THE POETICAL RENAISSANCE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
In characterising the original authors, apart from critics and
commentators, whom Italy produced during the first half of the
fifteenth century, we have omitted the men who really exerted the
most important influence upon literature. These form a group by
themselves--not one of Italian authors, for they rarely wrote in the
vernacular; scarcely one of authors at all, for they worked chiefly
as philologers. They are, however, much too important to be passed
over without notice, representing as they did the Renaissance in its
aspect as the rebirth of free thought and inquiry, a resurrection no
less momentous than the revival of art and letters, and preparing
the literary development which they were unable to effect. Few of
them were men of extraordinary mental power, but all were passionate
for the study of antiquity, and while, perhaps, intending to restore
Latin to its rank as the sole literary language, set forces at work
which deprived it of this primacy for ever. Even though Lorenzo de’
Medici might apologise for writing in a language condemned by men of
good judgment, and Varchi’s schoolmaster might punish him for reading
Petrarch, when men like Alberti took to cultivating the vernacular
speech in emulation of the Latin, it was clear that the latter had
already lost its monopoly.
The humanists had nevertheless in their own domain the great
advantage of being first in the field. They could hardly advance
in any direction without initiating some movement momentous in its
effect upon culture. Emanuel Chrysoloras brought the Greek language
to Florence; his son-in-law, Filelfo, voyaged to Constantinople, and
returned with a Greek library. Poggio Bracciolini, a most elegant
Latinist and epistolographer--unfortunately best remembered by his
virulent invectives, and by a book of facetiæ which does more credit
to his gaiety than to his morals--rendered the greatest service by his
assiduity in the collection of manuscripts. Leonardo Bruni accomplished
even more by the simple step of making accurate translations of Plato
and Aristotle, and thus delivering Western science from bondage to
the Arabians, through whose paraphrases these writings had hitherto
been chiefly known. Lorenzo Valla, an acute and intrepid critic and
original thinker, enthusiastic for truth in the abstract, but not
generally actuated by high principle, became the father of modern
negative criticism by his overthrow of the scandalous Papal imposture
of the Donation of Constantine. Gemistus Pletho, though a visionary,
introduced Plato to Italy, and powerfully stimulated thought through
the controversies aroused by his writings. Flavio Biondo was the
first scientific archæologist, describing the monuments of pagan and
Christian Rome, and investigating the topography of ancient Italy.
Vittorino da Feltre showed practically by his school at Mantua what
education ought to be, and Vespasiano da Bisticci wrote the lives of
his fellows. Even men like Filelfo, whose restless pens produced no
work of real importance, kept the intellectual life alert by their
incessant activity. For the time the age found what it needed in
such men, and scholars enjoyed the consideration awarded to poets
under Augustus, rhetoricians in the later Roman Empire, jurists under
Justinian, and the founders of religious orders in the days of St.
Dominic and St. Francis.
The deference shown to scholars is sufficiently attested by the
honourable offices conferred upon them, the competition of princes
and republics to obtain the most distinguished Latinists for their
secretaries, and the throngs that attended their lectures and other
public displays, vapid and empty as these frequently appear to us. The
prevailing current of taste proved highly advantageous in raising the
standard of university education. Bologna, in a former age the herald
of Italian academic culture, latterly in a condition of decay, revived
and asserted her supremacy, and her sister seats of learning competed
vigorously with her and each other. The triumph of humanism seemed
complete when in 1447 erudition made a Pope in the person of Nicholas
V., the founder of the Vatican Library, whose love of erudition was
such that it absolved in his eyes even Lorenzo Valla’s exposure of
pious frauds. Two great events favourable to culture succeeded--the
fall of Constantinople, which brought a fresh flight of learned Greeks
into Europe; and the invention of printing, of which, however, Italy
did not reap the benefit until 1464. The tardiness of so simple an
invention, upon the verge of which antiquity had continually been
hovering, is one of the most surprising facts in the history of the
human mind; the indifference with which it was at first received
is hardly less so; and the stimulus it imparted to literature long
fell below reasonable expectation. It is remarkable, however, that
two complete versions of the Bible appeared at Venice in 1471, and
significant that no vernacular Bible was allowed to be printed anywhere
else. The general character of the productions of the Italian press
is distinctly academical and utilitarian. Classics and classical
commentaries, theology, canon and civil law, medicine, form the staple;
imaginative vernacular literature, even of the past, is scanty;
contemporary literature might hardly have existed so far as the early
records of the press indicate. Apart from the studies which conduced
to a livelihood, the period all over Europe was one of intellectual
barrenness. But young men of lively genius were growing up, and one of
these was in a position to be as serviceable to modern belles-lettres
as Nicholas V. had been to the study of antiquity.
