Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  XXIII

  YET, once within the beloved walls — I must still call them walls, though they axe now razed to the ground and laid out in fine avenues, with a perpetual succession of horse-cars tinkling down their midst — I was all Florentine again, and furious against the Medici, whom after a whole generation the holy league of the Emperor and the Pope had brought back in the person of the bastard Alessandro. They brought him back, of course, in prompt and explicit violation of their sacred word; and it seemed to me that I could not wait for his cousin Lorenzino to kill him, — such is the ferocity of the mildest tourist in the presence of occasions sufficiently remote. But surely if ever a man merited murder it was that brutal despot, whose tyrannies and excesses had something almost deliriously insolent in them, and who, crime for crime, seems to have preferred that which was most revolting. But I had to postpone this exemplary assassination till I could find the moment for visiting the Riccardi Palace, in the name of which the fact of the elder Medicean residence is clouded. It has long been a public building, and now some branch of the municipal government has its meetings and offices there; but what the stranger commonly goes to see is the chapel or oratory frescoed by Benozzo Gozzoli, which is perhaps the most simply and satisfyingly lovely little space that ever four walls enclosed. The sacred histories cover every inch of it with form and colour; and if it all remains in my memory a sensation of delight, rather than anything more definite, that is perhaps a witness to the efficacy with which the painter wrought. Serried ranks of seraphs, peacock-plumed, and kneeling in prayer; garlands of roses everywhere; contemporary Florentines on horseback, riding in the train of the Three Magi Kings under the low boughs of trees; and birds fluttering through the dim, mellow atmosphere, the whole set dense and close in an opulent yet delicate fancifulness of design, — that is what I recall, with a conviction of the idleness and absurdity of recalling anything. It was like going out of doors to leave the dusky splendour of this chapel, which was intended at first to be seen only by the light of silver lamps, and come into the great hall frescoed by Luca Giordano, where his classicistic fables swim overhead in immeasurable light They still have the air, those boldly foreshortened and dramatically postured figures, of being newly dashed on — the work of yesterday begun the day before; and they fill one with an ineffable gaiety: War, Pestilence, and Famine, no less than Peace, Plenty, and Hygienic Plumbing — if that was one of the antithetical personages. Upon the whole, I think the seventeenth century was more comfortable than the fifteenth, and that when men had fairly got their passions and miseries impersonalized into allegory, they were in a state to enjoy themselves much better than before. One can very well imagine the old Cosimo who built this palace having himself carried through its desolate magnificence, and crying that, now his son was dead, it was too big for his family; but grief must have been a much politer and seemlier thing in Florence when Luca Giordano painted the ceiling of the great hall.

  In the Duke Alessandro’s time they had only got half-way, and their hearts ached and burned in primitive fashion. The revival of learning had brought them the consolation of much classic example, both virtuous and vicious, but they had not yet fully philosophized slavery into elegant passivity. Even a reprobate like Lorenzino de’ Medici—” the morrow of a debauch,” as De Musset calls him — had his head full of the high Roman fashion of finishing tyrants, and behaved as much like a Greek as he could.

  The Palazzo Riccardi now includes in its mass the site of the house in which Lorenzino lived, as well as the narrow street which formerly ran between his house and the palace of the Medici; so that if you have ever so great a desire to visit the very spot where Alessandro died that only too insufficient death, you must wreak your frenzy upon a small passage opening out of the present court. You enter this from the modern liveliness of the Via Cavour — in every Italian city since the unification there is a Via Cavour, a Via Garibaldi, and a Corso Vittorio Emmanuele — and you ordinarily linger for a moment among the Etruscan and Roman marbles before paying your half franc and going upstairs. There is a little confusion in this, but I think upon the whole it heightens the effect; and the question whether the custodian can change a piece of twenty francs, debating itself all the time in the mind of the amateur of tyrannicide, sharpens his impatience, while he turns aside into the street which no longer exists, and mounts the phantom stairs to the vanished chamber of the demolished house, where the Duke is waiting for the Lady Ginori, as he believes, but really for his death. No one, I think, claims that he was a demon less infernal than Lorenzino makes him out in that strange Apology of his, in which he justifies himself to posterity by appeals to antiquity. “Alessandro,” he says, “went far beyond Phalaris in cruelty, because, whereas Phalaris justly punished Perillus for his cruel invention for miserably tormenting and destroying men in his brazen Bull, Alessandro would have rewarded him if he had lived in his time, for he was himself always thinking out new sorts of tortures and deaths, like building men up alive in places so narrow that they could not turn or move, but might be said to be built in as a part of the wall of brick and stone, and in that state feeding them and prolonging their misery as much as possible, the monster not satisfying himself with the mere death of his people; so that the seven years of his reign, for debauchery, for avarice and cruelty, may be compared with seven others of Nero, of Caligula, or of Phalaris, choosing the most abominable of their whole lives, in proportion, of course, of the city to the empire; for in that time so many citizens will be found to have been driven from their country, and persecuted, and murdered in exile, and so many beheaded without trial and without cause, and only for empty suspicion, and for words of no importance, and others poisoned or slain by his own hand, or his satellites, merely that they might not put him to shame before certain persons, for the condition in which he was born and reared; and so many extortions and robberies will be found to have been committed, so many adulteries, so many violences, not only in things profane but in sacred also, that it will be difficult to decide whether the tyrant was more atrocious and impious, or the Florentine people more patient and vile.... And if Timoleon was forced to kill his own brother to liberate his country, and was so much praised and celebrated for it, and still is so, what authority have the malevolent to blame me? But in regard to killing one who trusted me (which I do not allow I have done), I say that if I had done it in this case, and if I could not have accomplished it otherwise, I should have done it.... That he was not of the house of Medici and my kinsman is manifest, for he was born of a woman of base condition, from Castelvecchi in the Romagna, who lived in the house of the Duke Lorenzo [of Urbino], and was employed in the most menial services, and married to a coachman.... He [Alessandro] left her to work in the fields, so that those citizens of ours who had fled from the tyrant’s avarice and cruelty in the city determined to conduct her to the Emperor at Naples, to show his Majesty whence came the man he thought fit to rule Florence. Then Alessandro, forgetting his duty in his shame, and the love for his mother, which indeed he never had, and through an inborn cruelty and ferocity, caused his mother to be killed before she came to the Emperor’s presence.”

