the only kind of Amadis there can ever
be in this world. At the same time it does us good to see the
courage of his idealism, the ingenuity of his wit, and the simplicity
of his goodness. But how shall we reconcile our sympathy with his
dream and our perception of its absurdity? The situation is
contradictory. We are drawn to some different point of view, from
which the comedy may no longer seem so amusing. As humour
becomes deep and really different from satire, it changes into
pathos, and passes out of the sphere of the comic altogether. The
mischances that were to amuse us as scoffers now grieve us as men,
and the value of the representation depends on the touches of
beauty and seriousness with which it is adorned.

_The grotesque._

Sec. 64. Something analogous to humour can appear in plastic forms,
when we call it the grotesque. This is an interesting effect
produced by such a transformation of an ideal type as exaggerates
one of its elements or combines it with other types. The real
excellence of this, like that of all fiction, consists in re-creation; in
the formation of a thing which nature has not, but might
conceivably have offered. We call these inventions comic and
grotesque when we are considering their divergence from the
natural rather than their inward possibility. But the latter
constitutes their real charm; and the more we study and develope
them, the better we understand it. The incongruity with the
conventional type than disappears, and what was impossible and
ridiculous at first takes its place among recognized ideals. The
centaur and the satyr are no longer grotesque; the type is accepted.
And the grotesqueness of an individual has essentially the same
nature. If we like the inward harmony, the characteristic balance of
his features, we are able to disengage this individual from the class
into which we were trying to force him; we can forget the
expectation which he was going to disappoint. The ugliness then
disappears, and only the reassertion of the old habit and demand
can make us regard him as in any way extravagant.

What appears as grotesque may be intrinsically inferior or superior
to the normal. That is a question of its abstract material and form.
But until the new object impresses its form on our imagination, so
that we can grasp its unity and proportion, it appears to us as a
jumble and distortion of other forms. If this confusion is absolute,
the object is simply null; it does not