Chapter 4.III. The Actor Unmasked.
"In intoxication," says the proverb, "men betray their real characters."
There is a no less honest and truth-revealing intoxication in prosperity,
than in wine. The varnish of power brings forth at once the defects and
the beauties of the human portrait.
The unprecedented and almost miraculous rise of Rienzi from the rank of the
Pontiff's official to the Lord of Rome, would have been accompanied with a
yet greater miracle, if it had not somewhat dazzled and seduced the object
it elevated. When, as in well-ordered states and tranquil times, men rise
slowly, step by step, they accustom themselves to their growing fortunes.
But the leap of an hour from a citizen to a prince - from the victim of
oppression to the dispenser of justice - is a transition so sudden as to
render dizzy the most sober brain. And, perhaps, in proportion to the
imagination, the enthusiasm, the genius of the man, will the suddenness be
dangerous - excite too extravagant a hope - and lead to too chimerical an
ambition. The qualities that made him rise, hurry him to his fall; and
victory at the Marengo of his fortunes, urges him to destruction at its
Moscow.
In his greatness Rienzi did not so much acquire new qualities, as develop
in brighter light and deeper shadow those which he had always exhibited.
On the one hand he was just - resolute - the friend of the oppressed - the
terror of the oppressor. His wonderful intellect illumined everything it
touched. By rooting out abuse, and by searching examination and wise
arrangement, he had trebled the revenues of the city without imposing a
single new tax. Faithful to his idol of liberty, he had not been betrayed
by the wish of the people into despotic authority; but had, as we have
seen, formally revived, and established with new powers, the Parliamentary
Council of the city. However extensive his own authority, he referred its
exercise to the people; in their name he alone declared himself to govern,
and he never executed any signal action without submitting to them its
reasons or its justification. No less faithful to his desire to restore
prosperity as well as freedom to Rome, he had seized the first dazzling
epoch of his power to propose that great federative league with the Italian
States which would, as he rightly said, have raised Rome to the
indisputable head of European nations. Under his rule trade was secure,
literature was welcome, art began to rise.
On the other hand, the prosperity which made more apparent his justice, his
integrity, his patriotism, his virtues, and his genius, brought out no less
glaringly his arrogant consciousness of superiority, his love of display,
and the wild and daring insolence of his ambition. Though too just to
avenge himself by retaliating on the patricians their own violence, though,
in his troubled and stormy tribuneship, not one unmerited or illegal
execution of baron or citizen could be alleged against him, even by his
enemies; yet sharing, less excusably, the weakness of Nina, he could not
deny his proud heart the pleasure of humiliating those who had ridiculed
him as a buffoon, despised him as a plebeian, and who, even now slaves to
his face, were cynics behind his back. "They stood before him while he
sate," says his biographer; "all these Barons, bareheaded; their hands
crossed on their breasts; their looks downcast; - oh, how frightened they
were!" - a picture more disgraceful to the servile cowardice of the nobles
than the haughty sternness of the Tribune. It might be that he deemed it
policy to break the spirit of his foes, and to awe those whom it was a vain
hope to conciliate.
For his pomp there was a greater excuse: it was the custom of the time; it
was the insignia and witness of power; and when the modern historian taunts
him with not imitating the simplicity of an ancient tribune, the sneer
betrays an ignorance of the spirit of the age, and the vain people whom the
chief magistrate was to govern. No doubt his gorgeous festivals, his
solemn processions, set off and ennobled - if parade can so be ennobled -
by a refined and magnificent richness of imagination, associated always
with popular emblems, and designed to convey the idea of rejoicing for
Liberty Restored, and to assert the state and majesty of Rome Revived - no
doubt these spectacles, however otherwise judged in a more enlightened age
and by closet sages, served greatly to augment the importance of the
Tribune abroad, and to dazzle the pride of a fickle and ostentatious
populace. And taste grew refined, luxury called labour into requisition,
and foreigners from all states were attracted by the splendour of a court
over which presided, under republican names, two sovereigns, (Rienzi,
speaking in one of his letters of his great enterprise, refers it to the
ardour of youth. The exact date of his birth is unknown; but he was
certainly a young man at the time now referred to. His portrait in the
Museo Barberino, from which his description has been already taken in the
first book of this work, represents him as beardless, and, as far as one
can judge, somewhere above thirty - old enough, to be sure, to have a
beard; and seven years afterwards he wore a long one, which greatly
displeased his naive biographer, who seems to consider it a sort of crime.
The head is very remarkable for its stern beauty, and little, if at all,
inferior to that of Napoleon; to which, as I before remarked, it has some
resemblance in expression, if not in feature.) young and brilliant, the one
renowned for his genius, the other eminent for her beauty. It was, indeed,
a dazzling and royal dream in the long night of Rome, spoiled of her
Pontiff and his voluptuous train - that holyday reign of Cola di Rienzi!
And often afterwards it was recalled with a sigh, not only by the poor for
its justice, the merchant for its security, but the gallant for its
splendour, and the poet for its ideal and intellectual grace!
