XII. PASTORAL AND DIDACTIC POETRY…

XII. PASTORAL AND DIDACTIC POETRY

The Idyllic Ideal--Golden Age--Arcadia--Sannazzaro--His Life--The Art of the Arcadia--Picture-painting--Pontano's Poetry--The Neapolitan Genius--Baiae and Eridanus--Eclogues--The Play of Cefalo--Castiglione's Tirsi--Rustic Romances--Molza's Biography--The Ninfa Tiberina--Progress of Didactic Poetry--Rucellai's Api--Alamanni's Coltivazione--His Life--His Satires--Pastoral Dramatic Poetry--The Aminta--The Pastor Fido--Climax of Renaissance Art.

The transition from the middle ages to the Renaissance was marked by the formation of a new ideal, which in no slight measure determined the type of Italian literature. The faiths and aspirations of Catholicism, whereof the Divine Comedy remains the monument in art, began to lose their hold on the imagination. The world beyond the grave grew dim to mental vision, in proportion as this world, through humanism rediscovered, claimed daily more attention. Poliziano's contemporaries were as far removed from Dante's apprehension of a future life as modern Evangelicals from Bunyan's vivid sense of sin and salvation. This parallel, though it may seem strained, is close enough to be serviceable. As the need of conversion is taken for granted among Protestants, so the other world was then assumed to be real. Yet neither the expectation of heavenly bliss nor the fear of purgatorial pain was felt with that intense sincerity which inspired Dante's cantos and Orcagna's frescoes. On both emotions the new culture, appearing at one moment as a solvent through philosophical speculation, at another as a corrosive in the skeptical and critical activity it stimulated, was acting with destructive energy. The present offered a distracting tumult of antagonistic passions, harmonized by no great hope. The future, to those inexperienced pioneers of modern thought, was dim, although the haze, through which the vision came to them, seemed golden. Thus it happened that the sensibilities of men athirst for some consoling fancy, took refuge in the dream of a past happy age. Virgil's description of Saturn's reign:

Au reus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat, Necdum etiam audierant inflari classica, necdum Impositos duris crepitare incudibus enses:

fascinated their imagination, and they amused themselves with the fiction of a primal state of innocence. Hesiod and the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the Idyls of Theocritus and Virgil's Eclogues, legends of early Greek civility, and romances of late Greek literature contributed their several elements to this conception of a pastoral ideal. It blent with Biblical reminiscences of Eden, with medieval stories of the Earthly Paradise. It helped that transfusion of Christian fancy into classic shape, for which the age was always striving.[246] On one side the ideal was purely literary, reflecting the artistic instincts of a people enthusiastic for form, and affording scope for their imitative activity. But on the other side it corresponded to a deep and genuine Italian feeling. That sympathy with rustic life, that love of nature humanized by industry, that delight in the villa, the garden, the vineyard, and the grove, which modern Italians inherited from their Roman ancestors, gave reality to what might otherwise have been but artificial. Vespasiano's anecdote of Cosimo de' Medici pruning his own fruit-trees; Ficino's description of the village feasts at Montevecchio; Flamminio's picture of his Latin farm; Alberti's tenderness in gazing at the autumn fields--all these have the ring of genuine emotion. For men who felt thus, the Age of Gold was no mere fiction, and Arcady a land of possibilities.

[Footnote 246: See above, Part i. p. 170, for the Golden Age in the Quadriregio.]

What has been well called la volutta idillica--the sensuous sensibility to beauty, finding fit expression in the Idyl--formed a marked characteristic of Renaissance art and literature. Boccaccio developed this idyllic motive in all his works which dealt with the origins of society. Poliziano and Lorenzo devoted their best poetry to the praise of rural bliss, the happiness of shepherd folk anterior to life in cities. The same theme recurs in the Latin poems of the humanists, from the sonorous hexameters of the Rusticus down to the delicate hendecasyllables of the later Lombard school. It pervades the elegy, the ode, the sonnet, and takes to itself the chiefest honors of the drama. The vision of a Golden Age idealized man's actual enjoyment of the country, and hallowed, as with inexplicable pathos, the details of ordinary rustic life. Weary with Courts and worldly pleasures, in moments of revolt against the passions and ambitions that wasted their best energies, the poets of that century, who were nearly always also men of state and public office, sighed for the good old times, when honor was an unknown name, and truth was spoken, and love sincere, and steel lay hidden in the earth, and ships sailed not the sea, and old age led the way to death unterrified by coming doom. As time advanced, their ideal took form and substance. There rose into existence, for the rhymsters to wander in, and for the readers of romance to dream about, a region called Arcadia, where all that was imagined of the Golden Age was found in combination with refined society and manners proper to the civil state. A literary Eldorado had been discovered, which was destined to attract explorers through the next three centuries. Arcadia became the wonder-world of noble youths and maidens, at Madrid no less than at Ferrara, in Elizabeth's London and in Marie Antoinette's Versailles. After engaging the genius of Tasso and Guarini, Spenser and Sidney, it degenerated into quaint conventionality. Companions of Turenne and Marlborough told tales of pastoral love to maids of honor near the throne. Frederick's and Maria Theresa's courtiers simpered and sighed like Dresden-china swains and shepherdesses. Crooked sticks with ribbons at the top were a fashionable appendage to red-heeled shoes and powdered perukes. Few phenomena in history are more curious than the prolonged prosperity and widespread fascination of this Arcadian romance.

To Sannazzaro belongs the glory of having first explored Arcadia, mapped out its borders, and called it after his own name. He is the Columbus of this visionary hemisphere. Jacopo Sannazzaro has more than once above been mentioned in the chapters devoted to Latin poetry. But the events of his life have not yet been touched upon.[247] His ancestors claimed to have been originally Spaniards, settled in a village of Pavia called S. Nazzaro, whence they took their name. The poet's immediate forefather was said to have followed Charles of Durazzo in 1380 to the south of Italy, where he received fiefs and lands in the Basilicata. Jacopo was born at Naples in 1458, and was brought up in his boyhood by his mother at S. Cipriano.[248] He studied at Naples under the grammarian Junianus Maius,[249] and made such rapid progress in both Greek and Latin scholarship as soon to be found worthy of a place in Pontano's Academy. In that society he assumed the pseudonym of Actius Sincerus. The friendship between Pontano and Sannazzaro lasted without interruption till the former's death in 1503. Their Latin poems abound in passages which testify to a strong mutual regard, and the life-size effigies of both may still be seen together in the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples.[250] Distinction in scholarship was, after the days of Alfonso the Magnanimous, a sure title to consideration at the Neapolitan Court. Sannazzaro attached himself to the person of Frederick, the second son of Ferdinand I.; and when this prince succeeded to the throne, he conferred upon the poet a pension of 600 ducats and the pleasant villa of Mergoglino between the city and Posillipo.[251] This recompense for past service was considerably below the poet's expectations and deserts; nor did he receive any post of state importance. Yet Sannazzaro remained faithful through his lifetime to the Aragonese dynasty. He attended the princes on their campaigns; espoused their quarrels in his fierce and potent series of epigrams against the Rovere and Borgia Pontiffs; and when Frederick retired to France in 1501, he journeyed into exile with his royal master, only returning to Naples after the ex-king's death. There Sannazzaro continued to reside until his own death in 1530. His later years were imbittered by the destruction of his Villa Mergellina during the occupation of Naples by the imperial troops under the Prince of Orange. But with the exception of this misfortune, he appears to have passed a quiet and honorable old age, devoting himself to piety, contributing to charitable works and church-building, and employing his leisure in study and the society of a beloved lady, Cassandra Marchesa.

[Footnote 247: The chief sources of Sannazzaro's biography are a section of his Arcadia (Prosa, vii.), and his Latin poems. The Sannazzari of Pavia had the honor of mention in Dante's Convito. Among the poet's Latin odes are several addressed to the patron saint of his race. See Sannazarii op. omn. Lat. scripta (Aldus, 1535), pp. 16, 53, 56, 59.]

[Footnote 248: Elegy, "Quod pueritiam egerit in Picentinis," op. cit. p. 27.]

[Footnote 249: Elegy, "Ad Junianum Maium Praeceptorem," op. cit. p. 20.]

[Footnote 250: I may refer in particular to Sannazzaro's beautiful elegy "De Studiis suis et Libris Joviani Pontani" among his Latin poems, op. cit. p. 10. For their terra-cotta portraits, see above Revival of Learning, p. 365.]

[Footnote 251: Sannazzaro's two odes on "Villa Mergellina" and "Fons Mergellines" (Op. cit. pp. 31, 53), are among his purest and most charming Latin compositions.]

In his early youth Sannazzaro formed a romantic attachment for a girl of noble birth, called Carmosina Bonifacia. This love made him first a poet; and the majority of his Italian verses may be referred to its influence. They consist of sonnets and canzoni, modeled upon Petrarch, but marked by independence of treatment, and spontaneity of feeling. The puristic revival had not yet set in, and Sannazzaro's style shows no servile imitation of his model. It may not be out of place to give a specimen in translation of these early Rime. I have chosen a sonnet upon jealousy, which La Casa afterwards found worthy of rehandling:

Horrible curb of lovers, Jealousy, That with one force doth check and sway my will; Sister of loathed and impious Death, that still With thy grim face troublest the tranquil sky; Thou snake concealed in laughing flowers which lie Rocked on earth's lap; thou that my hope dost kill; Amid fair fortunes thou malignant ill; Venom mid viands which men taste and die! From what infernal valley didst thou soar, O ruthless monster, plague of mortals, thou That darkenest all my days with misery o'er? Hence, double not these griefs that cloud my brow! Accursed fear, why camest thou? Was more Needed than Love's keen shafts to make me bow?

About the reality of Sannazzaro's passion for Carmosina there can be no doubt. The most directly powerful passages in the Arcadia are those in which he refers to it.[252] His southern temperament exposed him to the fiercest pangs of jealousy; and when he found that love disturbed his rest and preyed upon his health he resolved to seek relief in travel. For this purpose he went to France; but he could not long endure the exile from his native country; and on his return he found his Carmosina dead. The elegies in which he recorded his grief, are not the least poetical of his compositions both in Latin and Italian.[253] After establishing himself once more at Naples, Sannazzaro began the composition of the Eclogae Piscatoriae, in which he has been said to have brought the pastoral Muses down to the sea shore. The novelty of these poems secured for them no slight celebrity. Nor are they without real artistic merit. The charm of the sea is nowhere felt more vividly than on the bay of Naples, and nowhere else are the habits of a fishing population more picturesque. Nereids and Sirens, Proteus and Nisa, Cymothoe and Triton, are not out of place in modern verses, which can commemorate Naples, Ischia and Procida, under the titles of Parthenope, Inarime and Prochyte. Happy indeed is the poet, if he must needs write Latin elegies, whose home suggests such harmonies and cadences, for whom Baiae and Cumae and the Lucrine Lake, Puteoli and Capreae and Stabiae, are household words, and who looks from his study windows daily on scenes which realize the mythology still lingering in names and memories around them by beauty ever-present, inexpressible.

[Footnote 252: She is described in Prosa iv., and frequently mentioned under the name of Arancio or Amaranta.]

[Footnote 253: See the Epitaph "Hic Amarantha jacet," the last Eclogue of Arcadia, and the Latin eclogue "Mirabar vicina Mycon," in which Carmosina is celebrated under the name of Phyllis. I may here call attention to Pontano's elegy beginning "Harmosyne jacet hic" in the Tumuli, lib. ii. (Joannis Joviani Pontani Amorum Libri, etc., Aldus, 1518, p. 87).]

The second mistress of Sannazzaro's heart was a noble lady, Cassandra Marchesa. He paid his addresses to her more Platonico, and chose her for the object of refined compliments in classical and modern verse. The Latin elegies and epigrams are full of her praises; and one of the Eclogues, Pharmaceutria, is inscribed with her name. It would scarcely have been necessary to mention this courtly attachment, but for the pleasant light it casts upon Sannazzaro's character. The lady whom he had celebrated and defended in his manhood, was the friend of his old age. He is said to have died in her house.

The Arcadia was begun at Nocera in Sannazzaro's youth, continued during his first residence in France, and finished on his return to Naples. So much can be gathered from its personal references. The book blends autobiography and fable in a narrative of very languid interest. The poet's circumstances and emotions in exile are described at one moment in plain language, at another are presented with the indirectness of an allegory. Arcadia in some passages stands for a semi-savage country-district in France; in others it is the dream-world of poetry and pastoral simplicity. But in either case its scenery is drawn from Sannazzaro's own Italian home. The inhabitants are shepherds such as Virgil fancied, with even more of personal refinement. Through their lips the poet tells the tale of his own love, and paints his Neapolitan mistress among the nymphs of Mount Parthenion. Throughout, we note an awkward interminglement of subjective and objective points of view. Realism merges into fancy. Experience of life assumes the garb of myth or legend. Neither as an autobiographical romance nor again as a work of pure invention has the Arcadia surpassing merit. Loose in construction and uncertain in aim, it lacks the clearness and consistency of perfect art. And yet it is a masterpiece; because its author, led by prescient instinct, contrived to make it reflect one of the deepest and most permanent emotions of his time. The whole pastoral ideal--the yearning after a golden age, the beauty and pathos of the country, the felicity of simple folk, the details of rustic life, the charm of woods and gardens, the mythology of Pan and Satyrs, Nymphs and Fauns--all this is expressed in a series of pictures, idyllically graceful, artistically felt. It is not for its story that we read Arcadia, but for the Feast of Pales, the games at Massilia's shrine, the Sacrifice to Pan, Androgeo's tomb, the group of girls a-maying, the carved work of the beechen cup, the passion of Carino, the gardens with their flowers, and the bands of youths and maidens meeting under shadowy trees to dance and play. Pictures like these are presented with a scrupulous and loving sincerity, an anxious accuracy of studied style, which proves how serious was the author. His heart, as an artist, is in the realization of his dream-world; and his touch is firm and dry and delicate as Mantegna's. Indeed, we are constantly reminded of the Mantegnesque manner, and one reference justifies the belief that Sannazzaro strove to reproduce its effect.[254] The sensuousness of the Italian feeling for mere beauty is tempered with reticence and something of the coldness of Greek marbles. In point of diction, Boccaccio has been obviously imitated. But Boccaccio's style is not revived, as Masuccio strove to revive it, with the fire and energy of Southern passion substituted for its Tuscan irony and delicacy. On the contrary, the periods are still more artificial, the turns of phrase more tortured. Sannazzaro writes with difficulty in a somewhat unfamiliar language, rendered all the more stubborn by his endeavors to add classical refinements. Boccaccio's humor is gone; his sensuality is purged by contact with antique examples; the waving groves of the Filocopo are clipped and tutored like box-hedges in an academic garden. If there is less of natural raciness than came unsummoned to Boccaccio's aid, there is more of Virgil and Theocritus than he chose to appropriate. The slow deliberate expansion of each picture, stroke by stroke and touch by touch, reminds us of the quattrocento painters; while the precieusete of the phrasing has affinity to the manner of a late Greek stylist, especially perhaps, though almost certainly unconsciously, to that of Philostratus. This close correspondence of the Arcadia to the main artistic sympathies of the Renaissance, rendered it indescribably popular in its own age, and causes it still to rank as one of the representative masterpieces of the epoch. Through its peculiar blending of classical and modern strains--the feasts of Pales and of Pan taking color from Capo di Monte superstitions; the nymphs of wood and river modeled after girls from Massa and Sorrento; the yellow-haired shepherds of Mount Maenalus singing love-laments for Neapolitan Carmosina--we are enabled more nearly than in almost any other literary essay to appreciate the spirit of the classical revival as it touched Italian art. A little earlier, there was more of spontaneity and naivete. A little later, there was more of conscious erudition and consummate skill. The Arcadia comes midway between the Filocopo and the Pastor Fido.

[Footnote 254: In Prosa xi. he mentions a vase painted by the "Padoano Mantegna, artefice sovra tutti gli altri accorto ed ingegnosissimo."]

It is time to turn from dissertation, and to detach, almost at haphazard, some of those descriptions which render the Arcadia a storehouse of illustrations to the pictures of the fifteenth century. I will first select the frescoes on the front of Pales' chapel, endeavoring so far as possible to reproduce the intricacies and quaint affectations of the style.[255] The constant abuse of epithets, and the structure of the period by means of relatives, pegging its clauses down and keeping them in their places, will be noticed as part of the Boccaccesque tradition. "Intending now to ratify with souls devout the vows which had been made in former times of need, upon the smoking altars, all together in company we went unto the sacred temple, along whose frontal, raised upon a few ascending steps, we found above the doorway painted certain woods and hills of most delightful beauty, full of leafy trees and of a thousand sorts of flowers, among the which were seen many herds that went a-pasture, wending at pleasure through green fields, with peradventure ten dogs to guard them, the footsteps of the which upon the dust were traced most natural to the view. Of the shepherds, some were milking, some shearing wool, others playing on pipes, and there were there a few, who, as it seemed, were singing and endeavoring to keep in tune with these. But that which pleased me to regard with most attention were certain naked Nymphs, the which behind a chestnut bole stayed, as it were, half-hidden, laughing at a ram, who, in his eagerness to gnaw a wreath of oak that hung before his eyes, forgot to feed upon the grass around him. In that while came four Satyrs, with horns upon their heads and goat's feet, stealing through a shrubbery of lentisks, softly, softly, to take the maidens from behind. Whereof when they were ware, they took to flight through the dense grove, shunning nor thorns nor aught else that might annoy them; and of these one, nimbler than the rest, was clinging to a hornbeam's branches, and thence, with a long bough in her hands, defending herself. The others had cast themselves through fright into a river, wherethrough they fled a-swimming; and the clear water hid little or but nothing of their snow-white flesh. But whenas they saw themselves escaped, they sat them down on the further bank, fordone with toil and panting, drying their soaked hair, and thence with word and gesture seemed to mock at those who had not shown the power to capture them. And in one of the sides there was Apollo, with the yellowest hair, leaning upon a wand of wild olive, and watching Admetus' herds beside a river-bed; and thus, intently gazing on two sinewy bulls which jousted with their horns, he was not ware of wily Mercury, who in a shepherd's habit, with a kid-skin girded under his left shoulder, stole the cows away from him. And in that same space stood Battus, the bewrayer of the theft, transformed into a stone, stretching his finger forth in act of one who pointed. A little lower, Mercury was seen again, seated upon a large stone, and playing with swollen cheeks upon a rustic pipe, while his eyes were turned to mark a white calf close beside him, and with most cunning arts he strove to cozen Argus of the many eyes. On the other side, at the foot of an exceeding high oak-tree, was stretched a shepherd asleep among his goats; and a dog stayed near him, smelling at his pouch, which lay beneath his head; and he, forasmuch as the moon gazed at him with glad eyes, methought must be Endymion. Next to him was Paris, who with his sickle had begun to carve Oenone on an elm-tree's bark, and being called to judge between the naked goddesses that stood before him, had not yet been able to complete his work. But what was not less subtle in the thought than pleasant in the seeing was the shrewdness of the wary painter, who, having made Juno and Minerva of such extreme beauty that to surpass them was impossible, and doubting of his power to make Venus so lovely as the tale demanded, had painted her with back turned, covering the defect of art by ingenuity of invention. And many other things right charming and most beautiful to look upon, of the which I now have but a faulty memory, I saw there painted upon divers places." It is clear that Sannazzaro had not read Lessing's Laocoon or noted the distinctions between poetry and painting. Yet in this he was true to the spirit of his age; for actions no less continuous than some of those described by him, may be found represented in the frescoes of Gozzoli or Lippo Lippi.

[Footnote 255: Prosa iii.]

The finished portrait of Sannazzaro's mistress Carmosina shall supply my next question.[256] The exile is listening to shepherds singing, and one of them has mentioned Amaranta. He knows that she is present, and resolves to choose her by her gestures from the rest. "With wary glance, watching now one and now another, I saw among the maidens one who seemed to me the loveliest. Her hair was covered with a very thin veil, beneath which two eyes, lovely and most brilliant, sparkled not otherwise than the clear stars are wont to shine in a serene and limpid sky; and her face, inclining somewhat to the oval more than the round, of fair shape, with pallor that was not unpleasing, but tempered, as it were toward dark complexion turning, and relieved therewith by vermeil and gracious hues, filled with joy of love the eyes that gazed on her. Her lips were of the sort that surpass the morning roses; between the which, each time she spoke or smiled, she showed some portion of her teeth, of such rare and marvelous grace that I could not have compared them to aught else but orient pearls. Thence passing down to her marble and delicate throat, I saw upon that tender bosom the slight and youthful breasts, which, like two rounded apples, thrust her robe of finest texture somewhat forward; and in the midst of them I could discern the fairest little way, exceeding pleasant to the sight, the which, because it ended and escaped the view, was reason why I dwelt thereon with greater force of thought. And she, with most delicate gait and a gentle and aspiring stature, went through the fair fields, with her white hand plucking tender flowers. With the which when she had filled her lap, no sooner had the singing youth within her hearing mentioned Amaranta, than, dropping her hands and gathered robe, and as it were lost to her own recollection, without her knowing what befell, they all slid from her grasp, sowing the earth with peradventure twenty sorts of colors. Which, as though suddenly brought to herself, when she perceived, she blushed not otherwise than sometimes reddens the enchanted moon with rosy aspect, or as, upon the issuing of the sun, the red Aurora shows herself to mortal gaze. Whereupon she, not for any need methinks compelling her thereto, but haply hoping better thus to hide the blushes that came over her, begotten by a woman's modesty, bent toward earth again to pick them up, as though she cared for only that, choosing the white flowers from the crimson and the dark blue from the violet blossoms." Amaranta makes a pretty picture, but one which is too elaborate in detail. Her sisterhood is described with touches more negligent, and therefore the more artful.[257] "Some wore garlands of privet with yellow buds and certain crimson intermingled; others had white lilies and purple mixed with a few most verdant orange leaves between; one went starred with roses, and yon other whitened with jasmines. So that each by herself and altogether were more like to divine spirits than to human creatures. Whereupon many men there present cried with wonder: O blessed the possessor of such beauties!" The young swains are hardly less attractive than their nymphs.[258] "Logisto and Elpino, shepherds, comely of person and in years within the bounds of earliest youth: Elpino guardian of goats, Logisto of the woolly sheep: both with hair yellower than ripe ears of corn; both of Arcadia; both fit alike to sing and to make answer."

