II.

Such is the Italy of the Renaissance as we see it in the works of our

tragic playwrights: a country of mysterious horror, the sinister

reputation of which lasted two hundred years; lasted triumphantly

throughout the light and finikin eighteenth century, and found its

latest expression in the grim and ghastly romances of the school of Ann

Radcliff, romances which are but the last puny and grotesque descendants

of the great stock of Italian tragedies, born of the first

terror-stricken meeting of the England of Elizabeth with the Italy of

the late Renaissance. Is the impression received by the Elizabethan

playwrights a correct impression? Was Italy in the sixteenth century

that land of horrors? Reviewing in our memory the literature and art of

the Italian Renaissance, remembering the innumerable impressions of

joyous and healthy life with which it has filled us; recalling the

bright and thoughtless rhymes of Lorenzo dei Medici, of Politian, of

Bern!, and of Ariosto; the sweet and tender poetry of Bembo and Vittoria

Colonna and Tasso; the bluff sensuality of novelists like Bandello and

Masuccio, the Aristophanesque laughter of the comedy of Bibbiena and of

Beolco; seeing in our mind's eye the stately sweet matrons and noble

senators of Titian, the virginal saints and madonnas of Raphael, the

joyous angels of Correggio;--recapitulating rapidly all our impressions

of this splendid time of exuberant vitality, of this strong and serene

Renaissance, we answer without hesitation, and with only a smile of

contempt at our credulous ancestors--no. The Italy of the Renaissance

was, of all things that have ever existed or ever could exist, the most

utterly unlike the nightmare visions of men such as Webster and Ford,

Marston and Tourneur. The only Elizabethan drama which really represents

the Italy of the Renaissance is the comedy of Shakespeare, of Beaumont

and Fletcher, and of Ben Jonson and Massinger: to the Renaissance belong

those clear and sunny figures, the Portias, Antonios, Gratianos, Violas,

Petruchios, Bellarios, and Almiras; their faces do we see on the

canvases of Titian and the frescoes of Raphael; they are the real

children of the Italian Renaissance. These frightful Brachianos and

Annabellas and Ferdinands and Corombonas and Vindicis and Pieros of the

"White Devil," of the "Duchess of Malfy," of the "Revenger's Tragedy,"

and of "Antonio and Mellida," are mere fantastic horrors, as false as

the Counts Udolpho, the Spalatros, the Zastrozzis, and all their

grotesquely ghastly pseudo-Italian brethren of eighty years ago.

And, indeed, the Italy of the Renaissance, as represented in its

literature and its art, is the very negation of Elizabethan horrors. Of

all the mystery, the colossal horror and terror of our dramatists, there

is not the faintest trace in the intellectual productions of the Italian

Renaissance. The art is absolutely stainless: no scenes of horror, no

frightful martyrdoms, as with the Germans under Albrecht Duerer; no

abominable butcheries, as with the Bolognese of the seventeenth century;

no macerated saints and tattered assassins, as with the Spaniards; no

mystery, no contortion, no horrors: vigorous and serene beauty, pure and

cheerful life, real or ideal, on wall or canvas, in bronze or in marble.

The literature is analogous to the art, only less perfect, more tainted

with the weakness of humanity, less ideal, more real. It is essentially

human, in the largest sense of the word; or if it cease, in creatures

like Aretine, to be humanly clean, it becomes merely satyr-like,

swinish, hircose. But it is never savage in lust or violence; it is

quite free from the element of ferocity. It is essentially light and

quiet and well regulated, sane and reasonable, never staggering or

blinded by excess: it is full of intelligent discrimination, of

intelligent leniency, of well-bred reserved sympathy; it is civilized as

are the wide well-paved streets of Ferrara compared with the tortuous

black alleys of mediaeval Paris; as are the well-lit, clean, spacious

palaces of Michelozzo or Bramante compared with the squalid, unhealthy,

uncomfortable mediaeval castles of Duerer's etchings. It is indeed a

trifle too civilized; too civilized to produce every kind of artistic

fruit; it is--and here comes the crushing difference between the Italian

Renaissance and our Elizabethans' pictures of it--it is, this beautiful

rich literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, completely

deficient in every tragic element; it has intuition neither for tragic

event nor for tragic character; it affords not a single tragic page in

its poems and novels; it is incapable, after the most laborious and

conscientious study of Euripides and Seneca, utterly and miserably

incapable of producing a single real tragedy, anything which is not a

sugary pastoral or a pompous rhetorical exercise. The epic poets of the

Italian Renaissance, Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto, even the

