Renaissance in Italy
Chapter 86 : The poet summons his company of careless folk, on pleasure bent: No' siam una comp

The poet summons his company of careless folk, on pleasure bent:

No' siam una compagnia, I' dico di cacciapensieri.

He takes them forth into the fields among the farms and olive-gardens, bidding them leave prudence and grave thoughts within the lofty walls of Florence town:

Il senno e la contenenza Lasciam dentro all'alte mura Della citta di Fiorenza.

This note of gayety and pure enjoyment is sustained throughout his lyrics. In one _Ballata_ he describes a country girl, caught by thorns, and unable to avoid her admirer's glance.[144] Another gives a pretty picture of a maiden with a wreath of olive-leaves and silver.[145] A third is a little idyll of two girls talking to their lambs, and followed by an envious old woman.[146] A fourth is a biting satire on old women--_Di diavol vecchia femmina ha natura_.[147] A fifth is that incomparably graceful canzonet, _O vaghe montanine pasturelle_, the popularity of which is proved by the fact that it was orally transmitted for many generations, and attributed in after days to both Lorenzo de'

Medici and Angelo Poliziano.[148] Indeed, it may be said in pa.s.sing that Poliziano owed much to Sacchetti. This can be seen by comparing Sacchetti's _Ballata_ on the Gentle Heart, and his pastoral of the Thorn-tree with the later poet's lyrics.[149]

The unexpressed contrast between the cautious town-life of the burgher poet and his license in the villa, to which I have already called attention, determines the character of many minor lyrics by Sachetti.[150] We comprehend the spirit of these curious poems, at once popular and fas.h.i.+onable, when we compare them with medieval French _Pastourelles_, or with similar compositions by wandering Latin students. In the _Carmina Burana_ may be found several little poems, describing the fugitive loves of truant scholars with rustic girls, which prove that, long before Sacchetti's age, the town had sought spring-solace in the country.[151] Men are too apt to fancy that what they consider the refinements of pa.s.sion and fas.h.i.+on (the finer edge, for example, put upon desire by altering its object from the known and trivial to the untried and exceptional, from venal beauties in the city to shepherd maidens on the village-green) are inventions of their own times. Yet it was precisely a refinement of this sort which gave peculiar flavor to Sacchetti's songs in the fourteenth century, and which made them sought after. They had great vogue in Italy, enjoying the privilege of popularity among the working cla.s.ses, and helping to diffuse that sort of pastoral part-song which we still know as Madrigal.[152] Sacchetti was himself a good musician; many of his songs were set to music by himself, and others by his friends. This gives a pleasant old-world homeliness to the Latin t.i.tles inscribed beneath the rubrics--_Franciscus de Organis sonum dedit_; _Intonatum per Franc.u.m Sacchetti_; _Francus sonum dedit_; and so forth.

The Ballads and Madrigals of Niccol Soldanieri should be mentioned in connection with Sacchetti; though they do not detach themselves in any marked way from the style of love poetry practiced at the close of the fourteenth century.[153] The case is different with Alesso Donati's lyrics. In them we are struck by a new gust of coa.r.s.e and powerful realism, which has no parallel among the elder poets except in the savage sonnets of Cecco Angiolieri. Vividly natural situations are here detached from daily life and delineated with intensity of pa.s.sion, vehement sincerity. Sacchetti's gentleness and genial humor have disappeared. In their place we find a dramatic energy and a truth of language that are almost terrible. Each of the little scenes, which I propose to quote in ill.u.s.tration of these remarks, might be compared to etchings bitten with aquafortis into copper. Here, for example, is a nun, who has resolved to throw aside her veil and follow her lover in a page's dress[154]:

La dura corda e 'l vel bruno e la tonica Gittar voglio e lo scapolo Che mi tien qui rinchiusa e fammi monica; Poi teco a guisa d'a.s.setato giovane, Non gia che si sobarcoli, Venir me 'n voglio ove fortuna piovane: E son contenta star per serva e cuoca, Che men mi cocer ch'ora mi cuoca.

Here is a dialogue at dawn between a woman and her paramour. The presence of the husband sleeping in the chamber is suggested with a brutal vigor[155]:

De vattene oggimai, ma pianamente, Amor; per dio, s piano Che non ti senta il mal vecchio villano.

Ch'egli sta sentecchioso, e, se pur sente

Ch'i' die nel letto volta, Temendo abbraccia me no gli sie tolta.

Che tristo faccia Iddio chi gli m'a data E chi spera 'n villan buona derrata.