[Footnote 256: Prosa iv.]

[Footnote 257: Prosa iv.]

[Footnote 258: Ibid.]

Sannazzaro's touch upon inanimate nature is equally precise. Here is a description of the evening sky.[259] "It was the hour when sunset embroidered all the west with a thousand varieties of clouds; some violet, some darkly blue, and certain crimson; others between yellow and black, and a few so burning with the fire of backward-beaten rays that they seemed as though of polished and finest gold." Here is a garden:[260] "Moved by sympathy for Ergasto, many shepherds had moreover wrought the place about with high hedges, not of thorns or briars, but of junipers, roses and jasmines, and had delved therein with their mattocks a pastoral seat, and at even spaces certain towers of rosemary and myrtles interwoven with the most incomparable art." Here are flowers:[261] "There were lilies, there privets, there violets toned to amorous pallor, and in large abundance the slumberous poppies with their leaning heads, and the ruddy spikes of the immortal amaranth, most comely of coronals mid winter's rudeness."

[Footnote 259: Prosa v.]

[Footnote 260: Prosa x.]

[Footnote 261: Ibid.]

The same research of phrase marks the exhibition of emotion. Carino, the shepherd, tells how, overwhelmed with grief, he lay upon the ground and seemed lost to life:[262] "Came the oxherds, came the herdsmen of the sheep and goats, together with the peasants of the neighboring farms, deeming me distraught, as of a truth indeed I was; and all with deepest pity asked the reason of my woe. Unto whom I made no answer, but, minding my own weeping, thus with lamentable voice exclaimed: You of Arcady shall sing among your mountains of my death! You of Arcady, who only have the art of song, you of my death shall sing amid your mountains!" His complaint extends to a length which defies quotation. But here is an extract from it:[263] "O gods of heaven and earth, and whosoe'er ye are who have regard for wretched lovers, lend, I pray, your ears of pity to my lamentation, and listen to the dolent cries my tortured spirit sendeth forth! O Naiads, dwellers in the running water brooks! O Napean nymphs, most gracious haunters of far places and of liquid fonts, lift up your yellow tresses but a little from the crystal waves, and receive these my last cries before I perish! O you, O fairest Oreads, who naked on the hanging cliffs are wont to go achase, leave now your lofty mountain realm, and in my misery visit me, for I am sure to win your sorrow by what brings my cruel maid delight! Come forth from your trees, O pitying Hamadryads, ye anxious guardians over them, and turn your thoughts a little toward the martyrdom these hands of mine prepare for me! And you, O Dryads, most beauteous damsels of the woods profound, ye who not once but many and many a time have watched our shepherds at the fall of eve in circle dancing neath the shadow of cool walnut trees, with yellowest curls a-ripple down their snow-white necks, cause now I pray, if you are not with my too changeful fortune changed, that mid these shades my death may not be mute, but ever grow from day to day through centuries to come, so that the tale of years life lacks, may go to lengthen out my fame!"

[Footnote 262: Prosa viii.]

[Footnote 263: Ibid.]

For English students the Arcadia has a special interest, since it begot the longer and more ambitious work of Sir Philip Sidney. Hitherto I have spoken only of its prose; but the book blends prose and verse in alternating sections. The verse consists of mingled terza rima, canzoni and sestines. Not less artificial and decidedly less original than the prose, Sannazzaro's lyrics and eclogues do not demand particular attention. He put needless restraint upon himself by affecting the awkwardness of sdrucciolo rhymes[264]; and he lacked the roseate fluency, the winning ease, the unaffected graces of Poliziano. One sestine, sung by himself among the shepherds of Arcady, I have translated, because it paints the actual conditions of life which drove Sannazzaro into his first exile.[265] But the singularly charmless form adopted, which even Petrarch hardly rendered tolerable, seems to check the poet's spontaneity of feeling.

[Footnote 264: Even in this Sidney tried to follow him, with an effect the clumsiness of which can only be conceived by those who have read his triple rhyming English terza rima.]

[Footnote 265: Egloga vii.]

Even as a bird of night that loathes the sun, I wander, woe is me, through places dark, The while refulgent day doth shine on earth; Then when upon the world descendeth eve, I cannot, like all creatures, sink in sleep, But wake to roam and weep among the fields.

If peradventure amid woods and fields, Where shines not with his radiance the sun, Mine eyes, o'er-tired with weeping, close in sleep, Harsh dreams and wandering visions, vain and dark, Affright me so that still I shrink at eve, For fear of sleep, from resting on the earth.

O universal mother, kindly earth, Shall't ever be that, stretched on verdant fields, In slumber deep, upon that latest eve, I ne'er shall wake again, until the sun Rise to reveal his light to eyelids dark, And stir my soul again from that long sleep?

From that first moment when I banished sleep, And left my bed to lay myself on earth, The cloudless days for me were drear and dark, And turned to stubbly straw the flowery fields; So that when morn to men brings back the sun, It darkens round mine eyes in shadowy eve.

My lady, of her kindness, came one eve, Joyous and very fair, to me in sleep, And gladdened all my heart, even as the sun, When rains are past, is wont to clear the earth; And said to me: Come, gather from my fields Some flow'ret; cease to haunt those caverns dark.

Fly hence, fly hence, ye tedious thoughts and dark, That have obscured me in so long an eve! For I'll go seek the sunny smiling fields, Taking upon their herbage honeyed sleep: Full well I know that ne'er man made of earth More blest than now I am beheld the sun!

Song, in mid eve thou'lt see the orient sun, And me neath earth among those regions dark, Or e'er on yonder fields I take my sleep.

Whether the distinctively Neapolitan note can be discerned in Sannazzaro, seems more than doubtful. As in his Sapphic Odes and Piscatory Eclogues, so also in his Arcadia we detect the working of a talent self-restrained within the limits of finely-tempered taste. The case is very different with Pontano's Latin elegies and lyrics.[266] They breathe the sensuality and self-abandonment to impulse of a Southern temperament. They reflect the profuseness of nature in a region where men scarcely know what winter means, her somewhat too nakedly voluptuous beauties, her volcanic energies and interminglement of living fire with barren scoriae. For this reason, and because there is some danger of neglecting the special part played by the Southern Province in Italian literary history, I am induced to digress from the main topic of this chapter in the direction of Pontano's poetry.

[Footnote 266: From my chapter on Latin poetry in the Revival of Learning I purposely omitted more than a general notice of Pontano's erotic verses, intending to treat of them thereafter, when it should be necessary to discuss the Neapolitan contribution in Italian literature. The lyrics and elegies I shall now refer to, are found in two volumes of Pontani Opera, published by Aldus, 1513 and 1518. These volumes I shall quote together, using the minor titles of Amorum, Hendecasyllabi, and so forth, and mentioning the page. I am sorry that I have not a uniform edition of his Latin poetry (if that, indeed, exists, of which I doubt) before me.]

Though a native of Cerreto in Umbria, Pontano passed his life at Naples, and became, if we may trust the evidence of his lyrics, more Neapolitan than the Neapolitans. In him the southern peoples found a voice, which, though it uttered a dead language, expressed their sentiments. It is unlucky that Pontano, who deserves to be reckoned as the greatest poet of Naples, should have made this important contribution to Italian literature in Latin. Whether at that moment he could have spoken so freely in the vulgar tongue is more than doubtful. But be that as it may, we must have recourse to his Latin poems, in order to supply a needed link in the chain of Italian melody. Carducci acutely remarked that, more than any other poems of the century, they embody "the aesthetic and learned reaction against the mystical idealism of Christianity in a preceding age." They do so better than Beccadelli's, because, where the Hermaphroditus is obscene, the Eridanus, Baiae, Amor Conjugalis, Pompae, Naeniae of Pontano are only sensual. The cardinal point in Pontano is the breadth of his feeling. He touches the whole scale of natural emotions with equal passion and sincerity. The love of the young man for his sweetheart, the love of the husband for his bride, the love of a father for his offspring, the love of a nurse for her infant charge, find in his verse the same full sensuous expression. In Pontano there is no more of Teutonic Schwaermerei than of Dantesque transcendentalism. He does not make us marvel how the young man, who has embroidered odes upon the theme of Alma Pellegrina, or who has woven violet and moonshine into some Du bist wie eine Blume, can submit to light the hymeneal torch and face the prose of matrimony. Within the limits of unsophisticated instinct he is perfectly complete and rounded to a flawless whole. He does not say one thing and leave another to be understood--a contradiction that imports some radical unreality into the Platonic or sentimental modes of sexual expression. He expects woman to weigh but little less than man in scales of natural appetite. And yet his Muse is no mere vagrant Venus. She is a respectable if not, according to our present views, an altogether decent Juno. The final truth about her is that she revealed to her uniquely gifted bard, on earth and in the shrine of home, that poetry of love which Milton afterwards mythologized in Eden. The note of unadulterated humanity sounds with a clearness that demands commemoration in this poetry of passion. It is, if not the highest, yet the frankest and most decided utterance of mutual, legitimate desire. As such, it occupies an enviable place in the history of Italian love--equally apart from trecento sickliness and cinque cento corruption; unrefined perchance, but healthy; doing justice to the proletariate of Naples whence it sprung.

Pontano paints all primitive affections in a way to justify his want of reticence. His Fannia, Focilla, Stella, Ariadne, Cinnama--mistress or wife, we need not stop to question--are the very opposite of Dante's or of Petrarch's loves.[267] Liberal of their charms, rejoicing like the waves of the Chiaja in the laughter of the open day, they think it no shame to unbare their beauties to their lover's eyes, or to respond with ardor to his caresses. Christian modesty, medieval asceticism, the strife between the spirit and the flesh, the aspiration after mystic modes of feeling, have been as much forgotten in their portraits, as though the world had never undergone reaction against paganism. And yet they differ from the women of the Roman elegiac poets. They are less artificial than Corinna. Though "the sweet witty soul of Ovid" passed over these honeyed elegies, the Neapolitan poet remains a bourgeois of the fifteenth century. His passion is unreservedly sensual and at the same time tenderly affectionate. Its motive force is sexual desire; its depth and strength are in the love a husband and a father feels. Given the verses upon Fannia alone, we should be justified in calling Pontano a lascivious poet. The three books De Amore Conjugali show him in a different light. He there expounds the duties and relations of the family with the same robust and unaffected force of feeling he had shown in the description of a wanton. After painting his Stella with the gusto of an Italian Rubens, he can turn to shed tears almost sublime in their pathos over the tomb of Lucia his daughter, or to write a cradle-song for his son Luciolus.[268] The carnal appetites which are legitimated by matrimony and hallowed in domestic relations, but which it is the custom of civilized humanity to veil, assume a tone of almost Bacchic rapture in this fluent Latin verse. This constitutes Pontano's originality. Such a combination has never been presented to the world before or since. The genial bed, from which he draws his inspiration, found few poets to appreciate it in ancient days, and fewer who have dared to celebrate it so unblushingly among the moderns.[269]

[Footnote 267: Fannia is the most attractive of these women. See Amorum, lib. i. pp. 4, 5, 13. Stella, the heroine of the Eridani, is touched with greater delicacy. Cinnama seems to have been a girl of the people. Pontano borrows for her the language of popular poetry (Amorum, i. 19).

Ipsa tibi dicat, mea lux, mea vita, meus flos, Liliolumque meum, basiolumque meum. Carior et gemmis, et caro carior auro, Tu rosa, tu violae, tu mihi laevis onyx.]

[Footnote 268: Among the most touching of his elegiac verses is the lament addressed to his dead wife upon the death of their son Lucius, Eridanorum, lib. ii. p. 134. The collection of epitaphs called Tumuli bears witness to the depth and sincerity of his sorrow for the dead, to the all-embracing sympathy he felt for human grief. The very original series of lullabies, entitled Naeniae, illustrate the warmth of his paternal feeling. The nursery has never before or since been celebrated with such exuberance of fancy--and in the purest Ovidian elegiacs! It may, however, be objected that there is too much about wet-nurses in these songs.]

[Footnote 269: Pontano revels in Epithalamials and pictures of the joys of wedlock. See the series of elegies on Stella, Eridanorum, lib. i. pp. 108, 111, 113, 115; the congratulation addressed to Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, Hendecasyllaborum, lib. i. p. 194; and two among the many Epithalamial hymns, Hendec. lib. i. p. 195; Lepidina Pompa 7, p. 172, with its reiterated "Dicimus o hymenaee Io hymen hymenaee." The sensuality of these compositions will be too frank and fulsome for a chastened taste; but there is nothing in them extra or infra-human.]

The same series of Pontano's poems may be read with no less profit for their pictures of Neapolitan life.[270] He brings the baths of Baiae, unspoiled as yet by the eruption from Monte Nuovo, vividly before us; the myrtle-groves and gardens by the bay; the sailors stretched along the shore; the youths and maidens, flirting as they bathe or drink the waters, their evening walks, their little dinners, their assignations; all the round of pleasure in a place and climate made for love. Or we watch the people at their games, crowded together on those high-built carts, rattling the tambourine and dancing the tarantella--as near to fauns and nymphs in shape as humanity well may be.[271] Each mountain and each stream is personified; the genii of the villages, the Oreads of the copses, the Tritons of the waves, come forth to play with men:[272]

Claudicat hinc heros Capimontius, et de summo Colle ruunt misti juvenes mistaeque puellae; Omnis amat chorus, et juncti glomerantur amantes. Is lento incredit passu, baculoque tuetur Infirmum femur, et choreis dat signa movendis, Assuetus choreae ludisque assuetus amantum.

[Footnote 270: Hendecasyllaborum, lib. i. and ii. pp. 186-218. If one of these lyrics should be chosen from the rest, I should point to "Invitantur pueri et puellae ad audiendum Charitas," p. 209. It begins "Ad myrtum juvenes venite, myrti."]

[Footnote 271: For such glimpses into actual life, see Lepidina, pp. 160-174, in which a man and woman of Naples discourse of their first loves and wedlock. The Eclogues abound in similar material.]

[Footnote 272: Lepidina, p. 168. Capimontius is easily recognized as Capo di Monte.]

Nor are these personifications merely frigid fictions. The landscape of Naples lends itself to mythology, not only because it is so beautiful, but because human life and nature interpenetrate, as nowhere else in Europe, on that bay. Pontano has a tale to tell of every river and every grove--how Adonis lives again in the orange trees of Sorrento, how the Sebeto was a boy beloved by one of Nereus' daughters and slain by him in anger.[273] His tendency to personification was irresistible. Not content, like Sannazzaro, with singing the praises of his villa, he feigns a Nympha Antiniana, whom he invokes as the Muse of neo-Latin lyric rapture.[274] In the melodious series of love-poems entitled Eridanus, he exercises the same imaginative faculty on Lombard scenery. After closing this little book, we seem to be no less familiar with the "king of rivers," Phaethon, and the Heliades, than with the living Stella, to frame whose beauty in a fitting wreath these fancies have been woven.[275] Even the Elegy, which he used so freely and with so complete a pleasure in its movement, becomes for him a woman, with specific form and habit, and a love tale taken from some Propertian memory of he poet's Umbrian home. To quote Pontano is neither easy nor desirable. Yet I cannot resist the inclination to present Dame Elegia in her Ionian garb in part at least before a modern audience.[276]

Huc ades, et nitidum myrto compesce capillum, Huc ades ornatis o Elegia comis. Inque novam venias cultu praedivite formam, Laxa fluat niveos vestis adusque pedes. Quaque moves, Arabum spires mollissima nardum, Lenis et Assyrio sudet odore liquor. Tecum etiam Charites veniant, tua cura, puellae, Et juvet insolita ducere ab arte choros. Tu puerum Veneris primis lasciva sub annis Instruis, et studio perficis usque tuo. Hinc tibi perpetuae tribuit Cytherea juventae Tempora, neu formae sint mala damna tuae; Ergo ades, et cape, diva, lyram, sed pectine molli, Sed moveas dulci lenia fila sono. Quinetiam tu experta novos, ni fallor, amores, Dulcia supposito gramine furta probas. Namque ferunt, patrios vectam quandoque per Umbros, Clitumni liquidis accubuisse vadis: Hic juvenem vidisse, atque incaluisse natantem, Et cupisse ulnas iner habere tuas. Quid tibi lascivis, puer o formose, sub undis? Deliciis mage sunt commoda prata tuis. Hic potes e molli viola junxisse coronam, Et flavam vario flore ligare comam; Hic potes et gelida somnum quaesisse sub umbra, Et lassum viridi ponere corpus humo; Hic et adesse choris Dryadum, et saluisse per herbas, Molliaque ad teneros membra movere modos. Hic juvenis succensus amor, formamque secutus Et facilem cantum, quo capis ipsa deos, Tecum inter salices, sub amicta vitibus ulmo, In molli junxit candida membra toro; Inter et amplexus lassi jacuistis uterque, Et repetita venus dulce peregit opus.

[Footnote 273: See De Hortis Hesperidum, p. 139, and Amorum, lib. ii. p. 33.]

[Footnote 274: Versus Lyrici, pp. 91-94.]

[Footnote 275: See, for example, the elegy "De Venere lavante se in Eridano et quiescente," Erid. lib. i. p. 118.]

[Footnote 276: De Amore Conjugali, lib. i. p. 35. "Hither, and bind with myrtle thy shining hair! O hither, Elegia, with the woven tresses! Take a new form of sumptuous grace, and let thy loose robe flutter to thy snow-white feet. And where thou movest, breathe Arabian nard, and blandest perfume of Assyrian unguents. Let the girl Graces come, thy charge, with thee, and take their joy in dances woven with unwonted arts. Thou in his earliest years dost teach he boy of Venus, and instruct him in thy lore. Wherefore Cytherea gives thee perpetual youth, that never may thy beauty suffer decrease. Come hither, then, and take, O goddess, thy lyre, but with a gentle quill, and move the soft strings to a dulcet sound. Nay, thou thyself hast tried new pleasures, and knowest the sweet thefts of lovers laid on meadow grass. For they say that, wandering once in Umbria, my home, thou didst lie down beside Clitumnus' liquid pools; and there didst see a youth, and dote upon him while he swam, and long to hold him in thine arms. What dost thou, beauteous boy, beneath the wanton waves? These fields are better suited to thy joys! Here canst thou weave a violet wreath, and bind thy yellow hair with flowers of many a hue! Here canst thou sleep beneath cool shade, and rest thy body on the verdant ground! Here join the dances of the Dryads, and leap along the sward, and move thy supple limbs to tender music! The youth inflamed with this, and eager for the beauty and the facile song, wherewith thou captivatest gods, with thee among the willows, under a vine-mantled elm, joined his white limbs upon a grassy bed, and both enjoyed the bliss of love."]

That this poet was no servile imitator of Tibullus or Ovid is clear. That he had not risen to their height of diction is also manifest. But in Pontano, as in Poliziano, Latin verse lived again with new and genuine vitality.

If it were needful to seek a formal return from this digression to the subject of my chapter there would be no lack of opportunity. Pontano's Eclogues, the description of his gardens, his vision of the golden age and his long discourse on the cultivation of orange trees, justify our placing him among the strictly pastoral poets.[277] In treating of the country he displays his usual warmth and sensuous realism. He mythologizes; but his myths are the substantial forms of genuine emotion and experience. The Fauns he talks of, are such lads as even now may be seen upon the Ischian slopes of Monte Epomeo, with startled eyes, brown skin, and tangled tresses tossed adown their sinewy shoulders. The Bacchus of his vintage has walked, red from the wine-press, crowned with real ivy and vine, and sat down at the poet's elbow, to pledge him in a cup of foaming must.

[Footnote 277: I will only refer in detail to the elegy entitled "Laetatur in villa et hortis suis constitutis" (De Amore Conjugali, lib. ii. p. 52). The two books De Hortis Hesperidum (Aldus, 1513, pp. 138-159), compose a typical didactic poem.]

While Sannazzaro was exploring Arcadia at Naples, Poliziano had already transferred pastoral poetry to the theater at Mantua. Of the Orfeo and its place in Italian literature, I have spoken sufficiently elsewhere. It is enough to remember, in the present connection, that, while Arcady became the local dreamland of the new ideal, Orpheus took the place of its hero. As the institutor of civil society in the midst of a rude population, he personified for our Italian poets the spirit of their own renascent culture. Arcadia represented the realm of art and song, unstirred by warfare or unworthy passions. Orpheus attuned the simple souls who dwelt in it, to music with his ravishing lyre.

Pastoral representations soon became fashionable. Niccolo da Correggio put the tale of Cephalus and Procris on the stage at Ferrara, with choruses of nymphs, vows to Diana, eclogues between Corydon and Thyrsis, a malignant Faun, and a dea ex machina to close the scene.[278] At Urbino in the carnival of 1506 Baldassare Castiglione and his friend Cesare Gonzaga recited amoebean stanzas, attired in pastoral dress, before the Court. This eclogue, entitled Tirsi, deserves notice, less perhaps for its intrinsic merits, though these, judged by the standard of bucolic poetry, are not slight, than because it illustrates the worst vices of the rustic style in its adaptation to fashionable usage.[279] The dialogue opens with the customary lament of one love-lorn shepherd to another, and turns upon time-honored bucolic themes, until the mention of Metaurus reminds us that we are not really in Arcadia but at Urbino. The goddess who strays among her nymphs along its bank, is no other than the Duchess, attended by Emilia Pia and the other ladies of her Court. "The good shepherd, who rules these happy fields and holy lands," is Duke Guidubaldo. Then follow compliments to all the interlocutors of the Cortegiano. Bembo is the shepherd, "who hither came from the bosom of Hadria." The "ancient shepherd, honored by all, who wears a wreath of sacred laurel," is Morello da Ortona. The Tuscan shepherd, "wise and learned in all arts," must either be Bernardo Accolti or else Giuliano de' Medici. And yonder shepherd from the Mincio is Lodovico da Canossa. A chorus of shepherds and a morris-dance relieved the recitation, which was also enlivened by the introduction of one solo, sung by Iola. Thus in this early specimen of the pastoral mask we observe that confusion of things real and things ideal, of past and present, of imaginary rustics and living courtiers, which was destined to prove the bane of the species and to render it a literary plague in every European capital. The radical fault existed in Virgil's treatment of the Syracusan idyl. But each remove from its source rendered the falsehood more obnoxious. In Spenser's Eclogues the awkwardness is greater than in Castiglione's. Before Teresa Maria the absurdity was more apparent than before Elizabeth. At last the common sense of the public could no longer tolerate the sham, and Arcadia, with its make-believe and flattery and allegory, became synonymous with affectation.

[Footnote 278: It was printed in 1486.]

[Footnote 279: See the Poesie Volgari e Latine del Conte B. Castiglione (Roma 1760), pp. 7-26.]

It is no part of my programme to follow the development of the pastoral drama through all its stages in Italy.[280] For the end of this chapter I reserve certain necessary remarks upon its masterpieces, the Aminta and the Pastor Fido. At present it will suffice to indicate the fact that, on the stage, as in the eclogue, bucolic poetry followed two distinct directions--the one Arcadian and artificial, the other national and closely modeled on popular forms. The Nencia da Barberino and Beca da Dicomano of Lorenzo de' Medici and Luigi Pulci belong to the latter class of eclogues.[281] Their corresponding forms in dramatic verse are Berni's Catrina and Mogliazzo, together with the Tancia and Fiera of Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger.[282] If it is impossible to render any adequate account of pastoral drama, to do this for bucolic idyls would be no less difficult. Their name in Latin and Italian is legion. Poets so different in all things else as were Girolamo Benivieni, Antonio Tebaldeo, Sperone Speroni, Bernardino Baldi, Benedetto Varchi, and Luigi Tansillo--to mention only men of some distinction--brought Mopsus and Tityrus, Menalcas and Melibaeus, Amaryllis and Cydippe, from Virgil's Arcadia, and made them talk interminably of their loves and sheep in delicate Italian.[283] Folengo's sharp satiric wit, as we shall remark in another chapter, finally pursued them with the shafts of ridicule in Baldus and Zanitonella. Thus pastoral poetry completed the whole cycle of Italian literature--expressed itself through dialogue in the drama, adhered to Virgilian precedent in the Latinists and their Italian followers, adopted the forms of popular poetry, and finally submitted to the degradation of Maccaronic burlesque.

[Footnote 280: To do so would be almost impossible within lesser limits than those of a bulky volume. Any one who wishes to form a conception of the multitudes of pastoral plays written and printed in Italy, may consult the catalogues. I have before me one list, which I do not believe to be complete, in the Teatro Italiano, vol. x. It occupies twenty-seven closely-printed pages, and is devoted solely to rural scenes of actual life. The Arcadian masks and plays are omitted. Mutinelli, in the Annali Urbani di Venezia, p. 541, gives a list of the shows performed at Doges' banquets between 1574 and 1605. The large majority are pastoral; and it is noticeable that, as years go on, the pastorals drive all other forms of drama out of the field.]

[Footnote 281: See above, Part i., pp. 381, 382.]

[Footnote 282: For Berni, see Barbera's small edition, Florence, 1863. For Buonarroti, Lemonnier's edition in two volumes, 1860.]

[Footnote 283: See Poesie Pastorali e Rusticali (Milano, Classici Italiani, 1808) for a fairly representative collection of these authors.]

We can well afford to turn in silence from the common crowd of eclogue-writers. Yet one poet emerges from the rank and file, and deserves particular attention. Francesco Maria Molza stood foremost in his own day among scholars of ripe erudition and literary artists of accomplished skill. His high birth, his genial conversation, his loves and his misfortunes rendered him alike illustrious; and his Ninfa Tiberina is still the sweetest pastoral of the golden age. Molza was born in 1489 at Modena. Since his parents were among the richest and noblest people of that city, it is probable that he acquired the Greek and Latin scholarship, for which he was in after-life distinguished, under tutors at home. At the age of sixteen he went to Rome in order to learn Hebrew, and was at once recognized as a youth of more than ordinary promise by men like Marcantonio Flamminio and Lilio Giraldi. In 1512 he returned to Modena, where he married according to his rank. His wife brought him four children, and he passed a few years at this period with his family. But Molza soon wearied of domestic and provincial retirement. In 1516 he left home again and plunged into the dissipations of Roman life. From this date forward till his death in 1544 he must be reckoned among those Italians for whom Rome was dearer than their native cities. The brilliance of his literary fame and the affection felt for him by men of note in every part of Italy will not distract attention from the ignobility of his career. Faithless to his wife, neglectful of his children, continually begging money from his father, he passed his manhood in a series of amours. Some of these were respectable, but most of them disreputable. A certain Furnia, a low-born Beatrice Paregia, and the notorious Faustina Mancina are to be mentioned among the women who from time to time enslaved him. In the course of his intrigue with Beatrice he received a stab in the back from some obscure rival, which put him in peril of his life. For Faustina he composed the Ninfa Tiberina. She was a Roman courtesan, so famous for her beauty and fine breeding as to attract the sympathy of even severe natures. When she died, the town went into mourning, and the streets echoed with elegiac lamentations. It is curious that among Michelangelo's sonnets should be found one--not, however, of the best--written upon this occasion. While seeking amusement with the Imperias, who took Aspasia's place in Papal Rome, Molza formed a temporary attachment for a more illustrious lady--the beautiful and witty Camilla Gonzaga. He passed two years, between 1523 and 1525, in her society at Bologna. After his return to Rome, Molza witnessed the miseries of the sack, which made so doleful an impression on his mind that, saddened for a moment, he retired like the prodigal to Modena. Rome, however, although not destined to regain the splendor she had lost, shook off the dust and blood of 1527; and there were competent observers who, like Aretino, thought her still more reckless in vice than she had been before. Molza could not long resist the attractions of the Papal city. In 1529 we find him once more in Rome, attached to the person of Ippolito de' Medici, and delighting the Academies with his wit. Two years afterwards, his father and mother died on successive days of August. Molza celebrated their death in one of the most lovely of his many sonnets. But his ill life and obstinate refusal to settle at Modena had disinherited him; and henceforth he lived upon his son Camillo's bounty. To follow his literary biography at this period would be tantamount to writing the history of the two famous Academies delle Virtu and de' Vignaiuoli. Of both he was a most distinguished member. He amused them with his conversation, recited before them his Capitoli, and charmed them with the softness and the sweetness of his manners. Numbers of his sonnets commemorate the friendships he made in those urbane circles.

From the interchange, indeed, of occasional poems between such men as Molza, Soranzo, Gandolfo, Caro, Varchi, Guidiccioni, and La Casa, the materials for forming a just conception of he inner life of men of letters at that epoch must be drawn. They breathe a spirit of gentle urbanity, enlivened by jests, and saddened by a sense, rather uneasy than oppressive, of Italian disaster. The moral tone is pensive and relaxed; and in spite of frequent references to a corrupt Church and a lost nation, scarcely one spark of rage or passion flashes from the dreamy eyes that gaze at us. Leave us alone, they seem to say; it is true that Florence has been enslaved, and the shadow of disgrace rests upon our Rome; but what have we to do with it? And then they turn to indite sonnets on Faustina's hair or elegies upon her modesty[284]; and when they are tired with these recreations, meet together to invent ingenious obscenities.[285] It was in the midst of such trifling that the great misfortune of Molza's life befell him. The disease of the Renaissance, not the least of Italy's scourges in those latter days of heedlessness and dissolute living, overtook him in some haunt of pleasure. After 1539 he languished miserably under the infliction, and died of it, having first suffered a kind of slow paralysis, in February 1544. During the last months of his illness his thoughts turned to the home and children he had deserted. The exquisitely beautiful Latin elegy, in which he recorded the misery of slow decay, speaks touchingly, if such a late and valueless repentance can be touching, of his yearning for them.[286] In the autumn of 1543, accordingly, he managed to crawl back to Modena; and it was there he breathed his last, offering to the world as his biographer is careful to assure us, a rare example of Christian resignation and devotion.[287] All the men of the Renaissance died in the odor of piety; and Molza, as many of his sonnets prove, had true religious feeling. He was not a bad man, though a weak one. In the flaccidity of his moral fiber, his intellectual and aesthetical serenity, his confused and yet contented conscience, he fairly represents his age.

[Footnote 284: Of Molza's many sonnets upon this woman and her death, see especially Nos. cxi. cxii.]

[Footnote 285: In the chapter on Burlesque Poetry I shall have to justify this remark.]

[Footnote 286: See Revival of Learning, p. 488.]

[Footnote 287: The best Life of Molza is that written by Pierantonio Serassi, Bergamo, 1747. It is republished, with Molza's Italian poems, in the series of Classici Italiani, 1808.]

It would be difficult to choose between Molza's Latin and Italian poems, were it necessary to award the palm of elegance to either. Both are marked by the same morbidezza, the same pliancy, as of acanthus leaves that feather round the marble of some Roman ruin. Both are languid alike and somewhat tiresome, in spite of a peculiar fragrance. I have sought through upwards of 350 sonnets contained in two collections of his Italian works, for one with the ring of true virility or for one sufficiently perfect in form to bear transplantation. It is not difficult to understand their popularity during the poet's lifetime. None are deficient in touches of delicate beauty, spontaneous images, and sentiments expressed with much lucidity. And their rhythms are invariably melodious. Reading them, we might seem to be hearing flutes a short way from us played beside a rippling stream. And yet--or rather, perhaps, for this very reason--our attention is not riveted. The most distinctly interesting note in them is sounded when the poet speaks of Rome. He felt the charm of the seven hills, and his melancholy was at home among their ruins. Yet even upon this congenial topic it would be difficult to select a single poem of commanding power.

The Ninfa Tiberina is a monody of eighty-one octave stanzas, addressed by the poet, feigning himself a shepherd, to Faustina, whom he feigns a nymph. It has nothing real but the sense of beauty that inspired it, the beauty, exquisite but soulless, that informs its faultless pictures and mellifluous rhythms. We are in a dream-world of fictitious feelings and conventional images, where only art remains sincere and unaffected. The proper point of view from which to judge these stanzas, is the simply aesthetic. He who would submit to their influence and comprehend the poet's aim, must come to the reading of them attuned by contemplation of contemporary art. The arabesques of the Loggie, the metal-work of Cellini, the stucchi of the Palazzo del Te, Sansovino's bass-reliefs of fruits and garlands, Albano's cupids, supply the necessary analogues. Poliziano's Giostra demanded a similar initiation. But between the Giostra and the Ninfa Tiberina Italian art had completed her cycle from early Florence to late Rome, from Botticelli and Donatello to Giulio Romano and Cellini. The freshness of the dawn has been lost in fervor of noonday. Faustina succeeds to the fair Simonetta. Molza cannot "recapture the first fine careless rapture" of Poliziano's morning song--so exuberant and yet so delicate, so full of movement, so tender in its sentiment of art. The volutta idillica, which opened like a rosebud in the Giostra, expands full petals in the Ninfa Tiberina; we dare not shake them, lest they fall. And these changes are indicated even by the verse. It was the glory of Poliziano to have discovered the various harmonies, of which the octave, artistically treated, is capable, and to have made each stanza a miniature masterpiece. Under Molza's treatment the verse is heavier and languid, not by reason of relapse into the negligence of Boccaccio, but because he aims at full development of its resources. He weaves intricate periods, and sustains a single sentence, with parentheses and involutions, from the opening of the stanza to its close. Given these conditions, the Ninfa Tiberina is all nectar and all gold.

After an exordium, which introduces

La bella Ninfa mia, che al Tebro infiora Col pie le sponde,

Molza calls upon the shepherds to transfer their vows to her from Pales. She shall be made the goddess of the spring, and claim an altar by Pomona's. Here let the rustic folk play, dance, and strive in song. Hither let them bring their gifts.[288]

Io dieci pomi di fin oro eletto, Ch'a te pendevan con soave odore, Simil a quel, che dal tuo vago petto Spira sovente, onde si nutre amore, Ti sacro umil; e se n'avrai diletto, Doman col novo giorno uscendo fuore, Per soddisfar in parte al gran disio, Altrettanti cogliendo a te gl'invio.

E d'ulivo una tazza, ch'ancor serba Quel puro odor, che gia le diede il torno, Nel mezzo a cui si vede in vista acerba Portar smarrito un giovinetto il giorno, E si 'l carro guidar che accende l'erba, E sin al fondo i fiumi arde d'intorno, Stolto che mal tener seppe il viaggio, E il consiglio seguir fedele e saggio!

[Footnote 288:

Ten apples of fine gold, elect and rare, Which hung for thee, and softest perfume shed, Like unto that which from thy bosom fair Doth often breathe, whence Love is nourished, Humbly I offer; and if thou shalt care, To-morrow with the dawn yon fields I'll tread, My great desire some little to requite, Plucking another ten for thy delight.

Also an olive cup, where still doth cling That pure perfume it borrowed from the lathe, Where in the midst a fair youth ruining Conducts the day, and with such woeful scathe Doth guide his car, that to their deepest spring The rivers burn, and burn the grasses rathe; Ah fool, who knew not how to hold his way, Nor by that counsel leal and wise to stay!]

The description of the olive cup is carried over the next five stanzas, when the poet turns to complain that Faustina does not care for his piping. And yet Pan joined the rustic reeds; and Amphion breathed through them such melody as held the hills attentive; and Silenus taught how earth was made, and how the seasons come and go, with his sweet pipings. Even yet, perchance, she will incline and listen, if only he can find for her some powerful charm. Come forth, he cries, repeating the address to Galatea, leave Tiber to chafe within his banks and hurry toward the sea. Come to my fields and caves:[289]

A te di bei corimbi un antro ingombra, E folto indora d'elicrisi nembo L'edera bianca, e sparge si dolce ombra, Che tosto tolta a le verd'erbe in grembo D'ogni grave pensier te n'andrai sgombra; E sparso in terra il bel ceruleo lembo, Potrai con l'aura, ch'ivi alberga il colle, Seguir securo sonno dolce e molle.

[Footnote 289:

White ivy with pale corymbs loads for thee That cave, and with thick folds of helichryse Gildeth the arch it shades so lovingly; Here lapped in the green grass which round it lies, Thou shalt dismiss grave thoughts, and fancy-free Spread wide thy skirt of fair cerulean dyes, And with the wholesome airs that haunt the hill, Welcome sweet soothing sleep, secure from ill.]

It is perilous for thee to roam the shores where Mars met Ilia. O Father Tiber, deal gently with so fair a maiden. It was thou who erewhile saved the infant hope of Rome, whom the she-wolf suckled near thine overflow! But such themes soar too high for shepherd's pipings. I turn to Caro and to Varchi. Both are shepherds, who know how to stir the streams of Mincius and Arethuse. Even the gods have lived in forest wild, among the woods, and there Anchises by the side of Venus pressed the flowers. What gifts shall I find for my Faustina? Daphnis and Moeris are richer far than I. How can I contend with them in presents to the fair? And yet she heeds them not:

Tanto d'ogni altrui dono poco si cura Questa vaga angioletta umile e pura.

My passion weighs upon me as love weighed on Aristaeus. He forgot his flocks, his herds, his gardens, even his beehives for Eurydice. His heartache made him mad, and he pursued her over field and forest. She fled before him, but he followed:[290]

La sottil gonna in preda a i venti resta, E col crine ondeggiando addietro torna: Ella piu ch'aura, o piu che strale, presta Per l'odorata selva non soggiorna; Tanto che il lito prende snella e mesta, Fatta per paura assai piu adorna: Fende Aristeo la vagha selva anch'egli, E la man parle aver entro i capegli.

Tre volte innanzi la man destra spinse Per pigliar de le chiome il largo invito; Tre volte il vento solamente strinse, E resto lasso senza fin schernito: Ne stanchezza pero tardollo o vinse, Perche tornasse il pensier suo fallito; Anzi quanto mendico piu si sente, Tanto s'affretta, non che il corso allente.

[Footnote 290:

Her rippling raiment, to the winds a prey, Waves backward with her wavering tresses light; Faster than air or arrow, without stay She through the perfumed wood pursues her flight; Then takes the river-bed, nor heeds delay, Made even yet more beautiful by fright; Threads Aristaeus, too, the forest fair, And seems to have his hands within her hair.

Three times he thrust his right hand forth to clasp The abundance of her curls that lured him on; Three times the wind alone deceived his grasp, Leaving him scorned, with all his hopes undone; Yet not the toil that made him faint and gasp, Could turn him from his purpose still unwon; Nay, all the while, the more his strength is spent, The more he hurries on the course intent.]

The story of Eurydice occupies twenty-nine stanzas, and with it the poem ends abruptly. It is full of carefully-wrought pictures, excessively smooth and sugared, recalling the superficial manner of the later Roman painters. Even in the passage that describes Eurydice's agony, just quoted, the forest is odorata or vagha. Fear and flight make the maiden more adorna. The ruffian Aristaeus gets tired in the chase. He, too, must be presented in a form of elegance. Not the action, but how the action might be made a groundwork for embroidery of beauty, is the poet's care. We quit the Ninfa Tiberina with senses swooning under superfluity of sweetness--as though we had inhaled the breath of hyacinths in a heated chamber.

Closely allied to bucolic stands didactic poetry. The Works and Days of Hesiod and the Georgics of Virgil--the latter far more effectually, however, than the former--determined this style for the Italians. We have already seen to what extent the neo-Latin poets cultivated a form of verse that, more than any other, requires the skill of a great artist and the inspiration of true poetry, if it is to shun intolerable tedium.[291] The best didactic poems written in Latin by an Italian are undoubtedly Poliziano's Sylvae, and of these the most refined is the Rusticus.[292] But Poliziano, in composing them, struck out a new line. He did not follow his Virgilian models closely. He chose the form of declamation to an audience, in preference to the time-honored usage of apostrophizing a patron. This relieves the Sylvae from the absurdity of the poet's feigning to instruct a Memmius or Augustus, a Francis I. or Charles V., in matters about which those warriors and rulers can have felt but a frigid interest. Pontano's Urania and De Hortis Hesperidum are almost free from the same blemish. The former is addressed to his son Lucius, but in words so brief and simple that we recognize the propriety of a father giving this instruction to his child.[293] The latter is dedicated to Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, who receives complimentary panegyrics in the exordium and peroration, but does not interfere with the structure of the poem. Its chief honors are reserved, as is right and due, for Virgil:[294]--

Dryades dum munera vati Annua, dum magno texunt nova serta Maroni, E molli viola et ferrugineis hyacinthis, Quasque fovent teneras Sebethi flumina myrtos.

[Footnote 291: Revival of Learning, chap. viii.]

[Footnote 292: Ibid. pp. 453-463.]

[Footnote 293:

Tu vero nate ingentes accingere ad orsus Et mecum illustres coeli spatiare per oras, Namque aderit tibi Mercurius, cui coelifer Atlas Est avus, et notas puerum puer instruet artes.

Ed. Aldus (1513), p. 2.]

[Footnote 294: Ibid. p. 138.]

Pontano's greatness, here as elsewhere, is shown in his mytho-poetic faculty. The lengthy dissertation on the heavens and the lighter discourse on orange-cultivation are adorned and enlivened with innumerable legends suggested to his fertile fancy by the beauty of Neapolitan scenery. When we reach the age of Vida and Fracastoro, we find ourselves in the full tide of Virgilian imitation[295]; and it is just at this point in our inquiry that the transition from Latin to Italian didactic poetry should be effected.

[Footnote 295: See Revival of Learning, pp. 471-481, for notices of the Poetica, Bombyces, Scacchia and Syphilis.]

