The Idyllic Ideal—Golden Age—Arcadia—Sannazzaro—His Life—The Art of theArcadia—Picture-painting—Pontano's Poetry—The Neapolitan Genius—Baiæ and Eridanus—Eclogues—The Play ofCefalo—Castiglione'sTirsi—Rustic Romances—Molza's Biography—TheNinfa Tiberina—Progress of Didactic Poetry—Rucellai'sApi—Alamanni'sColtivazione—His Life—His Satires—Pastoral Dramatic Poetry—TheAminta—ThePastor Fido—Climax of Renaissance Art.
The Idyllic Ideal—Golden Age—Arcadia—Sannazzaro—His Life—The Art of theArcadia—Picture-painting—Pontano's Poetry—The Neapolitan Genius—Baiæ and Eridanus—Eclogues—The Play ofCefalo—Castiglione'sTirsi—Rustic Romances—Molza's Biography—TheNinfa Tiberina—Progress of Didactic Poetry—Rucellai'sApi—Alamanni'sColtivazione—His Life—His Satires—Pastoral Dramatic Poetry—TheAminta—ThePastor Fido—Climax of Renaissance Art.
Thetransition from the middle ages to the Renaissance was marked by the formation of a new ideal, which in no slight measure determined the type of Italian literature. The faiths and aspirations of Catholicism, whereof theDivine Comedyremains the monument in art, began to lose their hold on the imagination. The world beyond the grave grew dim to mental vision, in proportion as this world, through humanism rediscovered, claimed daily more attention. Poliziano's contemporaries were as far removed from Dante's apprehension of a future life as modern Evangelicals from Bunyan's vivid sense of sin and salvation. This parallel, though it may seem strained, is close enough to be serviceable. As the need of conversion is taken for granted among Protestants, so the other world was then assumed to be real. Yet neither the expectation of heavenly bliss nor the fear of purgatorial pain was felt with that intense sincerity whichinspired Dante's cantos and Orcagna's frescoes. On both emotions the new culture, appearing at one moment as a solvent through philosophical speculation, at another as a corrosive in the skeptical and critical activity it stimulated, was acting with destructive energy. The present offered a distracting tumult of antagonistic passions, harmonized by no great hope. The future, to those inexperienced pioneers of modern thought, was dim, although the haze, through which the vision came to them, seemed golden. Thus it happened that the sensibilities of men athirst for some consoling fancy, took refuge in the dream of a past happy age. Virgil's description of Saturn's reign:
fascinated their imagination, and they amused themselves with the fiction of a primal state of innocence. Hesiod and the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the Idyls of Theocritus and Virgil's Eclogues, legends of early Greek civility, and romances of late Greek literature contributed their several elements to this conception of a pastoral ideal. It blent with Biblical reminiscences of Eden, with medieval stories of the Earthly Paradise. It helped that transfusion of Christian fancy into classic shape, for which the age was always striving.[246]On one side the ideal was purely literary, reflecting the artistic instincts of a people enthusiastic for form, and affording scope for their imitative activity. But on the other side it corresponded to a deep and genuine Italian feeling. That sympathy with rusticlife, that love of nature humanized by industry, that delight in the villa, the garden, the vineyard, and the grove, which modern Italians inherited from their Roman ancestors, gave reality to what might otherwise have been but artificial. Vespasiano's anecdote of Cosimo de' Medici pruning his own fruit-trees; Ficino's description of the village feasts at Montevecchio; Flamminio's picture of his Latin farm; Alberti's tenderness in gazing at the autumn fields—all these have the ring of genuine emotion. For men who felt thus, the Age of Gold was no mere fiction, and Arcady a land of possibilities.
What has been well calledla voluttà idillica—the sensuous sensibility to beauty, finding fit expression in the Idyl—formed a marked characteristic of Renaissance art and literature. Boccaccio developed this idyllic motive in all his works which dealt with the origins of society. Poliziano and Lorenzo devoted their best poetry to the praise of rural bliss, the happiness of shepherd folk anterior to life in cities. The same theme recurs in the Latin poems of the humanists, from the sonorous hexameters of theRusticusdown to the delicate hendecasyllables of the later Lombard school. It pervades the elegy, the ode, the sonnet, and takes to itself the chiefest honors of the drama. The vision of a Golden Age idealized man's actual enjoyment of the country, and hallowed, as with inexplicable pathos, the details of ordinary rustic life. Weary with Courts and worldly pleasures, in moments of revolt against the passions and ambitions that wasted their best energies, the poets of that century, who were nearly always also men of state and public office, sighed forthe good old times, when honor was an unknown name, and truth was spoken, and love sincere, and steel lay hidden in the earth, and ships sailed not the sea, and old age led the way to death unterrified by coming doom. As time advanced, their ideal took form and substance. There rose into existence, for the rhymsters to wander in, and for the readers of romance to dream about, a region called Arcadia, where all that was imagined of the Golden Age was found in combination with refined society and manners proper to the civil state. A literary Eldorado had been discovered, which was destined to attract explorers through the next three centuries. Arcadia became the wonder-world of noble youths and maidens, at Madrid no less than at Ferrara, in Elizabeth's London and in Marie Antoinette's Versailles. After engaging the genius of Tasso and Guarini, Spenser and Sidney, it degenerated into quaint conventionality. Companions of Turenne and Marlborough told tales of pastoral love to maids of honor near the throne. Frederick's and Maria Theresa's courtiers simpered and sighed like Dresden-china swains and shepherdesses. Crooked sticks with ribbons at the top were a fashionable appendage to red-heeled shoes and powdered perukes. Few phenomena in history are more curious than the prolonged prosperity and widespread fascination of this Arcadian romance.
