Romola quotes

And in this way he had learned to distrust men without bitterness; looking on life mainly as a game of skill, but not dead to traditions of heroism and clean-handed honour.

For the human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.

It was his pride besides, that he was duly tinctured with the learning of his age, and judged not altogether with the vulgar, but in harmony with the ancients:

For are not the well-remembered buildings all there? The changes have not been so great in those uncounted years. I will go down and hear—I will tread the familiar pavement, and hear once again the speech of Florentines.”

Go not down, good Spirit! for the changes are great and the speech of Florentines would sound as a riddle in your ears.

Or, if you go, mingle with no politicians on the marmi, or elsewhere; ask no questions about trade in the Calimara; confuse yourself with no inquiries into scholarship, official or monastic.

the little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty; and men still yearn for the reign of peace and righteousness—still own that life to be the highest which is a conscious voluntary sacrifice.

For the Pope Angelico is not come yet.

By the holy ’vangels! if it had been anybody but me standing over you two minutes ago—but Bratti Ferravecchi is not the man to steal.

The cat couldn’t eat her mouse if she didn’t catch it alive, and Bratti couldn’t relish gain if it had no taste of a bargain.

Why, young man, one San Giovanni, three years ago, the Saint sent a dead body in my way—a blind beggar, with his cap well-lined with pieces—but, if you’ll believe me, my stomach turned against the money I’d never bargained for, till it came into my …

“Spoken like an oracle, Goro!” said the barber. “

Why, when we poor mortals can pack two or three meanings into one sentence, it were mere blasphemy not to believe that your miraculous bull means everything that any man in Florence likes it to mean.

”

But as if at the suggestion of a sudden thought, he thrust his hand into a purse or wallet that hung at his waist, and explored it again and again with a look of frustration.

“Not an obolus, by Jupiter!” he murmured, in a language which was not Tuscan or even Italian. “I thought I had one poor piece left. I must get my breakfast for love, then!”

He had not gone many steps farther before it seemed likely that he had found a quarter of the market where that medium of exchange might not be rejected.

“and if thy tongue can leave off its everlasting chirping long enough for thy understanding to consider the matter, thou mayst see that thou hast just shown the reason why the face of Messere will suit my traitor.

A perfect traitor should have a face which vice can write no marks on⁠—lips that will lie with a dimpled smile⁠—eyes of such agate-like brightness and depth that no infamy can dull them⁠—cheeks that will rise from a murder and not look haggard.

I say not this young man is a traitor:

but, as he approached, the snow melted, and when he ventured to look towards her again, while Nello was speaking, a pink flush overspread her face, to vanish again almost immediately, as if her imperious will had recalled it.

Tito’s glance, on the contrary, had that gentle, beseeching admiration in it which is the most propitiating of appeals to a proud, shy woman, and is perhaps the only atonement a man can make for being too handsome.

The finished fascination of his air came chiefly from the absence of demand and assumption.

Tito’s bright face showed its rich-tinted beauty without any rivalry of colour above his black sajo or tunic reaching to the knees.

It seemed like a wreath of spring, dropped suddenly in Romola’s young but wintry life, which had inherited nothing but memories

—memories of a dead mother, of a lost brother, of a blind father’s happier time—memories of far-off light, love, and beauty, that lay embedded in dark mines of books, and could hardly give out their brightness again until they were kindled for her by the …

… supercilious Politian—a fellow-browser, who was far from amiable—must be made aware that the solid secretary showed, in his leisure hours, a pleasant fertility in verses, which indicated pretty clearly how much he might do in that way if he were not a man of affairs.

Ineffable moment! when the man you secretly hate sends you a Latin epigram with a false gender

—hendecasyllables with a questionable elision, at least a toe too much—attempts at poetic figures which are manifest solecisms. That moment had come to Politian: the secretary had put forth his soft head from the official shell, and the terrible lurking crab was down upon him.

