Renaissance in Italy Volume I Part 20

[2] See p. 424.

Of his boyhood we know but little. His biographers only tell us that he was grave and solitary, frequenting churches, praying with pa.s.sionate persistence, obstinately refusing, though otherwise docile, to join his father in his visits to the court. Aristotle and S. Thomas Aquinas seem to have been the favorite masters of his study. In fact he refused the new lights of the humanists, and adhered to the ecclesiastical training of the schoolmen. Already at the age of twenty we find him composing a poem in Italian on the Ruin of the World, in which he cries: 'The whole world is in confusion: all virtue is extinguished, and all good manners; I find no living light abroad, nor one who blushes for his vices.' His point of departure had been taken, and the keynote of his life had been struck. The sense of intolerable sin that came upon him in Ferrara haunted him through manhood, set his hand against the Popes and despots of Italy, and gave peculiar tone to his prophetic utterances.

The attractions of the cloister, as a refuge from the storms of the world, and as a rest from the torments of the sins of others, now began to sway his mind.[1] But he communicated his desire to no one. It would have grieved his father and his mother to find that their son, who was, they hoped, to be a shining light at the court of Ferrara, had determined to a.s.sume the cowl. At length, however, came the time at which he felt that leave the world he must. 'It was on the 23d of April 1475,' says Villari; 'he was sitting with his lute and playing a sad melody; his mother, as if moved by a spirit of divination, turned suddenly round to him, and exclaimed mournfully, My son, that is a sign we are soon to part. He roused himself, and continued, but with a trembling hand, to touch the strings of the lute, without raising his eyes from the ground.' This would make a picture: spring twilight in the quaint Italian room, with perhaps a branch of fig-tree or of bay across the open window; the mother looking up with anxious face from her needlework; the youth, with those terrible eyes and tense lips and dilated nostrils of the future prophet, not yet worn by years of care, but strongly marked and unmistakable, bending over the melancholy chords of the lute, dressed almost for the last time in secular attire.

[1] Often in later life Savonarola cried that he had sought the cloister to find rest, but that G.o.d had chosen, instead of bringing him into calm waters, to cast him on a tempest-swollen sea. See the Sermon quoted by Villari, vol. i. p. 298.

On the very next day Girolamo left Ferrara in secret and journeyed to Bologna. There he entered the order of S. Dominic, the order of the Preachers, the order of his master S. Thomas, the order too, let us remember, of inquisitorial crusades. The letter written to his father after taking this step is memorable. In it he says: 'The motives by which I have been led to enter into a religious life are these: the great misery of the world; the iniquities of men, their rapes, adulteries, robberies, their pride, idolatry, and fearful blasphemies: so that things have come to such a pa.s.s that no one can be found acting righteously. Many times a day have I repeated with tears the verse:

Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum!

I could not endure the enormous wickedness of the blinded people of Italy; and the more so because I saw everywhere virtue despised and vice honored.' We see clearly that Savonarola's vocation took its origin in a deep sense of the wickedness of the world. It was the same spirit as that which drove the early Christians of Alexandria into the Thebaid.

Austere and haggard, consumed with the zeal of the Lord, he had moved long enough among the Ferrarese holiday-makers. Those elegant young men in tight hose and particolored jackets, with oaths upon their lips and deeds of violence and l.u.s.t within their hearts, were no a.s.sociates for him. It is touching, however, to note that no text of Ezekiel or Jeremiah, but Virgil's musical hexameter, sounded through his soul the warning to depart.

In this year Savonarola composed another poem, this time on the Ruin of the Church. In his boyhood he had witnessed the pompous shows which greeted aeneas Sylvius, more like a Roman general than a new-made Pope, on his entrance into Ferrara. Since then he had seen the monster Sixtus mount the Papal throne. No wonder if he, who had fled from the world to the Church for purity and peace, should need to vent his pa.s.sion in a song. 'Where,' he cries, 'are the doctors of old times, the saints, the learning, charity, chast.i.ty of the past?' The Church answers by displaying her rent raiment and wounded body, and by pointing to the cavern in which she has to make her home. 'Who,' exclaims the poet, 'has wrought this wrong?' _Una fallace, superba meretrice_--Rome! Then indeed the pa.s.sion of the novice breaks in fire:--

Deh! per Dio, donna, Se romper si potria quelle grandi ale!

The Church replies:--

Tu piangi e taci: e questo meglio parmi.

No other answer could be given to Savonarola's impatient yearnings even by his own hot heart, while he yet remained a young and unknown monk in Bologna. Nor, strive as he might strive through all his life, was it granted to him to break those outspread wings of arrogant Rome.

