Outside the Duomo.
While Baldassarre was possessed by the voice of Savonarola, he had not
noticed that another man had entered through the doorway behind him,
and stood not far off observing him. It was Piero di Cosimo, who took
no heed of the preaching, having come solely to look at the escaped
prisoner. During the pause, in which the preacher and his audience had
given themselves up to inarticulate emotion, the new-comer advanced and
touched Baldassarre on the arm. He looked round with the tears still
slowly rolling down his face, but with a vigorous sigh, as if he had
done with that outburst. The painter spoke to him in a low tone—
“Shall I cut your cords for you? I have heard how you were made
prisoner.”
Baldassarre did not reply immediately; he glanced suspiciously at the
officious stranger. At last he said, “If you will.”
“Better come outside,” said Piero.
Baldassarre again looked at him suspiciously; and Piero, partly
guessing his thought, smiled, took out a knife, and cut the cords. He
began to think that the idea of the prisoner’s madness was not
improbable, there was something so peculiar in the expression of his
face. “Well,” he thought, “if he does any mischief, he’ll soon get tied
up again. The poor devil shall have a chance, at least.”
“You are afraid of me,” he said again, in an undertone; “you don’t want
to tell me anything about yourself.”
Baldassarre was folding his arms in enjoyment of the long-absent
muscular sensation. He answered Piero with a less suspicious look and a
tone which had some quiet decision in it.
“No, I have nothing to tell.”
“As you please,” said Piero, “but perhaps you want shelter, and may not
know how hospitable we Florentines are to visitors with torn doublets
and empty stomachs. There’s an hospital for poor travellers outside all
our gates, and, if you liked, I could put you in the way to one.
There’s no danger from your French soldier. He has been sent off.”
Baldassarre nodded, and turned in silent acceptance of the offer, and
he and Piero left the church together.
“You wouldn’t like to sit to me for your portrait, should you?” said
Piero, as they went along the Via dell’ Oriuolo, on the way to the gate
of Santa Croce. “I am a painter: I would give you money to get your
portrait.”
The suspicion returned into Baldassarre’s glance, as he looked at
Piero, and said decidedly, “No.”
“Ah!” said the painter, curtly. “Well, go straight on, and you’ll find
the Porta Santa Croce, and outside it there’s an hospital for
travellers. So you’ll not accept any service from me?”
“I give you thanks for what you have done already. I need no more.”
“It is well,” said Piero, with a shrug, and they turned away from each
other.
“A mysterious old tiger!” thought the artist, “well worth painting.
Ugly—with deep lines—looking as if the plough and the harrow had gone
over his heart. A fine contrast to my bland and smiling Messer Greco—my
_Bacco trionfante_, who has married the fair Antigone in contradiction
to all history and fitness. Aha! his scholar’s blood curdled
uncomfortably at the old fellow’s clutch!” When Piero re-entered the
Piazza del Duomo the multitude who had been listening to Fra Girolamo
were pouring out from all the doors, and the haste they made to go on
their several ways was a proof how important they held the preaching
which had detained them from the other occupations of the day. The
artist leaned against an angle of the Baptistery and watched the
departing crowd, delighting in the variety of the garb and of the keen
characteristic faces—faces such as Masaccio had painted more than fifty
years before: such as Domenico Ghirlandajo had not yet quite left off
painting.
