THE POETRY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The blight that fell upon Italian literature near the close of the
sixteenth century was in the main to be ascribed to tyranny, temporal
and spiritual. Yet there was another source of ill for which neither
monarch nor priest was responsible: this was the malady which
necessarily befalls every form of literature and art when the bounds
of perfection have been reached, the craving to improve upon what is
incapable of improvement; first, perhaps, distinctly evinced in this
age by the Spanish bishop Guevara, author of the _Dial of Princes_
(1529), who invented what he called the _estilo alto_, which, if not
absolutely the predominant, had by the end of the century become a
conspicuous element in every European literature. The true course
would have been a new departure like that made by the Spanish and
Dutch masters when Italian art had fulfilled its mission; but this
requires not only genius, but the concurrence of favourable social and
political circumstances, without which nothing is possible but servile
repetition or preposterous exaggeration. Genius born amid inauspicious
surroundings is more prone to elect the latter than the former
alternative, and the greater the natural gift, the more outrageous the
abuse likely to be made of it.
Such epidemics are of no unfrequent occurrence in the history of
every literature; but at the beginning of the seventeenth century the
plague was common to all, and it was but natural that none should
suffer so severely as that which had hitherto been the model of good
taste. There seems no good reason for attributing this particular
affliction to Spanish influence. Spain had her Gongora, as Italy her
Marini, but there is no evidence that either taught the other. It was
a prevalent malady, which left Italian prose by no means unaffected.
Cardinal Bentivoglio, himself a model of pure and simple composition in
prose, though in verse an admirer of Marini, says of the poet Ciampoli,
redactor of briefs under Clement VIII., that his style would have been
in place if he had been inditing an heroic poem. Ciampoli’s poetry
was not likely to be more chastened than his prose; and in truth the
determination to dazzle and astonish at any cost was inevitably most
conspicuous in the branch of literature where a divine transport, when
real and not simulated, is rightly held to excuse many lapses from
absolute purity of diction; and where, as was also to be expected,
the arch offender was a man of genuine gifts, who with more natural
refinement and moral earnestness might have regenerated the literature
of his country, but whose false brilliancy only served to lure it
further astray.
It is the best apology of GIOVANNI BATTISTA MARINI (1569-1625) to
have been born a Neapolitan. From the days of Statius till now,
these vehement children of the South have been great improvisers.
Could we look upon Marini in this light, we should find little but
his voluptuousness to censure, and should be compelled to admire him
in some measure as a remarkable phenomenon, only lamenting that his
contemporaries should have mistaken a _lusus naturæ_ for an inspired
genius, a calculating boy for a Newton or a Galileo. It might indeed
have been better for Marini if he had trusted more to his natural
faculty for improvisation. “His first strokes,” says Settembrini,
“are sometimes beautiful, and if he left them as they were all would
be well, but he touches and retouches until they are quite blurred.”
This refers to the descriptions in his _Adone_ (1623), a poem which
is nothing but description. Adonis does nothing, but is carried
involuntarily through a series of situations contrived to display the
pictorial power of the poet. The showman makes the puppet dance, and
the puppet returns the compliment. There is no story, no moral, no
character, no inner unity, nothing but forty-five thousand lines of
word-painting, rich and brilliant indeed, but commonplace in so far
as the poet sees nothing invisible to ordinary eyes, and evinces no
originality in his manner of regarding man and nature.
Such merely verbal beauty must inevitably satiate, and Marini has
experienced more neglect, and even contempt, than many men of far
inferior faculty. In his own day he carried all before him, and was
even more admired in France than in Italy. It is at least to his credit
not to have undertaken his gorgeous but empty _Adone_ until he had
convinced himself of his inability to vie with Tasso in a nobler form
of epic. He also composed one really dignified poem on the deplorable
condition of Italy (attributed, however, by many to Fulvio Testi),
and poured forth a flood of idyllic and bucolic, marine, erotic, and
lyrical poetry, not devoid of striking beauties, but so disfigured by
conceits as to be necessarily condemned to oblivion upon the revival
of a purer taste. In some respects he might be compared to the Cowleys
and Crashaws of Charles the First’s time; but he is physical, while
they are metaphysical; his conceits are less far-fetched and ingenious
than theirs, and few of them either could or would have produced his
licentious, but, in an artistic point of view, admirable _Pastorella_.
