A PICTURE WHICH MIGHT BE ZURBARAN BUT IS ONLY BY GOYA.
María de Roch was very early at church next morning. For some time past
she had accustomed herself to rise early and perform her religious
duties so as to return home by nine o’clock, by which plan she avoided
meeting the crowd of worshippers who selected the more convenient
hours of the day. On this particular day, being Sunday, she was even
earlier than usual and came out of church having fulfilled the duties
that most flattered her soul; then, as usual, she spent the chief
part of the morning in religious reading. But she did not seek mental
nourishment in the rich stores of the older mystical literature of
Spain--writings purified in the crucible of the loftiest spiritual
faith and which are a real feast for the faithful soul, warming it
with a divine flame and edifying it with transcendental poetry and
morality. María fed her piety, sad to say, on the worst of contemporary
religious literature, the outcome, in many cases, of ecclesiastical
jobbery--in style a borrowed medley and in substance not really
religious at all, but materialistic in its tendencies--which, with
newspapers and prayer-books, forms the staple of the booksellers’
trade. Many of these effusions are translated from the French and
bear a “made to sell” stamp which is little short of profane. Their
covers do not lack the elegance and finish characteristic of good
modern workmanship; within lie prose and verse. But what prose! What
verse! There are certain ideas which demand simplicity of expression;
it is their natural garb, without which they cease to exist; there
are others which require dignity and grandeur, and which, lacking
these, degenerate into affectation and rhodomontade. María could
not appreciate these subtleties; her favourite works were full of
“celestial smiles” and “seraphic fires,” of “virgin souls” and “airs
from Heaven.” This sensual terminology appealed to her more directly
than any other language; her narrow intelligence would not have
understood any other or would have despised it, for her imagination
was particularly susceptible to the suggestions of her senses. María
admired the character of Santa Teresa because she had been taught to
do so, but she could not understand her sublime metaphysics. Seraphic
fervour was to her a flow of words or it was nothing. She did not
exhaust her brain by trying to conceive of the subtler forms of
devotion, nor was she capable of sublime abstractions. Her nature,
with its plain common-sense, was coarse, and led her to seek religious
fervour by other means. For instance, God’s mercy to his creatures was
to her a fact beyond dispute, but it only came home to her personally
as associated with some relic; the infinite perfection of the Creator,
though she believed in it implicitly, was real to her apprehension
only through the æsthetic medium of an image. The Virgin Mary, the
ideal which of all others most interpenetrates the heart of a woman,
did not fail to appeal to hers; but yet in order to feel her influence
in full force, to be wrought to enthusiasm or moved to tears, she would
steep--or shall I say dilute? her emotions in water from Lourdes.
Enough has been said to show that María’s religion was that of the
lower orders--meaning by low, incapable of thought and feeling, and
leading that mechanical existence of eating, digesting and sleeping,
which is the crassest and purest materialism. Vulgarity is not a class
distinction; it is an element, a component, a chemical constituent of
social geology; if a map could be constructed to show its distribution
it would appear as a black stain--a foul deposit--in every stratum
of humanity. And thus, just as a few elect spirits represent the
aristocracy of mind, María was the representative of vulgar credulity.
In other times and under other conditions, without ceasing to profess
piety or to pray six hours a day, she would have told fortunes by the
cards, have worked witchcraft by means of relics and rosaries, and have
mixed up her religious exercises with the tricks and arts of a gipsy.
But these are things of the past, though there are still malignant
souls in the world and gipsy arts and wiles, differing, it is true
from those of the middle ages. María’s aim and end was to belong
to every religious society, charitable or otherwise. She was, more
especially, what in the jargon of cant is known as a “_Josephina_,”
affiliated, that is to say, to a society named after St. Joseph, whose
principal object is to send up prayers for the Pope. It includes
a large number of highly respectable persons of whom no ridicule
is intended. María was a member of various other associations and
sisterhoods; nearly all of them have their periodical reports and
tracts, intended to consolidate their existence and to supply a form
of light literature which is sometimes extraordinarily droll to the
outsider. María accepted it all as unctuous and edifying and would
spend hours in reading the stories--would that we could reproduce a
few of them!--and addresses; and above all the section which may be
called “Mystico-pathological:” the list, that is to say, of the cures
effected every month by the wafers and ointments dipped in the famous
“_Perolito_” of Seville--miracles even greater than those wrought by
Holloway and other quacks. María had always by her a store of these
medicaments for the benefit of her friends and relations, being
absolutely convinced of their efficacy on those who employed them in
faith. The “Perolito” could never be a paying concern in any country
where common-sense and an efficient police were known. Though María
constantly aimed at treading in the footsteps of her brother Luis she
was free from his extravagant ecstasy, and her ideas and practice were
unlike his in many particulars. Her unhealthy pietism was the outcome
of a narrow intellect, and kept alive by her senses and the refractory
pride of her nature. Her ideas and feelings were absolutely foreign
to those of her husband, and we have seen what the character of her
affection for him was--the only affection of which she was capable--and
in her hours of penitential solitude how she had struggled to eradicate
even that! What violence she had done to her imagination in trying to
see as evil, what was good, as corrupt, what was worthy, as repulsive,
what was noble and attractive! She firmly believed that so long as
she allowed her mind to dwell on the image of her husband she was no
true saint. Was she right or wrong? None can tell but God who, in his
omniscience, saw the aspect that image wore.
