Renaissance in Italy Volume V Part 13

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 his _Arcadia_ we 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 scoriae. For this reason, and because there is some danger of neglecting the special part played by the Southern Province in Italian literary history, I am induced to digress from the main topic of this chapter in the direction of Pontano's poetry.

[Footnote 266: From my chapter on Latin poetry in the _Revival of Learning_ I purposely omitted more than a general notice of Pontano's erotic verses, intending to treat of them thereafter, when it should be necessary to discuss the Neapolitan contribution in Italian literature. The lyrics and elegies I shall now refer to, are found in two volumes of _Pontani Opera_, published by Aldus, 1513 and 1518.

These volumes I shall quote together, using the minor t.i.tles of _Amorum_, _Hendecasyllabi_, and so forth, and mentioning the page. I am sorry that I have not a uniform edition of his Latin poetry (if that, indeed, exists, of which I doubt) before me.]

Though a native of Cerreto in Umbria, Pontano pa.s.sed 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 aesthetic and learned reaction against the mystical idealism of Christianity in a preceding age." They do so better than Beccadelli's, because, where the _Hermaphroditus_ is obscene, the _Erida.n.u.s_, _Baiae_, _Amor Conjugalis_, _Pompae_, _Naeniae_ of 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 pa.s.sion 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 Teutonic _Schwarmerei_ than of Dantesque transcendentalism.

He does not make us marvel how the young man, who has embroidered odes upon the theme of _Alma Pellegrina_, or who has woven violet and moons.h.i.+ne into some _Du 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 s.e.xual expression. He expects woman to weigh but little less than man in scales of natural appet.i.te.

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 pa.s.sion. 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 from _trecento_ sickliness and _cinque cento_ corruption; 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" pa.s.sed over these honeyed elegies, the Neapolitan poet remains a _bourgeois_ of the fifteenth century. His pa.s.sion is unreservedly sensual and at the same time tenderly affectionate. Its motive force is s.e.xual 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 books _De Amore Conjugali_ show 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 appet.i.tes which are legitimated by matrimony and hallowed in domestic relations, but which it is the custom of civilized humanity to veil, a.s.sume a tone of almost Bacchic rapture in this fluent Latin verse.

This const.i.tutes 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 unblus.h.i.+ngly among the moderns.[269]

[Footnote 267: Fannia is the most attractive of these women. See _Amorum_, lib. i. pp. 4, 5, 13. Stella, the heroine of the _Eridani_, is touched with greater delicacy. Cinnama seems to have been a girl of the people. Pontano borrows for her the language of popular poetry (_Amorum_, i. 19).

Ipsa tibi dicat, mea lux, mea vita, meus flos, Liliolumque meum, basiolumque meum.

Carior et gemmis, et caro carior auro, Tu rosa, tu violae, tu mihi laevis onyx.]

[Footnote 268: Among the most touching of his elegiac verses is the lament addressed to his dead wife upon the death of their son Lucius, _Eridanorum_, lib. ii. p. 134. The collection of epitaphs called _Tumuli_ bears witness to the depth and sincerity of his sorrow for the dead, to the all-embracing sympathy he felt for human grief. The very original series of lullabies, ent.i.tled _Naeniae_, ill.u.s.trate the warmth of his paternal feeling. The nursery has never before or since been celebrated with such exuberance of fancy--and in the purest Ovidian elegiacs! It may, however, be objected that there is too much about wet-nurses in these songs.]

[Footnote 269: Pontano revels in Epithalamials and pictures of the joys of wedlock. See the series of elegies on Stella, _Eridanorum_, lib. i. pp. 108, 111, 113, 115; the congratulation addressed to Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, _Hendecasyllaborum_, lib. i. p. 194; and two among the many Epithalamial hymns, _Hendec._ lib. i. p. 195; _Lepidina_ Pompa 7, p. 172, with its reiterated "Dicimus o hymenaee Io hymen hymenaee." The sensuality of these compositions will be too frank and fulsome for a chastened taste; but there is nothing in them extra or infra-human.]

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 Baiae, 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 sh.o.r.e; the youths and maidens, flirting as they bathe or drink the waters, their evening walks, their little dinners, their a.s.signations; all the round of pleasure in a place and climate made for love. 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]

Claudicat hinc heros Capimontius, et de summo Colle ruunt misti juvenes mistaeque puellae; Omnis amat chorus, et juncti glomerantur amantes.

