enjoyed the consideration awarded to poets under
Augustus, rhetoricians in the later Roman Empire,
jurists under Justinian, and the founders of religious
orders in the days of St. Dominic and St. Francis.

The deference shown to scholars is sufficiently attested
by the honourable offices conferred upon them, the com-
petition of princes and republics to obtain the most
distinguished Latinists for their secretaries, and the
throngs that attended their lectures and other public
displays, vapid and empty as these frequently appear to
us. The prevailing current of taste proved highly advan-
tageous in raising the standard of university education.
Bologna, in a former age the herald of Italian academic
culture, latterly in a condition of decay, revived and
asserted her supremacy, and her sister seats of learning
competed vigorously with her and each other. The
triumph of humanism seemed complete when in 1447
erudition made a Pope in the person of Nicholas V., the
founder of the Vatican Library, whose love of erudition
was such that it absolved in his eyes even Lorenzo Valla's
exposure of pious frauds. Two great events favourable
to culture succeeded— the fall of Constantinople, which
brought a fresh flight of learned Greeks into Europe ;
and the invention of printing, of which, however, Italy
did not reap the benefit until 1464. The tardiness of
so simple an invention, upon the verge of which anti-
quity had continually been hovering, is one of the most
surprising facts in the history of the human mind ; the
indifference with which it was at first received is hardly
less so ; and the stimulus it imparted to literature long



LORENZO DE' MEDICI 113

fell below reasonable expectation. It is remarkable, how-
ever, that two complete versions of the Bible appeared at
Venice in 1471, and significant that no vernacular Bible
was allowed to be printed anywhere else. The general
character of the productions of the Italian press is dis-
tinctly academical and utilitarian. Classics and classical
commentaries, theology, canon and civil law, medicine,
form the staple ; imaginative vernacular literature, even
of the past, is scanty ; contemporary literature might
hardly have existed so far as the early records of the
press indicate. Apart from the studies which conduced
to a livelihood, the period all over Europe was one of
intellectual barrenness. But young men of lively genius
were growing up, and one of these was in a position to
be as serviceable to modern belles-lettres as Nicholas V.
had been to the study of antiquity.

It rarely happens that Augustus is also Virgil ; enough
if he is also Maecenas. Lorenzo de' Medici (1448-92)
united all these characters. A prince by position if not
by descent, he was not only a patron of literature, but a
highly intelligent and discriminating patron ; nor only a
favourer, but himself the producer of some of the best
literature of his day. In character, in circumstances, in
the bent of his policy and the general result of his
activity, he might not unfairly be termed a miniature
Augustus ; like him he confiscated the liberties of his
country as the sole alternative to anarchy, and repaid
her by prosperity and peace. All the great quaHties of
Augustus were his, and few of the defects which history
chiefly censures in his prototype. Both were stronger
in the self-regarding than in the self-forgetting virtues,
but Lorenzo once rose to heroism. History records no
action of Augustus comparable to Lorenzo's placing him-

H



114 ITALIAN LITERATURE

self in the power of the treacherous and unscrupulous
King of Naples for the sake of his country. Nor
had Lorenzo, like Augustus, ever occasion to pass the
sponge over an abortive tragedy. His compositions are
of different degrees of merit, but all are fluent and
graceful.

We have entered a different period from that of the
Uberti and Frezzi ; the tree of poetry, so long stiff' and
dry, now swells with sap, and buds with the prophecy of
a coming summer. Two distinct impulses are observable
in Lorenzo and his literary mate, Politian : in one point of
view the artistic, in the other the poetical spirit predomi-
nates. As artists, they strove successfully to attain perfect
elegance of expression, and to improve the metrical forms
which had descended from the fourteenth century. As
poets, they seized upon the songs and catches current in
the mouths of the people, and elevated them by judicious
treatment into the region of art. This could be possible
only to men of great poetic sensitiveness. Llad Lorenzo
and Politian been less refined by culture, had the one
been no scholar and the other no prince, either might
have been an Italian Burns ; as it is, their work as lyric
poets is more nearly comparable to Goethe's. They
made the popular Muse acceptable to men of breeding,
while gratifying their own tastes by work marked with
the stamp of study and erudition, and yet not beyond the
intelligence of the average educated man.