stately and sentimental Tasso, are no epic poets at all. They are mere

light and amusing gossips, some of them absolute buffoons. Their

adventures over hill and dale are mere riding parties; their fights mere

festival tournaments, their enchantments mere pageant wonders. Events

like the death of Hector, the slaughter of Penelope's suitors, the

festive massacre of Chriemhilt, the horrible deceit of Alfonso the

Chaste sending Bernardo del Carpio his father's corpse on horseback--

things like these never enter their minds. When tragic events do by some

accident come into their narration, they cease to be tragic; they are

frittered away into mere pretty conceits like the death of Isabella and

the sacrifice of Olympia in the "Orlando Furioso;" or melted down into

vague pathos, like the burning of Olindo and Sofronia, and the death of

Clorinda by the sentimental Tasso. Neither poet, the one with his

cheerfulness, the other with his mild melancholy, brings home, conceives

the horror of the situation; the one treats the tragic in the spirit

almost of burlesque, the other entirely in the spirit of elegy. So,

again, with the novel writers: these professional retailers of anecdotes

will pick up any subject to fill their volumes. In default of pleasant

stories of filthy intrigue or lewd jest, men like Cinthio and Bandello

will gabble off occasionally some tragic story, picked out of a history

book or recently heard from a gossip: the stories of Harmodius and

Aristogeiton, of Disdemona and the Moorish Captain, of Romeo Montecchio

and Giulietta Cappelletti, of the Cardinal d'Aragona and the Duchess of

Amalfi, of unknown grotesque Persian Sophis and Turkish Bassas--stories

of murder, massacre, rape, incest, anything and everything, prattled

off, with a few words of vapid compassion and stale moralizing, in the

serene, cheerful, chatty manner in which they recount their Decameronian

escapades or Rabelaisian repartees. As it is with tragic action, so is

it with tragic character. The literature of the country which suggested

to our Elizabethans their colossal villains, can display only a few

conventional monsters, fire-eating, swashbuckler Rodomonts and Sultan

Malechs, strutting and puffing like the grotesque villains of

puppet-shows; Aladins and Ismenos, enchanters and ogres fit to be put

into Don Quixote's library: mere conventional rag puppets, doubtless

valued as such and no more by the shrewd contemporaries of Ariosto and

Tasso. The inhabitants of Tasso's world of romance are pale chivalric

unrealities, lifeless as Spenser's half-allegoric knights and ladies;

those of Pulci's Ardenne forests and Cathay deserts are buffoons such as

Florentine shopmen may have trapped out for their amusement in rusty

armour and garlands of sausages. The only lifelike heroes and heroines

are those of Ariosto. And they are most untragic, unromantic. The men

are occasionally small scoundrels, but unintentionally on the part of

the author. They show no deep moral cancers or plague-spots; they

display cheerfully all the petty dishonour and small lusts which the

Renaissance regarded as mere flesh and blood characteristics. So also

Ariosto's ladies: the charming, bright women, coquettish or Amazonian,

are frail and fickle to the degree which was permissible to a court

lady, who should be neither prudish nor coquettish; doing unchaste

things and listening to unchaste words simply, gracefully, without

prurience or horror; perfectly well-bred, _gentili_, as Ariosto calls

them; prudent also, according to the notions of the day, in limiting

their imprudence. The adventure of Fiordispina with Ricciardetto would

have branded an English serving-wench as a harlot; the behaviour of

Roger towards the lady he has just rescued from the sea-monster would

have blushingly been attributed by Spenser to one of his satyrs; but

these were escapades quite within Ariosto's notions of what was

permitted to a _gentil cavaliero_ and a _nobil donzella_; and if

Fiordispina and Roger are not like Florimell and Sir Calidore, still

less do they in the faintest degree resemble Tourneur and Marston's

Levidulcias and Isabellas and Lussuriosos. And with the exception

perhaps, of this heroine and this hero, we cannot find any very great

harm in Ariosto's ladies and gentlemen: we may, indeed, feel indignant

when we think that they replace the chaste and noble impossibilities of

earlier romance, the Rolands and Percivals, the Beatrices and Lauras of

the past; when we consider that they represent for Ariosto, not the

bespattered but the spotless, not the real but the ideal. All this may

awaken in us contempt and disgust; but if we consider these figures in

themselves as realities, and compare them with the evil figures of our

drama, we find that they are mere venial sinners--light, fickle,

amorous, fibbing--very human in their faults; human, trifling, mild, not

at all monstrous, like all the art products of the Renaissance.[1]

[1] The "Orlando Innamorato" of Boiardo contains, part i, canto 8, a

story too horrible and grotesque for me to narrate, of a monster born of

Marchino and his murdered sister-in-law, which forms a strange exception

to my rule, even as does, for instance, Matteo di Giovanni's massacre of

the Innocents. Can this story have been suggested, a ghastly nightmare,

by the frightful tale of Sigismondo Malatesta and the beautiful Borbona,

which was current in Boiardo's day?