Scarcely less forcible is the girl's vow against her mother, who keeps her shut at home[156]:

In pena vivo qui sola soletta Giovin rinchiusa dalla madre mia, La qual mi guarda con gran gelosia.

Ma io le giuro alla croce di Dio Che s'ella mi terra qui piu serrata, Ch'i' diro--Fa' con Dio, vecchia arrabiata; E gitter la rocca, il fuso e l'ago, Amor, fuggendo a te di cui m'appago.

To translate these madrigals would be both difficult and undesirable. It is enough to have printed the original texts. They prove that aristocratic versifiers at this period were adopting the style of the people, and adding the pungency of brief poetic treatment to episodes suggested by _novelle_.[157]

While dealing with the Novelle and the semi-popular literature of this transition period, I have hitherto neglected those numerous minor poets who continued the traditions of the earlier _trecento_.[158] There are two main reasons for this preference. In the first place, the _novelle_ was destined to play a most important part in the history of the Renaissance, imposing its own laws of composition upon species so remote as the religious drama and romantic epic. In the second place, the dance-songs, canzonets and madrigals of Sacchetti's epoch lived upon the lips of the common folk, who during the fifteenth century carried Italian literature onward through a subterranean channel.[159] When vernacular poetry reappeared into the light of erudition and the Courts, the influences of that popular style, which drew its origin from Boccaccio and Sacchetti rather than from Dante or the Trovatori, determined the manner of Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano. Meanwhile the learned poems of the latest _trecentisti_ were forgotten with the lumber of the middle ages. For the special purpose, therefore, of this volume, which only regards the earlier stages of Italian literature in so far as they preceded and conditioned the Renaissance, it was necessary to give the post of honor to Boccaccio's followers. Some mention should, however, here be made of those contemporaries and imitators of Petrarch, in whom the traditions of the fourteenth century expired. It is not needful to pa.s.s in review the many versifiers who treated the old themes of chivalrous love with meritorious conventional facility. The true life of the Italians was not here; and the phase of literature which the Sicilian School inaugurated, survived already as an anachronism. The case is different with such poetry as dealt immediately with contemporary politics. In the declamatory compositions of this age, we hear the echoes of the Guelf and Ghibelline wars. The force of that great struggle was already spent; but the partisans of either faction, pa.s.sion enough survived to furnish genuine inspiration. Fazio degli Uberti's _sermintese_ on the cities of Italy, for example, was written in the bitter spirit of an exiled Ghibelline.[160] His ode to Charles IV. is a torrent of vehement medieval abuse, poured forth against an Emperor who had shown himself unworthy of his place in Italy[161]:

Sappi ch'i' son Italia che ti parlo, Di Lusimburgo ignominioso Carlo!

After detailing the woes which have befallen her in consequence of her abandonment by the imperial master, Italy addresses herself to G.o.d:

Tu dunque, Giove, perche 'l santo uccello ...

Da questo Carlo quarto Imperador non togli e dalle mani Degli altri lurchi moderni germani, Che d'aquila un allocco n'hanno fatto?

The Italian Ghibellines had, indeed, good reason to complain that German gluttons, Caesars in naught but name, who only thought of making money by their sale of fiefs and honors, had changed the eagle of the Empire into an obscene night-flying bird of prey. The same spirit is breathed in Fazio's ode on Rome.[162] He portrays the former mistress of the world as a lady clad in weeds of mourning, "ancient, august and honorable, but poor and needy as her habit showed, prudent in speech and of great puissance." She bids the poet rouse his fellow-countrymen from their sleep of sloth and drunkenness, to rea.s.sert the majesty of the empire owed to Italy and Rome:

O figliuol mio, da quanta crudel guerra Tutti insieme verremo a dolce pace, Se Italia soggiace A un solo Re che al mio voler consente!

This is the last echo of the _De Monarchia_. The great imperial idea, so destructive to Italian confederation, so dazzling to patriots of Dante's fiber, expires amid the wailings of minstrels who cry for the impossible, and haunt the Courts of petty Lombard princes.

In another set of _Canzoni_ we listen to Guelf and Ghibelline recriminations, rising from the burghs of Tuscany. The hero of these poems is Gian Galeazzo Visconti, rightly recognized by the Guelfs of Florence as a venomous and selfish tyrant, foolishly belauded by the Ghibellines of Siena as the vindicator of imperial principles. The Emperors have abandoned Italy; the Popes are at Avignon. The factions which their quarrels generated, agitate their people still, but on a narrower basis. Sacchetti slings invectives against the _maladetta serpe, aspro tiranno con amaro fele_, who shall be throttled by the Church and Florence, leagued to crush the Lombard despots.[163] Saviozzo da Siena addresses the same Visconti as _novella monarchia, giusto signore, clemente padre, insigne, virtuoso_. By his means the _dolce vedovella_, Rome or Italy, shall at last find peace.[164] This Duke of Milan, it will be remembered, had already ordered the crown of Italy from his Court-jeweler, and was advancing on his road of conquest, barred only by Florence, when the Plague cut short his career in 1402.

