of Gothic cathedrals, and perhaps two or three of Greek temples, are all that we possess approaching to an ideal of perfection.  All the rest ­Egyptian, Norman, Arabian, and most Gothic, and, which is very noticeable, for the most part all the strongest and mightiest ­depend for their power on some developement of the grotesque spirit; but much more the inferior domestic architecture of the middle ages, and what similar conditions remain to this day in countries from which the life of art has not yet been banished by its laws.  The fantastic gables, built up in scroll-work and steps, of the Flemish street; the pinnacled roofs set with their small humorist double windows, as if with so many ears and eyes, of Northern France; the blackened timbers, crossed and carved into every conceivable waywardness of imagination, of Normandy and old England; the rude hewing of the pine timbers of the Swiss cottage; the projecting turrets and bracketed oriels of the German street; these, and a thousand other forms, not in themselves reaching any high degree of excellence, are yet admirable, and most precious, as the fruits of a rejoicing energy in uncultivated minds.  It is easier to take away the energy, than to add the cultivation; and the only effect of the better knowledge which civilized nations now possess, has been, as we have seen in a former chapter, to forbid their being happy, without enabling them to be great.

Sec.  XXXV.  It is very necessary, however, with respect to this provincial or rustic architecture, that we should carefully distinguish its truly grotesque from its picturesque elements.  In the “Seven Lamps” I defined the picturesque to be “parasitical sublimity,” or sublimity belonging to the external or accidental characters of a thing, not to the thing itself.  For instance, when a highland cottage roof is covered with fragments of shale instead of slates, it becomes picturesque, because the irregularity and rude fractures of the rocks, and their grey and gloomy color, give to it something of the savageness, and much of the general aspect, of the slope of a mountain side.  But as a mere cottage roof, it cannot be sublime, and whatever sublimity it derives from the wildness or sternness which the mountains have given it in its covering, is, so far forth, parasitical.  The mountain itself would have been grand, which is much more than picturesque; but the cottage cannot be grand as such, and the parasitical grandeur which it may possess by accidental qualities, is the character for which men have long agreed to use the inaccurate word “Picturesque.”

Sec.  XXXVI.  On the other hand, beauty cannot be parasitical.  There is nothing so small or so contemptible, but it may be beautiful in its own right.  The cottage may be beautiful, and the smallest moss that grows on its roof, and the minutest fibre of that moss which the microscope can raise into visible form, and all of them in their own right, not less than the mountains and the sky; so that we use no peculiar term to express their beauty, however diminutive, but only when the sublime element enters, without sufficient worthiness in the nature of the thing to which it is attached.

Sec.  XXXVII.  Now this picturesque element, which is always given, if by nothing else, merely by ruggedness, adds usually very largely to the pleasurableness of grotesque work, especially to that of its inferior kinds; but it is not for this reason to be confounded with the grotesqueness itself.  The knots and rents of the timbers, the irregular lying of the shingles on the roofs, the vigorous light and shadow, the fractures and weather-stains of the old stones, which were so deeply loved and so admirably rendered by our lost Prout, are the picturesque elements of the architecture:  the grotesque ones are those which are not produced by the working of nature and of time, but exclusively by the fancy of man; and, as also for the most part by his indolent and uncultivated fancy, they are always, in some degree, wanting in grandeur, unless the picturesque element be united with them.

Sec.  XXXVII.  Inordinate play.  The reader will have some difficulty, I fear, in keeping clearly in his mind the various divisions of our subject; but, when he has once read the chapter through, he will see their places and coherence.  We have next to consider the expression throughout of the minds of men who indulge themselves in unnecessary play.  It is evident that a large number of these men will be more refined and more highly educated than those who only play necessarily; the power of pleasure-seeking implies, in general, fortunate circumstances of life.  It is evident also that their play will not be so hearty, so simple, or so joyful; and this deficiency of brightness will affect it in proportion to its unnecessary and unlawful continuance, until at last it becomes a restless and dissatisfied indulgence in excitement, or a painful delving after exhausted springs of pleasure.

The art through which this temper is expressed will, in all probability, be refined and sensual, ­therefore, also, assuredly feeble; and because, in the failure of the joyful energy of the mind, there will fail, also, its perceptions and its sympathies, it will be entirely deficient in expression of character, and acuteness of thought, but will be peculiarly restless, manifesting its desire for excitement in idle changes of subject and purpose.  Incapable of true imagination, it will seek to supply its place by exaggerations, incoherencies, and monstrosities; and the form of the grotesque to which it gives rise will be an incongruous chain of hackneyed graces, idly thrown together, ­prettinesses or sublimities, not of its own invention, associated in forms which will be absurd without being fantastic, and monstrous without being terrible.  And because, in the continual pursuit of pleasure, men lose both cheerfulness and charity, there will be small hilarity, but much malice, in this grotesque; yet a weak malice, incapable of expressing its own bitterness, not having grasp enough of truth to become forcible, and exhausting itself in impotent or disgusting caricature.

Sec.  XXXIX.  Of course, there are infinite ranks and kinds of this grotesque, according to the natural power of the minds which originate it, and to the degree in which they have lost themselves.  Its highest condition is that which first developed itself among the enervated Romans, and which was brought to the highest perfection of which it was capable, by Raphael, in the arabesques of the Vatican.  It may be generally described as an elaborate and luscious form of nonsense.  Its lower conditions are found in the common upholstery and decorations which, over the whole of civilized Europe, have sprung from this poisonous root; an artistical pottage, composed of nymphs, cupids, and satyrs, with shreddings of heads and paws of meek wild beasts, and nondescript vegetables.  And the lowest of all are those which have not even graceful models to recommend them, but arise out of the corruption of the higher schools, mingled with clownish or bestial satire, as is the case in the latter Renaissance of Venice, which we were above examining.  It is almost impossible to believe the depth to which the human mind can be debased in following this species of grotesque.  In a recent Italian garden, the favorite ornaments frequently consist of stucco images, representing, in dwarfish caricature, the most disgusting types of manhood and womanhood which can be found amidst the dissipation of the modern drawingroom; yet without either veracity or humor, and dependent, for whatever interest they possess, upon simple grossness of expression and absurdity of costume.  Grossness, of one kind or another, is, indeed, an unfailing characteristic of the style; either latent, as in the refined sensuality of the more graceful arabesques, or, in the worst examples, manifested in every species of obscene conception and abominable detail.  In the head, described in the opening of this chapter, at Santa Maria Formosa, the teeth are represented as decayed.

Sec.  X.  The minds of the fourth class of men who do not play at all, are little likely to find expression in any trivial form of art, except in bitterness of mockery; and this character at once stamps the work in which it appears, as belonging to the class of terrible, rather than of playful, grotesque.  We have, therefore, now to examine the state of mind which gave rise to this second and more interesting branch of imaginative work.

