The Pyramid of Vanities.
The wintry days passed for Romola as the white ships pass one who is
standing lonely on the shore—passing in silence and sameness, yet each
bearing a hidden burden of coming change. Tito’s hint had mingled so
much dread with her interest in the progress of public affairs that she
had begun to court ignorance rather than knowledge. The threatening
German Emperor was gone again; and, in other ways besides, the position
of Florence was alleviated; but so much distress remained that Romola’s
active duties were hardly diminished, and in these, as usual, her mind
found a refuge from its doubt.
She dared not rejoice that the relief which had come in extremity and
had appeared to justify the policy of the Frate’s party was making that
party so triumphant, that Francesco Valori, hot-tempered chieftain of
the Piagnoni, had been elected Gonfaloniere at the beginning of the
year, and was making haste to have as much of his own liberal way as
possible during his two months of power. That seemed for the moment
like a strengthening of the party most attached to freedom, and a
reinforcement of protection to Savonarola; but Romola was now alive to
every suggestion likely to deepen her foreboding, that whatever the
present might be, it was only an unconscious brooding over the mixed
germs of Change which might any day become tragic. And already by
Carnival time, a little after mid-February, her presentiment was
confirmed by the signs of a very decided change: the Mediceans had
ceased to be passive, and were openly exerting themselves to procure
the election of Bernardo del Nero as the new Gonfaloniere.
On the last day of the Carnival, between ten and eleven in the morning,
Romola walked out, according to promise, towards the Corso degli
Albizzi, to fetch her cousin Brigida, that they might both be ready to
start from the Via de’ Bardi early in the afternoon, and take their
places at a window which Tito had had reserved for them in the Piazza
della Signoria, where there was to be a scene of so new and striking a
sort, that all Florentine eyes must desire to see it. For the Piagnoni
were having their own way thoroughly about the mode of keeping the
Carnival. In vain Dolfo Spini and his companions had struggled to get
up the dear old masques and practical jokes, well spiced with
indecency. Such things were not to be in a city where Christ had been
declared king.
Romola set out in that languid state of mind with which every one
enters on a long day of sight-seeing purely for the sake of gratifying
a child, or some dear childish friend. The day was certainly an epoch
in carnival-keeping; but this phase of reform had not touched her
enthusiasm: and she did not know that it was an epoch in her own life
when _another_ lot would begin to be no longer secretly but visibly
entwined with her own.
She chose to go through the great Piazza that she might take a first
survey of the unparalleled sight there while she was still alone.
Entering it from the south, she saw something monstrous and
many-coloured in the shape of a pyramid, or, rather, like a huge
fir-tree, sixty feet high, with shelves on the branches, widening and
widening towards the base till they reached a circumference of eighty
yards. The Piazza was full of life: slight young figures, in white
garments, with olive wreaths on their heads, were moving to and fro
about the base of the pyramidal tree, carrying baskets full of
bright-coloured things; and maturer forms, some in the monastic frock,
some in the loose tunics and dark-red caps of artists, were helping and
examining, or else retreating to various points in the distance to
survey the wondrous whole: while a considerable group, amongst whom
Romola recognised Piero di Cosimo, standing on the marble steps of
Orgagna’s Loggia, seemed to be keeping aloof in discontent and scorn.
Approaching nearer, she paused to look at the multifarious objects
ranged in gradation from the base to the summit of the pyramid. There
were tapestries and brocades of immodest design, pictures and
sculptures held too likely to incite to vice; there were boards and
tables for all sorts of games, playing-cards along with the blocks for
printing them, dice, and other apparatus for gambling; there were
worldly music-books, and musical instruments in all the pretty
varieties of lute, drum, cymbal, and trumpet; there were masks and
masquerading-dresses used in the old Carnival shows; there were
handsome copies of Ovid, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Pulci, and other books of
a vain or impure sort; there were all the implements of feminine
vanity—rouge-pots, false hair, mirrors, perfumes, powders, and
transparent veils intended to provoke inquisitive glances: lastly, at
the very summit, there was the unflattering effigy of a probably
mythical Venetian merchant, who was understood to have offered a heavy
sum for this collection of marketable abominations, and, soaring above
him in surpassing ugliness, the symbolic figure of the old debauched
Carnival.
