ur in the indescribable,
ungovernable fury of Dante's fiends, ever shortening its own powers, and
disappointing its own purposes; the deaf, blind, speechless, unspeakable
rage, fierce as the lightning, but erring from its mark or turning
senselessly against itself, and still further debased by foulness of
form and action. Something is indeed to be allowed for the rude feelings
of the time, but I believe all such men as Dante are sent into the world
at the time when they can do their work best; and that, it being
appointed for him to give to mankind the most vigorous realization
possible both of Hell and Heaven, he was born both in the country and at
the time which furnished the most stern opposition of Horror and Beauty,
and permitted it to be written in the clearest terms. And, therefore,
though there are passages in the "Inferno" which it would be impossible
for any poet now to write, I look upon it as all the more perfect for
them. For there can be no question but that one characteristic of
excessive vice is indecency, a general baseness in its thoughts and acts
concerning the body,[40] and that the full portraiture of it cannot be
given without marking, and that in the strongest lines, this tendency to
corporeal degradation; which, in the time of Dante, could be done
frankly, but cannot now. And, therefore, I think the twenty-first and
twenty-second books of the "Inferno" the most perfect portraitures of
fiendish nature which we possess; and at the same time, in their
mingling of the extreme of horror (for it seems to me that the silent
swiftness of the first demon, "con l'ali aperte e sovra i pie leggiero,"
cannot be surpassed in dreadfulness) with ludicrous actions and images,
they present the most perfect instances with which I am acquainted of
the terrible grotesque. But the whole of the "Inferno" is full of this
grotesque, as well as the "Faerie Queen;" and these two poems, together
with the works of Albert Durer, will enable the reader to study it in
its noblest forms, without reference to Gothic cathedrals.

Sec. LIV. Now, just as there are base and noble conditions of the
apathetic grotesque, so also are there of this satirical grotesque. The
condition which might be mistaken for it is that above described as
resulting from the malice of men given to pleasure, and in which the
grossness and foulness are in the workman as much as in his subject, so
that he chooses to represent vice and disease rather than virt