The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
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 society (unknown in religious societies,
Moslem as well as Christian) the detestable denial of all dignity
to the poor. I am not speaking now of moral but of artistic things;
of the concrete arts and crafts used in popular worship.
Well, my imaginary pilgrim would walk past Kensington Gardens till
his sight was blasted by a prodigy. He would either fall on his
knees as before a shrine, or cover his face as from a sacrilege.
He would have seen the Albert Memorial. There is nothing so conspicuous
in Jerusalem. There is nothing so gilded and gaudy in Jerusalem.
Above all, there is nothing in Jerusalem that is on so large
a scale and at the same time in so gay and glittering a style.
My simple Eastern Christian would almost certainly be driven to
cry aloud, "To what superhuman God was this enormous temple erected?
I hope it is Christ; but I fear it is Antichrist." Such, he would think,
might well be the great and golden image of the Prince of the World,
set up in this great open space to receive the heathen prayers
and heathen sacrifices of a lost humanity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account