unnatural and feeble feeling; it
is not that the person needs excitement, or has any such strong
perceptions as would cause excitement, but he is dead to the horror, and
a strange evil influence guides his feebleness of mind rather to fearful
images than to beautiful ones,--as our disturbed dreams are sometimes
filled with ghastliness which seem not to arise out of any conceivable
association of our waking ideas, but to be a vapor out of the very
chambers of the tomb, to which the mind, in its palsy, has approached.

Sec. 17. But even this imbecile revelling in terror is more comprehensible,
more apparently natural, than the instinct which is found frequently
connected with it, of absolute joy in _ugliness_. In some conditions of
old German art we find the most singular insisting upon what is in all
respects ugly and abortive, or frightful; not with any sense of
sublimity in it, neither in mere foolishness, but with a resolute
choice, such as I can completely account for on no acknowledged
principle of human nature. For in the worst conditions of sensuality
there is yet some perception of the beautiful, so that men utterly
depraved in principle and habits of thought will yet admire beautiful
things and fair faces. But in the temper of which I am now speaking
there is no preference even of the lower forms of loveliness; no effort
at painting fair limbs or passionate faces, no evidence of any human or
natural sensation,--a mere feeding on decay and rolling in slime, not
apparently or conceivably with any pleasure in it, but under some
fearful possession of an evil spirit.

Sec. 18. The most wonderful instance of this feeling at its uttermost which
I remember, is the missal in the British Museum, Harl. MSS. 1892. The
drawings of the principal subjects in it appear to have been made first
in black, by Martin Schoengauer (at all events by some copyist of his
designs), and then another workman has been employed to paint these
drawings over. No words can describe the intensity of the "plague of the
heart" in this man; the reader should examine the manuscript carefully
if he desires to see how low human nature can sink. I had written a
description of one or two of the drawings in order to give some
conception of them to persons not able to refer to the book; but the
mere description so saddened and polluted my pages that I could not
retain it. I will only, therefore, name the principal characteristics
which belong to the workm