To Sannazzaro belongs the glory of having first explored Arcadia, mapped out its borders, and called it after his own name. He is the Columbus of this visionary hemisphere. Jacopo Sannazzaro has more than once above been mentioned in the chapters devoted to Latin poetry. But the events of his life have not yet been touched upon.[247]His ancestors claimed to have been originally Spaniards, settled in a village of Pavia called S. Nazzaro, whence they took their name. The poet's immediate forefather was said to have followed Charles of Durazzo in 1380 to the south of Italy, where he received fiefs and lands in the Basilicata. Jacopo was born at Naples in 1458, and was brought up in his boyhood by his mother at S. Cipriano.[248]He studied at Naples under the grammarian Junianus Maius,[249]and made such rapid progress in both Greek and Latin scholarship as soon to be found worthy of a place in Pontano's Academy. In that society he assumed the pseudonym of Actius Sincerus. The friendship between Pontano and Sannazzaro lasted without interruption till the former's death in 1503. Their Latin poems abound in passages which testify to a strong mutual regard, and the life-size effigies of both may still be seen together in the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples.[250]Distinction in scholarship was, after the days of Alfonso the Magnanimous, a sure title to consideration at the Neapolitan Court. Sannazzaro attached himself to the person of Frederick, the second son of Ferdinand I.; and when this prince succeeded to the throne, he conferred upon the poet apension of 600 ducats and the pleasant villa of Mergoglino between the city and Posillipo.[251]This recompense for past service was considerably below the poet's expectations and deserts; nor did he receive any post of state importance. Yet Sannazzaro remained faithful through his lifetime to the Aragonese dynasty. He attended the princes on their campaigns; espoused their quarrels in his fierce and potent series of epigrams against the Rovere and Borgia Pontiffs; and when Frederick retired to France in 1501, he journeyed into exile with his royal master, only returning to Naples after the ex-king's death. There Sannazzaro continued to reside until his own death in 1530. His later years were imbittered by the destruction of his Villa Mergellina during the occupation of Naples by the imperial troops under the Prince of Orange. But with the exception of this misfortune, he appears to have passed a quiet and honorable old age, devoting himself to piety, contributing to charitable works and church-building, and employing his leisure in study and the society of a beloved lady, Cassandra Marchesa.
In his early youth Sannazzaro formed a romantic attachment for a girl of noble birth, called Carmosina Bonifacia. This love made him first a poet; and the majority of his Italian verses may be referred to its influence. They consist of sonnets andcanzoni, modeled upon Petrarch, but marked by independence of treatment, and spontaneity of feeling. The puristic revival had not yet set in, and Sannazzaro's styleshows no servile imitation of his model. It may not be out of place to give a specimen in translation of these earlyRime. I have chosen a sonnet upon jealousy, which La Casa afterwards found worthy of rehandling:
About the reality of Sannazzaro's passion for Carmosina there can be no doubt. The most directly powerful passages in theArcadiaare those in which he refers to it.[252]His southern temperament exposed him to the fiercest pangs of jealousy; and when he found that love disturbed his rest and preyed upon his health he resolved to seek relief in travel. For this purpose he went to France; but he could not long endure the exile from his native country; and on his return he found his Carmosina dead. The elegies in which he recorded his grief, are not the least poetical of his compositions both in Latin and Italian.[253]After establishing himself once more at Naples, Sannazzaro began the composition of theEclogæ Piscatoriæ, in which he has been said to have brought the pastoral Muses down to the sea shore. The novelty of these poems secured for them no slight celebrity. Nor are they without real artistic merit. The charm of the sea is nowhere felt more vividly than on the bay of Naples, and nowhere else are the habits of a fishing population more picturesque. Nereids and Sirens, Proteus and Nisa, Cymothoe and Triton, are not out of place in modern verses, which can commemorate Naples, Ischia and Procida, under the titles of Parthenope, Inarime and Prochyte. Happy indeed is the poet, if he must needs write Latin elegies, whose home suggests such harmonies and cadences, for whom Baiæ and Cumæ and the Lucrine Lake, Puteoli and Capreæ and Stabiæ, are household words, and who looks from his study windows daily on scenes which realize the mythology still lingering in names and memories around them by beauty ever-present, inexpressible.
The second mistress of Sannazzaro's heart was a noble lady, Cassandra Marchesa. He paid his addresses to hermore Platonico, and chose her for the object of refined compliments in classical and modern verse. The Latin elegies and epigrams are full of her praises; and one of the Eclogues,Pharmaceutria, is inscribed with her name. It would scarcely have been necessary to mention this courtly attachment, but for the pleasant light it casts upon Sannazzaro's character. The lady whom he had celebrated and defended in his manhood, was the friend of his old age. He is said to have died in her house.
TheArcadiawas begun at Nocera in Sannazzaro's youth, continued during his first residence in France, and finished on his return to Naples. So much can be gathered from its personal references. The book blends autobiography and fable in a narrative of very languid interest. The poet's circumstances and emotions in exile are described at one moment in plain language, at another are presented with the indirectness of an allegory. Arcadia in some passages stands for a semi-savage country-district in France; in others it is the dream-world of poetry and pastoral simplicity. But in either case its scenery is drawn from Sannazzaro's own Italian home. The inhabitants are shepherds such as Virgil fancied, with even more of personal refinement. Through their lips the poet tells the tale of his own love, and paints his Neapolitan mistress among the nymphs of Mount Parthenion. Throughout, we note an awkward interminglement of subjective and objective points of view. Realism merges into fancy. Experience of life assumes the garb of myth or legend. Neither as an autobiographical romance nor again as a work of pure invention has theArcadiasurpassing merit. Loose in construction and uncertain in aim, it lacks the clearness and consistency of perfect art. And yet it is a masterpiece; because its author, led by prescient instinct, contrived to make it reflect one of the deepest and most permanent emotions of his time. The whole pastoral ideal—the yearning after a golden age, the beauty and pathos of the country, the felicity of simple folk, the details ofrustic life, the charm of woods and gardens, the mythology of Pan and Satyrs, Nymphs and Fauns—all this is expressed in a series of pictures, idyllically graceful, artistically felt. It is not for its story that we readArcadia, but for the Feast of Pales, the games at Massilia's shrine, the Sacrifice to Pan, Androgéo's tomb, the group of girls a-maying, the carved work of the beechen cup, the passion of Carino, the gardens with their flowers, and the bands of youths and maidens meeting under shadowy trees to dance and play. Pictures like these are presented with a scrupulous and loving sincerity, an anxious accuracy of studied style, which proves how serious was the author. His heart, as an artist, is in the realization of his dream-world; and his touch is firm and dry and delicate as Mantegna's. Indeed, we are constantly reminded of the Mantegnesque manner, and one reference justifies the belief that Sannazzaro strove to reproduce its effect.[254]The sensuousness of the Italian feeling for mere beauty is tempered with reticence and something of the coldness of Greek marbles. In point of diction, Boccaccio has been obviously imitated. But Boccaccio's style is not revived, as Masuccio strove to revive it, with the fire and energy of Southern passion substituted for its Tuscan irony and delicacy. On the contrary, the periods are still more artificial, the turns of phrase more tortured. Sannazzaro writes with difficulty in a somewhat unfamiliar language, rendered all the more stubborn by his endeavors to add classical refinements. Boccaccio's humor is gone; his sensuality ispurged by contact with antique examples; the waving groves of theFilocopoare clipped and tutored like box-hedges in an academic garden. If there is less of natural raciness than came unsummoned to Boccaccio's aid, there is more of Virgil and Theocritus than he chose to appropriate. The slow deliberate expansion of each picture, stroke by stroke and touch by touch, reminds us of thequattrocentopainters; while theprécieusetéof the phrasing has affinity to the manner of a late Greek stylist, especially perhaps, though almost certainly unconsciously, to that of Philostratus. This close correspondence of theArcadiato the main artistic sympathies of the Renaissance, rendered it indescribably popular in its own age, and causes it still to rank as one of the representative masterpieces of the epoch. Through its peculiar blending of classical and modern strains—the feasts of Pales and of Pan taking color from Capo di Monte superstitions; the nymphs of wood and river modeled after girls from Massa and Sorrento; the yellow-haired shepherds of Mount Mænalus singing love-laments for Neapolitan Carmosina—we are enabled more nearly than in almost any other literary essay to appreciate the spirit of the classical revival as it touched Italian art. A little earlier, there was more of spontaneity andnaïveté. A little later, there was more of conscious erudition and consummate skill. TheArcadiacomes midway between theFilocopoand thePastor Fido.