  On the way up to the chamber to which the dwarfish, sickly little tyrannicide has lured his prey, the most dramatic moment occurs. He stops the bold ruffian whom he has got to do him the pleasure of a certain unspecified homicide, in requital of the good turn by which he once saved his life, and whispers to him, “It is the Duke!” Scoronconcolo, who had merely counted on an every-day murder, falters in dismay. But he recovers himself: “Here we are; go ahead, if it were the devil himself!” And after that he has no more compunction in the affair than if it were the butchery of a simple citizen. The Duke is lying there on the bed in the dark, and Lorenzino bends over him with “Are you asleep, sir?” and drives his sword, shortened to half length, through him; but the Duke springs up, and crying out, “I did not expect this of thee!” makes a fight for his life that tasks the full strength of the assassins, and covers the cham
ber with blood. When the work is done, Lorenzino draws the curtains round the bed again, and pins a Latin verse to them explaining that he did it for the love of country and the thirst for glory.

  XXIV

  Is it perhaps all a good deal too much like a stage-play? Or is it that stage-plays are too much like facts of this sort? If it were at the theatre, one could go away, deploring the bloodshed, of course, but comforted by the justice done on an execrable wretch, the murderer of his own mother, and the pollution of every life that he touched. But if it is history we have been reading, we must turn the next page and see the city filled with troops by the Medici and their friends, and another of the race established in power before the people know that the Duke is dead. Clearly, poetical justice is not the justice of God. If it were, the Florentines would have had the republic again at once. Lorenzino, instead of being assassinated in Venice, on his way to see a lady, by the emissaries of the Medici, would have satisfied public decorum by going through the form of a trial, and would then have accepted some official employment and made a good end. Yet the seven Medicean dukes who followed Alessandro were so variously bad for the most part that it seems impious to regard them as part of the design of Providence. How, then, did they come to be? Is it possible that sometimes evil prevails by its superior force in the universe? We must suppose that it took seven Medicean despots and as many more of the house of Lorraine and Austria to iron the Florentines out to the flat and polished peacefulness of their modern effect. Of course, the commonwealth could not go on in the old way; but was it worse at its worst than the tyranny that destroyed it? I am afraid we must allow that it was more impossible. People are not put into the world merely to love their country; they must have peace. True freedom is only a means to peace; and if such freedom as they have will not give them peace, then they must accept it from slavery. It is always to be remembered that the great body of men are not affected by oppressions that involve the happiness of the magnanimous few; the affair of most men is mainly to be sheltered and victualled and allowed to prosper and bring up their families. Yet when one thinks of the sacrifices made to perpetuate popular rule in Florence, one’s heart is wrung in indignant sympathy with the hearts that broke for it. Of course, one must, in order to experience this emotion, put out of his mind certain facts, as that there never was freedom for more than one party at a time under the old commonwealth; that as soon as one party came into power the other was driven out of the city; and that even within the triumphant party every soul seemed corroded by envy and distrust of every other. There is, to be sure, the consoling reflection that the popular party was always the most generous and liberal, and that the oppression of all parties under the despotism was not exactly an improvement on the oppression of one. With this thought kept before you vividly, and with those facts blinked, you may go, for example, into the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo and make pretty sure of your pang in the presence of those solemn figures of Michael Angelo’s, where his Night seems to have his words of grief for the loss of liberty upon her lips: —

  “Tis sweet to sleep, sweeter of stone to be,

  And while endure the infamy and woe,

  For me ’tis happiness not to feel or see.

