It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations--but without confounding them--darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the starting-point of poetry.

All things are connected.
Thus, then, we see a principle unknown to the ancients, a new type, introduced in poetry; and as an additional element in anything modifies the whole of the thing, a new form of the art is developed.
This type is the grotesque; its new form is comedy.
And we beg leave to dwell upon this point; for we have now indicated the significant feature, the fundamental difference which, in our opinion, separates modern from ancient art, the present form from the defunct form; or, to use less definite but more popular terms, _romantic_ literature from _classical_ literature.
"At last!" exclaim the people who for some time past _have seen what we were coming at_, "at last we have you--you are caught in the act.
So then you put forward the ugly as a type for imitation, you make the _grotesque_ an element of art.

But the graces; but good taste! Don't you know that art should correct nature?
that we must _ennoble_ art?
that we must _select_?
Did the ancients ever exhibit the ugly or the grotesque?
Did they ever mingle comedy and tragedy?
The example of the ancients, gentlemen! And Aristotle, too, and Boileau, and La Haipe Upon my word!" These arguments are sound, doubtless, and, above all, of extraordinary novelty.

But it is not our place to reply to them.

We are constructing no system here--God protect us from systems! We are stating a fact.