One day, near the close of the seventeenth century, a number of
ladies and gentlemen--mostly poets and poetesses according to their
thinking were assembled on a pleasant hill in the neighborhood of
Rome. As they lounged upon the grass, in attitudes as graceful and
picturesque as they could contrive, and listened to a sonnet or an
ode with the sweet patience of their race,--for they were all
Italians,--it occurred to the most conscious man among them that here
was something uncommonly like the Golden Age, unless that epoch had
been flattered. There had been reading and praising of odes and
sonnets the whole blessed afternoon, and now he cried out to the
complaisant, canorous company, “Behold Arcadia revived in us!”
This struck everybody at once by its truth. It struck, most of all, a
certain Giovan Maria Crescimbeni, honored in his day and despised in
ours as a poet and critic. He was of a cold, dull temperament; “a mind
half lead, half wood”, as one Italian writer calls him; but he was an
inveterate maker of verses, and he was wise in his own generation. He
straightway proposed to the tuneful _abbés, cavalieri serventi_, and
_précieuses_, who went singing and love-making up and down Italy in
those times, the foundation of a new academy, to be called the Academy
of the Arcadians.
Literary academies were then the fashion in Italy, and every part of
the peninsula abounded in them. They bore names fanciful or grotesque,
such as The Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or
The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray,
The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the
production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think
of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of
the grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of
the inane formalities of their sessions. At the meetings of a famous
academy in Milan, they placed in the chair a child just able to talk;
a question was proposed, and the answer of the child, whatever it was,
was held by one side to solve the problem, and the debates, _pro_ and
_con_, followed upon this point. Other academies in other cities had
other follies; but whatever the absurdity, it was encouraged alike by
Church and State, and honored by all the great world. The governments
of Italy in that day, whether lay or clerical, liked nothing so well
as to have the intellectual life of the nation squandered in the
trivialities of the academies--in their debates about nothing, their
odes and madrigals and masks and sonnets; and the greatest politeness
you could show a stranger was to invite him to a sitting of your
academy; to be furnished with a letter to the academy in the next city
was the highest favor you could ask for yourself.
In literature, the humorous Bernesque school had passed; Tasso had
long been dead; and the Neapolitan Marini, called the Corrupter of
Italian poetry, ruled from his grave the taste of the time. This
taste was so bad as to require a very desperate remedy, and it was
professedly to counteract it that the Academy of the Arcadians had
arisen.
The epoch was favorable, and, as Emiliani-Giudici (whom we shall
follow for the present) teaches, in his History of Italian Literature,
the idea of Crescimbeni spread electrically throughout Italy. The
gayest of the finest ladies and gentlemen the world ever saw, the
_illustrissimi_ of that polite age, united with monks, priests,
cardinals, and scientific thinkers in establishing the Arcadia; and
even popes and kings were proud to enlist in the crusade for the true
poetic faith. In all the chief cities Arcadian colonies were formed,
“dependent upon the Roman Arcadia, as upon the supreme Arch-Flock”,
and in three years the Academy numbered thirteen hundred members,
every one of whom had first been obliged to give proof that he was a
good poet. They prettily called themselves by the names of shepherds
and shepherdesses out of Theocritus, and, being a republic, they
refused to own any earthly prince or ruler, but declared the Baby
Jesus to be the Protector of Arcadia. Their code of laws was written
in elegant Latin by a grave and learned man, and inscribed upon
tablets of marble.
