's wings. It is the grotesque, still the
grotesque, which now casts into the Christian hell the frightful faces
which the severe genius of Dante and Milton will evoke, and again
peoples it with those laughter-moving figures amid which Callot, the
burlesque Michelangelo, will disport himself. If it passes from the
world of imagination to the real world, it unfolds an inexhaustible
supply of parodies of mankind. Creations of its fantasy are the
Scaramouches, Crispins and Harlequins, grinning silhouettes of man,
types altogether unknown to serious-minded antiquity, although they
originated in classic Italy. It is the grotesque, lastly, which,
colouring the same drama with the fancies of the North and of the
South in turn, exhibits Sganarelle capering about Don Juan and
Mephistopheles crawling about Faust.

And how free and open it is in its bearing! how boldly it brings
into relief all the strange forms which the preceding age had timidly
wrapped in swaddling-clothes! Ancient poetry, compelled to provide
the lame Vulcan with companions, tried to disguise their deformity by
distributing it, so to speak, upon gigantic proportions. Modern genius
retains this myth of the supernatural smiths, but gives it an entirely
different character and one which makes it even more striking; it
changes the giants to dwarfs and makes gnomes of the Cyclops. With
like originality, it substitutes for the somewhat commonplace Lernaean
hydra all the local dragons of our national legends--the gargoyle of
Rouen, the _gra-ouilli_ of Metz, the _chair sallee_ of Troyes, the
_dree_ of Montlhery, the _tarasque_ of Tarascon--monsters of forms so
diverse, whose outlandish names are an additional attribute. All these
creations draw from their own nature that energetic and significant
expression before which antiquity seems sometimes to have recoiled.
Certain it is that the Greek Eumenides are much less horrible, and
consequently less _true_, than the witches in _Macbeth_. Pluto is not
the devil.

In our opinion a most novel book might be written upon the employment
of the grotesque in the arts. One might point out the powerful
effects the moderns have obtained from that fruitful type, upon which
narrow-minded criticism continues to wage war even in our own day.
It may be that we shall be led by our subject to call attention in
passing to some features of this vast picture. We will simply say here
that, as a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesq