Euphorion (Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance). Vernon Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ are neither abnormal nor gigantic. Their times were monstrous, not they. They were not, that is clear, at variance with the moral atmosphere which surrounded them; and they were the direct result of the social and political condition.

      This may seem no answer; for although we know the causes of monster births, they are monstrous none the less. What we mean is not that the existence of men capable of committing such actions was normal; we mean that the men who committed them, the conditions being what they were, were not necessarily men of exceptional character. The level of immorality was so high that a man need be no giant to reach up into the very seventh heaven of iniquity. When to massacre at a banquet a number of enemies enticed by overtures of peace was considered in Cæsar Borgia merely a rather audacious and not very holy action, indicative of very brilliant powers of diplomacy, then Cæsar Borgia required, to commit such an action, little more than a brilliant diplomatic endowment, unhampered by scruples and timidity; when a brave, and gracious prince like Gianpaolo Baglioni could murder his kinsmen and commit incest with his sister without being considered less gracious and magnanimous, then Gianpaolo Baglioni might indeed be but an Indifferent villain; when treachery, lust, and bloodshed, although objected to in theory, were condoned In practice, and were regarded as venial sins, those who indulged in them might be in fact scarcely more than venial sinners. In short, where a fiendish action might be committed without the per- petrator being considered a fiend, there was no need of his being one. And, indeed, the great villains of the Renaissance never take up the attitude of fiends; one or two, like certain Visconti or Aragonese, were madmen, but the others were more or less normal human beings. There was no barrier between them and evil; they slipped into it, remained in it, became accustomed to it; but a vicious determination to be wicked, a feeling of the fiend within one, like that of Shakespeare's Richard, or a gradual, conscious irresistible absorption into recognized iniquity like Macbeth's, there was not. The mere sense of absolute power and impunity, together with the complete silence of the conscience of the public at large, can make a man do strange things. If Cæsar Borgia be free to practise his archery upon hares and deer, why should he not practise it upon these prisoners? Who will blame him? Who can prevent him? If he had for his mistress every woman he might single out from among his captives, why not his sister? If he have the force to carry out a plan, why should a man stand in his way? The complete facility in the commission of all actions quickly brings such a man to the limits of the legitimate: there is no universal cry to tell him where those limits are, no universal arm to pull him back. He pooh-poohs, pushes them a little further, and does the iniquity. Nothing prevents his gratifying his ambition, his avarice, and his lust, so he gratifies them. Soon, seeking for further gratification, he has to cut new paths in villainy: he has not been restrained by man, who is silent; he is soon restrained no longer by nature, whose only voice is in man's conscience. Pleasure in wanton cruelty takes the same course: he prefers to throw javelins at men and women to throwing javelins at bulls or bears, even as he prefers throwing javelins at bulls or bears rather than at targets; the excitement is greater; the instinct is that of the soldiers of Spain and of France, who invariably preferred shooting at a valuable fresco like Sodoma's Christ, at Siena, or Lo Spagna's Madonna, at Spoleto, to practising against a mere worthless piece of wood. Such a man as Cæsar Borgia is the nec plus ultra of a Renaissance villain; he takes, as all do not, absolute pleasure in evil as such. Yet Cæsar Borgia is not a fiend nor a maniac. He can restrain himself whenever circumstances or policy require it; he can be a wise administrator, a just judge. His portraits show no degraded criminal; he is, indeed, a criminal in action, but not necessarily a criminal in constitution, this fiendish man who did not seem a fiend to Machiavel. We are astonished at the strange anomaly in the tastes and deeds of these Renaissance villains; we are amazed before their portraits. These men, who, in the frightful light of their own misdeeds, appear to us as complete demons or complete madmen, have yet much that is amiable and much that is sane; they stickle at no abominable lust, yet they are no bestial sybarites; they are brave, sober, frugal, enduring like any puritan; they are treacherous, rapacious, cruel, utterly indifferent to the sufferings of their enemies, yet they are gentle in manner, passionately fond of letters and art, superb in their works of public utility, and not incapable of genuinely admiring men of pure life like Bernardino or Savonarola: they are often, strange to say, like the frightful Baglionis of Perugia, passionately admired and loved by their countrymen. The bodily portraits of these men, painted by the sternly realistic art of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, are even more confusing to our ideas than their moral portraits drawn by historians and chroniclers. Cæsar Borgia, with his long fine features and noble head, is a gracious and refined prince; there is, perhaps, a certain duplicity in the well-cut lips; the beard, worn full and peaked in Spanish fashion, forms a sort of mask to the lower part of the face, but what we see is noble and intellectual. Sigismondo Malatesta has on his medals a head whose scowl has afforded opportunity for various fine descriptions of a blood maniac; but the head, thus found so expressive, of this monster, is infinitely more human than the head on the medals of Lionello d'Este, one of the most mild and cultivated of the decently behaved Ferrarese princes. The very flower of precocious iniquity, the young Baglionis, Vitellis, and Orsinis, grouped round Signorelli's preaching Antichrist at Orvieto, are, in their gallantly trimmed jerkins and jewelled caps, the veriest assemblage of harmless young dandies, pretty and insipid; we can scarcely believe that these mild beardless striplings, tight-waisted and well-curled like girls of sixteen, are the terrible Umbrian brigand condottieri—Gianpaolos, Simonettos, Vitellozzos, and Astorres—whose abominable deeds fill the pages of the chronicles of Matarazzo, of Frolliere, of Monaldeschi. Nowhere among the portraits of Renaissance monsters do we meet with anything like those Roman emperors, whose frightful effigies, tumid, toad-like Vitelliuses or rage-convulsed Caracallas, fill all our museums in marble or bronze or loathsome purple porphyry; such types as these are as foreign to the reality of the Italian Renaissance as are the Brachianos and Lussuriosos, the Pieros and Corombonas, to the Italian fiction of the sixteenth century.

      Nor must such anomalies between the type of the men and their deeds, between their abominable crimes and their high qualities, be merely made a subject for grandiloquent disquisition. The man of the Renaissance, as we have said, had no need to be a monster to do monstrous things; a crime did not necessitate such a moral rebellion as requires complete unity of nature, unmixed wickedness; it did not precipitate 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; grave and gracious! СКАЧАТЬ