Renaissance in Italy Volume VI Part 48

One example will serve as well as many to ill.u.s.trate the false att.i.tude a.s.sumed by Chiabrera when he posed as a new Pindar in the midst of seventeenth-century Italians. I will select the Ode to Don Cesare d'Este. There is something pathetically ridiculous, in this would-be swan of the Dircean fount, this apostle of pagan virtues, admonis.h.i.+ng the heir of Alfonso II to prove himself an obedient son of the Church by relinquis.h.i.+ng his Duchy of Ferrara to the Holy See. The poet asks him, in fine cla.s.sic phrases, whether he could bear to look on desecrated altars, confessionals without absolving priests, chapels without choristers, a people barred with bolt and lock from Paradise. How trivial are earthly compared with heavenly crowns! How vulgar is the love of power and gold! The exhortation, exquisite enough in chastened style, closes with this hypocritical appeal to Cesare's aristocratic prejudices:

Parli la plebe a suo volere, e pensi-- Non con la plebe hanno da gir gli Estensi.

That is to say, n.o.bility demands that the House of Este should desert its subjects, sacrifice its throne, crawl at a Pontiff's feet, and starve among a crowd of disthroned princes, wrapping the ragged purple of its misery around it till it, too, mixes with the people it contemns.

Hopeless as the venture was, Chiabrera made it the one preoccupation of his life, in these untoward circ.u.mstances, to remodel Italian poetry upon the Greek pattern. It was a merit of the Sei Cento, a sign of grace, that the Italians now at last threw orthodox aesthetic precepts to the winds, and avowed their inability to carry the Petrarchistic tradition further. The best of them, Campanella and Bruno, molded vulgar language like metal in the furnace of a vehement imagination, making it the vehicle of fantastic pa.s.sion and enthusiastic philosophy. From their crucible the Sonnet and the Ode emerged with no resemblance to academical standards. Grotesque, angular, gnarled, contorted, Gothic even, these antiquated forms beneath their wayward touch were scarcely recognizable. They had become the receptacles of burning, scalding, trenchant realities. Salvator Rosa, next below the best, forced indignation to lend him wings, and scaled Parna.s.sus with bra.s.s-bound feet and fury. Marino, bent on riveting attention by surprises, fervid with his own reality of l.u.s.t, employed the octave stanza as a Turkish Bey might use an odalisque. 'The only rule worth thinking of,' he said, 'is to know how and when and where to break all rules, adapting ourselves to current taste and the fas.h.i.+ons of the age.' His epic represents a successful, because a vivid, reaction against conventionality. The life that throbs in it is incontestable, even though that life may be nothing better than ephemeral. With like brutality of instinct, healthy because natural, the barocco architects embraced ugliness, discord, deformity, spasm, as an escape from harmony and regularity with which the times were satiated. Prose-writers burst the bonds of Bembo, trampled on Boccaccio, reveled in the stylistic debaucheries of Bartolo. Painters, rendered academic in vain by those Fabii of Bologna who had striven to restore the commonwealth of art by temporizing, launched themselves upon a sea of ma.s.sacre and murder, blood and entrails, horrors of dark woods and Baccha.n.a.lia of chubby Cupids. The popular Muse of Italy meanwhile emerged with furtive grace and inexhaustible vivacity in dialectic poems, dances, Pulcinello, Bergamasque Pantaloon, and what of parody and satire, Harlequinades, and carnival diversions, any local soil might cherish.[198] All this revolt against precedent, this resurrection of primeval instinct, crude and grinning, took place, let us remember, under the eyes of the Jesuits, within the shadow of the Inquisition, in an age reformed and ordered by the Council of Trent. Art was following Aretino, the reprobate and rebel. He first amid the languors of the golden age--and this is Aretino's merit--discerned that the only escape from its inevitable exhaustion was by pa.s.sing over into crudest naturalism.

[Footnote 198: See Scherillo's two books on the _Commedia dell'Arte_ and the _Opera Buffa_.]

