THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES: ITALY
Poets: Ariosto, Tasso, Guarini, Folengo, Marini, etc. Prose Writers:
Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Davila.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.--Italy, after Dante and Petrarch, possessed
literary strength and much literary glory in the sixteenth century.
She produced an admirable pleiad of poets and prose writers of high
merit. These were Ariosto, Tasso, Berni, Sannazaro, Machiavelli,
Bandello, Guicciardini. Below them were a hundred distinguished writers,
among which must be cited Aretino, Folengo, Bembo, Baldi, Tansillo,
Dolce, Benvenuto Cellini, Hannibal Caro, and Guarini.
ARIOSTO.--Ariosto wrote _Orlando Furioso_, which is not the epic in
parody, as has been too often observed, but the gay and joyous epopee of
Orlando and his companions. The principal characters are Orlando,
Charlemagne, Renaud, Agramant, Ferragus, Angelica, Bradamante, Marphisa.
The tone is extremely varied and the author is in turns joyous,
satirical, pathetic, melancholy, and even tragical. Ariosto is the
superlative poet of fantastic imagination combined with a foundation of
good sense, reason, and benevolence. Goethe has said of him very aptly:
"From a cloud of gold wisdom sometimes thunders sublime sentences, whilst
to a harmonious lute, folly seems to riot in savage digressions yet all
the while maintains a perfect measure." Ariosto was well read in the
classics, but fundamentally his master was Homer.
TASSO.--Torquato Tasso, whose life was characterised by a thousand trials
and who was long the victim of a mental malady, wrote a poem on the
crusade of Godfrey de Bouillon. The poem is full of the supernatural;
the chief characters are Renaud, Tancred, the enchantress Armida,
Clorinda. The inspiration of Tasso is specially mystic and lyrical;
his facility for description is delicious. The repute of _Jerusalem
Delivered_ in the seventeenth century was immense, and all the
literatures of Europe have innumerable references to the personages and
episodes of the poem. In Italy there were fervid partisans of the
superiority of Tasso over Ariosto or of Ariosto over Tasso, and many
duels on the subject, the most bellicose being, as always happens,
between those who had read neither.
BERNI.--Berni, like Ariosto, was half burlesque in the diverting portions
of his works. He wrote satires which were often virulent, paradoxes such
as the eulogy of the plague and of famine, and an _Amorous Orlando_
which is quite agreeable. The Bernesque type, that is, the humoristic,
was created by him and bears his name.
SANNAZARO.--Sannazaro wrote both in Latin and Italian. His chief claim to
fame lies in his _Arcadia_, an idyllic poem of bucolic sentiment,
destined to evoke thousands of imitations. He also produced eclogues and
sonnets in Italian which give sufficient grounds for regarding him as one
of the chief masters of that language.
MACHIAVELLI.--Great thinker, great politician, great moral philosopher,
Machiavelli possessed one of the most powerful minds ever known. He wrote
_The Prince_, _Discourses upon Livius_, an _Art of War_, diplomatic
letters and reports, for he was at one time secretary to the Florentine
Republic, a _History of Florence_, a comedy (_The Mandrake_),
romances and tales. _The Prince_ is a treatise of the art of acquiring
and preserving power by all possible means and more particularly by
intelligent and discreet crime. Machiavelli emphasised the separation, at
times relative, at times absolute, which exists between politics and
morals. His _Discourses upon Livius_ are full of sense, penetration, and
profundity; his light works show a singular dexterity of thought united
to a fundamental grossness which it would be impossible to misunderstand
or excuse.
BANDELLO.--Bandello is the author of novels in the vein of those of
Boccaccio or of Brantôme. His voluntary or spontaneous originality
consists in mixing licentious tales with sentences and maxims which are
most austere and moral. He also wrote elegiac odes that were highly
esteemed. His very pure style is considered in Italy to be strictly
classical.
GUICCIARDINI.--Guicciardini wrote with infinite patience, severe
conscientiousness, and imperturbable frigidity in a style that was
pure, though somewhat prolix, that _History of Florence_, virtually a
history of Italy, which from its first appearance was hailed as a classic
and has remained one. His history is altogether that of a statesman; he
passed his life among prominent public affairs, being Governor of Modena,
Parma, and Bologna, a diplomatist involved in the most important
negotiations; this historian is himself a historical personage.
FOLENGO.--Folengo wrote a macaronic poem: that is to say, one in which
Latin and Italian were mixed, called _Coccacius_ (which must be
remembered because when translated into French it became the earliest
model for Rabelais), as well as _Orlandini_ (childhood of Orlando), which
is amusing. Other serious works did not merit serious consideration.
