I
The citizens of Mantua were weary of revolutions. They had acknowledged the suzerainty of the Emperor Frederick and shaken it off. They had had a Podestà of their own and had shaken him off. They had expelled a Papal Legate, incurring excommunication thereby. They had tried dictators, consuls, prætors, councils of ten, and other numbers odd and even, and ere the middle of the thirteenth century were luxuriating in the enjoyment of perfect anarchy.
An assembly met daily in quest of a remedy, but its members were forbidden to propose anything old, and were unable to invent anything new.
“Why not consult Manto, the alchemist’s daughter, our prophetess, our Sibyl?” the young Benedetto asked at last.
“Why not?” repeated Eustachio, an elderly man.
“Why not, indeed?” interrogated Leonardo, a man of mature years.
All the speakers were noble. Benedetto was Manto’s lover; Eustachio her father’s friend; Leonardo his creditor. Their advice prevailed, and the three were chosen as a deputation to wait on the prophetess. Before proceeding formally on their embassy the three envoys managed to obtain private interviews, the two elder with Manto’s father, the youth with Manto herself. The creditor promised that if he became Duke by the alchemist’s influence with his daughter he would forgive the debt; the friend went further, and vowed that he would pay it. The old man promised his good word to both, but when he went to confer with his daughter he found her closeted with Benedetto, and returned without disburdening himself of his errand. The youth had just risen from his knees, pleading with her, and drawing glowing pictures of their felicity when he should be Duke and she Duchess.
She answered, “Benedetto, in all Mantua there is not one man fit to rule another. To name any living person would be to set a tyrant over my native city. I will repair to the shades and seek a ruler among the dead.”
“And why should not Mantua have a tyrant?” demanded Benedetto. “The freedom of the mechanic is the bondage of the noble, who values no liberty save that of making the base-born do his bidding. ’Tis hell to a man of spirit to be contradicted by his tailor. If I could see my heart’s desire on the knaves, little would I reck submitting to the sway of the Emperor.”
“I know that well, Benedetto,” said Manto, “and hence will take good heed not to counsel Mantua to choose thee. No, the Duke I will give her shall be one without passions to gratify or injuries to avenge, and shall already be crowned with a crown to make the ducal cap as nothing in his eyes, if eyes he had.”
Benedetto departed in hot displeasure, and the alchemist came forward to announce that the commissioners waited.
“My projection,” he whispered, “only wants one more piece of gold to insure success, and Eustachio proffers thirty. Oh, give him Mantua in exchange for boundless riches!”
“And they call thee a philosopher and me a visionary!” said Manto, patting his cheek.
The envoys’ commission having been unfolded, she took not a moment to reply, “Be your Duke Virgil.”
The deputation respectfully represented that although Virgil was no doubt Mantua’s greatest citizen, he laboured under the disqualification of having been dead more than twelve hundred years. Nothing further, however, could be extorted from the prophetess, and the ambassadors were obliged to withdraw.
The interpretation of Manto’s oracle naturally provoked much diversity of opinion in the council.
“Obviously,” said a poet, “the prophetess would have us confer the ducal dignity upon the contemporary bard who doth most nearly accede to the vestiges of the divine Maro; and he, as I judge, is even now in the midst of you.”
“Virgil the poet,” said a priest, who had long laboured under the suspicion of occult practices, “was a fool to Virgil the enchanter. The wise woman evidently demands one competent to put the devil into a hole—an operation which I have striven to perform all my life.”
“Canst thou balance our city upon an egg?” inquired Eustachio.
“Better upon an egg than upon a quack!” retorted the priest.
But such was not the opinion of Eustachio himself, who privately conferred with Leonardo. Eustachio had a character, but no parts; Leonardo had parts, but no character.
“I see not why these fools should deride the oracle of the prophetess,” he said. “She would doubtless impress upon us that a dead master is in divers respects preferable to a living one.”
“Surely,” said Eustachio, “provided always that the servant is a man of exemplary character, and that he presumes not upon his lord’s withdrawal to another sphere, trusting thereby to commit malpractices with impunity, but doth, on the contrary, deport himself as ever in his great taskmaster’s eye.”
“Eustachio,” said Leonardo, with admiration, “it is the misery of Mantua that she hath no citizen who can act half as well as thou canst talk. I would fain have further discourse with thee.”
The two statesmen laid their heads together, and ere long the mob were crying, “A Virgil! a Virgil!”
The councillors reassembled and passed resolutions.
“But who shall be Regent?” inquired some one when Virgil had been elected unanimously.
“Who but we?” asked Eustachio and Leonardo. “Are we not the heads of the Virgilian party?”
Thus had the enthusiastic Manto, purest of idealists, installed in authority the two most unprincipled politicians in the republic; and she had lost her lover besides, for Benedetto fled the city, vowing vengeance.
Anyhow, the dead poet was enthroned Duke of Mantua; Eustachio and Leonardo became Regents, with the style of Consuls, and it was provided that in doubtful cases reference should be made to the Sortes Virgilianae. And truly, if we may believe the chronicles, the arrangement worked for a time surprisingly well. The Mantuans, in an irrational way, had done what it behoves all communities to do rationally if they can. They had sought for a good and worthy citizen to rule them; it was their misfortune that such an one could only be found among the dead. They felt prouder of themselves for being governed by a great man—one in comparison with whom kings and pontiffs were the creatures of a day. They would not, if they could help it, disgrace themselves by disgracing their hero; they would not have it said that Mantua, which had not been too weak to bear him, had been too weak to endure his government. The very hucksters and usurers among them felt dimly that there was such a thing as an Ideal. A glimmering perception dawned upon mailed, steel-fisted barons that there was such a thing as an Idea, and they felt uneasily apprehensive, like beasts of prey who have for the first time sniffed gunpowder. The railleries and mockeries of Mantua’s neighbours, moreover, stimulated Mantua’s citizens to persevere in their course, and deterred them from doing aught to approve themselves fools. Were not Verona, Cremona, Lodi, Pavia, Crema, cities that could never enthrone the Virgil they had never produced, watching with undissembled expectation to see them trip? The hollow-hearted Eustachio and the rapacious Leonardo, their virtual rulers, might indeed be little sensible to this enthusiasm, but they could not disregard the general drift of public opinion, which said clearly: “Mantua is trying a great experiment. Woe to you if you bring it to nought by your selfish quarrels!”
The best proof that there was something in Manto’s idea was that after a while the Emperor Frederick took alarm, and signified to the Mantuans that they must cease their mumming and fooling and acknowledge him as their sovereign, failing which he would besiege their city.