nd, according to the height and
tone of our feeling, desire to see them in noble or inferior forms. Thus
there is a Divine beauty, and a terribleness or sublimity coequal with
it in rank, which are the subjects of the highest art; and there is an
inferior or ornamental beauty, and an inferior terribleness coequal with
it in rank, which are the subjects of grotesque art. And the state of
mind in which the terrible form of the grotesque is developed, is that
which in some irregular manner, dwells upon certain conditions of
terribleness, into the complete depth of which it does not enter for the
time.

Sec. XLIV. Now the things which are the proper subjects of human fear are
twofold; those which have the power of Death, and those which have the
nature of Sin. Of which there are many ranks, greater or less in power
and vice, from the evil angels themselves down to the serpent which is
their type, and which though of a low and contemptible class, appears
to unite the deathful and sinful natures in the most clearly visible and
intelligible form; for there is nothing else which we know, of so small
strength and occupying so unimportant a place in the economy of
creation, which yet is so mortal and so malignant. It is, then, on these
two classes of objects that the mind fixes for its excitement, in that
mood which gives rise to the terrible grotesque; and its subject will be
found always to unite some expression of vice and danger, but regarded
in a peculiar temper; sometimes (A) of predetermined or involuntary
apathy, sometimes (B) of mockery, sometimes (C) of diseased and
ungoverned imaginativeness.

Sec. XLV. For observe, the difficulty which, as I above stated, exists
in distinguishing the playful from the terrible grotesque arises out of
this cause; that the mind, under certain phases of excitement, _plays_
with _terror_, and summons images which, if it were in another temper,
would be awful, but of which, either in weariness or in irony, it
refrains for the time to acknowledge the true terribleness. And the mode
in which this refusal takes place distinguishes the noble from the
ignoble grotesque. For the master of the noble grotesque knows the depth
of all at which he seems to mock, and would feel it at another time, or
feels it in a certain undercurrent of thought even while he jests with
it; but the workman of the ignoble grotesque can feel and understand
nothing, and mocks at all things with the laughter of the idiot