Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  One realizes all this there with a distinctness which the clearness of the Italian atmosphere permits. In that air events do not seem to age any more than edifices; a life, like a structure, of six hundred years ago seems of yesterday, and one feels toward the Donati as if that troublesome family were one’s own contemporaries. The evil they brought on Dante was not domestic only, but they and their party were the cause of his exile and his barbarous sentence in the process of the evil times which brought the Bianchi and Neri to Florence.

  There is in history hardly anything so fantastically malicious, so tortuous, so perverse, as the series of chances that ended in his banishment. Nothing could apparently have been more remote from him, to all human perception, than that quarrel of a Pistoja family, in which the children of Messer Cancelliere’s first wife, Bianca, called themselves Bianchi, and the children of the second called themselves Neri, simply for contrary-mindedness’ sake. But let us follow it, and see how it reaches the poet and finally delivers him over to a life of exile and misery. One of these Cancellieri of Pistoja falls into a quarrel with another and wounds him with his sword. They are both boys, or hardly more, and the father of the one who struck the blow bids him go to his kinsmen and beg their forgiveness. But when he comes to them the father of the wounded youth takes him out to the stable, and striking off the offending hand on a block there, flings it into his face. “Go back to your father and tell him that hurts are healed with iron, not with words.” The news of this cruel deed throws all Pistoja into an incomprehensible mediaeval frenzy. The citizens arm and divide themselves into Bianchi and Neri; the streets become battlefields. Finally some cooler heads ask Florence to interfere. Florence is always glad to get a finger into the affairs of her neighbours, and to quiet Pistoja she calls the worst of the Bianchi and Neri to her. Her own factions take promptly to the new names; the Guelphs have long ruled the city; the Ghibellines have been a whole generation in exile. But the Nen take up the old Ghibelline role of invoking foreign intervention, with Corso Donati at their head, — a brave man, but hot, proud, and lawless. Dante is of the Bianchi party, which is that of the liberals and patriots, and in this quality he goes to Rome to plead with the Pope to use his good offices for the peace and freedom of Florence. In his absence he is banished for two years and heavily fined; then he is banished for life, and will be burned if he comes back. His party comes into power, but the sentence is never repealed, and in the despair of exile Dante, too, invokes the stranger’s help. He becomes Nero; he dies Ghibelline.

  I walked up from the other Donati houses through the Via Borgo degli Albizzi to the Piazza San Pier Maggiore to look at the truncated tower of Corso Donati, in which he made his last stand against the people when summoned by their Podestà to answer for all his treasons and seditions. He fortified the adjoining houses, and embattled the whole neighbourhood, galling his besiegers in the streets below with showers of stones and arrows. They set fire to his fortress, and then he escaped through the city wall into the open country, but was hunted down and taken by his enemies. On the way back to Florence he flung himself from his horse, that they might not have the pleasure of triumphing with him through the streets, and the soldier in charge of him was surprised into running him through with his lance, as Corso intended. This is the story that some tell; but others say that his horse ran away, dragging him over the road by his foot, which caught in his stirrup, and the guard killed him, seeing him already hurt to death. Dante favours the latter version of his end, and sees him in hell, torn along at the heels of a beast, whose ceaseless flight is toward “the valley where never mercy is.”

  The poet had once been the friend as well as brother-in-law of Corso, but had turned against him when Corso’s lust of power threatened the liberties of Florence. You must see this little space of the city to understand how intensely narrow and local the great poet was in his hates and loves, and how considerably he has populated hell and purgatory with his old neighbours and acquaintance. Among those whom he puts in Paradise was that sister of Corso’s, the poor Picarda, whose story is one of the most pathetic and pious legends of that terrible old Florence. The vain and worldly life which she saw around her had turned her thoughts toward heaven, and she took the veil in the convent of Santa Chiara. Her brother was then at Bologna, but he repaired straightway to Florence with certain of his followers, forced the convent, and dragging his sister forth amid the cries and prayers of the nuns, gave her to wife to Rosellino della Tosa, a gentleman to whom he had promised her. She, in the bridal garments with which he had replaced her nun’s robes, fell on her knees and implored the succour of her Heavenly Spouse, and suddenly her beautiful body was covered with a loathsome leprosy, and in a few days she died inviolate. Some will have it that she merely fell into a slow infirmity, and so pined away. Corso Donati was the brother of Dante’s wife, and without ascribing to Gemma more of his quality than Picarda’s, one may readily perceive that the poet had not married into a comfortable family.