Sec.  XLI.  Two great and principal passions are evidently appointed by the Deity to rule the life of man; namely, the love of God, and the fear of sin, and of its companion ­Death.  How many motives we have for Love, how much there is in the universe to kindle our admiration and to claim our gratitude, there are, happily, multitudes among us who both feel and teach.  But it has not, I think, been sufficiently considered how evident, throughout the system of creation, is the purpose of God that we should often be affected by Fear; not the sudden, selfish, and contemptible fear of immediate danger, but the fear which arises out of the contemplation of great powers in destructive operation, and generally from the perception of the presence of death.  Nothing appears to me more remarkable than the array of scenic magnificence by which the imagination is appalled, in myriads of instances, when the actual danger is comparatively small; so that the utmost possible impression of awe shall be produced upon the minds of all, though direct suffering is inflicted upon few.  Consider, for instance, the moral effect of a single thunder-storm.  Perhaps two or three persons may be struck dead within the space of a hundred square miles; and their deaths, unaccompanied by the scenery of the storm, would produce little more than a momentary sadness in the busy hearts of living men.  But the preparation for the Judgment by all that mighty gathering of clouds; by the questioning of the forest leaves, in their terrified stillness, which way the winds shall go forth; by the murmuring to each other, deep in the distance, of the destroying angels before they draw forth their swords of fire; by the march of the funeral darkness in the midst of the noon-day, and the rattling of the dome of heaven beneath the chariot-wheels of death; ­on how many minds do not these produce an impression almost as great as the actual witnessing of the fatal issue! and how strangely are the expressions of the threatening elements fitted to the apprehension of the human soul!  The lurid color, the long, irregular, convulsive sound, the ghastly shapes of flaming and heaving cloud, are all as true and faithful in their appeal to our instinct of danger, as the moaning or wailing of the human voice itself is to our instinct of pity.  It is not a reasonable calculating terror which they awake in us; it is no matter that we count distance by seconds, and measure probability by averages.  That shadow of the thunder-cloud will still do its work upon our hearts, and we shall watch its passing away as if we stood upon the threshing-floor of Araunah.

Sec.  XLII.  And this is equally the case with respect to all the other destructive phenomena of the universe.  From the mightiest of them to the gentlest, from the earthquake to the summer shower, it will be found that they are attended by certain aspects of threatening, which strike terror into the hearts of multitudes more numerous a thousandfold than those who actually suffer from the ministries of judgment; and that, besides the fearfulness of these immediately dangerous phenomena, there is an occult and subtle horror belonging to many aspects of the creation around us, calculated often to fill us with serious thought, even in our times of quietness and peace.  I understand not the most dangerous, because most attractive form of modern infidelity, which, pretending to exalt the beneficence of the Deity, degrades it into a reckless infinitude of mercy, and blind obliteration of the work of sin; and which does this chiefly by dwelling on the manifold appearances of God’s kindness on the face of creation.  Such kindness is indeed everywhere and always visible; but not alone.  Wrath and threatening are invariably mingled with the love; and in the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of Hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances, as that of Heaven.  It is well for us to dwell with thankfulness on the unfolding of the flower, and the falling of the dew, and the sleep of the green fields in the sunshine; but the blasted trunk, the barren rock, the moaning of the bleak winds, the roar of the black, perilous, merciless whirlpools of the mountain streams, the solemn solitudes of moors and seas, the continual fading of all beauty into darkness, and of all strength into dust, have these no language for us?  We may seek to escape their teaching by reasonings touching the good which is wrought out of all evil; but it is vain sophistry.  The good succeeds to the evil as day succeeds the night, but so also the evil to the good.  Gerizim and Ebal, birth and death, light and darkness, heaven and hell, divide the existence of man, and his Futurity.

Sec.  XLIII.  And because the thoughts of the choice we have to make between these two, ought to rule us continually, not so much in our own actions (for these should, for the most part, be governed by settled habit and principle) as in our manner of regarding the lives of other men, and our own responsibilities with respect to them; therefore, it seems to me that the healthiest state into which the human mind can be brought is that which is capable of the greatest love, and the greatest awe:  and this we are taught even in our times of rest; for when our minds are rightly in tone, the merely pleasurable excitement which they seek with most avidity is that which rises out of the contemplation of beauty or of terribleness.  We thirst for both, and, according to the height and tone of our feeling, desire to see them in noble or inferior forms.  Thus there is a Divine beauty, and a terribleness or sublimity coequal with it in rank, which are the subjects of the highest art; and there is an inferior or ornamental beauty, and an inferior terribleness coequal with it in rank, which are the subjects of grotesque art.  And the state of mind in which the terrible form of the grotesque is developed, is that which in some irregular manner, dwells upon certain conditions of terribleness, into the complete depth of which it does not enter for the time.

Sec.  XLIV.  Now the things which are the proper subjects of human fear are twofold; those which have the power of Death, and those which have the nature of Sin.  Of which there are many ranks, greater or less in power and vice, from the evil angels themselves down to the serpent which is their type, and which though of a low and contemptible class, appears to unite the deathful and sinful natures in the most clearly visible and intelligible form; for there is nothing else which we know, of so small strength and occupying so unimportant a place in the economy of creation, which yet is so mortal and so malignant.  It is, then, on these two classes of objects that the mind fixes for its excitement, in that mood which gives rise to the terrible grotesque; and its subject will be found always to unite some expression of vice and danger, but regarded in a peculiar temper; sometimes (A) of predetermined or involuntary apathy, sometimes (B) of mockery, sometimes (C) of diseased and ungoverned imaginativeness.

Sec.  XLV.  For observe, the difficulty which, as I above stated, exists in distinguishing the playful from the terrible grotesque arises out of this cause; that the mind, under certain phases of excitement, plays with terror, and summons images which, if it were in another temper, would be awful, but of which, either in weariness or in irony, it refrains for the time to acknowledge the true terribleness.  And the mode in which this refusal takes place distinguishes the noble from the ignoble grotesque.  For the master of the noble grotesque knows the depth of all at which he seems to mock, and would feel it at another time, or feels it in a certain undercurrent of thought even while he jests with it; but the workman of the ignoble grotesque can feel and understand nothing, and mocks at all things with the laughter of the idiot and the cretin.

To work out this distinction completely is the chief difficulty in our present inquiry; and, in order to do so, let us consider the above-named three conditions of mind in succession, with relation to objects of terror.