It is time to turn from dissertation, and to detach, almost at haphazard, some of those descriptions which render theArcadiaa storehouse of illustrations to thepictures of the fifteenth century. I will first select the frescoes on the front of Pales' chapel, endeavoring so far as possible to reproduce the intricacies and quaint affectations of the style.[255]The constant abuse of epithets, and the structure of the period by means of relatives, pegging its clauses down and keeping them in their places, will be noticed as part of the Boccaccesque tradition. "Intending now to ratify with souls devout the vows which had been made in former times of need, upon the smoking altars, all together in company we went unto the sacred temple, along whose frontal, raised upon a few ascending steps, we found above the doorway painted certain woods and hills of most delightful beauty, full of leafy trees and of a thousand sorts of flowers, among the which were seen many herds that went a-pasture, wending at pleasure through green fields, with peradventure ten dogs to guard them, the footsteps of the which upon the dust were traced most natural to the view. Of the shepherds, some were milking, some shearing wool, others playing on pipes, and there were there a few, who, as it seemed, were singing and endeavoring to keep in tune with these. But that which pleased me to regard with most attention were certain naked Nymphs, the which behind a chestnut bole stayed, as it were, half-hidden, laughing at a ram, who, in his eagerness to gnaw a wreath of oak that hung before his eyes, forgot to feed upon the grass around him. In that while came four Satyrs, with horns upon their heads and goat's feet, stealing through a shrubbery of lentisks, softly, softly, to take the maidens from behind. Whereofwhen they were ware, they took to flight through the dense grove, shunning nor thorns nor aught else that might annoy them; and of these one, nimbler than the rest, was clinging to a hornbeam's branches, and thence, with a long bough in her hands, defending herself. The others had cast themselves through fright into a river, wherethrough they fled a-swimming; and the clear water hid little or but nothing of their snow-white flesh. But whenas they saw themselves escaped, they sat them down on the further bank, fordone with toil and panting, drying their soaked hair, and thence with word and gesture seemed to mock at those who had not shown the power to capture them. And in one of the sides there was Apollo, with the yellowest hair, leaning upon a wand of wild olive, and watching Admetus' herds beside a river-bed; and thus, intently gazing on two sinewy bulls which jousted with their horns, he was not ware of wily Mercury, who in a shepherd's habit, with a kid-skin girded under his left shoulder, stole the cows away from him. And in that same space stood Battus, the bewrayer of the theft, transformed into a stone, stretching his finger forth in act of one who pointed. A little lower, Mercury was seen again, seated upon a large stone, and playing with swollen cheeks upon a rustic pipe, while his eyes were turned to mark a white calf close beside him, and with most cunning arts he strove to cozen Argus of the many eyes. On the other side, at the foot of an exceeding high oak-tree, was stretched a shepherd asleep among his goats; and a dog stayed near him, smelling at his pouch, which lay beneath his head; and he, forasmuch as the moon gazed at himwith glad eyes, methought must be Endymion. Next to him was Paris, who with his sickle had begun to carveŒnoneon an elm-tree's bark, and being called to judge between the naked goddesses that stood before him, had not yet been able to complete his work. But what was not less subtle in the thought than pleasant in the seeing was the shrewdness of the wary painter, who, having made Juno and Minerva of such extreme beauty that to surpass them was impossible, and doubting of his power to make Venus so lovely as the tale demanded, had painted her with back turned, covering the defect of art by ingenuity of invention. And many other things right charming and most beautiful to look upon, of the which I now have but a faulty memory, I saw there painted upon divers places." It is clear that Sannazzaro had not read Lessing'sLaocoonor noted the distinctions between poetry and painting. Yet in this he was true to the spirit of his age; for actions no less continuous than some of those described by him, may be found represented in the frescoes of Gozzoli or Lippo Lippi.
