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

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СКАЧАТЬ frightful distinctness, in the very capital of Christ's vicar on earth. This blundering mystery-play of the French troopers is the earliest imaginative fruit of that first terrified and fascinated glimpse of the men of the barbarous North at the strange Italy of the Renaissance; it is the first manifestation of that strong tragic impulse due to the sudden sight, by rude and imaginative young nations, of the splendid and triumphant wickedness of Italy.

      The French saw, wondered, shuddered, and played upon their camp stage the tragedy of the Borgias. But the French remained in Italy, became familiar with its ways, and soon merely shrugged their shoulders and smiled where they had once stared in horror. They served under the flags of Sforzas, Borgias, Baglionis, and Vitellis, by the side of the bravos of Naples and Umbria; they saw their princes wed the daughters of evil-famed Italian sovereigns, and their princes' children, their own Valois and Guises, develope into puny, ambiguous, and ominous Medicis and Gonzagas, surrounded by Italian minions and poison distillers, and buffoons and money- lenders. The French of the sixteenth century, during their long Neapolitan and Lombard wars and negotiations, and time to learn all that Italy could teach; to become refined, subtle, indifferent, and cynical: bastard Italians, with the bastard Italian art of Goujon and Philibert Delorme, and the bastard Italian poetry of Du Bellay and Ronsard. The French of the sixteenth century therefore translated Machiavel and Ariosto and Bandello; but they never again attempted such another play as that which they had improvised while listening to the tales of Alexander VI. and Cæsar and Lucrezia, in their camp in the meadows behind Sant' Angelo. The Spaniards then came to Italy, and the Germans: strong mediæval nations, like the French, with the creative power of the Middle Ages still in them, refreshed by the long rest of the dull fifteenth century. But Spaniards and Germans came as mere greedy and besotten and savage mercenaries: the scum of their countries, careless of Italian sights and deeds, thinking only of torturing for hidden treasure, or swilling southern wines; and they returned to Spain and to Germany, to persecutions of Moriscos and plundering of abbeys, as savage and as dull as they had arrived. A smattering of Italian literature, art, and manners was carried back to Spain and Germany by Spanish and German princes and governors, to be transmitted to a few courtiers and humanists; but the imagination of the lower classes of Spain and of Germany, absorbed in the Quixotic Catholicism of Loyola and the biblical contemplation of Luther, never came into fertilizing contact with the decaying Italy of the Renaissance. The mystery-play of the soldiers of Charles VIII. seemed destined to remain an isolated and abortive attempt. But it was not so. The invasions had exhausted themselves; the political organization of Italy was definitely broken up; its material wealth was exhausted; the French, Germans, and Spaniards had come and gone, and returned and gone again; they had left nothing to annex or to pillage; when, about the middle of the sixteenth century, the country began to be overrun by a new horde of barbarians: the English. The English came neither as invaders nor as marauders; they were peaceable students and rich noblemen, who, so far from trying to extort money or annex territory, rather profited the ruined Italians by the work which they did and the money which they squandered. Yet these quiet and profitable travellers, before whom the Italians might safely display their remaining wealth, were in reality as covetous of the possessions of Italy and as resolute to return home enriched as any tattered Gascon men- at-arms or gluttonous Swiss or grinding Spaniards. They were, one and all, consciously and unconsciously, dragged to Italy by the irresistible instinct that Italy possessed that which they required; by the greed of intellectual gain. That which they thus instinctively knew that Italy possessed, that which they must obtain, was a mode of thought, a habit of form; philosophy, art, civilization: all the materials for intellectual manipulation. For, in the sixteenth century, on awakening from its long evil sleep, haunted by the nightmare of civil war, of the fifteenth century, the English mind had started up in the vigour of well- nigh mature youth, fed up and rested by the long inactivity in which it had slept through its period of assimilation and growth. It had awakened at the first touch of foreign influence, and had grown with every fresh contact with the outer world: with the first glance at Plato and Xenophon suddenly opened by Erasmus and Colet, at the Bible suddenly opened by Cranmer; it had grown with its sob of indignation at the sight of the burning faggots surrounding the martyrs, with its joyous heart-throbs at the sight