This morning was a peculiar occasion, and the Frate’s audience, always
multifarious, had represented even more completely than usual the
various classes and political parties of Florence. There were men of
high birth, accustomed to public charges at home and abroad, who had
become newly conspicuous not only as enemies of the Medici and friends
of popular government, but as thorough Piagnoni, espousing to the
utmost the doctrines and practical teaching of the Frate, and
frequenting San Marco as the seat of another Samuel: some of them men
of authoritative and handsome presence, like Francesco Valori, and
perhaps also of a hot and arrogant temper, very much gratified by an
immediate divine authority for bringing about freedom in their own way;
others, like Soderini, with less of the ardent Piagnone, and more of
the wise politician. There were men, also of family, like Piero
Capponi, simply brave undoctrinal lovers of a sober republican liberty,
who preferred fighting to arguing, and had no particular reasons for
thinking any ideas false that kept out the Medici and made room for
public spirit. At their elbows were doctors of law whose studies of
Accursius and his brethren had not so entirely consumed their ardour as
to prevent them from becoming enthusiastic Piagnoni: Messer Luca
Corsini himself, for example, who on a memorable occasion yet to come
was to raise his learned arms in street stone-throwing for the cause of
religion, freedom, and the Frate. And among the dignities who carried
their black lucco or furred mantle with an air of habitual authority,
there was an abundant sprinkling of men with more contemplative and
sensitive faces: scholars inheriting such high names as Strozzi and
Acciajoli, who were already minded to take the cowl and join the
community of San Marco; artists, wrought to a new and higher ambition
by the teaching of Savonarola, like that young painter who had lately
surpassed himself in his fresco of the divine child on the wall of the
Frate’s bare cell—unconscious yet that he would one day himself wear
the tonsure and the cowl, and be called Fra Bartolommeo. There was the
mystic poet Girolamo Benevieni hastening, perhaps, to carry tidings of
the beloved Frate’s speedy coming to his friend Pico della Mirandola,
who was never to see the light of another morning. There were well-born
women attired with such scrupulous plainness that their more refined
grace was the chief distinction between them and their less
aristocratic sisters. There was a predominant proportion of the genuine
_popolani_ or middle class, belonging both to the Major and Minor Arts,
conscious of purses threatened by war-taxes. And more striking and
various, perhaps, than all the other classes of the Frate’s disciples,
there was the long stream of poorer tradesmen and artisans, whose faith
and hope in his Divine message varied from the rude and
undiscriminating trust in him as the friend of the poor and the enemy
of the luxurious oppressive rich, to that eager tasting of all the
subtleties of biblical interpretation which takes a peculiarly strong
hold on the sedentary artisan, illuminating the long dim spaces beyond
the board where he stitches, with a pale flame that seems to him the
light of Divine science.
But among these various disciples of the Frate were scattered many who
were not in the least his disciples. Some were Mediceans who had
already, from motives of fear and policy, begun to show the presiding
spirit of the popular party a feigned deference. Others were sincere
advocates of a free government, but regarded Savonarola simply as an
ambitious monk—half sagacious, half fanatical—who had made himself a
powerful instrument with the people, and must be accepted as an
important social fact. There were even some of his bitter enemies:
members of the old aristocratic anti-Medicean party—determined to try
and get the reins once more tight in the hands of certain chief
families; or else licentious young men, who detested him as the killjoy
of Florence. For the sermons in the Duomo had already become political
incidents, attracting the ears of curiosity and malice, as well as of
faith. The men of ideas, like young Niccolò Macchiavelli, went to
observe and write reports to friends away in country villas; the men of
appetites, like Dolfo Spini, bent on hunting down the Frate, as a
public nuisance who made game scarce, went to feed their hatred and lie
in wait for grounds of accusation.
Perhaps, while no preacher ever had a more massive influence than
Savonarola, no preacher ever had more heterogeneous materials to work
upon. And one secret of the massive influence lay in the highly mixed
character of his preaching. Baldassarre, wrought into an ecstasy of
self-martyring revenge, was only an extreme case among the partial and
narrow sympathies of that audience. In Savonarola’s preaching there
were strains that appealed to the very finest susceptibilities of men’s
natures, and there were elements that gratified low egoism, tickled
gossiping curiosity, and fascinated timorous superstition. His need of
personal predominance, his labyrinthine allegorical interpretations of
the Scriptures, his enigmatic visions, and his false certitude about
the Divine intentions, never ceased, in his own large soul, to be
ennobled by that fervid piety, that passionate sense of the infinite,
that active sympathy, that clear-sighted demand for the subjection of
selfish interests to the general good, which he had in common with the
greatest of mankind. But for the mass of his audience all the pregnancy
of his preaching lay in his strong assertion of supernatural claims, in
his denunciatory visions, in the false certitude which gave his sermons
the interest of a political bulletin; and having once held that
audience in his mastery, it was necessary to his nature—it was
necessary for their welfare—that he should _keep_ the mastery. The
effect was inevitable. No man ever struggled to retain power over a
mixed multitude without suffering vitiation; his standard must be their
lower needs and not his own best insight.
The mysteries of human character have seldom been presented in a way
more fitted to check the judgments of facile knowingness than in
Girolamo Savonarola; but we can give him a reverence that needs no
shutting of the eyes to fact, if we regard his life as a drama in which
there were great inward modifications accompanying the outward changes.
And up to this period, when his more direct action on political affairs
had only just begun, it is probable that his imperious need of
ascendancy had burned undiscernibly in the strong flame of his zeal for
God and man.
It was the fashion of old, when an ox was led out for sacrifice to
Jupiter, to chalk the dark spots, and give the offering a false show of
unblemished whiteness. Let us fling away the chalk, and boldly say,—the
victim is spotted, but it is not therefore in vain that his mighty
heart is laid on the altar of men’s highest hopes.