A Learned Squabble.
Bartolommeo Scala, secretary of the Florentine Republic, on whom Tito
Melema had been thus led to anchor his hopes, lived in a handsome
palace close to the Porta Pinti, now known as the Casa Gherardesca. His
arms—an azure ladder transverse on a golden field, with the motto
_Gradatim_ placed over the entrance—told all comers that the miller’s
son held his ascent to honours by his own efforts a fact to be
proclaimed without wincing. The secretary was a vain and pompous man,
but he was also an honest one: he was sincerely convinced of his own
merit, and could see no reason for feigning. The topmost round of his
azure ladder had been reached by this time: he had held his
secretaryship these twenty years—had long since made his orations on
the _ringhiera_, or platform of the Old Palace, as the custom was, in
the presence of princely visitors, while Marzocco, the republican lion,
wore his gold crown on the occasion, and all the people cried, “Viva
Messer Bartolommeo!”—had been on an embassy to Rome, and had there been
made titular Senator, Apostolical Secretary, Knight of the Golden Spur;
and had, eight years ago, been Gonfaloniere—last goal of the Florentine
citizen’s ambition. Meantime he had got richer and richer, and more and
more gouty, after the manner of successful mortality; and the Knight of
the Golden Spur had often to sit with helpless cushioned heel under the
handsome loggia he had built for himself, overlooking the spacious
gardens and lawn at the back of his palace.
He was in this position on the day when he had granted the desired
interview to Tito Melema. The May afternoon sun was on the flowers and
the grass beyond the pleasant shade of the loggia; the too stately silk
lucco was cast aside, and the light loose mantle was thrown over his
tunic; his beautiful daughter Alessandra and her husband, the Greek
soldier-poet Marullo, were seated on one side of him: on the other, two
friends not oppressively illustrious, and therefore the better
listeners. Yet, to say nothing of the gout, Messer Bartolommeo’s
felicity was far from perfect: it was embittered by the contents of
certain papers that lay before him, consisting chiefly of a
correspondence between himself and Politian. It was a human foible at
that period (incredible as it may seem) to recite quarrels, and favour
scholarly visitors with the communication of an entire and lengthy
correspondence; and this was neither the first nor the second time that
Scala had asked the candid opinion of his friends as to the balance of
right and wrong in some half-score Latin letters between himself and
Politian, all springing out of certain epigrams written in the most
playful tone in the world. It was the story of a very typical and
pretty quarrel, in which we are interested, because it supplied
precisely that thistle of hatred necessary, according to Nello, as a
stimulus to the sluggish paces of the cautious steed, Friendship.
Politian, having been a rejected pretender to the love and the hand of
Scala’s daughter, kept a very sharp and learned tooth in readiness
against the too prosperous and presumptuous secretary, who had declined
the greatest scholar of the age for a son-in-law. Scala was a
meritorious public servant, and, moreover, a lucky man—naturally
exasperating to an offended scholar; but then—O beautiful balance of
things!—he had an itch for authorship, and was a bad writer—one of
those excellent people who, sitting in gouty slippers, “penned poetical
trifles” entirely for their own amusement, without any view to an
audience, and, consequently, sent them to their friends in letters,
which were the literary periodicals of the fifteenth century. Now Scala
had abundance of friends who were ready to praise his writings: friends
like Ficino and Landino—amiable browsers in the Medicean park along
with himself—who found his Latin prose style elegant and masculine; and
the terrible Joseph Scaliger, who was to pronounce him totally ignorant
of Latinity, was at a comfortable distance in the next century. But
when was the fatal coquetry inherent in superfluous authorship ever
quite contented with the ready praise of friends? That critical
supercilious Politian—a fellow-browser, who was far from amiable—must
be made aware that the solid secretary showed, in his leisure hours, a
pleasant fertility in verses, which indicated pretty clearly how much
he might do in that way if he were not a man of affairs.
