CHAPTER II.
THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT.
From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticlife must be condemned.
Monasteries when they abound in a nation are tourniquets applied tocirculation, oppressive fixtures, centres of idleness where centresof activity are needed. Monastic communities bear the same relationto the great community of society that the mistletoe does to the oak,or the wart to the human body. Their prosperity and their plumpnessare the impoverishment of the country. The rule of the monastery,salutary at the beginning of civilizations, useful in bringing aboutthe subjugation of brutality by the spiritual, is harmful in the ripestrength of a nation. Further, when it relaxes and when it enters intoits period of decadence, as it still sets the example, it becomesharmful by the very reasons which made it healthful in its time ofpurity.
The cloister has had its day. Monasteries, helpful to the earlyeducation of modern civilization, have checked its growth, and hinderedits development. As an educating force and a means of formation forman, the monasteries, good in the tenth century, questionable in thefifteenth, are abominable in the nineteenth. The monastic leprosy haseaten almost to the bone two great nations, Italy and Spain, the onethe light, the other the splendor of Europe for ages; and at our owntime, these two illustrious nations have only begun to heal, thanks tothe strong and vigorous treatment of 1789.
The convent, the old convent for women especially, such as it stillappeared at the threshold of this century, in Italy, in Austria, inSpain, is one of the most gloomy concretions of the Middle Ages. Thecloister, this very cloister, is the point of intersection of terrors.The Catholic cloister, rightly so-called, is all filled with the blackrays of death.
The Spanish convent is especially doleful. There in the dim light,under misty arches, beneath domes made vague by the shadows, risealtars massive as the Tower of Babel, lofty as cathedrals; there inthe gloom huge white crucifixes hang by chains; there stand out nakedagainst the ebony background, huge white Christs of ivory--more thanbloody, bleeding; frightful yet grand, the elbows showing the bone,the kneepans showing the ligaments, the wounds showing the flesh;crowned with thorns of silver, nailed with nails of gold, with drops ofblood in rubies on the forehead and tears of diamonds in the eyes. Thediamonds and rubies look wet, and draw tears from those down below inthe gloom,--veiled beings, whose sides are wounded by the hair shirtand by the scourge with iron points, their bosoms crushed by wickerjackets, their knees galled by prayer; women who believe themselvesbrides, spectres who believe themselves seraphim. Do these women everthink? No. Have they wills? No. Do they love? No. Do they live? No.Their nerves have turned to bone, their bones to stone. Their veilis woven of the night. Their breathing under the veil is like sometragic respiration of death. Their abbess, a phantom, hallows them andterrifies them. The Immaculate is there, implacable. Such are the oldmonasteries of Spain. Retreats of fearful devotion, caves of virgins,savage wildernesses.
Catholic Spain was more Roman than Rome itself. The Spanish convent waspre-eminently the Catholic convent. It had a touch of the East aboutit. The Archbishop, kislar-agar of heaven, locked up and watched thisseraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun was the odalisque, thepriest was the eunuch. The devoted were chosen in their dreams, andpossessed Christ. By night the beautiful young man descended naked fromthe cross and became the rapture of the cell. High walls guarded fromevery living distraction the mystic sultana who had for her sultan theCrucified One. A mere glance outside was an infidelity. The _in pace_took the place of the leather sack. What they threw into the sea in theEast, they threw into the earth in the West. In both places, women'sarms were writhing; for these the sea, for those the grave; here thedrowned, there the buried. Dreadful analogy!
To-day, the champions of the past, since they cannot deny these things,have adopted the course of making light of them. They have made itthe fashion, this convenient and strange way of suppressing therevelations of history, of weakening the commentaries of philosophy,and of getting rid of all troublesome facts and all grave questions."Matter for declamations," say the able ones. "Declamations" repeat thefools. Jean-Jacques, a declaimer; Diderot, a declaimer; Voltaire onCalas, Labarre and Sirven, a declaimer. They have made it out now thatTacitus was a declaimer, that Nero was a victim, and that we reallyought to feel very sorry for "poor Holofernes."
Facts are obstinate, however, and hard to disconcert. The writer ofthis book has seen with his own eyes, within eight leagues of Brussels,and that is a part of the Middle Ages which every one has at hand, atthe Abbey of Villers, the dungeon-hole in the middle of the meadowwhich used to be the court-yard of the cloister; and on the banks ofthe Thil, four stone cells, half under ground, half under water. Thesewere the _in pace._ Each of these cells has the remains of an irondoor, a latrine, and a barred window, which from the outside is twofeet above the water, and from the inside is six feet above the floor.Four feet of river wash the outside of the wall. The floor is alwayswet. The tenant of the _in pace_ had for a bed this wet earth. In oneof these cells there is a broken piece of a collar fastened to thewall; in another may be seen a kind of square box made of four slabs ofgranite, too short to lie down in, too low to sit up in. They put intothat a human being with a stone lid over her. This exists. You can seeit. You can touch it. These _in pace_, these cells, these iron hinges,these collars, this high window, close to which flows the river, thisstone box closed with a granite lid like a tomb, with this difference,that here the corpse was a living being, this floor of mud, this sewer,these oozing walls,--what declaimers these are!