Savonarola is a man whom we shall probably never understand until we
know what horror may lie at the heart of civilisation. This we shall not
know until we are civilised. It may be hoped, in one sense, that we may
never understand Savonarola.
The great deliverers of men have, for the most part, saved them from
calamities which we all recognise as evil, from calamities which are the
ancient enemies of humanity. The great law-givers saved us from anarchy:
the great physicians saved us from pestilence: the great reformers
saved us from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evil
compared with which all these are flea-bites, the most desolating curse
that can fall upon men or nations, and it has no name, except we call it
satisfaction. Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order;
not from pestilence, but from paralysis; not from starvation, but from
luxury. Men like Savonarola are the witnesses to the tremendous
psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name
has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and
civilisation potentially the end of man.
For I fancy that Savonarola's thrilling challenge to the luxury of his
day went far deeper than the mere question of sin. The modern
rationalistic admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot downwards,
dwell, truly enough, upon the sound ethical justification of
Savonarola's anger, upon the hideous and extravagant character of the
crimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance. But they need not
be so anxious to show that Savonarola was no ascetic, that he merely
picked out the black specks of wickedness with the priggish
enlightenment of a member of an Ethical Society. Probably he did hate
the civilisation of his time, and not merely its sins; and that is
precisely where he was infinitely more profound than a modern moralist.
He saw that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that stolen
jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the symptoms;
that the disease was the complete dependence upon jewels and wine and
pictures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of ascetics
and Puritans in old times. A denunciation of harmless sports did not
always mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist
would call harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceedingly enlightened hatred
of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics are
sometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less.
Such, at least, was the hatred in the heart of Savonarola. He was making
war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless
quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which
all creation fell. He was preaching that severity which is the
sign-manual of youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, that
clean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as
to gain holiness, as indispensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic has
truly pointed out that Savonarola could not have been fundamentally
anti-æsthetic, since he had such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli,
and Luca della Robbia. The fact is that this purification and austerity
are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than
for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently
the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires
a discipline in pleasure, and an education in gratitude.
The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a
civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that
leads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow
old with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new.
The monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of
imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of
imagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as
it is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer be
surprised at an ox, that he worships the devil. Diablerie is the
stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the dram-drinking of the artist.
Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of all earthly tasks, that
of making men turn back and wonder at the simplicities they had learnt
to ignore. It is strange that the most unpopular of all doctrines is
the doctrine which declares the common life divine. Democracy, of which
Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of gospels; there is
nothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all kings.
Christianity, in Savonarola's mind, identical with democracy, is the
hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as
the saying that they are all the sons of God.
Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administered
to the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at the
present day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and for
mere men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be an
improvement on that of the great Florentine republican. It is such men
as these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to fear.
We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those which
awoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola--a hedonism that is more sick
of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that seeks
the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In many modern
works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly Renaissance sense of
the beauty of blood, the poetry of murder. The bankrupt and depraved
imagination does not see that a living man is far more dramatic than a
dead one. Along with this, as in the time of the Medici, goes the
falling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger for the strong man
which is unknown among strong men. The masterful hero is worshipped as
he is worshipped by the readers of the 'Bow Bells Novelettes,' and for
the same reason--a profound sense of personal weakness. That tendency to
devolve our duties descends on us, which is the soul of slavery, alike
whether for its menial tasks it employs serfs or emperors. Against all
this the great clerical republican stands in everlasting protest,
preferring his failure to his rival's success. The issue is still
between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of liberty and the
licence of slavery, between the perils of truth and the security of
silence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of pleasure. The
supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among us, men for
whom even nations and empires only exist to satisfy the moment, men to
whom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp and wintry
spring. They have an art, a literature, a political philosophy, which
are all alike valued for their immediate effect upon the taste, not for
what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their statuettes and
sonnets are rounded and perfect, while 'Macbeth' is in comparison a
fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their campaigns and
battles are always called triumphant, while Cæsar and Cromwell wept for
many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell of no resistance,
the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole nature recoils
into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer merely a
cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.
This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent
his whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course.
Few men understood his object; some called him a madman, some a
charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even have
understood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving them
from a calamity of contentment which should be the end of joys and
sorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silent
danger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They also
are supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple.
Mr M'Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine works
of art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been much
exaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of
incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real moment
more real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's friend Michael
Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other, and
burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow
transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.