Is lento incredit pa.s.su, baculoque tuetur Infirmum femur, et ch.o.r.eis dat signa movendis, a.s.suetus ch.o.r.eae ludisque a.s.suetus amantum.

[Footnote 270: _Hendecasyllaborum_, lib. i. and ii. pp. 186-218. If one of these lyrics should be chosen from the rest, I should point to "Invitantur pueri et puellae ad audiendum Charitas," p. 209. It begins "Ad myrtum juvenes venite, myrti."]

[Footnote 271: For such glimpses into actual life, see _Lepidina_, pp.

160-174, in which a man and woman of Naples discourse of their first loves and wedlock. The Eclogues abound in similar material.]

[Footnote 272: _Lepidina_, p. 168. Capimontius is easily recognized as Capo di Monte.]

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 ent.i.tled _Erida.n.u.s_, 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, and the 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]

Huc ades, et nitidum myrto compesce capillum, Huc ades ornatis o Elegia comis.

Inque novam venias cultu praedivite formam, Laxa fluat niveos vestis adusque pedes.

Quaque moves, Arab.u.m spires mollissima nardum, Lenis et a.s.syrio sudet odore liquor.

Tec.u.m etiam Charites veniant, tua cura, puellae, Et juvet insolita ducere ab arte choros.

Tu puerum Veneris primis lasciva sub annis Instruis, et studio perficis usque tuo.

Hinc tibi perpetuae tribuit Cytherea juventae Tempora, neu formae sint mala d.a.m.na tuae; Ergo ades, et cape, diva, lyram, sed pectine molli, Sed moveas dulci lenia fila sono.

Quinetiam tu experta novos, ni fallor, amores, Dulcia supposito gramine furta probas.

Namque ferunt, patrios vectam quandoque per Umbros, c.l.i.tumni liquidis accubuisse vadis: Hic juvenem vidisse, atque incaluisse natantem, Et cup.i.s.se ulnas iner habere tuas.

Quid tibi lascivis, puer o formose, sub undis?

Deliciis mage sunt commoda prata tuis.

Hic potes e molli viola junxisse coronam, Et flavam vario flore ligare comam; Hic potes et gelida somnum quaesisse sub umbra, Et la.s.sum viridi ponere corpus humo; Hic et adesse choris Dryadum, et saluisse per herbas, Molliaque ad teneros membra movere modos.

Hic juvenis succensus amor, formamque secutus Et facilem cantum, quo capis ipsa deos, Tec.u.m inter salices, sub amicta vitibus ulmo, In molli junxit candida membra toro; Inter et amplexus la.s.si jacuistis uterque, Et repet.i.ta venus dulce peregit opus.

[Footnote 273: See _De Hortis Hesperidum_, p. 139, and _Amorum_, lib.

ii. p. 33.]

[Footnote 274: _Versus Lyrici_, pp. 91-94.]

[Footnote 275: See, for example, the elegy "De Venere lavante se in Eridano et quiescente," _Erid._ lib. i. p. 118.]

[Footnote 276: _De Amore Conjugali_, lib. i. p. 35. "Hither, and bind with myrtle thy s.h.i.+ning hair! O hither, Elegia, with the woven tresses! Take a new form of sumptuous grace, and let thy loose robe flutter to thy snow-white feet. And where thou movest, breathe Arabian nard, and blandest perfume of a.s.syrian unguents. Let the girl Graces come, thy charge, with thee, and take their joy in dances woven with unwonted arts. Thou in his earliest years dost teach he boy of Venus, and instruct him in thy lore. Wherefore Cytherea gives thee perpetual youth, that never may thy beauty suffer decrease. Come hither, then, and take, O G.o.ddess, thy lyre, but with a gentle quill, and move the soft strings to a dulcet sound. Nay, thou thyself hast tried new pleasures, and knowest the sweet thefts of lovers laid on meadow gra.s.s. For they say that, wandering once in Umbria, my home, thou didst lie down beside c.l.i.tumnus' liquid pools; and there didst see a youth, and dote upon him while he swam, and long to hold him in thine arms. What dost thou, beauteous boy, beneath the wanton waves? These fields are better suited to thy joys! Here canst thou weave a violet wreath, and bind thy yellow hair with flowers of many a hue! Here canst thou sleep beneath cool shade, and rest thy body on the verdant ground! Here join the dances of the Dryads, and leap along the sward, and move thy supple limbs to tender music! The youth inflamed with this, and eager for the beauty and the facile song, wherewith thou captivatest G.o.ds, with thee among the willows, under a vine-mantled elm, joined his white limbs upon a gra.s.sy bed, and both enjoyed the bliss of love."]

