Romola

by George Eliot

  CHAPTER SEVENTY ONE.

  THE CONFESSION.

  When Romola brought home Tessa and the children, April was already nearits close, and the other great anxiety on her mind had been wrought toits highest pitch by the publication in print of Fra Girolamo's Trial,or rather of the confessions drawn from him by the sixteen Florentinecitizens commissioned to interrogate him. The appearance of thisdocument, issued by order of the Signoria, had called forth such strongexpressions of public suspicion and discontent, that severe measureswere immediately taken for recalling it. Of course there were copiesaccidentally mislaid, and a second edition, _not_ by order of theSignoria, was soon in the hands of eager readers.

  Romola, who began to despair of ever speaking with Fra Girolamo, readthis evidence again and again, desiring to judge it by some clearerlight than the contradictory impressions that were taking the form ofassertions in the mouths of both partisans and enemies.

  In the more devout followers of Savonarola his want of constancy undertorture, and his retraction of prophetic claims, had produced aconsternation too profound to be at once displaced as it ultimately wasby the suspicion, which soon grew into a positive datum, that anyreported words of his which were in inexplicable contradiction to theirfaith in him, had not come from the lips of the prophet, but from thefalsifying pen of Ser Ceccone, that notary of evil repute, who had madethe digest of the examination. But there were obvious facts that atonce threw discredit on the printed document. Was not the list ofsixteen examiners half made up of the prophet's bitterest enemies? Wasnot the notorious Dolfo Spini one of the new Eight prematurely elected,in order to load the dice against a man whose ruin had been determinedon by the party in power? It was but a murder with slow formalitiesthat was being transacted in the Old Palace. The Signoria had resolvedto drive a good bargain with the Pope and the Duke of Milan, byextinguishing the man who was as great a molestation to vicious citizensand greedy foreign tyrants as to a corrupt clergy. The Frate had beendoomed beforehand, and the only question that was pretended to exist nowwas, whether the Republic, in return for a permission to lay a tax onecclesiastical property, should deliver him alive into the hands of thePope, or whether the Pope should further concede to the Republic whatits dignity demanded--the privilege of hanging and burning its ownprophet on its own piazza.

  Who, under such circumstances, would give full credit to this so-calledconfession? If the Frate had denied his prophetic gift, the denial hadonly been wrenched from him by the agony of torture--agony that, in hissensitive frame, must quickly produce raving. What if these wickedexaminers declared that he had only had the torture of the rope andpulley thrice, and only on one day, and that his confessions had beenmade when he was under no bodily coercion--was that to be believed? Hehad been tortured much more; he had been tortured in proportion to thedistress his confessions had created in the hearts of those who lovedhim.

  Other friends of Savonarola, who were less ardent partisans, did notdoubt the substantial genuineness of the confession, however it mighthave been coloured by the transpositions and additions of the notary;but they argued indignantly that there was nothing which could warrant acondemnation to death, or even to grave punishment. It must be clear toall impartial men that if this examination represented the only evidenceagainst the Frate, he would die, not for any crime, but because he hadmade himself inconvenient to the Pope, to the rapacious Italian Statesthat wanted to dismember their Tuscan neighbour, and to those unworthycitizens who sought to gratify their private ambition in opposition tothe common weal.

  Not a shadow of political crime had been proved against him. Not onestain had been detected on his private conduct: his fellow-monks,including one who had formerly been his secretary for several years, andwho, with more than the average culture of his companions, had adisposition to criticise Fra Girolamo's rule as Prior, bore testimony,even after the shock of his retraction, to an unimpeachable purity andconsistency in his life, which had commanded their unsuspectingveneration. The Pope himself had not been able to raise a charge ofheresy against the Frate, except on the ground of disobedience to amandate, and disregard of the sentence of excommunication. It wasdifficult to justify that breach of discipline by argument, but therewas a moral insurgence in the minds of grave men against the Court ofRome, which tended to confound the theoretic distinction between theChurch and churchmen, and to lighten the scandal of disobedience.

