e
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