Ferrara, ove pur vedesi
Che fino alli barbieri paion nobili.
Here are the Signori of Naples:
da Napoli.
Ho ben inteso che ve n'e piu copia
Che a Ferrara di Conti; e credo ch'abbiano,
Come questi contado, quei dominio.]
The artistic merit of Ariosto's comedies consists in the perfection of
their structure. However involved the intrigues may be, we experience
no difficulty in following them; so masterly is their development.[187]
It may be objected that he too frequently resorts to the device of
anagnorisis, in order to solve a problem which cannot find its issue
in the action. This mechanical solution is so obviously employed to
make things easy for the author that no interest attaches to the
climax of his fables. Yet the characters are drawn with that ripe
insight into human nature which distinguished Ariosto. Machiavelli
observed that, being a native of Ferrara, cautious in the handling of
Tuscan idioms, and unwilling to use the dialect of his own city,
Ariosto missed the salt of comedy.[188] There is truth in this
criticism. Matched with the best Florentine dialogues, his language
wants the raciness of the vernacular. The _sdrucciolo_ verse, which he
preferred, fatigues the ear and adds to the impression of formality.
He frequently interrupts the action with tirades, talking, as it were,
in his own person to the audience, instead of making his characters
speak.[189] Yet foreigners, who study his comedies side by side with
Plautus, at almost the same distance of unfamiliarity, will recognize
the brilliance of his transcripts from contemporary life. These
studies of Italian manners are eminent for good taste, passing at no
point into extravagance, and only marred by a certain banality of
moral instinct. The _Lena_ has the highest value as a picture of
Ferrarese society. We have good reason to believe that it was founded
on an actual incident. It deserves to rank with Machiavelli's
_Mandragola_ and Aretino's _Cortigiana_ for the light it throws on
sixteenth-century customs. And the light is far more natural, less
lurid, less partial, than that which either Machiavelli or Aretino
shed upon the vices of their century.
[Footnote 187: Cecchi noticed the lucid order, easy exposition and
smooth conduct of Ariosto's plots, ranking him for these qualities
above the Latin poets. See the passage from _Le Pellegrine_ quoted
below.]
[Footnote 188: In an essay on the Italian language, included among
Machiavelli's works, but ascribed to him on no very certain ground.]
[Footnote 189: Notice the long monologue of the _Cassaria_ in which
Lucramo describes the fashionable follies of Ferrara. Ariosto
gradually outgrew this habit of tirade. The _Scolastica_ is freer than
any of his pieces from the fault.]
Of Machiavelli we have two genuine comedies in prose, the _Mandragola_
and the _Clizia_, and two of doubtful authenticity, called
respectively _Commedia in Prosa_ and _Commedia in Versi_, besides a
translation of the _Andria_.[190] Judging by internal evidence alone,
a cautious critic would reject the _Commedia in Versi_ from the canon
of Machiavelli's works; and if the existence of a copy in his
autograph has to be taken as conclusive evidence of its genuineness,
we can only accept it as a crude and juvenile production. It is
written in various measures, a graceless octave stanza rhyming only
in the last couplet being used instead of blank verse, while many of
the monologues are lyrical. The language is crabbed, uncertain,
archaistic--in no point displaying the incisive brevity of
Machiavelli's style. The scene is laid in ancient Rome, and the
intrigue turns upon a confusion between two names, Catillo and
Cammillo. The conventional parasite of antiquity and the inevitable
slaves play prominent parts; while the plot is solved by a
preposterous exchange of wives between the two chief characters. Thus
the fabric of the comedy throughout is unnatural and false to the
conditions of real life. Were it not for some piquant studies of
Italian manners, scattered here and there in the descriptive passages,
this _Commedia in Versi_ would scarcely deserve passing notice.[191]
[Footnote 190: _Le Commedie di N. Machiavelli, con prefazione di F.
Perfetti_, Firenze, Barbera, 1863.]
[Footnote 191: Take this picture of Virginia (act i. sc. 2):
_Ap._ Dilettasi ella dar prova a filare,
O tessere, o cucire, com'e usanza?
_Mis._ No, che far lassa tal cosa a sua madre.
_Ap._ Di che piglia piacer?
_Mis._ Delle finestre,
Dove la sta dal mattino alla sera.
E vaga e di novelle, suoni e canti,
E studia in lisci, e dorme, e cuce in guanti.
Or the picture of the lovers in church described by the servant, Doria
(act iii. sc. 2), or Virginia's portrait of her jealous husband (act
iii. sc. 5).]
The _Commedia in Prosa_, for which we might find a title in the name
of the chief personage, Fra Alberigo, displays the spirit and the
style of the _Mandragola_. Critics who do not accept it for
Machiavelli's own, must assume it to have been the work of a clever
and obsequious imitator. It is a short piece in three acts written to
expose the corruption of a Florentine household. Caterina, the
heroine, is a young wife married to an old husband, Amerigo. Their
maid-servant, Margherita, holds the threads of the intrigue in her
hands. She has been solicited on the one side by Amerigo to help him
in his amours with a neighbor's wife, and on the other by the friar,
Alberigo, to win Caterina to his suit. The devices whereby Margherita
brings her mistress and the monk together, cheats Amerigo of his
expected enjoyment, and so contrives that the despicable but injured
husband should establish Fra Alberigo in the position of a favored
house-friend, constitute the argument. Short as the play is, it
combines the chief points of the _Clizia_ and the _Mandragola_ in a
single action, and may be regarded as the first sketch of two
situations afterwards developed with more fullness by the author.[192]
The language is coarse, and the picture of manners, executed with
remorseless realism, would be revolting but for its strong
workmanship.[193] The playwright expended his force on the
servant-maid and the friar, those two instruments of domestic
immorality. Fra Alberigo is a vulgar libertine, provided with pious
phrases to cloak his vicious purpose, but casting off the mask when he
has gained his object, well knowing from past experience that the
appetites of the woman he seduces will secure his footing in her
husband's home.[194] Margherita revels in the corruption she has
aided. She delights in sin for its own sake, extracts handfuls of
coppers from the friar, and counts on profiting by the secret of her
mistress. Her speech and action display the animal appetites and gross
phraseology of the proletariate, degraded by city vices and hardened
to the spectacle of clerical hypocrisy.[195] One of her exclamations:
"I frati, ah! son piu viziati che 'l fistolo!" taken in conjunction
with her argument to Caterina: "I frati, eh? Non si trova generazione
piu abile ai servigi delle donne!" points the satire intended by the
playwright. Yet neither Caterina nor Amerigo yields a point of
baseness to these servile agents. Plebeian coarseness is stamped alike
upon their language and their desires. They have no delicacy of
feeling, no redeeming passion, no self-respect. They speak of things
unmentionable with a crudity that makes one shudder, and abuse each
other in sarcasms borrowed from the rhetoric of the streets.[196] To a
refined taste the calculations of Caterina are no less obnoxious and
are far less funny than the rogueries of the friar.
[Footnote 192: The scene between Caterina and Amerigo, when the latter
is caught in flagrant adultery (act iii. 5), anticipates the
catastrophe of the _Clizia_. The final scene between Caterina,
Amerigo, and Fra Alberigo bears a close resemblance to the climax of
the _Mandragola_. On the hypothesis that this comedy is not
Machiavelli's but an imitator's, the playwright must have had both the
_Clizia_ and the _Mandragola_ in his mind, and have designed a pithy
combination of their most striking elements.]
[Footnote 193: See especially the scenes between Caterina and
Margherita (act i. 3; act ii. 1) where the advantages of taking a
lover and of choosing a friar for this purpose are discussed. They
abound in _gros mots_, as thus:
_Cat._ Odi, in quanto a cotesta parte tu di' la verita; ma
quello odore ch'egli hanno poi di salvaggiume, non ch'altro
mi stomaca a pensarlo.
