in 1604, and in 1605 carried the compliments of that now Pontifical city
to Paul V. in Rome on his election to the Papacy. Upon this occasion
Cardinal Bellarmino told him that he had inflicted as much harm on
Christendom by his _Pastor Fido_ as Luther and Calvin by their heresies.
He retorted with a sarcasm which has not been transmitted to us, but
which may probably have reflected on the pollution of Christian morals
by the Jesuits. In 1612 Guarini died at Venice, whither he was summoned
by one of his innumerable and interminable lawsuits.
Bellarmino's censure of the _Pastor Fido_ strikes a modern reader as
inexplicably severe. Yet it is certain that the dissolute seventeenth
century recognized this drama as one of the most potent agents of
corruption. Not infrequent references in the literature of that age to
the ruin of families and reputations by its means, warn us to remember
how difficult it is to estimate the ethical sensibilities of society in
periods remote from our own.[183] In the course of the analysis which I
now propose to make of this play, I shall attempt to show how, coming
midway between Tasso's _Aminta_ and Marino's _Adone_, and appealing to
the dominant musical enthusiasms of the epoch, Guarini's _Pastor Fido_
may have merited the condemnation of far-sighted moralists. Not
censurable in itself, it was so related to the sentimental sensuality of
its period as to form a link in the chain of enervation which weighed on
Italy.
[Footnote 183: _Il Pastor Fido_, per cura di G. Casella (Firenze,
Barbera, 1866), p. liv.]
The _Pastor Fido_ is a tragi-comedy, as its author points out with some
elaboration in the critical essay he composed upon that species of the
drama. The scene is laid in Arcadia, where according to Guarini it was
customary to sacrifice a maiden each year to Diana, in expiation of an
ancient curse brought upon the country by a woman's infidelity. An
oracle has declared that when two scions of divine lineage are united in
marriage, and a faithful shepherd atones for woman's faithlessness,
this inhuman rite shall cease. The only youth and girl who fulfill these
conditions of divine descent are the daughter of Titiro named Amarilli,
and Silvio, the son of the high priest Montano. They have accordingly
been betrothed. But Silvio is indifferent to womankind in general, and
Amarilli loves a handsome stranger, Mirtillo, supposed to be the son of
Carino. The plot turns upon the unexpected fulfillment of the prophecy,
in spite of the human means which have been blindly taken to secure its
accomplishment. Amarilli is condemned to death for suspected misconduct
with a lover; and Mirtillo, who has substituted himself as victim in her
place, is found to be the lost son of Montano. This solution of the
intrigue, effected by an anagnorisis like that of the _Oedipus
Tyrannus_, supplies a series of dramatic scenes and thrilling situations
in the last act. Meanwhile the passion of Dorinda for Silvio, and the
accident whereby he is brought to return her affection at the moment
when his dart has wounded her, form a picturesque underplot of
considerable interest. Both plot and underplot are so connected in the
main action and so interwoven by links of mutual dependency that they
form one richly varied fabric. Regarded as a piece of cunning mechanism,
the complicated structure of the _Pastor Fido_ leaves nothing to be
desired. In its kind, this pastoral drama is a monumental work of art,
glittering and faultless like a polished bas-relief of hard Corinthian
bronze. Each motive has been carefully prepared, each situation amply
and logically developed. The characters are firmly traced, and sustained
with consistency. The cold and eager hunter Silvio contrasts with tender
and romantic Mirtillo. Corisca's meretricious arts and systematized
profligacy enhance the pure affection of Amarilli. Dorinda presents
another type of love, so impulsive that it conquers maidenly modesty.
The Satyr is a creature of rude lust, foiled in its brutal appetite by
the courtesan Corisca's wiliness. Carino brings the corruption of towns
into comparison with the innocence of the country.
In Carino the poet painted his own experience; and here his satire upon
the Court of Ferrara is none the less biting because it takes the form
of well-weighed and gravely-measured censure, instead of vehement
invective. The following lines may serve as a specimen of Guarini's
style in this species:--
I' mi pensai che ne' reali alberghi
Fossero tanto piu le genti umane,
Quant'esse ban piu di tutto quel dovizia,
Ond' e l'umanita si nobil fregio.
Ma mi trovai tutto 'l contrario, Uranio.
Gente di nome e di parlar cortese,
Ma d'opre scarsa, e di pieta nemica:
Gente placida in vista e mansueta,
Ma piu del cupo mar tumida e fera:
Gente sol d'apparenza, in cui se miri
Viso di carita, mente d'invidia
Poi trovi, e 'n dritto sguardo animo bieco,
E minor fede allor che pin lusinga.
Quel ch'altrove e virtu, quivi e difetto:
Dir vero, oprar non torto, amar non finto,
Pieta sincera, inviolabil fede,
E di core e di man vita innocente,
Stiman d'animo vil, di basso ingegno,
Sciochezza e vanita degna di riso.
L'ingannare, il mentir, la frode, il furto,
E la rapina di pieta vestita,
Crescer col danno e precipizio altrui,
E far a se dell'altrui biasimo onore,
Son le virtu di quella gente infida.
Non merto, non valor, non riverenza
Ne d'eta ne di grado ne di legge;
Non freno di vergogna, non rispetto
Ne d'amor ne di sangue, non memoria
Di ricevuto ben; ne, finalmente,
Cosa si venerabile o si santa
O si giusta esser puo, ch'a quella vasta
Cupidigia d'onori, a quella ingorda
Fama d'avere, inviolabil sia.
The _Pastor Fido_ was written in open emulation of Tasso's _Aminta_, and
many of its most brilliant passages are borrowed from that play. Such,
for example, is the Chorus on the Golden Age which closes the fourth
act. Such, too, is the long description by Mirtillo of the kiss he stole
from Amarilli (act ii. sc. 1). The motive here is taken from _Rinaldo_
(canto v.), and the spirit from _Aminta_ (act i. sc. 2). Guarini's Satyr
is a studied picture from the sketch in Tasso's pastoral. The dialogue
between Silvio and Linco (act i. sc. 1) with its lyrical refrain:
Lascia, lascia le selve,
Folle garzon, lascia le fere, ed ama:
reproduces the dialogue between Silvia and Dafne (act i. sc. 1) with its
similar refrain:
Cangia, cangia consiglio,
Pazzarella che sei.
In all these instances Guarini works up Tasso's motives into more
elaborate forms. He expands the simple suggestions of his model; and
employs the artifices of rhetoric where Tasso yielded to inspiration.
One example will suffice to contrast the methods of the spontaneous and
the reflective poet. Tasso with divine impulse had exclaimed:
Odi quell'usignuolo,
Che va di ramo in ramo
Cantando: Io amo, io amo!
This, in Guarini's hands, becomes:
Quell'augellin, che canta
Si dolcemente, e lascivetto vola
Or dall'abete al faggio,
Ed or dal faggio al mirto,
S'avesse umano spirto,
Direbbe: Ardo d'amore, ardo d'amore.
Here a laborious effort of the constructive fancy has been substituted
for a single flash of sympathetic imagination. Tasso does not doubt that
the nightingale is pouring out her love in song. Guarini says that if
the bird had human soul, it would exclaim, _Ardo d'amore_. Tasso sees it
flying from branch to branch. Guarini teases our sense of mental vision
by particularizing pine and beech and myrtle. The same is true of
Linco's speech in general when compared with Dafne's on the ruling power
of love in earth and heaven.
Of imagination in the true sense of the term Guarini had none. Of
fancy, dwelling gracefully, ingeniously, suggestively, upon externals he
had plenty. The minute care with which he worked out each vein of
thought and spun each thread of sentiment, was that of the rhetorician
rather than the poet. Tasso had made Aminta say:
La semplicetta Silvia
Pietosa del mio male,
S'offri di dar aita
Alla finta ferita, ahi lassole fece
Piu cupa, e piu mortale
La mia piaga verace,
Quando le labbra sue
Giunse alle labbra mie.
Ne l'api d'alcun fiore
Colgan si dolce il sugo,
Come fa dolce il mel, ch'allora io colsi
Da quelle fresche rose.
Now listen to Guarini's Mirtillo:
Amor si stava, Ergasto,
Com'ape suol, nelle due fresche rose
Di quelle labbra ascoso;
E mentre ella si stette
Con la baciata bocca
Al baciar della mia
Immobile e ristretta,
La dolcezza del mel sola gustai;
Ma poiche mi s'offerse anch'ella, e porse
L'una e l'altra dolcissima sua rosa....
This is enough to illustrate Guarini's laborious method of adding touch
to touch without augmenting th force of the picture.[184] We find
already here the transition from Tasso's measured art to the fantastic
prolixity of Marino. And though Guarini was upon the whole chaste in use
of language, his rhetorical love of amplification and fanciful
refinement not unfrequently betrayed him into Marinistic conceits.
Dorinda, for instance, thus addresses Silvio (act iv. sc. 9):
O bellissimo scoglio
Gia dall'onda e dal vento
Delle lagrime mie, de'miei sospiri
Si spesso invan percosso!
Sighs are said to be (act i. sc. 2):
impetuosi venti
Che spiran nell'incendio, e 'l fan maggiore
Con turbini d'Amore,
Ch' apportan sempre ai miserelli amanti
Foschi nembi di duol, piogge di pianti.
From this to the style of the _Adone_ there was only one step to be
taken.
[Footnote 184: I might have further illustrated this point by quoting
the thirty-five lines in which Titiro compares a maiden to the rose
which fades upon the spray after the fervors of the noon have robbed its
freshness (act i. sc. 4). To contest the beauty of the comparison would
be impossible. Yet when we turn to the two passages in Ariosto (_Orl.
Fur._ i. 42, 43, and xxiv. 80) on which it has been modeled, we shall
perceive how much Guarini lost in force by not writing with his eye upon
the object or with the authenticity of inward vision, but with a
self-conscious effort to improve by artifices and refinements upon
something he has read. See my essay on 'The Pathos of the Rose in Time,'
April, 1886.]
Though the scene of the _Pastor Fido_ was laid in Arcadia, the play
really represented polite Italian society. In the softness of its
sentiment, its voluptuous verbal melody, and its reiterated descant upon
effeminate love-pleasure, it corresponded exactly to the spirit of its
age.[185] This was the secret of its success; and this explains its
seduction. Not Corisca's wanton blandishments and professed cynicism,
but Mirtillo's rapturous dithyrambs on kissing, Dorinda's melting moods
of tenderness, and Amarilli's delicate regrets that love must be
postponed to honor, justified Bellarmino's censure. Without anywhere
transgressing the limits of decorum, the _Pastor Fido_ is steeped in
sensuousness. The sentiment of love idealized in Mirtillo and Amarilli
is pure and self-sacrificing. _Ama l'onesta mia, s'amante sei_, says
this maiden to her lover; and he obeys her. Yet, though the drama is
dedicated to virtue, no one can read it without perceiving the
blandishments of its luxurious rhetoric. The sensual refinement proper
to an age of social decadence found in it exact expression, and it
became the code of gallantry for the next two centuries.
[Footnote 185: Even Silvio, the most masculine of the young men, whose
heart is closed to love, appears before us thus:
Oh Silvio, Silvio! a che ti die Natura
Ne' piu begli anni tuoi
Fior di belta si delicato e vago,
Se tu se' tanto a calpestarlo intento?
Che s'avess'io cotesta tua si bella
E si fiorita guancia,
Addio selve, direi:
E seguendo altre fere,
E la vita passando in festa e'n gioco,
Farei la state all'ombra, e 'l verno al foco.
]
Meanwhile the literary dictator of the seventeenth century was
undoubtedly Marino. On him devolved the scepter which Petrarch
bequeathed to Politian, Politian to Bembo, and Bembo to Torquato Tasso.
In natural gifts he was no unworthy successor of these poets, though the
gifts he shared with them were conspicuously employed by him for
purposes below the scope of any of his predecessors. In artistic
achievement he concentrated the less admirable qualities of all, and
brought the Italian poetry of the Renaissance to a close by exaggerating
its previous defects. Yet, as a man, Marino is interesting, more
interesting in many respects than the melancholy discontented Tasso. He
accepted the conditions of his age with genial and careless sympathy,
making himself at once its idol, its interpreter, and its buffoon.
Finally, he illustrates the law of change which transferred to
Neapolitans in this age the scepter which had formerly been swayed by
Tuscans and Lombards.[186]
Giovanni Battista Marino was born at Naples in 1569. His father, a
jurist of eminence, bred him for the law. But the attractions of poetry
and pleasure were irresistible by this mobile son of the warm South--
La lusinga del Genio in me prevalse,
E la toga deposta, altrui lascisi
Parolette smaltir mendaci e false.
Ne dubbi testi interpretar curai,
Ne discordi accordar chiose mi calse,
Quella stimando sol perfetta legge
Che de'sensi sfrenati il fren corregge.
Legge omai piu non v' ha la qual per dritto
Punisca il fallo o ricompensi il merto.
Sembra quando e fin qui deciso e scritto
D'opinion confuse abisso incerto.
Dalle calumnie il litigante afflitto
Somiglia in vasto mar legno inesperto,
Reggono il tutto con affetto ingordo,
Passion cieca ed interesse sordo.
[Footnote 186: Telesio, Bruno, Campanella, Salvator Rosa, Vico, were,
like Marino, natives of the Regno.]