Giovanni Rucellai, the son of that Bernardo, who opened his famous Florentine Gardens to the Platonic Academy, was born in 1475. As the author of Rosmunda, he has already appeared in this book. When he died, in 1526, he bequeathed a little poem on Bees to his brother Palla and his friend Gian Giorgio Trissino. Trissino and Rucellai had been intimate at Florence and in Rome. They wrote the Sofonisba and Rosmunda in generous rivalry, meeting from time to time to compare notes of progress and to recite their verses. An eye-witness related to Scipione Ammirato how "these two dearest friends, when they were together in a room, would jump upon a bench and declaim pieces of their tragedies, calling upon the audience to decide between them on the merits of the plays."[296] Trissino received the MS. of his friend's posthumous poem at Padua, and undertook to see it through the press. The Api was published at Venice in 1539.[297] What remained to be said or sung about bees after the Fourth Georgic? Very little indeed, it must be granted. Yet the Api is no mere translation from Virgil; and though the higher qualities of variety invention and imagination were denied to Rucellai, though he can show no passages of pathos to compete with the Corycius senex, of humor to approach the battle of the hives, no episode, it need be hardly said, to match with Pastor Aristaeus, still his modest poem is a monument of pure taste and classical correctness. It is the work of a ripe scholar and melodious versifier, if not of a great singer; and its diction belongs to the best period of polite Italian.

[Footnote 296: See Morsolin's Giangiorgio Trissino (Vicenza, 1878), p. 92.]

[Footnote 297: Ibid. p. 245.]

The same moderate praise might be awarded to the more ambitious poem of Luigi Alamanni, entitled Coltivazione, but for its immoderate prolixity.[298] Alamanni resolved to combine the precepts of Hesiod, Virgil and Varro, together with the pastoral passages of Lucretius, in one work, adapting them to modern usage, and producing a comprehensive treatise upon farming. With this object he divided his poem into six books, the first four devoted to the labors of the several seasons, the fifth to gardens, and the sixth to lucky and unlucky days. On a rough computation, the whole six contain some 5,500 lines. La Coltivazione is dedicated to Francis I., and is marred by inordinate flatteries of the French people and their king. Students who have the heart to peruse its always chaste and limpidly flowing blank verse, will be rewarded from time to time with passages like the following, in which the sad circumstances of the poet and the pathos of his regrets for Italy raise the style to more than usual energy and dignity:[299]

Ma qual paese e quello ove oggi possa, Glorioso Francesco, in questa guisa Il rustico cultor goderse in pace L'alte fatiche sue sicuro e lieto? Non gia il bel nido ond'io mi sto lontano, Non gia l'Italia mia; che poiche lunge Ebbe, altissimo Re, le vostre insegne, Altro non ebbe mai che pianto e guerra. I colti campi suoi son fatti boschi, Son fatti albergo di selvagge fere, Lasciati in abbandono a gente iniqua. Il bifulco e 'l pastor non puote appena In mezzo alle citta viver sicuro Nel grembo al suo signor; che di lui stesso Che 'l devria vendicar, divien rapina ... Fuggasi lunge omai dal seggio antico L'italico villan; trapassi l'alpi; Truove il gallico sen; sicuro posi Sotto l'ali, signor, del vostro impero. E se qui non avra, come ebbe altrove Cosi tepido il sol, si chiaro il cielo, Se non vedra quei verdi colli toschi, Ove ha il nido piu bello Palla e Pomona; Se non vedra quei cetri, lauri e mirti, Che del Partenopeo veston le piagge; Se del Benaco e di mill'altri insieme Non sapra qui trovar le rive e l'onde; Se non l'ombra, gli odor, gli scogli ameni Che 'l bel liguro mar circonda e bagna; Se non l'ampie pianure e i verdi prati Che 'l Po, l'Adda e 'l Tesin rigando infiora, Qui vedra le campagne aperte e liete, Che senza fine aver vincon lo sguardo, etc.[300]

[Footnote 298: See Versi e Prose di Luigi Alamanni, 2 vols., Lemonnier, Firenze, 1859. This edition is prefaced by a Life written by Pietro Raffaelli.]

[Footnote 299: Op. cit. vol. ii p. 210. It is the opening of the peroration to Book i.]

[Footnote 300: "But what land is that where now, O glorious Francis, the husbandman may thus enjoy his labors with gladness and tranquillity in peace? Not the fair nest, from which I dwell so far away; nay, not my Italy! She since your ensigns, mighty king, withdrew from her, hath had naught else but tears and war. Her tilled fields have become wild woods, the haunts of beasts, abandoned to lawless men. Herdsman or shepherd can scarce dwell secure within the city beneath their master's mantle; for those who should defend them, make the country folk their prey.... Let Italy's husbandman fly far from his own home, pass the Alpine barrier, seek out the breast of Gaul, repose, great lord, beneath thy empire's pinions! And though he shall not have the sun so warm, the skies so clear, as he was wont to have; though he shall not gaze upon those green Tuscan hills, where Pallas and Pomona make their fairest dwelling; though he shall not see those groves of orange, laurel, myrtle, which clothe the slopes of Parthenope; though he shall seek in vain the banks and waves of Garda and a hundred other lakes; the shade, the perfume, and the pleasant crags, which Liguria's laughing sea surrounds and bathes; the ample plains and verdant meadows which flower beneath the waters of Po, Adda, and Ticino; yet shall he behold glad fields and open, spreading too far for eyes to follow!"]

Luigi Alamanni was the member of a noble Florentine family, who for several generations had been devoted to the Medicean cause. He was born in 1495, and early joined the band of patriots and scholars who assembled in the Rucellai gardens to hear Machiavelli read his notes on Livy. After the discovery of the conspiracy against Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, in which Machiavelli was implicated, and which cost his cousin Luigi di Tommaso Alamanni and his friend Jacopo del Diacceto their lives, Luigi escaped across the mountains by Borgo San Sepolcro to Urbino. Finally, after running many risks, and being imprisoned for a while at Brescia by Giulio's emissaries, he made good his flight to France. His wife and three children had been left at Florence. He was poor and miserable, suffering as only exiles suffer when their home is such a paradise as Italy. In 1527, after the expulsion of the Medici, Luigi returned to Florence, and took an active part in the preparations for the siege as well as in the diplomatic negotiations which followed the fall of the city. Alessandro de' Medici declared him a rebel; and he was forced to avail himself again of French protection. With the exception of a few years passed in Italy between 1537 and 1540, the rest of his life was spent as a French courtier. Both Francis I. and Henri II. treated him with distinction and bounty. Catherine de Medicis made him her master of the household; and his son received the bishopric of Macon. In 1556 he died at Amboise following the Court.

Luigi Alamanni was the greatest Italian poet of whose services Francis I. could boast, as Cellini was the greatest Italian artist. His works are numerous, and all are marked by the same qualities of limpid facility, tending to prolixity and feebleness. Sonnets and canzoni, satires, romantic epics, eclogues, translations, comedies, he tried them all. His translation of the Antigone deserves commendation for its style. His Flora is curious for its attempt to reproduce the comic iambic of the Latin poets. If his satires dealt less in generalities, they might aspire to comparison with Ariosto's. As it is, the poet's bile vents itself in abstract invectives, of which the following verses upon Rome may stand for a fair specimen:[301]

Or chi vedesse il ver, vedrebbe come Piu disnor tu, che 'l tuo Luter Martino, Porti a te stessa, e piu gravose some. Non la Germania, no, ma l'ozio e 'l vino, Avarizia, ambizion, lussuria, e gola Ti mena al fin, che gia veggiam vicino. Non pur questo dico io, non Francia sola, Non pur la Spagna, tutta Italia ancora Che ti tien d'eresia, di vizi scola. E chi nol crede, ne dimandi ognora Urbin, Ferrara, l'Orso, e la Colonna, La Marca, il Romagnuol, ma piu chi plora Per te servendo, che fu d'altri donna.

[Footnote 301: Vol. i. p. 251. It is the end of the third satire. "He who saw truly, would perceive that thyself brings on thee more dishonor than thy Martin Luther, and heavier burdens too. Not Germany, no, but sloth and wine, avarice, ambition, sensuality, and gluttony, are bringing thee to thy now near approaching end. It is not I who say this, not France alone, nor yet Spain, but all Italy, which holds thee for the school of heresy and vice. He who believes it not, let him inquire of Urbino, Ferrara, the Bear and the Column, the Marches and Romagna, yet more of her who weeps because you make her serve, who was once mistress over nations."]

Alamanni is said to have been an admirable improvisatore; and this we can readily believe, for his verses even when they are most polished, flow with a placidity of movement that betrays excessive case.

We have traced the pastoral ideal from its commencement in Boccaccio, through the Arcadia of Sannazzaro, Poliziano's Orfeo, and the didactic poets, up to the point when it was destined soon to find its perfect form in the Aminta and the Pastor Fido. Both Tasso and Guarini lived beyond the chronological limits assigned to this work. The Renaissance was finished; and Italy had passed into a new phase of existence, under the ecclesiastical reaction which is called the Counter-Reformation. It is no part of my programme to enter with particularity into the history of the second half of the sixteenth century. And yet the subject of this and the preceding chapter would be incomplete were I not to notice the two poems which combined the drama and the pastoral in a work of art no less characteristic for the people and the age than fruitful of results for European literature. Great tragedy and great comedy were denied to the Italians. But they produced a novel species in the pastoral drama, which testified to their artistic originality, and led by natural transitions to the opera. Poetry was on the point of expiring; but music was rising to take her place. And the imaginative medium prepared by the lyrical scenes of the Arcadian play, afforded just that generality and aloofness from actual conditions of life, which were needed by the new art in its first dramatic essays.

It would be a mistake to suppose that because the form of the Arcadian romance was artificial, it could not lend itself to the presentation of real passion when adapted to the theater. The study of the Aminta and the Pastor Fido is sufficient to remove this misconception. Though the latter is the more carefully constructed of the two, the plot in either case presents a series of emotional situations, developed with refined art and expressed with lyrical abundance. The rustic fable is but a veil, through which the everlasting lineaments of love are shown. Arcadia, stripped of pedantry and affectation, has become the ideal world of sentiment. Like amber, it incloses in its glittering transparency the hopes and fears, the pains and joys, which flit from heart to heart of men and women when they love. The very conventionality of the pastoral style assists the lyrical utterance of real feeling. For it must be borne in mind that both Aminta and the Pastor Fido are essentially lyrical. The salt and savor of each play are in their choruses and monologues. The dialogue, the fable and the characters serve to supply the poet with motives for emotion that finds vent in song. This being conceded, it will be understood how from their scenes as a whole world of melodrama issued. Whatever may have been the subject of an opera before the days of Gluck, it drew its life-blood from these pastorals.

The central motive of Aminta and the Pastor Fido is the contrast between the actual world of ambition, treachery and sordid strife, and the ideal world of pleasure, loyalty and tranquil ease. Nature is placed in opposition to civil society, the laws of honor to the laws of love, the manners of Arcadia to the manners of Italy. This cardinal motive finds its highest utterance in Tasso's chorus on the Age of Gold:

O bella eta dell'oro, Non gia perche di latte Sen corse il fiume, e stillo mele il bosco; Non perche i frutti loro Dier dall'aratro intatte Le terre, e gli angui errar senz'ira o tosco; Non perche nuvol fosco Non spiego allor suo velo, Ma in primavera eterna, Ch'ora s'accende, e verna, Rise di luce e di sereno il cielo; Ne porto peregrino O guerra, o merce agli altrui lidi il pino: Ma sol perche quel vano Nome senza oggetto, Quell'idolo d'errori, idol d'inganno, Quel che dal volgo insano Onor poscia fu detto, Che di nostra natura 'l feo tiranno, Non mischiava il suo affanno Fra le liete dolcezze Dell'amoroso gregge; Ne fu sua dura legge Nota a quell'alme in libertate avvezze: Ma legge aurea e felice, Che Natura scolpi, "S'ei piace, ei lice."

The last phrase, S'ei piace, ei lice, might be written on the frontispiece of both dramas, together with Dafne's sigh: Il mondo invecchia, E invecchiando intristisce. Of what use is life unless we love?

Amiam, che 'l sol si muore, e poi rinasce; A noi sua breve luce S'asconde, e 'l sonno eterna notte adduce.

The girl who wastes her youth in proud virginity, prepares a sad old age of vain regret:

Cangia, cangia consiglio, Pazzarella che sei; Che 'l pentirsi da sezzo nulla giova.

It is the old cry of the Florentine Canti and Ballate, "Gather ye rose-buds while ye may!" Di doman non c'e certezza. And the stories of Aminta and Pastor Fido teach the same lesson, that nature's laws cannot be violated, that even fate and the most stubborn bosoms bow to love.

Of the music and beauty of these two dramas, I find it difficult to speak. Before some masterpieces criticism bends in silence. We cannot describe what must be felt. All the melodies that had been growing through two centuries in Italy, are concentrated in their songs. The idyllic voluptuousness, which permeated literature and art, steeps their pictures in a golden glow. It is easy enough to object that their apparent simplicity conceals seduction, that their sentimentalism is unmanly, and their suggestions of physical beauty effeminating:--

Ma come Silvia il ricconobbe, e vide Le belle guance tenere d'Aminta Iscolorite in si leggiadri modi, Che viola non e che impallidisca Si dolcemente, e lui languir si fatto, Che parea gia ultimi sospiri Esalar l'alma; in guisa di Baccante, Gridando e percotendosi il bel petto, Lascio cadersi in sul giacente corpo; E giunse viso a viso, e bocca a bocca.

This passage warns us that an age of cicisbei and castrati has begun, and that the Italian sensuousness has reached its final dissolution. Silvia's kisses in Aminta, Mirtillo's kisses in Pastor Fido, introduce a new refinement of enervation. Marino with his Adone is not distant. But, while we recognize in both these poems--the one perfumed and delicate like flowers of spring, the other sculptured in pure forms of classic grace--evident signs of a civilization sinking to decay; though we almost loathe the beauty which relaxes every chord of manhood in the soul that feels it; we are bound to confess that to this goal the Italian genius had been steadily advancing since the publication of the Filocopo. The negation of chivalry, mysticism, asceticism, is accomplished. After traversing the cycle of comedy, romance, satire, burlesque poetry, the plastic arts, and invading every province of human thought, the Italian reaction against the middle ages assumes a final shape of hitherto unapprehended loveliness in the Aminta and the Pastor Fido. They complete and close the Renaissance, bequeathing in a new species of art its form and pressure to succeeding generations.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XIII. THE PURISTS

The Italians lose their Language--Prejudice against the Mother Tongue--Problem of the Dialects--Want of a Metropolis--The Tuscan Classics--Petrarch and Boccaccio--Dante Rejected--False Attitude of the Petrarchisti--Renaissance Sense of Beauty unexpressed in Lyric--False Attitude of Boccaccio's Followers--Ornamental Prose--Speron Sperone--The Dictator Bembo--His Conception of the Problem--The Asolani--Grammatical Essay--Treatise on the Language--Poems--Letters--Bembo's Place in the Cortegiano--Castiglione on Italian Style--His Good Sense--Controversies on the Language--Academical Spirit--Innumerable Poetasters--La Casa--His Life--Il Forno--Peculiar Melancholy--His Sonnets--Guidiccioni's Poems on Italy--Court Life--Caro and Castelvetro--Their Controversies--Castelvetro accused of Heresy--Literary Ladies--Veronica Gambara--Vittoria Colonna--Her Life--Her Friendship for Michelangelo--Life of Bernardo Tasso--His Amadigi and other Works--Life of Giangiorgio Trissino--His Quarrel with his Son Giulio--His Critical Works--The Italia Liberata.

It was the misfortune of the Italians that, when culture had become national and the revival of the vulgar literature had been effected, they found themselves in nearly the same relation to their own language as to Latin. After more than a hundred years absorbed in humanistic studies, the authors of the fourteenth century were hardly less remote than the Augustan classics; and to all but Tuscans their diction was almost foreign. At the beginning of the cinque cento, the living mother-tongue of Italy which Dante sought--the Vulgare, quod superius venabamur, quod in qualibet redolet civitate, nec cubat in ulla--was still to seek. Since the composition of Dante's essay De Vulgari Eloquio, the literary activity of the nation had, indeed, created a desire for some fixed standard of style in modern speech. But the experiments of the quattro cento had not far advanced the matter. They only proved that Tuscan was the dialect to imitate, and that success in the future must depend on adherence to the Tuscan authors. Hence it happened that Petrarch and Boccaccio came to be studied with the same diligence, the same obsequious reverence, as Cicero and Virgil. Italian was written with no less effort after formal purity, no less minute observance of rules, than if it had been a dead language. At the same time, as a consequence of this system, the vices of the humanistic style--its tendency to servile imitation, emptiness, rhetorical verbosity, and preference of form to matter--were imported into the vernacular literature.

While noting these drawbacks, which attended the resurgence of Italian at an epoch when the whole nation began to demand a common language, we must give due credit to the sagacity displayed by scholars at that epoch in grappling with the problem before them. The main points at issue were, first, to overcome the prejudice against the mother tongue, which still lingered among educated people; secondly, to adjust Italian to the standards of taste established by the humanistic movement; and, thirdly, to decide whether Tuscan should reign supreme, or be merged in a speech more representative of the Italians as a nation. Early in the century, the battle of Italian against Latin was practically won. There remained no obstinate antagonism to a purely national and modern literature. Still the type to which this literature should conform, the laws by which it should be regulated, were as yet unsettled. These questions had to be decided by intelligence rather than by instinct; for the Italians possessed no common medium of conversation, no common opportunities of forensic or parliamentary debate. That insensible process whereby French style has been modeled on the usages of conversation, and English style has been adapted to the tone of oratory, had to be performed, so far as this was possible, by conscious analysis. The Italians were aware that they lacked a language, and they set themselves deliberately to remedy this defect. These peculiar circumstances gave a pedantic tone to the discussion of the problem. Yet the problem itself was neither puerile nor pedantic. It concerned nothing less than the formation of an instrument of self-expression for a people, who had reached the highest grade of artistic skill in the exercise of the dead languages, and who, though intellectually raised to an equality of culture, were divided by tenacious local differences.

That Petrarch and Boccaccio should have been chosen as models of classical Italian style, was not only natural but inevitable. Writers, trained in the method of the humanists, required the guidance of authoritative masters. Just as they used Cicero and Virgil for the correction of medieval Latin, so Petrarch and Boccaccio were needed for the castigation of homespun dialects. Dante, had he been comprehended by such men, would not have satisfied ears educated in the niceties of Latin versification; nor could the builders of Ciceronian perorations have revived the simple prose of the Villani. Petrarch contented their sense of polish; Boccaccio supplied them with intricate periods and cadences of numerous prose. Yet the choice was in either case unfortunate, though for somewhat different reasons.

It was impossible for poets of the sixteenth century to follow Petrarch to the very letter of his diction, without borrowing his tone. Consequently these versifiers affected to languish and adore, wove conceits and complained of cruelty, in the fashion of Vaucluse. Their facile mistresses became Lauras; or else they draped a lay-figure, and wrote sonnets to its painted eyebrows. The confusion between literary ceremony and practical experience of passion wrought an ineradicable discord. Authors of indecent burlesques penned Platonic odes. Bembo, who was answerable for the Menta in its Latin form, praised his mistress Morosina in polished sonnets and elegiac threnodies. Firenzuola published the poems to Selvaggia and the Capitolo in praise of a specific against infamous diseases. La Casa gratified the same Academies with his panegyric of the Oven and his scholastic exercises in a metaphysical emotion. Reading thee diverse compositions side by side, we wake to the conviction that the Petrarchistic counterfeits, however excellent in form, have precisely the same mediocrity as Sannazzaro's epic, while the Bernesque effusions express the crudest temper of the men who wrote them. The one class of poems is redolent of affectation, the other of coarse realism. The middle term between these opposites is wanting. Nor could it well be otherwise. The conditions of society in the sixteenth century rendered Petrarch's sentiment impossible. His melancholy, engendered by the contest between passion and religious duty, had become a thing of the far past. The license of the times rendered this halting between two impulses ridiculous, when no man was found to question the divine right of natural appetite. Even the reverential attitude assumed by Petrarch as a lover, was out of date; and when his imitators aped it, their insincerity was patent. The highest enthusiasm of the Renaissance revealed itself through the plastic arts in admiration for corporeal beauty. This feeling, while it easily degenerated into sensuality, had no point of contact with Petrarch's medieval Platonism. Therefore the tone of the Petrarchisti was hypocritical, and the love they professed, a sham.

We have a further reason for resenting this devotion to a poet with whose habitual mood the men of that age could not sympathize. We know that they had much to say which remained buried beneath their fourteenth-century disguises. The sincerity of feeling, the fervid passion of poets like Bembo, Molza, or La Casa, cannot be denied. But their emotion found no natural channel of expression. It is not without irritation that we deplore the intellectual conditions of an age, which forced these artists to give forth what they felt in one of two equally artificial forms. Between transcription from the Latin elegists and reproduction of Petrarch there lay for them no choice. Consequently, the Renaissance lacked its full development upon the side of lyric poetry. The secret of the times remained unspoken--a something analogous to Venetian painting, a something indicated in Firenzuola's and Luigini's dialogues on female beauty, a something indirectly presented in Ariosto's episodes, which ought to have been uttered from the heart in song by men who felt the loveliness of plastic form. Instead of this lyrical expression of a ruling passion, we have to content ourselves with pseudo-platonic rhymes and with the fervid sensualities of Pontano's elegiacs. The sensibility to corporeal beauty, which was abundantly represented by Titian, Lionardo, Raphael, Correggio, Michelangelo in art, in literature was either shorn of its essential freedom by the limitations of conventional Platonism, or exaggerated on the side of animalism by imitation of erotic Latin poets. Furthermore, we have some right to regard the burlesque obscenity of academical literature as a partial reaction against the hypocritical refinements of the Petrarchistic mannerism. Thus the deepest instinct of the epoch, that which gave its splendor to the painting of the golden age, found no spontaneous utterance in lyric verse.

