Caricature, The Fantastic,

The Grotesque

John Addington Symonds

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 John Addington Symonds

CARICATURE, THE FANTASTIC,

THE GROTESQUE

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CARICATURE, THE FANTASTIC,
THE GROTESQUE

Edición preparada por

Silvia Alicia Manzanilla Sosa y Karla Marrufo
 ESSAYS
SPECULATIVE AND SUGGESTIVE

BY
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

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TUIRD EDITION

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1907
[All rights resorvod]
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 C a r i c a t u r e , T h e F a n t a s t i c , T h e G r o t e s q u e | 11

CARICATURE, THE FANTASTIC,

THE GROTESQUE
I
C is a distinct species of characterisation, in
a r ic a t u r e

which the salient features of a person or an object have been

emphasised with the view of rendering them ridiculous. The
derivation of this word justifies my definition. It comes from
the Italian caricare, to charge with a burden, or to surcharge,
Thus caricare un ritratto means to exaggerate what is already
prominent in the model, and in this way to produce a likeness
which misrepresents the person, while it remains recog­
nisable. Instead of emphasis, simple distortion may be used
to secure the effect of caricature. For example, the hints
suggested by reflection in a spoon are amplified into an
absurd portrait. Some faces and figures lend themselves
better to the concave, others to the convex surface of the
spoon. Or a fairly accurate image of a man or woman,
modelled in gutta-percha, may be pulled about in various
directions, with the result of producing a series of burlesque
portraits, in which the likeness of tho individual is never
wholly lost.
The most effective kind of caricature does not proceed by
such distortion. It renders its victim ludicrous or vile by
exaggerating what is defective, mean, ignoble in his person,
indicating at the same time that some corresponding flaws
in his spiritual nature are revealed by them. The master­
pieces of this art are those in which truth has been
accentuated by slight but deft and telling emphasis. Nothing,
as Aretino once remarked, is more cruel than malevolent
12 | S y m o n d s

insistence upon fact. You cannot injure your neighbour

better than by telling the truth about him, if the truth is to
his discredit. You cannot make him appear ridiculous more
crushingly than by calling attention to real faults in his
physique.
Thoso extraordinary caricatures of human faces which
Lionardo da Vinci delighted to produce, illustrate both
methods of emphasis and distortion. But they also exhibit
the play of a fantastic imagination. He accentuated the
analogies of human with bestial features, or degraded his
models to the level of goitred idiots by subtle blurrings and
erasures of thoir nobler traits.
Caricature is not identical with satire. Caricature implies
exaggeration of some sort. The bitterest satire hits its
mark by no exaggeration, but by indignant and unmerciful
exposure of ignobility. Yet caricature has always been used
for satirical purposes, with notable effect by Aristophanes in
his political comedies, with coarse vigour by Gilray in
lampoons of the last century, with indulgent humour by our
contemporary ‘Punch.’
The real aim of caricature is to depreciate its object by
evoking contempt or stirring laughter, when the imaginative
rendering of the person is an unmistakablo portrait, but
defects are brought into relief which might otherwise have
escaped notice. Instead therefore of being realistic, this
branch of art must be reckoned as essentially idealistic. In
so far as a caricature is powerfully conceived, it calls into
play fine, though never the noblest, never the most amiable,
qualities of interpretation.
II
The fantastic need have no element of caricature. It
invariably implies a certain exaggeration or distortion of
nature; but it lacks that deliberate intention to disparage
which lies at the root of caricature. What we call fantastic
in art results from an exercise of the capricious fancy, playing
with things which it combines into arbitrary non-existent
forms. These may be merely graceful, as is tho case with
 C a r i c a t u r e , T h e F a n t a s t i c , T h e G r o t e s q u e | 13

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 gun 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
14 | S y m o n d s

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 tho
chimiera of Hellenic sculpture, the homed and hoofed devil
of mediæval 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 Bab, Adam Bede, and other
products of imaginative art which aro modolled from familiar
objects. In this way fantastic art strikingly brings home to
us the truth of what Tasso once said : Non ô 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