  Men of ordinary morality and public spirit felt that the triumph of theFrate's enemies was really the triumph of gross licence. And keenFlorentines like Soderini and Piero Guicciardini may well have had anangry smile on their lips at a severity which dispensed with all law inorder to hang and burn a man in whom the seductions of a public careerhad warped the strictness of his veracity; may well have remarked thatif the Frate had mixed a much deeper fraud with a zeal and ability lessinconvenient to high personages, the fraud would have been regarded asan excellent oil for ecclesiastical and political wheels.

  Nevertheless such shrewd men were forced to admit that, however poor afigure the Florentine government made in its clumsy pretence of ajudicial warrant for what had in fact been predetermined as an act ofpolicy, the measures of the Pope against Savonarola were necessarymeasures of self-defence. Not to try and rid himself of a man whowanted to stir up the Powers of Europe to summon a General Council anddepose him, would have been adding ineptitude to iniquity. There was nodenying that towards Alexander the Sixth Savonarola was a rebel, and,what was much more, a dangerous rebel. Florence had heard him say, andhad well understood what he meant, that he would not _obey the devil_.It was inevitably a life and death struggle between the Frate and thePope; but it was less inevitable that Florence should make itself thePope's executioner.

  Romola's ears were filled in this way with the suggestions of a faithstill ardent under its wounds, and the suggestions of worldlydiscernment, judging things according to a very moderate standard ofwhat is possible to human nature. She could be satisfied with neither.She brought to her long meditations over that printed document manypainful observations, registered more or less consciously through theyears of her discipleship, which whispered a presentiment thatSavonarola's retraction of his prophetic claims was not merely aspasmodic effort to escape from torture. But, on the other hand, hersoul cried out for some explanation of his lapses which would make itstill possible for her to believe that the main striving of his life hadbeen pure and grand. The recent memory of the selfish discontent whichhad come over her like a blighting wind along with the loss of her trustin the man who had been for her an incarnation of the highest motives,had produced a reaction which is known to many as a sort of faith thathas sprung up to them out of the very depths of their despair. It wasimpossible, she said now, that the negative disbelieving thoughts whichhad made her soul arid of all good, could be founded in the truth ofthings: impossible that it had not been a living spirit, and no hollowpretence, which had once breathed in the Frate's words, and kindled anew life in her. Whatever falsehood there had been in him, had been afall and not a purpose; a gradual entanglement in which he struggled,not a contrivance encouraged by success.

  Looking at the printed confessions, she saw many sentences which borethe stamp of bungling fabrication: they had that emphasis and repetitionin self-accusation which none but very low hypocrites use to theirfellow-men. But the fact that these sentences were in strikingopposition, not only to the character of Savonarola, but also to thegeneral tone of the confessions, strengthened the impression that therest of the text represented in the main what had really fallen from hislips. Hardly a word was dishonourable to him except what turned on hisprophetic annunciations. He was unvarying in his statement of the endshe had pursued for Florence, the Church, and the world; and, apart fromthe mixture of falsity in that claim to special inspiration by which hesought to gain hold of men's minds, there was no admission of havingused unworthy means. Even in this confession, and without expurgationof the notary's malign phrases, Fra Girolamo shone
forth as a man whohad sought his own glory indeed, but sought it by labouring for the veryhighest end--the moral welfare of men--not by vague exhortations, but bystriving to turn beliefs into energies that would work in all thedetails of life.

  "Everything that I have done," said one memorable passage, which mayperhaps have had its erasures and interpolations, "I have done with thedesign of being for ever famous in the present and in future ages; andthat I might win credit in Florence; and that nothing of great importshould be done without my sanction. And when I had thus established myposition in Florence, I had it in my mind to do great things in Italyand beyond Italy, by means of those chief personages with whom I hadcontracted friendship and consulted on high matters, such as this of theGeneral Council. And in proportion as my first efforts succeeded, Ishould have adopted further measures. Above all, when the GeneralCouncil had once been brought about, I intended to rouse the princes ofChristendom, and especially those beyond the borders of Italy, to subduethe infidels. It was not much in my thoughts to get myself made aCardinal or Pope, for when I should have achieved the work I had inview, I should, without being Pope, have been the first man in the worldin the authority I should have possessed, and the reverence that wouldhave been paid me. If I had been made Pope, I would not have refusedthe office: but it seemed to me that to be the head of that work was agreater thing than to be Pope, because a man without virtue may be Pope;but _such a work as I contemplated demanded a man of excellentvirtues_."

