In the idea of men of modern times, however, the grotesque plays an enormous part.  It is found everywhere; on the one hand it creates the abnormal and the horrible, on the other the comic and the burlesque.  It fastens upon religion a thousand original superstitions, upon poetry a thousand picturesque fancies.  It is the grotesque which scatters lavishly, in air, water, earth, fire, those myriads of intermediary creatures which we find all alive in the popular traditions of the Middle Ages; it is the grotesque which impels the ghastly antics of the witches’ revels, which gives Satan his horns, his cloven foot and his bat’s wings.  It is the grotesque, still the grotesque, which now casts into the Christian hell the frightful faces which the severe genius of Dante and Milton will evoke, and again peoples it with those laughter-moving figures amid which Callot, the burlesque Michelangelo, will disport himself.  If it passes from the world of imagination to the real world, it unfolds an inexhaustible supply of parodies of mankind.  Creations of its fantasy are the Scaramouches, Crispins and Harlequins, grinning silhouettes of man, types altogether unknown to serious-minded antiquity, although they originated in classic Italy.  It is the grotesque, lastly, which, colouring the same drama with the fancies of the North and of the South in turn, exhibits Sganarelle capering about Don Juan and Mephistopheles crawling about Faust.

And how free and open it is in its bearing! how boldly it brings into relief all the strange forms which the preceding age had timidly wrapped in swaddling-clothes!  Ancient poetry, compelled to provide the lame Vulcan with companions, tried to disguise their deformity by distributing it, so to speak, upon gigantic proportions.  Modern genius retains this myth of the supernatural smiths, but gives it an entirely different character and one which makes it even more striking; it changes the giants to dwarfs and makes gnomes of the Cyclops.  With like originality, it substitutes for the somewhat commonplace Lernaean hydra all the local dragons of our national legends—­the gargoyle of Rouen, the gra-ouilli of Metz, the chair sallee of Troyes, the dree of Montlhery, the tarasque of Tarascon—­monsters of forms so diverse, whose outlandish names are an additional attribute.  All these creations draw from their own nature that energetic and significant expression before which antiquity seems sometimes to have recoiled.  Certain it is that the Greek Eumenides are much less horrible, and consequently less true, than the witches in Macbeth.  Pluto is not the devil.