The historian is driven to seek both the explanation and palliation of Lorenzo’s failure in the temper of his times.  There was enough daring left in Florence to carry through a plan of brilliant treason, modelled on an antique Roman tragedy.  But there was not moral force in the protagonist to render that act salutary, not public energy sufficient in his fellow-citizens to accomplish his drama of deliverance.  Lorenzo was corrupt.  Florence was flaccid.  Evil manners had emasculated the hero.  In the state the last spark of independence had expired with Ferrucci.

Still I have not without forethought dubbed this man a Cinque Cento Brutus.  Like much of the art and literature of his century, his action may be regarded as a bizarre imitation of the antique manner.  Without the force and purpose of a Roman, Lorenzo set himself to copy Plutarch’s men—­just as sculptors carved Neptunes and Apollos without the dignity and serenity of the classic style.  The antique faith was wanting to both murderer and craftsman in those days.  Even as Renaissance work in art is too often aimless, decorative, vacant of intention, so Lorenzino’s Brutus tragedy seems but the snapping of a pistol in void air.  He had the audacity but not the ethical consistency of his crime.  He played the part of Brutus like a Roscius, perfect in its histrionic details.  And it doubtless gave to this skilful actor a supreme satisfaction—­salving over many wounds of vanity, quenching the poignant thirst for things impossible and draughts of fame—­that he could play it on no mimic stage, but on the theatre of Europe.  The weakness of his conduct was the central weakness of his age and country.  Italy herself lacked moral purpose, sense of righteous necessity, that consecration of self to a noble cause, which could alone have justified Lorenzo’s perfidy.  Confused memories of Judith, Jael, Brutus, and other classical tyrannicides, exalted his imagination.  Longing for violent emotions, jaded with pleasure which had palled, discontented with his wasted life, jealous of his brutal cousin, appetitive to the last of glory, he conceived his scheme.  Having conceived, he executed it with that which never failed in Cinque Cento Italy—­the artistic spirit of perfection.  When it was over, he shrugged his shoulders, wrote his magnificent Apology with a style of adamant upon a plate of steel, and left it for the outlaws of Filippo Strozzi’s faction to deal with the crisis he had brought about.  For some years he dragged out an ignoble life in obscurity, and died at last, as Varchi puts it, more by his own carelessness than by the watchful animosity of others.  Over the wild, turbid, clever, incomprehensible, inconstant hero-artist’s grave we write our Requiescat.  Clio, as she takes the pen in hand to record this prayer, smiles disdainfully and turns to graver business.

* * * * *

TWO DRAMATISTS OF THE LAST CENTURY