shall hardly be found. At most the saying will suffer reprint as a
quaintness, a freak, or a paradox; and so it has proved. From Prato, dusty
little city of mid-Tuscany, and with the impress of its Reale Orfanotrofio
(nourisher, it would thus appear, of more Humanities than one) comes an
_"Opera Nova, nella quale si contengono bellissime historie, contrasti,
lamenti et frottole, con alcune canzoni a ballo, strambotti, geloghe,
farse, capitoli e bazellette di più eccellenti autori. Aggiuntevi assai
tramutationi, villanelle alla napolitana, sonetti alla bergamasca et
mariazi alla povana, indovinelli, ritoboli e passerotti"_; _cosa_,
this legend goes on to say, _molto piacevole et utile_. This is, no
doubt, rococo, and at best a pitiful, catchfarthing bit of ancientry: yet
it looks back to a time when it was indeed the fact that no choice work
could be but useful, and when eyes and ears, as conduits to the soul, had
that full of consideration we reserve for mouth and nose, purveyors to the
belly.
Vasari, Giorgio, he too, _bourgeois_ though he were, and in so far
the best of testimony, knew it when he found Luca's blue and white to be
"molto utile per la state." We should say that of a white umbrella or suit
of flannels; why of earthenware or an adroit _strambotto_? That marks
the cleft, the incurable gulf of difference between a people like the
Tuscans with art in their marrow, and our present selves with our touching
reliance upon a most unseemly hunger after facts. I suppose I should be
stretching a point if I said that _Samson Agonistes_ was _cosa
molto piacevole ed utile_. And yet I name there a great poem and a
weighty, whence the general public suck, or claim to suck, no small
advantage. Is it more useful to them than Bradshaw? I doubt. But here, in
this Opera Nova so furthered, are sixty-three little snatches of Luigi
Pulci's, eight lines to the stave, about the idlest of make-believe love
affairs, full of such Petrarchisms as "Gl' occhi tuoi belli son li crudel
dardi," or
"Tu m' ai trafitto il cor! donde io moro,
Se tu, iddea, non mi dai aiutoro."--
the merest commonplaces of gallantry: called on what account by their
contrivers _molto utile_?
I have urged in my Second Essay that the Tuscans were inveterate weavers
of fancy, choosing what came easiest to hand to weave withal. I dared to
see such airy spinning in that Spanish Chapel from which Mr. Ruskin has
nearly frightened the lovers of Art; I said that the _Summa_ was to
the painters there as good vantage ground as any novel of Sacchetti's. I
now say that Luigi Pulci and his kindred so treated the love-lore which
was solemn mystery to Guinicelli and Lapo and Fazio, or the young Dante
shuddering before his lord of terrible aspect. I would add Petrarch's name
to this honourable roll if I believed it fitting such a niche; but I find
him the greatest equivocator of them all, and owe him a grudge for making
a fifteenth-century Dante impossible. It is true, had there been such a
poet we should never have had our Milton; but that may not serve the Swan
of Vaucluse as justification for being miserable before a looking-glass,
that he starved his grandsons to serve ours. Take him then as a poser:
give him, for the argument's sake, Boccace to his company, Cino; give him
our Pulci, give him Ariosto, give him Lorenzo, Politian; give him Tasso
for aught I care; you have no one left but the sugar-cured Guarino. Dante
stands alone upon the skyey peaks of his great argument, steadied there
and holding his breath, as for the hush that precedes weighty endeavour;
and Bojardo (no Tuscan by birth) stands squarely to the plains, holding
out one hand to Rabelais over-Alps and another to Boccace grinning in his
grave. The fellow is such a sturdy pagan we must e'en forgive him some of
his quirks. Italian poesy, poor lady, stript to the smock, can still look
honestly out if she have but two such vestments whole and unclouted as the
_Commedia_ and the _Orlando_. Let us look at some of her spoiled
bravery. Take up my Opera Nova and pick over Pulci in his lightest mood. I
am minded to try my hand for your amusement.
"Let him rejoice who can; for me, I'd grieve.
Peace be with all; for me yet shall be war.
Let him that hugs delight, hug on, and leave
To me sweet pain, lest day my night shall mar.
I am struck hard; the world, you may believe,
Laughs out;--rejoice, my world! I'll pet my scar.
Rogue love, that puttest me to such a pass,
They cry thee, 'It is well!' I sing, 'Alas!'"