The career of Savonarola as a preacher began in 1482, when he was sent first to Ferrara and then to Florence on missions by his superiors. But at neither place did he find acceptance. A prophet has no honor in his own country; and for pagan-hearted Florence, though destined to be the theater of his life-drama, Savonarola had as yet no thundrous burden of invective to utter. Besides, his voice was sharp and thin; his face and person were not prepossessing. The style of his discourse was adapted to cloisteral disputations, and overloaded with scholastic distinctions.

The great orator had not yet arisen in him. The friar, with all his dryness and severity, was but too apparent. With what strange feelings must the youth have trodden the streets of Florence! In after-days he used to say that he foreknew those streets and squares were destined to be the scene of his labors. But then, voiceless, powerless, without control of his own genius, without the consciousness of his prophetic mission, he brooded alone and out of harmony with the beautiful and mundane city. The charm of the hills and gardens of Valdarno, the loveliness of Giotto's tower, the amplitude of Brunelleschi's dome--these may have sunk deep into his soul. And the subtle temper of the Florentine intellect must have attracted his own keen spirit by a secret sympathy. For Florence erelong became the city of his love, the first-born of his yearnings.

In the cloisters of San Marco, enriched with splendid libraries by the liberality of the Medicean princes, he was at peace. The walls of that convent had recently been decorated with frescoes by Fra Angelico, even as a man might crowd the leaves of a missal with illuminations. Among these Savonarola meditated and was happy. But in the pulpit and in contact with the holiday folk of Florence he was ill at ease. Lorenzo de' Medici overshadowed the whole city. Lorenzo, in whom the pagan spirit of the Renaissance, the spirit of free culture, found a proper incarnation, was the very opposite of Savonarola, who had already judged the cla.s.sical revival by its fruits, and had conceived a spiritual resurrection for his country. At Florence a pa.s.sionate love of art and learning--the enthusiasm which prompted men to spend their fortunes upon MSS. and statues, the sensibility to beauty which produced the masterworks of Donatello and Ghiberti, the thirst for knowledge which burned in Pico and Poliziano and Ficino--existed side by side with impudent immorality, religious deadness, cold contempt for truth, and cynical admiration of successful villainy. Both the good and the evil which flourished on this fertile soil so luxuriantly were combined in the versatile genius of the merchant prince, whose policy it was to stifle freedom by caressing the follies, vices, and intellectual tastes of his people.

The young Savonarola was as yet no match for Lorenzo. And whither could he look for help? The reform of morals he so ardently desired was not to be expected from the Church. Florence well knew that Sixtus had plotted to murder the Medici before the altar at the moment of the elevation of the Host. Excommunicated for a deed of justice after the failure of this Popish plot, the city had long been at war with the pontiff. If anywhere it was in the cells of the philosophers, in that retreat where Ficino burned his lamp to Plato, in that hall where the Academy crowned their master's bust with laurels, that the more sober-minded citizens found ghostly comfort and advice. But from this philosophy the fervent soul of Savonarola turned with no less loathing, and with more contempt, than from the Canti Carnascialeschi and Aristophanic pageants of Lorenzo, which made Florence at Carnival time affect the fashions of Athens during the Dionysia. It is true that Italy owed much to the elevated theism developed by Platonic students. While the humanists were exalting pagan license, and while the Church was teaching the worst kinds of immorality, the philosophers kept alive in cultivated minds a sense of G.o.d.

But the monk, nourished on the Bible and S. Thomas, valued this confusion of spirits and creeds in a chaos of indiscriminate erudition, at a small price. He had the courage in the fifteenth century at Florence to proclaim that the philosophers were in h.e.l.l, and that an old woman knew more of saving faith than Plato. Savonarola and Lorenzo were opposed as champions of two hostile principles alike emergent from the very life of the Renaissance: paganism reborn in the one, the spirit of the gospel in the other. Both were essentially modern; for it was the function of the Renaissance to restore to the soul of man its double heritage of the cla.s.sic past and Christian liberty, freeing it from the fetters which the Middle Ages had forged. Not yet, however, were Lorenzo and Savonarola destined to clash. The obscure friar at this time was preaching to an audience of some thirty persons in San Lorenzo, while Poliziano and all the fashion of the town crowded to the sermons of Fra Mariano da Genezzano in Santo Spirito. This man flattered the taste of the moment by composing orations on the model of Ficino's addresses to the Academy, and by complimenting Christianity upon its similarity to Platonism. Who could then have guessed that beneath the cowl of the harsh-voiced Dominican, his rival, burned thoughts that in a few years would inflame Florence with a conflagration powerful enough to destroy the fabric of the Medicean despotism?

