e medieval decline.
The great classical buildings of the Renascence were swept as bare
of it as any villa in Balham. But those who best appreciate this
loss to popular art will be the first to agree that at its best it
retained a touch of the barbaric as well as the popular. While we can
admire these matters of the grotesque, we can admit that their work
was sometimes unintentionally as well as intentionally grotesque.
Some of the carving did remain so rude that the angels were almost
as ugly as the devils. But this is the very point upon which I
would here insist; the mystery of why men who were so obviously
only beginning should have so suddenly stopped.

Men with medieval sympathies are sometimes accused, absurdly enough,
of trying to prove that the medieval period was perfect.
In truth the whole case for it is that it was imperfect.
It was imperfect as an unripe fruit or a growing child is imperfect.
Indeed it was imperfect in that very particular fashion which most
modern thinkers generally praise, more than they ever praise maturity.
It was something now much more popular than an age of perfection;
it was an age of progress. It was perhaps the one real age of progress
in all history. Men have seldom moved with such rapidity and such
unity from barbarism to civilisation as they did from the end of
the Dark Ages to the times of the universities and the parliaments,
the cathedrals and the guilds. Up to a certain point we may say
that everything, at whatever stage of improvement, was full
of the promise of improvement. Then something began to go wrong,
almost equally rapidly, and the glory of this great culture
is not so much in what it did as in what it might have done.
It recalls one of these typical medieval speculations, full of
the very fantasy of free will, in which the schoolmen tried to fancy
the fate of every herb or animal if Adam had not eaten the apple.
It remains, in a cant historical phrase, one of the great
might-have-beens of history.

I have said that it died young; but perhaps it would be truer to say that
it suddenly grew old. Like Godfrey and many of its great champions in
Jerusalem, it was overtaken in the prime of life by a mysterious malady.
The more a man reads of history the less easy he will find it to explain
that secret and rapid decay of medieval civilisation from within.
Only a few generations separated the world that worshipped St. Francis
from the world that burned Joan of Ar