The finished portrait of Sannazzaro's mistress Carmosina shall supply my next question.[256]The exile is listening to shepherds singing, and one of them has mentioned Amaranta. He knows that she is present, and resolves to choose her by her gestures from the rest. "With wary glance, watching now one and now another, I saw among the maidens one who seemed to me the loveliest. Her hair was covered with a very thin veil, beneath which two eyes, lovely and most brilliant, sparkled not otherwise than theclear stars are wont to shine in a serene and limpid sky; and her face, inclining somewhat to the oval more than the round, of fair shape, with pallor that was not unpleasing, but tempered, as it were toward dark complexion turning, and relieved therewith by vermeil and gracious hues, filled with joy of love the eyes that gazed on her. Her lips were of the sort that surpass the morning roses; between the which, each time she spoke or smiled, she showed some portion of her teeth, of such rare and marvelous grace that I could not have compared them to aught else but orient pearls. Thence passing down to her marble and delicate throat, I saw upon that tender bosom the slight and youthful breasts, which, like two rounded apples, thrust her robe of finest texture somewhat forward; and in the midst of them I could discern the fairest little way, exceeding pleasant to the sight, the which, because it ended and escaped the view, was reason why I dwelt thereon with greater force of thought. And she, with most delicate gait and a gentle and aspiring stature, went through the fair fields, with her white hand plucking tender flowers. With the which when she had filled her lap, no sooner had the singing youth within her hearing mentioned Amaranta, than, dropping her hands and gathered robe, and as it were lost to her own recollection, without her knowing what befell, they all slid from her grasp, sowing the earth with peradventure twenty sorts of colors. Which, as though suddenly brought to herself, when she perceived, she blushed not otherwise than sometimes reddens the enchanted moon with rosy aspect, or as, upon the issuing of the sun, the red Aurora shows herself tomortal gaze. Whereupon she, not for any need methinks compelling her thereto, but haply hoping better thus to hide the blushes that came over her, begotten by a woman's modesty, bent toward earth again to pick them up, as though she cared for only that, choosing the white flowers from the crimson and the dark blue from the violet blossoms." Amaranta makes a pretty picture, but one which is too elaborate in detail. Her sisterhood is described with touches more negligent, and therefore the more artful.[257]"Some wore garlands of privet with yellow buds and certain crimson intermingled; others had white lilies and purple mixed with a few most verdant orange leaves between; one went starred with roses, and yon other whitened with jasmines. So that each by herself and altogether were more like to divine spirits than to human creatures. Whereupon many men there present cried with wonder: O blessed the possessor of such beauties!" The young swains are hardly less attractive than their nymphs.[258]"Logisto and Elpino, shepherds, comely of person and in years within the bounds of earliest youth: Elpino guardian of goats, Logisto of the woolly sheep: both with hair yellower than ripe ears of corn; both of Arcadia; both fit alike to sing and to make answer."
Sannazzaro's touch upon inanimate nature is equally precise. Here is a description of the evening sky.[259]"It was the hour when sunset embroidered all the west with a thousand varieties of clouds; some violet, some darkly blue, and certain crimson; others between yellow and black, and a few so burning with the fire of backward-beaten rays that they seemed as though ofpolished and finest gold." Here is a garden:[260]"Moved by sympathy for Ergasto, many shepherds had moreover wrought the place about with high hedges, not of thorns or briars, but of junipers, roses and jasmines, and had delved therein with their mattocks a pastoral seat, and at even spaces certain towers of rosemary and myrtles interwoven with the most incomparable art." Here are flowers:[261]"There were lilies, there privets, there violets toned to amorous pallor, and in large abundance the slumberous poppies with their leaning heads, and the ruddy spikes of the immortal amaranth, most comely of coronals mid winter's rudeness."
The same research of phrase marks the exhibition of emotion. Carino, the shepherd, tells how, overwhelmed with grief, he lay upon the ground and seemed lost to life:[262]"Came the oxherds, came the herdsmen of the sheep and goats, together with the peasants of the neighboring farms, deeming me distraught, as of a truth indeed I was; and all with deepest pity asked the reason of my woe. Unto whom I made no answer, but, minding my own weeping, thus with lamentable voice exclaimed: You of Arcady shall sing among your mountains of my death! You of Arcady, who only have the art of song, you of my death shall sing amid your mountains!" His complaint extends to a length which defies quotation. But here is an extract from it:[263]"O gods of heaven and earth, and whosoe'er ye are who have regard for wretched lovers, lend, I pray, your ears of pity to my lamentation, and listen to the dolent cries my tortured spirit sendeth forth! O Naiads, dwellers in the running water brooks! O Napeannymphs, most gracious haunters of far places and of liquid fonts, lift up your yellow tresses but a little from the crystal waves, and receive these my last cries before I perish! O you, O fairest Oreads, who naked on the hanging cliffs are wont to go achase, leave now your lofty mountain realm, and in my misery visit me, for I am sure to win your sorrow by what brings my cruel maid delight! Come forth from your trees, O pitying Hamadryads, ye anxious guardians over them, and turn your thoughts a little toward the martyrdom these hands of mine prepare for me! And you, O Dryads, most beauteous damsels of the woods profound, ye who not once but many and many a time have watched our shepherds at the fall of eve in circle dancing neath the shadow of cool walnut trees, with yellowest curls a-ripple down their snow-white necks, cause now I pray, if you are not with my too changeful fortune changed, that mid these shades my death may not be mute, but ever grow from day to day through centuries to come, so that the tale of years life lacks, may go to lengthen out my fame!"
For English students theArcadiahas a special interest, since it begot the longer and more ambitious work of Sir Philip Sidney. Hitherto I have spoken only of its prose; but the book blends prose and verse in alternating sections. The verse consists of mingledterza rima,canzoniand sestines. Not less artificial and decidedly less original than the prose, Sannazzaro's lyrics and eclogues do not demand particular attention. He put needless restraint upon himself by affecting the awkwardness ofsdrucciolorhymes[264]; and he lacked the roseate fluency, the winning ease, the unaffected graces of Poliziano. One sestine, sung by himself among the shepherds of Arcady, I have translated, because it paints the actual conditions of life which drove Sannazzaro into his first exile.[265]But the singularly charmless form adopted, which even Petrarch hardly rendered tolerable, seems to check the poet's spontaneity of feeling.
Whether the distinctively Neapolitan note can be discerned in Sannazzaro, seems more than doubtful. As in his Sapphic Odes and Piscatory Eclogues, so also in hisArcadiawe detect the working of a talent self-restrained within the limits of finely-tempered taste. The case is very different with Pontano's Latin elegies and lyrics.[266]They breathe the sensuality and self-abandonment to impulse of a Southern temperament. They reflect the profuseness of nature in a region where men scarcely know what winter means, her somewhat too nakedly voluptuous beauties, her volcanic energies and interminglement of living fire with barren scoriæ. For this reason, and because there is some danger of neglecting the special part played by the Southern Province in Italian literary history, I aminduced to digress from the main topic of this chapter in the direction of Pontano's poetry.