Lorenzo's part as the patron of art and letters is so
considerable, that his writings, important as they are,
appear almost insignificant in comparison. The most
elaborate of his poems might be classed as idylls. They
comprise the Ambra, a graceful and fanciful Ovidian
allegorv on the m.etamorphosis of the nymph Ambra into



LORENZO'S LOVE POEMS 115

a rock to escape the pursuit of a river-god ; La Caccia
col Falcone, a lively description of this aristocratic sport ;
and La Nencia di Barbcrmo, no less vivid in its portraiture
of the humours of plebeian love-making. Lorenzo's own
love poetry consists chiefly of canzoni, more remarkable
for elegance than depth of feeling, but perfectly in the
character of a man of pleasure who is also a refined
gentleman. The spirituality of Dante and his contempo-
raries, the romantic passion of Petrarch, no longer suited
the age. The temple of Love, like the temple of the
Church, had been secularised ; in everything men habitu-
ally lived at a lower level. Yet this declension is com-
pensated in a great degree by the enhanced feeling of
reality : there can be no such controversy over Lorenzo's
innamorata as over Beatrice and Laura. The following
is a fair example of his erotic style :

" 7'hy beauty, gentle Violet, luas born

H^ here for the look of Love I first was fain,
And my bright stream of bitter tears was rain

That beauty to accomplish and adorn.

A fid such desire was from compassioti born,

That from the happy nook where thou wert lain
The fair hand gathered thee, and not in vain.

For by my oiun it willed thee to be borne.

And, as to me appears, thou wouldst retur?i
Once more to that fair liand, whence thee upofi
My naked breast I have securely set :

The naked breast that doth desire and burn,
And holds thee in her heart's place, that hath gone
To dwell where thou wert late, my Violet."

If there is more gallantry than passion in compositions
of this nature, they show at least that the lute of Love
had received a new string since the time of the trouba-
dours.



ii6 ITALIAN LITERATURE

Love of a sensuous kind is a chief ingredient in
Lorenzo's Canti Carnascialesclii, which are sometimes
highly licentious. He is accused of having composed
them with a special view of diverting the minds of the
young Florentines from politics ; but it seems unneces-
sary to go beyond the temptation to licence afforded by
the general relaxation of the carnival. The gay and the
serious Lorenzo were very different people, as remarked
by that acute observer Machiavelli. His epistle to his
own son Giovanni, afterwards Leo X., on his elevation
to the Cardinaiate at fourteen, is a model of wisdom and
right feeling. His spiritual poems, Latidi, moreover,
frequently speak the language of true religious emotion.

Lorenzo's court, as is universally known, was the chosen
abode of artists and men of letters. A twin star with
Lorenzo himself, but even brighter in his literary aspect
was Angelo Ambrogini (1454-92), known as Poliziano
from his birth at Montepulciano. Politian, the most
brilliant classical scholar of his age, was perhaps the
first professed philologist whose scholarship was entirely
divested of pedantry. With him classical studies were
a vivifying influence, pervading and adorning his literary
exercises in the vernacular, but implying no disparage-
ment of the latter. There is little to choose between
his Latin and his Italian poetry : the same poetic spirit
inspires both, and each is an exemplar of the charm of
a choice, yet not too ornate diction. He was accused
of writing his Latin verses " with more heat than art " ;
but this is only another way of saying that while com-
posing them he felt as an ancient, and might very well
be taken for a poet of the Silver Age. His lyric
tragedy or opera, Orfeo, will be treated along with the
Italian drama, of which it was the first meritorious



POLITIAN 117

example. His Giostra, a poem on the tournament ex-
hibited by Lorenzo's brother Giuliano in 1475, and
incidentally introducing its hero's passion for the lovely
Simonetta, remained unfinished in consequence of Giu-
liano's untimely death. It is full of beauties, and is
memorable in Italian poetry as the first example of the
thoroughly successful employment of the octave stanza.
Boccaccio had been too diffuse ; but Politian exemplified
the perfect fitness of this form for the combination of
narrative poetry with an inexhaustible succession of
verbal felicities, many of which, indeed, are appropriated
from earlier poets, but all, old and new, seem fused
into a glowing whole by the passion for classic form and
sensuous beauty. But Politian and his successors did
not emulate the classical poets' accurate delineation of
Nature. The materials of their descriptions are drawn
from storehouses to which every scholar has a key.
They bespeak reading and memory rather than actual
observation.

