erm of comedy, fostered by the modern muse--grew in
extent and importance as soon as it was transplanted to a soil more
propitious than paganism and the Epic. In truth, in the new poetry,
while the sublime represents the soul as it is, purified by Christian
morality, the grotesque plays the part of the human beast. The former
type, delivered of all impure alloy, has as its attributes all the
charms, all the graces, all the beauties; it must be able some day
to create Juliet, Desdemona, Ophelia. The latter assumes all the
absurdities, all the infirmities, all the blemishes. In this partition
of mankind and of creation, to it fall the passions, vices, crimes;
it is sensuous, fawning, greedy, miserly, false, incoherent,
hypocritical; it is, in turn, Iago, Tartuffe, Basile, Polonius,
Harpagon, Bartholo, Falstaff, Scapin, Figaro. The beautiful has but
one type, the ugly has a thousand. The fact is that the beautiful,
humanly speaking, is merely form considered in its simplest aspect
in its most perfect symmetry, in its most entire harmony with our
make-up. Thus the _ensemble_ that it offers us is always complete, but
restricted like ourselves. What we call the ugly, on the contrary, is
a detail of a great whole which eludes us, and which is in harmony,
not with man but with all creation. That is why it constantly presents
itself to us in new but incomplete aspects.

It is interesting to study the first appearance and the progress
of the grotesque in modern times. At first, it is an invasion, an
irruption, an overflow, as of a torrent that has burst its banks. It
rushes through the expiring Latin literature, imparts some coloring to
Persius, Petronius and Juvenal, and leaves behind it the _Golden Ass_
of Apuleius. Thence it diffuses itself through the imaginations of the
new nations that are remodelling Europe. It abounds in the work of
the fabulists, the chroniclers, the romancists. We see it make its way
from the South to the North. It disports itself in the dreams of the
Teutonic nations, and at the same time vivifies with its breath
the admirable Spanish _romanceros_, a veritable Iliad of the age of
chivalry. For example, it is the grotesque which describes thus,
in the _Roman de la Rose_, an august ceremonial, the election of a
king:--

"A long-shanked knave they chose, I wis,
Of all their men the boniest."

More especially it imposes its characteristic qualities upon that
wonderful architecture which, in the Mid