“In intoxication,” says the proverb, “men betray their real characters.”
There is a no less honest and truth-revealing intoxication in
prosperity, than in wine. The varnish of power brings forth at once the
defects and the beauties of the human portrait.
The unprecedented and almost miraculous rise of Rienzi from the rank of
the Pontiff’s official to the Lord of Rome, would have been accompanied
with a yet greater miracle, if it had not somewhat dazzled and seduced
the object it elevated. When, as in well-ordered states and tranquil
times, men rise slowly, step by step, they accustom themselves to
their growing fortunes. But the leap of an hour from a citizen to a
prince--from the victim of oppression to the dispenser of justice--is
a transition so sudden as to render dizzy the most sober brain. And,
perhaps, in proportion to the imagination, the enthusiasm, the genius
of the man, will the suddenness be dangerous--excite too extravagant a
hope--and lead to too chimerical an ambition. The qualities that made
him rise, hurry him to his fall; and victory at the Marengo of his
fortunes, urges him to destruction at its Moscow.
In his greatness Rienzi did not so much acquire new qualities, as
develop in brighter light and deeper shadow those which he had always
exhibited. On the one hand he was just--resolute--the friend of
the oppressed--the terror of the oppressor. His wonderful intellect
illumined everything it touched. By rooting out abuse, and by searching
examination and wise arrangement, he had trebled the revenues of the
city without imposing a single new tax. Faithful to his idol of liberty,
he had not been betrayed by the wish of the people into despotic
authority; but had, as we have seen, formally revived, and established
with new powers, the Parliamentary Council of the city. However
extensive his own authority, he referred its exercise to the people; in
their name he alone declared himself to govern, and he never executed
any signal action without submitting to them its reasons or its
justification. No less faithful to his desire to restore prosperity as
well as freedom to Rome, he had seized the first dazzling epoch of his
power to propose that great federative league with the Italian States
which would, as he rightly said, have raised Rome to the indisputable
head of European nations. Under his rule trade was secure, literature
was welcome, art began to rise.
On the other hand, the prosperity which made more apparent his justice,
his integrity, his patriotism, his virtues, and his genius, brought out
no less glaringly his arrogant consciousness of superiority, his love of
display, and the wild and daring insolence of his ambition. Though
too just to avenge himself by retaliating on the patricians their
own violence, though, in his troubled and stormy tribuneship, not one
unmerited or illegal execution of baron or citizen could be alleged
against him, even by his enemies; yet sharing, less excusably, the
weakness of Nina, he could not deny his proud heart the pleasure of
humiliating those who had ridiculed him as a buffoon, despised him as a
plebeian, and who, even now slaves to his face, were cynics behind his
back. “They stood before him while he sate,” says his biographer; “all
these Barons, bareheaded; their hands crossed on their breasts;
their looks downcast;--oh, how frightened they were!”--a picture more
disgraceful to the servile cowardice of the nobles than the haughty
sternness of the Tribune. It might be that he deemed it policy to break
the spirit of his foes, and to awe those whom it was a vain hope to
conciliate.
For his pomp there was a greater excuse: it was the custom of the time;
it was the insignia and witness of power; and when the modern historian
taunts him with not imitating the simplicity of an ancient tribune, the
sneer betrays an ignorance of the spirit of the age, and the vain
people whom the chief magistrate was to govern. No doubt his gorgeous
festivals, his solemn processions, set off and ennobled--if parade can
so be ennobled--by a refined and magnificent richness of imagination,
associated always with popular emblems, and designed to convey the idea
of rejoicing for Liberty Restored, and to assert the state and majesty
of Rome Revived--no doubt these spectacles, however otherwise judged in
a more enlightened age and by closet sages, served greatly to augment
the importance of the Tribune abroad, and to dazzle the pride of a
fickle and ostentatious populace. And taste grew refined, luxury called
labour into requisition, and foreigners from all states were attracted
by the splendour of a court over which presided, under republican names,
two sovereigns, (Rienzi, speaking in one of his letters of his great
enterprise, refers it to the ardour of youth. The exact date of his
birth is unknown; but he was certainly a young man at the time now
referred to. His portrait in the Museo Barberino, from which his
description has been already taken in the first book of this work,
represents him as beardless, and, as far as one can judge, somewhere
above thirty--old enough, to be sure, to have a beard; and seven years
afterwards he wore a long one, which greatly displeased his naive
biographer, who seems to consider it a sort of crime. The head is very
remarkable for its stern beauty, and little, if at all, inferior to that
of Napoleon; to which, as I before remarked, it has some resemblance in
expression, if not in feature.) young and brilliant, the one renowned
for his genius, the other eminent for her beauty. It was, indeed, a
dazzling and royal dream in the long night of Rome, spoiled of her
Pontiff and his voluptuous train--that holyday reign of Cola di Rienzi!
And often afterwards it was recalled with a sigh, not only by the poor
for its justice, the merchant for its security, but the gallant for its
splendour, and the poet for its ideal and intellectual grace!
