Renaissance in Italy Volume IV Part 28

A somewhat earlier composition than _La Giostra_ was _La Favola di Orfeo_, a dramatic poem similar in form to the _Sacra Rappresentazione_, with a cla.s.sical instead of a religious subject.[497] To call it a tragedy would be to dignify it with too grand a t.i.tle. To cla.s.s it with pastorals is equally impossible, though the songs of the shepherds and wood-nymphs may be said to have antic.i.p.ated the style of Ta.s.so's _Aminta_ and Guarini's _Pastor Fido_. Nor again is it properly speaking an opera, though it was undoubtedly meant for music. The _Orfeo_ combined tragedy, the pastoral, and the opera in a mixed work of melodramatic art, which by its great popularity inspired the poets of Italy to produce specimens of each kind, and prepared the public to receive them.[498] Still, in form and movement, it adhered to the traditions of the _Sacra Rappresentazione_, and its originality consisted in the subst.i.tution of a Pagan for a Christian fable.

Unerring instinct guided Poliziano in the choice of his subject. Orpheus was the proper hero of Renaissance Italy--the civilizer of a barbarous world by art and poetry, the lover of beauty, who dared to invade h.e.l.l and moved the iron heart of Pluto with a song. Long before the composition of _Orfeo_, Boccaccio had presented the same conception of society humanized by culture in his _Ninfale Fiesolano_. This was the ideal of the Renaissance; and, what is more, it accurately symbolized the part played by Italy after the dissolution of the middle ages. In the myth of Orpheus the humanism of the Revival became conscious of itself. This fable was the Mystery of the new age, the allegory of the work appointed for the nation. Did we dare to press a metaphor to the verge of the fantastic, we might even read in the martyrdom of Orpheus by the Maenads a prophecy of the Italian doom. Italy, who had aroused Europe from lethargy with the voice of poetry and learning, who had inaugurated a new age of civil and social refinement, who thought she could resist the will of G.o.d by arts and elegant accomplishments, after triumphing over the rude forces of nature was now about to violate the laws of nature in her vices, and to fall a victim to the Maenads of incurrent barbarism, inebriate with wine and blood, indifferent to the magic of the lyre, avengers blindly following the dictates of a power that rules the destinies of nations. Of this Italy, Poliziano, the author of _Orfeo_, was himself the representative hero, the protagonist, the intellectual dictator.[499]

The _Orfeo_ was sent with a letter of dedication to Messer Carlo Ca.n.a.le, the obsequious husband of that Vannozza, who bore Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia to the Pope Alexander VI. Poliziano says that he "wrote this play at the request of the Most Reverend the Cardinal of Mantua, in the s.p.a.ce of two days, among continual disturbances, and in the vulgar tongue, that it might be the better comprehended by the spectators." He adds: "This child of mine is of a sort to bring more shame than honor on its father."

There is good reason to believe that the year 1472, when the Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga returned from Bologna to Mantua, and was received with "triumphs and pomps, great feasts and banquets," was the date of its composition. If so, the _Orfeo_ was written at the age of eighteen. It could not have been played later than 1483, for in that year the Cardinal died. At eighteen Poliziano was already famous for his translation of the _Iliad_. He had gained the t.i.tle of _Homericus Juvenis_, and was celebrated for his powers of improvization.[500] That he should have put the _Orfeo_ together in forty-eight hours is hardly so remarkable as that he should have translated Herodian in the s.p.a.ce of a few days, while walking and dictating. For the _Orfeo_ is but a slight piece, though beautiful and pregnant with the germs of many styles to be developed from its scenes. The plot is simple, and the whole play numbers no more than 434 lines.

