Signor Torelli is less severe than Emiliani-Giudici upon the founders
of the Arcadia, and thinks they may have had intentions quite
different from the academical follies that resulted; while Leigh Hunt,
who has some account of the Arcadia in his charming essay on the
Sonnet, feels none of the national shame of the Italian critics, and
is able to write of it with perfect gayety. He finds a reason for its
amazing success in the childlike traits of Italian character; and,
reminding his readers that the Arcadia was established in 1690,
declares that what the Englishmen of William and Mary's reign would
have received with shouts of laughter, and the French under Louis XIV,
would have corrupted and made perilous to decency, “was so mixed up
with better things in these imaginative and, strange as it may seem,
most unaffected people, the Italians,--for such they are,--that, far
from disgusting a nation accustomed to romantic impulses and to the
singing of poetry in their streets and gondolas, their gravest and
most distinguished men and, in many instances, women, too, ran
childlike into the delusion. The best of their poets”, the
sweet-tongued Filicaja among others, “accepted farms in Arcadia
forthwith; ... and so little transitory did the fashion turn out
to be, that not only was Crescimbeni its active officer for
eight-and-thirty years, but the society, to whatever state of
insignificance it may have been reduced, exists at the present
moment”.
Leigh Hunt names among Englishmen who were made Shepherds of Arcadia,
Mathias, author of the “Pursuits of Literature”, and Joseph Cowper,
“who wrote the Memoirs of Tassoni and an historical memoir of Italian
tragedy”, Haly, and Mrs. Thrale, as well as those poor Delia Cruscans
whom bloody-minded Gifford champed between his tusked jaws in his
now forgotten satires. Pope Pius VII. gave the Arcadians a suite of
apartments in the Vatican; but I dare say the wicked tyranny now
existing at Rome has deprived the harmless swains of this shelter, if
indeed they had not been turned out before Victor Emmanuel came.
In the chapter on the Arcadia, with which Vernon Lee opens her
admirable Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, she tells us of
several visits which she recently paid to the Bosco Parrasio, long the
chief fold of the Academy. She found it with difficulty on the road to
the Villa Pamphili, in a neighborhood wholly ignorant of Arcadia and
of the relation of Bosco Parrasio to it. “The house, once the summer
resort of Arcadian sonneteers, was now abandoned to a family of
market-gardeners, who hung their hats and jackets on the marble heads
of improvvisatori and crowned poetesses, and threw their beans, maize,
and garden-tools into the corners of the desolate reception-rooms,
from whose mildewed walls looked down a host of celebrities--brocaded
doges, powdered princesses, and scarlet-robed cardinals, simpering
drearily in their desolation,” and “sad, haggard poetesses in
sea-green and sky-blue draperies, with lank, powdered locks and meager
arms, holding lyres; fat, ill-shaven priests in white bands and
mop-wigs; sonneteering ladies, sweet and vapid in dove-colored
stomachers and embroidered sleeves; jolly extemporary poets, flaunting
in many-colored waistcoats and gorgeous shawls.”
But whatever the material adversity of Arcadia, it still continues
to reward ascertained merit by grants of pasturage out of its ideal
domains. Indeed, it is but a few years since our own Longfellow, on a
visit to Rome, was waited upon by the secretary of the Arch-Flock,
and presented, after due ceremonies and the reading of a floral and
herbaceous sonnet, with a parchment bestowing upon him some very
magnificent possessions in that extraordinary dreamland. In telling me
of this he tried to recall his Arcadian name, but could only remember
that it was “Olympico something.”