Tho 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 naïveté and lack of technical skill. On
the contrary, Lombard sculpture, as we study this on the
façades of North Italian churches, and mediæval Teutonic
art in general, as we study thi3 upon the pages of illustrated
 C a r i c a t u r e , T h e F a n t a s t i c , T h e G r o t e s q u e | 15

manuscripts, in the choir-stalls of our cathedrals, or in the

carven ornaments of their exteriors, rarely fails to introduce
some grotesque element. The free play of the Northern
fancy ran over easily into distortion, degradation of form,
burlesque. Scandinavian poetry of the best period exhibits
striking specimens of Aristophanic satire, in which the gods
are mercilessly dealt with. Grotesqueness may be traced in
all the fantastic beings of Celtic and Germanic folk-lore—in
gnomes inhabiting the mountains, in kelpies of the streams
and mermaids of the ocean, in Puck and Robin Goodfellow,
in fairies of heath and woodland, in the princesses of Border
ballad-literature fated by magic spells to droe their doom as
loathly dragons.
Of such grotesqueness I doubt whether we can discern a
trace in classical mythology and art. Ugly stories about
Zeus and Cronos, quaint stories about the metamorphoses of
Proteus, and the Phorcydes with their one eye, are not
grotesque. They lack the touch of caricature, always a
conscious or semi-conscious element, which is needful to
create the species.
This element is absent in the voluminous literature of
the Arabs, as that is known to us through the ‘Arabian
Nights/ Princesses transformed into parrots, djinns with
swarthy faces doting on fair damsels, water-carriers con­
verted by some spell into caliphs, ghouls, animals that talk,
immense birds brooding over treasures in the wilderness, are
not grotesque. They lack the touch of conscious caricature
added to free fancy which differentiates the species.
Both caricature and the fantastic played an important part
in Southern and Eastern literature, but they did not come
into the peculiar connection which is necessary to grotesque­
ness. The fantastic made itself moderately felt in Hellas,
and assumed gigantic proportions in Islam. The Asiatic and
Greek minds, however, lacked a quality which was demanded in
order to elicit grotesqueness from phantasy. That quality the
Teutonic section of the Aryan family possessed in abundance;
it was all-pervasive in the products of their genius. We may
define it broadly as humour, I do not deny humour to the
16 | S y m o n d s

Greeks and Orientals; but I contend that Teutons have the

merit of applying humour to caricature and the fantastic,
so as to educe from both in combination what wo call
grotesqueness.
For obvious reasons I must omit all mention of what
strikes us as grotesque in the art-work of races with whom
we are imperfectly in sympathy. Hindoo idols, Chinese and
Japanese bronzes, Azfcec bas-reliefs, and such things, seem
to us grotesque. But it is almost impossible to decide how
far this apparent grotesqueness is due to inadequate com­
prehension on our part, or to religious symbolism. We cannot
oliminate the element of genuine intentional grotesqueness
which things so far remote from us contain.
IV
Closely allied to caricature and the grotesque we find
obscenity. This indeed has generally entered into both.
Tho reason is not far to seek. Nothing exposes human
beings to more contemptuous derision than the accentuation
in their persons of that which self-respect induces them to
hide. Indecency is therefore a powerful resource for satirical
caricaturists. Nothing, again, in the horse-play of the fancy
comes readier to hand than the burlesque exhibition of things
usually concealed. It appeals to the gross natural man, upon
whose sense of humour the creator of grotesque imagery
wishes to work, and with whom he is in cordial sympathy.
Indecency has always been extruded from the temple oi
art, and relegated to slums and dubious places in its precincts.
Why is this ? Perhaps it would suffice to answer that art is a
mirror of human life, and that those things which we exclude
from social intercourse are consequently excluded from the
icsthotic domain. This is an adequate account of tho matter.
But something will be gained for the understanding of art in
general if we examine the problem with moro attention.
Shelley lays it down as an axiom that all obscenity implies
a crime against the spiritual nature of man. This dictum
takes for granted an advanced state of society, when merely
 C a r i c a t u r e , T h e F a n t a s t i c , T h e G r o t e s q u e | 17

