Из книги: ITALIAN FANTASIES
The thunder continued but it was again the roar of an arena, though by the towered old palaces round the great semi-circle of cobbled piazza and by the fountain with the bas-reliefs of Christian virtues I knew I was back in Italy, in my beloved Siena. But what was this smoky flame that shot skyward and what was this tree near the Christian fountain that they were breaking up to throw on the bonfire? What was this dreadful sport that had replaced the Palio?
In a vast pyre burnt a great huddle of writhing figures, whose shrieks were drowned by the fiendish roar of the drunken mob.
“_Viva Maria! Viva Maria!_”
And I remembered that Siena had peculiarly dedicated itself to the Holy Mother, was the _civitas Virginis_, and that the Madonna was its feudal suzerain, formally presented with the keys of its gates. Visions from the old chronicles floated before me—the dedication of 1260, the weeping Syndic in his shirt, a rope round his neck, prostrate with the Bishop before the altar of the Virgin, or walking behind her as she was carried in the great barefoot procession to the chanting of Ave Marias; and the victory over Florence that duly followed, when, throwing her white mantle of mist over her city, she enabled her faithful feudatories to slay ten thousand Florentines “as a butcher slays animals in a slaughter house,” so that the Malena ran bank-high with blood, and the region, polluted by the carcases of eighteen thousand horses, was abandoned to the wild beasts, and coins were struck in her honour; and the renewed dedications whenever the Commune was in peril, the gorgeous processions and “Te Deums,” the great silk standard showing the Madonna rising into heaven over the city, the Cardinal, the Prior, the Captain of the People, the Signoria in violet and cloaked as on Good Friday, the trumpeters trumpeting in the striped Duomo, the feudal keys in a silver basin, the fifty poor damsels in white, dowered annually so long as the Virgin did her duty as suzerain——
But the shrieks from the bonfire brought me back to the moment.
“Whom are they burning?” I cried in horror.
“Only Jews,” replied my neighbour reassuringly, and indeed, I could now distinguish the Hebrew death-cries of the victims.
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One.”
“We burn them and the Tree of Liberty together!” my neighbour chuckled. “No godless French Republic for us!” A fierce yell from the crowd underlined his remark. He craned forward, beaming, exalted.
“They have found another! O Blessed Virgin of Comfort, they have found another!”
And I perceived, dragged along towards the pyre by her greying hair, a little olive-eyed Jewish mother, whose worn face I seemed to recognise under her dishevelled head-shawl.
“_Viva Maria! Viva Maria! Viva la Madre di Dio!_”
* * * * *
The spectacle was too horrible. With a convulsive shudder I shook off these visions and rose, cramped, to my feet. The sun was dipping beyond the mountains of Vicenza, the peaceful bell from below was still tolling, the air was cool and delicious. Now I could continue my climb to the church of Our Lady of the Mountain. And the loving epithets recommenced—“_Debellatrix Incredulorum_,” “_Janua Coeli_,” “_Turris Davidica_,” without pause, without end. And as I walked, other of her countless names began crowding upon me, from “Our Lady of Snows” to “Our Lady of Sorrows,” from “Our Lady of the Porringer” to “The Queen of the Angels,” and all the symbols of her, from the Pomegranate to the Sealed Book, from the Dove to the Porta Clausa; and all the myriads of churches and altars that had been dedicated to her from Rome to Ecuador—from Milan Cathedral with its hundred spires to the humblest wayside shrine of Sicily or Mexico—and all the feasts, all the “Months of Maria,” all the Pilgrimages, with all the medals and missals, all the effigies in wood or wax or bronze, all the marbles and mosaics, from the crude little black sacrosanct Byzantine figures to the exquisitely tender marble Pietà of Michelangelo, and all the convents and orders she had created, all the Enfants de Marie, and Serviti di Maria, and Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, and all the hymns, antiphons, litanies, lections, carols, canticles. The air was full of organ sounds and the melody of soaring voices. “Ave Maris Stella” they sang, and “Salve Regina” and “Stabat Mater,” and then in an infinite incantation, sounding and resounding from all the spaces of the world: “_Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis! Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!_” And her figure floated before me, pure, radiant, loving, as it has floated before millions of households for hundreds of years, consoling, blessing, vitalising.
