That pure perfume it borrowed from the lathe,
Where in the midst a fair youth ruining
Conducts the day, and with such woeful scathe
Doth guide his car, that to their deepest spring
The rivers burn, and burn the grasses rathe;
Ah fool, who knew not how to hold his way,
Nor by that counsel leal and wise to stay!]
The description of the olive cup is carried over the next five
stanzas, when the poet turns to complain that Faustina does not care
for his piping. And yet Pan joined the rustic reeds; and Amphion
breathed through them such melody as held the hills attentive; and
Silenus taught how earth was made, and how the seasons come and go,
with his sweet pipings. Even yet, perchance, she will incline and
listen, if only he can find for her some powerful charm. Come forth,
he cries, repeating the address to Galatea, leave Tiber to chafe
within his banks and hurry toward the sea. Come to my fields and
caves:[289]
A te di bei corimbi un antro ingombra,
E folto indora d'elicrisi nembo
L'edera bianca, e sparge si dolce ombra,
Che tosto tolta a le verd'erbe in grembo
D'ogni grave pensier te n'andrai sgombra;
E sparso in terra il bel ceruleo lembo,
Potrai con l'aura, ch'ivi alberga il colle,
Seguir securo sonno dolce e molle.
[Footnote 289:
White ivy with pale corymbs loads for thee
That cave, and with thick folds of helichryse
Gildeth the arch it shades so lovingly;
Here lapped in the green grass which round it lies,
Thou shalt dismiss grave thoughts, and fancy-free
Spread wide thy skirt of fair cerulean dyes,
And with the wholesome airs that haunt the hill,
Welcome sweet soothing sleep, secure from ill.]
It is perilous for thee to roam the shores where Mars met Ilia. O
Father Tiber, deal gently with so fair a maiden. It was thou who
erewhile saved the infant hope of Rome, whom the she-wolf suckled near
thine overflow! But such themes soar too high for shepherd's pipings.
I turn to Caro and to Varchi. Both are shepherds, who know how to stir
the streams of Mincius and Arethuse. Even the gods have lived in
forest wild, among the woods, and there Anchises by the side of Venus
pressed the flowers. What gifts shall I find for my Faustina? Daphnis
and Moeris are richer far than I. How can I contend with them in
presents to the fair? And yet she heeds them not:
Tanto d'ogni altrui dono poco si cura
Questa vaga angioletta umile e pura.
My passion weighs upon me as love weighed on Aristaeus. He forgot his
flocks, his herds, his gardens, even his beehives for Eurydice. His
heartache made him mad, and he pursued her over field and forest. She
fled before him, but he followed:[290]
La sottil gonna in preda a i venti resta,
E col crine ondeggiando addietro torna:
Ella piu ch'aura, o piu che strale, presta
Per l'odorata selva non soggiorna;
Tanto che il lito prende snella e mesta,
Fatta per paura assai piu adorna:
Fende Aristeo la vagha selva anch'egli,
E la man parle aver entro i capegli.
Tre volte innanzi la man destra spinse
Per pigliar de le chiome il largo invito;
Tre volte il vento solamente strinse,
E resto lasso senza fin schernito:
Ne stanchezza pero tardollo o vinse,
Perche tornasse il pensier suo fallito;
Anzi quanto mendico piu si sente,
Tanto s'affretta, non che il corso allente.
[Footnote 290:
Her rippling raiment, to the winds a prey,
Waves backward with her wavering tresses light;
Faster than air or arrow, without stay
She through the perfumed wood pursues her flight;
Then takes the river-bed, nor heeds delay,
Made even yet more beautiful by fright;
Threads Aristaeus, too, the forest fair,
And seems to have his hands within her hair.
Three times he thrust his right hand forth to clasp
The abundance of her curls that lured him on;
Three times the wind alone deceived his grasp,
Leaving him scorned, with all his hopes undone;
Yet not the toil that made him faint and gasp,
Could turn him from his purpose still unwon;
Nay, all the while, the more his strength is spent,
The more he hurries on the course intent.]
The story of Eurydice occupies twenty-nine stanzas, and with it the
poem ends abruptly. It is full of carefully-wrought pictures,
excessively smooth and sugared, recalling the superficial manner of
the later Roman painters. Even in the passage that describes
Eurydice's agony, just quoted, the forest is _odorata_ or _vagha_.
Fear and flight make the maiden more _adorna_. The ruffian Aristaeus
gets tired in the chase. He, too, must be presented in a form of
elegance. Not the action, but how the action might be made a
groundwork for embroidery of beauty, is the poet's care. We quit the
_Ninfa Tiberina_ with senses swooning under superfluity of
sweetness--as though we had inhaled the breath of hyacinths in a
heated chamber.
Closely allied to bucolic stands didactic poetry. The _Works and Days_
of Hesiod and the _Georgics_ of Virgil--the latter far more
effectually, however, than the former--determined this style for the
Italians. We have already seen to what extent the neo-Latin poets
cultivated a form of verse that, more than any other, requires the
skill of a great artist and the inspiration of true poetry, if it is
to shun intolerable tedium.[291] The best didactic poems written in
Latin by an Italian are undoubtedly Poliziano's _Sylvae_, and of these
the most refined is the _Rusticus_.[292] But Poliziano, in composing
them, struck out a new line. He did not follow his Virgilian models
closely. He chose the form of declamation to an audience, in
preference to the time-honored usage of apostrophizing a patron. This
relieves the _Sylvae_ from the absurdity of the poet's feigning to
instruct a Memmius or Augustus, a Francis I. or Charles V., in matters
about which those warriors and rulers can have felt but a frigid
interest. Pontano's _Urania_ and _De Hortis Hesperidum_ are almost
free from the same blemish. The former is addressed to his son Lucius,
but in words so brief and simple that we recognize the propriety of a
father giving this instruction to his child.[293] The latter is
dedicated to Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, who receives
complimentary panegyrics in the exordium and peroration, but does not
interfere with the structure of the poem. Its chief honors are
reserved, as is right and due, for Virgil:[294]--
Dryades dum munera vati
Annua, dum magno texunt nova serta Maroni,
E molli viola et ferrugineis hyacinthis,
Quasque fovent teneras Sebethi flumina myrtos.
[Footnote 291: _Revival of Learning_, chap. viii.]
[Footnote 292: _Ibid._ pp. 453-463.]
[Footnote 293:
Tu vero nate ingentes accingere ad orsus
Et mecum illustres coeli spatiare per oras,
Namque aderit tibi Mercurius, cui coelifer Atlas
Est avus, et notas puerum puer instruet artes.
Ed. Aldus (1513), p. 2.]
[Footnote 294: _Ibid._ p. 138.]
Pontano's greatness, here as elsewhere, is shown in his mytho-poetic
faculty. The lengthy dissertation on the heavens and the lighter
discourse on orange-cultivation are adorned and enlivened with
innumerable legends suggested to his fertile fancy by the beauty of
Neapolitan scenery. When we reach the age of Vida and Fracastoro, we
find ourselves in the full tide of Virgilian imitation[295]; and it is
just at this point in our inquiry that the transition from Latin to
Italian didactic poetry should be effected.
[Footnote 295: See _Revival of Learning_, pp. 471-481, for notices of
the _Poetica_, _Bombyces_, _Scacchia_ and _Syphilis_.]
Giovanni Rucellai, the son of that Bernardo, who opened his famous
Florentine Gardens to the Platonic Academy, was born in 1475. As the
author of _Rosmunda_, he has already appeared in this book. When he
died, in 1526, he bequeathed a little poem on Bees to his brother
Palla and his friend Gian Giorgio Trissino. Trissino and Rucellai had
been intimate at Florence and in Rome. They wrote the _Sofonisba_ and
_Rosmunda_ in generous rivalry, meeting from time to time to compare
notes of progress and to recite their verses. An eye-witness related
to Scipione Ammirato how "these two dearest friends, when they were
together in a room, would jump upon a bench and declaim pieces of
their tragedies, calling upon the audience to decide between them on
the merits of the plays."[296] Trissino received the MS. of his
friend's posthumous poem at Padua, and undertook to see it through the
press. The _Api_ was published at Venice in 1539.[297] What remained
to be said or sung about bees after the Fourth Georgic? Very little
indeed, it must be granted. Yet the _Api_ is no mere translation from
Virgil; and though the higher qualities of variety invention and
imagination were denied to Rucellai, though he can show no passages of
pathos to compete with the _Corycius senex_, of humor to approach the
battle of the hives, no episode, it need be hardly said, to match with
_Pastor Aristaeus_, still his modest poem is a monument of pure taste
and classical correctness. It is the work of a ripe scholar and
melodious versifier, if not of a great singer; and its diction belongs
to the best period of polite Italian.
[Footnote 296: See Morsolin's _Giangiorgio Trissino_ (Vicenza, 1878),
p. 92.]
[Footnote 297: _Ibid._ p. 245.]
The same moderate praise might be awarded to the more ambitious poem
of Luigi Alamanni, entitled _Coltivazione_, but for its immoderate
prolixity.[298] Alamanni resolved to combine the precepts of Hesiod,
Virgil and Varro, together with the pastoral passages of Lucretius, in
one work, adapting them to modern usage, and producing a comprehensive
treatise upon farming. With this object he divided his poem into six
books, the first four devoted to the labors of the several seasons,
the fifth to gardens, and the sixth to lucky and unlucky days. On a
rough computation, the whole six contain some 5,500 lines. _La
Coltivazione_ is dedicated to Francis I., and is marred by inordinate
flatteries of the French people and their king. Students who have the
heart to peruse its always chaste and limpidly flowing blank verse,
will be rewarded from time to time with passages like the following,
in which the sad circumstances of the poet and the pathos of his
regrets for Italy raise the style to more than usual energy and
dignity:[299]
Ma qual paese e quello ove oggi possa,
Glorioso Francesco, in questa guisa
Il rustico cultor goderse in pace
L'alte fatiche sue sicuro e lieto?
Non gia il bel nido ond'io mi sto lontano,
Non gia l'Italia mia; che poiche lunge
Ebbe, altissimo Re, le vostre insegne,
Altro non ebbe mai che pianto e guerra.
I colti campi suoi son fatti boschi,
Son fatti albergo di selvagge fere,
Lasciati in abbandono a gente iniqua.
Il bifulco e 'l pastor non puote appena
In mezzo alle citta viver sicuro
Nel grembo al suo signor; che di lui stesso
Che 'l devria vendicar, divien rapina ...
Fuggasi lunge omai dal seggio antico
L'italico villan; trapassi l'alpi;
Truove il gallico sen; sicuro posi
Sotto l'ali, signor, del vostro impero.
E se qui non avra, come ebbe altrove
Cosi tepido il sol, si chiaro il cielo,
Se non vedra quei verdi colli toschi,
Ove ha il nido piu bello Palla e Pomona;
Se non vedra quei cetri, lauri e mirti,
Che del Partenopeo veston le piagge;
Se del Benaco e di mill'altri insieme
Non sapra qui trovar le rive e l'onde;
Se non l'ombra, gli odor, gli scogli ameni
Che 'l bel liguro mar circonda e bagna;
Se non l'ampie pianure e i verdi prati
Che 'l Po, l'Adda e 'l Tesin rigando infiora,
Qui vedra le campagne aperte e liete,
Che senza fine aver vincon lo sguardo, etc.[300]
[Footnote 298: See _Versi e Prose di Luigi Alamanni_, 2 vols.,
Lemonnier, Firenze, 1859. This edition is prefaced by a Life written
by Pietro Raffaelli.]
[Footnote 299: _Op. cit._ vol. ii p. 210. It is the opening of the
peroration to Book i.]
[Footnote 300: "But what land is that where now, O glorious Francis,
the husbandman may thus enjoy his labors with gladness and
tranquillity in peace? Not the fair nest, from which I dwell so far
away; nay, not my Italy! She since your ensigns, mighty king, withdrew
from her, hath had naught else but tears and war. Her tilled fields
have become wild woods, the haunts of beasts, abandoned to lawless
men. Herdsman or shepherd can scarce dwell secure within the city
beneath their master's mantle; for those who should defend them, make
the country folk their prey.... Let Italy's husbandman fly far from
his own home, pass the Alpine barrier, seek out the breast of Gaul,
repose, great lord, beneath thy empire's pinions! And though he shall
not have the sun so warm, the skies so clear, as he was wont to have;
though he shall not gaze upon those green Tuscan hills, where Pallas
and Pomona make their fairest dwelling; though he shall not see those
groves of orange, laurel, myrtle, which clothe the slopes of
Parthenope; though he shall seek in vain the banks and waves of Garda
and a hundred other lakes; the shade, the perfume, and the pleasant
crags, which Liguria's laughing sea surrounds and bathes; the ample
plains and verdant meadows which flower beneath the waters of Po,
Adda, and Ticino; yet shall he behold glad fields and open, spreading
too far for eyes to follow!"]
Luigi Alamanni was the member of a noble Florentine family, who for
several generations had been devoted to the Medicean cause. He was
born in 1495, and early joined the band of patriots and scholars who
assembled in the Rucellai gardens to hear Machiavelli read his notes
on Livy. After the discovery of the conspiracy against Cardinal Giulio
de' Medici, in which Machiavelli was implicated, and which cost his
cousin Luigi di Tommaso Alamanni and his friend Jacopo del Diacceto
their lives, Luigi escaped across the mountains by Borgo San Sepolcro
to Urbino. Finally, after running many risks, and being imprisoned for
a while at Brescia by Giulio's emissaries, he made good his flight to
France. His wife and three children had been left at Florence. He was
poor and miserable, suffering as only exiles suffer when their home is
such a paradise as Italy. In 1527, after the expulsion of the Medici,
Luigi returned to Florence, and took an active part in the
preparations for the siege as well as in the diplomatic negotiations
which followed the fall of the city. Alessandro de' Medici declared
him a rebel; and he was forced to avail himself again of French
protection. With the exception of a few years passed in Italy between
1537 and 1540, the rest of his life was spent as a French courtier.
Both Francis I. and Henri II. treated him with distinction and bounty.
Catherine de Medicis made him her master of the household; and his son
received the bishopric of Macon. In 1556 he died at Amboise following
the Court.
Luigi Alamanni was the greatest Italian poet of whose services Francis
I. could boast, as Cellini was the greatest Italian artist. His works
are numerous, and all are marked by the same qualities of limpid
facility, tending to prolixity and feebleness. Sonnets and _canzoni_,
satires, romantic epics, eclogues, translations, comedies, he tried
them all. His translation of the _Antigone_ deserves commendation for
its style. His _Flora_ is curious for its attempt to reproduce the
comic iambic of the Latin poets. If his satires dealt less in
generalities, they might aspire to comparison with Ariosto's. As it
is, the poet's bile vents itself in abstract invectives, of which the
following verses upon Rome may stand for a fair specimen:[301]
Or chi vedesse il ver, vedrebbe come
Piu disnor tu, che 'l tuo Luter Martino,
Porti a te stessa, e piu gravose some.