Sec. XLVI. (A).  Involuntary or predetermined apathy.  We saw above that the grotesque was produced, chiefly in subordinate or ornamental art, by rude, and in some degree uneducated men, and in their times of rest.  At such times, and in such subordinate work, it is impossible that they should represent any solemn or terrible subject with a full and serious entrance into its feeling.  It is not in the languor of a leisure hour that a man will set his whole soul to conceive the means of representing some important truth, nor to the projecting angle of a timber bracket that he would trust its representation, if conceived.  And yet, in this languor, and in this trivial work, he must find some expression of the serious part of his soul, of what there is within him capable of awe, as well as of love.  The more noble the man is, the more impossible it will be for him to confine his thoughts to mere loveliness, and that of a low order.  Were his powers and his time unlimited, so that, like Fra Angelico, he could paint the Seraphim, in that order of beauty he could find contentment, bringing down heaven to earth.  But by the conditions of his being, by his hard-worked life, by his feeble powers of execution, by the meanness of his employment and the languor of his heart, he is bound down to earth.  It is the world’s work that he is doing, and world’s work is not to be done without fear.  And whatever there is of deep and eternal consciousness within him, thrilling his mind with the sense of the presence of sin and death around him, must be expressed in that slight work, and feeble way, come of it what will.  He cannot forget it, among all that he sees of beautiful in nature; he may not bury himself among the leaves of the violet on the rocks, and of the lily in the glen, and twine out of them garlands of perpetual gladness.  He sees more in the earth than these, ­misery and wrath, and discordance, and danger, and all the work of the dragon and his angels; this he sees with too deep feeling ever to forget.  And though when he returns to his idle work, ­it may be to gild the letters upon the page, or to carve the timbers of the chamber, or the stones of the pinnacle, ­he cannot give his strength of thought any more to the woe or to the danger, there is a shadow of them still present with him:  and as the bright colors mingle beneath his touch, and the fair leaves and flowers grow at his bidding, strange horrors and phantasms rise by their side; grisly beasts and venomous serpents, and spectral fiends and nameless inconsistencies of ghastly life, rising out of things most beautiful, and fading back into them again, as the harm and the horror of life do out of its happiness.  He has seen these things; he wars with them daily; he cannot but give them their part in his work, though in a state of comparative apathy to them at the time.  He is but carving and gilding, and must not turn aside to weep; but he knows that hell is burning on, for all that, and the smoke of it withers his oak-leaves.

Sec.  XLVII.  Now, the feelings which give rise to the false or ignoble grotesque, are exactly the reverse of these.  In the true grotesque, a man of naturally strong feeling is accidentally or resolutely apathetic; in the false grotesque, a man naturally apathetic is forcing himself into temporary excitement.  The horror which is expressed by the one, comes upon him whether he will or not; that which is expressed by the other, is sought out by him, and elaborated by his art.  And therefore, also, because the fear of the one is true, and of true things, however fantastic its expression may be, there will be reality in it, and force.  It is not a manufactured terribleness, whose author, when he had finished it, knew not if it would terrify any one else or not:  but it is a terribleness taken from the life; a spectre which the workman indeed saw, and which, as it appalled him, will appal us also.  But the other workman never felt any Divine fear; he never shuddered when he heard the cry from the burning towers of the earth,

  “Venga Medusa; si lo farem di smalto.”

He is stone already, and needs no gentle hand laid upon his eyes to save him.

Sec.  XLVIII.  I do not mean what I say in this place to apply to the creations of the imagination.  It is not as the creating but as the seeing man, that we are here contemplating the master of the true grotesque.  It is because the dreadfulness of the universe around him weighs upon his heart, that his work is wild; and therefore through the whole of it we shall find the evidence of deep insight into nature.  His beasts and birds, however monstrous, will have profound relations with the true.  He may be an ignorant man, and little acquainted with the laws of nature; he is certainly a busy man, and has not much time to watch nature; but he never saw a serpent cross his path, nor a bird flit across the sky, nor a lizard bask upon a stone, without learning so much of the sublimity and inner nature of each as will not suffer him thenceforth to conceive them coldly.  He may not be able to carve plumes or scales well; but his creatures will bite and fly, for all that.  The ignoble workman is the very reverse of this.  He never felt, never looked at nature; and if he endeavor to imitate the work of the other, all his touches will be made at random, and all his extravagances will be ineffective; he may knit brows, and twist lips, and lengthen beaks, and sharpen teeth, but it will be all in vain.  He may make his creatures disgusting, but never fearful.

Sec.  XLIX.  There is, however, often another cause of difference than this.  The true grotesque being the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous one.  There is much grotesque which is wrought out with exquisite care and pains, and as much labor given to it as if it were of the noblest subject; so that the workman is evidently no longer apathetic, and has no excuse for unconnectedness of thought, or sudden unreasonable fear.  If he awakens horror now, it ought to be in some truly sublime form.  His strength is in his work; and he must not give way to sudden humor, and fits of erratic fancy.  If he does so, it must be because his mind is naturally frivolous, or is for the time degraded into the deliberate pursuit of frivolity.  And herein lies the real distinction between the base grotesque of Raphael and the Renaissance, above alluded to, and the true Gothic grotesque.  Those grotesques or arabesques of the Vatican, and other such work, which have become the patterns of ornamentation in modern times, are the fruit of great minds degraded to base objects.  The care, skill, and science, applied to the distribution of the leaves, and the drawing of the figures, are intense, admirable, and accurate; therefore, they ought to have produced a grand and serious work, not a tissue of nonsense.  If we can draw the human head perfectly, and are masters of its expression and its beauty, we have no business to cut it off, and hang it up by the hair at the end of a garland.  If we can draw the human body in the perfection of its grace and movement, we have no business to take away its limbs, and terminate it with a bunch of leaves.  Or rather our doing so will imply that there is something wrong with us; that, if we can consent to use our best powers for such base and vain trifling, there must be something wanting in the powers themselves; and that, however skilful we may be, or however learned, we are wanting both in the earnestness which can apprehend a noble truth, and in the thoughtfulness which can feel a noble fear.  No Divine terror will ever be found in the work of the man who wastes a colossal strength in elaborating toys; for the first lesson which that terror is sent to teach us, is the value of the human soul, and the shortness of mortal time.

Sec.  L. And are we never, then, it will be asked, to possess a refined or perfect ornamentation?  Must all decoration be the work of the ignorant and the rude?  Not so; but exactly in proportion as the ignorance and rudeness diminish, must the ornamentation become rational, and the grotesqueness disappear.  The noblest lessons may be taught in ornamentation, the most solemn truths compressed into it.  The Book of Genesis, in all the fulness of its incidents, in all the depth of its meaning, is bound within the leaf-borders of the gates of Ghiberti.  But Raphael’s arabesque is mere elaborate idleness.  It has neither meaning nor heart in it; it is an unnatural and monstrous abortion.

