THE FANTASTIC, THE GROTESQUE 157 



arabesques devised by old Italian painters frescoed patterns 

 upon walls and ceilings, in which tendrils of the vine, 

 acanthus foliage, parts of beasts and men and birds and 

 fabulous creatures are brought into quasi-organic fusion 

 with candelabra, goblets, lyres, and other familiar objects of 

 utility. 



In its higher manifestations fantastic art creates beautiful 

 or terrific forms in correspondence with some vision of the 

 excited imagination. The sphinx and the dragon, the world - 

 snake of Scandinavian mythology, Shakespeare's Ariel, 

 Dante's Lucifer, are fantastic in this higher sense. In them 

 real conditions of man's subjective being have taken sensuous 

 shape at the bidding of creative genius. The artist, while 

 giving birth to such fantastic creatures of imagination, 

 resembles a deeply-stirred and dreaming man, whose brain 

 projects impossible shapes to symbolise the perturbations of 

 his spirit. Myth and allegory, the metamorphosis of mortals 

 into plants, fairies, satyrs, nymphs, and tutelary deities of sea 

 or forest, are examples of the fantastic in this sphere of 

 highest poetry. 



According to the view which I have just expressed, 

 fantastic art has to be considered as the least realistic of all 

 artistic species ; it is that in which the human mind shows 

 its ideality, its subjective freedom, its independence of fact 

 and external nature, most completely. Here a man's studies 

 of reality outside him, acute and penetrating as these may 

 be, become subservient to the presentation of thoughts 

 and emotions which have no validity except for his internal 

 consciousness. 



He will watch from dawn till gloom 



The lake-reflected sun illume 



The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, 



Nor heed nor see what things they be, 



But from these create he can 



Forms more real than living man, 



Nurslings of immortality. 



When well constructed, powerfully conceived, vigorously 

 projected, with sufficiency of verisimilitude to give them 