The academical study of Boccaccio proved disastrous for a different reason. In this case there was no division between the master and his pupils; for we have seen already that the author of the Decameron anticipated the Renaissance in the scope and tenor of his work. But he supplied students with a false standard. His Latinizing periods, his involved construction of sentences and oratorical amplification of motives encouraged the worst qualities of humanistic style. Boccaccio prevented the Italians from forming a masculine prose manner. Each writer, whatever might be the subject of his work, aimed at ornate diction. Cumbrous and circuitous phrases were admired for their own sake. The simplicity of the Chronicles was abandoned for ponderous verbosity, and Machiavelli's virile force found no successors in the crowd of academicians who dissected the Decameron for flowers of rhetoric.

Thus the efforts of the purists took a false direction from the outset both in prose and verse. The literature which aimed at being national, began with archaistic exercises; and Italy, at the moment of attaining self-consciousness, found herself, without a living language, forced to follow in the steps of antiquated authors. The industry and earnestness of the disciples made their failure the more notable; for while they pursued a track that could not lead to aught but mannerism, they plumed themselves upon the soundness of their method. In order to illustrate the spirit of this movement, I will select a passage from the works of Speron Sperone, who was by no means the least successful stylist of the period. He is describing his earlier essays in the art of writing and the steps by which he arrived at what he clearly thought to be perfection:[302]

"Being in all truth desirous beyond measure from my earliest years to speak and to write my thoughts in our mother tongue, and that not so much with a view to being understood, which lies within the scope of every unlettered person, as with the object of placing my name upon the roll of famous men, I neglected every other interest, and gave my whole attention to the reading of Petrarch and the hundred Novels; in which studies having exercised myself for many months with little profit and without a guide, under the inspiration of God I finally betook me to our revered Master Trifone Gabrielli[303]; by whose kindly assistance I arrived at perfect comprehension of those authors, whom, through ignorance of what I ought to notice, I had frequently before misunderstood. This excellent man and true father of ours first bade me observe the vocables, then gave me rules for knowing the declension and conjugation of nouns and verbs in Tuscan, and lastly explained to me articles, pronouns, participles, adverbs, and other parts of speech; so that, collecting all that I had learned, I composed a grammar for myself, by following the which while writing I so controlled my style that in a short space of time the world held me for a man of erudition, and still considers me as such. When it seemed to me that I had taken rank as a grammarian, I set myself, with the utmost expectation of every one who knew me, to the making of verses; and then, my head full of rhythms, sentences and words from Petrarch and Boccaccio, for a few years, I produced things that appeared wonderful to my judgment; but afterwards, thinking that my vein was beginning to dry up (inasmuch as words frequently failed me, and, not finding what to say in different sonnets, it occurred to me to rehandle the same thoughts), I had recourse to that which all the world does now[304]; for, using the greatest diligence, I composed a rhyming dictionary or vocabulary of Italian phrases; in the which I classed by the alphabet every word those two authors had used; moreover I collected in another book their divers ways of describing things, as day, night, anger, peace, hate, love, fear, hope, beauty, in such wise that not a single word or thought came from me which had not its precedent in their sonnets and novels." At this point Sperone frankly admits that his practice was too slavish. He then proceeds to tell how he compared Petrarch's Latin with his vulgar style in order to discover the correct rules of Italian versification. "Conquered by the arguments and experiments I have described, I returned to my earlier studies; and then, in addition to continual self-exercise in the reading of Petrarch (which by itself and without any other artifice may procure great benefit), by fixing my mind more diligently than before upon his modes of diction, I observed (as I believed) certain qualities pertaining in an eminent degree to the poet and also the orator; which, since you desire it, I will briefly expound. In the first place, while numbering and weighing his words one by one, I became aware that I discovered none common and none base, few harsh, all clear, all elegant; and all, moreover, so adapted to common use that one might have supposed he had selected and accumulated them with the concurrence of all Italy in conclave. Among the which (like stars amid the limpid space of midnight) some few shone out with special luster; for some part ancient words, but not unpleasing through their age, as uopo, unquanco, sovente; for some part beautiful and very graceful words, which like jewels that delight the eyes of all men, are only used by gentle and high intellects, such as gioia, speme, rai, disio, soggiorno, belta, and others of like quality, the which no learned tongue would utter, nor hand write, unless the ear consented. Time would fail to tell in detail of the verbs, adverbs, and other parts of speech, which make his verses noble; but one thing I will not pass in silence, namely that, when speaking of his lady, now of her person, now of her soul, now of her tears, now of her smile, now of her movement, now of her taking rest, now of her anger, now of her pity, and now of her age, in a word when describing and magnifying her alive or dead, he generally avoids the proper name of things, and by some wonderful art adorns each thing by words appropriate to others, calling her head fine gold and roof of gold, her eyes suns, stars, sapphires, nest and home of love, her cheeks now snow and roses, now milk and fire, rubies her lips, pearls her teeth, her throat and breast now ivory, now alabaster." Halfway up this Gradus ad Parnassum we are forced to stop and take deep breath. Sperone has launched the theory of "poetic diction," and advances boldly to its extreme consequences. We need not follow his analysis further into particulars. He carries it through the several topics of tautology, periphrasis, antithesis, and proportion of syllables in words of different length; after which the subject of prosody proper is discussed. Having finished with Petrarch, he then proceeds to render the same account of his studies in Boccaccio, observing the variety and choice of his phrases, but calling special attention to the numbers of his periods, and winding up with this sonorous sentence on prose architecture. "But you must know that as the composition of prose is a marshaling of the sounds of words in proper order, so its numbers are certain orders in their syllables; pleasing the ear wherewith, the art of oratory opens, continues and finishes a period: forasmuch as every clause has not only a beginning but also a middle and an end; at the beginning it puts itself in motion and ascends; in the middle, as though weary with exertion, it rests upon its feet awhile; then it descends, and flies to the conclusion for repose."[305]

[Footnote 302: I Dialoghi di Messer Speron Sperone (Aldus, Venice, 1542), p. 146. The passage is taken from a Dialogue on Rhetoric. I have tried to preserve the clauses of the original periods.]

[Footnote 303: Trifone Gabrielli was a Venetian, celebrated for his excellent morals no less than for his learning. He gained the epithet of the Socrates of his age, and died in 1549. His personal influence seems to have been very great. Bembo makes frequent and respectful references to him in his letters, and Giasone de Nores wrote a magnificent panegyric of him in the preface to his commentary on Horace's Ars Poetica, which he professed to have derived orally from Trifone.]

[Footnote 304: Sperone probably alludes to works like Minerbi's Vocabulary of words used by Boccaccio (Venice, 1535); Luna's Vocabolario di cinque mila vocaboli toschi del Furioso Petrarca Boccaccio e Dante (Naples, 1536); Accarigi's dictionary to Boccaccio entitled Ricchezze della lingua volgare (Venice, 1543); and so forth.]

[Footnote 305: It should be mentioned that the passage I have paraphrased is put into the lips of Antonio Broccardo, a Venetian poet, whose Rime were published in 1538. He attacked Bembo's works, and brought down upon himself such a storm of fury from the pedants of Padua and Venice that he took to his bed and died of grief.]

What is admirable, in spite of pedantry and servility, in this lengthy diatribe is the sense of art as art, the devotion to form for its own sake, the effort to grapple with the problems of style, the writer's single-hearted seeking after perfection. Nothing but a highly-developed artistic instinct in the nation could have produced students of this type. At the same time we feel an absence of spontaneity, and the tendency to aim at decorative writing is apparent. When the glow of discovery, which impelled Sperone and his fellow-pioneers to open a way across the continent of literature, had failed; when the practice of their school had passed into precepts, and their inventions had been formulated as canons of style; nothing remained for travelers upon this path but frigid repetition, precise observance of conventional limitations, and exercises in sonorous oratory. The rhetoric of the seventeenth century was a necessary outgrowth of pedantic purism. The conceits of Marini and his imitators followed inevitably from a rigorous application of rules that denied to poetry the right of natural expression. It may be urged that for a nation so highly sensitive to form as the Italians, without a metropolis to mold the language in the process of development, and without a spoken dialect of good society, there existed no common school of style but the recognized classics of Tuscany.[306] When each district habitually used a different speech for private and public utterance, men could not write as they talked, and they were therefore forced to write by rule. There is force in these arguments. Yet the consequences of a too minute and fastidious study of the Tuscan authors proved none the less fatal to the freedom of Italian literature; and what is more, sagacious critics foresaw the danger, though they were unable to avert it.

[Footnote 306: The difficulty is well put by one of the interlocutors in Castiglione's dialogue upon the courtier (ed. Lemonnier, p. 41): "Oltre a questo, le consuetudini sono molto varie, ne e citta nobile in Italia che non abbia diversa maniera di parlar da tutte l'altre. Pero non vi ristringendo voi a dichiarar qual sia la migliore, potrebbe l'uomo attaccarsi alla bergamasca cosi come alla fiorentina." Messer Federigo Fregoso of Genoa is speaking, and he draws the conclusion which practically triumphed in Italy: "Parmi adunque, che a chi vuol fuggir ogni dubio ed esser ben sicuro, sia necessario proporsi ad imitar uno, il quale di consentimento di tutti sia estimato buono ... e questo (nel volgar dico), non penso che abbia da esser altro che il Petrarca e 'l Boccaccio; e chi da questi dui si discosta va tentoni, come chi cammina per le tenebre e spesso erra la strada."]

The leader in this movement, acknowledged throughout Italy for more than half a century as dictator in the republic of letters, "foster-father of the language" (balio della lingua), "guide and master of our tongue" (guida e maestro di questa lingua), was Pietro Bembo.[307] Though only sixteen years junior to Angelo Poliziano, whom he had himself saluted as "ruler of the Ausonian lyre," Bembo outlived his master for the space of fifty-one years, and swayed the literary world at a period when Italian succeeded to the honors of Latin scholarship.[308] He was a Venetian. This fact is not insignificant, since it clearly marks the change that had come over the nation, when the scepter of learning was transferred to the northern provinces, and the exclusive privilege of correct Italian composition was shared with Tuscans by men of other dialects.[309] In his early youth Bembo had the good sense to perceive that the mother tongue was no less worthy of cultivation than Greek and Latin. The arguments advanced by Dante, by Alberti, by Lorenzo de' Medici, recurred with fresh force to his mind. He therefore made himself the champion of Italian against those exclusive students who, like Ercole Strozzi, still contended that the dead languages were alone worthy of attention.[310] He also saw that it was necessary to create a standard of correct style for writers who were not fortunate enough to have been born within the bounds of Tuscany. Accordingly, he devoted himself to the precise and formal study of fourteenth-century literature, polishing his own Italian compositions with a diligence that, while it secured transparent purity of diction, deprived them of originality and impulse. It is said that he passed each of his works through forty successive revisions, keeping as many portfolios to represent the stages at which they had arrived.

[Footnote 307: In the famous passage of the Furioso where Ariosto pronounces the eulogy of the poets of his day, he mentions Bembo thus (Orl. Fur. xlvi. 15).

Pietro Bembo, che 'l puro e dolce idioma nostro, Levato fuor del volgar uso tetro, Quale esser dee, ci ha co 'l suo esempio mostro.]

[Footnote 308: See Bembo's elegy on Poliziano quoted by me in the Revival of Learning, p. 484.]

[Footnote 309: See Revival of Learning, p. 506, for the transference of scholarship to Lombardy.]

[Footnote 310: See the Latin hendecasyllables quoted by me in the Revival of Learning, p. 415, and the Defense of Italian in the treatise "Della volgare Lingua" (Bembo, Opere, Milan, Class. It. x. 28). Carducci in his essay Delle Poesie Latine di Ludovico Ariosto, pp. 179-181, gives some interesting notices of Ercole Strozzi's conversion to the vulgar tongue.]

Having already sketched the life of Bembo, I shall here restrict myself to remarks upon those of his works which were influential in reviving the practice of Italian composition.[311] Among these the first place must be awarded to Gli Asolani, a dialogue on Love, written in his early manhood and dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia. The beauty of its language and the interest of the theme discussed rendered this treatise widely fashionable. Yet it is not possible to study it with pleasure now. Those Platonic conversations, in which the refined society of the Italian Courts delighted, have lost their attraction for us. Nothing but the charming description of Asolo, where the Queen of Cyprus had her garden, surrounded by trimmed laurels and divided crosswise with a leafy pergola of vines, retains its freshness. That picture, animated by the figures of the six novitiates of Love, now sauntering through shade and sunlight under the vine-branches, now seated on the grass to hear a lute or viol deftly touched, is in the best idyllic style of the Venetian masters. At the Court of Urbino, where Bembo was residing when his book appeared, it was received with acclamation, as a triumph of divine genius. The illustrious circle celebrated by Castiglione in his Cortegiano perused it with avidity, and there is no doubt that the publication gave a powerful impulse to Italian studies. These were still further fostered by Bembo's Defense of the Vulgar Tongue.[312] He had secured the hearing of the world by his Asolani. Women and the leaders of fashionable society were with him; and he pushed his arguments home against the Latinizing humanists. "To abandon our own language for another," he reminded them, "is the same as withdrawing supplies from our mother to support a strange woman." This phrase is almost identical with what Dante had written on the same topic two centuries earlier. But Bembo's standing-ground was different from Dante's. The poet of the fourteenth century felt called to create a language for his nation. The student of the sixteenth, imbued with the assimilative principles of scholarship, too fastidious to risk a rough note in his style, too feeble to attempt a new act of creation, was content to "affect the fame of an imitator."[313] His piety toward the mother-tongue was generous; his method of rehabilitation was almost servile.

[Footnote 311: See Revival of Learning, pp. 410-415, 481-485.]

[Footnote 312: Opere del Cardinale Bembo (Class. It. Milano, 1808, vol. x.).]

[Footnote 313: See his Latin treatise De Imitatione. It is in the form of an epistle.]

With the view of illustrating his practice by precepts, Bembo published a short Italian grammar, or compendium of Regole Grammaticali. It went through fourteen editions, and formed the text-book for future discussions of linguistic problems. Though welcomed with enthusiasm, this first attempt to reduce Italian to system was severely criticised, especially by Sannazzaro, Caro, Castelvetro and the Florentine Academy.

I have already had occasion to observe that, as a Latin poet, Bembo succeeded best with memorial verses. The same may be said about his Italian poems. The Canzoni on the death of his brother, and that on the death of his mistress Morosina, are justly celebrated for their perfection of form; nor are they so wanting in spontaneous emotion as many of his Petrarchistic exercises. Bembo was tenderly attached to this Morosina, whom he first met at Rome, and with whom he lived till her death at Padua in 1525. She was the mother of his three children, Lucilio, Torquato and Elena. The Canzone in question, beginning:

Donna, de' cui begli occhi alto diletto:

was written so late as 1539, three months after Bembo had been raised to the dignity of Cardinal.[314] As a specimen of the conceits which he tolerated in poetry, I have thought it worth while to present the following translation of a sonnet:[315]

Ah me, at one same moment forced to cry And hush, to hope and fear, rejoice and grieve, The service of one master seek and leave, Over my loss laugh equally and sigh! My guide I govern; without wings I fly; With favoring winds, to rocks and sandbanks cleave; Hate haughtiness, yet meekness disbelieve; Mistrust all men, nor on myself rely. I strive to stay the sun, set snows on fire; Yearn after freedom, run to take the yoke: Defend myself without, but bleed within; Fall, when there's none to lift me from the mire; Complain, when plaints are vain, of fortune's stroke; And power, being powerless, from impuissance win.

[Footnote 314: See Panizzi, Bioardo ed Ariosto, vi. lxxxi.]

[Footnote 315: Sonnet xxxvi. of his collected poems.]

In the sixteenth century verses of this stamp passed for masterpieces of incomparable elegance. The same high value was set on Bembo's familiar letters. He wrote them with a view to publication, and they were frequently reprinted during the course of the next fifty years.[316] These may still be read with profit by students for the light they cast upon Italian society during the first half of the cinque cento, and with pleasure by all who can appreciate the courtesies of refined breeding expressed in language of fastidious delicacy. The chief men of the day, whether Popes, princes, Cardinals or poets, and all the illustrious ladies, including Lucrezia Borgia, Veronica Gambara, and Vittoria Colonna, are addressed with a mingled freedom and ceremony, nicely graduated according to their rank or degree of intimacy, which proves the exquisite tact developed by the intercourse of Courts in men like Bembo.

[Footnote 316: My edition is in four volumes, Gualtero Scotto, Vinegia, MDLII. They are collected with copious additions in the Classici Italiani.]

Since the composition and publication of such letters formed a main branch of literary industry in the period we have reached,[317] it will be well to offer some examples of Bembo's epistolary style; and for this purpose, the correspondence with Lucrezia Borgia may be chosen, not only because of the interest attaching to her friendship with the author, but also because the topics treated display the refinement of his nature in a very agreeable light.[318] In one of these, written upon the occasion of her father's death, he calls Alexander VI. quel vostro cosi gran padre. In a second, touched with the deepest personal feeling, he announces the death of his own brother Carlo, mio solo e caro fratello, unico sostegno e sollazzo della vita mia.[319] In a third he thanks her for her letters of condolence: Le lagrime alle quali mi scrivete essere stata constretta leggendo nelle mei lettere la morte del mio caro e amato fratello M. Carlo, sono dolcissimo refrigerio stato al mio dolore, se cosa dolce alcuna m'e potuta venire a questo tempo. In a fourth he turns this graceful compliment: Pregherei eziandio il cielo, che ogni giorno v'accrescerebbe la bellezza; ma considero che non vi se ne puo aggiungere. In a fifth he congratulates Lucrezia upon the birth of a son and heir, and in a sixth condoles with her upon his early death. Then another boy is born, just when the Duke of Urbino dies; and Bembo mingles courtly tears with ceremonious protestations of his joy. It would be impossible to pen more scholarly exercises upon similar occasions; and through the style of the professed epistolographer we seem to feel that Bembo had real interest in the events he illustrates so elegantly. The fatal defect of his letters is, that he is always thinking more of his manner than of his matter. Like the humanists from whom he drew his mental lineage, he labored for posterity without reckoning on the actual demands posterity would make. Success crowned his efforts in the pleasure he afforded to the public of his day; but this was a success comparable with that of Bernardo Accolti or Tibaldeo of Ferrara, whom he scorned. He little thought that future students would rate an annalist of Corio's stamp, for the sake of his material, at a higher value than the polished author of the Lettere. Yet such is the irony of fame that we could willingly exchange Bembo's nicely-turned phrases for a few solid facts, a few spontaneous effusions.

[Footnote 317: It will be impossible to do more than make general reference to the vast masses of Italian letters printed in the sixteenth century. I must, therefore, content myself here with mentioning the collections of La Casa, Caro, Bernardo, and Torquato Tasso, Aretino, Guidiccioni, together with the miscellanies published under the titles of Lettre Scritte al Signor Pietro Aretino, the Lettere Diverse in three books (Aldus, 1567), and the Lettere di Tredici Uomini Illustri (Venetia, 1554).]

[Footnote 318: Lettere, ed. cit. vol. iv. pp. 1-31.]

[Footnote 319: Another letter, dated Venice, August 1, 1504, is fuller in particulars about this dearly-loved brother.]

Bembo was a power in literature, the exact force of which it is difficult to estimate without taking his personal influence into consideration. Distinguished by great physical beauty, gifted with a noble presence, cultivated in the commerce of the best society, he added to his insight and his mental energy all the charm that belongs to a man of fashion and persuasive eloquence in conversation. He was untiring in his literary industry, unfailing in his courtesy to scholars, punctual in correspondence, and generous in the use he made of his considerable wealth. At Urbino, at Venice, at Rome, and at Padua, his study was the meeting-place of learned men, who found the graces of the highest aristocracy combined in him with genial enthusiasm for the common interests of letters. Thus the man did even more than the author to promote the revolution he had at heart. This is brought home to us with force when we consider the place assigned to him in Castiglione's Cortegiano--a masterpiece of composition transcending, in my opinion, all the efforts made by Bembo to conquer the difficulties of style. Castiglione is no less correct than the dictator strove to be; but at the same time he is far more natural. He treats the same topics with greater ease, and with a warmth of feeling and conviction which endears him to the heart of those who read his golden periods. Yet Castiglione gives the honors of his dialogue to the author of the Asolani, when he puts into the mouth of Bembo that glowing panegyric of Platonic love, which forms the close and climax of his dialogue upon the qualities of a true gentleman.[320]

[Footnote 320: Il Cortegiano (ed. Lemonnier, Firenze, 1854), pp. 296-303. I have already spoken at some length about this essay in the Age of the Despots, pp. 183-190, and have narrated the principal events of Castiglione's life in the Revival of Learning, pp. 418-422. For his Latin poems see ib. pp. 490-497.]

