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.  It is such men as these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to fear.  We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those which awoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola—­a hedonism that is more sick of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that seeks the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature.  In many modern works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly Renaissance sense of the beauty of blood, the poetry of murder.  The bankrupt and depraved imagination does not see that a living man is far more dramatic than a dead one.  Along with this, as in the time of the Medici, goes the falling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger for the strong man which is unknown among strong men.  The masterful hero is worshipped as he is worshipped by the readers of the “Bow Bells Novelettes,” and for the same reason—­a profound sense of personal weakness.  That tendency to devolve our duties descends on us, which is the soul of slavery, alike whether for its menial tasks it employs serfs or emperors.  Against all this the great clerical republican stands in everlasting protest, preferring his failure to his rival’s success.  The issue is still between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of liberty and the license of slavery, between the perils of truth and the security of silence, between