… merry black demons well armed with claws and thongs, and other implements of sport, ready to perform impromptu farces of bastinadoing and clothes-tearing, why, that was the demons’ way of keeping a vigil, and they, too, might have descended from the domes and the tribunes.

The Tuscan mind slipped from the devout to the burlesque, as readily as water round an angle

; and the saints had already had their turn, had gone their way, and made their due pause before the gates of San Giovanni, to do him honour on the eve of his festa.

“Your solemnity will allow some quarter to playful fancy, I hope,” said Cei, with a shrug, “else what becomes of the ancients, whose example you scholars are bound to revere, Messer Pietro?

Life was never anything but a perpetual seesaw between gravity and jest.

”

… is not when the great bond of our Republic is expressing itself in ancient symbols, without which the vulgar would be conscious of nothing beyond their own petty wants of back and stomach, and never rise to the sense of community in religion and law.

There has been no great people without processions, and the man who thinks himself too wise to be moved by them to anything but contempt, is like the puddle that was proud of standing alone while the river rushed by.

”

“ ‘Da quel giorno in qua ch’amor m’accese Per lei son fatto e gentile e cortese.’ ”

“Nello, amico mio, thou hast an intolerable trick of making life stale by forestalling it with thy talk,”

said Tito, shrugging his shoulders, with a look of patient resignation, which was his nearest approach to anger: “not to mention that such ill-founded babbling would be held a great offence by that same goddess whose humble worshipper you are always professing yourself.”

He was perfectly well aware that that face was Tessa’s; but he had not chosen to say so. What had Nello to do with the matter?

Tito had an innate love of reticence⁠—let us say a talent for it⁠—which acted as other impulses do, without any conscious motive

, and, like all people to whom concealment is easy, he would now and then conceal something which had as little the nature of a secret as the fact that he had seen a flight of crows.

He made no other movement, but stood with his thumbs in his belt, looking down, in that transfixed state which accompanies the concentration of consciousness on some inward image.

“A man’s ransom!”⁠—who was it that had said five hundred florins was more than a man’s ransom?

If now, under this midday sun, on some hot coast far away, a man somewhat stricken in years—a man not without high thoughts and with the most passionate heart—a man who long years ago had rescued a little boy from a life of beggary, filth, …

He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of his conduct should not remain forever concealed.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.

The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires—the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity;

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.

The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires⁠—the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity

; as, on the other hand, the purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.

It ended so.

Tito had an unconquerable aversion to anything unpleasant, even when an object very much loved and desired was on the other side of it.

He had risen early; had waited; had seen sights, and had been already walking in the sun: he was inclined for a siesta, and inclined all the more because little Tessa was there, and seemed to make the air softer.

She was too happy to go to sleep—too happy to think that Tito would wake up, and that then he would leave her, and she must go home.

It takes very little water to make a perfect pool for a tiny fish, where it will find its world and paradise all in one, and never have a presentiment of the dry bank.

The fretted summer shade, and stillness, and the gentle breathing of some loved life near—it would be paradise to us all, if eager thought, the strong angel with the implacable brow, had not long since closed the gates.

Tessa was looking after him, but he could see that she was making no signs of distress. It was enough for Tito if she did not cry while he was present.

The softness of his nature required that all sorrow should be hidden away from him.

“I wonder when Romola will kiss my cheek in that way?” thought Tito, as he walked along. It seemed a tiresome distance now, and he almost wished he had not been so softhearted, or so tempted to linger in the shade.

Having once begun to explain away Baldassarre’s claim,

Tito’s thought showed itself as active as a virulent acid, eating its rapid way through all the tissues of sentiment.

His mind was destitute of that dread which has been erroneously decried as if it were nothing higher than a man’s animal care for his own skin:

for I understand that the Neapolitan and Milanese courtiers laugh at the scarcity of our plate, and think scorn of our great families for borrowing from each other that furniture of the table at their entertainments.

