ipitate a man for
ever into a moral abyss where no good could ever enter. Seeing no
barrier between the legitimate and the illegitimate, he could alternate
almost unconsciously between them. He was never shut out from evil, and
never shut out from good; the judgment of men did not dress him in a
convict's jacket which made evil his only companion; it did not lock him
up in a moral dungeon where no ray of righteousness could enter; he was
not condemned, like the branded harlot, to hopeless infamy. He need be
bad only as much and as long as he chose. Hence, on the part of the
evil-doer of the Renaissance, no necessity either for violent rebellion
or for sincere repentance; hence the absence of all characters such as
the tragic writer seeks, developed by moral struggle, warped by the
triumph of vice, or consciously soiled in virtue. What a "Revenger's
Tragedy" might not Cyril Tourneur have made, had he known all the
details, of the story of Alessandro de' Medici's death! What a Vindici
he would have made of the murderer Lorenzino; with what a strange lurid
grandeur he would have surrounded the plottings of the pander Brutus.
But Lorenzino de' Medici had none of the feeling of Tourneur's Vindici;
there was in him none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the
hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul creature whom he leads
to his death. Lorenzino had the usual Brutus mania of his day, but
unmixed with horror. To be the pander and jester of the Duke was no pain
to his nature; there was probably no sense of debasement in the
knowledge either of his employer or of his employment. To fasten on
Alexander, to pretend to be his devoted slave and server of his lust,
this piece of loathsome acting, merely enhanced, by the ingenuity it
required, the attraction of what to Lorenzino was an act of heroism. His
ambition was to be a Brutus; that he had bespattered the part probably
never occurred to him. The indifference to good and evil permitted the
men of the Renaissance to mix the two without any moral sickness, as it
permitted them to alternate them without a moral struggle. Such is the
wickedness of the Renaissance: not a superhuman fury of lust and
cruelty, like Victor Hugo's Lucrezia Borgia; but an indifferent, a
characterless creature like the Lucrezia Borgia of history: passive to
surrounding influences, blind to good and evil, infamous in the infamous
Rome, among her father and brother's courtesans and cut-throats; g