ch, are as
grand as the men who made them. The incongruities there are,
are those of local colour. In connection, by the way, with what I
said about beasts of burden, I mounted a series of steep staircases
to the roof of the convent beside the Holy Sepulchre. When I got
to the top I found myself in the placid presence of two camels.
It would be curious to meet two cows on the roof of a village church.
Nevertheless it is the only moral of the chapter interpolated here,
that we can meet things quite as curious in our own country.

When the critic says that Jerusalem is disappointing he generally
means that the popular worship there is weak and degraded,
and especially that the religious art is gaudy and grotesque.
In so far as there is any kind of truth in this, it is
still true that the critic seldom sees the whole truth.
What is wrong with the critic is that he does not criticise himself.
He does not honestly compare what is weak, in this particular world
of ideas, with what is weak in his own world of ideas. I will take
an example from my own experience, and in a manner at my own expense.
If I have a native heath it is certainly Kensington High Street,
off which stands the house of my childhood. I grew up in that
thorough-fare which Mr. Max Beerbohm, with his usual easy exactitude
of phrase, has described as "dapper, with a leaning to the fine arts."
Dapper was never perhaps a descriptive term for myself;
but it is quite true that I owe a certain taste for the arts
to the sort of people among whom I was brought up. It is also true
that such a taste, in various forms and degrees, was fairly common
in the world which may be symbolised as Kensington High Street.
And whether or no it is a tribute, it is certainly a truth that most
people with an artistic turn in Kensington High Street would have been
very much shocked, in their sense of propriety, if they had seen
the popular shrines of Jerusalem; the sham gold, the garish colours,
the fantastic tales and the feverish tumult. But what I want such
people to do, and what they never do, is to turn this truth round.
I want them to imagine, not a Kensington aesthete walking down
David Street to the Holy Sepulchre, but a Greek monk or a Russian
pilgrim walking down Kensington High Street to Kensington Gardens.
I will not insist here on all the hundred plagues of plutocracy
that would really surprise such a Christian peasant; especially that
curse of an irreligious socie