But in the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

”

“I will not contradict your modesty there, if you will have it so; but you don’t expect us clever Florentines to keep saying the same things over again every day of our lives, as we must do if we always told the truth.

We cry down Dante, and we cry up Francesco Cei, just for the sake of variety; and if we cry you up as a new Poliziano, heaven has taken care that it shall not be quite so great a lie as it might have been.

And are you not a pattern of virtue in this wicked city? with your ears double-waxed against all siren invitations that would lure you from the Via de’ Bardi, and the great work which is to astonish posterity?”

… Bardo, and walked up and down under the walls until the yellow light in the west had quite faded, when, without any distinct purpose, he took the first turning, which happened to be the Via San Sebastiano, leading him directly towards the Piazza dell’ Annunziata.

He was at one of those lawless moments which come to us all if we have no guide but desire, and if the pathway where desire leads us seems suddenly closed;

he was ready to follow any beckoning that offered him an immediate purpose.

He cared so much for the pleasures that could only come to him through the good opinion of his fellow-men, that he wished now he had never risked ignominy by shrinking from what his fellow-men called obligations.

But our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will.

Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness; and that dreadful vitality of deeds was pressing hard on Tito for the first time.

But our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will.

Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness; and that dreadful vitality of deeds was pressing hard on Tito for the first time.

He was going back to his lodgings in the Piazza di San Giovanni, but he avoided passing through the Mercato Vecchio, which was his nearest way, lest he should see Tessa. He was not in the humour to seek anything;

It was the busiest time of the day with Nello, and in this warm season and at an hour when clients were numerous, most men preferred being shaved under the pretty red and white awning in front of the shop rather than within narrow walls.

It is not a sublime attitude for a man, to sit with lathered chin thrown backward, and have his nose made a handle of; but to be shaved was a fashion of Florentine respectability, and it is astonishing how gravely men look at each other when they are all in the fashion.

It was the hour of the day, too, when yesterday’s crop of gossip was freshest, and the barber’s tongue was always in its glory when his razor was busy; the deft activity of those two instruments seemed to be set going by a common spring.

“Nay, Francesco,” said Macchiavelli, smiling, “a various scholar must have various opinions. And as for the Frate, whatever we may think of his saintliness, you judge his preaching too narrowly.

The secret of oratory lies, not in saying new things, but in saying things with a certain power that moves the hearers

—without which, as old Filelfo has said, your speaker deserves to be called, ‘non oratorem, sed aratorem.’ And, according to that test, Fra Girolamo is a great orator.”

Monks and nuns who prophesy are not of that rareness. For what says Luigi Pulci? ‘Dombruno’s sharp-cutting scimitar had the fame of being enchanted; but,’ says Luigi, ‘I am rather of opinion that it cut sharp because it was of strongly-tempered steel.’ Yes, yes;

Paternosters may shave clean, but they must be said over a good razor.

”

“Not I, Messer Greco; a philosopher is the last sort of animal I should choose to resemble. I find it enough to live, without spinning lies to account for life.

Fowls cackle, asses bray, women chatter, and philosophers spin false reasons⁠—that’s the effect the sight of the world brings out of them.

Well, I am an animal that paints instead of cackling, or braying, or spinning lies. And now, I think, our business is done; you’ll keep to your side of the bargain about the Oedipus and Antigone?”

I see it, I feel it, in everything he says and does. And if he is handsome, too, why should I not love him the better for that?

It seems to me beauty is part of the finished language by which goodness speaks.

You know you must have been a very handsome youth, godfather,”—she looked up with one of her happy, loving smiles at the stately old man—“you were about as tall as Tito, and you had very fine eyes;

But to have told that falsehood would have required perfect self-command in the moment of a convulsive shock: he seemed to have spoken without any preconception: the words had leaped forth like a sudden birth that had been begotten and nourished in the darkness.

Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil which gradually determines character.

