168 THE STONES OF VENICE

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 thought any more to the woe or to the danger, there is a shadow of them still present with him: and as the bright colours 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.

§ 47. Now, the feelings which give rise to the false or ignoble grotesque, are exactly the reverse of this. 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

[Version 0.04: March 2008]