s indulged in
every sensuality, turned treachery into a science and violence into an
instrument; and sometimes let themselves be intoxicated into mad lust
and ferocity, as their subjects were occasionally intoxicated with mad
austerity and mysticism; but the excesses of mad vice, like the excesses
of mad virtue, lasted only a short time, or lasted only in individual
saints or blood-maniacs; and the men of the Renaissance speedily
regained their level of indifferent righteousness and of indifferent
sinfulness. Righteousness and sinfulness both passive, without power of
aggression or resistance, and consequently in strange and dreadful peace
with each other. The wicked men did not dislike virtue, nor the good men
vice: the villain could admire a saint, and the saint could condone a
villain. The prudery of righteousness was as unknown as the cynicism of
evil; the good man, like Guarino da Verona, would not shrink from the
foul man; the foul man, like Beccadelli, would not despise the pure man.
The ideally righteous citizen of Agnolo Pandolfini does not interfere
with the ideally unrighteous prince of Machiavelli: each has his own
position and conduct; and who can say whether, if the positions were
exchanged, the conduct might not be exchanged also? In such a condition
of things as this, evil ceases to appear monstrous; it is explained,
endured, condoned. The stately philosophical historians, so stoically
grand, and the prattling local chroniclers, so highly coloured and so
gentle and graceful; Guicciardini and Machiavelli and Valori and Segni,
on the one hand--Corio, Allegretti, Matarazzo, Infessura, on the other;
all these, from whom we learn the real existence of immorality far more
universal and abominable than our dramatists venture to show, relate
quietly, calmly, with analytical frigidness or gossiping levity, the
things which we often shrink from repeating, and sometimes recoil from
believing. Great statesmanlike historians and humble chattering
chroniclers are alike unaffected by what goes on around them: they
collect anecdotes and generalize events without the fumes of evil, among
which they seek for materials in the dark places of national or local
history, ever going to their imagination, ever making their heart sicken
and faint, and their fancy stagger and reel. The life of these
righteous, or at least, not actively sinning men, may be hampered,
worried, embittered, or even broken by the villainy of their fellow-