Savonarola Unfrocked Again

A popular journal, with pretentions to literature and learning, lately held a symposium of well-known novelists. They were set to say whom they considered to be the most tragic figure in history. Says one of the convivials—a lady novelist:‘Of course, one can hardly say which is the most tragic figure in history ... If one must be named, I would choose Girolamo Savonarola; not because of his terrific downfall and miserable end, but because he was misled and bewildered by his own spiritual impulses; he was the dupe, as it were, of his own inspiration ; he came to feel that God had mocked him, perhaps that there was no God .... He was ugly, unloved, sickly, thwarted in his early passion, sensitive, awkward, self-conscious, uncertain of himself, of an unhappy bilious temperament, melancholy and nervous; never in the history of the world did a poorer vessel contain the fire of genius. Savonarola nearly accomplished a great thing—the reform of the Roman Church that would have prevented the Reformation. He had the audacity to call in the King of France to quell the Pope, the abominable Borgia—but that king was a sickly imbecile, and though the cannon pointed at St. Angelo, Savonarola’s Gallic tool broke in his hand.’‘He lived to be forsaken, reviled, despised, to find himself shrinking from torture, from death, without courage, without faith, and knowing that he had accomplished nothing. His supreme tragedy lay not in the triumphant ferocity of his enemies, but in his own limitations which had rendered his effort useless. . . . Something of this tragic life I have tried to portray in my novel, The Carnival of Florence.’