FullReads

My old suspicions reappeared, and a conversation we had two days afterwards helped to strengthen them.

We had gone on a visit to Schwanthaler, the sculptor, at his tiny little castle of Schwaneck, a few miles from Munich. The artist was out for a walk, but we were invited to come in and await his return, which would be shortly; and meanwhile Bourgonef undertook to show me over the castle, interesting as a bit of modern Gothic, realizing on a diminutive scale a youthful dream of the sculptor’s. When our survey was completed–and it did not take long–we sat at one of the windows and enjoyed a magnificent prospect. “It is curious,” said Bourgonef, “to be shut up here in this imitation of medieval masonry, where every detail speaks of the dead past, and to think of the events now going on in Paris which must find imitators all over Europe, and which open to the mind such vistas of the future. What a grotesque anachronism is this Gothic castle, built in the same age as that which sees a reforming pope!”

“Yes; but is not the reforming pope himself an anachronism?”

“As a Catholic,” here he smiled, intimating that his orthodoxy was not very stringent, “I cannot admit that; as a Protestant, you must admit that if there must be a pope, he must in these days be a reformer, or–give up his temporal power. Not that I look on Pio Nono as more than a precursor; he may break ground, and point the way, but he is not the man to lead Europe out of its present slough of despond, and under the headship of the Church found a new and lasting republic. We want a Hildebrand, one who will be to the nineteenth century as Gregory was to the eleventh.”

“Do you believe in such a possibility? Do you think the Roman pontiff can ever again sway the destinies of Europe?”

“I can hardly say I believe it; yet I see the possibility of such an opening if the right man were to arise. But I fear he will not arise; or if he should, the Conclave will stifle him. Yet there is but one alternative: either Europe must once more join in a crusade with a pope at the head, or it must hoist the red flag. There is no other issue.”

“Heaven preserve us from both! And I think we shall be preserved from the Pope by the rottenness of the Church; from the drapeau rouge by the indignation and horror of all honest men. You see how the Provisional Government has resisted the insane attempt of the fanatics to make the red flag accepted as the national banner?”

“Yes; and it is the one thing which dashes my pleasure in the new revolution. It is the one act of weakness which the Government has exhibited; a concession which will be fatal unless it be happily set aside by the energetic party of action.”

“An act of weakness? say rather an act of strength. A concession? say rather the repudiation of anarchy, the assertion of law and justice.”

“Not a bit. It was concession to the fears of the timid, and to the vanity of the French people. The tricolor is a French flag– not the banner of humanity. It is because the tricolor has been identified with the victories of France that it appeals to the vanity of the vainest of people. They forget that it is the flag of a revolution which failed, and of an empire which was one perpetual outrage to humanity. Whereas the red is new; it is the symbol of an energetic, thorough-going creed. If it carries terror with it, so much the better. The tyrants and the timid should be made to tremble.”

“I had no idea you were so bloodthirsty,” said I, laughing at his vehemence.

“I am not bloodthirsty at all; I am only logical and consistent. There is a mass of sophistry current in the world which sickens me. People talk of Robespierre and St. Just, two of the most virtuous men that ever lived–and of Dominic and Torquemada, two of the most single-minded–as if they were cruel and bloodthirsty, whereas they were only convinced.”