re at once more general and more internal.
They concern something tawdry, squalid or superstitious about the shrines
and those who use them. Now the mistake of critics is not that they
criticise the world; it is that they never criticise themselves.
They compare the alien with the ideal; but they do not at the same
time compare themselves with the ideal; rather they identify
themselves with the ideal. I have met a tourist who had seen
the great Pyramid, and who told me that the Pyramid looked small.
Believe me, the tourist looked much smaller. There is indeed another
type of traveller, who is not at all small in the moral mental sense,
who will confess such disappointments quite honestly, as a piece
of realism about his own sensations. In that case he generally suffers
from the defect of most realists; that of not being realistic enough.
He does not really think out his own impressions thoroughly;
or he would generally find they are not so disappointing after all.
A humorous soldier told me that he came from Derbyshire, and that
he did not think much of the Pyramid because it was not so tall
as the Peak. I pointed out to him that he was really offering
the tallest possible tribute to a work of man in comparing it
to a mountain; even if he thought it was a rather small mountain.
I suggested that it was a rather large tombstone. I appealed
to those with whom I debated in that district, as to whether they
would not be faintly surprised to find such a monument during
their quiet rambles in a country churchyard. I asked whether
each one of them, if he had such a tombstone in the family,
would not feel it natural, if hardly necessary, to point it out;
and that with a certain pride. The same principle of the higher realism
applies to those who are disappointed with the sight of the Sphinx.
The Sphinx really exceeds expectations because it escapes expectations.
Monuments commonly look impressive when they are high and often
when they are distant. The Sphinx is really unexpected,
because it is found suddenly in a hollow, and unnaturally near.
Its face is turned away; and the effect is as creepy as coming into a room
apparently empty, and finding somebody as still as the furniture.
Or it is as if one found a lion couchant in that hole in the sand;
as indeed the buried part of the monster is in the form of a
couchant lion. If it was a real lion it would hardly be less
arresting merely because it was near; nor could the f