But for Chiabrera, the excellent gentleman, the patronized of princes, scrupulous upon the point of honor, pupil of Jesuits, pious, twisted back on humanism by his Roman tutors, what escape was left for him? Obey the genius of his times he must. Innovate he must. He chose the least indecorous sphere at hand for innovation; and felt therewith most innocently happy. Without being precisely conscious of it, he had discovered a way of adhering to time-honored precedent while following the general impulse to discard precedent. He threw Petrarch overboard, but he took on Pindar for his pilot. 'When I see anything eminently beautiful, or hear something, or taste something that is excellent, I say: It is Greek Poetry.' In this self-revealing sentence lies the ruling instinct of the man as scholar. The highest praise he can confer upon Italian matters, is to call them Greek Poetry. 'When I have to express my aims in verse, I compare myself to Columbus, who said that he would discover a new world or drown.' Again, in this self-revealing sentence, Chiabrera betrays the instinct which in common with his period he obeyed. He was bound to startle society by a discovery or to drown.

For this, be it remembered, was the time in which Pallavicino, like Marino, declared that poetry must make men raise their eyebrows in astonishment. For Chiabrera, educated as he had been, that new world toward which he navigated was a new h.e.l.lenic style of Italian poetry; and the Theban was to guide him toward its sh.o.r.es. But on the voyage Chiabrera drowned: drowned for eternity in hyper-atlantic whirlpools of oblivion. Some critics, pitying so lofty, so respectable an ambition, have whispered that he found a little Island of the Blest and there planted modest myrtles of mediocre immortality. Yet this is not the truth. On such a quest there was only failure or success. He did not succeed. His cold mincemeat from Diocean tables, tepid historic parallels, artificially concocted legends, could not create Greek poetry again beneath the ribs of death. The age was destined to be saved by music. License was its only liberty, as the _Adone_ taught. Unmusical Chiabrera, buckram'd up by old mythologies and sterling precepts, left its life untouched. His antique virtues stood, like stucco G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, on pedestals in garden groves, and moldered. His Pindaric flights were such as a sparrow, gazing upward at a hawk, might venture on. Those abrupt transitions, whereby he sought to simulate the lordly _sprezzatura_ of the Theban eagle, 'soaring with supreme dominion in the azure depths of air,' remind us mainly of the hoppings of a frog.

Chiabrera failed: failed all the more lamentably because he was so scholarly, so estimable. He is chiefly interesting now as the example of a man devoted to the Church, a pupil of Jesuits, a moralist, and a humanist, in some sense also a patriot, who felt the temper of his time, and strove to innovate in literature. Devoid of sincere sympathy with his academically chosen models, thinking he had discovered a safe path for innovation, he fell flat in the slime and perished.

Marino had human life and vulgar nature, the sensualities and frivolities of the century, to help him. Chiabrera claimed none of these advantages. What had Ta.s.soni for his outfit? Sound common sense, critical ac.u.men, the irony of humor, hatred of tyrants and humbug, an acrid temper mollified by genial love of letters, a manly spirit of independence. Last, but not least, he inherited something of the old Elysian smile which played upon the lips of Ariosto, from which Ta.s.so's melancholy shrank discomfited, which Marino smothered in the kisses of his courtesans, and Chiabrera banned as too ign.o.ble for Dircean bards.

This smile it was that cheered Ta.s.soni's leisure when, fallen on evil days, he penned the _Socchia Rapita_.

Alessandro Ta.s.soni was born in 1565 of a n.o.ble Modenese family. Before completing his nineteenth year he won the degree of Doctor of Laws, and afterwards spent twelve years in studying at the chief universities of Lombardy. Between 1599 and 1603 he served the Cardinal Ascanio Colonna both in Spain and Rome, as secretary. The insight he then gained into the working of Spanish despotism made him a relentless enemy of that already decadent monarchy. When Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, sent back his Collar of the Golden Fleece in 1613 and drew the sword of resistance against Philip III., Ta.s.soni penned two philippics against Spaniards, which are the firmest, most embittered expression of patriotism as it then existed. He had the acuteness to perceive that the Spanish state was no longer in its prime of vigor, and the n.o.ble ingenuousness to dream that Italian princes might be roused to sink their rancors in a common effort after independence. As a matter of fact, Estensi, Medici, Farnesi, Gonzaghi, all the reigning houses as yet unabsorbed by Church or Spain, preferred the predominance of a power which sanctioned their local tyrannies, irksome and degrading as that overlords.h.i.+p was, to the hegemony of Piedmontese Macedon. And like all Italian patriots, strong in mind, feeble in muscle, he failed to reckon with the actual soldierly superiority of Spaniards. Italy could give generals at this epoch to her masters; but she could not count on levying privates for her own defense. Carlo Emmanuele rewarded the generous ardor of Ta.s.soni by grants of pensions which were never paid, and by offices at Court which involved the poet-student in perilous intrigue. 'My service with the princes of the House of Savoy,' so he wrote at a later period, 'did not take its origin in benefits or favors received or expected. It sprang from a pure spontaneous motion of the soul, which inspired me with love for the n.o.ble character of Duke Charles.' When he finally withdrew from that service, he had his portrait painted. In his hands he held a fig, and beneath the picture ran a couplet ending with the words, 'this the Court gave me.'