_Marg._ Eh! eh! poveretta voi! i frati, eh? Non si trova
generazione piu abile ai servigi delle donne. Voi dovete
forse avere a pigliarvi piacere col naso? etc.]
[Footnote 194: Compare his speech to Caterina (act ii. 5) with his
dialogue with Margherita (act iii. 4) and his final discourse on
charity and repentance (act iii. 6). The irony of these words,
"Certamente, Amerigo, che voi potete vantarvi d'aver la piu saggia e
casta giovane, non vo' dir di Fiorenza ma di tutto 'l mondo,"
pronounced before Caterina a couple of hours after her seduction,
fixes the measure of Machiavelli's cynicism.]
[Footnote 195: The quite unquotable but characteristic monologue which
opens the third act is an epitome of Margherita's character.]
[Footnote 196: Act iii. 5.]
This comedy of Fra Alberigo is a literal transcript from a cynical
_Novella_, dramatized and put upon the stage to amuse an audience
familiar with such arguments by their perusal of Sacchetti and
Boccaccio. Its freedom from Latinizing conventionality renders it a
striking example of the influence exercised by the _Novellieri_ over
the theater. The same may be said about both the _Clizia_ and the
_Mandragola_, though the former owes a portion of its structure to the
_Casina_ of Plautus.[197] The _Clizia_ is a finished picture of
Florentine home-life. Nicomaco and Sofronia are an elderly couple, who
have educated a beautiful girl, Clizia, from childhood in their house.
At the moment when the play opens, both Nicomaco and his son,
Cleandro, are in love with Clizia. Nicomaco as determined to marry her
to one of his servants, Pirro, having previously ascertained that the
dissolute groom will not object to sharing his wife with his master.
Sofronia's family pride opposes the marriage of her son and heir with
Clizia; but she is aware of her husband's schemes, and seeks to
frustrate them by giving the girl to an honest bailiff, Eustachio. In
the contest that ensues, Nicomaco gains the victory. It is settled
that Clizia is to be wedded to Pirro, and on the night of the marriage
Nicomaco makes his way into the bridal chamber. But here Sofronia
proves more than a match for her lord and master. Helped by Cleandro,
she substitutes for Clizia a young man-servant disguised as a woman,
who gives Nicomaco a warm reception, beats him within an inch of his
life, and exposes him to the ridicule of the household.[198] Sofronia
triumphs over her ashamed and miserable husband, who now consents to
Clizia's marriage with Eustachio. But at this juncture the long-lost
father of the heroine appears like a _deus ex machina_. He turns out
to be a rich Neapolitan gentleman. There remains no obstacle to
Cleandro's happiness, and the curtain falls upon a marriage in
prospect between the hero and the heroine. The weakness of the play,
considered as a work of art, is the mechanical solution of the plot.
Its strength and beauty are the masterly delineation of a family
interior. The _dramatis personae_ are vigorously sketched and act
throughout consistently. Nothing can be finer than the portrait of a
sober Florentine merchant, regular in his pursuits, punctual in the
performance of his duties, exact in household discipline and watchful
over his son's education, whose dignified severity of conduct has
yielded to the lunacies of an immoderate passion.[199] For the time
being Nicomaco forgets his old associates, abandons his business, and
consorts with youthful libertines in taverns. His appetite so blinds
him that he devises the odious scheme I have described, in order to
gratify a senile whim.[200] The lifelong fabric of honesty and honor
breaks down in him; and it is only when lessoned by the punishment
inflicted on him by his wife and son, that he returns to his old self
and sees the vileness of the situation his folly has created. Sofronia
is a notable housewife, rude but respectable. The good understanding
between her and her handsome son, Cleandro, whom she loves
affectionately, but whom she will not indulge in his caprice for
Clizia, is one of the best traits furnished by Italian comedy.
Cleandro himself has less than usual of the selfishness and sensuality
which degrade the Florentine _primo amoroso_. There is even something
of enthusiasm in his passion for Clizia--a germ of sentiment which
would have blossomed into romance under the more genial treatment of
our drama.[201] Morally speaking, what is odious in this comedy is the
willingness of every one to sacrifice Clizia. Even Cleandro says of
her: "Io per me la torrei per moglie, per amica, e in tutti quei modi,
che io la potessi avere." Nicomaco, when he has failed in his plot to
secure the girl, thinks only of his own shame, and takes no account of
the risk to which he has exposed her. Sofronia is merely anxious to
get her decently established beyond her husband's reach.
[Footnote 197: From an allusion in act ii. sc. 3, it is clear that the
_Clizia_ was composed after the _Mandragola_. If we assign the latter
comedy to a date later than 1512, the year of Machiavelli's disgrace,
which seems implied in its prologue, the _Clizia_ must be reckoned
among the ripest products of his leisure. The author hints that both
of these comedies were suggested to him by facts that had come under
his notice in Florentine society.]
[Footnote 198: The _Clizia_ furnished Dolce with the motive of his
_Ragazzo_ ("Il Ragazzo, comedia di M. Lodovico Dolce. Per Curtio de
Navo e fratelli al Leone, MDXLI."). An old man and his son love the
same girl. A parasite promises to get the girl for the old man, but
substitutes a page dressed up like a woman, while the son sleeps with
the real girl. Readers of Ben Jonson will be reminded of _Epicoene_.
But in Dolce's _Ragazzo_ the situation is made to suggest impurity and
lacks rare Ben's gigantic humor.]
[Footnote 199: See Sofronia's soliloquy, act. ii. sc. 4.]
[Footnote 200: Cleandro understands the faint shadow of scruple that
suggested this scheme: "perche tentare d'averla prima che maritata,
gli debbe parere cosa impia e brutta" (act i. sc. 1). This sentence is
extremely characteristic of Italian feeling.]
[Footnote 201: His observations on his father, are, however, marked by
more than ordinary coarseness. "Come non ti vergogni tu ad avere
ordinato, che si delicato viso sia da si fetida bocca scombavato, si
delicate carni da si tremanti mani, da si grinze e puzzolenti membra
tocche?" Then he mingles fears about Nicomaco's property with a
lover's lamentations. "Tu non mi potevi far la maggiore ingiuria,
avendomi con questo colpo tolto ad un tratto e l'amata e la roba;
perche Nicomaco, se questo amor dura, e per lasciare delle sue
sustanze piu a Pirro che a me" (act iv. sc. 1).]
Only long extracts could do justice to the sarcasm and irony with
which the dialogue is seasoned. Still a few points may be
selected.[202] Sofronia is rating Nicomaco for his unseasonable
dissipation. He answers: "Ah, moglie mia, non mi dire tanti mali a un
tratto! Serba qualche cosa a domane." Eustachio, in view of taking
Clizia for his wife, reflects: "In questa terra chi ha bella moglie
non puo essere povero, e del fuoco e della moglie si puo essere
liberale con ognuno, perche quanto piu ne dai, piu te ne rimane." When
Pirro demurs to Nicomaco's proposals, on the score that he will make
enemies of Sofronia and Cleandro, his master answers: "Che importa a
te? Sta' ben con Cristo e fatti beffe de' santi." A little lower down
Nicomaco trusts the decision of Clizia's husband to lot:
_Pirro._ Se la sorte me venisse contro?
_Nicom._ Io ho speranza in Dio, che la non verra.
_Pirro._ O vecchio impazzato! Vuole che Dio tenga le mani a
queste sue disonesta.
[Footnote 202: Act iii. scs. 4, 5, 6.]