The crowning merit of the Cortegiano is an air of good breeding and disengagement from pedantic prejudices. This urbanity renders it a book to read with profit and instruction through all time. Castiglione's culture was the result of a large experience of men and books, ripened by intercourse with good society in all its forms. His sense and breadth of view are peculiarly valuable when he discusses a subject like that which forms the topic of the present chapter. There is one passage in his book, relating to the problem of Italian style, which, had it been treated with the attention it deserved, might have saved his fellow-countrymen from the rigors of pedagogical despotism.[321]

[Footnote 321: Ed. cit. pp. 39-53.]

Starting from his cardinal axiom that good manners demand freedom from all affectation, he deprecates the use in speech or writing of those antiquated Tuscan words the purists loved. As usual, he hits the very center of the subject in his comments on this theme. "It seems to me, therefore, exceedingly strange to employ words in writing which we avoid in all the common usages of conversation. Writing is nothing but a form of speaking, which continues to exist after a man has spoken, and is, as it were, an image or rather the life of the words he utters. Therefore in speech, which, as soon as the voice has issued from the mouth, is lost, some things may be tolerated that are not admissible in composition, because writing preserves the words, subjects them to the criticism of the reader, and allows time for their mature consideration. It is consequently reasonable to use greater diligence with a view to making what we write more polished and correct, yet not to do this so that the written words shall differ from the spoken, but only so that the best in spoken use shall be selected for our composition." After touching on the need of lucidity, he proceeds "I therefore should approve of a man's not only avoiding antiquated Tuscan phrases, but also being careful to employ such as are in present use in Tuscany and other parts of Italy, provided they have a certain grace and harmony."[322] At this point another interlocutor in the dialogue observes that Italy possesses no common language. In the difficulty of knowing whether to follow the custom of Florence or of Bergamo, it is desirable to recognize a classical standard of style. Petrarch and Boccaccio should be selected as models. To refuse to imitate them is mere presumption. Here Castiglione states the position of the school he combats. In his answer to their argument he makes Giuliano de' Medici, one of the company, declare that he, a Tuscan of the Tuscans as he is, should never think of employing any words of Petrarch or Boccaccio which were obsolete in good society. Then the thread of exposition is resumed. The Italian language, in spite of its long past, may still be called young and unformed. When the Roman Empire decayed, spoken Latin suffered from the corruptions introduced by barbarian invaders. It retained greater purity in Tuscany than elsewhere. Yet other districts of Italy preserved certain elements of the ancient language that have a right to be incorporated with the living tongue; nor is it reasonable to suppose that a modern dialect should at a certain moment have reached perfection any more than Latin did. The true rule to follow is to see that a man has something good to say. "Making a division between thoughts and words is much the same as separating soul and body. In order, therefore, to speak or write well, our courtier must have knowledge; for he who has none, and whose mind is void of matter worthy to be apprehended, has naught to say or write." He must be careful to clothe his thoughts in select and fitting words, but above all things to use such "as are still upon the lips of the people." He need not shun foreign phrases, if there be a special force in them above their synonyms in his own language. Nor is there cause to fear lest the vulgar tongue should prove deficient in resources when examined by grammarians and stylists. "Even though it be not ancient Tuscan of the purest water, it will be Italian, common to the nation, copious and varied, like a delicious garden full of divers fruits and flowers." Here Castiglione quotes the precedent of Greek, showing that each of its dialects contributed something to the common stock, though Attic was recognized as sovereign for its polish. Among the Romans likewise, Livy was not tabooed because of his patavinity, nor Virgil because the Romans recognized a something in him of rusticity. "We, meanwhile, far more severe than the ancients, impose upon ourselves certain newfangled laws that have no true relation to the object. With a beaten track before our eyes, we try to walk in bypaths. We take a willful pleasure in obscurity, though our language, like all others, is only meant to express our thoughts with force and clearness. While we call it the popular speech, we plume ourselves on using phrases that are not only unknown to the people, but unintelligible to men of birth and learning, and which have fallen out of conversation in every district of the land." If Petrarch and Boccaccio were living at our epoch, they would certainly omit words that have fallen out of fashion since their days; and it is mere impertinence for a purist to tell me that I ought to say Campidoglio instead of Capitolio and so forth, because some elder Tuscan author wrote it, or the peasants of the Tuscan district speak it so. You argue that only pride prevents our imitating Petrarch and Boccaccio. But pray inform me whom they imitated? To model Latin poems upon Virgil or Catullus is necessary, because Latin is a dead language. But since Italian is alive and spoken, let us write it as we use it, with due attention to artistic elegance. "The final master of style is genius, and the ultimate guide is a sound natural judgment." Do we require all our painters to follow one precedent? Lionardo, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giorgione have struck out different paths of excellence in art. Writers should claim the same liberty of choice, the same spontaneity of inspiration. "I cannot comprehend how it should be right, instead of enriching Italian and giving it spirit, dignity and luster, to make it poor, attenuated, humble and obscure, and so to pen it up within fixed limits as that every one should have to copy Petrarch and Boccaccio. Why should we, for example, not put equal faith in Poliziano, Lorenzo de' Medici, Francesco Diaceto, and others who are Tuscan too, and possibly of no less learning and discretion than were Petrarch and Boccaccio? However, there are certain scrupulous persons abroad nowadays, who make a religion and ineffable mystery of their Tuscan tongue, frightening those who listen to them, to the length of preventing many noble and lettered men from opening their lips, and forcing them to admit they do not know how to talk the language they learned from their nurses in the cradle."[323]

[Footnote 322: Ariosto's style was formed on precisely these principles.]

[Footnote 323: The preface to the Cortegiano may be compared with this passage. When it appeared, the critics complained that Castiglione had not imitated Boccaccio. His answer is marked by good sense and manly logic: see pp. 3, 4. With Castiglione, Aretino joined hands, the ruffian with the gentleman, in this matter of revolt against the purists. See the chapter in this volume upon Aretino.]

If the Italians could have accepted Castiglione's principles, and approached the problem of their language in this liberal spirit, the nation would have been spared its wearisome, perpetually recurrent quarrel about words. But the matter had already got into the hands of theorists; and local jealousies were inflamed. The municipal wars of the middle ages were resuscitated on the ground of rhetoric and grammar. Unluckily, the quarrel is not over; adhuc sub judice lis est, and there is no judge to decide it. But in the nineteenth century it no longer rages with the violence that made it a matter of duels, assassinations and lifelong hatreds in the sixteenth. The Italians have recently secured for the first time in their history the external conditions which are necessary to a natural settlement of the dispute by the formation of a common speech through common usage. The parliament, the army, the newspapers of United Italy are rapidly creating a language adequate to all the needs of modern life; and though purists may still be found, who maintain that Passavanti's Specchio is a model of style for leading articles in Fanfulla, yet the nation, having passed into a new phase of existence, must be congratulated on having exchanged the "golden simplicity of the trecento" for a powerful and variously-colored instrument of self-expression.

To stir the dust of those obsolete controversies on the language of Italy--to make extracts from Varchi's, Sperone's or Bembo's treatises upon the Tongues--to set Tolommei's claims for Tuscan priority in the balance against Muzio's more modest pleas in favor of Italian[324]--to describe how one set of scholars argued that the vernacular ought to be called Tuscan, how another dubbed it Florentine or Sienese, and how a third, more sensible, voted for Italian[325]--to enumerate the blasts and counterblasts of criticism blown about each sentence in Boccaccio and Petrarch[326]--to resuscitate the orthographical encounters between Trissino and Firenzuola on the matter of the letter K--is no part of my present purpose. It must suffice to have noted that these problems occupied the serious attention of the literary world, and to have indicated by extracts from Sperone and Castiglione the extreme limits of pedantry and sound sense between which the opinion of the learned vibrated. The details of the quarrel may be left to the obscurity of treatises, long since doomed to "dust and an endless darkness."

[Footnote 324: Varchi's Ercolano or Dialogo delle Lingue; Sperone's dialogue Delle Lingue; Claudio Tolommei's Cesano; Girolamo Muzio's Battaglie.]

[Footnote 325: Varchi called it Fiorentina, Tolommei and Salviati Toscana, Bargagli Senese, Trissino and Muzio Italiana. Castiglione and Bembo agreed in aiming at Italian rather than pure Tuscan, but differed in their proposed method of cultivating style. Bembo preferred to call the language Volgare, as it was the common property of the Volgo. Castiglione suggested the title Cortigiana, as it was refined and settled by the usage of Courts. Yet Castiglione was more liberal than Bembo in acknowledging the claims of local dialects.]

[Footnote 326: For a list of commentators upon Petrarch at this period, see Tiraboschi, lib. iii. cap. iii., section 1. Common sense found at last sarcastic utterance in Tassoni.]

Much unprofitable expenditure of time and thought upon verbal questions of no vital interest was encouraged by the Academies, which now began to sprout like mushrooms in all towns of Italy.[327] The old humanistic societies founded by Cosimo de' Medici, Pomponius Laetus, Pontano, and Aldo for the promotion of classical studies, had done their work and died away. Their successor, the Umidi of Florence, the Pellegrini of Venice, the Eterei of Padua, the Vignaiuoli of Rome, professed to follow the same objects, with special attention to the reformation of Italian literature. Yet their very titles indicate a certain triviality and want of manly purpose. They were clubs combining conviviality with he pursuit of study; and it too frequently happened that the spirit of their jovial meetings extended itself to the dicerie, cicalate and capitoli recited by their members, when the cloth was drawn and the society sat down to intellectual banquets. At the same time the Academies were so fashionable and so universal that they gave the tone to literature. It was the ambition of all rising students to be numbered with the more illustrious bodies; and when a writer of promise joined one of these, he naturally felt the influence of his companions. Member vied with member in producing sonnets and rhetorical effusions on the slenderest themes; for it was less an object to probe weighty matters or to discover truth, than to make a display of ingenuity by clothing trifles in sonorous language. Surrounded by a crowd of empty-pated but censorious critics, exercised in the minutiae of style and armed with precedents from Petrarch, the poet read his verses to the company. They were approved or rejected according as they satisfied the sense of correctness, or fell below the conventional standard of imitative diction. To think profoundly, to feel intensely, to imagine boldly, to invent novelties, to be original in any line, was perilous. The wealth of the Academies, the interest of the public in purely literary questions, and the activity of the press encouraged the publication and circulation of these pedantic exercises. Time would fail to tell of all the poems and orations poured forth at the expense of these societies and greedily devoured by friends prepared to eulogize, or rival bodies eager to dissect and criticise. Students who are desirous of forming some conception of the multitudes of poets at this period, must be referred to the pages of Quadrio with a warning that Tiraboschi is inclined to think that even Quadrio's lists are incomplete. All ranks and conditions both of men and women joined in the pursuit. Princes and plebeians, scholars and worldlings, noble ladies and leaders of the demi-monde, high-placed ecclesiastics and penniless Bohemians aspired to the same honors; and the one idol of the motley crowd was Petrarch. There is no doubt that the final result of their labors was the attainment of a certain grace and the diffusion of literary elegance. Yet these gains carried with them a false feeling about poetry in general, a wrong conception of its purpose and its scope. The Italian purists could scarcely have comprehended the drift of Milton's excursion, in his "Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty," upon the high vocation of the prophet-bard. They would have been no less puzzled by Sidney's definition of poetry, and have felt Shelley's last word upon the poetic office, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," to be no better than a piece of pardonable lunacy.

[Footnote 327: See Revival of Learning, pp. 365-368.]

In this thick-spreading undergrowth of verse, where, as Tiraboschi aptly remarks, "beneath the green and ample foliage we seek in vain for fruit," it is difficult to see the wood by reason of the trees. Poet so closely resembles poet in the mediocrity of similar attainment, that we are forced to sigh for the energy of Michelangelo's unfinished sonnets, or the crudities of Campanella's muse. Yet it is possible to make a representative selection of writers, who, while they belonged to the school of the purists and were associated with the chief Academies of the day, distinguished themselves by some originality of style or by enduring qualities of literary excellence. Foremost among these may be placed Monsignore Giovanni della Casa. He was born in 1503 of noble Florentine parents, his mother being a member of the Tornabuoni family. Educated at Bologna, he entered the service of the Church, and already in 1538 had reached the dignity of Apostolic Clerk. Rome was still what Lorenzo de' Medici had called it, "a sink of all the vices," and very few ecclesiastics escaped its immoralities. La Casa formed some permanent connection, the fruit of which was his acknowledged son Quirino.[328] In 1540 he was sent on a special mission to Florence with the title of Apostolic Commissary; and in 1544 he was raised to the Archbishopric of Benevento, and soon afterwards appointed Nuncio at Venice. During the pontificate of Julius III., finding himself out of favor with the Vatican, he continued to reside at Venice, employing his leisure in literary occupations. Paul IV. recalled him to Rome, and made him Secretary of State. But though he seemed upon the point of touching the highest ecclesiastical dignity, La Casa was never promoted to the Cardinalate. It is difficult to find a reason for this omission, unless we accept the traditional belief that the scandal of his Capitolo del Forno barred La Casa's entrance to the Sacred College.[329] This burlesque poem, at any rate, supplied the Protestants with a weapon which they used against the Church. The legend based upon its audacious obscenities was credited by Bayle, and in part refuted by the Antibaillet of Menage. Though by no means more offensive to good taste than scores of similar compositions, the high rank of its author and the offices of trust he had discharged for the Papal Curia, emphasized its infamy, and caused La Casa to be chosen as the scapegoat for his comrades. He died in 1556.

[Footnote 328: Quirino is mentioned as "legitimatum, seu forsitan legitimandum," in La Casa's will (Opp. Venezia, Pasinelli, 1752, vol. i. p. lxxvii.). From his name and his age at La Casa's death we ought perhaps to refer this fruit of his amours to the Venetian period of his life and his intimacy with the Quirino family. His biographer, Casotti, says that he discovered nothing about the mother's name (loc. cit. p. lxxiii.).]

[Footnote 329: La Casa received a special commission at Venice in 1546, to prosecute Pier Paolo Vergerio for heresy. When Vergerio went into exile, he did his best to blacken La Casa's character, and used his writings to point the picture he drew in Protestant circles of ecclesiastical profligacy. The whole subject of La Casa's exclusion from the College is treated by his editor, Casotti (Opp. vol. 1. pp. xlv.-xlviii.). That the Bishop of Benevento was stung to the quick by Vergerio's invectives may be seen in his savage answer "Adversus Paulum Vergerium" (Opp. iii. 103), and in the hendecasyllables "Ad Germanos" (Opp. i. 295), both of which discuss the Forno and attempt to apologize for it.]

La Casa's name is best known in modern literature by his treatise on the manners of the finished gentleman. In his short essay, entitled Galateo, he discusses the particulars of social conduct, descending to rules about the proper use of the drinking-glass at table, the employment of the napkin, the dressing of the hair, and the treatment of immodest topics by polite periphrases.[330] Galateo is recommended not to breathe hard in the face of the persons he is speaking to, not to swear at his servants in company, not to trim his nails in public, not to tell indecent anecdotes to girls, and so forth. He is shown how to dress with proper pomp, what ceremonies to observe, and which to omit as servile or superfluous, how to choose his words, and how to behave at dinner. The book is an elaborate discourse on etiquette; and while it never goes far below the surface, it is full of useful precepts based upon the principles of mutual respect and tolerance which govern good society. We might accept it as a sequel to the Courtier; for while Castiglione drew the portrait of a gentleman, La Casa explained how this gentleman should conduct himself among his equals. The chief curiosity about the book is, that a man of its author's distinction should have thought it worthy of his pains to formulate so many rules of simple decency. From the introduction it is clear that La Casa meant the Galateo to be a handbook for young men entering upon the world. That it fulfilled this purpose, seems proved by the fact that its title passed into a proverb. "To teach the Galateo" is synonymous in Italian with to teach good manners.

[Footnote 330: Opp. vol. i. pp. 237-306. Galateo is said to have been a certain Galeazzo Florimonte of Sessa.]

One whole volume of La Casa's collected works is devoted to his official and familiar correspondence, composed in choice but colorless Italian.[331] Another contains his Italian and Latin poems. No poet of the century expressed his inner self more plainly than La Casa in his verse. The spectacle is stern and grave. From the vocabulary of the Tuscan classics he seems to have chosen the gloomiest phrases, to adumbrate some unknown terror of the soul.[332] Sometimes his sonnets, in their vivid but polished grandeur, rise even to sublimity, as when he compares himself to a leafless wood in winter, beaten by fiercer storms, with days more cold and short in front, and with a longer night to follow.[333] It is a cheerless prospect of old age and death, uncomforted by hope, unvisited by human love. The same shadow, intensified by even a deeper horror of some coming doom, rests upon another sonnet in which he deplores his wasted life.[334] It drapes, as with a funeral pall, the long majestic ode describing his early errors and the vanity of worldly pomp.[335] It adds despair to his lines on jealousy, intensity to his satire on Court-life, and incommunicable sadness to the poems of his love.[336] Very judicious were the Italian critics who pronounced his style too stern for the erotic muse. We find something at once sinister and solemn in his mood. The darkness that envelops him, issues from the depth of his own heart. The world around is bright with beautiful women and goodly men; but he is alone, shut up with fear and self-reproach. Such a voice befits the age, as we learn to know it in our books of history, far better than the light effusions of contemporary rhymsters. It suits the black-robed personages painted by Moroni, whose calm pale eyes seem gazing on a world made desolate, they know not why. Its accents are all the more melancholy because La Casa yielded to no impulses of rage. He remained sober, cold, sedate; but by some fatal instinct shunned the light and sought the shade. The gloom that envelops him is only broken by the baleful fires of his Capitoli. That those burlesque verses, of which I shall speak in another place, were written in his early manhood, and that the Rime were perhaps the composition of his age, need not prevent us from connecting them together. The dreariness of La Casa's later years may well have been engendered by the follies of his youth. It is the despondency of exhaustion following on ill-expended energy, the taedium vitae which fell on Italy when she awoke from laughter.

[Footnote 331: Vol. ii. of the Venetian edition, 1752.]

[Footnote 332: Take for instance this outburst from a complimentary sonnet (No. 40, vol. i. p. 70):

O tempestosa, o torbida procella, Che 'n mar si crudo la mia vita giri! Donna amar, ch'Amor odia e i suoi desiri, Che sdegno e feritate onor appella.

Or this opening of the sonnet on Court-honors (No. 26):

Mentre fra valli paludose ed ime Ritengon me larve turbate, e mostri, Che tra le gemme, lasso, e l'auro, e gli ostri Copron venen, che 'l cor mi roda e lima.

Or this from a Canzone on his love (No. 2):

Qual chiuso albergo in solitario bosco Pien di sospetto suol pregar talora Corrier di notte traviato e lasso; Tal io per entro il tuo dubbioso, e fosco. E duro calle, Amor, corro e trapasso.]

[Footnote 333: Sonnet 58, vol. i. 154.]

[Footnote 334: No. 52, ib. p. 136.]

[Footnote 335: Canzone 4, ib. p. 102.]

[Footnote 336: Sonnets 8, 26, 40. ib. pp. 12, 39, 70; Canzone 2, ib. p. 79.]

In illustration of the foregoing remarks I have translated six of La Casa's sonnets, which I shall here insert without further comment.[337] In point of form, Italian literature can show few masterpieces superior to the first and second.

[Footnote 337: They are Nos. 58, 50, 25, 26, 8. The sixth, on Jealousy, may be compared with Sannazzaro's, above, p. 200.]

Sweet woodland solitude, that art so dear To my dark soul lost in doubt's dreadful maze, Now that the North-wind, these short sullen days, Wraps earth and air in winter's mantle drear, And thy green ancient shadowy locks are sere, White as my own, above the frosty ways, Where summer flowers once basked beneath heaven's rays, But rigid ice now reigns and snows austere; Pondering upon that brief and cloudy light That's left for me, I walk, and feel my mind And members, like thy branches, frozen too; Yet me, within, without, worse frost doth bind, My winter brings a fiercer East-wind's blight, A longer darkness, days more cold, more few.

O Sleep, O tranquil son of noiseless Night, Of humid, shadowy Night; O dear repose For wearied men, forgetfulness of woes Grievous enough the bloom of life to blight! Succor this heart that hath outgrown delight, And knows no rest; these tired limbs compose; Fly to me, Sleep; thy dusky vans disclose Over my languid eyes, then cease thy flight. Where, where is Silence, that avoids the day? Where the light dreams, that with a wavering tread And unsubstantial footing follow thee? Alas! in vain I call thee; and these gray, These frigid shades flatter in vain. O bed, How rough with thorns! O nights, how harsh to me!

It was my wont by day to seek the grove Or grot or font, soothing my soul with song, Weaving sweet woes in rhyme, and all night long To watch the stars with Phoebus and with Love; Nor, Bernard, did I fear with thee to rove That sacred mount where now few poets throng: Till like sea-billows, uncontrollably strong, Me too the vulgar usage earthward drove; And bound me down to tears and bitter life, Where fonts are not, nor laurel boughs, nor shade, But false and empty honor stirs vain strife. Now, not unmixed with envious regret, I watch thee scale yon far-off heights, where yet No footstep on the sward was ever laid.