Sec.  LI.  Now, this passing of the grotesque into higher art, as the mind of the workman becomes informed with better knowledge, and capable of more earnest exertion, takes place in two ways.  Either, as his power increases, he devotes himself more and more to the beauty which he now feels himself able to express, and so the grotesqueness expands, and softens into the beautiful, as in the above-named instance of the gates of Ghiberti; or else, if the mind of the workman be naturally inclined to gloomy contemplation, the imperfection or apathy of his work rises into nobler terribleness, until we reach the point of the grotesque of Albert Durer, where, every now and then, the playfulness or apathy of the painter passes into perfect sublime.  Take the Adam and Eve, for instance.  When he gave Adam a bough to hold, with a parrot on it, and a tablet hung to it, with “Albertus Durer Noricus faciebat, 1504,” thereupon, his mind was not in Paradise.  He was half in play, half apathetic with respect to his subject, thinking how to do his work well, as a wise master-graver, and how to receive his just reward of fame.  But he rose into the true sublime in the head of Adam, and in the profound truthfulness of every creature that fills the forest.  So again in that magnificent coat of arms, with the lady and the satyr, as he cast the fluttering drapery hither and thither around the helmet, and wove the delicate crown upon the woman’s forehead, he was in a kind of play; but there is none in the dreadful skull upon the shield.  And in the “Knight and Death,” and in the dragons of the illustrations to the Apocalypse, there is neither play nor apathy; but their grotesque is of the ghastly kind which best illustrates the nature of death and sin.  And this leads us to the consideration of the second state of mind out of which the noble grotesque is developed; that is to say, the temper of mockery.

Sec.  LII. (B).  Mockery, or Satire.  In the former part of this chapter, when I spoke of the kinds of art which were produced in the recreation of the lower orders, I only spoke of forms of ornament, not of the expression of satire or humor.  But it seems probable, that nothing is so refreshing to the vulgar mind as some exercise of this faculty, more especially on the failings of their superiors; and that, wherever the lower orders are allowed to express themselves freely, we shall find humor, more or less caustic, becoming a principal feature in their work.  The classical and Renaissance manufacturers of modern times having silenced the independent language of the operative, his humor and satire pass away in the word-wit which has of late become the especial study of the group of authors headed by Charles Dickens; all this power was formerly thrown into noble art, and became permanently expressed in the sculptures of the cathedral.  It was never thought that there was anything discordant or improper in such a position:  for the builders evidently felt very deeply a truth of which, in modern times, we are less cognizant; that folly and sin are, to a certain extent, synonymous, and that it would be well for mankind in general, if all could be made to feel that wickedness is as contemptible as it is hateful.  So that the vices were permitted to be represented under the most ridiculous forms, and all the coarsest wit of the workman to be exhausted in completing the degradation of the creatures supposed to be subjected to them.

Sec.  LIII.  Nor were even the supernatural powers of evil exempt from this species of satire.  For with whatever hatred or horror the evil angels were regarded, it was one of the conditions of Christianity that they should also be looked upon as vanquished; and this not merely in their great combat with the King of Saints, but in daily and hourly combats with the weakest of His servants.  In proportion to the narrowness of the powers of abstract conception in the workman, the nobleness of the idea of spiritual nature diminished, and the traditions of the encounters of men with fiends in daily temptations were imagined with less terrific circumstances, until the agencies which in such warfare were almost always represented as vanquished with disgrace, became, at last, as much the objects of contempt as of terror.

The superstitions which represented the devil as assuming various contemptible forms of disguises in order to accomplish his purposes aided this gradual degradation of conception, and directed the study of the workman to the most strange and ugly conditions of animal form, until at last, even in the most serious subjects, the fiends are oftener ludicrous than terrible.  Nor, indeed, is this altogether avoidable, for it is not possible to express intense wickedness without some condition of degradation.  Malice, subtlety, and pride, in their extreme, cannot be written upon noble forms; and I am aware of no effort to represent the Satanic mind in the angelic form, which has succeeded in painting.  Milton succeeds only because he separately describes the movements of the mind, and therefore leaves himself at liberty to make the form heroic; but that form is never distinct enough to be painted.  Dante, who will not leave even external forms obscure, degrades them before he can feel them to be demoniacal; so also John Bunyan:  both of them, I think, having firmer faith than Milton’s in their own creations, and deeper insight into the nature of sin.  Milton makes his fiends too noble, and misses the foulness, inconstancy, and fury of wickedness.  His Satan possesses some virtues, not the less virtues for being applied to evil purpose.  Courage, resolution, patience, deliberation in council, this latter being eminently a wise and holy character, as opposed to the “Insania” of excessive sin:  and all this, if not a shallow and false, is a smooth and artistical, conception.  On the other hand, I have always felt that there was a peculiar grandeur in the indescribable, ungovernable fury of Dante’s fiends, ever shortening its own powers, and disappointing its own purposes; the deaf, blind, speechless, unspeakable rage, fierce as the lightning, but erring from its mark or turning senselessly against itself, and still further debased by foulness of form and action.  Something is indeed to be allowed for the rude feelings of the time, but I believe all such men as Dante are sent into the world at the time when they can do their work best; and that, it being appointed for him to give to mankind the most vigorous realization possible both of Hell and Heaven, he was born both in the country and at the time which furnished the most stern opposition of Horror and Beauty, and permitted it to be written in the clearest terms.  And, therefore, though there are passages in the “Inferno” which it would be impossible for any poet now to write, I look upon it as all the more perfect for them.  For there can be no question but that one characteristic of excessive vice is indecency, a general baseness in its thoughts and acts concerning the body, and that the full portraiture of it cannot be given without marking, and that in the strongest lines, this tendency to corporeal degradation; which, in the time of Dante, could be done frankly, but cannot now.  And, therefore, I think the twenty-first and twenty-second books of the “Inferno” the most perfect portraitures of fiendish nature which we possess; and at the same time, in their mingling of the extreme of horror (for it seems to me that the silent swiftness of the first demon, “con l’ali aperte e sovra i pie leggiero,” cannot be surpassed in dreadfulness) with ludicrous actions and images, they present the most perfect instances with which I am acquainted of the terrible grotesque.  But the whole of the “Inferno” is full of this grotesque, as well as the “Faerie Queen;” and these two poems, together with the works of Albert Durer, will enable the reader to study it in its noblest forms, without reference to Gothic cathedrals.

Sec.  LIV.  Now, just as there are base and noble conditions of the apathetic grotesque, so also are there of this satirical grotesque.  The condition which might be mistaken for it is that above described as resulting from the malice of men given to pleasure, and in which the grossness and foulness are in the workman as much as in his subject, so that he chooses to represent vice and disease rather than virtue and beauty, having his chief delight in contemplating them; though he still mocks at them with such dull wit as may be in him, because, as Young has said most truly,

  “’Tis not in folly not to scorn a fool.”

