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 mo