THE PROSE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The seventeenth century is for Italy a period of stagnation, relieved
only by the endeavour to conceal decay by fantastic extravagance, by a
fortunate reaction near its termination, and by some genuine progress
in isolated directions, which would have been fruitful of important
results in a better age. The false taste which disfigured the epoch
was not peculiar to Italy; but while in other countries it appears a
symptom of exuberant life, a disorder incident to infancy, in Italy
it dominates literature, some departments of practical knowledge and
study excepted. What elsewhere was boisterous youth, was in Italy
premature old age. No other cause for this decadence can be assigned
than the withering of national life under the blight of civil and
ecclesiastical tyranny. The reform of the Church, the purification
of morals, excellent things in themselves, had been bought from the
counter-Reformation at far too high a price.
We have indicated 1564 as the year in which the North of Europe begins
to gain steadily at the expense of the South. The date especially fatal
to Italy may perhaps be carried five years back, to 1559, when the long
contest between France and Spain for supremacy in the Peninsula was
decided in favour of the latter by the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. Up
to this time the Italians had been in some measure able to play their
oppressors off against each other; and such from Alexander the Sixth’s
time had been the policy of the Popes, who all wished the expulsion
of the barbarians, in so far as compatible with their own family
interests. The accommodation between the foreign Herod and the foreign
Pilate put an end to this system. The hope of the independence of Italy
was definitively resigned, the minor princes submitted to be Spanish
vassals, and the Popes indemnified themselves by enlisting the monarchs
in support of their spiritual authority. Jesuits, seminary priests,
and inquisitors darkened the land, and the ever-augmenting pressure
culminated at last in the rules for censorship promulgated by Clement
VIII. in 1595, which effectually stifled freedom of thought, and
stopped the dissemination of knowledge, except by leave of those whose
interest it was to prevent it. Not merely were heretical or licentious
writings interdicted, but criticism on rulers and ecclesiastics, and
praises of the freedom and virtue of antiquity.
Such satires as those in which, in the days of the Renaissance,
Alamanni and other orthodox Catholics had scourged the sins of
Church and State, could now be printed only in Protestant countries.
Anything might be prohibited that shocked the prejudice or surpassed
the comprehension of an ignorant and bigoted priest. Authors were
discouraged from writing, booksellers from publishing, and readers
from reading, while the frivolous pedantry and execrable taste of
the Jesuits infected almost all the schools. Renaissance had become
reaction; the new birth had passed into the second death. This iron
despotism could not be perpetually maintained. It was impossible to
shut Italians out from all knowledge of the intellectual progress of
Protestant countries, nor in the universal flux of things could the
stern inquisitorial type of ecclesiastical ruler be stereotyped for
ever. In course of time the _zelanti_ Popes gave way to affable and
humane personages, but the nation had meanwhile sunk into a mental
torpor, in which, with a few glorious exceptions, it remained plunged
until the crash of the old order of things in the French Revolution.
The exclusion of the vivifying spirit of the Reformation, the
impossibility of so much as alluding, except in disparagement, to the
chief transaction of contemporary history, indicate an emasculation, as
well as a paralysis, beyond the power of language to express.
The extinction of the free spirit of the Renaissance was the more
unfortunate for Italy, as it arrested the development of speculative
and scientific research which seemed opening upon her. It has been
frequently observed that the close of a brilliant literary epoch has
coincided with the birth of an era of positive science. The early
Greek philosophers follow Homer and the rhapsodists; Aristotle and
Theophrastus, Epicurus and Zeno, succeed the dramatists and the
orators; the decline of Latin literature is the age of the illustrious
jurists. Even so, as the great authors and the great artists departed
from Italy, she produced her greatest man of science, and a bold school
of philosophers arose to challenge the authority to which Dante and
Aquinas had bowed. “Philosophy,” says Symonds, “took a new point of
departure among the Italians, and all the fundamental ideas which have
since formed the staple of modern European systems were anticipated by
a few obscure thinkers.”
The chief representative of physical science, however, was by no
means obscure. GALILEO GALILEI was born in 1564, the year of the death
of Michael Angelo. The scientific achievements of this mighty genius
do not concern us as such. It must not be forgotten, however, that
he was also an accomplished author in the vernacular. His immortal
Dialogue (1632), the glory and the shame of his age, is written in
Italian, and is enumerated by Italians among exemplars of diction,
_testi di lingua_. What he might have accomplished if he had enjoyed
the applause and sympathy which greeted a Newton is difficult to say;
but the contrast between the lot of the Master of the Mint and the
President of the Royal Society on the one hand, and that of the lonely
captive on the other, is not greater than that between the condition of
England and that of Italy. It is needless to relate the oft-told story
of Galileo, which indeed rather regards the history of science than
that of literature. We are only concerned with him as a typical figure,
the most eminent victim of the spirit of persecution which deprived
Italy of her supremacy among intellectual nations, and which, even
before Galileo had excited its hatred, had claimed another victim, less
illustrious, but not less interesting.