There was but one chance for him now; the chance of Baldassarre’s failure in finding his revenge. And—Tito grasped at a thought more actively cruel than any he had ever encouraged before: might not his own unpremeditated words have some truth in them?

It was the fashion of old, when an ox was led out for sacrifice to Jupiter, to chalk the dark spots, and give the offering a false show of unblemished whiteness.

Let us fling away the chalk, and boldly say⁠—the victim is spotted, but it is not therefore in vain that his mighty heart is laid on the altar of men’s highest hopes.

But when he was complimented on his opportune service, he laughed it off as a thing of no moment, and to those who had not witnessed it, let Gaddi have the credit of the improvised welcome.

No wonder Tito was popular: the touchstone by which men try us is most often their own vanity.

Other things besides the oratorical welcome had turned out rather worse than had been expected.

“There, then,” he said, when the florins had been told down on his palm. “Take the coat. It’s made to cheat sword, or poniard, or arrow. But, for my part, I would never put such a thing on.

It’s like carrying fear about with one.

”

The sense of defect in her devotedness to him made her cling with all the force of compunction as well as affection to the duties of memory.

Love does not aim simply at the conscious good of the beloved object: it is not satisfied without perfect loyalty of heart; it aims at its own completeness.

Romola, by special favour, was allowed to intrude upon the painter without previous notice. She lifted the iron slide and called Piero in a flute-like tone, as the little maiden with the eggs had done in Tito’s presence.

Are you to thank a man for not being a rogue or a noodle? It’s enough if he himself thanks Messer Domeneddio, who has made him neither the one nor the other.

But women think walls are held together with honey.

”

Shall I ask Tito about it?” Her mind said at last, “No: I will not question him about anything he did not tell me spontaneously. It is an offence against the trust I owe him.” Her heart said, “I dare not ask him.”

There was a terrible flaw in the trust: she was afraid of any hasty movement, as men are who hold something precious and want to believe that it is not broken.

It was as if Tito had been helped by some diabolical prompter, who had whispered Baldassarre’s saddest secret in the traitor’s ear.

He was not mad; for he carried within him that piteous stamp of sanity, the clear consciousness of shattered faculties; he measured his own feebleness.

With the first movement of vindictive rage awoke a vague caution, like that of a wild beast that is fierce but feeble—or like that of an insect whose little fragment of earth has given way, and made it pause in a palsy of distrust.

… he thought, because he had any care for a withered, forsaken old man, whom nobody loved, whose soul was like a deserted home, where the ashes were cold upon the hearth, and the walls were bare of all but the marks of what had been.

It is in the nature of all human passion, the lowest as well as the highest, that there is a point where it ceases to be properly egoistic, and is like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.

He looked at the pale black-browed image in the water till he identified it with that self from which his revenge seemed to be a thing apart; and he felt as if the image too heard the silent language of his thought.

Still Tito did not look up, and Romola went out without saying any more.

Very slight things make epochs in married life, and this morning for the first time she admitted to herself not only that Tito had changed, but that he had changed towards her.

Did the reason lie in herself? She might perhaps have thought so, if there had not been the facts of the armour and the picture to suggest some external event which was an entire mystery to her.

He was not tormented by sentimental scruples which, as he had demonstrated to himself by a very rapid course of argument, had no relation to solid utility; but his freedom from scruples did not release him from the dread of what was disagreeable.

Unscrupulousness gets rid of much, but not of toothache, or wounded vanity, or the sense of loneliness, against which, as the world at present stands, there is no security but a thoroughly healthy jaw, and a just, loving soul.

And Tito was feeling intensely at this moment that no devices could save him from pain in the impending collision with Romola;

“No, child, no,” said Bernardo, uncovering his grey head, as he seated himself with firm erectness. “For seeing at this distance, my old eyes are perhaps better than your young ones.

Old men’s eyes are like old men’s memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.

