Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/129

Rh afforded by the lives of the cardinals and the wit of the capitoli, no ground remains for doubting that they hold the mirror up to society as it then was. If they have any other than a humorous or romantic interest, it is the interest of the tragedy of physical horror, as in our English Titus Andronicus. Of course there are many stories to which this broad and rapid generalization would not apply,—tales wholly innocent, or harmless at least, full of movement, fancy, and action, graceful and charming with the art of story-telling at its Italian best; but, as a whole, they must be described as exhibiting a masque of sin. They are of the town in taste and temper; the corruption they set forth is not of the court or the curia only, but of the citizens; the laugh with which they conclude is an echo from the lips of the trades-people. Their principal value now is historic; they are the clear record of that social decay which condemned Italy to centuries of degradation. To ask why they did not generate the novel or suggest the drama is to state a literary puzzle; but the hundred considerations which have been put forth to explain the abortive issue of the miracle plays apply here also. It would