Ineffable moment! when the man you secretly hate sends you a Latin
epigram with a false gender—hendecasyllables with a questionable
elision, at least a toe too much—attempts at poetic figures which are
manifest solecisms. That moment had come to Politian: the secretary had
put forth his soft head from the official shell, and the terrible
lurking crab was down upon him. Politian had used the freedom of a
friend, and pleasantly, in the form of a Latin epigram, corrected the
mistake of Scala in making the _culex_ (an insect too well-known on the
banks of the Arno) of the inferior or feminine gender. Scala replied by
a bad joke, in suitable Latin verses, referring to Politian’s
unsuccessful suit. Better and better. Politian found the verses very
pretty and highly facetious: the more was the pity that they were
seriously incorrect, and inasmuch as Scala had alleged that he had
written them in imitation of a Greek epigram, Politian, being on such
friendly terms, would enclose a Greek epigram of his own, on the same
interesting insect—not, we may presume, out of any wish to humble
Scala, but rather to instruct him; said epigram containing a lively
conceit about Venus, Cupid, and the _culex_, of a kind much tasted at
that period, founded partly on the zoological fact that the gnat, like
Venus, was born from the waters. Scala, in reply, begged to say that
his verses were never intended for a scholar with such delicate
olfactories as Politian, nearest of all living men to the perfection of
the ancients, and of a taste so fastidious that sturgeon itself must
seem insipid to him; defended his own verses, nevertheless, though
indeed they were written hastily, without correction, and intended as
an agreeable distraction during the summer heat to himself and such
friends as were satisfied with mediocrity, he, Scala, not being like
some other people, who courted publicity through the booksellers. For
the rest, he had barely enough Greek to make out the sense of the
epigram so graciously sent him, to say nothing of tasting its
elegances; but—the epigram was Politian’s: what more need be said?
Still, by way of postscript, he feared that his incomparable friend’s
comparison of the gnat to Venus, on account of its origin from the
waters, was in many ways ticklish. On the one hand, Venus might be
offended; and on the other, unless the poet intended an allusion to the
doctrine of Thales, that cold and damp origin seemed doubtful to Scala
in the case of a creature so fond of warmth; a fish were perhaps the
better comparison, or, when the power of flying was in question, an
eagle, or indeed, when the darkness was taken into consideration, a bat
or an owl were a less obscure and more apposite parallel, etcetera,
etcetera. Here was a great opportunity for Politian. He was not aware,
he wrote, that when he had Scala’s verses placed before him, there was
any question of sturgeon, but rather of frogs and gudgeons: made short
work with Scala’s defence of his own Latin, and mangled him terribly on
the score of the stupid criticisms he had ventured on the Greek epigram
kindly forwarded to him as a model. Wretched cavils, indeed! for as to
the damp origin of the gnat, there was the authority of Virgil himself,
who had called it the “_alumnus_ of the waters;” and as to what his
dear dull friend had to say about the fish, the eagle, and the rest, it
was “nihil ad rem;” for because the eagle could fly higher, it by no
means followed that the gnat could not fly at all, etcetera, etcetera.
He was ashamed, however, to dwell on such trivialities, and thus to
swell a gnat into an elephant; but, for his own part, would only add
that he had nothing deceitful or double about him, neither was he to be
caught when present by the false blandishments of those who slandered
him in his absence, agreeing rather with a Homeric sentiment on that
head—which furnished a Greek quotation to serve as powder to his
bullet.
The quarrel could not end there. The logic could hardly get worse, but
the secretary got more pompously self-asserting, and the scholarly
poet’s temper more and more venomous. Politian had been generously
willing to hold up a mirror, by which the too-inflated secretary,
beholding his own likeness, might be induced to cease setting up his
ignorant defences of bad Latin against ancient authorities whom the
consent of centuries had placed beyond question,—unless, indeed, he had
designed to sink in literature in proportion as he rose in honours,
that by a sort of compensation men of letters might feel themselves his
equals. In return, Politian was begged to examine Scala’s writings:
nowhere would he find a more devout admiration of antiquity. The
secretary was ashamed of the age in which he lived, and blushed for it.
