Manisty nodded, and laughed.
'An outsider, with no stakes on? Well—that's true. But being a Romantic and an artist I sided with the Church. The new machine, and the men that were running it, seemed to me an ugly jerry-built affair, compared with the Papacy and all that it stood for. But then—'
—He leant back in his chair, one hand snatching and tearing at the bushes round him, in his absent, destructive way.—
'Well then—as usual—facts began to play the mischief with one's ideas. In the first place, as one lives on in Italy you discover the antiquity of this quarrel; that it is only the Guelf and Ghibelline quarrel over again, under new names. And in the next—presently one begins to divine an Italy behind the Italy we know, or history knows!—Voices come to one, as Goethe would say, from the caves where dwell "Die Mütter"—the creative generative forces of the country.'—
He turned his flashing look on Benecke, pleased now as always with the mere task of speech.
'Anyway, as I have been going up and down their country, especially during the last six weeks; prating about their poverty, and their taxes, their corruption, the incompetence of their leaders, the folly of their quarrel with the Church; I have been finding myself caught in the grip of things older and deeper—incredibly, primevally old!—that still dominate everything, shape everything here. There are forces in Italy, forces of land and soil and race—only now fully let loose—that will remake Church no less than State, as the generations go by. Sometimes I have felt as though this country were the youngest in Europe; with a future as fresh and teeming as the future of America. And yet one thinks of it at other times as one vast graveyard; so thick it is with the ashes and the bones of men! The Pope—and Crispi!—waves, both of them, on a sea of life that gave them birth, "with equal mind"; and that with equal mind will sweep them both to its own goal—not theirs.'
He smiled at his own eloquence, and returned to his cigarette.
The priest had listened to him all through with the same subtle embarrassed look.
'This must have some cause,' he said slowly, when Manisty ceased to speak. 'Surely?—this change? I recall language so different—forecasts so gloomy.'
'Gracious!—I can give you books-full of them,' said Manisty, reddening, 'if you care to read them. I came out with a parti-pris—I don't deny it. Catholicism had a great glamour for me; it has still, so long as you don't ask me to put my own neck under the yoke! But Rome itself is disenchanting. And outside Rome!—During the last six weeks I have been talking to every priest I could come across in these remote country districts where I have been wandering. Per Dio!—Marcello used to talk—I didn't believe him. But upon my word, the young fellows whom the seminaries are now sending out in shoals represent a fact to give one pause!—Little black devils!—Scusi! Father,—the word escaped me. Broadly speaking, they are a political militia,—little else. Their hatred of Italy is a venom in their bones, and they themselves are mad for a spiritual tyranny which no modern State could tolerate for a week. When one thinks of the older men—of Rosmini, of Gioberti, of the priests who died on the Milan barricades in '48!'