Though a native of Cerreto in Umbria, Pontano passed his life at Naples, and became, if we may trust the evidence of his lyrics, more Neapolitan than the Neapolitans. In him the southern peoples found a voice, which, though it uttered a dead language, expressed their sentiments. It is unlucky that Pontano, who deserves to be reckoned as the greatest poet of Naples, should have made this important contribution to Italian literature in Latin. Whether at that moment he could have spoken so freely in the vulgar tongue is more than doubtful. But be that as it may, we must have recourse to his Latin poems, in order to supply a needed link in the chain of Italian melody. Carducci acutely remarked that, more than any other poems of the century, they embody "the æsthetic and learned reaction against the mystical idealism of Christianity in a preceding age." They do so better than Beccadelli's, because, where theHermaphroditusis obscene, theEridanus,Baiæ,Amor Conjugalis,Pompæ,Næniæof Pontano are only sensual. The cardinal point in Pontano is the breadth of his feeling. He touches the whole scale of natural emotions with equal passion and sincerity. The love of the young man for his sweetheart, the love of the husband for his bride, the love of a father for his offspring, the love of a nurse for her infant charge, find in his verse the same full sensuous expression. In Pontano there is no more of TeutonicSchwärmereithan of Dantesque transcendentalism. He does not make us marvel how the young man, who has embroidered odes upon thetheme ofAlma Pellegrina, or who has woven violet and moonshine into someDu bist wie eine Blume, can submit to light the hymeneal torch and face the prose of matrimony. Within the limits of unsophisticated instinct he is perfectly complete and rounded to a flawless whole. He does not say one thing and leave another to be understood—a contradiction that imports some radical unreality into the Platonic or sentimental modes of sexual expression. He expects woman to weigh but little less than man in scales of natural appetite. And yet his Muse is no mere vagrant Venus. She is a respectable if not, according to our present views, an altogether decent Juno. The final truth about her is that she revealed to her uniquely gifted bard, on earth and in the shrine of home, that poetry of love which Milton afterwards mythologized in Eden. The note of unadulterated humanity sounds with a clearness that demands commemoration in this poetry of passion. It is, if not the highest, yet the frankest and most decided utterance of mutual, legitimate desire. As such, it occupies an enviable place in the history of Italian love—equally apart fromtrecentosickliness andcinque centocorruption; unrefined perchance, but healthy; doing justice to the proletariate of Naples whence it sprung.
Pontano paints all primitive affections in a way to justify his want of reticence. His Fannia, Focilla, Stella, Ariadne, Cinnama—mistress or wife, we need not stop to question—are the very opposite of Dante's or of Petrarch's loves.[267]Liberal of their charms, rejoicing like the waves of the Chiaja in the laughter of the open day, they think it no shame to unbare their beauties to their lover's eyes, or to respond with ardor to his caresses. Christian modesty, medieval asceticism, the strife between the spirit and the flesh, the aspiration after mystic modes of feeling, have been as much forgotten in their portraits, as though the world had never undergone reaction against paganism. And yet they differ from the women of the Roman elegiac poets. They are less artificial than Corinna. Though "the sweet witty soul of Ovid" passed over these honeyed elegies, the Neapolitan poet remains abourgeoisof the fifteenth century. His passion is unreservedly sensual and at the same time tenderly affectionate. Its motive force is sexual desire; its depth and strength are in the love a husband and a father feels. Given the verses upon Fannia alone, we should be justified in calling Pontano a lascivious poet. The three booksDe Amore Conjugalishow him in a different light. He there expounds the duties and relations of the family with the same robust and unaffected force of feeling he had shown in the description of a wanton. After painting his Stella with the gusto of an Italian Rubens, he can turn to shed tears almost sublime in their pathos over the tomb of Lucia his daughter, or to write a cradle-song for his son Luciolus.[268]The carnal appetites which are legitimatedby matrimony and hallowed in domestic relations, but which it is the custom of civilized humanity to veil, assume a tone of almost Bacchic rapture in this fluent Latin verse. This constitutes Pontano's originality. Such a combination has never been presented to the world before or since. The genial bed, from which he draws his inspiration, found few poets to appreciate it in ancient days, and fewer who have dared to celebrate it so unblushingly among the moderns.[269]
The same series of Pontano's poems may be read with no less profit for their pictures of Neapolitan life.[270]He brings the baths of Baiæ, unspoiled as yet by the eruption from Monte Nuovo, vividly before us; the myrtle-groves and gardens by the bay; the sailors stretched along the shore; the youths and maidens, flirting as they bathe or drink the waters, their evening walks, their little dinners, their assignations; all the round of pleasure in a place and climate made forlove. Or we watch the people at their games, crowded together on those high-built carts, rattling the tambourine and dancing the tarantella—as near to fauns and nymphs in shape as humanity well may be.[271]Each mountain and each stream is personified; the genii of the villages, the Oreads of the copses, the Tritons of the waves, come forth to play with men:[272]
Nor are these personifications merely frigid fictions. The landscape of Naples lends itself to mythology, not only because it is so beautiful, but because human life and nature interpenetrate, as nowhere else in Europe, on that bay. Pontano has a tale to tell of every river and every grove—how Adonis lives again in the orange trees of Sorrento, how the Sebeto was a boy beloved by one of Nereus' daughters and slain by him in anger.[273]His tendency to personification was irresistible. Not content, like Sannazzaro, with singing the praises of his villa, he feigns a Nympha Antiniana, whom he invokes as the Muse of neo-Latin lyric rapture.[274]In the melodious series of love-poems entitledEridanus, he exercises the same imaginative faculty on Lombard scenery. After closing this little book, we seem to be no less familiar with the "king of rivers," Phaethon, andthe Heliades, than with the living Stella, to frame whose beauty in a fitting wreath these fancies have been woven.[275]Even the Elegy, which he used so freely and with so complete a pleasure in its movement, becomes for him a woman, with specific form and habit, and a love tale taken from some Propertian memory of he poet's Umbrian home. To quote Pontano is neither easy nor desirable. Yet I cannot resist the inclination to present Dame Elegia in her Ionian garb in part at least before a modern audience.[276]
That this poet was no servile imitator of Tibullus or Ovid is clear. That he had not risen to their height of diction is also manifest. But in Pontano, as in Poliziano, Latin verse lived again with new and genuine vitality.