According to one of the articles, the Academicians must study to
reproduce the customs of the ancient Arcadians and the character of
their poetry; and straightway “Italy was filled on every hand with
Thyrsides, Menalcases, and Meliboeuses, who made their harmonious
songs resound the names of their Chlorises, their Phyllises, their
Niceas; and there was poured out a deluge of pastoral compositions”,
some of them by “earnest thinkers and philosophical writers, who were
not ashamed to assist in sustaining that miserable literary vanity
which, in the history of human thought, will remain a lamentable
witness to the moral depression of the Italian nation.” As a pattern
of perfect poetizing, these artless nymphs and swains chose Constanzo,
a very fair poet of the sixteenth century. They collected his verse,
and printed it at the expense of the Academy; and it was established
without dissent that each Arcadian in turn, at the hut of some
conspicuous shepherd, in the presence of the keeper (such was the
jargon of those most amusing unrealities), should deliver a commentary
upon some sonnet of Constanzo. As for Crescimbeni, who declared that
Arcadia was instituted “strictly for the purpose of exterminating bad
taste and of guarding against its revival, pursuing it continually,
wherever it should pause or lurk, even to the most remote and
unconsidered villages and hamlets”--Crescimbeni could not do less than
write four dialogues, as he did, in which he evolved from four of
Constanzo's sonnets all that was necessary for Tuscan lyric poetry.
“Thus,” says Emiliani-Giudici, referring to the crusading intent of
Crescimbeni, “the Arcadians were a sect of poetical Sanfedista, who,
taking for example the zeal and performance of San Domingo de Gruzman,
proposed to renew in literature the scenes of the Holy Office among
the Albigenses. Happily, the fire of Arcadian verse did not really
burn! The institution was at first derided, then it triumphed and
prevailed in such fame and greatness that, shining forth like a
new sun, it consumed the splendor of the lesser lights of heaven,
eclipsing the glitter of all those academies--the Thunderstruck, the
Extravagant, the Humid, the Tipsy, the Imbeciles, and the like--which
had hitherto formed the glory of the Peninsula.”
I
Giuseppe Torelli, a charming modern Italian writer, in a volume called
_Paessaggi e Profili_ (Landscapes and Profiles), makes a study of
Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni, one of the most famous of the famous Arcadian
shepherds; and from this we may learn something of the age and society
in which such a folly could not only be possible but illustrious. The
patriotic Italian critics and historians are apt to give at least a
full share of blame to foreign rulers for the corruption of their
nation, and Signor Torelli finds the Spanish domination over a vast
part of Italy responsible for the degradation of Italian mind and
manners in the seventeenth century. He declares that, because of the
Spaniards, the Italian theater was then silent, “or filled with the
noise of insipid allegories”; there was little or no education among
the common people; the slender literature that survived existed solely
for the amusement and distinction of the great; the army and the
Church were the only avenues of escape from obscurity and poverty; all
classes were sunk in indolence.
The social customs were mostly copied from France, except that purely
Italian invention, the _cavaliere servente_, who was in great vogue.
But there were everywhere in the cities coteries of fine ladies,
called _preziose_, who were formed upon the French _précieuses_
ridiculed by Molière, and were, I suppose, something like what is
called in Boston demi-semi-literary ladies--ladies who cultivated
alike the muses and the modes. The preziose held weekly receptions at
their houses, and assembled poets and cavaliers from all quarters,
who entertained the ladies with their lampoons and gallantries, their
madrigals and gossip, their sonnets and their repartees. “Little by
little the poets had the better of the cavaliers: a felicitous rhyme
was valued more than an elaborately constructed compliment.” And this
easy form of literature became the highest fashion. People hastened to
call themselves by the sentimental pastoral names of the Arcadians,
and almost forgot their love-intrigues so much were they absorbed in
the production and applause of “toasts, epitaphs for dogs, verses on
wagers, epigrams on fruits, on Echo, on the Marchioness's canaries, on
the Saints. These were read here and repeated there, declaimed in
the public resorts and on the promenades”, and gravely studied and
commented on. A strange and surprising jargon arose, the utterance of
the feeblest and emptiest affectation. “In those days eyes were not
eyes, but pupils; not pupils, but orbs; not orbs, but the Devil knows
what,” says Signor Torelli, losing patience. It was the golden age
of pretty words; and as to the sense of a composition, good society
troubled itself very little about that. Good society expressed itself
in a sort of poetical gibberish, “and whoever had said, for example,
Muses instead of Castalian Divinities, would have passed for a lowbred
person dropped from some mountain village. Men of fine mind, rich
gentlemen of leisure, brilliant and accomplished ladies, had resolved
that the time was come to lose their wits academically.”