Tuscan Cities. William Dean Howells
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 succor 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 realize 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 laborers — 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 neighbors 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 moldering 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