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 age and 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.

[Footnote 277: I will only refer in detail to the elegy ent.i.tled "Laetatur in villa et hortis suis const.i.tutis" (_De Amore Conjugali_, lib. ii. p. 52). The two books _De Hortis Hesperidum_ (Aldus, 1513, pp. 138-159), compose a typical didactic poem.]

While Sannazzaro was exploring Arcadia at Naples, Poliziano had already transferred pastoral poetry to the theater at Mantua. Of the _Orfeo_ and 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 inst.i.tutor 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 pa.s.sions. Orpheus attuned the simple souls who dwelt in it, to music with his ravis.h.i.+ng lyre.

Pastoral representations soon became fas.h.i.+onable. Niccol 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 a _dea ex machina_ to close the scene.[278] At Urbino in the carnival of 1506 Balda.s.sare Castiglione and his friend Cesare Gonzaga recited amoebean stanzas, attired in pastoral dress, before the Court. This eclogue, ent.i.tled _Tirsi_, deserves notice, less perhaps for its intrinsic merits, though these, judged by the standard of bucolic poetry, are not slight, than because it ill.u.s.trates the worst vices of the rustic style in its adaptation to fas.h.i.+onable 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 G.o.ddess who strays among her nymphs along its bank, is no other than the d.u.c.h.ess, 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 the _Cortegiano_. 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.

[Footnote 278: It was printed in 1486.]

[Footnote 279: See the _Poesie Volgari e Latine del Conte B.

Castiglione_ (Roma 1760), pp. 7-26.]

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, the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor 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.

The _Nencia da Barberino_ and _Beca da Dicomano_ of Lorenzo de'

Medici and Luigi Pulci belong to the latter cla.s.s of eclogues.[281]

Their corresponding forms in dramatic verse are Berni's _Catrina_ and _Mogliazzo_, together with the _Tancia_ and _Fiera_ of 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 t.i.tyrus, Menalcas and Melibaeus, 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 in _Baldus_ and _Zanitonella_. 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.

[Footnote 280: To do so would be almost impossible within lesser limits than those of a bulky volume. Any one who wishes to form a conception of the mult.i.tudes of pastoral plays written and printed in Italy, may consult the catalogues. I have before me one list, which I do not believe to be complete, in the _Teatro Italiano_, vol. x. It occupies twenty-seven closely-printed pages, and is devoted solely to rural scenes of actual life. The Arcadian masks and plays are omitted.

Mutinelli, in the _Annali Urbani di Venezia_, p. 541, gives a list of the shows performed at Doges' banquets between 1574 and 1605. The large majority are pastoral; and it is noticeable that, as years go on, the pastorals drive all other forms of drama out of the field.]

[Footnote 281: See above, Part i., pp. 381, 382.]

[Footnote 282: For Berni, see Barbera's small edition, Florence, 1863.

For Buonarroti, Lemonnier's edition in two volumes, 1860.]

[Footnote 283: See _Poesie Pastorali e Rusticali_ (Milano, _Cla.s.sici Italiani_, 1808) for a fairly representative collection of these authors.]

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 in his 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 ill.u.s.trious; and his _Ninfa Tiberina_ is still the sweetest pastoral of the golden age.

Molza was born in 1489 at Modena. Since his parents were among the richest and n.o.blest people of that city, it is probable that he acquired the Greek and Latin scholars.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.sed 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 ign.o.bility of his career. Faithless to his wife, neglectful of his children, continually begging money from his father, he pa.s.sed 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 course of 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 the _Ninfa 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 amus.e.m.e.nt with the Imperias, who took Aspasia's place in Papal Rome, Molza formed a temporary attachment for a more ill.u.s.trious lady--the beautiful and witty Camilla Gonzaga. He pa.s.sed 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 son Camillo's bounty. To follow his literary biography at this period would be tantamount to writing the history of the two famous Academies _delle Virtu_ and _de' Vignaiuoli_. Of both he was a most distinguished member. He amused them with his conversation, recited before them his _Capitoli_, and charmed them with the softness and the sweetness of his manners. Numbers of his sonnets commemorate the friends.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sure 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 aesthetical serenity, his confused and yet contented conscience, he fairly represents his age.

[Footnote 284: Of Molza's many sonnets upon this woman and her death, see especially Nos. cxi. cxii.]