If I Were An Italian, I Should Feel Bound To Take A
Side; As It Is, I Wish To Leave All Quarrelling Behind Me, Having
As Much Of That In England As Suffices To Keep Me In Good Health
And Temper.
In old times people gave their spiritual and intellectual sop to
Nemesis.
Even when most positive, they admitted a percentage of
doubt. Mr. Tennyson has said well, "There lives more doubt" - I
quote from memory - "in honest faith, believe me, than in half the"
systems of philosophy, or words to that effect. The victor had a
slave at his ear during his triumph; the slaves during the Roman
Saturnalia dressed in their masters' clothes, sat at meat with
them, told them of their faults, and blacked their faces for them.
They made their masters wait upon them. In the ages of faith, an
ass dressed in sacerdotal robes was gravely conducted to the
cathedral choir at a certain season, and mass was said before him,
and hymns chanted discordantly. The elder D'Israeli, from whom I
am quoting, writes: "On other occasions, they put burnt old shoes
to fume in the censers; ran about the church leaping, singing,
dancing, and playing at dice upon the altar, while a BOY BISHOP or
POPE OF FOOLS burlesqued the divine service;" and later on he says:
"So late as 1645, a pupil of Gassendi, writing to his master what
he himself witnessed at Aix on the feast of Innocents, says - 'I
have seen in some monasteries in this province extravagances
solemnised, which pagans would not have practised. Neither the
clergy nor the guardians indeed go to the choir on this day, but
all is given up to the lay brethren, the cabbage cutters, errand
boys, cooks, scullions, and gardeners; in a word, all the menials
fill their places in the church, and insist that they perform the
offices proper for the day. They dress themselves with all the
sacerdotal ornaments, but torn to rags, or wear them inside out;
they hold in their hands the books reversed or sideways, which they
pretend to read with large spectacles without glasses, and to which
they fix the rinds of scooped oranges . . . ; particularly while
dangling the censers they keep shaking them in derision, and
letting the ashes fly about their heads and faces, one against the
other. In this equipage they neither sing hymns nor psalms nor
masses, but mumble a certain gibberish as shrill and squeaking as a
herd of pigs whipped on to market. The nonsense verses they chant
are singularly barbarous:-
Haec est clara dies, clararum clara dierum,
Haec est festa dies festarum festa dierum.'" {8}
Faith was far more assured in the times when the spiritual
saturnalia were allowed than now. The irreverence which was not
dangerous then, is now intolerable. It is a bad sign for a man's
peace in his own convictions when he cannot stand turning the
canvas of his life occasionally upside down, or reversing it in a
mirror, as painters do with their pictures that they may judge the
better concerning them. I would persuade all Jews, Mohammedans,
Comtists, and freethinkers to turn high Anglicans, or better still,
downright Catholics for a week in every year, and I would send
people like Mr. Gladstone to attend Mr. Bradlaugh's lectures in the
forenoon, and the Grecian pantomime in the evening, two or three
times every winter. I should perhaps tell them that the Grecian
pantomime has nothing to do with Greek plays. They little know how
much more keenly they would relish their normal opinions during the
rest of the year for the little spiritual outing which I would
prescribe for them, which, after all, is but another phase of the
wise saying - Surtout point de zele. St. Paul attempted an
obviously hopeless task (as the Church of Rome very well
understands) when he tried to put down seasonarianism. People must
and will go to church to be a little better, to the theatre to be a
little naughtier, to the Royal Institution to be a little more
scientific, than they are in actual life. It is only by pulsations
of goodness, naughtiness, and whatever else we affect that we can
get on at all. I grant that when in his office, a man should be
exact and precise, but our holidays are our garden, and too much
precision here is a mistake.
Surely truces, without even an arriere pensee of difference of
opinion, between those who are compelled to take widely different
sides during the greater part of their lives, must be of infinite
service to those who can enter on them. There are few merely
spiritual pleasures comparable to that derived from the temporary
laying down of a quarrel, even though we may know that it must be
renewed shortly. It is a great grief to me that there is no place
where I can go among Mr. Darwin, Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and
Ray Lankester, Miss Buckley, Mr. Romanes, Mr. Allen, and others
whom I cannot call to mind at this moment, as I can go among the
Italian priests. I remember in one monastery (but this was not in
the Canton Ticino) the novice taught me how to make sacramental
wafers, and I played him Handel on the organ as well as I could. I
told him that Handel was a Catholic; he said he could tell that by
his music at once. There is no chance of getting among our
scientists in this way.
Some friends say I was telling a lie when I told the novice Handel
was a Catholic, and ought not to have done so. I make it a rule to
swallow a few gnats a day, lest I should come to strain at them,
and so bolt camels; but the whole question of lying is difficult.
What IS "lying"? Turning for moral guidance to my cousins the
lower animals, whose unsophisticated nature proclaims what God has
taught them with a directness we may sometimes study, I find the
plover lying when she lures us from her young ones under the
fiction of a broken wing.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 13 of 74
Words from 12268 to 13293
of 75076
