As she stood there, a slight
impassioned figure, warming to her high argument, his sense of irony was
touched by the incongruity of her background. The wall behind her was
covered by an ancient fresco, fast fading under its touches of renewed
gilding, and representing the patron scholars of the mediaeval world:
the theologians, law-givers and logicians under whose protection the
free city had placed its budding liberties. There they sat, rigid and
sumptuous on their Gothic thrones: Origen, Zeno, David, Lycurgus,
Aristotle; listening in a kind of cataleptic helplessness to a
confession of faith that scattered their doctrines to the winds. As he
looked and listened, a weary sense of the reiterance of things came over
him. For what were these ancient manipulators of ideas, prestidigitators
of a vanished world of thought, but the forbears of the long line of
theorists of whom Fulvia was the last inconscient mouthpiece? The new
game was still played with the old counters, the new jugglers repeated
the old tricks; and the very words now poured out in defence of the new
cause were but mercenaries scarred in the service of its enemies. For
generations, for centuries, man had fought on; crying for liberty,
dreaming it was won, waking to find himself the slave of the new forces
he had generated, burning and being burnt for the same beliefs under
different guises, calling his instinct ideas and his ideas revelations;
destroying, rebuilding, falling, rising, mending broken weapons,
championing extinct illusions, mistaking his failures for achievements
and planting his flag on the ramparts as they fell.
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