Such, in the poet's maturity, was his judgment upon law; and probably he
expressed the same opinion with frankness in his youth. Seeing these
dispositions in his son, the severe parent cast him out of doors, and
young Marino was free to indulge vagabond instincts with lazzaroni and
loose companions on the quays and strands of Naples. In that luxurious
climate a healthy native, full of youth and vigor, needs but little to
support existence. Marino set his wits to work, and reaped too facile
laurels in the fields of Venus and the Muses. His verses speedily
attracted the notice of noble patrons, among whom the Duke of Bovino,
the Prince of Conca, and Tasso's friend the Marquis Manso have to be
commemorated. They took care that so genuine and genial a poet should
not starve. It was in one of Manso's palaces that Marino had an
opportunity of worshiping the singer of Armida and Erminia at a
distance. He had already acquired dubious celebrity as a juvenile Don
Juan and a writer of audaciously licentious lyrics, when disaster
overtook him. He assisted one of his profligate friends in the abduction
of a girl. For this breach of the law both were thrown together into
prison, and Marino only escaped justice by the sudden death of his
accomplice. His patrons now thought it desirable that he should leave
Naples for a time. Accordingly they sent him with letters of
recommendation to Rome, where he was well received by members of the
Crescenzio and Aldobrandino families. The Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandino
made him private secretary, and took him on a journey to Ravenna and
Turin. From the commencement to the end of his literary career Marino's
march through life was one triumphal progress. At Turin, as formerly in
Naples and Rome, he achieved a notable success. The Duke of Savoy, Carlo
Emmanuele, offered him a place at Court, appointed him secretary, and
dubbed him Knight of S. Maurice.
Vidi la corte, e nella corte io vidi
Promesse lunghe e guiderdoni avari,
Favori ingiusti e patrocini infidi,
Speranze dolci e pentimenti amari,
Sorrisi traditor, vezzi omicidi,
Ed acquisti dubbiosi e danni chiari,
E voti vani ed idoli bugiardi,
Onde il male e sicuro e il ben vien tardi.
It was the custom of all poets in that age to live in Courts and to
abuse them, to adulate princes and to vilify these patrons. Marino,
however, had real cause to complain of the treachery of courtiers. He
appears to have been a man of easy-going temper, popular among
acquaintances, and serviceable to the society he frequented. This
comradely disposition did not save him, however, from jealousies and
hatreds; for he had, besides, a Neapolitan's inclination for satire.
There was a Genoese poetaster named Gasparo Murtola established in
Court-service at Turin, who had recently composed a lumbering poem, _Il
Mondo Creato_. Marino made fun of it in a sonnet; Murtola retorted; and
a warfare of invectives began which equaled for scurrility and filth the
duels of Poggio and Valla. Murtola, seeing that he was likely to be
worsted by his livelier antagonist, waited for him one day round a
corner, gun in hand. The gun was discharged, and wounded, not Marino,
but a favorite servant of the duke. For this offense the assassin was
condemned to death; and would apparently have been executed, but for
Marino's generosity. He procured his enemy's pardon, and was repaid with
the blackest ingratitude. On his release from prison Murtola laid hands
upon a satire, _La Cuccagna_, written some time previously by his rival.
This he laid before the duke, as a seditious attack upon the government
of Savoy. Marino now in his turn was imprisoned; but he proved, through
the intervention of Manso, that the _Cuccagna_ had been published long
before his arrival at Turin. Disgusted by these incidents, he next
accepted an invitation from the French Court, and journeyed to Paris in
1615, where the Italianated society of that city received him like a
living Phoebus. Maria de Medici, as Regent, with Concini for her
counselor and lover, was then in all her vulgar glory. Richelieu's star
had not arisen to eclipse Italian intrigue and to form French taste by
the Academy. D'Urfe and Du Bartas, more marinistic than Marino, more
euphuistic than Euphues, gave laws to literature; and the pageant
pictures by Rubens, which still adorn the Gallery of the Louvre, marked
the full-blown and sensuous splendor of Maria's equipage. Marino's
genius corresponded nicely to the environment in which he now found
himself; the Italians of the French Court discerned in him the poet who
could best express their ideal of existence. He was idolized, glutted
with gold, indulged and flattered to the top of his bent. Yearly
appointments estimated at 10,000 crowns were augmented by presents in
return for complimentary verses or for copies of the poem he was then
composing. This poem was the _Adone_, the theme of which had been
suggested by Carlo Emmanuele, and which he now adroitly used as a means
of flattering the French throne. First printed at Paris in 1623, its
reception both there and in Italy secured apotheosis in his lifetime for
the poet.[187] One minor point in this magnificent first folio edition
of _Adone_ deserves notice, as not uncharacteristic of the age. Only two
Cantos out of the twenty are distinguished by anything peculiar in their
engraved decorations. Of these two, the eleventh displays the shield of
France; the thirteenth, which describes Falsirena's incantations and
enchantments, is ornamented with the symbol of the Jesuits, IHS. For
this the publishers alone were probably responsible. Yet it may stand as
a parable of all-pervasive Jesuitry. Even among the roses and raptures
of the most voluptuous poem of the century their presence makes itself
felt, as though to hint that the _Adone_ is capable of being used
according to Jesuitical rules of casuistry A.M.D.G. One warning voice
was raised before the publication of this epic. Cardinal Bentivoglio
wrote from Italy beseeching Marino to 'purge it of lasciviousness in
such wise that it may not have to dread the lash of our Italian
censure.' Whether he followed this advice, in other words whether the
original MS. of the _Adone_ was more openly licentious than the
published poem, I do not know. Anyhow, it was put upon the Index in
1627. This does not, however, appear to have impaired its popularity, or
to have injured its author's reputation. Soon after the appearance of
_Adone_, Marino, then past fifty, returned to Naples. He was desirous of
reposing on his laurels, wealthy, honored, and adored, among the scenes
from which he fled in danger and disgrace thirty years before. His
entrance into Naples was an ovation. The Iazzaroni came to meet his
coach, dancing and scattering roses; noblemen attended him on
horse-back; ladies gazed on him from balconies. A banner waving to the
wind announced the advent of 'that ocean of incomparable learning, soul
of lyres, subject for pens, material for ink, most eloquent, most
fertile, phoenix of felicity, ornament of the laurel, of swans in their
divine leisure chief and uncontested leader.' At Naples he died in
1625--felicitous in not having survived the fame which attended him
through life and reached its climax just before his death.
[Footnote 187: It is worth noting that Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_
was first printed in 1593, thirty years previously.]
The _Adone_ strikes us at first sight as the supreme poem of epicene
voluptuousness. Its smooth-chinned hero, beautiful as a girl, soft as a
girl, sentimental as a girl, with nothing of the man about him--except
that 'Nature, as she wrought him, fell adoting,'--threads a labyrinth of
suggestive adventures, in each of which he is more the patient than the
agent of desire. Mercury introduces him to our attention in a series of
those fables (tales of Narcissus, Ganymede, Cyparissus, Hylas, Atys) by
which antiquity figured the seductiveness of adolescence. Venus woos
him, and Falserina tries to force him. Captured in feminine attire by
brigands, he is detained in a cave as the mistress of their chief, and
doted on by the effeminate companion of his prison. Finally, he contends
for the throne of Cyprus with a band of luxurious youths--
Bardassonacci, paggi da taverna.
The crown is destined for the physically fairest. The rival charms of
the competitors are minutely noted, their personal blemishes sagaciously
detected, by a council of pleasure-sated worldlings. In his death Adonis
succumbs to the assault of a boar, fatally inflamed with lust, who
wounds the young man in his groin, dealing destruction where the beast
meant only amorous caresses. Gods and godesses console Venus in her
sorrow for his loss, each of whom relates the tale of similar disasters.
Among these legends Apollo's love for Hyacinth and Phoebus' love for
Pampinus figure conspicuously. Thus Marino's Adonis excites unhealthy
interest by the spectacle of boyhood exposed to the caprices and
allurements of both sexes doting on unfledged virility.
What contributes to this effect, in the central motive of the poem, is
that Venus herself is no artless virgin, no innocent Chloe,
corresponding to a rustic Daphnis. She is already wife, mother,
adulteress, _femme entretenue_, before she meets the lad. Her method of
treating him is that of a licentious queen, who, after seducing page or
groom, keeps the instrument of her pleasures in seclusion for occasional
indulgence during intervals of public business. Vulcan and Mars, her
husband and her _cicisbeo_, contest the woman's right to this caprice;
and when the god of war compels, she yields him the crapulous fruition
of her charms before the eye of her disconsolate boy-paramour. Her
pre-occupation with Court affairs in Cythera--balls, pageants,
sacrifices, and a people's homage--brings about the catastrophe. Through
her temporary neglect, Adonis falls victim to a conspiracy of the gods.
Thus the part which the female plays in this amorous epic is that of an
accomplished courtesan, highly placed in society. All the pathos, all
the attraction of beauty and of sentiment, is reserved for the
adolescent male.
This fact, though disagreeable, has to be noted. It is too
characteristic of the wave of feeling at that time passing over Europe,
to be ignored. The morbid strain which touched the Courts alike of
Valois, Medici and Stuarts; which infected the poetry of Marlowe and of
Shakespeare; which cast a sickly pallor even over sainthood and over
painting in the school of Bologna, cannot be neglected. In Marino's
_Adone_ it reaches its artistic climax.[188]
This, however, is not the main point about the poem. The _Adone_ should
rather be classed as the epic of voluptuousness in all its forms and
species. If the love-poetry of the Italian Renaissance began with the
sensuality of Boccaccio's _Amoroso Visione_, it ended, after traversing
the idyl, the novel, the pastoral, the elegy and the romance, in the
more complex sensuality of Marino's _Adone_; for this, like the _Amoroso
Visione_, but far more emphatically, proclaims the beatification of man
by sexual pleasure:--
Tramortiscon di gioia ebbre e languenti
L'anime stanche, al ciel d'Amor rapite.
Gl'iterati sospiri, i rotti accenti,
Le dolcissime guerre e le ferite,
Narrar non so--fresche aure, onde correnti,
Voi che il miraste, e ben l'udiste, il dite!
Voi secretari de'felici amori,
Verdi mirti, alti pini, ombrosi allori! (Canto viii.)
[Footnote 188: Ferrari, in his _Rivolnzioni d'Italia_, vol. iii. p. 563,
observes: 'Una Venere sospetta versa lagrime forse maschili sul
bellissimo Adonide,' etc. Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_, in like
manner, is so written as to force the reader to feel with Venus the
seduction of Adonis.]
Thus voluptuousness has its transcendentalism; and Marino finds even his
prolific vocabulary inadequate to express the mysteries of this heaven
of sensuous delights.[189]
It must not be thought that the _Adone_ is an obscene poem. Marino was
too skillful a master in the craft of pleasure to revolt or to regale
his readers with grossness. He had too much of the Neapolitan's frank
self-abandonment to nature for broad indecency in art to afford him
special satisfaction; and the taste of his age demanded innuendo. The
laureate of Courts and cities saturated with licentiousness knew well
that Coan vestments are more provocative than nudity. It was his object
to flatter the senses and seduce the understanding rather than to
stimulate coarse appetite. Refinement was the aphrodisiac of a
sated society, and millinery formed a main ingredient in its
love-philters.[190] Marino, therefore, took the carnal instincts for
granted, and played upon them as a lutist plays the strings of some lax
thrilling instrument. Of moral judgment, of antipathy to this or that
form of lust, of prejudice or preference in the material of pleasure,
there is no trace. He shows himself equally indulgent to the passion of
Mirra for her father, of Jove for Ganymede, of Bacchus for Pampinus, of
Venus for Adonis, of Apollo for Hyacinth. He tells the disgusting story
of Cinisca with the same fluent ease as the lovely tale of Psyche;
passes with the same light touch over Falserina at the bedside of Adonis
and Feronia in his dungeon; uses the same palette for the picture of
Venus caressing Mars and the struggles of the nymph and satyr. All he
demanded was a basis of soft sensuality, from which, as from putrescent
soil, might spring the pale and scented flower of artful luxury.
[Footnote 189: With the stanza quoted above Marino closes the cycle
which Boccaccio in the _Amoroso Visione_ (canto xlix.) had opened.]
[Footnote 190: On this point I may call attention to the elaborate
portraits drawn by Marino (canto xvi.) of the seven young men who
contend with Adonis for the prize of beauty and the crown of Cyprus.
Quite as many words are bestowed upon their costumes, jewelry and
hair-dressing as upon their personal charms.]
In harmony with the spirit of an age reformed or deformed by the
Catholic Revival, Marino parades cynical hypocrisy. The eighth canto of
_Adone_ is an elaborately-wrought initiation into the mysteries of
carnal pleasure. It is a hymn to the sense of touch:[191]
Ogni altro senso puo ben di leggiero
Deluso esser talor da falsi oggetti:
Questo sol no, lo qual sempre e del vero
Fido ministro e padre dei diletti.
Gli altri non possedendo il corpo intero,
Ma qualche parte sol, non son perfetti.
Questo con atto universal distende
Lesue forze per tutto, e tutto il prende.
[Footnote 191: I have pleasure in inviting my readers to study the true
doctrine regarding the place of touch among the senses as laid down by
Ruskin in _Modern Painters_, part iii. sec. 1, chap. ii.]
We are led by subtle gradations, by labyrinthine delays, to the final
beatification of Adonis. Picture is interwoven with picture, each in
turn contributing to the panorama of sensual Paradise. Yet while
straining all the resources of his art, with intense sympathy, to seduce
his reader, the poet drops of set purpose phrases like the following:
Flora non so, non so se Frine o Taide
Trovar mai seppe oscenita si laide.
Here the ape masked in the man turns around and grins, gibbering vulgar
words to point his meaning, and casting dirt on his pretended decency.