While mid low-lying dells and swampy vales Those troubled ghosts and dreams my feet delay, Which hide 'neath gems and gold and proud array The barb of poison that my heart impales; Thou on the heights that virtue rarely scales, By paths untrodden and a trackless way, Wrestling for fame with thine own soul, dost stray, Free o'er yon hills no earth-born cloud assails. Whence I take shame and sorrow, when I think How with the crowd in this low net accursed I fell, and how 'tis doomed that I shall die. O happy thou! Thou hast assuaged thy thirst! Not Phoebus but grief dwells with me, and I Must wait to purge my woes on Lethe's brink.

Now pomps and purple, now clear stream or field Seeking, I've brought my day to evensong, Profitless, like dry fern or tares, the throng Of luckless herbs that no fair fruitage yield. Wherefore my heart, false guide on this vain quest, More than a smitten flint strikes spark and flame; So dulled a spirit must she bring with shame To Him who placed it bright within my breast. Poor heart! She well deserves to chafe and burn Since her so precious and so noble freight, Ill-governed, she to loss and woe doth turn! Nor 'neath the North-wind do the branches quake On yonder bristling oak-trees, as I shake Fearing that even repentance comes too late.

Heart-ache, that drawest nutriment from fear, And still through growing fear dost gather power; That mingling ice with flame, confusion drear And fell disaster on love's realm dost shower! Forth from my breast, since all thy bitter cheer With my life's sweet thou'st blent in one brief hour! Hence to Cocytus! Where hell drinks each tear Of tortured souls, self-plagued, self-loathing, cower! There without rest thy dolorous days drag out, Thy dark nights without slumber! Smart thy worst No less with felt pangs than fictitious doubt! Avaunt! Why fiercer now than at the first, Now when thy venom runs my veins throughout, Bring'st thou on those black wings new dreams accurst?

The vicissitudes of Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century were so tragic, and her ruin was so near at hand, that we naturally seek some echo of this anguish in the verses of her poets. Nothing, however, is rarer than to find direct allusion to the troubles of the times, or apprehension of impending danger expressed in sonnet or canzone. While following Petrarch to the letter, the purists neglected his odes to Rienzi and the Princes of Italy. His passionate outcry, Italia mia, found no response in their rhetoric. Those sublime outpourings of eloquence, palpitating with alternate hopes and fears, might have taught the poets how to write at least the threnody of Rome or Florence. Had they studied this side of their master's style, the gravity of the matter supplied them by the miseries of their country, might have immortalized their purity of style. As it was, they preferred the Rime in Vita e Morte di Madonna Laura, and sang of sentiments they had not felt, while Italy was dying. Only here and there, as in the somber rhymes of La Casa, the spirit of the age found utterance unconsciously. But for the mass of versifiers it was enough to escape from the real agonies of the moment into academical Arcadia, to forget the Spaniard and the Frenchman in Philiroe's lap with Ariosto, or to sigh for a past age of gold:[338]

O rivi, o fonti, o fiumi, o faggi, o querce, Onde il mondo novello ebbe suo cibo In quel tranquilli secoli dell'oro: Deh come ha il folle poi cangiando l'esca, Cangiato il gusto! e come son questi anni Da quei diversi in povertate e 'n guerra!

[Footnote 338: La Casa, Canzone 4 (Opp. i. 151).]

This makes the occasional treatment of political subjects the more valuable; and we hail the patriotic poems of Giovanni Guidiccioni as a relief from the limpid nonsense of the amourists. Born at Lucca in 1500, he was made Bishop of Fossombrone by Paul III., and died in 1541. Contemporaries praised him for the grandeur of his conceptions and the severity of his diction, while they censured the obscurity that veiled his unfamiliar thoughts. "In those songs," writes Lilius Giraldus, "which he composed upon the woes and miseries of Italy, he set before his readers ample proofs of his illustrious style."[339] One sonnet might be chosen from these rhymes, reproving the Italians for their slavery and shame, and pointing to the cause, now irremediable, of their downfall:[340]

From deep and slothful slumber, where till now Entombed thou liest, waken, breathe, arise! Look on those wounds with anger in thine eyes, Italia, self-enslaved in folly's slough! The diadem of freedom from thy brow Torn through thine own misdoing, seek with sighs; Turn to the path, that straight before thee lies, From yonder crooked furrow thou dost plow. Think on thine ancient memories! Thou shalt see That those who once thy triumphs did adorn, Have chained thee to their yoke with fetters bound. Foe to thyself, thine own iniquity, With fame for them, for thee fierce grief and scorn, To this vile end hath forced thee, Queen discrowned!

[Footnote 339: De Poetis, Dial. ii.]

[Footnote 340: Opere di Messer G. Guidiccioni (Firenze, Barbera, 1867), vol. i. p. 12.]

Such appeals were impotent. Yet they proved a consciousness of the situation, an unextinguished sense of duty, in the man who penned them.[341]

[Footnote 341: We might parallel Guidiccioni's lamentations with several passages from the Latin elegies of the period, and with some of the obscurer compositions of Italian poetasters. See, for example, the extracts from Cariteo of Naples, Tibaldeo of Ferrara, and Cammelli of Pistoja on the passage of Charles VIII. quoted by Carducci, Delle Poesie Latine di Ludovico Ariosto, pp. 83-86. But the most touching expression of sympathy with Italy's disaster is the sudden silence of Boiardo in the middle of a canto of Orlando. See above, part i. p. 463.]

The Court-life followed by professional men of letters made it difficult for them to utter their real feelings in an age of bitter political jealousies. They either held their tongues, or kept within the safer regions of compliment and fancy. The biographies of Annibale Caro and Lodovico Castelvetro illustrate the ordinary conditions as well as the exceptional vicissitudes of the literary career at this epoch. Annibale Caro was born in 1507 at Civitanuova in the March of Ancona. Being poor and of humble origin, he entered the family of Luigi Gaddi at Florence, in the quality of tutor to his children. This patron died in 1541, and Caro then took service under Pier Luigi Farnese, one of the worst princelings of the period. When the Duke was murdered in 1547, he transferred himself to Parma, still following the fortunes of the Farnesi. Employed as secretary by the Cardinal Ranuccio and afterwards by the Cardinal Alessandro of that house, he lived at ease until his death in 1566. Caro's letters, written for his patrons, and his correspondence with the famous scholars of the day, pass for models of Italian epistolography. Less rigid than La Casa's, less manneristic than Bembo's, his style is distinguished by a natural grace and elegance of diction. He formed his manner by translation from the Greek, especially by a version of Daphnis and Chloe, which may be compared with Firenzuola's Asino d'Oro for classic beauty and facility of phrase. But the great achievement of his life was a transcription of the AEneid into blank verse. Though Caro's poem exceeds the original by about 5,500 lines, and therefore cannot pass for an exact copy of Virgil's form, Italians still reckon it the standard translation of their national epic. The charm of Caro's prose was communicated to his versi sciolti, always easy, always flowing, with varied cadence and sustained melody of rhythm. A Diceria de' Nasi, or discourse on noses, and a dissertation called Ficheide, commenting on Molza's Fichi, prove that Caro lent himself with pleasure to the academical follies of his contemporaries. It seems incredible that a learned man, who had spent the best years of his maturity in diplomatic missions to the Courts of princes, should have employed the leisure of his age in polishing these trifles. Yet such was the temper of the times that this frivolity passed for a commendable exercise of ingenuity.

Caro's original poems have not much to recommend them beyond limpidity of language. The sonnets to an imaginary mistress repeat conventional antitheses and complimentary concetti.[342] The adulatory odes are stiff and labored, as, indeed, they might be, when we consider that they were made to order upon Charles V., the Casa Farnese, and the lilies of France, by a plebeian scholar from Ancona.[343] The last-named of these flatteries, "Venite all'ombra de' gran gigli d'oro," is a masterpiece of prize poetry, produced with labor, filed to superficial smoothness, and overloaded with conceits. On its appearance it was hailed with acclamation as the final triumph of Italian writing. The Farnesi, who had recently placed themselves under the protection of France, and who bore her lilies on their scutcheon, used all their influence to get their servant's work applauded. The Academies were delighted with a display of consummate artifice and mechanical ability. One only voice was raised in criticism. Aurelio Bellincini, a gentleman of Modena, had sent a copy of the ode to Lodovico Castelvetro, with a request that he should pronounce upon its merits. Castelvetro, who was wayward and independent beyond the usual prudence of his class, replied with a free censure of the "plebeian diction, empty phrases, strange digressions, purple patches, poverty of argument, and absence of sentiment or inspiration," he detected in its stanzas. At the same time he begged his friend to keep this criticism to himself. Bellincini was indiscreet, and the letter found its way to Caro. Then arose a literary quarrel, which held all Italy in suspense, and equaled in ferocity the combats of the humanists.

[Footnote 342: See, for example, "Donna, qual mi foss'io," and "In voi mi trasformai," or "Eran l'aer tranquillo e l'onde chiare."]

[Footnote 343: See "Carlo il Quinto fu questi"; "Nell'apparir del giorno"; and "Venite all'ombra de' gran gigli d'oro."]

Lodovico Castelvetro was born in 1505 at Modena. He studied successively at Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, and Siena. Thence he passed to Rome, where strong pressure was put upon him to enter orders. His uncle, Giovanni Maria della Porta, promised, if he did so, to procure for him the bishopric of Gubbio. But Castelvetro had no mind to become a priest. He escaped clandestinely from Rome, and, after a brief sojourn at Siena, returned to Modena. Here in 1542 he subscribed the Formulary of Faith dictated by Cardinal Contarini, and thereby fell under suspicion of heresy. Though he escaped inquisitorial censure at the moment, the charges of Lutheranism were revived in 1554, when Caro declared open war against him. Invectives, apologies, censures, and replies were briskly interchanged between the principals, while half the scholars of Italy allowed themselves to be drawn into the fray--Varchi and Molza siding with Caro, Gian Maria Barbieri and other friends of Castelvetro taking up the cudgels for the opposite champion.[344] The bitterness of the contending parties may be gathered from the fact that Castelvetro was accused of having murdered a friend of Caro's, and Caro of having hired assassins to take Castelvetro's life.[345] It seems tolerably certain that either Caro or one of his supporters denounced their enemy to the Inquisition. He was summoned to Rome, and in 1560 was confined in the convent of S. Maria in Via to await his trial. After undergoing some preliminary examinations, Castelvetro became persuaded that his life was in peril. He contrived to escape by night from Rome, and, after a journey of much anxiety and danger, took refuge in Chiavenna, at that time a city of the Grisons. The Holy Office condemned him as a contumacious heretic in his absence. Wandering from Chiavenna to Lyons and Geneva, and back again to Chiavenna, he spent the rest of his life in exile, and died at the last place in 1571.

[Footnote 344: Among the liveliest missiles used in this squabble are Bronzino's Sattarelli, recently reprinted by Romagnoli, Bologna, 1863.]

[Footnote 345: Alberigo Longo was in fact murdered in 1555, and a servant of Castelvetro's was tried for the offense. But he was acquitted. Caro, on his side, gave occasion to the worst reports by writing in May 1560 to Varchi: "E credo che all'ultimo saro sforzato a finirla, per ogni altra via, e vengane cio che vuole." See Tiraboschi, Part 3, lib. iii. chap. 3 sec. 13.]

Castelvetro's publications do not correspond to his fame; for though he gave signs of an acute wit and a biting pen in his debate with Caro, he left but little highly-finished work to posterity. In addition to critical annotations upon Bembo's prose, published in his lifetime, he wrote a treatise upon Rhetoric, which was printed at Modena in 1653, and sent an Italian version of Aristotle's Poetics to the press in 1570. This book was the idol of his later years. It is said that, while residing at Lyons, his house took fire, and Castelvetro, careless of all else, kept crying out "The Poetics, the Poetics! Save me my Poetics!" He may be fairly reckoned among the men who did solid service in the cause of graver studies. Yet, but for the vicissitudes of his career, he could hardly claim a foremost place in literary history.

The ladies who cultivated poetry and maintained relations with illustrious men of letters at this epoch, were almost as numerous as the songsters of the other sex. Lodovico Domenichi in the year 1559 published the poems of no less than fifty authoresses in his Rime di alcune nobilissime e virtuosissime Donne. Subjected to the same intellectual training as men, they felt the same influences, and passed at the same moment from humanism to renascent Italian literature.[346] Many of these Viragos,[347] as it was the fashion of the age approvingly and with no touch of sarcasm to call them, were dames of high degree and leaders of society. Some, like la bella Imperia, were better known in the resorts of pleasure. All were distinguished by intercourse with artists and writers of eminence. It is impossible to render an account of their literary labors. But the names of a few, interesting alike for their talents and their amours, may here be recorded. Tullia di Aragona, the mistress of Girolamo Muzio, who ruled society in Rome, and lived in infamy at Venice[348]--Vittoria Accoramboni, whose tragedy thrilled Italy, and gave a masterpiece to our Elizabethan stage--Tarquinia Molza, granddaughter of the poet, and maid of honor at Ferrara in Guarini's brilliant days--Laura Terracina, with whose marriage and murder romance employed itself at the expense of probability--Veronica Franco, who entertained Montaigne in her Venetian home in 1580--Ersilia Cortese, the natural daughter of a humanist and wife of a Pope's nephew--Gaspara Stampa, "sweet songstress and most excellent musician":--such were the women, to whom Bembo and Aretino addressed letters, and whose drawing-rooms were the resort of Bandello's heroes.

[Footnote 346: The identity of male and female education in Italy is an important feature of this epoch. The history of Vittorino da Feltre's school at Mantua given by his biographer, Rosmini, supplies valuable information upon this point. Students may consult Burckhardt, Cultur der Renaissance, sec. 5, ed. 2, p. 312; Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, book i. sec. 4; Janitschek, Gesellschaft der Renaissance, Lecture 3.]

[Footnote 347: See Vulgate, Gen. ii. 23: "Haec vocabitur Virago," etc.]

[Footnote 348: In a rare tract called Tariffa delle puttane, etc., Tullia d'Aragona is catalogued among the courtesans of Venice. See Passano, Novellieri in Verso, p. 118.]

Two poetesses have to be distinguished from the common herd. These are Veronica Gambara and Vittoria Colonna. Veronica was the daughter of Count Gianfrancesco Gambara and his wife Alda Pia of Carpi, whose name recalls the fervid days of humanism at its noon.[349] She was born in 1485, and was therefore contemporary with the restorers of Italian literature. Bembo was the guide of her youth, and Vittoria Colonna the friend of her maturer years. In 1509 she married Giberto, lord of Correggio, by whom she had two sons, Ippolito and Girolamo. Her husband died after nine years of matrimony, and she was left to educate her children for the State and Church. She discharged her duties as a mother with praiseworthy diligence, and died in 1550, respected by all Italy, the type of what a noble woman should be in an age when virtue shone by contrast with especial luster. Her letters and her poems were collected and published in 1759 at Brescia, the city of her birth. Except for the purity of their sentiments and the sincerity of their expression, her verses do not rise far above mediocrity. Like literary ladies of the French metropolis, she owed her fame to personal rather than to literary excellence. "The house of Veronica," writes a biographer of the sixteenth century, "was an Academy, where every day she gathered round her for discourse on noble questions Bembo and Cappello, Molza and Mauro, and all the famous men of Europe who followed the Italian Courts."[350]

[Footnote 349: See Revival of Learning, p. 375.]

[Footnote 350: Rinaldo Corso, quoted by Tiraboschi.]

Fabrizio, the father of Vittoria Colonna, was Grand Constable of Naples. He married Agnesina di Montefeltro, daughter of Duke Federigo of Urbino. Their child Vittoria was born at Marino, a feud of the Colonna family, in the year 1490. At the age of four she was betrothed to Ferrante Francesco D'Avalos, a boy of the same age, the only son of the Marchese di Pescara. His father died while he was still a child: and in their nineteenth year the affianced couple were married at Ischia, the residence of the house of D'Avalos. The splendor of two princely families alike distinguished in the annals of Spanish and Italian history and illustrious by their military honors, conferred unusual luster upon this marriage. It was, moreover, on the bride's side at least, a love-match. Vittoria was beautiful and cultivated; the young Marquis of Pescara chivalrous and brave. She was tenderly attached to him, and he had not as yet revealed the darker side of his mixed character. Yet their happiness proved of very short duration. In 1512 he was wounded and made prisoner at the battle of Ravenna; and though he returned to his wife for a short interval, his duties again called him to the field of war in Lombardy in 1515. Vittoria never saw him after this date; and before his death the honor of her hero was tarnished by one of the darkest deeds of treason recorded in Italian history. Acting as general for the Spanish emperor, the Marquis entered Milan immediately after the battle of Pavia in 1525. He there and then began his intrigues with Girolamo Morone, Grand Chancellor of Francesco Sforza's duchy. Morone had formed a plan for reinstating his master in Milan by the help of an Italian coalition. With the view of securing the Marquis of Pescara, by which bold stroke he would have paralyzed the Spanish military power, Morone offered the young general the crown of Naples, if he would consent to join the league. D'Avalos turned a not unwilling ear to these proposals; but while the plot was hatching, he saw good reason to doubt of its success, and determined to clear himself with Charles V. by revealing the conspiracy. Accordingly, he made his lieutenant, Antonio de Leyva, assist at a privy conference between Morone and himself. Concealed behind the arras, this Spanish officer heard enough to be able afterwards to deliver direct testimony against the conspirators, while the Marquis averred that he had led them on designedly to this end. It may be difficult to estimate the precise amount of Pescara's guilt. But whether he was deceiving Morone from the first, or whether, as seems more probable, he entered the negotiation resolved to side with Charles or with the League as best might suit his purpose, there can be no doubt that he played an odious part in this transaction. He did not long survive the treason; for his constitution had been ruined by wounds received at Pavia. It was also rumored that Charles accelerated his death by poison. He died on November 25, 1525, execrated by the Italians, and handed down by their historians too perpetual infamy. Something of national jealousy mingled undoubtedly in their resentment. D'Avalos was a Spaniard, and made no concealment of his contempt for the Italian character. Finally, it must be admitted that if he really was acting throughout in his master's interest, his betrayal of Morone was but a bold stroke of policy which Machiavelli might have approved. The game was a dangerous one; but it was thoroughly consistent with statecraft as then understood.[351]

[Footnote 351: See Ricordi Inediti di Gerolamo Morone, pubblicati dal C. Tullio Dandolo, Milano, 1855.]

No suspicion of her husband's guilt seems to have crossed Vittoria Colonna's mind. Though left so young a widow, beautiful and illustrious by her high rank and education, she determined to consecrate her whole life to his memory and to religion. She survived him two-and-twenty years, which were spent partly in retirement at Ischia, partly in convents at Orvieto and Viterbo, partly in a semi-monastic seclusion at Rome. While still a girl and during her husband's absence in the field, she had amused her leisure with study. This now became her chief resource in the hours she spared from pious exercises. There was no man of great name in the world of letters who did not set his pride on being thought her friend. The collections of letters and poems belonging to that period abound in allusions to her genius, her holiness, and her great beauty. But her chief associates were the group of earnest thinkers who felt the influences of the Reformation without ceasing to be children of the Church. With Vittoria Colonna's name are inseparably connected those of Gasparo Contarini, Reginald Pole, Giovanni Morone, Jacopo Sadoleto, Marcantonio Flamminio, Pietro Carnesecchi, and Fra Bernardino Ochino. The last of these avowed his Lutheran principles; and Carnesecchi was burned for heresy; but Vittoria never adopted Protestantism in any of its dogmatic aspects. She remained an orthodox Catholic to the last, although it seems tolerably certain that she was by no means ignorant of the new doctrines nor unsympathetic to their spirit.[352] Her attitude was probably the same as that of many Italians who, before the opening of the Council of Trent, desired a reformation from within the Church. To bring it back to purer morals and an evangelical sincerity of faith, was their aim. Like Savonarola, they shrank from heresy, and failed to comprehend that a radical renovation of religion was inseparable, in the changed conditions of modern thought, from a metamorphosis of dogma and a new freedom accorded to the individual conscience. While the Teutonic world struck boldly for the liberation of the reason, the Italians dreamed of an impossible harmony between Catholicism and philosophy. Their compromises led to ethical hypocrisies and to that dogmatic despotism which was confirmed by the Tridentine Council.

[Footnote 352: The most recent investigations tend rather to confirm the tradition of Vittoria's Lutheran leanings. See Giuseppe Campori's Vittoria Colonna (Modena, 1878), and the fine article upon it by Ernesto Masi in the Rassegna Settimanale, January 29, 1879. Karl Benrath's Ueber die Quellen der italienischen Reformationsgeschichte (Bonn, 1876) is a valuable contribution to the history of Lutheran opinion in the South.]

A pleasant glimpse into Vittoria's life at Rome is given by the Portuguese artist, Francesco d'Olanda, who visited her about the year 1548. "Madonna Vittoria Colonna," he says, "Marchioness of Pescara and sister to the Lord Antonio Colonna, is one of the most excellent and famous women of Europe,--that is, of the whole civilized world. Not less chaste than beautiful, learned in Latin literature and full of genius, she possesses all the qualities and virtues that are praiseworthy in woman. After the death of her hero husband, she now leads a modest and retired life. Tired with the splendor and grandeur of her former state, she gives her whole affections to Christ and to serious studies. To the poor she is beneficent, and is a model of true Catholic devotion." He then proceeds to describe a conversation held with her, in which Michelangelo Buonarroti took a part.[353]

[Footnote 353: The whole document may be seen in the _Archivio Storico_, nuov. ser. tom. v. part 2, p. 139, or in Grimm's Life of Michelangelo.]