Throughout his life Ta.s.soni showed an independence rare in that century.

His princ.i.p.al works were published without dedications to patrons. In the preface to his _Remarks on Petrarch_ he expressed his opinion thus: 'I leave to those who like them the fruitless dedications, not to say flatteries, which are customary nowadays. I seek no protection; for a lie does not deserve it, and truth is indifferent to it. Let such as opine that the shadow of great personages can conceal the inept.i.tude of authors, make the most of this advantage.' Believing firmly in astrology, he judged that his own horoscope condemned him to ill-success. It appears that he was born under the influence of Saturn, when the sun and moon were in conjunction; and he held that this combination of the heavenly bodies boded 'things noteworthy, yet not felicitous.' It was, however, difficult for a man of Ta.s.soni's condition in that state of society to draw breath outside the circle of a Court.

Accordingly, in 1626, he entered the service of the Pope's nephew, Cardinal Lodovisio. He did not find this much to his liking: 'I may compare myself to P. Emilius Metellus, when he was shod with those elegant boots which pinched his feet. Everybody said, Oh what fine boots, how well they fit! But the wretch was unable to walk in them.' On the Cardinal's death in 1632 Ta.s.soni removed to the Court of Francesco I. of Modena, and died there in 1635.

As a writer, Ta.s.soni, in common with the best spirits of his time, aimed at innovation. It had become palpable to the Italians that the Renaissance was over, and that they must break with the traditions of the past. This, as I have already pointed out, was the saving virtue of the early seventeenth century; but what good fruits it might have fostered, had not the political and ecclesiastical conditions of the age been adverse, remains a matter for conjecture. 'It is my will and object to utter new opinions,' he wrote to a friend; and acting upon this principle, he attacked the chief prejudices of his age in philosophy and literature. One of his earliest publications was a miscellaneous collection of _Divers Thoughts_, in which he derided Aristotle's Physics and propounded speculations similar to those developed by Ga.s.sendi. He dared to cast scorn on Homer, as rude and barbarous, poor in the faculty of invention, taxable with at least five hundred flagrant defects. How little Ta.s.soni really comprehended Homer may be judged from his complacent a.s.sertion that the episode of Luna and Endymion (_Secchia Rapita_, canto viii.) was composed in the Homeric manner. In truth he could estimate the Iliad and Odyssey no better than Chiabrera could the Pythians and Olympians of Pindar. A just sense of criticism failed the scholars of that age, which was too remote in its customs, too imperfect in its science of history, to understand the essence of Greek art. With equally amusing candor Ta.s.soni pa.s.sed judgments upon Dante, and thought that he had rivaled the Purgatory in his description of the Dawn (_Secchia Rapita_, viii. 15, the author's note). We must, however, be circ.u.mspect and take these criticisms with a grain of salt; for one never knows how far Ta.s.soni may be laughing in his sleeve. There is no doubt, however, regarding the sincerity of his strictures upon the Della Cruscan Vocabulary of 1612, or the more famous inquiry into Petrarch's style. The _Considerazioni sopra le Rime del Petrarca_ were composed in 1602-3 during a sea voyage from Genoa to Spain. They told what now must be considered the plain truth of common sense about the affectations into which a servile study of the _Canzoniere_ had betrayed generations of Italian rhymesters. Ta.s.soni had in view Petrarch's pedantic imitators rather than their master; and when the storm of literary fury, stirred up by his work, was raging round him, he thus established his position: 'Surely it is allowable to censure Petrarch's poems, if a man does this, not from malignant envy, but from a wish to remove the superst.i.tions and abuses which beget such evil effects, and to confound the sects of the Rabbins hardened in their perfidy of obsolete opinion, and in particular of such as think they cannot write straight without the _falsariga_ of their model.' I may observe in pa.s.sing that the points in this paragraph are borrowed from a sympathizing letter which Marino addressed to the author on his essay. In another place Ta.s.soni stated, 'It was never my intention to speak evil of this poet [Petrarch], whom I have always admired above any lyrist of ancient or modern times.'

