w 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