Sec.  LV.  Now it is easy to distinguish this grotesque from its noble counterpart, by merely observing whether any forms of beauty or dignity are mingled with it or not; for, of course, the noble grotesque is only employed by its master for good purposes, and to contrast with beauty:  but the base workman cannot conceive anything but what is base; and there will be no loveliness in any part of his work, or, at the best, a loveliness measured by line and rule, and dependent on legal shapes of feature.  But, without resorting to this test, and merely by examining the ugly grotesque itself, it will be found that, if it belongs to the base school, there will be, first, no Horror in it; secondly, no Nature in it; and, thirdly, no Mercy in it.

Sec.  LVI.  I say, first, no Horror.  For the base soul has no fear of sin, and no hatred of it:  and, however it may strive to make its work terrible, there will be no genuineness in the fear; the utmost it can do will be to make its work disgusting.

Secondly, there will be no Nature in it.  It appears to be one of the ends proposed by Providence in the appointment of the forms of the brute creation, that the various vices to which mankind are liable should be severally expressed in them so distinctly and clearly as that men could not but understand the lesson; while yet these conditions of vice might, in the inferior animal, be observed without the disgust and hatred which the same vices would excite, if seen in men, and might be associated with features of interest which would otherwise attract and reward contemplation.  Thus, ferocity, cunning, sloth, discontent, gluttony, uncleanness, and cruelty are seen, each in its extreme, in various animals; and are so vigorously expressed, that when men desire to indicate the same vices in connexion with human forms, they can do it no better than by borrowing here and there the features of animals.  And when the workman is thus led to the contemplation of the animal kingdom, finding therein the expressions of vice which he needs, associated with power, and nobleness, and freedom from disease, if his mind be of right tone he becomes interested in this new study; and all noble grotesque is, therefore, full of the most admirable rendering of animal character.  But the ignoble workman is capable of no interest of this kind; and, being too dull to appreciate, and too idle to execute, the subtle and wonderful lines on which the expression of the lower animal depends, he contents himself with vulgar exaggeration, and leaves his work as false as it is monstrous, a mass of blunt malice and obscene ignorance.

Sec.  LVII.  Lastly, there will be no Mercy in it.  Wherever the satire of the noble grotesque fixes upon human nature, it does so with much sorrow mingled amidst its indignation:  in its highest forms there is an infinite tenderness, like that of the fool in Lear; and even in its more heedless or bitter sarcasm, it never loses sight altogether of the better nature of what it attacks, nor refuses to acknowledge its redeeming or pardonable features.  But the ignoble grotesque has no pity:  it rejoices in iniquity, and exists only to slander.

Sec.  LVIII.  I have not space to follow out the various forms of transition which exist between the two extremes of great and base in the satirical grotesque.  The reader must always remember, that, although there is an infinite distance between the best and worst, in this kind the interval is filled by endless conditions more or less inclining to the evil or the good; impurity and malice stealing gradually into the nobler forms, and invention and wit elevating the lower, according to the countless minglings of the elements of the human soul.

Sec.  LIX. (C).  Ungovernableness of the imagination.  The reader is always to keep in mind that if the objects of horror, in which the terrible grotesque finds its materials, were contemplated in their true light, and with the entire energy of the soul, they would cease to be grotesque, and become altogether sublime; and that therefore it is some shortening of the power, or the will, of contemplation, and some consequent distortion of the terrible image in which the grotesqueness consists.  Now this distortion takes place, it was above asserted, in three ways:  either through apathy, satire, or ungovernableness of imagination.  It is this last cause of the grotesque which we have finally to consider; namely, the error and wildness of the mental impressions, caused by fear operating upon strong powers of imagination, or by the failure of the human faculties in the endeavor to grasp the highest truths.

Sec.  LX.  The grotesque which comes to all men in a disturbed dream is the most intelligible example of this kind, but also the most ignoble; the imagination, in this instance, being entirely deprived of all aid from reason, and incapable of self-government.  I believe, however, that the noblest forms of imaginative power are also in some sort ungovernable, and have in them something of the character of dreams; so that the vision, of whatever kind, comes uncalled, and will not submit itself to the seer, but conquers him, and forces him to speak as a prophet, having no power over his words or thoughts. Only, if the whole man be trained perfectly, and his mind calm, consistent and powerful, the vision which comes to him is seen as in a perfect mirror, serenely, and in consistence with the rational powers; but if the mind be imperfect and ill trained, the vision is seen as in a broken mirror, with strange distortions and discrepancies, all the passions of the heart breathing upon it in cross ripples, till hardly a trace of it remains unbroken.  So that, strictly speaking, the imagination is never governed; it is always the ruling and Divine power:  and the rest of the man is to it only as an instrument which it sounds, or a tablet on which it writes; clearly and sublimely if the wax be smooth and the strings true, grotesquely and wildly if they are stained and broken.  And thus the “Iliad,” the “Inferno,” the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the “Faerie Queen,” are all of them true dreams; only the sleep of the men to whom they came was the deep, living sleep which God sends, with a sacredness in it, as of death, the revealer of secrets.

Sec.  LXI.  Now, observe in this matter, carefully, the difference between a dim mirror and a distorted one; and do not blame me for pressing the analogy too far, for it will enable me to explain my meaning every way more clearly.  Most men’s minds are dim mirrors, in which all truth is seen, as St. Paul tells us, darkly:  this is the fault most common and most fatal; dulness of the heart and mistiness of sight, increasing to utter hardness and blindness; Satan breathing upon the glass, so that if we do not sweep the mist laboriously away, it will take no image.  But, even so far as we are able to do this, we have still the distortion to fear, yet not to the same extent, for we can in some sort allow for the distortion of an image, if only we can see it clearly.  And the fallen human soul, at its best, must be as a diminishing glass, and that a broken one, to the mighty truths of the universe round it; and the wider the scope of its glance, and the vaster the truths into which it obtains an insight, the more fantastic their distortion is likely to be, as the winds and vapors trouble the field of the telescope most when it reaches farthest.