”

There was one thing that would have made the pang of disappointment in her husband harder to bear; it was, that anyone should know he gave her cause for disappointment. This might be a woman’s weakness, but it is closely allied to a woman’s nobleness.

She who willingly lifts up the veil of her married life has profaned it from a sanctuary into a vulgar place.

And this act, which came as a palpable demonstration of her own and his identity, had a power unexplained to herself, of shaking Romola.

It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live, that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into sound.

But there was a passionate voice speaking within her that presently nullified all such muffled murmurs.

To have had such words wrung from her—to have uttered them to her husband seemed a degradation of her whole life.

Hard speech between those who have loved is hideous in the memory, like the sight of greatness and beauty sunk into vice and rags.

That heart-cutting comparison of the present with the past urged itself upon Romola till it even transformed itself into wretched sensations: she seemed benumbed to everything but inward throbbings, and began to feel the need of some hard contact.

But her mind was roused to resistance of impressions that, from being obvious phantoms, seemed to be getting solid in the daylight.

As a strong body struggles against fumes with the more violence when they begin to be stifling, a strong soul struggles against fantasies with all the more alarmed energy when they threaten to govern in the place of thought.

What had the words of that vision to do with her real sorrows? That fitting of certain words was a mere chance; the rest was all vague—nay, those words themselves were vague; they were determined by nothing but her brother’s memories and beliefs.

“No, friend, I am not a servant; I am a scholar.”

There are men to whom you need only say, “I am a buffalo,” in a certain tone of quiet confidence, and they will let you pass.

The porter gave way at once, Baldassarre entered, and heard the door closed and chained behind him, as he too disappeared among the shining bushes.

then he turned towards the book which lay open at his side. It was a fine large manuscript, an odd volume of Pausanias. The moonlight was upon it, and he could see the large letters at the head of the page:

In old days he had known Pausanias familiarly; yet an hour or two ago he had been looking hopelessly at that page, and it had suggested no more meaning to him than if the letters had been black weather-marks on a wall; but at this moment they were once more the magic signs that conjure up a world.

That moonbeam falling on the letters had raised Messenia before him, and its struggle against the Spartan oppression.

But the men seated among the branching tapers and the flashing cups could know nothing of the pale fierce face that watched them from without.

The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness.

And the talk went on with more eagerness as it became less disconnected and trivial. The sense of citizenship was just then strongly forced even on the most indifferent minds.

And all the motives which might have made Tito shrink from the triple deceit that came before him as a tempting game, had been slowly strangled in him by the successive falsities of his life.

Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have once acted nobly seems a reason why we should always be noble.

But Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had won no memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could have a sense of falling.

… consciousness within us, that Tito himself, while he triumphed in the apparent verification of his lie, wished that he had never made the lie necessary to himself—wished he had recognised his father on the steps—wished he had gone to seek him—wished everything had been different.

But he had borrowed from the terrible usurer Falsehood, and the loan had mounted and mounted with the years, till he belonged to the usurer, body and soul.

The compassion excited in all the witnesses was not without its danger to Tito; for conjecture is constantly guided by feeling, and more than one person suddenly conceived that this man might have been a scholar and have lost his faculties.

“You assert your freedom proudly, my daughter.

But who is so base as the debtor that thinks himself free?

”

I say again, man cannot choose his duties. You may choose to forsake your duties, and choose not to have the sorrow they bring. But you will go forth; and what will you find, my daughter?

Sorrow without duty⁠—bitter herbs, and no bread with them.

”

it is simply the negation of high sensibilities. Romola was so deeply moved by the grand energies of Savonarola’s nature, that she found herself listening patiently to all dogmas and prophecies, when they came in the vehicle of his ardent faith and believing utterance.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

Romola’s trust in Savonarola was something like a rope suspended securely by her path, making her step elastic while she grasped it; if it were suddenly removed, no firmness of the ground she trod could save her from staggering, or perhaps from falling.

“Messer Dolfo’s head,” he was saying, “is more of a pumpkin than I thought.

