eed not repeat the argument here. It is already familiar,
and some sentences[38] from this portion of the essay I have quoted
elsewhere.

The preface also contained a plea for another peculiarity of the romantic
drama, its mixture, viz., of tragedy and comedy. According to Hugo, this
is the characteristic trait, the fundamental difference, which separates
modern from ancient art, romantic from classical literature. Antique
art, he says, rejected everything which was not purely beautiful, but the
Christian and modern spirit feels that there are many things in creation
besides that which is, humanly speaking, beautiful; and that everything
which is in nature is--or has the right to be--in art. It includes in
its picture of life the ugly, the misshapen, the monstrous. Hence
results a new type, the grotesque, and a new literary form, romantic
comedy. He proceeds to illustrate this thesis with his usual wealth of
imaginative detail and pictorial language. The Middle Ages, more than
any other period, are rich in instances of that intimate blending of the
comic and the horrible which we call the grotesque; the witches' Sabbath,
the hoofed and horned devil, the hideous figures of Dante's hell; the
Scaramouches, Crispins, Harlequins of Italian farce; "grimacing
silhouettes of man, quite unknown to grave antiquity"; and "all those
local dragons of our legends, the gargoyle of Rouen, the Taras of
Tarascon, etc. . . . The contact of deformity has given to the modern
sublime something purer, grander, more sublime, in short, than the
antique beauty. . . . Is it not because the modern imagination knows how
to set prowling hideously about our churchyards, the vampires, the ogres,
the erl-kings, the _psylles_, the ghouls, the _brucolaques_, the
_aspioles_, that it is able to give its fays that bodiless form, that
purity of essence which the pagan nymphs approach so little? The antique
Venus is beautiful, admirable, no doubt; but what has spread over the
figures of Jean Goujon that graceful, strange, airy elegance? What has
given them that unfamiliar character of life and grandeur, unless it be
the neighbourhood of the rude and strong carvings of the Middle
Ages? . . . The grotesque imprints its character especially upon that
wonderful architecture which in the Middle Ages takes the place of all
the arts. It attaches its marks to the fronts of the cathedrals;
enframes its hells and purgatories under the portal arches, and set