Tuscan Cities. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ faith; even doubt feebly asserted itself in their souls. A cold indifference to every principle prevailed, and those visages full of guile and subtlety wore a smile of chilly superiority and compassion at any sign of enthusiasm for noble and generous ideas. They did not oppose these or question them, as a philosophical sceptic would have done; they simply pitied them. . . . But Lorenzo had an exquisite taste for poetry and the arts. . . .

      Having set himself up to protect artists and scholars, his house became the resort of the most illustrious wits of his time, . . . and whether in the meetings under his own roof, or in those of the famous Platonic Academy, his own genius shown brilliantly in that elect circle. . . . A strange life indeed was Lorenzo's. After giving his whole mind and soul to the destruction, by some new law, of some last remnant of liberty, after pronouncing some fresh sentence of ruin or death, he entered the Platonic Academy, and ardently discussed virtue and the immortality of the soul; then sallying forth to mingle with the dissolute youth of the city, he sang his carnival songs, and abandoned himself to debauchery; returning home with Pulci and Politian, he recited verses and talked of poetry; and to each of these occupations he gave himself up as wholly as if it were the sole occupation of his life. But the strangest thing of all is that in all that variety of life they cannot cite a solitary act of real generosity toward his people, his friends, or his kinsmen; for surely if there had been such an act, his indefatigable flatterers would not have forgotten it. . . . He had inherited from Cosimo all that subtlety by which, without being a great statesman, he was prompt in cunning subterfuges, full of prudence and acuteness, skillful in dealing with ambassadors, most skillful in extinguishing his enemies, bold and cruel when he believed the occasion permitted. . . . His face revealed his character; there was something sinister and hateful in it; the complexion was greenish, the mouth very large, the nose flat, and the voice nasal; but his eye was quick and keen, his forehead was high, and his manner had all of gentleness that can be imagined of an age so refined and elegant as that; his conversation was full of vivacity, of wit and learning; those who were admitted to his familiarity were always fascinated by him. He seconded his age in all its tendencies; corrupt as it was, he left it corrupter still in every way; he gave himself up to pleasure, and he taught his people to give themselves up to it, to its intoxication and its delirium."

      XVIII

      This is the sort of being whom human nature in self-defense ought always to recognize as a devil, and whom no glamour of circumstance or quality should be suffered to disguise. It is success like his which, as Victor Hugo says of Louis Napoleon's similar success, "confounds the human conscience," and kindles the lurid light in which assassination seems a holy duty. Lorenzo's tyranny in Florence was not only the extinction of public liberty, but the control of private life in all its relations. He made this marriage and he forbade that among the principal families, as it suited his pleasure; he decided employments and careers; he regulated the most intimate affairs of households in the interest of his power, with a final impunity which is inconceivable of that proud and fiery Florence. The smoldering resentment of his tyranny, which flamed out in the conspiracy of the Pazzi, adds the consecration of a desperate love of liberty to the cathedral, hallowed by religion and history, in which the tragedy was enacted. It was always dramatizing itself there when I entered the Duomo, whether in the hush and twilight of some vacant hour, or in the flare of tapers and voices while some high ceremonial filled the vast nave with its glittering procession. But I think the ghosts preferred the latter setting. To tell the truth, the Duomo at Florence is a temple to damp the spirit, dead or alive, by the immense impression of stony bareness, of drab vacuity, which one receives from its interior, unless it is filled with people. Outside it is magnificently imposing, in spite of the insufficiency and irregularity of its piazza. In spite of having no such approach as St. Mark's at Venice, or St Peter's at Rome, or even the cathedral at Milan, in spite of being almost crowded upon by the surrounding shops and cafes, it is noble, and more and more astonishing; and there is the baptistery, with its heavenly gates, and the tower of Giotto, with its immortal beauty, as novel for each new-comer as if freshly set out there overnight for his advantage. Nor do I object at all to the cabstands there, and the little shops all round, and the people thronging through the piazza, in and out of the half-score of crooked streets opening upon it. You do not get all the grandeur of the cathedral outside, but you get enough, while you come away from the interior in a sort of destitution. One needs some such function as I saw there one evening at dusk in order to realize all the spectacular capabilities of the place. This function consisted mainly of a visible array of the Church's forces "against blasphemy," as the printed notices informed me; but with the high altar blazing, a constellation of candles in the distant gloom, and the long train of priests, choristers, acolytes, and white-cowled penitents, each with his taper, and the archbishop, bearing the pyx, at their head, under a silken canopy, it formed a setting of incomparable vividness for the scene on the last Sunday before Ascension, 1478.

