Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  In itself the church is nowise interesting or imposing, with that ugly and senseless classicism of its façade, which associates itself with Spain rather than Italy, and the stretch of its plain, low convent walls. It looks South American, it looks Mexican, with its plaza-like piazza; and the alien effect is heightened by the stiff tropical plants set round the recent military statue in the centre. But when you are within the convent gate, all is Italian, all is Florentine again; for there is nothing more Florentine in Florence than those old convent courts into which your sight-seeing takes you so often. The middle space is enclosed by the sheltering cloisters, and here the grass lies green in the sun the whole winter through, with daisies in it, and other simple little sympathetic weeds or flowers; the still air is warm, and the place has a climate of its own. Of course, the Dominican friars are long gone from San Marco; the place is a museum now, admirably kept up by the Government I paid a franc to go in, and found the old cloister so little conventual that there was a pretty girl copying a fresco in one of the lunettes, who presently left her scaldino on her scaffolding, and got down to start the blood in her feet by a swift little promenade under the arches where the monks used to walk, and over the dead whose gravestones pave the way. You cannot help those things; and she was really very pretty — much prettier than a monk. In one of the cells upstairs there was another young lady; she was copying a Fra Angelico, who might have been less shocked at her presence than some would think. He put a great number of women, as beautiful as he could paint them, in the frescos with which he has illuminated the long line of cells. In one place he has left his own portrait in a saintly company, looking on at an Annunciation; a very handsome youth, with an air expressive of an artistic rather than a spiritual interest in the fact represented, which indeed has the effect merely of a polite interview. One looks at the frescoes glimmering through the dusk of the little rooms in hardly discernible detail, with more or less care, according to one’s real or attempted delight in them, and then suddenly comes to the cell of Savonarola; and all the life goes out of those remote histories and allegories, and pulses in an agony of baffled good in this martyrdom. Here is the desk at which he read and wrote; here are laid some leaves of his manuscript, as if they had just trembled from those wasted hands of his; here is the hair shirt he wore, to mortify and torment that suffering flesh the more; here is a bit of charred wood gathered from the fire in which he expiated his love for the Florentines by a hideous death at their hands. It rends the heart to look at them! Still, after four hundred years, the event is as fresh as yesterday, — as fresh as Calvary; and never can the race which still gropes blindly here conceive of its divine source better than in the sacrifice of some poor fellow-creature who perishes by those to whom he meant nothing but good.

  As one stands in the presence of these pathetic witnesses, the whole lamentable tragedy rehearses itself again, with a power that makes one an actor in it. Here, I am of that Florence which has sprung erect after shaking the foot of the tyrant from its neck, too fiercely free to endure the yoke of the reformer; and I perceive the waning strength of Savonarola’s friends, the growing number of his foes. I stand with the rest before the Palazzo Vecchio waiting for the result of that ordeal by fire to which they have challenged his monks in’ test of his claims, and I hear with foreboding the murmurs of the crowd when they are balked of their spectacle by that question between the Dominicans and the Franciscans about carrying the host through the flames; I return with him heavy and sorrowful to his convent, prescient of broken power over the souls which his voice has swayed so long; I am there in San Marco when he rises to preach, and the gathering storm of insult and outrage bursts upon him, with hisses and yells, till the battle begins between his Piagnoni and the Arrabbiati, and rages through the consecrated edifice, and that fiery Peter among his friars beats in the skulls of his assailants with the bronze crucifix caught up from the altar; I am in the piazza before the church when the mob attacks the convent, and the monks, shaking off his meek control, reply with musket-shots from their cells; I am with him when the signory sends to lead him a prisoner to the Bargello; I am there when they stretch upon the rack that frail and delicate body, which fastings and vigils and the cloistered life have wrought up to a nervous sensibility as keen as a woman’s; I hear his confused and uncertain replies under the torture when they ask him whether he claims now to have prophesied from God; I climb with him, for that month’s respite they allow him before they put him to he question again, to the narrow cell high up in the tower of the Old Palace, where, with the roofs and towers of the cruel city he had so loved far below him, and the purple hills misty against the snow-clad mountains all round the horizon, he recovers something of his peace of mind, and keeps his serenity of soul; I follow him down to the chapel beautiful with Ghirlandajo’s frescoes where he spends his last hours, before they lead him between the two monks who are to suffer with him; and once more I stand among the pitiless multitude in the piazza. They make him taste the agony of death twice in the death of his monks; then he submits his neck to the halter, and the hangman thrusts him from the scaffold, where the others hang dangling in their chains above the pyre that is to consume their bodies. “Prophet!” cries an echo of the mocking voice on Calvary, “now is the time for a miracle!” The hangman thinks to please the crowd by playing the buffoon with the quivering form; a yell of abhorrence breaks from them, and he makes haste to descend and kindle the fire that it may reach Savonarola while he is still alive. A wind rises and blows the flame away. The crowd shrinks back terrified: “A miracle! a miracle!” But the wind falls again, and the bodies slowly burn, dropping a rain of blood into the hissing embers. The heat moving the right hand of Savonarola, he seems to lift it and bless the multitude. The Piagnoni fall sobbing and groaning to their knees; the Arrabbiati set on a crew of ribald boys, who, dancing and yelling round the fire, pelt the dead martyrs with a shower of stones.