So independent in his conduct and so bold in his opinions was the author of the _Secchia Rapita_. The composition of this poem grew out of the disputes which followed Ta.s.soni's _Remarks on Petrarch_. He found himself a.s.sailed by two scurrilous libels, which were traced to the Count Alessandro Brusantini, feudal lord of Culagna and Bismozza.

Justice could not be obtained upon the person of so eminent a n.o.ble.

Ta.s.soni, with true Italian refinement, resolved to give himself the unique pleasure of ingenious vengeance. The name of the Count's fief supplied him with a standing dish of sarcasm. He would write a satiric poem, of which the Conte Culagna should be the burlesque hero. After ten months' labor, probably in the year 1615, the _Secchia Rapita_ already went abroad in MS.[199] Ta.s.soni sought to pa.s.s it off as a product of his youth; but both the style and the personalities which it contained rendered this impossible. Privately issued, the poem had a great success. 'In less than a year,' writes the author, 'more MS. copies were in circulation than are usually sent forth from the press in ten years of the most famous works.' One professional scribe made 200 ducats in the course of a few months by reproducing it; and the price paid for each copy was eight crowns. It became necessary to publish the _Secchia Rapita_. But now arose innumerable difficulties. The printers of Modena and Padua refused; Giuliano Ca.s.siani had been sent to prison in 1617 for publis.h.i.+ng some verses of Testi against Spain. The Inquisition withheld its _imprimatur_. Attempts were made to have it printed on the sly at Padua; but the craftsman who engaged to execute this job was imprisoned.

At last, in 1622, Ta.s.soni contrived to have the poem published in Paris.

The edition soon reached Italy. In Rome it was prohibited, but freely sold; and at last Gregory XV. allowed it to be reprinted with some canceled pa.s.sages. There is, in truth, nothing prejudicial either to the Catholic creed or to general morality in the _Secchia Rapita_. We note, meanwhile, with interest, that it first saw the light at Paris, sharing thus the fortunes of the _Adone_, which it preceded by one year. If the greatest living Italians at this time were exiles, it appears that the two most eminent poems of their literature first saw the light on foreign sh.o.r.es.

[Footnote 199: For the date 1615 see Carducci's learned essay prefixed to his edition of the _Secchia Rapita_ (Barbera, 1861).]

The _Secchia Rapita_ is the first example of heroico-comic poetry.

Ta.s.soni claims in print the honor of inventing this new species, and tells his friends that 'though he will not pique himself on being a poet, still he sets some store on having discovered a new kind of poem and occupied a vacant seat.' The seat--and it was no Siege Perilous--stood indeed empty and ready to be won by any free-lance of letters. Folengo had burlesqued romance. But no one as yet had made a parody of that which still existed mainly as the unaccomplished hope of literature. Trissino with his _Italia Liberata_, Ta.s.so with his _Gerusalemme Liberata_, tried to persuade themselves and the world that they had succeeded in delivering Italy in labor of an epic. But their maieutic ingenuity was vain. The nation carried no epic in her womb.

Trissino's _Italia_ was a weazened changeling of erudition, and Ta.s.so's _Gerusalemme_ a florid b.a.s.t.a.r.d of romance. Ta.s.soni, noticing the imposition of these two eminent and worthy writers, determined to give his century an epic or heroic poem in the only form which then was possible. Briefly, he produced a caricature, modeled upon no existing work of modern art, but corresponding to the lineaments of that Desired of the Nation which pedants had prophesied. Unity of action celestial machinery, races in conflict, contrasted heroes, the wavering chance of war, episodes, bards, heroines, and love subordinated to the martial motive--all these features of the epic he viewed through the distorting medium of his comic art.

