But The
Englishman With Ingenuous Ardour Thinks To Believe In The Burning Bush
Wonder, And In So Far His Intelligence
Is infected; with equal ardour he
excludes the cow-performance from the range of possibility; and to him
it matters
Considerably which of the miracles are true and which are
false, seeing that his conduct is supposed to take colour from such
supernatural events. Ultra-credulous as to one set of narratives, he has
no credulity left for other sets; he concentrates his believing energies
upon a small space, whereas the Italian's are diffused, thinly, over a
wide area. It is the old story: Gothic intensity and Latin spaciousness.
So the Gothic believer takes his big dose of irrationalism on one fixed
day; the Latin, by attending Mass every morning, spreads it over the
whole week. And the sombre strenuousness of our northern character
expects a remuneration for this outlay of faith, while the other
contents himself with such sensuous enjoyment as he can momentarily
extract from his ceremonials. That is why our English religion has a
democratic tinge distasteful to the Latin who, at bottom, is always a
philosopher; democratic because it relies for its success, like
democratic politicians, upon promises - promises that may or may not be
kept - promises that form no part (they are only an official appendage)
of the childlike paganism of the south. . . .
Fifteen francs will buy you a reliable witness for a south Italian
lawsuit; you must pay a good deal more in England. Thence one might
argue that the cult of credulity implied by these saintly biographies is
responsible for this laxness, for the general disregard of veracity. I
doubt it. I am not inclined to blame the monkish saint-makers for this
particular trait; I suspect that for fifteen francs you could have
bought a first-class witness under Pericles. Southerners are not yet
pressed for time; and when people are not pressed for time, they do not
learn the time-saving value of honesty. Our respect for truth and fair
dealing, such as it is, derives from modern commerce; in the Middle Ages
nobody was concerned about honesty save a few trading companies like the
Hanseatic League, and the poor mediaeval devil (the only gentleman of
his age) who was generally pressed for time and could be relied upon to
keep his word. Even God, of whom they talked so much, was systematically
swindled. Where time counts for nothing, expeditious practices between
man and man are a drug in the market. Besides, it must be noted that
this churchly misteaching was only a fraction of that general shattering
which has disintegrated all the finer fibres of public life. It stands
to reason that the fragile tissues of culture are dislocated, and its
delicate edges defaced, by such persistive governmental brutalization as
the inhabitants have undergone. None but the grossest elements in a
people can withstand enduring misrule; none but a mendacious and servile
nature will survive its wear and tear. So it comes about that up to a
few years ago the nobler qualities which we associate with those old
Hellenic colonists - their intellectual curiosity, their candid outlook
upon life, their passionate sense of beauty, their love of nature - all
these things had been abraded, leaving, as residue, nothing save what
the Greeks shared with ruder races. There are indications that this
state of affairs is now ending.
The position is this. The records show that the common people never took
their saints to heart in the northern fashion - as moral exemplars; from
beginning to end, they have only utilized them as a pretext for fun and
festivals, a means of brightening the cata-combic, the essentially
sunless, character of Christianity. So much for the popular saints, the
patrons and heroes. The others, the ecclesiastical ones, are an
artificial product of monkish institutions. These monkeries were
established in the land by virtue of civil authority. Their continued
existence, however, was contingent upon the goodwill of the Vatican. One
of the surest and cheapest methods of obtaining this goodwill was to
produce a satisfactory crop of saints whose beatification swelled the
Vatican treasury with the millions collected from a deluded populace for
that end. The monks paid nothing; they only furnished the saint and, in
due course, the people's money. Can we wonder that they discovered
saints galore? Can we wonder that the Popes were gratified by their
pious zeal?
So things went on till yesterday. But now a large proportion of the ten
thousand (?) churches and monasteries of Naples are closed or actually
in ruins; wayside sanctuaries crumble to dust in picturesque fashion;
the price of holy books has fallen to zero, and the godly brethren have
emigrated to establish their saint-manufactories elsewhere. Not without
hope of success; for they will find purchasers of their wares wherever
mankind can be interested in that queer disrespect of the body which is
taught by the metaphysical ascetics of the East.
It was Lewes, I believe, who compared metaphysics to ghosts by saying
that there was no killing either of them; one could only dissipate them
by throwing light into the dark places they love to inhabit - to show
that nothing is there. Spectres, likewise, are these saintly caricatures
of humanity, perambulating metaphysics, the application in corpore
vili of Oriental fakirism. Nightmare-literature is the crazy recital of
their deeds and sufferings. Pathological phantoms! The state of mind
which engenders and cherishes such illusions is a disease, and it has
been well said that "you cannot refute a disease." You cannot nail
ghosts to the counter.
But a ray of light . . .
XXXII
ASPROMONTE, THE CLOUD-GATHERER
Day was barely dawning when we left Delianuova and began the long and
weary climb up Montalto. Chestnuts gave way to beeches, but the summit
receded ever further from us. And even before reaching the uplands, the
so-called Piano di Carmelia, we encountered a bank of bad weather. A
glance at the map will show that Montalto must be a cloud-gatherer,
drawing to its flanks every wreath of vapour that rises from Ionian and
Tyrrhenian; a west wind was blowing that morning, and thick fogs clung
to the skirts of the peak.
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