r 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 do