Renaissance in Italy Volume V Part 15

Luigi Alamanni was the greatest Italian poet of whose services Francis I. could boast, as Cellini was the greatest Italian artist. His works are numerous, and all are marked by the same qualities of limpid facility, tending to prolixity and feebleness. Sonnets and _canzoni_, satires, romantic epics, eclogues, translations, comedies, he tried them all. His translation of the _Antigone_ deserves commendation for its style. His _Flora_ is curious for its attempt to reproduce the comic iambic of the Latin poets. If his satires dealt less in generalities, they might aspire to comparison with Ariosto's. As it is, the poet's bile vents itself in abstract invectives, of which the following verses upon Rome may stand for a fair specimen:[301]

Or chi vedesse il ver, vedrebbe come Piu disnor tu, che 'l tuo Luter Martino, Porti a te stessa, e piu gravose some.

Non la Germania, no, ma l'ozio e 'l vino, Avarizia, ambizion, lussuria, e gola Ti mena al fin, che gia veggiam vicino.

Non pur questo dico io, non Francia sola, Non pur la Spagna, tutta Italia ancora Che ti tien d'eresia, di vizi scola.

E chi nol crede, ne dimandi ognora Urbin, Ferrara, l'Orso, e la Colonna, La Marca, il Romagnuol, ma piu chi plora Per te servendo, che fu d'altri donna.

[Footnote 301: Vol. i. p. 251. It is the end of the third satire. "He who saw truly, would perceive that thyself brings on thee more dishonor than thy Martin Luther, and heavier burdens too. Not Germany, no, but sloth and wine, avarice, ambition, sensuality, and gluttony, are bringing thee to thy now near approaching end. It is not I who say this, not France alone, nor yet Spain, but all Italy, which holds thee for the school of heresy and vice. He who believes it not, let him inquire of Urbino, Ferrara, the Bear and the Column, the Marches and Romagna, yet more of her who weeps because you make her serve, who was once mistress over nations."]

Alamanni is said to have been an admirable improvisatore; and this we can readily believe, for his verses even when they are most polished, flow with a placidity of movement that betrays excessive case.

We have traced the pastoral ideal from its commencement in Boccaccio, through the _Arcadia_ of Sannazzaro, Poliziano's _Orfeo_, and the didactic poets, up to the point when it was destined soon to find its perfect form in the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_. Both Ta.s.so and Guarini lived beyond the chronological limits a.s.signed to this work.

The Renaissance was finished; and Italy had pa.s.sed into a new phase of existence, under the ecclesiastical reaction which is called the Counter-Reformation. It is no part of my programme to enter with particularity into the history of the second half of the sixteenth century. And yet the subject of this and the preceding chapter would be incomplete were I not to notice the two poems which combined the drama and the pastoral in a work of art no less characteristic for the people and the age than fruitful of results for European literature.

Great tragedy and great comedy were denied to the Italians. But they produced a novel species in the pastoral drama, which testified to their artistic originality, and led by natural transitions to the opera. Poetry was on the point of expiring; but music was rising to take her place. And the imaginative medium prepared by the lyrical scenes of the Arcadian play, afforded just that generality and aloofness from actual conditions of life, which were needed by the new art in its first dramatic essays.

It would be a mistake to suppose that because the form of the Arcadian romance was artificial, it could not lend itself to the presentation of real pa.s.sion when adapted to the theater. The study of the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_ is sufficient to remove this misconception. Though the latter is the more carefully constructed of the two, the plot in either case presents a series of emotional situations, developed with refined art and expressed with lyrical abundance. The rustic fable is but a veil, through which the everlasting lineaments of love are shown. Arcadia, stripped of pedantry and affectation, has become the ideal world of sentiment.

Like amber, it incloses in its glittering transparency the hopes and fears, the pains and joys, which flit from heart to heart of men and women when they love. The very conventionality of the pastoral style a.s.sists the lyrical utterance of real feeling. For it must be borne in mind that both _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_ are essentially lyrical.

The salt and savor of each play are in their choruses and monologues.

The dialogue, the fable and the characters serve to supply the poet with motives for emotion that finds vent in song. This being conceded, it will be understood how from their scenes as a whole world of melodrama issued. Whatever may have been the subject of an opera before the days of Gluck, it drew its life-blood from these pastorals.

