The Jewel Merchants | Page 2

that The Jewel Merchants, in
addition to its "literary" deficiencies, lacks moral fervor. It will, I trust,
corrupt no reader irretrievably, to untraversable leagues beyond the last
hope of redemption: but, even so, it is a frankly unethical performance.
You must accept this resuscitated trio, if at all, very much as they
actually went about Tuscany, in long ago discarded young flesh, when

the one trait everywhere common to their milieu was the absence of
any moral excitement over such-and-such an action's being or not being
"wicked." This phenomenon of Renaissance life, as lived in Italy in
particular, has elsewhere been discussed time and again, and I lack here
the space, and the desire, either to explain or to apologize for the era's
delinquencies. I would merely indicate that this point of conduct is the
fulcrum of The Jewel Merchants.
The play presents three persons, to any one of whom the committing of
murder or theft or adultery or any other suchlike interdicted feat, is just
the risking of the penalty provided against the breaking of that especial
law if you have the vile luck to be caught at it: and this to them is all
that "wickedness" can mean. We nowadays are encouraged to think
differently: but such dear privileges do not entitle us to ignore the truth
that had any of these three advanced a dissenting code of conduct, it
would, in the time and locality, have been in radical irreverence of the
best-thought-of tenets. There was no generally recognized criminality
in crime, but only a perceptible risk. So must this trio thriftily adhere to
the accepted customs of their era, and regard an infraction of the
Decalogue (for an instance) very much as we today look on a violation
of our prohibition enactments.
In fact, we have accorded to the Eighteenth Amendment almost exactly
the status then reserved for Omnipotence. You found yourself
confronted by occasionally enforced if obviously unreasonable supernal
statutory decrees, which every one broke now and then as a matter of
convenience: and every now and then, also, somebody was caught and
punished, either in this world or in the next, without his ill-fortune's
involving any disgrace or particular reprehension. As has been finely
said, righteousness and sinfulness were for the while "in strange and
dreadful peace with each other. The wicked man did not dislike virtue,
nor the good man vice: the villain could admire a saint, and the saint
could excuse a villain, in things which we often shrink from repeating,
and sometimes recoil from believing."
Such was the sixteenth-century Tuscan view of "wickedness." I have
endeavored to reproduce it without comment.
So much of ink and paper and typography may be needed, I fear, to
remind you, in a more exhortatory civilization, that Graciosa is really,
by all the standards of her day, a well reared girl. To the prostitution of

her body, whether with or without the assistance of an ecclesiastically
acquired husband, she looks forward as unconcernedly as you must by
ordinary glance out of your front window, to face a vista so familiar
that the discovery of any change therein would be troubling.
Meanwhile she wishes this sorrow-bringing Eglamore assassinated, as
the obvious, the most convenient, and indeed the only way of getting
rid of him: and toward the end of the play, alike for her and Guido, the
presence of a corpse in her garden is merely an inconvenience without
any touch of the gruesome. Precautions have, of course, to be taken to
meet the emergency which has arisen: but in the dead body of a man
per se, the lovers can detect nothing more appalling, or more to be
shrunk from, than would be apparent if the lifeless object in the
walkway were a dead flower. The thing ought to be removed, if only in
the interest of tidiness, but there is no call to make a pother over it.
As for our Guido, he is best kept conformable to modern tastes, I
suspect, by nobody's prying too closely into the earlier relations
between the Duke and his handsome minion. The insistently curious
may resort to history to learn at what price the favors of Duke
Alessandro were secured and retained: it is no part of the play.
Above all, though, I must remind you that the Duke is unspurred by
malevolence. A twinge of jealousy there may be, just at first, to find his
pampered Eglamore so far advanced in the good graces of this pretty
girl, but that is hardly important. Thereafter the Duke is breaking no
law, for the large reason that his preference in any matter is the only
law thus far divulged to him. As concerns the man and the girl he
discovers on this hill-top, they, in common with all else in