Alarms and Discursions | Page 2

and
blazing diamond, which the water tossed up eternally and caught again
as a child catches a ball.
"Now," said the priest, "I have made a tower which is a little worthy of
the sun."

II
But about this time the island was caught in a swarm of pirates; and the
shepherds had to turn themselves into rude warriors and seamen; and at
first they were utterly broken down in blood and shame; and the pirates
might have taken the jewel flung up for ever from their sacred fount.
And then, after years of horror and humiliation, they gained a little and

began to conquer because they did not mind defeat. And the pride of
the pirates went sick within them after a few unexpected foils; and at
last the invasion rolled back into the empty seas and the island was
delivered. And for some reason after this men began to talk quite
differently about the temple and the sun. Some, indeed, said, "You
must not touch the temple; it is classical; it is perfect, since it admits no
imperfections." But the others answered, "In that it differs from the sun,
that shines on the evil and the good and on mud and monsters
everywhere. The temple is of the noon; it is made of white marble
clouds and sapphire sky. But the sun is not always of the noon. The sun
dies daily, every night he is crucified in blood and fire." Now the priest
had taught and fought through all the war, and his hair had grown white,
but his eyes had grown young. And he said, "I was wrong and they are
right. The sun, the symbol of our father, gives life to all those earthly
things that are full of ugliness and energy. All the exaggerations are
right, if they exaggerate the right thing. Let us point to heaven with
tusks and horns and fins and trunks and tails so long as they all point to
heaven. The ugly animals praise God as much as the beautiful. The
frog's eyes stand out of his head because he is staring at heaven. The
giraffe's neck is long because he is stretching towards heaven. The
donkey has ears to hear--let him hear."
And under the new inspiration they planned a gorgeous cathedral in the
Gothic manner, with all the animals of the earth crawling over it, and
all the possible ugly things making up one common beauty, because
they all appealed to the god. The columns of the temple were carved
like the necks of giraffes; the dome was like an ugly tortoise; and the
highest pinnacle was a monkey standing on his head with his tail
pointing at the sun. And yet the whole was beautiful, because it was
lifted up in one living and religious gesture as a man lifts his hands in
prayer.

III
But this great plan was never properly completed. The people had
brought up on great wagons the heavy tortoise roof and the huge necks

of stone, and all the thousand and one oddities that made up that unity,
the owls and the efts and the crocodiles and the kangaroos, which
hideous by themselves might have been magnificent if reared in one
definite proportion and dedicated to the sun. For this was Gothic, this
was romantic, this was Christian art; this was the whole advance of
Shakespeare upon Sophocles. And that symbol which was to crown it
all, the ape upside down, was really Christian; for man is the ape upside
down.
But the rich, who had grown riotous in the long peace, obstructed the
thing, and in some squabble a stone struck the priest on the head and he
lost his memory. He saw piled in front of him frogs and elephants,
monkeys and giraffes, toadstools and sharks, all the ugly things of the
universe which he had collected to do honour to God. But he forgot
why he had collected them. He could not remember the design or the
object. He piled them all wildly into one heap fifty feet high; and when
he had done it all the rich and influential went into a passion of
applause and cried, "This is real art! This is Realism! This is things as
they really are!"
That, I fancy, is the only true origin of Realism. Realism is simply
Romanticism that has lost its reason. This is so not merely in the sense
of insanity but of suicide. It has lost its reason; that is its reason for
existing. The old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their god.
The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs, dwarfs
and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summon all
these million creatures to worship their god; and then have no god for