      There is, to my thinking, no such mirror of the spirit of that time as the story of this conspiracy. A pope was at the head of it, and an archbishop was there in Florence to share actively in it. Having failed to find Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici together at Lorenzo's villa, the conspirators transfer the scene to the cathedral; the moment chosen for striking the blow is that supremely sacred moment when the very body of Christ is elevated for the adoration of the kneeling worshippers. What a contempt they all have for the place and the office! In this you read one effect of that study of antiquity which was among the means Lorenzo used to corrupt the souls of men; the Florentines are half repaganized. Yet at the bottom of the heart of one conspirator lingers a mediaeval compunction, and though not unwilling to kill a man, this soldier does not know about killing one in a church. Very well, then, give up your dagger, you simple soldier; give it to this priest; he knows what a church is, and how little sacred!

      The cathedral is packed with people, and Lorenzo is there, but Giuliano is not come yet. Are we to be fooled a second time? Malediction! Send someone to fetch that Medicean beast, who is so slow coming to the slaughter! I am of the conspiracy, for I hate the Medici; but these muttered blasphemies, hissed and ground through the teeth, this frenzy for murder — it is getting to be little better than that — make me sick. Two of us go for Giuliano to his house, and being acquaintances of his, we laugh and joke familiarly with him; we put our arms caressingly about him, and feel if he has a shirt of mail on, as we walk him between us through the crowd at the corner of the cafe there, invisibly, past all the cabmen ranked near the cathedral and the baptistery, not one of whom shall snatch his horse's oat-bag from his nose to invite us phantoms to a turn in the city. We have our friend safe in the cathedral at last — hapless, kindly youth, whom we have nothing against except that he is of that cursed race of the Medici — and now at last the priest elevates the host and it is time to strike; the little bell tinkles, the multitude hold its breath and falls upon its knees; Lorenzo and Giuliano kneel with the rest A moment, and Bernardo Bandini plunges his short dagger through the boy, who drops dead upon his face, and Francesco Fazzi flings himself upon the body, and blindly striking to make sure of his death, gives himself a wound in the leg that disables him for the rest of the work. And now we see the folly of entrusting Lorenzo to the unpracticed hand of a priest, who would have been neat enough, no doubt, at mixing a dose of poison. The bungler has only cut his man a little in the neck! Lorenzo's sword is out and making desperate play for his life; his friends close about him, and while the sacred vessels are tumbled from the altar and trampled underfoot in the mellay, and the cathedral rings with yells and shrieks and curses and the clash of weapons, they have hurried him into the sacristy and barred the doors, against which we shall beat ourselves in vain. Fury! Infamy! Malediction! Pick yourself up, Francesco Pazzi, and get home as you may! There is no mounting to horse and crying liberty through the streets for you! All is over! The wretched populace, the servile signory, side with the Medici; in a few hours the Archbishop of Pisa is swinging by the neck from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio; and while he is yet alive you are dragged, bleeding and naked, from your bed through the streets and hung beside him, so close that in his dying agony he sets his teeth in your breast with a convulsive frenzy that leaves you fast m the death-clutch of his jaws till they cut the ropes and you run hideously down to the pavement below.

      XIX

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