oceeds to soothe me by talking
about the myth of an Age of Gold. He says I am idealising
the right turning. He says the blue palings are not so blue
as they are painted. He says they are only blue with distance.
He assures me there are spots on the sun, even on the rising sun.
Sometimes he tells me I am wrong in my fixed conviction that the blue
was of solid sapphires, or the sun of solid gold. In short he assures
me I am wrong in supposing that the right turning was right in every
possible respect; as if I had ever supposed anything of the sort.
I want to go back to that particular place, not because it was
all my fancy paints it, or because it was the best place my fancy
can paint; but because it was a many thousand times better place
than the man-trap in which he and his like have landed me.
But above all I want to go back to it, not because I know it was
the right place but because I think it was the right turning.
And the right turning might possibly have led me to the right place;
whereas the progressive guide has quite certainly led me to
the wrong one.

Now it is quite true that there is less general human testimony
to the notion of a New Jerusalem in the future than to the notion
of a Golden Age in the past. But neither of those ideas, whether or
no they are illusions, are any answer to the question of a plain
man in the plain position of this parable; a man who has to find
some guidance in the past if he is to get any good in the future.
What he positively knows, in any case, is the complete collapse
of the present. Now that is the exact truth about the thing so often
rebuked as a romantic and unreal return of modern men to medieval things.
They suppose they have taken the wrong turning, because they know
they are in the wrong place. To know that, it is necessary not to
idealise the medieval world, but merely to realise the modern world.
It is not so much that they suppose the medieval world was above
the average as that they feel sure the modern world is below the average.
They do not start either with the idea that man is meant to live
in a New Jerusalem of pearl and sapphire in the future, or that a man
was meant to live in a picturesque and richly-painted tavern of the past;
but with a strong inward and personal persuasion that a man was
not meant to live in a man-trap.

For there is and will be more and more a turn of total change
in all our talk and writing about history. Everything in the pas