  Once more I was in San Marco, but it was now in the nineteenth century, on a Sunday of January, 1883. There, in the place of Savonarola, who, though surely no Protestant, was one of the precursors of the Reformation, stood a Northern priest, chief perhaps of those who would lead us back to Rome, appealing to us in the harsh sibilants of our English, where the Dominican had rolled the organ harmonies of his impassioned Italian upon his hearers’ souls. I have certainly nothing to say against Monsignor Capel, and I have never seen a more picturesque figure than his as he stood in his episcopal purple against the curtain of pale green behind him, his square priest’s cap on his fine head, and the embroidered sleeves of some ecclesiastical under-vestment showing at every tasteful gesture. His face was strong, and beautiful with its deep-sunk, dreamy eyes, and he preached with singular vigour and point to a congregation of all the fashionable and cultivated English-speaking people in Florence, and to larger numbers of Italians whom I suspected of coming partly to improve themselves in our tongue. They could not have done better; his English was exquisite in diction and accent, and his matter was very good. He was warning us against Agnosticism and the limitations of merely scientific wisdom; but I thought that there was little need to persuade us of God in a church where Savonarola had lived and aspired; and that even the dead, who had known him and heard him, and who now sent up their chill through the pavement from the tombs below, and made my feet so very cold, were more eloquent of immortality in that place.

  XXI

  ONE morning, early in February, I walked out through the picturesqueness of Oltrarno, and up the long ascent of the street to Porta San Giorgio, for the purpose of revering what is left of the fortifications designed by Michael Angelo for the defence of the city in the great siege of 1535. There are many things to distract even the most resolute pilgrim on the way to that gate, and I was but too willing to loiter. There are bric-a-brac shops on the Ponte Vecchio, and in the Via Guicciardini and the Piazza Pitti, with old canvases, and carvings, and bronzes in their windows; and though a little past the time of life when one piously loo
ks up the scenes of fiction, I had to make an excursion up the Via de’ Bardi for the sake of Romola, whose history begins in that street. It is a book which you must read again in Florence, for it gives a true and powerful impression of Savonarola’s time, even if the author does burden her drama and dialogue with too much history. The Via de’ Bardi, moreover, is worthy a visit for its own Gothic-palaced, mediaeval sake, and for the sake of that long stretch of the Boboli garden wall backing upon it with ivy flung over its shoulder, and a murmur of bees in some sort of invisible blossoms beyond. In that neighbourhood I had to stop a moment before the house — simple, but keeping its countenance in the presence of a long line of Guicciardini palaces — where Machiavelli lived; a barber has his shop on the ground floor now, and not far off, again, are the houses of the Canigiani, the maternal ancestors of Petrarch. And yet a little way, up a steep, winding street, is the house of Galileo. It bears on its front a tablet recording the great fact that Ferdinand II. de’ Medici visited his valued astronomer there, and a portrait of the astronomer is painted on the stucco; there is a fruiterer underneath, and there are a great many children playing about, and their mothers screaming at them. The vast sky is blue without a speck overhead, and I look down on the tops of garden trees, and the brown-tiled roofs of houses sinking in ever richer and softer picturesqueness from level to level below. But to get the prospect in all its wonderful beauty, one must push on up the street a little farther, and pass out between two indolent sentries lounging under the Grotto-esquely frescoed arch of Porta San Giorgio, into the open road. By this time I fancy the landscape will have got the better of history in the interest of any amateur, and he will give but a casual glance at Michael Angelo’s bastions or towers, and will abandon himself altogether to the rapture of that scene.

  For my part, I cannot tell whether I am more blest in the varieties of effect which every step of the descent outside the wall reveals in the city and its river and valley, or in the near olive orchards, gray in the sun, and the cypresses, intensely black against the sky. The road next the wall is bordered by a tangle of blackberry vines, which the amiable Florentine winter has not had the harshness to rob of their leaves; they hang green from the canes, on which one might almost hope to find some berries. The lizards, basking in the warm dust, rustle away among them at my approach, and up the path comes a gentleman in the company of two small terrier dogs, whose little bells finely tinkle as they advance. It would be hard to say just how these gave the final touch to my satisfaction with a prospect in which everything glistened and sparkled as far as the snows of Vallombrosa, lustrous along the horizon; but the reader ought to understand.