It rarely happens that Augustus is also Virgil; enough if he is also
Mæcenas. LORENZO DE’ MEDICI (1448-92) united all these characters.
A prince by position if not by descent, he was not only a patron
of literature, but a highly intelligent and discriminating patron;
nor only a favourer, but himself the producer of some of the best
literature of his day. In character, in circumstances, in the bent
of his policy and the general result of his activity, he might not
unfairly be termed a miniature Augustus; like him he confiscated the
liberties of his country as the sole alternative to anarchy, and repaid
her by prosperity and peace. All the great qualities of Augustus
were his, and few of the defects which history chiefly censures in
his prototype. Both were stronger in the self-regarding than in the
self-forgetting virtues, but Lorenzo once rose to heroism. History
records no action of Augustus comparable to Lorenzo’s placing himself
in the power of the treacherous and unscrupulous King of Naples for
the sake of his country. Nor had Lorenzo, like Augustus, ever occasion
to pass the sponge over an abortive tragedy. His compositions are of
different degrees of merit, but all are fluent and graceful.
We have entered a different period from that of the Uberti and Frezzi;
the tree of poetry, so long stiff and dry, now swells with sap, and
buds with the prophecy of a coming summer. Two distinct impulses are
observable in Lorenzo and his literary mate, Politian: in one point
of view the artistic, in the other the poetical spirit predominates.
As artists, they strove successfully to attain perfect elegance of
expression, and to improve the metrical forms which had descended
from the fourteenth century. As poets, they seized upon the songs and
catches current in the mouths of the people, and elevated them by
judicious treatment into the region of art. This could be possible only
to men of great poetic sensitiveness. Had Lorenzo and Politian been
less refined by culture, had the one been no scholar and the other no
prince, either might have been an Italian Burns; as it is, their work
as lyric poets is more nearly comparable to Goethe’s. They made the
popular Muse acceptable to men of breeding, while gratifying their own
tastes by work marked with the stamp of study and erudition, and yet
not beyond the intelligence of the average educated man.
Lorenzo’s part as the patron of art and letters is so considerable,
that his writings, important as they are, appear almost insignificant
in comparison. The most elaborate of his poems might be classed as
idylls. They comprise the _Ambra_, a graceful and fanciful Ovidian
allegory on the metamorphosis of the nymph Ambra into a rock to
escape the pursuit of a river-god; _La Caccia col Falcone_, a
lively description of this aristocratic sport; and _La Nencia di
Barberino_, no less vivid in its portraiture of the humours of plebeian
love-making. Lorenzo’s own love poetry consists chiefly of canzoni,
more remarkable for elegance than depth of feeling, but perfectly in
the character of a man of pleasure who is also a refined gentleman. The
spirituality of Dante and his contemporaries, the romantic passion of
Petrarch, no longer suited the age. The temple of Love, like the temple
of the Church, had been secularised; in everything men habitually lived
at a lower level. Yet this declension is compensated in a great degree
by the enhanced feeling of reality: there can be no such controversy
over Lorenzo’s innamorata as over Beatrice and Laura. The following is
a fair example of his erotic style:
_Thy beauty, gentle Violet, was born
Where for the look of Love I first was fain,
And my bright stream of bitter tears was rain
That beauty to accomplish and adorn.
And such desire was from compassion born,
That from the happy nook where thou wert lain
The fair hand gathered thee, and not in vain,
For by my own it willed thee to be borne.
And, as to me appears, thou wouldst return
Once more to that fair hand, whence thee upon
My naked breast I have securely set:
The naked breast that doth desire and burn,
And holds thee in her heart’s place, that hath gone
To dwell where thou wert late, my Violet._
If there is more gallantry than passion in compositions of this
nature, they show at least that the lute of Love had received a new
string since the time of the troubadours.
Love of a sensuous kind is a chief ingredient in Lorenzo’s _Canti
Carnascialeschi_, which are sometimes highly licentious. He is accused
of having composed them with a special view of diverting the minds of
the young Florentines from politics; but it seems unnecessary to go
beyond the temptation to licence afforded by the general relaxation
of the carnival. The gay and the serious Lorenzo were very different
people, as remarked by that acute observer Machiavelli. His epistle
to his own son Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., on his elevation to the
Cardinalate at fourteen, is a model of wisdom and right feeling. His
spiritual poems, _Laudi_, moreover, frequently speak the language of
true religious emotion.