In the days of the second Lombard League, when Frederick II. was fighting a losing battle with the Church, Guelf Bologna came into grim conflict with her Ghibelline neighbor Modena. The territory of these two cities formed the _champ clos_ of a duel in which the forces of Germany and nearly all Italy took part; and in one engagement, at Fossalta, the Emperor's heir, King Enzo of Sardinia, was taken captive. How he pa.s.sed the rest of his days, a prisoner of the Bolognese, and how he begat the semi-royal brood of Bentivogli, is matter of history and legend. During this conflict memorable among the many munic.i.p.al wars of Italy in the middle ages, it happened that some Modenese soldiers, who had pushed their way into the suburbs of Bologna, carried off a bucket and suspended it as a trophy in the bell-tower of the cathedral, where it may still be seen. One of the peculiarities of those mediaeval struggles which roused the rivalry of towns separated from each other by a few miles of fertile country, and which raged through generations till the real interests at issue were confounded in blind animosity of neighbor against neighbor--was the sense of humor and of sarcasm they encouraged.

To hurl dead donkey against your enemy's town-wall pa.s.sed for a good joke, and discredited his honor more than the loss of a hundred fighting men in a pitched battle. Frontier fortresses received insulting names, like the Perugian _Becca di questo_, or like the Bolognese _Grevalcore_.

There was much, in fact, in these Italian wars which reminds one of the hostilities between rival houses in a public school.

Such being the element of humor ready to hand in the annals of his country, Ta.s.soni chose the episode of the Bolognese bucket for the theme of a mock-heroic epic. He made what had been an insignificant incident the real occasion of the war, and grouped the facts of history around it by ingenious distortions of the truth. The bucket is the Helen of his Iliad:[200]

Vedrai s'al cantar mio porgi l'orecchia, Elena trasformarsi in una secchia.

[Footnote 200: Canto i. 2.]

A mere trifle thus becomes a point of dispute capable of bringing G.o.ds, popes, emperors, kings, princes, cities, and whole nations into conflict. At the same time the satirist betrays his malice by departing as little as possible from the main current of actual events. History lends verisimilitude to the preposterous a.s.sumption that heaven and earth were drawn into a squabble about a bucket: and if there is any moral to be derived from the _Secchia Rapita_ we have it here. At the end of the contention, when both parties are exhausted, it is found that the person of a king weighs in the scale of nations no more than an empty bucket:[201]

Riserbando ne' patti a i Modanesi La secchia, e 'l re de'Sardi ai Bolognesi.

Such is the main subject of the _Secchia Rapita_; and such is Ta.s.soni's irony, an irony worthy of Aristophanes in its far-reaching indulgent contempt for human circ.u.mstance. But the poem has another object. It was written to punish Count Alessandro Brusantini. The leading episode, which occupies about three cantos of the twelve, is an elaborate vilification of this personal enemy travestied as the contemptible Conte di Culagna.

Ta.s.soni's method of art corresponds to the irony of his inspiration. We find his originality in a peculiar blending of serious and burlesque styles, in abrupt but always well-contrived transitions from heroical magniloquence to plebeian farce and from scurrility to poetic elevation, finally in a frequent employment of the figure which the Greeks called [Greek: para prosdokian]. His poem is a parody of the Aristophanic type.

'Like a fantastically ironical magic tree, the world-subversive idea which lies at the root of it springs up with blooming ornament of thoughts, with singing nightingales and climbing chattering apes.'[202]

To seek a central motive or a sober meaning in this caprice of the satirical imagination would be idle. Ta.s.soni had no intention, as some critics have pretended, to exhibit the folly of those party wars which tore the heart of Italy three centuries before his epoch, to teach the people of his day the miseries of foreign interference, or to strike a death-blow at cla.s.sical mythology. The lesson which can be drawn from his cantos, that man in warfare disquiets himself in vain for naught, that a bucket is as good a _casus belli_ as Helen, the moral which Southey pointed in his ballad of the Battle of Blenheim, emerges, not from the poet's design, but from the inevitable logic of his humor.

Pique inspired the _Secchia Rapita_, and in the despicable character of Count Culagna he fully revenged the slight which had been put upon him.

The revenge is savage, certainly; for the Count remains 'immortally immerded' in the long-drawn episode which brought to view the shame of his domestic life. Yet while Ta.s.soni drew blood, he never ceased to smile; and Count Culagna remains for us a personage of comedy rather than of satire.

[Footnote 201: Canto xii. 77.]

[Footnote 202: So Heine wrote of Aristophanes. See my essay in _Studies of the Greek Poets_.]

