The weather was warm and sunny. The colossal walls of ruined ancient palaces and shrines, that must surely have been built for giants, stood out in relief against the blue sky. The silence was intense, the Roman season had not yet begun. Unknown crowds of English travellers had not yet descended from the Swiss mountains, nor sailed across the waters from Egypt. Irene felt quite at home among the ruins. She wandered for days among the ruins of the Forum and the Palatine, trying to imagine the life of the past, when the sun shone down not on the crumbling stones before her but on a world of glistening marble and pagan luxury; when the immense sculptured gods, sheltered at present in the galleries of the Vatican, rose on their pedestals high above the heads of the gorgeous crowd with its classic draperies and its garlands of flowers, worshipping, offering sacrifices, burning incense. What a beautiful, gay, triumphant picture! Why did it all end? What could have driven these people away from their beloved green hills, down to the unhealthy banks of the Tiber and those dirty, dark alleys? And why are people now in their turn moving away from these alleys and returning to the hills and the sunshine, and a new, healthier life?
For the first time the thought occurred to Irene that the world, like each individual human being, must gradually pass through all the different periods of life. First, the early years, with their faltering steps and their uncertain memory. Then, at about five years old, the beginning of gay, happy, early childhood, white raiment, crowns and garlands and flowers, dance and song and laughter and summer-time. Dolls are indispensable at this age—modelled of clay, hewn out of stone, carved in wood, at first very primitive and clumsy like those of the Egyptians, then always more and more lifelike, and finally perfected by the Greeks. And like a child who, having made itself a rag doll, takes it seriously and endows it with all sorts of qualities, so the Greeks and Romans place the gods they have made on pedestals, and call them Jupiter the terrible, Venus the passionate, Amor the little rogue, Minerva the wise, etc.
They dance around their gods with the careless gaiety of childhood; they love gorgeous processions, banquets, chariot-racing, and gladiators’ fights for life or death, upon which they look with laughter, since pity is to them, as to all children, a thing unknown.
But time passes, and the child grows older. New ideas and requirements awaken in him; games and gaiety lose their interest. He grows pensive, pale, and thin, and he feels the need of suffering and tears. Irene remembered how, at the age of seven, she had suddenly experienced a great desire to fast during all the seven weeks of Lent. Pale, fragile child as she had been, such privation had weakened her terribly; but incredible as it may seem, with a strength gleaned Heaven knows from where, she had actually held out to the end! She remembered also certain religious pilgrimages in the small provincial town, near which she had sometimes passed the summer with her father. Many a time in the torrid heat of a sultry July day had she walked for four or five hours through clouds of dust, along a rough, uneven road, in a procession behind an ikon, returning home half dead with fatigue, but unable to sleep, through sheer religious exaltation. Her thoughts, too, wandered back to the neighbouring convent, whither she had often gone to pray, and where, having attended vespers, she had sometimes stood through the whole night in prayer, soaring on the wings of a religious ecstasy, and feeling no fatigue. Her young soul had needed these raptures, fasts, and prayers. It had needed also the food of legends, and the more wonderful, the more supernatural these legends the dearer had they grown to her imagination. Her mind had acknowledged no logic, and had needed none.
Did not the same thing happen to the world in the Middle Ages, that period of Humanity’s later childhood? Christianity, or rather its rites and ceremonies (since its real meaning was unattainable to these children), was accepted with enthusiasm, because these rites and ceremonies exactly answered the requirements of the age: ecstasy, martyrdom, torture rapturously borne, naïve and lovely legends. Humanity would have no more of dolls and toys, and wrathfully destroyed the statues of the gods. Later on, in more recent times, those same people tenderly and lovingly collected the broken fragments of the statues and preserved them in their museums as cherished remembrances of childhood. It is thus that a grown-up man will pay a large sum for a broken doll, or for a faded coloured print that amused him in his early days.
Just as modelling is the heritage of babyhood, so painting is the delight of childhood. First come naïve little drawings, like the work of the Primitives, in which the figures of saints of high religious rank are made twice as large as those of their inferiors, or like the pictures of Perugino and his school, in which the infant Christ is depicted wearing a coral ornament similar to those put round the necks of Italian children to save them from the evil eye!
Day by day, art develops and grows more perfect, reaching its apotheosis almost simultaneously in all the countries of Europe. Yet in all their magnificence and perfection, something naïve and childlike remains even in the works of the great masters. They draw pictures from the life of Christ, for instance, with background and accessories of the Middle Ages. They represent some Pope in all his Catholic vestments and with his papal tiara kneeling humbly before the Virgin, with the Child in her arms. They are not in the least disturbed by the thought that if a Roman Pope exists at all, it is only because this Christ Child grew up, and because His Apostles founded the Church. Their childish mind does not occupy itself with such contradictions, and Michael Angelo gives to the world his famous Pièta, a magnificent marble group, in which the Virgin Mother is younger than her Son.
The defenceless child, unable to revenge himself on his tyrants and tormentors, loves to console himself with dreams of how the Divine Power—God and His angels, the Archangel Michael with a sword in his hand—will descend from heaven to help him. The wicked will be burnt in hell, and he, the offended and insulted one, will receive his reward in Paradise. Had he not this dream and this consolation, life would indeed be too heavy a burden.
But the child grows up, and reaches adolescence. He stands on the threshold of life, and the school-bench is left behind him. School has taught him but little—a few facts and some elementary information. But he has learnt to reason logically, and to examine the solid foundations on which the world rests. He begins to apply his logic to everything, and when he approaches religion, doubt trembles in his soul. The absurd improbability of the legends of the Middle Ages disgusts him, and at the same time he is obsessed by the fear of remaining without a religion, a fear which has been inculcated into his mind by his entire upbringing. Calm and cold-blooded people think it all out, and become confirmed Atheists. Not so, however, those others with fervent, burning souls! Poor Tolstoy, in the wrath of his old age, destroys and insults the very elements on which he has founded and formed his life, and, having insulted them, goes to church as before, prays humbly among beggars, throws himself into a monastery, and dies of despair on the highway.
How many such martyrs are there in our days! With tears and sobs they fall on their knees, stretch forth their hands to Heaven, and cry from the depths of their souls: “God! show me some miracle that I may again believe in Thee! It is only through Thy wonders and miracles worked in the early days of Christianity that people turned to Thee and believed. Why were these early Christians dearer to Thee than I? I love thee; it is hard for me to tear myself away from Thee! A miracle, a miracle, I beseech Thee! I will then believe anything, even what is against all reason and logic—only come to my help I implore Thee! Give me a sign or a miracle!”