der the
influence of that spirit of Christian melancholy and philosophical
criticism which we described a moment ago, poetry will take a
great step, a decisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an
earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It
will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations--but
without confounding them--darkness and light, the grotesque and the
sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and
the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the
starting-point of poetry. All things are connected.

Thus, then, we see a principle unknown to the ancients, a new type,
introduced in poetry; and as an additional element in anything
modifies the whole of the thing, a new form of the art is developed.
This type is the grotesque; its new form is comedy.

And we beg leave to dwell upon this point; for we have now indicated
the significant feature, the fundamental difference which, in our
opinion, separates modern from ancient art, the present form from
the defunct form; or, to use less definite but more popular terms,
_romantic_ literature from _classical_ literature.

"At last!" exclaim the people who for some time past _have seen what
we were coming at_, "at last we have you--you are caught in the act.
So then you put forward the ugly as a type for imitation, you make the
_grotesque_ an element of art. But the graces; but good taste! Don't
you know that art should correct nature? that we must _ennoble_ art?
that we must _select_? Did the ancients ever exhibit the ugly or the
grotesque? Did they ever mingle comedy and tragedy? The example of
the ancients, gentlemen! And Aristotle, too, and Boileau, and La Haipe
Upon my word!"

These arguments are sound, doubtless, and, above all, of extraordinary
novelty. But it is not our place to reply to them. We are constructing
no system here--God protect us from systems! We are stating a fact. We
are a his torian, not a critic. Whether the fact is agreeable or not
matters little, it is a fact. Let us resume, therefore, and try
to prove that it is of the fruitful union of the grotesque and the
sublime types that modern genius is born--so complex, so diverse in
its forms, so inexhaustible in its creations, and therein directly
opposed to the uniform simplicity of the genius of the ancients, let
us show that that is the point from which we must set out to establish
the real and radical difference between