From Florence, where he had met with no success, Savonarola was sent to San Gemignano, a little town on the top of a high hill between Florence and Siena. We now visit San Gemignano in order to study some fading frescoes of Gozzoli and Ghirlandajo, or else for the sake of its strange feudal towers, tall pillars of brown stone, crowded together within the narrow circle of the town walls. Very beautiful is the prospect from these ramparts on a spring morning, when the song of nightingales and the scent of acacia flowers ascend together from the groves upon the slopes beneath. The gray Tuscan landscape for scores and scores of miles all round melts into blueness, like the blueness of the sky, flecked here and there with wandering cloud-shadows. Let those who pace the gra.s.s-grown streets of the hushed city remember that here the first flash of authentic genius kindled in Savonarola's soul. Here for the first time he prophesied: 'The church will be scourged, then regenerated, and this quickly.' These are the celebrated three conclusions, the three points to which Savonarola in all his prophetic utterances adhered.

But not yet had he fully entered on his vocation. His voice was weak; his style uncertain; his soul, we may believe, still wavering between strange dread and awful joy, as he beheld, through many a backward rolling mist of doubt, the mantle of the prophets descend upon him.

Already he had abandoned the schoolmen for the Bible. Already he had learned by heart each verse of the Old and New Testaments. Pondering on their texts, he had discovered four separate interpretations for every suggestion of Sacred Writ. For some of the pregnant utterances of the prophets he found hundreds, pouring forth metaphor and ill.u.s.tration in wild and dazzling profusion of audacious, uncouth imagery. The flame which began to smoulder in him at San Gemignano burst forth into a blaze at Brescia, in 1486. Savonarola was now aged thirty-four. 'Midway upon the path of life' he opened the Book of Revelation: he figured to the people of Brescia the four-and-twenty elders rising to denounce the sins of Italy, and to declare the calamities that must ensue. He pictured to them their city flowing with blood. His voice, which now became the interpreter of his soul, in its resonance and earnestness and piercing shrillness, thrilled his hearers with strange terror. Already they believed his prophecy; and twenty-six years later, when the soldiers of Gaston de Foix slaughtered six thousand souls in the streets of Brescia, her citizens recalled the Apocalyptic warnings of the Dominican monk.

As Savonarola is now launched upon his vocation of prophecy, this is the right moment to describe his personal appearance and his style of preaching. We have abundant material for judging what his features were, and how they flashed beneath the storm of inspiration.[1] Fra Bartolommeo, one of his followers, painted a profile of him in the character of S. Peter Martyr. This shows all the benignity and grace of expression which his stern lineaments could a.s.sume. It is a picture of the sweet and gentle nature latent within the fiery arraigner of his nation at the bar of G.o.d. In contemporary medals the face appears hard, keen, uncompromising, beneath its heavy cowl. But the n.o.blest portrait is an intaglio engraved by Giovanni della Corniole, now to be seen in the Uffizzi at Florence. Of this work Michael Angelo, himself a disciple of Savonarola, said that art could go no further. We are therefore justified in a.s.suming that the engraver has not only represented faithfully the outline of Savonarola's face, but has also indicated his peculiar expression. A thick hood covers the whole head and shoulders.

Beneath it can be traced the curve of a long and somewhat flat skull, rounded into extraordinary fullness at the base and side. From a deeply sunken eye-socket emerges, scarcely seen, but powerfully felt, the eye that blazed with lightning. The nose is strong, prominent, and aquiline, with wide nostrils, capable of terrible dilation under the stress of vehement emotion. The mouth has full, compressed, projecting lips. It is large, as if made for a torrent of eloquence: it is supplied with ma.s.sive muscles, as if to move with energy and calculated force and utterance. The jawbone is hard and heavy; the cheekbone emergent: between the two the flesh is hollowed, not so much with the emaciation of monastic vigils as with the athletic exercise of wrestlings in the throes of prophecy. The face, on the whole, is ugly, but not repellent; and, in spite of its great strength, it shows signs of feminine sensibility. Like the faces of Cicero and Demosthenes, it seems the fit machine for oratory. But the furnaces hidden away behind that skull, beneath that cowl, have made it haggard with a fire not to be found in the serener features of the cla.s.sic orators. Savonarola was a visionary and a monk. The discipline of the cloister left its trace upon him. The wings of dreams have winnowed and withered that cheek as they pa.s.sed over it. The spirit of prayer quivers upon those eager lips. The color of Savonarola's flesh was brown: his nerves were exquisitely sensitive yet strong; like a network of wrought steel, elastic, easily overstrained, they recovered their tone and temper less by repose than by the evolution of fresh electricity. With Savonarola fasts were succeeded by trances, and trances by tempests of vehement improvization.

