University of Virginia Library

SCENE III.

A Room in the House of Duke Fernando, lighted up for Company.
The Duke; the Duchess, his mother.
Duch.
Henceforth I sheath my woman's weapon, and
No more with speech assail your staunch resolves.
To bland civility I'll subjugate
My carriage, so that pride show not its wounds
In bleeding words or bruiséd looks. 'Tis late
For me to learn so hard a lesson

Duke.
Mother,
You let imagination smother you,
Steeping your senses in the rotting past.
Life draws its sap from the quick-panting present.
Who would live healthily must breathe new air,
Made daily by the sun and night-cooled earth.
Yield to the past, the past will govern you;
Embrace the present, and you rule the future.
To look behind is to be weak: the strong
Looks forward, hugging close the bounding now.
The commonwealth needs ever stout new men.
Such were the Medici.

Duch.
Baseborn and base.
Myself I once refused a Medici,
In wealth a Crœsus to your rich Roberto.

Duke.
Dear mother, grant me this. Let but your eyes,
When they behold Cecilia, be true inlets,
Fairly delivering what they have received,
You'll see a hundred coronets on her brow,
And swear great Charlemagne her ancestor.

Duch.
Beauty, my son, is common. Nature joys
To scatter outward gifts—

Duke.
And inward too;—
Here comes the abbé, my embassador.
Enter Ignazio.
I catch good tidings from his gait. What news?

Ign.
Both good and bad.

Duke.
We'll hear the bad then first.

Ign.
The people, with its old perversity,
Still strives to have a will. Your Florentines
Are stuffed with impious heresy, the leaven
Of the blaspheming monk, Savonarola.
They'd spite the Pope; and so, choose Soderini,
Who feeds their hairy ears with promises;
And these the braying multitude sucks in,
Thinking them provender to fatten on.
The upshot is, we shall be largely beaten.

Duke.
The higher guilds—

Ign.
Turn out the strongest 'gainst us
Of this no whisper to the sage Roberto.
My friend Ariosto's fancy is not more nimble
To conjure corporalities from shadows.
He sits already in the chair of state.
I warrant you his tongue is glib in forms
Of ceremonial speech, his mirror practised
In bows official.—Comfort you with this,
For loss of the election: you have 'scaped,
My lord, a madman for your father-in-law.
The simultaneous weights of two such honors
Had surely cracked a skull so thin. Let not
Cold rumors cool him; but to-morrow lock,
With hand and seal, the contract for your marriage.

Enter several Gentlemen and Ladies.
Duke.
Welcome, kind friends. Ladies, you do me honor.
Signor Ottavio, what's your quarrel with us?
Your cheek is tanned by other suns than ours.

Ott.
My lord, I have of late divorced myself
From Florence but to brace my love for her
Neath skies less motherly.

Enter Roberto, Cecilia and Leonora.
Duke.
Ladies, my heart
Is in my tongue when I say welcome. Mother,
The ladies Cecilia and Leonora.
Signor Roberto, Florence has no son
For whom my doors so smoothly turn as you.
Her citizens, I trust, will prove they know
Whom they should prize. What of the election?

Rob.
Rumors
Fly thick and blind as hailstones in the night.
'T is a rough time in Florence; but our cause,
My lord, bears itself bravely.

Enter Alonzo and Filippo.
Duke.
Gentlemen,
Welcome. Signor Valerio, were the truth
Full known, you miss the liquid roads of Venice,
And the hushed gondola's voluptuous carriage.

Fil.
My lord, strangers in Florence lose their memories.

Duke.
A better guide to Beauty's hiding-places
Our city knows not than your friend, Alonzo.
Have you seen Michael Angelo?

Alon.
We've seen him
Look grander than his present self.

Duke.
How mean you?

Alon.
Standing before Leonardo's last Cartoon;
The bulging veins of his big forehead flooded
With fiery inflow of new power. Beside him—
Like an old lion listening his cub's young roar—
Renowned Leonardo stood, serene, exalted
In Buonarotti's fresh unstained emotion.
There was a sight to gorge a Tuscan's pride.
Yet more we saw. Swift through the door, a youth—
His visage beaming expectation—strode
To the front. At first he piercing gazed, all eye;
And then, over his beardless womanly face—
Like inward swell upon a glassy sea—
A tremor passed, heaving his smooth large brow
And placid look to sudden strength; until
The heart's clear quivering deep ran o'er in tears.
He turned: eyes met and hands, and in one breath
Broke the long silence, “Angelo,” “Raphael.”
Then he beheld the bearded head sublime;
And as he gazed drew slightly back in awe;
And great Da Vinci sweetly looked on him.

Ott.
Aptly you speak, sir, for your quiet craft,
And deftly lift your chiefs. As Florentine,
I almost wish, with you I could upmount
To your o'ertopping pinnacle of pride.
But I have stood in Venice, when the Doge
From the stored East came clogged with Turkish spoil,
To beard the mighty King of western France;
And I have heard the boastful cannon boom,
As proud Genóa crowded to her quays
To welcome home great Doria from the seas;
I've seen the flaunting chivalry of Spain
Group round their lofty Isabel, when she
Gave thankful audience to that vast Italian—
The foremost sailor of the sea-girt earth—
Who gendered in his brain a Continent,
And laid it at his wondering Mistress' feet.
Here were the steadfast grandeurs of broad action,
That make the heart throb prophecies of fame.
For these o'ermastering doers, Florence has
But writers, poets, painters, indoor workers,
Soft cunning weavers of ideal webs.

Alon.
The precious webs, whereof are wrought the cradles
That rock the infancy of stoutest deeds.
Th' ideal is, high wants of highest men,
Whose happy natures nurse the pith, that lifts
From height to height climbing humanity.
High poetry is higher history,
A record written by an inward puissance.
No story has the race that lacks th' ideal,
Which has its incarnation in th' elect,
Whose thoughts, grown larger than their times, leap out
In acts and words that lash the sluggard times
To their great motion, making history
With daily doings. Acts and words are twins,
Mutual reverberants, inseparable
As sound from speech, or starlight from the night,
And wed to Beauty, last in endless lineage;
For beauty is the Cybele of the mind.
Unwed to Beauty, lives nor act nor word
In men's imaginative memory.
Beauty's high priests, the dedicated poets—
Whether with pen or pencil ministering—
Are the fine nerves of Peoples. Weak in these,
They are as barren as the drooping air
Scanted in currents of electric life.
Heroes are acted beauty, and true greatness
Draws from th' ideal its choice nourishment.
A winged unresting presence, Beauty sways
Above our daily work, singing us heavenward.
For fifteen hundred years a great Ideal,
Quickening the heart, transmutes humanity.
Fanning the nations with its lustral wings,
Such vaulting hopes it stirs, that men, upswung
By its creative potency, believe
Its holy author's life shall yet be lived;
And his words, more beautiful than ever else
Were spoken—“Love thy neighbor as thyself,”—
No more ideal, be men's daily act.

Cec.
For your high teaching, sir, I thank you.

Rob.
Cecilia,
You are too bold.

Cec.
Are honest thanks, sir, boldness?

[The scenes part behind, displaying a banquet. The Duke gives his arm to Cecilia, Roberto to the Duchess, &c., and as the company move toward the tables the Curtain drops.]