lish tongue refused to mention, but which
weighed upon the English mind; and which, unspoken, nay (and it is the
glory of the Elizabethan dramatists excepting Ford), unhinted, yet
remained as an incubus in the consciousness of the playwrights and the
public, was in their thoughts when they wrote and heard such savage
misanthropic outbursts as those of Tourneur and of Marston. The sense of
the rottenness of the country whence they were obtaining their
intellectual nourishment, haunted with a sort of sickening fascination
the imaginative and psychological minds of the late sixteenth century,
of the men who had had time to outgrow the first cynical plunge of the
rebellious immature intellects of the contemporaries of Greene, Peele,
and Marlowe into that dissolved civilization. And of the great men who
were thus enthralled by Italy and Italian evil, only Shakespeare and
Massinger maintain or regain their serenity and hopefulness of spirit,
resist the incubus of horror: Shakespeare from the immense scope of his
vision, which permitted him to pass over the base and frightful parts of
human nature and see its purer and higher sides; Massinger from the very
superficiality of his insight and the narrowness of his sympathies,
which prevented his ever thoroughly realizing the very horrors he had
himself invented. But on the minds less elastic than that of
Shakespeare, and less superficial than that of Massinger, the Italian
evil weighed like a nightmare. With an infinitely powerful and
passionate imagination, and an exquisitely subtle faculty of mental
analysis; only lately freed from the dogma of the Middle Ages; unsettled
in their philosophy; inclined by wholesale classical reading to a sort
of negative atheism, a fatalistic and half-melancholy mixture of
epicurism and stoicism; yet keenly alive, from study of the Bible and of
religious controversies, to all questions of right and wrong; thus
highly wrought and deeply perplexed, the minds of the Elizabethan poets
were impressed by the wickedness of Italy as by the horrible deeds of
one whom we are accustomed to venerate as our guide, whom we cannot but
love as our benefactor, whom we cannot but admire as our superior: it
was a sense of frightful anomaly, of putrescence in beauty and
splendour, of death in life and life in death, which made the English
psychologist-poets savage and sombre, cynical and wrathful and hopeless.
The influence is the same on all, and the difference of at