The central motive of _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_ is the contrast between the actual world of ambition, treachery and sordid strife, and the ideal world of pleasure, loyalty and tranquil ease. Nature is placed in opposition to civil society, the laws of honor to the laws of love, the manners of Arcadia to the manners of Italy. This cardinal motive finds its highest utterance in Ta.s.so's chorus on the Age of Gold:

O bella eta dell'oro, Non gia perche di latte Sen corse il fiume, e still mele il bosco; Non perche i frutti loro Dier dall'aratro intatte Le terre, e gli angui errar senz'ira o tosco; Non perche nuvol fosco Non spieg allor suo velo, Ma in primavera eterna, Ch'ora s'accende, e verna, Rise di luce e di sereno il cielo; Ne port peregrino O guerra, o merce agli altrui lidi il pino: Ma sol perche quel vano Nome senza oggetto, Quell'idolo d'errori, idol d'inganno, Quel che dal volgo insano Onor poscia fu detto, Che di nostra natura 'l feo tiranno, Non mischiava il suo affanno Fra le liete dolcezze Dell'amoroso gregge; Ne fu sua dura legge Nota a quell'alme in libertate avvezze: Ma legge aurea e felice, Che Natura scolp, "S'ei piace, ei lice."

The last phrase, _S'ei piace, ei lice_, might be written on the frontispiece of both dramas, together with Dafne's sigh: _Il mondo invecchia, E invecchiando intristisce_. Of what use is life unless we love?

Amiam, che 'l sol si muore, e poi rinasce; A noi sua breve luce S'asconde, e 'l sonno eterna notte adduce.

The girl who wastes her youth in proud virginity, prepares a sad old age of vain regret:

Cangia, cangia consiglio, Pazzarella che sei; Che 'l pentirsi da sezzo nulla giova.

It is the old cry of the Florentine _Canti_ and _Ballate_, "Gather ye rose-buds while ye may!" _Di doman non c'e certezza._ And the stories of _Aminta_ and _Pastor Fido_ teach the same lesson, that nature's laws cannot be violated, that even fate and the most stubborn bosoms bow to love.

Of the music and beauty of these two dramas, I find it difficult to speak. Before some masterpieces criticism bends in silence. We cannot describe what must be felt. All the melodies that had been growing through two centuries in Italy, are concentrated in their songs. The idyllic voluptuousness, which permeated literature and art, steeps their pictures in a golden glow. It is easy enough to object that their apparent simplicity conceals seduction, that their sentimentalism is unmanly, and their suggestions of physical beauty effeminating:--

Ma come Silvia il riccon.o.bbe, e vide Le belle guance tenere d'Aminta Iscolorite in s leggiadri modi, Che viola non e che impallidisca S dolcemente, e lui languir s fatto, Che parea gia ultimi sospiri Esalar l'alma; in guisa di Baccante, Gridando e percotendosi il bel petto, Lasci cadersi in sul giacente corpo; E giunse viso a viso, e bocca a bocca.

This pa.s.sage warns us that an age of _cicisbei_ and _castrati_ has begun, and that the Italian sensuousness has reached its final dissolution. Silvia's kisses in _Aminta_, Mirtillo's kisses in _Pastor Fido_, introduce a new refinement of enervation. Marino with his _Adone_ is not distant. But, while we recognize in both these poems--the one perfumed and delicate like flowers of spring, the other sculptured in pure forms of cla.s.sic grace--evident signs of a civilization sinking to decay; though we almost loathe the beauty which relaxes every chord of manhood in the soul that feels it; we are bound to confess that to this goal the Italian genius had been steadily advancing since the publication of the _Filocopo_. The negation of chivalry, mysticism, asceticism, is accomplished. After traversing the cycle of comedy, romance, satire, burlesque poetry, the plastic arts, and invading every province of human thought, the Italian reaction against the middle ages a.s.sumes a final shape of hitherto unapprehended loveliness in the _Aminta_ and the _Pastor Fido_. They complete and close the Renaissance, bequeathing in a new species of art its form and pressure to succeeding generations.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE PURISTS.

The Italians lose their Language--Prejudice against the Mother Tongue--Problem of the Dialects--Want of a Metropolis--The Tuscan Cla.s.sics--Petrarch and Boccaccio--Dante Rejected--False Att.i.tude of the Petrarchisti--Renaissance Sense of Beauty unexpressed in Lyric--False Att.i.tude of Boccaccio's Followers--Ornamental Prose--Speron Sperone--The Dictator Bembo--His Conception of the Problem--The _Asolani_--Grammatical Essay--Treatise on the Language--Poems--Letters--Bembo's Place in the _Cortegiano_--Castiglione on Italian Style--His Good Sense--Controversies on the Language--Academical Spirit--Innumerable Poetasters--La Casa--His Life--_Il Forno_--Peculiar Melancholy--His Sonnets--Guidiccioni's Poems on Italy--Court Life--Caro and Castelvetro--Their Controversies--Castelvetro accused of Heresy--Literary Ladies--Veronica Gambara--Vittoria Colonna--Her Life--Her Friends.h.i.+p for Michelangelo--Life of Bernardo Ta.s.so--His _Amadigi_ and other Works--Life of Giangiorgio Trissino--His Quarrel with his Son Giulio--His Critical Works--The _Italia Liberata_.

It was the misfortune of the Italians that, when culture had become national and the revival of the vulgar literature had been effected, they found themselves in nearly the same relation to their own language as to Latin. After more than a hundred years absorbed in humanistic studies, the authors of the fourteenth century were hardly less remote than the Augustan cla.s.sics; and to all but Tuscans their diction was almost foreign. At the beginning of the _cinque cento_, the living mother-tongue of Italy which Dante sought--the _Vulgare, quod superius venabamur, quod in qualibet redolet civitate, nec cubat in ulla_--was still to seek. Since the composition of Dante's essay _De Vulgari Eloquio_, the literary activity of the nation had, indeed, created a desire for some fixed standard of style in modern speech.

But the experiments of the _quattro cento_ had not far advanced the matter. They only proved that Tuscan was the dialect to imitate, and that success in the future must depend on adherence to the Tuscan authors. Hence it happened that Petrarch and Boccaccio came to be studied with the same diligence, the same obsequious reverence, as Cicero and Virgil. Italian was written with no less effort after formal purity, no less minute observance of rules, than if it had been a dead language. At the same time, as a consequence of this system, the vices of the humanistic style--its tendency to servile imitation, emptiness, rhetorical verbosity, and preference of form to matter--were imported into the vernacular literature.

While noting these drawbacks, which attended the resurgence of Italian at an epoch when the whole nation began to demand a common language, we must give due credit to the sagacity displayed by scholars at that epoch in grappling with the problem before them. The main points at issue were, _first_, to overcome the prejudice against the mother tongue, which still lingered among educated people; _secondly_, to adjust Italian to the standards of taste established by the humanistic movement; and, _thirdly_, to decide whether Tuscan should reign supreme, or be merged in a speech more representative of the Italians as a nation. Early in the century, the battle of Italian against Latin was practically won. There remained no obstinate antagonism to a purely national and modern literature. Still the type to which this literature should conform, the laws by which it should be regulated, were as yet unsettled. These questions had to be decided by intelligence rather than by instinct; for the Italians possessed no common medium of conversation, no common opportunities of forensic or parliamentary debate. That insensible process whereby French style has been modeled on the usages of conversation, and English style has been adapted to the tone of oratory, had to be performed, so far as this was possible, by conscious a.n.a.lysis. The Italians were aware that they lacked a language, and they set themselves deliberately to remedy this defect. These peculiar circ.u.mstances gave a pedantic tone to the discussion of the problem. Yet the problem itself was neither puerile nor pedantic. It concerned nothing less than the formation of an instrument of self-expression for a people, who had reached the highest grade of artistic skill in the exercise of the dead languages, and who, though intellectually raised to an equality of culture, were divided by tenacious local differences.

That Petrarch and Boccaccio should have been chosen as models of cla.s.sical Italian style, was not only natural but inevitable. Writers, trained in the method of the humanists, required the guidance of authoritative masters. Just as they used Cicero and Virgil for the correction of medieval Latin, so Petrarch and Boccaccio were needed for the castigation of homespun dialects. Dante, had he been comprehended by such men, would not have satisfied ears educated in the niceties of Latin versification; nor could the builders of Ciceronian perorations have revived the simple prose of the Villani.

Petrarch contented their sense of polish; Boccaccio supplied them with intricate periods and cadences of numerous prose. Yet the choice was in either case unfortunate, though for somewhat different reasons.