As if to show that it was not to gratify the more vulgar appetite and
desire, in the midst of all his pomp, when the board groaned with
the delicacies of every clime, when the wine most freely circled, the
Tribune himself preserved a temperate and even rigid abstinence. (“Vita
di Cola di Rienzi”.--The biographer praises the abstinence of the
Tribune.) While the apartments of state and the chamber of his bride
were adorned with a profuse luxury and cost, to his own private rooms he
transported precisely the same furniture which had been familiar to him
in his obscurer life. The books, the busts, the reliefs, the arms which
had inspired him heretofore with the visions of the past, were endeared
by associations which he did not care to forego.
But that which constituted the most singular feature of his character,
and which still wraps all around him in a certain mystery, was his
religious enthusiasm. The daring but wild doctrines of Arnold of
Brescia, who, two centuries anterior, had preached reform, but
inculcated mysticism, still lingered in Rome, and had in earlier youth
deeply coloured the mind of Rienzi; and as I have before observed,
his youthful propensity to dreamy thought, the melancholy death of his
brother, his own various but successful fortunes, had all contributed
to nurse the more zealous and solemn aspirations of this remarkable
man. Like Arnold of Brescia, his faith bore a strong resemblance to the
intense fanaticism of our own Puritans of the Civil War, as if similar
political circumstances conduced to similar religious sentiments. He
believed himself inspired by awful and mighty commune with beings of the
better world. Saints and angels ministered to his dreams; and without
this, the more profound and hallowed enthusiasm, he might never
have been sufficiently emboldened by mere human patriotism, to
his unprecedented enterprise: it was the secret of much of his
greatness,--many of his errors. Like all men who are thus self-deluded
by a vain but not inglorious superstition, united with, and coloured by,
earthly ambition, it is impossible to say how far he was the visionary,
and how far at times he dared to be the impostor. In the ceremonies of
his pageants, in the ornaments of his person, were invariably introduced
mystic and figurative emblems. In times of danger he publicly professed
to have been cheered and directed by divine dreams; and on many
occasions the prophetic warnings he announced having been singularly
verified by the event, his influence with the people was strengthened by
a belief in the favour and intercourse of Heaven. Thus, delusion of
self might tempt and conduce to imposition on others, and he might not
scruple to avail himself of the advantage of seeming what he believed
himself to be. Yet, no doubt this intoxicating credulity pushed him
into extravagance unworthy of, and strangely contrasted by, his soberer
intellect, and made him disproportion his vast ends to his unsteady
means, by the proud fallacy, that where man failed, God would interpose.
Cola di Rienzi was no faultless hero of romance. In him lay, in
conflicting prodigality, the richest and most opposite elements of
character; strong sense, visionary superstition, an eloquence and
energy that mastered all he approached, a blind enthusiasm that mastered
himself; luxury and abstinence, sternness and susceptibility, pride to
the great, humility to the low; the most devoted patriotism and the most
avid desire of personal power. As few men undertake great and desperate
designs without strong animal spirits, so it may be observed, that with
most who have risen to eminence over the herd, there is an aptness, at
times, to a wild mirth and an elasticity of humour which often astonish
the more sober and regulated minds, that are “the commoners of life:”
And the theatrical grandeur of Napoleon, the severe dignity of
Cromwell, are strangely contrasted by a frequent, nor always seasonable
buffoonery, which it is hard to reconcile with the ideal of their
characters, or the gloomy and portentous interest of their careers. And
this, equally a trait in the temperament of Rienzi, distinguished his
hours of relaxation, and contributed to that marvellous versatility with
which his harder nature accommodated itself to all humours and all men.
Often from his austere judgment-seat he passed to the social board an
altered man; and even the sullen Barons who reluctantly attended his
feasts, forgot his public greatness in his familiar wit; albeit this
reckless humour could not always refrain from seeking its subject in the
mortification of his crest-fallen foes--a pleasure it would have been
wiser and more generous to forego. And perhaps it was, in part, the
prompting of this sarcastic and unbridled humour that made him often
love to astonish as well as to awe. But even this gaiety, if so it may
be called, taking an appearance of familiar frankness, served much to
ingratiate him with the lower orders; and, if a fault in the prince, was
a virtue in the demagogue.
To these various characteristics, now fully developed, the reader must
add a genius of designs so bold, of conceptions so gigantic and august,
conjoined with that more minute and ordinary ability which masters
details; that with a brave, noble, intelligent, devoted people to back
his projects, the accession of the Tribune would have been the close of
the thraldom of Italy, and the abrupt limit of the dark age of Europe.
With such a people, his faults would have been insensibly checked,
his more unwholesome power have received a sufficient curb. Experience
familiarizing him with power, would have gradually weaned him from
extravagance in its display; and the active and masculine energy of his
intellect would have found field for the more restless spirits, as his
justice gave shelter to the more tranquil. Faults he had, but whether
those faults or the faults of the people, were to prepare his downfall,
is yet to be seen.
Meanwhile, amidst a discontented nobility and a fickle populace, urged
on by the danger of repose to the danger of enterprise; partly blinded
by his outward power, partly impelled by the fear of internal weakness;
at once made sanguine by his genius and his fanaticism, and uneasy by
the expectations of the crowd,--he threw himself headlong into the
gulf of the rushing Time, and surrendered his lofty spirit to no
other guidance than a conviction of its natural buoyancy and its
heaven-directed haven.