Lorenzo’s court, as is universally known, was the chosen abode of
artists and men of letters. A twin star with Lorenzo himself, but
even brighter in his literary aspect was ANGELO AMBROGINI (1454-92),
known as POLIZIANO from his birth at Montepulciano. Politian, the most
brilliant classical scholar of his age, was perhaps the first professed
philologist whose scholarship was entirely divested of pedantry.
With him classical studies were a vivifying influence, pervading and
adorning his literary exercises in the vernacular, but implying no
disparagement of the latter. There is little to choose between his
Latin and his Italian poetry: the same poetic spirit inspires both,
and each is an exemplar of the charm of a choice, yet not too ornate
diction. He was accused of writing his Latin verses “with more heat
than art”; but this is only another way of saying that while composing
them he felt as an ancient, and might very well be taken for a poet of
the Silver Age. His lyric tragedy or opera, _Orfeo_, will be treated
along with the Italian drama, of which it was the first meritorious
example. His _Giostra_, a poem on the tournament exhibited by Lorenzo’s
brother Giuliano in 1475, and incidentally introducing its hero’s
passion for the lovely Simonetta, remained unfinished in consequence
of Giuliano’s untimely death. It is full of beauties, and is memorable
in Italian poetry as the first example of the thoroughly successful
employment of the octave stanza. Boccaccio had been too diffuse;
but Politian exemplified the perfect fitness of this form for the
combination of narrative poetry with an inexhaustible succession of
verbal felicities, many of which, indeed, are appropriated from earlier
poets, but all, old and new, seem fused into a glowing whole by the
passion for classic form and sensuous beauty. But Politian and his
successors did not emulate the classical poets’ accurate delineation of
Nature. The materials of their descriptions are drawn from storehouses
to which every scholar has a key. They bespeak reading and memory
rather than actual observation.
This, in Miss Ellen Clerke’s version, is Politian’s rendering of
the vision of perpetual Spring, first seen by Homer, after him by
Lucretius, and in our time by Tennyson. Like Ariosto and Tasso, he
places his enchanted garden on earth.
_A fair hill doth the Cyprian breezes woo,
And sevenfold stream of mighty Nilus see,
When the horizon reddeneth anew;
But mortal foot may not there planted be.
A green knoll on its slope doth rise to view,
A sunny meadow sheltering in its lee,
Where, wantoning 'mid flowers, each gale that passes
Sets lightly quivering the verdant grasses._
_A wall of gold its furthest edge doth screen,
Where lies a vale with shady trees set fair,
Upon whose branches, 'mid leaves newly green,
The quiring birds chant love songs on the air.
The grateful sound of waters chimes between,
By twin streams cool and lucid shed forth there,
In the wave sweet and bitter of whose river
Love whets the golden arrows of his quiver._
_Nor the perennial garden’s foliage green
Doth snow new-fallen blanch, or rime-frost hoar.
No vernal blight dare come these walls between.
No gale the grass and shrubs e’er ruffles o’er.
Nor is the year in fourfold season seen;
But joyous Spring here reigns for evermore,
Shakes to the breeze her blonde and rippling tresses,
And weaves her wreath of flowers as on she presses._
In Politian’s own eyes and those of his contemporaries his achievement
as a poet was less important than his labour as a classical scholar.
Nor, as respected the needs and interests of his contemporaries, was
this judgment wholly mistaken. “Knowledge in that age,” says Symonds,
“was the pearl of great price; not the knowledge of righteousness,
not the knowledge of Nature and her laws, but the knowledge of the
wonderful life which throbbed in ancient peoples, and which might
make this old world young again.” Politian’s chief merits as a
classical scholar were to have known how to excite a living interest
in antiquity, and to have been the first to attempt a scientific
classification of MSS. His translations from the Greek were admirable.
So long as Lorenzo presided over Florence, Politian’s lot, though
embittered by some violent literary controversies, had been brilliant
and prosperous: his patron’s death exposed him to the general
unpopularity of the supporters of Lorenzo’s incapable successor, the
French invader stood at the doors, Savonarola’s followers began to
assail culture in its representatives, and within little more than two
years Politian escaped the gathering storm either by a broken heart or
a voluntary death.
