The quiet garden, with
its clumps of box and lavender between paths converging to the statue of
Saint Benedict; the cloisters paved with the monks' nameless graves; the
traces of devotional painting left here and there on the weather-beaten
walls, like fragments of prayer in a world-worn mind: these formed a
circle of tranquillising influences in which he could gradually
reacquire the habit of living.
He had never deceived himself as to the cause of the riots. He knew from
Gamba and Andreoni that the liberals and the court, for once working in
unison, had provoked the blind outburst of fanaticism which a rasher
judgment might have ascribed to the clergy. The Dominicans, bigoted and
eager for power, had been ready enough to serve such an end, and some of
the begging orders had furnished the necessary points of contact with
the people; but the movement was at bottom purely political, and
represented the resistance of the privileged classes to any attack on
their inherited rights.
As such, he could no longer regard it as completely unreasonable. He was
beginning to feel the social and political significance of those old
restrictions and barriers against which his early zeal had tilted.
Certainly in the ideal state the rights and obligations of the different
classes would be more evenly adjusted. But the ideal state was a figment
of the brain. The real one, as Crescenti had long ago pointed out, was
the gradual and heterogeneous product of remote social conditions,
wherein every seeming inconsistency had its roots in some bygone need,
and the character of each class, with its special passions, ignorances
and prejudices, was the sum total of influences so ingrown and
inveterate that they had become a law of thought.
Pages:
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556