It was impossible for poets of the sixteenth century to follow Petrarch to the very letter of his diction, without borrowing his tone. Consequently these versifiers affected to languish and adore, wove conceits and complained of cruelty, in the fas.h.i.+on of Vaucluse.

Their facile mistresses became Lauras; or else they draped a lay-figure, and wrote sonnets to its painted eyebrows. The confusion between literary ceremony and practical experience of pa.s.sion wrought an ineradicable discord. Authors of indecent burlesques penned Platonic odes. Bembo, who was answerable for the _Menta_ in its Latin form, praised his mistress Morosina in polished sonnets and elegiac threnodies. Firenzuola published the poems to Selvaggia and the _Capitolo_ in praise of a specific against infamous diseases. La Casa gratified the same Academies with his panegyric of the Oven and his scholastic exercises in a metaphysical emotion. Reading thee diverse compositions side by side, we wake to the conviction that the Petrarchistic counterfeits, however excellent in form, have precisely the same mediocrity as Sannazzaro's epic, while the Bernesque effusions express the crudest temper of the men who wrote them. The one cla.s.s of poems is redolent of affectation, the other of coa.r.s.e realism. The middle term between these opposites is wanting. Nor could it well be otherwise. The conditions of society in the sixteenth century rendered Petrarch's sentiment impossible. His melancholy, engendered by the contest between pa.s.sion and religious duty, had become a thing of the far past. The license of the times rendered this halting between two impulses ridiculous, when no man was found to question the divine right of natural appet.i.te. Even the reverential att.i.tude a.s.sumed by Petrarch as a lover, was out of date; and when his imitators aped it, their insincerity was patent. The highest enthusiasm of the Renaissance revealed itself through the plastic arts in admiration for corporeal beauty. This feeling, while it easily degenerated into sensuality, had no point of contact with Petrarch's medieval Platonism. Therefore the tone of the Petrarchisti was hypocritical, and the love they professed, a sham.

We have a further reason for resenting this devotion to a poet with whose habitual mood the men of that age could not sympathize. We know that they had much to say which remained buried beneath their fourteenth-century disguises. The sincerity of feeling, the fervid pa.s.sion of poets like Bembo, Molza, or La Casa, cannot be denied. But their emotion found no natural channel of expression. It is not without irritation that we deplore the intellectual conditions of an age, which forced these artists to give forth what they felt in one of two equally artificial forms. Between transcription from the Latin elegists and reproduction of Petrarch there lay for them no choice.

Consequently, the Renaissance lacked its full development upon the side of lyric poetry. The secret of the times remained unspoken--a something a.n.a.logous to Venetian painting, a something indicated in Firenzuola's and Luigini's dialogues on female beauty, a something indirectly presented in Ariosto's episodes, which ought to have been uttered from the heart in song by men who felt the loveliness of plastic form. Instead of this lyrical expression of a ruling pa.s.sion, we have to content ourselves with pseudo-platonic rhymes and with the fervid sensualities of Pontano's elegiacs. The sensibility to corporeal beauty, which was abundantly represented by t.i.tian, Lionardo, Raphael, Correggio, Michelangelo in art, in literature was either shorn of its essential freedom by the limitations of conventional Platonism, or exaggerated on the side of animalism by imitation of erotic Latin poets. Furthermore, we have some right to regard the burlesque obscenity of academical literature as a partial reaction against the hypocritical refinements of the Petrarchistic mannerism. Thus the deepest instinct of the epoch, that which gave its splendor to the painting of the golden age, found no spontaneous utterance in lyric verse.

The academical study of Boccaccio proved disastrous for a different reason. In this case there was no division between the master and his pupils; for we have seen already that the author of the Decameron antic.i.p.ated the Renaissance in the scope and tenor of his work. But he supplied students with a false standard. His Latinizing periods, his involved construction of sentences and oratorical amplification of motives encouraged the worst qualities of humanistic style. Boccaccio prevented the Italians from forming a masculine prose manner. Each writer, whatever might be the subject of his work, aimed at ornate diction. c.u.mbrous and circuitous phrases were admired for their own sake. The simplicity of the Chronicles was abandoned for ponderous verbosity, and Machiavelli's virile force found no successors in the crowd of academicians who dissected the Decameron for flowers of rhetoric.

