The Note Might Have Been Spared; To A Man The Hospitallers Were
All Brimming With Innocent Talk, And, In My Experience Of The Monastery,
It Was Easier To Begin Than To Break Off A Conversation.
With the
exception of Father Michael, who was a man of the world, they showed
themselves full of kind and healthy interest in all sorts of subjects - in
politics, in voyages, in my sleeping-sack - and not without a certain
pleasure in the sound of their own voices.
As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how they
bear their solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart from any view
of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion
of women, but in this vow of silence. I have had some experience of lay
phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a bacchanalian character; and
seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily
dispersed. With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted
longer. In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch-and-go
association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger
electricity is sure to triumph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of
youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten minutes, and the arts and
sciences, and professional male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet
eyes and a caressing accent. And next after this, the tongue is the
great divider.
I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly criticism of a religious rule;
but there is yet another point in which the Trappist order appeals to me
as a model of wisdom.
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