A serene and spotless art, a literature often impure but always

cheerful, rational, civilized--this is what the Italian Renaissance

displays when we seek in it for spirits at all akin to Webster or Lope

de Vega, to Holbein or Ribera. To find the tragic we must wait for the

Bolognese painters of the seventeenth century, for Metastasio and

Alfieri in the eighteenth; it is useless seeking it in this serene and

joyous Renaissance. Where, then, in the midst of these spotless virgins,

these noble saints, these brilliant pseudo-chivalric joustings and

revels, these sweet and sonneteering pastorals, these scurrilous

adventures and loose buffooneries; where in this Italian Renaissance are

the horrors which fascinated so strangely our English playwrights: the

fratricides and incests, the frightful crimes of lust and blood which

haunted and half crazed the genius of Tourneur and Marston? Where in

this brilliant and courteous and humane and civilized nation are the

gigantic villains whose terrible features were drawn with such superb

awfulness of touch by Webster and Ford? Where in this Renaissance of

Italian literature, so cheerful and light of conscience, is the foul and

savage Renaissance of English tragedy? Does the art of Italy tell an

impossible, universal lie? or is the art of England the victim of an

impossible, universal hallucination?

Neither; for art can neither tell lies nor be the victim of

hallucination. The horror exists, and the light-heartedness exists; the

unhealthiness and the healthiness. For as, in that weird story by

Nathaniel Hawthorne, the daughter of the Paduan wizard is nurtured on

the sap and fruit and the emanations of poisonous plants, till they

become her natural sustenance, and she thrives and is strong and lovely;

while the youth, bred in the ordinary pure air and nourished on ordinary

wholesome food, faints and staggers as soon as he breathes the fatal

odours of the poison garden, and sinks down convulsed and crazed at the

first touch of his mistress' blooming but death-breathing lips; so also

the Italians, steeped in the sin of their country, seeing it daily and

hourly, remained intellectually healthy and serene; while the English,

coming from a purer moral atmosphere, were seized with strange moral

sickness of horror at what they had seen and could not forget. And the

nation which was chaste and true wrote tales of incest and treachery,

while the nation which was foul and false wrote poetry of shepherds and

knights-errant.

The monstrous immorality of the Italian Renaissance, as I have elsewhere

shown in greater detail, was, like the immorality of any other

historical period, not a formal rebellion against God, but a natural

result of the evolution of the modern world. The Italy of the

Renaissance was one of the many victims which inevitable moral sequence

dooms to be evil in order that others may learn to be good: it was a

sacrifice which consisted in a sin, a sacrifice requiring frightful

expiation on the part of the victim. For Italy was subjected, during

well-nigh two centuries, to a slow process of moral destruction; a

process whose various factors--political disorganization, religious

indifference, scientific scepticism, wholesale enthusiasm for the

antique, breaking-up of mediaeval standards and excessive growth of

industry, commerce, and speculative thought at the expense of warlike

and religious habits--were at the same time factors in the great advent

of modern civilization, of which Italy was the pioneer and the victim; a

process whose result was, in Italy, insensibly and inevitably to reduce

to chaos the moral and political organization of the nation; at once

rendering men completely unable to discriminate between good and evil,

and enabling a certain proportion of them to sin with complete impunity:

creating on the one hand moral indifference, and on the other social

irresponsibility. Civilization had kept pace with demoralization; the

faculty of reasoning over cause and effect had developed at the expense

of the faculty of judging of actions. The Italians of the Renaissance,

little by little, could judge only of the adaptation of means to given

ends; whether means or ends were legitimate or illegitimate they soon

became unable to perceive and even unable to ask. Success was the

criterion of all action, and power was its limits. Active and furious

national wickedness there was not: there was mere moral inertia on the

part of the people. The Italians of the Renaissance neither resisted

evil nor rebelled against virtue; they were indifferent to both, and a

little pressure sufficed to determine them to either. In the governed

classes, where the law was equal between men, and industry and commerce

kept up healthy activity, the pressure was towards good. The artizans

and merchants lived decent lives, endowed hospitals, listened to

edifying sermons, and were even moved (for a few moments) by men like

San Bernardino or Savonarola. In the governing classes, where all right

lay in force, where the necessity of self-defence induced treachery and

violence, and irresponsibility produced excess, the pressure was towards

evil. The princelets and prelates and mercenery generals indulged in

every sensuality, turned treachery into a science and violence into an

instrument; and sometimes let themselves be intoxicated into mad lust

and ferocity, as their subjects were occasionally intoxicated with mad

austerity and mysticism; but the excesses of mad vice, like the excesses

of mad virtue, lasted only a short time, or lasted only in individual

saints or blood-maniacs; and the men of the Renaissance speedily

regained their level of indifferent righteousness and of indifferent

sinfulness. Righteousness and sinfulness both passive, without power of

aggression or resistance, and consequently in strange and dreadful peace

with each other. The wicked men did not dislike virtue, nor the good men

vice: the villain could admire a saint, and the saint could condone a

villain. The prudery of righteousness was as unknown as the cynicism of

evil; the good man, like Guarino da Verona, would not shrink from the

foul man; the foul man, like Beccadelli, would not despise the pure man.

