Renaissance in Italy Volume II Part 23

_Poemata Selecta_, p. 224; and again, _ib._ p. 226:--

Tu Jovis ambrosiis das nos acc.u.mbere mensis; Tu nos diis aequas superis, &c.]

It is difficult in a summary to do justice to this portion of Vida's poem. His description of the ideal epic is indeed nothing more or less than a refined a.n.a.lysis of the 'aeneid;' and students desirous of learning what the Italians of the sixteenth century admired in Virgil will do well to study its acute and sober criticism. A panegyric of Leo closes the second book. From this peroration some lines upon the woes of Italy may be read with profit, as proving that the nation, conscious of its own decline, was contented to accept the primacy of culture in exchange for independence:--

Dii Romae indigetes, Trojae tuque auctor, Apollo Unde genus nostrum coeli se tollit ad astra, Hanc saltem auferri laudem prohibete Latinis: Artibus emineat semper, studiisque Minervae, Italia, et gentes doceat pulcherrima Roma; Quandoguidem armorum penitus fortuna recessit, Tanta Italos inter crevit discordia reges; Ipsi nos inter sacros distringimus enses, Nec patriam pudet externis aperire tyrannis.[448]

[Footnote 448: 'Ye native G.o.ds of Rome! and thou, Apollo, Troy's founder! by whom our race is raised to heaven! let not at least this glory be withdrawn from Latium's children: may Italy for ever hold the heights of art and learning, and most beauteous Rome instruct the nations; albeit all success in arms be lost, so great hath grown the discord of Italia's princes. Yea, one against the other, we draw b.l.o.o.d.y swords, nor feel we any shame in calling foreign tyrants into our own land.'--_Poemata Selecta_, p. 245.]

The third book treats of style and diction. To be clear and varied, to command metaphor and allusion, to choose phrases coloured by mythology and fancy, to suit the language to the subject, to vary the metrical cadence with the thought and feeling, and to be a.s.siduous in the use of the file are mentioned as indispensable to excellence. A peroration on Virgil, sonorous and impa.s.sioned, closes the whole poem, which, rightly understood, is a monument erected to the fame of the Roman bard by the piety of his Italian pupil. The final lines are justly famous:--

O decus Italiae! lux o clarissima vatum!

Te colimus, tibi serta damus, tibi thura, tibi aras; Et tibi rite sacrum semper dicemus honorem Carminibus memores. Salve, sanctissime vates!

Laudibus augeri tua gloria nil potis ultra, Et nostrae nil vocis eget; nos aspice praesens, Pectoribusque tuos castis infunde calores Adveniens, pater, atque animis te te insere nostris.[449]

[Footnote 449: 'Hail, light of Italy, thou brightest of the bards!

Thee we wors.h.i.+p, thee we adore with wreaths, with frankincense, with altars; to thee, as duty bids, for everlasting will we chaunt our holy hymns. Hail, consecrated bard! No increase to thy glory flows from praise, nor needs it voice of ours. Be near, and look upon thy votaries; come, father, and infuse thy fervour into our chaste hearts, and plant thyself within our souls.'--_Poemata Selecta_, p. 266.]

Vida's own intellect was clear, and his style perspicuous; but his genius was mediocre. His power lay in the disposition of materials and in ill.u.s.tration. A precise taste, formed on Cicero and Virgil, and exercised with judgment in a narrow sphere, satisfied his critical requirements. Virgil with him was first and last, and midst and without end. In a word, he shows what a scholar of sound parts and rhetorical apt.i.tude could achieve by the study and imitation of a single author.

Since I have begun to speak of didactic poems, I may take this opportunity of noticing Fracastoro, who seems to have chosen Ponta.n.u.s for his model, and, while emulating both Lucretius and Virgil, to have fallen short of Vida's elegance. His work is less remarkable for purity of diction than for ma.s.siveness of intellect, gravity of matter, and constructive ability. Jeronimo Fracastoro was born in 1483 at Verona, where he spent the greater portion of his life, enjoying high reputation as a physician, philosopher, astronomer, and poet.

During his youth he studied under Pomponazzo at Padua. The strong tincture of materialistic science he there received, continued through life to colour his thought. Among modern Pagans none is more completely bare of Christianity than Fracastoro. As is well known, he chose the new and terrible disease of the Renaissance for his theme, and gave a name to it that still is current. To speak of Fracastoro's 'Syphilis,' dedicated to Bembo, hailed with acclamation by all Italy, preferred by Sannazzaro to his own epic, and praised by Julius Caesar Scaliger as a 'divine poem,' is not easy now. The plague it celebrates appeared at Naples in 1495, and spread like wildfire over Europe, a.s.suming at first the form of an epidemic sparing neither Pope nor king, and stirring less disgust than dread among its victims.[450]

Whether the laws of its propagation were rightly understood in the sixteenth century is a question for physicians to decide. No one appears to have suspected that it differed in specific character from other pestilent disorders; and it is clear, both from contemporary chronicles and from Fracastoro's poem, that the _mal franzese_, as it was popularly called, suggested to the people of that age a.s.sociations different from those that have since gathered round it. At the same time more formidable and less loathsome, it was a not more unworthy subject for verse than the plague at Athens described by Lucretius.

