And abuse worthy of those breezy days of
Erasmus, when theologians really said what they thought of each other.
The frank polytheism of Montorio is more to my taste. This outpouring of
papistical rhetoric gives me unwarrantable sensations - it makes me feel
positively Protestant.
Another sign of increasing popularity is that the sacred bacchanals
connected with the "crowning" of various Madonnas were twice as
numerous, in Naples, in the nineteenth as in the eighteenth century. Why
an image of the Mother of God should be decked with this worldly symbol,
as a reward for services rendered, will be obscure only to those who
fail to appreciate the earthly-tangible complexion of southern religion.
Puerility is its key-note. The Italian is either puerile or adult; the
Englishman remains everlastingly adolescent. . . .
Now of course it is open to any one to say that the pious records from
which I have quoted are a desolation of the spirit; that they possess
all the improbability of the "Arabian Nights," and none of their charm;
that all the distempered dreamings to which our poor humanity is subject
have given themselves a rendezvous in their pages. I am not for
disputing the point, and I can understand how one man may be saddened by
their perusal, while another extracts therefrom some gleams of mirth.
For my part, I merely verify this fact: the native has been fed with
this stuff for centuries, and if we desire to enter into his feelings,
we must feed ourselves likewise - up to a point. The past is the key to
the present. That is why I have dwelt at such length on the subject - in
the hope of clearing up the enigma in the national character: the
unpassable gulf, I mean, between the believing and the unbelieving
sections of the community.
An Anglo-Saxon arriving at Bagnara and witnessing a procession in honour
of that Sacred Hat of the Mother of God which has led me into this
disquisition, would be shocked at the degree of bigotry implied. "The
Hat of the Virgin Mary," he would say - "what next?" Then, accosting some
ordinary citizen not in the procession - any butcher or baker - he would
receive a shock of another kind; he would be appalled at the man's
language of contemptuous derision towards everything which he, the
Anglo-Saxon, holds sacred in biblical tradition. There is no attempt,
here, at "reconciliation." The classes calling themselves enlightened
are making a clean sweep of the old gods in a fashion that bewilders us
who have accustomed ourselves to see a providential design in everything
that exists (possibly because our acquaintance with a providentially-
designed Holy Office is limited to an obsolete statute, the genial
de haeretico comburendo). The others, the fetishists, have
remained on the spiritual level of their own saints.
