II.

But meanwhile, during those centuries which lie between the dark ages

and modern times, the Middle Ages (inasmuch as they mean not a mere

chronological period, but a definite social and mental condition)

fortunately did not exist everywhere. Had they existed, it is almost

impossible to understand how they would ever throughout Europe have come

to an end; for as the favourite proverb of Catharine of Siena has it,

one dead man cannot bury another dead man; and the Middle Ages, after

this tedious dying of the fifteenth century, required to be shovelled

into the tomb, nay, rather, given the final stroke, by the Renaissance.

This that we foolishly call--giving a quite incorrect notion of sudden

and miraculous birth--the Renaissance, and limit to the time of the

revival of Greek humanities, really existed, as I have repeatedly

suggested wherever, during the mediaeval centuries, the civilization of

which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were big was not, by the

pressure of feudalism and monasticism, made to be abortive or stillborn.

Low as was Italy at the very close of the dark ages, and much as she

borrowed for a long while from the more precocious northern nations,

especially France and Provence; Italy had, nevertheless, an enormous

advantage in the fact that her populations were not divided into victor

and vanquished, and that the old Latin institutions of town and country

were never replaced, except in certain northern and southern districts,

by feudal arrangements. The very first thing which strikes us in the

obscure Italian commonwealths of early times, is that in these

resuscitated relics of Roman or Etruscan towns there is no feeling of

feudal superiority and inferiority; that there is no lord, and

consequently no serf. Nor is this the case merely within the city walls.

The never sufficiently appreciated difference between the Italian free

burghs and those of Germany, Flanders, and Provence, is that the

citizens depend only in the remotest and most purely fictitious way upon

any kind of suzerain; and moreover that the country, instead of

belonging to feudal nobles, belong every day more and more completely to

the burghers. The peasant is not a serf, but one of three things--a

hired labourer, a possessor of property, or a farmer, liable to no

taxes, paying no rent, and only sharing with the proprietor the produce

of the land. By this latter system, existing, then as now, throughout

Tuscany, the peasantry was an independent and well-to-do class. The land

owned by one man (who, in the commonwealths, was usually a shopkeeper or

manufacturer in the town) was divided into farms small enough to be

cultivated--vines, olives, corn, and fruit--by one family of peasants,

helped perhaps by a paid labourer. The thriftier and less scrupulous

peasants could, in good seasons, put by sufficient profit from their

share of the produce to suffice after some years, and with the addition

of what the women might make by washing, spinning, weaving, plaiting

straw hats (an accomplishment greatly insisted upon by Lorenzo dei

Medici), and so forth, to purchase some small strip of land of their

own. Hence, a class of farmers at once living on another man's land and

sharing its produce with him, and cultivating and paying taxes upon land

belonging to themselves.

Of these Tuscan peasants we get occasional glimpses in the mediaeval

Italian novelists--a well-to-do set of people, in constant communication

with the town where they sell their corn, oil, vegetables, and wine, and

easily getting confused with the lower class of artizans with whom they

doubtless largely intermarried. These peasants whom we see in tidy

kilted tunics and leathern gaiters, driving their barrel-laden bullock

carts, or riding their mules up to the red city gates in many a

Florentine and Sienese painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries, were in many respects better off than the small artizans of

the city, heaped up in squalid houses, and oppressed by the greater and

smaller guilds. Agnolo Pandolfini, teaching thrift to his sons in

Alberti's charming treatise on "The Government of the Family,"

frequently groans over the insolence, the astuteness of the peasantry;

and indeed seems to consider that it is impossible to cope with them--a

conclusion which would have greatly astounded the bailiffs of the feudal

proprietors in the Two Sicilies and beyond the Alps. Indeed it is

impossible to conceive a stranger contrast than that between the

northern peasant, the starved and stunted serf, whom Holbein drew,

driving his lean horses across the hard furrow, with compassionate Death

helping along the plough, and the Tuscan farmer, as shown us by Lorenzo

dei Medici--the young fellow who, while not above minding his cows or

hoeing up his field, goes into Florence once a week, offers his

sweetheart presents of coral necklaces, silk staylaces, and paint for

her cheeks and eyelashes; who promises, to please her, to have his hair

frizzled (as only the youths of the Renaissance knew how to be frizzled

and fuzzed) by the barber, and even dimly hints that some day he may

appear in silken jerkin and tight hose, like a well-to-do burgess. No

greater contrast perhaps, unless indeed we should compare his

sweetheart, Lorenzo's beautiful Nenciozza, with her box full of jewels,

her Sunday garb of damask kirtle and gold-worked bodice, her almost

queenly ways towards her adorers, with the wretched creature, not a

woman, but a mere female animal, cowering among her starving children in

her mud cottage, and looking forward, in dull lethargy, after the

morning full of outrages at the castle, to the night, the night on the

heath, lit with mysterious flickers, to the horrible joys of the

sacrifice which the oppressed brings to the dethroned, the serf to

Satan; when, in short, we compare the peasant woman described by Lorenzo

with the female serf resuscitated by the genius of Michelet; nay, more

poignant still, with that mother in the "Dance of Death," seated on the

mud flood of the broken-roofed, dismantled hovel, stewing something on a

fire of twigs, and stretching out vain arms to her poor tattered

baby-boy, whom, with the good-humoured tripping step of an old nurse,

the kindly skeleton is leading away out of this cruel world.