sensual functions have come to be regarded with sensitive

modesty. In other words, it defines the essence of obscenity
to be some cynical or voluptuous isolation of what is animal
in man, for special contemplation by the mind. Savages
recognise nothing indecent in thing3 which we consider highly
improper. Our ancestors spoke without a blush about matters
which could not now be mentioned before a polite company.
This is because savages and people of the Elizabethan age
were naïve, where we have become self-conscious. Thus
Shelley’s crimen Icesœ majestatis varies with the age and the
conditions of civility in which men live. Much that is
treasonable here and now against the spiritual nature of
humanity was unassailable two hundred years ago, and is still
respectable in the tropics. The point at issue is to decide
what constitutes a violation of local and temporal decorum
in this respect. Such violation is obscenity ; and the con­
ditions vary almost imperceptibly with the growth of society,
but always in favour of decorum.
There are many things allowable, nay laudable, in act,
which it is unpermissiblo to represent in figurative art or to
dwell upon in poetry. Yet these things imply nothing ugly.
On the contrary, they are compatible with the highest degree
of natural beauty. Even Aretino’s famous postures, if painted
with the passion of Giorgione, could not be pronounced
unbeautiful. Such motives abound in juxtapositions of forms
and in contrasts of physical types, which yield everything the
painter most desires for achieving his most ambitious triumphs.
The delineation of these things, however, though they are
allowable and laudable in act, though they are plastically
beautiful, offends our taste and is intolerable. If we ask why
this is so, the answer, I think, must be that civilisation only
accopts art under the condition of its making for the nobler
tendencies of human nature. In truth, I have approached
the present topic, in spite of its difficulty, mainly because it
confirms the views I hold regarding the dependence of the
arts on ethics.
There are acts necessary to the preservation of the species,
functions important in the economy of man ; but these, by
18 | S y m o n d s

a tacit consensus of opinion, we refuse to talk about, and

these therefore we are unwilling to see reflected in art’s
spiritual looking-glass. We grudge their being brought into
the sphere of intellectual things. We feel that the representa­
tion of them, implying as this does tho working of the artist’s
mind and our mind on them, contradicts a self-proservative
instinct which has been elaborately cultivated through un­
numbered generations for the welfare of the social organism.
Such representation brings before the sense in figure what is
already powerful enough in fact. It stirs in us what educa­
tion tends to curb, and exposes what humane culture teaches
us to withdraw from observation.
This position admits of somewhat different statement. At
a certain point art must make common cause with morality,
and the plastically beautiful has to be limited by ethical laws.
Man is so complex a being, and in the complex of his nature
the morally-trained sensibilities play so prominent a part, that
art, which aims at giving only elevated enjoyment, cannot
neglect ethics. Without being didactic it must be moralised,
because the normal man is moralised. If it repudiates this
obligation, it errs against its own ideal of harmony, rhythm,
repose, synthetic beauty. It introduces an element which we
seok to subordinate in life, and by which we are afraid of
being masterod. It ceases to bo adequate to humanity in its
best moments, and these best moments art has undertaken to
present in forms of sensuous but dignified loveliness.
Most people will agree upon this point. There remains,
however, considerable difference of opinion as to the bound­
aries which art dares not overpass—as to what deserves the
opprobrious title of indecency in plastic or poetic presenta­
tion. Some folk seem inclined to ban the nude without
exception, relegating the grandest handiwork of God, the
human form divine, to the obscurity of shrouded vestments.
Disinclined as I am to adopt this extreme position, I admit
that just here the cleanness or uncleanness of the artist's mind,
as felt in his touch on doubtful subjects, becomes a matter
of ethical importance. All depends on taste, on method of
treatment, on the tone communicated, on the mood in which
 C a r i c a t u r e , T h e F a n t a s t i c , T h e G r o t e s q u e | 19

matters of delicacy have been viewed. Tintoretto elevates

our imagination by his pictures of Eve tempting Adam;
Michel Angelo restrains and chastens wandering fancy;
Raphael removes the same theme beyond the sphere of
voluptuous suggestion, while retaining something of its sen­
suous allurement; Rembrandt produces a cynical satire in
the style of Swift’s description of Yahoos; Luca Giordano
disgusts by coarse and full-blown carnalism.
V
These considerations lead us finally to inquire in what
sphere of human sensibility the arts legitimately move.
It is usual to distinguish between ffisthetic and non-
resthetic senses—meaning by the former sight and hearing,
by the latter touch, taste, smell. In truth, no great art has
yet been based upon the three last-mentioned senses, in the
same way as painting and sculpture have been based on sight
and music upon hearing. This is because the two so-called
Aesthetic senses are links between what is spiritual in us and
external nature; we use them in the finer operations of our
intelligence. The three non-iesthetic senses serve utility and
natural needs; they have not been brought into that comity
where thought and emotion can be sensuously presented to
the mind. It is only by the faintest suggestions that a touch,
a taste, a smell evokes some spiritual mood. When it does
so the effect is indeed striking; we are thrilled in our very
entrails and marrow. But these suggestions are, in our
present condition, so vague, so elusive, so evanescent, so
peculiar to the individual, that no attempt has been made to
regard them as a substantial groundwork for the edifice of art.
In man we find an uninterrupted rhythm from the simplest
to the most complex states of consciousness, passing from
mere sensation up to elaborated thought. No break can be
detected in this rhythm, although psychologists are wont to
denote its salient moments by distinctive names. They spoak
of sensation, perception, emotion, will, reason, and so forth, as
though these wore separate faculties. But the infinite subtlety
20 | S y m o n d s