In the next place, Ta.s.soni meant to ridicule the poets of his time. He calls the _Secchia Rapita_ 'an absurd caprice, written to burlesque the modern poets.' His genius was nothing if not critical, and literature afforded him plenty of material for fun. Romance-writers with their jousts and duels and armed heroines, would-be epic poets with their extra-mundane machinery and pomp of phrase, Marino and his hyperbolical conceits, Tuscan purists bent on using only words of the Tre Cento, Petrarchisti spinning cobwebs of old metaphors and obsolete periphrases, all felt in turn the touch of his light lash. The homage paid to Petrarch's stuffed cat at Arqua supplied him with a truly Aristophanic gibe.[203] Society comes next beneath his ferule. There is not a city of Italy which Ta.s.soni did not wring in the withers of its self-conceit.

The dialects of Ferrara, Bologna, Bergamo, Florence, Rome, lend the satirist vulgar phrases when he quits the grand style and, taking Virgil's golden trumpet from his lips, slides off into a _canaille_ drawl or sluice of Billingsgate. Modena is burlesqued in her presiding Potta, gibbeted for her filthy streets. The Sienese discover that the world accounts them lunatics. The Florentines and Perugians are branded for notorious vice. Roman foppery, fantastical in feminine pretentiousness, serves as a foil to drag Culagna down into the ditch of ignominy. Here and there, Ta.s.soni's satire is both venomous and pungent, as when he paints the dotage of the Empire, stabs Spanish pride of sovereignty, and menaces the Papacy with insurrection. But for the most part, like Horace in the phrase of Persius, he plays about the vitals of the victims who admit him to their confidence--_admissus circ.u.m praecordia ludit_.

[Footnote 203: Canto viii. 33, 34.]

We can but regret that so clear-sighted, so urbane and so truly Aristophanic a satirist had not a wider field to work in.

Seventeenth-century Italy was all too narrow for his genius; and if the _Secchia Rapita_ has lost its savor, this is less the poet's fault than the defect of his material. He was strong enough to have brought the Athens of Cleon, the France of Henri III., or the England of James I.

within the range of his distorting truth-revealing mirror. Yet, even as it was, Ta.s.soni opened several paths for modern humorists. Rabelais might have owned that caricature of Mars and Bacchus rioting in a tavern bed with Venus travestied as a boy, and in the morning, after breakfasting divinely on two hundred restorative eggs, escaping with the fear of a scandalized host and the police-court before their eyes. Yet Rabelais would hardly have brought this cynical picture of crude debauchery into so fine a contrast with the celestial environment of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses. True to his principle of effect by alternation, Ta.s.soni sometimes sketches the deities whom he derides, in the style of Volpato engravings after Guido. They move across his canvas with ethereal grace. What can be more charming than Diana visiting Endymion, and confessing to the Loves that all her past career as huntress and as chaste had been an error? Venus, too, when she takes that sensuously dreamy all-poetic journey across the blue Mediterranean to visit golden-haired King Enzo in his sleep, makes us forget her entrance into Modena disguised as a lad trained to play female parts upon the stage.

This blending of true elegance with broad farce is a novelty in modern literature. We are reminded of the songs of the Mystae on the meadows of Elysium in the _Frogs_. Scarron and Voltaire, through the French imitators of Ta.s.soni, took lessons from his caricature of Saturn, the old diseased senator traveling in a sedan chair to the celestial parliament, with a clyster-pipe in front of him and his seat upon a close stool. Moliere and Swift, votaries of Cloacina, were antic.i.p.ated in the climax of Count Culagna's attempt to poison his wife, and in the invention of the enchanted a.s.s so formidable by Parthian discharges on its adversary. Over these births of Ta.s.soni's genius the Maccaronic Muse of Folengo and his Bolognese predecessors presided. There is something Lombard, a smack of sausage in the humor. But it remained for the Modenese poet to bring this Mafelina into the comity of nations. We are not, indeed, bound to pay her homage. Yet when we find her inspiring such writers as Swift, Voltaire, Sterne and Heine, it is well to remember that Ta.s.soni first evoked her from Mantuan gutters and the tripe-shops of Bologna.

'The fantastically ironical magic tree' of the _Secchia Rapita_ spread its green boughs not merely for chattering baboons. Nightingales sang there. The monkey-like Culagna, with his tricks and antics, disappears.