Such were the conditions of the peasantry of the great Italian

commonwealths. They were, as much as the northern serfs were the

reverse, creatures pleasant to deal with, pleasant to watch.

The upper classes, on the other hand, differed quite as much from the

upper classes of feudal countries. They were, be it remembered, men of

business, constantly in contact with the working classes; Albizis,

Strozzis, Pandolfinis, Guinigis, Tolomeis, no matter what their name,

these men who built palaces and churches which outdid the magnificence

of northern princes, and who might, at any moment, be sent ambassadors

from Florence, Lucca, or Siena, to the French or English kings, to the

Emperor or the Pope, spent a large portion of their days at their office

desk, among the bales of their warehouses, behind the counter of their

shops; they wore the same dress, had the same habits, spoke the same

dialect, as the weavers and dyers, the carriers and porters whom they

employed, and whose sons might, by talent and industry, amass a fortune,

build palaces, and go ambassadors to kings in their turn. When,

therefore, these merchant nobles turned to the country for rest and

relief from their cares, it was not to the country as it existed for the

feudal noble of the North. Boar and stag hunts had no attraction for

quiet men of business; forests stocked with wild beasts where vineyard

and cornfield might have extended, would have seemed to them the very

height of wastefulness, discomfort, and ugliness. Pacific and

businesslike, they merely transferred to the country the habits of

thought and of life which had arisen in the city. Not for them any

imitation of the feudal castle, turreted and moated, cut up into dark

irregular rooms and yards, filled with noisy retainers and stinking

hounds. On some gentle hillside a well-planned palace, its rooms

spacious and lofty, and sparely windowed for coolness in summer; with a

neat cloistered court in the centre, ventilating the whole house, and

affording a cool place, full of scent of flowers and sound of fountains

for the burning afternoons; a belvedere tower also, on which to seek a

breeze on stifling nights, when the very stars seem faint for heat, and

the dim plumy heads of cypress and poplar are motionless against the

misty blue sky. In front a broad terrace, whence to look down towards

the beloved city, a vague fog of roofs in the distance; on the side and

behind, elaborate garden walks walled with high walls of box and oak and

laurel, in which stand statues in green niches; gardens with little

channels to bring water, even during droughts, to the myrtles, the

roses, the stocks and clove pinks, over which bend with blossoms

brilliant against the pale blue sky the rose-flowered oleander, the

scarlet-flowered pomegranate; also aviaries and cages full of odd and

harmless creatures, ferrets, guinea pigs, porcupines, squirrels, and

monkeys; arbours where wife, daughters, and daughters-in-law may sew and

make music; and neat lawns where the young men may play at quoits,

football, or swordsticks and bucklers; and then, sweeping all round the

house and gardens and terraces an undulating expanse of field and

orchard, smoke-tinted with olive, bright green in spring with budding

crops, russet in autumn with sere vines; and from which, in the burning

noon, rises the incessant sawing noise of the cicalas, and ever and anon

the high, nasal, melancholy chant of the peasant, lying in the shade of

barn door or fig tree till the sun shall sink and he can return to his

labour. If the house in town, with its spacious store-rooms, its carved

chapel, and painted banqueting hall, large enough to hold sons' children

and brothers' wives and grandchildren, and a whole host of poor

relatives, whom the wise father (as Pandolfini teaches) employs rather

than strangers for his clerks and overseers--if this town house was the

pride of the Italian burgess; the villa, with its farms and orchards,

was the real joy, the holiday paradise of the over-worked man. To read

in the cool house, with cicala's buzz and fountain plash all round, the

Greek and Latin authors; to discuss them with learned men; to watch the

games of the youths and the children, this was the reward for years of

labour and intelligence; but sweeter than all this (how we feel it in

Agnolo Pandolfini's speeches!) were those occupations which the city

could not give: the buying and selling of plants, grain, and kine, the

meddling with new grafted trees, the mending of spaliers, the

straightening of fences, the going round (with the self-importance and

impatience of a cockney) to see what flowers had opened, what fruit had

ripened over-night; to walk through the oliveyards, among the vines; to

pry into stable, pig-stye, and roosting-place, taking up handfuls of

drying grain, breaking twigs of olives, to see how things were doing;

