LATIN POETRY
Special Causes for the Practice of Latin Versification in
Italy -- The Want of an Italian Language -- Multitudes of
Poetasters -- Beccadelli -- Alberti's 'Philodoxus' --
Poliziano -- The 'Sylvæ' -- 'Nutricia', 'Rusticus', 'Manto',
'Ambra' -- Minor Poems -- Pontano -- Sannazzaro -- Elegies
and Epigrams -- Christian Epics -- Vida's 'Christiad' --
Vida's 'Poetica' -- Fracastoro -- The 'Syphilis' --
_Barocco_ Flatteries -- Bembo -- Immoral Elegies --
Imitations of Ovid and Tibullus -- The 'Benacus' -- Epitaphs
-- Navagero -- Epigrams and Eclogues -- Molsa -- Poem on his
own Death -- Castiglione -- 'Alcon' and 'Lycidas' -- Verses
of Society -- The Apotheosis of the Popes -- Poem on the
Ariadne of the Vatican -- Sadoleto's Verses on the Laocoon
-- Flaminio -- His Life -- Love of the Country -- Learned
Friends -- Scholar-Poets of Lombardy -- Extinction of
Learning in Florence -- Decay of Italian Erudition.
The history of this last period of the Revival would be incomplete
without a survey of its Latin poetry. I shall have failed to convey a
right notion of the tendencies of humanism, if I have not shown that
the Italians were seeking not merely to acquire a knowledge of ancient
literature, but also to effect a resuscitation of antiquity in their
own writings. Regarding themselves as the heirs of Rome, separated
from the brilliant period of Latin civilisation by ten centuries of
ignorance, they strove with all their might to seize the thread of
culture at the very point where the poets of the Silver Age had
dropped it. In the opinion of Northern races it might seem unnatural
or unpatriotic to woo the Muses in a dead language; but for Italians
the Camoenæ had not died; on the hills of Latium, where they fell
asleep, they might awake again. Every familiar sight and sound
recalled 'the rich Virgilian rustic measure' of the 'Georgics' and
'Bucolics.' Nature had not changed, nor did the poets feel the
influence of Christianity so deeply as to find no meaning in the
mythic phraseology of Fauns and Nymphs.
Latin, again, was far less a language of the past for the Italians
than for other European nations. What risk the Tuscan dialect ran,
when Dante wrote the first lines of the 'Divine Comedy' in Latin, and
when Petrarch assumed the laurel crown by right of his 'Africa', is
known to every student. The serious efforts of the greatest writers
were for centuries devoted to Latin composition, because they believed
that the nation, in the modern as in the ancient world, might freely
use the speech of Cicero and Virgil. Their _volgari cose_ they
despised as trifles, not having calculated the impotence of scholars
or of kings to turn the streams of language from their natural
courses. Nor was this blindness so inexplicable as it seems to us at
first sight. Italy possessed no common dialect; Dante's 'Italiano
Illustre,' or 'Cortegiano', was even less native to the race at large,
less universal in its use, than Latin.[412] Fashioned from the Tuscan
for literary purposes, selected from the vocabulary of cultivated
persons, stripped of vernacular idioms, and studied in the works of a
few standard authors, it was itself, upon the soil that gave it birth,
a product of high art and conscious culture. The necessity felt soon
after Dante's death for translating the 'Divine Comedy' into Latin,
sufficiently proves that a Latin poem gained a larger audience than
the masterpiece of Italian literature. While the singer of a dialect,
however noble, appealed to his own fellow-citizens, the Latin poet
gave his verses _urbi et orbi_. If another proof of the artificiality
of Italian were needed, we should find it in the fact that the phrases
of Petrarch are not less obsolete now than in the fourteenth century.
The English require a glossary for Chaucer, and even Elizabethan
usages are out of date; in other words, the language of the people has
outgrown the style of its first poets. But Italian has undergone no
process of transformation and regeneration according to the laws of
organic growth, since it first started. The different districts still
use different dialects, while writers in all parts of the peninsula
have conformed their style as far as possible to early Tuscan models.
It may be questioned whether united Italy, having for the first time
gained the necessary conditions of national concentration, is not now
at last about to enter on a new phase of growth in literature, which,
after many years, will make the style of the first authors more
archaic than it seems at present.
[Footnote 412: Cf. Filelfo, quoted in a note to the next chapter, who
says,'Tuscan is hardly known to all Italians, while Latin is spread
far and wide throughout the whole world.']
The foregoing observations were requisite in order to explain why the
cultivation of Latin poetry was no mere play-work to Italian scholars.
The peculiar direction given by Petrarch to classical studies at the
outset must also be taken into account. We have seen that he regarded
rhetoric and poetry as the two chief aims of humanism. To be either a
poet or an orator was the object of all students who had slaked their
thirst at the Castalian springs of ancient learning. Philology and
poetry, accordingly, went hand in hand through the periods of the
Revival; and to this first impulse we are perhaps justified in tracing
back the prominence assigned to Latin verse in our own school studies.
Poetry being thus regarded as a necessary branch of scholarship, it
followed that few men distinguished for their learning abstained from
versification. Pedants who could do no more than make prosaic elegiacs
scan, and scholars respectable for their acquirements, but destitute
of inspiration, were reckoned among the _sacri vates_. It would be a
weariful--nay, hopeless--task to pass all the Latin versifiers of the
Renaissance in review. Their name is legion; even to count them would
be the same as to number the stars--_ad una ad una annoverar le
stelle_. It may be considered fortunate that perhaps the larger masses
of their productions still remain in manuscript, partly because they
preceded the age of printing, and partly, no doubt, because the good
sense of the age rejected them. What has been printed, however,
exceeds in bulk the 'Corpus Poetarum Latinorum,' and presents so many
varieties that to deal with more than a selection is impossible.[413]
[Footnote 413: I purpose in this chapter to use the _Delitiæ Poetarum
Italorum_, two parts divided into 4 vols., 1608; _Carmina Quinque
Illustrium Poetarum_, Bergomi, 1753; _Poemata Selecta Italorum_,
Oxonii, 1808; and _Selecta Poemata Italorum_, accurante A. Pope,
Londini, 1740.]
The poetasters of the first two periods need not be taken into
account. Struggling with a language imperfectly assimilated, and with
the rules of a prosody as yet but little understood, it was as much as
they could do to express themselves at all in metre. Elegance of
composition was out of the question when a writer could neither set
forth modern thoughts with ease nor imitate the classic style with
accuracy. What he lost in force by the use of a dead language, he did
not gain in polish; nor was the taste of the age schooled to
appreciate the niceties of antique diction. Beccadelli alone, by a
certain limpid fluency, attained to a degree of moderate excellence;
and how much he owed to his choice of subject may be questioned. The
obscenity of his themes, and the impudence required for their
expression, may have acted as a stimulus to his not otherwise
distinguished genius. There is, moreover, no stern conflict to be
fought with phrases when the author's topic is mere animalism. The
rest of his contemporaries, Filelfo included, did no more than smooth
the way for their successors by practising the technicalities of
verse and exciting emulation. To surpass their rude achievements was
not difficult, while the fame they enjoyed aroused the ambition of
younger rivals. Exception to this sweeping verdict may be made in
favour of Alberti, whose Latin play, called 'Philodoxus,' was a
brilliant piece of literary workmanship.[414] Not only did it impose
on contemporaries as a genuine classic, but, even when judged by
modern standards, it shows real familiarity with the language of Latin
comedy and rare skill in its employment.
[Footnote 414: Bonucci's edition of Alberti's works, vol. i. Alberti's
own preface, in the form of a dedicatory letter to Lionello d'Este,
describes how he came to write this comedy, and how it was passed off
upon contemporaries as an original play by Lepidus Comicus. _Ib._ pp.
cxxi.-cxxiii.]
Poliziano is the first Latin poet who compels attention in the
fifteenth century; nor was he surpassed, in fertility of conception
and mastery of metre, by any of his numerous successors. With all his
faults of style and crudities of diction, Poliziano, in my opinion,
deserves the chief place among original poets of revived Latin
literature. Bembo wrote more elegantly, Navagero more classically,
Amalteo with a grace more winning. Yet these versifiers owe their
celebrity to excellence of imitation. Poliziano possessed a manner of
his own, and made a dead language utter thoughts familiar to the age
in which he lived. He did not merely traverse the old ground of the
elegy, the epigram, the satire, and the idyll. Striking out a new path
for himself, and aiming at instruction, he poured forth torrents of
hexameters, rough perhaps and over-fluent, yet marked by intellectual
energy and copious fancy, in illustration of a modern student's
learning. This freedom of handling is shown to best advantage in his
'Sylvæ.'[415]
[Footnote 415: See above, p. 254, for the purpose fulfilled by the
_Sylvæ_.]
The 'Nutricia' forms an introduction to the history of poetry in
general, and carries on its vigorous stream the weight of universal
erudition. From it we learn how the most accomplished scholar of his
century judged and distinguished the whole body of fine literature
possessed by his contemporaries. On the emergence of humanity from
barbarism, writes Poliziano, poetry was given to men as a consolation
for the miseries of life and as an instrument of culture; their first
nurse in the cradle of civilisation was the Muse:--
Musa quies hominum, divomque æterna voluptas.[416]
[Footnote 416: 'Of men the solace, and of gods the everlasting joy.']
After characterising the Pagan oracles, the mythical bards of Hellas,
and the poet-prophets of the Jewish race, with brief but telling
touches, Poliziano addresses himself in the following lines to the
delineation of the two chief epic-singers:--
... etenim ut stellas fugere undique cælo,
Aurea cum radios Hyperionis exeruit fax,
Cernimus, et tenuem velut evanescere lunam;
Sic veterum illustres flagranti obscurat honores
Lampade Mæonides: unum quem dia canentem
Facta virum, et sævas æquantem pectine pugnas,
Obstupuit, prorsusque parem confessus Apollo est.
Proximus huic autem, vel ni veneranda senectus
Obstiterit, fortasse prior, canit arma virumque
Vergilius, cui rure sacro, cui gramine pastor
Ascræus, Siculusque simul cessere volentes.[417]
[Footnote 417: 'As from the heavens we see the stars on all sides
fleeing, when the golden torch of the sun-god rises, and the
diminished moon appears to fade; so with his burning lamp Mæonides
obscures the honours of the earlier bards. Him alone, while he sang
the divine deeds of heroes, and with his lyre arrayed fierce wars,
Apollo, wonder-struck, confessed his equal. Close at his side, or
higher even, but for the veneration due to age, Vergil entones the
song of arms and the hero--Vergil, to whom from holy tilth and pasture
land both Ascra's and Sicilia's shepherds yield their sway with
willing homage.'--_Quinque Illustrium Poetarum Carmina_, p. 167.]
Then follows the enumeration of lesser Greek and Roman epopoeists.
After them the lyrists and elegiac poets, among whom Pindar is
celebrated in the following magniloquent paragraph:--
Aërios procul in tractus, et nubila supra
Pindarus it Dircæus olor, cui nectare blandæ
Os tenerum libâstis apes, dum fessa levaret
Membra quiete puer mollem spirantia somnum;
Sed Tanagræa suo mox jure poetria risit,
Irrita qui toto sereret figmenta canistro;
Tum certare auso palmam intercepit opimam
Æoliis prælata modis atque illice formâ.
Ille Agathocleâ subnisus voce coronas
Dixit Olympiacas, et quâ victoribus Isthmos
Fronde comam, Delphique tegant, Nemeæaque tesqua
Lunigenam mentita feram; tum numina divum
Virtutesque, virosque undanti pectore torrens
Provexit, sparsitque pios ad funera questus.
Frugibus hunc libisque virum Cirrhæus ab arâ
Phoebus, et accubitu mensæ dignatus honoro est:
Panaque pastores solis videre sub antris
Pindarico tacitas mulcentem carmine silvas.