Non la Germania, no, ma l'ozio e 'l vino,
Avarizia, ambizion, lussuria, e gola
Ti mena al fin, che gia veggiam vicino.
Non pur questo dico io, non Francia sola,
Non pur la Spagna, tutta Italia ancora
Che ti tien d'eresia, di vizi scola.
E chi nol crede, ne dimandi ognora
Urbin, Ferrara, l'Orso, e la Colonna,
La Marca, il Romagnuol, ma piu chi plora
Per te servendo, che fu d'altri donna.
[Footnote 301: Vol. i. p. 251. It is the end of the third satire. "He
who saw truly, would perceive that thyself brings on thee more
dishonor than thy Martin Luther, and heavier burdens too. Not Germany,
no, but sloth and wine, avarice, ambition, sensuality, and gluttony,
are bringing thee to thy now near approaching end. It is not I who say
this, not France alone, nor yet Spain, but all Italy, which holds thee
for the school of heresy and vice. He who believes it not, let him
inquire of Urbino, Ferrara, the Bear and the Column, the Marches and
Romagna, yet more of her who weeps because you make her serve, who was
once mistress over nations."]
Alamanni is said to have been an admirable improvisatore; and this we
can readily believe, for his verses even when they are most polished,
flow with a placidity of movement that betrays excessive case.
We have traced the pastoral ideal from its commencement in Boccaccio,
through the _Arcadia_ of Sannazzaro, Poliziano's _Orfeo_, and the
didactic poets, up to the point when it was destined soon to find its
perfect form in the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_. Both Tasso and
Guarini lived beyond the chronological limits assigned to this work.
The Renaissance was finished; and Italy had passed into a new phase of
existence, under the ecclesiastical reaction which is called the
Counter-Reformation. It is no part of my programme to enter with
particularity into the history of the second half of the sixteenth
century. And yet the subject of this and the preceding chapter would
be incomplete were I not to notice the two poems which combined the
drama and the pastoral in a work of art no less characteristic for the
people and the age than fruitful of results for European literature.
Great tragedy and great comedy were denied to the Italians. But they
produced a novel species in the pastoral drama, which testified to
their artistic originality, and led by natural transitions to the
opera. Poetry was on the point of expiring; but music was rising to
take her place. And the imaginative medium prepared by the lyrical
scenes of the Arcadian play, afforded just that generality and
aloofness from actual conditions of life, which were needed by the new
art in its first dramatic essays.
It would be a mistake to suppose that because the form of the Arcadian
romance was artificial, it could not lend itself to the presentation
of real passion when adapted to the theater. The study of the
_Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_ is sufficient to remove this
misconception. Though the latter is the more carefully constructed of
the two, the plot in either case presents a series of emotional
situations, developed with refined art and expressed with lyrical
abundance. The rustic fable is but a veil, through which the
everlasting lineaments of love are shown. Arcadia, stripped of
pedantry and affectation, has become the ideal world of sentiment.
Like amber, it incloses in its glittering transparency the hopes and
fears, the pains and joys, which flit from heart to heart of men and
women when they love. The very conventionality of the pastoral style
assists the lyrical utterance of real feeling. For it must be borne in
mind that both _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_ are essentially lyrical.
The salt and savor of each play are in their choruses and monologues.
The dialogue, the fable and the characters serve to supply the poet
with motives for emotion that finds vent in song. This being conceded,
it will be understood how from their scenes as a whole world of
melodrama issued. Whatever may have been the subject of an opera
before the days of Gluck, it drew its life-blood from these pastorals.
The central motive of _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_ is the contrast
between the actual world of ambition, treachery and sordid strife, and
the ideal world of pleasure, loyalty and tranquil ease. Nature is
placed in opposition to civil society, the laws of honor to the laws
of love, the manners of Arcadia to the manners of Italy. This cardinal
motive finds its highest utterance in Tasso's chorus on the Age of
Gold:
O bella eta dell'oro,
Non gia perche di latte
Sen corse il fiume, e stillo mele il bosco;
Non perche i frutti loro
Dier dall'aratro intatte
Le terre, e gli angui errar senz'ira o tosco;
Non perche nuvol fosco
Non spiego allor suo velo,
Ma in primavera eterna,
Ch'ora s'accende, e verna,
Rise di luce e di sereno il cielo;
Ne porto peregrino
O guerra, o merce agli altrui lidi il pino:
Ma sol perche quel vano
Nome senza oggetto,
Quell'idolo d'errori, idol d'inganno,
Quel che dal volgo insano
Onor poscia fu detto,
Che di nostra natura 'l feo tiranno,
Non mischiava il suo affanno
Fra le liete dolcezze
Dell'amoroso gregge;
Ne fu sua dura legge
Nota a quell'alme in libertate avvezze:
Ma legge aurea e felice,
Che Natura scolpi, "S'ei piace, ei lice."
The last phrase, _S'ei piace, ei lice_, might be written on the
frontispiece of both dramas, together with Dafne's sigh: _Il mondo
invecchia, E invecchiando intristisce_. Of what use is life unless we
love?
Amiam, che 'l sol si muore, e poi rinasce;
A noi sua breve luce
S'asconde, e 'l sonno eterna notte adduce.
The girl who wastes her youth in proud virginity, prepares a sad old
age of vain regret:
Cangia, cangia consiglio,
Pazzarella che sei;
Che 'l pentirsi da sezzo nulla giova.
It is the old cry of the Florentine _Canti_ and _Ballate_, "Gather ye
rose-buds while ye may!" _Di doman non c'e certezza._ And the stories
of _Aminta_ and _Pastor Fido_ teach the same lesson, that nature's
laws cannot be violated, that even fate and the most stubborn bosoms
bow to love.
Of the music and beauty of these two dramas, I find it difficult to
speak. Before some masterpieces criticism bends in silence. We cannot
describe what must be felt. All the melodies that had been growing
through two centuries in Italy, are concentrated in their songs. The
idyllic voluptuousness, which permeated literature and art, steeps
their pictures in a golden glow. It is easy enough to object that
their apparent simplicity conceals seduction, that their
sentimentalism is unmanly, and their suggestions of physical beauty
effeminating:--
Ma come Silvia il ricconobbe, e vide
Le belle guance tenere d'Aminta
Iscolorite in si leggiadri modi,
Che viola non e che impallidisca
Si dolcemente, e lui languir si fatto,
Che parea gia ultimi sospiri
Esalar l'alma; in guisa di Baccante,
Gridando e percotendosi il bel petto,
Lascio cadersi in sul giacente corpo;
E giunse viso a viso, e bocca a bocca.
This passage warns us that an age of _cicisbei_ and _castrati_ has
begun, and that the Italian sensuousness has reached its final
dissolution. Silvia's kisses in _Aminta_, Mirtillo's kisses in _Pastor
Fido_, introduce a new refinement of enervation. Marino with his
_Adone_ is not distant. But, while we recognize in both these
poems--the one perfumed and delicate like flowers of spring, the other
sculptured in pure forms of classic grace--evident signs of a
civilization sinking to decay; though we almost loathe the beauty
which relaxes every chord of manhood in the soul that feels it; we are
bound to confess that to this goal the Italian genius had been
steadily advancing since the publication of the _Filocopo_. The
negation of chivalry, mysticism, asceticism, is accomplished. After
traversing the cycle of comedy, romance, satire, burlesque poetry, the
plastic arts, and invading every province of human thought, the
Italian reaction against the middle ages assumes a final shape of
hitherto unapprehended loveliness in the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor
Fido_. They complete and close the Renaissance, bequeathing in a new
species of art its form and pressure to succeeding generations.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE PURISTS.
The Italians lose their Language--Prejudice against the
Mother Tongue--Problem of the Dialects--Want of a
Metropolis--The Tuscan Classics--Petrarch and
Boccaccio--Dante Rejected--False Attitude of the
Petrarchisti--Renaissance Sense of Beauty unexpressed in
Lyric--False Attitude of Boccaccio's Followers--Ornamental
Prose--Speron Sperone--The Dictator Bembo--His Conception of
the Problem--The _Asolani_--Grammatical Essay--Treatise on
the Language--Poems--Letters--Bembo's Place in the
_Cortegiano_--Castiglione on Italian Style--His Good
Sense--Controversies on the Language--Academical
Spirit--Innumerable Poetasters--La Casa--His Life--_Il
Forno_--Peculiar Melancholy--His Sonnets--Guidiccioni's
Poems on Italy--Court Life--Caro and Castelvetro--Their
Controversies--Castelvetro accused of Heresy--Literary
Ladies--Veronica Gambara--Vittoria Colonna--Her Life--Her
Friendship for Michelangelo--Life of Bernardo Tasso--His
_Amadigi_ and other Works--Life of Giangiorgio Trissino--His
Quarrel with his Son Giulio--His Critical Works--The _Italia
Liberata_.
It was the misfortune of the Italians that, when culture had become
national and the revival of the vulgar literature had been effected,
they found themselves in nearly the same relation to their own
language as to Latin. After more than a hundred years absorbed in
humanistic studies, the authors of the fourteenth century were hardly
less remote than the Augustan classics; and to all but Tuscans their
diction was almost foreign. At the beginning of the _cinque cento_,
the living mother-tongue of Italy which Dante sought--the _Vulgare,
quod superius venabamur, quod in qualibet redolet civitate, nec cubat
in ulla_--was still to seek. Since the composition of Dante's essay
_De Vulgari Eloquio_, the literary activity of the nation had, indeed,
created a desire for some fixed standard of style in modern speech.
But the experiments of the _quattro cento_ had not far advanced the
matter. They only proved that Tuscan was the dialect to imitate, and
that success in the future must depend on adherence to the Tuscan
authors. Hence it happened that Petrarch and Boccaccio came to be
studied with the same diligence, the same obsequious reverence, as
Cicero and Virgil. Italian was written with no less effort after
formal purity, no less minute observance of rules, than if it had been
a dead language. At the same time, as a consequence of this system,
the vices of the humanistic style--its tendency to servile imitation,
emptiness, rhetorical verbosity, and preference of form to
matter--were imported into the vernacular literature.
While noting these drawbacks, which attended the resurgence of Italian
at an epoch when the whole nation began to demand a common language,
we must give due credit to the sagacity displayed by scholars at that
epoch in grappling with the problem before them. The main points at
issue were, _first_, to overcome the prejudice against the mother
tongue, which still lingered among educated people; _secondly_, to
adjust Italian to the standards of taste established by the humanistic
movement; and, _thirdly_, to decide whether Tuscan should reign
supreme, or be merged in a speech more representative of the Italians
as a nation. Early in the century, the battle of Italian against Latin
was practically won. There remained no obstinate antagonism to a
purely national and modern literature. Still the type to which this
literature should conform, the laws by which it should be regulated,
were as yet unsettled. These questions had to be decided by
intelligence rather than by instinct; for the Italians possessed no
common medium of conversation, no common opportunities of forensic or
parliamentary debate. That insensible process whereby French style has
been modeled on the usages of conversation, and English style has been
adapted to the tone of oratory, had to be performed, so far as this
was possible, by conscious analysis. The Italians were aware that they
lacked a language, and they set themselves deliberately to remedy this
defect. These peculiar circumstances gave a pedantic tone to the
discussion of the problem. Yet the problem itself was neither puerile
nor pedantic. It concerned nothing less than the formation of an
instrument of self-expression for a people, who had reached the
highest grade of artistic skill in the exercise of the dead languages,
and who, though intellectually raised to an equality of culture, were
divided by tenacious local differences.
That Petrarch and Boccaccio should have been chosen as models of
classical Italian style, was not only natural but inevitable. Writers,
trained in the method of the humanists, required the guidance of
authoritative masters. Just as they used Cicero and Virgil for the
correction of medieval Latin, so Petrarch and Boccaccio were needed
for the castigation of homespun dialects. Dante, had he been
comprehended by such men, would not have satisfied ears educated in
the niceties of Latin versification; nor could the builders of
Ciceronian perorations have revived the simple prose of the Villani.
Petrarch contented their sense of polish; Boccaccio supplied them with
intricate periods and cadences of numerous prose. Yet the choice was
in either case unfortunate, though for somewhat different reasons.
It was impossible for poets of the sixteenth century to follow
Petrarch to the very letter of his diction, without borrowing his
tone. Consequently these versifiers affected to languish and adore,
wove conceits and complained of cruelty, in the fashion of Vaucluse.
Their facile mistresses became Lauras; or else they draped a
lay-figure, and wrote sonnets to its painted eyebrows. The confusion
between literary ceremony and practical experience of passion wrought
an ineradicable discord. Authors of indecent burlesques penned
Platonic odes. Bembo, who was answerable for the _Menta_ in its Latin
form, praised his mistress Morosina in polished sonnets and elegiac
threnodies. Firenzuola published the poems to Selvaggia and the
_Capitolo_ in praise of a specific against infamous diseases. La Casa
gratified the same Academies with his panegyric of the Oven and his
scholastic exercises in a metaphysical emotion. Reading thee diverse
compositions side by side, we wake to the conviction that the
Petrarchistic counterfeits, however excellent in form, have precisely
the same mediocrity as Sannazzaro's epic, while the Bernesque
effusions express the crudest temper of the men who wrote them. The
one class of poems is redolent of affectation, the other of coarse
realism. The middle term between these opposites is wanting. Nor
could it well be otherwise. The conditions of society in the sixteenth
century rendered Petrarch's sentiment impossible. His melancholy,
engendered by the contest between passion and religious duty, had
become a thing of the far past. The license of the times rendered this
halting between two impulses ridiculous, when no man was found to
question the divine right of natural appetite. Even the reverential
attitude assumed by Petrarch as a lover, was out of date; and when his
imitators aped it, their insincerity was patent. The highest
enthusiasm of the Renaissance revealed itself through the plastic arts
in admiration for corporeal beauty. This feeling, while it easily
degenerated into sensuality, had no point of contact with Petrarch's
medieval Platonism. Therefore the tone of the Petrarchisti was
hypocritical, and the love they professed, a sham.
We have a further reason for resenting this devotion to a poet with
whose habitual mood the men of that age could not sympathize. We know
that they had much to say which remained buried beneath their
fourteenth-century disguises. The sincerity of feeling, the fervid
passion of poets like Bembo, Molza, or La Casa, cannot be denied. But
their emotion found no natural channel of expression. It is not
without irritation that we deplore the intellectual conditions of an
age, which forced these artists to give forth what they felt in one of
two equally artificial forms. Between transcription from the Latin
elegists and reproduction of Petrarch there lay for them no choice.
Consequently, the Renaissance lacked its full development upon the
side of lyric poetry. The secret of the times remained unspoken--a
something analogous to Venetian painting, a something indicated in
Firenzuola's and Luigini's dialogues on female beauty, a something
indirectly presented in Ariosto's episodes, which ought to have been
uttered from the heart in song by men who felt the loveliness of
plastic form. Instead of this lyrical expression of a ruling passion,
we have to content ourselves with pseudo-platonic rhymes and with the
fervid sensualities of Pontano's elegiacs. The sensibility to
corporeal beauty, which was abundantly represented by Titian,
Lionardo, Raphael, Correggio, Michelangelo in art, in literature was
either shorn of its essential freedom by the limitations of
conventional Platonism, or exaggerated on the side of animalism by
imitation of erotic Latin poets. Furthermore, we have some right to
regard the burlesque obscenity of academical literature as a partial
reaction against the hypocritical refinements of the Petrarchistic
mannerism. Thus the deepest instinct of the epoch, that which gave its
splendor to the painting of the golden age, found no spontaneous
utterance in lyric verse.
The academical study of Boccaccio proved disastrous for a different
reason. In this case there was no division between the master and his
pupils; for we have seen already that the author of the Decameron
anticipated the Renaissance in the scope and tenor of his work. But he
supplied students with a false standard. His Latinizing periods, his
involved construction of sentences and oratorical amplification of
motives encouraged the worst qualities of humanistic style. Boccaccio
prevented the Italians from forming a masculine prose manner. Each
writer, whatever might be the subject of his work, aimed at ornate
diction. Cumbrous and circuitous phrases were admired for their own
sake. The simplicity of the Chronicles was abandoned for ponderous
verbosity, and Machiavelli's virile force found no successors in the
crowd of academicians who dissected the Decameron for flowers of
rhetoric.
Thus the efforts of the purists took a false direction from the outset
both in prose and verse. The literature which aimed at being national,
began with archaistic exercises; and Italy, at the moment of attaining
self-consciousness, found herself, without a living language, forced
to follow in the steps of antiquated authors. The industry and
earnestness of the disciples made their failure the more notable; for
while they pursued a track that could not lead to aught but mannerism,
they plumed themselves upon the soundness of their method. In order to
illustrate the spirit of this movement, I will select a passage from
the works of Speron Sperone, who was by no means the least successful
stylist of the period. He is describing his earlier essays in the art
of writing and the steps by which he arrived at what he clearly
thought to be perfection:[302]
"Being in all truth desirous beyond measure from my earliest years to
speak and to write my thoughts in our mother tongue, and that not so
much with a view to being understood, which lies within the scope of
every unlettered person, as with the object of placing my name upon
the roll of famous men, I neglected every other interest, and gave my
whole attention to the reading of Petrarch and the hundred Novels; in
which studies having exercised myself for many months with little
profit and without a guide, under the inspiration of God I finally
betook me to our revered Master Trifone Gabrielli[303]; by whose
kindly assistance I arrived at perfect comprehension of those authors,
whom, through ignorance of what I ought to notice, I had frequently
before misunderstood. This excellent man and true father of ours first
bade me observe the vocables, then gave me rules for knowing the
declension and conjugation of nouns and verbs in Tuscan, and lastly
explained to me articles, pronouns, participles, adverbs, and other
parts of speech; so that, collecting all that I had learned, I
composed a grammar for myself, by following the which while writing I
so controlled my style that in a short space of time the world held me
for a man of erudition, and still considers me as such. When it seemed
to me that I had taken rank as a grammarian, I set myself, with the
utmost expectation of every one who knew me, to the making of verses;
and then, my head full of rhythms, sentences and words from Petrarch
and Boccaccio, for a few years, I produced things that appeared
wonderful to my judgment; but afterwards, thinking that my vein was
beginning to dry up (inasmuch as words frequently failed me, and, not
finding what to say in different sonnets, it occurred to me to
rehandle the same thoughts), I had recourse to that which all the
world does now[304]; for, using the greatest diligence, I composed a
rhyming dictionary or vocabulary of Italian phrases; in the which I
classed by the alphabet every word those two authors had used;
moreover I collected in another book their divers ways of describing
things, as day, night, anger, peace, hate, love, fear, hope, beauty,
in such wise that not a single word or thought came from me which had
not its precedent in their sonnets and novels." At this point Sperone
frankly admits that his practice was too slavish. He then proceeds to
tell how he compared Petrarch's Latin with his vulgar style in order
to discover the correct rules of Italian versification. "Conquered by
the arguments and experiments I have described, I returned to my
earlier studies; and then, in addition to continual self-exercise in
the reading of Petrarch (which by itself and without any other
artifice may procure great benefit), by fixing my mind more diligently
than before upon his modes of diction, I observed (as I believed)
certain qualities pertaining in an eminent degree to the poet and also
the orator; which, since you desire it, I will briefly expound. In the
first place, while numbering and weighing his words one by one, I
became aware that I discovered none common and none base, few harsh,
all clear, all elegant; and all, moreover, so adapted to common use
that one might have supposed he had selected and accumulated them with
the concurrence of all Italy in conclave. Among the which (like stars
amid the limpid space of midnight) some few shone out with special
luster; for some part ancient words, but not unpleasing through their
age, as _uopo_, _unquanco_, _sovente_; for some part beautiful and
very graceful words, which like jewels that delight the eyes of all
men, are only used by gentle and high intellects, such as _gioia_,
_speme_, _rai_, _disio_, _soggiorno_, _belta_, and others of like
quality, the which no learned tongue would utter, nor hand write,
unless the ear consented. Time would fail to tell in detail of the
verbs, adverbs, and other parts of speech, which make his verses
noble; but one thing I will not pass in silence, namely that, when
speaking of his lady, now of her person, now of her soul, now of her
tears, now of her smile, now of her movement, now of her taking rest,
now of her anger, now of her pity, and now of her age, in a word when
describing and magnifying her alive or dead, he generally avoids the
proper name of things, and by some wonderful art adorns each thing by
words appropriate to others, calling her head fine gold and roof of
gold, her eyes suns, stars, sapphires, nest and home of love, her
cheeks now snow and roses, now milk and fire, rubies her lips, pearls
her teeth, her throat and breast now ivory, now alabaster." Halfway up
this _Gradus ad Parnassum_ we are forced to stop and take deep breath.
Sperone has launched the theory of "poetic diction," and advances
boldly to its extreme consequences. We need not follow his analysis
further into particulars. He carries it through the several topics of
tautology, periphrasis, antithesis, and proportion of syllables in
words of different length; after which the subject of prosody proper
is discussed. Having finished with Petrarch, he then proceeds to
render the same account of his studies in Boccaccio, observing the
variety and choice of his phrases, but calling special attention to
the numbers of his periods, and winding up with this sonorous sentence
on prose architecture. "But you must know that as the composition of
prose is a marshaling of the sounds of words in proper order, so its
numbers are certain orders in their syllables; pleasing the ear
wherewith, the art of oratory opens, continues and finishes a period:
forasmuch as every clause has not only a beginning but also a middle
and an end; at the beginning it puts itself in motion and ascends; in
the middle, as though weary with exertion, it rests upon its feet
awhile; then it descends, and flies to the conclusion for
repose."[305]
[Footnote 302: _I Dialoghi di Messer Speron Sperone_ (Aldus, Venice,
1542), p. 146. The passage is taken from a Dialogue on Rhetoric. I
have tried to preserve the clauses of the original periods.]
[Footnote 303: Trifone Gabrielli was a Venetian, celebrated for his
excellent morals no less than for his learning. He gained the epithet
of the Socrates of his age, and died in 1549. His personal influence
seems to have been very great. Bembo makes frequent and respectful
references to him in his letters, and Giasone de Nores wrote a
magnificent panegyric of him in the preface to his commentary on
Horace's _Ars Poetica_, which he professed to have derived orally from
Trifone.]
[Footnote 304: Sperone probably alludes to works like Minerbi's
Vocabulary of words used by Boccaccio (Venice, 1535); Luna's
_Vocabolario di cinque mila vocaboli toschi del Furioso Petrarca
Boccaccio e Dante_ (Naples, 1536); Accarigi's dictionary to Boccaccio
entitled _Ricchezze della lingua volgare_ (Venice, 1543); and so
forth.]
[Footnote 305: It should be mentioned that the passage I have
paraphrased is put into the lips of Antonio Broccardo, a Venetian
poet, whose _Rime_ were published in 1538. He attacked Bembo's works,
and brought down upon himself such a storm of fury from the pedants of
Padua and Venice that he took to his bed and died of grief.]
What is admirable, in spite of pedantry and servility, in this lengthy
diatribe is the sense of art as art, the devotion to form for its own
sake, the effort to grapple with the problems of style, the writer's
single-hearted seeking after perfection. Nothing but a highly-developed
artistic instinct in the nation could have produced students of this
type. At the same time we feel an absence of spontaneity, and the
tendency to aim at decorative writing is apparent. When the glow of
discovery, which impelled Sperone and his fellow-pioneers to open a
way across the continent of literature, had failed; when the practice
of their school had passed into precepts, and their inventions had
been formulated as canons of style; nothing remained for travelers
upon this path but frigid repetition, precise observance of
conventional limitations, and exercises in sonorous oratory. The
rhetoric of the seventeenth century was a necessary outgrowth of
pedantic purism. The conceits of Marini and his imitators followed
inevitably from a rigorous application of rules that denied to poetry
the right of natural expression. It may be urged that for a nation so
highly sensitive to form as the Italians, without a metropolis to mold
the language in the process of development, and without a spoken
dialect of good society, there existed no common school of style but
the recognized classics of Tuscany.[306] When each district habitually
used a different speech for private and public utterance, men could
not write as they talked, and they were therefore forced to write by
rule. There is force in these arguments. Yet the consequences of a
too minute and fastidious study of the Tuscan authors proved none the
less fatal to the freedom of Italian literature; and what is more,
sagacious critics foresaw the danger, though they were unable to avert
it.
[Footnote 306: The difficulty is well put by one of the interlocutors
in Castiglione's dialogue upon the courtier (ed. Lemonnier, p. 41):
"Oltre a questo, le consuetudini sono molto varie, ne e citta nobile
in Italia che non abbia diversa maniera di parlar da tutte l'altre.
Pero non vi ristringendo voi a dichiarar qual sia la migliore,
potrebbe l'uomo attaccarsi alla bergamasca cosi come alla fiorentina."
Messer Federigo Fregoso of Genoa is speaking, and he draws the
conclusion which practically triumphed in Italy: "Parmi adunque, che a
chi vuol fuggir ogni dubio ed esser ben sicuro, sia necessario
proporsi ad imitar uno, il quale di consentimento di tutti sia
estimato buono ... e questo (nel volgar dico), non penso che abbia da
esser altro che il Petrarca e 'l Boccaccio; e chi da questi dui si
discosta va tentoni, come chi cammina per le tenebre e spesso erra la
strada."]
The leader in this movement, acknowledged throughout Italy for more
than half a century as dictator in the republic of letters,
"foster-father of the language" (_balio della lingua_), "guide and
master of our tongue" (_guida e maestro di questa lingua_), was Pietro
Bembo.[307] Though only sixteen years junior to Angelo Poliziano, whom
he had himself saluted as "ruler of the Ausonian lyre," Bembo outlived
his master for the space of fifty-one years, and swayed the literary
world at a period when Italian succeeded to the honors of Latin
scholarship.[308] He was a Venetian. This fact is not insignificant,
since it clearly marks the change that had come over the nation, when
the scepter of learning was transferred to the northern provinces, and
the exclusive privilege of correct Italian composition was shared with
Tuscans by men of other dialects.[309] In his early youth Bembo had
the good sense to perceive that the mother tongue was no less worthy
of cultivation than Greek and Latin. The arguments advanced by Dante,
by Alberti, by Lorenzo de' Medici, recurred with fresh force to his
mind. He therefore made himself the champion of Italian against those
exclusive students who, like Ercole Strozzi, still contended that the
dead languages were alone worthy of attention.[310] He also saw that
it was necessary to create a standard of correct style for writers who
were not fortunate enough to have been born within the bounds of
Tuscany. Accordingly, he devoted himself to the precise and formal
study of fourteenth-century literature, polishing his own Italian
compositions with a diligence that, while it secured transparent
purity of diction, deprived them of originality and impulse. It is
said that he passed each of his works through forty successive
revisions, keeping as many portfolios to represent the stages at which
they had arrived.
[Footnote 307: In the famous passage of the _Furioso_ where Ariosto
pronounces the eulogy of the poets of his day, he mentions Bembo thus
(_Orl. Fur._ xlvi. 15).
Pietro
Bembo, che 'l puro e dolce idioma nostro,
Levato fuor del volgar uso tetro,
Quale esser dee, ci ha co 'l suo esempio mostro.]
[Footnote 308: See Bembo's elegy on Poliziano quoted by me in the
_Revival of Learning_, p. 484.]
[Footnote 309: See _Revival of Learning_, p. 506, for the transference
of scholarship to Lombardy.]
[Footnote 310: See the Latin hendecasyllables quoted by me in the
_Revival of Learning_, p. 415, and the Defense of Italian in the
treatise "Della volgare Lingua" (Bembo, _Opere_, Milan, _Class. It._
x. 28). Carducci in his essay _Delle Poesie Latine di Ludovico
Ariosto_, pp. 179-181, gives some interesting notices of Ercole
Strozzi's conversion to the vulgar tongue.]
Having already sketched the life of Bembo, I shall here restrict
myself to remarks upon those of his works which were influential in
reviving the practice of Italian composition.[311] Among these the
first place must be awarded to _Gli Asolani_, a dialogue on Love,
written in his early manhood and dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia. The
beauty of its language and the interest of the theme discussed
rendered this treatise widely fashionable. Yet it is not possible to
study it with pleasure now. Those Platonic conversations, in which the
refined society of the Italian Courts delighted, have lost their
attraction for us. Nothing but the charming description of Asolo,
where the Queen of Cyprus had her garden, surrounded by trimmed
laurels and divided crosswise with a leafy _pergola_ of vines, retains
its freshness. That picture, animated by the figures of the six
novitiates of Love, now sauntering through shade and sunlight under
the vine-branches, now seated on the grass to hear a lute or viol
deftly touched, is in the best idyllic style of the Venetian masters.
At the Court of Urbino, where Bembo was residing when his book
appeared, it was received with acclamation, as a triumph of divine
genius. The illustrious circle celebrated by Castiglione in his
_Cortegiano_ perused it with avidity, and there is no doubt that the
publication gave a powerful impulse to Italian studies. These were
still further fostered by Bembo's Defense of the Vulgar Tongue.[312]
He had secured the hearing of the world by his _Asolani_. Women and
the leaders of fashionable society were with him; and he pushed his
arguments home against the Latinizing humanists. "To abandon our own
language for another," he reminded them, "is the same as withdrawing
supplies from our mother to support a strange woman." This phrase is
almost identical with what Dante had written on the same topic two
centuries earlier. But Bembo's standing-ground was different from
Dante's. The poet of the fourteenth century felt called to create a
language for his nation. The student of the sixteenth, imbued with the
assimilative principles of scholarship, too fastidious to risk a rough
note in his style, too feeble to attempt a new act of creation, was
content to "affect the fame of an imitator."[313] His piety toward
the mother-tongue was generous; his method of rehabilitation was
almost servile.
[Footnote 311: See _Revival of Learning_, pp. 410-415, 481-485.]
[Footnote 312: _Opere del Cardinale Bembo_ (_Class. It._ Milano, 1808,
vol. x.).]
[Footnote 313: See his Latin treatise _De Imitatione_. It is in the
form of an epistle.]
With the view of illustrating his practice by precepts, Bembo
published a short Italian grammar, or compendium of _Regole
Grammaticali_. It went through fourteen editions, and formed the
text-book for future discussions of linguistic problems. Though
welcomed with enthusiasm, this first attempt to reduce Italian to
system was severely criticised, especially by Sannazzaro, Caro,
Castelvetro and the Florentine Academy.
I have already had occasion to observe that, as a Latin poet, Bembo
succeeded best with memorial verses. The same may be said about his
Italian poems. The _Canzoni_ on the death of his brother, and that on
the death of his mistress Morosina, are justly celebrated for their
perfection of form; nor are they so wanting in spontaneous emotion as
many of his Petrarchistic exercises. Bembo was tenderly attached to
this Morosina, whom he first met at Rome, and with whom he lived till
her death at Padua in 1525. She was the mother of his three children,
Lucilio, Torquato and Elena. The _Canzone_ in question, beginning:
Donna, de' cui begli occhi alto diletto:
was written so late as 1539, three months after Bembo had been raised
to the dignity of Cardinal.[314] As a specimen of the conceits which
he tolerated in poetry, I have thought it worth while to present the
following translation of a sonnet:[315]
Ah me, at one same moment forced to cry
And hush, to hope and fear, rejoice and grieve,
The service of one master seek and leave,
Over my loss laugh equally and sigh!
My guide I govern; without wings I fly;
With favoring winds, to rocks and sandbanks cleave;
Hate haughtiness, yet meekness disbelieve;
Mistrust all men, nor on myself rely.
I strive to stay the sun, set snows on fire;
Yearn after freedom, run to take the yoke:
Defend myself without, but bleed within;
Fall, when there's none to lift me from the mire;
Complain, when plaints are vain, of fortune's stroke;
And power, being powerless, from impuissance win.
[Footnote 314: See Panizzi, _Bioardo ed Ariosto_, vi. lxxxi.]
[Footnote 315: Sonnet xxxvi. of his collected poems.]
In the sixteenth century verses of this stamp passed for masterpieces
of incomparable elegance. The same high value was set on Bembo's
familiar letters. He wrote them with a view to publication, and they
were frequently reprinted during the course of the next fifty
years.[316] These may still be read with profit by students for the
light they cast upon Italian society during the first half of the
_cinque cento_, and with pleasure by all who can appreciate the
courtesies of refined breeding expressed in language of fastidious
delicacy. The chief men of the day, whether Popes, princes, Cardinals
or poets, and all the illustrious ladies, including Lucrezia Borgia,
Veronica Gambara, and Vittoria Colonna, are addressed with a mingled
freedom and ceremony, nicely graduated according to their rank or
degree of intimacy, which proves the exquisite tact developed by the
intercourse of Courts in men like Bembo.
[Footnote 316: My edition is in four volumes, Gualtero Scotto,
Vinegia, MDLII. They are collected with copious additions in the
_Classici Italiani_.]
Since the composition and publication of such letters formed a main
branch of literary industry in the period we have reached,[317] it
will be well to offer some examples of Bembo's epistolary style; and
for this purpose, the correspondence with Lucrezia Borgia may be
chosen, not only because of the interest attaching to her friendship
with the author, but also because the topics treated display the
refinement of his nature in a very agreeable light.[318] In one of
these, written upon the occasion of her father's death, he calls
Alexander VI. _quel vostro cosi gran padre_. In a second, touched with
the deepest personal feeling, he announces the death of his own
brother Carlo, _mio solo e caro fratello, unico sostegno e sollazzo
della vita mia_.[319] In a third he thanks her for her letters of
condolence: _Le lagrime alle quali mi scrivete essere stata constretta
leggendo nelle mei lettere la morte del mio caro e amato fratello M.
Carlo, sono dolcissimo refrigerio stato al mio dolore, se cosa dolce
alcuna m'e potuta venire a questo tempo._ In a fourth he turns this
graceful compliment: _Pregherei eziandio il cielo, che ogni giorno
v'accrescerebbe la bellezza; ma considero che non vi se ne puo
aggiungere._ In a fifth he congratulates Lucrezia upon the birth of a
son and heir, and in a sixth condoles with her upon his early death.
Then another boy is born, just when the Duke of Urbino dies; and Bembo
mingles courtly tears with ceremonious protestations of his joy. It
would be impossible to pen more scholarly exercises upon similar
occasions; and through the style of the professed epistolographer we
seem to feel that Bembo had real interest in the events he illustrates
so elegantly. The fatal defect of his letters is, that he is always
thinking more of his manner than of his matter. Like the humanists
from whom he drew his mental lineage, he labored for posterity without
reckoning on the actual demands posterity would make. Success crowned
his efforts in the pleasure he afforded to the public of his day; but
this was a success comparable with that of Bernardo Accolti or
Tibaldeo of Ferrara, whom he scorned. He little thought that future
students would rate an annalist of Corio's stamp, for the sake of his
material, at a higher value than the polished author of the _Lettere_.
Yet such is the irony of fame that we could willingly exchange Bembo's
nicely-turned phrases for a few solid facts, a few spontaneous
effusions.
[Footnote 317: It will be impossible to do more than make general
reference to the vast masses of Italian letters printed in the
sixteenth century. I must, therefore, content myself here with
mentioning the collections of La Casa, Caro, Bernardo, and Torquato
Tasso, Aretino, Guidiccioni, together with the miscellanies published
under the titles of _Lettre Scritte al Signor Pietro Aretino_, the
_Lettere Diverse_ in three books (Aldus, 1567), and the _Lettere di
Tredici Uomini Illustri_ (Venetia, 1554).]
[Footnote 318: _Lettere_, ed. cit. vol. iv. pp. 1-31.]
[Footnote 319: Another letter, dated Venice, August 1, 1504, is fuller
in particulars about this dearly-loved brother.]
Bembo was a power in literature, the exact force of which it is
difficult to estimate without taking his personal influence into
consideration. Distinguished by great physical beauty, gifted with a
noble presence, cultivated in the commerce of the best society, he
added to his insight and his mental energy all the charm that belongs
to a man of fashion and persuasive eloquence in conversation. He was
untiring in his literary industry, unfailing in his courtesy to
scholars, punctual in correspondence, and generous in the use he made
of his considerable wealth. At Urbino, at Venice, at Rome, and at
Padua, his study was the meeting-place of learned men, who found the
graces of the highest aristocracy combined in him with genial
enthusiasm for the common interests of letters. Thus the man did even
more than the author to promote the revolution he had at heart. This
is brought home to us with force when we consider the place assigned
to him in Castiglione's _Cortegiano_--a masterpiece of composition
transcending, in my opinion, all the efforts made by Bembo to conquer
the difficulties of style. Castiglione is no less correct than the
dictator strove to be; but at the same time he is far more natural. He
treats the same topics with greater ease, and with a warmth of feeling
and conviction which endears him to the heart of those who read his
golden periods. Yet Castiglione gives the honors of his dialogue to
the author of the _Asolani_, when he puts into the mouth of Bembo that
glowing panegyric of Platonic love, which forms the close and climax
of his dialogue upon the qualities of a true gentleman.[320]
[Footnote 320: _Il Cortegiano_ (ed. Lemonnier, Firenze, 1854), pp.
296-303. I have already spoken at some length about this essay in the
_Age of the Despots_, pp. 183-190, and have narrated the principal
events of Castiglione's life in the _Revival of Learning_, pp.
418-422. For his Latin poems see _ib._ pp. 490-497.]
The crowning merit of the _Cortegiano_ is an air of good breeding and
disengagement from pedantic prejudices. This urbanity renders it a
book to read with profit and instruction through all time.
Castiglione's culture was the result of a large experience of men and
books, ripened by intercourse with good society in all its forms. His
sense and breadth of view are peculiarly valuable when he discusses a
subject like that which forms the topic of the present chapter. There
is one passage in his book, relating to the problem of Italian style,
which, had it been treated with the attention it deserved, might have
saved his fellow-countrymen from the rigors of pedagogical
despotism.[321]
[Footnote 321: Ed. cit. pp. 39-53.]
Starting from his cardinal axiom that good manners demand freedom from
all affectation, he deprecates the use in speech or writing of those
antiquated Tuscan words the purists loved. As usual, he hits the very
center of the subject in his comments on this theme. "It seems to me,
therefore, exceedingly strange to employ words in writing which we
avoid in all the common usages of conversation. Writing is nothing but
a form of speaking, which continues to exist after a man has spoken,
and is, as it were, an image or rather the life of the words he
utters. Therefore in speech, which, as soon as the voice has issued
from the mouth, is lost, some things may be tolerated that are not
admissible in composition, because writing preserves the words,
subjects them to the criticism of the reader, and allows time for
their mature consideration. It is consequently reasonable to use
greater diligence with a view to making what we write more polished
and correct, yet not to do this so that the written words shall differ
from the spoken, but only so that the best in spoken use shall be
selected for our composition." After touching on the need of lucidity,
he proceeds "I therefore should approve of a man's not only avoiding
antiquated Tuscan phrases, but also being careful to employ such as
are in present use in Tuscany and other parts of Italy, provided they
have a certain grace and harmony."[322] At this point another
interlocutor in the dialogue observes that Italy possesses no common
language. In the difficulty of knowing whether to follow the custom of
Florence or of Bergamo, it is desirable to recognize a classical
standard of style. Petrarch and Boccaccio should be selected as
models. To refuse to imitate them is mere presumption. Here
Castiglione states the position of the school he combats. In his
answer to their argument he makes Giuliano de' Medici, one of the
company, declare that he, a Tuscan of the Tuscans as he is, should
never think of employing any words of Petrarch or Boccaccio which were
obsolete in good society. Then the thread of exposition is resumed.
The Italian language, in spite of its long past, may still be called
young and unformed. When the Roman Empire decayed, spoken Latin
suffered from the corruptions introduced by barbarian invaders. It
retained greater purity in Tuscany than elsewhere. Yet other districts
of Italy preserved certain elements of the ancient language that have
a right to be incorporated with the living tongue; nor is it
reasonable to suppose that a modern dialect should at a certain moment
have reached perfection any more than Latin did. The true rule to
follow is to see that a man has something good to say. "Making a
division between thoughts and words is much the same as separating
soul and body. In order, therefore, to speak or write well, our
courtier must have knowledge; for he who has none, and whose mind is
void of matter worthy to be apprehended, has naught to say or write."
He must be careful to clothe his thoughts in select and fitting words,
but above all things to use such "as are still upon the lips of the
people." He need not shun foreign phrases, if there be a special force
in them above their synonyms in his own language. Nor is there cause
to fear lest the vulgar tongue should prove deficient in resources
when examined by grammarians and stylists. "Even though it be not
ancient Tuscan of the purest water, it will be Italian, common to the
nation, copious and varied, like a delicious garden full of divers
fruits and flowers." Here Castiglione quotes the precedent of Greek,
showing that each of its dialects contributed something to the common
stock, though Attic was recognized as sovereign for its polish. Among
the Romans likewise, Livy was not tabooed because of his patavinity,
nor Virgil because the Romans recognized a something in him of
rusticity. "We, meanwhile, far more severe than the ancients, impose
upon ourselves certain newfangled laws that have no true relation to
the object. With a beaten track before our eyes, we try to walk in
bypaths. We take a willful pleasure in obscurity, though our language,
like all others, is only meant to express our thoughts with force and
clearness. While we call it the popular speech, we plume ourselves on
using phrases that are not only unknown to the people, but
unintelligible to men of birth and learning, and which have fallen out
of conversation in every district of the land." If Petrarch and
Boccaccio were living at our epoch, they would certainly omit words
that have fallen out of fashion since their days; and it is mere
impertinence for a purist to tell me that I ought to say _Campidoglio_
instead of _Capitolio_ and so forth, because some elder Tuscan author
wrote it, or the peasants of the Tuscan district speak it so. You
argue that only pride prevents our imitating Petrarch and Boccaccio.
But pray inform me whom they imitated? To model Latin poems upon
Virgil or Catullus is necessary, because Latin is a dead language. But
since Italian is alive and spoken, let us write it as we use it, with
due attention to artistic elegance. "The final master of style is
genius, and the ultimate guide is a sound natural judgment." Do we
require all our painters to follow one precedent? Lionardo, Mantegna,
Raphael, Michelangelo, Giorgione have struck out different paths of
excellence in art. Writers should claim the same liberty of choice,
the same spontaneity of inspiration. "I cannot comprehend how it
should be right, instead of enriching Italian and giving it spirit,
dignity and luster, to make it poor, attenuated, humble and obscure,
and so to pen it up within fixed limits as that every one should have
to copy Petrarch and Boccaccio. Why should we, for example, not put
equal faith in Poliziano, Lorenzo de' Medici, Francesco Diaceto, and
others who are Tuscan too, and possibly of no less learning and
discretion than were Petrarch and Boccaccio? However, there are
certain scrupulous persons abroad nowadays, who make a religion and
ineffable mystery of their Tuscan tongue, frightening those who listen
to them, to the length of preventing many noble and lettered men from
opening their lips, and forcing them to admit they do not know how to
talk the language they learned from their nurses in the cradle."[323]
[Footnote 322: Ariosto's style was formed on precisely these
principles.]
[Footnote 323: The preface to the _Cortegiano_ may be compared with
this passage. When it appeared, the critics complained that
Castiglione had not imitated Boccaccio. His answer is marked by good
sense and manly logic: see pp. 3, 4. With Castiglione, Aretino joined
hands, the ruffian with the gentleman, in this matter of revolt
against the purists. See the chapter in this volume upon Aretino.]
If the Italians could have accepted Castiglione's principles, and
approached the problem of their language in this liberal spirit, the
nation would have been spared its wearisome, perpetually recurrent
quarrel about words. But the matter had already got into the hands of
theorists; and local jealousies were inflamed. The municipal wars of
the middle ages were resuscitated on the ground of rhetoric and
grammar. Unluckily, the quarrel is not over; _adhuc sub judice lis
est_, and there is no judge to decide it. But in the nineteenth
century it no longer rages with the violence that made it a matter of
duels, assassinations and lifelong hatreds in the sixteenth. The
Italians have recently secured for the first time in their history the
external conditions which are necessary to a natural settlement of the
dispute by the formation of a common speech through common usage. The
parliament, the army, the newspapers of United Italy are rapidly
creating a language adequate to all the needs of modern life; and
though purists may still be found, who maintain that Passavanti's
_Specchio_ is a model of style for leading articles in _Fanfulla_, yet
the nation, having passed into a new phase of existence, must be
congratulated on having exchanged the "golden simplicity of the
_trecento_" for a powerful and variously-colored instrument of
self-expression.
To stir the dust of those obsolete controversies on the language of
Italy--to make extracts from Varchi's, Sperone's or Bembo's treatises
upon the Tongues--to set Tolommei's claims for Tuscan priority in the
balance against Muzio's more modest pleas in favor of Italian[324]--to
describe how one set of scholars argued that the vernacular ought to
be called Tuscan, how another dubbed it Florentine or Sienese, and how
a third, more sensible, voted for Italian[325]--to enumerate the
blasts and counterblasts of criticism blown about each sentence in
Boccaccio and Petrarch[326]--to resuscitate the orthographical
encounters between Trissino and Firenzuola on the matter of the letter
K--is no part of my present purpose. It must suffice to have noted
that these problems occupied the serious attention of the literary
world, and to have indicated by extracts from Sperone and Castiglione
the extreme limits of pedantry and sound sense between which the
opinion of the learned vibrated. The details of the quarrel may be
left to the obscurity of treatises, long since doomed to "dust and an
endless darkness."
[Footnote 324: Varchi's _Ercolano_ or _Dialogo delle Lingue_;
Sperone's dialogue _Delle Lingue_; Claudio Tolommei's _Cesano_;
Girolamo Muzio's _Battaglie_.]
[Footnote 325: Varchi called it _Fiorentina_, Tolommei and Salviati
_Toscana_, Bargagli _Senese_, Trissino and Muzio _Italiana_.
Castiglione and Bembo agreed in aiming at Italian rather than pure
Tuscan, but differed in their proposed method of cultivating style.
Bembo preferred to call the language _Volgare_, as it was the common
property of the _Volgo_. Castiglione suggested the title _Cortigiana_,
as it was refined and settled by the usage of Courts. Yet Castiglione
was more liberal than Bembo in acknowledging the claims of local
dialects.]
[Footnote 326: For a list of commentators upon Petrarch at this
period, see Tiraboschi, lib. iii. cap. iii., section 1. Common sense
found at last sarcastic utterance in Tassoni.]
Much unprofitable expenditure of time and thought upon verbal
questions of no vital interest was encouraged by the Academies, which
now began to sprout like mushrooms in all towns of Italy.[327] The
old humanistic societies founded by Cosimo de' Medici, Pomponius
Laetus, Pontano, and Aldo for the promotion of classical studies, had
done their work and died away. Their successor, the Umidi of Florence,
the Pellegrini of Venice, the Eterei of Padua, the Vignaiuoli of Rome,
professed to follow the same objects, with special attention to the
reformation of Italian literature. Yet their very titles indicate a
certain triviality and want of manly purpose. They were clubs
combining conviviality with he pursuit of study; and it too frequently
happened that the spirit of their jovial meetings extended itself to
the _dicerie_, _cicalate_ and _capitoli_ recited by their members,
when the cloth was drawn and the society sat down to intellectual
banquets. At the same time the Academies were so fashionable and so
universal that they gave the tone to literature. It was the ambition
of all rising students to be numbered with the more illustrious
bodies; and when a writer of promise joined one of these, he naturally
felt the influence of his companions. Member vied with member in
producing sonnets and rhetorical effusions on the slenderest themes;
for it was less an object to probe weighty matters or to discover
truth, than to make a display of ingenuity by clothing trifles in
sonorous language. Surrounded by a crowd of empty-pated but censorious
critics, exercised in the minutiae of style and armed with precedents
from Petrarch, the poet read his verses to the company. They were
approved or rejected according as they satisfied the sense of
correctness, or fell below the conventional standard of imitative
diction. To think profoundly, to feel intensely, to imagine boldly, to
invent novelties, to be original in any line, was perilous. The
wealth of the Academies, the interest of the public in purely literary
questions, and the activity of the press encouraged the publication
and circulation of these pedantic exercises. Time would fail to tell
of all the poems and orations poured forth at the expense of these
societies and greedily devoured by friends prepared to eulogize, or
rival bodies eager to dissect and criticise. Students who are desirous
of forming some conception of the multitudes of poets at this period,
must be referred to the pages of Quadrio with a warning that
Tiraboschi is inclined to think that even Quadrio's lists are
incomplete. All ranks and conditions both of men and women joined in
the pursuit. Princes and plebeians, scholars and worldlings, noble
ladies and leaders of the _demi-monde_, high-placed ecclesiastics and
penniless Bohemians aspired to the same honors; and the one idol of
the motley crowd was Petrarch. There is no doubt that the final result
of their labors was the attainment of a certain grace and the
diffusion of literary elegance. Yet these gains carried with them a
false feeling about poetry in general, a wrong conception of its
purpose and its scope. The Italian purists could scarcely have
comprehended the drift of Milton's excursion, in his "Reason of Church
Government urged against Prelaty," upon the high vocation of the
prophet-bard. They would have been no less puzzled by Sidney's
definition of poetry, and have felt Shelley's last word upon the
poetic office, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
world," to be no better than a piece of pardonable lunacy.
[Footnote 327: See _Revival of Learning_, pp. 365-368.]
In this thick-spreading undergrowth of verse, where, as Tiraboschi
aptly remarks, "beneath the green and ample foliage we seek in vain
for fruit," it is difficult to see the wood by reason of the trees.
Poet so closely resembles poet in the mediocrity of similar
attainment, that we are forced to sigh for the energy of
Michelangelo's unfinished sonnets, or the crudities of Campanella's
muse. Yet it is possible to make a representative selection of
writers, who, while they belonged to the school of the purists and
were associated with the chief Academies of the day, distinguished
themselves by some originality of style or by enduring qualities of
literary excellence. Foremost among these may be placed Monsignore
Giovanni della Casa. He was born in 1503 of noble Florentine parents,
his mother being a member of the Tornabuoni family. Educated at
Bologna, he entered the service of the Church, and already in 1538 had
reached the dignity of Apostolic Clerk. Rome was still what Lorenzo
de' Medici had called it, "a sink of all the vices," and very few
ecclesiastics escaped its immoralities. La Casa formed some permanent
connection, the fruit of which was his acknowledged son Quirino.[328]
In 1540 he was sent on a special mission to Florence with the title of
Apostolic Commissary; and in 1544 he was raised to the Archbishopric
of Benevento, and soon afterwards appointed Nuncio at Venice. During
the pontificate of Julius III., finding himself out of favor with the
Vatican, he continued to reside at Venice, employing his leisure in
literary occupations. Paul IV. recalled him to Rome, and made him
Secretary of State. But though he seemed upon the point of touching
the highest ecclesiastical dignity, La Casa was never promoted to the
Cardinalate. It is difficult to find a reason for this omission,
unless we accept the traditional belief that the scandal of his
_Capitolo del Forno_ barred La Casa's entrance to the Sacred
College.[329] This burlesque poem, at any rate, supplied the
Protestants with a weapon which they used against the Church. The
legend based upon its audacious obscenities was credited by Bayle, and
in part refuted by the _Antibaillet_ of Menage. Though by no means
more offensive to good taste than scores of similar compositions, the
high rank of its author and the offices of trust he had discharged for
the Papal Curia, emphasized its infamy, and caused La Casa to be
chosen as the scapegoat for his comrades. He died in 1556.
[Footnote 328: Quirino is mentioned as "legitimatum, seu forsitan
legitimandum," in La Casa's will (_Opp._ Venezia, Pasinelli, 1752,
vol. i. p. lxxvii.). From his name and his age at La Casa's death we
ought perhaps to refer this fruit of his amours to the Venetian period
of his life and his intimacy with the Quirino family. His biographer,
Casotti, says that he discovered nothing about the mother's name
(_loc. cit._ p. lxxiii.).]
[Footnote 329: La Casa received a special commission at Venice in
1546, to prosecute Pier Paolo Vergerio for heresy. When Vergerio went
into exile, he did his best to blacken La Casa's character, and used
his writings to point the picture he drew in Protestant circles of
ecclesiastical profligacy. The whole subject of La Casa's exclusion
from the College is treated by his editor, Casotti (_Opp._ vol. 1. pp.
xlv.-xlviii.). That the Bishop of Benevento was stung to the quick by
Vergerio's invectives may be seen in his savage answer "Adversus
Paulum Vergerium" (_Opp._ iii. 103), and in the hendecasyllables "Ad
Germanos" (_Opp._ i. 295), both of which discuss the _Forno_ and
attempt to apologize for it.]
La Casa's name is best known in modern literature by his treatise on
the manners of the finished gentleman. In his short essay, entitled
_Galateo_, he discusses the particulars of social conduct, descending
to rules about the proper use of the drinking-glass at table, the
employment of the napkin, the dressing of the hair, and the treatment
of immodest topics by polite periphrases.[330] Galateo is recommended
not to breathe hard in the face of the persons he is speaking to, not
to swear at his servants in company, not to trim his nails in public,
not to tell indecent anecdotes to girls, and so forth. He is shown how
to dress with proper pomp, what ceremonies to observe, and which to
omit as servile or superfluous, how to choose his words, and how to
behave at dinner. The book is an elaborate discourse on etiquette; and
while it never goes far below the surface, it is full of useful
precepts based upon the principles of mutual respect and tolerance
which govern good society. We might accept it as a sequel to the
_Courtier_; for while Castiglione drew the portrait of a gentleman, La
Casa explained how this gentleman should conduct himself among his
equals. The chief curiosity about the book is, that a man of its
author's distinction should have thought it worthy of his pains to
formulate so many rules of simple decency. From the introduction it is
clear that La Casa meant the _Galateo_ to be a handbook for young men
entering upon the world. That it fulfilled this purpose, seems proved
by the fact that its title passed into a proverb. "To teach the
Galateo" is synonymous in Italian with to teach good manners.
[Footnote 330: _Opp._ vol. i. pp. 237-306. Galateo is said to have
been a certain Galeazzo Florimonte of Sessa.]
One whole volume of La Casa's collected works is devoted to his
official and familiar correspondence, composed in choice but colorless
Italian.[331] Another contains his Italian and Latin poems. No poet of
the century expressed his inner self more plainly than La Casa in his
verse. The spectacle is stern and grave. From the vocabulary of the
Tuscan classics he seems to have chosen the gloomiest phrases, to
adumbrate some unknown terror of the soul.[332] Sometimes his sonnets,
in their vivid but polished grandeur, rise even to sublimity, as when
he compares himself to a leafless wood in winter, beaten by fiercer
storms, with days more cold and short in front, and with a longer
night to follow.[333] It is a cheerless prospect of old age and death,
uncomforted by hope, unvisited by human love. The same shadow,
intensified by even a deeper horror of some coming doom, rests upon
another sonnet in which he deplores his wasted life.[334] It drapes,
as with a funeral pall, the long majestic ode describing his early
errors and the vanity of worldly pomp.[335] It adds despair to his
lines on jealousy, intensity to his satire on Court-life, and
incommunicable sadness to the poems of his love.[336] Very judicious
were the Italian critics who pronounced his style too stern for the
erotic muse. We find something at once sinister and solemn in his
mood. The darkness that envelops him, issues from the depth of his own
heart. The world around is bright with beautiful women and goodly men;
but he is alone, shut up with fear and self-reproach. Such a voice
befits the age, as we learn to know it in our books of history, far
better than the light effusions of contemporary rhymsters. It suits
the black-robed personages painted by Moroni, whose calm pale eyes
seem gazing on a world made desolate, they know not why. Its accents
are all the more melancholy because La Casa yielded to no impulses of
rage. He remained sober, cold, sedate; but by some fatal instinct
shunned the light and sought the shade. The gloom that envelops him is
only broken by the baleful fires of his _Capitoli_. That those
burlesque verses, of which I shall speak in another place, were
written in his early manhood, and that the _Rime_ were perhaps the
composition of his age, need not prevent us from connecting them
together. The dreariness of La Casa's later years may well have been
engendered by the follies of his youth. It is the despondency of
exhaustion following on ill-expended energy, the _taedium vitae_ which
fell on Italy when she awoke from laughter.
[Footnote 331: Vol. ii. of the Venetian edition, 1752.]
[Footnote 332: Take for instance this outburst from a complimentary
sonnet (No. 40, vol. i. p. 70):
O tempestosa, o torbida procella,
Che 'n mar si crudo la mia vita giri!
Donna amar, ch'Amor odia e i suoi desiri,
Che sdegno e feritate onor appella.
Or this opening of the sonnet on Court-honors (No. 26):
Mentre fra valli paludose ed ime
Ritengon me larve turbate, e mostri,
Che tra le gemme, lasso, e l'auro, e gli ostri
Copron venen, che 'l cor mi roda e lima.
Or this from a _Canzone_ on his love (No. 2):
Qual chiuso albergo in solitario bosco
Pien di sospetto suol pregar talora
Corrier di notte traviato e lasso;
Tal io per entro il tuo dubbioso, e fosco.
E duro calle, Amor, corro e trapasso.]
[Footnote 333: Sonnet 58, vol. i. 154.]
[Footnote 334: No. 52, _ib._ p. 136.]
[Footnote 335: _Canzone_ 4, _ib._ p. 102.]
[Footnote 336: Sonnets 8, 26, 40. _ib._ pp. 12, 39, 70; _Canzone_ 2,
_ib._ p. 79.]
In illustration of the foregoing remarks I have translated six of La
Casa's sonnets, which I shall here insert without further
comment.[337] In point of form, Italian literature can show few
masterpieces superior to the first and second.
[Footnote 337: They are Nos. 58, 50, 25, 26, 8. The sixth, on
Jealousy, may be compared with Sannazzaro's, above, p. 200.]
Sweet woodland solitude, that art so dear
To my dark soul lost in doubt's dreadful maze,
Now that the North-wind, these short sullen days,
Wraps earth and air in winter's mantle drear,
And thy green ancient shadowy locks are sere,
White as my own, above the frosty ways,
Where summer flowers once basked beneath heaven's rays,
But rigid ice now reigns and snows austere;
Pondering upon that brief and cloudy light
That's left for me, I walk, and feel my mind
And members, like thy branches, frozen too;
Yet me, within, without, worse frost doth bind,
My winter brings a fiercer East-wind's blight,
A longer darkness, days more cold, more few.
O Sleep, O tranquil son of noiseless Night,
Of humid, shadowy Night; O dear repose
For wearied men, forgetfulness of woes
Grievous enough the bloom of life to blight!
Succor this heart that hath outgrown delight,
And knows no rest; these tired limbs compose;
Fly to me, Sleep; thy dusky vans disclose
Over my languid eyes, then cease thy flight.
Where, where is Silence, that avoids the day?
Where the light dreams, that with a wavering tread
And unsubstantial footing follow thee?
Alas! in vain I call thee; and these gray,
These frigid shades flatter in vain. O bed,
How rough with thorns! O nights, how harsh to me!
It was my wont by day to seek the grove
Or grot or font, soothing my soul with song,
Weaving sweet woes in rhyme, and all night long
To watch the stars with Phoebus and with Love;
Nor, Bernard, did I fear with thee to rove
That sacred mount where now few poets throng:
Till like sea-billows, uncontrollably strong,
Me too the vulgar usage earthward drove;
And bound me down to tears and bitter life,
Where fonts are not, nor laurel boughs, nor shade,
But false and empty honor stirs vain strife.
Now, not unmixed with envious regret,
I watch thee scale yon far-off heights, where yet
No footstep on the sward was ever laid.
While mid low-lying dells and swampy vales
Those troubled ghosts and dreams my feet delay,
Which hide 'neath gems and gold and proud array
The barb of poison that my heart impales;
Thou on the heights that virtue rarely scales,
By paths untrodden and a trackless way,
Wrestling for fame with thine own soul, dost stray,
Free o'er yon hills no earth-born cloud assails.
Whence I take shame and sorrow, when I think
How with the crowd in this low net accursed
I fell, and how 'tis doomed that I shall die.
O happy thou! Thou hast assuaged thy thirst!
Not Phoebus but grief dwells with me, and I
Must wait to purge my woes on Lethe's brink.
Now pomps and purple, now clear stream or field
Seeking, I've brought my day to evensong,
Profitless, like dry fern or tares, the throng
Of luckless herbs that no fair fruitage yield.
Wherefore my heart, false guide on this vain quest,
More than a smitten flint strikes spark and flame;
So dulled a spirit must she bring with shame
To Him who placed it bright within my breast.
Poor heart! She well deserves to chafe and burn
Since her so precious and so noble freight,
Ill-governed, she to loss and woe doth turn!
Nor 'neath the North-wind do the branches quake
On yonder bristling oak-trees, as I shake
Fearing that even repentance comes too late.
Heart-ache, that drawest nutriment from fear,
And still through growing fear dost gather power;
That mingling ice with flame, confusion drear
And fell disaster on love's realm dost shower!
Forth from my breast, since all thy bitter cheer
With my life's sweet thou'st blent in one brief hour!
Hence to Cocytus! Where hell drinks each tear
Of tortured souls, self-plagued, self-loathing, cower!
There without rest thy dolorous days drag out,
Thy dark nights without slumber! Smart thy worst
No less with felt pangs than fictitious doubt!
Avaunt! Why fiercer now than at the first,
Now when thy venom runs my veins throughout,
Bring'st thou on those black wings new dreams accurst?
The vicissitudes of Italy during the first half of the sixteenth
century were so tragic, and her ruin was so near at hand, that we
naturally seek some echo of this anguish in the verses of her poets.
Nothing, however, is rarer than to find direct allusion to the
troubles of the times, or apprehension of impending danger expressed
in sonnet or _canzone_. While following Petrarch to the letter, the
purists neglected his odes to Rienzi and the Princes of Italy. His
passionate outcry, _Italia mia_, found no response in their rhetoric.
Those sublime outpourings of eloquence, palpitating with alternate
hopes and fears, might have taught the poets how to write at least the
threnody of Rome or Florence. Had they studied this side of their
master's style, the gravity of the matter supplied them by the
miseries of their country, might have immortalized their purity of
style. As it was, they preferred the _Rime in Vita e Morte di Madonna
Laura_, and sang of sentiments they had not felt, while Italy was
dying. Only here and there, as in the somber rhymes of La Casa, the
spirit of the age found utterance unconsciously. But for the mass of
versifiers it was enough to escape from the real agonies of the moment
into academical Arcadia, to forget the Spaniard and the Frenchman in
Philiroe's lap with Ariosto, or to sigh for a past age of gold:[338]
O rivi, o fonti, o fiumi, o faggi, o querce,
Onde il mondo novello ebbe suo cibo
In quel tranquilli secoli dell'oro:
Deh come ha il folle poi cangiando l'esca,
Cangiato il gusto! e come son questi anni
Da quei diversi in povertate e 'n guerra!
[Footnote 338: La Casa, _Canzone_ 4 (_Opp._ i. 151).]
This makes the occasional treatment of political subjects the more
valuable; and we hail the patriotic poems of Giovanni Guidiccioni as a
relief from the limpid nonsense of the amourists. Born at Lucca in
1500, he was made Bishop of Fossombrone by Paul III., and died in
1541. Contemporaries praised him for the grandeur of his conceptions
and the severity of his diction, while they censured the obscurity
that veiled his unfamiliar thoughts. "In those songs," writes Lilius
Giraldus, "which he composed upon the woes and miseries of Italy, he
set before his readers ample proofs of his illustrious style."[339]
One sonnet might be chosen from these rhymes, reproving the Italians
for their slavery and shame, and pointing to the cause, now
irremediable, of their downfall:[340]
From deep and slothful slumber, where till now
Entombed thou liest, waken, breathe, arise!
Look on those wounds with anger in thine eyes,
Italia, self-enslaved in folly's slough!
The diadem of freedom from thy brow
Torn through thine own misdoing, seek with sighs;
Turn to the path, that straight before thee lies,
From yonder crooked furrow thou dost plow.
Think on thine ancient memories! Thou shalt see
That those who once thy triumphs did adorn,
Have chained thee to their yoke with fetters bound.
Foe to thyself, thine own iniquity,
With fame for them, for thee fierce grief and scorn,
To this vile end hath forced thee, Queen discrowned!
[Footnote 339: _De Poetis_, Dial. ii.]
[Footnote 340: _Opere di Messer G. Guidiccioni_ (Firenze, Barbera,
1867), vol. i. p. 12.]
Such appeals were impotent. Yet they proved a consciousness of the
situation, an unextinguished sense of duty, in the man who penned
them.[341]
[Footnote 341: We might parallel Guidiccioni's lamentations with
several passages from the Latin elegies of the period, and with some
of the obscurer compositions of Italian poetasters. See, for example,
the extracts from Cariteo of Naples, Tibaldeo of Ferrara, and Cammelli
of Pistoja on the passage of Charles VIII. quoted by Carducci, _Delle
Poesie Latine di Ludovico Ariosto_, pp. 83-86. But the most touching
expression of sympathy with Italy's disaster is the sudden silence of
Boiardo in the middle of a canto of _Orlando_. See above, part i. p.
463.]
The Court-life followed by professional men of letters made it
difficult for them to utter their real feelings in an age of bitter
political jealousies. They either held their tongues, or kept within
the safer regions of compliment and fancy. The biographies of Annibale
Caro and Lodovico Castelvetro illustrate the ordinary conditions as
well as the exceptional vicissitudes of the literary career at this
epoch. Annibale Caro was born in 1507 at Civitanuova in the March of
Ancona. Being poor and of humble origin, he entered the family of
Luigi Gaddi at Florence, in the quality of tutor to his children. This
patron died in 1541, and Caro then took service under Pier Luigi
Farnese, one of the worst princelings of the period. When the Duke was
murdered in 1547, he transferred himself to Parma, still following the
fortunes of the Farnesi. Employed as secretary by the Cardinal
Ranuccio and afterwards by the Cardinal Alessandro of that house, he
lived at ease until his death in 1566. Caro's letters, written for his
patrons, and his correspondence with the famous scholars of the day,
pass for models of Italian epistolography. Less rigid than La Casa's,
less manneristic than Bembo's, his style is distinguished by a natural
grace and elegance of diction. He formed his manner by translation
from the Greek, especially by a version of _Daphnis and Chloe_, which
may be compared with Firenzuola's _Asino d'Oro_ for classic beauty
and facility of phrase. But the great achievement of his life was a
transcription of the _AEneid_ into blank verse. Though Caro's poem
exceeds the original by about 5,500 lines, and therefore cannot pass
for an exact copy of Virgil's form, Italians still reckon it the
standard translation of their national epic. The charm of Caro's prose
was communicated to his _versi sciolti_, always easy, always flowing,
with varied cadence and sustained melody of rhythm. A _Diceria de'
Nasi_, or discourse on noses, and a dissertation called _Ficheide_,
commenting on Molza's _Fichi_, prove that Caro lent himself with
pleasure to the academical follies of his contemporaries. It seems
incredible that a learned man, who had spent the best years of his
maturity in diplomatic missions to the Courts of princes, should have
employed the leisure of his age in polishing these trifles. Yet such
was the temper of the times that this frivolity passed for a
commendable exercise of ingenuity.
Caro's original poems have not much to recommend them beyond limpidity
of language. The sonnets to an imaginary mistress repeat conventional
antitheses and complimentary _concetti_.[342] The adulatory odes are
stiff and labored, as, indeed, they might be, when we consider that
they were made to order upon Charles V., the Casa Farnese, and the
lilies of France, by a plebeian scholar from Ancona.[343] The
last-named of these flatteries, "Venite all'ombra de' gran gigli
d'oro," is a masterpiece of prize poetry, produced with labor, filed
to superficial smoothness, and overloaded with conceits. On its
appearance it was hailed with acclamation as the final triumph of
Italian writing. The Farnesi, who had recently placed themselves under
the protection of France, and who bore her lilies on their scutcheon,
used all their influence to get their servant's work applauded. The
Academies were delighted with a display of consummate artifice and
mechanical ability. One only voice was raised in criticism. Aurelio
Bellincini, a gentleman of Modena, had sent a copy of the ode to
Lodovico Castelvetro, with a request that he should pronounce upon its
merits. Castelvetro, who was wayward and independent beyond the usual
prudence of his class, replied with a free censure of the "plebeian
diction, empty phrases, strange digressions, purple patches, poverty
of argument, and absence of sentiment or inspiration," he detected in
its stanzas. At the same time he begged his friend to keep this
criticism to himself. Bellincini was indiscreet, and the letter found
its way to Caro. Then arose a literary quarrel, which held all Italy
in suspense, and equaled in ferocity the combats of the humanists.
[Footnote 342: See, for example, "Donna, qual mi foss'io," and "In voi
mi trasformai," or "Eran l'aer tranquillo e l'onde chiare."]
[Footnote 343: See "Carlo il Quinto fu questi"; "Nell'apparir del
giorno"; and "Venite all'ombra de' gran gigli d'oro."]
Lodovico Castelvetro was born in 1505 at Modena. He studied
successively at Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, and Siena. Thence he passed
to Rome, where strong pressure was put upon him to enter orders. His
uncle, Giovanni Maria della Porta, promised, if he did so, to procure
for him the bishopric of Gubbio. But Castelvetro had no mind to become
a priest. He escaped clandestinely from Rome, and, after a brief
sojourn at Siena, returned to Modena. Here in 1542 he subscribed the
Formulary of Faith dictated by Cardinal Contarini, and thereby fell
under suspicion of heresy. Though he escaped inquisitorial censure at
the moment, the charges of Lutheranism were revived in 1554, when Caro
declared open war against him. Invectives, apologies, censures, and
replies were briskly interchanged between the principals, while half
the scholars of Italy allowed themselves to be drawn into the
fray--Varchi and Molza siding with Caro, Gian Maria Barbieri and other
friends of Castelvetro taking up the cudgels for the opposite
champion.[344] The bitterness of the contending parties may be
gathered from the fact that Castelvetro was accused of having murdered
a friend of Caro's, and Caro of having hired assassins to take
Castelvetro's life.[345] It seems tolerably certain that either Caro
or one of his supporters denounced their enemy to the Inquisition. He
was summoned to Rome, and in 1560 was confined in the convent of S.
Maria in Via to await his trial. After undergoing some preliminary
examinations, Castelvetro became persuaded that his life was in peril.
He contrived to escape by night from Rome, and, after a journey of
much anxiety and danger, took refuge in Chiavenna, at that time a city
of the Grisons. The Holy Office condemned him as a contumacious
heretic in his absence. Wandering from Chiavenna to Lyons and Geneva,
and back again to Chiavenna, he spent the rest of his life in exile,
and died at the last place in 1571.
[Footnote 344: Among the liveliest missiles used in this squabble are
Bronzino's _Sattarelli_, recently reprinted by Romagnoli, Bologna,
1863.]
[Footnote 345: Alberigo Longo was in fact murdered in 1555, and a
servant of Castelvetro's was tried for the offense. But he was
acquitted. Caro, on his side, gave occasion to the worst reports by
writing in May 1560 to Varchi: "E credo che all'ultimo saro sforzato a
finirla, per ogni altra via, e vengane cio che vuole." See Tiraboschi,
Part 3, lib. iii. chap. 3 sec. 13.]
Castelvetro's publications do not correspond to his fame; for though
he gave signs of an acute wit and a biting pen in his debate with
Caro, he left but little highly-finished work to posterity. In
addition to critical annotations upon Bembo's prose, published in his
lifetime, he wrote a treatise upon Rhetoric, which was printed at
Modena in 1653, and sent an Italian version of Aristotle's _Poetics_
to the press in 1570. This book was the idol of his later years. It is
said that, while residing at Lyons, his house took fire, and
Castelvetro, careless of all else, kept crying out "The _Poetics_, the
_Poetics_! Save me my _Poetics_!" He may be fairly reckoned among the
men who did solid service in the cause of graver studies. Yet, but for
the vicissitudes of his career, he could hardly claim a foremost place
in literary history.
The ladies who cultivated poetry and maintained relations with
illustrious men of letters at this epoch, were almost as numerous as
the songsters of the other sex. Lodovico Domenichi in the year 1559
published the poems of no less than fifty authoresses in his _Rime di
alcune nobilissime e virtuosissime Donne_. Subjected to the same
intellectual training as men, they felt the same influences, and
passed at the same moment from humanism to renascent Italian
literature.[346] Many of these Viragos,[347] as it was the fashion of
the age approvingly and with no touch of sarcasm to call them, were
dames of high degree and leaders of society. Some, like _la bella
Imperia_, were better known in the resorts of pleasure. All were
distinguished by intercourse with artists and writers of eminence. It
is impossible to render an account of their literary labors. But the
names of a few, interesting alike for their talents and their amours,
may here be recorded. Tullia di Aragona, the mistress of Girolamo
Muzio, who ruled society in Rome, and lived in infamy at
Venice[348]--Vittoria Accoramboni, whose tragedy thrilled Italy, and
gave a masterpiece to our Elizabethan stage--Tarquinia Molza,
granddaughter of the poet, and maid of honor at Ferrara in Guarini's
brilliant days--Laura Terracina, with whose marriage and murder
romance employed itself at the expense of probability--Veronica
Franco, who entertained Montaigne in her Venetian home in
1580--Ersilia Cortese, the natural daughter of a humanist and wife of
a Pope's nephew--Gaspara Stampa, "sweet songstress and most excellent
musician":--such were the women, to whom Bembo and Aretino addressed
letters, and whose drawing-rooms were the resort of Bandello's heroes.
[Footnote 346: The identity of male and female education in Italy is
an important feature of this epoch. The history of Vittorino da
Feltre's school at Mantua given by his biographer, Rosmini, supplies
valuable information upon this point. Students may consult Burckhardt,
_Cultur der Renaissance_, sec. 5, ed. 2, p. 312; Gregorovius,
_Lucrezia Borgia_, book i. sec. 4; Janitschek, _Gesellschaft der
Renaissance_, Lecture 3.]
[Footnote 347: See Vulgate, Gen. ii. 23: "Haec vocabitur Virago," etc.]
[Footnote 348: In a rare tract called _Tariffa delle puttane, etc._,
Tullia d'Aragona is catalogued among the courtesans of Venice. See
Passano, _Novellieri in Verso_, p. 118.]
Two poetesses have to be distinguished from the common herd. These are
Veronica Gambara and Vittoria Colonna. Veronica was the daughter of
Count Gianfrancesco Gambara and his wife Alda Pia of Carpi, whose name
recalls the fervid days of humanism at its noon.[349] She was born in
1485, and was therefore contemporary with the restorers of Italian
literature. Bembo was the guide of her youth, and Vittoria Colonna the
friend of her maturer years. In 1509 she married Giberto, lord of
Correggio, by whom she had two sons, Ippolito and Girolamo. Her
husband died after nine years of matrimony, and she was left to
educate her children for the State and Church. She discharged her
duties as a mother with praiseworthy diligence, and died in 1550,
respected by all Italy, the type of what a noble woman should be in an
age when virtue shone by contrast with especial luster. Her letters
and her poems were collected and published in 1759 at Brescia, the
city of her birth. Except for the purity of their sentiments and the
sincerity of their expression, her verses do not rise far above
mediocrity. Like literary ladies of the French metropolis, she owed
her fame to personal rather than to literary excellence. "The house of
Veronica," writes a biographer of the sixteenth century, "was an
Academy, where every day she gathered round her for discourse on noble
questions Bembo and Cappello, Molza and Mauro, and all the famous men
of Europe who followed the Italian Courts."[350]
[Footnote 349: See _Revival of Learning_, p. 375.]
[Footnote 350: Rinaldo Corso, quoted by Tiraboschi.]
Fabrizio, the father of Vittoria Colonna, was Grand Constable of
Naples. He married Agnesina di Montefeltro, daughter of Duke Federigo
of Urbino. Their child Vittoria was born at Marino, a feud of the
Colonna family, in the year 1490. At the age of four she was betrothed
to Ferrante Francesco D'Avalos, a boy of the same age, the only son
of the Marchese di Pescara. His father died while he was still a
child: and in their nineteenth year the affianced couple were married
at Ischia, the residence of the house of D'Avalos. The splendor of two
princely families alike distinguished in the annals of Spanish and
Italian history and illustrious by their military honors, conferred
unusual luster upon this marriage. It was, moreover, on the bride's
side at least, a love-match. Vittoria was beautiful and cultivated;
the young Marquis of Pescara chivalrous and brave. She was tenderly
attached to him, and he had not as yet revealed the darker side of his
mixed character. Yet their happiness proved of very short duration. In
1512 he was wounded and made prisoner at the battle of Ravenna; and
though he returned to his wife for a short interval, his duties again
called him to the field of war in Lombardy in 1515. Vittoria never saw
him after this date; and before his death the honor of her hero was
tarnished by one of the darkest deeds of treason recorded in Italian
history. Acting as general for the Spanish emperor, the Marquis
entered Milan immediately after the battle of Pavia in 1525. He there
and then began his intrigues with Girolamo Morone, Grand Chancellor of
Francesco Sforza's duchy. Morone had formed a plan for reinstating his
master in Milan by the help of an Italian coalition. With the view of
securing the Marquis of Pescara, by which bold stroke he would have
paralyzed the Spanish military power, Morone offered the young general
the crown of Naples, if he would consent to join the league. D'Avalos
turned a not unwilling ear to these proposals; but while the plot was
hatching, he saw good reason to doubt of its success, and determined
to clear himself with Charles V. by revealing the conspiracy.
Accordingly, he made his lieutenant, Antonio de Leyva, assist at a
privy conference between Morone and himself. Concealed behind the
arras, this Spanish officer heard enough to be able afterwards to
deliver direct testimony against the conspirators, while the Marquis
averred that he had led them on designedly to this end. It may be
difficult to estimate the precise amount of Pescara's guilt. But
whether he was deceiving Morone from the first, or whether, as seems
more probable, he entered the negotiation resolved to side with
Charles or with the League as best might suit his purpose, there can
be no doubt that he played an odious part in this transaction. He did
not long survive the treason; for his constitution had been ruined by
wounds received at Pavia. It was also rumored that Charles accelerated
his death by poison. He died on November 25, 1525, execrated by the
Italians, and handed down by their historians too perpetual infamy.
Something of national jealousy mingled undoubtedly in their
resentment. D'Avalos was a Spaniard, and made no concealment of his
contempt for the Italian character. Finally, it must be admitted that
if he really was acting throughout in his master's interest, his
betrayal of Morone was but a bold stroke of policy which Machiavelli
might have approved. The game was a dangerous one; but it was
thoroughly consistent with statecraft as then understood.[351]
[Footnote 351: See _Ricordi Inediti di Gerolamo Morone_, pubblicati
dal C. Tullio Dandolo, Milano, 1855.]
No suspicion of her husband's guilt seems to have crossed Vittoria
Colonna's mind. Though left so young a widow, beautiful and
illustrious by her high rank and education, she determined to
consecrate her whole life to his memory and to religion. She survived
him two-and-twenty years, which were spent partly in retirement at
Ischia, partly in convents at Orvieto and Viterbo, partly in a
semi-monastic seclusion at Rome. While still a girl and during her
husband's absence in the field, she had amused her leisure with study.
This now became her chief resource in the hours she spared from pious
exercises. There was no man of great name in the world of letters who
did not set his pride on being thought her friend. The collections of
letters and poems belonging to that period abound in allusions to her
genius, her holiness, and her great beauty. But her chief associates
were the group of earnest thinkers who felt the influences of the
Reformation without ceasing to be children of the Church. With
Vittoria Colonna's name are inseparably connected those of Gasparo
Contarini, Reginald Pole, Giovanni Morone, Jacopo Sadoleto,
Marcantonio Flamminio, Pietro Carnesecchi, and Fra Bernardino Ochino.
The last of these avowed his Lutheran principles; and Carnesecchi was
burned for heresy; but Vittoria never adopted Protestantism in any of
its dogmatic aspects. She remained an orthodox Catholic to the last,
although it seems tolerably certain that she was by no means ignorant
of the new doctrines nor unsympathetic to their spirit.[352] Her
attitude was probably the same as that of many Italians who, before
the opening of the Council of Trent, desired a reformation from within
the Church. To bring it back to purer morals and an evangelical
sincerity of faith, was their aim. Like Savonarola, they shrank from
heresy, and failed to comprehend that a radical renovation of religion
was inseparable, in the changed conditions of modern thought, from a
metamorphosis of dogma and a new freedom accorded to the individual
conscience. While the Teutonic world struck boldly for the liberation
of the reason, the Italians dreamed of an impossible harmony between
Catholicism and philosophy. Their compromises led to ethical
hypocrisies and to that dogmatic despotism which was confirmed by the
Tridentine Council.
[Footnote 352: The most recent investigations tend rather to confirm
the tradition of Vittoria's Lutheran leanings. See Giuseppe Campori's
_Vittoria Colonna_ (Modena, 1878), and the fine article upon it by
Ernesto Masi in the _Rassegna Settimanale_, January 29, 1879. Karl
Benrath's _Ueber die Quellen der italienischen Reformationsgeschichte_
(Bonn, 1876) is a valuable contribution to the history of Lutheran
opinion in the South.]
A pleasant glimpse into Vittoria's life at Rome is given by the
Portuguese artist, Francesco d'Olanda, who visited her about the year
1548. "Madonna Vittoria Colonna," he says, "Marchioness of Pescara and
sister to the Lord Antonio Colonna, is one of the most excellent and
famous women of Europe,--that is, of the whole civilized world. Not
less chaste than beautiful, learned in Latin literature and full of
genius, she possesses all the qualities and virtues that are
praiseworthy in woman. After the death of her hero husband, she now
leads a modest and retired life. Tired with the splendor and grandeur
of her former state, she gives her whole affections to Christ and to
serious studies. To the poor she is beneficent, and is a model of
true Catholic devotion." He then proceeds to describe a conversation
held with her, in which Michelangelo Buonarroti took a part.[353]
[Footnote 353: The whole document may be seen in the _Archivio
Storico_, nuov. ser. tom. v. part 2, p. 139, or in Grimm's Life of
Michelangelo.]
Vittoria Colonna's _Rime_ consist for the most part of sonnets on the
death of her husband, and on sacred and moral subjects. Penetrated by
genuine feeling and almost wholly free from literary affectation, they
have that dignity and sweetness which belongs to the spontaneous
utterance of a noble heart. Like the poets of an earlier and simpler
age, Vittoria listens to the voice of Love, and when he speaks,
records the thoughts dictated by his inspiration.[354] That the object
of her lifelong regret was unworthy of her, does not offend our sense
of fitness.[355] It is manifest that her own feeling for the Marquis
of Pescara, _il mio bel sole, mio lume eterno_, as she loves to call
him with pathetic iteration of the chosen metaphor, had satisfied her
unsuspecting nature.[356] Death consecrates her husband for Vittoria,
as death canonized Laura for Petrarch. He has become divine, and her
sole desire is to rejoin him in a world where parting is
impossible.[357] The blending of the hero with the saint, of earthly
fame with everlasting glory, in this half Christian half Pagan
apotheosis, is characteristic of the Renaissance. Michelangelo strikes
the same note in the _Capitolo_ upon his father's death: "Or sei tu
del morir morto e fatto divo." It is said that, in her first grief,
Vittoria thought of suicide as the means of escaping from this world.
But she triumphed over the temptation, and in Bembo's words proved
herself _vincitrice di se stessa_. We seem to trace the anguish of
that struggle in a sonnet which may possibly have suggested Bembo's
phrase.[358]
[Footnote 354: The first lines of the introductory sonnet are strictly
true:
Scrivo sol per sfogar l'interna doglia,
Di che si pasce il cor, ch'altro non vole,
E non per giunger lume al mio bel sole,
Che lascio in terra si onorata spoglia.]
[Footnote 355: The last biographer of Vittoria Colonna, G. Campori,
has shown that her husband was by no means faithful to his marriage
vows.]
[Footnote 356: The close of the twenty-second sonnet is touching by
reason of its allusion to the past. Vittoria had no children.
Sterili i corpi fur, l'alme feconde,
Che il suo valor lascio raggio si chiaro,
Che sara lume ancor del nome mio.
Se d'altre grazie mi fu il ciel avaro,
E se il mio caro ben morte m'asconde,
Pur con lui vivo; ed e quanto disio.]
[Footnote 357: See, for instance, _Rime Varie_, Sonetto li. and lxxi.
xc.]
[Footnote 358: It is No. 31 of the _Rime Varie_ (Florence, Barbera,
1860).]
The religious sonnets are distinguished in general by the same
simplicity and sincerity of style.[359] While Vittoria proves herself
a Catholic by her invocation of Madonna and S. Francis,[360] it is to
the cross of Christ that she turns with the deepest outgoings of pious
feeling.[361] Her cry is for lively faith, for evangelical purity of
conviction. There is nothing in these meditations that a Christian of
any communion may not read with profit, as the heartfelt utterances of
a soul athirst for God and nourished on the study of the Gospel.
[Footnote 359: The introductory Sonnet has, however, these ugly
_concetti_:
I santi chiodi ormai sian le mie penne,
E puro inchiostro il prezioso sangue;
Purgata carta il sacro corpo esangue,
Si ch'io scriva nel cor quel ch'ei sostenne.]
[Footnote 360: _Rime Sacre_, 119, 120, 86, 87.]
[Footnote 361: _Ibid._ 75, 80, 81.]
The memory of Vittoria Colonna is inseparable from that of
Michelangelo Buonarroti, who was her intimate companion during the
closing years of her life. Of that famous friendship this is not the
place to speak at length. It may be enough to report Condivi's words
about Michelangelo's grief when he had lost her. "I remember having
heard him say that nothing caused him so much sorrow as that, when he
went to visit her upon her passage from this life, he had not kissed
her forehead and face, even as he kissed her hand. Her death left him
oftentimes astonied and, as it were, deprived of reason." Some of
Michelangelo's best sonnets were composed for Vittoria Colonna in her
lifetime. Others record his sorrow for her loss. Those again which
give expression to his religious feelings, are animated by her spirit
of genuine piety. It is clear that her influence affected him
profoundly.
To include any notice of Michelangelo's poetry in a chapter devoted to
the purists, may seem paradoxical.[362] His verses are remarkable for
the imperfection of their style, and the rugged elevation of their
thoughts. With the school of Bembo he has nothing in common except
that Platonism which the versifiers of the time affected as a fashion,
but which had a real meaning for his creative genius. In the second
half of the sixteenth century Michelangelo's sonnets upon the divine
idea, lifting the soul by contemplation to her heavenly home, reach
our ears like utterances from some other and far distant age. Both in
form and in spirit they are alien to the _cinque cento_. Yet the
precisians of the time admired these uncouth verses for the
philosophic depth of thought they found in them. Benedetto Varchi
composed a learned treatise on the sonnet "Non ha l'ottimo artista";
and when the poems were printed, Mario Guidicci delivered two lectures
on them before the Florentine Academy.[363]
[Footnote 362: For a brief account of Michelangelo's _Rime_, see _Fine
Arts_, Appendix ii.; also the introduction to my translation of the
sonnets, _The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso
Campanella_, Smith and Elder, 1878.]
[Footnote 363: Varchi's and Guidicci's _Lezioni_ will be found in
Guasti's edition of the _Rime_.]
There is no sort of impropriety in placing Bernardo Tasso and
Giangiorgio Trissino upon the list of literary purists. The
biographies of these two men, more interesting for the share they took
in public life than for their poetical achievements, shall close a
chapter which has been, almost of necessity, rambling. Bernardo Tasso
was a member of the noble and ancient Bergamasque family Dei
Tassi.[364] He was born at Venice in 1493. Left an orphan in his early
childhood, an uncle on his father's side, the Bishop of Recanati, took
charge of him. But this good man was murdered in 1520, at the time
when Bernardo had just begun a brilliant career in the University of
Padua. The loss of his father and his uncle threw the young student on
the world, and he was glad to take service as secretary with the Count
Guido Rangone. At this epoch the Rangoni stood high among the first
nobility of Italy, and Count Guido was Captain-General of the Church.
He employed Bernardo in a mission to Paris in 1528, on the occasion of
Ercole d'Este's marriage to Renee, daughter of Louis XII. Tasso went
to France as servant of the Rangoni. He returned to Italy in the
employment of the Estensi. But he did not long remain at the Court of
Ferrara. About the year 1532, we find him with Ferrante Sanseverino,
Prince of Salerno, whom he accompanied in 1535 on the expedition to
Tunis. It cannot have been much later than this date that he married
the beautiful Porzia de' Rossi, who was the mother of his illustrious
son, Torquato. But though this marriage was in all respects a happy
one, in none more fortunate than in the birth of Italy's fourth sovran
poet, Bernardo was not destined to lead a life of tranquil
domesticity. His master, whom he followed whithersoever military
service called him, fell out of favor with the Spanish Court in 1547.
Maddened by the injustice of his treatment, the Prince deserted from
Charles V. to his rival, Francis, was declared a rebel and deprived of
his vast domains. Bernardo resolved to share his fortunes, and in
return for this act of loyalty, found himself involved in the ruin of
the Sanseverini. Henceforth he lived a wandering life, away from
Porzia and his family, and ill-contented with the pittance which his
patron could afford. In 1556, at Duke Guidubaldo's invitation, he
joined the Court of Urbino; and again in 1563 he entered the service
of the Duke of Mantua. He died in 1569 at Ostiglia.
[Footnote 364: I use the Life prefixed by G. Campori to his _Lettere
Inedite di Bernardo Tasso_ (Bologna, Romagnoli, 1869).]
It will be seen from this brief sketch that Bernardo Tasso spent his
life in mixed employments, as courtier, diplomatist, and military
secretary. His career was analogous to that of many nobly-born
Italians, for whom there existed no sphere outside the service of a
prince. Yet he found time, amid his journeys, campaigns and
miscellaneous Court duties, to practice literature. The seven books of
his collected poems--sonnets, odes and epithalamial hymns--placed him
among the foremost lyrists of the century; while his letters displayed
the merits which were usual in that species of composition. Had this
been all, he would have deserved honorable mention by the side of
Caro, on a somewhat lower level than Bembo. But he was also ambitious
of giving a new kind of epic to Italian literature. With this view, he
versified the Spanish romance of Amadis of Gaul in octave stanzas. The
_Amadigi_ is a chivalrous poem in the style of the _Orlando_, but
without the irony of Ariosto.[365] It cannot be reckoned a success;
for though written with fertile fancy and a flowing vein, its
prolixity is tedious. Tasso lacked the art of sustaining his reader's
attention. His attempt to treat the ideal of feudalism seriously,
without the faith and freshness of the chivalrous epoch, deprived his
work of that peculiar charm which belongs to the Italian romantic
epic. While still in MS., he submitted his poem to literary friends,
and read it at the Court of Urbino. The acclamation it received from
men whose literary principles coincided with his own, raised Tasso's
expectations high. He imagined that the world would welcome _Amadigi_
as a masterpiece, combining the interest of _Orlando_ with the dignity
and purity of a classic. When it appeared, however, the public
received it coldly, and on this occasion the verdict of the people was
indubitably right. Another mortification awaited the author. He had
dedicated his epic to Philip II. and filled its cantos with adulation
of the Spanish race. But the king took no notice of the gift; and two
years after the publication of _Amadigi_, it appeared that Tasso's
agents at the Spanish Court had not taken the trouble to present him
with a copy.[366]
[Footnote 365: The _Amadigi_ was printed by Giolito at Venice in 1560
under the author's own supervision. The book is a splendid specimen of
florid typography.]
[Footnote 366: Besides the _Amadigi_, Bernardo Tasso composed a second
narrative poem, the _Floridante_, which his son, Torquato, retouched
and published at Mantua in 1587.]
Bernardo Tasso is the representative of a class which was common in
Renaissance Italy, when courtiers and men of affairs devoted their
leisure to study and composed poetry upon scholastic principles. His
epic failed precisely through the qualities for which he prized it.
Less the product of inspiration than pedantic choice, it bore the
taint of languor and unpardonable dullness. Giangiorgio Trissino, in
the circumstances of his life no less than in the nature of his
literary work, bears a striking resemblance to the author of the
_Amadigi_. The main difference between the two men is that Trissino
adopted by preference the career of diplomacy into which poverty drove
Tasso.[367] He was born at Vicenza in 1478 of wealthy and noble
ancestors, from whom he inherited vast estates. His mother was
Cecilia, of the Bevilacqua family. During his boyhood Trissino enjoyed
fewer opportunities of study than usually fell to the lot of young
Italian nobles. He spent his time in active exercises; and it was only
in 1506 that he began his education in earnest. At this date he had
been married nine years, and had already lost his wife, the mother of
two surviving children, Francesco and Giulio.[368]
[Footnote 367: _Giangiorgio Trissino_, by Bernardo Morsolin (Vicenza,
1878), is a copious biography and careful study of this poet's times.]
[Footnote 368: Francesco died in 1514.]
Trissino's inclination toward literature induced him to settle at
Milan, where he became a pupil of the veteran Demetrius Chalcondylas.
He cultivated the society of learned men, collected MSS., and devoted
himself to the study of Greek philosophy. From the first, he showed
the decided partiality for erudition which was destined to rule his
future career. But scholars at that epoch, even though they might be
men of princely fortune, had little chance of uninterrupted leisure.
Trissino's estates gave him for a while as much trouble as poverty had
brought on Tasso. Vicenza was allotted to the Empire in 1509; and
afterwards, when the city gave itself to the Venetian Republic,
Trissino's adherence to Maximilian's party cost him some months of
exile in Germany and the temporary confiscation of his property.
Between 1510 and 1514, after his return from Germany, but before he
made his peace with Venice, Trissino visited Ferrara, Florence and
Rome. These years determined his life as a man of letters. The tragedy
of _Sofonisba_, which was written before 1515, won for its author a
place among the foremost poets of the time.[369] The same period
decided his future as a courtier. Leo X. sent him on a mission to
Bavaria, and upon his return procured his pardon from the Republic of
S. Mark. There is not much to be gained by following the intricate
details of Trissino's public career. After Leo's death, he was
employed by Clement VII. and Paul III. He assisted at the coronation
of Charles V., and on this occasion was made Knight and Count.
Gradually he assumed the style of a finished courtier; and though he
never took pay from his Papal or princely masters, no poet carried the
art of adulation further.[370]
[Footnote 369: See above, pp. 126-128.]
[Footnote 370: See Morsolin, _op. cit._, p. 360, for Trissino's own
emphatic statement that his services had been unpaid. _Ibid._ p. 344,
for a list of the personages he complimented.]
This self-subjection to the annoyances and indignities of Court-life
is all the more remarkable because Trissino continued to live like a
great noble. When he traveled, he was followed by a retinue of
servants. A chaplain attended him for the celebration of Mass. His
litter was furnished with silver plate, and with all the conveniences
of a magnificent household. His own cook went before, with couriers,
to prepare his table; and the equipage included a train of
sumpter-mules and serving-men in livery.[371] At home, in his palace
at Vicenza or among his numerous villas, he showed no less
magnificence. Upon the building of one country-house at Cricoli, which
he designed himself and surrounded with the loveliest Italian gardens,
enormous sums were spent; and when the structure was completed, he
opened it to noble friends, who lived with him at large and formed an
Academy called after him La Trissiniana.[372] Trissino was, moreover,
a diligent student and a lover of solitude. He spent many years of his
life upon the island of Murano, in a villa secluded from the world,
and open to none but a few guests of similar tastes.[373] Yet in spite
of the advantages which fortune gave him, in spite of his studious
habits, he could not resist the attraction which Courts at that epoch
exercised over men of birth and breeding throughout Europe. He was for
ever returning to Rome, although he expressed the deepest horror for
the corruptions of that sinful city.[374] No sooner had he established
himself in quiet among the woods and streams of the Vicentine lowlands
or upon the breast of the Venetian lagoons, than the hankering to
shine before a Prince came over him, and he resumed his march to
Ferrara, or made his bow once more in the Vatican.
[Footnote 371: _Ibid._ p. 323.]
[Footnote 372: _Ibid._ pp. 219-235.]
[Footnote 373: _Ibid._ p. 301.]
[Footnote 374: _Op. cit._ p. 366.]
The end of Trissino's life was troubled by a quarrel with his son
Giulio, in which it is difficult to decide whether the father or the
son was more to blame. Some years after the death of his first wife,
he married a cousin, Bianca Trissino, by whom he had another son,
Ciro. Giulio was sickly, and had taken to the ecclesiastical career.
His father's preference for Ciro was decided, and he openly expressed
it. That Bianca was not entirely responsible for the ensuing quarrel,
is certain from the fact that Trissino separated from this second wife
in 1535. But it appears that Giulio opened hostilities by behaving
with brutal rudeness to his stepmother. Trissino refused to receive
him, and cut off his allowance. Giulio then went to law with his
father. A hollow peace was patched up, and, after Bianca's death in
1540, Giulio was appointed steward of the family estates. His
management of Trissino's property led to new disputes, and new acts of
violence. On one occasion the son broke into his father's palace at
Vicenza, and tried to turn him by armed force into the streets upon a
bitter night of Christmas. Meanwhile fresh lawsuits were on foot, and
Giulio's cause triumphed in the courts of Venice, whither the case had
been removed on appeal from Vicenza. Infuriated by what he deemed a
maladministration of justice, the old poet hurled sonnets and
invectives against both cities, execrating their infamy in the
strongest verse he ever penned.[375] But he could not gain redress
against the son he hated. At the age of seventy-two, in the midst of
these private troubles, Trissino undertook his last journey to Rome.
There he died in 1550, and was buried near John Lascaris in the church
of S. Agata in Suburra.
[Footnote 375: _Op. cit._ p. 385.]
Whatever may have been the crimes of Giulio against his father,
Trissino used a cruel and unpardonable revenge upon his eldest son.
Not content with blackening his character under the name of Agrilupo
in the _Italia Liberata_,[376] he wrote a codicil to his will, in
which he brought against Giulio the most dangerous charge it was then
possible to make. He disinherited him with a curse, and accused him of
Lutheran heresy.[377] It was clearly the father's intention to hand
his son down to an immortality of shame in his great poem, to ruin him
in his temporal affairs, and to deprive him of his ecclesiastical
privileges. Posterity has defeated his first purpose; for few indeed
are the readers of Trissino's _Italia Liberata_. In his second and his
third objects, he was completely successful. Giulio was prosecuted for
heresy in 1551, cited before the Inquisition of Bologna in 1553,
excommunicated by the Roman Holy Office in 1554, condemned as a
contumacious heretic in 1556, driven into hiding at Venice, attacked
in bed and half murdered there in 1568, and finally thrown into prison
in 1573. He died in prison in 1576, without having shown any signs of
repentance, a martyr to his Lutheran opinions.[378] Ciro Trissino, the
third actor in this domestic tragedy, had already been strangled in
his villa at Cornedo in the year 1574.
[Footnote 376: _Ibid._ p. 413.]
[Footnote 377: _Ibid._ p. 414.]
[Footnote 378: The whole of this extraordinary sequel to Trissino's
biography will be read with interest in the last chapter of Signor
Morsolin's monograph. It leaves upon my mind the impression that
Giulio, though unpardonably ill-tempered, and possibly as
ill-conducted in his private life as his foes asserted, was the victim
of an almost diabolical persecution.]
Trissino's literary labors bring us back to the specific subject of
this chapter. He made it the aim of his life to apply the methods of
the ancients to the practice of Italian poetry, and to settle the
vexed questions of the language on rational principles. Conscious of
the novelty and ambitious nature of his designs, he adopted the Golden
Fleece of Jason for an emblem, signifying that his voyages in
literature led far beyond the ordinary track, with an inestimable
prize in view.[379] Had his genius been equal to his enterprise, he
might have effected a decisive revolution. But Trissino was a man of
sterling parts and sound judgment rather than a poet: a formulator of
rules and precepts rather than a creator. His bent of mind was
critical; and in this field he owed his success more to coincidence
with prevalent opinion than to originality. Though he fixed the type
of Italian tragedy by his _Sofonisba_, and tied comedy down to Latin
models by his _Simillimi_, we cannot rate his talents as a playwright
very high. The _Poetica_, in which he reduced Horace and Aristotle to
Italian prose, and laid down laws for adapting modern literature to
antique system, had a wide and lasting influence.[380] We may trace
the canon of dramatic unities, which through Italian determined French
practice, up to this source: but had not Trissino's precepts been
concordant with the tendencies of his age, it is probable that even
this treatise would have carried little weight. When he attempted to
reform Italian orthography on similar principles, he met with derision
and resistance.[381] The world was bent on aping the classics; it did
not care about adopting the Greek Kappa, Zeta, Phi, etc. Trissino
intervened with more effect in the dispute on language. He pleaded
that the vernacular, being the common property of the whole nation,
should be called Italian and cultivated with a wise tolerance of local
diction. Having discovered a copy of Dante's _De Eloquio_, he
communicated this treatise to the learned world in support of his own
views, and had a translation of it printed.[382] This publication
embittered the strife which was then raging. Some Florentine scholars,
led by Martelli, impugned its genuineness. But the _De Eloquio_
survived antagonistic criticism, and opened a new stage in the
discussion.