From the midst of such profound debility that he could scarcely crawl up the pulpit steps, he would pa.s.s suddenly into the plenitude of power, filling the Dome of Florence with denunciations, sustaining his discourse by no mere trick of rhetoric that flows to waste upon the lips of shallow preachers, but marshaling the phalanx of embattled arguments and pointed ill.u.s.trations, pouring his thought forth in columns of continuous flame, mingling figures of sublimest imagery with reasonings severest accuracy, at one time melting his audience tears, at another freezing them with terror, again quickening their souls with prayers and pleadings and blessings that had in them the sweetness of the very spirit of Christ. His sermons began with scholastic exposition; as they advanced, the ecstasy of inspiration fell upon the preacher, till the sympathies of the whole people of Florence gathered round him,[2] met and attained, as it were, to single consciousness in him. He then no longer restrained the impulse of his oratory, but became the mouthpiece of G.o.d, the interpreter to themselves of all that host. In a fiery crescendo, never flagging, never losing firmness of grasp or lucidity of vision, he ascended the altar steps of prophecy, and, standing like Moses on the mount between the thunders of G.o.d and the tabernacles of the plain, fulminated period after period of impa.s.sioned eloquence. The walls of the church re-echoed with sobs and wailings dominated by one ringing voice. The scribe to whom we owe the fragments of these sermons, at times breaks off with these words: 'Here I was so overcome with weeping that I could not go on.' Pico della Mirandola tells us that the mere sound of Savonarola's voice, startling the stillness of the Duomo, thronged through all its s.p.a.ce with people, was like a clap of doom: a cold shiver ran through the marrow of his bones, the hairs of his head stood on end, as he listened. Another witness reports: 'These sermons caused such terror, alarm, sobbing, and tears that every one pa.s.sed through the streets without speaking, more dead than alive.'

[1] Engravings of the several portraits may be seen in Harford's _Life of Michael Angelo Buonarroti_ (Longmans, 1857 vol. i.), and also in Villari.

[2] Nardi, in his _Istorie di Firenze_ (lib. ii. cap. 16), describes the crowd a.s.sembled in the Duomo to hear Savonarola preach: 'Per la molt.i.tudine degli uditori non essendo quasi bastante la chiesa cattedrale di santa Maria del Fiore, ancora che molto grande e capace sia, fu necessario edificar dentro lungo i pareti di quella, dirempetto al pergamo, certi gradi di legname rilevati con ordine di sederi, a guisa di teatro, e cos dalla parte di sopra all' entrata del coro e dalla parte di sotto in verso le porte della detta chiesa.'

Such was the preacher: and such was the effect of his oratory. The theme on which he loved to dwell was this. Repent! A judgment of G.o.d is at hand. A sword is suspended over you. Italy is doomed for her iniquity--for the sins of the Church, whose adulteries have filled the world--for the sins of the tyrants, who encourage crime and trample upon souls--for the sins of you people, you fathers and mothers, you young men, you maidens, you children that lisp blasphemy! Nor did Savonarola deal in generalities. He described in plain language every vice; he laid bare every abuse; so that a mirror was held up to the souls of his hearers, in which they saw their most secret faults appallingly portrayed and ringed around with fire. He entered with particularity into the details of the coming woes. One by one he enumerated the bloodshed, the ruin of cities, the trampling down of provinces, the pa.s.sage of armies, the desolating wars that were about to fall on Italy.[1] You may read pages of his sermons which seem like vivid narratives of what afterwards took place in the sack of Prato, in the storming of Brescia, in the battle of the Ronco, in the cavern-ma.s.sacre of Vicenza. No wonder that he stirred his audience to their center. The h.e.l.l within them was revealed. The coming doom above them was made manifest. Ezekiel and Jeremiah were not more prophetic. John crying to a generation of vipers, 'Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!'

was not more weighty with the mission of authentic inspiration.

[1] Savonarola's whole view of the situation and of the perils of Italy was that of a prophet. He saw more clearly than other people what was inevitable. But his disciples and the vulgar believed implicitly in his prophetic gift in the narrower sense, that is, in his power to predict events, such as the deaths of Lorenzo and the King of Naples, the punishment of Charles VIII, in the loss of the dauphin, etc. Pico says: 'Savonarola could read the future as clearly as one sees the whole is greater than the part.' And there is no doubt that, as time went on, Savonarola came to believe himself that he possessed this faculty. After his trial and execution a very uncomfortable sense of doubt remained upon the minds of those who had been witnesses of his life-drama. Upon this topic Guicciardini, _Stor. Fior., Op. Ined._ vol. iii. p. 179; Nardi, _Stor. Fior._ lib. ii. caps. 16 and 36, may be read with advantage.