And I thought of her long adventure to reach this marvellous apotheosis: in what a strange little source this mighty river had begun; how that looseness of the Septuagint translator in rendering the Hebrew for “maiden” by “virgin” in an utterly irrelevant passage of Isaiah had led to Mary’s virginity; how she had remained a virgin through all the vicissitudes of her married life, Joseph turning into a man of eighty with children by his former wife, or even remaining virgin himself, the brothers of Jesus changing into his cousins; how her son had been born as a ray of light or even as an illusive appearance; how, with the growth of theology and Mariolatry and nunneries and monasteries, she had grown holier and holier, immaculate, impeccable, a model to men and maidens, the Queen of Heaven, mighty beyond all the saints, giving four feast-days to the Church, entering into the liturgy, redeeming souls from purgatory on Assumption Day, and even sustaining the saintly with her milk; how her final purification from the taint of original sin had been a stumbling block for the more rigid theologians, St. Bernard opposing the festival, Aquinas and the Dominicans denying the dogma against Duns Scotus and the Franciscans; but how the “intellectuals”—so serviceable to the mob when their logic found contorted reasons for the popular faith—were sooner or later swept aside, the harsh definers of heresy themselves left heretics, when they ran counter to the popular emotion, the popular festivals, the popular instinct for an ideal of purity and perfection. What a curious play and interplay of schoolman-logic and living emotion, working ceaselessly through the centuries, combining or competing to re-shape and sublimate the carpenter’s wife till she was wrought to the mould of the popular need, her very parents, unknown to the Gospels, becoming, as Joachim and Anna, the centre of a fresh cycle of legends, pictures, Church festivals. And what uncountable volumes of monumental learning and jejune controversy, from Augustus and Anselm and the venerable Bede to the two thousand and twelve pages of Carlo Passaglia of Lucca, the respondent to Renan!
And my thoughts turned from the theologians to the poets and painters, to the _Vergine Bella e di sol vestita_—the beautiful Apocalyptic Virgin, clothed with the sun—of Petrarch, and the weeping Virgin of Tasso, and the _Vergine Madre Figlia del tuo Figlio_ of Dante, and the images in all these forms created by the artists, for whom the Madonna sufficed to open all the mansions of art; who could cluster all the poetry of the world round her glory or her grief, were it rural loveliness or the beauty of lilies, or lofty architecture, or space-rhythm, or begemmed and brocaded attire, or the sculptural nude; who set her rich-carved throne, adorned with arabesques or hued in strange green and gold, amid palatial pillars under diapered ceilings or within glamorous landscapes, or in the bowers of roses or under the shadow of lemon-trees; who even crowned her with the Papal tiara.
But none of these images would stay with me: for not even the triple crown, surmounted by the golden globe and cross, not even this symbol of temporal, spiritual, and purgatorial authority, could banish the worn face of the carpenter’s wife under the cheap head-shawl, the little olive-eyed mother in Israel, in whose ears sounded and resounded the terrible words: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”
THE EARTH THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE: OR THE ABSURDITY OF ASTRONOMY
From the swinging of the bronze lamp in the nave of Pisa Cathedral Galileo caught the idea of measuring Time by the pendulum; by the telescope he made at Padua he mapped Space. Within a decade of the burning of Giordano Bruno the heavens were opened up to show the infinity of worlds, and the heliocentric teaching of Copernicus was confirmed by the revelation of Jupiter’s satellites. What the _Sidereus Nuncius_ of Galileo announced was the end of an era. By this terrible book and his terrible telescope the poor little earth was pushed out of the centre of the stage. The moon—no longer _teres atque rotunda_—lost her beautiful spheric smoothness, her very light was a loan—unrepaid. Great _Sol_, himself, the old lord of creation, gradually sank to the obscure coryphæus of some choric dance veering towards and around some ineffable pivot in a measureless choragium. The ninefold vault engirdling Dante’s universe was shrivelled up. The cosy cosmos was replaced by a maze of solar systems, glory beyond glory, of milky ways that were but clouds of worlds, thick as a haze of summer insects or a whirl of sand in the Sahara. The poor human brain reeled in this simoom of stars, and to complete its confusion, the philosophers hastened to assure it that with the universe no longer geocentric, man could no longer flatter himself to be its central interest.
