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