III. GROTESQUE RENAISSANCE 173

and Renaissance manufactures of modern times having silenced the independent language of the operative, his humour and satire pass away in the word-wit which has of late become the especial study of the group of authors headed by Charles Dickens;¹ all this power was formerly thrown into noble art, and became permanently expressed in the sculptures of the cathedral. It was never thought that there was anything discordant or improper in such a position: for the builders evidently felt very deeply a truth of which, in modern times, we are less cognizant; that folly and sin are, to a certain extent, synonymous, and that it would be well for mankind in general if all could be made to feel that wickedness is as contemptible as it is hateful. So that the vices were permitted to be represented under the most ridiculous forms, and² the coarsest wit of the workman to be exhausted in completing the degradation of the creatures supposed to be subjected to them.

§ 53. Nor were even the supernatural powers of evil exempt from this species of satire. For with whatever hatred or horror the evil angels were regarded, it was one of the conditions of Christianity that they should also be looked upon as vanquished; and this not merely in their great combat with the King of Saints, but in daily and hourly combats with the weakest of His servants. In proportion to the narrowness of the powers of abstract conception in the workman, the nobleness of the idea of spiritual nature diminished, and the traditions of the encounters of men with fiends in daily temptations were imagined with less terrific circumstances, until the agencies which in such warfare were almost always represented as vanquished with

¹ [Ruskin, as we have seen (Vol. I. p. xlix., vol. IX. pp. 200, 429), was a regular reader of Dickens; and, as a glance at the General Index will show, referred constantly to his books. The opinion here expressed of Dickens as the head of the modern school of wit and satire is repeated in Modern Painters, vol. iii., App. iii.; “the essential value and truth” of his writings in their general drift and purpose is affirmed in Unto This Last, § 14 n.; his close observation of natural phenomena, love of beautiful scenery, and power of description are noted in Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. pp. 347, 570 n.), vol. iii. ch. xvi. § 20, and Fors Clavigera, Letter 19.]

² [In his copy for revision Ruskin struck out the word “all,” which appears in all editions hitherto, before “the coarsest wit.”]

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