_Vers de société_? No; too rhetorical: your antithesis gives
headaches to fine ladies. Euphuist? Not in the applied sense: read
Shakespere's sonnets in that manner; or, if you object that Shakespere is
too high for such comparisons, read Drummond of Hawthornden. Poetry, which
has a soul, we cannot call it. Verse it assuredly is, and of the most
excellent. Just receive a quatrain of the pure spring, and judge for
yourself:
"Chi gode goda, che pur io stento;
Chi è in pace si sia, ch' io son in guerra;
Chi ha diletto l' habbi, ch' io ho tormento;
Chi vive lieto, in me dolor afferra."
Balance is there. Vocalisation, adjustment of sound, discriminate use of
long syllables and short, of subjunctive and indicative moods.[1]
Unpremeditated art it is not: indeed it is craft rather than art; for Art
demands a larger share of soul-expenditure than Pulci could afford. And of
such is the delicate ware which Tuscany, nothing doubting, took for
_lavoro molto utile_. For, believe it or not, of that kind were Delia
Robbia's enrichments, Ghirlandajo's frescos, Raphael's Madonnas, and
Alberti's broad marble churches: of that kind and of no other; on a level
with the painted lady smiling out of a painted window at Airolo, whose
frozen lips assure the traverser of the Saint Gothard that he has passed
the ridge and may soon smell the olives.
[Footnote 1: More than that: the piece is an excellent example of the
skilful use of redundant syllables. It is certain that a study of Italian
poetry would help our, too often, tame blank verse to be (however bad
otherwise) at least not dull. It might bring it nearer to Milton, as Dante
brought Keats. Witness his revision of _Hyperion_. If the Tuscans
overrated the craft in Poetry, we assuredly underrate it.]
Wherein, then, is the use? Why, it is in the art of it. I will convict you
out of Alberti's own mouth, or his biographer's, for he spake it truly.
"For he was wont to say," thus runs the passage, "that whatever might be
accomplished by the wit of man with a certain choiceness, that indeed was
next to the divine." To image the divine, you see, you must accomplish
somewhat, scrupulously weigh, select and refuse; in short adapt
exquisitely your means until they are adequate to your ends. And, keeping
the eye steadily on that, you might grow to discard solemn ends, or
momentous, altogether, until poetry and painting ceased to be arts at all,
and must be classed, at best, with needlework. So indeed it proved in the
case of poetry. After Politian (who really did catch some echo of other
times, and of manners more primal than his own, and did instil something
of it in his _Orfeo_) no poet of Italy had anything serious to say. I
doubt it even of Tasso, though Tasso, I know, has a vogue. I except, of
course, Michael Angelo, as I have already said; and I except Boccace and
Bojardo. Painting was drawn out of the pit laid privily for her by the
sheer necessity of an outlet; and painting, having much to say, became the
representative Italian art. Poetry, the most ancient of them all, as she
is the most majestic; the art which refuses to be taught, and alone of her
sisters must be acquired by self-spenditure (so that before you can learn
to string your words in music you must be shaken with a thought which, to
your torturing, you must spoil); poetry, at once music and soothsay,
knitted to us as touching her common speech, and to the spheres as
touching on the same immortal harmonies; poetry such as Dante's was, was
gone from Tuscany, and painting, to her own ruining, reigned instead,
drawing in sculpture and architecture to share her kingdom and attributes.
Which indeed they did, to their equal detriment and our discouragement
that read.
When I want to see Death in small-clothes bowing in the drawing-room I
turn to my Petrarch and open at Sonnet cclxxxii., where it is written
how:--
_"It lies with Death to take the beauty of Laura but not the gracious
memory of her";_
As thus:
"Now hast them touch'd thy stretch of power, O Death;
Thy brigandage hath beggar'd Love's demesne
And quench'd the lamp that lit it, and the queen
Of all the flowers snapped with thy ragged teeth.
Hollow and meagre stares our life beneath
The querulous moon, robb'd of its sovereign:
Yet the report of her, her deathless mien--
Not thine, O churl! Not thine, thou greedy Death!
They are with her in Heaven, the which her grace,
Like some brave light, gladdens exceedingly
And shoots chance beams to this our dwelling-place;
So art thou swallowed in her victory.
Yet on me, beauty-whelmed in very sooth,
On me that last-born angel shall have ruth."
Look in vain for the deep heart-cry that voiced Dante's passion in the
tremendous statements of this:--
"Beatrice is gone up into high Heaven,
The kingdom where the angels are at peace;
And lives with them: and to her friends is dead.
Not by the frost of winter was she driven
Away, like others; nor by summer heats;
But through a perfect gentleness instead.
