and the
cretin.

To work out this distinction completely is the chief difficulty in our
present inquiry; and, in order to do so, let us consider the above-named
three conditions of mind in succession, with relation to objects of
terror.

Sec. _XLVI_. (A). Involuntary or predetermined apathy. We saw above that
the grotesque was produced, chiefly in subordinate or ornamental art, by
rude, and in some degree uneducated men, and in their times of rest. At
such times, and in such subordinate work, it is impossible that they
should represent any solemn or terrible subject with a full and serious
entrance into its feeling. It is not in the languor of a leisure hour
that a man will set his whole soul to conceive the means of representing
some important truth, nor to the projecting angle of a timber bracket
that he would trust its representation, if conceived. And yet, in this
languor, and in this trivial work, he must find some expression of the
serious part of his soul, of what there is within him capable of awe, as
well as of love. The more noble the man is, the more impossible it will
be for him to confine his thoughts to mere loveliness, and that of a low
order. Were his powers and his time unlimited, so that, like Fra
Angelico, he could paint the Seraphim, in that order of beauty he could
find contentment, bringing down heaven to earth. But by the conditions
of his being, by his hard-worked life, by his feeble powers of
execution, by the meanness of his employment and the languor of his
heart, he is bound down to earth. It is the world's work that he is
doing, and world's work is not to be done without fear. And whatever
there is of deep and eternal consciousness within him, thrilling his
mind with the sense of the presence of sin and death around him, must be
expressed in that slight work, and feeble way, come of it what will. He
cannot forget it, among all that he sees of beautiful in nature; he may
not bury himself among the leaves of the violet on the rocks, and of the
lily in the glen, and twine out of them garlands of perpetual gladness.
He sees more in the earth than these,--misery and wrath, and
discordance, and danger, and all the work of the dragon and his angels;
this he sees with too deep feeling ever to forget. And though when he
returns to his idle work,--it may be to gild the letters upon the page,
or to carve the timbers of the chamber, or the stones of the
pinnacle,--he cannot give his strength of though