time later unfolded into a serious aesthetic with Ruskin and the 
French symbolists. This Gothic taste, trite and ridiculous as it 
first appeared to serious people, was yet a confirmation of 
Blake’s diagnosis of the defects and needs of his age. It was 
itself a pre-Raphael or pre-Gutenberg quest for a unified mode 
of perception. In Modern Painters  (vol. III, p. 91) Ruskin states 
the matter in a way which entirely dissociates Gothic 
medievalism from any historical concern about the Middle Ages. 
He states the matter in a way that won him the serious 
interest of Rimbaud and Proust:

          A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by 
     a series of symbols thrown together in 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;