I measure men’s dullness by the devices they trust in for deceiving others.

Your dullest animal of all is he who grins and says he doesn’t mind just after he has had his shins kicked.

It was very seldom that he walked with Romola in the evening, yet he had happened to be walking with her precisely on this evening when her presence was supremely inconvenient.

Life was so complicated a game that the devices of skill were liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistledown.

It was not that he minded about the failure of Spini’s plot, but he felt an awkward difficulty in so adjusting his warning to Savonarola on the one hand, and to Spini on the other, as not to incur suspicion.

Ser Francesco di Ser Barone, more briefly known to infamy as Ser Ceccone, was not learned, not handsome, not successful, and the reverse of generous.

He was a traitor without charm.

It followed that he was not fond of Tito Melema.

Romola had an energy of her own which thwarted his, and no man, who is not exceptionally feeble, will endure being thwarted by his wife.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

No emotion darted across his face as he heard Romola for the first time speak of having gone away from him. His lips only looked a little harder as he smiled slightly and said—

“My Romola, when certain conditions are ascertained, we must make up our minds to them.

No amount of wishing will fill the Arno, as your people say, or turn a plum into an orange.

I have not observed even that prayers have much efficacy that way. You are so constituted as to have certain strong impressions inaccessible to reason: I cannot share those impressions, and you have withdrawn all trust from me in consequence. You have changed towards me;

The wintry days passed for Romola as the white ships pass one who is standing lonely on the shore⁠—passing in silence and sameness, yet each bearing a hidden burden of coming change.

Tito’s hint had mingled so much dread with her interest in the progress of public affairs that she had begun to court ignorance rather than knowledge. The threatening German Emperor was gone again; and, in other ways besides, the position of Florence was alleviated;

and, doubtless, many of those young souls were laying up memories of hope and awe that might save them from ever resting in a merely vulgar view of their work as men and citizens.

There is no kind of conscious obedience that is not an advance on lawlessness

, and these boys became the generation of men who fought greatly and endured greatly in the last struggle of their Republic.

For herself, she was conscious of no inward collision with the strict and sombre view of pleasure which tended to repress poetry in the attempt to repress vice.

Sorrow and joy have each their peculiar narrowness

; and a religious enthusiasm like Savonarola’s which ultimately blesses mankind by giving the soul a strong propulsion towards sympathy with pain, indignation against wrong, and the subjugation of sensual desire, must always incur the reproach of a great negation.

“Ah, then, you’ve fallen on your feet! Nofri said you were good-for-nothing vermin; but what then?

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

I always said you did well to run away, and it isn’t often Bratti’s in the wrong. Well, and so you’ve got a husband and plenty of money? Then you’ll never think much of giving four white quattrini for a red cross.

… affection and respect were clinging with new tenacity to her godfather, and with him to those memories of her father which were in the same opposition to the division of men into sheep and goats by the easy mark of some political or religious symbol.

After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling.

The great world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and hope.

“Ah, you are young, and the tears come easily,” said Baldassarre, with some impatience. “

But tears are no good; they only put out the fire within, and it is the fire that works.

Tears will hinder us. Listen to me.”

“Il tradimento a molti piace assai, Ma il traditore a gnun non piacque mal.”

The same society has had a gibbet for the murderer and a gibbet for the martyr, an execrating hiss for a dastardly act, and as loud a hiss for many a word of generous truthfulness or just insight: a mixed condition of things which is the sign, not of hopeless confusion, but of struggling order.

For Tito himself, he was not unaware that he had sunk a little in the estimate of the men who had accepted his services. He had that degree of self-contemplation which necessarily accompanies the habit of acting on well-considered reasons, of whatever quality;

and still Pontanus held up his head and prospered. Men did not really care about these things, except when their personal spleen was touched.