To do the _Orfeo_ justice, we ought to have heard it with its own accompaniment of music. Viewed as a tragedy, judged by the standard of our Northern drama, it will always prove a disappointment. That mastery over the complex springs of human nature which distinguished the first efforts of Marlowe, is almost wholly absent. A certain adaptation of the language to the characters, in the rudeness of Thyrsis when contrasted with the rustic elegance of Aristaeus; a touch of feeling in Eurydice's outcry of farewell; a discrimination between the tender sympathy of Proserpine and Pluto's stern relenting; a spirited representation of Baccha.n.a.lian enthusiasm in the Maenads; an attempt to model the Satyr Mnesillus as apart from human nature and yet conscious of its anguish--these points const.i.tute the chief dramatic features of the melodrama. But where there was the opportunity of a really tragic movement, Poliziano failed. We have only to read the lament uttered by Orpheus for the loss of Eurydice, in order to perceive how fine a situation has been spoiled. The pathos which might have made us sympathize with the lover in his misery, the pa.s.sion approaching frenzy which might have justified his misogyny, are absent. Poliziano seems to have already felt the inspiration of the Bacchic chorus which concludes the play, and to have forgotten his duty to his hero, whose sorrow for Eurydice is stultified and made unmeaning by the prosaic expression of a base resolve. Yet, when we return from these criticisms to the real merit of the piece, we find in it a charm of musical language, a subtlety of musical movement, which are irresistibly fascinating.

Thought and feeling seem alike refined to a limpidity that suits the flow of melody in song. The very words evaporate and lose themselves in floods of sound. Orpheus himself is a purely lyrical personage. Of character, he can scarcely be said to have anything marked; and his part rises to its height precisely in the pa.s.sage where the singer has to be displayed. Thus the _Orfeo_ is a good poem only where the situation is less dramatic than lyrical, and its finest scene was, fortunately for the author, one in which the dramatic motive could be lyrically expressed. Before the gates of Hades and the throne of Proserpine, Orpheus sings, and his singing is the right outpouring of a musician-poet's soul. Each octave resumes the theme of the last stanza with a swell of utterance, a _crescendo_ of intonation, that recalls the pa.s.sionate and unpremeditated descant of a bird upon the boughs alone.

To this true quality of music is added the persuasiveness of pleading.

Even while we read, the air seems to vibrate with pure sound, and the rich recurrence of the tune is felt upon the opening of each successive stanza. That the melody of this incomparable song is lost, must be reckoned a misfortune. We have reason to believe that the part of Orpheus was taken by Messer Baccio Ugolini, singing to the viol.[501]

s.p.a.ce does not permit me to detach the whole scene in Hades from the play and print it here; to quote a portion of it would be nothing less than mutilation.[502] I must content myself with this Chorus of the Maenads, which contains, as in a kernel, the whole dithyrambic poetry of the Italians:

Bacchus! we all must follow thee!

Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohe! Ohe!

With ivy coronals, bunch and berry, Crown we our heads to wors.h.i.+p thee!

Thou hast bidden us to make merry Day and night with jollity!

Drink then! Bacchus is here! Drink free, And hand ye the drinking-cup to me!

Bacchus! we all must follow thee!

Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohe! Ohe!

See, I have emptied my horn already; Stretch hither your beaker to me, I pray; Are the hills and the lawns where we roam unsteady?

Or is it my brain that reels away?

Let every one run to and fro through the hay, As ye see me run! Ho! after me!

Bacchus! we all must follow thee!

Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohe! Ohe!

Methinks I am dropping in swoon or slumber; Am I drunken or sober, yes or no?

What are these weights my feet enc.u.mber?

You too are tipsy, well I know!

Let every one do as ye see me do, Let every one drink and quaff like me!

Bacchus! we all must follow thee!

Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohe! Ohe!

Cry Bacchus! Cry Bacchus! Be blithe and merry, Tossing wine down your throats away!

Let sleep then come and our gladness bury: Drink you, and you, and you, while ye may!

Dancing is over for me to-day.

Let every one cry aloud Evohe!

Bacchus! we all must follow thee!

Bacchus! Bacchus! Ohe! Ohe!

