s them
aflame upon the windows; unrolls its monsters, dogs, demons around the
capitals, along the friezes, on the eaves." We find this same bizarre
note in the mediaeval laws, social usages, church institutions, and
popular legends, in the court fools, in the heraldic emblems, the
religious processions, the story of "Beauty and the Beast." It explains
the origin of the Shaksperian drama, the high-water mark of modern art.

Shakspere does not seem to me an artist of the grotesque. He is by turns
the greatest of tragic and the greatest of comic artists, and his tragedy
and comedy lie close together, as in life, but without that union of the
terrible and the ludicrous in the same figure, and that element of
deformity which is the essence of the proper grotesque. He has created,
however, one specimen of true grotesque, the monster Caliban. Caliban is
a comic figure, but not purely comic; there is something savage, uncouth,
and frightful about him. He has the dignity and the poetry which all
rude, primitive beings have: which the things of nature, rocks and trees
and wild beasts have. It is significant, therefore, that Robert Browning
should have been attracted to Caliban. Browning had little comic power,
little real humour; in him the grotesque is an imperfect form of the
comic. The same criticism applies to Hugo. He gave a capital example of
the grotesque in the four fools in the third act of "Cromwell" and in
Triboulet, the Shaksperian jester of "Le Roi s'Amuse." Their songs and
dialogues are bizarre and fantastic in the highest degree, but they are
not funny; they do not make us laugh like the clowns of Shakspere--they
are not comic, but merely queer. Hugo's defective sense of humour is
shown in the way in which he frequently takes that one step which,
Napoleon said, separates the sublime from the ridiculous--exaggerating
character and motive till the heroic passes into melodrama and melodrama
into absurdity. This fault is felt in his great prose romance
"Notre-Dame de Paris" (1831), a picture of mediaeval Paris, in which the
humpback Quasimodo affords an exact illustration of what the author meant
by the grotesque; another of the same kind is furnished by the hero of
his later romance "L'Homme qui Rit."

Gautier has left a number of sketches, written in a vein lovingly
humorous, of some of the eccentrics--the _curiosites romantiques_--whose
oddities are perhaps even more instructive as to the many direction