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For the new expels the old:
Shadows fly before the noon:
Light hath hunted out the night.”
How bold and coarse ye are! Was it this we asked of you, children rash and wayward, when we told you to be as children? We offered you milk; you are drinking wine. We led you softly, bridle in hand, along the narrow path. Mild and fearful, ye hesitated to go forward: and now, all at once, the bridle is broken; the course is cleared at a single bound. Ah! how foolish we were to let you make your own saints; to dress out the altar; to deck, to burden, to cover it up with flowers! Why, it is hardly distinguishable! And what we do see is the old heresy condemned of the Church, the innocence of nature: what am I saying?—a new heresy, not like to end to-morrow, the independence of man.
Listen and obey!—You are forbidden to invent, to create. No more legends, no more new saints: we have had enough of them. You are forbidden to introduce new chants in your worship: inspiration is not allowed. The martyrs you would bring to light should stay modestly within their tombs, waiting to be recognised by the Church. The clergy, the monks are forbidden to grant the tonsure of civil freedom to husbandmen and serfs. Such is the narrow fearful spirit that fills the Church of the Carlovingian days.[11] She unsays her words, she gives herself the lie, she says to the children, “Be old!”
A fall indeed! But is this earnest? They had bidden us all be young.—Ah! but priest and people are no longer one. A divorce without end begins, a gulf unpassable divides them for ever. The priest himself, a lord and prince, will come out in his golden cope, and chant in the royal speech of that great empire which is no more. For ourselves, a mournful company, bereft of human speech, of the only speech that God would care to hear, what else can we do but low and bleat with the guileless friends who never scorn us, who, in winter-time will keep us warm in their stable, or cover us with their fleeces? We will live with dumb beasts, and be dumb ourselves.
In sooth there is less need than before for our going to church. But the church will not hold us free: she insists on our returning to hear what we no longer understand. Thenceforth a mighty fog, a fog heavy and dun as lead, enwraps the world. For how long? For a whole millennium of horror. Throughout ten centuries, a languor unknown to all former times seizes upon the Middle Ages, even in part on those latter days that come midway betwixt sleep and waking, and holds them under the sway of a visitation most irksome, most unbearable; that convulsion, namely, of mental weariness, which men call a fit of yawning.
When the tireless bell rings at the wonted hours, they yawn; while the nasal chant is singing in the old Latin words, they yawn. It is all foreseen, there is nothing to hope for in the world, everything will come round just the same as before. The certainty of being bored to-morrow sets one yawning from to-day; and the long vista of wearisome days, of wearisome years to come, weighs men down, sickens them from the first with living. From brain to stomach, from stomach to mouth, the fatal fit spreads of its own accord, and keeps on distending the jaws without end or remedy. An actual disease the pious Bretons call it, ascribing it, however, to the malice of the Devil. He keeps crouching in the woods, the peasants say: if anyone passes by tending his cattle, he sings to him vespers and other rites, until he is dead with yawning.[12]
To be old is to be weak. When the Saracens, when the Norsemen threaten us, what will come to us if the people remain old? Charlemagne weeps, and the Church weeps too. She owns that her relics fail to guard her altars from these Barbarian devils.[13] Had she not better call upon the arm of that wayward child whom she was going to bind fast, the arm of that young giant whom she wanted to paralyse? This movement in two opposite ways fills the whole ninth century. The people are held back, anon they are hurled forward: we fear them and we call on them for aid. With them and by means of them we throw up hasty barriers, defences that may check the Barbarians, while sheltering the priests and their saints escaped thither from their churches.