Inde senem pueri gremio cervice repostâ
Infusum, et dulci laxantem corda sopore,
Protinus ad manes, et odoro gramine pictum
Elysium tacitâ rapuit Proserpina dextrâ.
Quin etiam hostiles longo post tempore flammæ,
Quæ septemgeminas populabant undique Thebas,
Expavere domum tanti tamen urere vatis,
Et sua posteritas medios quoque tuta per enses
Sensit inexhaustâ cinerem juvenescere famâ.[418]
[Footnote 418: 'Far off into the tracts of air and high above the
clouds soars Pindar, the Dircæan swan, whose tender mouth ye gentle
bees with nectar fed, while the boy gave rest to weary limbs that
breathed soft slumber. But him the maid of Tanagra derided, what time
she told him that he sowed his myths from the whole sack to waste; and
when he dared contend with her in song, she bore away the victor's
palm, triumphant by Æolian moods, and by her seductive beauty too. He
with his mighty voice, trained in the school of Agathocles, sang the
crowns of Olympia and the garlands wherewith the Isthmus and Delphi,
and the Nemean wastes that falsely claimed the moon-born monster,
shade the athlete's brows. Then, like a torrent, with swelling soul,
he passed to celebrate the powers and virtues of the gods and heroes,
and poured forth pious lamentations for the dead. Him Phoebus, lord
of Cirrha, honoured with food and drink from his altar, and made him
guest-fellow at his own board: shepherds too saw Pan in lonely caverns
charming the woods with a Pindaric song. At last, when he was old, and
lay with his neck reclined upon the bosom of the boy he loved,
soothing his soul in sleep, Proserpina with still right hand
approached and took him straight to join the shades and pace Elysium's
fragrant meads. Nay, more: long afterwards, the foeman's flames, which
laid seven-gated Thebes in ruins far and wide, these names dared not
to burn so great a poet's house; and his descendants, safe 'mid a
thousand swords, learned that his ashes still were young through fame
that lives for aye.'--_Carmina_, &c. p. 173.]
Sappho is described in the following lines:--
lyricis jam nona poetis
Æolis accedit Sappho, quæ flumina propter
Pierias legit ungue rosas, unde implicet audax
Serta Cupido sibi, niveam quæ pectine blando
Cyrinnem, Megaramque simul, cumque Atthide pulchram
Cantat Anactorien, et crinigeram Telesippen;
Et te conspicuum recidivo flore juventæ
Miratur revocatque, Phaon, seu munera vectæ
Puppe tuâ Veneris, seu sic facit herba potentem:
Sed tandem Ambracias temeraria saltat in undas.[419]
[Footnote 419: 'Ninth among lyric bards, Æolian Sappho joins the crew;
she who by flowing water plucks Pieria's rose for venturous Love to
twine in wreaths for his own brow; who with her dulcet lyre sings fair
Cyrinna's charms, and Megara, and Atthis and sweet Anactoria, and
Telesippa of the flowing hair. And thee, too, Phaon, beautiful in
youth's rathe flower, on thee she gazes, thee she calls again; such
power to thee gave Venus for her freightage in thy skiff, or else the
herb of love. Yet at the last, not wisely bold, she leaps into the
Ambracian waves.' _Ib._ &c. p. 175.]
Having disposed of the lyrists, Poliziano proceeds to the dramatic
poets. His brief notice of the three Attic tragedians is worthy of
quotation, if only because it proves what we should suspect from other
indications, that the best scholars of the earlier Renaissance paid
them little attention. The facts mentioned in the following lines seem
to be derived from the gossip of Athenæus:--
Æschylus aëriæ casu testudinis ictus,
Quemque senem meritæ rapuerunt gaudia palmæ,
Quemque tegit rabidis lacerum pia Pella molossis.[420]
[Footnote 420: 'Æschylus, smitten by a tortoise falling from the air
above his head, and he whose triumph, justly won in old age, killed
him with excess of joy, and he whose body, torn by raging hounds, the
reverent earth of Pella hides.'--_Carmina_, &c. p. 176.]
Nor are his observations on the comic dramatists less meagre.[421] The
Roman poets having been passed in the same rapid review, Poliziano
salutes the founders of Italian literature in the following fine
passage:--
Nec tamen aligerum fraudarim hoc munere Dantem,
Per Styga, per stellas, mediique per ardua montis
Pulchra Beatricis sub virginis ora volantem:
Quique Cupidineum repetit Petrarcha triumphum:
Et qui bis quinis centum argumenta diebus
Pingit, et obscuri qui semina monstrat amoris:
Unde tibi immensæ veniunt præconia laudis,
Ingeniis opibusque potens Florentia mater.[422]
[Footnote 421: _Ib._ p. 177.]
[Footnote 422: 'Nor yet of this meed of honour would I cheat
wing-bearing Dante, who flew through hell, through the starry heavens,
and o'er the intermediate hill of purgatory beneath the beauteous
brows of Beatrice; and Petrarch too, who tells again the tale of
Cupid's triumph; or him who in ten days portrays a hundred stories,
and lays bare the seeds of hidden love: from whom unmeasured fame and
name are thine, by wit and wealth twice potent, Florence, mother of
great sons!'--_Ib._ p. 178.]
The transition to Lorenzo at this point is natural. A solemn
peroration in praise of the Medicean prince, himself a poet, whose
studies formed the recreation of severer labours, ends the
composition. This is written in Poliziano's best style, and, though it
is too long to quote, six lines may be selected as indicating the
theme of the argument:--
Quodque alii studiumque vocant durumque laborem,
Hic tibi ludus erit; fessus civilibus actis
Huc is emeritas acuens ad carmina vires:
Felix ingenio, felix cui pectore tantas
Instaurare vices, cui fas tam magna capaci
Alternare animo, et varias ita nectere curas.[423]
[Footnote 423: 'What other men call study and hard toil, that for thee
shall be pastime; wearied with deeds of state, to this thou hast
recourse, and dost address the vigour of thy well-worn powers to song:
blest in thy mental gifts, blest to be able thus to play so many
parts, to vary thus the great cares of thy all-embracing mind, and
weave so many divers duties into one.'--_Carmina_, &c. p. 179.]
We possess the whole of Poliziano in the 'Nutricia.' It displays the
energy of intellect that carried him on bounding verse through the
intricacies of a subject difficult by reason of its scope and
magnitude. All his haste is here, his inability to polish or select,
his lava-stream of language hurrying the dross of prose and scoriæ of
erudition along a burning tide of song. His memory held, as it were,
in solution all the matter of antique literature; and when he wrote,
he poured details forth in torrents, combining them with critical
remarks, for the double purpose of instruction and panegyric. Taken at
the lowest valuation by students to whom his copious stores of
knowledge are familiar, the vivid and continuous melody of his leaping
hexameters places the 'Nutricia' above the lucubrations of more
fastidious Latinists. We must also remember that, when it was recited
from the professorial Chair of Rhetoric at Florence, the magnetism of
Poliziano's voice and manner supplied just that touch of charm the
poem lacks for modern readers; nor was the matter so hackneyed at the
end of the fifteenth century as it is now. Lilius Gyraldus, subjecting
the 'Sylvæ' to criticism at a time when Latin poetry had been
artistically polished by the best wits of the age of Leo, passed upon
them a judgment which may even now be quoted as final.[424]
'Poliziano's learning was marvellous, his genius fervent and
well-trained, his reading extensive and uninterrupted; yet he appears
to have composed his verses with more heat than art, using too little
judgment both in the selection of his materials and in the correction
of his style. When, however, you read his 'Sylvæ,' the impression left
upon your mind will be such that for the moment you will lack
nothing.'
[Footnote 424: 'Dialogus de Poetis nostri Temporis.' _Opp._ vol. ii.
p. 388. Edition of Basle, 1580.]
The second poem of the 'Sylvæ,' entitled 'Rusticus,' forms an
induction to the study of bucolic poets, principally Hesiod and
Virgil. It is distinguished by more originality and play of fancy than
the 'Nutricia;' some of its delineations of landscape and sketches of
country life compete not unfavourably with similar passages in the
author's 'Stanze.' To dwell upon these beauties in detail, and to
compare Poliziano, the Latin poet, with Poliziano, the Italian, would
be a pleasant task. Yet I must confine myself to quoting the last, and
in some respects the least imaginative, lines, for the sake of their
historical interest. Careggi and Florence, Lorenzo and his circle of
literary friends, rise before us in these verses:--
Talia Fesuleo lentus meditabar in antro,
Rure suburbano Medicum, quâ mons sacer urbem
Mæoniam, longique volumina despicit Arni:
Quâ bonus hospitium felix placidamque quietem
Indulget Laurens, Laurens haud ultima Phoebi
Gloria, jactatis Laurens fida anchora Musis;
Qui si certa magis permiserit otia nobis,
Afflabor majore Deo, nec jam ardua tantum
Silva meas voces, montanaque saxa loquentur,
Sed tu, si qua fides, tu nostrum forsitan olim,
O mea blanda altrix, non aspernabere carmen,
Quamvis magnorum genitrix Florentia vatum,
Doctaque me triplici recinet facundia linguâ.[425]
[Footnote 425: 'On themes like these I spent my hours of leisure in
the grottoes of Fiesole, at the Medicean villa, where the holy hill
looks down upon the Mæonian city, and surveys the windings of the
distant Arno. There good Lorenzo gives his friends a happy home and
rest from cares; Lorenzo, not the last of Phoebus' glorious band;
Lorenzo, the firm anchor of the Muses tempest-tost. If only he but
grant me greater ease, the inspiration of a mightier god will raise my
soul; nor shall the lofty woods alone and mountain rocks resound my
words; but thou--such faith have I--thou too shalt sometime hear, kind
nurse of mine, nor haply scorn my song, thou, Florence, mother of
imperial bards, and learned eloquence in three great tongues shall
give me fame.' _Carmina_, &c. p. 196.]
The third canto of the 'Sylvæ' is called 'Manto.' It relates the birth
of Virgil, to whom the Muses gave their several gifts, while the
Sibyl of Mantua foretold his future course of life and all the glories
he should gain by song. The poem concludes with a rhetorical eulogy of
Rome's chief bard, so characteristic of Renaissance enthusiasm for
Virgil that to omit a portion of it from these pages would be to
sacrifice one of the most striking examples of Italian taste in
scholarship:--
At manet æternum, et seros excurrit in annos
Vatis opus, dumque in tacito vaga sidera mundo
Fulgebunt, dum sol nigris orietur ab Indis,
Prævia luciferis aderit dum curribus Eos,
Dum ver tristis hiems, autumnum proferet æstas,
Dumque fluet spirans refluetque reciproca Tethys,
Dum mixta alternas capient elementa figuras,
Semper erit magni decus immortale Maronis,
Semper inexhaustis ibunt hæc flumina venis,
Semper ab his docti ducentur fontibus haustus,
Semper odoratos fundent hæc gramina flores,
Unde piæ libetis apes, unde inclyta nectat
Serta comis triplici juvenalis Gratia dextrâ.[426]
[Footnote 426: 'Nay, but for everlasting lives our poet's work,
abides, and goes forth toward the ages late in time. So long as in the
silent firmament the stars shall shine; so long as day shall rise from
sun-burned Ind; so long as Phosphor runs before the wheels of light;
so long as gloomy winter leads to spring, and summer to autumn; while
breathing ocean ebbs and flows by turns, and the mixed elements put on
their changing shapes--so long, for ever, shall endure great Maro's
fame, for ever shall flow these rivers from his unexhausted fount, for
ever shall draughts of learning be drawn from these rills, for ever
shall these meadows yield their perfumed flowers, to pasture holy bees,
and give the youthful Graces garlands for their hair.'--_Carmina_, &c.
p. 207.]
Not less ingenious than the poem itself is the elegiac introduction.
