Читать книгу Tuscan Cities - William Dean Howells - Страница 10

The cicerone who helped me about these figures was a white-robed young monk, one of twelve who are still left at Santa Maria Novella to share the old cloisters now mainly occupied by the pupils of a military college and a children's school. It was noon, and the corridors and the court were full of boys at their noisy games, on whom the young father smiled patiently, lifting his gentle voice above their clamor to speak of the suppression of the convents. This was my first personal knowledge of the effect of that measure, and I now perceived the hardship which it must have involved, as I did not when I read of it, with my Protestant satisfaction, in the newspapers. The uncomfortable thing about any institution which has survived its usefulness is that it still embodies so much harmless life that must suffer in its destruction. The monks and nuns had been a heavy burden no doubt, for many ages, and at the best they cumbered the ground; but when it came to a question of sweeping them away, it meant sorrow and exile and dismay to thousands of gentle and blameless spirits like the brother here, who recounted one of many such histories so meekly, so unresentfully. He and his few fellows were kept there by the piety of certain faithful who, throughout Italy, still maintain a dwindling number of monks and nuns in their old cloisters wherever the convent happened to be the private property of the order. I cannot say that they thus quite console the sentimentalist who would not have the convents re-established, even while suffering a poignant regret for their suppression; but I know from myself that this sort of sentimentalist is very difficult, and perhaps he ought not to be too seriously regarded.