ARETINO.--Aretino was a satirist and a poet so fundamentally licentious
that he has remained the type of infamous author. He wrote comedies
(_The Courtesan_, _The Marshal_, _The Philosopher_, _The Hypocrite_),
intimate letters that are extremely interesting for the study of the
customs of his day, religious and edifying books, replete with talent if
not with sincerity, as well as an innumerable mass of satires, pamphlets,
statements, diatribes which caused all the princes of his day to tremble,
and through making them tremble also brought gold into the coffers of
Aretino; he had raised blackmail to the height of a literary department.
BEMBO; BALDI.--Cardinal Bembo, a devout Ciceronian to the verge of
fanaticism, wrote more especially in Latin, but left Italian poems of
much elegance and charm; he ranks among the most brilliant
representatives of the Italian Renaissance.
Baldi, a very widely versed scholar, sought relaxation from his erudition
in writing _eclogues_, _moral poems_, and a very curious didactic poem on
_navigation_.
TANSILLO; DOLCE.--Tansillo, a very fertile poet, composed a rather
licentious poem entitled _The Vintager_, and a religious poem called
_The Tears of St. Peter_ (which the younger Malherbe thought so beautiful
that he partially translated it), _The Rustic Prophet_ and _The
Nurse_, wherein he showed himself the pupil of Tasso, comedies, a
bucolic drama, etc.
Dolce, not less prolific, produced five epic poems of which the best is
_The Childhood of Orlando_, many comedies, for the most part imitations
of Plautus, tragedies after Euripides and Seneca, and then one which
seems to have been original and was the celebrated _Mariamna_, so often
imitated in French. He was also an indefatigable translator of Horace,
Cicero, Philostrates, etc.
BENVENUTO CELLINI.--The great sculptor and chaser, Benvenuto Cellini,
belongs to literary history because of his _Treatise on Goldsmithing and
Sculpture_ and his admirable _Memoirs_, which are certainly in part
fictitious, but are a literary work of the foremost rank.
HANNIBAL CARO; GUARINI.--Hannibal Caro, by his _poems_, his
_letters_, his literary criticism, his comedy, _The Beggars_, and his
metrical translation of the _Aeneid_, acquired high rank in the judgment
both of Italy and Europe.
Guarini, the friend of Tasso, whom he helped in the labour of revising
and correcting _Jerusalem Delivered_, was unquestionably his pupil. Tasso
having written a bucolic poem, _Aminta_, Guarini wrote a bucolic poem,
_The Faithful Shepherd_, which has been one of the greatest literary
successes ever known. It was a kind of irregular drama mingled with
songs and dances, highly varied, poetic, pathetic sometimes in a rather
insipid way. All the _pastorals_, whether French or Italian, and later
the opera itself, can be traced to Guarini, or at least the taste for the
eclogue may be derived from the dramas Guarini originated. This was a man
whose influence has been considerable not only on literature, but also on
manners, customs, and morals.
DECADENCE OF LITERATURE.--In the seventeenth century Italian literature
indisputably was in decadence. In verse more especially, but also in
prose, it was the period of ability without depth and even without
foundation, of elegant and affected verbiage or burlesque lacking alike
in power, thought, and passion. Marini loomed large with his _Adonis_, an
ingenious mythological epic, sometimes brilliant but also lame, sometimes
full of points, but also with trifles. Great as was his reputation in
Italy, it was perhaps surpassed in France, where he was welcomed and
flattered by Marie de' Medici and hyperbolically praised by Voiture,
Balzac, Scudéry, etc.
SALVATOR ROSA; TASSONI; MAFFEI.--The great painter Salvator Rosa devoted
himself hardly less to literature; he left lyrical poems and particularly
satires which are far from lacking spirit, though often destitute of
taste. Satiric, too, was the paradoxical Tassoni, who scoffed at
Petrarch, and who in his _Thoughts_, long prior to J.J. Rousseau, was the
first, perhaps (but who knows?), to maintain that literature is highly
prejudicial to society and humanity, and who achieved fame by his _Rape
of the Bucket_: that is, by a burlesque poem on the quarrel between
the Bolognese and the inhabitants of Modena about a bucket.
Maffei (intruding somewhat on the eighteenth century), good scholar and
respected historian, produced in 1714 his _Merope_, which was an
excellent tragedy, as Voltaire well knew and also testified.
HISTORIANS AND CRITICS.--In prose there are none to point out in the
eighteenth century in Italy except historians and critics. Among
the historians must be noted Davila, who spent his youth in France near
Catherine de' Medici, served in the French armies, and on his return to
Padua devoted his old age to history. He wrote a _History of the Civil
Wars in France_ which was highly esteemed, and which Fénelon recollected
when writing his _Letter on the Pursuits of the French Academy_. The
foregoing are what must be mentioned as notable manifestations of
literary activity in Italy during the seventeenth century, but let it
not be forgotten that the scientific activity of the period was
magnificent, and that it was the century of Galileo, of Torricelli; of
the _four_ Cassini, as well as of so many others who were praised, as
they deserved to be, in the _Eulogies of the Learned_ of Fontenelle.