t any more to the woe or
to the danger, there is a shadow of them still present with him: and as
the bright colors mingle beneath his touch, and the fair leaves and
flowers grow at his bidding, strange horrors and phantasms rise by their
side; grisly beasts and venomous serpents, and spectral fiends and
nameless inconsistencies of ghastly life, rising out of things most
beautiful, and fading back into them again, as the harm and the horror
of life do out of its happiness. He has seen these things; he wars with
them daily; he cannot but give them their part in his work, though in a
state of comparative apathy to them at the time. He is but carving and
gilding, and must not turn aside to weep; but he knows that hell is
burning on, for all that, and the smoke of it withers his oak-leaves.

Sec. XLVII. Now, the feelings which give rise to the false or ignoble
grotesque, are exactly the reverse of these. In the true grotesque, a
man of naturally strong feeling is accidentally or resolutely apathetic;
in the false grotesque, a man naturally apathetic is forcing himself
into temporary excitement. The horror which is expressed by the one,
comes upon him whether he will or not; that which is expressed by the
other, is sought out by him, and elaborated by his art. And therefore,
also, because the fear of the one is true, and of true things, however
fantastic its expression may be, there will be reality in it, and force.
It is not a manufactured terribleness, whose author, when he had
finished it, knew not if it would terrify any one else or not: but it is
a terribleness taken from the life; a spectre which the workman indeed
saw, and which, as it appalled him, will appal us also. But the other
workman never felt any Divine fear; he never shuddered when he heard the
cry from the burning towers of the earth,

"Venga Medusa; si lo farem di smalto."

He is stone already, and needs no gentle hand laid upon his eyes to save
him.

Sec. XLVIII. I do not mean what I say in this place to apply to the
creations of the imagination. It is not as the creating but as the
_seeing_ man, that we are here contemplating the master of the true
grotesque. It is because the dreadfulness of the universe around him
weighs upon his heart, that his work is wild; and therefore through the
whole of it we shall find the evidence of deep insight into nature. His
beasts and birds, however monstrous, will have profound relations with
the true. He may be an