  That blending of ambition with belief in the supremacy of goodness madeno new tone to Romola, who had been used to hear it in the voice thatrang through the Duomo. It was the habit of Savonarola's mind toconceive great things, and to feel that he was the man to do them.Iniquity should be brought low; the cause of justice, purity, and loveshould triumph; and it should triumph by his voice, by his work, by hisblood. In moments of ecstatic contemplation, doubtless, the sense ofself melted in the sense of the Unspeakable, and in that part of hisexperience lay the elements of genuine self-abasement; but in thepresence of his fellow-men for whom he was to act, pre-eminence seemed anecessary condition of his life.

  And perhaps this confession, even when it described a doubleness thatwas conscious and deliberate, really implied no more than that waveringof belief concerning his own impressions and motives which most humanbeings who have not a stupid inflexibility of self-confidence must beliable to under a marked change of external conditions. In a life wherethe experience was so tumultuously mixed as it must have been in thePrate's, what a possibility was opened for a change of self-judgment,when, instead of eyes that venerated and knees that knelt, instead of agreat work on its way to accomplishment, and in its prosperity stampingthe agent as a chosen instrument, there came the hooting and thespitting and the curses of the crowd; and then the hard faces of enemiesmade judges; and then the horrible torture, and with the torture theirrepressible cry, "It is true, what you would have me say: let me go:do not torture me again: yes, yes, I am guilty. O God! Thy stroke hasreached me!"

  As Romola thought of the anguish that must have followed theconfession--whether, in the subsequent solitude of the prison,conscience retracted or confirmed the self-taxing words--that anguishseemed to be pressing on her own heart and urging the slow bitter tears.Every vulgar self-ignorant person in Florence was glibly pronouncing onthis man's demerits, while _he_ was knowing a depth of sorrow which canonly be known to the soul that has loved and sought the most perfectthing, and beholds itself fallen.

  She had not then seen--what she saw afterwards--the evidence of theFrate's mental state after he had had thus to lay his mouth in the dust.As the days went by, the reports of new unpublished examinations,eliciting no change of confessions, ceased; Savonarola was left alone inhis prison and allowed pen and ink for a while, that, if he liked, hemight use his poor bruised and strained right arm to write with. Hewrote; but what he wrote was no vindication of his innocence, no protestagainst the proceedings used towards him: it was a continued colloquywith that divine purity with which he sought complete reunion; it wasthe outpouring of self-abasement; it was one long cry for inwardrenovation. No lingering echoes of the old vehement self-assertion,"Look at my work, for it is good, and those who set their faces againstit are the children of the devil!" The voice of Sadness tells him, "Godplaced thee in the midst of the people even as if thou hadst been one ofthe excellent. In this way thou hast taught others, and hast failed tolearn thyself. Thou hast cured others: and thou thyself hast been stilldiseased. Thy heart was lifted up at the beauty of thy own deeds, andthrough this thou hast lost thy wisdom and art become, and shalt be toall eternity, nothing... After so many benefits with which God hashonoured thee, thou art fallen into the depths of the sea; and after somany gifts bestowed on thee, thou, by thy pride and vainglory, hastscandalised all the world." And when Hope speaks and argues that thedivine love has not forsaken him, it says nothing now of a great work tobe done, but only says, "Thou art not forsaken, else why is thy heartbowed in penitence? That too is a gift."

  There is no jot of worthy evidence that from the time of hisimprisonment to the supreme moment, Savonarola thought or spoke ofhimself as a martyr. The idea of martyrdom had been to him a passiondividing the dream of the future with the triumph of beholding his workachieved. And now, in place of both, had come a resignation which hecalled by no glorifying name.

  _But therefore he may the more fitly be called a martyr by hisfellow-men to all time_. For power rose against him not because of hissins, but because of his greatness--not because he sought to deceive theworld, but because he sought to make it noble. And through thatgreatness of his he endured a double agony: not only the reviling, andthe torture, and the death-throe, but the agony of sinking from thevision of glorious achievement into that deep shadow where he could onlysay, "I count as nothing: darkness encompasses me: yet the light I sawwas the true light."