| Will kein Gott auf Erde sein?Sind wir selber Götter. | ||
| W. MÜLLER. | ||
THROUGH the years Father Soledano had remained a fairly frequent visitor at the house of the Folyats. His was the only really constant intimacy that Francis enjoyed, and it was based on the kinship of their humour and their common taste for mental caricature. Both strangers to our town and dwelling outside its activity, they loved to foregather and burlesque its politics, its manners, and its worship of money. Father Soledano went further than Francis and poked his fun at English institutions, though then he became malicious and Francis could not see eye to eye with him. Francis had no politics save a dislike for Mr. Gladstone and a distrust of Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, and he knew too little of modern English literature to be able to appreciate the priest’s sarcasms at the expense of Carlyle, Ruskin, George Eliot, or Robert Browning. He had never heard of George Meredith, but he became almost angry when Soledano scoffed at Dickens and Thackeray. . . .
Their discussions used to take place on Sunday evenings in the study, and it often happened that Serge was present. One Sunday night when, as often happened, Soledano, harked back to the Manchester murders, he launched out upon a violent assault upon England, and quoted once more words that were often upon his lips, words of the mother of Charles Stewart Parnell:
“‘The English are hated everywhere for their arrogance, greed, cant, and hypocrisy. They want us all to think they are so goody-goody. They are simply thieves.’”
“Oh! come, come,” said Francis, “not so bad as that. After all we have given the world a good deal and showed the way to other nations in many things.”
“You have shown the other nations how to steal.”
“I don’t think any nation, or any collective body of men who have pooled their sense of right and wrong need much instruction in that,” said Serge. “It is simply a question of stealing from a body of men weaker than themselves. Men in the mass are abominable. There isn’t anything to choose between England and France, or Italy, or the new German Empire or America. England has been more successful than the rest and has therefore had more opportunity of doing harm. . . .”
“Good as well,” put in Francis. “Good as well.”
“Only incidentally and by accident,” retorted Soledano. “What I contend is that you cannot have collective villainy and individual virtue, collective bad action and individual good action.”