If it were needful to seek a formal return from this digression to the subject of my chapter there would be no lack of opportunity. Pontano's Eclogues, the description of his gardens, his vision of the golden ageand his long discourse on the cultivation of orange trees, justify our placing him among the strictly pastoral poets.[277]In treating of the country he displays his usual warmth and sensuous realism. He mythologizes; but his myths are the substantial forms of genuine emotion and experience. The Fauns he talks of, are such lads as even now may be seen upon the Ischian slopes of Monte Epomeo, with startled eyes, brown skin, and tangled tresses tossed adown their sinewy shoulders. The Bacchus of his vintage has walked, red from the wine-press, crowned with real ivy and vine, and sat down at the poet's elbow, to pledge him in a cup of foaming must.
While Sannazzaro was exploring Arcadia at Naples, Poliziano had already transferred pastoral poetry to the theater at Mantua. Of theOrfeoand its place in Italian literature, I have spoken sufficiently elsewhere. It is enough to remember, in the present connection, that, while Arcady became the local dreamland of the new ideal, Orpheus took the place of its hero. As the institutor of civil society in the midst of a rude population, he personified for our Italian poets the spirit of their own renascent culture. Arcadia represented the realm of art and song, unstirred by warfare or unworthy passions. Orpheus attuned the simple souls who dwelt in it, to music with his ravishing lyre.
Pastoral representations soon became fashionable. Niccolò da Correggio put the tale of Cephalus and Procris on the stage at Ferrara, with choruses of nymphs,vows to Diana, eclogues between Corydon and Thyrsis, a malignant Faun, and adea ex machinâto close the scene.[278]At Urbino in the carnival of 1506 Baldassare Castiglione and his friend Cesare Gonzaga recited amœbean stanzas, attired in pastoral dress, before the Court. This eclogue, entitledTirsi, deserves notice, less perhaps for its intrinsic merits, though these, judged by the standard of bucolic poetry, are not slight, than because it illustrates the worst vices of the rustic style in its adaptation to fashionable usage.[279]The dialogue opens with the customary lament of one love-lorn shepherd to another, and turns upon time-honored bucolic themes, until the mention of Metaurus reminds us that we are not really in Arcadia but at Urbino. The goddess who strays among her nymphs along its bank, is no other than the Duchess, attended by Emilia Pia and the other ladies of her Court. "The good shepherd, who rules these happy fields and holy lands," is Duke Guidubaldo. Then follow compliments to all the interlocutors of theCortegiano. Bembo is the shepherd, "who hither came from the bosom of Hadria." The "ancient shepherd, honored by all, who wears a wreath of sacred laurel," is Morello da Ortona. The Tuscan shepherd, "wise and learned in all arts," must either be Bernardo Accolti or else Giuliano de' Medici. And yonder shepherd from the Mincio is Lodovico da Canossa. A chorus of shepherds and a morris-dance relieved the recitation, which was also enlivened by the introduction of one solo,sung by Iola. Thus in this early specimen of the pastoral mask we observe that confusion of things real and things ideal, of past and present, of imaginary rustics and living courtiers, which was destined to prove the bane of the species and to render it a literary plague in every European capital. The radical fault existed in Virgil's treatment of the Syracusan idyl. But each remove from its source rendered the falsehood more obnoxious. In Spenser's Eclogues the awkwardness is greater than in Castiglione's. Before Teresa Maria the absurdity was more apparent than before Elizabeth. At last the common sense of the public could no longer tolerate the sham, and Arcadia, with its make-believe and flattery and allegory, became synonymous with affectation.
It is no part of my programme to follow the development of the pastoral drama through all its stages in Italy.[280]For the end of this chapter I reserve certain necessary remarks upon its masterpieces, theAmintaand thePastor Fido. At present it will suffice to indicate the fact that, on the stage, as in the eclogue, bucolic poetry followed two distinct directions—the one Arcadian and artificial, the other national and closely modeled on popular forms. TheNencia daBarberinoandBeca da Dicomanoof Lorenzo de' Medici and Luigi Pulci belong to the latter class of eclogues.[281]Their corresponding forms in dramatic verse are Berni'sCatrinaandMogliazzo, together with theTanciaandFieraof Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger.[282]If it is impossible to render any adequate account of pastoral drama, to do this for bucolic idyls would be no less difficult. Their name in Latin and Italian is legion. Poets so different in all things else as were Girolamo Benivieni, Antonio Tebaldeo, Sperone Speroni, Bernardino Baldi, Benedetto Varchi, and Luigi Tansillo—to mention only men of some distinction—brought Mopsus and Tityrus, Menalcas and Melibæus, Amaryllis and Cydippe, from Virgil's Arcadia, and made them talk interminably of their loves and sheep in delicate Italian.[283]Folengo's sharp satiric wit, as we shall remark in another chapter, finally pursued them with the shafts of ridicule inBaldusandZanitonella. Thus pastoral poetry completed the whole cycle of Italian literature—expressed itself through dialogue in the drama, adhered to Virgilian precedent in the Latinists and their Italian followers, adopted the forms of popular poetry, and finally submitted to the degradation of Maccaronic burlesque.