_Some_, indeed, there were who wanted to have their own works praised
and exalted to a level with the divine monuments of antiquity; but he,
Scala, could not oblige them. And as to the honours which were
offensive to the envious, they had been well earned: witness his whole
life since he came in penury to Florence. The elegant scholar, in
reply, was not surprised that Scala found the Age distasteful to him,
since he himself was so distasteful to the Age; nay, it was with
perfect accuracy that he, the elegant scholar, had called Scala a
branny monster, inasmuch as he was formed from the off-scourings of
monsters, born amidst the refuse of a mill, and eminently worthy the
long-eared office of turning the paternal millstones (_in pistrini
sordibus natus et quidem pistrino dignissimus_)!
It was not without reference to Tito’s appointed visit that the papers
containing this correspondence were brought out to-day. Here was a new
Greek scholar whose accomplishments were to be tested, and on nothing
did Scala more desire a dispassionate opinion from persons of superior
knowledge than on that Greek epigram of Politian’s. After sufficient
introductory talk concerning Tito’s travels, after a survey and
discussion of the gems, and an easy passage from the mention of the
lamented Lorenzo’s eagerness in collecting such specimens of ancient
art to the subject of classical tastes and studies in general and their
present condition in Florence, it was inevitable to mention Politian, a
man of eminent ability indeed, but a little too arrogant—assuming to be
a Hercules, whose office it was to destroy all the literary
monstrosities of the age, and writing letters to his elders without
signing them, as if they were miraculous revelations that could only
have one source. And after all, were not his own criticisms often
questionable and his tastes perverse? He was fond of saying pungent
things about the men who thought they wrote like Cicero because they
ended every sentence with “esse videtur:” but while he was boasting of
his freedom from servile imitation, did he not fall into the other
extreme, running after strange words and affected phrases? Even in his
much-belauded ‘Miscellanea’ was every point tenable? And Tito, who had
just been looking into the ‘Miscellanea,’ found so much to say that was
agreeable to the secretary—he would have done so from the mere
disposition to please, without further motive—that he showed himself
quite worthy to be made a judge in the notable correspondence
concerning the _culex_. Here was the Greek epigram which Politian had
doubtless thought the finest in the world, though he had pretended to
believe that the “transmarini,” the Greeks themselves, would make light
of it: had he not been unintentionally speaking the truth in his false
modesty?
Tito was ready, and scarified the epigram to Scala’s content. O wise
young judge! He could doubtless appreciate satire even in the vulgar
tongue, and Scala—who, excellent man, not seeking publicity through the
booksellers, was never unprovided with “hasty uncorrected trifles,” as
a sort of sherbet for a visitor on a hot day, or, if the weather were
cold, why then as a cordial—had a few little matters in the shape of
Sonnets, turning on well-known foibles of Politian’s, which he would
not like to go any farther, but which would, perhaps, amuse the
company.
Enough: Tito took his leave under an urgent invitation to come again.
His gems were interesting; especially the agate, with the _lusus
naturae_ in it—a most wonderful semblance of Cupid riding on the lion;
and the “Jew’s stone,” with the lion-headed serpent enchased in it;
both of which the secretary agreed to buy—the latter as a reinforcement
of his preventives against the gout, which gave him such severe twinges
that it was plain enough how intolerable it would be if he were not
well supplied with rings of rare virtue, and with an amulet worn close
under the right breast. But Tito was assured that he himself was more
interesting than his gems. He had won his way to the Scala Palace by
the recommendation of Bardo de’ Bardi, who, to be sure, was Scala’s old
acquaintance and a worthy scholar, in spite of his overvaluing himself
a little (a frequent foible in the secretary’s friends); but he must
come again on the ground of his own manifest accomplishments.
The interview could hardly have ended more auspiciously for Tito, and
as he walked out at the Porta Pinti that he might laugh a little at his
ease over the affair of the _culex_, he felt that fortune could hardly
mean to turn her back on him again at present, since she had taken him
by the hand in this decided way.