Nor can criticism express the comic humor of the scenes, especially of
those in which Nicomaco describes the hours of agony he spent in
Siro's bed, and afterwards capitulates at discretion to Sofronia.[203]
In spite of what is disagreeable in the argument and obscene in the
catastrophe, the _Clizia_ leaves a wholesomer impression on the mind
than is common with Florentine comedies. It has something of
Ariosto's _bonhomie_, elsewhere unknown in Machiavelli.
[Footnote 203: Act v. scs. 2 and 3.]
Meanwhile the _Mandragola_ is claiming our attention. In that comedy,
Machiavelli put forth all his strength. Sinister and repulsive as it
may be to modern tastes, its power is indubitable. More than any plays
of which mention has hitherto been made, more even than Ariosto's
_Lena_ and _Negromante_, it detaches itself from Latin precedents and
offers an unsophisticated view of Florentine life from its author's
terrible point of contemplation.
In order to appreciate the _Mandragola_, it is necessary to know the
plot. After spending his early manhood in Paris, Callimaco returns to
Florence, bent on making the beautiful Lucrezia his mistress. He has
only heard of her divine charms; but the bare report inflames his
imagination, disturbs his sleep, and so distracts him that he feels
forced "to attempt some bold stroke, be it grave, dangerous, ruinous,
dishonorable; death itself would be better than the life I lead."
Lucrezia is the faithful and obedient wife of Nicia, a doctor of laws,
whose one wish in life is to get a son. The extreme gullibility of
Nicia and his desire for an heir are the motives upon which Callimaco
relies to work his schemes. He finds a parasite, Ligurio, ready to
assist him. Ligurio is a friend of Nicia's family, well acquainted
with the persons, and so utterly depraved that he would sell his soul
for a good dinner. He advises Callimaco to play the part of a
physician who has studied the last secrets of his art in Paris,
introduces him in this capacity to Nicia, and suggests that by his
help the desired result may be obtained without the disagreeable
necessity of leaving Florence for the baths of San Filippo. In their
first interview Callimaco explains that a potion of mandragora
administered to Lucrezia will remove her sterility, but that it has
fatal consequences to the husband. He must perish unless he first
substitutes another man, whose death will extinguish the poison and
leave Lucrezia free to be the mother of a future family. Nicia revolts
against this odious project, which makes him the destroyer of his own
honor and a murderer. But Callimaco assures him that royal persons and
great nobles of France have adopted this method with success. The
argument has its due weight: "I am satisfied," says Nicia, "since you
tell me that a king and princes have done the like." But the
difficulty remains of persuading Lucrezia. Ligurio answers: that is
simple enough; let us work upon her through her confessor and her
mother. "You, I, our money, our badness, and the badness of those
priests will settle the confessor; and I know that, when the matter is
explained, we shall have her mother on our side." Thus we are
introduced to Fra Timoteo, the chief agent of corruption. The monk, in
a first interview, does not conceal his readiness to procure abortion
and cover infanticide. For a consideration, he agrees to convince
Lucrezia that the plot is for her good. He first demonstrates the
utility of Callimaco's method to the mother Sostrata, and then by her
help persuades Lucrezia that adultery and murder are not only venial,
but commendable with so fair an end in view. His sophistries
anticipate the darkest casuistry of Escobar. Lucrezia, with a woman's
good sense, fastens on the brutal and unnatural loathsomeness of the
proposed plan: "Ma di tutte le cose che si sono tentate, questa mi
pare la piu strana; avere a sottomettere il corpo mio a questo
vituperio, et essere cagione che un uomo muoia per vituperarmi: che io
non crederei, se io fussi sola rimasa nel mondo, e da me avesse a
risurgere l'umana natura, che mi fusse simile partito concesso."
Timoteo replies: "Qui e un bene certo, che voi ingraviderete,
acquisterete un'anima a messer Domenedio. Il male incerto e, che colui
che giacera dopo la pozione con voi, si muoia; ma e' si truova anche
di quelli che non muoiono. Ma perche la cosa e dubbia, pero e bene che
messer Nicia non incorra in quel pericolo. Quanto all'atto che sia
peccato, questo e una favola: perche la volonta e quella che pecca,
non il corpo; e la cagione del peccato e dispiacere al marito: e voi
gli compiacete; pigliarne piacere: e voi ne avete dispiacere," etc.
Sostrata, accustomed to follow her confessor's orders, and not
burdened with a conscience, clinches this reasoning: "Di che hai tu
paura, moccicona? E c'e cinquanta dame in questa terra che ne
alzarebbero le mani al cielo." Lucrezia gives way unwillingly: "Io son
contenta; ma non credo mai esser viva domattina." Timoteo comforts her
with a final touch of monkish irony: "Non dubitare, figliuola mia, io
preghero Dio per te; io diro l'orazione dell'Angiolo Raffaelo che
t'accompagni. Andate in buon'ora, e preparatevi a questo misterio, che
si fa sera." What follows is the mere working of the plot, whereby
Ligurio and Timoteo contrive to introduce Callimaco as the necessary
victim into Lucrezia's bed-chamber. The silly Nicia plays the part of
pander to his own shame; and when Lucrezia discovers the scheme by
which her lover has attained his ends, she exclaims: "Poi che
l'astuzia tua e la sciochezza del mio marito, la semplicita di mia
madre e la tristizia del mio confessore, m'hanno condotta a far quello
che mai per me medesima avrei fatto, io voglio giudicare che e' venga
da una celeste disposizione, che abbia voluto cosi. Pero io ti prendo
per signore, padrone e guida." It must be remarked that Lucrezia omits
from her reckoning the weakness which led her to consent.
My excuse for analyzing a comedy so indecent as the _Mandragola_, is
the importance it has, not only as a product of Machiavelli's genius,
but also as an illustration of contemporary modes of thought and
feeling. In all points this play is worthy of the author of the
_Principe_. The _Mandragola_ is a microcosm of society as Machiavelli
conceived it, and as it needs must be to justify his own philosophy.
It is a study of stupidity and baseness acted on by roguery. Credulity
and appetite supply the fulcrum needed by unscrupulous intelligence.
The lover, aided by the husband's folly, the parasite's profligacy,
the mother's familiarity with sin, the confessor's avarice, the wife's
want of self-respect, achieves the triumph of making Nicia lead him
naked to Lucrezia's chamber. Moving in the region of his fancy, the
poet adds _Quod erat demonstrandum_ to his theorem of vileness and
gross folly used for selfish ends by craft. But we who read it, rise
from the perusal with the certainty that it was only the corruption of
the age which rendered such a libel upon human nature plausible--only
the author's perverse and shallow view of life which sustained him in
this reading of a problem he had failed to understand. Viewed as a
critique upon life, the _Mandragola_ is feeble, because the premises
are false; and these same false premises regarding the main forces of
society, render the logic of the _Principe_ inconsequent. Men are not
such fools as Nicia or such catspaws as Ligurio and Timoteo. Women are
not such compliant instruments as Sostrata and Lucrezia. Human nature
is not that tissue of disgusting meannesses and vices, by which
Callimaco succeeds. Here lay Machiavelli's fallacy. He dreamed of
action as the triumph of astuteness over folly. Virtue with him meant
the management of immorality by bold intelligence. But while, on the
one hand, he exaggerated the stupidity of dupes, on the other he
underestimated the resistance which strongly-rooted moral instincts
offer to audacious villainy. He left goodness out of his account.
Therefore, though his reasoning, whether we examine the _Mandragola_
or the _Principe_, seems irrefragable on the premises from which he
starts, it is an unconvincing chain of sophisms. The world is not
wholly bad; but in order to justify Machiavelli's conclusions, we have
to assume that its essential forces are corrupt.