“So many nobler bodies to create, Greater, so manifold, to this one use,”
appeared disproportionate to Milton’s Adam. _Homo_ could not be the Master-Builder’s main concern—the great human tragedy was a by-product. A sad conclusion, and possibly a true—but a conclusion utterly unwarranted by these premises. More sanely did the beneficent and facile Raphael remind the doubting Adam,
“Whether heaven moves or earth Imports not.”
The noble astronomic questionings in the eighth book of “Paradise Lost” testify to the ferment among the first inhabitants of the new cosmos—Milton was born in the same year as the telescope and met Galileo at Florence—but despite the poet’s half-hearted protests, man has swallowed too humbly the doctrine that our earth is not the centre of the universe. Pray do not confound me with those pious pundits whose proofs of the flatness of the earth are still the hope of a lingering sect, and a witness to the immortality of human stupidity. I am no Muggletonian whose sun is four miles from the earth. I have no lance to tilt against the mathematicians and their tubes. But I fail to see how the mere broadening out of our universe can displace _Terra_ from the centre. Till we have the final and all-inclusive chart of the heavens—and worlds immeasurable are still beyond our ken, worlds whose light speeding to us at eleven million miles or so a minute is still on its way—how can any one assert conclusively that our earth is not in the exact centre of all the systems? That it goes round the sun—instead of being the centre of the sun’s revolution—is nothing against its supremacy or central status. The fire exists for the meat, though the _spit_ revolves and not the fire.
And if the earth be not in the centre of the systems, it assuredly remains at the centre of Space. For by that old definition of Hermes Trismegistus to which Pascal gave currency, every point of an infinite area is really its centre, even as no point is its circumference. And in a psychological sense too, wherever a spectator stands is the centre of the universe.
But grant the earth be not the centre of Space or the systems! What then? How does it lose its lofty estate? Is London at the globe’s kernel? Did the axis pass through Rome? Kepler wasted much precious time under the current philosophic obsession that the orbits of the planets must be circular—since any figure less perfect than a circle were incompatible with their dignity. Hence the cumbrous hypotheses to explain their apparent deviation from perfection, hence was the sphere girt
“With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.”
The same fallacy of symmetry surely underlies the notion that the earth is dethroned from its hegemony of the stellar system merely because the lines drawn to it from every _ultima Thule_ of the universe are unequal. ’Tis a confusion of geometric centre with centre of forces. It may be that just this asymmetric station was necessary for the evolution of the universe’s crowning race.
For if the Universe has not its aim and centre in man, pray to what other end all this planetary pother? If man is but a by-product of the cosmic laboratory, what is the staple? Till this question is answered, we may safely continue anthropocentric.
Man abased forsooth by this whirl of mammoth worlds! Nay, ’tis our grandeur that stands exalted, our modesty that stands corrected. We did not dream that our facture required such colossal machinery, that to engender us a billion billion planets must be in experimental effervescence. A fig upon their size! Do we rank Milton inferior to the megatherium? Can a man take thought by adding a cubit to his stature? The ant is wiser than the alligator, and the sprawling saurians of the primal slime may have their analogue in the huge weltering worlds that have never evolved a human brain. And had the earth swollen herself to the gross amplitude of the sun, her case were no better: she would still be—in the infinite wash of Space—a pebble, even as a pebble is a stellar system in miniature. There lies the paradox of infinity. Nothing in it is large enough to be important—if quantity is the criterion of importance. To be in one spot of Space is as dignified or undignified as to be in another. Why, I wonder, has position in Time escaped this invidious criticism. As well assert that nothing important can happen or nothing that happens can be important, because everything must happen at a mere point of Time, which is not even Time’s _central_ point. It was a truer sense of values that made Christendom and Islam boldly place their foundation at Time’s central point, up to which or back to which all the ages lead. The year One begins with Christ’s birth, with Mohammed’s Hegira. In the same spirit, though with a more literal belief, did the old cartographers draw their world round Jerusalem as a centre. Position in Time or Space is not the measure of importance, but importance is the measure of position in Time or Space. Where the highest life is being lived, there is the centre of the world, and unless a higher life is lived elsewhere, the centre of the universe. Not, where are we in Space, but are we on the central lines of cosmic evolution? That is the question.