Poliziano feigns that when the Minyæ came to Cheiron's cave on
Pelion, and supped with him, Orpheus sang a divine melody, and then
the young Achilles took the lyre, and with rude fingers praised the
poet's song. The Minyæ smiled, but Orpheus was touched by the
boy-hero's praises. Even so will Maro haply take delight in mine:--
Finis erat dapibus; citharam pius excitat Orpheus,
Et movet ad doctas verba canora manus.
Conticuere viri, tenuere silentia venti,
Vosque retro cursum mox tenuistis aquæ.
Jam volucres fessis pendere sub æthera pennis,
Jamque truces videas ora tenere feras.
Decurrunt scopulis auritæ ad carmina quercus,
Nudaque Peliacus culmina motat apex.
Et jam materno permulserat omnia cantu,
Cum tacuit, querulam deposuitque fidem.
Occupat hanc audax, digitosque affringit Achilles,
Indoctumque rudi personat ore puer.
Materiam quæris? laudabat carmina blandi
Hospitis, et tantæ murmura magna lyræ.
Riserunt Minyæ: sed enim tibi dicitur, Orpheu,
Hæc pueri pietas grata fuisse nimis.
Me quoque nunc magni nomen celebrare Maronis,
Si qua fides vero est, gaudet et ipse Maro.[427]
[Footnote 427: 'Supper was over; Orpheus awakes the lyre, and sings a
melody to suit the tune he plays. The men were silent; the winds
hushed; the rivers held their waters back to hear; the birds hung
motionless in air; and the wild beasts grew calm. From the cliffs the
oaks run down with listening ears, and the top of Pelion nods his
barren head. And now the bard had soothed the whole world with his
mother's song; when he ceased from singing and put down the thrilling
lyre. This bold Achilles seizes; he runs his fingers o'er the strings,
and chaunts an untaught lay, the simple boy. What was his theme? you
ask. He praised the singing of the gentle guest, the mighty murmurs of
that lyre divine. The Minyæ laughed; but yet, so runs the tale, even
all too sweet, Orpheus, to thee was the boy's homage. Just so my
praise of mighty Maro's name, if faith be not a dream, gives joy to
Maro's self.'--_Carmina_, &c. p. 197.]
The fourth poem, bearing the name of 'Ambra,' forms a similar
induction to the study of Homer. The youth of Homer is narrated, and
how Achilles appeared to him, blinding him with the vision of his
heroic beauty, and giving him the wand of Teiresias. Then follow
descriptions of both 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey,' and a passage of
high-flown panegyric; the whole ending with these lines on Lorenzo's
villa of Cajano:--
Et nos ergo illi gratâ pietate dicamus
Hanc de Pierio contextam flore coronam,
Quam mihi Cajanas inter pulcherrima nymphas
Ambra dedit patriæ lectam de gramine ripæ;
Ambra mei Laurentis amor, quem corniger Umbro,
Umbro senex genuit domino gratissimus Arno,
Umbro suo tandem non erepturus ab alveo.[428]
[Footnote 428: 'We also, therefore, with glad homage dedicate to him
this garland twined of Pieria's flowers, which Ambra, loveliest of
Cajano's nymphs, gave to me, culled from meadows on her father's
shores; Ambra, the love of my Lorenzo, whom Umbrone, the horned
stream, begat--Umbrone, dearest to his master Arno, Umbrone, who now
henceforth will never break his banks again.'--_Carmina_, &c. p. 224.]
Taking into consideration the purpose fulfilled by Poliziano's 'Sylvæ'
in his professorial career, it is impossible to deny their merit. The
erudition is borne with ease; it does not clog or overload the poet's
impulse. The flattery of Lorenzo is neither fulsome nor unmerited. The
verse flows strongly and majestically, though more variety of cadence
in the hexameter may be desired. The language, in spite of repetitions
and ill-chosen archaisms, is rich and varied; it has at least the
charm of being the poet's own, not culled with scrupulous anxiety from
one or two illustrious sources. Some of the pictures are delicately
sketched, while the whole style produces the effect of eloquent and
fervid improvisation. For fulness and rapidity of utterance, copious
fancy, and wealth of illustration, these four poems will bear
comparison with Roman work of the Silver Age. The Florentines who
crowded Poliziano's lecture-room must have felt as in the days of the
Empire, when Statius declaimed his periods to a Roman audience, and
the patrician critics clapped applause.[429]
[Footnote 429: Cf. Juvenal, _Satire_, i. 9-14; vii. 81-87. Persius,
_Satire_, i. 79-82. And cf. Petronius Arbiter for a detailed picture
of these Roman recitations.]
Among Poliziano's minor poems it is enough to mention the elegiac
couplets on some violets sent him by his mistress, the verses
descriptive of a beautiful girl, and the lamentation for the wife of
Sismondo della Stufa.[430] They illustrate the delicacy of his style
and the freedom of his fancy in the treatment of occasional themes,
and are far superior to his epigrams and epitaphs.[431] The numerous
encomiastic elegies addressed to Lorenzo de' Medici and other patrons
are wholly without value. Poliziano was a genuine poet. He needed the
inspiration of true feeling or of lively fancy; on a tame occasion he
degenerated into frigid baldness. Yet the satires on Mabilius, where
spite and jealousy have stirred his genius, are striking for their
volubility and pungency. A Roman imitator of Catullus in his brutal
mood could not have produced abuse more flexible and nauseous. Taken
altogether, Poliziano's Latin compositions display the qualities of
fluency and abundance that characterise his Italian verses, though
they have not the exquisite polish of the 'Giostra.' Their final merit
consists in their spontaneity. No stylist of the age of Leo knew how
to use the language of classic Rome with so much ease.
[Footnote 430: _Carmina Quinque_, &c. pp. 250, 272, 276.]
[Footnote 431: The epitaphs on Giotto, Lippo Lippi, the fair
Simonetta, and others, are only valuable for their historic interest,
such as that is.]
Jovianus Pontanus deserves a high place among the writers of Latin
verse, whether we regard his didactic poems on astronomy and the
cultivation of the orange, his epigrams, or the amorous elegies that,
for their grace, may be compared almost with Ovid.[432] Even during
his lifetime Pontanus became a classic, and after his death he was
imitated by the most ambitious versifiers of the late Renaissance.[433]
The beauty of South Italian landscape--Sorrento's orange gardens and
Baiæ's waters--passed into the fancy of the Neapolitan poets, and gave
colour to their language. Nor was Pontanus, in spite of his severe
studies and gravely-tempered mind, dead to the seductions of this
siren. What we admire in Sannazzaro's 'Arcadia' assumes the form of
pure Latinity in his love poems.[434] Their style is penetrated with
the feeling for physical beauty, Pagan and untempered by an
afterthought of Christianity. Their vigorous and glowing sensuality
finds no just analogue except in some Venetian paintings. It was not,
however, by his lighter verses so much as by the five books called 'De
Stellis' or 'Urania' that Pontanus won the admiration of Italian
scholars. In this long series of hexameters he contrived to set forth
the whole astronomical science of his age, touching upon the mythology
of the celestial signs, describing the zodiac, discussing the motion
of the heavens, raising the question of planetary influences, and
characterising the different regions of the globe by their relation to
the sun's path across the sky. He seems to have taken the
'Metamorphoses' of Ovid for his model of versification; and though we
miss the variety of Ovid's treatment, great ingenuity is displayed in
adorning so difficult a subject with poetical episodes.[435] Personal
interest is added to the conclusion of 'Urania' by the lamentation
poured forth for his daughter Lucia by the poet:--
Ornabam tibi serta domi; Syriumque liquorem
Ad thalamos geminæ, geminæ, tua cura, sorores
Fundebant. Quid pro sertis Syrioque liquore
Liquisti? Sine sole dies, sine sidere noctes,
Insomnes noctes.[436]
[Footnote 432: I shall quote from his _Collected Poems_, Aldus, 1513.]
[Footnote 433: See the Elegy of Sannazzaro on the writings of
Pontanus, _Poemata Selecta_, pp. 1-4, and Fracastoro's _Syphilis_, ib.
p. 72.]
[Footnote 434: _Delitiæ Poetarum Italorum_, pt. ii. pp. 668-712.
Specimens may also be read in the _Poemata Selecta Italorum_, pp.
1-24.]
[Footnote 435: See, for instance, the tale of Hylas, lib. v. p. 103;
the tale of Cola Pesce, lib. iv. p. 79; the council of the gods, lib.
i. p. 18; the planet Venus, lib. i. p. 5.]
[Footnote 436: Lib. v. pp. 105-108. 'For thee I hung the house with
wreaths; and thy twin sisters poured forth Syrian perfumes at the
marriage chamber. What for our garlands and our perfumes hast thou
left? Days without light, nights without a star, long sleepless
nights.']
Lucia died before her marriage-day, and her grey-headed father went
mourning for her, fooled by memory, vainly seeking the joy that could
not come again. Had she become, he asks, a star in heaven, and did the
blessed gods and heroines enjoy her splendour? No voice replied when
he called into the darkness, nor did new constellations beam on him
with brightness from his daughter's eyes. All through the wakeful
night he mourned, but when dawn went forth he marked a novel lustre on
the sea and in the sky. Lucia had been added to the nymphs of morning.
She smiled upon her father as she fled before the wheels of day; and
now the sun himself arose, and in his light her light was swallowed:
Hyperion scaled the heights of heaven with more than his own glory.
With this apotheosis of his daughter, so curiously Pagan in feeling,
and yet so far from classical in taste, the poem might have ended, had
not Pontano reserved its final honours for himself. To Lucia, now made
a goddess, he addresses his prayers that she should keep his name and
fame alive on earth when he is dead:--
Fama ipsa assistens tumulo cum vestibus aureis,
Ore ingens, ac voce ingens, ingentibus alis,
Per populos late ingenti mea nomina plausu
Vulgabit, titulosque feret per sæcula nostros;
Plaudentesque meis resonabunt laudibus auræ,
Vivet et extento celeber Jovianus in ævo.[437]
[Footnote 437: 'Fame herself, seated by my tomb with golden raiment,
mighty-mouthed, mighty-voiced, with mighty wings, shall spread abroad
among the people my names with mighty sound of praise, and carry
through the centuries my titles, and with my glory shall resound
applauding airs of heaven; renowned through everlasting ages Jovian
shall live.']
Sannazzaro's own elegies on the joys of love and country life, the
descriptions of his boyhood at Salerno, the praises of his Villa
Mergillina, and his meditations among the ruins of Cumæ, are marked by
the same characteristics. Nothing quite so full of sensual enjoyment,
so soft, and so voluptuous can be found in the poems of the Florentine
and Roman scholars. They deserve study, if only as illustrating the
luxurious tone of literature at Naples. It was not by these lighter
effusions, however, that Sannazzaro won his fame. The epic on the
birth of Christ cost him twenty years of labour; and when it was
finished, the learned world of Italy welcomed it as a model of correct
and polished writing. At the same time the critics seem to have felt,
what cannot fail to strike a modern reader, that the difficulties of
treating such a theme in the Virgilian manner, and the patience of the
stylist, had rendered it a masterpiece of ingenuity rather than a work
of genius.[438] Sannazzaro's epigrams, composed in the spirit of
bitterest hostility towards the Borgia family, were not less famous
than his epic. Alfonso of Aragon took the poet with him during his
campaign against the Papal force in the Abruzzi; and these satires,
hastily written in the tent and by the camp-fire, formed the amusement
of his officers. From the soldiers of Alfonso they speedily passed, on
the lips of courtiers and scholars, through all the cities of Italy;
nor is it easy to say how much of Lucrezia Borgia's legend may not be
traceable to their brief but envenomed couplets. What had been the
scandal of the camp acquired consistency in lines too pungent to be
forgotten and too witty to remain unquoted.[439] As a specimen of
Sannazzaro's style, the epigram on Venice may here be cited:--
Viderat Hadriacis Venetam Neptunus in undis
Stare urbem, et toto ponere jura mari:
Nunc mihi Tarpeias quantumvis, Jupiter, arces
Objice, et illa tui moenia Martis, ait:
Si Pelago Tybrim præfers, urbem aspice utramque;
Illam homines dices, hanc posuisse deos.[440]
[Footnote 438: 'Lilius Gyraldus,' loc. cit. p. 384, writes about this
epic, 'in quibus, ut sic dicam, statarius poeta videri potest. Non
enim verborum volubilitate fertur, sed limatius quoddam scribendi
genus consectatur, et limâ indies atterit, ut de illo non ineleganter
dictum illud Apellis de Protogene Pontanus usurpare solitus esset, eum
manum de tabulâ tollere nescire.']