Thus the efforts of the purists took a false direction from the outset both in prose and verse. The literature which aimed at being national, began with archaistic exercises; and Italy, at the moment of attaining self-consciousness, found herself, without a living language, forced to follow in the steps of antiquated authors. The industry and earnestness of the disciples made their failure the more notable; for while they pursued a track that could not lead to aught but mannerism, they plumed themselves upon the soundness of their method. In order to ill.u.s.trate the spirit of this movement, I will select a pa.s.sage from the works of Speron Sperone, who was by no means the least successful stylist of the period. He is describing his earlier essays in the art of writing and the steps by which he arrived at what he clearly thought to be perfection:[302]

"Being in all truth desirous beyond measure from my earliest years to speak and to write my thoughts in our mother tongue, and that not so much with a view to being understood, which lies within the scope of every unlettered person, as with the object of placing my name upon the roll of famous men, I neglected every other interest, and gave my whole attention to the reading of Petrarch and the hundred Novels; in which studies having exercised myself for many months with little profit and without a guide, under the inspiration of G.o.d I finally betook me to our revered Master Trifone Gabrielli[303]; by whose kindly a.s.sistance I arrived at perfect comprehension of those authors, whom, through ignorance of what I ought to notice, I had frequently before misunderstood. This excellent man and true father of ours first bade me observe the vocables, then gave me rules for knowing the declension and conjugation of nouns and verbs in Tuscan, and lastly explained to me articles, p.r.o.nouns, participles, adverbs, and other parts of speech; so that, collecting all that I had learned, I composed a grammar for myself, by following the which while writing I so controlled my style that in a short s.p.a.ce of time the world held me for a man of erudition, and still considers me as such. When it seemed to me that I had taken rank as a grammarian, I set myself, with the utmost expectation of every one who knew me, to the making of verses; and then, my head full of rhythms, sentences and words from Petrarch and Boccaccio, for a few years, I produced things that appeared wonderful to my judgment; but afterwards, thinking that my vein was beginning to dry up (inasmuch as words frequently failed me, and, not finding what to say in different sonnets, it occurred to me to rehandle the same thoughts), I had recourse to that which all the world does now[304]; for, using the greatest diligence, I composed a rhyming dictionary or vocabulary of Italian phrases; in the which I cla.s.sed by the alphabet every word those two authors had used; moreover I collected in another book their divers ways of describing things, as day, night, anger, peace, hate, love, fear, hope, beauty, in such wise that not a single word or thought came from me which had not its precedent in their sonnets and novels." At this point Sperone frankly admits that his practice was too slavish. He then proceeds to tell how he compared Petrarch's Latin with his vulgar style in order to discover the correct rules of Italian versification. "Conquered by the arguments and experiments I have described, I returned to my earlier studies; and then, in addition to continual self-exercise in the reading of Petrarch (which by itself and without any other artifice may procure great benefit), by fixing my mind more diligently than before upon his modes of diction, I observed (as I believed) certain qualities pertaining in an eminent degree to the poet and also the orator; which, since you desire it, I will briefly expound. In the first place, while numbering and weighing his words one by one, I became aware that I discovered none common and none base, few harsh, all clear, all elegant; and all, moreover, so adapted to common use that one might have supposed he had selected and acc.u.mulated them with the concurrence of all Italy in conclave. Among the which (like stars amid the limpid s.p.a.ce of midnight) some few shone out with special l.u.s.ter; for some part ancient words, but not unpleasing through their age, as _uopo_, _unquanco_, _sovente_; for some part beautiful and very graceful words, which like jewels that delight the eyes of all men, are only used by gentle and high intellects, such as _gioia_, _speme_, _rai_, _disio_, _soggiorno_, _belta_, and others of like quality, the which no learned tongue would utter, nor hand write, unless the ear consented. Time would fail to tell in detail of the verbs, adverbs, and other parts of speech, which make his verses n.o.ble; but one thing I will not pa.s.s in silence, namely that, when speaking of his lady, now of her person, now of her soul, now of her tears, now of her smile, now of her movement, now of her taking rest, now of her anger, now of her pity, and now of her age, in a word when describing and magnifying her alive or dead, he generally avoids the proper name of things, and by some wonderful art adorns each thing by words appropriate to others, calling her head fine gold and roof of gold, her eyes suns, stars, sapphires, nest and home of love, her cheeks now snow and roses, now milk and fire, rubies her lips, pearls her teeth, her throat and breast now ivory, now alabaster." Halfway up this _Gradus ad Parna.s.sum_ we are forced to stop and take deep breath.