The ideally righteous citizen of Agnolo Pandolfini does not interfere

with the ideally unrighteous prince of Machiavelli: each has his own

position and conduct; and who can say whether, if the positions were

exchanged, the conduct might not be exchanged also? In such a condition

of things as this, evil ceases to appear monstrous; it is explained,

endured, condoned. The stately philosophical historians, so stoically

grand, and the prattling local chroniclers, so highly coloured and so

gentle and graceful; Guicciardini and Machiavelli and Valori and Segni,

on the one hand--Corio, Allegretti, Matarazzo, Infessura, on the other;

all these, from whom we learn the real existence of immorality far more

universal and abominable than our dramatists venture to show, relate

quietly, calmly, with analytical frigidness or gossiping levity, the

things which we often shrink from repeating, and sometimes recoil from

believing. Great statesmanlike historians and humble chattering

chroniclers are alike unaffected by what goes on around them: they

collect anecdotes and generalize events without the fumes of evil, among

which they seek for materials in the dark places of national or local

history, ever going to their imagination, ever making their heart sicken

and faint, and their fancy stagger and reel. The life of these

righteous, or at least, not actively sinning men, may be hampered,

worried, embittered, or even broken by the villainy of their fellow-men;

but, except in some visionary monk, life can never be poisoned by the

mere knowledge of evil. Their town maybe betrayed to the enemy, their

daughters may be dishonoured or poisoned, their sons massacred; they

may, in their old age, be cast starving on the world, or imprisoned or

broken by torture; and they will complain and be fierce in diatribe: the

fiercest diatribe written against any Pope of the Renaissance being,

perhaps, that of Platina against Paul II., who was a saint compared with

his successors Sixtus and Alexander, because the writer of the diatribe

and his friends were maltreated by this pope. When personally touched,

the Italians of the Renaissance will brook no villainy--the poniard

quickly despatches sovereigns like Galeazzo Maria Sforza; but when the

villainy remains abstract, injures neither themselves nor their

immediate surroundings, it awakens no horror, and the man who commits it

is by no means regarded as a fiend. The great criminals of the

Renaissance--traitors and murderers like Lodovico Sforza, incestuous

parricides like Gianpaolo Baglioni, committers of every iniquity under

heaven like Caesar Borgia--move through the scene of Renaissance history,

as shown by its writers great and small, quietly, serenely,

triumphantly; with gracious and magnanimous bearing; applauded, admired,

or at least endured. On their passage no man, historian or chronicler,

unless the agent of a hostile political faction, rises up, confronts

them and says, "This man is a devil."

And devils these men were not: the judgment of their contemporaries,

morally completely perverted, was probably psychologically correct; they

misjudged the deeds, but rarely, perhaps, misjudged the man. To us

moderns, as to our English ancestors of the sixteenth century, this is

scarcely conceivable. A man who does devilish deeds is necessarily a

devil; and the evil Italian princes of the Renaissance, the Borgias,

Sforzas, Baglionis, Malatestas, and Riarios appear, through the mist of

horrified imagination, so many uncouth and gigantic monsters, nightmare

shapes, less like human beings than like the grand and frightful angels

of evil who gather round Milton's Satan in the infernal council. Such

they appear to us. But if we once succeed in calmly looking at them,

seeing them not in the lurid lights and shadows of our fancy, but in the

daylight of contemporary reality, we shall little by little be forced to

confess (and the confession is horrible) that most of these men are

neither abnormal nor gigantic. Their times were monstrous, not they.

