A manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy, which
was copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome, and contains
a detailed account of the horrors which ended in the extinction of one
of the noblest and richest families of that city during the
Pontificate of Clement VIII, in the year 1599. The story is, that an
old man having spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, conceived
at length an implacable hatred towards his children; which showed
itself towards one daughter under the form of an incestuous passion,
aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty and violence. This
daughter, after long and vain attempts to escape from what she
considered a perpetual contamination both of body and mind, at length
plotted with her mother-in-law and brother to murder their common
tyrant. The young maiden, who was urged to this tremendous deed by an
impulse which overpowered its horror, was evidently a most gentle and
amiable being, a creature formed to adorn and be admired, and thus
violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance
and opinion. The deed was quickly discovered, and, in spite of the
most earnest prayers made to the Pope by the highest persons in Rome,
the criminals were put to death. The old man had during his life
repeatedly bought his pardon from the Pope for capital crimes of the
most enormous and unspeakable kind, at the price of a hundred thousand
crowns; the death therefore of his victims can scarcely be accounted
for by the love of justice. The Pope, among other motives for
severity, probably felt that whoever killed the Count Cenci deprived
his treasury of a certain and copious source of revenue. (The Papal
Government formerly took the most extraordinary precautions against
the publicity of facts which offer so tragical a demonstration of its
own wickedness and weakness; so that the communication of the
manuscript had become, until very lately, a matter of some
difficulty.) Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader all
the feelings of those who once acted it, their hopes and fears, their
confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions, and
opinions, acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one
tremendous end, would be as a light to make apparent some of the most
dark and secret caverns of the human heart.
On my arrival at Rome I found that the story of the Cenci was a
subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a
deep and breathless interest; and that the feelings of the company
never failed to incline to a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a
passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her,
who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust. All ranks of
people knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the
overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of exciting in
the human heart. I had a copy of Guido's picture of Beatrice which is
preserved in the Colonna Palace, and my servant instantly recognized
it as the portrait of La Cenci.
This national and universal interest which the story produces and has
produced for two centuries and among all ranks of people in a great
City, where the imagination is kept for ever active and awake, first
suggested to me the conception of its fitness for a dramatic purpose.
In fact it is a tragedy which has already received, from its capacity
of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men, approbation and
success. Nothing remained as I imagined, but to clothe it to the
apprehensions of my countrymen in such language and action as would
bring it home to their hearts. The deepest and the sublimest tragic
compositions, King Lear and the two plays in which the tale of Oedipus
is told, were stories which already existed in tradition, as matters
of popular belief and interest, before Shakspeare and Sophocles made
them familiar to the sympathy of all succeeding generations of
mankind.
This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous:
anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be
insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase
the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the
pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these
tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the
contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring. There
must also be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to
what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral purpose
aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the
human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of
itself; in proportion to the possession of which knowledge, every
human being is wise, just, sincere, tolerant and kind. If dogmas can
do more, it is well: but a drama is no fit place for the enforcement
of them. Undoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of
another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is
kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from
his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement,
are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she
would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a
tragic character: the few whom such an exhibition would have
interested, could never have been sufficiently interested for a
dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their interest
among the mass who surround them. It is in the restless and
anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of
Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is
in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her
wrongs and their revenge, that the dramatic character of what she did
and suffered, consists.
I have endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the characters
as they probably were, and have sought to avoid the error of making
them actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong, false or true:
thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of the sixteenth
century into cold impersonations of my own mind. They are represented
as Catholics, and as Catholics deeply tinged with religion. To a
Protestant apprehension there will appear something unnatural in the
earnest and perpetual sentiment of the relations between God and men
which pervade the tragedy of the Cenci. It will especially be startled
at the combination of an undoubting persuasion of the truth of the
popular religion with a cool and determined perseverance in enormous
guilt. But religion in Italy is not, as in Protestant countries, a
cloak to be worn on particular days; or a passport which those who do
not wish to be railed at carry with them to exhibit; or a gloomy
passion for penetrating the impenetrable mysteries of our being, which
terrifies its possessor at the darkness of the abyss to the brink of
which it has conducted him. Religion coexists, as it were, in the mind
of an Italian Catholic, with a faith in that of which all men have the
most certain knowledge. It is interwoven with the whole fabric of
life. It is adoration, faith, submission, penitence, blind admiration;
not a rule for moral conduct. It has no necessary connection with any
one virtue. The most atrocious villain may be rigidly devout, and
without any shock to established faith, confess himself to be so.
Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is
according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a
persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check. Cenci himself built a
chapel in the court of his Palace, and dedicated it to St. Thomas the
Apostle, and established masses for the peace of his soul. Thus in the
first scene of the fourth act Lucretia's design in exposing herself to
the consequences of an expostulation with Cenci after having
administered the opiate, was to induce him by a feigned tale to
confess himself before death; this being esteemed by Catholics as
essential to salvation; and she only relinquishes her purpose when she
perceives that her perseverance would expose Beatrice to new outrages.
I have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction
of what is commonly called mere poetry, and I imagine there will
scarcely be found a detached simile or a single isolated description,
unless Beatrice's description of the chasm appointed for her father's
murder should be judged to be of that nature. (An idea in this speech
was suggested by a most sublime passage in "El Purgaterio de San
Patricio" of Calderon; the only plagiarism which I have intentionally
committed in the whole piece.)
In a dramatic composition the imagery and the passion should
interpenetrate one another, the former being reserved simply for the
full development and illustration of the latter. Imagination is as the
immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal
passion. It is thus that the most remote and the most familiar imagery
may alike be fit for dramatic purposes when employed in the
illustration of strong feeling, which raises what is low, and levels
to the apprehension that which is lofty, casting over all the shadow
of its own greatness. In other respects, I have written more
carelessly; that is, without an over-fastidious and learned choice of
words. In this respect I entirely agree with those modern critics who
assert that in order to move men to true sympathy we must use the
familiar language of men, and that our great ancestors the ancient
English poets are the writers, a study of whom might incite us to do
that for our own age which they have done for theirs. But it must be
the real language of men in general and not that of any particular
class to whose society the writer happens to belong. So much for what
I have attempted; I need not be assured that success is a very
different matter; particularly for one whose attention has but newly
been awakened to the study of dramatic literature.
I endeavoured whilst at Rome to observe such monuments of this story
as might be accessible to a stranger. The portrait of Beatrice at the
Colonna Palace is admirable as a work of art: it was taken by Guido
during her confinement in prison. But it is most interesting as a just
representation of one of the loveliest specimens of the workmanship of
Nature. There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features: she
seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed
is lightened by the patience of gentleness. Her head is bound with
folds of white drapery from which the yellow strings of her golden
hair escape, and fall about her neck. The moulding of her face is
exquisitely delicate; the eyebrows are distinct and arched: the lips
have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which
suffering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely
could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we
are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping
and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene. In the whole mien
there is a simplicity and dignity which, united with her exquisite
loveliness and deep sorrow, are inexpressibly pathetic. Beatrice Cenci
appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and
gentleness dwell together without destroying one another: her nature
was simple and profound. The crimes and miseries in which she was an
actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which
circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the
world.
The Cenci Palace is of great extent; and though in part modernized,
there yet remains a vast and gloomy pile of feudal architecture in the
same state as during the dreadful scenes which are the subject of this
tragedy. The Palace is situated in an obscure corner of Rome, near the
quarter of the Jews, and from the upper windows you see the immense
ruins of Mount Palatine half hidden under their profuse overgrowth of
trees. There is a court in one part of the Palace (perhaps that in
which Cenci built the Chapel to St. Thomas), supported by granite
columns and adorned with antique friezes of fine workmanship, and
built up, according to the ancient Italian fashion, with balcony over
balcony of open-work. One of the gates of the Palace formed of immense
stones and leading through a passage, dark and lofty and opening into
gloomy subterranean chambers, struck me particularly.
Of the Castle of Petrella, I could obtain no further information than
that which is to be found in the manuscript.