While racking the resources of allusive diction to veil and to suggest
an immodest movement of his hero (Adonis being goaded beyond the bounds
of boyish delicacy by lascivious sights), he suddenly subsides with a
knavish titter into prose:
Cosi il fanciullo all'inonesto gioco.
But the end of all this practice is that innocent Adonis has been
conducted by slow and artfully contrived approaches to a wanton's
embrace, and that the spectators of his seduction have become, as it
were, parties to his fall. To make Marino's cynicism of hypocrisy more
glaring, he prefaces each canto with an allegory, declaring that Adonis
and Venus symbolize the human soul abandoned to vice, and the
allurements of sensuality which work its ruin. In the poem itself,
meanwhile, the hero and heroine are consistently treated as a pair of
enviable, devoted, and at last unfortunate lovers.[192]
It is characteristic of the mood expressed in the _Adone_ that
voluptuousness should not be passionate, but sentimental. Instead of
fire, the poet gives us honeyed tears to drink, and rocks the soul upon
an ever-rippling tide of Lydian melody. The acme of pleasure, as
conceived by him, is kissing. Twenty-three of the most inspired stanzas
of the eighth canto are allotted to a panegyric of the kiss, in which
delight all other amorous delights are drowned.[193] Tasso's melancholy
yearning after forbidden fruit is now replaced by satiety contemplating
the image of past joys with purring satisfaction. This quality of
self-contented sentiment partly explains why the type of beauty adored
is neither womanly nor manly, but adolescent. It has to be tender,
fragile, solicitous, unripe; appealing to sensibility, not to passion,
by feminine charms in nerveless and soulless boyhood. The most
distinctive mark of Adonis is that he has no character, no will, no
intellect. He is all sentiment, sighs, tears, pliability, and sweetness.
[Footnote 192: The hypocrisy of the allegory is highly significant for
this phase of Italian culture. We have seen how even Tasso condescended
to apply it to his noble epic, which needed no such miserable pretense.
Exquisitely grotesque was the attempt made by Centorio degli Ortensi to
sanctify Bandello's _Novelle_ by supplying each one of them with a moral
interpretation (ed. Milano: Gio. Antonio degli Antoni, 1560, See
Passano's _Novellieri in Prosa_, p. 28).]
[Footnote 193: What I have elsewhere, called 'the tyranny of the kiss'
in Italian poetry, begins in Tasso's _Rinaldo_, acquires vast
proportions in Guarino's _Pastor Fido_, and becomes intolerable in
Marino's _Adone_.]
This emasculate nature displays itself with consummate effect in the
sobbing farewell, followed by the pretty pettishnesses, of the
seventeenth canto.
As a contrast to his over-sweet and cloying ideal of lascivious grace,
Marino counterposes extravagant forms of ugliness. He loves to describe
the loathsome incantations of witches. He shows Falserina prowling among
corpses on a battle-field, and injecting the congealed veins of her
resuscitated victim with abominable juices. He crowds the Cave of
Jealousy with monsters horrible to sight and sense; depicts the
brutality of brigands; paints hideous portraits of eunuchs, deformed
hags, unnameable abortions. He gloats over cruelty, and revels in
violence.[194] When Mars appears upon the scene, the orchestra of lutes
and cymbals with which we had been lulled to sleep, is exchanged for a
Corybantic din of dissonances. Orgonte, the emblem of pride, outdoes the
hyperboles of Rodomonte and the lunes of Tamburlaine. Nowhere, either in
his voluptuousness or in its counterpart of disgust, is there
moderation. The Hellenic precept, 'Nothing overmuch,' the gracious Greek
virtue of temperate restraint, which is for art what training is for
athletes, discipline for soldiers, and pruning for orchard trees, has
been violated in every canto, each phrase, the slightest motive of this
poem. Sensuality can bear such violation better than sublimity;
therefore the perfume of voluptuousness in the _Adone_, though
excessive, is both penetrating and profound; while those passages which
aim at inspiring terror or dilating the imagination, fail totally of
their effect. The ghastly, grotesque, repulsive images are so
overcharged that they cease even to offend. We find ourselves in a
region where tact, sense of proportion, moral judgment, and right
adjustment of means to ends, have been wantonly abandoned. Marino avowed
that he only aimed at surprising his readers:
E del poeta il fin la meraviglia.
[Footnote 194: See the climax to the episode of Filauro and Filora.]
But 45,000 lines of sustained astonishment, of industrious and
indefatigable appeals to wonder by devices of language, devices of
incident, devices of rhodomontade, devices of innuendo, devices of
_capricci_ and _concetti_, induce the stolidity of callousness. We leave
off marveling, and yield what is left of our sensibility to the
fascination of inexhaustible picturesqueness. For, with all his faults,
Marino was a master of the picturesque, and did possess an art of
fascination. The picturesque, so difficult to define, so different from
the pictorial and the poetical, was a quality of the seventeenth century
corresponding to its defects of bad taste. And this gift no poet shared
in larger measure than Marino.
Granted his own conditions, granted the emptiness of moral and
intellectual substance in the man and in his age, we are compelled to
acknowledge that his literary powers were rich and various. Few
writers, at the same time, illustrate the vices of decadence more
luminously than this Protean poet of vacuity. Few display more clearly
the 'expense of spirit in a waste of shame.' None teach the dependence
of art upon moralized and humane motives more significantly than this
drunken Helot of genius. His indifference to truth, his defiance of
sobriety, his conviction that the sole end of art is astonishment, have
doomed him to oblivion not wholly merited. The critic, whose duty forces
him to read through the _Adone_, will be left bewildered by the
spectacle of such profuse wealth so wantonly squandered.[195] In spite
of fatigue, in spite of disgust, he will probably be constrained to
record his opinion that, while Tasso represented the last effort of
noble poetry struggling after modern expression under out-worn forms of
the Classical Revival, it was left for Marino in his levity and license
to evoke a real and novel though _rococo_ form, which nicely
corresponded to the temper of his times, and determined the immediate
future of art. For this reason he requires the attention which has here
been paid him.
[Footnote 195: In support of this opinion upon Marino's merit as a poet,
I will cite the episode of Clizio (canto i. p. 17); the tale of Psyche
(iv. 65); the tale of the nightingale and the boy--which occurs both in
Ford and Crashaw, by the way (vii. 112); the hymn to pleasure (vii.
116); the passage of Venus and Adonis to the bath (viii. 133); the
picture of the nymph and satyr (viii. 135); the personification of the
Court (x. 167); the Cave of Jealousy (xii. 204-206); the jewel-garden of
Falserina (xii. 218); Falserina watching Adonis asleep (xii. 225);
Falserina's incantations (xiii. 233); Mars in the lap of Venus
surrounded by the loves (xiii. 245); Venus disguised as a gypsy (xv.
290); the game of chess (xv. 297); the leave-taking of Venus and Adonis
(xvii. 332); the phantom of dead Adonis (xviii. 357); the grief of Venus
(xviii. 358-362); the tales of Hyacinth and Pampinus (xix. 372-378). The
references are to ed. Napoli, Boutteaux, 1861.]
But how, it may be asked, was it possible to expand the story of Venus
and Adonis into an epic of 45,000 lines? The answer to this question
could best be given by an analysis of the twenty cantos: and since few
living students have perused them, such a display of erudition would be
pardonable. Marini does not, however, deserve so many pages in a work
devoted to the close of the Italian Renaissance. It will suffice to say
that the slender narrative of the amour of Venus and her boyish idol,
his coronation as king of Cyprus, and his death by the boar's tusk, is
ingeniously interwoven with a great variety of episodes. The poet finds
occasion to relate the principal myths of Hellenic passion treating
these in a style which frequently reminds us of Ovid's Metamorphoses; he
borrows tales from Apuleius, Lucian, and the pastoral novelists; he
develops the theme of jealousy in Mars and Vulcan, introduces his own
autobiography, digresses into romantic adventures by sea and land,
creates a rival to Venus in the sorceress Falserina, sketches the
progress of poetry in one canto and devotes another to a panegyric of
Italian princes, extols the House of France and adulates Marie de
Medicis, surveys the science of the century, describes fantastic palaces
and magic gardens, enters with curious minuteness into the several
delights of the five senses, discourses upon Courts, ambition, avarice
and honor, journeys over the Mediterranean, conducts a game of chess
through fifty brilliant stanzas; in brief, while keeping his main theme
in view, is careful to excite and sustain the attention of his readers
by a succession of varied and ingeniously suggested novelties.
Prolixity, indefatigable straining after sensational effect,
interminable description, are the defects of the _Adone_; but they are
defects related to great qualities possessed by the author, to
inexhaustible resources, curious knowledge, the improvisatore's
facility, the trained rhetorician's dexterity in the use of language,
the artist's fervid delight in the exercise of his craft.
Allowing for Marino's peculiar method, his _Adone_ has the excellence of
unity which was so highly prized by the poets of his age and nation.
Critics have maintained that the whole epic is but a development of the
episode of Rinaldo in Armida's garden. But it is more than this. It
contains all the main ingredients of the Italian Romance, with the
exception of chivalry and war. There is a pastoral episode corresponding
to that of Erminia among the shepherds, a magnificent enchantress in the
manner of Alcina, an imprisonment of the hero which reminds us of
Ruggiero in Atlante's magic castle, a journey like Astolfo's to the
moon, a conflict between good and evil supernatural powers, a thread of
allegory more or less apparent, a side glance at contemporary history;
and these elements are so combined as to render the _Adone_ one of the
many poems in the long romantic tradition. It differs mainly from its
predecessors in the strict unity of subject, which subordinates each
episode and each digression to the personal adventures of the heroine
and hero; while the death and obsequies of Adonis afford a tragic close
that is lacking to previous poems detached from the Carolingian cycle.
Contemporary writers praised it as a poem of peace. But it is the poem
of ignoble peace, of such peace as Italy enjoyed in servitude, when a
nation of _cicisbei_ had naught to occupy their energies but sensual
pleasure. Ingenious as Marino truly was in conducting his romance upon
so vast a scheme through all its windings to one issue, we feel that the
slender tale of a boy's passion for the queen of courtesans and his
metamorphosis into the scarlet windflower of the forest supplied no
worthy motive for this intricate machinery. The metaphor of an alum
basket crystallized upon a petty frame of wire occurs to us when we
contemplate its glittering ornaments, and reflect upon the poverty of
the sustaining theme. It might in fact stand for a symbol of the
intellectual vacancy of the age which welcomed it with rapture, and of
the society which formed a century of taste upon its pattern.
In another and higher literary quality the _Adone_ represents that
moment of Italian development. A foreigner may hardly pass magisterial
judgment on its diction. Yet I venture to remark that Marino only at
rare intervals attains to purity of poetic style; even his best passages
are deformed, not merely by conceits to which the name of _Marinism_ has
been given, but also by gross vulgarities and lapses into trivial prose.
Notwithstanding this want of distinction, however, he has a melody that
never fails. The undulating, evenly on-flowing _cantilena_ of his verbal
music sustains the reader on a tide of song. That element of poetry,
which, as I have observed, was developed with remarkable success by
Tasso in some parts of the _Gerusalemme_ is the main strength of the
_Adone_. With Marino the _Chant d'Amour_ never rises so high, thrills so
subtly, touches the soul so sweetly and so sadly, as it does in Tasso's
verse. But in all those five thousand octave stanzas it is rarely
altogether absent. The singing faculty of the Neapolitan was given to
this poet of voluptuousness; and if the song is neither deep nor
stirring, neither stately nor sublime, it is because his soul held
nothing in its vast vacuity but sensuous joy.[196] A musical Casanova,
an unmalignant Aretino, he sang as vulgar nature prompted; but he always
kept on singing. His partiality for detonating dissonances, squibs and
crackers of pyrotechnical rhetoric, braying trumpets and exploding
popguns, which deafen and distract our ears attuned to the suave cadence
of the _cantilena_, is no less characteristic of the Neapolitan. Marino
had the improvisatory exuberance, the impudence, the superficial
passion, the luxurious delight in life, and the noisiness of his
birthplace. He also shared its love of the grotesque as complement and
contrast to pervading beauty.
[Footnote 196: There are passages of pure _cantilena_ in this poem,
where sense is absolutely swallowed up in sound, and words become the
mere vehicle for rhythmic melody. Of this verbal music the dirge of the
nymphs for Adonis and the threnos of Venus afford excellent examples
(xix. pp. 358-361). Note especially the stanza beginning:
Adone, Adone, o bell'Adon, tu giaci,
Ne senti i miei sospir, ne miri il pianto!
O bell'Adone, o caro Adon, tu taci,
Ne rispondi a colei che amasti tanto!
There is nothing more similar to this in literature than Fra Jacopone's
delirium of mystic love:
Amor amor Jesu, son giunto a porto;
Amor amor Jesu, tu m'hai menato;
Amor amor Jesu, dammi conforto;
Amor amor Jesu, si m'hai enfiamato.
Only the one is written in a Mixo-Lydian, the other in a Hyper-Phrygian
mood.
]
A serious fault to be found with Marino's style is its involved
exaggeration in description. Who, for instance, can tolerate this
picture of a young man's foot shod with a blue buskin?
L'animato del pie molle alabastro
Che oscura il latte del sentier celeste
Stretto alla gamba con purpureo nastro
Di cuoio azzurro un borsacchin gli veste.
Again he carries to the point of lunacy that casuistical rhetoric,
introduced by Ariosto and refined upon by Tasso, with which luckless
heroines or heroes announce their doubts and difficulties to the world
in long soliloquies. The ten stanzas which set forth Falserina's
feelings after she has felt the pangs of love for Adonis, might pass for
a parody:
Ardo, lassa, o non ardo! ahi qual io sento
Stranio nel cor non conosciuto affetto!