Marini’s influence on the contemporary poetry of his own country was
very great; but the two or three men of genius remained unaffected
by him, and the names of his multitudinous imitators are not worth
preserving. His life, though chequered by scrapes and quarrels, was on
the whole prosperous, and the patronage of the French court made him
independent of the petty princes of Italy. He had bitter enemies in
Gasparo Murtola, a poet who would be forgotten but for his and Marini’s
mutual lampoons, and Tommaso Stigliani, a more considerable personage,
who had enjoyed the great honour of being run through the body by the
historian Davila, and whose early promise had drawn a sonnet from
Tasso, remarkable for the hint it affords that Tasso himself had
projected an epic upon Columbus:
_Thy song Orphean, able to placate
The Stygian thrones, and wailing shades appease,
Stiglian, doth so upon my spirit seize,
Mine own in its compare I humbly rate.
And if like Autumn with thy April mate
As promised by such harbingers as these,
Thou’lt pass the pillared bounds of Hercules,
And safe to utmost Thule navigate.
Now, parted from the crowd, intrepid go,
Scaling steep Helicon, thy high desire,
No more in dread to wander to and fro.
There swaying from a cypress hangs my lyre;
Salute it in my name, and bid it know
That Time and Fortune for my ill conspire._
The peculiar appropriateness of Tasso’s compliment arises from the
fact that Stigliani was then engaged upon an epic on the discovery of
America, which was far from justifying Torquato’s predictions.
The style of Marini, however, was not allowed to bear unchallenged
sway. The first place in lyrical poetry was boldly claimed by, and
by many accorded to, another bard, whose personal and poetical
idiosyncrasies stood in strong contrast to the Neapolitan’s. GABRIELLO
CHIABRERA (1552-1637), a native of Savona, was a man of antique
mould, haughty, aspiring, and self-sufficing. His youth was spent at
Rome. Jealous of his honour, he found himself, as he tells us in his
autobiography, necessitated to wash out sundry affronts in blood, which
he accomplished to his satisfaction, but whether in single combat or
in other fashion he does not explicitly say. Retired for safety to
his native Ligurian town, and digesting the large assortment of ideas
which he had brought away with him from the literary circles of Rome,
he hit upon the great discovery of his life, that the Italian canzone
needed to be reformed upon a Greek model. It really was a discovery
which changed the whole course of his literary activity--of no such
importance as that of the need of a closer observation of nature which
Wordsworth deduced from noticing the blackness of a leaf outlined
against a sunny sky, but still a genuine discovery. Its value lay
not so much in its abstract worth or in any real assimilation of the
spirit of Greek poetry by Chiabrera, but in an endeavour after a high
standard, which, even when misdirected, proved the best corrective of
the inanity and effeminacy to which the Italian canzone had become
prone.
Chiabrera might be somewhat conventional in style and barren in
thought: he was all the more a precious antidote to the dissolute
lusciousness of a Marini, and his example exercised a salutary
influence throughout the whole of the seventeenth century. So late as
1740, Spence, travelling in Italy, was told that the Italian lyrical
poets of the day were divisible into Petrarchists and Chiabrerists. The
popularity of so bold an innovator, and the honours and distinctions
showered upon him by princes and potentates, are creditable to the age.
He wrote his brief autobiography at eighty, and died at eighty-five,
exulting to the last in his sanity of mind and body; distinguished
also, according to Rossi (Nicius Erythræus), as the ugliest of the
poets: “Quis enim qui ejus faciem aspexisset, arbitratus esset, ex
illius ore subnigro, tetrico, invenusto, tam candidula, tam vinula, tam
venustula carmina posse prodere?” A man congenial to Wordsworth, who
has translated some of his stately metrical epitaphs with corresponding
dignity.[20] He has many traits of those great modern masters of form,
Landor and Platen, but, though no mean sculptor of speech, falls as
much behind them in perfection of classic mould as he surpasses them in
productiveness.