Theology, then, stands where it did, wherever _Terra_ stands. Not the mythical theology of sacred books, but the scientific theology of sacred facts. The expansion of the universe from a mapped parish to a half-uncharted wilderness of worlds cannot shake religion—a Deity is more suitably lodged in infinity than on a roof-garden—but it did shake the Church, so recklessly committed to a disprovable cosmogony. And the Church burnt books and men with its habitual consuming zeal, denying the motion of the earth as it had denied the Antipodes, clinging to an earth surrounded by menial planets, as it had clung to the flat plane of “Christian Topography.”
But is there nothing to be said for the Churchmen? Were they mere venomous obscurantists? Nay, they were patriots fighting for their father-world, for the cosmos of their ancestors, _pro aris et focis_. They saw their little universe threatened by the rise of a great stellar empire. They saw themselves about to be swallowed up and lost in its measureless magnificence. And so in a frenzy of chauvinism they gagged Galileo and burned Giordano Bruno, those traitors in the camp, in league with Reason, emperor of the stars.
But despite the Church’s defeat, our little globe still maintains a sturdy independence. And until you bring me evidence of a superior genus, I shall continue to regard our good red earth as the centre of creation, and man as the focus of inter-celestial planetary forces.
Millions of spiritual creatures may walk the earth unseen, as Milton asserts, and millions more may be invisible in Mars and the remoter seats of the merry-go-round, but _de non apparentibus et de non existentibus eadem est ratio_. It is William James who of all philosophers in the world would argue our fates regulated by superior beings with whom we co-exist as with us our cats and dogs. The analogy has not even one leg to stand on. The cat and the dog have solid proof of our existence, they see and hear us, and we share with them a large segment of existence. Our anatomy and theirs are much of a muchness. They divide with us our food and our drink and bask at the same fire, nay, it requires a vast conceit to look them in the face and deny our kinship. But who save Gulliver hath beheld a bodily Superman or partaken of his meals? Even with our spiritual superiors, with our Shakespeares and Beethovens, we have a substantial basis of identity. The range of thought which circumscribes ours must at the same time partially coincide with it, and though our thoughts be not wholly their thoughts, their thoughts must needs be partially ours.
God may be infinitely more than man, but He is not finitely less. Even a God without humour would be—to that extent—man’s inferior. Matthew Arnold’s gibe of the “magnified non-natural man” is groundless. I do not become a magnified non-natural dog because I have attributes in common with my terrier. The God of theology is already divested of man’s matter; deflate Him likewise of man’s spirit, and what remains? In robbing their Deity of all human traits the de-anthropomorphic philosophers have overshot the mark and reduced Him to a transcendental nullity who can neither be comprehended by His creatures nor comprehend them.
Or if they allow Him ideas and passions, they neutralise and sterilise them in a frenzy of scholastic paradox. “_Amas, nec æstuas_,” cries St. Augustine, “_zelas et securus es; pænitet te et non doles; irasceris et tranquillus es_.” God repents, but without regret; He is angry but perfectly tranquil. To evade the limitations of any attribute we endow Him at the same time with its opposite, as who should say a white negro. But such violent assaults upon the unthinkable yield no prize either of understanding or of satisfaction.
If “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” be not that same love which a noble man may feel for his fellow-creatures of every order of being, if it be a love that is at the same time indifference, or even hate, then it may equally be expressed as “the hate which moves the sun and the other stars” (and which is at the same time love). Or it may find far honester expression as the agnostic’s unknowable—the X that moves the sun and the other stars. If God’s justice be not man’s justice, then it is no justice. It _must_ be our justice—if it is justice at all—our justice, only occupied and obscured by innumerable pros and cons to us unknown, and extending over times and spaces beyond our ken, so that were we placed in possession of all the evidence we should applaud the verdict. The philosophers do but narrow their God under illusion of broadening Him—or rather they broaden Him so tenuously that He becomes an infinite impalpability, whose accidental evaporation would scarcely be noted. It was a more consistent mystic who said: “God may not improperly be styled nothing.”
So that our circumnavigation of the infinite brings us back to our noble selves and our own door-step. The sun is still there to give us light by day, and the moon and stars still shine to give us light by night. Nor is it less their function to nourish us with beauty and with mystery.