  In the stump of the old tower which I had come to see, I found a poulterer’s shop, bloody and evil-smelling, and two frowzy girls picking chickens. In the wall there is a tablet signed by the Messer Capitani of the Guelph Party, forbidding any huckster to sell his wares in that square under pain of a certain fine. The place now naturally abounds in them.

  The Messer Capitani are all dead, with their party, and the hucksters are no longer afraid.

  XV

  FOR my part, I find it hard to be serious about the tragedy of a people who seem, as one looks back at them in their history, to have lived in such perpetual broil as the Florentines. They cease to be even pathetic; they become absurd, and tempt the observer to a certain mood of triviality, by their indefatigable antics in cutting and thrusting, chopping off heads, mutilating, burning, and banishing. But I have often thought that we must get a false impression of the past by the laws governing perspective, in which the remoter objects are inevitably pressed together in their succession, and the spaces between are ignored. In looking at a painting, these spaces are imagined; but in history, the objects, the events are what alone make their appeal, and there seems nothing else. It must always remain for the reader to revise his impressions, and rearrange them, so as to give some value to conditions as well as to occurrences. It looks very much, at first glance, as if the Florentines had no peace from the domination of the Romans to the domination of the Medici. But in all that time they had been growing in wealth, power, the arts and letters, and were constantly striving to realise in their state the ideal which is still our only political aim—” a government of the people by the people for the people.” Whoever opposed himself, his interests or his pride, to that ideal, was destroyed sooner or later; and it appears that if there had been no foreign interference, the one-man power would never have been fastened on Florence. We must account, therefore, not only for seasons of repose not obvious in history, but for a measure of success in the realization of her political ideal. The feudal nobles, forced into the city from their petty sovereignties beyond its gates; the rich merchants and bankers, creators and creatures of its prosperity; the industrious and powerful guilds of artisans; the populace of unskilled labourers — authority visited each in turn; but no class could long keep it from the others, and no man from all the rest. The fluctuations were violent enough, but they only seem incessant through the necessities of perspective; and somehow, in the most turbulent period, there was peace enough for the industries to fruit and the arts to flower. Now and then a whole generation passed in which there was no upheaval, though it must be owned that these generations seem few. A life of the ordinary compass witnessed so many atrocious scenes, that Dante, who peopled his Inferno with his neighbours and fellow-citizens, had but to study their manners and customs to give life to his picture. Forty years after his exile, when the Florentines rose to drive out Walter of Brienne, the Duke of Athens, whom they had made their ruler, and who had tried to make himself their master by a series of cruel oppressions, they stormed
the. Palazzo Vecchio, where he had taken refuge, and demanded certain of his bloody minions; and when his soldiers thrust one of these out among them, they cut him into small pieces, and some tore the quivering fragments with their teeth.

  XVI

  THE savage lurks so near the surface in every man that a constant watch must be kept upon the passions and impulses, or he leaps out in his war-paint, and the poor integument of civilization that held him is flung aside like a useless garment The Florentines were a race of impulse and passion, and the mob was merely the frenzy of that popular assemblage by which the popular will made itself known, the suffrage being a thing as yet imperfectly understood and only secondarily exercised. Yet the peacefulest and Apparently the wholesomest time known to the historians was that which followed the expulsion of the Duke of Athens, when the popular mob, having defeated the aristocratic leaders of the revolt, came into power, with such unquestionable authority that the nobles were debarred from office, and punished not only in their own persons, but in kith and kin, for offences against the life of a plebeian. Five hundred noble families were exiled, and of those left, the greater part sued to be admitted among the people. This grace was granted them, but upon the condition that they must not aspire to office for five years, and that if any of them killed or grievously wounded a plebeian, he should be immediately and hopelessly re-ennobled; which sounds like some fantastic invention of Mr Frank R. Stockton’s, and only too vividly recalls Lord Tolloller’s appeal in “Iolanthe.”

