Of course John Ruskin had a thorough-going admiration for so great a spiritual thinker as Dante and expressed it in no {309} uncertain terms. With his wonderful power to point out the significance of unexpected manifestations of human genius, Ruskin has even succeeded in minimizing one of the great objections urged against Dante, better perhaps than could be done by anyone else, for English speaking people at least. For many readers Dante is almost unbearable, because of certain grotesque elements they find in him. This has been the source and cause of more unfavorable criticism than anything else in the great Florentine's writings. Ruskin of course saw it but appreciated it at its proper significance, and has made clear in a passage that every Dante reader needs to go over occasionally, in order to assure himself that certain unusual things in Dante's attitude towards life are an expression rather of the highest human genius and its outlook on life, than some narrow limitation of medievalism. Ruskin said:-- "I believe that there is no test of greatness in nations, periods, nor men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention or incapability of understanding it. I think that the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties, all at their highest is Dante; and in him the grotesque reaches at once the most distinct and the most noble development to which it was ever brought in the human mind. Of the grotesqueness in our own Shakespeare I need hardly speak, nor of its intolerableness to his French critics; nor of that of AEschylus and Homer, as opposed to the lower Greek writers; and so I believe it will be found, at all periods, in all minds of the first order." Great reverence for Dante might have been expected in Italy but the colder Northern nations shared it.