Vittoria Colonna's Rime consist for the most part of sonnets on the death of her husband, and on sacred and moral subjects. Penetrated by genuine feeling and almost wholly free from literary affectation, they have that dignity and sweetness which belongs to the spontaneous utterance of a noble heart. Like the poets of an earlier and simpler age, Vittoria listens to the voice of Love, and when he speaks, records the thoughts dictated by his inspiration.[354] That the object of her lifelong regret was unworthy of her, does not offend our sense of fitness.[355] It is manifest that her own feeling for the Marquis of Pescara, il mio bel sole, mio lume eterno, as she loves to call him with pathetic iteration of the chosen metaphor, had satisfied her unsuspecting nature.[356] Death consecrates her husband for Vittoria, as death canonized Laura for Petrarch. He has become divine, and her sole desire is to rejoin him in a world where parting is impossible.[357] The blending of the hero with the saint, of earthly fame with everlasting glory, in this half Christian half Pagan apotheosis, is characteristic of the Renaissance. Michelangelo strikes the same note in the Capitolo upon his father's death: "Or sei tu del morir morto e fatto divo." It is said that, in her first grief, Vittoria thought of suicide as the means of escaping from this world. But she triumphed over the temptation, and in Bembo's words proved herself vincitrice di se stessa. We seem to trace the anguish of that struggle in a sonnet which may possibly have suggested Bembo's phrase.[358]

[Footnote 354: The first lines of the introductory sonnet are strictly true:

Scrivo sol per sfogar l'interna doglia, Di che si pasce il cor, ch'altro non vole, E non per giunger lume al mio bel sole, Che lascio in terra si onorata spoglia.]

[Footnote 355: The last biographer of Vittoria Colonna, G. Campori, has shown that her husband was by no means faithful to his marriage vows.]

[Footnote 356: The close of the twenty-second sonnet is touching by reason of its allusion to the past. Vittoria had no children.

Sterili i corpi fur, l'alme feconde, Che il suo valor lascio raggio si chiaro, Che sara lume ancor del nome mio. Se d'altre grazie mi fu il ciel avaro, E se il mio caro ben morte m'asconde, Pur con lui vivo; ed e quanto disio.]

[Footnote 357: See, for instance, Rime Varie, Sonetto li. and lxxi. xc.]

[Footnote 358: It is No. 31 of the Rime Varie (Florence, Barbera, 1860).]

The religious sonnets are distinguished in general by the same simplicity and sincerity of style.[359] While Vittoria proves herself a Catholic by her invocation of Madonna and S. Francis,[360] it is to the cross of Christ that she turns with the deepest outgoings of pious feeling.[361] Her cry is for lively faith, for evangelical purity of conviction. There is nothing in these meditations that a Christian of any communion may not read with profit, as the heartfelt utterances of a soul athirst for God and nourished on the study of the Gospel.

[Footnote 359: The introductory Sonnet has, however, these ugly concetti:

I santi chiodi ormai sian le mie penne, E puro inchiostro il prezioso sangue; Purgata carta il sacro corpo esangue, Si ch'io scriva nel cor quel ch'ei sostenne.]

[Footnote 360: Rime Sacre, 119, 120, 86, 87.]

[Footnote 361: Ibid. 75, 80, 81.]

The memory of Vittoria Colonna is inseparable from that of Michelangelo Buonarroti, who was her intimate companion during the closing years of her life. Of that famous friendship this is not the place to speak at length. It may be enough to report Condivi's words about Michelangelo's grief when he had lost her. "I remember having heard him say that nothing caused him so much sorrow as that, when he went to visit her upon her passage from this life, he had not kissed her forehead and face, even as he kissed her hand. Her death left him oftentimes astonied and, as it were, deprived of reason." Some of Michelangelo's best sonnets were composed for Vittoria Colonna in her lifetime. Others record his sorrow for her loss. Those again which give expression to his religious feelings, are animated by her spirit of genuine piety. It is clear that her influence affected him profoundly.

To include any notice of Michelangelo's poetry in a chapter devoted to the purists, may seem paradoxical.[362] His verses are remarkable for the imperfection of their style, and the rugged elevation of their thoughts. With the school of Bembo he has nothing in common except that Platonism which the versifiers of the time affected as a fashion, but which had a real meaning for his creative genius. In the second half of the sixteenth century Michelangelo's sonnets upon the divine idea, lifting the soul by contemplation to her heavenly home, reach our ears like utterances from some other and far distant age. Both in form and in spirit they are alien to the cinque cento. Yet the precisians of the time admired these uncouth verses for the philosophic depth of thought they found in them. Benedetto Varchi composed a learned treatise on the sonnet "Non ha l'ottimo artista"; and when the poems were printed, Mario Guidicci delivered two lectures on them before the Florentine Academy.[363]

[Footnote 362: For a brief account of Michelangelo's Rime, see Fine Arts, Appendix ii.; also the introduction to my translation of the sonnets, The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella, Smith and Elder, 1878.]

[Footnote 363: Varchi's and Guidicci's Lezioni will be found in Guasti's edition of the Rime.]

There is no sort of impropriety in placing Bernardo Tasso and Giangiorgio Trissino upon the list of literary purists. The biographies of these two men, more interesting for the share they took in public life than for their poetical achievements, shall close a chapter which has been, almost of necessity, rambling. Bernardo Tasso was a member of the noble and ancient Bergamasque family Dei Tassi.[364] He was born at Venice in 1493. Left an orphan in his early childhood, an uncle on his father's side, the Bishop of Recanati, took charge of him. But this good man was murdered in 1520, at the time when Bernardo had just begun a brilliant career in the University of Padua. The loss of his father and his uncle threw the young student on the world, and he was glad to take service as secretary with the Count Guido Rangone. At this epoch the Rangoni stood high among the first nobility of Italy, and Count Guido was Captain-General of the Church. He employed Bernardo in a mission to Paris in 1528, on the occasion of Ercole d'Este's marriage to Renee, daughter of Louis XII. Tasso went to France as servant of the Rangoni. He returned to Italy in the employment of the Estensi. But he did not long remain at the Court of Ferrara. About the year 1532, we find him with Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno, whom he accompanied in 1535 on the expedition to Tunis. It cannot have been much later than this date that he married the beautiful Porzia de' Rossi, who was the mother of his illustrious son, Torquato. But though this marriage was in all respects a happy one, in none more fortunate than in the birth of Italy's fourth sovran poet, Bernardo was not destined to lead a life of tranquil domesticity. His master, whom he followed whithersoever military service called him, fell out of favor with the Spanish Court in 1547. Maddened by the injustice of his treatment, the Prince deserted from Charles V. to his rival, Francis, was declared a rebel and deprived of his vast domains. Bernardo resolved to share his fortunes, and in return for this act of loyalty, found himself involved in the ruin of the Sanseverini. Henceforth he lived a wandering life, away from Porzia and his family, and ill-contented with the pittance which his patron could afford. In 1556, at Duke Guidubaldo's invitation, he joined the Court of Urbino; and again in 1563 he entered the service of the Duke of Mantua. He died in 1569 at Ostiglia.

[Footnote 364: I use the Life prefixed by G. Campori to his Lettere Inedite di Bernardo Tasso (Bologna, Romagnoli, 1869).]

It will be seen from this brief sketch that Bernardo Tasso spent his life in mixed employments, as courtier, diplomatist, and military secretary. His career was analogous to that of many nobly-born Italians, for whom there existed no sphere outside the service of a prince. Yet he found time, amid his journeys, campaigns and miscellaneous Court duties, to practice literature. The seven books of his collected poems--sonnets, odes and epithalamial hymns--placed him among the foremost lyrists of the century; while his letters displayed the merits which were usual in that species of composition. Had this been all, he would have deserved honorable mention by the side of Caro, on a somewhat lower level than Bembo. But he was also ambitious of giving a new kind of epic to Italian literature. With this view, he versified the Spanish romance of Amadis of Gaul in octave stanzas. The Amadigi is a chivalrous poem in the style of the Orlando, but without the irony of Ariosto.[365] It cannot be reckoned a success; for though written with fertile fancy and a flowing vein, its prolixity is tedious. Tasso lacked the art of sustaining his reader's attention. His attempt to treat the ideal of feudalism seriously, without the faith and freshness of the chivalrous epoch, deprived his work of that peculiar charm which belongs to the Italian romantic epic. While still in MS., he submitted his poem to literary friends, and read it at the Court of Urbino. The acclamation it received from men whose literary principles coincided with his own, raised Tasso's expectations high. He imagined that the world would welcome Amadigi as a masterpiece, combining the interest of Orlando with the dignity and purity of a classic. When it appeared, however, the public received it coldly, and on this occasion the verdict of the people was indubitably right. Another mortification awaited the author. He had dedicated his epic to Philip II. and filled its cantos with adulation of the Spanish race. But the king took no notice of the gift; and two years after the publication of Amadigi, it appeared that Tasso's agents at the Spanish Court had not taken the trouble to present him with a copy.[366]

[Footnote 365: The Amadigi was printed by Giolito at Venice in 1560 under the author's own supervision. The book is a splendid specimen of florid typography.]

[Footnote 366: Besides the Amadigi, Bernardo Tasso composed a second narrative poem, the Floridante, which his son, Torquato, retouched and published at Mantua in 1587.]

Bernardo Tasso is the representative of a class which was common in Renaissance Italy, when courtiers and men of affairs devoted their leisure to study and composed poetry upon scholastic principles. His epic failed precisely through the qualities for which he prized it. Less the product of inspiration than pedantic choice, it bore the taint of languor and unpardonable dullness. Giangiorgio Trissino, in the circumstances of his life no less than in the nature of his literary work, bears a striking resemblance to the author of the Amadigi. The main difference between the two men is that Trissino adopted by preference the career of diplomacy into which poverty drove Tasso.[367] He was born at Vicenza in 1478 of wealthy and noble ancestors, from whom he inherited vast estates. His mother was Cecilia, of the Bevilacqua family. During his boyhood Trissino enjoyed fewer opportunities of study than usually fell to the lot of young Italian nobles. He spent his time in active exercises; and it was only in 1506 that he began his education in earnest. At this date he had been married nine years, and had already lost his wife, the mother of two surviving children, Francesco and Giulio.[368]

[Footnote 367: Giangiorgio Trissino, by Bernardo Morsolin (Vicenza, 1878), is a copious biography and careful study of this poet's times.]

[Footnote 368: Francesco died in 1514.]

Trissino's inclination toward literature induced him to settle at Milan, where he became a pupil of the veteran Demetrius Chalcondylas. He cultivated the society of learned men, collected MSS., and devoted himself to the study of Greek philosophy. From the first, he showed the decided partiality for erudition which was destined to rule his future career. But scholars at that epoch, even though they might be men of princely fortune, had little chance of uninterrupted leisure. Trissino's estates gave him for a while as much trouble as poverty had brought on Tasso. Vicenza was allotted to the Empire in 1509; and afterwards, when the city gave itself to the Venetian Republic, Trissino's adherence to Maximilian's party cost him some months of exile in Germany and the temporary confiscation of his property. Between 1510 and 1514, after his return from Germany, but before he made his peace with Venice, Trissino visited Ferrara, Florence and Rome. These years determined his life as a man of letters. The tragedy of Sofonisba, which was written before 1515, won for its author a place among the foremost poets of the time.[369] The same period decided his future as a courtier. Leo X. sent him on a mission to Bavaria, and upon his return procured his pardon from the Republic of S. Mark. There is not much to be gained by following the intricate details of Trissino's public career. After Leo's death, he was employed by Clement VII. and Paul III. He assisted at the coronation of Charles V., and on this occasion was made Knight and Count. Gradually he assumed the style of a finished courtier; and though he never took pay from his Papal or princely masters, no poet carried the art of adulation further.[370]

[Footnote 369: See above, pp. 126-128.]

[Footnote 370: See Morsolin, op. cit., p. 360, for Trissino's own emphatic statement that his services had been unpaid. Ibid. p. 344, for a list of the personages he complimented.]

This self-subjection to the annoyances and indignities of Court-life is all the more remarkable because Trissino continued to live like a great noble. When he traveled, he was followed by a retinue of servants. A chaplain attended him for the celebration of Mass. His litter was furnished with silver plate, and with all the conveniences of a magnificent household. His own cook went before, with couriers, to prepare his table; and the equipage included a train of sumpter-mules and serving-men in livery.[371] At home, in his palace at Vicenza or among his numerous villas, he showed no less magnificence. Upon the building of one country-house at Cricoli, which he designed himself and surrounded with the loveliest Italian gardens, enormous sums were spent; and when the structure was completed, he opened it to noble friends, who lived with him at large and formed an Academy called after him La Trissiniana.[372] Trissino was, moreover, a diligent student and a lover of solitude. He spent many years of his life upon the island of Murano, in a villa secluded from the world, and open to none but a few guests of similar tastes.[373] Yet in spite of the advantages which fortune gave him, in spite of his studious habits, he could not resist the attraction which Courts at that epoch exercised over men of birth and breeding throughout Europe. He was for ever returning to Rome, although he expressed the deepest horror for the corruptions of that sinful city.[374] No sooner had he established himself in quiet among the woods and streams of the Vicentine lowlands or upon the breast of the Venetian lagoons, than the hankering to shine before a Prince came over him, and he resumed his march to Ferrara, or made his bow once more in the Vatican.

[Footnote 371: Ibid. p. 323.]

[Footnote 372: Ibid. pp. 219-235.]

[Footnote 373: Ibid. p. 301.]

[Footnote 374: Op. cit. p. 366.]

The end of Trissino's life was troubled by a quarrel with his son Giulio, in which it is difficult to decide whether the father or the son was more to blame. Some years after the death of his first wife, he married a cousin, Bianca Trissino, by whom he had another son, Ciro. Giulio was sickly, and had taken to the ecclesiastical career. His father's preference for Ciro was decided, and he openly expressed it. That Bianca was not entirely responsible for the ensuing quarrel, is certain from the fact that Trissino separated from this second wife in 1535. But it appears that Giulio opened hostilities by behaving with brutal rudeness to his stepmother. Trissino refused to receive him, and cut off his allowance. Giulio then went to law with his father. A hollow peace was patched up, and, after Bianca's death in 1540, Giulio was appointed steward of the family estates. His management of Trissino's property led to new disputes, and new acts of violence. On one occasion the son broke into his father's palace at Vicenza, and tried to turn him by armed force into the streets upon a bitter night of Christmas. Meanwhile fresh lawsuits were on foot, and Giulio's cause triumphed in the courts of Venice, whither the case had been removed on appeal from Vicenza. Infuriated by what he deemed a maladministration of justice, the old poet hurled sonnets and invectives against both cities, execrating their infamy in the strongest verse he ever penned.[375] But he could not gain redress against the son he hated. At the age of seventy-two, in the midst of these private troubles, Trissino undertook his last journey to Rome. There he died in 1550, and was buried near John Lascaris in the church of S. Agata in Suburra.

[Footnote 375: Op. cit. p. 385.]

Whatever may have been the crimes of Giulio against his father, Trissino used a cruel and unpardonable revenge upon his eldest son. Not content with blackening his character under the name of Agrilupo in the Italia Liberata,[376] he wrote a codicil to his will, in which he brought against Giulio the most dangerous charge it was then possible to make. He disinherited him with a curse, and accused him of Lutheran heresy.[377] It was clearly the father's intention to hand his son down to an immortality of shame in his great poem, to ruin him in his temporal affairs, and to deprive him of his ecclesiastical privileges. Posterity has defeated his first purpose; for few indeed are the readers of Trissino's Italia Liberata. In his second and his third objects, he was completely successful. Giulio was prosecuted for heresy in 1551, cited before the Inquisition of Bologna in 1553, excommunicated by the Roman Holy Office in 1554, condemned as a contumacious heretic in 1556, driven into hiding at Venice, attacked in bed and half murdered there in 1568, and finally thrown into prison in 1573. He died in prison in 1576, without having shown any signs of repentance, a martyr to his Lutheran opinions.[378] Ciro Trissino, the third actor in this domestic tragedy, had already been strangled in his villa at Cornedo in the year 1574.

[Footnote 376: Ibid. p. 413.]

[Footnote 377: Ibid. p. 414.]

[Footnote 378: The whole of this extraordinary sequel to Trissino's biography will be read with interest in the last chapter of Signor Morsolin's monograph. It leaves upon my mind the impression that Giulio, though unpardonably ill-tempered, and possibly as ill-conducted in his private life as his foes asserted, was the victim of an almost diabolical persecution.]

Trissino's literary labors bring us back to the specific subject of this chapter. He made it the aim of his life to apply the methods of the ancients to the practice of Italian poetry, and to settle the vexed questions of the language on rational principles. Conscious of the novelty and ambitious nature of his designs, he adopted the Golden Fleece of Jason for an emblem, signifying that his voyages in literature led far beyond the ordinary track, with an inestimable prize in view.[379] Had his genius been equal to his enterprise, he might have effected a decisive revolution. But Trissino was a man of sterling parts and sound judgment rather than a poet: a formulator of rules and precepts rather than a creator. His bent of mind was critical; and in this field he owed his success more to coincidence with prevalent opinion than to originality. Though he fixed the type of Italian tragedy by his Sofonisba, and tied comedy down to Latin models by his Simillimi, we cannot rate his talents as a playwright very high. The Poetica, in which he reduced Horace and Aristotle to Italian prose, and laid down laws for adapting modern literature to antique system, had a wide and lasting influence.[380] We may trace the canon of dramatic unities, which through Italian determined French practice, up to this source: but had not Trissino's precepts been concordant with the tendencies of his age, it is probable that even this treatise would have carried little weight. When he attempted to reform Italian orthography on similar principles, he met with derision and resistance.[381] The world was bent on aping the classics; it did not care about adopting the Greek Kappa, Zeta, Phi, etc. Trissino intervened with more effect in the dispute on language. He pleaded that the vernacular, being the common property of the whole nation, should be called Italian and cultivated with a wise tolerance of local diction. Having discovered a copy of Dante's De Eloquio, he communicated this treatise to the learned world in support of his own views, and had a translation of it printed.[382] This publication embittered the strife which was then raging. Some Florentine scholars, led by Martelli, impugned its genuineness. But the De Eloquio survived antagonistic criticism, and opened a new stage in the discussion.

[Footnote 379: See Morsolin, op. cit., p. 197. This device was imprinted as early as 1529, upon the books published for Trissino at Verona by Janicolo of Brescia.]

[Footnote 380: The Poetica was printed in 1529; but it had been composed some years earlier.]

[Footnote 381: His grammatical and orthographical treatises were published under the titles of Epistola a Clemente VII., Grammatichetta, Dialogo Castellano, Dubbi Grammaticali. Firenzuola made Trissino's new letters famous and ridiculous by the burlesque sonnets he wrote upon them.]

[Footnote 382: Vicenza, Tolomeo Janicolo, 1529.]

In his attempt to add the heroic species of the epic to Italian literature, Trissino was even less successful than in his dramatic experiments. Disgusted with Ariosto's success in what he regarded as a barbarous style of art, he set himself to make an epic on the model of Homer, with scrupulous obedience to Aristotle's rules. For his subject he chose an episode from Italian history, and used blank verse instead of the attractive octave stanza. The Italia Liberata cost its author twenty years of labor.[383] It was a masterpiece of erudition, displaying profound acquaintance with Roman tactics, and a competent knowledge of Roman topography. But in spite of its characters plaques upon those of the Iliad, in spite of its learnedly-constructed episodes, in spite of its fidelity to Aristotle, the Italia Liberata was not a poem. The good sense of the nation refused it. Tasso returned to the romantic method and the meretricious charms of the ottava rima. Only Gravina among critics spoke a good word for it. The subject lacked real grandeur. Italy delivered from the Goths, was only Italy delivered to the Lombards. The unity of the poem was not the unity of an epic, but of a chapter from a medieval Chronicle. The machinery of angels, travestied with classic titles, was ridiculous. The Norcian Sibyl, introduced in rivalry with Virgil's Sibyl of Avernus, was out of place. And though Trissino expunged what made the old romantic poems charming, he retained their faults. Intricate underplots and flatteries of noble families were consistent with a species which had its origin in feudal minstrelsy. They were wholly out of character with a professed transcription from the Greek. Neither style nor meter rose to the heroic level. The blank verse was pedestrian and prolix. The language was charged with Lombardisms. Thus the Italia Liberata proved at all points that Trissino could make rules, but that he could not apply them to any purpose. It is curious to compare his failure with Milton's success in a not entirely dissimilar endeavor. The poet achieves a triumph where the pedant only suffers a defeat; and yet the aim of both was almost identical. So different is genius guided by principles from the mechanical carpentry of imitative talent.

[Footnote 383: Nine books were first printed at Rome in 1547 by Valerio and Luigi Dorici. The whole, consisting of twenty-seven books, was published at Venice in 1548 by Tolomeo Janicolo of Brescia. This Janicolo was Trissino's favorite publisher.]

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