“If only he were not an atheist!” was her constant thought; and the
response was an implacable determination never to have anything in
common with such a man. In thought she referred to that brother
whose shade would visit her in the lonely watches of the night and
it had been his wish--his will--that she and the atheist should live
separated; he had pronounced her free from her matrimonial bondage and
released her from the burden of earthly duty, that she might henceforth
belong solely to God. And now and again she would start from sleep in
an agony of distress, her forehead damp with sweat, and trembling in
every limb. “And if he loves some other woman!” she would mutter to
herself.
Her ideas had taken this turn. She could even bear to think that her
husband might die without loving her, but that he should live and love
some one else--that he should give to another that which ought to be
hers.--That was her real grief and constant mortification; and when
her reflections reached this point her whole being leaped into revolt
with an impulse which was the very passion of egotism.
During the period when Leon was gradually becoming estranged from her
María took a delight in humiliating him; it was a pleasure to see him
come in every evening, ready to receive the lash. Nay, sometimes, from
the force of habit and from the sincere regard which he had inspired
in her, she was really glad at his coming but she took care to conceal
both the gladness and the affection. Merciful Heaven! It would never do
to let it be said that she hailed and welcomed the “Atheist.” Secretly
she took an interest in everything that concerned him, gave orders for
his comfort, and if he were ailing, made him take advice and remedies,
only taking care not to give him water from the Grotto at Lourdes or
wafer from Seville as these are specific only for those who believe in
them.
When they talked to each other it cost her a constant effort to keep
herself from gazing with pleasure and sympathy on her husband’s
attractive face, and when she was alone, she repented of her weakness,
calling herself reprobate and sensual and imploring her brother in
Heaven to aid her by the virtue of certain sacred relics.--“But if only
he were not an atheist!” And she would weep at the thought.
When Leon left her once for all, María who had clenched the matter by
declaring that God forbid her to love him, felt utterly crushed; her
hearth was vacant and desolate. She was terrified too--of what? She
herself knew not. During one whole night she could not command her
mind to a single thought of devotion. She was stunned, but at the same
time her brain ached with a swarm of evil visions like the trampling
of horses snorting as they charge. She needed much reading and all the
counsel and warnings of her spiritual directors before she could fairly
bury the fair corpse of her departed happiness; much prayer, much
penance, much labour of her fancy to see what she knew to be good and
beautiful as evil and hideous. But she was not the first to undertake
this odious task of purifying her soul by the instrumentality of the
imagination--heaping foulness over the grave of all the joys of love
and graces of life; hermits and ascetics had done it before her, and
filled up the measure by personal castigation. María laboured in the
obscurity of her tortured brain to see the happy days of her honeymoon
in the darkest and foulest colours and so threw a lurid light on the
sweetest hours of her married life.--It was a frightful revulsion and
anarchy of soul.
As has been said, María, when her husband was absent for ever felt
a miserable void, anxiety and solitude. Where was he gone? She made
various enquiries, but without betraying her disquietude. She profaned
even her prayers by thinking of it--San Antonio! but this man was
hers--her husband and should belong to no one else!
Logic of this kind comes with fulminating force sometimes to a
half-demented brain; and the strange thing was that in spite of what
she choose to call Leon’s atheism, she had always recognised in him a
basis of honourable feeling in which she had perfect confidence. Still,
so narrow was her apprehension, that she had never thought of setting
that magnanimity against his disbelief. Why did she trust the honour of
an atheist? She did not know, but that she did was beyond dispute. Now,
when her husband, her mate, her companion, had left her, she was bereft
of all trust. María was going through a strange experience. It seemed
to be close to her, a monstrous and hideous presence that gazed at her,
that haunted her, that glided with a cold and slimy touch up the pleats
of her dress, looked into her heart with its wicked black eyes, poked
in its taper head, and then drew in its long writhing body to the very
tip of its slender tail--curled itself up in her heart where it lay
coiled, radiating an intolerable heat but as still and motionless as
death in the nest that it had made there.