“Sir,” said Johnson, “I suppose so.”
King Francis swung his plumed cap in his hand and looked towards the sage with a light laugh.
“Yes,” he answered. “The aims of woman do not seem to coincide with the aims of man so often as they formerly did. I cannot imagine what women want with aims.”
“Generally, a husband,” returned Heine. “It is in New England, where there are the fewest husbands to be had, that women have the most aims. In Tartary, where they do not attempt to rear the superfluous females, the women have enough to do in keeping house, or keeping tent, for their husbands. Aims, as you call them, are the result of idleness. If every man were obliged to work as hard as he could for his daily bread, there would be no time for scheming and no aims for anybody — we should have peipetual peace and no nonsense with it, no high-sounding talk about the solemnity of creation, no professional pomposity. We should have nothing to think of but bread and the price of bread. That is real advancement. That is modern socialism. That is the ideal republic. That is freedom — not only from tyrants but from lecturers. Do away with everything, and especially with education. When a man and a woman must labour all day for bread at a trade, and may never have more than their daily allowance of bread, no matter how they labour, what possible good can education do them? Let us turn socialists and destroy at a blow those differences which mankind has taken scores of centuries to create. If a baby is born with an exceptionally intellectual skull, knock it on the head. It is for the public good that there should be no differences. It is for the freedom of humanity to kill everything above the average. If any man stand more than five feet four inches in his stockings, cut him down to the average of humanity. Excellence is damnation, for it means superiority, and the superiority of one man suffices to demonstrate the degraded idiotcy of millions who, but for him, might justly call themselves wise.”
“I thought you began by abusing aims and ambitions,” said Gwendoline. “I should think that nothing else could save you from the idiots you last mentioned.”
“Ah, madam,” replied Heine, “to end an argument on the same side upon which one stood at its beginning would show a lamentable lack of imagination! Forgive my turning about — there is such a difference between a poet’s ambition and the theoretical desire for evolved goodness which Mr. Herbert Spencer preaches. There is such a vast difference between Freedom in rhyme and Freedom upon stamped paper! One reason why I hate all this modern philosophy is because it never takes into account the fact that a man may change his mind, that he may like buttered bread to-day and dry bread to-morrow, rest one week and hard work the next. Is man a machine that he should live not only by law, but by inflexible rule? Is he a wheel, that he must for ever turn upon one axle? A steam-engine of which the philosophers are to handle the throttle-valve and the reversing lever and adjust the expansion gear to the measure of their steam supply? What is man, in the name of common sense? Is he a thinking creature, capable of thinking for himself? Or is he a learned ass to be taught to perform tricks in the circus of philosophy before a critical public of graduates in the science of teaching asses? Is man not only to eat, drink, work, and rest by method, but also to love by rule, to be ambitious by rule, to sacrifice his neighbour to himself when the rule tells him he is more valuable to the community than his neighbour, to weep by rule a nicely calculated number of tears, and to adjust his laughter to the subject which excites it, by the infallible method of prime and ultimate ratios? Is there to be no choice left, no free will, no imagination, no poetry, and no prose but the tiresome account book wherein is reckoned up the happiness of the greatest number? Are civilised men to slave at a daily task in Europe, binding themselves by an oath never to want more than their equal portion, in order that an idiotic African or a pot-bellied Hindu vegetarian may have a like portion with themselves — to wit, sixteen ounces of bread and a glass of water, more or less? Go to! These dreams of equality are rubbish! The frog who tries to puff himself up to the size of the ox must burst, and the ox who tries to reduce himself by privation to the size of the frog will starve. There are big animals and little animals, big brains and little brains, big thoughts and little thoughts. The only freedom worth the name is that which gives each man a fair chance to find his level and leaves the rest to himself, which allows one man to pursue happiness and another man to pursue greatness, and which admits that what would make one man happy would make another unspeakably miserable. Show me the philosopher who has changed the destinies of mankind by his theories, and I will talk seriously with you. Prove to me that any one of the great men of the earth, beginning with Cæsar — or with Menes, the Thinite, if you please — governed according to the precepts of any philosophy, and I will admit then that philosophy has played a part in the world.”
“It seems to me,” said Diana, “that freedom comes under the class of things, or ideas, or principles, with which philosophy has dealt. Many nations have fought for that, and have governed themselves solely with the intention of remaining free.”
“Freedom never was made the subject of philosophical speculation, until men had lost it,” returned Heine. “When a boy has plenty of jam he does not invent plans for stealing more.”
“Exactly,” argued Diana. “Philosophy professes to teach men how to obtain what is good for them, when they do not possess all that they have a right to possess — and it teaches men to be contented when they cannot get what they hanker after.”
“If you mean to impose that definition on the world,” replied Heine, “you must set up a High Pontiff among philosophers to decide what is legitimate philosophy and what is not. In other words you must persuade all men to accept the judgment of one man, which means that all men must be subjected to a supreme tyrant, that is to say, liberty is to be destroyed. That is the result of the philosophy of freedom. Either it will end by destroying freedom, because it will force everybody under the rule of a tyrant, or it will set up half a dozen different kinds of freedom which will fight each other to death, which is contrary to the definition of freedom. That is a pretty dilemma.”