We can well afford to turn in silence from the common crowd of eclogue-writers. Yet one poet emerges from the rank and file, and deserves particular attention. Francesco Maria Molza stood foremost inhis own day among scholars of ripe erudition and literary artists of accomplished skill. His high birth, his genial conversation, his loves and his misfortunes rendered him alike illustrious; and hisNinfa Tiberinais still the sweetest pastoral of the golden age. Molza was born in 1489 at Modena. Since his parents were among the richest and noblest people of that city, it is probable that he acquired the Greek and Latin scholarship, for which he was in after-life distinguished, under tutors at home. At the age of sixteen he went to Rome in order to learn Hebrew, and was at once recognized as a youth of more than ordinary promise by men like Marcantonio Flamminio and Lilio Giraldi. In 1512 he returned to Modena, where he married according to his rank. His wife brought him four children, and he passed a few years at this period with his family. But Molza soon wearied of domestic and provincial retirement. In 1516 he left home again and plunged into the dissipations of Roman life. From this date forward till his death in 1544 he must be reckoned among those Italians for whom Rome was dearer than their native cities. The brilliance of his literary fame and the affection felt for him by men of note in every part of Italy will not distract attention from the ignobility of his career. Faithless to his wife, neglectful of his children, continually begging money from his father, he passed his manhood in a series of amours. Some of these were respectable, but most of them disreputable. A certain Furnia, a low-born Beatrice Paregia, and the notorious Faustina Mancina are to be mentioned among the women who from time to time enslaved him. In the courseof his intrigue with Beatrice he received a stab in the back from some obscure rival, which put him in peril of his life. For Faustina he composed theNinfa Tiberina. She was a Roman courtesan, so famous for her beauty and fine breeding as to attract the sympathy of even severe natures. When she died, the town went into mourning, and the streets echoed with elegiac lamentations. It is curious that among Michelangelo's sonnets should be found one—not, however, of the best—written upon this occasion. While seeking amusement with the Imperias, who took Aspasia's place in Papal Rome, Molza formed a temporary attachment for a more illustrious lady—the beautiful and witty Camilla Gonzaga. He passed two years, between 1523 and 1525, in her society at Bologna. After his return to Rome, Molza witnessed the miseries of the sack, which made so doleful an impression on his mind that, saddened for a moment, he retired like the prodigal to Modena. Rome, however, although not destined to regain the splendor she had lost, shook off the dust and blood of 1527; and there were competent observers who, like Aretino, thought her still more reckless in vice than she had been before. Molza could not long resist the attractions of the Papal city. In 1529 we find him once more in Rome, attached to the person of Ippolito de' Medici, and delighting the Academies with his wit. Two years afterwards, his father and mother died on successive days of August. Molza celebrated their death in one of the most lovely of his many sonnets. But his ill life and obstinate refusal to settle at Modena had disinherited him; and henceforth he lived upon his sonCamillo's bounty. To follow his literary biography at this period would be tantamount to writing the history of the two famous Academiesdelle Virtùandde' Vignaiuoli. Of both he was a most distinguished member. He amused them with his conversation, recited before them hisCapitoli, and charmed them with the softness and the sweetness of his manners. Numbers of his sonnets commemorate the friendships he made in those urbane circles.
From the interchange, indeed, of occasional poems between such men as Molza, Soranzo, Gandolfo, Caro, Varchi, Guidiccioni, and La Casa, the materials for forming a just conception of he inner life of men of letters at that epoch must be drawn. They breathe a spirit of gentle urbanity, enlivened by jests, and saddened by a sense, rather uneasy than oppressive, of Italian disaster. The moral tone is pensive and relaxed; and in spite of frequent references to a corrupt Church and a lost nation, scarcely one spark of rage or passion flashes from the dreamy eyes that gaze at us. Leave us alone, they seem to say; it is true that Florence has been enslaved, and the shadow of disgrace rests upon our Rome; but what have we to do with it? And then they turn to indite sonnets on Faustina's hair or elegies upon her modesty[284]; and when they are tired with these recreations, meet together to invent ingenious obscenities.[285]It was in the midst of such trifling that the great misfortune of Molza's life befell him. The disease of the Renaissance,not the least of Italy's scourges in those latter days of heedlessness and dissolute living, overtook him in some haunt of pleasure. After 1539 he languished miserably under the infliction, and died of it, having first suffered a kind of slow paralysis, in February 1544. During the last months of his illness his thoughts turned to the home and children he had deserted. The exquisitely beautiful Latin elegy, in which he recorded the misery of slow decay, speaks touchingly, if such a late and valueless repentance can be touching, of his yearning for them.[286]In the autumn of 1543, accordingly, he managed to crawl back to Modena; and it was there he breathed his last, offering to the world as his biographer is careful to assure us, a rare example of Christian resignation and devotion.[287]All the men of the Renaissance died in the odor of piety; and Molza, as many of his sonnets prove, had true religious feeling. He was not a bad man, though a weak one. In the flaccidity of his moral fiber, his intellectual and æsthetical serenity, his confused and yet contented conscience, he fairly represents his age.
It would be difficult to choose between Molza's Latin and Italian poems, were it necessary to award the palm of elegance to either. Both are marked by the samemorbidezza, the same pliancy, as of acanthus leaves that feather round the marble of some Roman ruin. Both are languid alike and somewhat tiresome, in spite of a peculiar fragrance. I have sought through upwards of 350 sonnets contained in two collections ofhis Italian works, for one with the ring of true virility or for one sufficiently perfect in form to bear transplantation. It is not difficult to understand their popularity during the poet's lifetime. None are deficient in touches of delicate beauty, spontaneous images, and sentiments expressed with much lucidity. And their rhythms are invariably melodious. Reading them, we might seem to be hearing flutes a short way from us played beside a rippling stream. And yet—or rather, perhaps, for this very reason—our attention is not riveted. The most distinctly interesting note in them is sounded when the poet speaks of Rome. He felt the charm of the seven hills, and his melancholy was at home among their ruins. Yet even upon this congenial topic it would be difficult to select a single poem of commanding power.
TheNinfa Tiberinais a monody of eighty-one octave stanzas, addressed by the poet, feigning himself a shepherd, to Faustina, whom he feigns a nymph. It has nothing real but the sense of beauty that inspired it, the beauty, exquisite but soulless, that informs its faultless pictures and mellifluous rhythms. We are in a dream-world of fictitious feelings and conventional images, where only art remains sincere and unaffected. The proper point of view from which to judge these stanzas, is the simply æsthetic. He who would submit to their influence and comprehend the poet's aim, must come to the reading of them attuned by contemplation of contemporary art. The arabesques of the Loggie, the metal-work of Cellini, the stucchi of the Palazzo del Te, Sansovino's bass-reliefs of fruits and garlands, Albano's cupids, supply the necessary analogues.Poliziano'sGiostrademanded a similar initiation. But between theGiostraand theNinfa TiberinaItalian art had completed her cycle from early Florence to late Rome, from Botticelli and Donatello to Giulio Romano and Cellini. The freshness of the dawn has been lost in fervor of noonday. Faustina succeeds to the fair Simonetta. Molza cannot "recapture the first fine careless rapture" of Poliziano's morning song—so exuberant and yet so delicate, so full of movement, so tender in its sentiment of art. Thevoluttà idillica, which opened like a rosebud in theGiostra, expands full petals in theNinfa Tiberina; we dare not shake them, lest they fall. And these changes are indicated even by the verse. It was the glory of Poliziano to have discovered the various harmonies, of which the octave, artistically treated, is capable, and to have made each stanza a miniature masterpiece. Under Molza's treatment the verse is heavier and languid, not by reason of relapse into the negligence of Boccaccio, but because he aims at full development of its resources. He weaves intricate periods, and sustains a single sentence, with parentheses and involutions, from the opening of the stanza to its close. Given these conditions, theNinfa Tiberinais all nectar and all gold.