It was weakness only that was despised; power of any sort carried its immunity

; and no man, unless by very rare good fortune, could mount high in the world without incurring a few unpleasant necessities which laid him open to enmity, and perhaps to a little hissing, when enmity wanted a pretext.

Perhaps both causes were at work.

Our relations with our fellow-men are most often determined by coincident currents of that sort; the inexcusable word or deed seldom comes until after affection or reverence has been already enfeebled by the strain of repeated excuses.

It was true that Savonarola’s glance at Romola had some of that hardness which is caused by an egotistic prepossession.

“I do not believe it!” said Romola, her whole frame shaken with passionate repugnance.

“God’s kingdom is something wider⁠—else, let me stand outside it with the beings that I love.”

The two faces were lit up, each with an opposite emotion, each with an opposite certitude. Further words were impossible. Romola hastily covered her head and went out in silence.

“That is true,” said Niccolò Macchiavelli; “but where personal ties are strong, the hostilities they raise must be taken due account of. Many of these halfway severities are mere hotheaded blundering.

The only safe blows to be inflicted on men and parties are the blows that are too heavy to be avenged.

”

“Not at all, my good Domenico,” said Macchiavelli, smiling, and laying his hand on the elder’s shoulder. “

Satan was a blunderer, an introducer of novita, who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattered.

”

Therefore Tito had felt easier when he knew that the Eight had gone to the Bargello to order the instant erection of the scaffold. Four other men—his intimates and confederates—were to die, besides Bernardo del Nero.

But a man’s own safety is a god that sometimes makes very grim demands.

Tito felt them to be grim: even in the pursuit of what was agreeable, this paradoxical life forced upon him the desire for what was disagreeable.

“My poor Romola,” said Bernardo, in a low voice, “I have only to die, but thou hast to live—and I shall not be there to help thee.”

“Yes,” said Romola, hurriedly, “you will help me⁠—always⁠—because I shall remember you.”

She was taken away and conducted up the flight of steps that led to the loggia surrounding the grand old court. She took her place there, determined to look till the moment when her godfather laid his head on the block.

had she not proved that the things to which she had pledged herself were impossible? The impulse to set herself free had risen again with overmastering force; yet the freedom could only be an exchange of calamity.

There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a mistake. She has lost her crown.

The deepest secret of human blessedness has half whispered itself to her, and then forever passed her by.

tender fellow-feeling for the nearest has its danger too, and is apt to be timid and sceptical towards the larger aims without which life cannot rise into religion.

In this way poor Romola was being blinded by her tears.

No one who has ever known what it is thus to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken.

But since he had tuned his voice to flattery, Ser Ceccone would pitch his in the same key, and it remained to be seen who would win at the game of outwitting.

To have a mind well oiled with that sort of argument which prevents any claim from grasping it, seems eminently convenient sometimes: only the oil becomes objectionable when we find it anointing other minds on which we want to establish a hold.

Tito, however, not being quite omniscient, felt now no more than a passing twinge of uneasiness at the suggestion of Ser Ceccone’s power to hurt him. It was only for a little while that he cared greatly about keeping clear of suspicions and hostility.

… of the Trial by Fire, the latter characteristics were stimulated into unusual activity by an acute physical sensitiveness which gives overpowering force to the conception of pain and destruction as a necessary sequence of facts which have already been causes of pain in our experience.

The promptitude with which men will consent to touch red-hot iron with a wet finger is not to be measured by their theoretic acceptance of the impossibility that the iron will burn them: practical belief depends on what is most strongly represented in the mind at a given moment.

And with the Frate’s constitution, when the Trial by Fire was urged on his imagination as an immediate demand, it was impossible for him to believe that he or any other man could walk through the flames unhurt—impossible for him to believe that even if …

But the Florentines were not likely to make these fine distinctions.

To the common run of mankind it has always seemed a proof of mental vigour to find moral questions easy, and judge conduct according to concise alternatives.