and to have long conversations with the peasants, shrewd enough to

affect earnest attention when the master was pleased to vent his

town-acquired knowledge of agriculture and gardening. Sweet also,

doubtless, for younger folk, or such perhaps as were fonder of teaching

new lute tunes to the girls than of examining into cabbages, and who

read Dante and Boccaccio more frequently than Cicero or Sallust; though

sweet perhaps only as a vague concomitant of their lazy pleasures, to

listen to those songs of the peasantry rising from the fields below,

while lying perhaps on one's back in the shaded grass, watching the

pigeons whirring about the belvedere tower. Vaguely pleasant this also,

doubtless; but for a long while only vaguely. For, during more than two

centuries, the burgesses of Italy were held enthralled by the Courtly

poets of other countries; listening to, and reading, at first, only

Provencals and Sicilians, or Italians, like Sordello, pretending to be

of Provence or Sicily; and even later, enduring in their own poets,

their own Guittones, Cavalcantis, Cinos, Guinicellis, nay even in Dante

and Petrarch's lyrics, only the repetition (however vivified by genius)

of the old common-places of Courtly love, and artificial spring, of the

poetry of feudal nations. But the time came when not only Provencal and

Sicilian, but even Tuscan, poetry was neglected, when the revival of

Greek and Latin letters made it impossible to rewrite the threadbare

mediaeval prettinesses, or even to write in earnest in the modern tongue,

so stiff and thin (as it seemed) and like some grotesque painted saint,

when compared with the splendidly fleshed antique languages, turning and

twining in graceful or solemn involutions, as of a Pyrrhic or a maidens'

dance. And it was during this period, from Petrarch to Politian, that,

as philologists have now proved beyond dispute, the once fashionable

chivalric romance, and the poetry of Provencal and Sicilian school, cast

off by the upper classes, was gradually picked up by the lower and

especially by the rural classes. Vagabond ballad-singers and

story-tellers--creatures who wander from house to house, mending broken

pottery, collecting rags or selling small pedlar's wares--were the old

clothesmen who carried about these bits of tarnished poetic finery. The

people of the town, constantly in presence of the upper classes, and

therefore sooner or later aware of what was or was not in fashion, did

not care long for the sentimental daintiness of mediaeval poetry;

besides, satire and scurrility are as inevitable in a town as are dogs

in gutters and cats on roofs; and the townsfolk soon set their own

buffoonish or satirical ideas to whatever remained of the music of

mediaeval poetry: already early in the fifteenth century the sonnet had

become for the Florentine artizans a mere scurrilous epigram. It was

different in the country. The peasant, at least the Tuscan peasant, is

eminently idealistic and romantic in his literary tastes; it may be that

he has not the intellectual life required for any utterances or forms of

his own, and that he consequently accepts poetry as a ready-made

ornament, something pretty and exotic, which is valued in proportion to

its prettiness and rarity. Be the reason whatever it may, certain it is

that nothing can be too artificial or high-flown to please the Italian

peasantry: its tales are all of kings; princesses, fairies, knights,

winged horses, marvellous jewels, and so forth; its songs are almost

without exception about love, constancy, moon, stars, flowers. Such

things have not been degraded by familiarity and parody as in the town;

they retain for the country folk the vague charm (like that of music,

automatic and independent of thorough comprehension) of belonging to a

sphere of the marvellous; hence they are repeated and repeated with

almost religious servility, as any one may observe who will listen to

the stories and verses told and sung even nowadays in the Tuscan

country, or who will glance over the splendid collections of folklore

made in the last twenty years. Such things, must suffer alteration from

people who can neither read nor write, and who cannot be expected to

remember very clearly details which, in many cases, must have for them

only the vaguest meaning. The stories split in process of telling and

re-telling, and are completed with bits of other stories; details are

forgotten and have to be replaced; the same happens with poetry: songs

easily get jumbled together, their meaning is partially obliterated, and

has to be restored or, again, an attempt is made by bold men to adapt

some seemingly adaptable old song to a new occasion an old love ditty

seems fit to sing to a new sweetheart.--names, circumstances, and

details require arranging for this purpose; and hence more alterations.

Now, however much a peasant may enjoy the confused splendours of Court

life and of Courtly love, he cannot, with the best will in the world,

restore their details or colouring if they happen to become obliterated.

