THE PETRARCHISTS
We have seen that the definite result of the literary ferment which
accompanied the revival of vernacular Italian literature after the
long torpor of the fifteenth century was the recognition of literary
form, rather than intellectual substance, as the principal object of
cultivation, a conclusion completely in harmony with the national
genius as well as the national traditions. Had this been otherwise,
revolt would soon have made itself evident. On the contrary, however,
we meet with scarcely any manifestation of the existence of a romantic
spirit in Italian literature until Manzoni begins to be inspired by
Scott and Byron, and Foscolo by Rousseau. The consequence is a great
lack of richness and variety in comparison with a literature like
the English, where all descriptions of tendencies have been allowed
ample scope, and now one, now another, has successively seemed to be
predominant; but none, except now and then for a time, has attained an
absolute mastery.
On the other hand, the devotion of the Italian writers to elegance
and symmetry of composition has rendered their literature a model for
cultured writers in all languages, has deeply influenced contemporary
literatures in their rudimentary stages, and has preserved many a
writer from oblivion whose original power was not conspicuous, whose
themes have long since become antiquated, but who still challenges the
attention of posterity by charm of style. “Cela qui n’est pas écrit
ne dure pas” is a rule without exception, and the converse is often,
though not always, true also. One highly important class of these
writers is that large section of the poets who modelled themselves
avowedly on the greatest master of style their literature possessed or
possesses, the man whose thoughts, often most precious in themselves,
are displayed to incomparable advantage by incomparable felicity of
expression.
Very few Italian lyrical poets of the sixteenth century ventured to
stray far from the traces of Petrarch, who became to them what Virgil
and Homer and Ovid had necessarily become to writers in Latin verse.
Had Petrarch excelled in epic as he excelled in lyric, Ariosto and
Tasso too would have been his humble followers, and the whole of
the poetical literature of the age would have been imitative, and
consequently second-rate. Yet, although the mass of this derivative
literature is intolerably empty and insipid, much is distinguished by a
perfection of expression which makes it not merely delightful reading
but a valuable study. The poets frequently seem to approach Petrarch
very nearly, but none reproduce him. Those succeed best whose imitation
is the least avowed, and who are most remote from their model in native
temperament, such as Tansillo; on the other hand, Bembo, Molza, and
their like, who in mere form have most nearly approached Petrarch by
most completely suppressing their own individuality, present much less
to interest modern readers, although their contemporaries, estimating
them from another point of view, extolled them to the skies.
Bembo and Molza, nevertheless, only followed in the track of the
gifted man whom we have already seen so influential in the development
of Italian prose--Jacopo Sannazaro. Sannazaro’s attention was, indeed,
principally given to Latin poetry. But the qualifications of an
eminent Latinist and of a pattern Petrarchist were much the same. Both
abdicated all claim to originality by setting before themselves a model
which it was taken for granted--and with justice--that they would be
for ever unable to rival. Sannazaro was, notwithstanding, something
more than a master of felicitous expression. His Virgilian _De Partu
Virginis_, in which he vied with the chief contemporary writers of
Latin hexameters, Vida and Fracastoro, is less attractive than his
elegies, into which he has introduced more of personal feeling, or his
Piscatorian Eclogues, in which he has successfully revived the form, if
not the spirit, of ancient composition, and from which Milton did not
disdain to borrow ornaments for _Lycidas_. As a follower of Petrarch,
Sannazaro stands on a different footing from Bembo and Molza. Their
excellence in their own way is indisputable, but monotonous: they
neither rise nor sink; every poem of theirs is just as good as every
other poem. Sannazaro, a man of noble character and strong feeling,
imports a personal note into his poetry, and succeeds in proportion
to the clearness with which he can render this audible. His praise of
Petrarch’s Laura, for instance, is something more than conventionality,
and these lines, _Mors et Vita_, translated by Glassford, express the
sum of much serious meditation:
_Alas! when I behold this empty show
Of life, and think how soon it shall have fled;
When I consider how the honoured head
is daily struck by death’s mysterious blow,
My heart is wasted like the melting snow,
And hope, that comforter, is nearly dead;
Seeing these wings have been so long outspread,
And yet so sluggish is my flight and low.