E forse ardore? ardor non e, che spento
L'avrei col pianto; e ben d'ardor sospetto!
Sospetto no, piuttosto egli e tormento.
Come tormento fia, se da diletto?
And so forth through eighty lines in which every conceivable change is
rung upon _Amo o non amo?... Io vivo e moro pur.... Io non ho core
e lo mio cor n'ha dui.... With all this effort no one is convinced of
Falserina's emotion, and her long-winded oration reads like a
schoolboy's exercise upon some line of the fourth Aeneid. Yet if we
allow the sense of rhythmical melody to intervene between our
intellectual perception and Marino's language, we shall still be able to
translate these outpourings into something which upon the operatic stage
would keep its value. False rhetoric and the inability to stop when
enough and more than enough has been said upon any theme to be
developed, are the incurable defects of Marino. His profuse _fioriture_
compared with the simpler descant of Ariosto or Tasso remind us of
Rossini's florid roulades beside the grace of Pergolese's or the majesty
of Marcello's song.
The peculiar quality of bad taste which is known in Italy as
_Marinismo_, consisted in a perpetual straining after effect by
antitheses, conceits, plans on words degenerating into equivocation, and
such-like rhetorical grimaces. Marino's _ars poetica_ was summed up in
this sentence: 'Chi non sa far stupir, vada alia striglia.' Therefore,
he finds periphrases for the simplest expressions. He calls the
nightingale _sirena de'boschi_, gunpowder _l'irreparabil fulmine
terreno_, Columbus _il ligure Argonauta_, Galileo _il novello
Endimione_. In these instances, what might have been expanded into a
simile, is substituted for the proper word in order to surprise the
reader. When he alludes to Dante, he poses a conundrum on that poet's
surname: _Ben sull'ali liggier tre mondi canta_. The younger Palma is
complimented on wresting the _palm_ from Titian and Veronese. Guido Reni
is apostrophized as: _Reni onde il maggior Reno all'altro cede_[197] We
are never safe in reading his pages from the whirr and whistle of such
verbal fireworks. And yet it must be allowed that Marino's style is on
the whole freer from literary affectations than that of our own
Euphuists. It is only at intervals that the temptation to make a point
by clever trickery seems irresistible. When he is seriously engaged upon
a topic that stirs his nature to the depth, as in the eighth canto,
description flows on for stanza after stanza with limpid swiftness.
Another kind of artifice to which he has resort, is the repetition of a
dominant word:
[Footnote 197: There is a streamlet called Reno near Bologna.]
Con tai lusinghe il lusinghiero amante
La lusinghiera Dea lusinga e prega.
* * * * *
Godiamci, amiamei. Amor d'amor mercede,
Degno cambio d'amore e solo amore.
This play on a word sometimes passes over into a palpable pun, as in the
following pretty phrase:
O mia dorata ed adorata Dea.
Still we feel that Shakespeare was guilty of precisely the same verbal
impertinences. It is only intensity of feeling which prevents such lines
as:
Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call:
All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more:
from being Marinistic. But it must be added that this intensity of
feeling renders the artifice employed sublimely natural. Here we lay our
finger on the crucial point at issue in any estimate of literary
mannerism. What is the force of thought, the fervor of emotion, the
acute perception of truth in nature and in man, which lies behind that
manneristic screen? If, as in the case of Shakespeare, sufficiency or
superabundance of these essential elements is palpable, we pardon, we
ignore, the euphuism. But should the quality of substance fail, then we
repudiate it and despise it. Therefore Marino, who is certainly not more
euphuistic than Shakespeare, but who has immeasurably less of potent
stuff in him, wears the motley of his barocco style in limbo bordering
upon oblivion, while the Swan of Avon parades the same literary livery
upon both summits of Parnassus. So true it is that poetry cannot be
estimated apart from intellectual and moral contents. Had Marino
written:
Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down:
or:
'twould anger him
To raise a spirit in his mistress' circle
Of some strange nature, letting it there stand
Till she had laid it and conjured it down:
or:
The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon
The prick of noon:
he would have furnished his accusers with far stronger diatribes against
words of double meaning and licentious conceits than his own pages
offer. But since it was out of the fullness of world-wisdom that
Shakespeare penned those phrases for Mercutio, and set them as pendants
to the impassioned descants upon love and death which he poured from the
lips of Romeo, they pass condoned and unperceived.
Only poverty of matter and insincerity of fancy damn in Marino those
literary affectations which he held in common with a host of
writers--with Gorgias, Aeschylus, Chaeremon, Philostratus, among Greeks;
with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bembo, Aretino, Tasso, Guarini, among
Italians; with Calderon and Cervantes, not to mention Gongora, among
Spaniards; with the foremost French and English writers of the
Renaissance; with all verbal artists in any age, who have sought unduly
to refine upon their material of language. In a word, Marino is not
condemned by his so-called Marinism. His true stigma is the inadequacy
to conceive of human nature except under a twofold mask of sensuous
voluptuousness and sensuous ferocity. It is this narrow and ignoble
range of imagination which constitutes his real inferiority, far more
than any poetical extravagance in diction. The same mean conception of
humanity brands with ignominy the four generations over which he
dominated--that brood of eunuchs and courtiers, churchmen and _Cavalieri
serventi_, barocco architects and brigands, casuists and bravi,
grimacers, hypocrites, confessors, impostors, bastards of the spirit,
who controlled Italian culture for a hundred years.
At a first glance we shall be astonished to find that this poet, who may
justly be regarded as the corypheus of Circean orgies in the seventeenth
century, left in MS. a grave lament upon the woes of Italy. Marino's
_Pianto d'Italia_ has no trace of Marinism. It is composed with sobriety
in a pedestrian style of plainness, and it tells the truth without
reserve. Italy traces her wretchedness to one sole cause, subjection
under Spanish rule.
Lascio ch'un re che di real non tiene
Altro che il nome effemminato e vile
A sua voglia mi reggi, e di catene
Barbare mi circondi il pie servile.
This tyrant foments jealousy and sows seeds of discord between the
Italian states. His viceroys are elected from the cruelest, the most
unjust, the most rapacious, and the most luxurious of the courtiers
crawling round his throne. The College of Cardinals is bought and sold.
No prince dares move a finger in his family or state without consulting
the Iberian senate; still less can he levy troops for self-defense. Yet
throughout Europe Spanish victories have been obtained by Italian
generals; the bravest soldiers in foreign armies are Italian exiles.
Perhaps it may be argued that the empty titles which abound in every
petty city, the fulsome promises on which those miserable vassals found
their hopes, are makeweights for such miseries. Call them rather chains
to bind the nation, lures and birdlime such as snarers use. There is but
one quarter to which the widowed and discrowned Queen of Nations can
appeal for succor. She turns to Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, to the
hills whence cometh help. It was not, however, until two centuries after
Marino penned these patriotic stanzas, that her prayer was answered. And
the reflection forced upon us when we read the _Pianto d'Italia_, is
that Marino composed it to flatter a patron who at that moment
entertained visionary schemes of attacking the Spanish hegemony.
To make any but an abrupt transition from Marino to Chiabrera would be
impossible. It is like passing from some luxurious grove of oranges and
roses to a barren hill-top without prospect over sea or champaign. We
are fortunate in possessing a few pages of autobiography, from which
all that is needful to remember of Gabriello Chiabrera's personal
history may be extracted. He was born in 1552 at Savona, fifteen days
after his father's death. His mother made a second marriage, and left
him to the care of an uncle, with whom at the age of nine he went to
reside in Rome. In the house of this bachelor uncle the poor little
orphan pined away. Fever succeeded fever, until his guardian felt that
companionship with boys in play and study was the only chance of saving
so frail a life as Gabriello's. Accordingly he placed the invalid under
the care of the Jesuits in their Collegio Romano. Here the child's
health revived, and his education till the age of twenty throve apace.
The Jesuits seem to have been liberal in their course of training; for
young Chiabrera benefited by private conversation with Paolo Manuzio and
Sperone Speroni, while he attended the lectures of Muretus in the
university.
How different was this adolescence from that of Marino! Both youths grew
to manhood without domestic influences; and both were conspicuous in
after life for the want of that affection which abounds in Tasso. But
here the parallel between them ends. Marino, running wild upon the
streets of Naples, taking his fill of pleasure and adventure, picking up
ill-digested information at hap-hazard, and forming his poetic style as
nature prompted; Chiabrera, disciplined in piety and morals by Jesuit
directors, imbued with erudition by an arid scholar, a formal pedant
and an accomplished rhetorician, the three chief representatives of
decadent Italian humanism: no contrast can be imagined greater than that
which marked these two lads out for diverse paths in literature. The one
was formed to be the poet of caprice and license, openly ranking with
those
Che la ragion sommettono al talento,
and making _s'ei piace ei lice_ his rule of conduct and of art. The
other received a rigid bent toward decorum, in religious observances, in
ethical severity, and in literature of a strictly scholastic type.
Yet Chiabrera was not without the hot blood of Italian youth. His uncle
died, and he found himself alone in the world. After spending a few
years in the service of Cardinal Cornaro, he quarreled with a Roman
gentleman, vindicated his honor by some act of violence, and was
outlawed from the city. Upon this he retired to Savona; and here again
he met with similar adventures. Wounded in a brawl, he took the law into
his own hands, and revenged himself upon his assailant. This punctilio
proved him to be a true child of his age; and if we may credit his own
account of both incidents, he behaved himself as became a gentleman of
the period. It involved him, however, in serious annoyances both at Rome
and Savona, from which he only extricated himself with difficulty and
which impaired his fortune. Up to the age of fifty he remained
unmarried, and then took a wife by whom he had no children. He lived to
the ripe age of eighty-four, always at Savona, excepting occasional
visits to friends in Italian cities, and he died unmolested by serious
illness after his first entrance into the Collegio Romano. How he
occupied the leisure of that lengthy solitude may be gathered from his
published works--two or three thick volumes of lyrics; four bulky poems
of heroic narrative; twelve dramas, including two tragedies; thirty
satires or epistles; and about forty miscellaneous poems in divers
meters. In a word, he devoted his whole life to the art of poetry, for
which he was not naturally gifted, and which he pursued in a gravely
methodical spirit. It may be said at once that the body of his work,
with the exception of some simple pieces of occasion, and a few chastely
written epistles, is such as nobody can read without weariness.
Before investigating Chiabrera's claim to rank among Italian poets, it
may be well to examine his autobiography in those points which touch
upon the temper of society. Short as it is, this document is precious
for the light it casts upon contemporary custom. As a writer, Chiabrera
was distinguished by sobriety of judgment, rectitude, piety, purity of
feeling, justice toward his fellow-workers in literature, and an earnest
desire to revive the antique virtues among his countrymen. There is no
reason to suppose that these estimable qualities did not distinguish him
in private life. Yet eight out of the eighteen pages of his biography
are devoted to comically solemn details regarding the honors paid him
by Italian princes. The Grand Duke of Florence, Ferdinand I., noticed
him standing with uncovered head at a theatrical representation in the
Pitti Palace. He bade the poet put his cap on and sit down. Cosimo, the
heir apparent, showed the same condescending courtesy. When he was at
Turin, Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, placed a coach and pair at his
disposal, and allowed him 300 lire for traveling expenses to and from
Savona. But this prince omitted to appoint him lodgings in the palace,
nor did he invite him to cover in the presence. This perhaps is one
reason why Chiabrera refused the duke's offer of a secretaryship at
Court. Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, on the contrary, allotted him
rooms and always suffered him to keep his hat on. The Pope, who was an
old college friend of Chiabrera, made him handsome presents, and on one
delightful occasion allowed him to hear a sermon in the Papal pew. The
Doge of Genoa, officially particular in points of etiquette, always took
care to bid him cover, although he was a subject born of the Republic.
Basely insignificant as are these details, they serve to show what value
was then ascribed even by men of real respectability to trifling
princely favors. The unction with which Chiabrera relates them, warming
his cold style into a glow of satisfaction, is a practical satire upon
his endeavor to resuscitate the virtues of antique republics in that
Italy. To do this was his principal aim as a moralist; to revive the
grand style of Pindar was his object as an artist. Each attempt involved
impossibility, and argued a visionary ambition dimly conscious of its
scope. Without freedom, without the living mythology of Hellas, without
a triumphant national cause, in the very death of independence, at the
end of a long age of glorious but artificial culture, how could
Chiabrera dare to pose as Pindar? Instead of the youth of Greece
ascending with free flight and all the future of the world before it,
decrepit Italy, the Italy so rightly drawn by Marino in his _Pianto_,
lay groveling in the dust of decaying thrones. Her lyrist had to sing of
pallone-matches instead of Panhellenic games; to celebrate the heroic
conquest of two Turkish galleys by a Tuscan fleet, instead of Marathon
and Salamis; to praise S. Lucy and S. Paul with tepid fervor, instead of
telling how Rhodes swam at her god's bidding upward from the waves.
One example will serve as well as many to illustrate the false attitude
assumed by Chiabrera when he posed as a new Pindar in the midst of
seventeenth-century Italians. I will select the Ode to Don Cesare
d'Este. There is something pathetically ridiculous, in this would-be
swan of the Dircean fount, this apostle of pagan virtues, admonishing
the heir of Alfonso II to prove himself an obedient son of the Church by
relinquishing his Duchy of Ferrara to the Holy See. The poet asks him,
in fine classic phrases, whether he could bear to look on desecrated
altars, confessionals without absolving priests, chapels without
choristers, a people barred with bolt and lock from Paradise. How
trivial are earthly compared with heavenly crowns! How vulgar is the
love of power and gold! The exhortation, exquisite enough in chastened
style, closes with this hypocritical appeal to Cesare's aristocratic
prejudices:
Parli la plebe a suo volere, e pensi--
Non con la plebe hanno da gir gli Estensi.