Sec.  LXII.  Now, so far as the truth is seen by the imagination in its wholeness and quietness, the vision is sublime; but so far as it is narrowed and broken by the inconsistencies of the human capacity, it becomes grotesque; and it would seem to be rare that any very exalted truth should be impressed on the imagination without some grotesqueness in its aspect, proportioned to the degree of diminution of breadth in the grasp which is given of it.  Nearly all the dreams recorded in the Bible, ­Jacob’s, Joseph’s, Pharaoh’s, Nebuchadnezzar’s, ­are grotesques; and nearly the whole of the accessary scenery in the books of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse.  Thus, Jacob’s dream revealed to him the ministry of angels; but because this ministry could not be seen or understood by him in its fulness, it was narrowed to him into a ladder between heaven and earth, which was a grotesque.  Joseph’s two dreams were evidently intended to be signs of the steadfastness of the Divine purpose towards him, by possessing the clearness of special prophecy; yet were couched in such imagery, as not to inform him prematurely of his destiny, and only to be understood after their fulfilment.  The sun, and moon, and stars were at the period, and are indeed throughout the Bible, the symbols of high authority.  It was not revealed to Joseph that he should be lord over all Egypt; but the representation of his family by symbols of the most magnificent dominion, and yet as subject to him, must have been afterwards felt by him as a distinctly prophetic indication of his own supreme power.  It was not revealed to him that the occasion of his brethren’s special humiliation before him should be their coming to buy corn; but when the event took place, must he not have felt that there was prophetic purpose in the form of the sheaves of wheat which first imaged forth their subjection to him?  And these two images of the sun doing obeisance, and the sheaves bowing down, ­narrowed and imperfect intimations of great truth which yet could not be otherwise conveyed, ­are both grotesque.  The kine of Pharaoh eating each other, the gold and clay of Nebuchadnezzar’s image, the four beasts full of eyes, and other imagery of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, are grotesques of the same kind, on which I need not further insist.

Sec.  LXIII.  Such forms, however, ought perhaps to have been arranged under a separate head, as Symbolical Grotesque; but the element of awe enters into them so strongly, as to justify, for all our present purposes, their being classed with the other varieties of terrible grotesque.  For even if the symbolic vision itself be not terrible, the sense of what may be veiled behind it becomes all the more awful in proportion to the insignificance or strangeness of the sign itself; and, I believe, this thrill of mingled doubt, fear, and curiosity lies at the very root of the delight which mankind take in symbolism.  It was not an accidental necessity for the conveyance of truth by pictures instead of words, which led to its universal adoption wherever art was on the advance; but the Divine fear which necessarily follows on the understanding that a thing is other and greater than it seems; and which, it appears probable, has been rendered peculiarly attractive to the human heart, because God would have us understand that this is true not of invented symbols merely, but of all things amidst which we live; that there is a deeper meaning within them than eye hath seen, or ear hath heard; and that the whole visible creation is a mere perishable symbol of things eternal and true.  It cannot but have been sometimes a subject of wonder with thoughtful men, how fondly, age after age, the Church has cherished the belief that the four living creatures which surrounded the Apocalyptic throne were symbols of the four Evangelists, and rejoiced to use those forms in its picture-teaching; that a calf, a lion, an eagle, and a beast with a man’s face, should in all ages have been preferred by the Christian world, as expressive of Evangelistic power and inspiration, to the majesty of human forms; and that quaint grotesques, awkward and often ludicrous caricatures even of the animals represented, should have been regarded by all men, not only with contentment, but with awe, and have superseded all endeavors to represent the characters and persons of the Evangelistic writers themselves (except in a few instances, confined principally to works undertaken without a definite religious purpose); ­this, I say, might appear more than strange to us, were it not that we ourselves share the awe, and are still satisfied with the symbol, and that justly.  For, whether we are conscious of it or not, there is in our hearts, as we gaze upon the brutal forms that have so holy a signification, an acknowledgment that it was not Matthew, nor Mark, nor Luke, nor John, in whom the Gospel of Christ was unsealed:  but that the invisible things of Him from the beginning of the creation are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; that the whole world, and all that is therein, be it low or high, great or small, is a continual Gospel; and that as the heathen, in their alienation from God, changed His glory into an image made like unto corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed boasts, the Christian, in his approach to God, is to undo this work, and to change the corruptible things into the image of His glory; believing that there is nothing so base in creation, but that our faith may give it wings which shall raise us into companionship with heaven; and that, on the other hand, there is nothing so great or so goodly in creation, but that it is a mean symbol of the Gospel of Christ, and of the things He has prepared for them that love Him.

Sec.  LXIV.  And it is easy to understand, if we follow out this thought, how, when once the symbolic language was familiarized to the mind, and its solemnity felt in all its fulness, there was no likelihood of offence being taken at any repulsive or feeble characters in execution or conception.  There was no form so mean, no incident so commonplace, but, if regarded in this light, it might become sublime; the more vigorous the fancy and the more faithful the enthusiasm, the greater would be the likelihood of their delighting in the contemplation of symbols whose mystery was enhanced by apparent insignificance, or in which the sanctity and majesty of meaning were contrasted with the utmost uncouthness of external form:  nor with uncouthness merely, but even with every appearance of malignity or baseness; the beholder not being revolted even by this, but comprehending that, as the seeming evil in the framework of creation did not invalidate its Divine authorship, so neither did the evil or imperfection in the symbol invalidate its Divine message.  And thus, sometimes, the designer at last became wanton in his appeal to the piety of his interpreter, and recklessly poured out the impurity and the savageness of his own heart, for the mere pleasure of seeing them overlaid with the fine gold of the sanctuary, by the religion of their beholder.

Sec.  LXV.  It is not, however, in every symbolical subject that the fearful grotesque becomes embodied to the full.  The element of distortion which affects the intellect when dealing with subjects above its proper capacity, is as nothing compared with that which it sustains from the direct impressions of terror.  It is the trembling of the human soul in the presence of death which most of all disturbs the images on the intellectual mirror, and invests them with the fitfulness and ghastliness of dreams.  And from the contemplation of death, and of the pangs which follow his footsteps, arise in men’s hearts the troop of strange and irresistible superstitions which, more or less melancholy or majestic according to the dignity of the mind they impress, are yet never without a certain grotesqueness, following on the paralysis of the reason and over-excitement of the fancy.  I do not mean to deny the actual existence of spiritual manifestations; I have never weighed the evidence upon the subject; but with these, if such exist, we are not here concerned.  The grotesque which we are examining arises out of that condition of mind which appears to follow naturally upon the contemplation of death, and in which the fancy is brought into morbid action by terror, accompanied by the belief in spiritual presence, and in the possibility of spiritual apparition.  Hence are developed its most sublime, because its least voluntary, creations, aided by the fearfulness of the phenomena of nature which are in any wise the ministers of death, and primarily directed by the peculiar ghastliness of expression in the skeleton, itself a species of terrible grotesque in its relation to the perfect human frame.

Sec.  LXVI.  Thus, first born from the dusty and dreadful whiteness of the charnel house, but softened in their forms by the holiest of human affections, went forth the troop of wild and wonderful images, seen through tears, that had the mastery over our Northern hearts for so many ages.  The powers of sudden destruction lurking in the woods and waters, in the rocks and clouds; ­kelpie and gnome, Lurlei and Hartz spirits; the wraith and foreboding phantom; the spectra of second sight; the various conceptions of avenging or tormented ghost, haunting the perpetrator of crime, or expiating its commission; and the half fictitious and contemplative, half visionary and believed images of the presence of death itself, doing its daily work in the chambers of sickness and sin, and waiting for its hour in the fortalices of strength and the high places of pleasure; ­these, partly degrading us by the instinctive and paralyzing terror with which they are attended, and partly ennobling us by leading our thoughts to dwell in the eternal world, fill the last and the most important circle in that great kingdom of dark and distorted power, of which we all must be in some sort the subjects until mortality shall be swallowed up of life; until the waters of the last fordless river cease to roll their untransparent volume between us and the light of heaven, and neither death stand between us and our brethren, nor symbols between us and our God.