Chiabrera wrote several epics, dramas, poems on sacred history, and
other pieces, and the mass of his poetry is of formidable extent; but
apart from his _Sermoni_, felicitous imitations of Horace, he lives
solely by his lyrics. These fall into two classes, which he would have
described as Pindaric and Anacreontic. The former are set compositions
of great pomp and magnificence; not like Marini’s poems, depending
upon verbal beauty alone, but upon a real if formal grandeur of style.
They are less like the notes of Apollo’s lyre than orchestras of all
sorts of instruments, “flute, violin, bassoon,” but more particularly
bassoon. They are splendidly sonorous, and exhibit great art in
heightening ordinary ideas by magnificent diction. Of the wild,
untutored graces of the woods and fields they have absolutely nothing;
their sphere is the court, save for the feeling which Chiabrera, as
becomes a Ligurian, occasionally manifests for the sea; and the ideas
are seldom absolutely novel, though they often seem so. But there is
true elevation of thought and majesty of diction: a lyrical afflatus
seems to descend upon the poet and whirl him on, sped, in the absence
of a really inspiring subject, by his own excitement, as a courser is
urged along by the thunder of his own hoofs. Yet there is no factitious
emotion, the theme is really for the moment everything to the poet,
while he remains sufficiently master of himself to turn every strong
point to the best account.
Like the surviving lyrics of his model Pindar, his odes are usually
addressed to particular persons or prompted by some event. Among the
best are the long series he poured forth on occasion of the trifling
victories gained by the Italian galleys over the Turks, which prove
how fine a patriotic poet he might have been if his age had given him
anything better to celebrate. His Anacreontics precisely correspond to
his Pindarics, brilliant effusions with more glitter than glow, but
ingenious, felicitous, and transcending mere rhetoric by the exquisite
music of the versification. Chiabrera is not an Italian Pindar or
Anacreon, and his natural gift for poetry was inferior to Marini’s; but
he is entitled to the great honour of having barred out by a strong
dike the flood of false taste, and having conferred dignity upon a most
unpropitious age of Italian literature.
Chiabrera’s mantle fell upon Count FULVIO TESTI (1593-1646), in some
respects a more genuine poet, though his inferior in splendour of
language and harmony of versification, and like him infertile in ideas
and contracted in his outlook upon the world. Testi was nevertheless
an interesting personage, picturesque in the style of Rembrandt or
Caravaggio, an unquiet spirit, haughty, moody, vindictive. Under a free
government he might have been a great citizen, but the circumstances of
his age left him no other sphere than court or diplomatic employment.
He was not the man to run easily in harness, and spent his life in
losing and regaining the favour of the Este princes, now come down to
be Dukes of Modena, but still with places and pensions in their gift,
and died in prison, just as, if the Duke may be believed, he was on
the point of being released. If so, the cause of his disgrace was
probably nothing graver than his wish to quit the Duke’s service. In
any case, the tale of his having been secretly decapitated to appease
the resentment of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, satirised in his famous
canzone, _Ruscelletto orgoglioso_, seems to be a mere legend.
This canzone is undoubtedly one of the finest lyrics in the Italian
language, magnificent alike in its description of the swollen rivulet
and in its application to the inflated upstart. The rest of Testi’s
better compositions resemble it; they are odes stately in diction
and sonorous in versification, fine examples of the grand style in
poetry, and proving what dignity of style can effect even without any
considerable opulence or striking novelty of thought. They are usually
on subjects personal to himself, sometimes depicting the miseries of
court life with the feeling that comes from experience, sometimes
affecting a philosophical tranquillity to which he was really a
stranger. One stands out from the rest, the poem which he addressed in
his youth to the Duke of Savoy, exhorting him to deliver Italy from
the Spaniards. Testi was not alone in the prophetic foresight that
the redemption of Italy would come from Savoy. Campanella, Chiabrera,
and others of the best Italians of the day shared it with him, but no
other has given it such direct and eloquent expression. The genius of
Italy appears in vision to the poet, enumerates her wrongs, denounces
her oppressor, and calls for vengeance in a series of most animated
octaves, equally impressive and persuasive.
