During this accusation the burgomaster remained standing with his figure drawn up to its full height. Only the dark swollen vein on his weary brow betrayed the indignation seething in his soul.
"I disdain to make any reply to such a charge. I know the hearts of my fellow citizens too well to fear that any one of them believes it."
"No, certainly not!" exclaimed the wiser ones. But the majority were silent in their wrathful despair.
"I know that many of you misjudge me, and I bear you no resentment for it. I admit that in such a period of storm and stress it is difficult to maintain an unprejudiced judgment.
"I know also that I myself have often bewildered your judgment, for it is impossible to create such a work without giving offense here and there. I know that many who feel wounded and slighted secretly resent it, and I do not blame them! Only I beg you to visit the rancor on me personally--not extend it to the cause and injure that out of opposition to me. In important moments like these, I beg you to let all private grudges drop and gather around me--in this one decisive hour think only of the whole community, and not of all the wrongs the burgomaster may have done you individually.
"If I had only the interest of Ammergau to guard, all would be well! But I have not only your welfare to protect, but the dignity of a cause for which I am responsible to God--so long as it remains in my hands. Human nature is weak and subject to external impressions. The religious conceptions of thousands depend upon the greater or less powerful illusion produced by the Passion Play as a moral symbol. This is a heavy responsibility in a time when negation and materialism are constantly undermining faith and dragging everything sacred in the dust. In such a period, the utmost perfection of detail is necessary, that the form at least may command respect, where the essence is despised. I will try to make this dear to you by an example. The cynic who sneers at our worship of Mary and, with satirical satisfaction, paints the Virgin as the corpulent mother of four or five boys, will laugh at an Altötting Virgin but grow silent and earnest before a Sistine Madonna! For here the divinity in which he does not wish to believe confronts him in the work of art and compels his reverence. It is precisely in a period of materialism like the present that religious representation has its most grateful task--for the deeper man sinks into sensualism, the more accessible he is to sensual impressions, and the more easily religion can influence him through visible forms, repelling or attracting according to the defective or artistic treatment of the material. The religious-sensuous impetus is the only one which can influence times like these, that is why the Passion Play is more important now than ever!
"God has bestowed upon me the modest talent of organization and a little artistic culture, that I may watch over it, and see that those who come to us trustfully to seek their God, do not go away with a secret disappointment--and that those who come to laugh may be quiet--and ashamed.
"This is the great task allotted to me, which I have hitherto executed without regard for personal irritability, and the injury of petty individual interests, and hope to accomplish even under stress of the most dire necessity.
"If you wish to oppose it, you should have given the office I occupy to some one who thinks the task less lofty, and who is complaisant enough to sacrifice the noble to the petty. But see where you will end with the complaisant man, who listens to every one. See how soon anarchy will enter among you, for where individual guidance is lacking, and every one can assert his will, the seed of discord shoots up, overgrowing everything. Now you are all against me, but then you will be against one another, and while you are quarreling and disputing, time will pass unused, and at last the first antiquated model will be seized because it can be most easily and quickly executed. But the modern world will turn away with a derisive laugh, saying: 'We can't look at these peasant farces any more.'
"Then answer for robbing thousands of a beautiful illusion and letting them return home poorer in faith and reverence than they came--answer for it to God, whose sublime task you have degraded by an inferior performance, and lastly to yourselves for forgetting the future in the present gain, and to profit by the Passion Play a few more times now, ruin it for future decades. You do not believe it because, in this secluded village, you cannot know what the taste of our times demands. But I do, for I have lived in the outside world, and I tell you that whoever sees these incomplete performances will certainly not return, and will make us a reputation stamping us as bunglers forever!"