The tortured and tortuous demons of Gothic doorways, Goya's saturnalian figures or Stravinsky's dissonances, are evidence that in every age there has existed in the souls of artists an undying impulse toward grotesque creation. The traditional shapes of aesthetic fancy are grotesque. Fauns, centaurs, Pegasus, and Medusa range the olive-gray slopes of Greece, disturbing the tanned normality of resting shepherds; northern woods are full of elves and witches, hitting like unwholesome night birds; Croquemitaine, bogy of little children, grimly stalks the neat Brittany orchards; and the meadows of England are the stamping ground of the unicorn, its copses conceal a grinning, misshapen Puck, while giants hurl rocks at one another in Cornwall, and dragons breathe fire through the dangerous secret verdure of Wales. Ghosts are universal, and as for the devil, he has since his conception been the lay figure on which the grotesque imagination has hung its most formidable dreams.

China and India give plastic form to the monstrous; Leonardo da Vinci fills sketch-books with beasts never seen on land or sea and faces that haunt us by their inordinate greeds and wild asymmetry; under the exquisite pattern of Aubrey Beardsley's black and white there peeps forth a horned, intangible horror.

The grotesque, in its most naive aspect, springs from a primitive love and fear of the unknown—a shuddering lust for the impossible. Art, Janus-faced, is either a celebration of reality or an escape from it: the passion for life as it is of a Balzac, or the opalescent, prophetic reverie of a Shelley. The grotesque, then, in its own cross-grained way, falls into the second category and is a denial of reality; it is a denizen of that unreal world so necessary to those whose feet are bruised by the hard road of fact. There are humans who must find wings or perish; some will even take to bats' wings. The grotesque is a twisted, fog-ridden forest in that Never-Never-Land which is the acme of those who find mortal flesh a prison.

Across this unbelievable realm of the grotesque falls the shadow of fear. It is part of man’s unending search for sensation that he should thus build phantoms to pursue himself with, that he should assure to himself, in this way, the emotion of terror. There is a primordial cell in our brains which responds fearfully to the abnormal. Even while we experience a delicious shiver of pleasure at our fright, something cries out in us before the grotesque like a child in a nightmare. We are to shout, "This is not true!" so as to reassure ourselves. We may laugh at the "worm" in "Siegfried," trailing his green cotton folds and gleaming his acetylene eyes with such amazingly German literalness, but we shall not restrain a quiver of nerves at his entrance, a shock at his noisy unnaturalness. And yet what a persistent attraction lies for us in the inharmonious, and how we shudder at and still pore over the diabolic deformity of a stone gargoyle, the livid attenuated saints of El Greco or the icily morbid fantasies of Edgar Allan Poe.

Apart from this primal terrifying intent of the grotesque, there is often in it a more civilized emotion—the sharp laughter of caricature. And here is an anomaly. For although the grotesque is an escape from the actual, in the sense of being an exaggerationyet it is often but a heightening of external aspects—a tumultuous piling up and an exacerbation of all too familiar, distasteful fact. Leonardo's pencil sketches, in which human beings subtly begin to resemble animals discourse humorously concerning his contemporaries; the passers-by in the street, grasping old women, gluttonous old men, shrews, street boys, and sets. Caliban is perhaps at root only some earth-bound blackguard of the Elizabethan pothouse and Bottom a bumptious yokel at the Stratford fair. Daumier's clawing lawyers are so many violent footnotes on human cunning, avarice and hatred.

Although the grotesque may contain caricature, many caricatures do not reach the stature of true grotesque. Caricature per se is an intellectual feat, a physiological comment untouched by that preoccupation with pattern and rhythm which is the sine qua non of the plastic arts.

The true grotesque is a work of art. But a work of art with a dark taint on its birth. For we shall not look long at the grotesque without realizing that there is in it something spiritually ominous, a quality in it more profound than its strangeness or its humour. For what reason, after all, does the artist, the striver after the ideal, the lover, one would have thought, of the proportioned and the lovely, create the distorted and the unsightly? What obscure passion is working in him, what denatured instinct? He is foiling us in our search for the restfully ordered, for some deep and original harmony. Is it fanciful to believe that the grotesque is an expression of pain, of some tragic uneasiness in the soul, which finds relief in negation? Shakespeare gave Titania an ass for a lover; did not this spring from some living hatred of some living Titania?

A number of present-day artists patiently evolve the inharmonious, using fine material and fine energy in the effort. The lucid ancients made rigid division between the lovely and the grotesque, expressing both with equal care and detachment. The moderns, more impatient and more subjective, weave the grotesque, often unconsciously one would say, into their fabrics some more richly than others, some to that point of perturbing excess which arouses cries of "Degenerate" or "Faker", and indignation meetings among lovers of safety.

Lovers of safety will not approve the grotesque, for there is no safety in imagination. If the song of the imagination is the lovely, the grotesque is its cry of despair.

And the damned grotesques
Made arabesques
Like wind upon the sand.

Humour is the balancing pole with which the distraught spirit rights itself. In the grotesque, humour is pushed to the point of frenzy. The grotesque is the artist's revenge upon what has hurt him too deeply. First evolved out of man's primitive sense of fear and thirst for the impossible, it has become in its later, more sophisticated form, a wild gesture, tom from the creator by the extremity of his suffering. It is as painful and intimate as a wound. We shrink from its desperate underscoring of the mediocre and the despicable, conscious that this is a broken gesture, the result of a man's failure to transcend his bitterness. The greater artist sublimates beyond this aesthetic cynicism into a creative act of faith. Michelangelo, Beethoven, Whitman—these conquered the temptation to mockery, which is a strong one to intense temperaments, and out of their tried courage wove visions that are part of the hope of humanity. The lesser artist, with a sensitiveness too keen, too proud, too easily jangled, and a less sublime self-control, abandons himself to negation as a man takes to drink. The grotesque is an evasion and therefore a defeat. We are shocked at it, as at a dissipation; we pity its creator. For it is the expression of a man's frustrated imaginations, of his subconscious obsessions; it is his fallen angel's denial of any lasting beauty; it is his final, caustic, vanquished laugh at reality.