This, in Miss Ellen Gierke's version, is Politian's ren-
dering of the vision of perpetual Spring, first seen by
Homer, after him by Lucretius, and in our time by
Tennyson. Like Ariosto and Tasso, he places his en-
chanted garden on earth.

" A fair hill doth the Cypria7i breezes woo.
And sevenfold stream ofntii^hiy A' Hits see,
IVhen the horizon reddenetli anew ;
But 7)wrtal foot may not there planted be.
A green knoll on its slope doth rise to view,
A sunny meadow sheltering in its lee,
Where, wantoning ''mid flowers, each gale that passes
Sets lightly qjtivering the verdant grasses.

A wall of gold its furthest edge doth screen,
Where lies a vale with shady trees set fair.



ii8 ITALIAN LITERATURE

Upon whose bratjches, 'mid leai'es newly green,
The quirifig birds chant love songs on the air.
The grateful sound of waters chimes between,
By twin streams cool and lucid shed forth there,
In the wave sweet and bitter of whose river
Love whets the golden arrows of his quivcf .

Nor the pej'ejinial garden's foliage green
Doth snow ncw-falle7i blanch, or rime-frost hoar.
No vernal blight dare come these walls between.
No gale the grass and shrubs e'er ruffles o'er.
Nor is tlie year i7i fourfold season seefi;
But joyous Spritig here reigns for evermore.
Shakes to the breeze her blonde and rippling tresses,
And weaves Jier wreath of flowers as on she presses."

In Politian's own eyes and those of his contemporaries
his achievement as a poet was less important than his
labour as a classical scholar. Nor, as respected the
needs and interests of his contemporaries, was this
judgment wholly mistaken. " Knowledge in that age,"
says Symonds, " was the pearl of great price ; not the
knowledge of righteousness, not the knowledge of Nature
and her laws, but the knowledge of the wonderful life
which throbbed in ancient peoples, and which might
make this old world young again." Politian's chief
merits as a classical scholar were to have known how to
excite a living interest in antiquity, and to have been
the first to attempt a scientific classification of MSS.
His translations from the Greek were admirable. So
long as Lorenzo presided over Florence, Politian's lot,
though embittered by some violent literary controversies,
had been brilliant and prosperous : his patron's death
exposed him to the general unpopularity of the sup-
porters of Lorenzo's incapable successor, the French
invader stood at the doors, Savonarola's followers began



/



POPULAR POETRY 119

to assail culture in its representatives, and within little
more than two years Politian escaped the gathering
storm either by a broken heart or a voluntary death.

To appreciate Politian's services in imparting literary
form to popular poetry, it will be necessary to bestow a
glance on this poetry as it existed in Tuscany in his day,
and in a measure exists still. We have previously re-
marked upon the absence of national ballad poetry at a
very early period ; and when at length we find traces of
popular song, little resembling Chevy Chase is to be dis-
covered, the staple being carols and love catches. Some
of these may be as old as the thirteenth century, and the
mass continued augmenting as one anonymous singer
after another added something sufficiently attractive to
be propagated from hamlet to hamlet, and treasured in
the memory.

Similar lyrical production went on over most parts
of Italy ; the Sicilian songs, after the Tuscan, being
the most numerous, or at least the best preserved.
These ditties fall generally into two divisions, rispetti and
stornclli : the former consisting of four or six verses
rhyming alternately, followed by a couplet ; the latter of
three lines only, the last rhyming with the first. These
soon developed into the madrigal, a form affected by
persons of culture and professional musicians, but the
people continued to carol as of old. Thus, sponta-
neous births of the instinct for love and song, under-
going countless modifications in passing from mouth
to mouth, until the right form has been found at last,
and sifted by the taste of generation after genera-
tion, these little songs have formed a really beautiful
collection of verse, reflecting in their ardour, graceful
fancy and purity of sentiment, the best characteristics



I20 ITALIAN LITERATURE

of the race from which they sprung. How good they
are may be seen from a few of the specimens so admir-
ably rendered by John Addington Symonds :^ —

" The moon has risen her plaint to lay
Before the face of Love Divine ;
Saying in heaven she will not stay.
Since you have stolen what fnade her shine.
Aloud she wails with sorrow wan ; —
She told her stars, and two are gone :
They are not there ; ye have them now ;
They are the eyes in your bright brow.

Think it fio grief that 1 am brown ;
For all brunettes are born to reign :
White is the snow, yet troddeti down ;
Black pepper, kings do not disdain :
White snow lies mounded in the vales j
Black pepper's weighed in brazen scales.