It is probably owing to the considerable infusion of Greek blood into
Naples and Sicily that the inhabitants of these regions, so backward in
many respects in comparison with the rest of Italy, have displayed a
peculiar genius for philosophical research. Aquinas was a Neapolitan,
and in our own day the subtleties of German metaphysics have found a
more sympathetic reception and a more ready comprehension in the South
than elsewhere in Italy. The four chief Italian thinkers of the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries belonged to the kingdom of
Naples. BERNARDO TELESIO (1509-85) has missed the posthumous celebrity
of the others by escaping their tragic fate; but his reputation in his
own day was greater than theirs. Campanella wept at his tomb, and Bacon
calls him the first experimental observer of nature. He led the way in
the revolt against the authority of Aristotle which became general in
the seventeenth century, and his sensationalism helped to mould the
thought of Hobbes and Gassendi.
A fiery martyrdom, a sublimely poetical mind, and an intuition of
modern views and discoveries have made GIORDANO BRUNO a more celebrated
and interesting figure than Telesio, although too far in advance of his
contemporaries and too late recognised by posterity to be influential
with either. “The most faithful and pithily condensed abstract of
Bruno’s philosophy,” says Symonds, “is contained in Goethe’s poem,
_Prôömium zu Gott und Welt_. Yet this poem expresses Goethe’s thought,
and it is doubtful whether Goethe had studied Bruno except in the
work of his disciple, Spinoza.” “Disciple,” it may be added, is much
too strong a word to express the Hebrew thinker’s relation to the
Neapolitan. It would be difficult to conceive two men more dissimilar,
except in intellectual intrepidity and in love of truth. Spinoza is the
closest of reasoners, without a particle of poetry in his composition.
Bruno has magnificent divinations, with little reasoning power. If
Spinoza did read him, he must have been greatly annoyed by him. On the
other hand, the celebrated definition, “A God-intoxicated man,” which
seems so inappropriate to the intellectual geometer of Amsterdam,
absolutely fits the rapt Neapolitan prophet of the essential unity of
all things. The same vehemence which we have remarked in Neapolitan
men of letters--Pontano, Tansillo, Basile--combines in Bruno with
the metaphysical instinct of the race to form a poet-philosopher, as
incoherent as if he had just emerged from the Sibyl’s cave, but full
of the most surprising intuitions, instinct with the germs of modern
thought and discovery. His very incoherence seems a claim to reverence;
it does not convey the impression of intellectual inadequacy, but
rather of an inspired message transcending mortal powers of speech. A
chastened taste cannot but be offended by the drollery and burlesque
which, like a true Neapolitan, Bruno blends with daring speculation and
serious reflection, as well as by his gaudy rhetoric and exaggerated
euphuism; yet Symonds is right in observing that “when the real divine
œstrum descends upon him the thought is simple, the diction direct;
the attitude of mind and the turn of expression are singularly living,
surprisingly modern.”
Like Galileo, Bruno chose the dialogue as the most convenient form of
propagating his opinions, and unlike most contemporary philosophers,
claims a place among vernacular writers. In his _Spaccio della
Bestia Trionfante_ and his comedy _Il Candelaio_ he is satirical;
metaphysically speculative in the _Cena delle Ceneri_, _Della Causa_,
and _Dell’ Infinito Universo_; but perhaps the most interesting of
his works is _Gli Eroici Furori_, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, a
dithyramb in prose and verse on the progress of the soul to union with
the Divinity. It may be too much to say with the English translator
that in this remarkable book the author “lays down the basis for the
religion of thought and science”; but it is true that the ordinary
ecclesiastical ideals are thrust aside, and progress in truth,
knowledge, and justice declared to be the end of man. If many had
thought so, none had said it so openly. Bruno, however, never learned
to observe, and remained all his life the metaphysician and the poet.
Chief among his intuitions, after his perception of the unity of all
existence, must be placed his instinctive recognition of the immense
revolution which the acceptance of the Copernican theory must effect in
religious belief. It is probable that he thus alarmed the priesthood
ere he could arouse the laity, and that to him must be ascribed the
persecution of Galileo, nearly a century after Copernicus had been
permitted to dedicate his treatise to the Pope.