  “Spurn not the nobly born

  With love affected,

  Nor treat with virtuous scorn

  The well-connected.

  High rank involves no shame —

  We boast an equal claim

  With him of humble name

  To be respected.”

  The world has been ruled so long by the most idle and worthless people in it, that it always seems droll to see those who earn the money spending it, and those from whom the power comes using it. But we who are now trying to offer this ridiculous spectacle to the world ought not to laugh at it in the Florentine government of 1343-46. It seems to have lasted no long time, for at the end of three or four years the divine wrath smote Florence with the pest. This was to chastise her for her sins, as the chroniclers tell us; but as a means of reform it failed apparently. A hundred thousand of the people died, and the rest, demoralized by the terror and enforced idleness in which they had lived, abandoned themselves to all manner of dissolute pleasures, and were much worse than if they had never had any pest This pest, of which the reader will find a lively account in Boccaccio’s introduction to the “Decamerone” — he was able to write of it because, like De Foe, who described the plague of London, he had not seen it — seems rather to have been a blow at popular government, if we may judge from the disorders which it threw the democratic city into, and the long train of wars and miseries that presently followed. But few of us are ever sufficiently in the divine confidence to be able to say just why this or that thing happens, and we are constantly growing more modest about assuming to know. What is certain is that the one-man power, forboded and resisted from the first in Florence, was at last to possess itself of the fierce and jealous city. It showed itself, of course, in a patriotic and beneficent aspect at the beginning, but within a generation the first memorable Medici had befriended the popular cause and had made the weight of his name felt in Florence. From Salvestro de Medici, who succeeded in breaking the power of the Guelph nobles in 1382, and, however unwillingly, promoted the Tumult of the Ciompi and the rule of the lowest classes, it is a long step to Averardo de’ Medici, another popular leader in 1421; and it is again another long step from him to Cosimo de’ Medici, who got himself called the Father of his Country, and died in 1469, leaving her with her throat fast in the clutch of his nephew, Lorenzo the Magnificent. But it was the stride of destiny, and nothing apparently could stay it.

  XVII

  THE name of Lorenzo de’ Medici is the next name of unrivalled greatness to which one comes in Florence after Dante’s. The Medici, however one may be principled against them, do possess the imagination there, and I could not have helped going for their sake to the Piazza of the Mercato Vecchio, even if I had not wished to see again and again one of the most picturesque and characteristic places in the city. As I think of it, the pale, delicate sky of a fair winter’s day in Florence spreads over me, and I seem to stand in the midst of the old square, with its mouldering colonnade on one side, and on the other its low, irregular roofs, their brown tiles thinly tinted with a growth of spindling grass and weeds, green the whole year round. In front of me a vast, white old palace springs seven stories into the sunshine, disreputably shabby from basement to attic, but beautiful, with the rags of a plebeian wash-day caught across it from balcony to balcony, as if it had fancied trying to hide its forlornness in them. Around me are peasants and donkey-carts and Florentines of all sizes and ages; my ears are filled with the sharp din of an Italian crowd, and my nose with the smell of immemorial, innumerable market-days, and the rank, cutting savour of frying fish and cakes from a score of neighbouring cook-shops; but I am happy — happier than I should probably be if I were actually there. Through an archway in the street behind me, not far from an admirably tumble-down shop full of bric-a-brac of low degree, all huddled — old bureaus and bedsteads, crockery, classic lamps, assorted saints, shovels, flat-irons, and big-eyed madonnas — under a sagging pent-roof, I enter a large court, like Piazza Donati. Here the Medici, among other great citizens, had their first houses; and in the narrow street opening out of this court stands the little church which was then the family chapel of the Medici, after the fashion of that time, where all their marriages, christenings, and funerals took place. In time this highly respectable quarter suffered the sort of social decay which so frequently and so capriciously affects highly respectable quarters in all cities; and it had at last fallen so low in the reign of Cosimo I., that when that grim tyrant wished cheaply to please the Florentines by making it a little harder for the Jews than for the Christians under him, he shut them up in the old court. They had been let into Florence to counteract the extortion of the Christian usurers, and upon the condition that they would not ask more than twenty per cent, interest How much more had been taken by the Christians one can hardly imagine; but if this was a low rate to Florentines, one easily understands how the bankers of the city grew rich by lending to the necessitous world outside. Now and then they did not get back their principal, and Edward III. of England has still an outstanding debt to the house of Peruzzi, which he bankrupted in the fourteenth century. The best of the Jews left the city rather than enter the Ghetto, and only the baser sort remained to its captivity. Whether any of them still continue there, I do not know; but the place has grown more and more disreputable, till now it is the home of the forlornest rabble I saw in Florence, and if they were not the worst, their looks are unjust to them. They were mainly women and children, as the worst classes seem to be everywhere — I do not know why — and the air was full of the clatter of their feet and tongues, intolerably reverberated from the high, many-windowed walls of scorbutic brick and stucco. These walls were, of course, garlanded with garments hung to dry from their casements. It is perpetually washing-day in Italy, and the observer, seeing so much linen washed and so little clean, is everywhere invited to the solution of one of the strangest problems of the Latin civilization.