To appreciate Politian’s services in imparting literary form to popular
poetry, it will be necessary to bestow a glance on this poetry as it
existed in Tuscany in his day, and in a measure exists still. We have
previously remarked upon the absence of national ballad poetry at a
very early period; and when at length we find traces of popular song,
little resembling _Chevy Chase_ is to be discovered, the staple being
carols and love catches. Some of these may be as old as the thirteenth
century, and the mass continued augmenting as one anonymous singer
after another added something sufficiently attractive to be propagated
from hamlet to hamlet, and treasured in the memory.
Similar lyrical production went on over most parts of Italy; the
Sicilian songs, after the Tuscan, being the most numerous, or at least
the best preserved. These ditties fall generally into two divisions,
_rispetti_ and _stornelli_: the former consisting of four or six
verses rhyming alternately, followed by a couplet; the latter of three
lines only, the last rhyming with the first. These soon developed
into the _madrigal_, a form affected by persons of culture and
professional musicians, but the people continued to carol as of old.
Thus, spontaneous births of the instinct for love and song, undergoing
countless modifications in passing from mouth to mouth, until the right
form has been found at last, and sifted by the taste of generation
after generation, these little songs have formed a really beautiful
collection of verse, reflecting in their ardour, graceful fancy and
purity of sentiment, the best characteristics of the race from which
they sprung. How good they are may be seen from a few of the specimens
so admirably rendered by John Addington Symonds:[10]--
_The moon has risen her plaint to lay
Before the face of Love Divine;
Saying in heaven she will not stay,
Since you have stolen what made her shine.
Aloud she wails with sorrow wan;--
She told her stars, and two are gone:
They are not there; ye have them now;
They are the eyes in your bright brow._
_Think it no grief that I am brown;
For all brunettes are born to reign:
White is the snow, yet trodden down;
Black pepper, kings do not disdain:
White snow lies mounded in the vales;
Black pepper’s weighed in brazen scales._
_O Swallow, Swallow, flying through the air,
Turn, turn, I prithee, from thy flight above.
Give me one feather from thy wing so fair,
For I will write a letter to my love.
When I have written it and made it clear,
I’ll give thee back thy feather, Swallow dear;
When I have written it on paper white,
I’ll make, I swear, thy missing feather right;
When once ’tis written on fair leaves of gold,
I’ll give thee back thy wings and flight so bold._
Two other leading poetical figures of the fifteenth century, Matteo
Maria Boiardo and Luigi Pulci, authors of the _Orlando Innamorato_ and
the _Morgante Maggiore_, will be best treated along with the writers of
chivalrous romance in epic form. It is not quite clear how far Pulci
had a share in the poems ascribed to his elder brother Luca (1431-70);
but the latter’s verses on Giuliano de’ Medici, his crusading epic,
_Ciriffo Calvaneo_, and his pastoral, _Driadeo_, undoubtedly owe much
to Luigi. The heroic epistles in verse which pass under his name are
no doubt by him. Another poet, GIROLAMO BENIVIENI, shines amid the
Platonic circle of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. His verses
might have given him no inconsiderable distinction if he could have
attained to lucidity of diction; but his powers of expression are
inadequate to the abstruseness of his themes. He does best when his
idealism is embodied in an objective shape, as in the following sonnet,
clearly suggested by the first in the _Vita Nuova_:
_In utmost height of Heaven I saw the choir
Of happy stars in their infinity
Attending on the Sun obediently,
And he was pasturing them with his own fire.
And, wealthy with my spoil, I saw Desire
Unstring his bow and lay his arrows by,
And proffer Heaven, with all humility,
My heart, which golden drapery did attire.
And, of this disarrayed, not half so fair
Smiles Earth to Sun when by his crescent light
The ivory horn of vernal Bull is smit
As in this glory did my heart appear,
Which now my mortal breast doth scorn and slight,
Abandoning, nor will return to it._
The Italian writings of Benivieni’s friend Savonarola are chiefly
theological. Their fervour gained them great influence at the time,
but the celebrity which they still enjoy is due rather to the fame of
the writer than to their literary qualities. Savonarola nevertheless
affected the literature of his day, partly by his war against classical
and Renaissance culture, and partly by the impulse which he gave to
the pamphlet, precursor of the newspaper press. Cristoforo Landino’s
Camaldolese Dialogues would have been important contributions lo the
national literature if they had been written in Italian.
