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 mediæval 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 Cæsar 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 Cæsar Borgia merely a rather audacious and not very holy action, indicative of very brilliant powers of diplomacy, then Cæsar 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 per- petrator 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 Cæsar 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 Cæsar Borgia is the nec plus ultra of a Renaissance villain; he takes, as all do not, absolute pleasure in evil as such. Yet Cæsar 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. Cæsar 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 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 and Francesco Cenci read anything besides their prayer- book 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.