Sec.  LXVII.  We have now, I believe, obtained a view approaching to completeness of the various branches of human feeling which are concerned in the developement of this peculiar form of art.  It remains for us only to note, as briefly as possible, what facts in the actual history of the grotesque bear upon our immediate subject.

From what we have seen to be its nature, we must, I think, be led to one most important conclusion; that wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened preeminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy.  And, accordingly, I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations, or men, more sure than the developement, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it.  I think that the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante; and in him the grotesque reaches at once the most distinct and the most noble developement to which it was ever brought in the human mind.  The two other greatest men whom Italy has produced, Michael Angelo and Tintoret, show the same element in no less original strength, but oppressed in the one by his science, and in both by the spirit of the age in which they lived; never, however, absent even in Michael Angelo, but stealing forth continually in a strange and spectral way, lurking in folds of raiment and knots of wild hair, and mountainous confusions of craggy limb and cloudy drapery; and, in Tintoret, ruling the entire conceptions of his greatest works to such a degree that they are an enigma or an offence, even to this day, to all the petty disciples of a formal criticism.  Of the grotesque in our own Shakspeare I need hardly speak, nor of its intolerableness to his French critics; nor of that of Aeschylus and Homer, as opposed to the lower Greek writers; and so I believe it will be found, at all periods, in all minds of the first order.

Sec.  LXVIII.  As an index of the greatness of nations, it is a less certain test, or, rather, we are not so well agreed on the meaning of the term “greatness” respecting them.  A nation may produce a great effect, and take up a high place in the world’s history, by the temporary enthusiasm or fury of its multitudes, without being truly great; or, on the other hand, the discipline of morality and common sense may extend its physical power or exalt its well-being, while yet its creative and imaginative powers are continually diminishing.  And again:  a people may take so definite a lead over all the rest of the world in one direction, as to obtain a respect which is not justly due to them if judged on universal grounds.  Thus the Greeks perfected the sculpture of the human body; threw their literature into a disciplined form, which has given it a peculiar power over certain conditions of modern mind; and were the most carefully educated race that the world has seen; but a few years hence, I believe, we shall no longer think them a greater people than either the Egyptians or Assyrians.

Sec.  LXIX.  If, then, ridding ourselves as far as possible of prejudices owing merely to the school-teaching which remains from the system of the Renaissance, we set ourselves to discover in what races the human soul, taken all in all, reached its highest magnificence, we shall find, I believe, two great families of men, one of the East and South, the other of the West and North:  the one including the Egyptians, Jews, Arabians, Assyrians, and Persians; the other, I know not whence derived, but seeming to flow forth from Scandinavia, and filling the whole of Europe with its Norman and Gothic energy.  And in both these families, wherever they are seen in their utmost nobleness, there the grotesque is developed in its utmost energy; and I hardly know whether most to admire the winged bulls of Nineveh, or the winged dragons of Verona.

Sec.  LXX.  The reader who has not before turned his attention to this subject may, however, at first have some difficulty in distinguishing between the noble grotesque of these great nations, and the barbarous grotesque of mere savages, as seen in the work of the Hindoo and other Indian nations; or, more grossly still, in that of the complete savage of the Pacific islands; or if, as is to be hoped, he instinctively feels the difference, he may yet find difficulty in determining wherein that difference consists.  But he will discover, on consideration, that the noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty, though the mind may wilfully turn to other images or the hand resolutely stop short of the perfection which it must fail, if it endeavored, to reach; while the grotesque of the Sandwich islander involves no perception or imagination of anything above itself.  He will find that in the exact proportion in which the grotesque results from an incapability of perceiving beauty, it becomes savage or barbarous; and that there are many stages of progress to be found in it even in its best times, much truly savage grotesque occurring in the fine Gothic periods, mingled with the other forms of the ignoble grotesque resulting from vicious inclinations or base sportiveness.  Nothing is more mysterious in the history of the human mind, than the manner in which gross and ludicrous images are mingled with the most solemn subjects in the work of the middle ages, whether of sculpture or illumination; and although, in great part, such incongruities are to be accounted for on the various principles which I have above endeavored to define, in many instances they are clearly the result of vice and sensuality.  The general greatness of seriousness of an age does not effect the restoration of human nature; and it would be strange, if, in the midst of the art even of the best periods, when that art was entrusted to myriads of workmen, we found no manifestations of impiety, folly, or impurity.

Sec.  LXXI.  It needs only to be added that in the noble grotesque, as it is partly the result of a morbid state of the imaginative power, that power itself will be always seen in a high degree; and that therefore our power of judging of the rank of a grotesque work will depend on the degree in which we are in general sensible of the presence of invention.  The reader may partly test this power in himself by referring to the Plate given in the opening of this chapter, in which, on the left, is a piece of noble and inventive grotesque, a head of the lion-symbol of St. Mark, from the Veronese Gothic; the other is a head introduced as a boss on the foundation of the Palazzo Corner della Regina at Venice, utterly devoid of invention, made merely monstrous by exaggerations of the eyeballs and cheeks, and generally characteristic of that late Renaissance grotesque of Venice, with which we are at present more immediately concerned.

Sec.  LXXII.  The developement of that grotesque took place under different laws from those which regulate it in any other European city.  For, great as we have seen the Byzantine mind show itself to be in other directions, it was marked as that of a declining nation by the absence of the grotesque element; and, owing to its influence, the early Venetian Gothic remained inferior to all other schools in this particular character.  Nothing can well be more wonderful than its instant failure in any attempt at the representation of ludicrous or fearful images, more especially when it is compared with the magnificent grotesque of the neighboring city of Verona, in which the Lombard influence had full sway.  Nor was it until the last links of connexion with Constantinople had been dissolved, that the strength of the Venetian mind could manifest itself in this direction.  But it had then a new enemy to encounter.  The Renaissance laws altogether checked its imagination in architecture; and it could only obtain permission to express itself by starting forth in the work of the Venetian painters, filling them with monkeys and dwarfs, even amidst the most serious subjects, and leading Veronese and Tintoret to the most unexpected and wild fantasies of form and color.