If he chance to forget that when the princess first met the wizard she

was riding forth on a snow-white jennet with a falcon on her glove,

there is nothing to prevent his describing her as walking through the

meadow in charge of a flock of geese; and similarly, should he happen to

forget that the Courtly lover compares the skin of his mistress to ivory

and her eyes to Cupid's torches, he is quite capable of filling up the

gap by saying that the girl is as white as a turnip and as bright-eyed

as a ferret. As with details of description and metaphors, so also with

the emotional and social parts of the business. The peasant has not been

brought up in the idea that the way to gain a woman's affection is to

stick her glove on a helmet and perform deeds of prowess closely

resembling those of Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena; so he attempts to

ingratiate himself by offering her presents of strawberries, figs,

buttons, hooks-and-eyes, and similar desirable things. Again, were the

peasant to pay attentions to a married woman, he would merely get (what

noble husbands were too well bred to dream of) a sound horsewhipping, or

perhaps even a sharp knife thrust in his stomach; so that he takes good

care to address his love songs only to marriageable young women. In this

way, without any deliberate attempt .at originality, the old Courtly

poetry becomes, when once removed to the country, thoroughly patched and

seamed with rustic ideas, feelings, and images; while never ceasing to

be, in its general stuff and shape, of a kind such as only professional

poets of the upper classes can produce. The Sicilian lyrics collected by

Signor Pitre, still more the Tuscan poems of Tigri's charming volume,

are, therefore, a curious mixture of high-flown sentiment, dainty

imagery, and most artistic arrangements of metre and diction (especially

in the rispetto, where metrical involution is accompanied by logical

involution of the most refined mediaeval sort), with hopes and complaints

such as only a farmer could frame, with similes and descriptions such as

only the business of the field, vineyard, and dairy could suggest. A

mixture, but not a jumble. For as in this slow process of assimilation

and alteration only that was remembered by the peasant which the peasant

could understand and sympathize with; and only that was welded into the

once Courtly poetry which was sufficiently refined to please the people

who delighted in the exotic refinement--as, in short, everything came

about perfectly simply and unconsciously, there resulted what in good

sooth may be considered as a perfectly substantive and independent form

of art, with beauties and refinements of its own. And, indeed, it

appears to me that one might say, without too much paradox, that in

these peasant songs only does the poetry of minnesingers and

troubadours, become thoroughly enjoyable; that only when the

conventionality of feeling and imagery is corrected by the freshness,

the straightforwardness, nay, even the grotesqueness of rural likings,

dislikings, and comparisons, can the dainty beauty of mediaeval Courtly

poetry ever really satisfy our wishes. Comparing together Tigri's

collection of Tuscan folk poetry with any similar anthology that might

be made of middle-high German and Provencal, and early Italian lyrics, I

feel that the adoption of Courtly mediaeval poetry by the Italian

peasantry of the Renaissance can be compared more significantly than at

first seemed with the adoption of a once fashionable garb by country

folk. The peasant pulled about this Courtly lyrism, oppressively tight

in its conventional fit and starched with elaborate rhetorical

embroideries; turned it inside out, twisted a bit here, a bit there,

ripped open seam after seam, patched and repatched with stuffs and

stitches of its own; and then wore the whole thing as it had never been

intended to be worn; until this cast-off poetic apparel, stretched on

the freer moral limbs of natural folk, faded and stained by weather and

earth into new and richer tints, had lost all its original fashionable

stiffness, and crudeness of colour, and niminy-piminy fit, and had

acquired instead I know not what grace of unexpectedness,

picturesqueness, and ease.[1]

[1] Any one who is sceptical of the Courtly derivation of the Italian

popular song may, besides consulting the admirable book of Prof.

d'Ancona, compare with the contents of Tigri's famous "Canti popolari

Toscani," the following scraps of Sicilian and early Italian lyrics:--

The Emperor Frederick II. writes: "Rosa di maggio--Colorita e

fresca--Occhi hai fini--E non rifini--Di gioie dare--Lo tuo parlare--La

gente innamora--Castella ed altura."

Jacopo Pugliesi says of his lady: "Chiarita in viso piu che

argento--Donami allegrezze--Ben eo son morto--E mal colto--Se non mi dai

conforto--_Fior dell' orto_."

Inghilfredi Siciliano: "Gesu Cristo ideolla in paradiso--E poi la fece

angelo incarnando--Gioia aggio preso di giglio novello--E vago, che

sormonta ogni ricchezza--Sua dottrina m' affrezza--Cosi mi coglie e

olezza--Come pantera le bestie selvagge."

Jacopo da Lentino: "E di virtute tutte l' altre avanza--E somigliante a

stella e di splendore--Colla sua conta (_cf_. Provencal _coindeta_,

gentille) e gaia innamoranza--E piu bella e che rosa e che fiore--Cristo

le doni vita ed allegranza--E si la cresca in gran pregio ed onore."

