rave
and gracious! in the grave and gracious Ferrara, among the Platonic
poets and pacific courtiers of the court of the Estensi. Thus, in the
complete prose and colourlessness of reality, has the evil of the
Renaissance been understood and represented only by one man, and
transmitted to us in one pale and delicate psychological masterpiece far
more loathsome than any elaborately hideous monster painting by Marston
or Tourneur. The man who thus conceived the horrors of the Italian
Renaissance in the spirit in which they were committed is Ford. In his
great play he has caught the very tone of the Italian Renaissance: the
abominableness of the play consisting not in the coarse slaughter scenes
added merely to please the cockpit of an English theatre, but in the
superficial innocence of tone; in its making evil lose its appearance of
evil, even as it did to the men of the Renaissance. Giovanni and
Annabella make love as if they were Romeo and Juliet: there is scarcely
any struggle, and no remorse; they weep and pay compliments and sigh and
melt in true Aminta style. There is in the love of the brother and
sister neither the ferocious heat of tragic lust, nor the awful shudder
of unnatural evil; they are lukewarm, neither good nor bad. Their
abominable love is in their own eyes a mere weakness of the flesh; there
is no sense of revolt against man and nature and God; they are neither
dragged on by irresistible demoniac force nor held back by the grip of
conscience; they slip and slide, even like Francesca and Paolo. They pay
each other sweet and mawkish compliments. The ferocious lust of
Francesco Cenci is moral compared with the way in which the "trim youth"
Giovanni praises Annabella's beauty; the blushing, bride-like way in
which Annabella, "white in her soul," acknowledges her long love. The
atrociousness of all this is, that if you strike out a word or two the
scene may be read with perfect moral satisfaction, with the impression
that this is really "sacred love." For in these scenes Ford wrote with a
sweetness and innocence truly diabolical, not a shiver of horror passing
through him--serene, unconscious; handling the filthy without sense of
its being unclean, to the extent, the incredible extent, of making
Giovanni and Annabella swear on their mother's ashes eternal fidelity in
incest: horror of horrors, to which no Walpurgis Night abomination could
ever approach, this taking as witness of the unutterable, not an obscen