'I began'--Savonarola writes himself with reference to a course of sermons delivered in 1491--'I began publicly to expound the Revelation in our Church of S. Mark. During the course of the year I continued to develop to the Florentines these three propositions: That the Church would be renewed in our time; that before that renovation G.o.d would strike all Italy with a fearful chastis.e.m.e.nt; that these things would happen shortly.' It is by right of the foresight of a new age contained in these three famous so-called conclusions that Savonarola deserves to be named the Prophet of the Renaissance. He was no apostle of reform: it did not occur to him to reconstruct the creed, to dispute the discipline, or to criticise the authority of the Church. He was no founder of a new order: unlike his predecessors, Dominic and Francis, he never attempted to organize a society of saints or preachers; unlike his successors, Caraffa the Theatine and Loyola the Jesuit, he enrolled no militia for the defense of the faith, constructed no machinery for education. Starting with simple horror at the wickedness of the world, he had recourse to the old prophets. He steeped himself in Bible studies. He caught the language of Malachi and Jeremiah. He became convinced that for the wickedness of Italy a judgment was imminent. From that conclusion he rose upon the wings of faith to the belief that a new age would dawn. The originality of his intuition consisted in this, that while Italy was asleep, and no man trembled for the future, he alone felt that the stillness of the air was fraught with thunder, that its tranquillity was like that which precedes a tempest blown from the very nostrils of the G.o.d of Hosts.

To the astonishment of his hearers, and perhaps also of himself, his prophecies began to fulfill themselves. Within three years after his first sermon in S. Mark's, Charles VIII. had entered Italy, Lorenzo de'

Medici was dead, and politicians no less than mystics felt that a new chapter had been opened in the book of the world's history. The Reform of the Church was also destined to follow. What Savonarola had foreseen, here too happened; but not in the way he would have wished, nor by the means he would have used. It is one thing to be a prophet in the sense of discerning the catastrophe to which circ.u.mstances must inevitably lead, another thing to trace beforehand the path which will be taken by the hurricanes that change the face of the world. Remaining in his soul a monk, attached by education and by natural sympathy to the past rather than the future, he felt in spite of himself the spirit of the coming age. Had he lived but one century earlier, we should not have called him prophet. It was the Renaissance which set the seal of truth upon his utterances. Yet in his vision of the world to be, he was like Balaam prophesying blindly of a star.

Sixtus IV. had died and been succeeded by Innocent VIII. Innocent had given place to Alexander. The very nadir of the abyss had been reached.

Then Savonarola saw a vision and heard a voice: _Ecce gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter._ The sword turned earthward; the air was darkened with fiery sleet and arrows; thunders rolled; the world was filled with pestilences, wars, famines. At another time he dreamed and looked toward Rome. From the Eternal City there rose a black cross, reaching to heaven, and on it was inscribed _Crux irae Dei._ Then too the skies were troubled; clouds rushed through the air discharging darts and fire and swords, and mult.i.tudes below were dying. These visions he published in sermons and in print. Pictures were made from them. They and the three conclusions went abroad through Italy. Again, Charles was preparing for his expedition. Savonarola took the Ark of Noah for his theme. The deluge was at hand; he bade his hearers enter the ship of refuge before the terrible and mighty nation came: 'O Italy! O Rome! I give you over to the hands of a people who will wipe you out from among the nations! I see them descending like lions. Pestilence comes marching hand in hand with war. The deaths will be so many that the buriers shall go through the streets crying out: Who hath dead, who hath dead? and one will bring his father, and another his son. O Rome! I cry again to you to repent, Repent, Venice! Milan, repent!' 'The prophets a hundred years ago proclaimed to you the flagellation of the Church. For five years I have been announcing it: and now again I cry to you. The Lord is full of wrath. The angels on their knees cry to Him: Strike, strike! The good sob and groan: We can no more. The orphans, the widows say: We are devoured, we cannot go on living. All the Church triumphant hath cried to Christ: Thou diedst in vain. It is heaven which is in combat. The saints of Italy, the angels, are leagued with the barbarians. Those who called them in have put the saddles to the horses. Italy is in confusion, saith the Lord; this time she shall be yours. And the Lord cometh above his saints, above the blessed ones who march in battle-array, who are drawn up in squadrons. Whither are they bound? S.

Peter is for Rome, crying: To Rome, to Rome! and S. Paul and S. Gregory march, crying: To Rome! And behind them go the sword, the pestilence, the famine. S. John cries: Up, up, to Florence! And the plague follows him. S. Anthony cries: Ho for Lombardy! S. Mark cries: Haste we to the city that is throned upon the waters! And all the angels of heaven, sword in hand, and all the celestial consistory, march on unto this war.'

