אבנימ

“…considering the generally awful state of contemporary “fine arts” as but one of the blighted fruits of our Enlightenment/Modernist worldview confusion—which is in turn just part and parcel of our madcap refusal to receive Christendom’s great cultural, intellectual, and spiritual legacy…this long-forgotten C.S. Lewis poem… really seems to say it all…"

~ George Grant

No. It’s an impudent falsehood. Men did not
Invariably think the newer way
Prosaic, mad, inelegant, or what not.

Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church? Did anybody say
How modern and how ugly? They did not.

Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror? They were not.

If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?

Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.

If a quack doctor’s breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway
All that I can’t do now, all that I could?

So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.