They were not, that is clear, at variance with the moral atmosphere

which surrounded them; and they were the direct result of the social and

political condition. This may seem no answer; for although we know the

causes of monster births, they are monstrous none the less. What we mean

is not that the existence of men capable of committing such actions was

normal; we mean that the men who committed them, the conditions being

what they were, were not necessarily men of exceptional character. The

level of immorality was so high that a man need be no giant to reach up

into the very seventh heaven of iniquity. When to massacre at a banquet

a number of enemies enticed by overtures of peace was considered in

Caesar Borgia merely a rather audacious and not very holy action,

indicative of very brilliant powers of diplomacy, then Caesar Borgia

required, to commit such an action, little more than a brilliant

diplomatic endowment, unhampered by scruples and timidity; when a brave,

and gracious prince like Gianpaolo Baglioni could murder his kinsmen and

commit incest with his sister without being considered less gracious and

magnanimous, then Gianpaolo Baglioni might indeed be but an indifferent

villain; when treachery, lust, and bloodshed, although objected to in

theory, were condoned In practice, and were regarded as venial sins,

those who indulged in them might be in fact scarcely more than venial

sinners. In short, where a fiendish action might be committed without

the perpetrator being considered a fiend, there was no need of his being

one. And, indeed, the great villains of the Renaissance never take up

the attitude of fiends; one or two, like certain Visconti or Aragonese,

were madmen, but the others were more or less normal human beings. There

was no barrier between them and evil; they slipped into it, remained in

it, became accustomed to it; but a vicious determination to be wicked, a

feeling of the fiend within one, like that of Shakespeare's Richard, or

a gradual, conscious irresistible absorption into recognized iniquity

like Macbeth's, there was not. The mere sense of absolute power and

impunity, together with the complete silence of the conscience of the

public at large, can make a man do strange things. If Caesar Borgia be

free to practise his archery upon hares and deer, why should he not

practise it upon these prisoners? Who will blame him? Who can prevent

him? If he had for his mistress every woman he might single out from

among his captives, why not his sister? If he have the force to carry

out a plan, why should a man stand in his way? The complete facility in

the commission of all actions quickly brings such a man to the limits of

the legitimate: there is no universal cry to tell him where those limits

are, no universal arm to pull him back. He pooh-poohs, pushes them a

little further, and does the iniquity. Nothing prevents his gratifying

his ambition, his avarice, and his lust, so he gratifies them. Soon,

seeking for further gratification, he has to cut new paths in villainy:

he has not been restrained by man, who is silent; he is soon restrained

no longer by nature, whose only voice is in man's conscience. Pleasure

in wanton cruelty takes the same course: he prefers to throw javelins at

men and women to throwing javelins at bulls or bears, even as he prefers

throwing javelins at bulls or bears rather than at targets; the

excitement is greater; the instinct is that of the soldiers of Spain and

of France, who invariably preferred shooting at a valuable fresco like

Sodoma's Christ, at Siena, or Lo Spagna's Madonna, at Spoleto, to

practising against a mere worthless piece of wood. Such a man as Caesar

Borgia is the _nec plus ultra_ of a Renaissance villain; he takes, as

all do not, absolute pleasure in evil as such. Yet Caesar Borgia is not a

fiend nor a maniac. He can restrain himself whenever circumstances or

policy require it; he can be a wise administrator, a just judge. His

portraits show no degraded criminal; he is, indeed, a criminal in

action, but not necessarily a criminal in constitution, this fiendish

man who did not seem a fiend to Machiavel. We are astonished at the

strange anomaly in the tastes and deeds of these Renaissance villains;

we are amazed before their portraits. These men, who, in the frightful

light of their own misdeeds, appear to us as complete demons or complete

madmen, have yet much that is amiable and much that is sane; they

stickle at no abominable lust, yet they are no bestial sybarites; they

are brave, sober, frugal, enduring like any puritan; they are

treacherous, rapacious, cruel, utterly indifferent to the sufferings of

their enemies, yet they are gentle in manner, passionately fond of

letters and art, superb in their works of public utility, and not

incapable of genuinely admiring men of pure life like Bernardino or

Savonarola: they are often, strange to say, like the frightful Baglionis

of Perugia, passionately admired and loved by their countrymen. The

bodily portraits of these men, painted by the sternly realistic art of

the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, are even more confusing to

our ideas than their moral portraits drawn by historians and

chroniclers. Caesar Borgia, with his long fine features and noble head,

is a gracious and refined prince; there is, perhaps, a certain duplicity

in the well-cut lips; the beard, worn full and peaked in Spanish

fashion, forms a sort of mask to the lower part of the face, but what we

see is noble and intellectual. Sigismondo Malatesta has on his medals a

head whose scowl has afforded opportunity for various fine descriptions

of a blood maniac; but the head, thus found so expressive, of this

monster, is infinitely more human than the head on the medals of

Lionello d'Este, one of the most mild and cultivated of the decently

behaved Ferrarese princes. The very flower of precocious iniquity, the

young Baglionis, Vitellis, and Orsinis, grouped round Signorelli's

preaching Antichrist at Orvieto, are, in their gallantly trimmed jerkins

and jewelled caps, the veriest assemblage of harmless young dandies,

pretty and insipid; we can scarcely believe that these mild beardless

striplings, tight-waisted and well-curled like girls of sixteen, are the

terrible Umbrian brigand condottieri--Gianpaolos, Simonettos,

Vitellozzos, and Astorres--whose abominable deeds fill the pages of the

chronicles of Matarazzo, of Frolliere, of Monaldeschi. Nowhere among the

portraits of Renaissance monsters do we meet with anything like those

Roman emperors, whose frightful effigies, tumid, toad-like Vitelliuses

or rage-convulsed Caracallas, fill all our museums in marble or bronze

or loathsome purple porphyry; such types as these are as foreign to the

reality of the Italian Renaissance as are the Brachianos and

Lussuriosos, the Pieros and Corombonas, to the Italian fiction of the

sixteenth century.