Then he speaks of his own fate: 'What shall be the end of our war, you ask? If this be a general question, I shall answer Victory! If you ask it of myself in particular, I answer, Death, or to be hewn in pieces.

This is our faith, this is our guerdon, this is our reward! We ask for no more than this. But when you see me dead, be not then troubled. All those who have prophesied have suffered and been slain. To make my word prevail, there is needed the blood of many.'

These are the prophecies with which Savonarola antic.i.p.ated the coming of a foreign conqueror. It is interesting to trace in his apostrophes the double feeling of the prophet. Desire for the advent of Charles as a Messiah, liberator, and purifier of the Church, contends with an instinctive horror of the barbarian. Savonarola, like Dante, like all Italian patriots, except only Machiavelli, who too late had been lessoned by bitter experience to put no trust in foreign princes, could not refrain from hoping even against hope that good might come from beyond the Alps. Yet when the foreigners appeared, he trembled at the violence they wrought upon the ancient liberties of Italy. Savonarola's chief shortcoming as a patriot consisted in this, that he strengthened the old folly of the Florentines in leaning upon strangers.[1] Had he taught the Italians to work out their self-regeneration from within, instead of preparing them to accept an alien's yoke, he would have won a far more lasting meed of fame. As it was, together with the pa.s.sion for liberty which became a religion with his followers, he strove to revive the obsolete tactics of an earlier age, and bequeathed to Florence the weak policy of waiting upon France. This legacy bore bitter fruits in the next century. If it was the memory of the Friar which nerved the citizens of Florence to sustain the siege of 1528, the same memory bound them to seek aid from inconsequent Francis, and to hope that at the last moment a cohort of seraphim would defend their walls.[2]

[1] Segni, _Ist. Fior._ lib. i. p. 23, records a saying of Savonarola's, _Gigli con gigli dover fiorire_, as one of the causes of the obstinate French partiality of the Florentines in 1529.

[2] See Varchi, Segni, and Nardi, who agree on these points.

That Savonarola believed in his own prophecies there is no doubt. They were in fact, as I have already tried to show, a view of the political and moral situation of Italy, expressed with the force of profound religious conviction and based upon a theory of the divine government of the world. But now far he allowed himself to be guided by visions and by words uttered to his soul in trance, is a somewhat different question.

It is just at this point that a man possessed of acute insight and trusting to the truth of his instincts may be tempted under strong devotional excitement to pa.s.s the border land which separates healthy intuition from hallucination. If Savonarola's studies of the Hebrew prophets inclined him to believe in dreams and revelations, yet on the other hand the strong logic of his intellect, trained in scholastic distinctions, taught him to mistrust the promptings of a power that spoke to him when he was somewhat more or less than his prosaic self.

How could he be sure that the spirit came from G.o.d? We know for certain that he struggled against the impulse of divination and refused at times to obey it. But it overcame him. Like the Ca.s.sandra of aeschylus, he panted in the grasp of one mightier than himself. 'An inward fire,' he cried, 'consumes my bones and forces me to speak out' And again: 'I have, O Lord, burnt my wings of contemplation, and I have launched into a tempestuous sea, where I have found contrary winds in every quarter. I wished to reach a harbor, but could not find the way thither; I wished to lay me down, but could meet with no resting-place. I longed to be silent and to utter not a word. But the word of the Lord is in my heart; and if it does not come forth, it must consume the marrow of my bones.

Thus, O Lord, if it be Thy will that I should navigate in deep waters, Thy will, be done.'

At another time he says: 'I remember well that upon one occasion, in the year 1491, when I was preaching in the Duomo, having composed my sermon entirely upon these visions, I determined to abstain from all allusion to them, and in future to adhere to this resolution. G.o.d is my witness that the whole of Sat.u.r.day and the whole of the succeeding night I lay awake, and could see no other course, no other doctrine. At daybreak, worn out and depressed by the many hours I had lain awake, while I was praying I heard a voice that said to me: "Fool that thou art, dost thou not see that it is G.o.d's will that thou shouldst keep to the same path?" The consequence of which was that on the same day I preached a tremendous sermon.'

These pa.s.sages leave upon the mind no doubt of Savonarola's sincerity.

If he deceived others, he was himself the first to be deceived, and that too not before he had subjected himself to the most searching examination, seeking in vain to escape from the force which compelled him to play the part of prophet. Terrible, indeed, must have been the wrestlings and questionings of this strong-fibered intellect, alone and diffident, within the toils of ecstasy.