Sec.  LXXIII.  We may be deeply thankful for this peculiar reserve of the Gothic grotesque character to the last days of Venice.  All over the rest of Europe it had been strongest in the days of imperfect art; magnificently powerful throughout the whole of the thirteenth century, tamed gradually in the fourteenth and fifteenth, and expiring in the sixteenth amidst anatomy and laws of art.  But at Venice, it had not been received when it was elsewhere in triumph, and it fled to the lagoons for shelter when elsewhere it was oppressed.  And it was arrayed by the Venetian painters in robes of state, and advanced by them to such honor as it had never received in its days of widest dominion; while, in return, it bestowed upon their pictures that fulness, piquancy, decision of parts, and mosaic-like intermingling of fancies, alternately brilliant and sublime, which were exactly what was most needed for the developement of their unapproachable color-power.

Sec.  LXXIV.  Yet, observe, it by no means follows that because the grotesque does not appear in the art of a nation, the sense of it does not exist in the national mind.  Except in the form of caricature, it is hardly traceable in the English work of the present day; but the minds of our workmen are full of it, if we would only allow them to give it shape.  They express it daily in gesture and gibe, but are not allowed to do so where it would be useful.  In like manner, though the Byzantine influence repressed it in the early Venetian architecture, it was always present in the Venetian mind, and showed itself in various forms of national custom and festival; acted grotesques, full of wit, feeling, and good-humor.  The ceremony of the hat and the orange, described in the beginning of this chapter, is one instance out of multitudes.  Another, more rude, and exceedingly characteristic, was that instituted in the twelfth century in memorial of the submission of Woldaric, the patriarch of Aquileia, who, having taken up arms against the patriarch of Grado, and being defeated and taken prisoner by the Venetians, was sentenced, not to death, but to send every year on “Fat Thursday” sixty-two large loaves, twelve fat pigs, and a bull, to the Doge; the bull being understood to represent the patriarch, and the twelve pigs his clergy:  and the ceremonies of the day consisting in the decapitation of these representatives, and a distribution of their joints among the senators; together with a symbolic record of the attack upon Aquileia, by the erection of a wooden castle in the rooms of the Ducal Palace, which the Doge and the Senate attacked and demolished with clubs.  As long as the Doge and the Senate were truly kingly and noble, they were content to let this ceremony be continued; but when they became proud and selfish, and were destroying both themselves and the state by their luxury, they found it inconsistent with their dignity, and it was abolished, as far as the Senate was concerned, in 1549.

Sec.  LXXV.  By these and other similar manifestations, the grotesque spirit is traceable through all the strength of the Venetian people.  But again:  it is necessary that we should carefully distinguish between it and the spirit of mere levity.  I said, in the fifth chapter, that the Venetians were distinctively a serious people, serious, that is to say, in the sense in which the English are a more serious people than the French; though the habitual intercourse of our lower classes in London has a tone of humor in it which I believe is untraceable in that of the Parisian populace.  It is one thing to indulge in playful rest, and another to be devoted to the pursuit of pleasure:  and gaiety of heart during the reaction after hard labor, and quickened by satisfaction in the accomplished duty or perfected result, is altogether compatible with, nay, even in some sort arises naturally out of, a deep internal seriousness of disposition; this latter being exactly the condition of mind which, as we have seen, leads to the richest developements of the playful grotesque; while, on the contrary, the continual pursuit of pleasure deprives the soul of all alacrity and elasticity, and leaves it incapable of happy jesting, capable only of that which is bitter, base, and foolish.  Thus, throughout the whole of the early career of the Venetians, though there is much jesting, there is no levity; on the contrary there is an intense earnestness both in their pursuit of commercial and political successes, and in their devotion to religion, which led gradually to the formation of that highly wrought mingling of immovable resolution with secret thoughtfulness, which so strangely, sometimes so darkly, distinguishes the Venetian character at the time of their highest power, when the seriousness was left, but the conscientiousness destroyed.  And if there be any one sign by which the Venetian countenance, as it is recorded for us, to the very life, by a school of portraiture which has never been equalled (chiefly because no portraiture ever had subjects so noble), ­I say, if there be one thing more notable than another in the Venetian features, it is this deep pensiveness and solemnity.  In other districts of Italy, the dignity of the heads which occur in the most celebrated compositions is clearly owing to the feeling of the painter.  He has visibly raised or idealized his models, and appears always to be veiling the faults or failings of the human nature around him, so that the best of his work is that which has most perfectly taken the color of his own mind; and the least impressive, if not the least valuable, that which appears to have been unaffected and unmodified portraiture.  But at Venice, all is exactly the reverse of this.  The tone of mind in the painter appears often in some degree frivolous or sensual; delighting in costume, in domestic and grotesque incident, and in studies of the naked form.  But the moment he gives himself definitely to portraiture, all is noble and grave; the more literally true his work, the more majestic; and the same artist who will produce little beyond what is commonplace in painting a Madonna or an apostle, will rise into unapproachable sublimity when his subject is a member of the Forty, or a Master of the Mint.

Such, then, were the general tone and progress of the Venetian mind, up to the close of the seventeenth century.  First, serious, religious, and sincere; then, though serious still, comparatively deprived of conscientiousness, and apt to decline into stern and subtle policy:  in the first case, the spirit of the noble grotesque not showing itself in art at all, but only in speech and action; in the second case, developing itself in painting, through accessories and vivacities of composition, while perfect dignity was always preserved in portraiture.  A third phase rapidly developed itself.

Sec.  LXXVI.  Once more, and for the last time, let me refer the reader to the important epoch of the death of the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo in 1423, long ago indicated as the commencement of the decline of the Venetian power.  That commencement is marked, not merely by the words of the dying Prince, but by a great and clearly legible sign.  It is recorded, that on the accession of his successor, Foscari, to the throne, “SI FESTEGGIO DALLA Città UNO ANNO INTERO:”  “The city kept festival for a whole year.”  Venice had in her childhood sown, in tears, the harvest she was to reap in rejoicing.  She now sowed in laughter the seeds of death.

Thenceforward, year after year, the nation drank with deeper thirst from the fountains of forbidden pleasure, and dug for springs, hitherto unknown, in the dark places of the earth.  In the ingenuity of indulgence, in the varieties of vanity, Venice surpassed the cities of Christendom, as of old she surpassed them in fortitude and devotion; and as once the powers of Europe stood before her judgment-seat, to receive the decisions of her justice, so now the youth of Europe assembled in the halls of her luxury, to learn from her the arts of delight.

It is as needless, as it is painful, to trace the steps of her final ruin.  That ancient curse was upon her, the curse of the cities of the plain, “Pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness.”  By the inner burning of her own passions, as fatal as the fiery reign of Gomorrah, she was consumed from her place among the nations; and her ashes are choking the channels of the dead salt sea.

ber to be seen by the guests invited to
    the espousals.  “And when th