  Do not awake me therefore. Ah, speak low!”

  XXV

  THOSE words of Michael Angelo’s answer to Strozzi’s civil verses on his Day and Night are nobly simple, and of a colloquial and natural pitch to which their author seldom condescended in sculpture. Even the Day is too muscularly awaking and the Night too anatomically sleeping for the spectator’s perfect loss of himself in the sculptor’s thought; but the figures are so famous that it is hard to reconcile one’s self to the fact that they do not celebrate the memory of the greatest Medici. That Giuliano whom we see in the chapel there is little known to history; of that Lorenzo, history chiefly remembers that he was the father of Alessandro, whom we have seen slain, and of Catharine de’ Medici. Some people may think this enough; but we ought to read the lives of the other Medici before deciding. Another thing to guard against in that chapel is the cold; and, in fact, one ought to go well wrapped up in visiting any of the in-door monuments of Florence. Santa Croce, for example, is a temple whose rigours I should not like to encounter again in January, especially if the day be fine without. Then the sun streams in with a deceitful warmth through the mellow blazon of the windows, and the crone, with her scaldino at the door, has the air almost of sitting by a register. But it is all an illusion. By the time you have gone the round of the strutting and mincing allegories, and the pompous effigies with which art here, as everywhere, renders death ridiculous, you have scarcely the courage to penetrate to those remote chapels where the Giotto frescoes are. Or if you do, you shiver round among them with no more pleasure in them than if they were so many boreal lights. Vague they are, indeed, and spectral enough, those faded histories of John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist, and St. Francis of Assisi, and as far from us, morally, as anything at the pole; so that the honest sufferer, who feels himself taking cold in his bare head, would blush for his absurdity in pretending to get any comfort or joy from them, if all the available blood in his body were not then concentrated in the tip of his nose. For my part, I marvelled at myself for being led even temporarily, into temptation of that sort; and it soon came to my putting my book under my arm and my hands in my pockets, and, with a priest’s silken skull-cap on my head, sauntering among those works of art with no more sense of obligation to them than if I were their contemporary. It is well, if possible, to have some one with you to look at the book, and see what the works are and the authors. But nothing of it is comparable to getting out into the open piazza again, where the sun is so warm, — though not so warm as it looks.

  It suffices for the Italians, however, who are greedy in nothing, and do not require to be warmed through, any more than to be fed full. The wonder of their temperance comes back with perpetual surprise to the gluttonous Northern nature. Their shyness of your fire, their gentle deprecation of your out-of-hours hospitality, amuse as freshly as at first; and the reader who has not known the fact must imagine the well-dressed throng in the Florentine street more meagrely breakfasted and lunched than anything but destitution with us, and protected against the cold in-doors by nothing but the clothes which are much more efficient without.

  XXVI.

  WHAT strikes one first in the Florentine crowd is that it is so well dressed. I do not mean that the average of fashion is so great as with us, but that the average of raggedness is less. Venice, when I saw it again, seemed in tatters, but, so far as I can remember, Florence was not even patched; and this, in spite of the talk one constantly hears of the poverty which has befallen the city since the removal of the capital to Rome. All classes are said to feel this adversity more or less, but none of them show it on the street; beggary itself is silenced to the invisible speech which one sees moving the lips of the old women who steal an open palm towards you at the church doors. Florence is not only better dressed on the average than Boston, but, with little over half the population, there are, I should think, nearly twice as many private carriages in the former city. I am not going beyond the most non-committal si dice in any study of the Florentine civilisation, and I know no more than that it is said (as it has been said ever since the first northern tourist discovered them) that they will starve themselves at home to make a show abroad. But if they do not invite the observer to share their domestic self-denial, — and it is said that they do not, even when he has long ceased to be a passing stranger, — I do not see why he should complain. For my part, their abstemiousness cost me no sacrifice, and I found a great deal of pleasure in looking at the turnouts in the Cascine, and at the fur-lined coats in the streets and piazzas. They are always great wearers of fur in the south, but I think it is less fashionable than it used to be in Italy. The younger swells did not wear it in Florence, but now and then I met an elderly gentleman, slim, tall, with an iron-gray moustache, who, in folding his long fur-lined over
coat loosely about him as he walked, had a gratifying effect of being an ancestral portrait of himself; and with all persons and classes content to come short of recent fashion, fur is the most popular wear for winter. Each has it in such measure as he may; and one day in the Piazza della Signoria, when there was for some reason an assemblage of market-folk there, every man had hanging operatically from his shoulder an overcoat with cheap fur collar and cuffs. They were all babbling and gesticulating with an impassioned amiability, and their voices filled the place with a leafy rustling which it must have known so often in the old times, when the Florentines came together there to govern Florence. One ought not, I suppose, to imagine them always too grimly bent on public business in those times. They must have got a great deal of fun out of it, in the long run, as well as trouble, and must have enjoyed sharpening their wits upon one another vastly.