Returning to the details of Savonarola's biography, we find him still in Lombardy in 1486. After leaving Brescia he moved to Reggio, where he made the friendship of the famous Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. They continued intimate till the death of the latter in 1494; it was his nephew, Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, who afterwards wrote the Life of Savonarola. From Reggio the friar went to Genoa; and by this time his fame as a prophet in the north of Lombardy was well established. Now came the turning-point in his life. Fourteen hundred and ninety is the date which determined his public action as a man of power in Italy. Lorenzo de' Medici, strangely enough, was the instrument of his recall in this year to Florence. Lorenzo, who, if he could have foreseen the future of his own family in Florence, would rather have stifled this monk's voice in his cowl, took pains to send for him and bring him to S. Mark's, the convent upon which his father had lavished so much wealth. He hoped to add l.u.s.ter to his capital by the preaching of the most eloquent friar in Italy. Clear-sighted as he was, he could not discern the flame of liberty which burned in Savonarola's soul.

Savonarola, the democratic party leader, was a force in politics as incalculable beforehand as Ferrucci the hero. On August 1, 1490, the monk ascended the pulpit of S. Mark's, and delivered a tremendous sermon on a pa.s.sage from the Apocalypse. On the eve of this commencement he is reported to have said: 'Tomorrow I shall begin to preach, and I shall preach for eight years.' The Florentines were greatly moved. Savonarola had to remove from the Church of S. Mark to the Duomo; and thus began the spiritual dictatorship which he exercised thenceforth without intermission till his death.

Lorenzo soon began to resent the influence of this uncompromising monk, who, not content with moral exhortations, confidently predicted the coming of a foreign conqueror, the fall of the Magnificent, the peril of the Pope, and the ruin of the King of Naples. Yet it was no longer easy to suppress the preacher. Very early in his Florentine career Savonarola had proved himself to be fully as great an administrator as an orator.

The Convent of San Marco dominated by his personal authority, had made him Prior in 1491, and he was already engaged in a thorough reform of all the Dominican monasteries of Tuscany. It was usual for the Priors elect of S. Mark to pay a complimentary visit to the Medici, their patrons. Savonarola, thinking this a worldly and unseemly custom, omitted to observe it. Lorenzo, noticing the discourtesy, is reported to have said, with a smile: 'See now! here is a stranger who has come into _my house_, and will not deign to visit me.' He forgot that Savonarola looked upon his convent as a house of G.o.d. At the same time the prince made overtures of goodwill to the Prior, frequently attended his services, and dropped gold into the alms-box of S. Mark's. Savonarola took no notice of him, and handed his florins over to the poor of the city. Then Lorenzo stirred up Fra Mariano da Genezzano, Savonarola's old rival, against him; but the clever rhetorician was no longer a match for the full-grown athlete of inspired eloquence. Da Genezzano was forced to leave Florence in angry discomfiture. With such unbending haughtiness did Savonarola already dare to brave the powers that be. He had recognized the oppressor of liberty, the corrupter of morality, the opponent of true religion, in Lorenzo. He hated him as a tyrant. He would not give him the right hand of friendship or the salute of civility. In the same spirit he afterwards denounced Alexander, scorned his excommunication, and plotted with the kings of Christendom for the convening of a Council. Lorenzo, however, was a man of supreme insight into character, and knew how to value his antagonist. Therefore, when the hour for dying came, and when, true child of the Renaissance that he was, he felt the need of sacraments and absolution, he sent for Savonarola, saying that he was the only honest friar he knew. The magnanimity of the Medici was only equaled by the firmness of the monk.

Standing by the bedside of the dying man, who had confessed his sins, Savonarola said: 'Three things are required of you: to have a full and lively faith in G.o.d's mercy; to restore what you have unjustly gained; to give back liberty to Florence.' Lorenzo a.s.sented readily to the two first requisitions. At the third he turned his face in silence to the wall. He must indeed have felt that to demand and promise this was easier than to carry it into effect. Savonarola left him without absolution. Lorenzo died.[1]

[1] It is just to observe that great doubt has been thrown on the facts above related concerning Lorenzo's death. Poliziano, who was with Lorenzo during his last illness, does not mention them in his letter to Jacobus Antiquarius (xv. Kal. Jun. 1492).