Marini’s school continued to dominate literary circles, although Rossi
assures us that Testi’s simplicity was more acceptable to readers
at large. “The sun,” says Vernon Lee, “cooled itself in the waters
of rivers which were on fire; the celestial sieve, resplendent with
shining holes, was swept by the bristly back of the Apennines; love
was an infernal heaven and a celestial hell, it was burning ice and
freezing fire, and was inspired by ladies made up entirely of coral,
gold thread, lilies, roses, and ivory, on whose lips sat Cupids
shooting arrows which were snakes.” Poetry worthy of the name seemed
extinct after Testi’s death, and the literature of England being then
unknown beyond her own borders, the sceptre over every department of
intellectual activity except science passed into the hand of France.
After a while, however, signs of revival became apparent. The writers
who restored to Italy some share of her ancient glory were all strongly
influenced by Chiabrera.
The first of these in order of time was a man who would have been
famous if he had never written a verse, FRANCESCO REDI (1626-99), the
illustrious physician and naturalist. One would scarcely have expected
this eager scrutiniser of nature to have come forward as a Bacchanalian
laureate; but certain it is that, neglecting the more imposing side
of Chiabrera’s poetical work, Redi applied himself to develop the
dithyramb in its strict sense of a Bacchic song. Chiabrera had given
excellent examples of this on a small scale; but Redi completely
distanced him with his _Bacchus in Tuscany_, where the jolly god,
returned from his Indian conquest, for the benefit of Ariadne passes
in review literally and figuratively all the wines of Tuscany, with
such consequences as is reasonable to expect. The literary character of
the piece cannot be better described than by Salfi, the continuator of
Ginguené, as “consisting in the enthusiasm which passes rapidly from
one theme to another, and, seeming to say nothing but what it chooses,
says, in effect, nothing but what it should.” Dryden evidently had
it in mind when he wrote _Alexander’s Feast_, and the difficulties
of translation have been surprisingly overcome by Leigh Hunt. Redi’s
sonnets are also remarkable, occasionally tame in subject or disfigured
by conceits, but in general nobly thought and nobly expressed, with
a strong Platonic element. They nearly all relate to Love, and fall
into two well-marked divisions, one upbraiding him as the source of
perpetual torment, the other celebrating him as the symbol of Divinity,
and the chief agent by which man is raised above himself. The latter
thought has seldom been more finely expressed than in the following
pair of sonnets, the first of which is translated by Mr. Gosse:
_Love is the Minstrel; for in God’s own sight,
The master of all melody, he stands,
And holds a golden rebeck in his hands,
And leads the chorus of the saints in light;
But ever and anon those chambers bright
Detain him not, for down to these low lands
He flies, and spreads his musical commands,
And teaches men some fresh divine delight.
For with his bow he strikes a single chord
Across a soul, and wakes in it desire
To grow more pure and lovely, and aspire
To that ethereal country where, outpoured
From myriad stars that stand before the Lord,
Love’s harmonies are like a flame of fire._
_If I am aught, it is Love’s miracle,
He to rough mass gave shape with forming file;
He, as youth bloomed in April’s sunny smile,
Came through the eyes within the heart to dwell.
My Lord and Master he, who bade expel
All sordid thought and apprehension vile,
Sweetness bestowed on rude unmellowed style,
And melody that shall be memorable.
