mall things about it. They do not even discover
what is interesting about their own disappointment. And similarly
even those who are truly irritated by the unfamiliar fashions
of worship in a place like Jerusalem, do not know how to discover
what is interesting in the very existence of what is irritating.
For instance, they talk of Byzantine decay or barbaric delusion,
and they generally go away with an impression that the ritual
and symbolism is something dating from the Dark Ages.
But if they would really note the details of their surroundings,
or even of their sensations, they would observe a rather curious fact
about such ornament of such places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
as may really be counted unworthy of them. They would realise
that what they would most instinctively reject as superstitious does
not date from what they would regard as the ages of superstition.
There really are bad pictures but they are not barbaric pictures;
they are florid pictures in the last faded realism of the Renascence.
There really is stiff and ungainly decoration, but it is not
the harsh or ascetic decoration of a Spanish cloister; it is much
more like the pompous yet frivolous decorations of a Parisian hotel.
In short, in so far as the shrine has really been defaced it
has not been defaced by the Dark Ages, but rather if anything
by the Age of Reason. It is the enlightened eighteenth century,
which regarded itself as the very noonday of natural culture
and common sense, that has really though indirectly laid its
disfiguring finger on the dark but dignified Byzantine temple.
I do not particularly mind it myself; for in such great matters I
do not think taste is the test. But if taste is to be made the test,
there is matter for momentary reflection in this fact; for it
is another example of the weakness of what may be called fashion.
Voltaire, I believe, erected a sort of temple to God in his own garden;
and we may be sure that it was in the most exquisite taste of the time.
Nothing would have surprised him more than to learn that,
fifty years after the success of the French Revolution, almost every
freethinker of any artistic taste would think his temple far less
artistically admirable than the nearest gargoyle on Notre Dame.
Thus it is progress that must be blamed for most of these things:
and we ought not to turn away in contempt from something antiquated,
but rather recognise with respect and even alarm a sort of perma