But Burlmacchi, Pico, Barsanti, Razzi, and others of the Frate's party, agree in the story. What Poliziano wrote was that Savonarola confessed Lorenzo and retired without volunteering the blessing. Razzi says the interview between Savonarola and Lorenzo took place without witnesses; Pico and Burlamacchi relate the event as they heard of it from the lips of Savonarola. We have therefore to judge between the testimony of Poliziano, who held no communication with the friar, and the veracity of several narrators, bia.s.sed indeed by hostility toward the Medici, but in direct intercourse with the only man who could tell the exact truth of what pa.s.sed--the confessor, Savonarola, who had been alone with Lorenzo. Villari, after sifting the evidence, arrives at the conclusion that we may believe Burlamacchi. The Baron Reumont, in his recent _Life of Lorenzo_, vol. ii. p. 590, gives some solid reasons for accepting this conclusion with caution, and Gino Capponi expresses a distinct disbelief in Burlamacchi's narration.

The third point insisted upon by the friar, Restore liberty to Florence, not only broke the peace of the dying prince, but it also afterwards for ever ruled the conduct of Savonarola. From this time his life is that of a statesman no less than of a preacher. What Lorenzo refused, or was indeed upon his deathbed quite unable to perform, the monk determined to achieve. Henceforth he became the champion of popular liberty in the pulpit. Feeling that in the people alone lay any hope of regeneration for Italy, he made it the work of his whole life to give the strength and sanction of religion to republican freedom. This work he sealed with martyrdom. The spirit of the creed which he bequeathed to his partisans in Florence was political no less than pious. Whether Savonarola was right to embark upon the perilous sea of statecraft cannot now be questioned. What prophet of Israel from Samuel to Isaiah was not the maker and destroyer of kings and const.i.tutions? When we call him by their t.i.tle, we mean to say that he, like them, controlled by spiritual force the fortunes of his people. Whether he sought it or not, this role of politician was thrust upon him by the course of events: nor was the history of Italian cities deficient in precedents of similar functions a.s.sumed by preaching friars.[1]

[1] It is enough to allude to Arnold of Brescia in Rome, to Fra Bussolari in Pavia, ami to John of Vicenza. Sec Appendix iv.

To Lorenzo succeeded the incompetent Piero de' Medici, who surrendered the fortresses of Tuscany to the French army. While Savonarola was prophesying a sword, a scourge, a deluge, Charles VIII. rode at the head of his knighthood into Florence. The city was leaderless, unused to liberty. Who but the monk who had predicted the invasion should now attempt to control it? Who but he whose voice alone had power to a.s.semble and to sway the Florentines should now direct them? His administrative faculty in a narrow sphere had been proved by his reform of the Dominican Convents. His divine mission was authenticated by the arrival of the French. The Lord had raised him up to act as well as to utter. He felt this: the people felt it. He was not the man to refuse responsibility.

During the years of 1493 and 1494, when Florence together with Italy was in imminent peril, the voice of Savonarola never ceased to ring. His sermons on the psalm 'Quam bonus' and on the Ark of Noah are among the most stupendous triumphs of his eloquence. From his pulpit beneath the somber dome of Brunelleschi he kept pouring forth words of power to resuscitate the free spirit of his Florentines. In 1495, when the Medici had been expelled and the French army had gone upon its way to Naples, Savonarola was called upon to reconst.i.tute the state. He bade the people abandon their old system of Parlamenti and Balia, and establish a Grand Council after the Venetian type.[1] This inst.i.tution, which seemed to the Florentines the best they had ever adopted, might be regarded by the historian as only one among their many experiments in const.i.tution-making, if Savonarola had not stamped it with his peculiar genius by announcing that Christ was to be considered the Head of the State.[2] This step at once gave a theocratic bias to the government, which determined all the acts of the monk's administration. Not content with political organization, too impatient to await the growth of good manners from sound inst.i.tutions, he set about a moral and religious reformation. Pomps, vanities, and vices were to be abandoned.

Immediately the women and the young men threw aside their silks and fine attire. The Carnival songs ceased. Hymns and processions took the place of obscene choruses and pagan triumphs. The laws were remodeled in the same severe and abrupt spirit. Usury was abolished. Whatever Savonarola ordained, Florence executed. By the magic of his influence the city for a moment a.s.sumed a new aspect. It seemed as though the old austerity which Dante and Villani praised were about to return without the factious hate and pride that ruined medaeival Tuscany. In everything done by Savonarola at this epoch there was a strange combination of political sagacity with monastic zeal. Neither Guicciardini nor Machiavelli, writing years afterwards, when Savonarola had fallen and Florence was again enslaved, could propose anything wiser than his Consiglio Grande.

Yet the fierce revivalism advocated by the friar--the bonfire of Lorenzo di Credi's and Fra Bartolommeo's pictures, of MSS, of Boccaccio and cla.s.sic poets, and of all those fineries which a Venetian Jew is said to have valued in one heap at 22,000 florins--the recitation of such Baccha.n.a.lian songs as this--