Michael Angelo's madrigals and sonnets were eagerly sought for during
his lifetime. They formed the themes of learned academical discourses,
and won for him the poet's crown in death. Upon his tomb the Muse of
Song was carved in company with Sculpture, Architecture, and Painting.
Since the publication of the _rifacimento_ in 1623, his verses have
been used among the _testi di lingua_ by Italians, and have been
studied in the three great languages of Europe. The fate of
Campanella's philosophical poems has been very different. It was owing
to a fortunate chance that they survived their author; and until the
year 1834 they were wholly and entirely unknown in Italy. The history
of their preservation is so curious that I cannot refrain from giving
some account of it, before proceeding to sketch so much of Campanella's
life and doctrine as may be necessary for the understanding of his
sonnets.
The poems were composed during Campanella's imprisonment at Naples; and
from internal evidence there is good reason to suppose that the greater
part of them were written at intervals in the first fourteen years of
the twenty-five he passed in confinement.[9] In the descriptive
catalogue of his own works, the philosopher mentions seven books of
sonnets and canzoni, which he called 'Le Cantiche.'[10] Whether any of
these would have been printed but for a mere accident is doubtful. A
German gentleman, named Tobia Adami, who is supposed to have been a
Court-Counsellor at Weimar, after travelling through Greece, Syria, and
Palestine, in company with a young friend called Rodolph von Bunau,
visited Campanella in his dungeon. A close intimacy sprang up between
them, and Adami undertook to publish several works of the philosopher
in testimony of his admiration. Among these were 'Le Cantiche.'
Instead, however, of printing the poems _in extenso_, he made a
selection, choosing those apparently which took his fancy, and which,
in his opinion, threw most light on Campanella's philosophical
theories. It is clear that he neglected the author's own arrangement,
since there is no trace of the division into seven books. What
proportion the selection bore to the whole bulk of the MS. seems to me
uncertain, though the latest editor asserts that it formed only a
seventh part.[11] The manuscript itself is lost, and Adami's edition of
the specimens is all that now remains as basis for the text of
Campanella's poems.
This first edition was badly printed in Germany on very bad paper,
without the name of press or place. Besides the poems, it contained a
brief prose commentary by the editor, the value of which is still very
great, since we have the right to suppose that Adami's explanations
embodied what he had received by word of mouth from Campanella. The
little book bore this title:--'Scelta d' alcune poesie filosofiche di
Settimontano Squilla cavate da' suo' libri detti La Cantica, con
l'esposizione, stampato nell' anno MDCXXII.' The pseudonym _Squilla_ is
a pun upon Campanella's name, since both _Campana_ and _Squilla_ mean a
bell; while _Settimontano_ contains a quaint allusion to the fact that
the philosopher's skull was remarkable for seven protuberances.[12] A
very few copies of the unpretending little volume were printed; and
none of these seem to have found their way into Italy, though it is
possible that they had a certain circulation in Germany. At any rate
there is reason to suppose that Leibnitz was not unacquainted with the
poems, while Herder, in the Renaissance of German literature, published
free translations from a few of the sonnets in his 'Adrastea.'
To this circumstance we owe the reprint of 1834, published at Lugano by
John Gaspar Orelli, the celebrated Zurich scholar. Early in his youth
Orelli was delighted with the German version made by Herder; and during
his manhood, while residing as Protestant pastor at Bergamo, he used
his utmost endeavours to procure a copy of the original. In his preface
to the reprint he tells us that these efforts were wholly unsuccessful
through a period of twenty-five years. He applied to all his literary
friends, among whom he mentions the ardent Ugo Foscolo and the learned
Mazzuchelli; but none of these could help him. He turned the pages of
Crescimbeni, Quadrio, Gamba, Corniani, Tiraboschi, weighty with
enormous erudition--and only those who make a special study of Italian
know how little has escaped their scrutiny--but found no mention of
Campanella as a poet. At last, after the lapse of a quarter of a
century, he received the long-coveted little quarto volume from
Wolfenbuttel in the north of Germany. The new edition which Orelli gave
to the press at Lugano has this title:--'Poesie Filosofiche di Tommaso
Campanella pubblicate per la prima volta in Italia da Gio. Gaspare
Orelli, Professore all' Università di Zurigo. Lugano, 1834.' The same
text has been again reprinted at Turin, in 1854, by Alessandro
d'Ancona, together with some of Campanella's minor works and an essay
on his life and writings. This third edition professes to have improved
Orelli's punctuation and to have rectified his readings. But it still
leaves much to be desired on the score of careful editorship. Neither
Orelli nor D'Ancona has done much to clear up the difficulties of the
poems--difficulties in many cases obviously due to misprints and errors
of the first transcriber; while in one or two instances they allow
patent blunders to pass uncorrected. In the sonnet entitled 'A Dio'
(D'Ancona, vol. i. p. 102), for example, _bocca_ stands for _buca_ in a
place where sense and rhyme alike demand the restitution of the right
word.
At no time could the book have hoped for many readers. Least of all
would it have found them among the Italians of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, to whom its energetic language and unfamiliar
conceptions would have presented insuperable difficulties. Between
Dante and Alfieri no Italian poet except Michael Angelo expressed so
much deep thought and feeling in phrases so terse, and with originality
of style so daring; and even Michael Angelo is monotonous in the range
of his ideas and uniform in his diction, when compared with the
indescribable violence and vigour of Campanella. Campanella borrows
little by way of simile or illustration from the outer world, and he
never falls into the commonplaces of poetic phraseology. His poems
exhibit the exact opposite of the Petrarchistic or the Marinistic
mannerism. Each sonnet seems to have been wrenched alive and
palpitating from the poet's heart. There is no smoothness, no gradual
unfolding of a theme, no rhetorical exposition, no fanciful embroidery,
no sweetness of melodic cadence, in his masculine art of poetry.
Brusque, rough, violent in transition, leaping from the sublime to the
ridiculous--his poems owe their elevation to the intensity of their
feeling, the nobleness and condensation of their thought, the energy
and audacity of their expression, their brevity, sincerity, and weight
of sentiment. Campanella had an essentially combative intellect. He was
both a poet and a philosopher militant. He stood alone, making war upon
the authority of Aristotle in science, of Machiavelli in state-craft,
and of Petrarch in art, taking the fortresses of phrase by storm, and
subduing the hardest material of philosophy to the tyranny of his
rhymes. Plebeian saws, salient images, dry sentences of metaphysical
speculation, logical summaries, and fiery tirades are hurled together--
half crude and cindery scoriae, half molten metal and resplendent ore--
from the volcano of his passionate mind. Such being the nature of
Campanella's style, when in addition it is remembered that his text is
sometimes hopelessly corrupt and his allusions obscure, the
difficulties offered by his sonnets to the translator will be readily
conceived.