[Footnote 439: See _Delitiæ Poetarum Italorum_, second part, pp.
713-761. The following couplet on the death of Cesare Borgia is
celebrated:--
Aut nihil aut Cæsar vult dici Borgia; quidni?
Cum simul et Cæsar possit et esse nihil.]
[Footnote 440: 'When Neptune beheld Venice stationed in the Adriatic
waters, and giving laws to all the ocean, "Now taunt me, Jupiter, with
the Tarpeian rock and those walls of thy son Mars!" he cried. "If thou
preferrest Tiber to the sea, look on both cities; thou wilt say the
one was built by men, the other by gods."']
I have already touched upon the Virgilianism of Sannazzaro's 'Partus
Virginis.'[441] What the cold churches of Palladio are to Christian
architecture, this frigid epic is to Christian poetry. Leo X.
delighted to recognise the Gospel narrative beneath a fancy dress of
mythological inventions, and to witness the triumph of classical
scholarship in the holy places of the mediæval faith. To fuse the
traditions of Biblical and secular antiquity was, as I have often
said, the dream of the Renaissance. What Pico and Ficino attempted in
philosophical treatises, the poets sought to effect by form. Religion,
attiring herself in classic drapery, threw off the cobwebs of the
Catacombs, and acquired the right of _petites entrées_ at the Vatican.
It did not signify that she had sacrificed her majesty to fashion, or
that her tunic _à la mode antique_ was badly made. Her rouge and
spangles enchanted the scholarly Pontiff, who forthwith ordered Vida
to compose the 'Christiad,' and gave him a benefice at Frascati in
order that he might enjoy a poet's ease. Vida's epic, like
Sannazzaro's, was not finished during the lifetime of Leo. Both the
'Christiad' and the 'Partus Virginis' reflected lustre on the age of
Clement.
[Footnote 441: See above, p. 288.]
Vida won his first laurels in the field of didactic poetry. Virgilian
exercises on the breeding of silkworms and the game of chess displayed
his faculty for investing familiar subjects with the graces of a
polished style.[442] Such poems, whether written in Latin, or, like
the 'Api' of Rucellai, in Italian, gratified the taste of the
Renaissance, always appreciative of form independent of the matter it
invested. For a modern student Vida's metrical treatise in three books
on the 'Art of Poetry' has greater interest; since it illustrates the
final outcome of classic studies in the age of Leo. The 'Poetica' is
addressed to Francis, Dauphin of France, in his Spanish prison:[443]--
Primus ades, Francisce; sacras ne despice Musas,
Regia progenies, cui regum debita sceptra
Gallorum, cum firma annis accesserit ætas.
Hæc tibi parva ferunt jam nunc solatia dulces;
Dum procul a patriâ raptum, amplexuque tuorum,
Ah dolor! Hispanis sors impia detinet oris,
Henrico cum fratre; patris sic fata tulerunt
Magnanimi, dum fortunâ luctatur iniquâ.
Parce tamen, puer, o lacrymis; fata aspera forsan
Mitescent, aderitque dies lætissima tandem
Post triste exilium patriis cum redditus oris
Lætitiam ingentem populorum, omnesque per urbes
Accipies plausus, et lætas undique voces;
Votaque pro reditu persolvent debita matres.
Interea te Pierides comitentur; in altos
Jam te Parnassi mecum aude attollere lucos.[444]
[Footnote 442: _Bombycum; Libri duo. Scacchia, Ludus; Liber unus._
Pope's _Poemata Italorum_, vol. i. pp. 103-130; pp. 190-210. The
former poem is addressed to Isabella Gonzaga, née d'Este.]
[Footnote 443: _Poemata Selecta_, pp. 207-266. It will be remembered
that Francis I., after Pavia, gave his two sons as hostages to Charles
V.]
[Footnote 444: 'Thou, Francis, art the first to answer to my call.
Scorn not the sacred Muses, scion of a royal line, to whom the sceptre
of the kings of Gallia in due season of maturity will pass. Their
sweetness even now shall yield thee some slight solace, exiled from
home and fatherland by fate impiteous on the Spanish shore, thee and
thy brother Henry. So the fortunes of thy mighty-hearted father
willed, condemned to strive against unequal doom. Yet spare thy tears:
perchance hard fate will soften, and a day of supreme joy will come at
last, when, after thy sad exile, once more given to thy nation, thou
shalt behold thy country's gladness, and hear the shouts of all her
cities and the ringing songs of happiness, and mothers shall perform
their vows for thy return. Meanwhile let the maidens of Pieria attend
thee; and, with me for guide, ascend into the groves of high
Parnassus.']
After this dedication Vida describes the solace to be found in poetry,
and adds some precepts on the preparation of the student's mind.[445]
A rapid review of the history of poetry--the decline of Greek
inspiration after Homer, and of Latin after Virgil; the qualities of
the Silver Age, and the Revival of letters under the Medici at
Florence--serves to show how narrow the standard of Italian culture
had become between the period of Poliziano, who embraced so much in
his sketch of literature, and that of Vida, who confined himself to so
little. The criticism is not unjust; but it proves that the refinement
of taste by scholarship had resulted in restricting students to one or
two models, whom they followed with servility.[446] Having thus
established his general view of the poetic art, Vida proceeds to
sketch a plan of education. The qualities and duties of a tutor are
described; and here we may notice how far Vittorino's and Guarino's
methods had created an ideal of training for Italy. The preceptor must
above all things avoid violence, and aim at winning the affections of
his pupil; it would be well for him to associate several youths in the
same course of study, so as to arouse their emulation. He must not
neglect their games, and must always be careful to suit his method to
the different talents of his charges. When the special studies to be
followed are discussed, Vida points out that Cicero is the best school
of Latin style. He recommends the early practice of bucolic verse, and
inculcates the necessity of treating youthful essays with indulgence.
These topics are touched with more or less felicity of phrase and
illustration; and though the subject-matter is sufficiently trite, the
good sense and kindly feeling of the writer win respect. The first
book concludes with a peroration on the dignity and sanctity of poets,
a theme the humanists were never weary of embroidering.[447] The
second describes the qualities of a good poem, as these were conceived
by the refined but formal taste of the sixteenth century. It should
begin quietly, and manage to excite without satisfying the curiosity
of the reader. Vain displays of learning are to be avoided. Episodes
and similes must occur at proper intervals; and a frugal seasoning of
humour will be found agreeable. All repetitions should be shunned, and
great care should be taken to vary the narrative with picturesque
descriptions. Rhetoric, again, is not unworthy of attention, when the
poet seeks to place convenient and specious arguments in the mouths of
his personages.
[Footnote 445:
tibi digna supellex
Verborum rerumque paranda est, proque videnda
Instant multa prius, quorum vatum indiget usus.
_Poemata Selecta_, p. 209.]
[Footnote 446: After mentioning the glories of Virgil, Vida adds:--
Sperare nefas sit vatibus ultra.
Nulla mora, ex illo in pejus ruere omnia visa,
Degenerare animi, atque retro res lapsa referri.
Hic namque ingenio confisus posthabet artem;
Ille furit strepitu, tenditque æquare tubarum
Voce sonos, versusque tonat sine more per omnes;
Dant alii cantus vacuos, et inania verba
Incassum, solâ capti dulcedine vocis.
_Poemata Selecta_, p. 213. Cf. the advice (p. 214) to follow none but
Virgil:--
Ergo ipsum ante alios animo venerare Maronem,
Atque unum sequere, utque potes, vestigia serva.]
[Footnote 447:
Dona deûm Musæ: vulgus procul este profanum.
_Poemata Selecta_, p. 224; and again, _ib._ p. 226:--
Tu Jovis ambrosiis das nos accumbere mensis;
Tu nos diis æquas superis, &c.]
It is difficult in a summary to do justice to this portion of Vida's
poem. His description of the ideal epic is indeed nothing more or less
than a refined analysis of the 'Æneid;' and students desirous of
learning what the Italians of the sixteenth century admired in Virgil
will do well to study its acute and sober criticism. A panegyric of
Leo closes the second book. From this peroration some lines upon the
woes of Italy may be read with profit, as proving that the nation,
conscious of its own decline, was contented to accept the primacy of
culture in exchange for independence:--
Dii Romæ indigetes, Trojæ tuque auctor, Apollo
Unde genus nostrum coeli se tollit ad astra,
Hanc saltem auferri laudem prohibete Latinis:
Artibus emineat semper, studiisque Minervæ,
Italia, et gentes doceat pulcherrima Roma;
Quandoguidem armorum penitus fortuna recessit,
Tanta Italos inter crevit discordia reges;
Ipsi nos inter sacros distringimus enses,
Nec patriam pudet externis aperire tyrannis.[448]
[Footnote 448: 'Ye native gods of Rome! and thou, Apollo, Troy's
founder! by whom our race is raised to heaven! let not at least this
glory be withdrawn from Latium's children: may Italy for ever hold the
heights of art and learning, and most beauteous Rome instruct the
nations; albeit all success in arms be lost, so great hath grown the
discord of Italia's princes. Yea, one against the other, we draw
bloody swords, nor feel we any shame in calling foreign tyrants into
our own land.'--_Poemata Selecta_, p. 245.]
The third book treats of style and diction. To be clear and varied, to
command metaphor and allusion, to choose phrases coloured by mythology
and fancy, to suit the language to the subject, to vary the metrical
cadence with the thought and feeling, and to be assiduous in the use
of the file are mentioned as indispensable to excellence. A peroration
on Virgil, sonorous and impassioned, closes the whole poem, which,
rightly understood, is a monument erected to the fame of the Roman
bard by the piety of his Italian pupil. The final lines are justly
famous:--
O decus Italiæ! lux o clarissima vatum!
Te colimus, tibi serta damus, tibi thura, tibi aras;
Et tibi rite sacrum semper dicemus honorem
Carminibus memores. Salve, sanctissime vates!
Laudibus augeri tua gloria nil potis ultra,
Et nostræ nil vocis eget; nos aspice præsens,
Pectoribusque tuos castis infunde calores
Adveniens, pater, atque animis te te insere nostris.[449]
[Footnote 449: 'Hail, light of Italy, thou brightest of the bards!
Thee we worship, thee we adore with wreaths, with frankincense, with
altars; to thee, as duty bids, for everlasting will we chaunt our holy
hymns. Hail, consecrated bard! No increase to thy glory flows from
praise, nor needs it voice of ours. Be near, and look upon thy
votaries; come, father, and infuse thy fervour into our chaste hearts,
and plant thyself within our souls.'--_Poemata Selecta_, p. 266.]
Vida's own intellect was clear, and his style perspicuous; but his
genius was mediocre. His power lay in the disposition of materials and
in illustration. A precise taste, formed on Cicero and Virgil, and
exercised with judgment in a narrow sphere, satisfied his critical
requirements. Virgil with him was first and last, and midst and
without end. In a word, he shows what a scholar of sound parts and
rhetorical aptitude could achieve by the study and imitation of a
single author.
Since I have begun to speak of didactic poems, I may take this
opportunity of noticing Fracastoro, who seems to have chosen Pontanus
for his model, and, while emulating both Lucretius and Virgil, to have
fallen short of Vida's elegance. His work is less remarkable for
purity of diction than for massiveness of intellect, gravity of
matter, and constructive ability. Jeronimo Fracastoro was born in 1483
at Verona, where he spent the greater portion of his life, enjoying
high reputation as a physician, philosopher, astronomer, and poet.
