The Confession.
When Romola brought home Tessa and the children, April was already near
its close, and the other great anxiety on her mind had been wrought to
its highest pitch by the publication in print of Fra Girolamo’s Trial,
or rather of the confessions drawn from him by the sixteen Florentine
citizens commissioned to interrogate him. The appearance of this
document, issued by order of the Signoria, had called forth such strong
expressions of public suspicion and discontent, that severe measures
were immediately taken for recalling it. Of course there were copies
accidentally mislaid, and a second edition, _not_ by order of the
Signoria, was soon in the hands of eager readers.
Romola, who began to despair of ever speaking with Fra Girolamo, read
this evidence again and again, desiring to judge it by some clearer
light than the contradictory impressions that were taking the form of
assertions in the mouths of both partisans and enemies.
In the more devout followers of Savonarola his want of constancy under
torture, and his retraction of prophetic claims, had produced a
consternation too profound to be at once displaced as it ultimately was
by the suspicion, which soon grew into a positive datum, that any
reported words of his which were in inexplicable contradiction to their
faith in him, had not come from the lips of the prophet, but from the
falsifying pen of Ser Ceccone, that notary of evil repute, who had made
the digest of the examination. But there were obvious facts that at
once threw discredit on the printed document. Was not the list of
sixteen examiners half made up of the prophet’s bitterest enemies? Was
not the notorious Dolfo Spini one of the new Eight prematurely elected,
in order to load the dice against a man whose ruin had been determined
on by the party in power? It was but a murder with slow formalities
that was being transacted in the Old Palace. The Signoria had resolved
to drive a good bargain with the Pope and the Duke of Milan, by
extinguishing the man who was as great a molestation to vicious
citizens and greedy foreign tyrants as to a corrupt clergy. The Frate
had been doomed beforehand, and the only question that was pretended to
exist now was, whether the Republic, in return for a permission to lay
a tax on ecclesiastical property, should deliver him alive into the
hands of the Pope, or whether the Pope should further concede to the
Republic what its dignity demanded—the privilege of hanging and burning
its own prophet on its own piazza.
Who, under such circumstances, would give full credit to this so-called
confession? If the Frate had denied his prophetic gift, the denial had
only been wrenched from him by the agony of torture—agony that, in his
sensitive frame, must quickly produce raving. What if these wicked
examiners declared that he had only had the torture of the rope and
pulley thrice, and only on one day, and that his confessions had been
made when he was under no bodily coercion—was that to be believed? He
had been tortured much more; he had been tortured in proportion to the
distress his confessions had created in the hearts of those who loved
him.
Other friends of Savonarola, who were less ardent partisans, did not
doubt the substantial genuineness of the confession, however it might
have been coloured by the transpositions and additions of the notary;
but they argued indignantly that there was nothing which could warrant
a condemnation to death, or even to grave punishment. It must be clear
to all impartial men that if this examination represented the only
evidence against the Frate, he would die, not for any crime, but
because he had made himself inconvenient to the Pope, to the rapacious
Italian States that wanted to dismember their Tuscan neighbour, and to
those unworthy citizens who sought to gratify their private ambition in
opposition to the common weal.
Not a shadow of political crime had been proved against him. Not one
stain had been detected on his private conduct: his fellow-monks,
including one who had formerly been his secretary for several years,
and who, with more than the average culture of his companions, had a
disposition to criticise Fra Girolamo’s rule as Prior, bore testimony,
even after the shock of his retraction, to an unimpeachable purity and
consistency in his life, which had commanded their unsuspecting
veneration. The Pope himself had not been able to raise a charge of
heresy against the Frate, except on the ground of disobedience to a
mandate, and disregard of the sentence of excommunication. It was
difficult to justify that breach of discipline by argument, but there
was a moral insurgence in the minds of grave men against the Court of
Rome, which tended to confound the theoretic distinction between the
Church and churchmen, and to lighten the scandal of disobedience.
Men of ordinary morality and public spirit felt that the triumph of the
Frate’s enemies was really the triumph of gross licence. And keen
Florentines like Soderini and Piero Guicciardini may well have had an
angry smile on their lips at a severity which dispensed with all law in
order to hang and burn a man in whom the seductions of a public career
had warped the strictness of his veracity; may well have remarked that
if the Frate had mixed a much deeper fraud with a zeal and ability less
inconvenient to high personages, the fraud would have been regarded as
an excellent oil for ecclesiastical and political wheels.