If we turn from the _Mandragola_ to the society of which it is a
study, and which complacently accepted it as an agreeable work of art,
we are filled with a sense of surprise bordering on horror. What must
the people among whom Machiavelli lived, have been, to justify his
delineation of a ruffian so vicious as Ligurio, a confessor so lost to
sense of duty as Timoteo, a mother who scruples not to prostitute her
daughter to the first comer, a lover so depraved as Callimaco, a wife
so devoid of womanly feeling as Lucrezia? On first reflection, we are
inclined to believe that the poet in this comedy was venting Swiftian
indignation on the human nature which he misconceived and loathed. The
very name Lucrezia seems chosen in irony--as though to hint that
Rome's first martyr would have failed, if Tarquin had but used her
mother and her priest to tame her. Yet, on a second reading, the
_Mandragola_ reveals no scorn or anger. It is a piece of scientific
anatomy, a demonstration of disease, executed without subjective
feeling. The argument is so powerfully developed, with such simplicity
of language, such consistency of character, such cold analysis of
motives, that we cannot doubt the verisimilitude of the picture. No
one, at the date of its appearance, resented it. Florentine audiences
delighted in its comic flavor. Leo X. witnessed it with approval. His
hatred of the monks found satisfaction in Timoteo. Society, far from
rising in revolt against the poet who exposed its infamy with a pen of
poisoned steel, thanked the man of genius for rendering vice amusing.
Of satire or of moral purpose there is none in the _Mandragola_.
Machiavelli depicted human nature just as he had learned to know it.
The sinister fruits of his studies made contemporaries laugh.
The _Mandragola_ was the work of an unhappy man. The prologue offers a
curious mixture of haughtiness and fawning, only comparable to the
dedication of the _Principe_ and the letter to Vettori.[204] A sense
of his own intellectual greatness is combined with an uneasy feeling
of failure:
Non e componitor di molta fama.
[Footnote 204: See _Age of the Despots_, pp. 315-319. Of the two
strains of character so ill-blent in Machiavelli, the _Mandragola_
represents the vulgar, and the _Principe_ the noble. The one
corresponds to his days at Casciano, the other to his studious
evenings.]
As an apology for his application to trivialities, he pleads
wretchedness and _ennui_:
E se questa materia non e degna,
Per esser piu leggieri
D'un uom che voglia parer saggio e grave,
Scusatelo con questo, che s'ingegna
Con questi vani pensieri
Fare el suo tristo tempo piu soave;
Perche altrove non ave
Dove voltare el viso;
Che gli e stato interciso
Mostrar con altre imprese altra virtue,
Non sendo premio alle fatiche sue.
These verses, indifferent as poetry, are poignant for their revelation
of a disappointed life. Left without occupation, unable to display his
powers upon a worthy platform, he casts the pearls of his philosophy
before the pleasure-seeking swine. The sense of this degradation
stings him and he turns upon society with threats. Let them not
attempt to browbeat or intimidate him:
Che sa dir male anch'egli,
E come questa fu la sua prim'arte:
E come in ogni parte
Del mondo, ove il si suona,
Non istima persona,
Ancor che faccia el sergiere a colui
Che puo portar miglior mantel di lui.
Throughout his prologue we hear the growl of a wounded lion, helpless
in his lair, yet conscious that he still has strength to rend the
fools and knaves around him.
Aretino completed the disengagement of Italian from Latin comedy.
Ignoring the principles established by the Plautine mannerists, he
liberated the elements of satire and of realism held in bondage by
their rules. His reasoning was unanswerable. Why should he attend to
the unities, or be careful to send the same person no more than five
times on the stage in one piece? His people shall come and go as they
think fit, or as the argument requires.[205] Why should he make Romans
ape he style of Athens? His Romans shall be painted from life; his
servants shall talk and act like Italian varlets, not mimicking the
ways of Geta or Davus.[206] Why should he shackle his style with
precedents from Petrarch and Boccaccio? He will seek the fittest
words, the aptest phrases, the most biting repartees from ordinary
language.[207] Why condescend to imitation, when his mother wit
supplies him with material, and the world of men lies open like a book
before his eyes?[208] Why follow in the footsteps of the pedants, who
mistake their knowledge of grammar for genius, and whose commentaries
are an insult to the poets they pretend to illustrate?[209]
[Footnote 205: "Se voi vedessi uscire i personaggi piu di cinque volte
in scena, non ve ne ridete, perche le catene che tengono i molini sul
fiume, non terrebbeno i pazzi d'oggidi" (Prologue to the
_Cortigiana_).]
[Footnote 206: "Non vi maravigliate se lo stil comico non s'osserva
con l'ordine che si richiede, perche si vive d'un'altra maniera a Roma
che non si vivea in Atene" (_Ibid._).]
[Footnote 207: "Io non mi son tolto dagli andari del Petrarca e del
Boccaccio per ignoranza, che pur so cio che essi sono; ma per non
perdere il tempo, la pazienza e il nome nella pazzia di volermi
transformare in loro" (Prologue to the _Orazia_).]
[Footnote 208: "Piu pro fa il pane asciutto in casa propria che
l'accompagnato con molte vivande su altrui tavola. Imita qua, imita
la; tutto e fava, si puo dire alle composizioni dei piu ... di chi
imita, mi faccio beffe ... posso giurare d'esser sempre me stesso, ed
altri non mai" (_Ibid._).]
[Footnote 209: "Io mi rido dei pedanti, i quali si credono che la
dottrina consiste nella lingua greca, dando tutta la riputatione allo
in _bus_ in _bas_ della grammatica" (Prologue to _Orazia_). "I
crocifissori del Petrarca, i quali gli fanno dir cose con i loro
comenti, che non gliene fariano confessare diece tratti di corda. E
bon per Dante che con le sue diavolerie fa star le bestie in dietro,
che a questa ora saria in croce anch'egli" (Prologue to
_Cortigiana_).]
Conscious of his own defective education, and judging the puristic
niceties of the age at their true value, Aretino thus flung the glove
of defiance in the face of a learned public. It was a bold step; but
the adventurer knew what he was doing. The originality of his _Ars
Poetica_ took the world by surprise. His Italian audience delighted in
the sparkle of a style that gave point to their common speech. Had
Aretino been a writer of genius, Italy might now have owed to his
audacity and self-reliance the starting-point of national dramatic
art.[210] He was on the right path, but he lacked the skill to tread
it. His comedies, loosely put together, with no constructive vigor in
their plots and no grasp of psychology in their characters, are a
series of powerfully-written scenes, piquant dialogues, effective
situations, rather than comedies in the higher sense of the word. We
must not look for Ariosto's lucid order, for Machiavelli's disposition
of parts, in these vagaries of a brilliant talent aiming at immediate
success. We must be grateful for the filibustering bravado which made
him dare to sketch contemporary manners from the life. The merit of
these comedies is naturalness. Such affectation of antithesis or
labored epigram as mars their style, was part of Aretino's self. It
reveals the man, and is not wearisome like the conceits of the
pedantic school. What he had learned, seen or heard in his experience
of the world--and Aretino saw, heard and learned the worst of the
society in which he lived--is presented with vigor. The power to
express is never shackled by a back-thought of reserve or delicacy.
Each character stands outlined with a vividness none the less
convincing because the study lacks depth. What Aretino cannot supply,
is the nexus between these striking passages, the linking of these
lively portraits into a coherent whole. Machiavelli's logic, perverse
as it may be, produces by its stringent application a more impressive
aesthetical effect. The doctrine of style for style's sake, derided by
Aretino, satisfies at least our sense of harmony. In the insolence of
freedom he spoils the form of his plays by discussions, sometimes
dull, sometimes disgusting, in which he vents his spite or airs his
sycophancy without regard for the exigencies of his subject. Still, in
spite of these defects, Aretino's plays are a precious mine of
information for one who desires to enter into direct communication
with the men of the Renaissance.
