is in nature is—­or has the right to be—­in art.  It includes in its picture of life the ugly, the misshapen, the monstrous.  Hence results a new type, the grotesque, and a new literary form, romantic comedy.  He proceeds to illustrate this thesis with his usual wealth of imaginative detail and pictorial language.  The Middle Ages, more than any other period, are rich in instances of that intimate blending of the comic and the horrible which we call the grotesque; the witches’ Sabbath, the hoofed and horned devil, the hideous figures of Dante’s hell; the Scaramouches, Crispins, Harlequins of Italian farce; “grimacing silhouettes of man, quite unknown to grave antiquity”; and “all those local dragons of our legends, the gargoyle of Rouen, the Taras of Tarascon, etc. . . .  The contact of deformity has given to the modern sublime something purer, grander, more sublime, in short, than the antique beauty. . . .  Is it not because the modern imagination knows how to set prowling hideously about our churchyards, the vampires, the ogres, the erl-kings, the psylles, the ghouls, the brucolaques, the aspioles, that it is able to give its fays that bodiless form, that purity of essence which the pagan nymphs approach so little?  The antique Venus is beautiful, admirable, no doubt; but what has spread over the figures of Jean Goujon that graceful, strange, airy elegance?  What has given them that unfamiliar character of life and grandeur, unless it be the neighbourhood of the rude and strong carvings of the Middle Ages? . . .  The grotesque imprints its character especially upon that wonderful architecture which in the Middle Ages takes the place of all the arts.  It attaches its marks to the fronts of the cathedrals; enframes its hells and purgatories under the portal arches, and sets them aflame upon the windows; unrolls its monsters, dogs, demons around the capitals, along the friezes, on the eaves.”  We find this same bizarre note in the mediaeval laws, social usages, church institutions, and popular legends, in the court fools, in the heraldic emblems, the religious processions, the story of “Beauty and the Beast.”  It explains the origin of the Shaksperian drama, the high-water mark of modern art.

Shakspere does not seem to me an artist of the grotesque.  He is by turns the greatest of tragic and the greatest of comic artists, and his tragedy and comedy lie close together, as in life, but without that union of the terrible and the ludicrous in the same figure, and that element of deformity which is the essence of the proper grotesque.  He has created, however, one specimen of true grotesque, the monster Caliban.  Caliban is a comic figure, but not purely comic; there is something savage, uncouth, and frightful about him.  He has the dignity and the poetry which all rude, primitive beings have:  which the things of nature, rocks and trees and wild beasts have.  It is significant, therefore, that Robert