Nevertheless such shrewd men were forced to admit that, however poor a
figure the Florentine government made in its clumsy pretence of a
judicial warrant for what had in fact been predetermined as an act of
policy, the measures of the Pope against Savonarola were necessary
measures of self-defence. Not to try and rid himself of a man who
wanted to stir up the Powers of Europe to summon a General Council and
depose him, would have been adding ineptitude to iniquity. There was no
denying that towards Alexander the Sixth Savonarola was a rebel, and,
what was much more, a dangerous rebel. Florence had heard him say, and
had well understood what he meant, that he would not _obey the devil_.
It was inevitably a life and death struggle between the Frate and the
Pope; but it was less inevitable that Florence should make itself the
Pope’s executioner.
Romola’s ears were filled in this way with the suggestions of a faith
still ardent under its wounds, and the suggestions of worldly
discernment, judging things according to a very moderate standard of
what is possible to human nature. She could be satisfied with neither.
She brought to her long meditations over that printed document many
painful observations, registered more or less consciously through the
years of her discipleship, which whispered a presentiment that
Savonarola’s retraction of his prophetic claims was not merely a
spasmodic effort to escape from torture. But, on the other hand, her
soul cried out for some explanation of his lapses which would make it
still possible for her to believe that the main striving of his life
had been pure and grand. The recent memory of the selfish discontent
which had come over her like a blighting wind along with the loss of
her trust in the man who had been for her an incarnation of the highest
motives, had produced a reaction which is known to many as a sort of
faith that has sprung up to them out of the very depths of their
despair. It was impossible, she said now, that the negative
disbelieving thoughts which had made her soul arid of all good, could
be founded in the truth of things: impossible that it had not been a
living spirit, and no hollow pretence, which had once breathed in the
Frate’s words, and kindled a new life in her. Whatever falsehood there
had been in him, had been a fall and not a purpose; a gradual
entanglement in which he struggled, not a contrivance encouraged by
success.
Looking at the printed confessions, she saw many sentences which bore
the stamp of bungling fabrication: they had that emphasis and
repetition in self-accusation which none but very low hypocrites use to
their fellow-men. But the fact that these sentences were in striking
opposition, not only to the character of Savonarola, but also to the
general tone of the confessions, strengthened the impression that the
rest of the text represented in the main what had really fallen from
his lips. Hardly a word was dishonourable to him except what turned on
his prophetic annunciations. He was unvarying in his statement of the
ends he had pursued for Florence, the Church, and the world; and, apart
from the mixture of falsity in that claim to special inspiration by
which he sought to gain hold of men’s minds, there was no admission of
having used unworthy means. Even in this confession, and without
expurgation of the notary’s malign phrases, Fra Girolamo shone forth as
a man who had sought his own glory indeed, but sought it by labouring
for the very highest end—the moral welfare of men—not by vague
exhortations, but by striving to turn beliefs into energies that would
work in all the details of life.
“Everything that I have done,” said one memorable passage, which may
perhaps have had its erasures and interpolations, “I have done with the
design of being for ever famous in the present and in future ages; and
that I might win credit in Florence; and that nothing of great import
should be done without my sanction. And when I had thus established my
position in Florence, I had it in my mind to do great things in Italy
and beyond Italy, by means of those chief personages with whom I had
contracted friendship and consulted on high matters, such as this of
the General Council. And in proportion as my first efforts succeeded, I
should have adopted further measures. Above all, when the General
Council had once been brought about, I intended to rouse the princes of
Christendom, and especially those beyond the borders of Italy, to
subdue the infidels. It was not much in my thoughts to get myself made
a Cardinal or Pope, for when I should have achieved the work I had in
view, I should, without being Pope, have been the first man in the
world in the authority I should have possessed, and the reverence that
would have been paid me. If I had been made Pope, I would not have
refused the office: but it seemed to me that to be the head of that
work was a greater thing than to be Pope, because a man without virtue
may be Pope; but _such a work as I contemplated demanded a man of
excellent virtues_.”
