We Need More Gargoyles

by Anne White 

Reflecting on the way the brave new world was going in the 1940’s, scholar and critic Russell Kirk wrote, “The men of the Enlightenment had cold hearts and smug heads; now their successors were in the process of imposing a dreary conformity upon the world, with Efficiency and Progress and Equality for their watchwords--abstractions preferred to all those fascinating and lovable peculiarities of human nature and human society which are products of prescription and tradition.” Referring to his admiration of Gothic architecture, he added, “I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.”

In an article written years later, Kirk added, “What we have lacked more than anything else since the Second World War, I suspect, is poetic imagination in the minds of public men.”

John Ruskin, also a huge fan of all things Gothic, predated Kirk’s words about “fascinating and lovable peculiarities” in The Stones of Venice:

For the very first requirement of Gothic architecture being that it shall admit the aid, and appeal to the admiration, of the rudest as well as the most refined minds, the richness of the work is . . . a part of its humility [which is] shown not only in the imperfection, but in the accumulation, of ornament… if the co-operation of every hand, and the sympathy of every heart, are to be received, we must be content to allow the redundance which disguises the failure of the feeble, and wins the regard of the inattentive.

For Russell Kirk, keeping the “poetic imagination” alive meant sidestepping abstractions and going straight to the gargoyles.

For C. S. Lewis, I think, it meant including a bear as part of the household in That Hideous Strength. Without a great deal of explanation as to why.

With that she opened the bathroom door. Inside, sitting up on its hunkers beside the bath and occupying most of the room was a great, snuffly, wheezy, beady-eyed, loose-skinned, gor-bellied brown bear…”Why don’t you go out and take some exercise that lovely afternoon, you great lazy thing?” said Mrs. Maggs. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, sitting there getting in everyone’s way.”

What might poetic imagination mean for us, in a time when dreary conformity has indeed knocked many gargoyles on the head? What might it require of us?

Possibly more humility, with minds that can celebrate the richness of imperfection.

Sometimes more redundance. And certainly less efficiency. It’s harder to take a bath when you have to push the bear out first.

But also…co-operation, sympathy, and “the regard of the inattentive.” Poetic imagination allows grace which is sufficient to “disguise the failure of the feeble.” Efficiency clears out anything or anyone that cannot be conformed or categorized; but imagination finds a place for such things; even, if necessary, turning them into water-spouting gargoyles.

This is our “human nature and human society,” in all its “prescription and tradition.”

Now we must deal with a child of man, who has a natural desire to know the history of his race and of his nation, what men thought in the past and are thinking now; the best thoughts of the best minds taking form as literature, and at its highest as poetry, or, as poetry rendered in the plastic forms of art: as a child of God, whose supreme desire and glory it is to know about and to know his almighty Father: as a person of many parts and passions who must know how to use, care for, and discipline himself, body, mind and soul: as a person of many relationships,––to family, city, church, state, neighbouring states, the world at large: as the inhabitant of a world full of beauty and interest, the features of which he must recognise and know how to name, and a world too, and a universe, whose every function of every part is ordered by laws which he must begin to know. (Charlotte Mason, Philosophy of Education, p. 157)

(“Kirk out.”)