[Footnote 210: His tragedy _Orazia_ has just the same merits of
boldness and dramatic movement in parts, the same defects of
incoherence. It detaches itself favorably from the tragedies of the
pedants.]
Aretino's point of view is that of the successful adventurer. Unlike
Machiavelli, he has no sourness and reveals no disappointment. He has
never fallen from the high estate of an impersonal ambition. His
report of human depravity is neither scientific nor indignant. He
appreciates the vices of the world, by comprehending which, as means
to ends, he has achieved celebrity. They are the instruments of his
advance in life, the sources of his wealth, the wisdom he professes.
Therefore, while he satirizes, he treats them with complacence. Evil
is good for its own sake also in his eyes. Having tasted all its
fruits, he revels in recalling his sensations, just as Casanova took
pleasure in recording his debaucheries. His knowledge of society is
that of an upstart, who has risen from the lowest ranks by the arts of
the bully, flatterer and pander. We never forget that he began life as
a lackey, and the most valuable quality of his comedies is that they
depict the great world from the standpoint of the servants' hall.
Aretino is too powerful and fashionable to be aware of this. He poses
as the sage and satirist. But the revelation is none the less pungent
because it is made unconsciously. The Court, idealized by Castiglione,
censured by Guarini, inveighed against by La Casa, here shows its
inner rottenness for our inspection, at the pleasure of a charlatan
who thrives on this pollution. We hear how the valets of debauched
prelates, the parasites of petty nobles, the pimps who battened on the
vices of the rich, the flatterer who earned his bread by calumny and
lies, viewed this world of fashion, how they discussed it among
themselves, how they utilized its corruption. We shake hands with
ruffians and cut-throats, enter the Roman brothels by their back-door,
sit down in their kitchens, and become acquainted with the secrets of
their trade. It may be suggested that the knowledge supplied by
Aretino, if it concerns such details, is neither profitable nor
valuable. No one, indeed, who is not specially curious to realize the
manners of Renaissance Italy, should occupy his leisure with these
comedies.
The _Cortigiana_ is a parody of Castiglione's _Cortegiano_. A Sienese
gentleman, simple and provincial, the lineal descendant of Pulci's
Messer Goro, arrives in Rome to make his fortune.[211] He is bent on
assuming the fine airs of the Court, and hopes to become at least a
Cardinal before he returns home. On his first arrival Messer Maco
falls into the clutches of a sharper, who introduces him to
disreputable society, under color of teaching him the art of
courtiership. The satire of the piece consists in showing Rome to be
the school of profligacy rather than of gentle customs.[212] Before he
has spent more than a few days in the Eternal City, the country squire
learns the slang of the _demi-monde_ and swaggers among courtesans and
rufflers. Maestro Andrea, who has undertaken his education, lectures
him upon the virtues of the courtier in a scene of cynical irony:[213]
"La principal cosa, il cortigiano vuol sapere bestemmiare, vuole
essere giuocatore, invidioso, puttaniere, eretico, adulatore,
maldicente, sconoscente, ignorante, asino, vuol sapere frappare, far
la ninfa, et essere agente e paziente." Some of these qualities are
understood at once by Messer Maco. Concerning others he asks for
further information: "Come si diventa eretico? questo e 'l
caso.--Notate.--Io nuoto benissimo.--Quando alcuno vi dice che in
Corte sia bonta, discrezione, amore, o conoscenza, dite no 'l credo
... in somma a chi vi dice bene de la Corte, dite: tu sei un
bugiardo." Again, Messer Maco asks: "Come si dice male?" The answer
is prompt and characteristic of Aretino:[214] "Dicendo il vero,
dicendo il vero." What Maestro Andrea teaches theoretically, is
expounded as a fact of bitter experience by Valerio and Flamminio, the
gentlemen in waiting on a fool of fortune named Parabolano.[215] These
men, admitted to the secrets of a noble household, know its inner
sordidness, and reckon on the vanity and passions of their patron. A
still lower stage in the scale of debasement is revealed by the
conversations of the lackeys, Rosso and Cappa, who discuss the foibles
of their master with the coarseness of the stables.[216] In so far as
the _Cortigiana_ teaches any lesson, it is contained in the
humiliation of Parabolano. His vices have made him the slave and
creature of foul-minded serving-men, who laugh together over the
disgusting details of his privacy, while they flatter him to his face
in order to profit by his frivolities.[217] Aretino's own experience
of life in Rome enabled him to make these pictures of the servants'
hall and antechamber pungent.[218] The venom engendered by years of
servitude and adulation is vented in his criticism of the Court as
censured from a flunkey's point of view. Nor is he less at home in
painting the pleasures of the class whom he has chosen for his critics
of polite society. Cappa's soliloquy upon the paradise of the tavern,
and Rosso's pranks, when he plays the gentleman in his master's fine
clothes, owe the effect of humor to their realistic verve.[219] We
feel them to be reminiscences of fact. These scenes constitute the
salt of the comedy, supported by vivid sketches of town
characters--the news-boy, the fisherman of the Tiber, and the
superannuated prostitute.[220]
[Footnote 211: "Egli e uno di quegli animali di tanti colori che il
vostro avolo compero in cambio d'un papagallo" (act i. sc. 1).]
[Footnote 212: Its most tedious episode is a panegyric of Venice at
the expense of Rome (act iii. sc. 7).]
[Footnote 213: Act i. sc. 22.]
[Footnote 214: He makes the same point in the prologue to _La
Talenta_: "Chi brama d'acquistarsi il nome del piu scellerato uomo che
viva, dica il vero."]
[Footnote 215: Act i. sc. 9; act ii. sc. 6; act ii. sc. 10; act iii.
sc. 7.]
[Footnote 216: See especially act i. sc. 7.]
[Footnote 217: Act iv. sc. 6.]
[Footnote 218: Notice the extraordinary virulence of his invective
against the _tinello_ or common room of servants in a noble household
(act v. sc. 15).]
[Footnote 219: Act ii. sc. 1; act i. scs. 11-18.]
[Footnote 220: Act i. sc. 4; act i. sc. 11; act ii. sc. 7.]
In the _Cortigiana_ it was Aretino's object to destroy illusions about
Court-life by describing it in all the vileness of reality.[221] The
_Marescalco_ is a study of the same conditions of society, with less
malignity and far more geniality of humor.[222] A rich fool has been
recommended by his lord and master, the Duke of Mantua, to take a
wife. He loathes matrimony, and shrinks from spending several thousand
ducats on the dower. But the parasites, buffoons and henchmen of the
prince persuade and bully him into compliance. He is finally married
to a page dressed as a woman, and his relief at discovering the sex of
his supposed wife forms the climax of the plot. The play is conducted
with so much spirit that we may not be wrong in supposing Shakspere in
_Twelfth Night_ and Ben Jonson in _Epicoene_ to have owed something
to its humor. We look, however, in vain for such fine creatures of the
fancy as Sir Toby Belch, or for a catastrophe so overwhelming as the
_crescendo_ of noise and bustle which subdue the obstinacy of Morose.
On the other hand, the two companion scenes in which Marescalco's
nurse enlarges on the luxuries of married life, while Ambrogio
describes its miseries, are executed with fine sense of comic
contrast.[223]
[Footnote 221: Act ii. sc. 6.]
[Footnote 222: Of all Aretino's plays the _Marescalco_ is the simplest
and the most artistically managed.]
[Footnote 223: Act i. sc. 6; act ii. sc. 5.]
