“You have invented for yourself all sorts of fantastic heroes,” he said. And you are unreasonably cross because you do not meet them in real life. Be reasonable, Irene Pavlovna! Human beings are simply animals. It is not so very long since they lived in caves and dressed in skins. They have not been lazy. They have worked zealously at themselves, and have attained much. It is not their fault if it needs another thousand centuries to perfect them, to entirely overthrow the animal, and to attain the spiritual ideal that God has placed before them. If you personally have already attained all this, that is your special good luck; but, pardon me, I doubt it exceedingly. Your life is not at an end yet, and the savage beast may yet awaken in you quite unexpectedly. I, of course, perfectly understand your dislike of the Petrograd career-hunters. I do not greatly admire them myself. Nevertheless, I still assert that ambition, especially in Russia, is more a virtue than a vice. We Slavs are so listless and lazy, that without ambition we become, at the very best, Oblomoffs,[2] and at the worst, primitive beasts. You don’t know the kind of types one meets in our far away provinces.
“You are very proud of the fact that you care nothing for wealth or rank. But do you know, Irene Pavlovna, that this is only another sign of a morbid, diseased nature? I always have the feeling that your ancestors must have lived too forcibly, too passionately—they have left you the legacy of an exhausted organism, and you no longer have the strength to love or care for anything. In your place, I should try to cultivate artificially some passion that would attach you more firmly to Mother Earth!”
[1] A sledge with three horses abreast.—Ed.
[2] A famous character in a novel by Goncharoff, the type of a talented failure.
VIII
Père Etienne, feeling that the struggle with Gzhatski was getting beyond his strength, began to look round for help, and, as a first step, advised Irene to hear some of the sermons that are preached on certain days at most of the principal Roman churches. On the following Sunday, she made her way to San Luigi dei Francesi, a church famous for the eloquence of its preachers. The sermon was to be preached at four o’clock, before Vespers. The organ was playing softly as Irene entered the splendid edifice, with its magnificent marble pillars and bronze decoration. Italian preachers in Rome usually speak from a broad covered rostrum, lined with red cloth, in which frame the preacher, unable to restrain his excitement, strides backwards and forwards, and gesticulates wildly, alternately throwing himself into a chair, and rising again. These broad rostrums are of very ancient origin; their prototype is still to be found among the ruins of the Forum, where they served, in bygone days of the Republic, as platforms from which the populace was addressed.
French preachers do not gesticulate. They mount a little winding stairway, to a round narrow pulpit, with an umbrella-like baldaquin, in which their little figures white-robed, and with black pelerines, look like Chinese dolls. While the Italian priest, in his passionate ardour, smites his chest and thunders at the congregation, his French brother pronounces a calm, well-thought out speech, whose aim is to astonish by its brilliant wit and its fine subtlety.
On this occasion, the sermon was on the subject of the cult of early Christian martyrs. It was, indeed, rather an historical lecture than a sermon. The preacher made a perfectly expressed and masterly exposition of various facts hitherto unknown to Irene, about the catacombs; the high honour in which the tombs of the first Christian martyrs were held, and the respect shown even to false martyrs, i.e., to deceased Christians, given out by their ambitious relatives as saints who had died for the Faith. These falsifications had, according to the preacher, assumed such enormous proportions, that it had been found necessary, in about the second century, to organize a special commission with the purpose of looking into the matter.