II
SAVONAROLA
(1452–1498)
And the Renaissance of Conscience
When the first warm days of May come to a land chilled through with the frosts of winter, all pastures and meadows, all vineyards and orchards, even the desert and the mountain rift awake to a new bloom and beauty. The revival of learning which culminated in that golden age known as the Renaissance was ushered in by the poet Dante, with his love for Beatrice and his immortal poem called the Divine Comedy. Dante has been likened unto that angel who descended from Heaven and, standing with one foot on the sea and one on the land, lifted the trumpet to his lips, and wakened the whole world. To Dante belongs the double glory "of immortalizing in verse the centuries behind him, while he inaugurated a new age and created a new language." But if Dante's face was turned upward and backward, his work was taken up by the great humanist, Petrarch, whose face was toward the future. Soon the whole land was awake, and while other countries were held in the grip of ice and winter, full summer burst upon Italy.
Scholars have interpreted the Renaissance from many different angles. Students of literature identify it with the discovery and reproduction of the manuscripts of the Greek and Latin authors. Artists associate it with Giotto's paintings and tower, with Michael Angelo's Moses and Last Judgment, and with the names of Alberti and Leonardo. Scientists point toward the discoveries of Copernicus and Columbus, just as jurists think of the rise of popular freedom and the overthrow of tyranny. Practical men associate the new era with the art of printing and the manufacture of paper and gunpowder, with the use of the compass by mariners, and the telescope by astronomers. But none of these interpretations fully suffice to explain the new era, with its new energy of the intellect and its outburst of unrivalled genius.
The mental and emotional condition of Europe at the beginning of the fifteenth century may be likened to the vague longings in the heart of that child, who, legend hath it, was carried away from his father's castle by a band of gipsies. The gipsies carried the boy to Spain, and there they taught him to ride and hunt and steal after the gipsy fashion. But he had the blood of his ancestors within him, and there was something burning and throbbing within. Sometimes in his dreams he saw a beautiful face leaning over him, and heard the bosom pressure words of his mother, who could not be forgotten. Not otherwise was it with society at the beginning of the fifteenth century. For centuries the books, the arts, the tools, once so familiar to Virgil and Horace, to Mæcenas and Cæsar Augustus had lain neglected on the shores of that Dead Sea called the Dark Ages. Vague and uneasy memories haunted Europe. Imagination increased the value of the lost treasure. Looking backward through an atmosphere roseate through fancy, Helen's face took on new loveliness. Achilles became the ideal knight, Ulysses a divine hero, and Penelope the sum of all the gifts distributed among ideal women.
But in the middle of the fifteenth century occurred the fall of Constantinople, that Saragossa sea into which had been drawn the literary treasures of the preceding centuries. Constantinople had become a treasure-house in which were assembled the manuscripts that had been carried away by the citizens of Rome fleeing from the Huns. As the centuries came and went, merchants, bankers, rich men from far-off provinces had taken their jewels, carved furniture, ivories, paintings, bronzes, marbles, rugs, silks, laces, and housed their treasure in palaces, looking out upon the Bosphorus. So that in 1452, when the advancing Saracens approached the city, the scholars and rich men of Constantinople fled to their boats, and spreading canvas sailed into the western sun. Months passed before these fugitives dropped anchor at the mouth of the Po. One morning, an old man, wrapped in a cloak stained with the salt seawater, stepped from a little boat to the wharf of Florence. Being poor and also hungry he made his way to a bread-shop. Having no money, he drew from beneath his cloak a parchment. When the bread-shop was filled with listeners he began to read the story of Helen's beauty and Achilles' courage; the story of Ulysses' wanderings and Penelope's fidelity; the tale of blind Œdipus, and of his daughter's loving care. He recited the oration of Pericles after the plague in Athens, and told the story of the wanderings of Æneas. With ever-increasing excitement the men of Florence listened. At last, waking from the spell, they lifted the stranger upon their shoulders and carried him to the palace of a merchant prince, and bade him tell the story, and soon the merchant's house was crowded with young men preparing pages of vellum and sheets of leather, while writers copied the poems and the dramas of the old manuscript, and artists turned the vellum pages into illuminated missals. The spark became a flame. Learning became a glorious contagion. The fires spread from village to village, and city to city. The dawn of the modern world had come.
In the city of Florence, circumstances and climate were singularly favourable to the new movement. Florence was the city of flowers; it lay upon the banks of the Arno, set amidst orange groves, and its palaces, art galleries, and churches, when the vineyards were in full bloom, looked like a string of pearls lying in a cup of emeralds. All that Athens had been to the age of Pericles, Florence was to be to the era of Savonarola. Neither time nor events have availed to lessen the hold of Florence upon the great men of earth. Because of her rich associations with genius and beauty, the greatest souls of the earth have often turned feet toward Florence, as the birds of paradise leave the desert to seek out the oasis with its fountain and flowers. Florence was the city of Dante with his Divine Comedy, the city of Giotto, with his tower, of Gioberti, with the gates of wrought iron that are so beautiful that Michael Angelo said they were worthy to be the gates of Paradise. To Florence in after years went Robert Browning, to write The Ring and the Book, and Elizabeth Barrett, with the finest love sonnets in literature. To Florence centuries later went George Eliot, to write her Romola, and in Florence, Keats and Shelley dreamed their dreams of song and verse. To Florence came Cavour, the statesman, and Mazzini, the reformer, Garibaldi, the soldier, to build the new Italy. Many the scholar and patriot who has said with Robert Browning, "Italy is a word graven on my heart." And it was to Florence that there came in the year 1490 Savonarola, the greatest moral force the city ever knew.
Savonarola was a man of almost universal genius. He was an orator, and the fire of his eloquence still burns in the sermons he has left the world. He was a reformer, and descended upon the sins of his age like a flame of fire, shaking Italy like the stroke of an earthquake. He was a prophet, and he dreamed dreams of a new Italy and of a golden age in morals. He was a statesman and he was created a preacher, and he fulfilled the dreams of a divine Orpheus, who drew all things to him by the mystery and magic of his speech. He was a martyr, and wore, not the red hat of the cardinal, but the fire that belonged to the chariot of flame, in which his soul rode up to Heaven to meet his God. Like all men of the first order of genius he was great on many sides. It was his glory that he awakened the moral sense and brought the life of God into the soul of man. Savonarola was like the Matterhorn or the Breithorn that lift their peaks so high that they look out upon the Rhine of the north and the Po of the south, upon the vineyards of France and the valleys of Austria.