Form: a quarterly of the arts (1.1916/1917)

The Grotesque

RITUALthere of course came naturally. The feast of
CorpusChristifalls about Midsummer—the time of
flowers, of bees, of sunshine. The singing proces-
sion of the Blessed Sacrament wound in and out among
the parterresof the College garden. Thelanternsand candles
carried by the acolytes and altar boys made mockery of the
sun and the incense from the clinking thurible outdid the
flowers. Children strewed roses and every blossom the
garden affords, to make exquisite thepath of the Body of
Christ.

IN summer mornings after the solemn moment of the
Elevation of the Host, when the thurifer with his clink-
ing chains and his attendant torchbearers with their
flickering candles had departed, the high sun slanted sharply
downwards through the great eastern window athwart the
lingering clouds of incense making slow shifting lazy patterns
of colour. The silence as it were stood listening. Into the
drowsy stillness stole presently the lonely voice of the
celebrant uplifted in the glorious and ever haunting chant
of the Lord’s Prayer. “Pater Noster, qui es in coelis . . .”
O lovely prayer ; chanted in what worthy cadences!

THE idea of sacrifice—the brutal sacrifice of thebody
and blood was etherealized; symbolical only in
gentle forms of bread and wine. The priest’s voice
hushes itself again: the Gregorian is silent. The atonement
was made, and all was peace. “Et verbum caro factum est, et
habitavit in nobis ; et vidimus gloriam ejus ; gloriam quasi
unigeniti a Patre, plenum gratiae et veritatis,” and with “Deo
Gratias” the Mass was over. The listening silence sealed
up its ears and went to sleep again. A ruminant sleep full
of dreams and meditations and scents and murmurings of
bees and flowers.

BUT what, you will say, are you talking about ?
What has all this to do with the Grotesque? Listen
and I will tell you. Such were the days of boyhood.
But what of the nights? Days filled with peace and beauty

—Nights of Fear and Horror
and Hell. Was the atonement
after all complete? Still doubts
and horrors and f ears of punish-
mentforsinsasyet undreamt of
haunted the dark. The day-
light mightbelong toGod; but
night could be, and sometimes
was, the Devil’s own.

ON our chapel and
church there were no
grotesques such as are
found on mediawal edifices
(the church was, I believe, de-
signed by Hansom, of greater
popular fame for his cabs than
for his churches). But still in
the manuals of devotion were
many old monkish meditations on Mortal Sin, on Death, on
Judgmentandaneternityof Hell, lingering from the middle
ages. For instance—“ In hellevery sense will be exquisitely
tormented. The sight, by the presence of devils; the ears by
shrieks and howlings, by curses and blasphemies: the smell,
by insupportable stink and rottenness, the taste by raging
hunger and thirst . . . the touch, by glowing fire that will
search their inmost parts . . . The dreadful torments of hell

would be in some sort tolerable if they were at last to end;
but no, God’s hatred must for ever pursue the wretched
sinner; after millions of years the fire of hell will be as
activeandragingasever,the body and soul as much disposed
to suffer, and the damned as distant from God as at the first
moment of their imprisonment. (Catholic Manual,

P- 3°> 31-)

WITH such a fate awaiting the soul of a little boy
who should die with one mortal sin upon his
soul, do I exaggerate when I say that night and
darkness which hold in themselves sufficient horrors for any
nervous and imaginative child may in truth become the
Devil’s Own?

WELL then; Why then; Whatthen? WhatWal-
purgis Nights of Nightmares; of the Seven
Deadly Sins, and of the Devil and all his angels
—Devils and fiends incarnate; and, worst of all, formless,
colourless, undefinable horrors and fears.

ON the dark backward and abysm of Time, before man
haddiscovered and come to a knowledge of the One
True God, the Devil was known and feared: for
he had made his presence felt. It is here I think that we

get the very roots and
originof theundeniable
grotesque. The study
of the Grotesquein Art
is bound up with the
study of Demonology,
and so indirectly of
Theology.

Ido not know the
work of Morto da
Feltre—and I pass
over the derivation of
grotesque from the
style of decoration of
the grottos of his time.
It is asthough we were
to describe Rackham’s
own dainty fancies as
“cellaresque” from the style of decoration of the German
beer cellars; and it is even possible that the goblins that
one generallyfindspainted on the friezes of these haunts bear
some far away kinship with our subject, even historically.

GROTESQUE” has come to meanforme,andIbe-
lieve for most people—not only a style in which
Morto da Feltre worked, or a style pertaining
to the decoration of grottos—but covers a whole order and
range of ideas, such as perhaps I may most readily define
by a negative.

THE discussion as to what constitutes the idea of
Beauty is endless, and I will not enter upon it—and
the discussion as to what is “Grotesque” in the
meaning which the wordholdsfor memightbeequallyfutile
and inconclusive. If I say that for me the idea of the “ Gro-
tesque” is the opposite of the idea of “Beauty,” I shall sum
up most readily and with the most immediate utility what
we are about to discuss. A normal person might sum up
Beauty in Art as the expression of what we most admire and
love, and the Grotesque as the expression of what we most

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