Nor must such anomalies between the type of the men and their deeds,

between their abominable crimes and their high qualities, be merely made

a subject for grandiloquent disquisition. The man of the Renaissance, as

we have said, had no need to be a monster to do monstrous things; a

crime did not necessitate such a moral rebellion as requires complete

unity of nature, unmixed wickedness; it did not precipitate a man for

ever into a moral abyss where no good could ever enter. Seeing no

barrier between the legitimate and the illegitimate, he could alternate

almost unconsciously between them. He was never shut out from evil, and

never shut out from good; the judgment of men did not dress him in a

convict's jacket which made evil his only companion; it did not lock him

up in a moral dungeon where no ray of righteousness could enter; he was

not condemned, like the branded harlot, to hopeless infamy. He need be

bad only as much and as long as he chose. Hence, on the part of the

evil-doer of the Renaissance, no necessity either for violent rebellion

or for sincere repentance; hence the absence of all characters such as

the tragic writer seeks, developed by moral struggle, warped by the

triumph of vice, or consciously soiled in virtue. What a "Revenger's

Tragedy" might not Cyril Tourneur have made, had he known all the

details, of the story of Alessandro de' Medici's death! What a Vindici

he would have made of the murderer Lorenzino; with what a strange lurid

grandeur he would have surrounded the plottings of the pander Brutus.

But Lorenzino de' Medici had none of the feeling of Tourneur's Vindici;

there was in him none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the

hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul creature whom he leads

to his death. Lorenzino had the usual Brutus mania of his day, but

unmixed with horror. To be the pander and jester of the Duke was no pain

to his nature; there was probably no sense of debasement in the

knowledge either of his employer or of his employment. To fasten on

Alexander, to pretend to be his devoted slave and server of his lust,

this piece of loathsome acting, merely enhanced, by the ingenuity it

required, the attraction of what to Lorenzino was an act of heroism. His

ambition was to be a Brutus; that he had bespattered the part probably

never occurred to him. The indifference to good and evil permitted the

men of the Renaissance to mix the two without any moral sickness, as it

permitted them to alternate them without a moral struggle. Such is the

wickedness of the Renaissance: not a superhuman fury of lust and

cruelty, like Victor Hugo's Lucrezia Borgia; but an indifferent, a

characterless creature like the Lucrezia Borgia of history: passive to

surrounding influences, blind to good and evil, infamous in the infamous

Rome, among her father and brother's courtesans and cut-throats; grave

and gracious! in the grave and gracious Ferrara, among the Platonic

poets and pacific courtiers of the court of the Estensi. Thus, in the

complete prose and colourlessness of reality, has the evil of the

Renaissance been understood and represented only by one man, and

transmitted to us in one pale and delicate psychological masterpiece far

more loathsome than any elaborately hideous monster painting by Marston

or Tourneur. The man who thus conceived the horrors of the Italian

Renaissance in the spirit in which they were committed is Ford. In his

great play he has caught the very tone of the Italian Renaissance: the

abominableness of the play consisting not in the coarse slaughter scenes

added merely to please the cockpit of an English theatre, but in the

superficial innocence of tone; in its making evil lose its appearance of

evil, even as it did to the men of the Renaissance. Giovanni and

Annabella make love as if they were Romeo and Juliet: there is scarcely

any struggle, and no remorse; they weep and pay compliments and sigh and

melt in true Aminta style. There is in the love of the brother and

sister neither the ferocious heat of tragic lust, nor the awful shudder

of unnatural evil; they are lukewarm, neither good nor bad. Their

abominable love is in their own eyes a mere weakness of the flesh; there

is no sense of revolt against man and nature and God; they are neither

dragged on by irresistible demoniac force nor held back by the grip of

conscience; they slip and slide, even like Francesca and Paolo. They pay

each other sweet and mawkish compliments. The ferocious lust of

Francesco Cenci is moral compared with the way in which the "trim youth"