I must finish off what might be a much longer collection with a charming

little scrap, quite in rispetto tone, by Guinicelli: "Vedut 'ho la

lucente stella diana--Ch' appare anzi che 'l giorno renda albore--Ch' a

preso forma di figura umana--Sovr' ogni altra mi par che dia

splendore--Viso di neve colorato in grana--Occhi lucenti, gai e pien

d'amore--Non credo che nel mondo sia cristiana--Si piena di beltate e di

valore."]

Well; for many a year did the song of the peasants rise up from the

fields and oliveyards unnoticed by the good townsfolk taking their

holiday at the Tuscan villa; but one day, somewhere in the third quarter

of the fifteenth century, the long-drawn chant of the rispetto, telling

perhaps how the singer's sweetheart was beautiful as the star Diana, so

beautiful as a baby that the Pope christened her with his own hands; the

quavering nasal cadence of the stornello saying by chance--

Flower of the Palm, &c.,

did at last waken the attention of one lettered man, a man of curious

and somewhat misshapen body and mind, of features satyr-like in

ugliness, yet moody and mystical in their very earthiness; a man

essentially of the senses, yet imperfect in them, without taste or

smell, and, over and above, with a marvellously supple intellect; weak

and coarse and idealistic; and at once feebly the slave of his times,

and so boldly, spontaneously innovating as to be quite unconscious of

innovation: the mixed nature, or rather the nature in many heterogeneous

bits, of the man of letters who is artistic almost to the point of being

an actor, natural in every style because morally connected with no style

at all. The man was Lorenzo di Piero dei Medici, for whom posterity has

exclusively reserved the civic title of all his family and similar town

despots, calling him the Magnificent. It is the fashion at present to

give Lorenzo only the leavings, as it were, of our admiration for the

weaker, less original, nay, considerably enervate, humanistic exquisite

Politian; and this absurd injustice appears to me to show that the very

essence and excellence of Lorenzo is not nowadays perceived. The

Renaissance produced several versatile and charming poets; and, in the

midst of classic imitation, one or two, of whom one is certainly

Boiardo, of real freshness and raciness. But of this new element in the

Renaissance, this element which is neither imitation of antiquity nor

revival of mediaeval, which is original, vital, fruitful, in short,

modern, Lorenzo is the most versatile example. He is new, Renaissance,

modern; not merely in this or that quality, he is so all round. And this

in the first place because he is so completely the man of impressions;

the man not uttering wonderful things, nor elaborating exquisite ones,

but artistically embodying with marvellous versatility whatever strikes

his fancy and feeling--fancy and feeling which are as new as the

untouched sculptor's clay. And this extraordinary temper of art for

art's sake, or rather effect for effect and form's sake, was possible in

that day only in a man equally without strong passions, and without

strong convictions. He is naturally attracted most by what is most

opposed to the academic, Virgilian, Horatian, or Petrarchesque

aestheticism of his contemporaries; he is essentially a realist, and all

the effects, which he produces, all the beauty, charm, or beastliness of

his work, corresponds to beauty, charm, or beastliness in the reality of

things. If Lorenzo writes at one moment carnival songs of ribald

dirtiness, at the next hymns full of holy solemnity; it is, I think,

merely because this versatile artist takes pleasure in trying whether

his face may not be painted into grinning drunkenness, and then

elongated and whitened into ascetic gentleness. Instead of seeking, like

most of his contemporaries, to be Greek, Roman, or mediaeval by turns, he

preferred trying on all the various tricks of thought and feeling which

he remarked among his unlettered townsfolk. His realism naturally drew

him towards the classes where realism can deal with the real; and not

the affected, the self-conscious, the deliberately attempted. Hence

those wonderful little poems, the carnival songs of the gold-thread

spinners, of the pastry-cooks, of the shoemakers, which give us so

completely, so gracefully, the whole appearance, work, manner, gesture

of the people; give them to us with ease and rapidity so perfect, that

we scarcely know how they are given; that we almost forget verses and

song, and actually see the pulling, twisting, and cutting of the

gold-threads; that we see and hear the shoemaker's hands smoothing down

the leather of the shoe in his hand, to convince his customers of its

pliability; that we see and smell the dear little pale yellow pasties

nestling in the neat white baskets, after having stood by and watched

the dough being kneaded, chopped, and floured over, the iron plates

heated in the oven, the soft, half-baked paste twisted and bent; nay, we

feel almost as if we had eaten of them, those excellent things which

seem such big mouthfuls but are squeezed and crunched at one go like

nothing at all. Hence, I mean from this love of watching effects and

reproducing them, originated also the masterpiece of Lorenzo dei Medici,

the "Nencia da Barberino."