But if I therefore should complain and weep--
If chide with love, or fortune, or the fair--
No cause I have; myself must bear it all,
Who, like a man 'mid trifles lulled to sleep,
With death beside me, feed on empty air,
Nor think how soon this mouldering garb must fall._
Among Sannazaro’s contemporaries, a little too early to have imbibed
the full spirit of the Petrarchan revival, may be especially named
Antonio Tebaldeo (1463-1537), an admired poet who survived his
reputation; Serafino dell’ Aquila, imitated by Wyat, whose Neapolitan
vehemence betrayed his lively talent into bombast; Antonio Cammelli,
the political laureate of the Ferrarese court; Antonello Petrucci, who
wrote as Damocles banqueted, with the headsman’s axe suspended over
him; Notturno Neapolitano; and Filosseno, chiefly remarkable for the
undisguised gallantry of his sonnets addressed to Lucrezia Borgia.
Bembo was a model man of letters, to whom in this capacity the Italian
language and Italian culture are infinitely beholden. As a poet he is
perhaps best characterised by the forty drawers through which he is
said to have successively passed his sonnets, making some alteration
for the better in every one of them. If there had been any originality
in any of them, this would hardly have survived the twentieth drawer,
but there never had been, and since the polish was always meant to be
the merit, there hardly could be too much polishing. Bembo’s poetry at
all events serves to refute the heresy which identities genius with
industry; and if we admit with Roscoe that “any person of good taste
and extensive reading might, _by a due portion of labour_, produce
works of equal merit,” we must nevertheless allow that it will probably
be long ere such a capacity for labour reappears. He entirely fulfilled
the requirements of his own age, by which he was simply idolised.
The quintessence of his contemporaries’ admiration is concentrated
in Vittoria Colonna’s humble yet dignified remonstrance with him for
having failed to celebrate the death of her husband:
_Unkind was Fate, prohibiting the rays
Of my great Sun your kindling soul to smite;
For thus in perpetuity more bright
Your fame had been, more glorious his praise.
His memory, exalted in your lays,
That ancient times obscure, and ours delight,
Had 'scaped in fell Oblivion’s despite
The second death, that on the spirit preys.
If in your bosom might infusèd be
My ardour, or my pen as yours inspired,
Great as the dead should be the elegy.
But now I fear lest Heaven with wrath be fired;
Toward you, for overmuch humility;
Toward me, who have too daringly aspired._
Bembo’s Latin poetry, of which charming specimens may be seen in
Symonds’s _Renaissance_, is better than his Italian, for it does not
disappoint. The fame of FRANCESCO MARIA MOLZA (1489-1544) was in his
day hardly second to Bembo’s, and was based on much the same grounds.
Like Bembo, he was an elegant Latin poet, who carried the maxims
appropriate for composition in a dead language into a living one.
Like Bembo’s, his vernacular poems, with one remarkable exception,
are models of diction as inexpressive as harmonious--a perpetual
silvery chime which soothes the ear, but conveys nothing to the mind.
The exception is a poem in which the usual vagueness and emptiness
of sentiment assumes substance from its pastoral setting. The _Ninfa
Tiberina_, in which one of Molza’s innumerable light loves is idealised
as a shepherdess, is just such a piece of mosaic as Gray’s Elegy.
The author has amassed all the commonplaces of pastoral poetry, and,
without adding a single idea of his own, has combined them into so
rich and glowing a picture that he may well claim to have superseded
the entire school of pastoral versifiers, the few excepted who have
derived their inspiration from Nature, like his predecessor Politian.
“Molza is to Politian,” says Symonds, “as the rose to the rosebud.” He
was born at Modena, but lived chiefly at Rome, leaving his wife and
family in his native city. They would indeed have been much in the
way, for he was continually involved in some amour, and his irregular
ties ultimately proved fatal to him. He was a leading member of the
brilliant literary circles of Rome and Florence, and as a companion and
a man of letters his contemporaries have nothing but praise for him.
Petrarch is a poet as much within the scope of imitation as beyond
the pursuit of rivalry. The swarms of Petrarchists stun the ear and
darken the light of the period: Tansillo might well say that every
hillock had grown a Parnassus. They may be found in the thesaurus of
Dolce, a series whose continuous publication for so many years at all
events affords proof that this appetite for imitative verse was not
factitious. Some few stand forth from the crowd by some exceptional
characteristics, and it is of these only that we can speak. The first
of these in chronological order is BERNARDO TASSO (1493-1568), whom
we have already met as the author of the _Amadigi_. In his lyrical as
in his epical attempts, Tasso is one of those provoking poets who are
always trembling on the verge of excellence, ever good, hardly ever
quite good enough. Even the famous sonnet on his renunciation of his
lady, which, Dolce tells us, thrilled Italy, is less eminent for the
beauty of the poetry than the nobility of the sentiment. Once, however,
straying within the domain of pastoral poetry, he found and polished a
gem worthy of the Greek Anthology:
_The herb and floweret of my verdant shore,
Shepherd, thy pasturing flock’s possession be;
And thine the olive and the mulberry
That mantle these fair hillocks o’er and o’er.
