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

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Название Euphorion (Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance)
Автор произведения Vernon Lee
Жанр Документальная литература
Серия
Издательство Документальная литература
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4064066380472



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"Duchess of Malfy," of the "Revenger's Tragedy," and of "Antonio and Mellida," are mere fantastic horrors, as false as the Counts Udolpho, the Spalatros, the Zastrozzis, and all their grotesquely ghastly pseudo-Italian brethren of eighty years ago.

      A serene and spotless art, a literature often impure but always cheerful, rational, civilized—this is what the Italian Renaissance displays when we seek in it for spirits at all akin to Webster or Lope de Vega, to Holbein or Ribera. To find the tragic we must wait for the Bolognese painters of the seventeenth century, for Metastasio and Alfieri in the eighteenth; it is useless seeking it in this serene and joyous Renaissance. Where, then, in the midst of these spotless virgins, these noble saints, these brilliant pseudo-chivalric joustings and revels, these sweet and sonneteering pastorals, these scurrilous adventures and loose buffooneries; where in this Italian Renaissance are the horrors which fascinated so strangely our English playwrights: the fratricides and incests, the frightful crimes of lust and blood which haunted and half crazed the genius of Tourneur and Marston? Where in this brilliant and courteous and humane and civilized nation are the gigantic villains whose terrible features were drawn with such superb awfulness of touch by Webster and Ford? Where in this Renaissance of Italian literature, so cheerful and light of conscience, is the foul and savage Renaissance of English tragedy? Does the art of Italy tell an impossible, universal lie? or is the art of England the victim of an impossible, universal hallucination?

      Neither; for art can neither tell lies nor be the victim of hallucination. The horror exists, and the light-heartedness exists; the unhealthiness and the healthiness. For as, in that weird story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the daughter of the Paduan wizard is nurtured on the sap and fruit and the emanations of poisonous plants, till they become her natural sustenance, and she thrives and is strong and lovely; while the youth, bred in the ordinary pure air and nourished on ordinary wholesome food, faints and staggers as soon as he breathes the fatal odours of the poison garden, and sinks down convulsed and crazed at the first touch of his mistress' blooming but death-breathing lips; so also the Italians, steeped in the sin of their country, seeing it daily and hourly, remained intellectually healthy