of the seas and islands of the New World; it had grown with the sudden passionate strain of every nerve and every muscle when the galleys of Philip had been sighted in the Channel. And when it had paused, taken breath, and looked calmly around it, after the tumult of all these sights and sounds and actions, the English mind, in the time of Elizabeth, had found itself of a sudden full-grown and blossomed out into superb manhood, with burning activities and indefatigable powers. But it had found itself without materials for work. Of the scholastic philosophy and the chivalric poetry of the Middle Ages there remained but little that could be utilized: the few bungled formulas, the few half-obsolete rhymes still remaining, were as unintelligible, in their spirit of feudalism and monasticism and mysticism, as were the Angevin English and the monkish Latin in which they were written to these men of the sixteenth century. All the intellectual wealth of England remained to be created; but it could not be created out of nothing. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon could not be produced out of the half-effete and scattered fragments of Chaucer, of Scotus, and of Wycliffe. The materials on which English genius was to work must be sought abroad, and abroad they could be found only in Italy. For in the demolished Italy of the sixteenth century lay the whole intellectual wealth of the world: the great legacy of Antiquity, the great work of the Middle Ages had been stored up, and had been increased threefold, and sorted and classified by the Renaissance; and now that the national edifice had been dismantled and dilapidated, and the national activity was languishing, it all lay in confusion, awaiting only the hand of those who would carry it away and use it once more. To Italy therefore Englishmen of thought and fancy were dragged by an impulse of adventure and greed as irresistible as that which dragged to Antwerp and the Hanse ports, to India and America, the seekers for gold and for soil. To Italy they flocked and through Italy they rambled, prying greedily into each cranny and mound of the half-broken civilization, upturning with avid curiosity all the rubbish and filth; seeking with aching eyes and itching fingers for the precious fragments of intellectual splendour; lingering with fascinated glance over the broken remnants and deep, mysterious gulfs of a crumbling and devastated civilization. And then, impatient of their intoxicating and tantalizing search, suddenly grown desperate, they clutched and stored away everything, and returned home tattered, soiled, bedecked with gold and with tinsel, laden with an immense uncouth burden of jewels, and broken wealth, and refuse and ordure, with pseudo-antique philosophy, with half-mediæval Dantesque and Petrarchesque poetry, with Renaissance science, with humanistic pedantry and obscenity, with euphuistic conceits and casuistic quibble, with art, politics, metaphysics—civilization embedded in all manner of rubbish and abomination, soiled with all manner of ominous stains. All this did they carry home and throw helter-skelter into the new-kindled fire of English intellectual life, mingling with it many a humble-seeming Northern alloy; cleaning and compounding, casting into shapes, mediæval and English, this strange Corinthian brass made of all these heterogeneous remnants, classical, Italian, Saxon, and Christian. A strange Corinthian brass indeed; and as various in tint, in weight, and in tone, in manifold varieties of mixture, as were the moulds into which it was cast: the white and delicate silver settling down in the gracious poetic moulds of Sidney and Spenser; the glittering gold, which can buy and increase, in the splendid, heavy mould of Bacon's prose; and the copper, the iron, the silver and gold in wondrous mixture, with wondrous iridescences of colour and wondrous scale of tone, all poured into the manifold moulds, fantastic and beautiful and grand, of Shakespeare. And as long as all this dross and ore and filth brought from the ruins of Italy was thus mingling in the heat of English genius, while it was yet but imperfectly fused, while already its purest and best compounded portion was being poured in Shakespeare's mould, and when already there remained only a seething residue; as long as there remained aught of the glowing fire and the molten mass, some of it all, of the pure metal bubbling up, of the scum frothing round, nay, of the very used-up dregs, was ever and anon being ladled out—gold, dross, filth, all indiscriminately—and cast into shapes severe, graceful, or uncouth. And this somewhat, thus pilfered from what was to make, or was making, or had made, the works of Shakespeare; this base and noble, still unfused or already exhausted alloy, became the strange heterogeneous works of the Elizabethan dramatists: of Webster, of Ford, of Tourneur, of Ben Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of their minor brethren; from the splendid ore of Marlowe, only СКАЧАТЬ