But be my fountain’s fresh and sparkling store
Of gushing waters undisturbed by thee,
For they are vowed to Muses’ ministry,
And whoso drinks is poet evermore.
Solely for these and for Apollo fit,
And Loves and Nymphs the sacred stream doth burst,
Or haply some fair swan may drink of it;
But thou, if not a swain untutored, first
Thy dues to Love in melody acquit,
Then with the bubbling coolness quench thy thirst._
Another poet of the time vies with Bernardo Tasso in nobility of
character, evinced in his case by the fervour of his patriotism.
The bulk of the verse of GUIDO GUIDICCIONI, Bishop of Fossombrone
(1500-41), consists of insipid love-strains in the style of Bembo and
Molza; but when he touches upon the wrongs and misfortunes of his
country he becomes inspired, and speaks in tones of alternate majesty
and pathos, to which the following sonnet superadds the charms of fancy:
_The Arno and the Tiber and the Po
This sad lament and heavy plaint of mine
I hear, for solely I my ear incline,
Accompany with music sad and low.
No more Heaven’s light on sunny wave doth glow,
No more the dwindled lamps of virtue shine;
Dark western tempests, dank and foul with brine,
Have swept the meads and laid the flowerets low.
The myrtle, Rivers, and the laurel-spray,
Delight and diadem of chosen souls,
And sacred shrines the blast hath borne away;
No more unto the sea your torrent rolls
Exulting, or your Naiades display
Their snowy breasts and shining aureoles._
If other Italian poets felt like Guidiccioni, they shunned to give
their sentiments utterance. The chief original poem of ANNIBALE CARO
(1507-66), the accomplished translator of Virgil and Longus, and one
of the best letter-writers of his age, was a panegyric on the house of
Valois--_Venite all’ombra dei gran gigli d’oro_ (“_Hither, where spread
the golden fleurs-de-lis_”). A few years later, with equal genius and
equal insensibility to the part that became an Italian, Caro turned to
celebrate the Spanish conqueror. Whatever may be thought of the theme
of his poem, it is in execution one of the great things of Italian
poetry:
_Here the Fifth Charles reposes, at whose name
Eyes of superbest monarchs seek the ground,
Whom Story’s tongue and Honour’s trump resound,
Quelling all loudest blasts of meaner fame.
How hosts and legioned chiefs he overcame,
Kings, but for him invincible, discrowned,
Swayed realms beyond Imagination’s bound,
And his own mightier soul did rule and tame--
This knows the admiring world, and this the Sun,
That did with envy and amazement see
His equal course with equal glory run
Wide earth around; which now accomplished, he,
From heaven observant of the world he won,
Smiling inquires, 'And toiled I thus for thee?'_
GIOVANNI DELLA CASA (1500-56) emulated Caro in the nobility of his
style, which would scarcely have been expected, considering the
licentious character of some of his verse and his ecclesiastical
profession. He does, however, sometimes attain a dignity and gravity
which, apart from the beauty of his diction, lift him high out of the
crowd of Petrarchists; nor are his themes invariably amorous. His
_Galateo_, a treatise on politeness, has earned him the name of the
Italian Chesterfield. He would have attained greater eminence as a man
of letters but for the distractions of politics and business, which he
deplores in the following sonnet:
_To woodland fount or solitary cave
In sunlit hour I plained my amorous teen;
Or wove by light of Luna’s lamp serene
My song, while yet to song and love I clave;
Nor by thy side the sacred steep to brave
Refused, where rarely now is climber seen;
But cares and tasks ungrateful intervene,
And like the weed I drift upon the wave.
And idly thus my barren hours are spent
In realms of fountain and of laurel void,
Where but vain tinsel is accounted blest.
Forgive, then, if not wholly unalloyed
My pleasure to behold thee eminent
On pinnacle no other foot hath prest._
ANGELO DI COSTANZO (1507-91), already noticed as an historian, is
another example of a writer of sonnets who rose from the crowd by the
individuality which he contrived to impress upon his performances. His
great characteristic is an exquisite elegance, not, as in some other
instances, veiling inanity, but usually the accompaniment of something
well worth saying. The following piece is a good instance of his power
of enhancing, by ingenious embellishment, a thought interesting and
attractive in itself:
_River, that from thy Apennine recess,
Swollen with surge of tributary snow,
Com’st foaming, and thy tawny overflow
Hurlest on Samnian vales with headlong stress;
Thy farther shore, inhere Love awaits to bless,
I seek, and by thy wrath unharmed would go;
If thou intendest not my overthrow,
With stringent curb thy furious flood repress.