  The ancient home of the Medici has none of the feudal dignity, the baronial pride, of the quarter of the Lamberti and the Buondelmonti; and, disliking them as I did, I was glad to see it in the possession of that squalor so different from the cheerful and industrious thrift of Piazza Donati and the neighbourhood of Dante’s house. No touch of sympathetic poetry relieves the history of that race of demagogues and tyrants, who, in their rise, had no thought but to aggrandize themselves, and whose only greatness was an apotheosis of egotism. It is hard to understand through what law of development from lower to higher, the P
rovidence which rules the affairs of men permitted them supremacy; and it is easy to understand how the better men whom they supplanted and dominated should abhor them. They were especially a bitter dose to the proud-stomached aristocracy of citizens which had succeeded the extinct Ghibelline nobility in Florence; but, indeed, the three pills which they adopted from the arms of their guild of physicians, together with the only appellation by which history knows their lineage, were agreeable to none who wished their country well. From the first Medici to the last, they were nearly all hypocrites or ruffians, bigots or imbeciles; and Lorenzo, who was a scholar and a poet, and the friend of scholars and poets, had the genius and science of tyranny in supreme degree, though he wore no princely title and assumed to be only the chosen head of the commonwealth.

  “Under his rule,” says Villari, in his “Life of Savonarola,” that almost incomparable biography, “all wore a prosperous and contented aspect; the parties that had so long disquieted the city were at peace; imprisoned, or banished, or dead, those who would not submit to the Medicean domination; tranquillity and calm were everywhere. Feasting, dancing, public shows, and games amused the Florentine people who, once so jealous of their rights, seemed to have forgotten even the name of liberty. Lorenzo, who took part in all these pleasures, invented new ones every day. But among all his inventions, the most famous was that of the carnival songs (canti camasctaleschi), of which he composed the first, and which were meant to be sung in the masquerades of carnival, when the youthful nobility, disguised to represent the Triumph of Death, or a crew of demons, or some other caprice of fancy, wandered through the city, filling it with their riot. The reading of these songs will paint the corruption of the town far better than any other description. To-day, not only the youthful nobility, but the basest of the populace, would hold them in loathing, and to go singing them through the city would be an offence to public decency which could not fail to be punished. These things were the favourite recreation of a prince lauded by all the world and held up as a model to every sovereign, a prodigy of wisdom, a political and literary genius. And such as they called him then many would judge him still,” says our author, who explicitly warns his readers against Roscoe’s “Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” as the least trustworthy of all in its characterization. “They would forgive him the blood spilt to maintain a dominion unjustly acquired by him and his: the disorder wrought in the commonwealth; the theft of the public treasure to supply his profligate waste; the shameless vices to which in spite of his feeble health he abandoned himself; and even that rapid and infernal corruption of the people, which he perpetually studied with all the force and capacity of his soul. And all because he was the protector of letters and the fine arts!