And nothing was likely to seem plainer than that a man who at one time declared that God would not leave him without the guarantee of a miracle, and yet drew back when it was proposed to test his declaration, had said what he did …

What was the cause of their superior courage, if it was not their superior faith? Savonarola could not have explained his conduct satisfactorily to his friends, even if he had been able to explain it thoroughly to himself. And he was not.

Our naked feelings make haste to clothe themselves in propositions which lie at hand among our store of opinions, and to give a true account of what passes within us something else is necessary besides sincerity, even when sincerity is unmixed.

In these very moments, when Savonarola was kneeling in audible prayer, he had ceased to hear the words on his lips. They were drowned by argumentative voices within him that shaped their reasons more and more for an outward audience.

That dissidence between inward reality and outward seeming was not the Christian simplicity after which he had striven through years of his youth and prime, and which he had preached as a chief fruit of the Divine life.

In the stress and heat of the day, with cheeks burning, with shouts ringing in the ears, who is so blest as to remember the yearnings he had in the cool and silent morning and know that he has not belied them?

“O God, it is for the sake of the people—because they are blind—because their faith depends on me. If I put on sackcloth and cast myself among the ashes, who will take up the standard and head the battle?

As Tito took the letter, Savonarola stood in suppressed excitement that forbade further speech.

There seems to be a subtle emanation from passionate natures like his, making their mental states tell immediately on others; when they are absentminded and inwardly excited there is silence in the air.

Tito made a deep reverence and went out with the letter under his mantle.

when he felt himself spit upon, smitten and kicked with grossest words of insult, it seemed to him that the worst bitterness of life was past. If men judged him guilty, and were bent on having his blood, it was only death that awaited him.

But the worst drop of bitterness can never be wrung on to our lips from without: the lowest depth of resignation is not to be found in martyrdom; it is only to be found when we have covered our heads in silence and felt, “I am not worthy to be a martyr; the Truth shall prosper, but not by me.”

But that brief imperfect triumph of insulting the Frate, who had soon disappeared under the doorway of the Old Palace, was only like the taste of blood to the tiger. Were there not the houses of the hypocrite’s friends to be sacked?

For Tito’s anxiety to quit Florence had been stimulated by the events of the previous day: investigations would follow in which appeals might be made to him delaying his departure: and in all delay he had an uneasy sense that there was danger.

Falsehood had prospered and waxed strong; but it had nourished the twin life, Fear.

He no longer wore his armour, he was no longer afraid of Baldassarre; but from the corpse of that dead fear a spirit had risen—the undying habit of fear. He felt he should not be safe till he was out of this fierce, turbid Florence;

investigations would follow in which appeals might be made to him delaying his departure: and in all delay he had an uneasy sense that there was danger. Falsehood had prospered and waxed strong; but it had nourished the twin life, Fear.

He no longer wore his armour, he was no longer afraid of Baldassarre; but from the corpse of that dead fear a spirit had risen⁠—the undying habit of fear.

He felt he should not be safe till he was out of this fierce, turbid Florence; and now he was ready to go. Maso was to deliver up his house to the new tenant; his horses and mules were awaiting him in San Gallo;

“He is perhaps the same old man who appeared at supper in my gardens,” said Bernardo Rucellai, one of the Eight. “I had forgotten him. I thought he had died in prison. But there is no knowing the truth now.”

Who shall put his finger on the work of justice, and say, “It is there”? Justice is like the Kingdom of God⁠—it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.

The strongly marked type of race in their features, and their peculiar garb, made her conjecture that they were Spanish or Portuguese Jews, who had perhaps been put ashore and abandoned there by rapacious sailors, to whom their property remained as a prey.

Such things were happening continually to Jews compelled to abandon their homes by the Inquisition: the cruelty of greed thrust them from the sea, and the cruelty of superstition thrust them back to it.

“But, surely,” thought Romola, “I shall find some woman in the village whose mother’s heart will not let her refuse to tend this helpless child—if the real mother is indeed dead.”