That is to say, nobility demands that the House of Este should desert
its subjects, sacrifice its throne, crawl at a Pontiff's feet, and
starve among a crowd of disthroned princes, wrapping the ragged purple
of its misery around it till it, too, mixes with the people it contemns.
Hopeless as the venture was, Chiabrera made it the one preoccupation of
his life, in these untoward circumstances, to remodel Italian poetry
upon the Greek pattern. It was a merit of the Sei Cento, a sign of
grace, that the Italians now at last threw orthodox aesthetic precepts
to the winds, and avowed their inability to carry the Petrarchistic
tradition further. The best of them, Campanella and Bruno, molded vulgar
language like metal in the furnace of a vehement imagination, making it
the vehicle of fantastic passion and enthusiastic philosophy. From their
crucible the Sonnet and the Ode emerged with no resemblance to
academical standards. Grotesque, angular, gnarled, contorted, Gothic
even, these antiquated forms beneath their wayward touch were scarcely
recognizable. They had become the receptacles of burning, scalding,
trenchant realities. Salvator Rosa, next below the best, forced
indignation to lend him wings, and scaled Parnassus with brass-bound
feet and fury. Marino, bent on riveting attention by surprises, fervid
with his own reality of lust, employed the octave stanza as a Turkish
Bey might use an odalisque. 'The only rule worth thinking of,' he said,
'is to know how and when and where to break all rules, adapting
ourselves to current taste and the fashions of the age.' His epic
represents a successful, because a vivid, reaction against
conventionality. The life that throbs in it is incontestable, even
though that life may be nothing better than ephemeral. With like
brutality of instinct, healthy because natural, the barocco architects
embraced ugliness, discord, deformity, spasm, as an escape from harmony
and regularity with which the times were satiated. Prose-writers burst
the bonds of Bembo, trampled on Boccaccio, reveled in the stylistic
debaucheries of Bartolo. Painters, rendered academic in vain by those
Fabii of Bologna who had striven to restore the commonwealth of art by
temporizing, launched themselves upon a sea of massacre and murder,
blood and entrails, horrors of dark woods and Bacchanalia of chubby
Cupids. The popular Muse of Italy meanwhile emerged with furtive grace
and inexhaustible vivacity in dialectic poems, dances, Pulcinello,
Bergamasque Pantaloon, and what of parody and satire, Harlequinades, and
carnival diversions, any local soil might cherish.[198] All this revolt
against precedent, this resurrection of primeval instinct, crude and
grinning, took place, let us remember, under the eyes of the Jesuits,
within the shadow of the Inquisition, in an age reformed and ordered by
the Council of Trent. Art was following Aretino, the reprobate and
rebel. He first amid the languors of the golden age--and this is
Aretino's merit--discerned that the only escape from its inevitable
exhaustion was by passing over into crudest naturalism.
[Footnote 198: See Scherillo's two books on the _Commedia dell'Arte_ and
the _Opera Buffa_.]
But for Chiabrera, the excellent gentleman, the patronized of princes,
scrupulous upon the point of honor, pupil of Jesuits, pious, twisted
back on humanism by his Roman tutors, what escape was left for him? Obey
the genius of his times he must. Innovate he must. He chose the least
indecorous sphere at hand for innovation; and felt therewith most
innocently happy. Without being precisely conscious of it, he had
discovered a way of adhering to time-honored precedent while following
the general impulse to discard precedent. He threw Petrarch overboard,
but he took on Pindar for his pilot. 'When I see anything eminently
beautiful, or hear something, or taste something that is excellent, I
say: It is Greek Poetry.' In this self-revealing sentence lies the
ruling instinct of the man as scholar. The highest praise he can confer
upon Italian matters, is to call them Greek Poetry. 'When I have to
express my aims in verse, I compare myself to Columbus, who said that he
would discover a new world or drown.' Again, in this self-revealing
sentence, Chiabrera betrays the instinct which in common with his period
he obeyed. He was bound to startle society by a discovery or to drown.
For this, be it remembered, was the time in which Pallavicino, like
Marino, declared that poetry must make men raise their eyebrows in
astonishment. For Chiabrera, educated as he had been, that new world
toward which he navigated was a new Hellenic style of Italian poetry;
and the Theban was to guide him toward its shores. But on the voyage
Chiabrera drowned: drowned for eternity in hyper-atlantic whirlpools of
oblivion. Some critics, pitying so lofty, so respectable an ambition,
have whispered that he found a little Island of the Blest and there
planted modest myrtles of mediocre immortality. Yet this is not the
truth. On such a quest there was only failure or success. He did not
succeed. His cold mincemeat from Diocean tables, tepid historic
parallels, artificially concocted legends, could not create Greek poetry
again beneath the ribs of death. The age was destined to be saved by
music. License was its only liberty, as the _Adone_ taught. Unmusical
Chiabrera, buckram'd up by old mythologies and sterling precepts, left
its life untouched. His antique virtues stood, like stucco gods and
goddesses, on pedestals in garden groves, and moldered. His Pindaric
flights were such as a sparrow, gazing upward at a hawk, might venture
on. Those abrupt transitions, whereby he sought to simulate the lordly
_sprezzatura_ of the Theban eagle, 'soaring with supreme dominion in the
azure depths of air,' remind us mainly of the hoppings of a frog.
Chiabrera failed: failed all the more lamentably because he was so
scholarly, so estimable. He is chiefly interesting now as the example of
a man devoted to the Church, a pupil of Jesuits, a moralist, and a
humanist, in some sense also a patriot, who felt the temper of his time,
and strove to innovate in literature. Devoid of sincere sympathy with
his academically chosen models, thinking he had discovered a safe path
for innovation, he fell flat in the slime and perished.
Marino had human life and vulgar nature, the sensualities and
frivolities of the century, to help him. Chiabrera claimed none of these
advantages. What had Tassoni for his outfit? Sound common sense,
critical acumen, the irony of humor, hatred of tyrants and humbug, an
acrid temper mollified by genial love of letters, a manly spirit of
independence. Last, but not least, he inherited something of the old
Elysian smile which played upon the lips of Ariosto, from which Tasso's
melancholy shrank discomfited, which Marino smothered in the kisses of
his courtesans, and Chiabrera banned as too ignoble for Dircean bards.
This smile it was that cheered Tassoni's leisure when, fallen on evil
days, he penned the _Socchia Rapita_.
Alessandro Tassoni was born in 1565 of a noble Modenese family. Before
completing his nineteenth year he won the degree of Doctor of Laws, and
afterwards spent twelve years in studying at the chief universities of
Lombardy. Between 1599 and 1603 he served the Cardinal Ascanio Colonna
both in Spain and Rome, as secretary. The insight he then gained into
the working of Spanish despotism made him a relentless enemy of that
already decadent monarchy. When Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, sent
back his Collar of the Golden Fleece in 1613 and drew the sword of
resistance against Philip III., Tassoni penned two philippics against
Spaniards, which are the firmest, most embittered expression of
patriotism as it then existed. He had the acuteness to perceive that the
Spanish state was no longer in its prime of vigor, and the noble
ingenuousness to dream that Italian princes might be roused to sink
their rancors in a common effort after independence. As a matter of
fact, Estensi, Medici, Farnesi, Gonzaghi, all the reigning houses as yet
unabsorbed by Church or Spain, preferred the predominance of a power
which sanctioned their local tyrannies, irksome and degrading as that
overlordship was, to the hegemony of Piedmontese Macedon. And like all
Italian patriots, strong in mind, feeble in muscle, he failed to reckon
with the actual soldierly superiority of Spaniards. Italy could give
generals at this epoch to her masters; but she could not count on
levying privates for her own defense. Carlo Emmanuele rewarded the
generous ardor of Tassoni by grants of pensions which were never paid,
and by offices at Court which involved the poet-student in perilous
intrigue. 'My service with the princes of the House of Savoy,' so he
wrote at a later period, 'did not take its origin in benefits or favors
received or expected. It sprang from a pure spontaneous motion of the
soul, which inspired me with love for the noble character of Duke
Charles.' When he finally withdrew from that service, he had his
portrait painted. In his hands he held a fig, and beneath the picture
ran a couplet ending with the words, 'this the Court gave me.'
Throughout his life Tassoni showed an independence rare in that century.
His principal works were published without dedications to patrons. In
the preface to his _Remarks on Petrarch_ he expressed his opinion thus:
'I leave to those who like them the fruitless dedications, not to say
flatteries, which are customary nowadays. I seek no protection; for a
lie does not deserve it, and truth is indifferent to it. Let such as
opine that the shadow of great personages can conceal the ineptitude of
authors, make the most of this advantage.' Believing firmly in
astrology, he judged that his own horoscope condemned him to
ill-success. It appears that he was born under the influence of Saturn,
when the sun and moon were in conjunction; and he held that this
combination of the heavenly bodies boded 'things noteworthy, yet not
felicitous.' It was, however, difficult for a man of Tassoni's condition
in that state of society to draw breath outside the circle of a Court.
Accordingly, in 1626, he entered the service of the Pope's nephew,
Cardinal Lodovisio. He did not find this much to his liking: 'I may
compare myself to P. Emilius Metellus, when he was shod with those
elegant boots which pinched his feet. Everybody said, Oh what fine
boots, how well they fit! But the wretch was unable to walk in them.' On
the Cardinal's death in 1632 Tassoni removed to the Court of Francesco
I. of Modena, and died there in 1635.
As a writer, Tassoni, in common with the best spirits of his time, aimed
at innovation. It had become palpable to the Italians that the
Renaissance was over, and that they must break with the traditions of
the past. This, as I have already pointed out, was the saving virtue of
the early seventeenth century; but what good fruits it might have
fostered, had not the political and ecclesiastical conditions of the age
been adverse, remains a matter for conjecture. 'It is my will and object
to utter new opinions,' he wrote to a friend; and acting upon this
principle, he attacked the chief prejudices of his age in philosophy and
literature. One of his earliest publications was a miscellaneous
collection of _Divers Thoughts_, in which he derided Aristotle's Physics
and propounded speculations similar to those developed by Gassendi. He
dared to cast scorn on Homer, as rude and barbarous, poor in the faculty
of invention, taxable with at least five hundred flagrant defects. How
little Tassoni really comprehended Homer may be judged from his
complacent assertion that the episode of Luna and Endymion (_Secchia
Rapita_, canto viii.) was composed in the Homeric manner. In truth he
could estimate the Iliad and Odyssey no better than Chiabrera could the
Pythians and Olympians of Pindar. A just sense of criticism failed the
scholars of that age, which was too remote in its customs, too imperfect
in its science of history, to understand the essence of Greek art. With
equally amusing candor Tassoni passed judgments upon Dante, and thought
that he had rivaled the Purgatory in his description of the Dawn
(_Secchia Rapita_, viii. 15, the author's note). We must, however, be
circumspect and take these criticisms with a grain of salt; for one
never knows how far Tassoni may be laughing in his sleeve. There is no
doubt, however, regarding the sincerity of his strictures upon the Della
Cruscan Vocabulary of 1612, or the more famous inquiry into Petrarch's
style. The _Considerazioni sopra le Rime del Petrarca_ were composed in
1602-3 during a sea voyage from Genoa to Spain. They told what now must
be considered the plain truth of common sense about the affectations
into which a servile study of the _Canzoniere_ had betrayed generations
of Italian rhymesters. Tassoni had in view Petrarch's pedantic
imitators rather than their master; and when the storm of literary fury,
stirred up by his work, was raging round him, he thus established his
position: 'Surely it is allowable to censure Petrarch's poems, if a man
does this, not from malignant envy, but from a wish to remove the
superstitions and abuses which beget such evil effects, and to confound
the sects of the Rabbins hardened in their perfidy of obsolete opinion,
and in particular of such as think they cannot write straight without
the _falsariga_ of their model.' I may observe in passing that the
points in this paragraph are borrowed from a sympathizing letter which
Marino addressed to the author on his essay. In another place Tassoni
stated, 'It was never my intention to speak evil of this poet
[Petrarch], whom I have always admired above any lyrist of ancient or
modern times.'
So independent in his conduct and so bold in his opinions was the author
of the _Secchia Rapita_. The composition of this poem grew out of the
disputes which followed Tassoni's _Remarks on Petrarch_. He found
himself assailed by two scurrilous libels, which were traced to the
Count Alessandro Brusantini, feudal lord of Culagna and Bismozza.
Justice could not be obtained upon the person of so eminent a noble.
Tassoni, with true Italian refinement, resolved to give himself the
unique pleasure of ingenious vengeance. The name of the Count's fief
supplied him with a standing dish of sarcasm. He would write a satiric
poem, of which the Conte Culagna should be the burlesque hero. After ten
months' labor, probably in the year 1615, the _Secchia Rapita_ already
went abroad in MS.[199] Tassoni sought to pass it off as a product of
his youth; but both the style and the personalities which it contained
rendered this impossible. Privately issued, the poem had a great
success. 'In less than a year,' writes the author, 'more MS. copies were
in circulation than are usually sent forth from the press in ten years
of the most famous works.' One professional scribe made 200 ducats in
the course of a few months by reproducing it; and the price paid for
each copy was eight crowns. It became necessary to publish the _Secchia
Rapita_. But now arose innumerable difficulties. The printers of Modena
and Padua refused; Giuliano Cassiani had been sent to prison in 1617 for
publishing some verses of Testi against Spain. The Inquisition withheld
its _imprimatur_. Attempts were made to have it printed on the sly at
Padua; but the craftsman who engaged to execute this job was imprisoned.
