Some people complain that the working man of our own day does not show an individual interest in his work.  But it will be well to realise that they would be much more annoyed with him if he did.  The medieval workman took so individual an interest in his work that he would call up devils entirely on his own account, carving them in corners according to his own taste and fancy.  He would even reproduce the priests who were his patrons and make them as ugly as devils; carving anti-clerical caricatures on the very seats and stalls of the clerics.  If a modern householder, on entering his own bathroom, found that the plumber had twisted the taps into the images of two horned and grinning fiends, he would be faintly surprised.  If the householder, on returning at evening to his house, found the door-knocker distorted into a repulsive likeness of himself, his surprise might even be tinged with disapproval.  It may be just as well that builders and bricklayers do not gratuitously attach gargoyles to our smaller residential villas.  But well or ill, it is certainly true that this feature of a flexible popular fancy has never reappeared in any school of architecture or any state of society since the 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.