During his youth he studied under Pomponazzo at Padua. The strong
tincture of materialistic science he there received, continued through
life to colour his thought. Among modern Pagans none is more
completely bare of Christianity than Fracastoro. As is well known, he
chose the new and terrible disease of the Renaissance for his theme,
and gave a name to it that still is current. To speak of Fracastoro's
'Syphilis,' dedicated to Bembo, hailed with acclamation by all Italy,
preferred by Sannazzaro to his own epic, and praised by Julius Cæsar
Scaliger as a 'divine poem,' is not easy now. The plague it celebrates
appeared at Naples in 1495, and spread like wildfire over Europe,
assuming at first the form of an epidemic sparing neither Pope nor
king, and stirring less disgust than dread among its victims.[450]
Whether the laws of its propagation were rightly understood in the
sixteenth century is a question for physicians to decide. No one
appears to have suspected that it differed in specific character from
other pestilent disorders; and it is clear, both from contemporary
chronicles and from Fracastoro's poem, that the _mal franzese_, as it
was popularly called, suggested to the people of that age associations
different from those that have since gathered round it. At the same
time more formidable and less loathsome, it was a not more unworthy
subject for verse than the plague at Athens described by Lucretius.
Treating the disease, therefore, as a curse common to his generation,
the scientific poet dared to set forth its symptoms, to prescribe
remedies, to discuss the question of its origin, and to use it as an
illustration of antagonistic forces, pernicious and beneficent, in the
economy of nature. To philosophise his repulsive subject-matter was
the author's ambition. His contemporaries admired the poetic graces
with which he had contrived to adorn it.
[Footnote 450: See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 433, note.]
The exordium of the first book states the problem. Whence came this
new scourge of humanity? Not, surely, from America, though it is there
indigenous. Its diffusion after the disasters of 1494 was too rapid to
admit of this hypothesis.[451] To the corruption of the atmosphere
must be referred the general invasion of the plague.[452] The theory
of infected and putrescent air is stated in a long Lucretian passage,
followed by a scientific account of the symptoms of syphilis. At this
point the poet diversifies his argument by an episode, narrating the
sad death of a young man born on the banks of the Oglio, and leading
by gradual transitions to a peroration on the wars and woes of
Italy.[453] Over all the poets of this age the miseries of their
country hung like a cloud, and, touch the lyre as they may at the
beginning of their song, it is certain ere the ending to give forth a
dolorous groan. In the second book Fracastoro enters on the subject of
remedies. He lays stress on choice of air, abundant exercise,
avoidance of wine and heating diet, blood-letting, abstinence from
sensual pleasures, fomentations, herbs, and divers minute rules of
health. By attention to these matters the disease may be, if not
shunned, at least mitigated. The sovereign remedy of quicksilver
demanded fuller illustration; therefore the poet introduces the
legendary episode of the shepherd Ilceus, conducted by the nymph
Liparë to the sulphur founts and lakes of mercury beneath Mount Etna.
Ilceus bathed, and was renewed in health. The rigorously didactic
intention of Fracastoro is proved by the recipe for a mercurial
ointment and the description of salivation that wind up this
book.[454] The third opens with an allusion to the discovery of
America, and a celebration of the tree Hyacus (Guaiacum). It is
noticeable that, with such an opportunity for singing the praises of
Columbus, Fracastoro passed him by, nor cared to claim for Italy a
share in the greatest achievement of the century. Mingling myth with
history, he next proceeds to tell how the Spaniards arrived in the
West Indies, and shot birds sacred to the Sun,[455] one of which spoke
with human voice, predicting the evils that would fall upon the crew
for their impiety. Not the least of these was to be a strange and
terrible disease. The natives of the islands flocked to meet the
strangers, and some of them were tettered with a ghastly eruption.
This leads to the episodical legend of the shepherd Syphilus, who
dared to deride the Sun-god, and of the king Alcithous, who accepted
divine honours in his stead. The Sun, to requite the insolence of
Syphilus, afflicted him with a dreadful sickness. It yielded to no
cure until the nymph Ammericë initiated him in the proper lustral
rites, and led him to the tree Hyacus. The poem ends with a panegyric
of Guaiacum.
[Footnote 451:
quoniam in primis ostendere multos
Possumus, attactu qui nullius hanc tamen ipsam
Sponte suâ sensere luem, primique tulere.
_Poemata Selecta_, p. 67.]
[Footnote 452:
Quumque animadvertas, tam vastæ semina labis
Esse nec in terræ gremio, nec in æquore posse,
Haud dubie tecum statuas reputesque necesse est,
Principium sedemque mali consistere in ipso
Aëre, qui terras circum diffunditur omnes.
_Ibid._ p. 69.]
[Footnote 453: _Ibid._ pp. 79, 80.]
[Footnote 454: _Ibid._ pp. 95, 96.]
[Footnote 455: These phrases he finds for a fowling-piece:--
Cava terrificis horrentia bombis
Aera, et flammiferum tormenta imitantia fulmen.
_Poemata Selecta_, p. 101.]
I have sketched the subject of the 'Syphilis' in outline because of
its importance not only for the neo-Latin literature of the
Renaissance, but also for the history of medical opinion. As a
didactic poem, it is constructed with considerable art; the style,
though prosaic, is forcible, and the meaning is always precise.
Falling short of classic elegance, Fracastoro may still be said to
have fulfilled the requirements of Vida, and to have added something
male and vigorous peculiar to himself. His adulatory verses to
Alessandro Farnese, Paul III., and Julius III. might be quoted as
curious examples of fulsome flattery conveyed in a _barocco_ style.
They combine Papal cant with Pagan mannerism, Virgilian and Biblical
phraseology, masculine gravity of diction and far-fetched conceits, in
a strange amalgam, as awkward as it is ridiculous.[456]
[Footnote 456: Cf. the passage about Alessandro Farnese's journeys--
Matre deâ comitante et iter monstrante nepoti--
and the reformation in Germany. _Poemata Selecta_, p. 125. The whole
idyll addressed to Julius III., _ib._ pp. 130-135, is inconceivably
uncouth.]
Another group of Latin versifiers, with Bembo at their head,
cultivated the elegy, the idyll, and the ode. The authors of their
predilection were Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus. Abandoning the
attempt to mould Christian or modern material into classic form, they
frankly selected Pagan motives, and adhered in spirit as well as style
to their models. Two elegiac poems of Bembo's, the 'Priapus' and the
'Faunus ad Nympeum Flumen,' may be cited as flagrant specimens of
sixteenth-century licentiousness.[457] Polished language and almost
faultless versification are wasted upon themes of rank obscenity. The
'Priapus,' translated and amplified in Italian _ottava rima_, gained a
popular celebrity beyond the learned circles for whom it was
originally written. We may trace its influence in many infamous
Capitoli of the burlesque poets. Bembo excelled in elegiac verse. In a
poem entitled 'De Amicâ a Viro Servatâ,' he treated a characteristically
Italian subject with something of Ovid's graceful humour.[458] A lover
complains of living near his mistress, closely watched by her jealous
husband. Here, as elsewhere, the morality is less to be admired than
the versification; and that the latter, in spite of Bembo's scrupulous
attention to metre, is not perfect, may be gathered from this line:--
Tunc quos nunc habeo et quos sum olim habiturus amicos.
[Footnote 457: _Carmina Quinque Illustrium Poetarum_, pp. 4 and 9-11.]
[Footnote 458: _Ib._ pp. 18-23.]
After reading hexameters so constructed we are tempted to shut the
book with a groan, wondering how it was that a Pope's secretary and a
prince of the Church should have thought it worth his while to compose
a poem so injurious to his reputation as a moralist, or to preserve in
it a verse so little favourable to his fame as a Latinist. More
beautiful, because more true to classic inspiration, is the elegy of
'Galatea.'[459] The idyllic incidents suggest a series of pretty
pictures for bas-reliefs or decorative frescoes in the manner of
Albano. Bembo's masterpiece, however, in the elegiac metre, is a poem
with 'De Galeso et Maximo' for its title.[460] It was composed, as the
epigraph informs us, at the command of a great man at Rome; but
whether that great man was also the greatest in Rome, and whether
Maximus was another name for Leo, is matter of conjecture. The boy
Galesus had wronged Maximus, his master. When reproved, he offered no
excuses, called no witnesses, uttered no prayers to Heaven, indulged
in no asseverations of innocence, shed no tears:--
Nil horum aggreditur; sed tantum ingrata loquentis
Implicitus collo dulce pependit onus.
Nec mora, cunctanti roseis tot pressa labellis
Oscula coelitibus invidiosa dedit,
Arida quot levibus florescit messis aristis,
Excita quot vernis floribus halat humus.
Maxime, quid dubitas? Si te piget, ipse tuo me
Pone loco: hæc dubitem non ego ferre mala.[461]
[Footnote 459: _Carmina Quinque Illustrium Poetarum_, p. 7.]
[Footnote 460: _Ib._ p. 23.]
[Footnote 461:
None of these things he tried; but only ran,
And clasped with his sweet arms the angry man;
Hung on his neck, rained kisses forth that Heaven
Envied from those red lips to mortals given;
In number like ripe ears of ruddy corn,
Or flowers beneath the breath of April born.
Still doubting, Maximus? Change place with me:
Gladly I'd bear such infidelity.]
Bembo's talent lay in compositions of this kind. His verses, to quote
the phrase of Gyraldus, were uniformly 'sweet, soft, and delicate.'
When he attempted work involving more sustained effort of the
intellect and greater variety of treatment, he was not so successful.
His hexameter poem 'Benacus,' a description of the Lago di Garda,
dedicated to Gian Matteo Giberti, reads like an imitation of Catullus
without the Roman poet's grace of style or wealth of fancy.[462] Among
Bembo's most perfect compositions may be reckoned his epitaphs on
celebrated contemporaries. The following written for Poliziano,
deserves quotation.[463] Not only is the death of the scholar,
following close upon that of his patron, happily touched, but the last
line pays a proper tribute to Poliziano as an Italian poet:--
Duceret extincto cum mors Laurente triumphum,
Lætaque pullatis inveheretur equis,
Respicit insano ferientem pollice chordas,
Viscera singultu concutiente, virum.
Mirata est, tenuitque jugum; furit ipse, pioque
Laurentem cunctos flagitat ore Deos:
Miscebat precibus lacrymas, lacrymisque dolorem;
Verba ministrabat liberiora dolor.
Risit, et antiquæ non immemor illa querelæ,
Orphei Tartareæ cum patuere viæ,
Hic etiam infernas tentat rescindere leges,
Fertque suas, dixit, in mea jura manus.
Protinus et flentem percussit dura poetam,
Rupit et in medio pectora docta sono.
Heu sic tu raptus, sic te mala fata tulerunt,
Arbiter Ausoniæ, Politiane, lyræ.[464]
[Footnote 462: _Carmina Quinque Illustrium Poetarum_, pp. 26-34.]
[Footnote 463: _Ib._ p. 38.]
[Footnote 464: 'When Lorenzo was dead, and Death went by in triumph,
drawn by her black horses, her eyes fell on one who madly struck the
chords, while sighs convulsed his breast. She turned, and stayed the
car; he storms and calls on all the gods for Lorenzo, mixing tears
with prayers, and sorrow with his tears, while sorrow suggests words
of wilder freedom. Death laughed; remembering her old grudge, when
Orpheus made his way to hell, she cried, "Lo, he too seeks to abrogate
our laws, and lays his hand upon my rights!" Nor more delay; she
struck the poet while he wept, and broke his heart-strings in the
middle of his sighs. Alas! thus wast thou taken from us, ravished by
harsh fate, Politian, master of the Italian lyre!']