At last, in 1622, Tassoni contrived to have the poem published in Paris.
The edition soon reached Italy. In Rome it was prohibited, but freely
sold; and at last Gregory XV. allowed it to be reprinted with some
canceled passages. There is, in truth, nothing prejudicial either to the
Catholic creed or to general morality in the _Secchia Rapita_. We note,
meanwhile, with interest, that it first saw the light at Paris, sharing
thus the fortunes of the _Adone_, which it preceded by one year. If the
greatest living Italians at this time were exiles, it appears that the
two most eminent poems of their literature first saw the light on
foreign shores.
[Footnote 199: For the date 1615 see Carducci's learned essay prefixed
to his edition of the _Secchia Rapita_ (Barbera, 1861).]
The _Secchia Rapita_ is the first example of heroico-comic poetry.
Tassoni claims in print the honor of inventing this new species, and
tells his friends that 'though he will not pique himself on being a
poet, still he sets some store on having discovered a new kind of poem
and occupied a vacant seat.' The seat--and it was no Siege
Perilous--stood indeed empty and ready to be won by any free-lance of
letters. Folengo had burlesqued romance. But no one as yet had made a
parody of that which still existed mainly as the unaccomplished hope of
literature. Trissino with his _Italia Liberata_, Tasso with his
_Gerusalemme Liberata_, tried to persuade themselves and the world that
they had succeeded in delivering Italy in labor of an epic. But their
maieutic ingenuity was vain. The nation carried no epic in her womb.
Trissino's _Italia_ was a weazened changeling of erudition, and Tasso's
_Gerusalemme_ a florid bastard of romance. Tassoni, noticing the
imposition of these two eminent and worthy writers, determined to give
his century an epic or heroic poem in the only form which then was
possible. Briefly, he produced a caricature, modeled upon no existing
work of modern art, but corresponding to the lineaments of that Desired
of the Nation which pedants had prophesied. Unity of action celestial
machinery, races in conflict, contrasted heroes, the wavering chance of
war, episodes, bards, heroines, and love subordinated to the martial
motive--all these features of the epic he viewed through the distorting
medium of his comic art.
In the days of the second Lombard League, when Frederick II. was
fighting a losing battle with the Church, Guelf Bologna came into grim
conflict with her Ghibelline neighbor Modena. The territory of these two
cities formed the _champ clos_ of a duel in which the forces of Germany
and nearly all Italy took part; and in one engagement, at Fossalta, the
Emperor's heir, King Enzo of Sardinia, was taken captive. How he passed
the rest of his days, a prisoner of the Bolognese, and how he begat the
semi-royal brood of Bentivogli, is matter of history and legend. During
this conflict memorable among the many municipal wars of Italy in the
middle ages, it happened that some Modenese soldiers, who had pushed
their way into the suburbs of Bologna, carried off a bucket and
suspended it as a trophy in the bell-tower of the cathedral, where it
may still be seen. One of the peculiarities of those mediaeval struggles
which roused the rivalry of towns separated from each other by a few
miles of fertile country, and which raged through generations till the
real interests at issue were confounded in blind animosity of neighbor
against neighbor--was the sense of humor and of sarcasm they encouraged.
To hurl dead donkey against your enemy's town-wall passed for a good
joke, and discredited his honor more than the loss of a hundred fighting
men in a pitched battle. Frontier fortresses received insulting names,
like the Perugian _Becca di questo_, or like the Bolognese _Grevalcore_.
There was much, in fact, in these Italian wars which reminds one of the
hostilities between rival houses in a public school.
Such being the element of humor ready to hand in the annals of his
country, Tassoni chose the episode of the Bolognese bucket for the theme
of a mock-heroic epic. He made what had been an insignificant incident
the real occasion of the war, and grouped the facts of history around it
by ingenious distortions of the truth. The bucket is the Helen of his
Iliad:[200]
Vedrai s'al cantar mio porgi l'orecchia,
Elena trasformarsi in una secchia.
[Footnote 200: Canto i. 2.]
A mere trifle thus becomes a point of dispute capable of bringing gods,
popes, emperors, kings, princes, cities, and whole nations into
conflict. At the same time the satirist betrays his malice by departing
as little as possible from the main current of actual events. History
lends verisimilitude to the preposterous assumption that heaven and
earth were drawn into a squabble about a bucket: and if there is any
moral to be derived from the _Secchia Rapita_ we have it here. At the
end of the contention, when both parties are exhausted, it is found
that the person of a king weighs in the scale of nations no more than an
empty bucket:[201]
Riserbando ne' patti a i Modanesi
La secchia, e 'l re de'Sardi ai Bolognesi.
Such is the main subject of the _Secchia Rapita_; and such is Tassoni's
irony, an irony worthy of Aristophanes in its far-reaching indulgent
contempt for human circumstance. But the poem has another object. It was
written to punish Count Alessandro Brusantini. The leading episode,
which occupies about three cantos of the twelve, is an elaborate
vilification of this personal enemy travestied as the contemptible Conte
di Culagna.
Tassoni's method of art corresponds to the irony of his inspiration. We
find his originality in a peculiar blending of serious and burlesque
styles, in abrupt but always well-contrived transitions from heroical
magniloquence to plebeian farce and from scurrility to poetic elevation,
finally in a frequent employment of the figure which the Greeks called
[Greek: para prosdokian]. His poem is a parody of the Aristophanic type.
'Like a fantastically ironical magic tree, the world-subversive idea
which lies at the root of it springs up with blooming ornament of
thoughts, with singing nightingales and climbing chattering apes.'[202]
To seek a central motive or a sober meaning in this caprice of the
satirical imagination would be idle. Tassoni had no intention, as some
critics have pretended, to exhibit the folly of those party wars which
tore the heart of Italy three centuries before his epoch, to teach the
people of his day the miseries of foreign interference, or to strike a
death-blow at classical mythology. The lesson which can be drawn from
his cantos, that man in warfare disquiets himself in vain for naught,
that a bucket is as good a _casus belli_ as Helen, the moral which
Southey pointed in his ballad of the Battle of Blenheim, emerges, not
from the poet's design, but from the inevitable logic of his humor.
Pique inspired the _Secchia Rapita_, and in the despicable character of
Count Culagna he fully revenged the slight which had been put upon him.
The revenge is savage, certainly; for the Count remains 'immortally
immerded' in the long-drawn episode which brought to view the shame of
his domestic life. Yet while Tassoni drew blood, he never ceased to
smile; and Count Culagna remains for us a personage of comedy rather
than of satire.
[Footnote 201: Canto xii. 77.]
[Footnote 202: So Heine wrote of Aristophanes. See my essay in _Studies
of the Greek Poets_.]
In the next place, Tassoni meant to ridicule the poets of his time. He
calls the _Secchia Rapita_ 'an absurd caprice, written to burlesque the
modern poets.' His genius was nothing if not critical, and literature
afforded him plenty of material for fun. Romance-writers with their
jousts and duels and armed heroines, would-be epic poets with their
extra-mundane machinery and pomp of phrase, Marino and his hyperbolical
conceits, Tuscan purists bent on using only words of the Tre Cento,
Petrarchisti spinning cobwebs of old metaphors and obsolete periphrases,
all felt in turn the touch of his light lash. The homage paid to
Petrarch's stuffed cat at Arqua supplied him with a truly Aristophanic
gibe.[203] Society comes next beneath his ferule. There is not a city of
Italy which Tassoni did not wring in the withers of its self-conceit.
The dialects of Ferrara, Bologna, Bergamo, Florence, Rome, lend the
satirist vulgar phrases when he quits the grand style and, taking
Virgil's golden trumpet from his lips, slides off into a _canaille_
drawl or sluice of Billingsgate. Modena is burlesqued in her presiding
Potta, gibbeted for her filthy streets. The Sienese discover that the
world accounts them lunatics. The Florentines and Perugians are branded
for notorious vice. Roman foppery, fantastical in feminine
pretentiousness, serves as a foil to drag Culagna down into the ditch of
ignominy. Here and there, Tassoni's satire is both venomous and pungent,
as when he paints the dotage of the Empire, stabs Spanish pride of
sovereignty, and menaces the Papacy with insurrection. But for the most
part, like Horace in the phrase of Persius, he plays about the vitals of
the victims who admit him to their confidence--_admissus circum
praecordia ludit_.
[Footnote 203: Canto viii. 33, 34.]
We can but regret that so clear-sighted, so urbane and so truly
Aristophanic a satirist had not a wider field to work in.
Seventeenth-century Italy was all too narrow for his genius; and if the
_Secchia Rapita_ has lost its savor, this is less the poet's fault than
the defect of his material. He was strong enough to have brought the
Athens of Cleon, the France of Henri III., or the England of James I.
within the range of his distorting truth-revealing mirror. Yet, even as
it was, Tassoni opened several paths for modern humorists. Rabelais
might have owned that caricature of Mars and Bacchus rioting in a tavern
bed with Venus travestied as a boy, and in the morning, after
breakfasting divinely on two hundred restorative eggs, escaping with the
fear of a scandalized host and the police-court before their eyes. Yet
Rabelais would hardly have brought this cynical picture of crude
debauchery into so fine a contrast with the celestial environment of
gods and goddesses. True to his principle of effect by alternation,
Tassoni sometimes sketches the deities whom he derides, in the style of
Volpato engravings after Guido. They move across his canvas with
ethereal grace. What can be more charming than Diana visiting Endymion,
and confessing to the Loves that all her past career as huntress and as
chaste had been an error? Venus, too, when she takes that sensuously
dreamy all-poetic journey across the blue Mediterranean to visit
golden-haired King Enzo in his sleep, makes us forget her entrance into
Modena disguised as a lad trained to play female parts upon the stage.
This blending of true elegance with broad farce is a novelty in modern
literature. We are reminded of the songs of the Mystae on the meadows of
Elysium in the _Frogs_. Scarron and Voltaire, through the French
imitators of Tassoni, took lessons from his caricature of Saturn, the
old diseased senator traveling in a sedan chair to the celestial
parliament, with a clyster-pipe in front of him and his seat upon a
close stool. Moliere and Swift, votaries of Cloacina, were anticipated
in the climax of Count Culagna's attempt to poison his wife, and in the
invention of the enchanted ass so formidable by Parthian discharges on
its adversary. Over these births of Tassoni's genius the Maccaronic Muse
of Folengo and his Bolognese predecessors presided. There is something
Lombard, a smack of sausage in the humor. But it remained for the
Modenese poet to bring this Mafelina into the comity of nations. We are
not, indeed, bound to pay her homage. Yet when we find her inspiring
such writers as Swift, Voltaire, Sterne and Heine, it is well to
remember that Tassoni first evoked her from Mantuan gutters and the
tripe-shops of Bologna.
'The fantastically ironical magic tree' of the _Secchia Rapita_ spread
its green boughs not merely for chattering baboons. Nightingales sang
there. The monkey-like Culagna, with his tricks and antics, disappears.
Virtuous Renoppia, that wholesome country lass, the _bourgeois_
counterpart of Bradamante, withholds her slipper from the poet's head
when he is singing sad or lovely things of human fortune. Our eyes,
rendered sensitive by vulgar sights, dwell with unwonted pleasure on the
chivalrous beauty of King Enzo. Ernesto's death touches our sympathy
with pathos, in spite of the innuendo cast upon his comrade Jaconia.
Paolo Malatesta rides with the shades of doom, the Dantesque cloud of
love and destiny, around his forehead, through that motley mock-heroic
band of burghers. Manfredi, consumed by an unholy passion for his
sister, burns for one moment, like a face revealed by lightning, on our
vision and is gone. Finally, when the mood seizes him (for Tassoni
persuades us into thinking he is but the creature of caprice), he tunes
the soft idyllic harp and sings Endymion's love-tale in strains soft as
Marino's, sweet as Tasso's, outdoing Marino in delicacy, Tasso in
reserve. This episode moved rigid Alfieri to admiration. It remains
embedded in a burlesque poem, one of the most perfectly outlined
triumphs of refined Italian romantic art. Yet such was the strength of
the master's hand, so loyal was he to his principle of contrast, that he
cuts the melodious idyl short with a twang of the guitar-strings, and
strikes up a tavern ballad on Lucrezia. The irony which ruled his art
demanded this inversion of proprieties. Cynthia wooing Endymion shows us
woman in her frailty; Lucrece violated by Tarquin is woman in her
dignity. The ironical poet had to adorn the first story with his
choicest flowers of style and feeling, to burlesque the second with his
grossest realism.
This antithesis between sustained poetry and melodiously-worded slang,
between radiant forms of beauty and grotesque ugliness, penetrates the
_Secchia Rapita_ in every canto and in every detail. We pass from
battle-scenes worthy of Ariosto and Tasso at their best into ditches of
liquid dung. Ambassadors are introduced with touches that degrade them
to the rank of _commis voyageurs_. Before the senate the same men utter
orations in the style of Livy. The pomp of war is paraded, its machinery
of catapults is put in motion, to discharge a dead ass into a besieged
town; and when the beleagured garrison behold it flying through the air,
they do not take the donkey for a taunt, but for a heavenly portent. A
tournament is held and very brave in their attire are all the
combatants. But according to its rules the greatest sluggard wins the
crown of honor. Even in the similes, which formed so important an
element of epic decoration, the same principle of contrast is
maintained. Fine vignettes from nature in the style consecrated by
Ariosto and Tasso introduce ludicrous incidents. Vulgar details picked
up from the streets prepare us for touches of pathos or poetry.