“Sir,” said Johnson, “I do not believe that there is any dilemma which can defy common sense. According to Varro, the son of Antipater broke the head of the philosophic dilemma with a mattock, with the ‘quick argument by the single horn’ — in other words by a forcible application of common sense. Freedom, sir, is the contrary of enforced servitude.”
CHAPTER XIII.
DIANA HAD WANDERED from the house alone one morning and as she picked her way among the rocks, she paused now and then to pluck the wildflowers that grew in every cranny and carpeted every little plot of grass among the boulders. She was thinking of all she had heard during the past days and trying to reconcile the many varying opinions expressed by the strange party. She wished that she could go back into the closed centuries and see the lives of these dead men as they had been, and she sighed as she realised how far she was from understanding the real existence and conditions of existence of humanity in past ages.
“After all,” she said aloud to herself, “we are not sure of ever understanding any history but that of our own particular lives. We dislike people who talk about themselves, and when they do not we are angry with them for not telling us what we want so much to know. Vanity of vanities!”
“And yet,” said a quiet voice beside her, “next to ourselves, nothing interests us so much as other people.”
Diana turned and recognised the beautiful features and the lofty figure of Lionardo.
“I thought I was alone!” she exclaimed in some surprise. “I am so glad it is you,” she added, quickly.
“Not more glad than I am,” answered the old man, courteously. “You were thinking aloud — I took the liberty of joining in the conversation of your thoughts. You were saying, or thinking, that people are interesting. Indeed there is very little else in the world which has any great interest for those who live in it, or for those who have lived in it.”
“I am glad to
hear you say so,” replied Diana. “I have sometimes thought that it is bad for the mind to occupy it too much with people. Inanimate things seem safer; they do not change so fast. When we know anything about them, we feel quite sure of what we know. It is not the same with people.”
“People progress. Things either remain as they are or decay,” said Lionardo, looking thoughtfully at the young girl. “It is clear that although in the last thousand years mankind has improved, nature has tended to degenerate wherever she has not continued to be as she was. The sea knocks away the cliffs and slowly eats the land, the sun melts the glaciers, man makes holes in the mountains and the moon moves more rapidly round the earth, the earth revolves more slowly upon her axis. In rather less than twenty millions of years the moon will probably go round the earth once a day and will remain apparently stationary in the heavens.”
“That is a long way off,” laughed Diana. “It will not come in my time.”
“No. Your time, as you call it, is the time while you are alive. After that, time will belong to the next generation — not to you. The reason why time is so tremendously important to you is because the time of your life is all the time there is, so far as you are concerned. As you help to make it, so your time will appear to the view of those who follow you.”
“Past time always seems more interesting than the present,” said Diana, looking into the painter’s deep eyes as though she were trying to conjure up the life that had once surrounded his. “I have often wished that I might have lived when you did.”
“It was an age of individuals. This is the age of the millions.”
“And what will the next age be?” asked the young girl.
“The age of collapse and of barbarian domination, I suppose,” answered Lionardo.
“Of the three, yours, the age of individuals, is the most interesting.”
“It seems so to you. People who live in luxurious leisure, using their intelligence in refined study, easily fancy that in an age of individuals talent played a greater part than it does now, and that they themselves would have been important figures in their times. But the people who lead the millions, in the age of the million, think their own century the most interesting. They think that in my time, for instance, they could have led everybody just as certainly and with half the trouble, so that they get more credit now than they would have got then.”
“Do you think they really could?” asked Diana. “Do you think that Prince Bismarck would have succeeded in unifying Italy under one rule, as Cesare Borgia tried to do?”
“It is quite certain that Cesare Borgia would have failed to unify Germany in the nineteenth century in Prince Bismarck’s place,” answered the artist, with a smile. “Cesare’s mode of operating was different. He was Machiavelli’s ideal — cunning, cultivated, witty, unscrupulous. Bismarck is the incarnation of consistency animated by gunpowder. He has confounded the diplomatists of Europe for five and twenty years by telling them the truth. He goes upon the principle that honesty is the best policy for people who are able to hit very hard. Cesare Borgia considered that lying was the appropriate dress of strength and that secret murder was the only expression of force. He did not see, when he had subdued a great part of northern Italy to his own rule, that his position depended upon his father’s life and influence. When his father Alexander the Sixth, died, Cesare naturally fell.”
“I have heard it said that he might have maintained his conquests if he had not been ill from poison just at the critical moment,” said Diana.
“I do not believe it. People are always finding excuses for fascinating men who fail after making a great deal of noise. After all, why did you bring up Cesare Borgia as an example? He was handsome, clever and a scoundrel, but he never came near greatness.”
“He is a specimen of the times, that is all. I would like to have seen him — I would like to hear him talk with Bayard, for instance. It would be such a delightful contrast. Besides, he was a typical Italian.”
“Ah, my dear young lady,” replied the artist, “you are unfair to us. I cannot let you say that Cesare Borgia was a type of our nation. We are better than that; on the faith of an artist, we are not all murderers and poisoners and traitors. There have been good men amongst us.”