But art thou verily resolved to kill,
And purposest that this conclusive day
Shall jointly terminate my good and ill,
Grant me but once to stem thy shock and spray:
My happy errand I would fain fulfil;
Me going spare, returning sweep away._
The general passion for verse naturally extended to the refined and
accomplished ladies of the time. Only two, however, have gained a
permanent position in Italian literature, as much by their characters
as by their poetry. The muse of VITTORIA COLONNA (1490-1547) chiefly
prompted the apotheosis of her husband, the Marquis of Pescara, “a
sworded man whose trade was blood,” and who, though a great captain,
scarcely possessed a single amiable or magnanimous trait of character.
The pathos of the situation surpasses that of the verse which it called
forth. As a woman, Vittoria evoked the enthusiastic admiration of her
contemporaries, and lives for posterity more in the strains of Michael
Angelo than in her own.
The unhappy fate of GASPARA STAMPA (1524-53), who literally died
of love, would have preserved her name without her verse; she was,
nevertheless, a true poetess, and might have been a great one had she
not, like so many poetesses, struck upon the fatal rock of fluency.
Could her centuries of sonnets be concentrated into a dozen, she would
rank high.
More truly a poet than any of the stricter Petrarchists is a
Neapolitan, LUIGI TRANSILLO, although his advantage is rather intensity
of feeling than superiority in the poetic art. He must indeed be
admitted to have derogated in some measure from the high standard of
taste then generally prevalent, and to have foreshadowed, though but in
a very trifling degree, the extravagances of the seventeenth century.
This may be forgiven to his southern ardour and liveliness, and foreign
critics are not likely to perceive the little technical defects so
severely visited upon him by his countrymen. He had the unspeakable
advantage over his competitors of being devoted to no ideal nymph, but
to a real and very great and very cold lady, the Marchioness del Vasto,
wife of the Viceroy of Naples. Such an attachment was necessarily
Platonic on his part, and imaginary, if so much, on the lady’s. The
first rapture is magnificently expressed in the sonnet in which the
poor knight and military retainer, whose business in life was to help
in clearing the Mediterranean of Turks, compares his rash love to the
flight of Icarus:
_Now that my wings are spread to my desire,
The more vast height withdraws the dwindling land,
Wider to wind these pinions I expand,
And earth disdain, and higher mount and higher:
Nor of the fate of Icarus inquire,
Nor cautious droop, or sway to either hand;
Dead I shall fall, full well I understand;
But who lives gloriously as I expire?
Yet hear I my own heart that pleading cries,
Stay, madman, whither art thou bound? descend!
Ruin is ready Rashness to chastise.
But I, Fear not, though this indeed the end;
Cleave we the clouds, and praise our destinies,
If noble fall on noble flight attend._
Suspicion, jealousy, bitterly wounded feeling, open breach, and hollow
reconciliation make up the remainder of the sonnets, the best of which
have few superiors in any literature for fire and passion. His other
poetical performances are far from inconsiderable. The best known is
the sin of his youth, the _Vendemmiatore_, whose ultra-Fescennine
truth to rustic manners and the licence of the vintage brought it into
the Index, and its author into gaol. In quite a different key are
his delightful didactic poems, _Il Podere_, on the management of an
estate, and _La Balía_, on the care of children, translated by Roscoe.
Some of his familiar _Capitoli_ are very pleasing, and some of his
miscellaneous poems are very fine, especially this on the Spaniards
slain by the Turks at Castel Nuovo, on the coast of Dalmatia:
_Hail, scene of fated Valour’s final stand,
Revered far these sad heaps of whitening bone,
Their trace who other monument have none,
Pyreless and tombless on this desert strand;
Who hitherward from far Iberian land
To Adria’s shores on blast of battle blown,
With streaming blood of foemen, and their own,
Came to empurple foreign sea and sand.
Three hundred Fabii gave immortal name
To ancient Tiber; what to Spain by death
Heroic of three thousand shall be given?
Greater the host, more excellent the aim
Of warrior martyrs; those their dying breath
Resigned to Italy, and these to heaven._
The graceful poets who thus tuned their harps to the notes of Petrarch
sang within the hearing of a spirit of another sort, whose verses, had
they known them, they would have compared unfavourably with their own
elegance, but whose appearance in their circle would have been like
that of Victor Hugo’s Pan at the banquet of the Olympians. MICHAEL
ANGELO, the greatest Italian after Dante, had not, like Dante, acquired
the secret of poetic form. He indites as on marble with mallet and
chisel; but the inscription is everlasting. “Ungrammatical, rude in
versification, crabbed or obscure in thought,” as Symonds describes
them, Michael Angelo’s sonnets are yet priceless as a revelation of the
man, more distinct than that vouchsafed by his painting or sculpture.