Giovanni praises Annabella's beauty; the blushing, bride-like way in

which Annabella, "white in her soul," acknowledges her long love. The

atrociousness of all this is, that if you strike out a word or two the

scene may be read with perfect moral satisfaction, with the impression

that this is really "sacred love." For in these scenes Ford wrote with a

sweetness and innocence truly diabolical, not a shiver of horror passing

through him--serene, unconscious; handling the filthy without sense of

its being unclean, to the extent, the incredible extent, of making

Giovanni and Annabella swear on their mother's ashes eternal fidelity in

incest: horror of horrors, to which no Walpurgis Night abomination could

ever approach, this taking as witness of the unutterable, not an obscene

Beelzebub with abominable words and rites, but the very holiest of

holies. If ever Englishman approached the temper of the Italian

Renaissance, it was not Tourneur, nor Shelley with his cleansing hell

fires of tragic horror, but this sweet and gentle Ford. If ever an

artistic picture approached the reality of such a man as Gianpaolo

Baglioni, the incestuous murderer whom the Frolliere chronicler,

enthusiastic like Matarazzo, admires, for "his most beautiful person,

his benign and amiable manner and lordly bearing," it is certainly not

the elaborately villainous Francesco Cenci of Shelley, boasting like

another Satan of his enormous wickedness, exhausting in his picture of

himself the rhetoric of horror, committing his final enormity merely to

complete the crown of atrocities in which he glories; it is no such

tragic impossibility of moral hideousness as this; it is the Giovanni of

Ford, the pearl of virtuous and studious youths, the spotless, the

brave, who, after a moment's reasoning, tramples on a vulgar

prejudice--"Shall a peevish sound, a customary form from man to man, of

brother and of sister, be a bar 'twixt my eternal happiness and me?" who

sins with a clear conscience, defies the world, and dies, bravely,

proudly, the "sacred name" of Annabella on his lips, like a chivalrous

hero. The pious, pure Germany of Luther will give the world the tragic

type of the science-damned Faustus; the devout and savage Spain of

Cervantes will give the tragic type of Don Juan, damned for mockery of

man and of death and of heaven; the Puritan England of Milton will give

the most sublimely tragic type of all, the awful figure of him who says,

"Evil, be thou my good." What tragic type can this evil Italy of

Renaissance give to the world? None: or at most this miserable, morbid,

compassionated Giovanni: whom Ford would have us admire, and whom we can

only despise.

The blindness to evil which constitutes the criminality of the

Renaissance is so great as to give a certain air of innocence. For the

men of that time were wicked solely from a complete sophistication of

ideas, a complete melting away (owing to slowly operating political and

intellectual tendencies) of all moral barriers. They walked through the

paths of wickedness with the serenity with which they would have trod

the ways of righteousness; seeing no boundary, exercising their psychic

limbs equally in the open and permitted spaces and in the forbidden.

They plucked the fruit of evil without a glance behind them, without a

desperate setting of their teeth; plucked it openly, calmly, as they

would have plucked the blackberries in the hedge; bit into it, ate it,

with perfect ease and serenity, saying their prayers before and after,

as if it were their natural daily bread mentioned in the Lord's Prayer;

no grimace or unseemly leer the while; no moral indigestion or nightmare

(except very rarely) in consequence. Hence the serenity of their

literature and art. These men and women of the Italian Renaissance have,

in their portraits, a very pleasing nobility of aspect: serene,

thoughtful, healthy, benign. Titian's courtesans are our archetypes of

dignified womanhood; we might fancy Portia or Isabella with such calm,

florid beauty, so wholly unmeretricious and uncankered. The humanists

and priests who lie outstretched on the acanthus-leaved and

flower-garlanded sarcophagi by Desiderio and Rossellino are the very

flowers of refined and gentle men of study; the youths in Botticelli's

"Adoration of The Magi," for instance, are the ideal of Boiardo's

chivalry, Rinaldos and Orlandos every one; the corseleted generals of

the Renaissance, so calm and stern and frank, the Bartolomeo Colleoni of

Verrocchio, the Gattamelata by Giorgione (or Giorgione's pupil), look

fit to take up the banner of the crusade: that Gattamelata in the Uffizi

gallery especially looks like a sort of military Milton: give him a pair

of wings and he becomes at once Signorelli's archangel, clothed in

heavenly steel and unsheathing the flaming sword of God. Compare with

these types Holbein's courtiers of Henry VIII.; what scrofulous hogs!

Compare Sanchez Coello's Philip II. and Don Carlos; what monomaniacs.

Compare even Duerer's magnificent head of Willibald Pirkheimer: how the

swine nature is blended with the thinker. And the swine will be subdued,

the thinker will triumph. Why? Just because there is a contest--because

the thinker-Willibald is conscious of the swine-Willibald. In this

coarse, brutal, deeply stained Germany of the time of Luther, affording

Duerer and Holbein, alas! how many besotten and bestial types, there will

arise a great conflict: the obscene leering Death--Death-in-Life as he

really is--will skulk everywhere, even as in the prints of the day,

hideous and powerful, trying, with hog's snout, to drive Christ Himself

out of limbo; but he is known, seen, dreaded. The armed knight of Duerer

turns away from his grimacings, and urges on his steel-covered horse. He

visits even the best, even Luther in the Wartburg; but the good men open

their Bibles, cry "Vade retro!" and throw their inkstands at him,

showing themselves terrified and ruffled after the combat. And these

Germans of Luther's are disgustingly fond of blood and horrors: they

like to see the blood spirt from the decapitated trunk, to watch its

last contortions; they hammer with a will (in Duerer's "Passion") the

nails of the cross, they peel off strips of skin in the flagellation.