That blending of ambition with belief in the supremacy of goodness made
no new tone to Romola, who had been used to hear it in the voice that
rang through the Duomo. It was the habit of Savonarola’s mind to
conceive great things, and to feel that he was the man to do them.
Iniquity should be brought low; the cause of justice, purity, and love
should triumph; and it should triumph by his voice, by his work, by his
blood. In moments of ecstatic contemplation, doubtless, the sense of
self melted in the sense of the Unspeakable, and in that part of his
experience lay the elements of genuine self-abasement; but in the
presence of his fellow-men for whom he was to act, pre-eminence seemed
a necessary condition of his life.
And perhaps this confession, even when it described a doubleness that
was conscious and deliberate, really implied no more than that wavering
of belief concerning his own impressions and motives which most human
beings who have not a stupid inflexibility of self-confidence must be
liable to under a marked change of external conditions. In a life where
the experience was so tumultuously mixed as it must have been in the
Frate’s, what a possibility was opened for a change of self-judgment,
when, instead of eyes that venerated and knees that knelt, instead of a
great work on its way to accomplishment, and in its prosperity stamping
the agent as a chosen instrument, there came the hooting and the
spitting and the curses of the crowd; and then the hard faces of
enemies made judges; and then the horrible torture, and with the
torture the irrepressible cry, “It is true, what you would have me say:
let me go: do not torture me again: yes, yes, I am guilty. O God! Thy
stroke has reached me!”
As Romola thought of the anguish that must have followed the
confession—whether, in the subsequent solitude of the prison,
conscience retracted or confirmed the self-taxing words—that anguish
seemed to be pressing on her own heart and urging the slow bitter
tears. Every vulgar self-ignorant person in Florence was glibly
pronouncing on this man’s demerits, while _he_ was knowing a depth of
sorrow which can only be known to the soul that has loved and sought
the most perfect thing, and beholds itself fallen.
She had not then seen—what she saw afterwards—the evidence of the
Frate’s mental state after he had had thus to lay his mouth in the
dust. As the days went by, the reports of new unpublished examinations,
eliciting no change of confessions, ceased; Savonarola was left alone
in his prison and allowed pen and ink for a while, that, if he liked,
he might use his poor bruised and strained right arm to write with. He
wrote; but what he wrote was no vindication of his innocence, no
protest against the proceedings used towards him: it was a continued
colloquy with that divine purity with which he sought complete reunion;
it was the outpouring of self-abasement; it was one long cry for inward
renovation. No lingering echoes of the old vehement self-assertion,
“Look at my work, for it is good, and those who set their faces against
it are the children of the devil!” The voice of Sadness tells him, “God
placed thee in the midst of the people even as if thou hadst been one
of the excellent. In this way thou hast taught others, and hast failed
to learn thyself. Thou hast cured others: and thou thyself hast been
still diseased. Thy heart was lifted up at the beauty of thy own deeds,
and through this thou hast lost thy wisdom and art become, and shalt be
to all eternity, nothing... After so many benefits with which God has
honoured thee, thou art fallen into the depths of the sea; and after so
many gifts bestowed on thee, thou, by thy pride and vainglory, hast
scandalised all the world.” And when Hope speaks and argues that the
divine love has not forsaken him, it says nothing now of a great work
to be done, but only says, “Thou art not forsaken, else why is thy
heart bowed in penitence? That too is a gift.”
There is no jot of worthy evidence that from the time of his
imprisonment to the supreme moment, Savonarola thought or spoke of
himself as a martyr. The idea of martyrdom had been to him a passion
dividing the dream of the future with the triumph of beholding his work
achieved. And now, in place of both, had come a resignation which he
called by no glorifying name.
_But therefore he may the more fitly be called a martyr by his
fellow-men to all time_. For power rose against him not because of his
sins, but because of his greatness—not because he sought to deceive the
world, but because he sought to make it noble. And through that
greatness of his he endured a double agony: not only the reviling, and
the torture, and the death-throe, but the agony of sinking from the
vision of glorious achievement into that deep shadow where he could
only say, “I count as nothing: darkness encompasses me: yet the light I
saw was the true light.”