  XXII

  I WAS instructed by the friend in whose tutelage I was pursuing with so much passion my search for historical localities that I had better not give myself quite away to either the associations or the landscapes at Porta San Giorgio, but wait till I visited San Miniato. Afterward I was glad that I did so, for that is certainly the point from which best to enjoy both. The day of our visit was gray and overcast, but the air was clear, and nothing was lost to the eye among the objects distinct in line and colour, almost as far as it could reach. We went out of the famous Porta Romana, by which so much history enters and issues that if the customs officers there were not the most circumspect of men, they never could get round among the peasants’ carts to tax their wine and oil without trampling a multitude of august and pathetic presences under foot. One shudders at the rate at which one’s cocchiere dashes through the Past thronging the lofty archway, and scatters its phantoms right and left with loud explosions of his whip. Outside it is somewhat better, among the curves and slopes of the beautiful suburban avenues, with which Florence was adorned to be the capital of Italy twenty years ago. But here, too, history thickens upon you, even if you know it but a little; it springs from the soil that looks so red and poor, and seems to fill the air. In no other space, it seems to me do the great events stand so dense as in that city and the circuit of its hills; so that, for mere pleasure in its beauty, the sense of its surpassing loveliness, perhaps one had better not know the history of Florence at all. As little as I knew it, I was terribly incommoded by it; and that morning, when I drove up to San Miniato to “realize” the siege of Florence, keeping a sharp eye out for Montici, where Sciarra Colonna had his quarters, and the range of hills whence the imperial forces joined in the chorus of his cannon battering the tower of the church, I would far rather have been an unpremeditating listener to the poem of Browning which the friend in the carriage with me was repeating. The din of the guns drowned his voice from time to time, and while he was trying to catch a faded phrase, and going back and correcting himself, and saying, “No — yes — no! That’s it — no! Hold on — I have it!” as people do in repeating poetry, my embattled fancy was flying about over all the historic scene, sallying, repulsing, defeating, succumbing; joining in the famous camisada when the Florentines put their shirts on over their armour and attacked the enemy’s sleeping camp by night, and at the same time playing ball down in the piazza of Santa Croce with the Florentine youth in sheer contempt of the besiegers. It was prodigiously fatiguing, and I fetched a long sigh of exhaustion as I dismounted at the steps of San Miniato, which was the outpost of the Florentines, and walked tremulously round it for a better view of the tower in whose top they had planted their great gun. It was all battered there by the enemy’s shot aimed to dislodge the piece, and in the crumbling brickwork nodded tufts of grass and dry weeds in the wind, like so many conceits of a frivolous tourist springing from the tragic history it recorded. The apse of the church below this tower is of the most satisfying golden brown in colour, and within, the church is what all the guide-books know, but what I own I have forgotten. It is a very famous temple, and every one goes to see it, for its frescoes and mosaics and its peculiar beauty of architecture; and I dedicated a moment of reverent silence to the memory of the poet Giusti, whose monument was there. After four hundred years of slavery, his pen was one of the keenest and bravest of those which resumed the old Italian fight for freedom, and he might have had a more adequate monument. I believe there is an insufficient statue, or perhaps it is only a bust, or may be a tablet with his face in bas-relief; but the modern Italians are not happy in their commemorations of the dead. The little Campo Santo at San Miniato is a place to make one laugh and cry with the hideous vulgarity of its realistic busts and its photographs set in the tombstones; and yet it is one of the least offensive in Italy. When I could escape from the fascination of its ugliness, I went and leaned with my friend on the parapet that encloses the Piazza Michelangelo, and took my fill of delight in the landscape. The city seemed to cover the whole plain beneath us with the swarm of its edifices, and the steely stretch of the Arno thrust through its whole length and spanned by its half-dozen bridges. The Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio swelled up from the mass with a vastness which the distance seemed only to accent and reveal. To the northward showed the snowy tops of the Apennines, while on the nearer slopes of the soft brown hills flanking the wonderful valley the towns and villas hung densely drifted everywhere, and whitened the plain to its remotest purple.

  I spare the reader the successive events which my unhappy acquaintance with the past obliged me to wait and see sweep over this mighty theatre. The winter was still in the wind that whistled round our lofty perch, and that must make the Piazza Michelangelo so delicious in the summer twilight; the bronze copy of the David in the centre of the square looked half frozen. The terrace is part of the system of embellishment and improvement of Florence for her brief supremacy as capital; and it is fitly called after Michael Angelo because it covers the site of so much work of his for her defence in the great siege. We looked about till we could endure the cold no longer, and then returned to our carriage. By this time the siege was over, and after a resistance of fifteen months we were betrayed by our leader, Malatesta Baglioni, who could not resist the Pope’s bribe. With the disgraceful facility of pleasure-seeking foreigners,
we instantly changed sides, and returned through the Porta Romana, which his treason opened, and, because it was so convenient, entered the city with a horde of other Spanish and German bigots and mercenaries that the empire had hurled against the stronghold of Italian liberty.