O Swallow, Swallow, flying through the air.
Turn, turn, I prithee, from thy flight above.
Give tne one feather from thy wing so fair.
For I will write a letter to my love.
When I have written it and made it clear,
P II give thee back thy feather. Swallow dear ;
When I have written it on paper white,
ril make, I swear, thy missing feather right;
When once ^tis written on fair leaves of gold,
P II give thee back thy wings and flight so bold}''

Two other leading poetical figures of the fifteenth
century, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Luigi Pulci, authors
of the Orlando Innamorato and the Morgante Maggiore,
will be best treated along with the writers of chivalrous

^ The best collection of popular Italian belletristic literature is the Canti e
Racconti del Popolo Italiano, in eight volumes, edited by E. Comparetti and
A. D'Ancona,



BENIVIENI 121

romance in epic form. It is not quite clear how far
Pulci had a share in the poems ascribed to his elder
brother Luca (1431-70) ; but the latter's verses on
Giuliano de' Medici, his crusading epic, Ciriffo Calvaneo,
and his pastoral, Driadeo, undoubtedly owe much to
Luigi. The heroic epistles in verse which pass under
his name are no doubt by him. Another poet, GirOLAMO
Benivieni, shines amid the Platonic circle of Marsilio
Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. His verses might have
given him no inconsiderable distinction if he could have
attained to lucidity of diction ; but his powers of expres-
sion are inadequate to the abstruseness of his themes.
He does best when his idealism is embodied in an
objective shape, as in the following sonnet, clearly
suggested by the first in the Vita Niiova :

" In utmost height of Heaven I saw the choir

Of happy stars in their infinity

Attending on the Sun obediently^
And he was pasturing thetn with his own fire.
And, wealthy with my spoil, I saw Desire

Unstring his botu and lay his arrozus by.

And proffer Heaven, with all humility,
My heart, which goldeti drapery did attire.
And, of this disarrayed, 7iot half so fair

Siniles Earth to Sun when by his crescent light

The ivory horn of vernal Bull is smit
As in this glory did my heart appear.

Which now my mortal breast doth scorn and slight,

Abandoning, nor will return to it."

The Italian writings of Benivieni's friend Savonarola
are chiefly theological. Their fervour gained them great
influence at the time, but the celebrity which they still
enjoy is due rather to the fame of the writer than to
their literary qualities. Savonarola nevertheless affected



122 ITALIAN LITERATURE

the literature of his day, partly by his war against classical
and Renaissance culture, and partly by the impulse which
he gave to the pamphlet, precursor of the newspaper press.
Cristoforo Landino's Camaldolese Dialogues would have
been important contributions to the national literature if
they had been written in Italian.

The first writer of prose who presents us with a per-
fect example from which the new period may be dated
is Jacopo Saxnazaro, as much as Politian the nursling
of a court ; to whom we are also indebted for the first
example of the pastoral romance, and the first proof
that excellent Italian prose could be written outside
Tuscany. Sannazaro, born in 1458, was a Neapolitan of
Spanish descent, as it is said, and the statement seems
to be corroborated by the peculiar independence and
dignity of character which distinguish him from the
supple literati of his time. Even Pontano, whose obli-
gations to the royal house of Naples were so extreme,
played an ambiguous part upon the ephemeral French
conquest of 1495. Sannazaro's loyalty not onlv sus-
tained that brief ordeal, but when four years later the
cause of the Neapolitan dynasty was irrevocably lost, he
accompanied his fallen master to France, and spent
several years in exile. Returning to Naples, he inhabited
a beautiful villa at Mergellina, and devoted himself to
the poetry of which we shall have to speak in another
place. After witnessing the destruction of his retreat in
the French war (1528), he died in 1530 in the house of
Cassandra, Marchesa Castriota, whom he had vainly de-
fended against her husband's attempt to repudiate her.
Few of his contemporaries deserve equal respect as a
man ; and although as a writer but of the second rank,
it was granted to him, alike in prose and verse, to mark



SANNAZARO'S ARCADIA 123

an era in literature signalising the triumph of Petrarch
and Boccaccio over the pedantry of the fifteenth cen-
tury, but at the same time the deliberate preference of
form to matter, and the discouragement of irregular
originality.

