Part 2 (1/2)
I returned six months later. A scaffold had been put up in the middle of the nave; upon it an art critic was examining the paintings, and as the day was overcast he threw upon the walls the beams of a lamp with a reflector. Then you saw arms thrown out, faces grimacing, without unity, without harmony; the most exquisite figures took on something fantastic and grotesque.
He came down triumphant, with a portfolio stuffed with sketches; here a foot, there a muscle, farther on a bit of face, and I could not refrain from musing on the frescos as I had seen them bathed in sunlight.
The sun and the lamp are both deceivers; they transform what they show; but if the truth must be told I own to my preference for the falsehoods of the sun.
History is a landscape, and like those of nature it is continually changing. Two persons who look at it at the same time do not find in it the same charm, and you yourself, if you had it continually before your eyes, would never see it twice alike. The general lines are permanent, but it needs only a cloud to hide the most important ones, as it needs only a jet of light to bring out such or such a detail and give it a false value.
When I began this page the sun was disappearing behind the rains of the Castle of Crussol and the splendors of the sunset gave it a s.h.i.+ning aureola; the light flooded everything, and you no longer saw anywhere the damage which wars have inflicted upon the old feudal manor. I looked, almost thinking I could perceive at the window the figure of the chatelaine ... Twilight has come, and now there is nothing up there but crumbling walls, a discrowned tower, nothing but ruins and rubbish, which seem to beg for pity.
It is the same with the landscapes of history. Narrow minds cannot accommodate themselves to these perpetual transformations: they want an objective history in which the author will study the people as a chemist studies a body. It is very possible that there may be laws for historic evolution and social transformations as exact as those of chemical combinations, and we must hope that in the end they will be discovered; but for the present there is no purely objective truth of history.
To write history we must think it, and to think it is to transform it.
Within a few years, it is true, men have believed they had found the secret of objectivity, in the publication of original doc.u.ments. This is a true progress which renders inestimable service, but here again we must not deceive ourselves as to its significance. All the doc.u.ments on an epoch or an event cannot usually be published, a selection must be made, and in it will necessarily appear the turn of mind of him who makes it. Let us admit that all that can be found is published; but alas, the most unusual movements have generally the fewest doc.u.ments.
Take, for instance, the religious history of the Middle Ages: it is already a pretty delicate task to collect official doc.u.ments, such as bulls, briefs, conciliary canons, monastic const.i.tutions, etc., but do these doc.u.ments contain all the life of the Church? Much is still wanting, and to my mind the movements which secretly agitated the ma.s.ses are much more important, although to testify to them we have only a few fragments.
Poor heretics, they were not only imprisoned and burned, but their books were destroyed and everything that spoke of them; and more than one historian, finding scarcely a trace of them in his heaps of doc.u.ments, forgets these prophets with their strange visions, these poet-monks who from the depths of their cells made the world to thrill and the papacy to tremble.
Objective history is then a utopia. We create G.o.d in our own image, and we impress the mark of our personality in places where we least expect to find it again.
But by dint of talking about the tribunal of history we have made most authors think that they owe to themselves and their readers definitive and irrevocable judgments.
It is always easier to p.r.o.nounce a sentence than to wait, to reserve one's opinion, to re-examine. The crowd which has put itself out to be present at a trial is almost always furious with the judges when they reserve the case for further information; its mind is so made that it requires precision in things which will bear it the least; it puts questions right and left, as children do; if you appear to hesitate or to be embarra.s.sed you are lost in its estimation, you are evidently only an ignoramus.
But perhaps below the Areopagites, obliged by their functions to p.r.o.nounce sentence, there is place at the famous tribunal for a simple spectator who has come in by accident. He has made out a brief and would like very simply to tell his neighbors his opinion.
This, then, is not a history _ad probandum_, to use the ancient formula.
Is this to say that I have only desired to give the reader a moment of diversion? That would be to understand my thought very ill. In the grand spectacles of history as in those of nature there is something divine; from it our minds and hearts gain a virtue at once pacifying and encouraging, we experience the salutary sensation of littleness, and seeing the beauties and the sadnesses of the past we learn better how to judge the present hour.
In one of the frescos of the Upper Church of a.s.sisi, Giotto has represented St. Clara and her companions coming out from St. Damian all in tears, to kiss their spiritual father's corpse as it is being carried to its last home. With an artist's liberty he has made the chapel a rich church built of precious marbles.
Happily the real St. Damian is still there, nestled under some olive-trees like a lark under the heather; it still has its ill-made walls of irregular stones, like those which bound the neighboring fields. Which is the more beautiful, the ideal temple of the artist's fancy, or the poor chapel of reality? No heart will be in doubt.
Francis's official historians have done for his biography what Giotto did for his little sanctuary. In general they have done him ill-service.
Their embellishments have hidden the real St. Francis, who was, in fact, infinitely n.o.bler than they have made him to be. Ecclesiastical writers appear to make a great mistake in thus adorning the lives of their heroes, and only mentioning their edifying features. They thus give occasion, even to the most devout, to suspect their testimony. Besides, by thus surrounding their saints with light they make them superhuman creatures, having nothing in common with us; they are privileged characters, marked with the divine seal; they are, as the litanies say, vials of election, into which G.o.d has poured the sweetest perfumes; their sanct.i.ty is revealed almost in spite of themselves; they are born saints as others are born kings or slaves, their life is set out against the golden background of a tryptich, and not against the sombre background of reality.
By such means the saints, perhaps, gain something in the respect of the superst.i.tious; but their lives lose something of virtue and of communicable strength. Forgetting that they were men like ourselves, we no longer hear in our conscience the command, ”Go and do likewise.”
It is, then, a work of piety to seek behind the legend for the history.
Is it presumptuous to ask our readers to try to understand the thirteenth century and love St. Francis? They will be amply rewarded for the effort, and will soon find an unexpected charm in these too meagre landscapes, these incorporate souls, these sickly imaginations which will pa.s.s before their eyes. Love is the true key of history.
A book has always a great number of authors, and the following pages owe much to the researches of others; I have tried in the notes to show the whole value of these debts.
I have also had colaborers to whom it will be more difficult for me to express my grat.i.tude. I refer to the librarians of the libraries of Italy and their a.s.sistants; it is impossible to name them all, their faces are better known to me than their names, but I would here say that during long months pa.s.sed in the various collections of the Peninsula, all, even to the most humble employees, have shown a tireless helpfulness even at those periods of the year when the number of attendants was the smallest.
Professor Alessandro Leto, who, barely recovered from a grave attack of influenza, kindly served as my guide among the archives of a.s.sisi, deserves a very particular mention. To the Syndic and munic.i.p.ality of that city I desire also to express my grat.i.tude.