But this great plan was never properly completed. The people had brought
up on great wagons the heavy tortoise roof and the huge necks of stone,
and all the thousand and one oddities that made up that unity, the owls
and the efts and the crocodiles and the kangaroos, which hideous
by themselves might have been magnificent if reared in one definite
proportion and dedicated to the sun. For this was Gothic, this was
romantic, this was Christian art; this was the whole advance of
Shakespeare upon Sophocles. And that symbol which was to crown it all,
the ape upside down, was really Christian; for man is the ape upside
down.
But the rich, who had grown riotous in the long peace, obstructed the
thing, and in some squabble a stone struck the priest on the head and
he lost his memory. He saw piled in front of him frogs and elephants,
monkeys and giraffes, toadstools and sharks, all the ugly things of the
universe which he had collected to do honour to God. But he forgot why
he had collected them. He could not remember the design or the object.
He piled them all wildly into one heap fifty feet high; and when he had
done it all the rich and influential went into a passion of applause and
cried, “This is real art! This is Realism! This is things as they really
are!”
That, I fancy, is the only true origin of Realism. Realism is simply
Romanticism that has lost its reason. This is so not merely in the sense
of insanity but of suicide. It has lost its reason; that is its reason
for existing. The old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their
god. The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs,
dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summon all
these million creatures to worship their god; and then have no god for
them to worship. Paganism was in art a pure beauty; that was the dawn.
Christianity was a beauty created by controlling a million monsters of
ugliness; and that in my belief was the zenith and the noon. Modern
art and science practically mean having the million monsters and being
unable to control them; and I will venture to call that the disruption
and the decay. The finest lengths of the Elgin marbles consist splendid
houses going to the temple of a virgin. Christianity, with its gargoyles
and grotesques, really amounted to saying this: that a donkey could
go before all the horses of the world when it was really going to the
temple. Romance means a holy donkey going to the temple. Realism means a
lost donkey going nowhere.
The fragments of futile journalism or fleeting impression which are here
collected are very like the wrecks and riven blocks that were piled in a
heap round my imaginary priest of the sun. They are very like that grey
and gaping head of stone that I found overgrown with the grass. Yet I
will venture to make even of these trivial fragments the high boast that
I am a medievalist and not a modern. That is, I really have a notion of
why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have not
the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the
connecting link between all these chaotic papers. But it could be
stated. This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now
set before the reader does not consist of separate idols cut out
capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are
meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the
gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else; I leave to others the
angels and the arches and the spires. But I am very sure of the style of
the architecture, and of the consecration of the church.