158 CARICATURE, 



rank among extraordinary phenomena, and with sufficient 

 correspondence to the natural moods of human thought, 

 these phantasies and their appropriate shapes acquire a 

 reality of their own, and impose upon the credulity of man- 

 kind. They are felt to be actual through the force with 

 which their makers felt them, and through their adaptation 

 to the fancies of imaginative minds in general. Thus the 

 chimaera of Hellenic sculpture, the horned and hoofed devil 

 of mediaeval painting, Shakespeare's Caliban, Milton's Death, 

 Goethe's Mephistopheles, can all be claimed as products of 

 fantastic art. Yet these figments are hardly less real for our 

 consciousness than the Farnese bull, Lancelot, Landseer's 

 stags, Hamlet, Dr. Brown's Eab, Adam Bede, and other 

 products of imaginative art which are modelled from familiar 

 objects. In this way fantastic art strikingly brings home to 

 us the truth of what Tasso once said : Non & creatore se non 

 Iddio ed il poeta (God and the poet are the only creators). 

 It does this because it proves that the recombining power of 

 the imagination, as in dreams, so also in poetry and plastic 

 art, is able to construct unrealities which possess even more 

 than the spiritual influence and all but the validity of fact for 

 human minds. 



Ill 



The grotesque is a branch of the fantastic. Its specific 

 difference lies in the fact that an element of caricature, 

 whether deliberately intended or imported by the craftsman's 

 spontaneity of humour, forms an ingredient in the thing 

 produced. Certain races and certain epochs display a pre- 

 dilection for the grotesque, which is conspicuously absent in 

 others. Hellenic art, I think, was never intentionally grotesque, 

 except on rare occasions in the comedy of Aristophanes. 

 What resembles grotesqueness in the archaic stages of Greek 

 sculpture in the bas-reliefs from Selinus, for example 

 must be ascribed to na/ivett and lack of technical skill. On 

 the contrary, Lombard sculpture, as we study this on the 

 fa9ades of North Italian churches, and mediaeval Teutonic 

 art in general, as we study this upon the pages of illustrated 



