ands
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 prayerbook 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 nigh