In the _Talanta_ we return to Roman society. This comedy is a study of
courtesan life, analyzed with thorough knowledge of its details. The
character of Talanta, who plays her four lovers one against the other,
extracting presents by various devices from each of them, displays the
author's intimate acquaintance with his subject.[224] Talanta on the
stage is a worthy pendant to Nanna in the _Ragionamenti_. But the
intrigue is confused, tedious and improbable; and after reading the
first act, we have already seen the best of Aretino's invention. The
same may be said about the _Ipocrita_ and the _Filosofo_, two comedies
in which Aretino attempted to portray a charlatan of Tartufe's type
and a student helpless in his wife's hands. These characters are not
ill conceived, but they are too superficially executed to bear the
weight of the plot laid upon them. In like manner the pedant in the
_Marescalco_ and the swashbuckler in the _Talanta_ are rather
silhouettes than finished portraits. Though well sketched, they lack
substance. They have neither the lifelike movement of Shakspere's
minor persons, nor the impressive mechanism of Jonson's humors.
Bobadil and Master Holofernes, though caricatures, move in a higher
region of the comic art. The characters Aretino would imitate
supremely well, were a page like Giannico in the _Marescalco_, a
footman like Rosso in the _Cortigiana_, or a woman of the town like
Talanta. His comedies are never wanting in bustle and variety of
business; while the sarcasm of the author, flying at the
best-established reputations, sneering at the most fashionable
prejudices of society, renders them effective even now, when all the
jealousies he flouted have long been buried in oblivion.[225]
[Footnote 224: Talanta's apology for her rapacity and want of heart
(act i. sc. 1); the description of her by her lover Orfinio, who sees
through her but cannot escape her fascination (act i. sc. 7); the
critique of her by a sensible man (act i. sc. 12); her arts to bring
her lover back to his allegiance and wheedle the most odious
concessions (act i. sc. 13); her undisguised marauding (act i. sc.
14); these moments in the evolution of her character are set forth
with the decision of a master's style.]
[Footnote 225: The Prologue to the _Cortigiana_ passes all the
literary celebrities of Italy in review with a ferocity of sarcasm
veiled in irony that must have been extremely piquant. And take this
equivocal compliment to Molza from the _Marescalco_ (act v. sc. 3),
"il Molza Mutinense, che arresta con la sua fistola i torrenti."]
Bibbiena's _Calandra_ is a farce, obscene but not malignant. Ariosto's
comedies are studies of society from the standpoint of the middle
class. If he is too indulgent to human frailty, too tolerant of vice,
we never miss in him the wisdom of a genial observer. Machiavelli's
_Mandragola_ casts the dry light of the intellect on an abyss of evil.
Nothing but the brilliance of the poet's wit reconciles us to his
revelation of perversity. Aretino, by the animation of his sketches,
by his prurient delight in what is vile, makes us comprehend that even
the _Mandragola_ was possible. Machiavelli stands outside his subject,
like Lucifer, fallen but disdainful. Aretino is the Belial who
acknowledges corruption for his own domain. Ariosto and Machiavelli
are artists each in his kind perfect. Aretino is an _improvvisatore_,
clever with the pen he uses like a burin.
It would be difficult to render an account of the comedies produced
by the Italians in the sixteenth century, or to catalogue their
authors. A computation has been made which reckons the plays known to
students at several thousands. In spite of this extraordinary richness
in comic literature, Italy cannot boast of a great comedy. No poet
arose to carry the art onward from the point already reached when
Aretino left the stage. The neglect that fell on those innumerable
comedies, was not wholly undeserved. It is true that their scenes
suggested brilliant episodes to French and English playwrights of
celebrity. It is true that the historian of manners finds in them an
almost inexhaustible store of matter. Still they are literary
lucubrations rather than the spontaneous expression of a vivid
nationality. Nor have they the subordinate merit of dealing in a
scientific spirit with the cardinal vices and follies of society. We
miss the original plots, the powerful modeling of character, the
philosophical insight which would have reconciled us to a _Commedia
erudita_.
When we examine the plays of Firenzuola, Cecchi, Ambra, Gelli, Il
Lasca, Doni, Dolce, we find that a hybrid form of art had been
established by the practice of the earlier playwrights. This hybrid
implied Plautus and Terence as a necessary basis. It adopted the
fusion of Latin arguments with Italian manners which was so ably
realized by Ariosto and Machiavelli. It allowed something for the
farce traditions which the Rozzi made fashionable at Rome. It assumed
ingredients from the _Burle_ and _Novelle_ of the marketplace,
reproduced the language of the people, and made use of current
scandals to give piquancy to its conventional plots. But
notwithstanding the admixture of so many modern elements, the
stereotyped Latinism of its form rendered this comedy unnatural.
Ingenious _contaminatio_, to use a phrase in vogue among Roman
critics, was always more apparent than creative instinct.
The _Commedia erudita_ presented a framework ready-made to the
playwright, and easily accepted on the strength of usage by the
audience he sought to entertain. At the same time it left him free,
within prescribed limits, to represent the manners of contemporary
life. The main object of a great drama "to show the very age and body
of the time his form and pressure," is thrust into the second rank;
and the most valuable portions of these clever works of skill are
their episodes--such scenes, for example, as those which in the
_Aridosio_ of Lorenzino de' Medici reveal the dissoluteness of
conventual customs in a scholastic _rifacimento_ of the _Adelphi_ and
the _Mostellaria_.[226] Had the fusion of classical and modern
elements been complete as in the _Epicoene_ of Jonson, or had the
character-drawing been masterly as in Moliere's _Avare_, we should
have no cause for complaint. But these are just the qualities of
success missed by the Italian playwrights. Their studies from nature
are comparatively slight. Having exhibited them in the presentation of
the subject or introduced them here and there by way of interludes,
they work the play to its conclusion on the lines of Latinistic
convention.[227]
[Footnote 226: _Lorenzino de' Medici_, Daelli, Milano, 1862.]
[Footnote 227: The pseudo-classical hybrid I have attempted to
describe is analogous in its fixity of outline to the conventional
framework of the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_, which allowed a playwright
the same subordinate liberty of action and saved him the trouble of
invention to a like extent. It may here be noticed that the Italians
in general adopted stereotyped forms for dramatic representation.
Harlequin, Columbine, and Pantaloon, the Bolognese doctor, the
Stenterello of Florence, the Meneghino of Milan, and many other
dramatic types, recognized as stationary, yet admitting of infinite
variety in treatment by author or actor, are notable examples. In
estimating the dramatic genius of Italy this tendency to move within
defined and conventional limits of art, whether popular or literary,
must never be forgotten.]
Such being the form of _cinque cento_ comedy, it follows that its
details are monotonous. The characters are invariably drawn from the
ranks of the rich burgher classes; and if we may trust the evidence
furnished by the playwrights, the morality of these classes must have
been of an almost inconceivable baseness. We survey a society
separated from the larger interests than elevate humanity, without
public ambition or the sense of national greatness, excluded from the
career of arms, dead to honor, bent upon sensual enjoyment and petty
intrigues. The motive which sustains the plot, is illicit love; but in
its presentation there is no romance, nothing to cloak the animalism
of an unchecked instinct. The young men who play the part of _primi
amorosi_, are in debt or without money. It is their object to repair
their fortunes by a rich marriage, to secure a maintenance from a
neighbor's wife they have seduced, to satisfy the avarice of a greedy
courtesan, or to conceal the results of an intrigue which has brought
their mistress into difficulties. From the innumerable scenes devoted
to these elegant and witty scapegraces, it would be difficult to glean
a single sentence expressive of conscience, remorse, sense of loyalty
or generous feeling. They submit to the most odious bargains and
disreputable subterfuges, sacrificing the honor of their families or
the good fame of the women who depend upon them, to the attainment of
some momentary self-indulgence.[228] Without respect for age, they
expend their ingenuity in robbing their parents and exposing their
fathers to ridicule.[229] Nor is it possible to feel much sympathy for
the elders, who are so brutally used. The old man of these comedies is
either a superannuated libertine, who makes himself ridiculous by his
intrigues with a neighbor's wife, or a parsimonious tyrant, or else an
indulgent rake, who acts the pander for his good-for-nothing rascal of
a son.[230] Mere simpletons like Machiavelli's Nicia, or Aretino's
Messer Maco, furnish another type of irreverent age, unredeemed by the
comic humor of Falstaff or the gigantic lusts of Sir Epicure Mammon.
Between son and father the inevitable servant plays the part of clever
rogue. It is he who weaves the meshes of the intrigue that shall cut
the purse-strings of the stingy parent, blind the eyes of the husband
to his wife's adultery, or cheat the creditor of his dues. Our
sympathy is always enlisted on the side of the schemers; and however
base their tricks may be, we are invited to applaud the success which
crowns them. The girls are worthy of their lovers. Corrupted by
nurses; exposed to the contaminating influences of the convent;
courted by grooms and servants in their father's household; tampered
with by infamous duennas; betrayed by their own mothers or intrusted
by their fathers to notorious prostitutes; they accept the first
husband proposed to them by their parents, confident in the hope of
continuing clandestine intrigues with the neighbor's son who has
seduced them.[231] The wives are such as the _Novelle_ paint them,
yielding to the barest impulses of wantonness, and covering their
debauchery with craft that raises a laugh against the husbands they
have cozened. Such are the main actors, the conventional personages,
of the domestic comedy. The subordinate characters consist of
parasites and flatterers; ignorant pedants and swaggering _bravi_;
priests who ply the trade of pimps; astrologers who thrive upon the
folly of their clients; doctors who conceal births; prostitutes and
their attendant bullies; compliant go-betweens and rapacious bawds;
pages, street urchins, and officers of justice. The adulterous
intrigue required such minor persons as instruments; and it often
happens that scenes of vivid comic humor, dialogues of the most
brilliant Tuscan idiom, are suggested by the interaction of these
puppets, whose wires the clever valet and the _primo amoroso_ pull.
[Footnote 228: Cinthio's conduct towards Emilia in the _Negromante_ is
a good instance.]
[Footnote 229: See above, p. 163, note, for Cleandro in the
_Mandragola_; and compare Alamanno's conversation with his uncle Lapo,
his robbery of his mother's money-box, and his reflections on the loss
he should sustain by her re-marriage, in Gelli's _La Sporta_ (act iii.
5; ii. 2). Camillo's allusions to his father's folly in Gelli's
_Errore_ (act iv. 2) are no less selfish and heartless. Alamanno's
plot to raise a dower by fraud (_La Sporta_, iv. 1) may be compared
with Fabio's trick upon his stepmother in Cecchi's _Martello_. In the
latter his father takes a hand.]
[Footnote 230: Ghirigoro in Gelli's _Sporta_, Gherardo in Gelli's
_Errore_, Girolamo in Cecchi's _Martello_. It is needless to multiply
examples. The analyses of Machiavelli's comedies will suffice.]
[Footnote 231: It would be easy to illustrate each of these points
from the comedies of Ariosto, Cecchi, Machiavelli, Lorenzino de'
Medici; to which the reader may be referred _passim_ for proof.]
The point of interest for contemporary audiences was the _burla_--the
joke played off by a wife upon her husband, by rogues upon a
simpleton, by a son upon his father, by a servant on his master's
creditors, by a pupil on his pedantic tutor. Accepting the conditions
of a comedy so constructed, and eliminating ethical considerations, we
readily admit that these jokes are infinitely amusing. The scene in
Gelli's _Sporta_ where Ghirigoro de' Macci receives the confidences of
the youth who has seduced his daughter, under the impression that he
is talking about his money-box, is not unworthy of Moliere's _Avare_.
Two scenes in Gelli's _Errore_, where Gherardo Amieri, disguised as an
old woman, is tormented by a street urchin whom his son has sent to
teaze him, and afterwards confronted by his angry wife, might have
adorned the _Merry Wives of Windsor_.[232] Cecchi's comedies in like
manner abound in comical absurdities, involving exquisitely realistic
pictures of Florentine manners.[233] For the student of language, no
less than for the student of Renaissance life, they are invaluable.
But the similarity of form which marks the comedies of the _cinque
cento_, renders it impossible to do justice to their details in the
present work. I must content myself with the foregoing sketch of their
structure derived from the perusal of such plays as were accessible in
print, and with the further observation that each eminent dramatist
developed some side of the common heritage transmitted by their common
predecessors. Thus Firenzuola continued the Latin tradition with
singular tenacity, adapting classical arguments in his _Lucidi_ and
_Trinuzia_ to modern themes with the same inimitable transparency of
style he had displayed in his _rifacimento_ of the _Golden Ass_.[234]
Gelli adapted the _Aulularia_ in his _Sporta_, and closely followed
the _Clizia_ in his _Errore_. The devotion professed for Machiavelli
by this playwright, was yielded by Cecchi to Ariosto; and thus we
notice two divergent strains of tradition within the circle of
Florentine art.[235] Cecchi was a voluminous dramatic writer. Besides
his comedies in _sdrucciolo_ and _piano_ verse, he composed _Sacre
Rappresentazioni_ and plays of a mixed kind derived from a free
handling of that elder form.[236] While Gelli and Cecchi severally
followed the example of Machiavelli and Ariosto, Il Lasca attempted to
free the Italian drama from the fetters of erudite convention.[237]
His comedies are exceedingly witty versions of _Novelle_, forming
dramatic pendants to his narratives in that style. Yet though he
strove to make the stage a mirror of contemporary customs, he could
not wholly escape from the mannerism into which the dramatic art had
fallen. Nor was it possible, now that the last gleam of liberty had
expired in Italy, when even Florence accepted her fate, and the
Inquisition was jealously watching every new birth of the press, to
create what the earlier freedom of the Renaissance had missed. The
drama was condemned to trivialities which only too faithfully
reflected the political stagnation, and the literary trifling of a
decadent civilization.[238]
[Footnote 232: _Opere di Gio. Battista Gelli_ (Milano, 1807), vol.
iii.]
[Footnote 233: _Commedie di Giovan Maria Cecchi_, 2 vols., Lemonnier.]
[Footnote 234: _Opere di Messer Agnolo Firenzuola_ (Milano, 1802),
vol. v.]
[Footnote 235:
E 'l divino Ariosto anco, a chi cedono
Greci, Latini e Toscan, tutti i comici.
Prologue to _I Rivali_.
Ma che diro di te, spirito illustre,
Ariosto gentil, qual lode fia
Uguale al tuo gran merto, al tuo valore?
Cede a te nella comica palestra
Ogni Greco e Latin, perche tu solo
Hai veramente dimostrato come
Esser deve il principio, il mezzo e 'l fine
Delle comedie, etc.
_Le Pellegrine_, Intermedio Sesto, published by Barbera, 1855.]
[Footnote 236: See the "Esaltazione della Croce," _Sacre
Rappresentazioni_, Lemonnier, vol. iii. Compare those curious hybrid
plays, _Il Figliuolo Prodigo_, _La Morte del Re Acab_, _La Conversione
della Scozia_, in his collected plays (Lemonnier, 1856). _Lo Sviato_
may be mentioned as another of his comedies derived from the _Sacre
Rappr._ with a distinctly didactic and moral purpose.]
[Footnote 237: See Prologue to _La Strega_, and above, p. 124.]
[Footnote 238: I reserve for another chapter the treatment of the
Pastoral, which eventually proved the most original and perfect
product of the Italian stage.]
