e appeared to be
no space between them; but I knew that there was always the same space
between them. So it is with the centuries, when they are in the distant
past it is difficult to distinguish in what century any particular event
happened. History may settle such points, but the arts come to us from a
country of the imagination whose laws of time and space are not as our
laws. Art is trying to get the people to realise that a thing happened,
not to teach them precisely when."

I quoted this to my priest, and he admitted its justice; also he was so
polite as to waive his objection about anacronismo, which, I then saw,
had only been started in consideration of my being a professor; not that
I am really a professor but he had introduced me to our host as one, and
I had accepted the distinction so as to avoid the dreary explanation that
would have been forced upon me after a disclaimer. He having waived his
anacronismo so generously, it was now my turn to trump up an objection
which I could deal with afterwards as circumstances might require. In
making my choice I did not forget his cloth and, imitating as well as I
could his tone of tolerant contempt, muttered the word "Irriverenza"
several times. He saw what I meant at once and, in his reply, somewhat
followed my lead.

"Where," he asked, "is the irreverence in making S. Joachim's friends
arrive in tall hats and dress clothes? Why should they not read the
_Giornale di Sicilia_ and play cards? Where is the irreverence in making
the children celebrate his daughter's birth by dancing to a piano? Why
should not the Madonna have her baby-linen made on an American
sewing-machine?"

As he took this line so decidedly and we had given up the anacronismo, I
gave up the irreverence at once and agreed with him that there is no
reason against any of these things being done if it helps the spectators.
The arts are concerned more with faith than with reason, more with the
spirit than with the flesh, more with truth than with fact, and we can
never get away from the intention of the artist. Even in that Art of
Arts which we call Life, our judgment must always be influenced by the
spirit in which we believe that a thing is done. I have read somewhere
that one coachman will flick flies off his horse with the intention of
worrying the flies, while another (Mario, for instance) does the same
thing with the intention of relieving the horse. When a modern Frenchman
in the spi