Virtuous Renoppia, that wholesome country la.s.s, the _bourgeois_ counterpart of Bradamante, withholds her slipper from the poet's head when he is singing sad or lovely things of human fortune. Our eyes, rendered sensitive by vulgar sights, dwell with unwonted pleasure on the chivalrous beauty of King Enzo. Ernesto's death touches our sympathy with pathos, in spite of the innuendo cast upon his comrade Jacona.

Paolo Malatesta rides with the shades of doom, the Dantesque cloud of love and destiny, around his forehead, through that motley mock-heroic band of burghers. Manfredi, consumed by an unholy pa.s.sion for his sister, burns for one moment, like a face revealed by lightning, on our vision and is gone. Finally, when the mood seizes him (for Ta.s.soni persuades us into thinking he is but the creature of caprice), he tunes the soft idyllic harp and sings Endymion's love-tale in strains soft as Marino's, sweet as Ta.s.so's, outdoing Marino in delicacy, Ta.s.so in reserve. This episode moved rigid Alfieri to admiration. It remains embedded in a burlesque poem, one of the most perfectly outlined triumphs of refined Italian romantic art. Yet such was the strength of the master's hand, so loyal was he to his principle of contrast, that he cuts the melodious idyl short with a tw.a.n.g of the guitar-strings, and strikes up a tavern ballad on Lucrezia. The irony which ruled his art demanded this inversion of proprieties. Cynthia wooing Endymion shows us woman in her frailty; Lucrece violated by Tarquin is woman in her dignity. The ironical poet had to adorn the first story with his choicest flowers of style and feeling, to burlesque the second with his grossest realism.

This ant.i.thesis between sustained poetry and melodiously-worded slang, between radiant forms of beauty and grotesque ugliness, penetrates the _Secchia Rapita_ in every canto and in every detail. We pa.s.s from battle-scenes worthy of Ariosto and Ta.s.so at their best into ditches of liquid dung. Amba.s.sadors are introduced with touches that degrade them to the rank of _commis voyageurs_. Before the senate the same men utter orations in the style of Livy. The pomp of war is paraded, its machinery of catapults is put in motion, to discharge a dead a.s.s into a besieged town; and when the beleagured garrison behold it flying through the air, they do not take the donkey for a taunt, but for a heavenly portent. A tournament is held and very brave in their attire are all the combatants. But according to its rules the greatest sluggard wins the crown of honor. Even in the similes, which formed so important an element of epic decoration, the same principle of contrast is maintained. Fine vignettes from nature in the style consecrated by Ariosto and Ta.s.so introduce ludicrous incidents. Vulgar details picked up from the streets prepare us for touches of pathos or poetry.

Ta.s.soni takes high rank as a literary artist for the firmness with which he adhered to his principle of irony, and for the facility of vigor which conceals all traces of effort in so difficult a task. I may be thought to have pitched his praise too high. But those will forgive me who enjoy the play of pure sharp-witted fancy, or who reflect upon the sadness of the theme which occupies my pen in these two volumes.

Of the four poets to whom this chapter is devoted, Guarini, Marino, and Ta.s.soni were successful, Chiabrera was a respectable failure. The reason of this difference is apparent. In the then conditions of Italian society, at the close of a great and glorious period of varied culture, beneath the shadow of a score of Spaniardizing princelings, with the spies of the Inquisition at every corner, and the drill of the Tridentine Council to be gone through under Jesuitical direction, there was no place for a second Pindar. But there was scope for decorative art, for sensuous indulgence, and for genial irony. Happy the man who paced his vineyards, dreaming musically of Arcadia! Happy the man who rolled in Circe's pigsty! Happy the man who sat in his study and laughed! Therefore the most meritorious productions of the time, Boccalini's _Ragguagli di Parnaso_, Bracciolini's _Scherno degli Dei_, have a touch of Ta.s.soni's humor in them; while Achillini and Preti limp somewhat feebly after Marino's Alcibidean swagger, and endless pastorals pullulate from Guarini's tragi-comedy. We need not occupy our minds with these secondary writers, nor do more than indicate the scholarly niceness with which Filicaja in the second half of the seventeenth century continued Chiabrera's tradition. But one word must be said in honor of Fulvio Testi, the Modenese poet and statesman, who paid for the fame of a Canzone with his head. He has a double interest for us: first, because Leopardi esteemed him the n.o.blest of Italian lyrists after Petrarch; secondly, because his fate proved that Ta.s.so's dread of a.s.sa.s.sination was not wholly an illusion. Reading the ode addressed to Count Raimondo Montecuccoli, _Ruscelletto orgoglioso_, the ode which brought Testi to the block in a dungeon of the Estensi, we comprehend what Leopardi meant by his high panegyric. It is a piece of poetry, lofty in style, grave in movement, pregnant with weighty thought, stern and rugged, steeped in a sublimity of gloom and Stoicism which remind us of the author of _La Ginestra_. The century produced little that bore a stamp so evident of dignity and greatness.