For from the lamp of her meek lowlihead
Such an exceeding glory went up hence
That it woke wonder in the Eternal Sire,
Until a sweet desire
Entered Him for that lovely excellence,
So that He bade her to Himself aspire;
Counting this weary and most evil place
Unworthy of a thing so full of grace."
[Footnote: This translation is Rossetti's.]
Now and again it may happen that a poet, ridden by the images of his
thought, can "state the facts" and leave the rhyme to chance. The Greeks,
to whom facts were rarer and of more significance, one supposes, than they
are to us, did it habitually. That is what gives such irresistible import
to Homer and to Sophocles. They knew that the adjective is the natural
enemy of the verb. The naked act, the bare thought, a sequence of stately-
balanced rhythm and that ensuing harmony of sentences, gave their poetry
its distinction. They did not wilfully colour their verse, if they did, as
I suppose we must admit, their statues. "Now," says Sir Thomas, "there is
a musick wherever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus far we
may maintain the musick of the spheres; for those well-ordered motions,
and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the
understanding they strike a note most full of harmony." After the Greeks,
Dante, who may have drawn _lo bello stile_ from Virgil, but hardly
his great notes, as of a bell, carried on the tradition of directness and
naked strength. But Petrarch, and after him all Tuscany, dallied with
light thinking, and beat all the images of Love's treasury into thin
conventions.
_Però_, what gentlemen they were, these "ingegni fiorentini," these
Tuscan wits! What innate breeding and reticence! What punctilious loyalty
to the little observances of literature, of wall-decoration, call it, in
the most licentiously minded of them! Lorenzo Magnifico was a rake and
could write lewdly enough, as we all know. Yet, when he chose, that is
when Art bade him, how unerringly he chose the right momentum. His too was
"la mente che non erra." I found this of his the other day, and must needs
close up my notes with it. The very notion of it was, in his time, a
convention; a series of sonnets bound together by an argument; a _Vita
nova_ without its overmastering occasion. Simonetta was dead; whereupon
"tutti i fiorentini ingegni, come si conviene in si pubblica jattura,
diversamente ed avversamente si dolsono, chi in versi, chi in prosa." The
poor dead lady was, in fact, a butt for these sharpshooters. Yet hear
Lorenzo.
"Died, as we have declared, in our city a certain lady, whereby all people
alike in Florence were moved to compassion. And this is no marvel, seeing
that with all earthly beauty and courtesy she was adorned as, before her
day, no other under heaven could have been. Among her other excellent
parts, she had a carriage so sweet and winsome that whosoever should have
any commerce or friendly dealing with her, straightway fell to believe
himself enamoured of her. Ladies also, and all youth of her degree, not
only suffered no harbourage to unkindly thought upon this her eminence
over all the rest, nor grudged it her at all, but stoutly upheld and took
pleasure in her loveliness and gracious bearing; and this so honestly that
you would have found it hard to be believed so many men without jealousy
could have loved her, or so many ladies without envy give her place. So,
the more her life by its comely ordering had endeared her to mankind, pity
also for her death, for the flower of her youth, and for a beauteousness
which in death, it may be, showed the more resplendently than in life, did
breed in the heart the smarting of great desire. Therefore she was carried
uncovered on the bier from her dwelling to the place of burial, and moved
all men, thronging there to see her, to abundant shedding of tears. And in
some, who before had not been aware of her, after pity grew great marvel
for that she, in death, had overcome that loveliness which had seemed
insuperable while she yet lived. Among which people, who before had not
known her, there grew a bitterness and, as it were, ground of reproach,
that they had not been acquainted with so fair a thing before that hour
when they must be shut off from it for ever; to know her thus and have
perpetual grief of her. But truly in her was made manifest that which our
Petrarch had spoken when he said,
'Death showed him lovely in her lovely face.'"
This is to write like a gentleman and an artist, with ear attuned to the
subtlest fall and cadence, with scrupulous weighing of words that their
true outline shall hold clear and sharp. It is _intarsiatura_,
skilful and clean at the edges. He goes on to play with his hammered
thought, always as delicately and precisely as before.
"Falling, therefore, such an one to death, all the wits of Florence, as is
seemly in so public a calamity, lamented severally and mutually, some in
rhyme, some in prose, the ruefulness of it; and bound themselves to exalt
her excellence each after the contriving of his mind: in which company I,
too, must needs be; I, too, mingle rhymes with tears. So I did in the
sonnets below rehearsed; whereof the first began thus:
'O limpid shining star that to thy beam.'