Bruno’s own martyrdom had preceded Galileo’s; he suffered death in
February 1600, after a life of constant flight and exile, which at
one time brought him to England, where he lectured at Oxford and
became Sidney’s friend, and latterly of imprisonment. His fate is a
striking illustration of the dismal though inevitable change that had
come over the spirit of the ecclesiastical rulers: a Renaissance Pope
would probably have protected him. His name long seemed forgotten,
and his writings obliterated. Early in the eighteenth century
interest in him revived, as is shown by the collection of his works
in Lord Sunderland’s library. Brucker gave an intelligible digest
of his opinions; Schelling avowedly sought inspiration from him;
Coleridge names him with Dante and Ariosto as one of the three most
representative Italians; and at present, even though he be chiefly
efficient through his influence on more disciplined geniuses and more
systematic thinkers, the world has hardly a more striking example of
the truth, “The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become
the head of the corner.”
As Bruno is the personification of martyrdom in the cause of
philosophical speculation, another Neapolitan philosopher of the age,
the Dominican TOMMASO CAMPANELLA (1568-1639) represents martyrdom for
the sake of country. Campanella is not only a less important figure
than Bruno, but less sane and practical. With all his extravagance,
Bruno is no visionary; if he sometimes appears obscure and confused,
the defect is not in the brain, but in the tongue. Campanella, though
endowed with profound ideas, was a visionary who based his hopes
of delivering his country from the Spanish yoke on predictions of
the millennium, to be fulfilled by the advent of the Turks, and was
sufficiently paradoxical to dream of a perfect republic in the kingdom
of Naples. But this alliance of mental unsoundness with extraordinary
intelligence renders him deeply interesting; unlike the frank and
candid Bruno, he is one of the _problematische Naturen_ who, as Goethe
justly says, perpetually attract mankind. The flower of his life
(1599-1625) was spent in prison, and some of it in torture, on account
of a conspiracy which, after all the investigations of Signor Amabile,
remains in many respects obscure, but which was undoubtedly designed to
free Naples from the yoke, not only of Spain, but of Rome.
Released at length, Campanella successively found an asylum at Rome
and at Paris, where he died in 1639. As his captivity became milder,
he had been permitted to write, and to receive visits from friends,
through whom his works found their way to the public. They are mostly
of a political character. The chief, _De Sensu et Magia Naturali_, is
a curious blending of philosophy and occultism; another, a defence of
Galileo, does him honour, even though he afterwards changed his view;
but another, _De Monarchia Universali_, seeks to revive the mediæval
idea of the universal Church and the universal Empire, substituting
Spain for Germany. Until the rediscovery of his poems, his literary
reputation principally rested upon one of his slightest productions,
his _City of the Sun_, an Utopian picture of a perfect community. It
contains a remarkable anticipation of the steamboat: “They possess
rafts and triremes which go over the waters without rowers or the force
of the wind, but by a marvellous contrivance. And other vessels they
have which are moved by the winds.”
Campanella’s claims as a vernacular writer rest entirely upon his
poems, of which there are said to have been seven books. With the
exception of some extracted from the documents of his trial by the
diligence of Signor Amabile, all that remain are the sonnets printed
in Germany by his disciple, Tobias Adami, in 1622, and forgotten
until their republication by Orelli, in 1834. But for these pieces
we should not know the real Campanella, whom they exhibit in a more
favourable light, even as a thinker, than does the brilliant intuition,
chequered with gross credulity, of his professedly philosophical
writings. Like Michael Angelo’s, they are rather hewn than written--the
utterances of a powerful intellect and a passionate heart seeking to
express themselves through a medium but imperfectly mastered, hence
vehement, abrupt, contorted even to the verge of absurdity, but full
of substance, and as remote as possible from the polished inanity
which is so frequently a reproach to the Italian sonnet. Addington
Symonds, wrestling with Campanella as Campanella wrestled with his own
language, has produced excellent translations, accompanied by a careful
commentary. “That this sonnet,” he says of the following, “should have
been written by a Dominican monk, in a Neapolitan prison, in the first
half of the seventeenth century, is truly noteworthy:”
_The people is a beast of muddy brain
That knows not its own force, and therefore stands
Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands
Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein.
One kick would be enough to break the chain;
But the beast fears, and what the child demands
It does; nor its own terror understands,
Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.
Most wonderful! with its own hand it ties
And gags itself--gives itself death and war
For pence doled out by kings from its own store.