Treating the disease, therefore, as a curse common to his generation, the scientific poet dared to set forth its symptoms, to prescribe remedies, to discuss the question of its origin, and to use it as an ill.u.s.tration of antagonistic forces, pernicious and beneficent, in the economy of nature. To philosophise his repulsive subject-matter was the author's ambition. His contemporaries admired the poetic graces with which he had contrived to adorn it.

[Footnote 450: See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, p. 433, note.]

The exordium of the first book states the problem. Whence came this new scourge of humanity? Not, surely, from America, though it is there indigenous. Its diffusion after the disasters of 1494 was too rapid to admit of this hypothesis.[451] To the corruption of the atmosphere must be referred the general invasion of the plague.[452] The theory of infected and putrescent air is stated in a long Lucretian pa.s.sage, followed by a scientific account of the symptoms of syphilis. At this point the poet diversifies his argument by an episode, narrating the sad death of a young man born on the banks of the Oglio, and leading by gradual transitions to a peroration on the wars and woes of Italy.[453] Over all the poets of this age the miseries of their country hung like a cloud, and, touch the lyre as they may at the beginning of their song, it is certain ere the ending to give forth a dolorous groan. In the second book Fracastoro enters on the subject of remedies. He lays stress on choice of air, abundant exercise, avoidance of wine and heating diet, blood-letting, abstinence from sensual pleasures, fomentations, herbs, and divers minute rules of health. By attention to these matters the disease may be, if not shunned, at least mitigated. The sovereign remedy of quicksilver demanded fuller ill.u.s.tration; therefore the poet introduces the legendary episode of the shepherd Ilceus, conducted by the nymph Lipare to the sulphur founts and lakes of mercury beneath Mount Etna.

Ilceus bathed, and was renewed in health. The rigorously didactic intention of Fracastoro is proved by the recipe for a mercurial ointment and the description of salivation that wind up this book.[454] The third opens with an allusion to the discovery of America, and a celebration of the tree Hyacus (Guaiac.u.m). It is noticeable that, with such an opportunity for singing the praises of Columbus, Fracastoro pa.s.sed him by, nor cared to claim for Italy a share in the greatest achievement of the century. Mingling myth with history, he next proceeds to tell how the Spaniards arrived in the West Indies, and shot birds sacred to the Sun,[455] one of which spoke with human voice, predicting the evils that would fall upon the crew for their impiety. Not the least of these was to be a strange and terrible disease. The natives of the islands flocked to meet the strangers, and some of them were tettered with a ghastly eruption.

This leads to the episodical legend of the shepherd Syphilus, who dared to deride the Sun-G.o.d, and of the king Alcithous, who accepted divine honours in his stead. The Sun, to requite the insolence of Syphilus, afflicted him with a dreadful sickness. It yielded to no cure until the nymph Ammerice initiated him in the proper l.u.s.tral rites, and led him to the tree Hyacus. The poem ends with a panegyric of Guaiac.u.m.

[Footnote 451:

quoniam in primis ostendere multos Possumus, attactu qui nullius hanc tamen ipsam Sponte sua sensere luem, primique tulere.

_Poemata Selecta_, p. 67.]

[Footnote 452:

Quumque animadvertas, tam vastae semina labis Esse nec in terrae gremio, nec in aequore posse, Haud dubie tec.u.m statuas reputesque necesse est, Principium sedemque mali consistere in ipso Aere, qui terras circ.u.m diffunditur omnes.

_Ibid._ p. 69.]

[Footnote 453: _Ibid._ pp. 79, 80.]

[Footnote 454: _Ibid._ pp. 95, 96.]

[Footnote 455: These phrases he finds for a fowling-piece:--

Cava terrificis horrentia bombis Aera, et flammiferum tormenta imitantia fulmen.

_Poemata Selecta_, p. 101.]

I have sketched the subject of the 'Syphilis' in outline because of its importance not only for the neo-Latin literature of the Renaissance, but also for the history of medical opinion. As a didactic poem, it is constructed with considerable art; the style, though prosaic, is forcible, and the meaning is always precise.

Falling short of cla.s.sic elegance, Fracastoro may still be said to have fulfilled the requirements of Vida, and to have added something male and vigorous peculiar to himself. His adulatory verses to Alessandro Farnese, Paul III., and Julius III. might be quoted as curious examples of fulsome flattery conveyed in a _barocco_ style.

They combine Papal cant with Pagan mannerism, Virgilian and Biblical phraseology, masculine gravity of diction and far-fetched conceits, in a strange amalgam, as awkward as it is ridiculous.[456]

[Footnote 456: Cf. the pa.s.sage about Alessandro Farnese's journeys--

Matre dea comitante et iter monstrante nepoti--

and the reformation in Germany. _Poemata Selecta_, p. 125. The whole idyll addressed to Julius III., _ib._ pp. 130-135, is inconceivably uncouth.]

