Carlyle achieves both these effects in his presentation of the Irish widow's death, which he transforms into what Ruskin called a symbolical grotesque, his general term for symbols, allegories, and emblems. This notion of the symbolical grotesque proves particularly useful for understanding the sage's emblematic set pieces, in part because Ruskin's general theories of symbolism and imagination derive chiefly from Old Testament prophecy and in part because they emphasize an intrinsic connection between symbolism, satire, and the grotesque that pervades the writings of the Victorian and modern sages.
The very act of taking such phenomena as the material of interpretation instantly establishes them as matters of importance — and one of the sage's claims is that he perceives signs and warnings overlooked by his fellows. The sage's acts of interpretation also have another significant effect, for they transform some person, thing, or event into an elaborate emblem that the sage explains to his readers or listeners. Furthermore, since these contemporary phenomena that the sage takes to be Signs of the Times function within the prophetic pattern of diagnosis and warning, they reveal major instances of disorder and tend to be come grotesque. Since they also provide the sage with means to attack his audience's falling away from the right path, they also tend to become satirical as well.
Before examining the various forms the grotesque assumes in the writings of Victorian and modem sages, I propose to look briefly at Ruskin's writings on the subject, which provide a rare opportunity to observe one of the originators of this literary mode setting forth the theoretical basis of a technique important to it.
Ruskin's discussions of the grotesque have an additional importance to one concerned to comprehend the writings of the sage, for Ruskin relates it to satire and sublimity, fantasy and horror, epistemology and prophecy — to those topics, in other words, which play such an important role in this genre. These explanations appear in the last volume of The Stones of Venice (1853) and Modern Painters, volume 3 (1856), and take the form of theoretical descriptions of the artist, which are psychological profiles of the mind that creates this artistic mode, and analyses of works of art and literature that embody it. According to the third volume of Modern Painters, the grotesque has three basic modes or branches, one of which is the fantastic, a comparatively rare form produced by the "healthful and open play of the imagination" (5.131). This delicate fairy art, which is seen "in Shakespere's Ariel and Titania, and in Scott's White Lady," is seldom achieved, says Ruskin, because the "moment we begin to contemplate sinless beauty we are apt to get serious; and moral fairy tales, and such other innocent work, are hardly ever truly, that is to say, naturally, imaginative; but for the most part laborious inductions and compositions. The moment any real vitality enters them, they are nearly sure to become satirical, or slightly gloomy, and so connect themselves with the evil enjoying branch" (5.131-32).
The second form of grotesque imagination, which served as the basis for Ruskin's conception of a high art suited to the Victorian age, is the "thoroughly noble one . . . which arises out of the use or fancy of tangible signs to set forth an otherwise less expressible truth; including nearly the whole range of symbolical and allegorical art and poetry" (5.132). In explaining this portion of his theory, Ruskin focuses upon the individual image, which he terms the Symbolical Grotesque. According to him, "A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in a bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character" (5.132). Employing Spenser's description of envy in the first book of The Faerie Queene as his example of a symbolical grotesque, he demonstrates that it communicates complex truths with more power and economy than can discursive prose. After explaining all the ideas about envy this passage includes, he points out that the poet has compressed all this material in nine lines, "or, rather in one image, which will hardly occupy any room at all on the mind's shelves, but can be lifted out, whole, whenever we want it. All noble grotesques are concentrations of this kind, and the noblest convey truths which nothing else could convey" (5.133). Even the minor examples of this symbolic mode convey truth with a delight "which no mere utterance of the symbolised truth would have possessed, but which belongs to the effort of the mind to unweave the riddle, or to the sense it has of there being an infinite power and meaning in the thing seen, beyond all that is apparent" (5.133).
The important point for Ruskin is that all symbolism is intrinsically grotesque; according to him, whenever we experience anything too great or too difficult for us to grasp fully — and he holds that most truths are beyond human beings — we encounter the grotesque. The Stones of Venice argues that human limitations require the grotesque, which is both the result of man's fallen nature and a divine accommodation to it: "The fallen human soul, at its best, must be as a diminishing glass, and that a broken one, to the mighty truths of the universe round it; and the wider the scope of its glance, and the vaster the truths into which it obtains an insight, the more fantastic their distortion is likely to be, as the winds and vapours trouble the field of the telescope most when it reaches farthest" (11.181). In so far as the imagination perceives truth, the result is "sublime," but "so far as it is narrowed and broken by the inconsistencies of the human capacity, it becomes grotesque" (11.181); and it is rare, he adds, that any exalted truth impresses itself upon the imagination without producing the grotesque. So truth appeared to Moses and the prophets, and so, argues Ruskin, it must still appear to great artists and writers. According to him, in all times and places the grotesque has provided the means by which
the most appalling and eventful truth has been wisely conveyed, from the most sublime words of true Revelation, to the . . . [words] of the oracles, and the more or less doubtful teaching of dreams; and so down to ordinary poetry. No element of imagination has a wider range, a more magnificent use, or so colossal a grasp of sacred truth. [5.134]
The third form of grotesque imagination, one that is completely grotesque in the usual, narrower sense of the term, arises from the fact that the imagination
in its mocking or playful moods ... is apt to jest, sometimes bitterly, with under-current of sternest pathos, sometimes waywardly, sometimes slightly and wickedly, with death and sin; hence an enormous mass of grotesque art, some most noble and useful, as Holbein's Dance of Death, and Albert Durer's Knight and Death, going down gradually through various conditions of less and less seriousness in an art whose only end is that of mere excitement, or amusement by terror" (5.131).
According to Ruskin, this darker form of the grotesque includes work ranging from traditional religious images of death and the devil to satire and horrific art, and we may add that it also includes both the more satirical, more conventionally grotesque, interpretive set pieces of the sage and his invented ones as well. Taking quite literally the notion that art and prophecy are closely allied, Ruskin, like Carlyle and many other Victorians, found himself attracted in theory and practice, in his theories of the grotesque and his writings as a sage, to such powerful congeries of types, symbols, and emblems, particularly with a strong tinge of the grotesque as we usually use the term.
19 March 2008