The first writer of prose who presents us with a perfect example from
which the new period may be dated is JACOPO SANNAZARO, as much
as Politian the nursling of a court; to whom we are also indebted for
the first example of the pastoral romance, and the first proof that
excellent Italian prose could be written outside Tuscany. Sannazaro,
born in 1458, was a Neapolitan of Spanish descent, as it is said, and
the statement seems to be corroborated by the peculiar independence and
dignity of character which distinguish him from the supple literati of
his time. Even Pontano, whose obligations to the royal house of Naples
were so extreme, played an ambiguous part upon the ephemeral French
conquest of 1495. Sannazaro’s loyalty not only sustained that brief
ordeal, but when four years later the cause of the Neapolitan dynasty
was irrevocably lost, he accompanied his fallen master to France, and
spent several years in exile. Returning to Naples, he inhabited a
beautiful villa at Mergellina, and devoted himself to the poetry of
which we shall have to speak in another place. After witnessing the
destruction of his retreat in the French war (1528), he died in 1530
in the house of Cassandra, Marchesa Castriota, whom he had vainly
defended against her husband’s attempt to repudiate her. Few of his
contemporaries deserve equal respect as a man; and although as a
writer but of the second rank, it was granted to him, alike in prose
and verse, to mark an era in literature signalising the triumph of
Petrarch and Boccaccio over the pedantry of the fifteenth century, but
at the same time the deliberate preference of form to matter, and the
discouragement of irregular originality.
Sannazaro’s _Arcadia_, historically the most important of his
writings, is comparatively a youthful performance, having been
substantially completed by 1489, though not published in a correct
edition until 1504. It would in any case mark an epoch as the
first perfect example of the pastoral romance, which Boccaccio had
foreshadowed in his _Ameto_, but which Sannazaro enriched by elements
derived from Theocritus and Virgil. His landscape and personages are
entirely classical; the shepherds contend with each other in song
precisely as in the Greek and Latin eclogues, and no attempt is made
to represent rustic manners as they really are. The descriptions,
whether of nature or of humanity, on the other hand, are graceful
and vivid, and informed by a most poetical sentiment; and it may be
said that Sannazaro’s work would be more esteemed at this day if it
had had fewer imitators. The style admits of but little variety, and
pastoral fiction easily became insipid in the hands of a succession
of followers who did not, like Shakespeare in the _Winter’s Tale_,
resort to Nature for their delineations. Sannazaro himself is not
exempt from the charge of monotony. More serious defects, however, are
those of excessive Latinisation in the construction of sentences, and
rhetorical exaggeration, arising from his too close adherence to the
immature style of Boccaccio’s early writings, instead of the simple
elegance of the _Decameron_. The resolution to achieve poetry in prose
at any cost, causes a crabbed involution and overloads the diction with
adjectives; while there is yet enough of true feeling to overcome even
the wearisomeness of the perpetual laments of the shepherds over the
unparalleled cruelty of their innamoratas. Sannazaro had a mistress
to whose memory he remained faithful all his life, and most of his
fictitious characters veil actual personages. When this is understood,
the romance loses its apparent artificiality; and Settembrini’s remark
is justified, “_Anche oggi si sente una dolcezza d’ affetto a leggere
quel libro_.”
The main literary interest, however, of the _Arcadia_ is that it marks
an epoch and carries the reform which Lorenzo de’ Medici and Politian
had initiated in verse into the domain of prose. It is perhaps the sole
Italian prose composition of the fifteenth century which can be said
to wear a classic stamp; and being received with enthusiasm and read
by all, it fixed a standard which subsequent writers were compelled to
maintain. It prescribed the rule for pastoral romance in all languages:
not only did Sidney borrow its spirit and many of its episodes as well
as its name for his own work, more, however, of a romance and less of
a pastoral than Sannazaro’s; not only did the two great Portuguese
pastoralists, Bernardim Ribeiro and Montemayor, model themselves upon
it; but Shakespeare took from it the name of Ophelia, and traces of it
may be found, not only in the pastoral part of Keats’s _Endymion_, but
even in his _Hyperion_.
By Sannazaro’s time, then, it may be said that Italian literature
was fairly despatched on the route which it was to follow throughout
the golden Cinque Cento. Elegance, finish, polish were to be the
chief aims; form was to be esteemed at least on a par with matter;
the mediæval elements, as we find them in Dante, were to be kept in
abeyance. The classical tradition was to be taken up, and Italy was
to appear as the literary heiress of Rome; but not to the extent of
corrupting her own language with Latinisms. Such a tacit resolution
was admirable for raising and maintaining the standard of literary
composition, but was hostile to the development of transcendent genius.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] The best collection of popular Italian belletristic literature is
the _Canti e Racconti del Popolo Italiano_, in eight volumes, edited by
E. Comparetti and A. D’Ancona.