My spirit at his call her pinions bent
To wing the heavenly realm where Time is not;
From star to star he beckoned, and she went:
By him my heart hath chosen for her lot
True honour whose renown shall ne’er be spent;
If aught my soul hath borne, ’twas he begot._
Poets are often found to be gregarious. Redi had two chief friends
at the Tuscan court--Menzini, of whom we shall have to speak, and
Filicaja, who in an unpoetical age raised the Italian lyric to as
great a height as it had ever attained in the Cinque Cento. VINCENZO
FILICAJA (1642-1707) is one of the highest examples the world has seen
of the academical poet, the man who is rarely hurried away by the god,
but who seriously and perseveringly follows poetry as an art, in whose
breast the sacred fire is always burning, but always needing to be
stirred up. A grave, just magistrate, and a deeply religious man, he
was well constituted to sing events of such importance to the Christian
commonwealth as the deliverance of Vienna by Sobieski, and, from his
point of view, the conversion of Queen Christina. Tender, affectionate,
and carrying with him the life-long wound of an unfortunate passion,
he was no less qualified to be the laureate of domestic sorrow, while
his elevation of mind lent uncommon dignity to many of his occasional
pieces, especially his sonnets. If only his scrolls smelt less of the
lamp he might deserve Macaulay’s exaggerated praise as the greatest
lyrist of modern times, supposing this expression to denote the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The great qualities of Filicaja are majesty and tenderness. The _non
bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur majestas et amor_ only applies
to him in so far as these gifts, though dwelling in the same breast,
are not often found united in the same poem. His canzoni possess
amplitude of form and pomp of diction, seldom or never bombastic,
or transgressing the limits of good taste. From this the poet was
preserved by his deep seriousness, to which anything like tinsel
was utterly abhorrent. He strongly felt the obligation to exert his
utmost strength when writing on an important theme, as he usually did
when he wrote at all. It is his manner to approach his subject from
a variety of sides, and make each the topic of a separate poem. Thus
his great cycle of odes on the relief of Vienna, perhaps the finest of
his works, consists of six separate productions, constituting a grand
whole, but any one of which could have stood perfectly well by itself.
Such a method of composition implies great deliberation, and Filicaja
rarely conveys the impression of a seer or a bard. His thoughts are
sometimes trite, but the feeling which gives them birth is always deep
and sincere. The same is true of the best of his numerous sonnets, some
of which rise to grandeur. By far the finest is the famous _Italia,
Italia, a cui feò la sorte_, which is to Italian literature what
Milton’s sonnet on the massacre of the Vaudois is to English:
_Italia, O Italia, doomed to wear
The fatal wreath of loveliness, and so
The record of illimitable woe
Branded for ever on thy brow to bear!
Would that less beauty or more vigour were
Thy heritage! that they who madly glow
For that which their own fury layeth low,
More terrible might find thee, or less fair!
Not from thine Alpine rampart should the horde
Of spoilers then descend, or crimson stain
Of rolling Po quench thirst of Gallic steed:
Nor should’st thou, girded with another’s sword,
Smite with a foreign arm, enslavement’s chain,
Victor or vanquished, equally thy meed._
Filicaja, however, did not always compose in this majestic style.
He could be light and playful. Some of his sonnets, like those of
Tansillo and other writers of the Cinque Cento, strongly bring out the
characteristic distinction between the Italian and the English sonnet,
which is entirely in favour of the former. The English sonnet, even
when dealing with a light theme, is apt to be ponderous. The Italian,
even when serious, is tuneful, and buoyant on the wing.
Filicaja fixed the model of the Italian canzone for a long time, for
the innovations of his successor ALESSANDRO GUIDI (1650-1712), a
protégé of Queen Christina, and one of the founders of the “Arcadia,”
had more admirers than imitators. They consisted in the irregularity
and sometimes the disuse of rhyme, interesting as experiments, but
unfavourable to the stately march of the most dignified form of lyrical
composition. Guidi was nevertheless a fine poet, and manifests a
peculiar fire and dignity when hymning the glories and tragedies of
Rome. He must have been a very ermine among authors, if it be true that
he died of disgust at a misprint in one of his books.