"Night had fallen: together we walked, a dear friend and I, together
talking of our common sorrow: and so speaking, the night being wondrous
clear, I lifted my eyes to a star of exceeding brilliancy, which appeared
in the West, of such assured splendour as not alone to excel other stars,
but so eagerly to shine that it threw in shadow all the lights of heaven
about it. Whereof having great marvel, I turned to my friend, saying--'We
ought not to wonder at this sight, seeing that the soul of that most
gentle lady is of a truth either re-informed in this, a new star, or
conjoined to shine with it. Wherefore there is no marvel in such exceeding
brightness; and we who took comfort in her living delights, may even now
be appeased by her appearance in a limpid star. And if our vision for such
a light is tender and fragile, we should beseech her shade, that is the
god in her, to make us bolder by withholding some part of her beam that we
may sometimes look upon her, nor sear our eyes. But, to say sooth, this is
no over-boldness in her, endowed as she was with all the power of her
beauty, that she should strive to shine more excellently than all the
other stars, or even yet more proudly with Phoebus himself, asking of him
his very chariot, that she, rather, may rule our day. Which thing, if you
allow it without presumption in our star, how vilely shows the
impertinence of Death to have laid hands upon such loveliness and
authority as hers.' And since these my reasonings seemed of the stuff
proper for a sonnet, I took leave of my friend and composed that one which
follows; speaking in it of the above-mentioned star."
The sonnet is in the right Petrarchian vein, adroit and shallow as you
please. With such a preface it could hardly be otherwise--the invocation
of the lady's shade, the twitting of Death (making his Mastership jig to
suit their occasions who had of late been in his presence) and the naive
acceptance of all gifts as "buona materia a an sonetto," In the end he
spins four to her memory; then finds another lady and doubles all his
superlatives for her. For the star, he remembers, may have been Lucifer;
and Lucifer is but herald of the day. To it then! with all the _buona
materia a un sonetto_ the dawn can give you. Thus flourished poetry in
the Tuscan _quattrocento_; for Politian was but little more poet than
Lorenzo, while he was no less dextrous as a rhymer and fashioner of
conceits. Not serious, but _piacevole_, with an _elegantia quædam
prope divinum_; therefore _molto utile_. Pen-work in fact, and kin
to needlework. Because Tuscany saw choicely-wrought things pleasing, and
pleasant things useful, we of to-day can see Florence as an open-air
Museum. But we wrap our own Poets in heavy bindings and let them lie on
drawing-room tables in company of Whitaker's Almanack and an album of
photographs. Well, well! We must teach them to say, _Philistia, be thou
glad of me_, I suppose.
V
OF BOILS AND THE IDEAL
[Footnote: This appeared in the _New Review_ for December 1896, and
is reproduced by leave of the Publisher.]
_(A Colloquy with Perugino)_
"There," said my Roman escort, as we forded the Tiber near Torglano, "the
haze is lifting: behold august Perugia," I looked out over the misty
plain, and saw the spiked ridge of a hill, serried with towers and
belfries as a port with ships' masts; then the grey stone walls and
escarpments warm in the sun; finally a mouth to the city, which seemed to
engulph both the white road and the citizens walking to and fro upon it
like flies. But it was some time yet before I could decipher the image on
the gonfalon streaming in the breeze above the Signiory. It was actually,
on a field vert, a griffin rampant sable, langued gules. "So ho!" said the
guide when! had described it, "So ho! the Mountain Cat is at home
again.... And here comes scouring one of the whelps," he added in alarm. A
young man, black-avised, bare-headed, pressing a lathered horse, bore down
upon us. He seemed to gain exultation with every new pulse of his
strength: the Genius of Brute Force, handsome as he was evil. And yet not
evil, unless a wild beast is evil; which it probably is not. He soon
reached us, pulled up short with a clatter of hoofs, and hailed me in a
raw dialect, asking what I did, whence and who I was, whither I went, what
I would? As he spake--looking at me with fierce eyes in which pride,
suspicion, and the shyness of youth struggled and rent each other--he
fooled with a straight sword, and seemed to put his demands rather to
provoke a quarrel than to get an answer. I wished no quarrel with a boy,
so, as my custom is, I answered deliberately that I travelled, and from
Rome; that my name was Hewlett, at his service; that I was going to
Perugia; that I would be rid of him. I saw him grow loutish before my
adroit impassivity; his fencing was not with such tools. He sulked, and
must know next what I wanted at Perugia. I told him I had business with
Pietro Vannucci, called Il Perugino by those who admired him from a
distance; and he seemed relieved, withal a something of contempt for my
person fluttered on his pretty lip. At any rate, he left fingering his
steel toy. "Peter the Pious!" he scoffed, "Are you of his litter? Pots and
Pans? Off with you; you'll find him hoarding his money or his wife. To the
wife you may send these from Semonetto." Whereat my young gentleman fell
to kissing his hand in the air. I rose in my stirrups and bowed
elaborately, and, taking off my hat in the act, put him to some shame, for
he was without that equipment. He pulled a wry face at me, like any
schoolboy, and cantered off on his spent horse, arms akimbo, and his irons
rattling about him. My guide marked a furtive cross on his breast and
vowed, I am pretty sure, a score candles to Santa Maria in Cosmedin if
ever he reached home. "God is good," he said, "God is very good. That was
Simon Baglione."