Its own are all things between earth and heaven;
But this it knows not, and if one arise
To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven._
Some of Campanella’s other sonnets are very striking, especially his
impassioned remonstrance with the free Swiss for hiring themselves out
to Italian despots. His religious pieces are characterised by a devout
tone, and an unshakeable reliance upon Providence. His creed, like
Bruno’s, is pantheistic. The same is the case with another Neapolitan
thinker of less importance, GIULIO CESARE VANINI (1585-1626), whose
misunderstood pantheism caused him to be burned at Toulouse, the
most intolerant city in France. His writings are in Latin, but so
characteristically Italian in spirit as to deserve the attention of
Italian students. Out of many which he composed, only two were printed.
The _Amphitheatre_ is, in the opinion of Mr. Owen (_Sceptics of the
Italian Renaissance_), decidedly orthodox, the _Dialogues_ are as
decidedly free-thinking, but it is not always quite clear how far the
author is speaking in his own person.
While these adventurous speculators were infusing a ferment into the
quiescent thought of their day, the edifice of modern jurisprudence
was receiving important additions from Alberico Gentili, a Protestant
exile, happily in safety at Oxford, whose works, nevertheless,
belong rather to moral science than to literature. Much at the same
time prose literature was enriched by the ethical prolusions of the
most distinguished poet of the age. Though suffering from delusions
sometimes amounting to frenzy, Tasso’s brain was clear on all subjects
to which these delusions did not extend. He could reason powerfully
and gracefully on any question of taste or morals, arrange his ideas
with symmetry, and support his views with appropriate quotations. The
form which he adopted was the dialogue, requiring not only judgment
and memory, but an accurate discrimination between the interlocutors,
which he always maintains. Even the discourse with his familiar spirit,
although composed in the hospital for lunatics, and containing many
fantastic notions, is consecutive and rational. It is perhaps the most
interesting of any, from its close relation to the writer; although
almost as much may be said for the _Gonzaga_, in which Tasso celebrates
the noble conduct of his father in preferring public duty to private
interest; and the _Paterfamilias_, in which he describes a personal
adventure. His other dialogues, all models of elegance and urbanity,
usually treat of those virtues which enter most especially into the
character of a gentleman, and his own bad success at courts does not
discourage him from tendering advice to courtiers.
A more powerful intellect if a less accomplished pen than Tasso’s
forms a connecting link between the science, alike moral and physical,
and the historical erudition of the age. PIETRO SARPI (1552-1623)
would in our day have been a great natural philosopher; and in fact,
notwithstanding his profound knowledge both of theology and canon
law, his reputation long principally rested upon his experiments
and researches in optics, anatomy, and other natural sciences. Paul
the Fifth’s aggression upon Sarpi’s native Venice in a matter of
ecclesiastical jurisdiction summoned the modest friar to public
life, and after the triumphant issue of the controversy in which
he had borne the chief part, he turned to write the history of the
momentous assembly which had so deeply affected the character of the
Church of Rome for good and ill--the Council of Trent. As a liberal
thinker, whose creed approached without quite attaining the Protestant
standpoint, he was naturally hostile to a convocation which had
stereotyped so many corruptions; while as an ecclesiastical statesman
he was well able to penetrate the worldly motives which had actuated
its conveners from first to last. The substantial truth of his view
of it is generally admitted; it remains a question how far he has
dealt conscientiously with his materials. The equitable Ranke subjects
both him and the antagonistic historian, Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino,
to a close scrutiny, and finds himself unable to entirely acquit or
condemn either of them. Both have frequently displayed a praiseworthy
fairness under strong temptation to garble the documents before them,
but neither has always resisted the inducement to magnify or minimise
evidence in accordance with his prepossessions. Sarpi’s main fault is a
disposition to interpret every document in the light of his own times,
when the pretensions of the Papacy had greatly risen, and its spirit
had become more inflexible and despotic. This, however it may detract
from the value of his history, was pardonable in one who had taken
a leading part in resisting the most arrogant of the Popes, and had
been left for dead by assassins, suborned, as generally believed, by
the Papal court. As an advocate, Sarpi is far superior to his verbose
though often ingenious antagonist; as an historian, Ranke places him
immediately after Machiavelli. As a man, he appears sublimed by study
and suffering into an incarnation of pure intellect, passionless
except in his zeal for truth and freedom and his devotion to the
Republic. “Let us,” he nobly said when the Pope hurled his interdict at
Venice--“let us be Venetians first and Christians afterwards.”