This poem, of some fifty octaves, is the result of those Tuscan peasant

songs, of which I have told you the curious Courtly descent, at last

having struck the fancy of a real poet. It is, what Lorenzo's

masterpiece necessarily must be, in the highest degree a modern

performance; as modern as a picture by Bastien Lepage; as an opera,

founded upon local music, by Bizet. For it is not by any manner of means

a pastoral, a piece of conventional poetic decoration, with just a

little realistic detail, more of the mere conventional or more of the

realistic dominating according as it is a pastoral by Theocritus, or a

pastoral by Quinault or Metastasio. It is the very reverse of this: it

is the attempt to obtain a large and complete, detailed and balanced

impression by the cunning arrangement of a number of small effects which

the artist has watched in reality; it is the making into a kind of

little idyl, something half narrative, half drama, with distinct figures

and accessories and background, of a whole lot of little fragments

imitated from the peasant poetry, and set in thin, delicate rims of

imitation no longer of the peasant's songs, but of the peasant's

thoughts and speech; a perfect piece of impressionist art, marred only

in rare places by an attempt (inevitable in those days) to force the

drawing and colour into caricature. The construction, which appears to

be nowhere, is in reality a masterpiece; for, without knowing it, you

are shown the actors, the background, the ups and downs of temper, the

variation of the seasons; above all you are shown the heroine through

the medium of the praises, the complaints, the narratives of the past,

the imaginings of the future, of the hero, whose incoherent rhapsodizing

constitutes the whole poem. He, Vallera, is a well-to-do young farmer;

she, Nencia, is the daughter of peasant folk of the castellated village

of Barberino in the Mugello; he is madly in love, but shy, and (to all

appearance) awkward, so that we feel convinced that of all these

speeches in praise of his Nenciozza, in blame of his indifference,

highly poetic flights and most practical adjurations to see all the

advantages of a good match, the young woman hears few or none; Vallera

is talking not to her, but at her, or rather, he is rehearsing to

himself all the things which he cannot squeeze out in her presence. It

is the long day-dream, poetic, prosaic, practical, and imaginative, of a

love-sick Italian peasant lad, to whom his sweetheart is at once an

ideal thing of beauty, a goddess at whose shrine songs must be sung and

wreaths twined; and a very substantial lass, who cannot be indifferent

to sixpenny presents, and whom he cannot conceive as not ultimately

becoming the sharer of his cottage, the cooker of his soup, the mender

of his linen, the mother of his brats--a dream in which image is effaced

by image, and one thought is expelled, unfinished, by another. She is to

him like the Fairy Morgana, the fairy who kept so much of chivalry in

her enchanted island; she is like the evening star when above his

cottage it slowly pierces the soft blue sky with its white brilliancy;

she is purer than the water in the well, and sweeter than the malmsey

wine, and whiter than the miller's flour; but her heart is as hard as a

pebble, and she loves driving to distraction a whole lot of youths who

dangle behind her, captives of those heart-thievish eyes of hers. But

she is also a most excellent housewife, can stand any amount of hard

field labour, and makes lots of money by weaving beautiful woollen

stuff. To see her going, to church of a morning, she is a little pearl!

her bodice is of damask, and her petticoat of bright, colour, and she

kneels down carefully where she may be seen, being so smart. And then,

when she dances!--a born dancer, bouncing like a little goat, and

twirling more than a mill-wheel; and when she has finished she makes you

such a curtsey; no citizen's wife in Florence can curtsey as she does.

It was in April that he first fell in love. She was picking salad in the

garden; he begged her for a little, and she sent him about his business;

las, alas! ever since then his peace has been gone; he cannot sleep, he

can only think of her, and follow her about; he has become quite

good-for-nothing as to his field work,--yet he hears all the people

around laughing and saying, "Of course Vallera will get her." Only _she_

will pay no heed to him. She is finer to look at than the Pope, whiter

than the whitest wood core: she is more delectable than are the young

figs to the earwigs, more beautiful than the turnip flower, sweeter than

honey. He is more in love with her than the moth is in love with the

lamp; she loves to see him perishing for her. If he could cut himself in

two without too much pain, he would, just to let her see that he carries

her in his heart. No; he would cut out his heart, and when she has

touched it with that slender hand of hers, it would cry out, "Nencia,

Nencia bella." But, after all, he is not to be despised: he is an

excellent labourer, most learned in buying--and selling pigs, he can

play the bagpipe beautifully; he is rich, is willing to go to any

expense to please her, nay, even to pay the barber double that his hair

may be nice and fuzzy from the crimping irons; and if only he were to

get himself tight hose and a silk jerkin, he would be as good as any

Florentine burgess. But she will not listen; or, rather, she listens and

laughs. Yes, she sits up in bed at night and laughs herself to death at

the mere thought of him, that is all he gets. But he knows what it is!