It remains to speak of the third cla.s.s of poems which the great scholar and supple courtier flung like wild flowers with a careless hand from the chariot of his triumph to the Capitolian heights of erudition. Small store, indeed, he set by them--these Italian love-songs, hastily composed to please Donna Ippolita Leoncina, the t.i.tular mistress of his heart; thrown off to serve the turn of Giuliano and his younger friends; or improvised, half jestingly, to meet the humor of his princely patron, when Lorenzo, quitting the laurel-crowned bust of Plato, or the groves of Careggi, or the audience-chamber where he parleyed with the envoys of the Sforza, went abroad like King Manfred of old with lute and mandoline and viol to serenade the windows of some facile beauty in the twilight of a night of June.[503] Little did Poliziano dream that his learning would pa.s.s away almost unreckoned, but that men of after time would gather the honey of the golden days of the Renaissance from these wilding garlands.[504] Yet, however slightly Poliziano may have prized these productions of his early manhood, he proved that the _Canzone_, the _Rispetto_, and the _Ballata_ were as much his own in all their multiformity of lyric loveliness, as were the rich sonorous measures of the octave stanza. Expressing severally the depths of tender emotion, the caprices of adoring pa.s.sion, and the rhythmic sentiment that winds in myriad movements of the dance, these three kinds of poem already belonged to the people and to love. Poliziano displayed his inborn taste and mastery of art in nothing more than in the ease with which he preserved the pa.s.sionate simplicity of the Tuscan _Volkslied_, while giving it a place among the lyrics of the learned. We have already seen how that had been achieved by Boccaccio and Sacchetti, and afterwards in a measure by Lorenzo de' Medici. But the problem of writing love-poetry for the people in their own forms, without irony and innuendo, was not now so easy as it had been in the fourteenth century, when no barrier had yet arisen between educated poets and the folk. Nor had even Boccaccio, far less Lorenzo, solved it with the exquisite tact and purity of style we find in all Poliziano's verses. In order to comprehend their charm, we must transfer ourselves to Florence on a summer night, when the prince is abroad upon the streets attended by singing-boys as beautiful as Sandro's angels. The professor's chair is forgotten, and Plato's spheres are left to turn unheeded. Pulci and Poliziano join hands with girls from the workshop and the attic. Lorenzo and Pico figure in the dance with 'prentice-lads and carvers of wood-work or marble. All through the night beneath the stars the music of their lutes is ringing; and when the dancing stops, they gather round some balcony, or hold their own upon the square in matches of improvised melody with the unknown rhymsters of the people. What can be prettier than the ballad of roses made for "such a night," by Angelo Poliziano?[505]

Poliziano's _Rispetti_ are written for the most part in _ottava rima_.

This form alone suffices to mark them out as literary reproductions of the poetry upon which they are modeled. In the _Rispetti_ more than the _Ballate_ we notice a certain want of _navete_, which distinguishes them from the racier inspirations of the popular Muse. That pa.s.sionate insight into the soul and essence of emotion which rarely fails the peasant in his verse however rude, is here replaced by _concetti_ rounded into pearls of fancy with the daintiest art. Those brusque and vehement images that flash the light of imagination on the movements of the heart, throbbing with intensest natural feeling, yield to carefully selected metaphors developed with a strict sense of economy. Instead of the young _contadino_ willing to mortgage Paradise for his _dama_, wors.h.i.+ping her with body, will and soul, compelling the morning and the evening star and the lilies of the field and the bells that swing their notes of warning over Rome, to serve the bidding of his pa.s.sion, we have the scholar-courtier, who touches love with the finger-tips for pastime, and who imitates the gold of the heart with baser metal of fine rhetoric. Still we find in these _Rispetti_ a quality which their rustic models lack. This is the roseate fluency and honeyed rapture of their author--an exquisite limpidity and ease of diction that reveal the inborn gift of art. Language in Poliziano's hand is plastic, taking form like softest wax, so that no effort of composition, no labor of the file can be discerned.

Nec pluteum caedit nec demorsos sapit ungues.