Sperone has launched the theory of "poetic diction," and advances boldly to its extreme consequences. We need not follow his a.n.a.lysis further into particulars. He carries it through the several topics of tautology, periphrasis, ant.i.thesis, and proportion of syllables in words of different length; after which the subject of prosody proper is discussed. Having finished with Petrarch, he then proceeds to render the same account of his studies in Boccaccio, observing the variety and choice of his phrases, but calling special attention to the numbers of his periods, and winding up with this sonorous sentence on prose architecture. "But you must know that as the composition of prose is a marshaling of the sounds of words in proper order, so its numbers are certain orders in their syllables; pleasing the ear wherewith, the art of oratory opens, continues and finishes a period: forasmuch as every clause has not only a beginning but also a middle and an end; at the beginning it puts itself in motion and ascends; in the middle, as though weary with exertion, it rests upon its feet awhile; then it descends, and flies to the conclusion for repose."[305]

[Footnote 302: _I Dialoghi di Messer Speron Sperone_ (Aldus, Venice, 1542), p. 146. The pa.s.sage is taken from a Dialogue on Rhetoric. I have tried to preserve the clauses of the original periods.]

[Footnote 303: Trifone Gabrielli was a Venetian, celebrated for his excellent morals no less than for his learning. He gained the epithet of the Socrates of his age, and died in 1549. His personal influence seems to have been very great. Bembo makes frequent and respectful references to him in his letters, and Giasone de Nores wrote a magnificent panegyric of him in the preface to his commentary on Horace's _Ars Poetica_, which he professed to have derived orally from Trifone.]

[Footnote 304: Sperone probably alludes to works like Minerbi's Vocabulary of words used by Boccaccio (Venice, 1535); Luna's _Vocabolario di cinque mila vocaboli toschi del Furioso Petrarca Boccaccio e Dante_ (Naples, 1536); Accarigi's dictionary to Boccaccio ent.i.tled _Ricchezze della lingua volgare_ (Venice, 1543); and so forth.]

[Footnote 305: It should be mentioned that the pa.s.sage I have paraphrased is put into the lips of Antonio Broccardo, a Venetian poet, whose _Rime_ were published in 1538. He attacked Bembo's works, and brought down upon himself such a storm of fury from the pedants of Padua and Venice that he took to his bed and died of grief.]

What is admirable, in spite of pedantry and servility, in this lengthy diatribe is the sense of art as art, the devotion to form for its own sake, the effort to grapple with the problems of style, the writer's single-hearted seeking after perfection. Nothing but a highly-developed artistic instinct in the nation could have produced students of this type. At the same time we feel an absence of spontaneity, and the tendency to aim at decorative writing is apparent. When the glow of discovery, which impelled Sperone and his fellow-pioneers to open a way across the continent of literature, had failed; when the practice of their school had pa.s.sed into precepts, and their inventions had been formulated as canons of style; nothing remained for travelers upon this path but frigid repet.i.tion, precise observance of conventional limitations, and exercises in sonorous oratory. The rhetoric of the seventeenth century was a necessary outgrowth of pedantic purism. The conceits of Marini and his imitators followed inevitably from a rigorous application of rules that denied to poetry the right of natural expression. It may be urged that for a nation so highly sensitive to form as the Italians, without a metropolis to mold the language in the process of development, and without a spoken dialect of good society, there existed no common school of style but the recognized cla.s.sics of Tuscany.[306] When each district habitually used a different speech for private and public utterance, men could not write as they talked, and they were therefore forced to write by rule. There is force in these arguments. Yet the consequences of a too minute and fastidious study of the Tuscan authors proved none the less fatal to the freedom of Italian literature; and what is more, sagacious critics foresaw the danger, though they were unable to avert it.

[Footnote 306: The difficulty is well put by one of the interlocutors in Castiglione's dialogue upon the courtier (ed. Lemonnier, p. 41): "Oltre a questo, le consuetudini sono molto varie, ne e citta n.o.bile in Italia che non abbia diversa maniera di parlar da tutte l'altre.

Per non vi ristringendo voi a dichiarar qual sia la migliore, potrebbe l'uomo attaccarsi alla bergamasca cos come alla fiorentina."