There is a fellow who will keep sneaking about her; if Vallera only

catch him near his cottage, won't he give him a taste of his long new

knife! nay, rip him up and throw his bowels, like those of a pig, to dry

on a roof! He is sorry--perhaps he bores her--God bless you, Nencia!--he

had better go and look after his sheep.

All this is not the poetry of the Renaissance peasant; it is the poem

made out of his reality; the songs which Vallera sang in the fields

about his Nencia we must seek in the volume of Tigri; those rispetti and

stornelli of to-day are the rispetti and stornelli of four centuries

ago; they are much more beautiful and poetic than any of Lorenzo's work;

but Lorenzo has given us not merely a peasant's love-song; he has given

us a peasant's thoughts, actions, hopes, fears; he has given us the

peasant himself, his house, his fields, and his sweetheart, as they

exist even now. For Lorenzo is gone, and, greater than he, the paladins

and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, have followed the saints and virgins

of Dante into the limbo of fair unrealities; and the very Greek and

Roman heroes of a hundred years ago, the very knights and covenanters of

forty years since, have joined them; but Vallera exists still, and still in

the flesh exists his Nenciozza. Everything changes, except the country

and the peasant. For, in the long farms of Southern Tuscany, with double

row of blackened balcony all tapestried with heavy ingots of Indian

corn, and spread out among the olives of the hillside, up which twists

the rough bullock road protected by its vine trellis; and in the little

farms, with queer hood-shaped double roofs (as if to pull over the face

of the house when it blows hard), and pigeon towers which show that some

day they must have been fortified, all about Florence; farms which I

pass every day, with their sere trees all round, their rough gardens of

bright dahlias and chrysanthemums draggled by the autumn rains--in these

there are, do not doubt it, still Nencias: magnificent creatures, fit

models for Amazons, only just a trifle too full-blown and matronly; but

with real Amazonian limbs, firm and delicate, under their red and purple

striped print frocks; creatures with heads set on necks like towers or

columns, necks firm in broad, well-fleshed chest as branches in a tree's

trunk; great penthouses of reddish yellow or lustreless black crimped

hair over the forehead; the forehead, like the cheeks, furrowed a good

deal--perhaps we dainty people might say, faded and wrinkled by work in

the burning sun and the wind; women whom you see shovelling bread into

the heated ovens, or plashing in winter with bare arms in half-frozen

streams, or digging up a turnip field in the drizzle; or on a Sunday,

standing listless by their door, surrounded by rolling and squalling

brats, and who, when they slowly look up at the passer-by, show us, on

those monumental faces of theirs, a strange smile, a light of bright

eyes and white teeth; a smile which to us sophisticated townspeople is

as puzzling as certain sudden looks in some comely animal, but which yet

makes us understand instinctively that we have before us a Nencia; and

that the husband yonder, though he now swears at his wife, and perhaps

occasionally beats her, has nevertheless, in his day, dreamed, argued,

raged, and sung to himself just like Lorenzo's Vallera.

The "Nencia da Barberino" is certainly Lorenzo dei Medici's masterpiece:

it is completely and satisfactorily worked out. Yet we may strain

possibilities to the point of supposing (which, however, I cannot for a

moment suppose) that this "Nencia" is a kind of fluke; that by an

accident a beautiful and seemingly appreciative poem has resulted where

the author, a mediaeval realist of a superior Villon sort, had intended

only a piece of utter grotesqueness. But important as is the "Nencia,"