More richly endowed for poetry than Bembo was his fellow-countryman
Andrea Navagero. Few Latin versifiers of the Renaissance combined so
much true feeling and fancy with a style more pure and natural. Some
of his little compositions, half elegy, half idyll, have the grace and
freedom of the Greek Anthology.[465] There is a simple beauty in their
motives, while the workmanship reminds us of chiselling in smooth waxy
marble; unlike the Roman epigrammatists, Navagero avoided pointed
terminations.[466] The picture of Narcissus dead and transformed to a
flower, in the elegy of 'Acon,' might be quoted as a fair specimen of
his manner:--
Magna Parens, quæ cuncta leves producis in auras,
Totaque diverso germine picta nites;
Quæ passim arboribus, passim surgentibus herbis,
Sufficis omnifero larga alimenta sinu;
Excipe languentem puerum, moribundaque membra,
Æternumque tuâ fac, Dea, vivat ope.
Vivet, et ille vetus Zephyro redeunte quotannis
In niveo candor flore perennis erit.[467]
[Footnote 465: Notice especially 'Thyrsidis vota Veneri,' 'Invitatio
ad amoenum fontem,' 'Leucippem amicam spe præmiorum invitat,' 'Vota
Veneri ut amantibus faveat,' and 'In Almonem.'--_Carmina_, &c. pp. 52,
53, 54, 55.]
[Footnote 466: Paolo Giovio noticed this; in his _Elogia_ he writes,
'_Epigrammata non falsis aculeatisque finibus, sed tenerâ illâ et
prædulci priscâ suavitate claudebat._']
[Footnote 467: 'Mighty mother, thou who bringest all things forth to
breathe the liquid air, who shinest in thy painted robe of diverse
budding lives, thou who from thy teeming bosom givest nourishment to
trees and sprouting herbs in every region of the earth, take to
thyself the fainting boy, cherish his dying limbs, and make him live
for ever by thy aid. Yes, he shall live; and that white loveliness of
his, each year as spring returns, shall blossom in a snowy
flower.'--_Carmina_, &c. p. 57.]
The warnings addressed to his mistress in her country rambles, to
beware of rustic gods, and the whole eclogue of 'Iolas,' are written
in a rich and facile style, that makes us wonder whether some poet of
the Græco-Roman period did not live again in Navagero.[468] Only here
and there, as in the case of all this neo-Latin writing, an awkward
word or a defective cadence breaks the spell, and reminds us that it
was an artificial thing. A few lines forming the exordium to an
unfinished poem on Italy may be inserted here for their intrinsic
interest:--
Salve, cura Deûm, mundi felicior ora,
Formosæ Veneris dulces salvete recessus:
Ut vos post tantos animi mentisque labores
Aspicio, lustroque libens! ut munere vestro
Sollicitas toto depello e pectore curas![469]
[Footnote 468: 'Ad Gelliam rusticantem,' _Carmina_, &c. pp. 64-66.
'Iolas,' _ib._ pp. 66-68.]
[Footnote 469: 'Hail, darling of the gods, thou happiest spot of
earth! hail chosen haunt of beauty's queen! What joy I feel to see you
thus again, and tread your shores after so many toils endured in mind
and soul! How from my heart by your free gift I cast all anxious
cares!'--_Carmina_, &c. p. 84.]
Navagero, we are told, composed these verses on his return from a
legation to Spain. Born in 1483, he spent his youth and early manhood
in assiduous study. Excessive application undermined his health, and
Giovio relates that he began to suffer from _atra bilis_, or the
melancholy of scholars. The Venetian Senate had engaged him to compose
the history of the Republic in Latin; this work was already begun when
illness forced him to abandon it. He was afterwards employed in an
unsuccessful mission to Charles V. and in diplomatic business at the
Court of France. He died at Blois of fever, contracted in one of his
hurried journeys. He was only forty-six when he perished, bequeathing
to immediate posterity the fame of a poet at least equal to the
ancients. In that age of affectation and effort the natural flow of
Navagero's verse, sensuous without coarseness and highly coloured
without abuse of epithets, raised a chorus of applause that may strike
the modern student as excessive. The memorial poems written on his
death praise the purity of sentiment and taste which made him burn a
copy of Martial yearly to the chaste Muses.[470] One friend calls
upon the Nereids to build his tomb by the silent waters of the
lagoons, and bids the Faun of Italy lament with broken reeds.[471]
Another prophesies that his golden poems will last as many years as
there are flowers in spring, or grapes in autumn, or storms upon the
sea, or stars in heaven, or kisses in Catullus, or atoms in the
universe of Lucretius.[472]
[Footnote 470: See the Hendecasyllabics of Johannes Matthæus,
_Carmina_, &c. p. 86.]
[Footnote 471: Basilius Zanchius, _Carmina_, &c. p. 85.]
[Footnote 472: M. Antonius Flaminius, _ib._ p. 85.]
A place very close to Navagero might be claimed for Francesco Maria
Molsa, a nobleman of Modena, who enjoyed great fame at Rome for his
Latin and Italian poetry. After a wild life of pleasure he died at the
age of forty-one, worn out with love and smitten by the plague of the
Renaissance. The sweetest of his elegies celebrate the charms of
Faustina Mancini, his favourite mistress. In spite of what Italians
would call their _morbidezza_, it is impossible not to feel some
contempt for the polished fluency, the sensual relaxation, of these
soulless verses. A poem addressed to his friends upon his sick bed,
within sight of certain death, combines the author's melody of cadence
with a certain sobriety of thought and tender dignity of feeling.[473]
It is, perhaps, of all his compositions the worthiest to live. The
following couplets describe the place which he would choose for his
sepulchre:--
Non operosa peto titulos mihi marmora ponant,
Nostra sed accipiat fictilis ossa cadus;
Exceptet gremio quæ mox placidissima tellus,
Immites possint ne nocuisse feræ.
Rivulus hæc circum dissectus obambulet, unda
Clivoso qualis tramite ducta sonat;
Exiguis stet cæsa notis super ossa sepulta,
Nomen et his servet parva tabella meum:
Hic jacet ante annos crudeli tabe peremptus
Molsa; ter injecto pulvere, pastor, abi.
Forsitan in putrem longo post tempore glebam
Vertar, et hæc flores induet urna novos;
Populus aut potius abruptis artubus alba
Formosâ exsurgam conspicienda comâ.
Scilicet huc diti pecoris comitata magistro
Conveniet festo pulchra puella die;
Quæ molles ductet choreas, et veste recinctâ
Ad certos nôrit membra movere modos.[474]
[Footnote 473: _Poemata Selecta_, pp. 203-206. An elegy written by
Janus Etruscus, Pope's _Poemata Italorum_, vol. ii. p. 25, on a
similar theme, though very inferior to Molsa's, may be compared with
it.]
[Footnote 474: 'I ask for no monument of wrought marble to proclaim my
titles: let a vase of baked clay receive these bones. Let earth,
quietest of resting-places, take them to herself, and save them from
the injury of ravening wolves. And let a running stream divide its
waters round my grave, drawn with the sound of music from a
mountain-flank. A little tablet carved with simple letters will be
enough to mark the spot, and to preserve my name: "Here lies Molsa,
slain before his day by wasting sickness: cast dust upon him thrice,
and go thy way, gentle shepherd." It may be that after many years I
shall turn to yielding clay, and my tomb shall deck herself with
flowers; or, better, from my limbs shall spring a white poplar, and in
its beauteous foliage I shall rise into the light of heaven. To this
place will come, I hope, some lovely maid attended by the master of
the flock; and she shall dance above my bones and move her feet to
rhythmic music.']
The Paganism of the Renaissance, exchanging Christian rites for old
mythologies, and classic in the very tomb, has rarely found sweeter
expression than in this death song. We trace in it besides a note of
modern feeling, the romantic sense of community with nature in the
immortality of trees and flowers.[475]
[Footnote 475: For the picture of the girl dancing on the lover's
grave, cf. Omar Khayyam. Cf. too Walt Whitman's metaphor for
grass--'the beautiful uncut hair of graves.']
Castiglione cannot claim comparison with Navagero for sensuous charm
and easy flow of verse. Nor has he those touches of genuine poetry
which raise Molsa above the level of a fluent versifier. His Latin
exercises, however, offer much that is interesting to a student of
Renaissance literature; while the depth of feeling and the earnestness
of thought in his clear and powerful hexameters surpass the best
efforts of Bembo's artificial muse. When we read the idyll entitled
'Alcon,' a lamentation for the friend whom he had loved in youth--
Alcon deliciæ Musarum et Apollinis, Alcon
Pars animæ, cordis pars Alcon maxima nostri--[476]
we are impelled to question how far Milton owed the form of 'Lycidas'
to these Italian imitations of the Græco-Roman style. What seemed
false in tone to Johnson, what still renders that elegy the
stumbling-block of taste to immature and unsympathetic students, is
the highly artificial form given to natural feeling. Grief clothes
herself in metaphors, and, abstaining from the direct expression of
poignant emotion, dwells on thoughts and images that have a beauty of
their own for solace. Nor is it in this quality of art alone that
'Lycidas' reminds us of Renaissance Latin verse. The curious blending
of allusions to Church and State with pastoral images is no less
characteristic of the Italian manner. As in 'Lycidas,' so also in
these lines from Castiglione's 'Alcon,' the truth of sorrow transpires
through a thin veil of bucolic romance:--
Heu miserande puer, fatis surrepte malignis!
Non ego te posthac, pastorum adstante coronâ,
Victorem aspiciam volucri certare sagittâ;
Aut jaculo, aut durâ socios superare palæstrâ.
Non tecum posthac molli resupinus in umbrâ
Effugiam longos æstivo tempore soles:
Non tua vicinos mulcebit fistula montes,
Docta nec umbrosæ resonabunt carmina valles:
Non tua corticibus toties inscripta Lycoris,
Atque ignis Galatea meus nos jam simul ambos
Audierint ambæ nostros cantare furores.
Nos etenim a teneris simul usque huc viximus annis,
Frigora pertulimusque æstus noctesque diesque,
Communique simul sunt parta armenta labore.
Rura mea hæc tecum communia; viximus una:
Te moriente igitur curnam mihi vita relicta est?
Heu male me ira Deûm patriis abduxit ab oris,
Ne manibus premerem morientia lumina amicis.[477]
[Footnote 476: 'Alcon, the darling of Phoebus and the Muses; Alcon,
a part of my own soul; Alcon, the greatest part of my own
heart.'--_Carmina Quinque Poetarum_, p. 89.]
[Footnote 477: 'Alas! poor youth, withdrawn from us by fate malign.
Never again shall I behold thee, while the shepherds stand around, win
prizes with thy flying shafts or spear, or wrestle for the crown;
never again with thee reclining in the shade shall I all through a
summer's day avoid the sun. No more shall thy pipe soothe the
neighbouring hills, the vales repeat thy artful songs. No more shall
thy Lycoris, whose name inscribed by thee the woods remember, and my
Galatea hear us both together chaunt our loves. For we like brothers
lived our lives till now from infancy: heat and cold, days and nights,
we bore; our herds were reared with toil and care together. These
fields of mine were also thine: we lived one common life. Why, then,
when thou must die, am I still left to live? Alas! in evil hour the
wrath of Heaven withdrew me from my native land, nor suffered me to
close thy lids with a friend's hands!'--_Carmina_, &c. p. 91.]
Castiglione's most polished exercises are written on fictitious
subjects in elegiac metre. Thus he feigns a letter from his wife, in
the style of the 'Heroidum Epistolæ,' praying him to beware of Rome's
temptations, and to keep his heart for her.[478] Again he warns his
mistress to avoid the perils of the sea-beach, where the Tritons
roam:--
Os informe illis, rictus, oculique minaces,
Asperaque anguineo cortice membra rigent:
Barba impexa, ingens, algâ limoque virenti
Oblita, oletque gravi lurida odore coma.[479]
[Footnote 478: _Ib._ p. 100.]
