Richly-varied experiences in the confessional have been
amplified and irradiated by divine inspiration. I hesitate what to call
this literature, seeing that it was obviously written to the glory of
God and His Virgin Mother. The congregation of the Index, which was
severe in the matter of indecent publications and prohibited Boccaccio's
Decameron on these grounds, hailed with approval the appearance of such
treatises composed, as they were, for the guidance of young priests.
Cruelty (in the shape of the Inquisition) and lasciviousness (as
exemplified by such pious filth) - these are the prime fruits of that
cult of asceticism which for centuries the Government strove to impose
upon south Italy. If the people were saved, it was due to that
substratum of sanity, of Greek sophrosyne, which resisted the one and
derided the other. Whoever has saturated himself with the records will
marvel not so much that the inhabitants preserved some shreds of common
sense and decent feeling, as that they survived at all - he will marvel
that the once fair kingdom was not converted into a wilderness, saintly
but uninhabited, like Spain itself.
For the movement continued in a vertiginous crescendo. Spaniardism
culminated in Bourbonism, and this, again, reached its climax in the
closing years of the eighteenth century, when the conditions of south
Italy baffled description.