“When Science from Creation’s face Enchantment’s veil withdraws, What lovely visions yield their place To cold material laws!”
Campbell, who thus complained, was no profound poet. The laws are neither cold nor material, nor do the lovely visions yield their place. Their loveliness is as abiding as the laws which produce them. ’Tis true that at first Galileo seemed to have profaned Cynthia, the “goddess excellently bright.” The moon, the beautiful moon of poets and lovers, lay betrayed—a dead planet, a scarred desolation, seamed with arid ravines and pitted with a pox of craters. Is then the moon of the poets a delusion which science bids us put away like a childish toy? No, by her own heavens, no. A more scientific science restores the glamour. The moon has all the beauty she appears to have. The loveliest woman’s face, viewed through a magnifying glass, appears equally scarred and seamed and pitted. But here ’tis the lens that is accused of falsification, ’tis the ugliness that is pronounced the delusion—a face was meant to be seen at a certain distance and with the natural eye. Even so—and the moon chose _her_ distance with admirable discretion.
The synthesis of everyday reality is always man’s central verity. The peering unnatural scientific vision of the moon has the lesser truth, is but a spectral rim of the whole-orbed reality. ’Tis the poet’s moon that is the full moon. But the poet were as foolish as the astronomer if he in his turn imagined himself dealing with absolutes, if he forgot that in logic as in landscape all views depend on the point at which you place yourself. It is only from the true point of view that the earth remains the centre of the universe.
OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS: OR THE EMPTINESS OF RELIGIONS
And what is the invasion of our consciousness by the extended stellar system to its invasion by the intensive infinities of our own globular parish? The endless galaxy of the centuries and the civilisations has opened out before our telescopic thought. We are no longer at the centre of our cosmos—we can no longer snuggle in a cosy conceptual world, Classical or Christian, nor can we make the best of both these worlds, like Raphael or Milton. The dim populations have become lurid. Japan pours her art upon us, and her equal claim to hold a chosen people—“pursuing,” as its Emperor’s oath declares, “a policy co-extensive with the heavens and the earth.” Egypt unrolls the teeming scroll of her immemorial dynasties. The four hundred millions of China lie on our imaginations like a nightmare in yellow, and we perceive that the maker of man hath a predilection for pigtails. India opens out her duskily magnificent infinities and we are grown familiar with Brahma and Vishnu, with Vedas and Buddha-Jâtakas. Persia reveals to us in the Zend Avesta of Zoroaster a strangely modern gospel, glimmering through grotesque images of space and time. Mohammed is no longer an Infidel, and we recognise the subtlety alike of the Motekallamin and the Arabic Aristotelians. We respect the Norse Gods and the great Tree Yggdrasil. The Teutonic divinities have reappeared in every part of the civilised earth and their operatic voice is heard with more reverence than any other god’s. Even the old Peruvian civilisation solicits us, that successful social order of the Incas. The stellar swirl of worlds is a crude puzzle in quantity beside these mental worlds which the peoples have spun for themselves like cocoons.