The secular historians of the period are very numerous, but, with the
exception of the Latinist Strada, only two have attained a durable
celebrity. Enrico Caterino Davila (1576-1631), who had become well
acquainted with French affairs by military service in the wars of
religion, wrote the history of these contests from 1558 to 1598
“with Venetian sagacity and soldierly brevity.” He wants few of the
qualifications of an excellent historian, and his history is placed
not far below that of Guicciardini, to which, indeed, it is preferred
by Macaulay. He is accused, however, of affecting more penetration
than he possessed into the secret counsels of princes. Cardinal Guido
Bentivoglio’s history of the revolt of the Low Countries against the
Spaniards (1558-1609) is necessarily defective as coming from the
wrong side. Such a history could not be adequately written without
sympathy with its heroes and comprehension of the principles involved,
neither of which could be expected from a Papal nuncio. Bentivoglio
nevertheless writes with reasonable impartiality, and is well informed
on the exterior of the transactions he records, though utterly blind
to their real significance. His style is most agreeable. His relation
of his mission as nuncio, with speculations on the possibility of
suppressing the Reformation in England and elsewhere, is perhaps more
intrinsically valuable than his history; and his memoirs of his own
career at the Papal court, though necessarily worded with great reserve
and caution, are both entertaining and instructive. He was born in
1577, and died in conclave in 1644, just as he seemed about to be
elected Pope; done to death, Nicius Erythræus affirms, by the snoring
of the Cardinal in the next cell, which deprived him of sleep for
eleven successive nights.
All the authors we have mentioned, though for the most part writing in
the seventeenth century, were born in the sixteenth. The seventeenth
century was far advanced towards its close ere it had produced a single
prose-writer of literary importance, although some of its numerous
penmen were interesting for their characters or the circumstances of
their lives. Bartoli’s _History of the Society of Jesus_ is badly
executed, but important from its subject. GREGORIO LETI was the most
representative figure, personifying the spirit of revolt against
tyranny spiritual and political. Born at Milan in 1630, he emigrated
to Geneva, became a Protestant, and, after a roving life, eventually
settled at Amsterdam, where he died historiographer of the city
in 1701. He had already constituted himself a historiographer and
biographer general, writing the lives of kings, princes, and governors,
and depicting the rise and fall of states, as fast as bookseller could
commission, or printer put into type. Yet he is not a hack writer, but
has an individuality of his own, and although his works are devoid
of scientific worth, they served a useful purpose in their day by
asserting freedom of speech. Their value is in proportion to the degree
in which they subserve this purpose; the most important, therefore,
are his lives of Sixtus V. and of Innocent the Tenth’s rapacious and
imperious niece, Olimpia Maldachini. Ranke has clearly shown that the
former, which has done more than any other book to determine popular
opinion regarding Sixtus, is mainly derived from MS. authorities of
little value; which proves that Leti did not invent, but also that he
did not discriminate.
Several other writers approached Leti’s type, of whom Tomasi, the
author of a very uncritical life of Cæsar Borgia, may be taken as
a specimen. Two emigrant Italians, Siri and Marana, ministered
successfully to the growing appetite for news and political criticism,
soon to engender regular journalism; the former by his _Mercurio_,
published irregularly from 1644 to 1682; the latter by his ingenious
_Turkish Spy_. Ferrante Pallavicino enlivened the general dulness
by his _Divorzio Celeste_, a conception worthy of Lucian, though
not worked out as Lucian would have wrought it, and other satires
which eventually cost him his life. TRAJANO BOCCALINI, nearer the
commencement of the century, had treated political as well as literary
affairs with freedom in his _News from Parnassus_, in which he
professed to impart information respecting transactions in the kingdom
of Apollo. The fiction was greatly admired in its day, translated into
most European languages, and probably exerted considerable influence
upon Quevedo, Swift, and Addison. Boccalini also distinguished himself
as a commentator on Tacitus, a writer much studied at this epoch of
general gloom and discouragement, and as the author of an exposure of
the weakness of the Spanish monarchy, which is said to have occasioned
his assassination.
The one writer, however, whom it is possible to admire without
qualification, and who has preserved his freshness to our own day, is
a traveller, PIETRO DELLA VALLE, who between 1614 and 1626 explored
Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Persia, and part of India. Apart from the
prejudices inevitable in his age and country, Della Valle is the
model of an observant and sagacious voyager, and the letters in which
his observations are recorded form most delightful reading. Later in
the century excellent letters on scientific subjects were written by
Magalotti and Redi. The illustrious naturalists who in some measure
redeemed the intellectual barrenness of the epoch, do not fall within
the domain of literary history, which, except for some poets, is one
of ever-augmenting inanity and insipidity, culminating in absolute
sterility. A second Greece had been enslaved, but this time the fierce
conqueror refused to be himself led into captivity. Spain and the
Papacy and their victim were equally useless to culture, which would
have perished from the earth had it still been confined to the fair land
_Begirt by wall of Alp and azure sea,
And cloven by the ridges Apennine._