of nature eludes such rude attempts at classification. Art

finds its proper sphere of operation only in the middle region
of the scale. The physical rudiments of consciousness are
not aesthetic, because they bring our carnal functions into play,
and only indirectly agitate the complex of our nature. The
more abstract modes of thought are not esthetic, because they
have renounced the element of corporeity and sense; and art
has to fulfil its function through sensuous presentation. Art
is therefore obliged to cast roots down into sense, and to
flower up into thought, remaining within the province where
these extremes of consciousness interpenetrate. This is what
Hegel meant when he called beauty die sinnliche Erscheinung
der Idee (the apparition, to sense and in sense, of the idea)—a
definition which, in spite of its metaphysical form, is precisely
suited to express the fact.
Poetry, if I may apply these conclusions to the most purely
intellectual of the arts, makes an appeal to thought, emotion,
sense, together, in one blended harmony. If thought pre­
dominates too crudely, as in some cantos of Dante’s *Paradiso,’
in some books of Lucretius, in many passages of Milton’s and
of Wordsworth’s verse, then the external form of metre and
poetic diction does not save the product from being prosaic.
On the other hand, if a coarse appeal be made to sense
through sound, as in a large portion of Marino’s ‘Adone,’
we are cloyed by sweet vacuity. Or if, as in the case of
Baffo’s Venetian lyrics, the contents be deliberately prurient,
awakening mere animal associations, then no form of sonnet,
madrigal, or ode saves this poetry from being prosaic. It
meets the same condemnation at the lower end of the scale as
we passed on parts of Dante, Lucretius, Milton, Wordsworth
at the higher end. Purely intellectual and purely seDsual
poetry fail alike by contradicting the law of poetry’s existence.
They are not poetry, but something else.
Neither unmixed thought nor nnmixed sense is the proper
stuff of art. Still we must remember that art, occupying the
middle region between these extremes, has to bring the
manifold orchestra of consciousness into accord. Nowhere
is there an abrupt chasm in man’s sentient being. Touch,
 C a r i c a t u r e , T h e F a n t a s t i c , T h e G r o t e s q u e | 21

taste, smell, sex must be made to vibrate like the dull strings
of bass-viols, to thrill like woody tubes of hautboys, to pierce
like shrill yet mellow accents of the clarionet, to stir the
soul like the tumultuous voices of brass instruments. Sight
and hearing, through their keener intellectual significance,
dominate this harmony; even as treble and tenor chords of
violin and viola control a symphony. The final object of the
whole concert is to delight and stimulate the mind, not to
exercise the brain by logical propositions, nor to excite the
appetite by indecent imagery. Precisely in this attunement
of all the senses to the service of impassioned thought lies the
secret of the noblest art.
22 I S y m o n d s
 C a r i c a t u r e , T h e F a n t a s t i c , T h e G r o t e s q u e | 23

I n d ic e

Portada original ............................................................................................ 9

Caricature, The Fantastic, The Grotesque

I 11
II 12
III 14
IV 16
V 19
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 • En qué esferas de la sensibilidad humana se
desenvuelve lo artístico? ¿Cuál es la naturaleza del
¿ arte más noble, si se toma en cuenta tanto lo ético
como la estimulación de lo sensorial inherente a la
percepción del hombre? ¿Cuál es la finalidad del arte? A lo
largo de cinco apartados, John Addington Symonds (1840­
1893) perfila algunas respuestas a estas preguntas,
planteando definiciones, puntos de contacto y diferencias
entre la caricatura, lo fantástico, lo grotesco y lo obsceno.
La caricatura exhibe, a través de la exageración, los
defectos de los individuos. Lo fantástico amplifica y
distorsiona la realidad, creando figuras hermosas o
terroríficas surgidas de una imaginación exaltada. Lo
grotesco, como rama de lo fantástico, también incluye
elementos caricaturescos. Y lo obsceno, ubicado por
Symonds entre la caricatura y lo grotesco, permite la
intervención de lo erótico y de lo que el autor denomina la
indecencia, arma por demás poderosa para la caricatura
satírica.
Como resultado de la reflexión acerca de los límites
y fronteras difusas entre estas cuatro estéticas, asistimos
en este texto a una disertación sobre el arte y la
importancia de colocar lo sensorial en el centro de la
contemplación artística.