CHAPTER XII.

PALESTRINA AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERN MUSIC.

Italy in Renaissance produces no National School of Music--Flemish Composers in Rome--Singers and Orchestra--The Chaotic Indecency of this Contrapuntal Style--Palestrina's Birth and Early History--Decrees of the Tridentine Council upon Church Music--The Ma.s.s of Pope Marcello--Palestrina Satisfies the Cardinals with his New Style of Sacred Music--Pius IV. and his Partiality for Music--Palestrina and Filippo Neri--His Motetts--The Song of Solomon set to Melody--Palestrina, the Saviour of Music--The Founder of the Modern Style--Florentine Essays in the Oratorio.

It is a singular fact that while Italy led all the European races in scholars.h.i.+p and literature, in the arts of sculpture and painting, in commerce and the sciences of life, she had developed no national school of music in the middle of the sixteenth century. Native melody might indeed be heard in abundance along her sh.o.r.es and hillsides, in city streets and on the squares where men and girls danced together at evening. But such melody was popular; it could not be called artistic or scientific. The music which resounded through the Sistine Chapel, beneath the Prophets of Michel Angelo, on high days and festivals, was not Italian. The composers of it came for the most part from Flemish or French provinces, bearing the names of Josquin Depres, of Andrew Willaert, of Eleazar Genet, of James Arkadelt, of Claude Gondimel; and the performers were in like manner chiefly ultramontanes. Julius II. in 1513 founded a chapel in the Vatican Basilica called the Cappella Giulia for the maintenance of twelve male singers, twelve boys, and two masters of the choristers. In doing so it was his object to encourage a Roman school of music and to free the Chapter of S. Peter's from the inconvenience of being forced to engage foreign choir-men. His scheme, however, had been only partially successful. As late as 1540, we find that the princ.i.p.al composers and musicians in Rome were still foreigners. To three Italians of repute, there were five Flemings, three Frenchmen, three Spaniards, one German, and one Portuguese.[204]

[Footnote 204: See Baini, _Life of Palestrina_, vol. ii. p. 20.]

The Flemish style of contrapuntal or figured harmony, which had enchanted Europe by its novelty and grace when Josquin Depres, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, brought it into universal vogue, was still dominant in Italy. But this style already showed unmistakable signs of decadence and dissolution. It had become unfit for ecclesiastical uses, and by the exaggeration of its qualities it was tending to anarchy. The grand defect of Flemish music, considered as an art of expression, was that it ignored propriety and neglected the libretto. Instead of exercising original invention, instead of suiting melodies to words by appropriate combinations of sound and sense, the composers chose any musical themes that came to hand, and wrought them up into elaborate contrapuntal structures without regard for their book.

The first words of a pa.s.sage from the Creed, for instance, were briefly indicated at the outset of the number: what followed was but a reiteration of the same syllables, and divided in the most arbitrary manner to suit the complicated descant which they had to serve. The singers could not adapt their melodic phrases to the liturgical text, since sometimes pa.s.sages of considerable length fell upon a couple of syllables, while on the contrary a long sentence might have no more than a bar or even less a.s.signed to it. They were consequently in the habit of drawling out or gabbling over the words, regardless of both sense and sentiment. Nor was this all. The composers of the Flemish school prided themselves on overloading their work with every kind of intricate and difficult ornament, exhibiting their dexterity by canons of many types, inversions, imitations, contrapuntal devices of divers ingenious and distracting species. The verbal theme became a mere basis for the utterance of scientific artifices and the display of vocal gymnastics.

The singers, for their part, were allowed innumerable licenses. While the ba.s.s sustained the melody, the other voices indulged in extempore descant (_composizione alla mente_) and in extravagances of technical execution (_rifiorimenti_), regardless of the style of the main composition, violating time, and setting even the fundamental tone at defiance.