Sannazaro's Arcadia , historically the most important
of his writings, is comparatively a youthful performance,
having been substantially completed by 1489, though not
published in a correct edition until 1504. It would in
any case mark an epoch as the first perfect example of
the pastoral romance, which Boccaccio had foreshadowed
in his AvictOy but which Sannazaro enriched by elements
derived from Theocritus and Virgil. His landscape and
personages are entirely classical ; the shepherds contend
with each other in song precisely as in the Greek and
Latin eclogues, and no attempt is made to represent
rustic manners as they really are. The descriptions,
whether of nature or of humanity, on the other hand,
are graceful and vivid, and informed by a most poetical
sentiment ; and it may be said that Sannazaro's work
would be more esteemed at this day if it had had fewer
imitators. The style admits of but little variety, and
pastoral fiction easily became insipid in the hands of
a succession of followers who did not, like Shakespeare
in the Winter s Tale, resort to Nature for their delinea-
tions. Sannazaro himself is not exempt from the charge
of monotony. More serious defects, however, are those
of excessive Latinisation in the construction of sentences,
and rhetorical exaggeration, arising from his too close
adherence to the immature style of Boccaccio's early
writings, instead of the simple elegance of the Decameron.
The resolution to achieve poetry in prose at any cost,
causes a crabbed involution and overloads the diction



124 ITALIAN LITERATURE

with adjectives ; while there is yet enough of true feehng
to overcome even the wearisomeness of the perpetual
laments of the shepherds over the unparalleled cruelty
of their innamoratas. Sannazaro had a mistress to whose
memory he remained faithful all his life, and most of his
fictitious characters veil actual personages. When this
is understood, the romance loses its apparent artificiality;
and Settembrini's remark is justified, "Anche oggi si sente
una dolcczza d^ affetto a leggere quel libro!'

The main literary interest, however, of the Arcadia is
that it marks an epoch and carries the reform which
Lorenzo de' Medici and Politian had initiated in verse
into the domain of prose. It is perhaps the sole Italian
prose composition of the fifteenth century which can be
said to wear a classic stamp ; and being received with
enthusiasm and read by all, it fixed a standard which
subsequent writers were compelled to maintain. It pre-
scribed the rule for pastoral romance in all languages :
not only did Sidney borrow its spirit and many of its
episodes as well as its name for his own work, more,
however, of a romance and less of a pastoral than
Sannazaro's ; not only did the two great Portuguese
pastoralists, Bernardim Ribeiro and Montemayor, model
themselves upon it ; but Shakespeare took from it the
name of Ophelia, and traces of it may be found, not
only in the pastoral part of Keats's Endymion, but even
in his Hyperion.

By Sannazaro's time, then, it may be said that Italian
literature was fairly despatched on the route which it
was to follow throughout the golden Cinque Cento.
Elegance, finish, polish were to be the chief aims ; form
was to be esteemed at least on a par with matter ; the
mediaeval elements, as we find them in Dante, were to



CLASSICAL TRADITION 125

be kept in abeyance. The classical tradition was to be
taken up, and Italy was to appear as the literary heiress
of Rome ; but not to the extent of corrupting her own
language with Latinisms. Such a tacit resolution was
admirable for raising and maintaining the standard of
literary composition, but was hostile to the development
of transcendent genius.



CHAPTER X

CHIVALRIC POETRY

The history of the Itahaii chivahic epic is one of the
most interesting departments of the story of Hterature,
both on its own account, and because it reveals as in a
mirror the growth of the more important epic of the tale
of Troy. It arose out of a real event of the deepest
importance to Europe, but this it so disfigured by
romance and imagination as to be hardly recognisable.
Charles Martel, the deliverer of France from the Saracens,
is confounded with another and still more illustrious
Charles, whose relations with the Saracen monarchs were
usually amicable ; and, by what seems to be a universal
law, this hero comes to occupy but a corner of the temple
nominally dedicated to him, and his renown is trans-
ferred to creatures of pure imagination. As Agamemnon,
who at all events personifies the most powerful state of
primitive Greece, yields as a poetic hero to such histori-
cally subordinate, if not absolutely fictitious personages
as Achilles and Ulysses ; as the terrible Attila, the portent
of his time, shrinks in the Nibelungen Lied into the in-
significant figure of Etzel ; so, in the romancer's eye, the
real glories of Charlemagne dwindle to nothing before
the petty skirmish of Roncesvalles.

In all these instances, and equally so in the cycle of
Arthur, a germ of historical reality lies latent in the