[Footnote 479: 'Hideous is their face, their grinning mouth, their
threatening eyes, and their rough limbs are stiff with snaky scales;
their beard hangs long and wide, uncombed, tangled with sea-weed and
green ooze, and their dusky hair smells rank of brine.'--_Ib._ p.
103.]
In these couplets we seem to read a transcript from some fresco of
Mantegna or Julio Romano. Two long elegies are devoted to the theme of
marine monsters, and the tale of Hippolytus is introduced to clinch
the poet's argument. Among Castiglione's poems of compliment, forming
a pleasant illustration to his book of the 'Courtier,' may be
mentioned the lines on 'Elisabetta Gonzaga singing.'[480] Nor can I
omit the most original of his elegies, written, or at least conceived,
in the camp of Julius before Mirandola.[481] Walking by night in the
trenches under the beleaguered walls, Castiglione meets the ghost of
Lodovico Pico, who utters a lamentation over the wrongs inflicted on
his city and his race. The roar of cannon cuts short this monologue,
and the spectre vanishes into darkness with a groan. During his long
threnody the prince of Mirandola apostrophises the warlike Pope in
these couplets:--
O Pater, O Pastor populorum, O maxime mundi
Arbiter, humanum qui genus omne regis;
Justitiæ pacisque dator placidæque quietis,
Credita cui soli est vita salusque hominum;
Quem Deus ipse Erebi fecit Coelique potentem,
Ut nutu pateant utraque regna tuo![482]
[Footnote 480: 'De Elisabetta Gonzaga canente,' _Carmina_, &c. p. 97.
Cf. Bembo's 'Ad Lucretiam Borgiam,' _ib._ p. 14, on a similar theme.]
[Footnote 481: _Ib._ p. 95.]
[Footnote 482: 'O father, O shepherd of the nations, O great master of
the world who rulest all the human race, giver of justice, peace, and
tranquil ease; thou to whom alone is committed the life and salvation
of men, whom God Himself made lord of hell and heaven, that either
realm might open at thy nod.']
When the spiritual authority of the Popes came thus to be expressed in
Latin verse, it was impossible not to treat them as deities. The
temptation to apply to them the language of Roman religion was too
great; the double opportunity of flattering their vanity as Pontiffs,
and their ears as scholars, was too attractive to be missed. In
another place Castiglione used the following phrases about Leo:--
Nec culpanda tua est mora, nam præcepta Deorum
Non fas, nec tutum est spernere velle homini:
Esse tamen fertur clementia tanta Leonis
Ut facili humanas audiat ore preces.[483]
[Footnote 483: 'I do not blame thee for delaying thy return, since
neither is it safe nor right for man to set at naught a God's command;
and yet so great is Leo's kindness said to be that he inclines a ready
ear to human prayers.'--_Ib._ p. 102.]
Navagero called Julius II. _novus ex alto demissus Olympo Deus_ (a new
God sent down from heaven to earth), and declared that the people of
Italy, in thanksgiving for his liberation of their country from the
barbarians, would pay him yearly honours with prayer and praise:--
Ergo omnes, veluti et Phoebo Panique, quotannis
Pastores certis statuent tibi sacra diebus,
Magne Pater; nostrisque diu cantabere silvis.
Te rupes, te saxa, cavæ te, Maxime Juli,
Convalles, nemorumque frequens iterabit imago.
At vero nostris quæcumque in saltibus usquam
Quercus erit, ut quæque suos dant tempora flores,
Semper erit variis ramos innexa coronis;
Inscriptumque geret felici nomine truncum.
Tum quoties pastum expellet, pastasve reducet
Nostrum aliquis pecudes; toties id mente revolvens
Ut liceat, factum esse tuo, Pater optime, ductu;
Nullus erit, qui non libet tibi lacte recenti,
Nullus erit qui non teneros tibi nutriat agnos.
Quin audire preces nisi dedignabere agrestes,
Tu nostra ante Deos in vota vocaberis omnes.
Ipse ego bina tibi solenni altaria ritu,
Et geminos sacrâ e quercu lauroque virenti
Vicino lucos Nanceli in litore ponam.[484]
[Footnote 484: 'Therefore shall all our shepherds pay thee divine
honours, as to Pan or Phoebus, on fixed days, great Father; and long
shalt thou be celebrated in our forests. Thy praise, Julius the Great,
the cliffs, the rocks, the hollow valleys, and the woodland echoes
shall repeat. Wherever in our groves an oak tree stands, as spring and
summer bring the flowers, its branches shall be hung with wreaths, its
trunk shall be inscribed with thy auspicious name. As often as our
shepherds drive the flocks afield, or bring them pastured home, each
one, remembering that he does this under thy protection, shall pour
libations of new milk forth to thee, and rear thee tender lambs for
sacrifice. Nay, if thou spurn not rustic prayers, before all gods
shall we invoke thee in our supplications. I myself will build and
dedicate to thee two altars, and will plant twin groves of sacred oak
and laurel evergreen for thee.'--_Carmina_, &c. pp. 58, 59.]
It will be remembered that the oak was the ensign of the Della Rovere
family, so that when the poets exalted Julius to Olympus, they were
not in want of a tree sacred to the new deity. To trace this Pagan
flattery of the Popes through all its forms would be a tedious
business. It will be enough to quote Poliziano's 'Sapphics' to
Innocent VIII.:--
Roma cui paret dominusque Tibris,
Qui vicem summi geris hic Tonantis,
Qui potes magnum reserare et idem
Claudere coelum.[485]
[Footnote 485: 'Thou whom Rome obeys, and royal Tiber, who wieldest
upon earth the Thunderer's power, whose it is to lock and open the
gates of heaven.'--_Ib._ p. 260.]
A more quaint confusion of Latin mythology and mediæval superstition,
more glibly and trippingly conveyed in flimsy verse, can hardly be
imagined; and yet even this, I think, is beaten by the ponderous
conceits of Fracastoro, who, through the mouth of the goat-footed Pan,
saluted Julius III. as the mountain of salvation, playing on his name
Del Monte:--
Hoc in Monte Dei pecudes pascentur et agni,
Graminis æterni pingues et velleris aurei;
Exsilient et aquæ vivæ, quibus ubera capræ
Grandia distendant, distendant ubera vaccæ.[486]
[Footnote 486: 'In this mountain of the Lord shall flocks and herds
feed, fat with eternal pastures and golden-fleeced. Living waters too
shall leap forth, wherewith the goats shall swell their udders, and
the kine likewise.'--_Poemata Selecta_, p. 132.]
The mountain soon becomes a shepherd, and the shepherd not only rules
the people, and feeds the sheep of God, but chains the monsters of the
Reformation to a rock in Caucasus, and gives peace and plenty to
Italy:--
Æternis illum numeris ad sidera tollent,
Heroemque, deumque, salutiferumque vocabunt.[487]
[Footnote 487: 'Him with immortal verse the poets shall exalt to
heaven, and call him hero, god, and saviour.'--_Ib._ p. 133.]
Returning to Castiglione: I have already spoken of his epitaph on
Raphael and his description of the newly-discovered 'Ariadne.'[488]
The latter exercise in rhetoric competes with Sadoleto's laboured
hexameters on the Laocoon. These verses, frigid as a prize poem in our
estimation, moved Bembo to enthusiasm. When they appeared he wrote to
Sadoleto, 'I have read your poem on Laocoon a hundred times. O
wonder-working bard! Not only have you made for us, as it were, a
second statue to match that masterpiece; but you have engraved upon my
mind the very statue itself.' This panegyric stirs a smile when we
compare it with Sadoleto's own prolusion, the fruit of a grave
intellect and cultivated taste rather than of genius and
inspiration.[489]
[Footnote 488: See above, pp. 312, 317.]
[Footnote 489: See _Carmina Quinque Poetarum_, pp. 318-336.]
Time would fail to tell of all the later Latin poets--of La Casa's
polished lyrics in the style of Horace, of Amalteo's waxen eclogues,
of Aonio Paleario's fantastic hexameters upon the 'Immortality of the
Soul,'[490] of Strozzi's elegies, of Ariosto's epigrams, and
Calcagnini's learned muse. When I repeat that every educated man wrote
Latin verses in that century, and that all who could committed their
productions to the press, enough has been said to prove the
impossibility of dealing more than superficially with so vast a mass
of meritorious mediocrity.
[Footnote 490: A didactic poem in three books; Pope's _Poemata
Italorum_, vol. i. pp. 211-270. The description of the Resurrection,
the Last Judgment, and the entrance of the blessed into Paradise,
forming the conclusion of the last book, is an excellent specimen of
_barocco_ style and bathos. Virgil had written, '_Ite domum pasti, si
quis pudor, ite juvenci!_' Paleario makes the Judge address the damned
souls thus: '_Ite domum in tristem, si quis pudor, ite ruentes_,' &c.
How close Milton's path lay to the worst faults in poetry, and how
wonderfully he escaped, may well be calculated by the study of such
verse as this.]
One name remains to be rescued from the decent obscurity of the
'Delitiæ Poetarum Italorum.' Marcantonio Flaminio was born at
Seravalle in 1498. He came, while yet a young man, to the Court of Leo
armed with Latin poetry for his credentials. No better claim on
patronage from Pope or cardinal could be preferred in that age of
twanging lyres. At Rome Flaminio lived in the service of Alessandro
Farnese, whose hospitality he afterwards repaid with verses honourable
alike to poet and patron by their freedom from vulgar flattery. The
atmosphere of a Court, however, was uncongenial to Flaminio. Fond of
country life, addicted to serious studies, sober in his tastes, and
cheerful in his spirits, pious, and unaffectedly unambitious, he
avoided the stream of the great world and lived retired. Community of
interests brought him into close connection with the Cardinals Pole
and Contarini, from whom he caught so much of the Reformation spirit
as a philosophical Italian could assimilate; but it was not in his
modest and quiet nature to raise the cry of revolt against
authority.[491] The most distinguished wits and scholars of the age
were among his intimate friends. Both his poems and his correspondence
reflect an agreeable light upon the literary society of the late
Renaissance. The Latin verses, with which we are at present occupied,
breathe genuine piety, healthful simplicity, and moral purity, in
strong contrast with the neopaganism of the Roman circle. These
qualities suit the robust style, clear, terse, and nervous, he knew
how to use. It is pleasant to close the series of Italian Latinists
with one who combined the best art of his century with the temper of a
republican and the spirit of a Christian.
[Footnote 491: This epigram on Savonarola shows Flaminio's sympathy
with the preachers of pure doctrine:--
Dum fera flamma tuos, Hieronyme, pascitur artus,
Relligio, sacras dilaniata comas,
Flevit, et o, dixit, crudeles parcite flammæ,
Parcite, sunt isto viscera nostra rogo.]
The most prominent quality of Flaminio as a poet is love of the
country. Three little compositions describing his own farm are
animated with the enthusiasm of genuine affection.[492] We feel that
no mere reminiscence of Catullus makes him write--
Jam vos revisam, jam juvabit arbores
Manu paternâ consitas
Videre, jam libebit in cubiculo
Molles inire somnulos.[493]
[Footnote 492: 'Ad Agellum suum.'--_Poemata Selecta_, pp. 155, 156,
177.]
[Footnote 493: 'Now shall I see you once again; now shall I have the
joy of gazing on the trees my father planted, and falling into gentle
slumber in his little room.']
Nor is it an idle prayer he addresses to the Muses in these lines:--
At vos, o Heliconiæ puellæ,
Queis fontes et amoena rura cordi,
Si carâ mihi luce cariores
Estis, jam miserescite obsecrantis,
Meque, urbis strepitu tumultuosæ
Ereptum, in placido locate agello.[494]
[Footnote 494: 'Maidens of Helicon, who love the fountains and the
pleasant fields, as you are dearer to me than the dear light, have
pity now upon your suppliant, take me from the tumult of the noisy
town, and place me in my tranquil farm.']