As if to show that it was not to gratify the more vulgar appetite and
desire, in the midst of all his pomp, when the board groaned with the
delicacies of every clime, when the wine most freely circled, the Tribune
himself preserved a temperate and even rigid abstinence. ("Vita di Cola di
Rienzi". - The biographer praises the abstinence of the Tribune.) While
the apartments of state and the chamber of his bride were adorned with a
profuse luxury and cost, to his own private rooms he transported precisely
the same furniture which had been familiar to him in his obscurer life.
The books, the busts, the reliefs, the arms which had inspired him
heretofore with the visions of the past, were endeared by associations
which he did not care to forego.
But that which constituted the most singular feature of his character, and
which still wraps all around him in a certain mystery, was his religious
enthusiasm. The daring but wild doctrines of Arnold of Brescia, who, two
centuries anterior, had preached reform, but inculcated mysticism, still
lingered in Rome, and had in earlier youth deeply coloured the mind of
Rienzi; and as I have before observed, his youthful propensity to dreamy
thought, the melancholy death of his brother, his own various but
successful fortunes, had all contributed to nurse the more zealous and
solemn aspirations of this remarkable man. Like Arnold of Brescia, his
faith bore a strong resemblance to the intense fanaticism of our own
Puritans of the Civil War, as if similar political circumstances conduced
to similar religious sentiments. He believed himself inspired by awful and
mighty commune with beings of the better world. Saints and angels
ministered to his dreams; and without this, the more profound and hallowed
enthusiasm, he might never have been sufficiently emboldened by mere human
patriotism, to his unprecedented enterprise: it was the secret of much of
his greatness, - many of his errors. Like all men who are thus self-
deluded by a vain but not inglorious superstition, united with, and
coloured by, earthly ambition, it is impossible to say how far he was the
visionary, and how far at times he dared to be the impostor. In the
ceremonies of his pageants, in the ornaments of his person, were invariably
introduced mystic and figurative emblems. In times of danger he publicly
professed to have been cheered and directed by divine dreams; and on many
occasions the prophetic warnings he announced having been singularly
verified by the event, his influence with the people was strengthened by a
belief in the favour and intercourse of Heaven. Thus, delusion of self
might tempt and conduce to imposition on others, and he might not scruple
to avail himself of the advantage of seeming what he believed himself to
be. Yet, no doubt this intoxicating credulity pushed him into extravagance
unworthy of, and strangely contrasted by, his soberer intellect, and made
him disproportion his vast ends to his unsteady means, by the proud
fallacy, that where man failed, God would interpose. Cola di Rienzi was no
faultless hero of romance. In him lay, in conflicting prodigality, the
richest and most opposite elements of character; strong sense, visionary
superstition, an eloquence and energy that mastered all he approached, a
blind enthusiasm that mastered himself; luxury and abstinence, sternness
and susceptibility, pride to the great, humility to the low; the most
devoted patriotism and the most avid desire of personal power. As few men
undertake great and desperate designs without strong animal spirits, so it
may be observed, that with most who have risen to eminence over the herd,
there is an aptness, at times, to a wild mirth and an elasticity of humour
which often astonish the more sober and regulated minds, that are "the
commoners of life:" And the theatrical grandeur of Napoleon, the severe
dignity of Cromwell, are strangely contrasted by a frequent, nor always
seasonable buffoonery, which it is hard to reconcile with the ideal of
their characters, or the gloomy and portentous interest of their careers.
And this, equally a trait in the temperament of Rienzi, distinguished his
hours of relaxation, and contributed to that marvellous versatility with
which his harder nature accommodated itself to all humours and all men.
Often from his austere judgment-seat he passed to the social board an
altered man; and even the sullen Barons who reluctantly attended his
feasts, forgot his public greatness in his familiar wit; albeit this
reckless humour could not always refrain from seeking its subject in the
mortification of his crest-fallen foes - a pleasure it would have been
wiser and more generous to forego. And perhaps it was, in part, the
prompting of this sarcastic and unbridled humour that made him often love
to astonish as well as to awe. But even this gaiety, if so it may be
called, taking an appearance of familiar frankness, served much to
ingratiate him with the lower orders; and, if a fault in the prince, was a
virtue in the demagogue.
To these various characteristics, now fully developed, the reader must add
a genius of designs so bold, of conceptions so gigantic and august,
conjoined with that more minute and ordinary ability which masters details;
that with a brave, noble, intelligent, devoted people to back his projects,
the accession of the Tribune would have been the close of the thraldom of
Italy, and the abrupt limit of the dark age of Europe. With such a people,
his faults would have been insensibly checked, his more unwholesome power
have received a sufficient curb. Experience familiarizing him with power,
would have gradually weaned him from extravagance in its display; and the
active and masculine energy of his intellect would have found field for the
more restless spirits, as his justice gave shelter to the more tranquil.
Faults he had, but whether those faults or the faults of the people, were
to prepare his downfall, is yet to be seen.
Meanwhile, amidst a discontented nobility and a fickle populace, urged on
by the danger of repose to the danger of enterprise; partly blinded by his
outward power, partly impelled by the fear of internal weakness; at once
made sanguine by his genius and his fanaticism, and uneasy by the
expectations of the crowd, - he threw himself headlong into the gulf of the
rushing Time, and surrendered his lofty spirit to no other guidance than a
conviction of its natural buoyancy and its heaven-directed haven.
