Euphorion (Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance). Vernon Lee
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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 un-utterable, 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 un- sheathing 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 Dürer'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 Dürer 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 Dürer 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 Dürer'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