It was the year Fourteen Hundred Eighty-two, and the whole world was athrill with thought and feeling. Lorenzo the Magnificent was at the very height of his power and popularity; printing-presses gave letters an impetus; art flourished; the people were dazzled by display and were dipping deep into the love of pleasure. The austerity of Christian religion had glided off by imperceptible degrees into pagan pageantry, and the song of bacchanals filled the streets at midnight.
Lorenzo did for the world a great and splendid work—for one thing, he discovered Michelangelo—and the encouragement he gave to the arts made Florence the beautiful dream in stone that she is even to this day.
The world needs the Lorenzos and the world needs, too, the Savonarolas—they form an Opposition of Forces that holds the balance true. Power left to itself attains a terrific impetus: a governor is needed, and it was Savonarola who tempered and tamed the excesses of the Medici.
In Fourteen Hundred Eighty-three Savonarola was appointed Lenten preacher at the Church of Saint Lorenzo in Florence. His exhortations were plain, homely, blunt—his voice uncertain, and his ugly features at times inclined his fashionable auditors to unseemly smiles. When ugliness forgets itself and gives off the flash of the spirit, it becomes magnificent—takes upon itself a halo—but this was not yet to be.
The orator must subdue his audience or it will subdue him.
Savonarola retired to his cloister-cell, whipped and discouraged. He took no part in the festivals and fetes: the Gardens of Lorenzo were not for him; the society of the smooth and cultured lovers of art and literature was beyond his pale. Being incapable by temperament of mixing in the whirl of pleasure, he found a satisfaction in keeping out of it, thus proving his humanity. Not being able to have a thing, we scorn it. Men who can not dance are apt to regard dancing as sinful.
Savonarola saw things as a countryman sees them when he goes to a great city for the first time.
There is much that is wrong—very much that is wasteful, extravagant, absurd and pernicious, but it is not all base, and the visitor is apt to err in his conclusions, especially if he be of an intense and ascetic type.
Savonarola was sick at heart, sick in body—fasts and vigils had done their sure and certain work for nerves and digestion. He saw visions and heard voices, and in the Book of Revelation he discovered the symbols of prophesy that foretold the doom of Florence. He felt that he was divinely inspired.