Cellini - Page 2

we all
give thanks that we are not like him, but every trait that he had
large, we have in little. Cellini was sincere; he never doubted his
own infallibility, but he points out untiringly the fallibilities in
various popes and everybody else. When Cellini goes out and kills a
man before breakfast, he absolves himself by showing that the man
richly deserved his fate. The braggart and bully are really cowards
at the last. A man who is wholly brave would not think to brag of
it. He would be as brave in his calm moments as in moments of
frenzy--take old John Brown, for instance. But when Cellini had a
job on hand he first worked himself into a torrent of righteous
wrath. He poses as the injured one, the victim of double, deep-dyed
conspiracies, and so he goes through life afraid of every one, and
is one of whom all men are afraid.

Every artist has occasional attacks of Artistic Jealousy, and happy
is the man who contents himself with the varioloid variety. Cellini
had three kinds: acute, virulent and chronic.

Berloiz has worked the man up into a strong and sinewy drama,
several others have done the same, but it will require the combined
skill of Rostand, Mansfield and Samuel Eberly Gross to ever do the
character justice.

John Morley says, "There is nothing worse than mettle in a blind
horse." So one might say there is nothing worse than sincerity in a
superstitious person. Benvenuto Cellini is the true type of a
literary and artistic Bad Man. Had he lived in Colorado in Eighteen
Hundred Seventy, the Vigilance Committee would have used him to
start a graveyard.

But he is so open, so simple, so candid, that we laugh at his
lapses, admire his high resolves, sigh at his follies, sympathize
with his spasms of repentance, and smile a misty smile at one who is
humorous without meaning to be, who was deeply religious but never
pious, who was highly conscientious, undoubtedly artistic, and who
blundered through life, always in a turmoil, hopelessly entangled in
the web of Fate, committing every crime, justifying himself in
everything, and finally passing out peacefully, sincerely believing
that he had lived a Christian life.

Benvenuto Cellini was born in Florence, in the year Fifteen Hundred,
the day after the feast-day of All Souls, at four-thirty precisely
in the afternoon.

The name Benvenuto means welcome: the world welcomed Benvenuto from
the first. When five years of age he seized upon a live scorpion
that he found in the yard and carried it into the house. His father
seeing the deadly creature in his hand sought to get him to throw it
away, but he only clung the tighter to the plaything. The parent
then grabbed a pair of shears and cut off the tail,