wn 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