everything. It has a pompous
Latin name, but it is incurably Gothic and grotesque. One simple proof
of this is that it is always left out of all dignified and decorative
art. There is no perspective in the Elgin Marbles, and even the
essentially angular angels in mediaeval stained glass almost always (as
it says in "Patience") contrive to look both angular and flat. There is
something intrinsically disproportionate and outrageous in the idea of
the distant objects dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer objects
swelling enormous and intolerable. There is something frantic in the
notion that one's own father by walking a little way can be changed by a
blast of magic to a pigmy. There is something farcical in the fancy that
Nature keeps one's uncle in an infinite number of sizes, according to
where he is to stand. All soldiers in retreat turn into tin soldiers;
all bears in rout into toy bears; as if on the ultimate horizon of
the world everything was sardonically doomed to stand up laughable and
little against heaven.

It was for this reason that the old woman and her donkey struck us
first when seen from behind as one black grotesque. I afterwards had
the chance of seeing the old woman, the cart, and the donkey fairly,
in flank and in all their length. I saw the old woman and the donkey
PASSANT, as they might have appeared heraldically on the shield of some
heroic family. I saw the old woman and the donkey dignified, decorative,
and flat, as they might have marched across the Elgin Marbles. Seen thus
under an equal light, there was nothing specially ugly about them; the
cart was long and sufficiently comfortable; the donkey was stolid
and sufficiently respectable; the old woman was lean but sufficiently
strong, and even smiling in a sour, rustic manner. But seen from behind
they looked like one black monstrous animal; the dark donkey cars seemed
like dreadful wings, and the tall dark back of the woman, erect like a
tree, seemed to grow taller and taller until one could almost scream.

Then we went by her with a blasting roar like a railway train, and fled
far from her over the brow of the hill to my friend's home.

There we paused only for my friend to stock the car with some kind of
picnic paraphernalia, and so started again, as it happened, by the way
we had come. Thus it fell that we went shattering down that short, sharp
hill again before the poor old woman and her donkey had managed to crawl
to the top of it;