This line of Persius denotes the excellences no less than the faults of his erotic poetry, so charming in its flow, so fit to please a facile ear, so powerless to stir the depth of the soul or wring relenting from reluctant hearts. Compared with the love-poetry of elder poets, these _Rispetti_ are what the artificial epigrams of Callimachus or the Anacreontics of the Alexandrian versifiers were to the ardent stanzas of Sappho, the impa.s.sioned scolia of Pindar. While they fail to reflect the ingenuous emotions of youth exulting in the Paradise of love without an afterthought, they no less fail to embody philosophy or chivalrous religion or the tragedy of pa.s.sions in conflict. They are inspired by Aphrodite Pandemos, and the joys of which they tell are carnal.[506]

What has been said about the detached _Rispetti_, is true of those longer poems which consist of many octave stanzas strung together with a continuity of pleading rhetoric. The facility bordering on negligence of their construction is apparent. Verses that occur in one, reappear in others without alteration. All repeat the same arguments, the same enticements to a less than lawful love. The code of Florentine wooing may be conveniently studied in the rambling paragraphs, while the levity of their declarations and the fluency of their vows, doing the same service on different occasions, show them to be "false as dicers'

oaths," mere verses of the moment, made to sway a yielding woman's heart.[507] Yet who can help enjoying them, when he connects their effusiveness of fervent language with the episodes of the _Novelle_, ill.u.s.trated by figures borrowed from contemporary frescoes? Those sinewy lads of Signorelli and Masuccio, in parti-colored hose and tight jackets, climbing mulberry-tree or vine beneath their lady's window; those girls with the demure eyes of Lippo Lippi and Bandello, suspending rope-ladders from balconies to let their Romeo escape at daybreak: those lovers rus.h.i.+ng, half-clad in s.h.i.+rt or jerkin, from bower and bed-chamber to cross their swords with jealous husbands at street corners; rise before us and sing their love-songs in these verses of Poliziano, written for precisely such occasions to express the very feelings of these heroes of romance. After all, too, there is a certain sort of momentary sincerity in their light words of love.

Three lyrics of higher artistic intention and of very different caliber mark the zenith of Poliziano's achievement. These are the portrait of the country girl, _La brunettina mia_; the canzone to _La Bella Simonetta_, written for Giuliano de' Medici; and the magnificent imitation of Petrarch's manner, beginning _Monti, valli, antri e colli_.[508] They are three studies in pictorial poetry, transparent, limpid, of incomparable freshness. A woman has sat for the central figure of each, and the landscape round her is painted with the delicacy of a _quattrocento_ Florentine. _La Brunettina_ is the simple village beauty, who bathes her face in the fountain, and crowns her blonde hair with a wreath of wild flowers. She is a blossoming branch of thorn in spring. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s are May roses, her lips are strawberries. The portrait is so ethereally tinted and so firmly modeled that we seem to be looking at a study painted by a lover from the life. Simonetta moves with n.o.bler grace and a diviner majesty[509]:

In lei sola raccolto Era quant'e d'onesto e bello al mondo.

Un'altra sia tra le belle la prima: Costei non prima chiamesi, ma sola; Che 'l giglio e la viola Cedono e gli altri fior tutti alla rosa.

Pendevon dalla testa luminosa Scherzando per la fronte e suoi crin d'oro, Mentre ella nel bel coro Movea ristretti al suono e dolci pa.s.si.

She is the lady of the _Stanze_, whom Giuliano found among the fields that April morning[510]:

Candida e ella, e candida la vesta, Ma pur di rose e fior dipinta e d'erba; Lo inanellato crin dall'aurea testa Scende in la fronte umilmente superba.

Ridegli attorno tutta la foresta, E quanto pu sue cure disacerba, Nell'atto regalmente e mansueta; E pur col ciglio le tempeste acqueta.

Ell'era a.s.sissa sopra la verdura Allegra, e ghirlandetta avea contesta Di quanti fior crea.s.se mai natura, De' quali era dipinta la sua vesta.

E come prima al giovan pose cura, Alquanto paurosa alz la testa; Poi con la bianca man ripreso il lembo, Levossi in pie con di fior pieno un grembo.

