The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a
civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads
to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old
with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new. The
monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of
imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of
imagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as
it is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer be
surprised at an ox, that he worships the devil. Diablerie is the
stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the dram-drinking of the artist.
Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of all earthly tasks, that
of making men turn back and wonder at the simplicities they had learnt
to ignore. It is strange that the most unpopular of all doctrines is the
doctrine which declares the common life divine. Democracy, of which
Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of gospels; there is
nothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all kings.
Christianity, in Savonarola's mind, identical with democracy, is the
hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as
the saying that they are all the sons of God.
Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administered
to the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at the
present day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and for
mere men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be an
improvement on that of the great Florentine republican.
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