Tassoni takes high rank as a literary artist for the firmness with which
he adhered to his principle of irony, and for the facility of vigor
which conceals all traces of effort in so difficult a task. I may be
thought to have pitched his praise too high. But those will forgive me
who enjoy the play of pure sharp-witted fancy, or who reflect upon the
sadness of the theme which occupies my pen in these two volumes.
Of the four poets to whom this chapter is devoted, Guarini, Marino, and
Tassoni were successful, Chiabrera was a respectable failure. The reason
of this difference is apparent. In the then conditions of Italian
society, at the close of a great and glorious period of varied culture,
beneath the shadow of a score of Spaniardizing princelings, with the
spies of the Inquisition at every corner, and the drill of the
Tridentine Council to be gone through under Jesuitical direction, there
was no place for a second Pindar. But there was scope for decorative
art, for sensuous indulgence, and for genial irony. Happy the man who
paced his vineyards, dreaming musically of Arcadia! Happy the man who
rolled in Circe's pigsty! Happy the man who sat in his study and
laughed! Therefore the most meritorious productions of the time,
Boccalini's _Ragguagli di Parnaso_, Bracciolini's _Scherno degli Dei_,
have a touch of Tassoni's humor in them; while Achillini and Preti limp
somewhat feebly after Marino's Alcibidean swagger, and endless pastorals
pullulate from Guarini's tragi-comedy. We need not occupy our minds with
these secondary writers, nor do more than indicate the scholarly
niceness with which Filicaja in the second half of the seventeenth
century continued Chiabrera's tradition. But one word must be said in
honor of Fulvio Testi, the Modenese poet and statesman, who paid for the
fame of a Canzone with his head. He has a double interest for us: first,
because Leopardi esteemed him the noblest of Italian lyrists after
Petrarch; secondly, because his fate proved that Tasso's dread of
assassination was not wholly an illusion. Reading the ode addressed to
Count Raimondo Montecuccoli, _Ruscelletto orgoglioso_, the ode which
brought Testi to the block in a dungeon of the Estensi, we comprehend
what Leopardi meant by his high panegyric. It is a piece of poetry,
lofty in style, grave in movement, pregnant with weighty thought, stern
and rugged, steeped in a sublimity of gloom and Stoicism which remind us
of the author of _La Ginestra_. The century produced little that bore a
stamp so evident of dignity and greatness.
CHAPTER XII.
PALESTRINA AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERN MUSIC.
Italy in Renaissance produces no National School of Music--Flemish
Composers in Rome--Singers and Orchestra--The Chaotic Indecency of
this Contrapuntal Style--Palestrina's Birth and Early
History--Decrees of the Tridentine Council upon Church Music--The
Mass of Pope Marcello--Palestrina Satisfies the Cardinals with his
New Style of Sacred Music--Pius IV. and his Partiality for
Music--Palestrina and Filippo Neri--His Motetts--The Song of
Solomon set to Melody--Palestrina, the Saviour of Music--The
Founder of the Modern Style--Florentine Essays in the Oratorio.
It is a singular fact that while Italy led all the European races in
scholarship and literature, in the arts of sculpture and painting, in
commerce and the sciences of life, she had developed no national school
of music in the middle of the sixteenth century. Native melody might
indeed be heard in abundance along her shores and hillsides, in city
streets and on the squares where men and girls danced together at
evening. But such melody was popular; it could not be called artistic or
scientific. The music which resounded through the Sistine Chapel,
beneath the Prophets of Michel Angelo, on high days and festivals, was
not Italian. The composers of it came for the most part from Flemish or
French provinces, bearing the names of Josquin Depres, of Andrew
Willaert, of Eleazar Genet, of James Arkadelt, of Claude Gondimel; and
the performers were in like manner chiefly ultramontanes. Julius II. in
1513 founded a chapel in the Vatican Basilica called the Cappella Giulia
for the maintenance of twelve male singers, twelve boys, and two masters
of the choristers. In doing so it was his object to encourage a Roman
school of music and to free the Chapter of S. Peter's from the
inconvenience of being forced to engage foreign choir-men. His scheme,
however, had been only partially successful. As late as 1540, we find
that the principal composers and musicians in Rome were still
foreigners. To three Italians of repute, there were five Flemings, three
Frenchmen, three Spaniards, one German, and one Portuguese.[204]
[Footnote 204: See Baini, _Life of Palestrina_, vol. ii. p. 20.]
The Flemish style of contrapuntal or figured harmony, which had
enchanted Europe by its novelty and grace when Josquin Depres, in the
last quarter of the fifteenth century, brought it into universal vogue,
was still dominant in Italy. But this style already showed unmistakable
signs of decadence and dissolution. It had become unfit for
ecclesiastical uses, and by the exaggeration of its qualities it was
tending to anarchy. The grand defect of Flemish music, considered as an
art of expression, was that it ignored propriety and neglected the
libretto. Instead of exercising original invention, instead of suiting
melodies to words by appropriate combinations of sound and sense, the
composers chose any musical themes that came to hand, and wrought them
up into elaborate contrapuntal structures without regard for their book.
The first words of a passage from the Creed, for instance, were briefly
indicated at the outset of the number: what followed was but a
reiteration of the same syllables, and divided in the most arbitrary
manner to suit the complicated descant which they had to serve. The
singers could not adapt their melodic phrases to the liturgical text,
since sometimes passages of considerable length fell upon a couple of
syllables, while on the contrary a long sentence might have no more than
a bar or even less assigned to it. They were consequently in the habit
of drawling out or gabbling over the words, regardless of both sense and
sentiment. Nor was this all. The composers of the Flemish school prided
themselves on overloading their work with every kind of intricate and
difficult ornament, exhibiting their dexterity by canons of many types,
inversions, imitations, contrapuntal devices of divers ingenious and
distracting species. The verbal theme became a mere basis for the
utterance of scientific artifices and the display of vocal gymnastics.
The singers, for their part, were allowed innumerable licenses. While
the bass sustained the melody, the other voices indulged in extempore
descant (_composizione alla mente_) and in extravagances of technical
execution (_rifiorimenti_), regardless of the style of the main
composition, violating time, and setting even the fundamental tone at
defiance.
The composers, to advance another step in the analysis of this strange
medley, took particular delight in combining different sets of words,
melodies of widely diverse character, antagonistic rhythms and divergent
systems of accentuation in a single piece. They assigned these several
ingredients to several parts; and for the further exhibition of their
perverse skill, went even to the length of coupling themes in the major
and the minor.
The most obvious result of such practice was that it became impossible
to understand what words were being sung, and that instead of concord
and order in the choir, a confused discord and anarchy of dinning sounds
prevailed. What made the matter from an ecclesiastical point of view
still worse, was that these scholastically artificial compositions were
frequently based on trivial and vulgar tunes, suggesting the tavern, the
dancing-room, or even worse places, to worshipers assembled for the
celebration of a Sacrament. Masses bore titles adopted from the popular
melodies on which they were founded: such, for example, as 'Adieu mes
amours,' 'A l'ombre d'un buissonnet,' 'Baise-moi,' 'L'ami baudichon
madame,' 'Le vilain jaloux.' Even the words of love-ditties and obscene
ballads in French, Flemish, and Italian, were being squalled out by the
tenor while the bass gave utterance to an _Agnus_ or a _Benedictus_, and
the soprano was engaged upon the verses of a Latin hymn. Baini, who
examined hundreds of these Masses and motetts in MS., says that the
words imported into them from vulgar sources 'make one's flesh creep and
one's hair stand on end.' He does not venture to do more than indicate a
few of the more decent of these interloping verses; but mentions one
_Kyrie_, in which the tenor sang _Je ne vis oncques la pareille_; a
_Sanctus_, in which he had to utter _gracieuse gente mounyere_; and a
_Benedictus_, where the same offender was employed on _Madame, faites
moy scavoir_. As an augmentation of this indecency, numbers from a Mass
or motett which started with the grave rhythm of a Gregorian tone, were
brought to their conclusion on the dance measure of a popular _ballata_,
so that _Incarnatus est_ or _Kyrie eleison_ went jigging off into
suggestions of Masetto and Zerlina at a village ball.
To describe all the impertinences to which the customs of vocal
execution then in vogue gave rise, by means of flourishes,
improvisations, accelerations of time and multitudinous artifices
derived from the _ad libitum_ abuses of the fugal machinery, would serve
no purpose. But it may be profitably mentioned that the mischief was not
confined to the vocal parts. Organ and orchestra of divers instruments
were allowed the same liberty of improvising on the given theme,
embroidering these with fanciful _capricci_, and indulging their own
taste in symphonies connected with the main structure by slight and
artificial links. Instrumental music had not yet taken an independent
place in art. The lute, the trumpet, or the stops of the organ, followed
and imitated the voice; and thus in this confusion a choir of stringed
and wind instruments was placed in competition with the singing
choir.[205] It would appear that the composer frequently gave but a
ground-sketch of his plan, without troubling himself to distribute
written parts to the executants. The efflorescences, excursuses and
episodes to which I have alluded, were supplied by artists whom long
training in this kind of music enabled to perform their separate sallies
and to execute their several antics within certain limits of recognized
license. But since each vied with the other to produce striking effects,
the choir rivaling the orchestra, the tenor competing with the bass, the
organ with the viol, it followed that the din of their accumulated
efforts was not unjustly compared to that made by a 'sty of grunting
pigs,' the builders of the Tower of Babel, or the 'squalling of cats in
January.'[206] 'All their happiness,' writes a contemporary critic,
'consisted in keeping the bass singer to the fugue, while at the same
time one voice was shouting out _Sanctus_, another _Sabaoth_, a third
_gloria tua_, with howlings, bellowings and squealings that cannot be
described.'
[Footnote 205: While the choir was singing, the orchestra was playing
concerted pieces called _ricercari_, in which the vocal parts were
reproduced.]
[Footnote 206: See the original passages from contemporary writers
quoted by Baini, vol. i. pp. 102-104. Savonarola went so far as to
affirm: 'Che questo canto figurato l'ha trovato Satanasso,' a phrase
quite in the style of a Puritan abusing choirs and organs.]
It must not be thought that this almost unimaginable state of things
indicated a defect either of intellectual capacity or of artistic skill.
It was due rather to the abuse of science and of virtuosity, both of
which had attained to a high degree of development. It manifested the
decadence of music in its immaturity, through over-confident employment
of exuberant resources on an end inadequate for the fulfillment of the
art. Music, it must be remembered, unlike literature and plastic art,
had no antique tradition to assimilate, no masterpieces of accomplished
form to study. In the modern world it was an art without connecting
links to bind it to the past. And this circumstance rendered it liable
to negligent treatment by a society that prided itself upon the recovery
of the classics. The cultivated classes abandoned it in practice to
popular creators of melody upon the one hand, and to grotesque
scholastic pedants on the other. And from the blending of those
ill-accorded elements arose the chaos which I have attempted to
describe.
Learned composers in the style developed by the Flemish masters had
grown tired of writing simple music for four voices and a single choir.
They reveled in the opportunity of combining eight vocal parts and
bringing three choirs with accompanying orchestras into play at the same
time. They were proud of proving how by counterpoint the most dissimilar
and mutually-jarring factors could be wrought into a whole, intelligible
to the scientific musician, though unedifying to the public. In the
neglect of their art, considered as an art of interpretation and
expression, they abandoned themselves to intricate problems and to the
presentation of incongruous complexities.
The singers were expert in rendering difficult passages, in developing
unpromising motives, and in embroidering the arras-work of the composer
with fanciful extravagances of vocal execution. The instrumentalists
were trained in the art of copying effects of fugue or madrigal by lutes
and viols in concerted pieces. The people were used to dance and sing
and touch the mandoline together; in every house were found amateurs who
could with voice and string produce the studied compositions of the
masters.
What was really lacking, amid this exuberance of musical resources, in
this thick jungle of technical facilities, was a controlling element of
correct taste, a right sense of the proper function of music as an
interpretative art. On the very threshold of its modern development,
music had fallen into early decay owing to the misapplication of the
means so copiously provided by nature and by exercise. A man of genius
and of substantial intuition into the real ends of vocal music was
demanded at this moment, who should guide the art into its destined
channel. And in order to elicit such a creator of new impulses, such a
Nomothetes of the disordered state, it was requisite that external
pressure should be brought to bear upon the art. An initiator of the
right caliber was found in Palestrina. The pressure from without was
supplied by the Council of Trent.
It may here be parenthetically remarked that music, all through modern
history, has needed such legislators and initiators of new methods.
Considered as an art of expression, she has always tended to elude
control, to create for herself a domain extraneous to her proper
function, and to erect her resources of mere sound into
self-sufficingness. What Palestrina effected in the sixteenth century,
was afterwards accomplished on a wider platform by Gluck in the
eighteenth, and in our own days the same deliverance has been attempted
by Wagner. The efforts of all these epoch-making musicians have been
directed toward restraining the tendencies of music to assert an
independence, which for herself becomes the source of weakness by
reducing her to co-operation with insignificant words, and which renders
her subservient to merely technical dexterities.