But not only the peoples. Each creature that has ever lived, from the spider to Shakespeare, has spun for itself its own cosmos. Microcosm we cannot call this cosmos, since that implies the macrocosm drawn to smaller scale, and this—like all creations—is a mere selection from the universe, excluding and including after its own idiosyncrasy. Autocosm is the word we need for it—a new word, but a phenomenon as old as the first created consciousness, and a phenomenon that has never perfectly repeated itself since that day. For no two autocosms have ever been precisely alike. In the lower orders of being the autocosm may be substantially identical throughout all the individuals of the species, but as we mount in the grade of organisation, the autocosm becomes more and more individual. And even the large generic autocosms, how variously compounded—the scent-world of dogs, the eye-world of birds, the uncanny touch-world of bats, the earth-world of worms, the water-world of fishes, the gyroscopic world of dancing-mice, the flesh-world of parasites, the microscopic world of microbes. These worlds do not need untrammelled orbits, they intersect one another inextricably in an infinite interlacing. Yet each is a symmetric sphere of being, a rounded whole, and to its denizens the sole and self-sufficient cosmos. One creature’s poison is another creature’s meat, one creature’s offal is another creature’s paradise, and our cemetery is a nursery aswarm with creeping mites. If on the one hand Nature seems a wasteful housekeeper, scattering a thousand seeds that one may bear, on the other hand she appears ineffably ingenious in economising every ort and oddment, every cheese-paring and scum-drop as the seed-plot of new and joyous existence. Life, like an infinite nebulous spirit, bursts in through every nook and cranny of matter, squeezing itself into every possible and improbable mould, and even filling a chink in an existing creature rather than remain outside organisation. And each atom of spirit that achieves material existence takes its cramped horizons for the boundaries of the universe and itself as the centre of creation. Woe indeed to the creature that has seen beyond its own boundaries, that can weave no cosy autocosm to nestle in. This is what happens to your Shakespeares and your Schopenhauers; this is the “Everlasting Nay” of “Sartor Resartus.” Life is become
“A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”
Such an autocosm is the shirt of Nessus. Hercules must tear it off or perish. And we are all the time changing our autocosms. That is the meaning of experience. Only the fool dies in the same cosmos in which he was born, and a great teacher or a great statesman changes the autocosm of his generation.
Here be the true weavings with which Time’s Shuttle is busy, these endless patternings and re-patternings of mental worlds, adjusted to ever-changing creatures, and ever-shifting circumstances. The birth and death of planets is stability compared with this mercurial flux, which in the human world is known as movements of thought and religion, growths and decays of language, periods of art and politics. History is the clash of autocosms, and every war is a war of the worlds.
As I walk into Milan Cathedral, the modern autocosm fades out with the buzz and tingle of the electric cars that engirdle the great old building, and the massive walls of the mediæval autocosm shut me into a glowing gloom of unearthly radiance, whose religious hush is accentuated by the sound of soft bells. Only the dominating figure on the cross seems out of tone; this blood is too violent for peace. What a paradox that the Christians are such dominant races—perhaps they needed this brake. But even without the blood, the cruciform dusk of the interior is in discord with the lace-work of the exterior, recalls the sombreness below the glittering Renaissance. All this multitudinous microscopic work is waste, all this wealth of fretwork and final, for it is only at a distance, when the details have faded into the mass, that this mass appears noble. And this, too, is like the Catholic autocosm, with its rococo detail and its massive magnificence.
And round the Cathedral, as I said, rages the modern order—is not Milan the metropolis of Italian science and do not all tram-roads lead to the Piazza del Duomo?—and a ballet I saw in La Scala danced the carmagnole of the new world. “Excelsior” was its jubilant motto, the ascent being from Cathedrals to Railway Bridges and Balloons. A Shining Spirit of Light (_Luce_) inspired Civiltà and baffled the priestly powers of darkness (_Tenebre_), while ineffably glittering coryphées proclaimed with their toes “Eureka!”
But ah! my dear Corybants of Reason, an autocosm may be habitable and even comfortable in despite of Science. Its working value is independent of its containing false materials, or true materials in false proportions. And yet, my dear devotees of Pragmatism—that parvenu among Philosophies—its utility does not establish its truth. A false coin will do all the work of a true coin so long as it is not found out. Nevertheless there exists a test of coins independent of their power of gulling the public. And there exists a name for those who continue to circulate a coin _after_ they know it to be false. The Pragmatist may apply his philosophy to justify past forms of belief and action, now outmoded, but he will do infinite mischief if he tries to juggle himself or the world into such forms of belief or action _because_ they lead to spiritual and practical satisfactions.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to _believe_!
Nay, it is doubtful whether satisfaction can come as the sequel of any but a genuine and involuntary belief. There is much significance in the story of the old Welsh lady who desired the removal of the mountain in front of her window and complained to her pastor that all her prayers had been unable to move it a single inch. “Because you have not _real_ faith,” was the glib clerical reply. Whereupon, resolved to have “_real_ faith,” the old lady spent a night of prayer on her knees opposite the mountain. When morning came, and she rolled up the blind, lo! the mountain stood as before. “There!” she exclaimed. “_Just as I expected!_”
This pseudo-faith is, I fear, all that the Pragmatist can beguile or batter himself into, for if he has real faith he needs no Pragmatism to justify it by.