All the defined idealism, the sweetness and the purity of Tuscan portraiture are in these stanzas. Simonetta does not pa.s.s by with a salutation in a mist of spiritual glory like Beatrice. She is surrounded with no flames of sensual desire like the Griselda of Boccaccio. She sits for her portrait in a tranquil light, or moves across the canvas with the dignity of a great lady:

Lei fuor di guisa umana Mosse con maesta l'andar celeste, E con man sospendea l'ornata veste Regale in atto e portamento altero.

It was a rare and fugitive moment in the history of art when Poliziano could paint La Simonetta in these verses, and Lippo Lippi showed her likeness on cathedral walls of Prato. Different models of feminine beauty, different ideals of womanly grace served the painters and poets of a more developed age; t.i.tian's Flora and Dosso Dossi's Circe ill.u.s.trating the Alcina of Ariosto and the women of Guarini. Once more, it is the thought of Simonetta which pervades the landscape of the third canzone I have mentioned. Herself is absent; but, as in a lyric of Petrarch, her spirit is felt, and we are made to see her throned beneath the gnarled beech-branches or dipping her foot in the too happy rivulet. Something just short of perfection in the _staccato_ exclamations of the final trophe reminds us of Poliziano's most serious defect. Amid so much tenderness of natural feeling, he fails to make us believe in the reality of his emotion. Not pa.s.sion, not thought, but the refined sensuousness of a nature keenly alive to plastic beauty, educated in the schools of cla.s.sical and Florentine art, and gifted with inexhaustible facility of language, is the dominant quality of Poliziano's Italian poetry. The same quality is found in his Latin and Greek verse--in the plaintive elegies for La Bella Simonetta and Albiera degli Albizzi, in the _Violae_ and in that ode _In puellam suam_[511]

which is the Latin sister of _La brunettina_. The _Sylvae_ add a new element of earnestness to his style; for if Poliziano felt deep and pa.s.sionate emotion, it was for Homer, Virgil and the poets praised in the _Nutricia_, while the _Rusticus_ condenses in one picture of marvelous fullness the outgoings of genuine emotion stimulated by his love of the country.

Hanc, o coelicolae magni, concedite vitam!

Sic mihi delicias, sic blandimenta laborum, Sic faciles date semper opes; hac improba sunto Vota tenus. Nunquam certe, nunquam ilia precabor, Splendeat ut rutilo frons invidiosa galero, Tergeminaque gravis surgat mihi mitra corona.

That is the heart-felt prayer of Poliziano. Give me the tranquil scholar's life among the pleasures of the fields; my books for serious thought in studious hours; the woods and fields for recreation; with moderate wealth well-gotten without toil; no bishop's miter or triple tiara to vex my brows. It is the same ideal as Alberti's. From this background of the modest rural life emerge three splendid visions--the Golden Age, when all was plenitude and peace; Orpheus of the dulcet lyre, evoking harmony from discord in man's jarring life; and Venus rising from the waves to bless the world with beauty felt through art.

Such was the programme of human life sketched by the representative mind of his century, in an age when the Italians were summoned to do battle with France, Germany and Spain invasive of their borders.

Poliziano died before the great catastrophe. He sank at the meridian of his fame, in the same month nearly as Pico, two years later than Lorenzo, a little earlier than Ficino, in the year 1494, so fatal to his country, the date that marks the boundary between two ages in Italian history.

FOOTNOTES:

[459] Lorenzo de' Medici, b. 1448, d. 1492. Poliziano, b. 1454, d.

1494. Luigi Pulci, b. 1432, d. about 1487. Boiardo, b. about 1434, d.

1494. Sannazzaro, b. 1458, d. 1530.

[460] Machiavelli, b. 1469, d. 1527. Ariosto, b. 1474, d. 1533.

Guicciardini, b. 1482, d. 1540. Bembo, b. 1470, d. 1547. Castiglione, b. 1478, d. 1529. La Casa, b. 1503, d. 1556. Pietro Aretino, b. 1492, d. 1557.