The poet of Siena exhorts him to take courage for his task, in lines that are not deficient in a certain fire of inspiration:

Tu vedi in ciel la fiammeggiante aurora, Le stelle tue propizie e rutilanti, E' segni tutti quanti Ora disposti alla tua degna spada.

In another strophe he refers to the Italian crown:

Ecco qui Italia che ti chiama padre, Che per te spera omai di trionfare, E di se incoronare Le tue benigne e preziose chiome.

An anonymous sonnetteer of the same period uses similar language[165];

Roma vi chiama--Cesar mio novello, I' son ignuda, e l'anima pur vive; Or mi coprite col vostro mantello.

The Ghibelline poets, whether they dreamed like Fazio of Roman Empire, or flattered the Visconti with a crown to be won by triumph over the detested Guelfs, made play with Dante's memory. Some of the most interesting lyrics of the school are elegies upon his death. To this cla.s.s belong two sonnets by Pieraccio Tedaldi and Mucchio da Lucca.[166]

Nor must Boccaccio's n.o.ble pair of sonnets, although he was not a political poet, be here forgotten.[167] That Dante was diligently studied can be seen, not only in the diction of this epoch, but also in numerous versified commentaries upon the Divine Comedy--in the _terza rima_ abstracts of Boson da Gubbio, Jacopo Alighieri, Saviozzo da Siena, and Boccaccio.[168]

Tuscan politics are treated from the Guelf point of view in Sacchetti's odes upon the war with Pisa, upon the government of Florence after 1378, and against the cowardice of the Italians.[169] His conception of a burgher's duties, the ideal of Guelf _bourgeoisie_ before Florence had become accustomed to tyrants, finds expression in a sonnet--_Amar la patria_.[170] We frequently meet with the word _Comune_ on his lips:

O vuol re o signore o vuol comune, Che per comune dico ci ch'io parlo.

A like note of munic.i.p.al independence is sounded in the poems of Antonio Pucci, and in the admonitory stanzas of Matteo Frescobaldi.[171]

Considerable interest attaches to these political compositions for the light they throw on party feeling at the close of the heroic age of Italian history. The fury with which those factions raged, prompts the bards of either camp to curses. I may refer to this pa.s.sage from Folgore da San Gemignano, when he sees the Ghibelline Uguccione triumphant over Tuscany:[172]

Eo non ti lodo Dio e non ti adoro, E non ti prego e non ti ringrazio, E non ti servo ch'io ne son piu sazio Che l'aneme de star en purgatoro; Perche tu ai messi i Guelfi a tal martoro Ch'i Ghibellini ne fan beffe e strazio, E se Uguccion ti comanda.s.se il dazio, Tu 'l pagaresti senza peremptoro!

Yet neither in the confused idealism of the Ghibellines nor in the honest independence of the Guelfs lay the true principle of national progress. Sinking gradually and inevitably beneath the sway of despots, the Italians in the fifteenth century were destined to become a nation of scholars, artists, _litterati_. The age of Dante, the uncompromising aristocrat, was over. The age of Boccaccio, the easy-going _bourgeois_, had begun. The future glories of Italy were to be won in the field of culture; and all the hortatory lyrics I have mentioned, exerted but little influence over the development of a spirit which was growing quietly within the precincts of the people. The Italian people at this epoch cared far less for the worn-out factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines than for home-comforts and tranquillity in burgher occupations. The keener intellects of the fifteenth century were already so absorbingly occupied with art and cla.s.sical studies that there was no room left in them for politics of the old revolutionary type. Meanwhile the new intrigues of Cabinets and Courts were left to a cla.s.s of humanistic diplomatists, created by the conditions of despotic government. Scarcely less ineffectual were the moral verses of Bambagiuoli and Cavalca, or the Petrarchistic imitations of Marchionne Torrigiani, Federigo d'Arezzo, Coluccio Salutati, Roberto di Battifolle, and Bonaccorso da Montemagno.[173] The former belonged to a phase of medieval culture which was waning. The elegant but lifeless Petrarchistic school dragged through the fifteenth century, culminating in the _Canzoniere_ of Giusto de' Conti, a Roman, which was called _La bella mano_. The revival of their mannerism, with a fixed artistic motive, by Bembo and the purists of the sixteenth century, will form part of my later history of Renaissance literature.

