It is with diffidence that I offer a translation of Michael Angelo's
sonnets, for the first time completely rendered into English rhyme, and
that I venture on a version of Campanella's philosophical poems. My
excuse, if I can plead any for so bold an attempt, may be found in
this--that, so far as I am aware, no other English writer has dealt
with Michael Angelo's verses since the publication of his autograph;
while Campanella's sonnets have hitherto been almost utterly unknown.
Something must be said to justify the issue of poems so dissimilar in a
single volume. Michael Angelo and Campanella represent widely sundered,
though almost contemporaneous, moments in the evolution of the Italian
genius. Michael Angelo was essentially an artist, living in the prime
of the Renaissance. Campanella was a philosopher, born when the
Counter-Reformation was doing all it could to blight the free thought
of the sixteenth century; and when the modern spirit of exact enquiry,
in a few philosophical martyrs, was opening a new stage for European
science. The one devoted all his mental energies to the realisation of
beauty: the other strove to ascertain truth. The one clung to Ficino's
dream of Platonising Christianity: the other constructed for himself a
new theology, founded on the conception of God immanent in nature.
Michael Angelo expressed the aspirations of a solitary life dedicated
to the service of art, at a time when art received the suffrage and the
admiration of all Italy. Campanella gave utterance to a spirit, exiled
and isolated, misunderstood by those with whom he lived, at a moment
when philosophy was hunted down as heresy and imprisoned as treason to
the public weal.
The marks of this difference in the external and internal circumstances
of the two poets might be multiplied indefinitely. Yet they had much in
common. Both stood above their age, and in a sense aloof from it. Both
approached poetry in the spirit of thinkers bent upon extricating
themselves from the trivialities of contemporary literature. The
sonnets of both alike are contributions to philosophical poetry in an
age when the Italians had lost their ancient manliness and energy. Both
were united by the ties of study and affection to the greatest singer
of their nation, Dante, at a time when Petrarch, thrice diluted and
emasculated, was the Phoebus of academies and coteries.
This common antagonism to the degenerate genius of Italian literature
is the link which binds Michael Angelo, the veteran giant of the
Renaissance, to Campanella, the audacious Titan of the modern age.