It is worthy of notice, as a final remark upon the history of the
comic stage, that at this very moment of its ultimate frustration
there existed the germ of a drama analogous to that of England, only
waiting to be developed by some master spirit. That was the _Farsa_,
which Cecchi, the most prolific, original and popular of Florentine
playwrights, deigned to cultivate.[239] He describes it thus: "The
_Farsa_ is a new third species between tragedy and comedy. It enjoys
the liberties of both, and shuns their limitations; for it receives
into its ample boundaries great lords and princes, which comedy does
not, and, like a hospital or inn, welcomes the vilest and most
plebeian of the people, to whom Dame Tragedy has never stooped. It is
not restricted to certain motives; for it accepts all subjects--grave
and gay, profane and sacred, urbane and rude, sad and pleasant. It
does not care for time or place. The scene may be laid in a church, or
a public square, or where you will; and if one day is not long
enough, two or three may be employed. What, indeed, does it matter to
the _Farsa_? In a word, this modern mistress of the stage is the most
amusing, the most convenient, the sweetest, prettiest country-lass
that can be found upon our earth."[240] He then goes on to describe
the liberty of language allowed in the _Farsa_, rounding off a picture
which exactly applies to our Elizabethan drama. The _Farsa_, in the
form it had assumed when Cecchi used it, was, in fact, the survival of
an ancient, obscure species of dramatic art, which had descended from
the period of classical antiquity, and which recently had blent with
the traditions of the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_. Had circumstances been
favorable to the development of a national drama in Italy, the popular
elements of the Pagan farce and the medieval Mystery would have
naturally issued through the _Farsa_ in a modern form of art analogous
to that produced in England. But the Italians had, as we have seen, no
public to demand the rehabilitation of the _Farsa_; nor was Cecchi a
Shakspere, or even a Marlowe, to prove, in the face of Latinizing
playwrights, that the national stage lay in its cradle here. It
remained for the poets of a far-off island, who disdained Italian
_jigs_ and owed nothing to the _Farse_ of either Florentine or
Neapolitan contemporaries, acting by instinct and in concert with the
sympathies of a great nation, to take this "sweetest, prettiest
country-lass" by the hand and place her side by side with Attic
Tragedy and Comedy upon the supreme throne of art.
[Footnote 239: The titles of his _Farse_ given by D'Ancona are _I
Malandrini_, _Pittura_, _Andazzo_, _Sciotta_, _Romanesca_.]
[Footnote 240: Prologue to the _Romanesca_, Firenze, Cenniniana,
1874.]
The Italian comedies offer an even more startling picture of social
vice than the _Novelle_.[241] To estimate how far they represent a
general truth, is difficult; especially when we remember that they
were written in a conventional style, to amuse princes, academicians,
and prelates.[242] Comparing their testimony with that of private
letters and biographical literature (the correspondence, for example,
of Alessandra degli Strozzi, Alberti's treatise on the Family, and
statements gleaned from memoirs and _Ricordi_), we are justified in
believing that a considerable difference existed at the commencement
of this epoch between public and domestic manners in Italy; between
the Court and the home, the piazza and the fireside, the diversions of
fashionable coteries and the conversation of friends and kinsmen. The
family still retained some of its antique simplicity. And it was not
as yet vitiated by the institution of Cicisbeism. But the great world
was incredibly corrupt. Each Court formed a nucleus of dissolute
living. Rome, stigmatized successively by men so different as Lorenzo
de' Medici, Pietro Aretino, Gian-Giorgio Trissino, and Messer
Guidiccioni, poisoned the whole Italian nation. Venice entertained a
multitude of prostitutes, and called them _benemeritae_ in public acts.
Since, therefore, these centers of aristocratic and literary life drew
recruits from the burgher and rural classes, the strongholds of
patriarchal purity were continually being sapped by contact with
fashionable uncleanliness. And thus in the sixteenth century a common
standard of immorality had been substituted for earlier severity of
manners. The convulsions of that disastrous epoch, following upon a
period of tranquillity, during which the people had become accustomed
to luxury, submerged whole families in vice. "Wars, famines, and the
badness of the times," wrote Aretino, "inclining men to give
themselves amusement, have so debauched all Italy (_imputtanita tutta
Italia_), that cousins and kinsfolk of both sexes, brothers and
sisters, mingle together without shame, without a shadow of
conscience."[243] Though it is preposterous to see Aretino posing as a
censor of morals, his acuteness was indubitable; nor need we suppose
that his acquaintance with the disease rendered him less sagacious in
detecting its causes. What Corio tells us about Lodovico Sforza's
capital, what we read about the excess of luxury into which the nobles
of Vicenza and Milan plunged, amid the horrors of the French and
Spanish occupation, confirms his testimony.[244] After the Black
Death, described by Matteo Villani, the Florentines consoled
themselves for previous sufferings by an outburst of profligate and
reckless living. So now they sought distraction in unbridled
sensuality. Society was in dissolution, and men lived for the moment,
careless of consequences. The immorality of the theater was at once a
sign and a source of this corruption. "O times! O manners!" exclaims
Lilius Giraldus:[245] "the obscenities of the stage return in all
their foulness. Plays are acted in every city, which the common
consent of Christendom had banned because of their depravity. Now the
very prelates of the faith, our nobles, our princes, bring them back
again among us, and cause them to be publicly presented. Nay, priests
themselves are eagerly ambitious of the infamous title of actors, in
order to bring themselves into notoriety, and to enrich themselves
with benefices."
[Footnote 241: Dolce in the Prologue to his _Ragazzo_ says that,
immodest as a comedy may be, it would be impossible for any play to
reproduce the actual depravity of manners.]
[Footnote 242: What I have already observed with regard to the
_Novelle_--namely, that Italy lacked the purifying and ennobling
influences of a real public, embracing all classes, and stimulating
the production of a largely designed, broadly executed literature of
human nature--is emphatically true also of her stage. The people
demand greatness from their authors--simplicity, truth, nobleness.
They do not shrink from grossness; they tolerate what is coarse. But
these elements must be kept in proper subordination. Princes, petty
coteries, academies, drawing-room patrons, the audience of the
antechamber and the boudoir, delight in subtleties, _doubles
entendre_, scandalous tales, Divorce Court arguments. The people
evokes Shakspere; the provincial Court breeds Bibbiena.]
[Footnote 243: _Cortigiana_, act ii. sc. 10.]
[Footnote 244: See Corio, quoted in _Age of the Despots_, p. 548, note
1. For Milanese luxury, Bandello, vol. i. pp. 219 _et seq._; vol. iv.
p. 115 (Milan edition, 1814). For Vicenza, Morsolin's _Trissino_, p.
291.]
[Footnote 245: _De Poet. Hist._ Dial. 8. Giraldi may have had men like
Inghirami, surnamed "Phaedra," and Cardinal Bibbiena in view.]
It must not be supposed that the immorality of the comic stage
consists in the license of language, incident or plot. Had this been
all, we should hardly be justified in drawing a distinction between
the Italians of the Renaissance and our own Elizabethan playwrights.
It lies far deeper, in the vicious philosophy of life paraded by the
authors, in the absence of any didactic or satirical aim. Moliere,
while exposing evil, teaches by example. A canon of goodness is
implied, from which the deformities of sin and folly are deflections.
But Machiavelli and Aretino paint humanity as simply bad. The palm of
success is awarded to unscrupulous villainy. An incapacity for
understanding the immutable power of moral beauty was the main disease
of Italy. If we seek the cause of this internal cancer, we must trace
the history of Italian thought and feeling back to the age of
Boccaccio; and we shall probably form an opinion that misdirected
humanism, blending with the impieties of a secularized Papacy, the
self-indulgence of the despots, and the coarse tastes of the
_bourgeoisie_, had sapped the conscience of society.
CHAPTER 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.