This was the preparation for a new sort of bonfire—the Burning of
Vanities. Hidden in the interior of the pyramid was a plentiful store
of dry fuel and gunpowder; and on this last day of the festival, at
evening, the pile of vanities was to be set ablaze to the sound of
trumpets, and the ugly old Carnival was to tumble into the flames amid
the songs of reforming triumph.
This crowning act of the new festivities could hardly have been
prepared but for a peculiar organisation which had been started by
Savonarola two years before. The mass of the Florentine boyhood and
youth was no longer left to its own genial promptings towards street
mischief and crude dissoluteness. Under the training of Fra Domenico, a
sort of lieutenant to Savonarola, lads and striplings, the hope of
Florence, were to have none but pure words on their lips, were to have
a zeal for Unseen Good that should put to shame the lukewarmness of
their elders, and were to know no pleasures save of an angelic
sort—singing divine praises and walking in white robes. It was for them
that the ranges of seats had been raised high against the walls of the
Duomo; and they had been used to hear Savonarola appeal to them as the
future glory of a city specially appointed to do the work of God.
These fresh-cheeked troops were the chief agents in the regenerated
merriment of the new Carnival, which was a sort of sacred parody of the
old. Had there been bonfires in the old time? There was to be a bonfire
now, consuming impurity from off the earth. Had there been symbolic
processions? There were to be processions now, but the symbols were to
be white robes and red crosses and olive wreaths—emblems of peace and
innocent gladness—and the banners and images held aloft were to tell
the triumphs of goodness. Had there been dancing in a ring under the
open sky of the Piazza, to the sound of choral voices chanting loose
songs? There was to be dancing in a ring now, but dancing of monks and
laity in fraternal love and divine joy, and the music was to be the
music of hymns. As for the collections from street passengers, they
were to be greater than ever—not for gross and superfluous suppers, but
for the benefit of the hungry and needy; and, besides, there was the
collecting of the _Anathema_, or the Vanities to be laid on the great
pyramidal bonfire.
Troops of young inquisitors went from house to house on this exciting
business of asking that the Anathema should be given up to them.
Perhaps, after the more avowed vanities had been surrendered, Madonna,
at the head of the household, had still certain little reddened balls
brought from the Levant, intended to produce on a sallow cheek a sudden
bloom of the most ingenuous falsity? If so, let her bring them down and
cast them into the basket of doom. Or, perhaps, she had ringlets and
coils of “dead hair?”—if so, let her bring them to the streetdoor, not
on her head, but in her hands, and publicly renounce the Anathema which
hid the respectable signs of age under a ghastly mockery of youth. And,
in reward, she would hear fresh young voices pronounce a blessing on
her and her house.
The beardless inquisitors, organised into little regiments, doubtless
took to their work very willingly. To coerce people by shame, or other
spiritual pelting, into the giving up of things it will probably vex
them to part with, is a form of piety to which the boyish mind is most
readily converted; and if some obstinately wicked men got enraged and
threatened the whip or the cudgel, this also was exciting. Savonarola
himself evidently felt about the training of these boys the difficulty
weighing on all minds with noble yearnings towards great ends, yet with
that imperfect perception of means which forces a resort to some
supernatural constraining influence as the only sure hope. The
Florentine youth had had very evil habits and foul tongues: it seemed
at first an unmixed blessing when they were got to shout “_Viva Gesù_!”
But Savonarola was forced at last to say from the pulpit, “There is a
little too much shouting of ‘_Viva Gesù_!’ This constant utterance of
sacred words brings them into contempt. Let me have no more of that
shouting till the next Festa.”