“Savonarola,” suggested Diana.
“Savonarola — well — Savonarola,” repeated the old man in doubtful tones, spreading out his hand with the palm downwards and alternately raising the thumb and the little finger, as though balancing the good and evil genii of the Dominican monk.
“You seem to hesitate,” remarked the young girl.
“Savonarola — he was not a bad man — no — but he was a detestable fellow. He fell a victim to a piece of his own very gratuitous political scheming.”
“What an extraordinary view! I always heard that he was burnt by Alexander as a heretic.”
“So he was,” replied Lionardo, thoughtfully.
“Well, then — I do not understand,” said Diana.
“I will give you the history of Savonarola in three words — Enthusiasm, Fanaticism, Failure. He began to preach in 1489, under Pope Innocent the Eighth, and he inveighed against Lorenzo de’ Medici on the ground that he had usurped the sovereignty of Florence. He forgot that Lorenzo inherited the supremacy from his father Pietro, whose father, again, Cosmo de’ Medici, had already been practically the ruler of Florence. He forgot, too, that Lorenzo himself had narrowly escaped being murdered with his brother by the agents of Sixtus the Fourth, the Pazzi, the so-called friends of liberty. Savonarola took upon himself to refuse absolution to Lorenzo when on his deathbed, on the sole ground that the latter would not renounce and abdicate the power he had inherited. That was in 1492. In 1494 Savonarola excited the Florentines against Pietro, Lorenzo’s son, when he returned from his attempt to treat with Charles the Eighth of France, and succeeded in driving him out, thus thrusting his fellow-citizens into the arms of the French king, who forthwith entered Florence as a foreign conqueror; and the Florentines had great difficulty in getting rid of him. From that time Savonarola continued to preach an alliance with Charles the Eighth, which practically meant a submission to him. Meanwhile Alexander the Sixth, Rodrigo Borgia, scandalised the world by his conduct and Savonarola openly denounced the Pope. He forgot, however, that Alexander the Sixth, with all his vices, had been ONE of the founders of the league which had driven the French out of Italy. Alexander resented Savonarola’s propaganda of the French alliance and, seeking occasion against him, declared the monk a heretic for assuming to be endowed with supernatural gifts and for his attacks on the government of the Church. Savonarola refused the ordeal by fire himself, and his friend and fellow-monk, Domenico Buonvicino, refused it at the last moment, when the pile was erected. Every one declared Savonarola an impostor, and he was delivered over to the Pope. Under torture, he weakly confessed all manner of misdeeds which he had not committed, and he, with his two friends Buonvicino and Marraffi were strangled and their bodies were burnt in the Piazza della Signoria. That is the history of Girolamo Savonarola. I do not see that there is material for making a martyr of him since his death — there was certainly not the stuff of a hero in him when he was alive.”
“That is a very prejudiced account of him,” remarked Diana.
“I could say far worse things of him. He was an iconoclast, a destroyer of everything that was beautiful, a Vandal! If he had lived to carry out his schemes he would have left not one work of art in Florence. He detested Lorenzo for his love of the antique and would have got rid of all the Medici for ever, if he could. Pray, what would Florence have been without the Medici?”
“Nevertheless,” objected Diana, who would not relinquish her point, “people have been found to defend him as a hero and a martyr even in our day.”
“As they defend Giordano Bruno,” retorted the artist. “But Sismondi, the most important of modern Italian historians, and who was profoundly prejudiced against the popes, did not defend him in his actions, though he admired h
im for his original qualities. Sismondi accuses him of taking his own impulses for prophetic revelations, by which he directed the politics of his disciples, and states without comment the fact that the monk pushed the Florentines into an alliance with Charles the Eighth, the enemy of Italian liberty. Sismondi, who hated the popes, and especially detested Alexander the Sixth, could not refrain from stating that Savonarola was burnt alive, contrary to the evidence of all the best authorities, but he does not conceal the fact that Savonarola pretended, like Mahomet, to be receiving constant and direct revelations from God. Machiavelli speaks of him as veering from point to point, to paint and colour his fraud and cunning. That is natural enough, since Machiavelli was deeply attached to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Your English historian Roscoe who may be supposed to represent the judgment of Protestants upon the Dominican monk, speaks of him with unmeasured scorn. He says that Savonarola entitled himself to the homage of the people of Florence by foretelling their destruction and that he contributed essentially to the accomplishment of his own predictions; and he further adds that he entertained the most vindictive animosity against his patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici. I do not see what other evidence you can want. The fact that he was enthusiastic when he began his career, does not excuse him for having been vindictive at a later period, nor for having acted the impostor in pretending to receive divine revelations of which the object was the ruin of Florence. Believe me, my dear young lady, all this sympathy for Girolamo Savonarola is sentimental. It is of a piece with the modern fashion of extolling the virtues of Lucrezia Borgia and of making out that Nero was a gentle, sensitive, and misunderstood artist of genius. I can defend Alexander the Sixth and Cesare Borgia as eloquently as you can defend Savonarola or Giordano Bruno, upon different grounds.”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 317