Three other poets who did not aspire to the elevation of Filicaja and
Guidi, aided to re-enthrone sound taste, and did honour to the end
of the seventeenth century. BENEDETTO MENZINI (1646-1704), another
protégé of Christina’s, and in some sense a pupil of Redi, wrote
caustic satires, graceful Anacreontics, respectable odes, and an Art
of Poetry as sound as could be expected from one whose knowledge of
modern literature was so limited. To see, more than half a century
after Shakespeare, the Solimano and the Torrismondo propounded as the
highest modern examples of tragic art certainly inspires cogitation
touching the serviceableness of the light within, supposing that light
to be darkness. Within his limits, however, Menzini is most judicious,
and his own compositions do credit to his maxims; witness the following
keen satiric apologue in sonnet form:
_A tender slip of laurel I of late
Implanted in fair soil, and Heaven besought
To prosper till it might, to fulness brought,
Enshade the brow august of Laureate;
And Zephyrus to boot did supplicate
To fan with soothing wing, lest harm in aught
By bitter breath of Boreas should be wrought,
Loosed from the cave where Æolus holds state.
Tardy and difficult, full well I know,
The upward striving of Apollo’s spray,
Matched with frail growths that lightly come and go;
Yet chide we not the fortunate delay,
If, when the bay is worthy of the brow,
Brow there be also worthy of the bay._
Carlo Maria Maggi (1630-99), without soaring high, did excellent work
in ode, sonnet, and madrigal. Francesco Lemene (1634-1704) was more
ambitious, but his tumid religious poetry has fallen into oblivion, and
he only lives by his pretty Anacreontics.
As the great questions which had divided the preceding century became
settled, and political interests narrowed more and more, the spirit
of the age naturally turned to satire. Menzini is its best satirist;
but at an earlier period Chiabrera, Soldani, and the impetuous and
unequal Salvator Rosa had exercised themselves in this department
of literature, and the century’s last literary sensation was the
successive appearance of the Latin satires of Sergardi (Sectanus),
models of composition, which for nearly a decade kept the reading
portion of the Roman public in an uproar. It might have been thought
that comedy would have flourished, but some promising beginnings died
away, while opera progressed steadily. Tragedies continued to be
written on the classical system, but there was no power to breathe
life into the old forms, unless the great temporary success of
Prospero Bonarelli’s _Solimano_, which we have seen Menzini parallel
with Tasso’s _Torrismondo_, may be taken to denote an exception. The
_Phillis of Scyros_ of Bonarelli’s brother Giudubaldo was the one
achievement in pastoral drama. The novelette languished, and chivalric
fiction had but one representative in Italy, the _Caloandro_ of
Giuseppe Ambrogio Marini, an excellent romance nevertheless, ending
with five marriages, where monarchs and warriors play the part of the
antiquated knights-errant, and so superior in sanity to the unwieldy
fictions of the Clélie type that Caylus thought it worth translating
into French in the following century. The _Eudemia_ of J. V. Rossi
(Nicius Erythræus), in Latin, is a good specimen of the _Argenis_ class
of romances. The same author’s _Pinacotheca_, in three parts, a most
entertaining repertory of biographies, chiefly more or less literary,
of the early part of the century, is further remarkable as indicative
of a perception of the growing needs of the world, and an unconscious
foreshadowing of a culture as yet afar off. And this is broadly the
character of the seventeenth century in Italy, a poor and barren time
if paralleled with the past, but pregnant with the seeds of future
harvests, repressed for a time by ungenial circumstances. Comparing
the Italian literature of the seventeenth century with that of England
and France, we see that all ran through substantially the same stages,
but that, while these are vigorous alike in their aberrations and
their reforms, Italian literature is languid in both, a circumstance
sufficiently accounted for by its absolute enslavement, and their
comparative freedom.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] It is not improbable that the “three feet long and two feet wide,”
which brought such ridicule upon Wordsworth, may be a reminiscence of
Chiabrera’s description of his house, “Di cui l’ampiezza venticinque
braccia Forse consume.”