Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby; Dorothea Ponsonby

Should the whole army of my enemies be arrayed against me, my heart will not quake: for Thou art my refuge and wilt lead me to my latter end.

Most of us are very easily persuaded to do what every one else does, because it is so much less trouble. It is disagreeable to be sneered at or abused. Now and again we may do something because we know it to be right at the risk of causing displeasure, but it is very hard to keep on through a lifetime fighting against popular opinion or opposing those who are considered our superiors and whom all the world look up to as set in authority over us. The orders of those in command, those who govern, those who set the fashion, and those who have riches with all the laws and traditions behind them, are what is called authority. If you defy authority from stupidity, obstinacy, or perversity, it is merely foolish; but if you defy authority because you are convinced that what you think is right, it is a very difficult thing to do; and in doing it you are likely to make far more enemies than friends. It is much easier to accept things as they are, to think of your own enjoyment first and foremost, and let others do the wrangling while you look on. But the mere spectators in life are no help to any one, not even to themselves. Life is conflict. It is to the fighters who, with a clear vision of better things, have bravely fought the evil around them that we owe any changes for the better in the history of the world.

Savonarola, the Italian monk, was by no means a spectator; he was a fighter of the most strenuous type. Historians may differ in their accounts of his character and his work. But one thing is certain: few men have lived a life of such vigorous activity or one that was so filled with exciting incidents: few men have stood by their convictions with such courage and persistence or suffered more cruelly for their opinions. He spent the best part of his life fighting authority, upsetting public opinion, and defying his superiors. He was defeated in the end because those who were for the moment stronger than he killed him. But perhaps his death, as in other cases that may occur to you, was his greatest triumph. Men may kill the body of their victim, but they cannot kill the spirit he has roused by his influence and example. That lives on when all his persecutors are dead and forgotten.

Girolamo Savonarola was born in Ferrara, a town in Northern Italy, in the year 1452. He was the third of five brothers and he had two sisters. His grandfather was a physician and a man of learning, and his father was a courtier of no great importance. Girolamo was devoted to his mother, and he corresponded with her all through his eventful life. As a boy he seems to have been very serious and reserved—one of those boys whom other boys do not understand. He did not like playing with other children, but preferred going out for long rambles by himself. It was arranged by his family that he should be a doctor, like his grandfather; but as he grew up and began to think deeply about everything he saw around him, he became appalled at the cruelty and wickedness and frivolity of the society in which he lived, and his mind was filled with doubts and misgivings. Poets, players, fools, court flatterers, knights, pages, scholars, and fair ladies were entertained in the great red-brick castle of Ferrara, and below in the dark dungeons lay, confined and chained, prisoners who had incurred the Duke’s displeasure. It was in the precincts of this palace that young Girolamo gained his first experience of life.

When he was nineteen he fell in love with a girl of the Strozzi family, but he was rejected with disdain and told he was not sufficiently well born to aspire to one of such noble birth. This added to the bitterness of his heart, and his disgust for the world increased. For two years he struggled with himself, uncertain whether he should obey his parents or follow his own inclinations; and he prayed daily, “Lord, teach me the way my soul should walk.” At last, in despair, he abandoned his medical studies, left home, and fled secretly to a Dominican monastery at Bologna, where he became a monk. Villari the historian describes the touching scene on the very eve of his departure: “He was sitting with his lute and playing a sad melody; his mother, as if moved by a spirit of divination, turned suddenly round to him and exclaimed mournfully, ‘My son, this is a sign we are soon to part.’ He roused himself and continued, but with a trembling hand, to touch the strings of the lute without raising his eyes from the ground.” The next day he was gone. He wrote from Bologna to tell his father of his determination to renounce the world, where virtue was despised and vice held in honor. In the convent he began at once to wear himself to a shadow by acting as a servant and humbling himself by a life of the severest simplicity and discipline. In “The Ruin of the World,” a poem he wrote when he was twenty, he says, “The world is in confusion; all virtue is extinguished and all good manners. I find no living light abroad, nor one who blushes for his vices.”

It was not Savonarola’s young imagination that made him think the world so very wicked. He was particularly observant, and noted carefully all that was passing not only in Ferrara but in the rest of Italy, and specially in Rome. At that time, indeed, while there were many men of learning, great princes, great artists, and great ladies, the people as a whole despised religion and led frivolous lives, given up to every sort of dissipation. Vice, corruption, and robbery were common both in the Church and outside, and all classes were degraded by the low tone of morals.

After six quiet years in the convent, during which he wrote several poems showing his horror at the immorality of the world as he saw it, he was sent on a mission back to Ferrara. But he attracted no attention there, for “no man is a prophet in his own country.” Shortly afterwards he was recalled and sent to the Dominican Convent of San Marco in Florence. This building is still carefully preserved because of the beautifully designed frescoes which were painted on the walls of the refectory, sacristy, and chapter house, as well as in the cells on the upper floor, by the artist-monk Fra Angelico, who died in 1455, not many years before Fra Girolamo made San Marco his headquarters and home.

In appearance, Savonarola was a man of middle height, with gaunt features, heavy black brows, a large mouth, heavy jaw, and a protruding underlip. This may sound unattractive, but features alone do not make a face. It was his expression by which those who came in contact with him were fascinated. His rugged features were beautified by a look of gentle sympathy and benevolence mixed with firm determination, and his eyes flashed with the fire of a deep and passionate enthusiasm. The portrait given here is by Fra Bartolomeo, a friend who came under the influence of Savonarola and was deeply impressed by his life and death.

In his great humility he was not at first aware that he had any special power over other men. While traveling one day he found himself among a lot of rough boatmen and soldiers who were indulging in coarse language and blasphemous oaths. What could a young monk do in the midst of such a crew? Yet in half-an-hour Savonarola had eleven of them kneeling at his feet and imploring forgiveness. Such incidents as this must have revealed to him the extraordinary influence he could wield. Curiously enough, his first sermon in the great Church of San Lorenzo in Florence was an entire failure. With his awkward gestures and unimpressive manner he could not even hold his congregation, which gradually dwindled away and left the church.

For two years he continued to preach to a few listless people in the empty aisles of San Gemignano. All the time, no doubt, he was aware that the power was growing in him and he was awaiting his opportunity. Suddenly the moment came, and one day at Brescia he burst out and became as it were transformed. Awestruck crowds then flocked to hear him, and his wonderful oratory and penetrating eloquence developed quickly, and soon pierced into the very souls of his congregations. It often happened that men climbed walls and swarmed on the pillars to catch sight of his striking features and hear the deep tones of his thrilling voice. He practised no tricks of rhetoric, but his whole being was poured out in a vehement tempest of eloquence, at one moment melting his audience to tears, at another freezing them with terror. The scribe himself who wrote down many of the sermons breaks off at times with the words, “Here I was so overcome with weeping that I could not go on.”