ures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of ascetics
and Puritans in old times. A denunciation of harmless sports did not
always mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist
would call harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceedingly enlightened hatred
of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics are
sometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less.

Such, at least, was the hatred in the heart of Savonarola. He was making
war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless
quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which
all creation fell. He was preaching that severity which is the
sign-manual of youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, that
clean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as
to gain holiness, as indispensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic has
truly pointed out that Savonarola could not have been fundamentally
anti-aesthetic, since he had such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli,
and Luca della Robbia. The fact is that this purification and austerity
are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than
for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently
the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires
a discipline in pleasure, and an education in gratitude.

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 dec