This really was madness!  The Church had created art, had cherished it for centuries; and now by the effeteness of her sons she was cast into a corner.  All the great movements of our day, one after the other—­romanticism, naturalism—­had been effected independently of her, or even against her will.

If a book were not restricted to the simplest tales, or pleasing fiction ending in virtue rewarded and vice punished, that was enough; the propriety of beadledom was at once ready to bray.

As soon as the most modern form of art, the most malleable and the broadest—­the Novel—­touched on scenes of real life, depicted passion, became a psychological study, an effort of analysis, the army of bigots fell back all along the line.  The Catholic force, which might have been thought better prepared than any others to contest the ground which theology had long since explored, retired in good order, satisfied to cover its retreat by firing from a safe distance, with its old-fashioned match-lock blunderbusses, on works it had neither inspired nor written.

The Church party, centuries behind the time, and having made no attempt to follow the evolution of style in the course of ages, now turned to the rustic who can scarcely read; it did not understand more than half of the words used by modern writers, and had become, it must be said, a camp of the illiterate.  Incapable of distinguishing the good from the bad, it included in one condemnation the filth of pornography and real works of art; in short, it ended by emitting such folly and talking such preposterous nonsense, that it fell into utter discredit and ceased to count at all.

And it would have been so easy for it to work on a little way, to try to keep up with the times, and to understand, to convince itself whether in any given work the author was writing up the Flesh, glorifying it, praising it, and nothing more, or whether, on the contrary, he depicted it merely to buffet it—­hating it.  And, again, it would have done well to convince itself that there is a chaste as well as a prurient nude, and that it should not cry shame on every picture in which the nude is shown.  Above all, it ought to have recognized that vices may well be depicted and studied with a view to exciting disgust of them and showing their horrors.

For, after all, this was the great theory of the Middle Ages, the theological method in sculpture, the literary dogma of the monks of that time; and this is the meaning and purpose of certain groups which even now shock the propriety of our methodistical purists.  These unseemly subjects and images of indecency are very numerous at Saint Benoit on the Loire, in the cathedral of Reims, at le Mans, in the crypt at Bourges, everywhere in our churches; for in those where they do not occur, it is because the prudery which was most rife in the most immoral times, broke them by stoning them in the name of a morality very unlike that which was inculcated by the mediaeval saints.