After an exordium, which introduces
Molza calls upon the shepherds to transfer their vows to her from Pales. She shall be made the goddess of the spring, and claim an altar by Pomona's. Here letthe rustic folk play, dance, and strive in song. Hither let them bring their gifts.[288]
The description of the olive cup is carried over the next five stanzas, when the poet turns to complain that Faustina does not care for his piping. And yet Pan joined the rustic reeds; and Amphion breathed through them such melody as held the hills attentive; and Silenus taught how earth was made, and how theseasons come and go, with his sweet pipings. Even yet, perchance, she will incline and listen, if only he can find for her some powerful charm. Come forth, he cries, repeating the address to Galatea, leave Tiber to chafe within his banks and hurry toward the sea. Come to my fields and caves:[289]
It is perilous for thee to roam the shores where Mars met Ilia. O Father Tiber, deal gently with so fair a maiden. It was thou who erewhile saved the infant hope of Rome, whom the she-wolf suckled near thine overflow! But such themes soar too high for shepherd's pipings. I turn to Caro and to Varchi. Both are shepherds, who know how to stir the streams of Mincius and Arethuse. Even the gods have lived in forest wild, among the woods, and there Anchises by the side of Venus pressed the flowers. What gifts shall I find for my Faustina? Daphnis and Mœris are richer far than I. How can I contend with them in presents to the fair? And yet she heeds them not:
My passion weighs upon me as love weighed on Aristæus. He forgot his flocks, his herds, his gardens, even his beehives for Eurydice. His heartache made him mad, and he pursued her over field and forest. She fled before him, but he followed:[290]
The story of Eurydice occupies twenty-nine stanzas, and with it the poem ends abruptly. It is full of carefully-wrought pictures, excessively smooth and sugared, recalling the superficial manner of the later Roman painters. Even in the passage that describes Eurydice's agony, just quoted, the forest isodorataorvagha. Fear and flight make the maiden moreadorna. The ruffian Aristæus gets tired in the chase. He, too, must be presented in a form of elegance. Not the action, but how the action might be made a groundwork for embroidery of beauty, is the poet's care. We quit theNinfa Tiberinawith senses swooning under superfluity of sweetness—as though we had inhaled the breath of hyacinths in a heated chamber.
Closely allied to bucolic stands didactic poetry. TheWorks and Daysof Hesiod and theGeorgicsof Virgil—the latter far more effectually, however, than the former—determined this style for the Italians. We have already seen to what extent the neo-Latin poets cultivated a form of verse that, more than any other, requires the skill of a great artist and the inspiration of true poetry, if it is to shun intolerable tedium.[291]The best didactic poems written in Latin by an Italian are undoubtedly Poliziano'sSylvæ, and of these the most refined is theRusticus.[292]But Poliziano, in composing them, struck out a new line. He did not follow his Virgilian models closely. He chose the form of declamation to an audience, in preference to the time-honored usage of apostrophizing a patron. Thisrelieves theSylvæfrom the absurdity of the poet's feigning to instruct a Memmius or Augustus, a Francis I. or Charles V., in matters about which those warriors and rulers can have felt but a frigid interest. Pontano'sUraniaandDe Hortis Hesperidumare almost free from the same blemish. The former is addressed to his son Lucius, but in words so brief and simple that we recognize the propriety of a father giving this instruction to his child.[293]The latter is dedicated to Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, who receives complimentary panegyrics in the exordium and peroration, but does not interfere with the structure of the poem. Its chief honors are reserved, as is right and due, for Virgil:[294]—
Pontano's greatness, here as elsewhere, is shown in his mytho-poetic faculty. The lengthy dissertation on the heavens and the lighter discourse on orange-cultivation are adorned and enlivened with innumerable legends suggested to his fertile fancy by the beauty of Neapolitan scenery. When we reach the age of Vida and Fracastoro, we find ourselves in the full tide of Virgilian imitation[295]; and it is just at this point in ourinquiry that the transition from Latin to Italian didactic poetry should be effected.
Giovanni Rucellai, the son of that Bernardo, who opened his famous Florentine Gardens to the Platonic Academy, was born in 1475. As the author ofRosmunda, he has already appeared in this book. When he died, in 1526, he bequeathed a little poem on Bees to his brother Palla and his friend Gian Giorgio Trissino. Trissino and Rucellai had been intimate at Florence and in Rome. They wrote theSofonisbaandRosmundain generous rivalry, meeting from time to time to compare notes of progress and to recite their verses. An eye-witness related to Scipione Ammirato how "these two dearest friends, when they were together in a room, would jump upon a bench and declaim pieces of their tragedies, calling upon the audience to decide between them on the merits of the plays."[296]Trissino received the MS. of his friend's posthumous poem at Padua, and undertook to see it through the press. TheApiwas published at Venice in 1539.[297]What remained to be said or sung about bees after the Fourth Georgic? Very little indeed, it must be granted. Yet theApiis no mere translation from Virgil; and though the higher qualities of variety invention and imagination were denied to Rucellai, though he can show no passages of pathos to compete with theCorycius senex, of humor to approach the battle of the hives, no episode, it need be hardly said, to match withPastor Aristæus, still his modest poem is a monument of pure taste and classical correctness.It is the work of a ripe scholar and melodious versifier, if not of a great singer; and its diction belongs to the best period of polite Italian.