Giovanni Pier Luigi, called Palestrina from his birthplace in one of the
Colonna fiefs near Rome, the ancient Praeneste, was born of poor
parents, in the year 1524, He went to Rome about 1540, and began his
musical career probably as a choir-boy in one of the Basilicas. Claude
Goudimel, the Besancon composer, who subsequently met a tragic death at
Lyons in a massacre of Huguenots, had opened a school of harmony in
Rome, where Palestrina learned the first rudiments of that science. What
Palestrina owed to Goudimel, is not clear. But we have the right to
assume that the Protestant part-songs of the French people which
Goudimel transferred to the hymn-books of the Huguenots, had a potent
influence upon the formation of his style. They may have been for him
what the Chorales of Germany were for the school of Bach.[207]
Externally, Palestrina's life was a very uneventful one, and the records
collected with indefatigable diligence by his biographer have only
brought to light changes from one post to another in several Basilicas,
and unceasing industry in composition. The vast number of works
published by Palestrina in his lifetime, or left in MS. at his death, or
known to have been written and now lost, would be truly astonishing were
it not a fact that very eminent creative genius is always copious, and
in no province of the arts more fertile than in that of music.
Palestrina lived and died a poor man. In his dedications he occasionally
remarks with sober pathos on the difficulty of pursuing scientific
studies in the midst of domestic anxiety. His pay was very small, and
the expense of publishing his works, which does not seem to have been
defrayed by patrons, was at that time very great. Yet he enjoyed an
uncontested reputation as the first of living composers, the saviour of
Church music, the creator of a new style; and on his tomb, in 1594, was
inscribed this title: _Princeps Musicae_.
[Footnote 207: See Michelet, _Histoire de France_, vol. xi. pp. 76, 101,
vol. xii. p. 383 (Paris: Lacroix, 1877).]
The state of confusion into which ecclesiastical music had fallen,
rendered it inevitable that some notice of so grave a scandal should be
taken by the Fathers of the Tridentine Council in their deliberations on
reform of ritual. It appears, therefore, that in their twenty-second
session (September 17, 1562) they enjoined upon the Ordinaries to
'exclude from churches all such music as, whether through the organ or
the singing, introduces anything of impure or lascivious, in order that
the house of God may truly be seen to be and may be called the house of
prayer.'[208] In order to give effect to this decree of the Tridentine
Council, Pius IV. appointed a congregation of eight Cardinals upon
August 2, 1564, among whom three deserve especial mention--Michele
Ghislieri, the Inquisitor, who was afterwards Pope Pius V.; Carlo
Borromeo, the sainted Archbishop of Milan; and Vitellozzo Vitellozzi. It
was their business, among other matters of reform, to see that the
Church music of Rome was instantly reduced to proper order in accordance
with the decree of the Council. Carlo Borromeo was nephew and chief
minister of the reigning Pope. Vitellozzo Vitellozzi was a young man of
thirty-three years, who possessed a singular passion for music.
[Footnote 208: Baini, i. p. 196.]
To these two members of the congregation, as a sub-committee, was
deputed the special task of settling the question of ecclesiastical
music, it being stipulated that they should by all means see that
sufficient clearness was introduced into the enunciation of the
liturgical words by the singers.
I will here interrupt the thread of the narration, in order to touch
upon the legendary story which connects Palestrina incorrectly with what
subsequently happened. It was well known that on the decisions of the
sub-committee of the congregation hung the fate of Church music. For
some while it seemed as though music might be altogether expelled from
the rites of the Catholic Ecclesia. And it soon became matter of history
that Palestrina had won the cause of his art, had maintained it in its
eminent position in the ritual of Rome, and at the same time had opened
a new period in the development of modern music by the production of his
Mass called the _Mass of Pope Marcellus_ at this critical moment. These
things were true; and when the peril had been overpassed, and the actual
circumstances of the salvation and revolution of Church music had been
forgotten, the memory of the crisis and the title of the victorious Mass
remained to form a mythus. The story ran that the good Pope Marcellus,
who occupied the Holy See for only twenty-two days, in the year 1555,
determined on the abolition of all music but Plain Song in the Church;
hearing of which resolve, Palestrina besought him to suspend his decree
until he had himself produced and presented a Mass conformable to
ecclesiastical propriety. Marcello granted the chapel-master this
request; and on Easter Day, the Mass, which saved Church music from
destruction, was performed with the papal approval and the applause of
Rome. It is not necessary to point out the many impossibilities and
contradictions involved in this legend, since the real history of the
Mass which wrought salvation for Church music, lies before us plainly
written in the prolix pages of Baini. Yet it would have vexed me to pass
by in silence so interesting and instructive an example of the mode by
which the truth of history is veiled in legend.
Truth is always more interesting than fiction, and the facts of this
important episode in musical history are not without their element of
romance. There is no doubt that there was a powerful party in the
Catholic Church imbued with a stern ascetic or puritanical spirit, who
would gladly have excluded all but Plain Song from her services. Had
Michele Ghislieri instead of the somewhat worldly Angelo de'Medici been
on the Papal throne, or had the decision of the musical difficulty been
delegated to him by the congregation of eight Cardinals in 1564,
Palestrina might not have obtained that opportunity of which he so
triumphantly availed himself. But it happened that the reigning Pope was
a lover of the art, and had a special reason for being almost
superstitiously indulgent to its professors. While he was yet a
Cardinal, in the easy-going days of Julius III., Angelo de'Medici had
been invited with other princes of the Church to hear the marvelous
performances upon the lute and the incomparable improvisations of a boy
called Silvio Antoniano. The meeting took place at a banquet in the
palace of the Venetian Cardinal Pisani. When the guests were assembled,
the Cardinal Rannuccio Farnese put together a bouquet of flowers, and
presenting these to the musician, bade him give them to that one of the
Cardinals who should one day be chosen Pope. Silvio without hesitation
handed the flowers to Angelo de'Medici, and taking up his lute began to
sing his praises in impassioned extempore verse. After his election to
the Papacy, with the title of Pius IV., Angelo de'Medici took Silvio
into his service, and employed him in such honorable offices that the
fortunate youth was finally advanced to the dignity of Cardinal under
the reign of Clement VIII., in 1598.[209]
[Footnote 209: It will be remembered that this Silvio Antoniano was one
of the revisers of Tasso's poem, and the one who gave him most trouble.]
It was therefore necessary for the congregation of musical reform to
take the Pope's partiality for this art into consideration; and they
showed their good will by choosing his own nephew, together with a
notorious amateur of music, for their sub-committee. The two Cardinals
applied to the College of Pontifical Singers for advice; and these
deputed eight of their number--three Spaniards, one Fleming, and four
Italians--to act as assistants in the coming deliberations. It was soon
agreed that Masses and motetts in which different verbal themes were
jumbled, should be prohibited; that musical motives taken from profane
songs should be abandoned; and that no countenance should be given to
compositions or words invented by contemporary poets. These three
conditions were probably laid down as indispensable by the Cardinals in
office before proceeding to the more difficult question of securing a
plain and intelligible enunciation of the sacred text. When the
Cardinals demanded this as the essential point in the proposed reform,
the singers replied that it would be impossible in practice. They were
so used to the complicated structure of figured music, with its canons,
fugal intricacies, imitations and inversions, that they could not even
imagine a music that should be simple and straightforward, retaining the
essential features of vocal harmony, and yet allowing the words on which
it was composed to be distinctly heard. The Cardinals rebutted these
objections by pointing to the Te Deum of Costanzo Festa (a piece which
has been always sung on the election of a new Pope from that day to our
own times) and to the Improperia of Palestrina, which also holds its own
in the service of the Sistine. But the singers answered that these were
exceptional pieces, which, though they might fulfill the requirements of
the Congregation of Reform, could not be taken as the sole models for
compositions involving such variety and length of execution as the Mass.
Their answer proved conclusively to what extent the contrapuntal style
had dissociated itself from the right object of all vocal music, that of
interpreting, enforcing, and transfiguring the words with which it
deals, and how it had become a mere art for the scientific development
of irrelevant and often impertinent melodic themes.
In order to avoid an absolute deadlock, which might have resulted in the
sacrifice of ecclesiastical harmony, and have inflicted a death-blow on
modern music, the committee agreed to refer their difficulties to
Palestrina. On the principle of _solvitur ambulando_, he was invited to
study the problem, and to produce a trial piece which should satisfy the
conditions exacted by the Congregation as well as the requirements of
the artists. Literally, he received commission to write a Mass in sober
ecclesiastical style, free from all impure and light suggestions in the
themes, the melodies and the rhythms, which should allow the sacred
words in their full sense to be distinctly heard, without sacrificing
vocal harmony and the customary interlacing of fugued passages. If he
succeeded, the Cardinals promised to make no further innovation; but if
he failed, Carlo Borromeo warned him that the Congregation of Reform
would disband the choral establishments of the Pontifical Chapel and the
Roman churches, and prohibit the figured style in vogue, in pursuance
of the clear decision of the Tridentine Council.
This was a task of Hercules imposed on Palestrina. The art to which he
had devoted his lifetime, the fame which he had acquired as a composer,
the profession by which he and all his colleagues gained their daily
bread, depended on his working out the problem. He was practically
commanded to discover a new species of Church music, or to behold the
ruin of himself and his companions, the extinction of the art and
science he so passionately loved. Truly may his biographer remark: 'I am
deliberately of opinion that no artist either before or since has ever
found himself in a parallel strait.'
We have no exact record of the spirit in which he approached this
labor.[210] But he was a man of sincere piety, a great and enthusiastic
servant of art. The command he had received came from a quarter which at
that period and in Rome had almost divine authority. He knew that music
hung trembling in the balance upon his failure or success.
[Footnote 210: In the Dedication of the _Mass of Pope Marcello_ to
Philip II. in 1567 Palestrina only says that he had been constrained by
the order of men of the highest gravity and most approved piety to apply
himself _ad sanctissimum Missae sacrificium novo modorum genere
decorandum_, and that he had performed his task with indefatigable pains
and industry (Baini, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 280). But it is noteworthy
that of the three Masses furnished for the approval of the congregation,
the first was entitled _Illumina oculos meos_, and that an anecdote
referring to this title relates Palestrina's earnest prayers for grace
and inspiration during the execution of the work (_ibid._ p. 223,
note.)]
And these two motives, the motive of religious zeal and the motive of
devotion to art, inspired him for the creation of a new musical world.
Analysis of his work and comparison of it with the style which he was
called on to supersede, show pretty clearly what were the principles
that governed him. With a view to securing the main object of rendering
the text intelligible to the faithful, he had to dispense with the
complicated Flemish system of combined melodies in counterpoint, and to
employ his scientific resources of fugue and canon with parsimony, so
that in future they should subserve and not tyrannize over expression.
He determined to write for six voices, two of which should be bass, in
order that the fundamental themes should be sustained with dignity and
continuity. But what he had principally in view, what in fact he had
been called on to initiate, was that novel adaptation of melody and
science to verbal phrase and sense, whereby music should be made an art
interpretative of religious sentiment, powerful to clothe each shade of
meaning in the text with appropriate and beautiful sound, instead of
remaining a merely artificial and mechanical structure of sounds
disconnected from the words employed in giving them vocal utterance.
Palestrina set to work, and composed three Masses, which were performed
upon April 28, 1565, before the eight Cardinals of the congregation in
the palace of Cardinal Vitellozzi. All three were approved of; but the
first two still left something to be desired. Baini reports that they
preserved somewhat too much of the cumbrous Flemish manner; and that
though the words were more intelligible, the fugal artifices overlaid
their clear enunciation. In the third, however, it was unanimously
agreed that Palestrina had solved the problem satisfactorily. 'Its style
is always equal, always noble, always alive, always full of thought and
sincere feeling, rising and ascending to the climax; not to understand
the words would be impossible; the melodies combine to stimulate
devotion; the harmonies touch the heart; it delights without
distracting; satisfies desire without tickling the senses; it is
beautiful in all the beauties of the sanctuary.' So writes Palestrina's
enthusiastic biographer; so apparently thought the Cardinals of the
congregation; and when this Mass (called the _Mass of Pope Marcellus_,
out of grateful tribute to the Pontiff, whose untimely death had
extinguished many sanguine expectations) was given to the world, the
whole of Italy welcomed it with a burst of passionate applause. Church
music had been saved. Modern music had been created. A new and
lovely-form of art had arisen like a star.
It was not enough that the _Mass of Pope Marcellus_ should have
satisfied the congregation. It had next to receive the approval of the
Pope, who heard it on June 19. On this occasion, if the Court Chronicle
be correct, Pius made a pretty speech, declaring that 'of such nature
must have been the harmonies of the new song heard by John the Apostle
in the heavenly Jerusalem, and that another John had given us a taste of
them in the Jerusalem of the Church Militant.' He seems, indeed, to have
been convinced that the main problem of preserving clearness of
enunciation in the uttered words had been solved, and that there was now
no reason to deprive the faithful of the artistic and devotional value
of melodious music. He consequently appointed Palestrina to the post of
composer for the Papal Chapel, and created a monopoly for the
performance of his works. This measure, which roused considerable
jealousy among musicians at the moment, had the salutary effect of
rendering the new style permanent in usage.
Of Palestrina's voluminous compositions this is not the place to speak.
It is enough to have indicated the decisive part which he took in the
reformation of Church music at a moment when its very existence was
imperiled, and to have described the principles upon which he laid down
new laws for the art. I must not, however, omit to dwell upon his
subsequent connection with S. Filippo Neri, since the music he composed
for the Oratory of that saint contributed much toward the creation of a
semi-lyrical and semi-dramatic style to which we may refer the origins
of the modern Oratorio. Filippo Neri was the spiritual director of
Palestrina, and appointed him composer to his devout confraternity. For
the use of that society the master wrote a series of _Arie Divote_ on
Italian words. They were meant to be sung by the members, and to
supersede the old usages of Laud-music, which had chiefly consisted in
adapting popular street-tunes to sacred words.[211]
[Footnote 211: See _Renaissance in Italy_, vol. iv. pp. 263, 305.]