He is never tired of contrasting the pleasures of the country with the
noise and weariness of Rome:--
Ipse miser tumultuosâ
Urbe detinear; tibi benignus
Dedit Jupiter in remoto agello
Latentem placidâ frui quiete,
Inter Socraticos libros, et inter
Nymphas et Satyros, nihil profani
Curantem populi leves honores.[495]
[Footnote 495: 'I, poor wretch, am prisoned in the noisy town. Kind
Jupiter allows you, secluded in your distant farm, to take the joys of
peace among Socratic books, among the nymphs and satyrs, unheeding the
light honours of the vulgar crowd.'--'Ad Honoratum Fascitellum,'
_Poemata Selecta_, p. 178.]
Flaminio's thought of the country is always connected with the
thought of study. The picture of a tranquil scholar's life among the
fields, diversified by sport and simple pleasures of the rustic folk,
gives freshness to his hendecasyllables, whether addressed to his
patron Alessandro Farnese, or to his friends Galeazzo Florimonte and
Francesco Torriani:[496]--
Inde ocellos
Ut primum sopor incubans gravabit,
Jucundissime amice, te sub antrum
Ducam, quod croceis tegunt corymbis
Serpentes hederæ, imminensque laurus
Suaviter foliis susurrat: at tu
Ne febrim metuas gravedinemve;
Est enim locus innocens: ubi ergo
Hic satis requieveris, legentur
Lusus Virgilii, et Syracusani
Vatis, quo nihil est magis venustum,
Nihil dulcius, ut mihi videtur.
Cum se fregerit æstus, in virenti
Convalle spatiabimur; sequetur
Brevis coena; redibis inde ad urbem.[497]
[Footnote 496: _Poemata Selecta_, pp. 153, 169, 173.]
[Footnote 497: 'Then, when sleep descends upon your eyes, best friend
of mine, I'll lead you to a cave o'ercurtained by the wandering ivy's
yellow bunches, whereby the sheltering laurel murmurs with her gently
waving leaves. Fear no fever or dull headache. The place is safe. So
when you are rested, we will read the rustic songs of Virgil or
Theocritus; sweet and more charming verse I know not; and after the
day's heat is past, we will stroll in some green valley. A light
supper follows, and then you shall return to town.'--_Ib._ p. 174.]
One of Flaminio's best poems is written from his friend Stefano
Sauli's villa near Genoa.[498] It describes how he spends his time
between the philosophy of Aristotle and the verses of Catullus, while
Sauli at his side devotes himself to Cicero. The fall of evening lures
them from their study to the sea-beach: perched upon a water-girded
rock, they angle with long reeds for fishes, or watch the white sails
on the purple waves. The same theme is repeated in a copy of
hexameters addressed to Sauli.[499] Flaminio had fallen ill of fever
at Rome. To quit the city was his cure:--
Scilicet ut Romæ corruptas fugimus auras,
Et riguos patriæ montes saltusque salubres
Venimus, effoetos venit quoque robur in artus:
Diffugit macies, diffugit corpore pallor;
Et somnus vigiles irrepsit blandus ocellos,
Quem neque desiliens crepitanti rivulus undâ,
Nec Lethea mihi duxere papavera quondam.[500]
[Footnote 498: 'Ad Christophorum Longolium,' _Ib._]
[Footnote 499: _Poemata Selecta_, p. 163.]
[Footnote 500: 'No sooner had I left Rome's tainted air for the clear
streams and healthful forests of my native land, than strength
returned into my wasted limbs; my body lost the pallor and emaciation
of disease, and sweet sleep crept upon my wakeful eyes, such as no
waters falling with a tinkling sound or Lethe's poppies had induced
before.']
Sauli, for his part, is congratulated on having exchanged the cares of
Church and State for Ciceronian studies among his laurel groves and
gleaming orange gardens.
Flaminio's intimate relations with the ablest men of the century,
those especially who were engaged in grave and Christian studies, add
extrinsic interest to his fugitive pieces. In one poem he alludes to
the weak health of Cardinal Pole;[501] in another he compares Plato's
description of the ideal republic with Contarini's work upon the
magistrates and commonwealth of Venice:--
Descripsit ille maximus quondam Plato
Longis suorum ambagibus voluminum,
Quis civitatis optimus foret status:
Sed hunc ab ipsâ sæculorum origine
Nec ulla vidit, nec videbit civitas.
At Contarenus optimam rempublicam
Parvi libelli disputationibus
Illam probavit esse, plus millesima
Quam cernit æstas Adriatico in mari
Florere pace, litteris, pecuniâ.[502]
[Footnote 501: _Poemata Selecta_, p. 162.]
[Footnote 502: 'Plato, the greatest of sages, once described in his
long volumes the best form of a State; but this from the beginning of
the world till now hath never yet been seen, nor will it afterwards be
seen in any city. Contarini in his little book has proved that the
best commonwealth is that which now for more than a thousand years has
flourished in the Adriatic with peace, letters, and wealth.'--_Poemata
Selecta_, p. 162.]
When Vittoria Colonna died, Flaminio wrote a lamentation on the loss
he had sustained, and on the extinction of so great a light for Italy.
These verses are remarkable for their sobriety and strength:--
Cui mens candida, candidique mores,
Virtus vivida, comitasque sancta,
Coeleste ingenium, eruditioque
Rara, nectare dulciora verba,
Summa nobilitas, decora vultûs
Majestas, opulenta sed bonorum
Et res et domus usque aperta ad usus.[503]
[Footnote 503: 'Ad Hieronymum Turrianum,' _ib._ p. 168. 'Her mind was
pure, her manners pure; her virtue lively, her courtesy without a
taint of earth; her intellect was heavenly, her learning rare; her
words sweeter than nectar; her nobility the highest; her features
beautiful in their majesty; her wealth liberally open to the use of
good men.']
The same firm and delicate touch in the delineation of character gives
value to the lines written on his father's death:--
Vixisti, genitor, bene ac beate,
Nec pauper, neque dives, eruditus
Satis, et satis eloquens, valente
Semper corpore, mente sanâ, amicis
Jucundus, pietate singulari.
Nunc lustris bene sexdecim peractis
Ad divûm proficisceris beatas
Oras; i, genitor, tuumque natum
Olympi cito siste tecum in arce.[504]
[Footnote 504: 'Well and happily hast thou lived, my father; neither
poor nor rich; learned enough and eloquent enough; of vigorous body
and of healthy mind; pleasant to thy friends, and in thy piety
unrivalled. Now, after sixteen lustres finished, thou goest to the
regions of the blest. Go, father, and soon greet thy son, to stay with
thee in heaven's high seat.'--'Ad Patrem morientem,' _Poemata
Selecta_, p. 157.]
At the risk of extending this notice of Flaminio's poetry beyond due
limits, I must quote from a copy of verses sent to Alessandro
Farnese, together with a volume containing the Latin _prolusiones_ of
the North Italian scholars:--
Hos tibi lepidissimos poetas
Dono, tempora quos tulere nostra,
Fortunata nimis, nimis beata
Nostra tempora, quæ suos Catullos,
Tibullos, et Horatios, suosque
Marones genuere. Quis putasset,
Post tot sæcula tam tenebricosa,
Et tot Ausoniæ graves ruinas,
Tanta lumina tempore uno in una
Tam brevi regione Transpadanâ
Oriri potuisse? quæ vel ipsa
Sola barbarie queant fugatâ
Suum reddere litteris Latinis
Splendorem, veteremque dignitatem.[505]
[Footnote 505: _Poemata Selecta_, p. 166. 'These most graceful poets I
give you, the offspring of our too, too happy times, which have
produced their Catullus and their Horace, their Tibullus and their
Maro. Who could have thought, after so many ages of such darkness, and
all the ruin that has weighed on Italy, that so many lights could have
arisen at one epoch in one little region of the land above the Po?
They alone are enough to put to flight the gloom of barbarism, and to
restore its antique glory and own splendour to Latin literature.'
After this he goes on to add that these poets will confer eternal
lustre on Italy. Not only the northern nations of Europe, but America
also has begun to study Latin; and races in another hemisphere will
take their culture from these pages. The Cardinal is finally reminded
that immortality of fame awaits him in their praises.]
There is the whole of humanism in this passage--the belief in the
unity of Italian civilisation, the conviction that the Middle Ages
were but an interruption of historic continuity, the confidence in the
restoration of classic literature, and the firm hope that Latin would
never cease to be the language of culture. Flaminio says nothing,
unless parenthetically, about the real woes of his country. The
tyranny of the Spaniard and the violence of the German are reckoned
with the old wrongs of the Goth and the Vandal in one phrase--'_tot
graves ruinas_.' He does not touch upon the dismemberment of Italy
into mutually jealous and suspicious States: for him the Italian
nation, even in a dream, has no existence. He is satisfied with a
literary ideal. Too fortunate, too blessed, are these days of ours, in
spite of Florence extinguished, Rome sacked, Milan devastated, Venice
curbed, because, forsooth, Bembo and Fracastoro have made a pinchbeck
age of poetry. Here lay the incurable weakness of the humanistic
movement. The vanity of the scholar, determined to seek the present in
the past, building the walls of Troy anew with borrowed music, and
singing in falsetto while Rome was burning--this blindness to the
actual situation of Italy was scarcely less pernicious, scarcely less
a sign of incapacity for civil life than the selfishness of the
Despots or the egotism of the Papacy. Italy was foredoomed to lose her
place among the nations at the very moment when she was recovering
culture for the modern world; and when that culture was recovered
through her industry and genius, not she, but the races of the North,
began to profit by the acquisition--not her imitations of the Latin
Muse, but the new languages of Europe were destined to prevail and
lead the age.
Another point for observation is that the centre of humanistic studies
has shifted.[506] Florence, disillusioned, drained of strength, and
sucked dry by the tyrants, holds her tongue. The schools of Naples and
of Rome are silent. Lombardy is now the mother of poets, who draw
their inspiration no longer from Valdarno or the myrtle groves of
Posilippo, but from the blue waves of Garda.[507] The university where
science still flourishes is Padua. The best professors of the
classics, Celio Calcagnini and Lilius Gyraldus, teach at Ferrara.
Bembo, the dictator of letters for his century, Navagero, the sweetest
versifier, Contarini, the most sober student, are Venetians. Stefano
Sauli, the author of a Ciceronian treatise on the Christian hero, is a
patrician of Genoa. Sadoleto and Molsa are Modenese. Verona claims
Fracastoro and the Torriani. Imola is the mother city of Flaminio.
Castiglione and Capilupo are natives of Mantua; Amalteo and Vida of
Forli and Cremona; Bonfadio and Archio of Lake Garda. If we seek the
causes of this change, we find them partly in the circumstance that
Venice at this period was free, while Ferrara still retained her
independence under native princes; partly also in the fact that
Florence had already overtaxed her intellectual energies. Like a
creeping paralysis, the extinction of liberty and spiritual force was
gradually invading all the members of the Italian community. The
Revival of Learning came to an end, as far as Italy was concerned, in
these Transpadane poets.
[Footnote 506: 'Tam brevi regione Transpadanâ.']
[Footnote 507: Cf. Bembo's _Benacus_, Bonfadio's _Gazani Vici
Descriptio_, Fracastoro's _Ad Franciscum Turrianum Veronensem_, &c.]
To trace the history of philosophic thought, set in motion by the
Renaissance and stamped out by the Counter-Reformation, and to
describe the aftergrowth of art and literature encouraged by the
Catholic reaction, must form the subject of a separate inquiry.
I hope, if I have time and strength, after the completion of my work
on the Renaissance, to trace this sequel in a volume on 'Italy and the
Council of Trent.' To this chapter of Italian history will also belong
the philosophy of the sixteenth century, the poetry of Tasso, the
painting of the Bolognese masters, and the new music of Palestrina.