Nevertheless, as the long stream of white-robed youthfulness, with its
little red crosses and olive wreaths, had gone to the Duomo at dawn
this morning to receive the communion from the hands of Savonarola, it
was a sight of beauty; and, doubtless, many of those young souls were
laying up memories of hope and awe that might save them from ever
resting in a merely vulgar view of their work as men and citizens.
There is no kind of conscious obedience that is not an advance on
lawlessness, and these boys became the generation of men who fought
greatly and endured greatly in the last struggle of their Republic.
Now, in the intermediate hours between the early communion and
dinner-time, they were making their last perambulations to collect alms
and vanities, and this was why Romola saw the slim white figures moving
to and fro about the base of the great pyramid.
“What think you of this folly, Madonna Romola?” said a brusque voice
close to her ear. “Your Piagnoni will make _l’inferno_ a pleasant
prospect to us, if they are to carry things their own way on earth.
It’s enough to fetch a cudgel over the mountains to see painters, like
Lorenzo di Credi and young Baccio there, helping to burn colour out of
life in this fashion.”
“My good Piero,” said Romola, looking up and smiling at the grim man,
“even you must be glad to see some of these things burnt. Look at those
gewgaws and wigs and rouge-pots: I have heard you talk as indignantly
against those things as Fra Girolamo himself.”
“What then?” said Piero, turning round on her sharply. “I never said a
woman should make a black patch of herself against the background. Va!
Madonna Antigone, it’s a shame for a woman with your hair and shoulders
to run into such nonsense—leave it to women who are not worth painting.
What! the most holy Virgin herself has always been dressed well; that’s
the doctrine of the Church:—talk of heresy, indeed! And I should like
to know what the excellent Messer Bardo would have said to the burning
of the divine poets by these Frati, who are no better an imitation of
men than if they were onions with the bulbs uppermost. Look at that
Petrarca sticking up beside a rouge-pot: do the idiots pretend that the
heavenly Laura was a painted harridan? And Boccaccio, now: do you mean
to say, Madonna Romola—you who are fit to be a model for a wise Saint
Catherine of Egypt—do you mean to say you have never read the stories
of the immortal Messer Giovanni?”
“It is true I have read them, Piero,” said Romola. “Some of them a
great many times over, when I was a little girl. I used to get the book
down when my father was asleep, so that I could read to myself.”
“_Ebbene_?” said Piero, in a fiercely challenging tone.
“There are some things in them I do not want ever to forget,” said
Romola; “but you must confess, Piero, that a great many of those
stories are only about low deceit for the lowest ends. Men do not want
books to make them think lightly of vice, as if life were a vulgar
joke. And I cannot blame Fra Girolamo for teaching that we owe our time
to something better.”
“Yes, yes, it’s very well to say so now you’ve read them,” said Piero,
bitterly, turning on his heel and walking away from her.
Romola, too, walked on, smiling at Piero’s innuendo, with a sort of
tenderness towards the old painter’s anger, because she knew that her
father would have felt something like it. For herself, she was
conscious of no inward collision with the strict and sombre view of
pleasure which tended to repress poetry in the attempt to repress vice.
Sorrow and joy have each their peculiar narrowness; and a religious
enthusiasm like Savonarola’s which ultimately blesses mankind by giving
the soul a strong propulsion towards sympathy with pain, indignation
against wrong, and the subjugation of sensual desire, must always incur
the reproach of a great negation. Romola’s life had given her an
affinity for sadness which inevitably made her unjust towards
merriment. That subtle result of culture which we call Taste was
subdued by the need for deeper motive; just as the nicer demands of the
palate are annihilated by urgent hunger. Moving habitually amongst
scenes of suffering, and carrying woman’s heaviest disappointment in
her heart, the severity which allied itself with self-renouncing
beneficent strength had no dissonance for her.