These tell of his tremendous force; the deep springs of tenderness in
his nature are only to be learned from the poems, the most important of
which are consecrated to Love, now ideal and impersonal, now expending
itself upon some fair object, masculine or feminine, but in either
case Platonic. Vittoria Colonna and Tommmaso de’ Cavalieri are the
objects of the poet’s deepest attachment. The following sonnet was most
probably inscribed to Cavalieri:
_By your eyes’ aid a gentle light I see,
Which but for these mine own would never share;
By your auxiliar feet a load I bear
Which my lame limbs refuse to bear for me.
I, plumeless, yet upon your pinions flee;
When heaven I seek, your soul conducts me there;
Blushes or pallor at your will I wear;
Sun chills and winter warms at your decree.
The fashion of your will prescribeth mine;
My thought hath in your thinking taken birth;
My speech gives voice to your discourse unspoken.
A sunless moon that by herself would shine,
I were without you; only seen on earth
By light of sun that on her dark hath broken._
The roughness of Michael Angelo’s verse was planed down by the first
editor, his great-nephew, and the true text has only been retrieved in
our time.
Two religious poets stand aloof from the class of Petrarchists, rather
by the nature of their themes than the quality of their talent. CELIO
MAGNO, a religious poet of Protestant tendencies, produced a hymn to
the Almighty which ranks among the best canzoni of the period, and
had anticipated Coleridge’s project, which with him as with Coleridge
remained a project, for a series of similar compositions. GABRIELE
FIAMMA, Bishop of Chioggia, is in general a tame versifier, but in
two inspired moments produced two of the most beautiful sonnets in
the language: one of which is remarkable for expressing in an ornate
style the thought of Heine’s famous lyric, “Mein Herz gleicht ganz dem
Meere”; the other, apart from its great beauty, as an instance of a
sonnet which, beginning apparently in a commonplace style, is vivified
through and through by the last tercet:
_Never with such delight the bee in spring,
When the full mead teems with the novel flower,
The sweetness of the honey-burdened bower
Amasses for her cell in wayfaring;
Not with like joy, when glades cease echoing
The baying hound, no more compelled to cower
In covert, doth the hind the forest scour,
Panting for crystal rivulet or spring:
As I the sob acclaim that signifies
Passion of love or awe divinely given,
Or other ecstasy that God endears.
Transported with her bliss the spirit cries;
How vast his rapture who inhabits heaven,
If joy he hath more joyful than these tears!_
The Cinque Cento period of Italian poetry, which to the men of that
day seemed the _ne plus ultra_ of artistic achievement, has since
received less praise and exerted less influence than fairly its due.
It was a great thing to have produced works so perfect in form, and
to have refined the language in so eminent a degree. The general
belief, too, that the Italian poetry of this age was devoid of all but
formal excellence involves a great exaggeration. It is true that the
literature of the period is overloaded with masses of mechanical and
conventional stuff, but Guidiccioni and Casa and Tansillo are capable
on occasion of expressing themselves with an energy the more impressive
from being restrained within the limits prescribed by a chastened
taste, and many Italian sonnets are even better fitted to be breathed
from the trumpet than warbled to the lute. A great development in this
direction might have been expected, but for the extinction of political
and spiritual liberty.
What the Italian lyric might have become we see in Milton, who could
have written neither his _Lycidas_ nor his sonnets without Tuscan
models. He undoubtedly weighted, without overweighting, both canzone
and sonnet with thought to a degree unparalleled in Italy, but how much
he owed to Italians appears by a comparison of his sonnets with those
of Wordsworth, who neglected the traditions which Milton carefully
observed. Wordsworth has even more ripeness of thought and moral
elevation than his predecessor; but while Milton’s work is immaculate,
Wordsworth’s is full of flaws.
With all its defects, the poetry of the Cinque Cento will survive as
a proof that rules of art exist and may be ascertained, and cannot be
safely departed from; no less than as an example of the embellishment
which even ordinary thoughts may receive from nobility of diction
and breadth of style; and as an instance of the great part which a
literature not too original or too racy of the native soil may play
in moulding and enriching the literatures of neighbouring and less
advanced nations. Nor can it be fairly judged by itself as an isolated
phenomenon. It was a part, and far from the most important part, of a
stupendous artistic movement, which spoke more readily and eloquently
with brush and chisel than with pen, and expressed through their medium
much that in an age more exclusively literary would have been committed
to paper.