Lorenzo has left behind him another poem, greatly inferior in

completeness, but which settles beyond power of doubt that in him the

Renaissance was not merely no longer mediaeval, but most intensely

modern. This poem is the "Ambra." It is simply an allegorical narrative

of the inundation, by the river Ombrone, of a portion, called Ambra, of

the great Medicean villa of Poggio a Caiano. Lorenzo's object was

evidently to write a semi-Ovidian poem, of a kind common in his day, and

common almost up to our own: a river-god, bearded, crown of reeds, urn,

general dampness and uproariousness of temper, all quite correct; and a

nymph, whom he pursues, who prays to the Virgin huntress to save her

from his love, and who, just in the nick of time, is metamorphosed into

a mossy stone, dimly showing her former woman's shape; the style of

thing, charming, graceful, insipid, of which every one can remember a

dozen instances, and which immediately brings up to the mind a vision of

grand-ducal gardens, where, among the clipped ilexes and the cypress

trunks, great lumbering water-gods and long-limbed nymphs splash,

petrified and covered with melancholy ooze and yellow lichen, among the

stagnant grotto waters. In some respects, therefore, there is in the

"Ambra" somewhat more artificial, more _barrocco_ than that early

Renaissance of Politian and Pontano would warrant. There also several

bits, half graceful, half awkward, pedantic, constrained, childish,

delightful, like the sedge-crowned rivers telling each other anecdotes

of the ways and customs of their respective countries, and especially

the charming dance of zephyr with the flowers on the lawns of Cyprus,

which must immediately suggest pictures by Piero di Cosimo and by

Botticelli. So far, therefore, there is plenty to enjoy, but nothing to

astonish, in the "Ambra." But the Magnificent Lorenzo has had the

extraordinary whim of beginning his allegory with a description,

twenty-one stanzas long, of the season of floods. A description, full of

infinitely delicate minute detail: of the plants which have kept their

foliage while the others are bare--the prickly juniper, the myrtle and

bay; of the flocks of cranes printing the sky with their queer shapes,

of the fish under the ice, and the eagle circling slowly round the

ponds--little things which affect us mixed up as they are with all

manner of stiff classic allusions, very much as do the carefully painted

daisies and clover among the embossed and gilded unrealities of certain

old pictures. From these rather finikin details, Lorenzo passes,

however, to details which are a good deal more than details, things

little noticed until almost recently: the varying effect of the olives

on the hillside--a grey, green mass, a silver ripple, according as the

wind stirs them; the golden appearance of the serene summer air, and so

forth; details no longer, in short, but essentially, however minute,

effects. And then, suddenly leaving such things behind, he rushes into

the midst of a real picture, a picture which you might call almost

impressionistic, of the growth of rivers and the floods. The floods are

a grand sight; more than a sight--a grand performance, a drama;

sometimes, God knows, a tragedy. Last night, under a warm, hazy sky,

through whose buff-tinted clouds the big moon crept in and out, the

mountain stream was vaguely visible--a dark riband in its wide shingly

bed, when the moon was hidden; a narrow, shallow, broken stream, sheets

of brilliant metallic sheen, and showers of sparkling facets, when the

moon was out; a mere drowsy murmur mixing with the creaking and rustling

of dry reeds in the warm, wet wind. Thus in the evening. Look down from

your window next morning. A tremendous rushing mass of waters, thick,

turbid, reddish, with ominous steel-like lustre where its coppery

surface reflects the moist blue sky, now fills the whole bed, shaking

its short fringe of foam, tossing the spray as it swirls round each

still projecting stone, angrily tugging at the reeds and alders which

flop their draggled green upon its surface; eddying faster and faster,

encircling each higher rock or sandbank, covering it at last with its

foaming red mass. Meanwhile, the sky is covered in with vaporous grey

clouds, which enshroud the hills; the clear runnels, dash over the green

banks, spirt through the walls, break their way across the roads; the

little mountain torrents, dry all summer, descend, raging rivers, red

with the hill soil; and with every gust of warm wind the river rises

higher and rushes along tremendously impetuous. Down in the plain it

eats angrily at the soft banks, and breaks its muddy waters, fringed on

the surface with a sort of ominous grime of broken wood and earth,

higher and higher against the pierheads of the bridges; shaking them to

split their masonry, while crowds of men and women look on, staring at

the rising water, at the planks, tables, beams, cottage thatches, nay,

whole trees, which it hurls at the bridge piers. And then, perhaps, the

terrible, soft, balmy flood-wind persisting, there comes suddenly the

catastrophe; the embankment, shaken by the resistless current, cracks,

fissures gives way; and the river rushes into the city, as it has

already rushed into the fields, to spread in constantly rising,

melancholy livid pools, throughout the streets and squares.

This Lorenzo saw, and, wonderful to say, in this soiled and seething

river, in these torn and crumbling banks, in all the dreadfulness of

these things, he saw a beauty and a grandeur. But he saw not merely the

struggle of the waters and of the land; he--the heartless man who laid

his hand even upon the saved-up money of orphan girls in order to keep

up the splendour of his house and of his bank--saw the misfortunes of

the peasantry; the mill, the cottage by the riverside, invaded by the

flood; the doors burst open by the tremendous rushing stream, the

stables and garners filled with the thick and oozy waters; the poor

creatures, yesterday prosperous, clinging to the roof, watching their

sheep and cows, their hay, and straw, and flour, the hemp bleached in

the summer, the linen spun and woven in the long winter, their furniture

and chattels, their labour and their hope whirled along by the foaming

river.

Thus by this versatile Lorenzo dei Medici, this flippant, egotistic

artist and despot, has at last been broken the long spell of the Middle

Ages. The Renaissance has sung no longer of knights and of spring, but

of peasants and of autumn. An immoral and humanistic time, an immoral

and humanistic man, have had at length a heart for the simpler, ruder

less favoured classes of mankind; an eye for the bolder, grander, more

solemn sights of Nature: modern times have begun, modern sympathies,

modern art are in full swing.