Messer Federigo Fregoso of Genoa is speaking, and he draws the conclusion which practically triumphed in Italy: "Parmi adunque, che a chi vuol fuggir ogni dubio ed esser ben sicuro, sia necessario proporsi ad imitar uno, il quale di consentimento di tutti sia estimato buono ... e questo (nel volgar dico), non penso che abbia da esser altro che il Petrarca e 'l Boccaccio; e chi da questi dui si discosta va tentoni, come chi cammina per le tenebre e spesso erra la strada."]

The leader in this movement, acknowledged throughout Italy for more than half a century as dictator in the republic of letters, "foster-father of the language" (_balio della lingua_), "guide and master of our tongue" (_guida e maestro di questa lingua_), was Pietro Bembo.[307] Though only sixteen years junior to Angelo Poliziano, whom he had himself saluted as "ruler of the Ausonian lyre," Bembo outlived his master for the s.p.a.ce of fifty-one years, and swayed the literary world at a period when Italian succeeded to the honors of Latin scholars.h.i.+p.[308] He was a Venetian. This fact is not insignificant, since it clearly marks the change that had come over the nation, when the scepter of learning was transferred to the northern provinces, and the exclusive privilege of correct Italian composition was shared with Tuscans by men of other dialects.[309] In his early youth Bembo had the good sense to perceive that the mother tongue was no less worthy of cultivation than Greek and Latin. The arguments advanced by Dante, by Alberti, by Lorenzo de' Medici, recurred with fresh force to his mind. He therefore made himself the champion of Italian against those exclusive students who, like Ercole Strozzi, still contended that the dead languages were alone worthy of attention.[310] He also saw that it was necessary to create a standard of correct style for writers who were not fortunate enough to have been born within the bounds of Tuscany. Accordingly, he devoted himself to the precise and formal study of fourteenth-century literature, polis.h.i.+ng his own Italian compositions with a diligence that, while it secured transparent purity of diction, deprived them of originality and impulse. It is said that he pa.s.sed each of his works through forty successive revisions, keeping as many portfolios to represent the stages at which they had arrived.

[Footnote 307: In the famous pa.s.sage of the _Furioso_ where Ariosto p.r.o.nounces the eulogy of the poets of his day, he mentions Bembo thus (_Orl. Fur._ xlvi. 15).

Pietro Bembo, che 'l puro e dolce idioma nostro, Levato fuor del volgar uso tetro, Quale esser dee, ci ha co 'l suo esempio mostro.]

[Footnote 308: See Bembo's elegy on Poliziano quoted by me in the _Revival of Learning_, p. 484.]

[Footnote 309: See _Revival of Learning_, p. 506, for the transference of scholars.h.i.+p to Lombardy.]

[Footnote 310: See the Latin hendecasyllables quoted by me in the _Revival of Learning_, p. 415, and the Defense of Italian in the treatise "Della volgare Lingua" (Bembo, _Opere_, Milan, _Cla.s.s. It._ x. 28). Carducci in his essay _Delle Poesie Latine di Ludovico Ariosto_, pp. 179-181, gives some interesting notices of Ercole Strozzi's conversion to the vulgar tongue.]

Having already sketched the life of Bembo, I shall here restrict myself to remarks upon those of his works which were influential in reviving the practice of Italian composition.[311] Among these the first place must be awarded to _Gli Asolani_, a dialogue on Love, written in his early manhood and dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia. The beauty of its language and the interest of the theme discussed rendered this treatise widely fas.h.i.+onable. Yet it is not possible to study it with pleasure now. Those Platonic conversations, in which the refined society of the Italian Courts delighted, have lost their attraction for us. Nothing but the charming description of Asolo, where the Queen of Cyprus had her garden, surrounded by trimmed laurels and divided crosswise with a leafy _pergola_ of vines, retains its freshness. That picture, animated by the figures of the six novitiates of Love, now sauntering through shade and sunlight under the vine-branches, now seated on the gra.s.s to hear a lute or viol deftly touched, is in the best idyllic style of the Venetian masters.

At the Court of Urbino, where Bembo was residing when his book appeared, it was received with acclamation, as a triumph of divine genius. The ill.u.s.trious circle celebrated by Castiglione in his _Cortegiano_ perused it with avidity, and there is no doubt that the publication gave a powerful impulse to Italian studies. These were still further fostered by Bembo's Defense of the Vulgar Tongue.[312]