Another group of Latin versifiers, with Bembo at their head, cultivated the elegy, the idyll, and the ode. The authors of their predilection were Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus. Abandoning the attempt to mould Christian or modern material into cla.s.sic form, they frankly selected Pagan motives, and adhered in spirit as well as style to their models. Two elegiac poems of Bembo's, the 'Priapus' and the 'Faunus ad Nympeum Flumen,' may be cited as flagrant specimens of sixteenth-century licentiousness.[457] Polished language and almost faultless versification are wasted upon themes of rank obscenity. The 'Priapus,' translated and amplified in Italian _ottava rima_, gained a popular celebrity beyond the learned circles for whom it was originally written. We may trace its influence in many infamous Capitoli of the burlesque poets. Bembo excelled in elegiac verse. In a poem ent.i.tled 'De Amica a Viro Servata,' he treated a characteristically Italian subject with something of Ovid's graceful humour.[458] A lover complains of living near his mistress, closely watched by her jealous husband. Here, as elsewhere, the morality is less to be admired than the versification; and that the latter, in spite of Bembo's scrupulous attention to metre, is not perfect, may be gathered from this line:--

Tunc quos nunc habeo et quos sum olim habiturus amicos.

[Footnote 457: _Carmina Quinque Ill.u.s.trium Poetarum_, pp. 4 and 9-11.]

[Footnote 458: _Ib._ pp. 18-23.]

After reading hexameters so constructed we are tempted to shut the book with a groan, wondering how it was that a Pope's secretary and a prince of the Church should have thought it worth his while to compose a poem so injurious to his reputation as a moralist, or to preserve in it a verse so little favourable to his fame as a Latinist. More beautiful, because more true to cla.s.sic inspiration, is the elegy of 'Galatea.'[459] The idyllic incidents suggest a series of pretty pictures for bas-reliefs or decorative frescoes in the manner of Albano. Bembo's masterpiece, however, in the elegiac metre, is a poem with 'De Galeso et Maximo' for its t.i.tle.[460] It was composed, as the epigraph informs us, at the command of a great man at Rome; but whether that great man was also the greatest in Rome, and whether Maximus was another name for Leo, is matter of conjecture. The boy Galesus had wronged Maximus, his master. When reproved, he offered no excuses, called no witnesses, uttered no prayers to Heaven, indulged in no a.s.severations of innocence, shed no tears:--

Nil horum aggreditur; sed tantum ingrata loquentis Implicitus collo dulce pependit onus.

Nec mora, cunctanti roseis tot pressa labellis Oscula coelitibus invidiosa dedit, Arida quot levibus florescit messis aristis, Excita quot vernis floribus halat humus.

Maxime, quid dubitas? Si te piget, ipse tuo me Pone loco: haec dubitem non ego ferre mala.[461]

[Footnote 459: _Carmina Quinque Ill.u.s.trium Poetarum_, p. 7.]

[Footnote 460: _Ib._ p. 23.]

[Footnote 461:

None of these things he tried; but only ran, And clasped with his sweet arms the angry man; Hung on his neck, rained kisses forth that Heaven Envied from those red lips to mortals given; In number like ripe ears of ruddy corn, Or flowers beneath the breath of April born.

Still doubting, Maximus? Change place with me: Gladly I'd bear such infidelity.]

Bembo's talent lay in compositions of this kind. His verses, to quote the phrase of Gyraldus, were uniformly 'sweet, soft, and delicate.'

When he attempted work involving more sustained effort of the intellect and greater variety of treatment, he was not so successful.

His hexameter poem 'Benacus,' a description of the Lago di Garda, dedicated to Gian Matteo Giberti, reads like an imitation of Catullus without the Roman poet's grace of style or wealth of fancy.[462] Among Bembo's most perfect compositions may be reckoned his epitaphs on celebrated contemporaries. The following written for Poliziano, deserves quotation.[463] Not only is the death of the scholar, following close upon that of his patron, happily touched, but the last line pays a proper tribute to Poliziano as an Italian poet:--

Duceret extincto c.u.m mors Laurente triumphum, Laetaque pullatis inveheretur equis, Respicit insano ferientem pollice chordas, Viscera singultu concutiente, virum.

Mirata est, tenuitque jugum; furit ipse, pioque Laurentem cunctos flagitat ore Deos: Miscebat precibus lacrymas, lacrymisque dolorem; Verba ministrabat liberiora dolor.

Risit, et antiquae non immemor illa querelae, Orphei Tartareae c.u.m patuere viae, Hic etiam infernas tentat rescindere leges, Fertque suas, dixit, in mea jura ma.n.u.s.

Protinus et flentem percussit dura poetam, Rupit et in medio pectora docta sono.

Heu sic tu raptus, sic te mala fata tulerunt, Arbiter Ausoniae, Politiane, lyrae.[464]

[Footnote 462: _Carmina Quinque Ill.u.s.trium Poetarum_, pp. 26-34.]

[Footnote 463: _Ib._ p. 38.]