But then they can master all that; they can be pure, charitable; they

have gentleness for the hare and the rabbit, like Luther; they kneel

piously before the cross-bearing stag, like Saint Hubert. Not so the

Italians. They rarely or never paint horrors, or death, or abominations.

Their flagellated Christ, their arrow-riddled Sebastian, never writhe or

howl with pain; indeed, they suffer none. Judith, in Mantegna's print,

puts the head of Holophernes into her bag with the serenity of a muse;

and the head is quite clean, without loathsome drippings or torn

depending strings of muscle; unconvulsed, a sort of plaster cast. The

tragedy of Christ, the tragedy of Judith; the physical agency shadowing

the moral agony; the awfulness of victim and criminal--the whole tragic

meaning was unknown to the light and cheerful contemporaries of Ariosto,

the cold and cynical contemporaries of Machiavelli.

The tragic passion and imagination which, in the noble and grotesque

immaturity of the Middle Ages, had murmured confusedly in the popular

legends which gave to Ezzelin the Fiend as a father, and Death and Sin

as adversaries at dice; which had stammered awkwardly but grandly in the

school Latin of Mussato's tragedy of "Eccerinis;" which had wept and

stormed and imprecated and laughed for horror in the infinite

tragedy--pathetic, grand, and grotesque, like all great tragedy--of

Dante; this tragic passion and imagination, this sense of the horrible

and the terrible, had been forfeited by the Italy of the Renaissance,

lost with its sense of right and wrong. The Italian Renaissance, supreme

in the arts which require a subtle and strong perception of the

excellence of mere lines and colours and lights and shadows, which

demand unflinching judgment of material qualities; was condemned to

inferiority in the art which requires subtle and strong perception of

the excellence of human emotion and action; in the art which demands

unflinching judgment of moral motives. The tragic spirit is the

offspring of the conscience of a people. The sense of the imaginative

grandeur of evil may perhaps be a forerunner of demoralization; but such

a sense of wonder and awe, such an imaginative fascination of the

grandly, superhumanly wicked such a necessity to magnify a villain into

a demon with archangelic splendour of power of evil, can exist only in

minds pure and strong, braced up to virtue, virgin of evil, with a

certain childlike power of wonder; minds to whom it appears that to be

wicked requires a powerful rebellion; minds accustomed to nature and

nature's plainness, to whom the unnatural can be no subject of

sophistication and cynicism, but only of wonder. While, in Italy,

Giraldi Cinthio prattles off to a gay party of ladies and gentlemen

stories of murder and lust as frightful as those of "Titus' Andronicus,"

of "Giovanni and Annabella," and of the "Revenger's Tragedy," in the

intelligent, bantering tone in which he tells his Decameronian tales; in

England, Marston, in his superb prologue to the second part of "Antonio

and Mellida," doubts whether all his audience can rise to the conception

of the terrible passions he wishes to display:

If any spirit breathes within this round

Uncapable of weighty passion,

Who winks and shuts his apprehension up

From common sense of what men were and are,

Who would not know what men must be: let such

Hurry amain from our black visaged shows;

We shall affright their eyes.

The great criminals of Italy were unconscious of being criminals; the

nation was unconscious of being sinful. Bembo's sonnets were the fit

reading for Lucrezia Borgia; pastorals by Guarini the dramatic

amusements of Rannuccio Farnesi; if Vittoria Accoramboni and Francesco

Cenci read anything besides their prayerbook or ribald novels, it was

some sugary "Aminta" or "Pastor Fido:" their own tragedies by Webster

and Shelley they could never have understood.

And thus the Italians of the Renaissance walked placidly through the

evil which surrounded them; for them, artists and poets, the sky was

always blue and the sun always bright, and their art and their poetry

were serene. But the Englishmen of the sixteenth century were astonished

and fascinated by the evil of Italy: the dark pools of horror, the dabs

of infamy which had met them ever and anon in the brilliant southern

cities, haunted them like nightmare, bespattered for them the clear blue

sky, and danced, black and horrible spots, before the face of the sun.

The remembrance of Italian wickedness weighed on them like an incubus,

clung to them with a frightful fascination. While the foulest criminals

of Italy discussed the platonic vapidnesses of Bembo's sonnets, and wept

at the sweet and languid lamentations of Guarini's shepherds and nymphs;

the strong Englishmen of the time of Shakespeare, the men whose children

were to unsheathe under Cromwell the sword of righteousness, listened

awe-stricken and fascinated with horror to the gloomy and convulsed, the

grand and frightful plays of Webster and of Tourneur. And the sin of the

Renaissance, which the art of Italy could neither pourtray nor perceive;

appeared on the stage decked in superb and awful garb by the tragic

imagination of Elizabethan England.