"He seemed a very unlicked cub," was all my reply. So we climbed the dusty
steep, winding twice or thrice round about the hill in a brown plain set
with stubbed trees, and entered the armed city by the Porta Eburnea.
Inside the walls, threading our way up a spiral lane among bullock-carts,
cloaked cavaliers, monks, fair-haired girls carrying pitchers and baskets,
bullies, bravoes, and well-to-do burgesses, we passed from one ambush to
another, by dark gullies, stinking traps, and twisted stairways, to the
Via Deliziosa, without ever a hint of the broad sunshine or whiff of the
balmy air which we had left outside on the plain. In a little mildewed
court, where one patch of light did indeed slope upon a lemon-tree loaded
with fruit and flowers, I found my man in a droll pass with his young
wife. He was, in fact, tiring her hair in the open: nothing more;
nevertheless there was that air of mystery in the performance which made
me at once squeamish of going further, and afraid to withdraw. I stood,
therefore, in confusion while the sport went on. It was of his seeking I
could see, for the poor girl looked shamefaced and weary enough. She was a
winsome child (no more), broad in the brows, full in the eye, yellow-
haired, like most of the women in this place, with a fine-shaped mouth,
rather voluptuously underlipped, and, as I then saw her, sitting in a
carven chair with her hands at a listless droop over the arms of it. Her
hair, which was loose about her and of great length and softness, lay at
the mercy of her master. He, a short, pursy man, well over middle age--
"past the Grand Climacteric," as Bulwer Lytton used to say--red and
anxiously lined, stood behind her, barber fashion, and ran her hair
through his fingers, all the while talking to himself very fast. His eyes
were half-shut: he seemed ravished by the sight of so much gold (if common
reports belie him not) or the feel of so much silk (the likelier opinion),
I know not which. Assuredly so odd a beginning to my adventure, a hardier
man would have stumbled!
The sport went on. The girl, as I considered her, was of slight, almost
mean figure; her good looks, which as yet lay rather in promise, resolved
themselves into a small compass, for they ended at her shoulders. Below
them she was slender to stooping, and with no shape to speak of. Allow her
a fine little head, the timid freshness natural to her age, a blush-rose
skin, slim neck, and that glorious weight of hair: there is Perugino's
wife! Add that she was vested in a milky green robe which was cut square
and low at the neck and fitted her close, and I have no more to say on her
score than she had on any. As for the Maestro himself, I got to know him
better. On mere sight I could guess something of him. A master evidently,
unhappy when not ordering something; fidgety by the same token; yet a
fellow of humours, and fertile of inventions whereon to feed them. The
more I considered him the more subtle ministry to his pleasures did I find
this morning's work to be. A man, finally, happiest in dreams. I looked at
him now in that vein. In and out, elbow-deep sometimes, went his hands and
arms, plunging, swimming in that luxurious mesh of hair. He sprayed it out
in a shower for Danaë; he clutched it hard and drew it into thick
burnished ropes of fine gold. Anon, as the whim caught him, he would pile
it up and hedge it with great silver pins, fan-shape, such as country
girls use, till it took the semblance, now of a tower, now of a wheel, now
of some winged beast--sphinx or basilisk--couching on the girl's head.
Then, stepping back a little, he would clasp his hands over his eyes, and
with head in air sing some snatch of triumph, or laugh aloud for the very
wildness of his power; and so the game went on, that seemed a feast of
delight to the man--a feast? an orgy of sense. But the woman might have
been cut in stone. Had she not breathed, or had not her fingers faintly
stirred now and again, you would have sworn her a wax doll.