One note is unmistakable in all the poetry of these last _trecentisti_.

It is a note of profound discouragement, mistrust, and disappointment.

We have already heard it sounded by Sacchetti in his lament for Boccaccio. Boccaccio had raised it himself in two n.o.ble sonnets--_Apizio legge_ and _Fuggit'e ogni virtu_.[174] It takes the shrillness of a threnody in Tedaldi's _Il mondo vile_ and in Manfredi di Boccaccio's _Amico il mondo_.[175] The poets of that age were dimly conscious that a new era had opened for their country--an era of money-getting, despotism, and domestic ease. They saw the people used to servitude and sunk in common pleasures--dead to the high aims and imaginative aspirations of the past. The turbulence of the heroic age was gone. The men of the present were all _Vigliacci_. And as yet both art and learning were but in their cradle. It was impossible upon the opening of the fifteenth century, in that crepuscular interval between two periods of splendor, to know what glories for Italy and for the world at large would be produced by Giotto's mighty lineage and Petrarch's progeny of scholars. We who possess in history the vision of that future can be content to wait through a transition century. The men of the moment not unnaturally expressed the querulousness of Italy, distracted by her struggles of the past and sinking into somnolence. Cosimo de' Medici, the molder of Renaissance Florence, was already born in 1389; and men of Cosimo's stamp were no heroes for poets who had felt the pa.s.sions that moved Dante.

The Divine Comedy found fewer imitators than the _Canzoniere_; for who could bend the bow of Ulysses? Yet some poets of the transition were hardy enough to attempt the Dantesque meter, and to pretend in a prosaic age that they had shared the vision of the prophets. Among these should be mentioned Fazio degli Uberti, a scion of Farinata's n.o.ble house, who lived and traveled much in exile.[176] Taking Solinus, the antique geographer, for his guide, Fazio produced a topographical poem called the _Dicta Mundi_ or _Dittamondo_.[177]

From the prosaic matter of this poem, which resembles a very primitive Mappamondo, ill.u.s.trated with interludes of history and excursions into mythological zoology, based upon the text of Pliny, and not unworthy of Mandeville, two episodes emerge and arrest attention. One is the description of Rome--a somber lady in torn raiment, who tells the history of her eventful past, describes her triumphs and her empire, and points to the ruins on her seven crowned hills to show how beautiful she was in youth[178]:

Ivi una dama scorsi; Vecchia era in vista, e trista per costume.

Gli occhi da lei, andando, mai ton torsi; Ma poiche presso le fui giunto tanto Ch'io l'avvisava senza nessun forsi, Vidi il suo volto, ch'era pien di pianto, Vidi la vesta sua rotta e disfatta, E roso e guasto il suo vedovo manto.

E con tutto che fosse cos fatta, Pur nell'abito suo onesto e degno Mostrava uscita di gentile schiatta.

Tanto era grande, e di n.o.bil contegno, Ch'io diceva fra me: Ben fu costei, E pare ancor da posseder bel regno.

Fazio addresses the mighty shadow with respectful sympathy. Rome answers in language which is n.o.ble through its simple dignity:

Non ti maravigliare s'io ho doglia, Non ti maravigliar se trista piango, Ne se me vedi in s misera spoglia; Ma fatti maraviglia, ch'io rimango, E non divento qual divenne Ecuba Quando gittava altrui le pietre e il fango.

The second pa.s.sage of importance, more noticeable for a sense of s.p.a.ce and largeness than for its poetical expression, is a description of the prospect seen from Alvernia, that high station of the "topless Apennines," where S. Francis took the Stigmata, and where Dante sought a home in the destruction of his earthly hopes[179]:

Noi fummo sopra il sa.s.so dell Alverna Al f.a.ggio ove Francesco fue fedito Dal Serafin quel d ch'ei piu s'interna.

Molto e quel monte devoto e romito, Ed e s alto che il piu di Toscana Mi disegn un frate col suo dito.

Guarda, mi disse, al mare, e vedi piana Con altri colli la maremma tutta Dilettevole molto e poco sana.

Ivi e Ma.s.sa, Grosseto e la distrutta Civita vecchia, ed ivi Populonia Ch'appena pare, tanto e mal condutta.

The whole of Tuscany and Umbria, their cities, plains, rivers and mountain summits, are unrolled; and the friar concludes with a sentence which well embodies the feeling we have in gazing over an illimitable landscape: